“If you start calling me Anthony, nobody’ll know who you’re talking about. Stick with Daisy.”
She rested her hand on my cheek for two minutes and looked at me. I guess she was looking into my eyes, but she hadn’t taken the sunglasses off so I couldn’t be sure. Then she started the car and headed out Beaton Road toward the Neck. The good beach.
She pulled over on the shoulder and I spread our breakfast out on the warm hood of the car. We tried to open the Arts section so we could count the Ninas in the Hirschfeld drawing, but the wind came up and blew my coffee onto it.
“Mom, what did you want to be when you were little?”
She swept a hand around at the beach and the big gabled house that was the only thing on the Neck. “This, honey. I wanted to be this.”
“To live at the beach?”
“To not live in an apartment block in Astoria! Girls then didn’t want to be things; they wanted to have things. I wanted you, Daisy. I wanted to be your mother.”
I pulled her out onto the sand. She tried to resist, and when I wouldn’t give up, she made me stop so she could take her sandals off. We ran through the sand toward the foamy water, laughing at the sea gulls and the way her scarf tried to blow away. In the bright windy sunshine, all that pink was okay.
“See? The fresh air is good for you.”
“You’re good for me,” she said. “What would I do without you?”
She was out of breath but smiling. Her cheeks were pink too, and she waved her hands around like all of a sudden she could think straight; she had things to say. Right then, I thought I was saving her.
We got home and fell onto the couch with the rest of the paper, smelling like ozone and salt, with wind-burned skin and watering eyes. I was so happy.
Joan had run away to Hicksville and I didn’t know why, but my mother was laughing and Robbie had gone to bed. I had the quiet lady’s musket ball in the palm of my hand and it felt lucky. I still had a window I could see the water from. We’d have school the day after tomorrow, and Joan would be there with me. That was the size of my world and I liked it that way.
Or none of that was true, and I was just hiding that morning. Just like my mother, laying perfect table settings over the scars and the cracks.
By the time the leaves fell down and clogged the gutters, my mother had stepped out of her movie-theater light and I couldn’t tell where the edges of the world were anymore. Someone had switched the projector off and we were all disappearing into the smoky dark.
It was that night I found Beatrice. It had been two weeks since I’d finished my blue box, and I’d been taking the bus and the train around so I could use a random scattering of phone booths.
That night after dinner I put a couple of issues of the TAP newsletter in my backpack with a list of country codes. My mother was on the couch, reading Shogun and drinking a white-wine spritzer.
“Going over Joan’s, Mom.” I wasn’t; I still didn’t know where Joan was. But my mother never checked.
“Daisy! Wait.”
I stopped in the hallway with the screen door in my hand.
“Come here a minute.” She leaned over and patted the cushion by where her feet were curled up.
I put my backpack down by the door and went over to sit on the edge of the couch. I could see the roots of her hair and the distance in her eyes. Down where she was, in that well full of Valium and chardonnay, there was love. I could see the echo of it in the way she looked at me.
“What are you doing, Daisy?”
“I just told you. I’m going to Joan’s. How’s the book?”
“Sad. There was an earthquake. Do you need anything? Did you eat?”
“I ate with you, Mom.”
She looked away for a minute, and then giggled. “I know that, silly Daisy. I meant are you full? Do you need anything? Want some cookies?”
“I’m good, Mom.”
She put her hand in my hair. “You are, aren’t you? Such a good kid.”
“Yep. And I’ll be home early. Okay?”
“Sure, but where are your other friends, honey?”
She slid the hand down to my cheek and I heard Robbie bouncing down the stairs.
“What other friends?”
“What other friends?” Robbie leaned his head into the living room. “Joan is his friend. He’s gonna marry her.”
“Don’t joke like that, Robbie. It’s not funny.”
“I’m not going to marry Joan. That would be like incest.”
Actually, I’d never really thought about it before. I turned the idea around in the air over the couch and tried to look at it from every angle.
“It isn’t funny, Daisy,” Mom said. “It’s sad. People never accept the children from mixed marriages. They don’t fit anywhere. Just an awful fact of life.”
“You mean white people don’t accept children from mixed marriages? Those kids grow up somewhere, Mom.”
My words circled the room and disappeared out the window. She turned her head back and forth between me and Robbie like it was hard to follow the conversation.
Anyway, after I thought about it, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to marry Joan. I just wanted to live in her house and make her breakfast every day and buy her an aquarium for her birthday and sit with her up in the trees, waiting for winter. And I didn’t want her to marry anyone else.
“Got some work to do, Mom,” Robbie said.
She smiled up at him. “Thank you, honey.”
The screen door slammed behind Robbie, and I leaned my head down on my mother’s knee. She breathed out a sigh of happiness that made me feel guilty, because I was only waiting until I heard Robbie pull away. Wherever he was going, I didn’t want to know about it.
I stood up when I heard the Charger speed away around the curve of Jensen Road.
“Daisy?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you every minute,” she said. “Every minute of my life.”
“I know that. I can always tell, Mom. Honest.”
It was like I’d let go of some string that was holding her upright. She fell back against the couch and closed her eyes.
I went out onto the porch and held the screen door until it clicked shut, then headed up through the woods to Beltaire Road. It was a warm night. Once I crossed 25A, I was beyond the breeze from the water. Particles of grit from the road stuck to my skin and my hair stuck to my neck. I had one of Robbie’s old T-shirts on with some cutoffs. Standing in front of Casa Lucciola out on Meadowlark Road, I watched my scrawny limbs turn pink and blue in the blinking neon. Inside, there were families sitting in red leather booths eating shrimp fra diavolo and chicken Parmesan. A dad was laughing over his Sambuca while Mr. Pinissiaro patted him on the back and smiled. Everyone seemed connected, like they all had a place. Like it was me trapped behind the window glass and not them.
I looked at the phone booth on the corner. It was too close to home, but I went over and picked up the receiver anyway, just to listen while it sang its one-note song. Once I lifted that handset out of its cradle, I was inside the line. The circuit went through me. It was me between the earpiece and the keypad, making notes spark down the wires. I was part of a giant electric spiderweb the size of America. The size of the world. And I could make it do things.
I got out my blue box and dialed directory assistance in Boise, Idaho. Then I used it to open up a line to Atlanta, listening to the clicks and beeps chirping like birds inside the wires. I’d been working my way around Europe anyway, looking for people who spoke English. I guess it was because of the people in Casa Lucciola that I dialed a 39 number that night. Italy.
“Pronto.” My grandmother used to say that. The voice was somewhere between a woman and a girl.
“Do you speak English? I’m sorry, I know it’s late.” I was pretty sure it was after midnight in Italy.
“Yes, and who are you?” It was English, but more beautiful. She had an accent and she was, not whispering exactly, but speaking low. Like th
ere was no need to shout and all the time in the world.
“My name is Daisy.”
“You are a girl? You don’t sound like a girl.”
“Um, no. It’s my nickname. I have blond hair and I’m really pale, I guess.”
“You should be the Lion.”
“I don’t think I look like a lion. Pretty much a Daisy.”
“The lion. It’s a flower.”
“Dandelion?”
“Yes. It’s more like a man.”
Just like that. She never even asked why I called. She didn’t want to know where I lived, but I told her anyway. When I asked her where she was, she wouldn’t say.
“It’s warm,” she said. “There is no air. I’m sitting in the window.” Later, she said, “I am married, but too young. Not happy.”
It was months before I wondered what would make a person pick up a phone and say those things to a stranger. Right then I just said them right back.
“My mother is . . . kind of lost. My brother is doing bad things. I can’t tell anyone. I don’t know how to help them.”
We stayed on for an hour, that first time. The whole time, I pictured our words traveling a trunk cable under the Atlantic, back and forth between us while sea creatures swam overhead. Beatrice was sitting in a window somewhere in the humid air, smelling the Mediterranean Sea and talking to me like I was the very person she wanted to be in a conversation with. Like it was easy.
Now I’m at Aunt Regina’s house, without a blue box or a pay phone. Beatrice was part of it all, but not the way Joan thought. Working the phones made me free. Inside the phone system I was like Joan holding her breath underwater. I was pushing through to another world, made only of electricity and sound. I could say whatever I needed to. I didn’t need to hide because I was already invisible.
The Watery Breath That Shaped Them
Joan
I TOLD YOU about Mr. Johnson’s microscope so you’d know I’d been looking at protozoa for a month already by the time school started. I was excited about biology, but once I got there I realized I already knew everything we were covering. I decided it was going to be boring. I wish I could say I was never so wrong in my life, but I have been. I’ve been wrong so much, I’m having a hard time putting my mistakes in order and weighing them up.
The day the teacher first brought out the microscopes, the leaves outside had started turning and the sun was so bright he had to close the blinds so we could see our slides.
The first strange thing about Mr. Tomaszewski was that he assigned me a cheerleader for a lab partner. Usually teachers put me with the rest of the freaks. I thought Charlie Ferguson would be my lab partner, or Una, the German girl who played the French horn.
The next weird thing about Mr. Tomaszewski was that when he noticed me labeling all the parts on the diagram of the protozoan without paying attention to him or looking at my book, it didn’t piss him off. He didn’t say anything sarcastic or accuse me of cheating. He just tapped my paper and nodded at the cheerleader like she should learn from me. Also, I should mention that he wore jeans to school and had hair down below his ears.
When the bell rang, I took my time putting stuff in my backpack while Mr. Tomaszewski opened the blinds and put the tray of slides in his sink.
“Joan Harris?” he said when I was heading out the door. I turned around and he said, “That’s you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Maybe he was pissed off that I knew the names of all the parts on the protozoan.
“You like biology?”
I shrugged. “I like water. I like to know how stuff works.”
“Oh, right.” He laughed like he knew what I meant better than I did.
He didn’t know what I meant. Nobody did.
“Maybe you should do some extra credit,” Mr. Tomaszewski said. “You might get bored with this stuff. Seems like you know it already.”
Well, I wasn’t expecting that. My whole life, teachers had only ever talked to me like I was either a criminal or a charity case. Do you know how weird it is, having a teacher talk to you like you’re a person for the first time? Maybe he did get it? I took a big breath and dove straight into Nick Tomaszewski without checking first to see how shallow he was.
He went over to the windows and started cranking open the blinds. The sunlight came streaking into the quiet and lit up the two of us, alone in the room now, and the dust in the air. I turned around and wove my way through the metal stools to the door. When I opened it, the sound of two thousand kids leaving class came rushing in like a storm wave full of rocks.
“Thanks, Mr. Tomaszewski. Bye,” I said, but the words got lost in the crowd of voices, and I stepped out into the hallway without looking back.
Maybe he was the first thing I didn’t tell Daisy, and maybe it was because Daisy never asked. He was spending all his time talking to some woman in Italy on the phone. Or maybe because he lied to me first. It makes me sound like a baby when I say it, but it might be true. I could see the things he knew hiding in his eyes. He was pretending they weren’t there, so why should I be the honest one?
I kept quiet, and a space started to open up between us. Once it was there, things started pouring into it. By October, it was all changing so fast that sometimes I got dizzy just standing still. My parents. Robbie. Andre riding around in Robbie’s car. Daisy refusing to talk to me. Teresa. Beatrice. Mr. Tomaszewski. I spent the whole fall semester feeling like the ground was moving beneath me.
My mom was in the city working on a production. She called that night to talk to me and Andre about school. I looked out the kitchen window at the sunset, so her voice on the phone was just background.
Is there a reason why the inside of clamshells look like sunsets? I mean, that way that things in nature always echo each other—it’s weird, right? Whirlpools and galaxies, roots and veins, music and math.
“Joan?”
“What?”
“Well, hello to you, too. How’s school?”
“Fine.”
It’s because there are only three rules to the universe. That’s why everything repeats, I mean. Gravity, inertia, action and reaction. You put some really simple stuff in the middle of a void with three basic rules and you get all this. Daisy and jellyfish, whiskey and trains, electricity and angel dust, cops and spider crabs and the telephone network. It’s all full of repeating patterns, if you can figure out where to look.
“Have you made any new friends?”
“No. Well, maybe, but not at school.”
“You planning to join this conversation at all?”
“What for?”
“So, it’s gonna be you, huh?”
“Me what?”
“I’ve been waiting for the boys to get angry. You, I expected to understand.”
“Understand what?!” Then I was mad at myself for yelling. Like she’d scored off me.
“Okay, well, I’ll see you soon, honey.”
I put the receiver down on the counter and left it there for Andre. Maybe she said she loved me, but something jumped in the harbor right then so I wasn’t listening. A sea bass, maybe. It was getting dark so I couldn’t tell.
I went into my room and got out the Encyclopedia of Animal Life, but something was distracting me. I kept looking from the diagram of the cuttlefish to the empty ceiling, and there was this feeling in my stomach. My chest, maybe. Pressure. It worked its way up into my throat, trying to choke me or turn into tears.
Out the window, bats were diving over the water and the stars were stabbing their way into the sky. X-Ray Spex was thumping through the wall of Andre’s room. He wasn’t even in there; he was on the phone. How was anybody supposed to think in our house? If it wasn’t the silence it was the noise.
I threw the encyclopedia on the floor and went out through the kitchen and down the steps. The tide was halfway in, so I sat on the bottom step to take my shoes off and roll up my jeans. The moon was hidden and the air was still, but I could feel the chill sinking down onto the water jus
t outside the porch light. Maybe the darkness was telling me things, but I wasn’t interested. I only wanted to know one thing. How do I make everything simple again? How do I put the world back together?
I took my bicycle from under the porch and went through the water to the Abbates’ landing. The water spun up off my tires and onto my legs, and a cloud blew away from in front of the moon. All I could see was the spray glittering and the path of the moon on the water, until I rounded the curve and the orange lights of town blotted out everything under the trees. By the time I’d dragged the bike through the woods barefoot, I was covered in scratches and one foot was bleeding, but I needed the bike and I didn’t want anyone to see me.
Robbie was dangerous and complicated and in the way. He was the lie between us, or at least at the time I thought he was the only one.
If Robbie went to the park, I could get on my bicycle and follow him. I could leave it up on Baywater Avenue where he couldn’t see me and maybe get close enough to hear what he was saying. If I could find out what he was up to, I could make a call. I wanted someone to come and take him away in handcuffs so the space between me and Daisy would be clear again. Because seriously, Robbie McNamara? I’m sorry, but he just didn’t matter to me. Waste of space. Space in the middle of my best friend’s life. Prime real estate.
You don’t have to call me heartless. Trust me, I know already. You’ll see. But all I wanted was to tell on him, I swear. All I wanted was to make him stop so Daisy and Andre and even Teresa would all be safe again.
I put my shoes back on and waited. The dark under the trees was still whispering to me, and I still wasn’t listening.
Robbie went by at about eight thirty. He was by himself, smoking, with the window down and Bruce Springsteen on the tape deck. I got on my bike and followed him through the intersection at the bottom of Main Street. There were some kids on the grass in the park, but nobody noticed me. I puffed up the hill underneath all the lights in all the living room windows on Baywater Avenue, shining like some kind of Victorian Christmas card in September. All warm glow and no televisions. People on Baywater Avenue do not have televisions in their front rooms.
How We Learned to Lie Page 7