Tell Me

by Mary Robison

“O.K.,” he said at last. “We just give them the truth. Describe how we seized control.”

  We said, “They’re going to ask Sarah, and she’ll say, ‘Ask

  Hazel.’”

  •

  Our parents asked Hazel. She told them everything—all that she knew. She said, “Share.… Admit who won.… People look different at different ages.… Providence is the capital of Rhode Island.… Stand still in line.… Mother and Father have been alive a long time.… Don’t pet strange animals.… Get someone to go with you.… Hold tight to the bus railing.… It is never all right to hit.… We have Eastern Standard Time.… Put baking soda on your bee stings.… Whatever Mother and Father tell you, believe them.”

  9

  Kite and Paint

  OCEAN CITY. IT WAS the last day of August, and everybody was waiting for Hurricane Carla. Don was outside the house he shared with Charlie Nunn, poking at the roses with an umbrella. The cuffs of Don’s pants were soaked with dew. His morning coughs were deep, and with each round of coughs he straightened up and clutched his cardigan at his throat.

  Charlie Nunn was watching Don from an old glider on the porch. He had taken apart the morning paper, and had the sports section open on his khakis. Both men were in their sixties.

  “You don’t sound good,” Charlie said.

  “I know it,” Don said. He paused in the roses and whacked at a spoke of weed with his umbrella.

  A green car pulled up at the curb in front of the house. Charlie nodded at a face in the window of the car. The car door opened, and Don’s former wife, Holly, got out. She was all dressed up—a pale-green crocheted dress, nylons, and alligator shoes. She came up the path of flat stones that led to the house, with one hand on her red straw hat.

  “Come in, come in, Holly,” Charlie said. He folded his newspaper and tucked it under his thigh. “Do sit down,” he said.

  “Thank you, no,” Holly said. “I’m just here to check on my piano.” She stepped onto the porch, and her hand dropped from her hat to one hip. She smiled at Charlie.

  “I could kick myself for not moving it out of here long ago,” she said. “Don can’t play it. Unless he learned to play.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Charlie said. “But the piano’s safe. I got it on top of the meat freezer, believe it or not. I built a frame for it so it won’t warp if we get flooded, and it’s shrouded in polyethylene.”

  “On a meat freezer?” Holly said. “My goodness. It’s really nice of you, Charlie. Or did you even know the piano belonged to me?”

  “I guess I did,” Charlie said. “I used to keep track of what was whose. Last evening, I just decided everything had to be protected.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” Holly said. “Are you two going anywhere for the hurricane?”

  “Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “I guess almost everyone else already left.”

  “Yes, a lot of them are staying over at the grade school,” Holly said. “It’s high ground.” She turned and looked toward Don. “I wonder if he should be out there,” she said. “What’s he doing?”

  “Picking mint, it looks like,” Charlie Nunn said. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing at all,” Holly said. She tapped one of her shoes against the other.

  “Let’s go look at the piano,” Charlie said. He got off the glider and led Holly by the wrist through the front door.

  They went through the parlor and the kitchen to a small storage room at the back of the house. Charlie gestured at the piano, an upright, which was lying on one side on top of a low freezer. Inside its slatted frame, it was swathed in plastic wrappings.

  “It looks like a coffin,” Holly said. “It should be fine. It looks great. How in the world—”

  “I got in some beach kids, and they gave me a hand with it,” Charlie said.

  “What are those?” Holly said, pointing to some flat shapes stacked in one corner.

  “Sized canvases,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m keeping them safe. Don won’t use them. He hasn’t worked since he had the flu.”

  “He hasn’t?” Holly said.

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said, “you know the only time he painted with me was when we were first married—oh, twenty years ago. Back when he was friends with some of the big names.”

  Charlie followed her back into the parlor.

  “Oh, God, look at that,” Holly said. “He left the caps off his oils. They’re all clotted.” She went over to Don’s drawing table, in one corner of the room, and stared at the metal trays that held his paint tubes.

  “I would at least like to see the canvases stay dry,” Charlie said, half sitting on an arm of the couch. “They were work.”

  “They predict fourteen-foot waves,” Holly said.

  “I heard that,” he said. “If we flood out, I swear I’m taking the canvases first. I had to cut the stretchers with a mitre box. They’re black oak. The sizing’s made with white lead from Germany and glue from Japan.”

  He got off the couch and went over to a closet. “Let me show you something. This makes me furious,” he said over his shoulder. He knelt and eased a square of illustration board from between some storage envelopes on the closet floor.

  Charlie showed Holly the illustration board. It had childish doodles of a warplane dropping a row of finned bombs, and beneath the bombs there was a pencil sketch of a pelican.

  “Do you see this part?” Charlie said, circling the pelican with the tip of his index finger. “Feather-perfect,” he said. “It could buy us food.”

  “How bad is the financial situation with you two?” Holly said.

  Charlie said, “I have a pension from teaching.”

  “You taught? I never knew that,” Holly said.

  “Sure. I taught shop at the junior high for twenty-three years.”

  “This junior high? Then you’re from here.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “My dad was with the shore patrol. My mother’s still alive. She lives on Decker Street. I’m told somebody already drove her to Philadelphia for the blow. One of my nieces, I think.”

  Don came into the parlor, carrying a handful of mint. “Aren’t you scared?” he said to Holly.

  “No, I’m not scared,” she said. “Just exhausted is all.”

  “I think I’ll take some of my kites down to the beach,” Don said. “It’s getting sort of windy already.” He dropped the mint on the seat of an armchair.

  “In fourteen-foot waves?” Holly said. “How smart would that be?”

  Don pointed the end of his umbrella at Holly’s hat. “What a thing on your head,” he said.

  Holly’s face reddened. She said, “I’m on my way to Philadelphia, Don. I’ll be at Mary Paul’s.” She turned to Charlie. “Maybe I’ll see your mother,” she said.

  “Maybe you will,” Charlie said, rocking forward on the soles of his shoes.

  “Good-bye, Charlie,” Holly said, heading for the door.

  “Good-bye, Don,” said Don.

  “Yes, good-bye, Don,” Holly said.

  •

  “I don’t feel good,” Charlie said, in the next hour. He and Don were in the parlor.

  “Go outside and take some breaths,” Don said.

  Charlie frowned at the couch, which was heaped with cardboard boxes he had just brought up from the basement. He got down and lay on his back on the parlor rug. He put his left fingers on his right wrist, and cocked his arm to read his pulse against his watch.

  Don had switched his pants and sweater for a bathrobe and sandals. He was sitting in an armchair and drinking from a bottle of gin. On his lap was a small wheel of cheese.

  “The air is so bad in here it’s making me cry,” he said.

  Charlie had a lighted cigarette in his mouth and was smoking it while he took his pulse. Some ashes had fallen on his unshaven chin.

  Don snapped the switch on an electric fan that stood on a table beside his chair. The fan wagged slowly to and fro, cutting the smoke
haze over Charlie’s body.

  “Chess?” Don said. “A quick game while we wait?”

  Charlie stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray he had balanced on his stomach. He glared at his watch. “No, I don’t want to play chess,” he said. “I just want to feel better.”

  “You would if you ate. Only you’d better get to it, because what you see here is about all there is, and it’s nearly gone,” Don said. He snapped off the fan.

  “You’re eating that cheese with the rind still on,” Charlie said.

  There was a gust of wind outside, and the parlor curtains billowed against the windowsills. “You should see it out there,” Don said. “From here, it looks like the sky is beige.”

  Charlie rubbed his stomach.

  “I’ll let you see what I did last night,” Don said. He got up and stepped over Charlie on the way to the closet. He brought out a shopping bag and put it on the rug by Charlie’s head.

  “Looky here,” Don said. He pulled a half-dozen kites from the bag. The kites were made of rice paper, balsa-wood strips, and twine, and were decorated with poster paints in bright primary colors.

  “They look like flags,” Charlie said.

  “I made drawings of each one in a notebook, beforehand,” Don said. “I gave them titles. These are called ‘Comet’ and ‘Whale.’” He showed Charlie a blue kite and a yellow one with an orange diagonal stripe.

  “Yeah. What else?” Charlie said.

  “This is ‘Boastful,’” Don said, handing Charlie a kite. “Stay still a minute.” He crossed the room, with a kite in each hand.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Charlie said.

  Don propped the kites against the boxes on the sofa, where the light from one of the parlor windows fell on them. “These are the next to the best,” he said, standing back. “‘My Beauty’ and ‘Moon.’”

  “Right, right,” Charlie said. “Let’s see the best.”

  “This one—‘Reddish Egret,’” Don said. “It’s my favorite.” He held the last kite flat above Charlie’s face. “See?” he said, touching a stenciled figure in the center of the kite. “It’s a bird.”

  “Why don’t you send them to Zack, in the city?” Charlie said as Don took the last kite away. “He could get you some gallery space or something, I bet.”

  “I fired Zack,” Don said. “It’d be fun to waste them in the blow.”

  “Not a chance,” Charlie said.

  “Why can’t we?”

  “I’m not getting off this floor,” Charlie said, “unless it’s to get in hot bathwater, and I mean up to my chin.”

  Don collected his kites and dropped them one by one into the shopping bag. He threw himself into the armchair and turned on the fan again.

  “Holly was shocked at the mess your oils are in,” Charlie said after a while.

  “Oh, don’t even tell me,” Don said. “Holly! Her very presence is dispiriting to me.”

  “I don’t know why you say that,” Charlie said. “All she hopes for is to see you do an occasional day’s work.”

  “I never liked to paint,” Don said.

  Charlie turned on his side on the floor and braced his head on his palm. “Would you turn off that fan? I can’t hear myself,” he said. “You liked painting when you had a model. Especially that one model.”

  The fan quit by itself, in midglance, and the noise from the refrigerator stopped.

  “Uh-oh,” Charlie said. “That means the hot water, too.” He got off the rug and went to the window, and stood holding back the curtain. “It looks like a good one,” he said. “How about flying your kites from the porch roof, if I rip up an old bedsheet? For the tails, I mean. You want to climb out there and try it?”

  “I do,” said Don.

  10

  Father, Grandfather

  MY DAUGHTERS WERE BIG, beautiful blondes who shared a loft in the East Village, but lately they’d been staying at my place, helping me resettle. I could hear them now in the living room, the younger one, Cammie, asking as she came to, “Where is it I have to get up this second and go?”

  “Supermarket,” said Cake. “We need napkins, disposable cups. We have no ice tongs.”

  She sighed and said, “Cammie, my God. It’s a good thing your clothes are all-occasion.”

  Cammie had slept fully dressed on my couch.

  “Well, but I wake up ready to go,” Cammie said.

  “I think you drink,” said Cake.

  “What if I do?” Cammie asked as she pulled up and shook off.

  Now both of them arrived in the kitchen.

  “Not water from a tap, though, which is something I’ve seen you do,” Cammie said. “What’s this we’re cooking?”

  They stood at the stove. On one of the front burners sat a huge gurgling kettle.

  “Clothes,” Cake said. “They were ugly, so I’m dying them. That sundress what’s-her-name gave me, and this other stuff, if it doesn’t get pitch black I’m throwing it out.”

  She used a long wooden wand to stir the clothing and the kettle’s dark water.

  “Did you make that? It’s an oar,” Cammie said.

  Cake nodded. Both my girls had, like me, degrees in anthropology, but Cake had gone into the design and production of wooden spoons. Cammie served drinks at a cowboy bar.

  “Hi,” I said now, from my seat behind the breakfast nook. I had been sitting there, unnoticed, the whole long time.

  •

  They returned from the market with sacks of food and the idea of using my bigger kitchen to make hors d’oeuvres.

  They had invited me to a cocktail party that night at their loft. I was looking forward to the party and to meeting their many friends. The past eighteen months, I’d been away traveling on a grant. I’d gone to Ciudad Juarez to live with the Okut.

  “Before we do anything,” Cake said. “This kitchen.”

  •

  They cleared shelves and cabinets and flipped cans and jars into recycling bags. They used what they called the “six-sack solution”—separate sacks for paper, glass, metal, plastics, food garbage, and one for nonperishables.

  I left the kitchen and hid; close, but in another room.

  I heard Cammie say, “Here’re all the supplements we bought for her—iodine, zinc, chromium, selenium.… Seals unbroken, soon to expire.”

  Cake called out to me in a tone that made my cat leap: “Mom! You cannot rely on food for nutrition! The soil your produce is grown in is worthless!”

  “Come here, Moo,” I told the cat. “You didn’t do anything.”

  •

  Now they were defrosting my freezer.

  “Get back! Get that blow-dryer outta here!” Cake yelled. “That is so dangerous! Mom, will you tell her this is dangerous? And that she can’t slam at it with a ballpeen hammer. The thing’s got Freon!”

  My door buzzer sounded. As I got up to answer, I saw the doorknob turn, saw the door open. My father slipped in. I exhaled relief and sat back down.

  Dad was dressed for cold in a topcoat and a furry black muffler. His face and bald head were deeply tanned.

  “Unlocked?” he asked me. He glanced left, glanced right. He leaned over my chair. “Who’s here?”

  “The girls,” I said. “You’re so tan!”

  He straightened. He said, “Thanks,” as he unbuttoned his topcoat. He said, “I use that cream. It’s not bad. Not streaky orange like in the old days. I’ll bring you some.”

  Cammie’s voice said, “Grandpa? Don’t take this the wrong way, but no.”

  She stood in the kitchen entryway. She was holding a platelet of ice.

  “It costs three or four dollars,” he said.

  “I know,” Cammie said, “but the greater cost. There’re laws now about smear-on tans. That anyone who has one can’t vote.”

  “I’m not registered anyway,” Dad said when Cammie was gone.

  “Oh lordy,” I said. “Don’t tell them that.”

  “Who’s in authority here?” he asked.r />
  •

  “I’ve got crocuses, a few tulips,” he said. He lived in Brooklyn. “Saw kids doing an egg hunt the other morning. Oh, and, Gloria, I read in Cosmopolitan that you’re supposed to—”

  “Wait,” I said. “You read Cosmopolitan?”

  He looked right, he looked left. “Only sometimes, if it’s lying out and I happen to pick it up.”

  I hadn’t moved in hours and my chair’s upholstered buttons had numbed circles into my back.

  “This article cautioned you to cook eggs all the way. You want to be certain of that when you’re getting ready for Easter.”

  I didn’t comment, but Cake called from the kitchen, “We’re a little old for baskets, Grandpa. Though we still need Mom’s help tying our Easter bonnets on.”

  Dad was lounging on the carpet now before the television. The cat came from the shadows and climbed onto him.

  “Your husband still with that woman?” he asked me.

  I said, “Why would you believe me, but I don’t know or care.”

  “You may be fooling yourself,” my dad said.

  “Then I successfully have. Just shoo her away. The cat,” I said.

  “Oh no, don’t worry about it. I’m flattered she wants to sit here.”

  “Except I do like these pants,” he said after a moment. He lifted the cat off his lap and brushed at his trousers.

  I got out of my chair and stood by a bookcase. I had heard Cake say, “You want to bet that if we go in there she still won’t have moved.”

  “Badgering your own witness!” Dad told the TV.

  Perry Mason was on, and Dad had been ahead of the prosecutor character with objections. “Not best evidence. Wasn’t introduced in cross.” He said, “I think this must have been a joke episode, the way Raymond Burr keeps announcing he’s waiting for Mr. Right.”

  “Have you seen this one?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, I might’ve. I’ve got them all on tape. It’s to the point that whatever I’m doing I move to the theme song, you know? Tahd-ah, duhd-ee, tahd-ah, duhd-ee.”

  The smoke alarm in my kitchen sounded.

  The girls, through the entryway, high-jumped. Cake swatted at the alarm. Cammie was fanning at it with a towel.

  My dad scooted over to me and asked if he should intervene. “Although I’m not sure how,” he said.