Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  He’d opened it and let her peer inside. Her eyes scanned the titles. She had never heard of any of them. That night, when he took her to the Barnsider for a drink, he’d read passages to her from them. In the soft light of the bar she could see the blonde shadows on his face. They looked almost silver. Beneath her feet, the floor was littered with peanut shells that cracked as she leaned closer to him, to catch every word he read. She could smell him, a rich, spicy smell that made her think of tropical islands, of fruit and ocean spray and exotic herbs. Sometimes still, Daisy would open a drawer or a closet and get a whiff of Alexander, and it made her ache deep inside.

  “There are things,” Daisy said quietly into the telephone, “that no one knows but me.” She remembered sitting in his car, a blue Mustang convertible that he still had when he died, and kissing him. Someone’s watching, Alexander had whispered. She’d followed his pointing finger to the sky, where a white full moon hung, its cratered face gazing back at them.

  “I’ve got to go,” Daisy said. She could still hear Iris talking as she hung up the phone.

  Daisy slipped on her shoes and refilled her wineglass. She went outside, past Sam’s rusty swingset to her friend Allison’s condo across the courtyard. All of the units were the same—long and rectangular windows against wooden exteriors painted in flat blue or green or yellow. Daisy’s high heels clicked against the cobblestones, slipping occasionally into a crack and sticking there for an instant.

  She could see Allison through the open window, smoking a joint. Motown blasted out and she swayed to the music, her eyes shut. From here she looked like a teenager, all freckles and long shiny hair. Close up, though, Daisy knew there were lines around Allison’s mouth and eyes. They went out a lot together, to different bars, country and western mostly. They drank and danced and usually took men back with them for the night.

  The door wasn’t closed all the way and Daisy walked right inside.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Marvin Gaye was singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

  Daisy lowered the volume on the stereo and Allison opened her eyes slowly. Alexander would have said that she was a bad influence on Daisy. He always said that she was too easily influenced and that’s how she got into trouble.

  “Hey,” Daisy said again.

  Allison smiled up at her.

  “I need to go out,” Daisy said. “Maybe to the Country Western Playhouse. What do you say?”

  “Sure,” Allison said, but she didn’t move.

  Daisy took the joint from her and puffed on it hard, begging it to soothe her.

  “Should I change or something?” Allison said. She ran her hands down her boyish body, over her Michael Jackson Victory Tour T-shirt and tight Levis.

  “You look fine,” Daisy said. Then, “I need to get out.”

  Allison opened the elaborately carved teak box that sat on the coffee table. My dope box, she called it. She took out two thick joints.

  “For the road,” she said.

  Daisy looked in the mirror over the couch. She reached into her purse and pulled out some makeup—mascara, blush, lipstick, all in little pink cosmetic cases.

  “You have enough of that stuff on already,” Allison said as she tugged on a pair of red cowboy boots. Thick swirls were etched into the sides and toes.

  Daisy brushed on more mascara, licking the tip of the wand first.

  “It’s December, you know,” she said. “You’d better grab a jacket or something.”

  Allison stared into the closet until Daisy grabbed a suede jacket off a hanger and pushed it into her hands.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  They always took Daisy’s car when they went out. It was Allison’s opinion that a pink Cadillac attracted more attention than her white Hyundai. Daisy’s license plate said I SELL.

  On the way to the bar, as they drove along the curvy country roads, Bruce Springsteen pounding from the back speakers, the two women shared a joint. Allison’s foot moved in time to the music. Softly, she joined in the chorus of “Rosalita.”

  Daisy looked over at her. She wanted to tell Allison about Sam, but Allison’s ex-husband had custody of their daughter, and Daisy was afraid to open up the subject. She didn’t want to listen to Allison’s complaints about visiting privileges and lawyers. She just wanted someone to tell her it was all right not to spend Christmas with her son. That is was okay to want him out of her life for just a little while.

  At the bar, Daisy ordered them each a shot of tequila.

  “Bad day, huh?” the bartender said as he poured the drinks.

  She avoided his eyes. Once, very drunk, Daisy had spent the night with him, in his pickup truck under a scratchy gray blanket with USN stamped in black on the front. She had lost her shoes somewhere between the bar and the parking lot and had hitchhiked home, barefoot, at dawn, her back sore from leaning against the spare tire in the back of the truck.

  Allison’s eyes darted nervously around the room. Although it had never happened, she always feared that her ex-husband would follow her some night and try to get evidence to keep her from seeing their eight-year-old daughter, Brandy. Finally she relaxed, sure that he wasn’t there.

  “Some day,” she said, emptying her drink, “I’m going to turn around and Carl will be standing there with a Polaroid. I just know it.”

  Daisy shook her head.

  “From them,” the bartender said. He refilled the women’s glasses and cocked his head toward the end of the bar.

  Daisy looked at the two men and raised her glass in thanks. A few minutes later the guys came over.

  “You old enough to drink?” one of them asked Allison.

  “This one sure is,” the other man said. He ran his finger up the length of Daisy’s arm.

  He was shorter than Daisy and she could see a bald spot the size of a half dollar on the top of his head.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him.

  “Jim,” he said.

  “Jim,” she laughed softly. “Hey, Jimbo.” She felt the tequila burn the back of her throat when she swallowed. The tension had started to ooze out of her, like there was a little hole in a dam and the water could seep out. Right then, with Jim’s finger dancing across her throat, pausing on the spot where her pulse beat, then moving down to her collarbone, Daisy didn’t think about Mackenzie or Sam. She didn’t wonder if she should have gone to Boston or not. She just felt free. She reached for her glass and slipped. Jim grabbed her arm.

  “Steady,” he said.

  “How many have you had?” the guy talking to Allison said.

  Jim led Daisy to the dance floor. Willie Nelson croaked. “Let It Be Me” through the crackly speakers. Daisy formed herself against him. He smelled like Old Spice. His head rested against her shoulder. His hands cupped her buttocks, kneading. She pressed against him. Nothing mattered.

  Back at the bar, he whispered to her, his fingers tracing her neckline, scooting across her skin like a spider.

  “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.”

  She looked past Jim for Allison. She didn’t see her anywhere.

  “Come on, Jimmy,” Daisy whispered. “Let’s go and be nice to each other.”

  They went back to her place. As he moved on top of her, Daisy’s hands clutching his back, she felt the dam break, the tension pouring out of her, gushing, until she was the freest she could be. She heard herself scream, grunt.

  It was always this way. Later, in the early morning, with the sky through her window a rosy pink, as she pretended to be asleep, her mouth thick from smoke and liquor, she watched him dress and leave the room without looking back at her. It was then, when she was alone, naked, that Daisy felt like she was just the kind of person Mrs. Porter always said she was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MACKENZIE STILL HALF EXPECTED to see Grammie in the doorway when she drove up to the house. Up until Grammie had died ten years ago, every time Mackenzie had turned the corner onto their street she had been met by
the sight of her grandmother, framed in the picture window of the front room of the house, like a portrait of a New England home. Grammie always used to dress formally, as if she were expecting very important company. She wore a catch of lace at her throat, held there by a large imposing cameo. The laces were scented like flowers—lilies, violets, and roses—and they scratched any face that tried to hug her. She was not a woman given to affection. Even though Mackenzie had grown up in the same house as her grandmother, she’d never once seen her barefoot, or without powdered cheeks.

  The woman Mackenzie saw now in that window had her hair tied up in a bright orange kerchief. Her gray sweatshirt had Greek letters on it, in faded maroon. For months now, Mackenzie had tried to come to terms with the fact that other people—strangers—were living in their house. When her father had called and told her he had rented it, she had screamed “No!” and had hung up without hearing more. The next time they had spoken, Jams had told her, “They’re good people. They have two little girls,” as if that somehow made it all right for these people to be there. She thought again of those garish Christmas lights. They hung now like misshapen fruit from the bushes, dull and hard.

  She tried to imagine what was inside the house as she walked up the path toward the front door. The path wasn’t shoveled. Instead, the snow had been beaten down by people walking on it, leaving small mounds in the way like miniature igloos. Her parents used to hire a neighborhood boy to shovel the path in winter and trim the hedges and lawn in summer. He lived in that small fieldstone house down the street. She struggled to recall his name. Suddenly it seemed important to remember it. She imagined his face, round with tiny spaced teeth and rubbery looking ears. Walker? she thought. Jeff Walker? Her toe nudged one of the mounds of snow. Mackenzie looked down. Someone had stuck a pink flamingo swizzle stick into it.

  “Great,” she said, and climbed the steps to the front door.

  It was hard for Mackenzie to ring the doorbell, like a visitor. She wanted to grab the clear glass knob and push the door open, to yell “It’s me!” and have her mother call to her from the kitchen. On her way through the front room, she’d say hello to Grammie, who wouldn’t look up, but would just wave her hand like she was shooing a fly. That hand had a ring on it, clustered with the birth-stones of her children, and her grandchildren. A pearl and two rubies, a diamond, and an emerald. The stones formed no specific pattern, just nestled against each other in a careless group.

  From inside, she heard a baby cry.

  Mackenzie rang the doorbell. She saw the doorknob was cracked.

  She rang the bell three more times before the woman, Patty, finally opened the door.

  “Sorry,” Patty said, “I had to choose. Baby or door.” She looked beyond Mackenzie. “Look at that,” she said, laughing.

  She walked out, past Mackenzie and down the stairs.-She kneeled beside the snow mound with the pink flamingo stuck in it.

  “You know,” Mackenzie said, “there’s a neighborhood boy who will come and shovel. For very little money really. He lives in that fieldstone house. Jeff Walker, I think.”

  Patty didn’t look up.

  “It would look so much neater if it was shoveled,” Mackenzie said.

  “This looks like those pictures of the moon,” Patty said. She twanged the swizzle stick. “You know, with the American flag stuck in a crater somewhere.”

  Mackenzie peered into the house. Except for a Christmas tree, the front room was empty. All of the old furniture was crammed into Aunt Hope’s tiny apartment and these people hadn’t even bothered to move in any of their own. Pushed into one corner sat a playpen, empty except for a blue ball.

  “We had a party last night,” the woman said.

  Mackenzie thought of those lights, the men singing “White Christmas.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I think I’ll leave that swizzle stick there,” Patty said. “I sort of like it.”

  She stood and looked at Mackenzie. “Did you say you were looking for the Walkers?”

  “I’m Mackenzie Porter. I—”

  “Oh, God.” Patty’s face wrinkled. “I’m sorry.”

  Mackenzie shrugged, thought, Sorry? For what? For living in my house? For putting up these stupid lights like a circus? Sorry that you and your husband are alive and well with your two little girls while my family has fallen apart?

  Out loud she said, “I left some things here. I thought maybe I could retrieve them.”

  “Come on in,” Patty said. “I just figured you were from UNICEF or Christmas seals or something.”

  Mackenzie followed the woman inside. The house smelled of cigarette smoke and strangers.

  “I was just straightening out from the party,” the woman said, and touched the orange kerchief, tugged at its corner. “I don’t always walk around like this, in my husband’s fraternity shirt from a million years ago. Anyway, I’m Patty. We’re renting for a year.” She laughed. “But I guess you know that.”

  “My grandmother used to sit right there, every afternoon, and read.” Mackenzie pointed to the spot where the Christmas tree stood. “She’d fill the silver teapot and drink the whole thing herself. With lots of sugar. She used cubes. Lumps, she called them. Like that old joke, one lump or two.”

  Patty was frowning now, shifting her weight from foot to foot.

  Mackenzie laughed nervously. “Listen to me ramble,” she said. “You have to excuse me. I haven’t been myself lately.”

  Patty nodded, smiled. “Of course. Your father says that too. That he’s not quite himself yet.”

  That’s for sure, Mackenzie thought. She imagined his pockets, full of stolen dime store items. A plastic whistle. Bubble gum. Erasers shaped like animals, Hershey Kisses and Mr. Goodbars.

  “You’re a photographer, right?” Patty said. “Your father says you go all over the world taking pictures. I did a lot of traveling too. I was a stewardess.” She blushed proudly. “I guess you know that too.”

  Mackenzie motioned toward the stairs.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I just want to check and see if I can find—”

  “I could just go on talking forever. Go on up. You didn’t come here to socialize.”

  “Actually,” Mackenzie said, “I left this box full of pictures in my room. In the closet. Maybe you moved them.”

  “Well, which room was yours? There’s a couple rooms we haven’t even looked in yet. You can look through every closet in the house as long as you don’t wake the kids.”

  “Great,” Mackenzie said.

  She walked up the stairs. The center was still carpeted with the same oriental pattern. Midnight blue background with red and green flowers on a vine, climbing upward. She stopped three steps from the top. When she was eleven, she had sat on this step and smoked a cigarette with Alexander. She had coughed so hard the cigarette had fallen and burned a hole in the carpet. There it was still. Mackenzie bent forward and poked her pinky into it. When it had happened, her forefinger had been the size of that hole. It had gaped at them, enormous.

  At the top of the stairs, she sat on the chintz-covered window seat. Patty had pinned three swatches of fabric to the seat. Was she recovering it? Mackenzie groaned. One had a pattern, eagles and cannons.

  “Not eagles,” she said out loud.

  She looked away, out the window. One autumn she had sat on this seat every Friday night, waiting for Alexander’s blue Mustang to come around the corner. She was fifteen that fall, and Alexander had gone off to college in Massachusetts. Every Friday he came home with his roommate, Mackenzie’s first secret love, Mark Hayden. They would take her to a movie where she’d sit between them, unable to concentrate, listening to Mark breathe. Sometimes he’d look over at her and smile and she would have to clutch the armrest of her seat, afraid she might fall to the floor. By winter, he’d started going out with a girl named Kate. She had a long red braid that hung down her back like a horse’s tail. It swooshed when she walked. Mark stopped coming on Fridays but for
a while Mackenzie still sat there, on the window seat, looking out.

  My first broken heart, Mackenzie thought. She could almost see that blue Mustang now, coming around the corner, could almost hear the old eight-track tapes playing. “Surfin’ USA,” “Good Lovin’,” “Do You Believe in Magic?” For an instant, her heart skipped a beat, the way it used to back then, when she thought that Alexander and Mark were coming just for her—college men!—and the songs were playing just for her.

  Years later, at Alexander and Daisy’s wedding, she had danced with Mark. He had grown soft around the middle and wore too much cologne. Kate’s hair was cut like Farrah Fawcett’s, all wispy waves. They’d made a fortune by buying a Datsun dealership. As they had danced, Mackenzie realized for the first time how short Mark was. Inches shorter than her. But despite it all, during that one dance, while the band played a bad rendition of the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” Mackenzie had once again felt dizzy with that feeling of first love. When she’d told Alexander, he’d laughed. “Mark had an enormous crush on you too. I told him if he laid one finger on you I’d kill him.” “Thanks a lot,” she’d said. “If it wasn’t for you I’d be driving around in a brand new Datsun now.”

  Mackenzie walked down the hall, afraid to open any doors, afraid of what was behind them. Or of what was gone. When she opened her own bedroom door, she was surprised that everything was as she’d left it. She wished she could walk inside, close the door, and go back in time to the days when she’d lie in this bed and practiced kissing on her pillow, pretending it was Mark Hayden.

  It looked as if Aunt Hope had made a halfhearted effort to pack some things up. There were a few cardboard boxes, closed shut with masking tape, and neatly labeled in Magic Marker, COIN COLLECTION, the top one said. The boxes were old ones from the liquor store, Seagram’s and J&B.

  She opened the closet, was surprised to see clothing hanging inside in plastic dry-cleaning bags. She peeked into the first few and saw old sweaters of hers and her mother’s. On the floor, behind an orange and black psychedelic case full of Herman’s Hermits and Jan & Dean albums, was a large white box, just where she’d left it a few months ago.