“Only a kid like you would pick out a blind mutt and then want to keep it.”
“Excuse me,” I say, standing in front of him.
He shakes the orange pill container in front of me.
I remember when I was small and sick with the flu or something and had to take a pill. He crushed it into a cup of warm milk. He stayed up with me. He fell asleep at the end of this bed—him, not my mother. She always said she needed her sleep or she couldn’t function. He was up with me, stroking my legs, making sure that whatever was wrong with me would soon be fixed. I don’t know what he wants from me. One minute he wants me to grow up, get a summer job, help with the campaign, and in another, he won’t let me have a lock on the door and I’m under interrogation.
“I’m going to flush this down the toilet. You got me? I expect this to be the end of it. We love you, Max, your mother and I love you.”
“Flushing prescription drugs down the toilet, that isn’t good for the environment. The drugs enter the water system.”
“So you do think you’re smarter than me?” he says. “Let me be very clear about this. These—and all the others—are going down the toilet. Call the EPA.”
I’m not smart at all, I want to say, only his son. He blocks me from leaving.
“Dinner smells good, doesn’t it?” he says. “You’re going to be at the Labor Day event, Max? We need to show a united front as a family.”
I lock eyes with him.
He takes that as a yes and says, “Smart boy,” and shifts away as if he hates looking at me. I don’t care what he says. I see it in his eyes that he wishes he had another son, one that wins.
In a moment, he is in the main bathroom. The toilet flushes, and a shudder runs through the house as the pills are driven into the ecosystem.
The scent of frying hamburgers wafts down the hall. I used to love my mother’s hamburgers, juicy and slick with onions on the side. Tonight the smell makes me angry. During the last two years, she stopped cooking. She was always taking the train up to Albany to meet my father for some event. I was left with money for takeout. I don’t need to sit down with them for dinner now. I can’t look at them now.
King rubs against my legs. I clutch at his collar. Even blind, he finds my face and licks it.
Claire
Friday, 7:00 P.M.
We stay as long as we can, after most of the families leave, tugging their wagons off the beach, the wagons now piled with wet, sandy towels and half-asleep children seemingly more of the sea than the land. In their wake, upturned plastic sand buckets remain. Fresh-dug holes spill over with seawater. Sea gulls forage the garbage. And the oceanfront reverts into the empty place it should be.
I hurry a sleepy Izzy toward the minivan. I think that we’ll miss getting home before my father. We’ll end up getting caught in traffic, our hair knotted with sand and seaweed, our skin scaly with too much sun, our mouths singing: we are mermaids.
Yet in less than a half hour, our minivan slips into the driveway, the lone car. I call my father on his cell phone and leave a message. I thank him for the wonderful day at the movies. I warm up leftover macaroni and cheese, add a few raw carrots to each of our plates. I don’t know how my mother grocery shopped. I can’t seem to figure out how much to buy, or what to buy, or when to buy. Izzy loves bananas. But somehow the ones I purchase turn instantly brown and soft, and then what do you do with them? We have piles of brown bananas and I don’t know what to do with them. We’ve lived on macaroni and cheese for weeks, but I have it all under control. However, tonight neither of us is very hungry. I make sure Izzy has her bath, using the last of our mother’s bubble bath, and change her into one of her princess nightgowns. I don’t remember ever having a princess nightgown. I fluff out her blond hair. Next to me she is fair, adorably freckled. She slips her skinny arms around me and kisses me for the tenth time or more today. She’s easier with her kisses than I ever was.
Curling up in her bed, she smells like a mix of sea and lavender. All the lights must be on. All the teddy bears must be lined around her. Blond curls and valentine lips, I think again for the tenth or twentieth time, she’s going to be gorgeous. I sigh. “Go to sleep.”
She pops her head up. “When is Daddy coming home?”
“Soon.”
“Can I stay awake for him?”
“Sure,” I say, knowing she’ll be asleep in ten minutes. “Just close your eyes.”
She lays her head back down with her eyes wide open. “Sometimes I can’t remember her before, can you?”
“It’s time for sleep now.”
She studies my face so hard I have to turn away. “I know who she used to look like.”
I pick up her soggy bathing suit from the floor.
“You. She looks like you, Claire.”
“No. She doesn’t look like me.” In her bedroom mirror, a glimpse of my face, burned brown from the sun with its chapped lips and peeling nose, almost confirms this for me. I don’t easily remember what she looked like before.
“You do. You look exactly like her.”
I have to get her to sleep. I don’t want to have this conversation. Not now. I don’t want to think that to Izzy I look like our mother. I’m not her. I don’t want to be her.
Izzy flops back on her bed and slips her hands behind her head. “Where do you go when you die, Claire?”
“I told you.”
“I forgot.”
“You don’t have to worry about dying.”
“But I want to know. When I die, will I go to heaven? Will Mommy be there when I get there? Will she be all better?”
I can’t do this tonight. I just can’t. My father should be home. He should be the one answering these questions, or not answering them, as is usually the case. I’ll make us dinner. Do the laundry, even. But not this.
“Mommy isn’t dying so soon, and neither am I, and neither are you.”
“What’s heaven like, Claire?”
“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“I like asking questions. You do, too.”
“Let’s talk about something else. Did you have fun today?”
“I always have fun at the beach. But I am going to have more fun tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Every day I try to have more fun,” she says, as if I’m the six-year-old.
“We’re both going to have more fun tomorrow.”
“But Claire, I still want to know. What happens when you die? What happens to your skin? Do your bones become like dinosaur bones?”
Everyone says that Izzy is one of the most verbal kids they’ve ever met. Sometimes, I wish she were a little less verbal. “You don’t have to worry about that for a long, long time.”
“Sometimes I dream of her, and it’s before she had the stroke.”
“Izzy, you have to go to sleep,” I say with desperation. I want to go into my room and be in the dark on my computer.
“When I die, will she be in heaven?”
“She’s not dead. She’s in the rehabilitation center.” My voice has an edge. I don’t want to talk about anyone dying.
“I know that. But when I’m dead,” she persists, “will she be there? Will Daddy? Will you?”
“Yes. But no one is dying.”
“Everybody will be in heaven with me,” she says, happy and matter-of-fact in her logic. “Guess what I’m going to wear in heaven?”
“You’re not going to heaven for a long time. You have time to plan your outfit.”
“Just guess. What am I going to wear in heaven?”
“Elizabeth.” She knows I use her full name when I’ve had enough.
“I’m going to wear my bathing suit in heaven—not the one with frogs that I wore today, the pink one. Are you allowed to do that? Is there an ocean in heaven?”
“Elizabeth, there’s an ocean in heaven, okay? Now, I’m going to my room. Shout if you need anything,” I say, and what I think is: Please, please, go to sleep already. Please let me go.
Please let me be for the rest of the night by myself, alone, without dreams of my mother, or dying, or even heaven.
Izzy scoots under her blanket, made up of alternating squares, berry purple and yellow, knitted by our mother in the last months of her pregnancy, the needles tapping and clacking every evening for weeks. She didn’t have to look at each stitch. She didn’t even have to stop and count her lines. She never knitted things with holes in them, never got frustrated, never had to unravel lines and start all over again. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to knit like that again. I press my face into Izzy’s blanket, baby-soft and lavender-scented, my mother’s scent. Her knitting runs across my face in perfect, tight stitches.
Izzy tugs the blanket to her chin. I kiss her tonight on her forehead six times, one for each of her six years.
“I can’t wait to be seven,” she says, and I almost scream in exasperation. “You know why, Claire?”
“Why?”
“Because then you’ll give me seven kisses every night, won’t you?”
I want to give her another kiss right now, but I know what it’s like to wait and plan for things like that.
“Will Mommy be home for my birthday? Please say yes.”
“I can’t,” I say. “Do you want another kiss?”
“No,” she says. “Just leave the light on. One more thing, Claire.”
“What?”
“Did you double-check the front door? Daddy is always saying to lock the door, that you never know,” she says, sounding like a grown-up. I don’t ever want her to turn seven.
“Checked and double-checked.”
“What is it that ‘you never know’?” she says, drifting off.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe I’ll dream of Mommy tonight,” she says in a sleepy, faraway voice.
I hurry out. Take five, six steps into the darkness of the hallway, before I hear, “Claire? Claire?”
I can’t do this. I’ve been with her all day. I can’t be mother and father to her. I don’t say anything. I want to go—anywhere, or at least be alone to think and write.
“Claire?”
I suck in my breath. He should be here now. He should be dealing with her. What if he doesn’t come home? What if it’s only her and me? I push the fear down.
Her voice calls out, louder now. “I love you, Claire.”
I breathe. “I love you more, Izzy.”
Barkley
Friday, 8:00 P.M.
In the pitch black in front of the computer screen, the brain filters information at full speed. I must connect with her. She is my vision, my creation. Filmmakers would label her the ingenue. The naive young girl. The one who must be taught. She is mine to teach.
Next to me, the super-sized bag of corn chips and jar of hot salsa are half-emptied. May have to venture out for more. Must feed the body.
I type with one hand and eat with the other. The body and mind are two entities, paralleling each other, an independent and dependent clause. The body needs food to keep it satiated, calm in front of the screen. The mind must roam free.
Words jump on the screen.
I found her in a half dozen places on the Internet, and I am now at her blog, inside of her words. Claire’s words. Stare at the particles, verbs, nouns, split infinitives, until they are in straight, even lines. I am reading a poem from Claire. My Claire. I absorb each syllable. I am not alone. I am with her.
The voice intrudes. Correct me: instructs. I will sing of mercy and judgment. That is a poetic line. That is truth.
Her poem is not about mercy or judgment. I say this aloud, to the voice in my head. Problems arise with the poem. Not that I am a professional critic, yet even I can see beyond the words: the grammar is arbitrary.
Who makes the rules about where to break the line in a poem? Is there a rule book, like in sports, to consult? I understand from my private studies that there is a format for scripts and one must follow it or be punished by the film industry.
The words waver in and out of focus. I stare harder.
Is there a rule about periods versus commas versus semicolons at the end of the line? Doesn’t a semicolon connect two independent clauses? Didn’t my English teacher at that community college call semicolons the bastards of grammar and want them banned from papers? If there are no rules of grammar anymore, what does that say about our society? Have we given up even the basics of how to control our poetry?
I eat faster, more chips, more salsa.
Neurons ping my brain like an electrical storm. I shiver. I am in the center of the storm. Charged. I can smell ozone, a rarified acrid smell of fire in open skies. My left hand falls away from the chips. The back of my throat scratches for a cigarette and coffee. Cigarette. Coffee. Claire.
I never used to like coffee. I started drinking it at school, at that community college. One cup in the morning to get me going, and then, by the end of this year, spring semester, I drank ten or twelve oversized cups a day. I had a hot coffee in my hand when the English professor pressed me to sit down, to calm down. I was calm. He asked me to interpret the white spaces on the poem. One cannot read the invisible; one cannot read space. Skewered beliefs in space and connections and metaphor. And the coffee flew out of my hand, struck the professor in his face and arm, seared him. I apologized. My parents apologized. I am bereft of apologies.
Pound down the last of the chips.
Behave wisely, and so will our friend.
I have no friends, I want to scream: I am alone in my room. I have a gun in my drawer. I have bullets. But it would be insane to scream that out loud.
I fling the plastic bag to the floor. Scatter crumbs like broken shells. Waves crash over me. I am drowning at my desk.
Behave in the perfect way. The path is straight ahead.
I breathe from the gut. My head hurts, but the voice soothes. Before me, the words on the screen are, suddenly, straight and true. Focus, hard. The poem is for me to decode, and only I can do this, only I can understand her. Claire must know this.
Claire
Friday, 9:00 P.M.
After checking on Izzy, now sleeping, I lift back the plaid curtains and search out from the front window for a sign of my father. If it were up to me, I’d strip all the faux early American—the flowered, the crocheted, and the cross-stitched—from the house. Strip this living room down to its bare essentials. My father won’t let me store away even one embroidered pillow.
I try my father’s cell phone again. I don’t even bother leaving another message. I notice dirty dishes in front of the television in the den. I don’t think they were there this morning. I carry the traces of him—my life is filled with dirty dishes—into the kitchen sink. I circle through the house, clean the plates, leave the kitchen spotless, double-check that the back door is locked, hurry around the kitchen to the front door, and double-check that lock, too, not that my house would be the first one on the block that anyone would ever think of breaking into. If someone wanted in, all they had to do was push through a flimsy window screen. One of my father’s many cutbacks this summer was air-conditioning. I ram the swollen living room window up even farther as if that will cool down the house.
I press my face against the screen, wish for a breeze. I expect to see my father appear out of the shadows, into my sight, up the pathway of fieldstones. Nothing stirs, except the wings of crickets and the howling of dogs. The night is inside as much as outside.
I cross my arms, squeeze myself into my center. I throw my shoulders back even though they ache. My mother was all legs and curves and bounce, I mean she is, or will be again. I shake my arms loose as if swimming wildly through air. Nothing seems to fit me right anymore; my pants are too short, my shirt too tight. I feel like this is somebody else’s body. If it were up to me, I would have a different body, bared to essentials—only necessary nouns and verbs, maybe an occasional adjective, never an adverb—a body, lips that someone would kiss. I feel like some revelation should be at hand. I move across the
living room, past the two wing chairs, hers and his, pulled up close to each other, empty these past months. He should be home, but does it really matter? If he were home, he’d be in the alcove off the kitchen, watching some movie, something black-and-white, something with the sound turned up so as to compensate for the grim lack of color. He doesn’t watch sports, doesn’t care which baseball or football team wins or loses, like other dads. He likes happy endings, and that’s why he says he watches old movies. If he doesn’t come home until late tonight, we’ll do fine without him.
I switch on the outdoor lights. Two dim bulbs flicker on and moths swoop in around them. We haven’t been using the outdoor lights, also trying to cut back. But perhaps tonight he’ll need them to find his way home. A car slows down before driving off. Something in the shadows, something shifts; hear a cry, another dog, long, lonesome. One outdoor bulb pops and dies out, and then the other—like what I imagine two gunshots would sound like. I flinch. A wave of darkness ripples over the house. I listen for Izzy. Silence. Finally, finally, on the couch, I am alone, unfettered, unburdened, unleashed … unconnected, unmasked, untapped, unseen, shifting through the shadows.
* * *
I won’t be home.
Will be very late. Don’t worry.
All is well here.
The message looks like a haiku by someone who can’t count syllables.
No xxoo, no love. It is from my father, who hates all electronic communication, rarely e-mails, never texts. I don’t know this person anymore. I punch in his cell phone number. I reach a robotic voice informing me that his box is full. I couldn’t leave a message if I wanted to leave one. There’s no connecting to him even if I could. I’m going to ream him out when he gets home, I think to myself, and realize that I’m suddenly sounding like the adult.
I type: Where is “here”? When will you be home?
His answer doesn’t make sense: YMRRIQOW. I bet he’s typed on the wrong keys and pressed send anyway. He’ll be home when he gets home. Then I’m going to tell him that I’ve had enough. I don’t want this feeling of being grown up and not grown up, ruptured from my old self—into what? Old enough to take care of the house, take care of my sister, to have all these responsibilities and yet not have any of—of what? Any fun? Any friends? I want a guy who wants—what should he want? What do I want? I just want a guy who isn’t my father. A guy who doesn’t need me to take care of everything. But who would want someone like me? I run my hands through the length of my hair and then across my lips as if checking that I’m whole. I know that I don’t need my father or some guy. I can do this all just fine. Except, isn’t there something or someone who will make me forget who I am—let me be someone other than the good daughter and sister—let me imagine that if I stood on the shore, the distance between the sea and the possibility of land was only as far as I could swim.
Before My Eyes Page 8