by Ann Packer
“Friday,” he says. “I had some doughnuts.”
“Today's Sunday,” Ingrid says.
“What are you doing here?” I say. “Are you a student?” He laughs, and now I do jump down from my niche. “Ingrid,” I say.
She ignores me. “How old are you?” she asks him.
“Ingrid, Ingrid—so many questions.” He moves a little closer to her. “It's my turn. What's on your shirt?” He points at Ingrid's chest—at the breast pocket of her camp shirt, where I know it says “Pine Hill Camp” in navy embroidery.
“Now, Ingrid,” I say. “We'll get in trouble.”
“It's my camp shirt,” she says. “I'm going to get you some food—stay right here, OK?”
She jumps down and Bug goes over and boosts himself into her place. “It's still warm,” he says, and he gives us a queasy grey smile.
As soon as we're out of his sight we start running. “You're so stupid,” I say to Ingrid, but then I look at her and see that she's begun to cry. “What?” I say. “What?”
“He's starving.”
I try to pat her shoulder, but running seems more important.
SOMETHING HAS CHANGED at the party. People are talking louder, and their gestures seem exaggerated. They're drunk, of course, but at eleven I think the difference is about something else: how grown-ups live in a world that's more real than ours, noisier and brighter.
I leave Ingrid in one of the chairs against the wall and look around for my parents. Right away I see my mother halfway across the room: the glint of her dress, and then her profile, smiling a smile born of tedium. I think it would be better to find my father, but something makes her turn, and when she sees me she says something to the people she's with and heads my way.
“Darling,” she says, “you saved me from death by boredom. Having fun?” She reaches over and does something to my collar, and I twist away.
“Where's Dad?”
“Oh, who knows. Off serenading some thirteen-year-old girl, no doubt.” She looks at me, then pulls my head close and ruffles my hair. “Buddy, honestly. He was R. M.—Romeo Montague. It's a joke, sweetheart. I haven't seen him in hours, or at least half hours.”
“I don't know,” I say. “We met this man outside and he says he's hungry. Ingrid wants to take him some food, but I don't know.”
“Wait a second, slow down. What happened?”
I explain as well as I can, but as I speak the whole thing seems to lose significance; I know she's not going to understand.
“Well,” she says when I'm done, “take him some meatballs if you want. God knows no one's bothering to eat.”
“He was sort of—weird.”
Ingrid arrives at my mother's side. She's more composed, but it's evident she's been crying.
“What is it, honey?” my mother says to her.
Ingrid shrugs, tears gathering again in her eyes.
“You kids had better just stay here.” My mother reaches out to someone behind me, and Dick Traeger joins our group. “Dick,” she says, her hand on his arm, “my kids met up with some character who wants our food. What do you think?”
Dick Traeger looks at us carefully. He has unbuttoned the second button of his shirt, and there's an unpleasant triangle of hair curling there. He turns to my mother. “Far be it from me to be an elitist. The more, the merrier.”
“He was hungry,” Ingrid says, and tears begin to spill down her face.
“According to Buddy,” my mother says to Dick Traeger, “he was also ‘weird.’”
“Weird,” Dick Traeger says. “Do you mean different? The world is a wide and wonderful place, Buddy. We have to embrace difference.”
“Don't tease him,” my mother says.
“Who's teasing? I'm serious.”
Ingrid sobs. “Will you come with us?”
My mother and Dick Traeger look at each other. “We'll all go,” Dick Traeger says. “Safety in numbers, eh?”
“I don't want to go.” I know I sound petulant, but I don't care. “Where's Dad?”
“What difference does it make?” my mother snaps. “Ingrid, go get one of those little plates and load it up. Let's go if we're going.”
I catch a glimpse of my father leaving the room, and I hurry after him. “Dad,” I call when I get to the exit; he's halfway down the hall to the men's room. “Dad.”
He turns around. “Hello,” he says, smiling genially at me. He comes back to where I've stopped. “Don't I know you?”
“Dad,” I say. I feel myself starting to cry, and I turn away from him.
“What's wrong, Robert?” He puts his hand on my shoulder.
I explain what happened—better, this time. I watch my father's expression change, and even as I feel relieved that I've made someone understand I regret a little bringing him into it: telling both of them was a mistake.
Ingrid appears in the doorway, plate of food in hand, my mother and Dick Traeger just behind her. She's stopped crying: this is fun now. “Dad,” she says. “Want to come?”
My mother and Dick Traeger exchange a glance.
“What are you doing, Helen?” my father says.
“There's some poor hungry wretch out there and my tenderhearted girl”—my mother reaches out and takes hold of Ingrid's shoulders, pulling her close—“wants to feed him.”
“That hungry wretch scared your children,” my father says. “You're not going anywhere.” He steps forward and takes the plate from Ingrid. He doesn't seem to know what to do with it: after a moment he puts a meatball in his mouth and begins chewing angrily. “Have one,” he says to me, his mouth still full.
“Don't be ridiculous, Harry,” my mother says. “Of course he scared them. Hunger's scary. You think someone who hasn't eaten since Friday should be polite?”
Dick Traeger clears his throat. “It does seem too bad just to let him get away with it. I mean, I figured if we went too the kids wouldn't have to feel bad about letting him go hungry, and we could, I don't know, let the creep know that he can't just go around frightening our children.”
“I'm stunned,” my father says to my mother.
She brings a hand to her throat. “What?”
“Stunned,” he says, “stunned that you would use your children like this.”
“I don't know what you're talking about—Harry.”
My father turns his back on us and walks a few paces away. He brings his hands up to his face, and I know what he's doing: pressing his fingertips to the bridge of his nose. I'm afraid he's going to yell, although this is something I've rarely known him to do. I'm preparing to be mortified, but when he finally turns he hands me the plate of food and says, “Well, go then. All of you. Go.”
IT'S TOUGH, IT'S tough to be a child and have to face a parent's infidelity. It's embarrassing: not just because you know it's about sex—appalling even when you think of them doing it with the person they're supposed to do it with—but also because it's wrong and weak and therefore childish. Your parent has come down to your level, and there isn't enough room there for both of you. Not to mention the vacuum left behind.
IT'S GETTING DARK out when we leave the party, dark and a little cool. “Look, goosebumps,” my mother says, holding out her bare arm for me to see. “There's a ghost walking over my grave.”
We have arranged ourselves into an odd pairing: Ingrid and Dick Traeger, my mother and me. Ingrid and Dick Traeger are ahead of us, Dick Traeger now carrying the plate of food, his posture somehow grim. Ingrid doesn't seem to mind walking with him—as we followed them through the door I heard her ask him if he liked tennis. I can't imagine where she got this: not the question, but the poise.
I don't respond to my mother, and she glances at me and begins rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “Brrr,” she says.
Still I don't speak.
“Ah declayuh,” she says. “Ah don't know how y'all kin stayund it heuh. Mah Suthun blood just turns to ahss in these pots.”
This is my cue, her final plea. I look at my m
other: she is shivering, but what decides me is something in her eyes, a vague but definite promise. “You Suthun gulls,” I say. “Y'all are fragile.”
My mother laughs and puts her arm around me. “Look,” she whispers. She takes hold of an imaginary plate of food, sets her face in a grimace, and walks a few paces with her toes angled way to the sides. She's doing Dick Traeger, and she's got it just right: he is duck-footed.
I laugh. And, unforgivably, do Ingrid: plod, plod.
Then we round the final corner, and Bug is gone.
“Oh, no,” Ingrid wails. She turns around and stamps her foot.
“He's gone,” I say to my mother.
“He's gone?” Dick Traeger says.
My mother starts to giggle. She puts her hand over her mouth, and she laughs and laughs.
“It's not funny,” Ingrid says. “It's not fair.”
Dick Traeger steps over to a trash can and lets the plate of food fall from his hand. He faces my mother and crosses his arms over his chest. “You find it funny,” he says.
She turns away from him, biting her lip. I can see she's biting it hard, hard enough for it to hurt, and I know what she's doing: trying to sober up. It's what I do in school to stop myself from laugh-ing—that, or I say to myself, over and over again, My grandfather's dead, my grandfather's dead, and although I never knew him, my mother's father, it works.
“Come on,” I say to Ingrid. “Let's go see if it's still warm.”
We leave them standing there and cross the arcade to the empty niche. It's not warm, but there's a stone in it, and I say, “Hey, what's this?”
“A rock,” Ingrid says. “You stupid.”
“I think he left it here for you.” I pick it up and see that it's got some kind of writing on it. “It's got a message on it,” I say.
“It does not.”
It's too dark right here to read it, so I step into the courtyard, out into what's left of the daylight. The stone is about the size of a hamburger patty, bigger than it looked when Bug took it from his pocket; painted on it, in dark green letters I can barely make out, are the words “Please Turn Me Over.” I turn the stone over. “Thank You,” it says on the other side.
I turn around. Ingrid is leaning against the wall, pouting—apparently not really looking at me. I pretend to throw the stone toward the fountain, just in case she is looking, then I put it in my pocket. I decide that I'll wait and give it to her when we get home tonight. Or maybe tomorrow.
I go back under the arcade. “Let's go tell Dad,” I say.
“Tell him what,” she says, but she follows after me. We walk past my mother and Dick Traeger, both of whom now have their arms crossed over their chests, and I hear my mother say the word “mistake.” We keep walking.
AFTER MY MOTHER died Ingrid and I picked a weekend and met at the house in Palo Alto to sort through her things. Instead of having children Ingrid and Bruce had bought a Universal gym, and Ingrid was lean and hard, her hair blown dry so you could see the comb marks in it.
“You know what I was imagining driving down here?” she said. “Big fights over china and silver, like I even care.” She looked around our mother's living room, all blue and green silk—tasteful, you could have said, to a fault. She picked up a throw pillow, a little jade jewel. “What, for example, would I do with this?”
“Sit on it?” I said. “Listen, this isn't about apportioning, is it? Let's just make sure we know what's here and we'll sell it, OK?”
“Sure.”
Her purse still hung from her shoulder. “Shall we have a seat?” I said.
She set the purse down and sat on the edge of the couch. I sat opposite her, my mother's wide glass coffee table between us. “Something to drink?” I said. “I picked up a few things on my way from the airport.”
She smirked.
“Mr. Host,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Better you than me.” Ingrid sat back and put her feet up. “Do you realize that until she got sick I hadn't been here since my wedding? All I can think about is standing right over there in that horrifying dress she made me buy and her making these little disappointed sounds like I'd picked it and she didn't really approve but she wasn't going to say anything. I can't tell you how close we came to blowing the whole thing off and just going to a justice of the peace.”
“If we cantaloupe,” I said, “lettuce marry, and we'll make a peach of a pear.”
“Ha, ha,” said Ingrid, but she smiled and seemed to relax a little.
Her wedding had been the killing blow for her and my mother: when Ingrid announced that she was going to marry, my mother's vision blurred past Bruce, who coached girls' soccer and softball at a junior high school, and past Ingrid, whom she could never clearly see, and focused instead on some kind of ur-wedding, for which, at the very least, special orchids would have to be grown. It was a beautiful, beautiful wedding, a huge, gorgeous straw on the back of a very weak camel.
“You know what was in the freezer?” I said.
“What?”
“A piece of your wedding cake.”
Ingrid grinned. “I guess she forgot to put it under her pillow so she'd dream about the man she was going to marry.”
“Maybe she was afraid she'd dream about the one she did marry.”
“Poor guy,” said Ingrid.
We started in the bedroom. Ingrid wanted a picture of the four of us on the beach when she and I were very young, and another of me at my college graduation, hair to my shoulders and a wide paisley tie. I said that I'd take my mother's bedside lamp. We stood at the dresser and looked uneasily at each other.
“I'm not really sure I feel up to her underwear,” Ingrid said.
“Courage.”
She pulled open the top drawer and her mouth fell open. “What?”
Inside were perhaps forty small boxes—china boxes, papiermâché boxes, silver and straw and wood boxes. Most of them had been gifts from me, but seeing them all together was a shock: the collection seemed to amount to a kind of fetish. (But whose fetish? My mother's or mine? And boxes—what would Herself say?)
“Jesus,” Ingrid said. She opened a box; inside was a pair of earrings. She opened another: the same. She began pulling the boxes out of the drawer and opening them: a pin, more earrings, a bracelet, tiny locks of our baby hair tied in blue and pink ribbons (and here Ingrid looked away from me, hurried on to the next box), more earrings, another bracelet. “Why didn't she just get a jewelry box?” she said.
I saw how she could think that, I really did. But I missed my mother so much at that moment that I felt breathless: how we'd have laughed together at the idea that one thing could ever have been as satisfying to her as forty things.
“Are you OK?” Ingrid said. “Do you want to take a break?”
“I'm fine.”
“Sure?”
I nodded.
She opened a square leather box I'd bought for my mother in Florence. “What's this?”
In the box was a stiff, yellowing card, soft-cornered, on which were printed two letters: N. D.
“God.” I took the card out of the box.
“What is it?”
I thought: If she doesn't remember, why dredge it up? Although, to be honest, I'm not sure whom I thought I was protecting. I put the card back and closed the box. “Actually,” I said, “maybe we should take a break. I mean, we've been at it for what, fifteen minutes? I bought some cheese and crackers.”
“Robert.” She opened the box again. “Tell me.”
You hated sharing her, I heard Kevin saying. With your father or with Ingrid. “Don't you remember that night?” I said. “The English Department party and that guy Bug?”
Ingrid blushed deeply. But: “No,” she said.
“Well, then—it's too hard to explain.”
She bit her lip. She took a long breath and sat on the bed. “You know what kills me?” she said after a while. “She really didn't give a shit what we knew or didn't know.”
I thought that th
is was wrong, at least in my case. She wanted, needed me to know.
“You know?” Ingrid said. “I mean, do you think Dick Traeger was even the only one?”
I knew he wasn't: his distinction was that he was the first. “Probably not,” I said. “In fact, she once had me help her choose what to wear to an assignation.”
Once?
Ingrid rolled her eyes. “Assignation,” she said. “That word makes it sound so romantic.” She watched me for a little while, and then she reached into the drawer for another box.
IT WAS ROMANTIC, Ingrid. It was. “What do you think, Buddy?” my mother says. “With the belt or without? With the earrings or no? This scarf?” It's a Saturday morning; Ingrid is out roller-skating, my father is at his office on the campus. I'm sitting on a stool in my parents' bathroom, watching my mother as she turns from side to side, admiring herself in the mirror. Her face is slightly flushed, intense, her mind racing ahead to the moment when he first sees her. We are pretending, both of us, that she's going to meet a woman friend for lunch, and we both know that we both know we're only pretending. My mother slips on her shoes and reaches for a bottle of perfume. She turns to face me. “Come and smell, Buddy,” she says. “What do you think?”
LATE ON THE night of my mother's yellow dress I heard my parents arguing in their bedroom, and even later I woke to find my mother in my room, standing at the window: I couldn't see her so much as feel that she was there. Somehow, without my even rolling over, she knew I had awakened, and she started to talk to me.
“I'm not going anywhere, Buddy,” she said. “I wasn't meant to live this life, but that doesn't mean I'm going to leave it.” She moved over to my desk, and I heard her pull out the chair and sit down. “Would you like to hear a secret?” she said. “My daddy would hate it if he knew I'd married your father.”
I didn't say anything. I was beginning to be able to see, and I saw her pick up something from my desk and hold it to her face. Bug's stone. I was afraid she would ask me what it was, or turn on the light to see. I imagined her reading it aloud, whispering, “Please turn me over. Thank you.” I knew it was something she would love—“That's just how I feel,” she would say, laughing a little. “Can I have it, Buddy?” And I would give it to her.