by K. L. Cook
While they finished their meals, she started clearing the table. Her father suddenly stood up and sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” hamming it up until Rich and Gene spluttered again with laughter.
“Hey, good-lookin’, whatcha got cookin’?”
He pulled her away from the sink, hugging her close to him, and they twirled quickly on the small kitchen floor.
“Sing for me, boys!”
Gene and Rich sang along and pounded the table. She and her father two-stepped, ended with an extravagant twirl, and then he held her close and dipped her dramatically like Fred Astaire did with Ginger Rogers. Gene and Rich cheered. She laughed and tried to push him away, but he picked her up and twirled her around the kitchen once again, almost knocking over the skillet full of still-warm grease. When he put her down, little sweat beads trickled along both their hairlines. It was hot outside, and despite the windows being open, it seemed even hotter in the kitchen.
He sat down. “Whoa! I need some more tea. Your sister’s done wore me out.”
He poured himself another tall glass from the pitcher on the table, and they all watched him lift his head and the tea drain down his throat, his big Adam’s apple bobbing. When he finished, he shook his head vigorously a couple of times, which made the boys laugh but sent a dark, cold shiver across the back of Laura’s neck. The image reminded her, for some reason, of Greta and her puppies.
He reached out his hand to her, and she took it, and he gently pulled her into his lap and said, “Boys, your sister is our little sweetie. Don’t you ever forget it.”
He nuzzled his clean-shaven chin into her throat and kissed her cheek. It felt rough. Quickly he was up, putting on his watch, patting the boys’ heads. Then he was gone.
Watching him rumble down the road in his truck, leaving a gray-white plume of dust behind him, she felt empty. The word forlorn popped into her head.
“Gene, why don’t you do the dishes.”
“It ain’t my turn.”
“I don’t care,” she snapped. “Just do it.”
On the front porch, she sat in the metal chair her father had welded and listened to the loud buzzing of the cicadas. The evening sun was still hot and bright. She looked at the hole where their old oak tree had been uprooted after it had been struck by lightning the day before her mother disappeared. Her father had not refilled the hole, and it looked like a robbed grave.
She went back inside and helped Gene dry the plates. The three of them went to the backyard, and Rich played in the sandbox and on the swing while she and Gene pulled the laundry off the line.
She checked Fay’s food bowl. Still full. The dog hadn’t eaten much in the past few months. Although her father said it was because of the heat more than anything else, Laura still believed that it was because of what happened with Greta, followed by the disappearance of their mother. He said that was foolishness. She stroked Fay’s side and neck and rubbed her belly. Despite what her father said, she knew why Fay was upset.
She helped bathe Rich, and they all grabbed their pillows and sleeping bags and went next door. Mrs. Ambling answered the door in her nightgown. Her face looked blotchy, her eyes watery, her nose red and runny. She had a tissue in her hand.
“Oh, Lord,” she said. “I meant to call. I took some medicine, and it’s made me a little dopey.”
“What’s wrong?” Laura asked.
“I’ve come down with something. I don’t know what. I’ve got a fever. Has your father already left?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“Well, I suppose you all can just come on in. I hope you don’t catch what I’ve got, though.”
“We can stay at our house,” Laura said.
“Your father said he’d be out late.”
“It’s okay. I watch the boys all the time.”
“But Daddy said—” Gene began.
“It’s okay, really,” Laura said. “You don’t feel good. We’ll be right next door. We can come over if there’s a problem.”
“Are you sure?”
Mrs. Ambling smiled weakly, clearly relieved, the door already closing on them.
“I’m sure.”
She left her father a note on the kitchen table, explaining about Mrs. Ambling, so he wouldn’t be angry. The three of them listened to a baseball game on the radio. Later, after Gene and Rich went to bed, she pulled out the letter she’d received from Gloria just this week. In it she’d included a picture of herself, the air force pilot she married, and their baby girl, Julie. In the background was the Mediterranean Sea with craggy cliffs rising dramatically in the distance. Gloria didn’t know about their mother yet; they didn’t know how to reach Gloria, and even if they could have, their father didn’t like to talk about either her mother or Gloria. Her sister looked happy in the picture. Laura wished she could be with her, though she knew that if she was with her, then Gloria would have to know about their mother, and part of what made Gloria seem happy was the fact that she didn’t know. Laura missed her sister, but she didn’t feel sad anymore that she was gone. Just a kind of sweet longing to be with her again. It was more complicated with her mother.
She picked up the Hollywood Star Gazette, which she’d bought with her baby-sitting money. But the bright, thickly textured pictures of Janet Leigh and Deborah Kerr agitated her. She was only fourteen and felt she was still too boyish-looking, nothing like these glamorous, curvy women. They reminded her, strangely, of her mother, whose body had been made thick in the middle by hard work and children, but she was still womanly enough, and her face had not yet been too hardened by age or the West Texas wind. No movie star, but she was pretty, with large, dark brown eyes and a thin, perfect nose, and sometimes, when she was free from worry and her ash blond hair was loose around her face, she seemed radiant to Laura.
She didn’t like to think about her mother too much, especially when she was alone, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. The thoughts or images would be there in her mind and wouldn’t go away. Her mother was like a ghost who might return at any time, but if she did, what would happen then? Laura tried to imagine where she was now, what she was doing, but without any context it all seemed like that huge hole in the yard. Laura feared she might forget what her mother looked like. She wished she had a photograph. It seemed odd to her that there were no photographs. Her mother had taken the wedding picture with her.
Laura got up, turned the radio to a music station, and sang along quietly to Patsy Cline and a Weavers song and Bob Wills, always Bob Wills and his western swing, and danced around the room. She closed her eyes and imagined herself with Charlton Heston, and then with her father on the sawdust dance floor of the Armory—the smoky, sweaty, sweet-smelling perfume of the couples, the skirts billowing out, the two-stepping, waltzing, fast-twirling, double-dipping couples. She couldn’t wait until she was able to go dancing there herself. In less than a month, she’d be starting high school, and she could go if someone asked her. She’d already picked out the dress she wanted to buy—a green-and-white-striped one with small white satin bows on the sleeves and waist. She was saving her baby-sitting money to get it.
She spun one last time before plopping down on the couch, sweaty again because it was so hot inside, even with the breeze blowing in. She sat there and listened to the radio until it signed off, and the house seemed eerily quiet, except for the cicadas and the occasional bark or lonely howl of a dog down the alley.
In bed, trying to will herself to sleep, she could hear the late-summer breeze whistling in the branches of the trees. She wondered if her mother had lain awake at night, preparing herself to leave, to not have to think about what would be left behind, toughening her spirit. Had she been planning it for a long time? It seemed so sudden, without warning. Mrs. Ambling said she’d just walked out to the road, carrying that brown suitcase. And she was gone, but of course she wasn’t. How could she be completely gone when she was here right now in Laura’s mind?
She opened her eyes, tried to keep them open for
thirty seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—which Gloria had told her was the secret to washing away bad thoughts or dreams. Then she closed her eyes again and told herself, Fall asleep, fall asleep, fall asleep, fall asleep, until the phrase seemed funny. So strange that word “falling,” like going over an embankment, standing on the unrailed precipice at Palo Duro Canyon, the vertigo of below, trying to stop the silly crazy foolish impulse to jump, jump, jump. Just an inch—no, not even that much—separating ground from air. And then falling into…where? Into air, into nothing. Like being asleep is the fall itself, not the landing. You don’t fall from or into or onto sleep. You just fall asleep. Like disappearing. Like her mother. She’d fallen. But fallen where? No. Fallen away—away from them, but to what? Into what? Or maybe it was like sleep after all, neither away from nor to anything. It was the thing itself.
And then Laura was asleep, solidly, without thought or dream.
When she woke, it was to the sound of something being knocked over in another room. Gene lay curled on the corner of his and Manny’s bed. Rich was stretched out with his feet hanging through the bars because he was too big for the crib.
She heard a laugh, then muffled whispers. She grabbed the pocketknife from her dresser and crept toward the hallway.
The lights were out, but the moon filtered through the sheer curtains. Her father’s door was slightly ajar. She heard laughter, more whispering, and she knew then that her father was in the room with a woman. Had her mother come back? She hesitated in the hallway with the knife in her hand. No, it was not her mother’s voice. She felt stupid. She started to return to bed and sleep, but then she heard a little high-pitched yelp, and she stopped and sat down, her back against the wall. The darkness of the house enveloped her. She scooted close to her father’s door and sat there on her knees. She closed her eyes. Outside, the cicadas buzzed. The bed squeaked, rocking back and forth. She imagined a small canoe swaying in the troughs of waves. She squeezed her eyes tightly and thought she could hear their lips against each other. Her father’s breathing seemed labored and deep and rhythmic, and the woman’s voice swelled between his, higher-pitched and sharp, almost whistling.
She moved her face closer to the door. Her heart thumped in her chest and neck and temples. She felt paralyzed by their laboring. She thought of Fay when she was in heat, the male dogs panting, their tongues dripping. Laura’s stomach dropped, but she pressed her face next to the cracked door. She closed one eye and with the other tried to see into the room. It was dark except for a faint light from the open-shuttered window, which cast a slatted splash of yellow over her father’s bare, moving back and made a silhouette of the woman. The sheets and covers clung to the edges of the bed.
When her eyes adjusted, she saw the outline of her father’s body pressing down onto the woman. The bed did seem to roll, though not with the sea wildness she had imagined. The springs continued to squeak. Their breathing increased in intensity. She could see the woman’s white thighs spread wide, like phosphorescent wings perpendicular to his hips, but the rest of her body seemed trapped beneath his, swallowed in the sagging, lumpy mattress and under his long broad body. The woman’s arm was slung back against the pillow, crooked over her face, her mouth pinched at the corners in a grimace as his shoulders rubbed against her cheeks. He moved forcefully over her, and his breathing turned to muffled groans. He rocked and pressed so that her body disappeared into the bed.
Is this why my mother disappeared? The question caught in her mind like a hook.
The woman shook her head and let out what sounded like a painful moan, and Laura felt sickened by it and unsure if she should open the door and let herself be seen. She wanted to stop this, wanted her father off this woman, wanted him to quit pressing and breathing in this way. But she could not bring herself to do it. She closed her eyes, but the sounds overwhelmed her. She heard the mocking drone of the cicadas outside.
When she opened her eyes again, her heart leapt into her throat because the woman’s arm was no longer over her face, and she stared directly at Laura. Could the woman see her there? Surely not. But there the woman was; she just kept staring, her eyes distinct and luminous in the dark. Laura stared back and could see that the face was not womanish but girlish, with chubby white cheeks and a soft, puckerish mouth. She felt a panic billow inside her as her father made more noise, and the bed rocked against the wall, and the woman-girl let out a small groan, muffled by her father’s shoulder.
She jerked back. She felt dizzy in the hall and closed her eyes, but all the noise—those crazy cicadas, her father’s breathing, the bedsprings—thundered in her head. She felt as if she were being held upside down, and when she opened her eyes, she was surprised to find herself still sitting upright in the hall. She crawled toward her room, shut the door, and slipped into her bed. She put her face into the pillow and covered her ears so she couldn’t hear anything except the rush of blood in her temples, which after a few minutes diminished to a steady throb.
She tried to sleep but couldn’t. And then she heard a rustling in the hallway. The bathroom door opened and closed. Water ran. The toilet flushed. A minute later, the door opened again, and then there were footsteps outside her own door. It creaked. She kept her eyes closed, fearing what she would see when she opened them. She knew that someone was in the room—her father, certainly, though the presence seemed lighter—and she could also smell something sweet, like warmed buttermilk, so she didn’t move. She held her breath and felt a slight pressure by the side of her bed, a rustle, and then the door closed. Feet padded to her father’s room, and then his door shut.
She opened her eyes. Beside her on the small bed was the knife. It seemed puny and foolish there. She swallowed hard, her throat scratchy, raw. She reached out and grabbed the knife handle. It was moist. She opened it and pressed her finger against the dull blade. It did not cut her. She closed it again and slipped it between the mattress and box spring, and lay there in the dark listening. After a while, there was rustling in the other room, the click of her father’s door, the sound of feet over the hardwood floor, her father whispering. Finally the front door creaked open and shut. Her father’s truck rumbled to life.
She tiptoed to the window and watched the truck back out, crunching the gravel of the driveway, the beams from the headlights making small yellow circles in the dark street. She felt the hot summer air through the bug screen, could smell the dust from the road, the ragweed twitching her nostrils, could hear the cicadas still at it.
The night was barely lit now by the clouded moon. She waited until she no longer heard the truck. She didn’t return to her own bed but checked on Gene and Rich in the beds beside hers. Even though Manny was gone for the night, Gene was huddled close to his edge, a habit of deferring to his older brother even in his absence. Though only six years older than Gene, she felt sorry for him and angry, too, that already life had taught him to expect so little. She reached out and stroked his head, but he didn’t stir. Even his breathing was shallow, as if he were afraid to take too much air from the world. Rich, by contrast, was stretched out in the crib, a space hog, a thrasher, someone who demanded his due without even knowing it. It was just part of his nature.
And what was her nature? What did she look like when she slept? What would she think if she could see herself clearly? The fact that she could not know, that she remained partially blind to herself, bewildered her. Eyes always looking out and then in, but not at. She reached over the crib and straightened Rich, tugged the sheet from beneath him, covered him up. There was no real reason with the heat, but it was a habit of hers, this need to be covered and to cover others at night.
She glided out of the bedroom, into the hallway, and then into her father’s room, where the windows were open. She pulled the lamp cord, and a harsh white glow splashed the room, forced her to squint. The covers and sheets lay tangled around the mattress. There was a pocket in the middle of the bed where the woman-girl had been. Laura placed one hand
out and down, ran it just a few inches over the top of the sheets, feeling the heat still present from their bodies. She was hesitant at first to touch, to disturb. The heat radiated the entire length of the mattress, from the foot to the pillows, and she floated both hands above the bed and was surprised by the invisible warmth. She reached down to the center, where their hips met, and she touched the sheet. It was hot and slightly damp, but she pressed one palm down flat, her fingers spread, and ran her hand back and forth and then around in a circle. She reached out with her other hand and could imagine the two of them in here, not even a half hour ago, and the quiet stillness of the room was like the buzzing sound you hear in the silence after thunder.
She smelled them here, too, and took a calm pleasure in isolating the scents. Her father’s hair oil and Old Spice, the woman-girl’s too-sweet perfume, like that buttermilk smell drifting into her room. There was a faint whiff of the rum her father liked and spearmint gum and something else, something sharp, pungent, the smell of sex, she figured, and lingering above and below and swirling through was the dank, tangy odor of sweat.
She searched for her mother’s own particular smell, the talcum powder like a fine dust on her body, but it wasn’t here anymore, not even a trace, and she felt saddened by that loss, a kind of betrayal, but Laura wasn’t sure now who was being betrayed.
She opened her eyes, tugged on the lamp cord, and slid her feet purposefully over the hardwood floor so she could hear the callused shwoosh of her feet, out of her father’s room, through the narrow hallway that seemed like a tunnel to her—she’d never noticed this before—and then to the living room. It, too, held the smell of her father and the woman-girl in it, and she followed slowly, could trace it to the door, which she opened. She stepped outside to the porch, and even there she could smell them, as if they’d left a vaporous trail. Then the odors dissipated and were gone.
She sat down on the porch, feeling very calm, very awake. She let the breeze brush through her nightgown. It was still hot. She then stood up on her tiptoes, pulled her gown over her head, and, reaching high, stretched out her body, which seemed dangerous, thrilling. She hadn’t been outside with so little on since she was a child; she remembered the last time, running around naked in the summery yard, chasing Fay and some of her puppies before they gave them away.