How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  On the way home, the train rode slantways into the sunset, throwing a parallelogram shadow onto gravel and the weeds. I sat in the facing seats at the end of the car and put my backpack behind my head. Down the aisle there were some old people coming back from a week at the beach, and a bunch of off-duty conductors riding back to Jamaica.

  I leaned back to look out at the strip malls and the wrecking yards and the lights glowing into the pink air. I put my feet up and thought about hope, how easy it was.

  “You using all these seats or what?”

  I looked over at a pair of stockings full of holes and then up at a blue Mohawk. I hadn’t even realized she was standing over me.

  I said, “Sorry,” and moved my feet, even though there were only about five other people in the whole car.

  There was a guy standing next to her, but he didn’t say anything. They sat down across from me and she put her feet up between me and my window.

  “Cool jacket,” she said.

  “I got it from my brother.”

  “Well, it’s cool on you. Where you going?”

  “South Highbone. You?”

  “South Highbone, on this train?”

  “It’s complicated. Where are you going?”

  “Ronkonkoma. This is my cousin Kevin. He doesn’t say much.”

  He raised a hand and said, “Hey.” He had black hair and black eyes and a Swiss army coat.

  “You don’t look like a Kevin.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, my parents are Greek. My mom thought Kevin was a hardcore American name. She thought it would make me blend in.”

  “You guys live in Ronkonkoma?”

  “Kevin lives in Bay Ridge. They send him out here for the fresh air.” She looked out at a container yard and smirked.

  “I thought you were from the city, too.”

  She laughed. “Why, ’cause I don’t look like a cheerleader?”

  “Don’t people hassle you?”

  “I live in Commack. What do you think?” But she smiled. “Where you been?”

  “Greenport. I had to make a phone call and I couldn’t do it from home.”

  Then I had to explain a little about the phones. Kevin wasn’t saying anything, but he was looking at me like I was about to do something he didn’t want to miss. It made me feel a little uncomfortable, but also a little more like I mattered.

  “You gonna tell me your name?” I said to the Mohawk girl. I sounded like Robbie. Like talking to people didn’t faze me at all.

  “Anne.”

  “Seriously?” I looked at her net vest, held together with safety pins, and the PiL button on her jacket. “Anne doesn’t seem good enough.”

  “Okay, what’s yours? Alexander Graham Bell?”

  “Daisy. Well, it’s been Daisy ever since I was three.” I nodded at Kevin. “My mom wasn’t thinking about the whole blending-in thing. Technically my name’s Anthony.”

  “Nah, Daisy is definitely better,” Anne said. “It’s tough on you.”

  That was the first time I realized that when you’re talking to strangers, everything about you is new. There’s no expectation. No context. In Anne’s ears, my name sounded completely different than it did to the people who knew me. I could feel the world get a little bit bigger.

  “You go to school in Brooklyn?” I asked Kevin.

  “College. Hunter.”

  He was nineteen and he was taking fine art. They don’t make people like Kevin in Highbone. But then, I didn’t think they made people like Anne on Long Island either.

  Before she got off the train, Anne asked me for a piece of paper. All I had was my empty matchbook. She borrowed a pencil from Kevin.

  While she was writing she said, “Kevin’s going to meet me in Westbury in January. We’re going to see the Slits at My Father’s Place. You should come.”

  She stood over me while she undid one of her safety pins. Then she used it to pin the matchbook to my jacket. On it was her number.

  “’Cause I know you’re good with the phone,” she said. Then she kicked my feet off the seat and ran off the train laughing.

  “Cool to meet you,” Kevin said, and swung down the steps after her.

  I leaned back and looked out the window, listening to the buzzing in my veins. Since the middle of summer, I’d been trapped in a parallel circuit. Joan. Robbie. My mother. All of them were pathways through resistance. Until that day, when I stepped outside the trap. I went the other way, didn’t ask first, didn’t tell anyone, and did what I figured was right.

  It felt good at the time. At the time, I thought Anne and Kevin were proof that I had shifted something. I actually believed I’d just manufactured hope out of thin air.

  Two days before the hurricane hit we turned on the news while my mother sorted through the mail. A whole week’s worth was piled up on the bricks of the hearth, bills and circulars on top of a pile of old Pennysavers. The hurricane was still a tropical storm in the Caribbean, but the weatherman kept showing us pictures of it swirling toward us.

  “This is his once-in-a-lifetime chance,” my mother said. “He’s hoping it’ll be bad.”

  “The leaves’ll be great this year, Mom. Can we drive upstate?”

  She wasn’t listening. “If people get evacuated and maybe a couple of them die, he’ll go coast-to-coast.”

  “I’m sure that’s not what he’s thinking, Mom. Anyway, how bad can a hurricane be in October?”

  In the end the leaves never got a chance last year. The hurricane came and ripped them away while they were still halfway green.

  “You seem happy today, Mom. Something cheered you up?”

  She picked up her coffee cup and said, “I can’t take this anymore. I wasn’t cut out for this.”

  I was so used to those two phrases coming out of her mouth; I hardly heard them by that point. She sighed and went upstairs with her coffee and a water bill trailing from her other hand. I watched the big swirling storm on the weather map and the sun coming in the windows and thought, How bad can it be?

  My mother came back downstairs all dressed up. I looked at her blond hair, shining in the sunlight coming from the front hallway. I’d gotten used to the dark line down the middle of her head. She’d been slipping for at least a year at that point, smudges on her nails, her color growing out. The truth kept creeping up out of her body no matter what she did to hold it back. Now her nails had gone back to the right color red.

  “You look nice, Mom. What’s the big occasion?”

  She looked at me and tilted her head. I looked into her eyes, but they didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

  “Nothing, Daisy. Hold my hands.” She held her new fingernails out to me and I reached past them to touch her palms. Her eyes went misty and she smiled like someone had just said they loved her but she didn’t love them back. Not the way they wanted.

  I should have known it was a sign of something when the blond went all the way to her scalp again. I did know, but I read it wrong. I was looking, but I wasn’t listening. She was wearing dressy sandals and she seemed bright, full of energy. I thought she was coming back to us. When I close my eyes and look at that last image of her on the couch in the morning light, I can still feel my own happiness. I thought my phone call had fixed her. Everything was about to get better.

  “Best boy,” she said. “Tell me about your week.”

  “I told you before, Mom. I had metal shop. We did quadratic equations in math. Arthur lent me a book named The Street. It’s really sad.”

  The other thing I’d done was wire a tape recorder to my light switch. When you hit the light it said, “Hello, Daisy. Come on in. Relax.” But that stuff made her nervous, so I didn’t mention it.

  “Where’s Robbie?”

  “No idea.”

  “I’ll have to go up and see your dad. Will you two take care of each other?” She meant that as a serious question. I know she did. In her mind, Robbie could take care of me.

  “Yeah, Mom. We’ll do the leaves, too. If Robbie
helps me, I can clean out the gutters for real this time.”

  “You’re so good, Daisy. Someone lucky is gonna marry you.”

  She left the next day. It had rained overnight, regular rain, not hurricane rain yet. There were piles of wet leaves on the driveway. She made Robbie get out of bed and started talking to him about emergencies and the mortgage and the savings account.

  She put her arm around me and looked over at him. “You know he’s special, right?” She meant me.

  “Yeah, Mom,” Robbie said. “I’m gonna make sure he’s okay. He’s going to be a college genius, if I have to carry him there on my back.” He meant that, too. He would have done anything to take care of me. He did.

  The wind came up and blew some beech leaves around in circles, while the telephone wires swayed back and forth over Jensen Road. I stood next to Robbie in the driveway, watching while she took the Chevy down the hill. When the sun hit the copper paint, you could see it had glitter in it. There were maple leaves stuck to the back windshield and the white vinyl hardtop. Her brake lights went on at the bottom of the driveway and again before she hit the curve by the Narragansett.

  I grew up on a road to nowhere, that’s for sure. It carried people around that curve and right out of existence. All those people who crashed into the wall when we were little, and my dad, then my mother, and all the others, too. When I think about it, they all went around that curve before they disappeared. Even me.

  Daisy

  THE HURRICANE STALKED us for a couple days, winding its way up the coast and feinting a few blows at the coast of Virginia and Maryland. People unplugged things, and the sound of televisions was replaced with the sound of battery-powered radios.

  I taped up the windows and called Joan.

  We spent a lot of that night in the dormer window watching the crazy wind. We talked about Ray Velker. Nobody had seen him in a couple of weeks by that point. We wondered for a minute if he’d gone back home because of the hurricane. Showed up to help his parents unplug the appliances and tape the windows.

  “Where’s your mom tonight?” I asked her.

  “In the city, where else?”

  But of course I was really wondering about mine. Where was my mother that night? Was she up the Hudson somewhere, safe inside four walls? Dry? Sitting in a rest stop watching the wipers and the rain glistening red in the tail lights?

  “Do you wonder what their lives were like before we got here?” Joan was saying.

  “Huh?” I pulled our pan of hot chocolate out of the fireplace and poured it.

  “You’re not listening.” Joan poked my arm and made me spill some onto the bricks.

  “Sorry. I was thinking about Robbie.”

  “Yeah, but before Robbie, before Arthur, what were they like?”

  “What was who like?”

  “Our parents, Daisy! You ever think whatever they are now is because of us? We’re in the way of them being who they’re supposed to be.”

  That was so obviously not true about either of my parents, or Joan’s mother. Except for Joan’s dad, none of our parents even let us slow them down. I couldn’t say that, though.

  “No, Joan. I don’t. I don’t think being who you’re supposed to be means you get everything you want. It’s how you deal with what you get.”

  “Put that shit on a Hallmark card, McNamara. That’s good enough to keep a hundred housewives quiet for a whole month.”

  I took the hot chocolate upstairs so we could sit in our sleeping bags and drink it in the attic window. Now I’m trying to figure out which things had happened by the time the hurricane came. What was on her mind at that point?

  Me? I was hiding in the middle of a hundred-mile-an-hour wind. Everyone around me was moving, but I was standing still.

  The best thing that happened that night was when the old oak fell down across Jensen Road. It took down a power line and it was at least three hours before LILCO cut the juice. It was like somebody opened a vein and let the lifeblood out of the suburbs, blue and white and spitting. I looked out at that writhing wire and then over at Joan. She was burning, too. I could see it. Things were growing and changing inside her, and she was reaching out to touch the world.

  The raindrops lit up and the televisions died and everything that kept our lives circulating came free of its casing and seeped out into the storm.

  For days, the world was full of garbage. Pieces of trees and pieces of boats and junk out of people’s backyards blown around everywhere. The abandoned house had fallen another foot, and for months we were afraid to go in it. I woke up in the middle of one night and looked down at the dead power lines at the side of the road. There were striped sawhorses with flashing yellow lights around them.

  I came downstairs and found Robbie at the dining room table with the checkbook. He had some ground-up pills sitting in the mortar and pestle with a rolled up twenty, but he was doing the math. I checked it.

  “Hey, Robbie. Want some coffee?”

  “Daisy.”

  “Yeah, I’m the only other person here now, remember? So, coffee?”

  “This one’s red.” He held up an envelope. “We need to do this one.”

  “Okay, Robbie.” I started making the coffee anyway.

  “Daisy, some kids are dealing some weird shit in the school. Stay away from it, okay?”

  “I already know. The other day—”

  I was about to tell him about Patrick and Ray dosing me. I was about to say how I sat there trying to keep the floor down all night. I thought we’d both laugh. Then it hit me. He probably already knew. He might even know where Ray was. Robbie was dealing, Ray was meeting him in the driveway, and I was so busy trying to stop Joan from asking questions, I hadn’t really asked myself.

  I never finished my sentence, but Robbie didn’t notice anyway.

  “You hear me? None of that dust and shit, right?”

  “Right, Robbie. How much sugar?”

  Turned out we didn’t have any sugar. Robbie said he was making a list and pulled out the telephone pad from under a stack of bills. He wrote “SUGAR” on it in capitals.

  “It’s a weird high, anyway. You wouldn’t like it.” He wasn’t wrong about that.

  How did Robbie know about what kind of shit was going around school? Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? I guess I knew right then that the angel dust Patrick and Ray gave me at Hatchet Mary’s came from Robbie. I’d spent a whole day and a night crouched in the attic window, trying to keep the walls of reality from falling in and crushing me, and it was probably Robbie’s fault. I turned my head and looked outside so I didn’t have to look at the facts.

  It was so dark out, all I could see in the kitchen window was the kitchen. And me looking back at myself in a T-shirt with Oxum Oaxaca written on it backward. It was four a.m., no point going back to sleep.

  “This one’s red,” Robbie said again. “We have to do this one.”

  “Okay, Robbie. Let me check your math.”

  “Go for it. You’re the college genius.”

  Like I said, it was right. He couldn’t even remember five minutes back, but he could add and subtract and balance two columns, as long as one of them wasn’t made out of something that could get you high. Spawn of an accountant, Robbie McNamara.

  I took a shower before the sun came up. When I got out, Robbie was asleep in the living room chair. I made pancakes, but when I tried to wake Robbie up he just ran into the bathroom and threw up then went back to sleep on the couch.

  I never call Joan in the mornings because her dad works late and sleeps late. So I finished off the maple syrup and put it on the list, then ate the pancakes myself. While I was eating, the sun came up washed my reflection out of the kitchen window. When it lit the tops of the trees in Carter’s Bay, I went up into the attic so I could get a look at the world before I went out into it. I saw Joan heading to the bus stop, but I didn’t shout. I didn’t want her to come in and see Robbie.

  When I got o
ut onto the road, Joan was leaning against the cement wall with a cop standing over her. Arthur’s car was parked at the top of the Harrises’ stairs and the people from the Narragansett were cleaning all the hurricane junk out of their parking lot. Then all that disappeared into the image of Joan with her head leaning back against the wall, looking past that uniform at the sky. The cop was tall and so skinny his uniform was baggy at the waist. The weather was getting cold, and the breath was condensing between them, turning gold in the sideways sun.

  When you walk along that wall the sound of your steps bounces off it and out over the harbor. You can’t sneak up on anybody right there, not even with bare feet. When I hit the road along the wall, the cop turned his sunglasses on me, then he said something I couldn’t hear and nodded at Joan.

  “Hey, Joan!” I ran the rest of the way.

  Not because I was really worried, but because you just do, don’t you? When we were little we ran everywhere, down under the trees, splashing through the shallow water, crunching the snow in January, up and down the attic stairs. If you took your shoes off in the halls at school you could get up a run and then slide. We liked doing that in the art hallway next to the graffiti wall. Maybe last year was the year we stopped running. The year we slowed down and everything caught up to us.

  The cop was parked on the inside of the curve with his flashers on. You wouldn’t see the flashers until you were on top of him, but what did he care? If someone hit his car, he’d get a new one and the other person’s life would be fucked. He opened his door and got in, didn’t even look at me when he pulled away.

  “You rob a bank or what, Joan?”

  “Or what.”

  “Seriously, what did the cop want?”

  “I don’t know, Daisy. What do cops want? Ask Sigmund Freud.”