My mother was here. My mother would smooth the strange, halting relationship of a father and his semiadult daughter, but we were doing surprisingly well. He was annoying and proud and sort of nice in small doses. We were reaching across that weird chasm, from making once-a-week three-minute phone calls to something else, something sort of charming and sincere. On the horizon, there were possible father-daughter activities: maybe kayaking? Bowling? Picking out shirts for him at the mall? And during all of this, this strange, fast-flickering fantasy, I saw my father turn from the window and grip at the edge of my desk to stabilize himself.
—Wait, he said to Eva. Wait.
Eva watched us warily from the doorway. She peeled off her fake eyelash.
—Who’s at the door? he asked.
—Your wife? she said. I don’t know. I didn’t ask her name.
Oh god, I thought. Oh god, no.
—Sweetie, my father said to me. Sweetie, sit down for a second.
—You brought her here? I said.
—She wanted to meet you, he said. But I asked her to wait in the car.
Eva was transfixed now. She stood in the doorway, her impish face glowing at the obvious drama of our situation.
—I don’t know why she’s coming in now, he said. I’m sorry. I asked her to wait until I spoke with you. I’m truly sorry.
Sylvie, the poor woman, sitting in his car like an obedient beagle, waiting for her master to let her into the house. It was pathetic. It was gross. I shoved Eva out of the doorframe and staggered downstairs. My vision had tunneled; my ears were dulled with a current of blood. Behind me, my father was begging for a pause that I couldn’t dispense.
She wore high heels (on a Saturday morning, of all occasions, I fumed), and her hair fell down her shoulders in absurd, cartoonish ringlets. Her arms and legs were long and slender, but she had a torso like a potato. Her jewelry screamed cubic zirconia. Or worse, it was real. Worse, it was from my father. She clutched at a navy gift bag with a grosgrain ribbon.
—I’m so sorry, Rich, she said. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t wait.
—She isn’t ready, my father said.
—Marcia, I’m so sorry. It’s so nice to meet you. You look just like— I’m sorry, is there a bathroom I could use? she asked, and then she threw the gift bag as if it were a grenade, and vomited on the foyer floor.
I looked at my father’s face. Horror left him immobile.
—Help her, I commanded, but he didn’t move. So I went. I stood behind her while she retched onto our tile. I rubbed her back.
—Let it out, I told her. Always good to let it out.
Eva, who had followed the commotion, brought a recycling bin in from the mail closet and held it under her face.
—Do you want to sit? I asked Sylvie. She shook her head no between heaves, leaning forward, her hands on her bony knees.
She gagged, and we recoiled and stared, and I kept rubbing her back. I made stupid considerations. Should I walk her to the bathroom? What if she left a trail on the floor? Should I lead her outside? Should I tell my father to take her home? She finished and started to cry.
—Don’t do that, I said. You’ll mess up your makeup.
I led her into the living room. My father stood dumb.
—Dad, get a grip, I said behind me. He followed.
Eva had already left and returned with tissues and three pledges. I didn’t need to look back to know that they were already cleaning up. Leave it to a sorority house to master the efficiency of mopping up after a purge. One pledge brought water. Another picked up the gift bag and put it beside Sylvie. They were benevolent and strangely angelic-looking, with the indicators of their own hangovers on their faces: dark circles under their eyes, scraps of last night’s makeup clutching at the skin, ashy hair pulled into identical wild topknots. Of course, out of earshot, I knew they were in the foyer hissing insults over the bucket of suds.
—Do you feel better? I asked Sylvie, and she wept harder.
—Come on, I said. You’re not even the first person to throw up in this house this morning.
—I’ve pictured this for years, she cried, and I never thought it would happen like this.
She gestured at herself, and then smiled at me blearily. I wasn’t quite ready to smile back.
—Does Mom know about her? I asked my father.
—Which part? he asked.
His hands were crawling over his mouth, rubbing the contours of his face, as if he could erase the years from them.
—All of it. Meeting me?
—I moved out on Thursday, he said.
I was too defeated to feel stunned.
—She hasn’t called you because she thought I should be the one to tell you. I’m moving in with Sylvie. Your mom is keeping the dog, he added lamely, as if I cared at all about the status of the overfed little mongrel that I had only met four times.
—Why now? I said. After all of these years?
—We tried to make it work with your mom, Sylvie began, but—
—She wasn’t amenable, he said.
I refused to allow myself to interpret what they meant by that.
—We need to go, Sylvie said. I’m so sorry, but we need to go. I wanted us to take you to lunch, and really get to know you, but I think I’m going to be sick again.
She was blanching by the second.
—Should I open this? I said. I picked at the bag.
—Oh god, Sylvie said.
She reached for the bag but I pulled it away from her. It was my gift. If they were going to alter the trajectory of my family’s life in one sitting, I at least had the right to open the gift they had picked out for me. The bag was almost weightless.
—We need to slow down, my dad said. This was a mistake.
I picked up the bag and found, inside, a sonogram.
• • •
I don’t think it’s fair to say that my father was the reason why I fell apart. Why, in the next year, I’d start rolling and bombing out of classes and how, eventually, I’d drop out just like Nathan. I don’t want to blame him completely. But I do.
When I was little, my dad would come home from work by six and eat dinner with all of us without fail. There were Sesame Street place mats, and silly straws for milk. Nathan, depending on the year, depending on the day, resented or adored me. My dad made jokes about Nathan’s soccer coach. My mother thawed out fish sticks in the microwave. We used paper napkins. There was no television permitted at dinner, technically, but we’d leave it on mute and gaze at it collectively when we were bored with each other. And then, at nine o’clock every night, my father would leave for two hours. He had a standing meeting with friends at the shooting range, he told us. Some nights, if I felt restless, I’d crawl out of bed and watch television with my mother in their bedroom while she waited for him to come home.
—When you hear the garage door, you’ve gotta scoot, she’d tell me. And we’d curl up and watch old movies while somewhere, at an unfixed point across town, my father cocked and fired.
So this is how good liars do it: they move slowly, in increments. They laugh loudly at the dinner table. They pick up paper napkins and diet soda for their wives at the store, on their way home from another woman’s apartment. They teach their children, through years of subterfuge, that the only way to be authentic is to be colossally destructive.
• • •
In the parking lot, my father opened Sylvie’s door and let her clutch at his forearm as she lowered herself into the passenger seat. She waved at me from the window, then reclined and disappeared from sight.
—I know you’ll have questions, he told me.
—Did you love Mom?
—I still do, he said. His eye contact did not waver.
Why do people lie? I wondered. To protect themselves? Or others? Why go to all of that effort for such a clumsy ending? He was so quietly devastating, his deceptions were so infiltrative in my own life, that sometimes I worried that his decisions would devour my famil
y whole. I just never thought he’d build a new one in the process.
—You’re too old to be a father again, I said.
—I don’t feel old. Sometimes I forget my age completely.
—I don’t.
—May I hug you? he asked. I let him.
I didn’t speak.
—Tell me what’s in your head, he begged.
—I can’t decide if it’s worse to cheat with one woman for ten years, or with multiple women.
—Marcia, he said.
—Don’t Marcia me, I said. I need time.
—Do you hate me? he asked.
His hands were in his pockets and he was looking down at his shoes. He looked like a boy in trouble. He looked like a liar.
—I have to talk to Mom, I said.
I watched them drive away, and when I was sure they were gone I collapsed on the bench outside of the house. It was too cold to be comfortable but I wasn’t ready to face Eva and the others. Everyone would know. I pressed my hands over my eyes. In the parking lot, a car door slammed and boots clopped across the driveway. They stopped at the bench. Nathan stood over me, backlit by a weak sun. He was holding his basil pot with the two remaining seedlings: his best contenders.
—He never showed?
—He already left.
—What happened? What’d I miss?
He sat beside me.
I plucked a scrawny seedling, put it between my teeth and crushed it, stem and all.
8
Wild Things Sorry for Themselves
-AMANDA-
March 2008
I’ve been keeping the ducklings in a box in my room since yesterday and no one has complained so far. Kyra’s room is to my right and she’s never home long enough to notice, and Tracy’s to my left. She knows about them but doesn’t seem to mind. They’re blacker than I’d imagined, and they’ve got nostrils, which is something I’d never really thought about. Sometimes when they drink they dip too deep and splutter, bless their hearts, because they don’t understand yet that water and nose holes don’t mix and their brains aren’t big enough to help them learn, so they do it over and over, thirsty and choking.
When I was a baby and I didn’t get what I’d want, my granddad would say, A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever feeling sorry for itself. I found out in my freshman comp class that it was actually a line from a poem and not something he’d made up on his own, but it doesn’t take the right out of him. I feel bad for the babies because I can’t do it for them.
I found them at the edge of the campus pond yesterday. No preening mom, no father. Was there another choice, except to scoop them into an empty Xerox box from outside the Arts Building? They’d all gone silent in the car ride home, puffing their bellies to catch the warm air from the heating vent. Last night, I fell asleep to feathers and shuffling paper.
I’ve been feeding them pieces of cabbage and cooked corn but their poop is coming out green, which can’t be good, and they all huddle in a clump like they’re freezing even though I’ve got two desk lamps turned over the box. They can’t really quack yet, but they chirp in ways that feel huffy. It’s like they’re waiting for me to be enough for them.
Their first night with me, I read them Ecclesiastes.
—To every thing there is a season, I read, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
When they looked up at me they let their beaks fall open as if they were surprised by what I had to say.
Granddad is losing his ears these days so I had to email him for advice on what to do with the babies. He lived on a farm when he was a kid, just like everyone else’s grandparents in the world. He wrote back in under an hour:
hello sugar snap my sweet Amanda how’s my girl why dont you find yourself a feed store near school and ask for something called starter crumbs you can leave a dish out for them pretty much all day and don’t have to worry about them getting too fat ducks are stupid but they are smarter than people and know whenn too much is too much and have you got a bright desk lamp to put over the box that should keep them warm at night you should see the forsythia out here bless the lord this spring is really something and I know it will come up to you soon post man didn’t show up at all yesterday if you can believe that sleet rain snow but he gets a limp and no one fills in no wonder this country is a mess may god bless you and keep you love from your granddaddy
I could teach him how to press enter but he is just too precious to fix.
• • •
The ducklings look at me, heads all on the same swivel. The cabbage is limp and they blink and ruffle at me, like, Is there a main course? Their chirps are always in twos: tee tee, tee tee, tee tee.
I like to talk to people telepathically, but so far no one has said that they hear me. They’re afraid, maybe. Or they feel it but their brain doesn’t write out the words clear. Still, when Tracy walked into my room I thought at her, you’re a beautiful gift from our lord, and in my prayers. Tracy pulls her hair, lashes, and eyebrows out when she thinks no one is looking. It’s a shy-girl problem, I think, to go on like no one can see you.
She kneels at the box slowly like it’s an altar. Her bandanna is slipping and I can see a bald spot the size of an egg on her hairline.
—Only five, she says.
—Are there supposed to be more?
—I don’t know. I guess not. I always thought there would be more in a litter. Is it called a litter?
—Maybe a flock?
—Flocks are for big birds, she says.
I wish there were three of us in my room, one loud person to do the talking for us. But there isn’t, and so I say, Their poop is green.
Tracy is a good girl. She nods at me like I’ve said something smart.
—You know what? We should take them for a swim.
• • •
Nobody uses the bathtub in our house except for pedicures. In a bathroom with three toilet stalls and three showers, it just feels too open to loll around naked in a stew. The radio plays in here at every hour. One night when I was still pledging I found myself on the pink-tiled floor at 3:00 a.m. with sick in my hair, listening to static. I woke up even later curled up in the left shower with my clothes on, the water running. I only use the middle shower now.
Tracy runs the bath and I put the ducks in one at a time. They look healthy but they feel like hollow little accidents. They could disappear with one wrong squeeze.
—They’re so cyooooote, Tracy says. And she’s right. I worry so much I forget that they are precious. Their feet make tiny currents in the tub and they paddle around, aimless, knocking into one another and leaving trails of poop in the water. The effort they put into paddling is scary.
—Did you ever have any pets? she asks me.
—A cat, I say.
We’d called her Mehetabel. She was an outside cat, half wild. Only my granddad could pet her, and that was only if she was eating. One day she’d shown up with a kitten hanging out of her, long dead, and when my granddad went to pull it out she ran into the woods. We never saw her again.
—My parents never let me have pets, Tracy says. Except fish. But fish don’t count.
In this light, I can see tiny speckles of eyebrow hairs, too small for her to pull.
—They don’t blink, they don’t count, I say. And both of us are quiet and happy with the new rule. I never thought I could have friends in this house. I’ve tried, but no one wants to hear God’s word and so I carry His words alone. Maybe, when Tracy is ready, she will hear His call.
When the water turns cold I start to worry about them catching a chill, so I dry each one, tiny pats on their faces and backs and underbellies. All of them wiggle and writhe at me save one, who is so still that I think he’s probably got something wrong with him.
Granddad told me that when he was a boy his toddler sister Ruth fell in love with some baby chicks and wrapped them up in a towel in her arms, and gave them a squeezing hug that smothered them all. She thought the
y were sleeping because they felt safe in her arms. He told me this when I was just barely not a toddler myself, sitting Indian-style on the floor in a too-big nightgown that stretched over either knee, taut like calfskin. I remember being surprised that I was big enough to kill a chick. I remember thinking, if he ever let me go to the public school, that I would tell all of my new friends this story. Did I ask him this night or another why death happens?
After their bath, I print out driving directions to a place called Old Town Tackle and Supply! Tracy is still in my room, watching the ducklings fluff and hop around the piles of shredded paper I’ve made for them to sleep in.
—Can you keep an eye on them for me while I’m gone? I ask.
—Huh? Her face is all cheek, like a bunny. She has no eyelashes. So many times I want to ask her why she does it, and then I don’t.
—I’ve got to buy them some supper, I say.
—And you want me to watch them?
—If it’s all right with you.
She’s got a shy, naked smile. —No one says “supper,” you know.
—I know, I say, when I only half do. At home we say it all the time.
—No offense, she says, but sometimes you talk like the 1930s.
I want to ask, why the offense? If I could start myself over, if we could all go back to before we were, wouldn’t we?
Before I leave, she tells me thank you, and I say you’re welcome, and neither one of us pauses over taking the other’s words.
• • •
The drive to the feed store is all back roads. This state used to farm tobacco, but now only a few places near my school still do it, and the curing barns I pass look wilted and gray. The feed store, when I find it, is the same color. It’s hard to tell if it’s a true old feed store from the front or if it’s just pretending to be one with the paint job. The parking lot is gravel, the inside floors are speckled with pieces of dirt and melted ice and straw. A bell tattles when I walk in. The racket it makes is unfair. There is a man at the counter and I tell him inside to be nice. He is wearing a shirt with a Browning logo and he’s sucking on an e-cigarette.
I don’t have any words for these people.
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