There was some kind of animal—bigger than a squirrel, maybe a muskrat, a possum, or coon—trapped in my bedroom. We were handling the matter by not opening the door. “I’ve got many other problems besides that,” my mother claimed. “And I do not have money for professional extermination.”
Every night, the thing circled the walls, and I thought I heard it wailing. It was dying, it had to get out.
I didn’t open the door.
My mother didn’t care if I was paid or not, as long as I was working. I signed up to be a candy striper. At the hospital, I took great pride in going directly where I had been told not to go, 5B, the indigent ward. I dropped off cigarettes and magazines, envisioning myself as a girl Robin Hood. I kept waiting for some great doctor to hire me or marry me or cite me for my good work, in a lavish public ceremony.
One day two candy stripers stopped me in the hallway. They wore their pink-and-white candy-striper pinafores. The little white hats. The white hose, white shoes.
“Fine, don’t say hi, Heather.” The girl frowned at me in an exaggerated way.
“You always act like you don’t know us,” the other one said.
“Heather, you are such a snob.”
They were tormenting me, trying to trick me, or else they had me mixed up with someone else. I turned in the opposite direction, feeling stupendously stupid. After a few long purposeful strides, I turned back. From behind, I could see that they walked a certain way, and I recognized them instantly. They were Christy Summers and Lauren Martin, girls who went to my school, girls who lived three streets down from my mother’s house. They were best friends: nerdy, unpopular, nice girls, girls I’d known for years, girls I liked and wanted to be friends with. They walked down the wide corridor so certain, sure of where they were going, sure as stalks.
Why, when I was out in public, did I act so much like my mother? Why did I treat everyone like a stranger, like the enemy? Why couldn’t I be friendly, social? I didn’t want to be like her, not at all. But I wasn’t becoming my own person. I had no favorites, no preferences, nothing that individuated me, or collected me into circles. Other people seemed to know exactly what they liked: Mounds or Almond Joy, board shorts or cord shorts, school spirit or pot smoke, baseball players or football players, school or hating school, The Dukes of Hazzard or CHiPs, Fantasy Island or The Love Boat. I adored and feared and despised and felt uncertain about all of these things, equally, all the time. I didn’t even know if I liked the Beatles or the Stones.
Part of me was secretly glad I was this way. Instead of participating, I listened and watched. I dissolved into uncertainty. I turned invisible. It was socially crippling and completely nerve-wracking, but I felt that not knowing things about myself was a special talent, something good and useful, my sole superpower.
To get myself through the year, I began to cultivate an amalgamated Nancy Drew/Great Gatsby college fantasy: I would live in an old-fashioned dormitory, have my own room, my own bed, my own thoughts, library within walking distance. All day people would talk about books and ideas, ideas just barely touched on in high school, like communism, France, schwa e, impasto. I imagined a boyfriend with oatmeal linen pants and horn-rimmed glasses and a nice, old-fashioned slow sedan from the 1940s or 1950s; we would walk holding hands and go to soda shops, and I would wear plaid skirts and glasses and carry piles of books secured with a rubber strap. His mother would live in a mansion; I would glide down her hallways in white floaty dresses.
Come summer, I started lifeguarding at the YMCA on Saturdays. Sitting in the high chair under the red umbrella, I calculated the money I was making per minute, how much I would need for first-semester tuition, room deposit, the food plan. Between calculations, I blew my whistle: No running, no running, no running. It got to where the job was so boring, you wished for someone to start drowning. I never spoke. The other lifeguards didn’t chat with me, and boys didn’t linger at the foot of my chair, staring up at me from behind Ray-Bans. I was working. This wasn’t my social hour. I aligned myself with the pool director, a darkly tanned woman in her sixties with short, straight white hair, pool-blue eyes, and a military manner. I was hoping she would say, publicly, that I was a model lifeguard and the others should try to be more like me. At the end of summer, she said they didn’t need me back next year.
My mother during this time was working temp jobs for Kelly Services. No one really wanted her, she said. She could tell when she walked in: she was despised. I took this at face value; it sounded like the real world was a lot like school. She read detective novels from the library at dinner and shouted at the characters and I read the encyclopedias and shushed her. We did the dishes together.
The animal in my bedroom at some point must have died; neither one of us would open my bedroom door. Now the house seemed to be dormant, asleep in a kind of rigid, forgotten stupor. The furniture was covered in white sheets. Most of the bulbs were missing from the lights and lamps. We hunkered down, using only the kitchen, her bathroom. We shared her bed.
She didn’t talk to me so much as lecture me. “You think these boys you are seeking out like you? No. Do they have your best interests in mind? No. They are thinking about their interests. I know about the boys who come by here after school, Heather. I get calls. I have sources. I’ve read your so-called diary.
“If you get pregnant, you are out. Oh You Tee out, in a skinny minute, don’t even think you have a place to stay here, because you don’t. Nosirree Bob, don’t even think about it. Don’t even let such a thought darken your door. You want rights? You’ve got responsibilities. Consider that. Reflect on that.
“And I’m onto you.”
She smelled like talcum powder and lotion and something else, something metallic, like wet iron. When I tried to give her a hug, she gripped my arms, hard, and pushed them down. She darted away, throwing the dish towel at me, the front door slamming behind her. It was like I was the one living with a mercurial teen. I felt world-weary and magnanimous. I put dishes away. I cleaned out her fridge, a museum of frightening former food items.
I babysat. The time I spent in the homes of other families, alone with their children, were the choicest hours of my life. I read books at the library on how to babysit; I memorized games from 1950s party guides so I would be prepared to entertain any number of children. I skimmed books on child development written for teachers and psychologists. I imagined various dilemmas arising, and how I would handle them capably: a neighborhood fight, a hurricane, food poisoning, the parents not coming back.
I loved the children and I also loved the moms. Mrs. Anderson, the painter, with her sprawling ancient plantation home, white columns peeling, the screened sleeping porches where I taught her daughters to sew doll clothes, where we had tea parties and dressed up as angels and princesses. Mrs. Ripple, the nurse with a perfect lacquered hive of ash-blond hair, whose husband was a dentist and whose kitchen and bathrooms gleamed like surgical theaters. In her tidy, color-coded home, I felt like a tropical butterfly, a little messy, but in a good way, an antidote, a tiny hurricane working for the force of good.
I kept my money in a shoe box, under the bathroom sink, back behind the towels. I checked and re-counted it every day.
The Madigans’ house sat up on the hill, the windows shining clean, the gold drapes drawn back. The house was smiling. I showed up at half an hour before I was due. Mrs. Madigan had tennis, lunch at the club, then golf. In her white tennis skirt and pretty top, her sunglasses on top of her head, she took me straight to the fridge. Leftovers were in labeled glass containers. Chicken curry. Spaghetti. Mushroom beef. Any of this was for me. Any of it.
As soon as I got there, Jay said to his mother, “Can you please go?” Jay was almost three. He cried when she came home.
While Jay napped, I lay on the cool blue satin bedspread in the guest room, pretending my husband was coming home. What would I make? Beef Stroganoff? Or lemon fish with white rice? The shelves were lined with novels that came from Book-of-the-Month. Kur
t Vonnegut, Go Ask Alice, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Some I read, and some I sort of read.
At bath time, we always had bubbles and songs, and long, drawn-out plays where Jay played bubble-bearded pirates and baseball players and told me exactly what to say. I drifted through the hours, watching, carried along on a gentle warm tide of three-year-old energy, surreal and sweet and mind-numbing, unmalleable. I imagined this was what it was like being on drugs. Night after night, Jay told me about the brother he was expecting, George, and what we would do the next time I came, and how he would play football in college and I would come and watch him. In Jay’s dresser drawers were tiny ironed University of Florida T-shirts, pajamas, even underwear printed with the grinning gator. In his closet, UF jackets and tops and footballs and seat cushions. His mother had been a cheerleader there; his father had played football. Jay was going to UF. He was going to be the quarterback. He was going to UF, would become a fireman, and then, he said, he was going to marry his mom. He was three, but he knew all this. I was almost seventeen, and I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation.
Eventually, school started. Wayne and I skipped a lot: the beach was fifty minutes away, fewer when the Torino was running well. I felt smug and smarter than everybody else. When it rained, or even when it was sunny, we went to the downtown public library. (We’re not sheep!) I had taken to the psychology section, searching out the contours of my mind and my mother’s. I found a checklist that seemed to describe my mother: dementia praecox. I’d never heard of it before. I didn’t think she was demented. But praecox—which sounded like peacocks—maybe it meant someone who acted demented, showed her feathers in a crazy way, a showy way—that fit. The checklist was very specific. These people were always afraid someone was trying to break into the house. They believed they were being followed. They had many moods, all intense, happy one minute, terrified or enraged the next; then it was as though nothing had happened. Dementia praecox, I wrote in my journal, and I underlined it.
I found myself a few entries below. My condition was much worse: dysthymia, a chronic sense of unhappiness. It was more common in women than men, you could start having it in childhood, there was no cure. I wrote all this down too. I put down an equals sign and then my name.
I didn’t really believe this was me and my mother. I was exaggerating us. Dementia praecox was a kind of psychosis; my mother wasn’t psychotic. Psychotic was ax-murdering. I’d seen Psycho (or most of it, until my mother stormed down the aisle of the movie theater and loudly ordered me to leave). I didn’t think she was insane, I thought she was a pain in the ass.
I looked for my father in the book too. I did not find him, his habits. But with these parents, I wasn’t even sure exactly what I was looking for.
Sometimes, when I came home from school, my mother was hidden in her closet, under blankets, and she wouldn’t move or speak. It was as though she were dead. I would sit with her, but she would recoil, like a cornered animal. I knew she wanted me to go away, not to see her like this. I would ride my bike up and down the streets of our neighborhood. Wayne turned out to have another girlfriend; he seemed somewhat pleased to confess his cheating. I missed Keith Landreu so much my heart hurt.
I don’t know when exactly Fred came back from Germany. He didn’t call or come by, but I tracked him down. I could not live in my mother’s house. When I told Fred she was too strict, he said, “She has ruined both you kids. That woman has ruined everything she comes into contact with.” Which wasn’t really true, I thought, but I said yes, yes, yes. I moved back in with him.
The first day back in his house, things were very strange. The radio was on, not the television. Fred was not drinking. He was on the roof, sweeping off branches and leaves and loose gravel. He edged part of the front lawn. He sawed down dead palm fronds and had me drive all the stuff out to the dump. This went on for three days. He ate two bags of Oreo cookies and grazed on Lorna Doones and doughnut holes.
I pieced together a story: Instead of firing him outright, Martin Marietta, where he’d worked off and on, had sent him to a plant in Germany because of his drinking problem. Things had not gotten any better. When he came back, they must have given him an ultimatum: thirty days of rehab or he would lose his job. It was his second stint in rehab, he told me by the pool on the night of the fourth day of my living back with him. I had chemically adjusted the pool: the water was clear and blue and sparkling. I was floating on a raft in my purple bikini, drinking an Old Milwaukee. He was drinking pure gin from a tumbler. “Some messed-up people in there,” he said. “Real bad. Real bad.” He shook his head. I wanted to know how bad, how were they messed up, what had he seen? When had all this happened? How did he get there?
“Classified.” He laughed and coughed and laughed. He banged on the table.
It was good to see him again. I didn’t really want to know the details.
Ruby was back. We all went to dinner—Ruby and Fred, me and Wayne—at an old restaurant in Wekiva Springs, on the river. Wayne and I had never really broken up, despite his cheating on me: I just didn’t have the strength or energy to start a big conversation. Plus, I needed him to drive me around, and I needed someone to call when Fred was out of control. Eventually, I would go off to college and then we’d be done. Wayne was adamantly against college; he bragged that he went to the school of hard knocks. This always cracked Fred up. I’d heard him say the same thing of his own education, though he had an MBA, had attended Northwestern.
We watched the raccoons with their cute little paws and bandit faces claw food off garbage can lids. Fred ordered a bottle of wine in a pale green fish bottle. He quickly emptied the bottle and made the fish swim above our glasses. The waitress brought a cake. Everyone sang. I wished to be rich and go to college. I blew out the candles.
Fred wanted to dance by the table. I said no, no, no, but he dragged me up out of my chair. There was no music. He hung on me. His nails had the usual polish; under his shirt, the standard bra. I looked at Wayne and Ruby, who were staring off into space, slanted, a few steps left of center themselves. I pretended it was fun to be out in a restaurant, to be doing things my mother would disapprove of. Ruby and Fred ordered more drinks and I tucked my feet up into Wayne’s lap and he rubbed them and made as many hard-on and woody references as he could, all of which I pretended not to understand.
My father made a long toast to me. “She will never abandon her daddy, isn’t that right, girl child?” He was standing, staggering, slurring, and people were watching.
“That’s right!” I said, and I pulled him down into his chair and he wept.
Fred went to the men’s room or the bar or the car. He was gone a long time. Wayne had gone somewhere too. He liked to talk to women and he liked me to see him doing it. I didn’t care. I couldn’t even pretend to care. Ruby smoked Virginia Slims that came out of a pink leather case. Her lighter was a Zippo, silver, expensive, and it snapped into flame with a sweet click.
I was sitting on my chair sideways, watching the little raccoons, ready to go home, go to bed.
“Your daddy shore is something special,” she said.
I said, “He is something,” and she nodded and nodded, but it wasn’t so much like agreement, it was more like her head was loose. It was too sad to see. I felt like my father was a bad influence on Ruby. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted it to be just me and Ruby. If it was just us and my birthday, we could have gone together to New Orleans, gone shopping, to a nice restaurant, and to bed, early, nice, normal. I told her I was going to round everybody up so we could get going, and she said, “Oh, you’d better probably not. He has to think it’s his own idea.”
“Well, it’s my birthday,” I said. I excused myself and wandered around looking for the restrooms. There was a man leaning on the pay phone but not using it, tilted, smoking a cigarette in the shadows. He looked crazy, large, and unreal, like a man coated in something. I slid past him and pressed open the door to the women’s room. I felt something
grab my bottom through my dress, a hard squeeze.
I turned around slowly, scared to make a scene. Where he had touched me felt on fire. I was dreading everything that would come next.
“It’s your old daddy! It’s your old daddy!” he hollered, grinning, grabbing me, shaking me, and I saw the teeth, the wide, white false teeth. “Happy birthday, number-one girl chile. Happy—” he slurred, lurching toward me, wanting to hug, or dance. I put my hands up: Stop, stay back. I didn’t smile. “You scared the shit out of me,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Classified!” he said. He leaned against the wall, coughing, coughing.
I stormed into the women’s room, locked the stall. I couldn’t pee. I was too scared, all tight inside. If I had thought about it all, which I did not, I would have said I didn’t recognize him, because I didn’t love him enough. I was embarrassed by him and I didn’t want to know him in public. I believed my father was right: I was like my mother. Difficult on purpose, deliberately obtuse, only happy if I was miserable and making other people miserable. Not knowing people—it was such a her thing to do, maddening and obstructive and attention-grabbing and thoroughly weird.
Six
We’d found the perfect house, the house with levels. Dave took the day off work and we went to my bank. Dave was the loan officer’s name too. Bank Dave was shiny and superbly neat, and his pale stocky hands flashed over his calculator like a professional dealer’s over playing cards. He told my Dave it would be cheaper and easier if everything was, at least for the application process, in my name, because my Dave had some cleaning up to do. My Dave had no savings, none at all. He needed to clear out some debts, write some clarifying letters, tidy up old business. Then we needed to get an inspection and send Bank Dave a copy of the report.
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