What Big Teeth

by Rose Szabo

  I opened the trunk with the two on its luggage tag. The smell of lavender wafted out. Inside, in neat compartments, were quilts, bedding, and a nightstand set in a wooden box inlaid with silver. I helped Grandmere strip the sheets off the bed, and when a giant cloud of dust engulfed us, I ran laughing to open the window and let in the breeze. She shut her eyes and breathed in, just the way I had when I first came here.

  “What a beautiful view,” she said. “I love the sea air.”

  “Me, too!”

  She caught my hand and squeezed it.

  We went through the trunk, putting sheets on the bed. Underneath were even more sheets, satin ones and ones trimmed with lace.

  “Do you like them?” Grandmere asked.

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “They’re for you.”

  She went to the upright trunk, which was tied shut with twine, and deftly plucked out the knots. She pulled open the top drawer, which was full of white linen underthings. The drawer underneath was larger and held clothes.

  “And these are for you as well,” she said. “I thought just a few nice pieces from France—a skirt suit we can have tailored, a few dresses—might be the right present for a young woman. I hope it’s to your taste?”

  “This is so kind of you,” I said. I took out one of the dresses and held it up. It wasn’t like Luma’s airy little things, the ones that made me look like a little girl. It was black silk, high-necked, long-sleeved, but with little gestures and tucks that made me suspect it wouldn’t look stuffy at all. “I haven’t had new clothes in … a long time.”

  “My poor thing,” Grandmere said. “Has your family fallen on hard times?”

  “No, just … well, maybe now.” I was mesmerized by the sway of the dress. I swished it through the air, wondering what shoes—what stockings—you wore with something like this. “There wasn’t much call for me to have clothes of my own. I went to school, so all my clothes are uniforms.”

  “And you’ve been home for weeks,” she said, “and no one’s thought to get you anything new.”

  “How did you even know what to bring?” I asked.

  She smiled. “You’re just the size I was at your age,” she said.

  It was all too much. The dress, black and rustling and smelling of lavender. The box of clean white underclothes. The beaming woman with rosy cheeks and wrinkled crepe-paper skin, a storybook grandmother. I sat down on the edge of the bed. My throat felt tight. I realized I was crying. I never cried, not in front of people. I covered my face.

  “Shhh,” she said, sitting down beside me. She cupped my shoulder in her hand. “It’s alright, my dear.”

  I cried silently, the way I’d learned in boarding school, and she sat beside me, rubbing my back. When I could catch my breath again I wiped my face with the heel of my hand.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “My poor thing,” she said. “Well, I came at the right time. I’ll do what I can to help. I am worried about that sister of yours.”

  “Luma?” I said, feeling a little jealous. “She’s fine. She’s just a bit…” I stopped myself, not sure what I wanted to say next.

  “She’s certainly…” She hesitated. “Pretty.”

  “I—yes,” I said. “She is. And so I think she doesn’t try very hard.” It was a relief to say it to someone. But at the same time, I felt my chest tighten, as though Luma might hear me.

  “Your mother tells me you’re very clever, though,” Grandmere said. “Why don’t you tell me everything that’s been happening?”

  I told her about Grandma Persephone dying, about Grandpa and the funeral and what Lusitania had said. I told her about my father getting angry with me for trying to run the business, and about him hitting me, and she winced in shock. It poured out of me so fluidly that at first, I didn’t realize what I was trimming out. I didn’t mention the strange card on the night of Grandma’s death, and I didn’t mention Rhys’s obsession with Arthur. Or Luma’s. Or mine.

  I felt guilty about that, at first. But she thought I was sweet. I didn’t want her to know anything that would make her think badly of me. Maybe when we were closer, I’d be braver, but not just yet. It was better to test the waters, to not let everything go at once.

  “And then I wrote to you,” I said. “I thought you’d be … I didn’t think you’d be so…”

  “Normal?” she said.

  I laughed a little. “Yes.”

  She patted me.

  “Well, I assure you, I have my moments,” she said. “I am your mother’s mother.”

  “Grandmere,” I said, “can I ask you something?”

  “Of course!”

  “Why is Mother like she is?”

  She looked away and gave a long sigh.

  “Poor girl,” she said. “She was born looking like that; I tried everything to help her, but she refused me. She told me later that when she met your father, it wasn’t that he was particularly kind, or particularly drawn to her—it was just that he didn’t see her as strange. I think that was what she liked about him.”

  I thought about my father, standing so close to Arthur in the front hall but shrinking from my mother when she’d tried to comfort him after Grandma Persephone had died. I couldn’t imagine spending my life with someone who didn’t love me. I’d rather be alone, I thought, but a part of me questioned that. After all, I was here now, wasn’t I?

  “Your family does seem to revel in strangeness, after all,” Grandmere said. “I think she felt at home. But do you?”

  “I think I’m not strange enough for them,” I said. “Or too strange for them. I can’t tell.”

  She reached out to cup my cheek in one pink suede glove.

  “You are not strange to me,” she said. “I don’t see anything that is not right about you.”

  * * *

  I helped Grandmere sort and put away her beautiful things until the late afternoon, when she finally insisted on a nap.

  “Do you want me to bring you anything?” I asked. “A glass of water? Something to eat?”

  She patted my hand. “No, my dear,” she said. “Just rest. We’ll talk over dinner. Why don’t you take your new things to your room?”

  I left with the trunk she’d brought for me. I was in the third-floor hallway, rolling it toward my own door, when Luma sprang at me out of the shadows.

  “We have to talk,” she hissed.

  She pulled me into her room, trunk and all, and shut the door behind her.

  “What’s all that?” she said.

  “Presents,” I said. “For me.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “She’s brought you a lot of stuff,” she said. “Why didn’t she bring me anything?”

  I laughed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’ve been wearing my school uniform since I got here,” I said. “I don’t have anything. You’ve got plenty of stuff. Look at this place!” I waved a hand around at the piles of antique lace dresses, faded silk underwear, chokers and jewels and pearl combs tossed around like garbage.

  “I just take what I want,” Luma said. “There’s more stuff in the attic. Lusitania used to have stuff sent here by mistake, too, you can have some of those. Why didn’t you say you wanted clothes?”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “I didn’t have anything, and she’s the only one who noticed.”

  “But how could she know that?” Luma said. “She just got here.”

  That made me pause. First I thought of the letter, and that I’d have to be sure to tell Grandmere not to mention it to anyone. Then I realized that in my letter I’d said nothing about clothes.

  “There’s something wrong here,” Luma said. “I can feel it.”

  “You feel a lot of things,” I said, regathering the trunk. “It’s a good thing I’m here to do the thinking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grandmere is here to help,” I said. “Right before she
died, Grandma Persephone said that you all don’t know how to take care of yourselves. And from what I’ve seen, she’s right. I need someone who knows how to run a house.”

  “I could help you,” Luma said. “Or Mother.”

  “You haven’t been.”

  “I’m just saying we don’t need this mean old lady to tell us what to do.”

  “Is she mean?” I said. “Or does she just say things you don’t like?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I sighed.

  “Luma,” I said, “she’s an old woman. We’re, well, we’re Zarrins. Why are you letting her get to you?”

  She leaned toward me, and looked at me very seriously.

  “If she says one more thing to me about my clothes,” she said, “I’m going to rip her throat out.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. “She’s your grandmother, too. Treat her with some respect.”

  Luma slunk back to her dressing table and started brushing out her hair. Silver strands caught in the brush as she ripped out big tangles.

  After I left her, I tried to rest like Grandmere had suggested. I should have been tired; we’d unpacked trunks for hours. But I felt too alert to lie down, too jittery to sit quietly and read a book. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I slipped down the back stairs and out the kitchen door, past a mumbling Margaret, and out to the backyard. I went to the cliff’s edge and followed the rickety staircase down to the beach below. I had to finish what I’d started.

  I looked around to make sure no stray village children or fishermen had made it out here, and then I stripped out of my skirt and my worn school uniform shirt, my drawers and my camisole, took my shoes off and tucked my socks inside them. I picked my way along the rocks, clambered up one of the boulders, and looked at the water below. I knew it would be freezing, which was always Rhys and Luma’s excuse for not swimming. For a moment I stood paralyzed. What if I couldn’t swim anymore? What if that was one more thing that I’d forgotten?

  But something about Grandmere being here had made me feel a little bolder. And I’d survived everything else this place had thrown at me. I took a deep breath and lifted my arms above my head. I brought them together, pointed like an arrow, and flung myself off of the rocks.

  My body knew what to do, mostly. I slid into the water. The cold electrified me, but it didn’t hurt, exactly—not the way Luma and Rhys used to complain about. It felt like turning over, like the sensation I’d felt while tumbling down the stairs at school—like being someone else, someone for whom the cold was restorative, pure. The water was shallower than I’d remembered, and I was almost immediately brushing the bottom with the tips of my fingers. I swam along it for a little bit, my eyes open underwater, keeping my nose tilted down so my nostrils wouldn’t fill with brine. Other people always complained that salt water stung their eyes, but I didn’t feel it. I could look around, see the schools of fish that darted in loose formation. I could watch crabs crawl along the bottom, see bits of shells pulverized by the waves as they floated past my outstretched hands.

  I remembered a trick from when I was younger and sucked my nostrils shut. I turned over onto my back, looking up at the last little bit of sunlight that filtered down through the water. The waves here were harsh and crashed up against the shore, but this far down they were gentled by the weight of the water, and barely moved me at all. I was too skinny for my age and dense like a rock, so I could sit on the bottom without much effort and just look up, the sky over my head a murky green dappled with gold.

  Eventually, though, I ran out of air and had to struggle to the surface to breathe through my open mouth. I gasped again and again, my lungs arguing with the rest of me about where we really belonged.

  I didn’t think Grandmere would approve of this, a girl swimming by herself, swimming naked. But something about being in a room with her had made me want some air. I liked her, but being with her felt like being watched. Like being in the same room as a good teacher who expected me to do well. That was it, I told myself, and I felt guilty that I still wanted to sneak away from her.

  When the sun had dropped behind the cliffs, I lingered a moment more, floating on my back in the water while the fading light turned everything murky. Then I started back toward the shore. I was wading through the breakers, up to my waist, when I saw a dark shape on the sand. It resolved into Arthur, leaning on a folded umbrella, its point buried in the sand. He was beside my pile of clothes. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, and now here he was, as though by magic.

  At first I felt embarrassed, but as I swam closer, as my feet started to brush the bottom, I didn’t crouch down. I let myself emerge from the water a little at a time, flicking my hair forward to cover my chest. He was always putting me at a disadvantage—knowing more than me, keeping it all to himself. A part of me wanted to see if I could shock him. I stepped up out of the breakers. I couldn’t believe myself. The nuns would have strangled me with their bare hands.

  “Your mother asked me to fetch you to dinner,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d see you here.”

  “I do look out of place on a beach.”

  We were standing closer to each other now. He still wore his jacket, his antique celluloid collar, his shiny shoes. His smoked glasses revealed nothing as I stared into them. I felt like I was playing with him, asking him whether he was going to look away, and maybe he was playing back. It was hard to tell exactly, but I felt like he was looking right into my eyes. Out of the dim light of the house, I could see things about him that I couldn’t usually. The deep lines on his lips were not wrinkles, but pearlescent scars. There were others of those on his body, little raised ridges that looked almost like embroidery, as though someone had very carefully sewn up rends in his skin. Maybe he’d been in a war, I thought. My father had been in the War. Shelling, gas, shrapnel. Maybe that was what had happened to him.

  “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” I said, the words sliding out of my mouth unbidden. And for a moment I saw myself that way: not as a gawky teenage girl, but a creature of the waves. I felt imperious, commanding. He could not resist my power.

  For a moment I thought he seemed incredulous, stunned. And then he turned his head away, pointedly looking out over the ocean.

  “I do not think that they will sing to me,” he said, and took a few steps away from my clothes.

  And like that, the ethereal creature was gone, and I was a girl again. I dove for my clothes with a fervor that surprised me. I scrambled into my shirt and drew it around me without buttoning it up. Instantly, it made me feel safer, but it also made me feel like someone who needed safety. It was a bad trade.

  “You know your Eliot,” he said. He was still looking away. I was sure he’d never look at me again.

  “I thought I read him at school,” I said. “But when I came home I found his poems tacked up all over my room.”

  “So that’s what happened to my book. I wondered where it had gotten to.”

  I froze.

  “Oh no,” I said. “I cut it up. I’m so sorry.”

  He laughed, a dry, raspy sound. “It’s hardly the worst thing a Zarrin’s ever done to me.”

  The way he said it made me think of seeing that secret door under the stairs; a thing I hadn’t known existed, opening just long enough for me to see it slam shut.

  “What have they done to you?” I asked.

  I realized I’d stepped closer to him without meaning to. We were as close as he and my father had been in the hall the day of the funeral, so close that I was surprised I couldn’t feel his breath on my face. For a moment I thought he was going to speak. But then I heard the click of his jaw locking up. I knew this by now: something was keeping him from speaking, something beyond him.

  “Arthur,” I said. But he shook his head and held up a hand.

  “You’re going to catch a cold,” he said, when he managed to speak again.

  I flushed, reached do
wn for my skirt, and started tugging it up over my waist. He turned his back entirely, leaning on his umbrella and looking out at the surf. The sun was red on the water, hovering just above the lip of the world.

  “Your grandmother was the one who insisted on this beach,” Arthur said. He spoke slowly, as though picking his way across the rocks, choosing each word with care. “Your grandfather never cared much for water, since he was raised in a landlocked country. But your grandma told me once that she liked the high cliff. She said it reminded her of her mother’s village in Crete.”

  Crete. I thought of the blinding white town on the dark ocean. Was that what I’d dreamed of? Those steep hills, those old women in black?

  “Do you miss her?” I asked.

  He turned toward me abruptly, me with my shirt half buttoned. I suspected he wasn’t looking at my body, such as it was. It was the question that got his attention.

  “What happened between you two?” I asked. “You seem to be so angry at her sometimes. But sometimes it sounds like you liked her.”

  “I don’t know if I liked her,” he said. “I think I just knew her very well.”

  “But you must have forgiven her.” I felt suddenly bold. “For the worst thing the Zarrins did to you, I mean.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You still come to dinner.”

  Another pause. And then: “I suppose I do.”

  It was too much: the last rays of sunlight breaking into fragments on the waves, the light reflecting across his face giving him a strange bloom. My heart was breaking. I wanted to know everything about him, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. Not with Luma after him, to say nothing of Rhys. And not with that something else, whatever it was, that I didn’t yet understand.

  I was the head of this household, even with Grandmere here. I had to handle this with dignity.

  “I know you’re seeing my sister,” I said. “I think you two might make each other very happy. I know things have been strange, and I’ve been rude to you. But I hope you can forgive that. I hope we can be friends. And as friends, I think I should warn you about something.”