She pocketed the knife and walked away, looking back only once, with satisfaction at the sight of the amputated rope. It served Sam right. He would be enraged that someone had gone to his house at night and cut the thing down, even if it meant nothing to him, even if the old swing was something he’d pitied, as one pities the detritus of one’s own past. But now it was lying there, on the ground, and she felt relieved.
Sam would know that someone hated him. He might even guess it was her, and he’d wonder why she’d ever gotten so worked up.
Frank and Me
I knew Frank McCormick from around. We had home ec together last year, when I was a freshman and he was a junior. I mixed the chicken, the cream of mushroom soup, and the dried tarragon in a plastic bowl, while Frank wrote in his black spiral notebook—the names of the kids who’d paid him, and those who still owed, five, ten bucks, whatever it was for a bag of dope delivered straight to homeroom. Frank had a beard and smelled like cigarettes. His eyes were blue and long-lashed. To a certain type of girl, Frank was a god. I wasn’t that type.
He was my kitchen partner because Ms. Cosgrove, using some inexplicable teacher logic, put us together. I liked that he at least helped clean up, that he’d sprinkle the sink with Ajax and then dry it with a clean dishrag so that Ms. Cosgrove never called us back to dry out the sink. I always wondered, though, why someone might want a dry sink in a real kitchen. A dry sink. Not in my father’s house.
I am not a lucky person. Or if I have any luck, it is strictly the kind derived from the clear misfortune of others. My father would agree. My sister, Adele, has a purer sort of luck. She was in college already last year when our mother died. Or maybe it was Isaac who had the best luck of all, nestled in the crook of our mother’s arm in the downstairs guest room the night the pilot light went out in the kitchen stove. Dad and I both had the stomach flu, and Mom took Isaac with her downstairs, trying to avoid the spread of what she called the pestilence. Mom was afraid of germs. Before she went down there she threw our windows open wide, mine on one end of the hall, Dad’s on the other, so our germs would not infest the house. The firemen said it was the cross ventilation that saved us from the poison. Downstairs, Mom and Isaac appeared to be still asleep, the blue crocheted coverlet pulled up to their chins. Mom crocheted the coverlet herself. It had yellow flowers around the edges, and you could still see the pale stain left by a glob of Silly Putty I’d mashed into the yarn when I was three. Uncharacteristically, Mom spanked me for that. She’d told me nine times to put that gunk away.
After the accident, Adele came home for a semester, bringing with her, unannounced, a white and brown baby goat named Raisin. Adele went to an “experimental” college in Vermont. In addition to the usual stuff, they studied organic farming and animal husbandry. The mother goat, Adele explained, had had twins and rejected Raisin, and Adele had been raising him on the bottle. He was a docile thing, about a month old when Adele brought him down from Vermont in a borrowed station wagon. He’d been carsick on the way, but other than that, hadn’t caused my sister much hassle. In fact, she told me later, he’d been welcome company.
Adele regretted having to leave her new life in Vermont for the remnant of the old one that existed back with me and Dad. Raisin, at least, was a part of Adele’s new life, the life that had taken her away at just the right time, that had kept her strong and innocent, while Dad and I lived in days that can only be described as an aftermath. Sorrow was our skin. The fluttering white curtains let in a sweet, autumnal sun that we gazed at with suspicion: What business did sunlight have with us?
Raisin became the only member of our household that had the good fortune to not comprehend our sad state. His wispy beard twitched when he chewed, and he seemed to smile whenever one of us said his name. His eyes were yellow around the black rectangular pupils. They conveyed harmless mischief, and even the joy that was natural to his species’ reputation for trickery. He was the tamest of creatures, and would often stand out in the garden on the highest of the rocky outcroppings that lined the back patio—he’d stand perfectly still for five or ten minutes, with only the pinkish end of his nose twitching. His little beard would catch the breeze. In his isolation from a herd, he seemed to enjoy playing at being a little goat.
Our father would often gaze at Raisin, out in the garden, munching the pachysandra or azaleas, or standing statue still, and he would nod with slight approval, take another sip of his now ever-present glass of wine, and go back to his work.
Our father writes poetry and teaches at a nearby college. Seven days after our mother and Isaac died, he returned to work. He put on his white button-down shirt, threadbare blue blazer, worn jeans, and brown loafers, and got into his red Fiat convertible and drove down county to the college. His beard was now mostly gray and he’d lost a good amount of weight. I remember hoping that nobody said anything to him about his appearance, that nobody noticed the faintly sour odor on his breath, the odor of a man who’d gone to bed slightly drunk.
Dad made a show of being concerned about me. He said when I turned sideways, I almost disappeared. I said he did too, but he just looked at me, as if to say what happened to him was irrelevant. Although he’d always been affectionate with Adele and me, it was our mother who took care of our daily needs, who shopped for us, cooked our meals, and planted reassuring kisses on our foreheads. Our father now stared at us as though through the lens of her absence. Who were we now, he seemed to be asking himself, and what would we become?
I had no answers for him, only my own unarticulated questions. I never dusted downstairs in the living room where my mother and Isaac slept intertwined on the couch that night. I let the dust rest where it fell. I let my mother’s secrets lie undisturbed.
Adele returned to school in January. She bought one of those green nylon coats with a fur-lined hood and a pair of down mittens. She left in the borrowed station wagon, plain-faced, with hair she could nearly sit on. I imagined her back in Vermont, trudging from one white clapboard building to another in the blowing snow. I thought how her college friends would welcome her, how they’d embrace her and, like sisters, even kiss her cheek. She’d cried when she left me, but I didn’t shed a tear. She was escaping, and so I banished her from my heart.
There was ice on the pachysandra, on the thin branches of the dogwoods. The hundred steps that lay between our front door and the sidewalk below were shellacked with it. I said nothing to my father about this hazard, and he said nothing to me, as though it were normal for people to clutch, every morning, at railings and even tree branches to keep from a catastrophic fall down their own front stairs.
Our house, one of the oldest in town, had a large stone porch out front, a high vaulted ceiling downstairs, and a fireplace in each bedroom. Had it not been in such ill repair, you might have called it a mansion. The hundred steps out front had once been lined with hedges, trimmed into form, blooming in early spring. But they were now slickened and overgrown. We had simply forgotten about it all, and the house stood forlorn that winter, overgrown even down to the sidewalk, where the sticky sycamore pods lay crushed and pulpy among piles of brown leaves and frozen twigs. Ours was the house the neighborhood children crossed the street to avoid. And then there was Raisin, Adele’s goat, which she left with us there in the suburbs when she returned to school. She said the Vermont winter would be too harsh for him, but I thought she hated to take him from our father.
Dad made a bed for Raisin in the garage. He lay straw and blankets in there. When Dad came home from work in the evening, Raisin ran to greet him, and Dad would scratch Raisin’s head and look at him with soft amazement. I thought that wine and Raisin would forever be my father’s only pleasures. Of course it would only be a matter of time before someone complained, and we’d have to ship Raisin off to Vermont. But I could see why Adele felt she had to leave him. It was like we were all living one strange dream back then, and the dream contained a goat. We hung on to Raisin because he seemed as unreal as Mom and Isaac being gone.
>
Dad and I preferred the disconcerting dream to the jagged edges of loss. He poured himself his wine of forgetfulness, and I peered out at the world through ice-covered trees. Sometimes I didn’t change my clothes or brush my hair for days at a time. My friends tried to bring me to their houses; their mothers dropped off casseroles. There were calls to the high school psychologist, made not by my father but on his behalf by well-meaning mothers who saw the disarray, the motes of dust showering the oriental carpets, the wastebaskets overflowing with Dad’s papers, the goat shit on the hundred leaf-covered steps. All the way out to the sidewalk, the detritus of our grief-encased living spewed. They couldn’t understand how the filth protected us, kept us in our dream state, the dust like snow in a snow globe, the ice, our glass. Our goat we pretended was something ordinary, a lawn ornament, though we lacked the lawn, having given up each blade of grass to the pachysandra, the ivy, the dead leaves.
One Friday after Adele had been gone a month or so, Dad came home and opened his customary bottle of wine. It was a beautiful golden color, his glass three-quarters full whenever I looked, either because he didn’t drink it or because it was constantly replenished. I was wearing the ripped jeans I’d worn every day since Monday, and a gray sweatshirt of Adele’s with the name of her college in green script. I’d found an old red and blue pair of bowling shoes in a thrift store in town that I bought out of pity for them and had worn every day including the days I’d had gym. I wore no socks and I slipped on the ice and froze my ankles when I walked to school in them. My father said nothing about my inadequate clothing. He said nothing about the weather, nothing about the outside world at all. We’d scarcely gone anywhere since the day of the funeral. If we’d gone out together, we’d be looking for them. We’d see Isaac at Reynold’s Field. We’d see Mom wheeling the metal cart at the A&P, in the distracted way she had that made you feel like nothing would ever get done. We’d see people who looked like them, and we’d despair.
If Dad and I had gone anywhere together with the bright winter sun beating down upon us, I might have had to betray my mother and tell him what I knew. I might have had to tell him how she’d hidden herself, and how now that she was gone I could see her. How I could remember now the day before they died. How I saw her in the kitchen, using a knife to split the skin of a chicken. She had a head of garlic in one hand and the knife in the other, and I’d come in just as she’d been examining the blade. “What are you doing?” I’d startled her. “Seasoning it,” she’d said, and she reached for the salt without meeting my gaze.
It was a Friday afternoon, and I was in my room, looking out onto the ice-coated garden, watching as Raisin half clomped, half skidded on the stone pathway that led around the garden and back to his home in the garage. He had little horns by this time, but his eyes still roved and showed the whites in a way that seemed to suggest he’d yet to embark on serious goat-ness. He pawed at the stones and then licked the old brown oak leaves, and then seemed to find something to eat, an acorn perhaps. He began to crunch on it, and then looked around for more.
That was when Frank McCormick appeared at the top of our hundred steps holding the hand of a little girl. The girl had long, messy blond hair and was wearing a white knit hat with a large pom-pom on top. She had on black snow boots that looked, judging from the careful way she lifted them, like they were a size or two too large. She looked to be maybe seven or eight years old, though I’m not good with ages. The two of them slip-slided across the front walk to the door.
The doorbell rang like an echo, like a reminder of the existence of doorbells. I wondered if my father would answer it. I left my room and went downstairs.
Frank stood hand in hand with the little girl. I was almost surprised he wasn’t carrying his spiral-bound drug dealer’s notebook. “Hi, there,” Dad said. Maybe he thought Frank was some student of his who he only dimly recognized. “Can I get you a drink?” Frank stared for a moment at the gold-tinted wine and shook his head no. I noticed, for the first time, that his beard wasn’t very thick, a boy’s beard. He looked up when the stairs made a creaking noise, and smiled.
“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t know this was your house.”
“Yep,” I said. “You can tell we don’t get many visitors.”
“The walk, you mean,” Frank said, shaking his head. “That was intense.” I was surprised Frank didn’t seem to know which house this was. Didn’t everyone in town remember the day the ambulance came?
“This is my sister,” Frank said, “Candace. Say hey, Candace.”
Candace said hello, and then stuck her tongue in her cheek and waggled it around in there so she looked a bit like a frog. Her cheeks turned a light pink. I wondered why kids got so embarrassed like that, just having to say hello.
“We’re here to clear up a little problem Candace and some of her pals are having.” My heart skipped a beat. I somehow knew what was coming. Frank stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. He did know about us. He’d just pretended to be surprised to see me. It was a kindness I wouldn’t have thought him capable of.
“We’re here,” he started again, “because Candace has kind of a silly idea about this house, and, um, who lives here.” My father started to look watery-eyed at this, maybe a little wobbly. I wanted him to sit down, but we were all still there in the vestibule, and Frank kept peering out the front door into the overgrown garden. The steps, the garden. There was some problem with it all.
“Candace walks by here every day on her way to school,” Frank said. “And this is where the sidewalk is. Mrs. Fox on the other side doesn’t like the kids up on her lawn, so she yells at them to cross over here, but . . .”
“Oh,” I said. “Dad and I haven’t cleaned it up much, I guess.” Frank laughed. He had dimples I’d never noticed.
“It’s not that so much, but I guess that’s part of it.” Candace shook her head no. She had no problem with the piles of wet oak leaves. “It’s actually the witch,” Frank said, finally, resting his hand on the top of Candace’s pom-pom. At this Candace’s face contorted.
“You see, the kids say that they’ve heard a witch laughing up here in this house. I told them Halloween is over, but they say they’ve been hearing it for a while, and that it’s getting louder. So now they race past the house every day, and my mom is actually sick of the whole deal because they complain about walking to school, and they want a ride. So, I’m just here to prove that there’s no witch—just nice, ordinary people.” Frank eyed my dad like maybe he was just shy of ordinary, and I thought of my bowling shoes, and my unbrushed hair. I thought about how Frank must have seen me, how last year, in cooking class, I’d been like other girls.
Dad surprised me then by laughing aloud. It was a big laugh with no sadness in it. “Come here, sweetheart,” he said, taking Candace’s hand. “I’ll show you our witch.” The girl’s eyes got big and round, but she went with him out into the cold air of the garden, rounding the corner to the backyard. Frank and I followed, all of us taking minute steps across the icy stones. There, in the back of the house, chomping on acorns, with his baby goat smile, and his just-growing horns, was Raisin, our happiness, our shame.
“Would you like to pet him?” Dad asked, and Candace nodded. Dad explained how Adele raised Raisin from a baby, and how she’d left him here for the time being because she thought the Vermont winter would be too cold. “We’ll have to get rid of him in the spring,” Dad said. “Sooner or later the town will come after us.” Dad smiled at the girl, showing his slightly pointed, tobacco-stained teeth. Candace petted Raisin and he nibbled on the knotted mitten that hung from the sleeve of her jacket by a safety pin. Someone was tired of the girl losing things.
That was when Frank slipped back to my side. He looked chilly in just a jean jacket and a sweater. I was shivering in my sweatshirt. Through my chattering teeth, I invited them in for hot chocolate. I led them back to the kitchen, and Dad, after shaking Frank’s hand, wobbled off to his study. Frank sat on one of our old, rickety kitche
n stools by the counter, and Candace sat at the table, playing with a salt and pepper set we had in the shape of a rooster and a hen. I stirred the hot chocolate in a saucepan. I fussed with my hair, tried to flatten what I knew was a bird’s-nest-sized knot in the back.
“So, no more cooking class with Ms. Cosgrove, huh? Kind of miss those days.” I was disappointed he was starting up with that.
“Nope, I’ve got art now—painting, with Mr. L.”
“I’m taking Auto Body,” he said, then leaned his chin on his hand, watching me stir. “Maybe you should check out my ride,” he said. “I fixed it myself. A sweet Corvair.”
“What’s that?” I asked, smiling in spite of myself. It was funny the way he called it his “ride.”
“Are you kidding? A classic car,” he said. “Serious classic. We could get something to eat, then drive out to Indian Lake, if you wanted.”
“All right,” I said. “That’d be fun, sometime.”
“No,” he said. “I mean now. I’ll take Candace home, then come back and get you.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Did I look like I was going anywhere?
“Maybe,” I said, “in like an hour.” If it were anyone else, anyone who would have expected anything of me, I’d have begged off, said Dad needed me to cook, and I’d have done what I had been doing for months—stayed in bed reading, or pretending to read, and then falling asleep on top of the covers in whatever I happened to be wearing.
I was surprised how long my hair was when I blew it out. I wasn’t fussing with it, I told myself, just didn’t want it to freeze when I went outside, but I knew by the way Dad looked at me when I came downstairs that I looked almost like a different person. It had been about six months since Mom and Isaac, and just weeks since Adele had left us on our own. I’d stopped caring enough to look in the mirror in June, after the funeral, around the time I started to think about the way Mom held that knife in her hand. I thought all the time about that knife. I could feel its chill spreading in me. I could feel its curse between my shoulder blades.
Nothing Real Volume 2 Page 3