by Abby Bardi
After dinner, Mary Fred would help me clear up, and we would do the dishes. Sometimes she was able to get Puffin todry them or even to put them away. Her technique was to lure Puffin into the kitchen with a discussion of an interesting court case and then to go on talking to her, handing her a dishtowel without comment. Puffin would start wiping without even seeming to realize that what she was doing was technically work, so she never got a chance to scream her usual protest that she was being exploited, that she was nothing but a chattel, which was one of her SAT words, and that the workers of the world had to rise up and take over (I think she got that from Diane).
For three weeks, my house just kept on getting cleaner, and things proceeded smoothly until about the middle of July, when Puffin had to go to France with Peter. I'd been dreading this, and I can't say Puffin seemed to be looking forward to it much either. Peter was taking his wife and their five-year-old twins, Samantha and Kate, and though Puffin seemed fond of her little half sisters in a way, I knew she would have rather been alone with her dad. She got along fairly well with Peter's wife, Jemma, and I was careful to tell her that that was okay with me, that I didn't view it as a betrayal. Though the truth is, I did; in my heart of hearts, I felt that Puffin should simply refuse to talk to Jemma and should stay home on principle, but of course, I never said anything to her about this because I knew it was completely unfair of me. I knew that the idea of traveling with them en famille was hard for her, and that she would have preferred to spend her sixteenth birthday at home. On the other hand, she really wanted to go to France, since she had been studying French for years, though her accent sounded closer to Baltimore than Versailles.
In any case, she was going, and I didn't even try to talk her out of it. A little voice in my head, a voice that had had a lotof therapy since the divorce, said that maybe I had decided to foster Mary Fred so I wouldn't have to deal with being alone. I neither confirmed nor denied this. I told the voice that I was not alone, that I had Roy, but the voice just laughed at this.
When it was finally time for Puffin to leave, Mary Fred and I stood on the porch waiting for Peter's car. When I saw his Saab coming up the street, I wished her a quick bon voyage and darted back into the house. I could see Mary Fred through the porch window, still waving long after the car had pulled away.
I think things were tougher for Mary Fred while Puffin was away, and I know they were harder for me. I had already felt inadequate when dealing with Mary Fred, but now I felt downright incompetent; I had no idea what she needed or what I ought to be doing for her. Ever since childhood, I had often felt that everyone else in the world had attended classes on how to do all the ordinary things in life, but I had somehow skipped them. It was the ordinary things that Mary Fred seemed to need—food, guidance, nurturing, companionship— but easy as those things seemed to be for most people, they were the hardest ones for me. In the evenings, the TV was strangely silent now—I suppose she couldn't bring herself to watch it unless under duress—and when I came home from work, I found her reading to herself most days. I called Diane a number of times about getting Mary Fred a tutor, but she said the program's funds had been cut, though she was still working on it. The house just kept getting cleaner than ever, and I felt terribly guilty about it, but I told myself that at least poor Mary Fred had something to do. When I was home, I sat and talked to her, and she seemed to like that well enough. Whenever I asked her questions about her family or her past,she seemed to clam up, but she was always ready to talk about religion.
“What is a Lacker?” I asked her one night. I had heard her use the word a few times since her outburst that first weekend.
“Well, ma'am,” she said, pausing as if trying to decide how to put it. She hadn't called me “ma'am” in a while. “It's pretty hard to explain. I'll put it the simple way. A Lacker is someone who is lacking in what we call Soti.”
“What is Soti?”
“It means a sense of the Imminence.”
“Oh, it's an acronym.” I thought she had said the word “immanence,” but later I found out she meant imminence with an i. “The in-dwelling spirit?”
“No, the Imminence means—we call it the soon-ness.”
“Of God?”
“Of the One. See, we'll be there soon, in the garden.”
“Whereas Lackers—”
“Yes.” She looked sad. “That's the thing. Lackers don't have Soti, and without Soti, well, you just don't know how to prepare. You have to be prepared in mind and body.”
“Prepared for what? The Big Cat?”
Mary Fred pressed her thin lips together like she was afraid that too much information was going to escape. “Papa says it's no use talking about it.”
“With Lackers, you mean?”
“Well, ma'am, I'm sorry. That doesn't sound very polite, does it?”
“Is the Big Cat some kind of animal?”
Mary Fred let out a peal of laughter. “Oh, no, Alice, good heavens. You thought it was some kind of big pussycat that was coming to catch us all like mice?” She laughed till hereyes teared. Then she didn't seem to want to say any more about it.
On the weekends, I took her to the mall and tried to find her things she might like. We looked for brown clothes, and after a lot of searching, we actually found a few shirts, though they were nylon and Mary Fred said they felt strange. I guess she had never worn anything but cotton. We went into shoe stores, and it wasn't hard to find her some nice plain brown sandals. I was so used to trying to talk Puffin out of huge tottering heels that it was refreshing to buy a pair of flats without a struggle. We went into the accessories store and looked for brown hair clips. There weren't any, but there were a lot of pink ones, and when Mary Fred wasn't looking, I bought her one, hoping I was not somehow corrupting her. Then we went to the food court for lunch. I had stir-fried vegetables and Mary Fred had a fish sandwich.
When we got home, I gave her the pink hair clip. She opened the bag, and when she saw it, she took in her breath really sharply and looked at me with rapt eyes. I helped her put it in her hair. Her hair was thin and very straight, and it slipped out of the clip after a few minutes, but she put it right back and then kept looking at her reflection in the mirror over the mantel and smiling at herself. When she smiled, she was a very pretty girl, and it was nice to see her in pink after all that unremitting brown. With her hair up, she had a swan-like neck, and looked very graceful. “Oh, Alice,” she said. “I look like one of those movie stars.”
“Yeah, like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Roy said as he drifted past us.
Mary Fred seemed to know who Arnold Schwarzenegger was, and she threw back her head and laughed like Roy was just the funniest person on earth.
* * *
Some nights when Mary Fred had gone to bed, I sat up alone in the living room, trying to read in the armchair. I could never seem to get my mind to focus; it kept drifting away, usually to Peter. I had not taken the divorce well, in fact there had been times when I was not sure I would ever be able to function again, but it had been years now and I was basically okay, unless something set me off. Right now it was anything to do with France. It seemed as if every book I opened had some reference to it—the author would talk about someone's je ne sais quoi, or about Napoleon, or if it was a novel, the characters would start eating camembert, or brioche, and I would picture Peter on the Boulevard St. Michel with his new family, his beautiful children and his calm, solid-looking wife, the edges of my vision all fuzzy, all of them skipping along, flowers sprouting up behind them like in a soft-focus ad for allergy medication. Peter and I had been to Paris when we were young and had always planned to return, but like so many of the things I had counted on, it had never happened. I sat in the armchair and willed the vision to go away, but it wouldn't, and sometimes I found myself mentally dumping Jemma into the Seine and taking her place, and I could see myself skipping along with them, my hair, no longer gray, floating on the breeze, my face happy again.
By the time Puffin got
back, Mary Fred and I had developed one of those wordless relationships where you stand in the kitchen together, one person washing and the other drying the dishes, without saying much beyond remarking on how light out it still was, or how you saw a cardinal this morning in the rhododendrons. We would go from washing the dishes to putting them away like synchronized swimmers, and then wewould move into the dining room, wiping the table with a rag and putting the good silverware, which we had started using routinely, back in the sideboard. Roy was often still sitting in the living room when we got done, and we would tidy up around him, fluffing the pillows on the couch, straightening the throws I had laid there to hide the stains and holes. Roy would never help us, though he'd sometimes jokingly call out directions—“You missed a spot,” he'd say when we were dusting, or “I'd like my slippers, please.” One time, Mary Fred went and found a pair of slippers for him and brought them downstairs, and he looked really embarrassed and said he'd been kidding.
“Don't joke with me, Uncle Roy, I always take people seriously,” she said.
He looked even more embarrassed at this, and he put the slippers on.
A few days before Puffin came home, Mary Fred spent about forty-eight hours painting a huge sign to hang on the front door. She had made me go to Kmart and buy a long roll of paper and some poster paints. The sign said “Bienvenue Chez Vous, Mademoiselle Heather” and had about forty exclamation points after it. I could tell Roy had given her all the high school French he remembered. Above the words, she had painted little things she thought were French: the Eiffel Tower, a beret, a poodle. Roy suggested she paint some French fries, but she could tell from his tone that he was joking again.
We all sat in the living room, waiting for Puffin—even Roy—and finally, about an hour later than we expected, she came bursting in the door, smiling, and kissed us all on both cheeks. “It's so clean in here,” she said, looking around.
“Well?” Mary Fred said when Puffin had settled in a bit. “Tell us all about it. We want to know everything. Can you speak French now?”
“Où se trouve le Métro?” Puffin said, and Mary Fred clapped her hands.
“What was your favorite place?” Mary Fred asked.
“It's hard to say. It was all just so— splendide.” Puffin went over to her suitcase, which she had flung down on the couch, and rummaged around in it, pulling out several bags. “J'ai les cadeaux,” she said with no trace of a French accent, and she handed a flat bag to me, a small round bag to Roy, and a large box to Mary Fred. Roy reached into his bag and pulled out a snowstorm with the Eiffel Tower in it. “Wow, thanks, Puff,” he said, sounding genuinely pleased.
“Pas de quoi,” she said. “Mom, you go next.”
I reached into my bag and pulled out a small print of my favorite Renoir painting, La Moulin de la Galette. “Oh, Puff, how did you know?”
“Dad told me,” Puffin said, not quite meeting my eyes.
I put my arms around her and said, “Merci, sweetheart.” I felt like running up to my room, throwing myself down on the bed, and sobbing, but I managed to just stand there.
“It's from Jeu de Paume,” she explained. I told her I knew. “Mary Fred's turn,” she said, pointing to the large white box.
“Really?” Mary Fred looked all excited. “Oh, Heather, what could it be?” She pulled the top off the box carefully, drew out something pink and slinky, and held it up so we all could see. “Oh, my goodness!” she said with a little squeal. “Is this for me?”
“Oui, pour toi,” Puffin said. “Essayer —um, try it on.”
“Should I?”
“Go on, Mary Fred,” Roy said. “Let's see what you'd look like if you were French.”
Mary Fred ran upstairs and came back down with the shirt on. She was still wearing her plain brown skirt, which looked strange below the shirt—it was tight, with a low neckline, and had little gathers on it with embroidered flowers. I was sure it had cost Puffin a fair amount of money. “Oh, honey,” I said, “you look beautiful.”
“Do I?” Mary Fred looked at herself in the mirror and let out a little gasp.
“Ooh la la,” Puffin said. “Tu est trés belle.”
It was true; Mary Fred looked incredible. I was so used to seeing her in brown cotton that I hadn't realized how blue her eyes were, or how sweet and heart-shaped her face was. Even her freckles, which had made her seem kind of homely before, seemed stylish and flattering, and her hair, pulled back in the pink clip, fell loosely around her face and framed it. I watched her in the mirror as she tilted her head to one side and smiled at herself.
“Voilà,” Puffin said. “Le makeover.”
I looked over at Roy. He was watching her too but not saying anything.
We had dinner—Mary Fred had insisted we make something French, so that afternoon I had thrown a bottle of burgundy into a pot roast, which shocked her. She hadn't known people cooked with wine, though I assured her that all the alcohol burned off when you did it. “Boeuf bourgignon,” I said when I took it out of the oven. It smelled of thyme, and the smell made me terribly sad. When Peter and I were in France, though we had been graduate students and very poor, we had had some incredible meals. When we got home, I tried to copy everything we had eaten, and he often said I had exactly duplicatedthe recipe for whatever it was, but to me nothing ever tasted quite right.
Mary Fred had set the table with the paper napkins folded into swans again as well as some cloth napkins we had gotten at Pier 1, which she had folded and fanned in our wineglasses. We had picked some flowers from the garden and she had arranged them in the center of the table, a weird combination of dahlias, zinnias, and yarrow. Puffin looked happy to be home. She was smiling and chattering away about the Champs-Elysées and how expensive everything had been, but how her dad had bought her a really nice shirt there anyway. She looked up at me when she said it, and I guessed that she was making sure I didn't mind. She knew I hated it when she talked about things Peter had bought her, things I couldn't afford.
“Did you go to the Left Bank?” I asked her. That was where Peter and I had stayed, in a cheap hotel next to a crêpe stand. We had only been married a year at that time, and it was still new and exciting to sleep together, and in a new place. We could lean out our hotel window and see the lights up and down the street start to blink on. When my thoughts started to drift to things like this, I was in the habit of snapping myself out of it, giving myself a little mental slap before I ended up daydreaming about Peter. But since Puffin had gone to France with him, the slap didn't seem to do much good; I kept seeing myself in bed with him, naked, him gazing at me adoringly as if I were a treasure. I wondered if he looked at Jemma like that.
When I looked up, I realized that Mary Fred was examining my face quizzically. I wondered what my expression had been—had I been frowning, or had I looked like I was about to cry? “How were the twins, Puffin?” I asked in as neutral a voice as I could muster.
“Oh, they were brats,” Puffin said. “They cried on the plane, both ways. We had to keep giving them ice cream to shut them up. I forget how to say ‘ice cream’ in French. I think it's ‘glass’ or something. Anyway, we went to the most amazing toy store, it was totally awesome, and they wanted everything in there. There was a stuffed bear about twice my size, and they kept crying because they wanted Dad to buy it for them. He kept telling them he'd have to buy it a seat on the airplane but they said they didn't care. Samantha actually lay on the ground and started kicking her feet. It was so embarrassing.”
“I know the feeling,” Roy said. “That's how I feel most of the time. Hey, Al, remember how when I was six, we stopped at a Howard Johnson's and I found a stuffed dog in the gift shop and I just had to have it?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh, come on, you've got to remember. I just stood there crying until Mom dragged me out of there, and I screamed all the way to Pittsburgh.”
“No, doesn't ring a bell.”
“Geeze, Al, it was the most traumatic experien
ce of my life, and you don't even remember it?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“What kind of stuffed dog was it?” Mary Fred asked.
“I still remember it perfectly,” Roy said, stroking his shaggy chin whiskers, which suddenly seemed so odd to me, thinking of his six-year-old self. “It was a brown dog with a white stomach and these big cute brown eyes. I had already named it Brownie in my mind. We kept on driving, and I kept screaming ‘I want Brownie, I want Brownie,’ till I felt like I was going to throw up. Finally Dad pulled the car over to the side of the road and said he was going to smack me ifI didn't shut up. Come on, Al, tell me you don't remember this.”
“Honest, Roy, I wish I did. It's just that it probably happened a million times. You only remember the once.”
“No, Al, that was the only time that mattered. My heart was broken. I was never the same boy after that.”
“Was that what your problem was?” It was true that at some point, Roy had gone from being a bubbly little elf to a droopy, sad creature. “It was all because of Brownie?”
“Sure,” Roy said. “That was it.”
“Poor little Roy,” Mary Fred said. “I can just see you there, crying your little heart out.” She gave him a look of utmost compassion. He stared down at his plate, as if he suddenly felt silly for telling us his sad story.