A Stranger on the Planet

by Adam Schwartz

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Do it for me then. Just do it for me, all right?”

  I went into the living room and sat next to Eddie on the couch.

  He was leaning forward, one hand on the channel dial. He kept changing back and forth between the Yankee game on channel eleven and the Mets game on channel nine.

  “Stay with me, kid, and you’ll never miss a pitch,” he told me. I had already missed dozens of them, but I didn’t say anything.

  After Ruth finished cleaning up in the kitchen, she and Seamus joined us on the couch. Sarah went into the bedroom she shared with our mother to read her book, Planet of the Apes. Eddie supplied a running commentary about the games. Tom Seaver was about to pitch low and away. Cleon Jones was going to tag up. When the players didn’t do as he had predicted, he called them bums and sons of bitches. My mother feigned interest for a while, then excused herself to put Seamus to bed. When she returned, she sat next to us on the couch and opened an Agatha Christie mystery. The year before, my mother had taken us to see a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium and had spent the afternoon sitting in the bleachers reading Pride and Prejudice from cover to cover.

  At ten thirty, my mother told me it was time for bed, but Eddie told her I ought to stay up because Tom Seaver was pitching a perfect game and we were witnessing history. Then one of the Cubs finally got a hit in the ninth inning. “Son of a bitch!” Eddie exclaimed.

  “Does this mean it’s not historic anymore?” my mother asked.

  “That’s right, baby,” Eddie said, and sent me another wink, as if only he and I understood how hopeless women were when it came to sports.

  “All right, sweetie, bedtime,” my mother said to me.

  “Good night, son,” Eddie said, and tousled my hair.

  A couple of minutes after I had changed into my pajamas, my mother came into the room and sat on the side of my bed. Seamus was asleep on the other side of the room.

  “That was nice,” she said, “all of us watching the game together. Just like a family.”

  “I guess so,” I replied.

  She told me she was glad I approved of Eddie.

  “Are you really going to marry him?”

  “Yes. I think he’ll be a good father.”

  I knew Eddie was all wrong, but I didn’t see a way out. More than my sister and brother, I was the one who truly missed having a father. I was the most difficult of my mother’s three children—the most unhappy, the most surly, the most headstrong, the poorest student. My mother and I both believed that all my faults could be fixed by having a man in my life. My deepest longings had set these events in motion, had brought Eddie into our lives, and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

  I asked my mother if she and Eddie were going to have more children.

  “No, darling. No more children.”

  “Does that mean you’re still going to have sex with him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Men and women still have sex when they’re not trying to have children.”

  “I know,” I replied defensively.

  “Seth, honey. I just want you to know one thing. I still consider you the man of the house.”

  My mother had conferred this title on me when I was six, right after my father had left. The words hadn’t meant anything to me then, and they didn’t mean anything to me at that moment. I doubt they meant much to my mother either. But she probably thought it was something she ought to say, like a prayer you recite but don’t believe in.

  THE NEXT MORNING MY MOTHER drove us to the airport for our fight to Boston. Seamus was crying because he didn’t want to leave our mother for two weeks. I tried to cheer him up by telling him about all the wonderful things we would be doing on Cape Cod. We’d go sailing and swimming and waterskiing. Of course I was also saying this to agitate my mother.

  “Tell me something,” she said to me. “Why doesn’t your father buy a house for you and your brother and sister to live in before he buys a second house for himself?”

  She was right. My father lived in a ten-room house in Cambridge with his wife, Hortense; their child, Francois; and a nanny. We lived in a four-room apartment.

  “But this house is for us,” I answered. “That’s why he invited us for two weeks.”

  “That’s right,” she retorted. “I’m sure he was thinking of you and your brother and sister when he bought this house. That’s why he never calls you or writes. Because he’s always thinking about you so much.”

  Sarah was glum about the trip because she would have preferred to go to sleepaway camp with her friends. She was also much more realistic than I was when it came to our father. Like me, she was hurt by the fact that he paid so little attention to us, but she didn’t harbor any illusions that he secretly loved us, that, if not for Hortense and my mother, he would love us openly, unconditionally. When Sarah and I were very young, we had communicated in our private twins’ language; after our father left and I retreated into myself, missing him with a searing sadness, we gradually lost our private language until, at age twelve, with our hormones humming like an electrified steel fence, we barely communicated at all.

  As we approached the airport, Sarah said, “Mom, I don’t want you to marry Eddie. I don’t want him for a stepfather.”

  “Fine. Then you can go live with your father. All of you. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to have you.”

  Seamus began crying, saying that he didn’t want to go live with our father.

  THE HOUSE IN WELLFEET HAD three small bedrooms. My father and Hortense shared one; Francois shared another with his nanny, Mathilde, an old woman from France; Sarah, Seamus, and I were assigned to the third. “Jesus Christ!” Sarah said to me. “We’re twelve years old. Doesn’t he understand that we need our privacy at this age?” Sarah was zealous about maintaining her privacy, and not just because she was twelve and her body was changing. Her vigilance was a reaction against our mother, who left her bloodstained panties hanging from the shower rod, who changed her clothes in front of all of us, who, three months before, had come into the bathroom when I was showering, pulled back the curtain, and exclaimed, “Oh, look, you have pubic hair too! So does your sister.”

  We settled into a routine at the house in Wellfeet right away. Seamus and I woke up every morning at around seven. We’d go into the living room and play board games and read for about an hour. Now and then Seamus would cry out, “Seth, I’m bored here. I want to go home!” I was just as bored and lonely as my brother, but I’d tell him to keep quiet, afraid that our father would send us home if he heard our discontent.

  At eight o’clock Mathilde and Francois would come down and have breakfast with us. Mathilde kept her iron gray hair wound in a tight bun. She always wore nylons, heavy black shoes, and a sweater, no matter how hot the weather. Mathilde spoke to me in high-speed French and treated me like a six- or seven-year-old, as if my age were lost in translation too.

  “No, no,” Mathilde exclaimed the first morning, as I poured milk over my cereal. She seized the bottle and tipped a tiny amount over Francois’s cereal. “Comme ça,” she said to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, reclaiming the bottle of milk. “Je ne parle pas français.” Then I emptied half the bottle into my bowl. The Cheerios foated up to the top and over the rim like tiny corpses.

  Mathilde raised her arms and admonished me in furious French. “Cochon! Vous causez seulement des problèmes! Je dis votre père à ce sujet.”

  “I’m frightfully sorry,” I said in an affected British accent, “but you may not see my penis.” Hearing the word “penis,” Seamus laughed convulsively, spraying milk and cereal across the table— an action three-year-old Francois immediately imitated.

  Mathilde became apoplectic. “Vous petit juif sale! Avez-vous été élevé dans une gouttière?”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “I’m dreadfully sorry if you’ve never seen a penis. But it’s impossible. Quite impossible.”

  At about ten o’clock I would hear water
coursing through the pipes. This was my signal to go upstairs and jump in the shower with my father. Hortense was maniacally frugal and couldn’t bear to think of what their water bill would be if all seven people in the house showered individually. I was glad for this arrangement, because it was a chance to spend time alone with my father for ten minutes. He would be almost done with his shower when I stepped into the back of the tub; after a minute we’d trade places. I would shower rapidly, then wrap a towel around my waist, and sit on the rim of the tub, watching my father shave. Our conversation was always the same: He always asked me if I had played nicely with my brothers that morning, and I always told him yes, and he always said, “That’s nice.” Then I would wait expectantly for him to ask me more questions, to inquire about my life, hoping that the close, steamy, shaving-cream-and-toothpaste-scented air of the bathroom would provide a medium for greater intimacy between us. But he would just regard his face in the mirror, looking to see if he had done a satisfactory job of shaving himself.

  One morning I told him that I thought my mother was going to remarry.

  “I know,” he replied, sighing heavily, as if the mention of my mother placed a burden on him.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I just do,” he said.

  I wasn’t surprised that he knew about Eddie, especially if my mother planned to marry him. It gave her an excuse to get my father’s attention, to remind him that she still existed, to impose a little chaos on his nice, orderly life.

  “I met him the day before we came here,” I said. “I didn’t like him.”

  My father was still regarding his face in the mirror.

  “He yelled at me and twisted my arm.”

  My father finally turned around and looked at me.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Not really.”

  “I see,” he said. “I see.”

  WE ALL SPENT THE AFTERNOONS at the pond behind our cottage. My father and Hortense would read The New York Times and the Boston Globe from cover to cover, then they would open their books and medical journals. Sarah would isolate herself on a blanket about twenty yards from us, reading, writing letters, or swimming far out into the pond. Occasionally my father would look up and gaze out at her, as if trying to decide whether or not he should be concerned. Seamus and I had our books to read, and sometimes we played cards or Monopoly. An old canoe was beached near the house. One day I asked my father if Seamus and I could paddle around the pond in it. He said no, explaining that it wasn’t safe without life jackets. Then I asked him if we could buy life jackets in town.

  Hortense looked up from her book. “No, no,” she said. “You are here for only ten more days. We are not going to spend money on life jackets.”

  “This is the most boring place in the world!” Seamus complained.

  “Good. Then next summer you can stay home,” Hortense said.

  My father asked Seamus what he would like to do.

  “Seth said we were going to go sailing and waterskiing. All we do is sit here and read.”

  “We are here to relax,” Hortense told him. “Your father and I work very hard and we need to relax.”

  “Why don’t we go to the ocean?” I suggested, thinking waves might be more interesting than a placid pond.

  My father gave me a pained expression. “We have this nice pond all to ourselves. Why do we need to drive to the beach and get sand in everything?”

  “How about miniature golf?” I suggested, recalling a number of courses I had seen on Route Six.

  “Yeah!” Seamus exclaimed. “Let’s do that!”

  My father turned to Hortense. “Horty, my love, would you like to go miniature golfing?”

  “No,” she said very decidedly, without looking up from her book.

  “Hortense doesn’t want to go,” my father translated. “Can you think of something we’d all enjoy?”

  “I just did,” I replied.

  He pressed his lips tightly together. “Look how nicely Francois is playing. Can’t you two go play with him?”

  Francois was playing in the nude along the shoreline among a bright scatter of beach toys, singing children’s songs in French. Mathilde watched over him, barefoot but still clad in her heavy sweater.

  “He’s only three years old,” I pointed out.

  “Besides,” Seamus added, “they don’t even speak English.”

  Hortense glared at us over the top of her book. “Thank God!” she declared.

  My father laughed uproariously.

  Over the next week I grew more and more sullen. Hortense was becoming livid at all the food I left on my plate. At dinner one night she handed me the same plate I had used at breakfast that morning. The plate was gravelly with filaments of old toast; a mound of leftover jam solidly adhered to the rim. I asked for a clean plate. Hortense told me I could have a clean plate when I finished my jam. I replied that I didn’t like jam for dinner. “Too bad,” she said. I helped myself to one of the hamburgers my father had cooked on the grill. At dinner the next night Hortense banged down the same plate in front of me. Next to the two-day-old jam was a congealed disk of ketchup and my leftover burger, glazed with a white, waxy membrane of fat. Again I requested a clean plate. Hortense ordered me to finish my hamburger. I refused, declaring it no longer edible.

  “It’s fine,” she insisted. “I’m sick and tired of you wasting good food. We don’t have money to throw away.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I said. “You’re both doctors.”

  “We are researchers. We have very little money.”

  “Then how come you bought this house?” Sarah asked.

  “What’s the difference whether I eat the hamburger or not?” I added. “You’ve already paid for it.”

  “Elliot!” Hortense exclaimed. Usually Sarah and I exchanged smiles when Hortense said our father’s name; her pronunciation of it rhymed with idiot. But at that moment my sister and I just looked down at our plates. My father was concentrating on his food. He wanted no part of this. “Seth, just eat what’s on your plate,” he said.

  A platter of plump, bursting hot dogs was next to Hortense, out of my reach.

  “I’d like a hot dog, please,” I said, my hands folded primly in my lap.

  “No,” Hortense responded. “You finish what you have.”

  “I’d like a hot dog, please,” I repeated.

  I was ready to forgive my father everything—his indifference, his abandonment of me—if he told Hortense to give me a clean plate with a hot dog on it.

  “Look, Seth,” he said, “just eat what’s on your plate. Then you can have all the hot dogs you want.”

  Sarah, sitting next to Hortense, plucked a hot dog off the platter and put it on my plate. She pushed her chair away from the table and went out the door. I cut one piece of the hot dog and chewed it very slowly, looking directly at Hortense. Then I declared myself full and left the table.

  I went outside to look for Sarah but didn’t see her anywhere. It was after seven thirty, and I could already see a star in the twilight. I dragged the canoe down to the water, stepped in it, shoved away from the shore, and paddled until I reached the middle of the pond. Then I let the canoe drift and fell into one of my most consoling reveries—that Hortense would leave my father. She always railed about living in the United States, and she was so devoid of love or humor or happiness—certainly it seemed possible that she might leave him and return to France with Francois and Mathilde. My father would be shattered. I would go live with him, nurture him with love and solace, and he would finally recognize me as his true family, the one person in the world who would love him unconditionally and never leave him. I fantasized in this fashion until the sky was almost black. The stars were massing, the trees turning into a dark ring around the water. I was waiting for my father to come look for me, to shout out my name. This was my chance to hear concern in his voice, hear him express grief and panic over me. But all the lights in the house gradually went off, and
I knew I could stay out on the pond all night and my father would sleep undisturbed for his usual ten hours. Then I tried to imagine his reaction if he came down to the beach in the morning and found my drowned corpse on the shore. Would he collapse to the ground in sorrow and regret? Or would he turn my body over with his toe, studying it disapprovingly?

  Finally, I did hear a voice calling me, but it was Sarah’s, not my father’s. As I paddled into shore, I saw Sarah sitting on the ground, her knees pulled up to her chin. She put her head down and began crying.

  I stepped out of the canoe and pulled it up onto the land. I wanted to put my arms around Sarah, to comfort and console her, but I was too self-conscious. Physical affection was a foreign language to us. I sat down next to her and asked her why she was so upset.

  “I just had my period. My blood is all over the sheets. I don’t want Hortense to know.”

  “She’s a woman. She’ll understand.”

  Sarah, still agitated, began rocking back and forth. She could see that I didn’t get it. I had recently read Anne Frank’s diary and remembered how Anne rejoiced in getting her period, calling it her “sweet secret.” I couldn’t reconcile Sarah’s reaction with what I had read about Anne Frank.

  “This is my first time. It’s supposed to be a big deal between mothers and daughters,” Sarah told me. “Mom is going to have a fit if she knows that Hortense had to help me.”

  “Do you want to hide the sheets?” I asked.

  “Yes, but where? You know Hortense is going to find them.”

  “Not if we paddle out to the middle of the pond and drop them overboard.”

  “All right,” Sarah said, laughing with relief. “Let’s do that.”

  She went back in the house and returned with the sheets in a pillowcase. As she sat facing me in the front of the canoe, I gave it a shove, jumped in, and paddled back out to the center of the pond. Sarah dropped the pillowcase over the side. For a moment it billowed out under the surface of the water, looking like a drowned ghost. “Oh, shit!” Sarah exclaimed. “Maybe I should have put some rocks in it.” But then it gradually became heavy with water and we watched the sack containing my sister’s bloody sheets disappear down into the blackness.