by Maile Meloy
“He said it was surprising that I didn’t shave under my arms,” her mother said, shaking a pillow out of its case. “So I shaved.” She laughed. “So much for my feminist principles. I kind of like it, though. I told him I didn’t think Italian women shaved, but he said they did. I’m not sure he’s right. They’re more natural in Europe.” She shook the other pillow out, and dropped the pillowcase on the floor. “So what did you think of Jake?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think Carlo’s a good father.”
Valentine tried, as she sometimes did, to remember her own father living in the house. He had been too tall for the overhead light fixture in the kitchen, and swore when he bumped his head but never took the fixture down. Her parents had fought, but that was just part of life. Then he was gone, living in California. When Valentine asked why he had moved so far away, her mother sat down on the couch to answer. She said that they just couldn’t stay in the same town, divorced. His pull on her was too strong, and he couldn’t stand her having a new relationship, so neither of them would have been happy. When Valentine asked her father the same question on the phone, he said, “I had an important job to do in California.” Then he asked what her mother said about it. Valentine said she didn’t know. For a while, at night, she would hear the phone ring and then her mother crying, but that had stopped.
Her mother bundled up the sheets, and carried them past Valentine into the kitchen.
THERE FOLLOWED a difficult period, as Gwen ran through her divorce settlement. She polished her wedding silver to have it appraised, but came home from the jeweler’s crying, unwilling to sell it. She was happy in the mornings after Carlo stayed, but whatever he did wore off, and she was miserable again. They ate from her wedding china, with the silver scrollwork around the edges, because those were the only plates. She grew vegetables to sell to a local organic café, and they ate what was left. When Valentine found a steamed white worm on her broccoli, her mother said, “It’s from the garden.”
“It’s a worm.”
“Just take it off.”
“It’s gross.”
“I ate my broccoli already,” her mother said, smiling wanly, making a joke. “At least you found your worm first.”
“I don’t want to eat things from the garden anymore.”
Her mother stared at her, looking lost. Then she stood, dropped her plate in the sink, and shut her bedroom door.
Summer days, Valentine went to the public library downtown. She sat in the empty children’s section, reading comic books: The Incredible Hulk, and the Archie and Veronicas her mother said were sexist. A bearded man in a jean jacket sometimes sat close to her, and brushed against her once as she leaned over a table, reading. The librarian came over and asked him to leave. After that, Valentine would glance around the library, to see if he was there. She looked forward to school starting in the fall.
ONE DAY SHE WALKED home to find Carlo stalking back and forth across the living room, and her mother sitting on the couch. He was angry.
“Rich brats,” he said. “It’s worse in summer school. Everyone indulges them.”
“Did you sleep with one of them?” her mother asked.
“No!” he said. “Jesus.”
“What did you do?”
“I gave them the grades they deserved. I wouldn’t take late papers. They complained to the fucking dean.”
“They can’t fire you for grades.”
“Maybe I yelled a little.”
“Is there some kind of probation?”
“I was already on that.”
“Jake’s outside, baby,” her mother said to her.
She found Jake bouncing a volleyball on his knee, on the other side of the big pine tree. The sun lit up his dark hair, and Valentine wanted to touch it, he was so beautiful. She wondered if Jake were the dangerous kind of handsome, if that was why she had a nervous feeling in her chest.
“Is he still mad?” Jake asked.
She nodded.
“He made dinner for some students and they got drunk,” he said. “One hit a tree in her car. Angie. She’s okay, though.”
“Does my mom know?”
“She doesn’t know anything.” Jake kicked the volleyball into the lilacs, and Valentine watched it disappear. “What’s there to do here?” he asked.
“We can go up on the roof.”
The old maple tree was easy to climb, and its branches stretched out over Valentine’s bedroom. There were maple seeds scattered on the flat roofing, and she showed Jake how to spin the dried ones like helicopters to the ground.
“This is so cool!” Jake said, running up to the roof’s peak and leaping over it, arms in the air, then skidding down on his rubber-soled Vans to where the asphalt shingles flattened out again.
“We’re not supposed to be up here,” Valentine said. “There are live wires.”
Jake spoke to the lines that ran over their heads. “General and Mrs. Electric!” he said. “We want permission to be on the roof !”
Valentine sat on her heels on the incline, watching him act out all the parts—the general barking orders, long-suffering Mrs. Electric, Jake the boy who had come to play on the roof—and she wished she could make up things like that. He kept going until his father yelled, “Jake!” from below.
Then Jake’s face grew solemn, and they climbed in silence down the tree.
Gwen said, “There are live wires up there,” and Jake sneaked Valentine a look. Carlo wasn’t speaking to anyone. With Jake in the car, he drove away too fast down the gravel alleyway.
THEY READ about the accident in the newspaper. Angela Ellberg, twenty-one, had been charged with DUI. The instructor who provided the alcohol, Charles Gregory—that was Carlo—had been fired. Valentine’s mother was furious, red-faced and crying.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” she demanded.
Valentine thought of Jake saying her mother didn’t know anything.
Carlo and Jake came to the house that night with two bottles of red wine and a sack of groceries. Gwen stopped them at the door. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
“The college wanted to keep it a secret,” Carlo said. “They asked me not to tell.”
“But I listened to you talk about grades!”
“I’m sorry,” Carlo said. “I should have told you. Can I come in?” He walked past them with the groceries. Jake sidled over to the stereo to look at the records. Valentine followed her mother and Carlo into the kitchen.
“What are you going to do?” Gwen asked.
Carlo picked Valentine up and spun her around, saying, “O donna di virtù, beata e bella, loda di Dio vera!”
“Please speak English,” Gwen said.
“Instead of Dante?” he asked. “I like your hair like that, Val.”
Valentine touched her braids, and he put her down and started unpacking the groceries.
“I’m filing a lawsuit,” he said. “They should never have fired me. I’m going to rake them over the proverbial coals.”
Her mother frowned at the filmy plastic produce bags on the counter, and Valentine knew she was thinking that she already had lettuce and good tomatoes, her own. “A lawsuit for what?”
“Wrongful termination.”
“Who’s Angela Ellberg?”
“My best student. I had no idea she was drunk.”
“You gave them alcohol.”
“A glass of wine,” Carlo said. “Anyone who got an A on the Italian midterm got an Italian dinner. This is not a crime. They were all of age. Angie has a bump on her head and a scratch on her arm, and it’s her own damn fault. They were drinking before.”
“You could have asked me to the dinner.”
“Oh, boy,” Carlo said. He set a can of tomato paste on the counter. “Are you mad because you disapprove of the event, or because you weren’t invited?”
Valentine’s mother said nothing.
“I thought it would be more of a drinking-type social thing if you w
ere there,” he said. “I was trying—God help me—to be appropriate. Now close your eyes.”
She stared at him a minute, and then did close her eyes, and he took a necklace of tiny dark-red beads from his pocket and hooked it around her neck.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this is an embarrassing mess. That looks nice.”
She went to look in the bathroom mirror, and Carlo gave Valentine a funny, apologetic smile and shrugged. Her mother came back and kissed him, and he opened a bottle of wine and started to cook. He was short enough for the low ceiling, and never hit his head on the light.
They put out the china plates for dinner, and Carlo added two more wineglasses, pouring some for Jake and Valentine.
“Carlo, please,” Gwen said.
“I refuse to pretend it’s an evil,” he said. “Kids drink it in Italy from their baby bottles. I’ve given them a tiny bit. Now sit down and mangia, mangia. How is it?”
“Aside from the tomatoes?”
“You haven’t even tried them yet. Valentine, what do you think?”
Valentine glanced at her mother. The tomatoes didn’t have worms. Nothing had worms. “It’s good,” she said.
Her mother looked betrayed, but a minute later she was laughing at something Carlo had said.
THAT NIGHT AT BEDTIME, Jake laid out his sleeping bag on Valentine’s bedroom floor, saying that the couch was lumpy and her room the only one with carpet. The carpet was made of sample squares, glued together in a checkered grid, green and red and blue.
“What if I sat up at night with a dream,” Jake said, “then cracked my head open on the hard floor out there?”
He acted out the head-cracking, making a head-cracked face, and Valentine watched from her pillow. She had tasted the wine and felt nothing from it, only a kind of warmth.
“Is Angela Ellberg pretty?” she heard herself ask.
“Angie?” he said. “Sure. Why?”
“Is your dad in love with her?”
He thought about it. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Are you?” She held her breath.
“No,” he said scornfully.
They lay in silence for a while, in the light from the lamp by her bed, and then he sat up suddenly, propping himself on one arm. His eyes were dark and serious.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked.
It took her a second to respond. It wasn’t surprise she felt, just unpreparedness. “Why?”
“Because I want to.”
Valentine closed her eyes and the kiss was cool and dry. It pressed against her lips for a long moment, and she saw the blaze of light from the bonfire and wanted to climb down into his arms, and then it was gone. The air in front of her face felt empty and cold. Jake lay back with his hands behind his head and looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at her and nodded, as if to say that was what he had wanted.
SEPTEMBER CAME, and her mother had a new job with the state, and Jake went to live with his mother for the school year. One day walking home from the library, Valentine saw him downtown. He had friends with him, and she felt shy and kept walking, and he didn’t seem to notice. She looked down to see if she was wearing her cool jeans. She was, but when she checked in a shop window, she saw herself, not tall and cool but small, in a little girl’s pink coat.
At a birthday party that weekend, the other girls asked if she had kissed a boy yet. She felt her face burning and refused to answer, and they squealed with delight.
Carlo started coming around more often, now that he lived alone. He settled his lawsuit against the college, which made him happy because it meant he’d been right, but it didn’t give him his job back. One day Valentine found him reading the newspaper in the kitchen when she got home from school, and she felt suddenly bold.
“Are you going to live here?” she asked.
He seemed to think about it before he answered. “If I play my cards right,” he said.
“Did you ask my mom?”
“Not really,” he said. “Not yet.”
That night her mother stayed out late, without calling. Valentine ate a grilled-cheese sandwich with Carlo, who taught her sentences in Italian. Buona sera, signorina! Come ti chiami? Quanti anni hai?
“God, I miss my job,” he said suddenly. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I miss it like I used to miss my wife.”
They heard Gwen come through the front door, and Carlo frowned. He stood as she walked into the kitchen.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he asked.
“At dinner,” she said, sliding her nice jacket off her arms.
“With?”
“A friend,” she said. “From work.”
“You left Val alone? You didn’t call?”
“I knew you’d be here,” she said. “You’re always here.” She went into her bedroom and shut the door.
Carlo looked at Valentine and sighed. “I don’t ask for so much,” he said. After a while he knocked at the bedroom door and after some discussion went inside.
THE NEXT MORNING was a Saturday. When Valentine got up in her nightgown, there was pancake smell from the kitchen. Her mother stood at the stove, and Carlo sat at the kitchen table, pouring chokecherry syrup on his pancakes.
“The risen Beatrice,” he said, pulling out a chair for her. “Whose clear eyes see all.”
“Hi, baby,” her mother said, but her voice sounded unhappy.
There was a long silence.
“I think we’re too cooped up here,” Carlo said. “Let’s all take a trip and go camping. Jake, too.”
“We already have a trip planned,” Gwen said.
“Great, where?”
“My parents want to see Val. It’s just us.”
Carlo scowled at his plate, and knocked over his orange juice so it dripped onto the floor. He jumped up to keep it off his jeans, and Gwen wiped the table in annoyed silence.
They took up the subject of the trip after breakfast, their voices barely muffled by the closed bedroom door. “I went through this with my wife,” Carlo was saying. “I won’t go through it again.”
Valentine climbed up the tree to the roof and crouched at the edge to spin maple seeds to the ground, her toes almost out in the air. The last time she had been on the roof with Jake, talking about their parents, he had said, “They kiss with tongue.”
Valentine had been surprised to hear him say it only because it was so obvious—she had seen them do it a million times. But Jake had been living with his mother, who probably didn’t do that.
“Gross,” Valentine had said, in a tentative way, hoping that was the right response.
Jake said, “I don’t think it’s gross,” but he didn’t sound sure. He flicked a maple seed with his finger and thumb, and it sailed out in a long curve, then spun to the ground.
Valentine had eyed him sideways, wondering if he wanted to try it. She wanted to, suddenly: she wanted to know what it was like. And why would he mention it if he didn’t? Then the front door had slammed—Gwen and Carlo fighting, like they were now—and Carlo shouted, “Jake!”
“I better go,” Jake had said, and he was down the tree and gone.
Now, alone on the roof, Valentine looked at her shoes and wished people would either stay or go away, but not constantly be coming back and leaving again. She guessed by people she meant Jake. Her father hadn’t come back in a long time.
The door slammed and Carlo passed below her without looking up, got into his car in the driveway, and drove away.
She climbed down and went into the house, where her mother sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor, her face in her hands.
“We’re taking a trip?” Valentine asked.
“We are now,” her mother said.
It was a long drive in hot weather, and they kept the windows down and listened to tapes. Gwen sang along to Joan Armatrading in a clear, thin voice—“I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I can walk under ladders . . .” Valentine watched the trees and fields and telephone poles go by. Her
grandparents’ house was big and neat and looked over a valley. Her grandfather was tall and silver-haired, and her grandmother was blond, and they walked and spoke briskly. Valentine and her mother shared a room with two single beds, where Gwen sometimes cried without warning. There were sweet pea blossoms from the garden on the night table. They all went for a hike to a clear, cold lake. Then they said goodbye. On the long drive home, Valentine asked if they were going to see Carlo anymore.
“Probably not, baby,” her mother said.
Valentine looked out the car window.
“I mean, no,” her mother said. “I told him we wouldn’t. It’s over.”
Valentine wasn’t sure what to say. She was used to Carlo, by now, and she would miss Jake.
They got back to the house in the middle of the night, and Valentine woke to the familiar maple branches outside the windshield, hanging in the pale light from the alleyway. She pretended to be asleep.
“Come on,” her mother said. “I’m too tired to carry you.”
So Valentine shouldered her backpack and went in. The first thing she noticed was how hot the house was, shockingly hot. She stood in the doorway, feeling the strange heat on her face and in her lungs. The house smelled like hot wood. Her mother rushed to turn off the gas heaters, which were blazing, glowing blue in the dark. The hissing, breathing sound of them stopped.
“I turned off the pilot before we left,” she said, looking to Valentine. “You saw me do it.”
It sounded like an accusation. Valentine didn’t remember. “Can I go outside?” she asked. It was so hot, and she was so tired.
“Leave the door open,” her mother said, turning on a light.
Valentine sat on the front step in the cool air, listening to her mother open windows, and waited for her eyes to adjust again to the dark. Her mother let out a cry inside the house. Valentine studied the garden on the other side of the clothesline, and it looked strange in the shadows, though she couldn’t say why.
Her mother came outside, and her voice was small and choked. “He was here,” she said. “He took things. That necklace he gave me, and some photographs.”