Give Me Your Answer True

by Suanne Laqueur

  ERIK WENT HOME WITH DAISY over spring break.

  The farm-to-market business was called Bianco’s. The house itself was called La Tarasque, after a legendary dragon from the region of France where Joe Bianco was born. A stone replica of the creature squatted by the mailbox, where the private driveway branched off from the main road.

  Erik’s eyes widened as they took in the sweeping vista of orchards and vineyards, the rolling green hills of Lancaster County spreading beyond. His eyes nearly bulged when, after dinner, Francine showed him to one of the bedrooms in the renovated carriage house and Daisy tagged along with a pillow under her arm.

  “Where are you sleeping?” he said to her.

  “Here. With you.”

  “Goodnight, darlings,” Francine said as she went down the stairs. “Sleep well.”

  “I think my head just exploded,” Erik said.

  He and Daisy walked the orchards, apple blossoms falling like confetti into their hair. Erik helped Joe clear fallen branches, prune and tie the grape vines. He held baby chicks and ducklings in his careful hands. Put his face to the tiny, fragrant pine trees dotting the acres which, in a decade, would allow Bianco’s to be a Christmas tree farm.

  And he ate a ton.

  Francine adored a good appetite. She was amused one morning when Erik picked a gold grapefruit out of the fruit bowl instead of the ruby reds Daisy and her father preferred.

  “I like things that are kind of bitter,” he said, a little shyly.

  “You do?” Daisy said.

  “Yeah. It’s why I let tea steep for such a long time. I like when all the tannins come out and give it that edge.”

  Francine embarked on a feeding campaign. Salads with radicchio or endive or chicory. He devoured them. Homemade pasta with broccoli rabe, which Daisy detested. He ate three helpings. Joe had him try a well-aged Cabernet Sauvignon, one of the highest tannin red wines.

  “Wow,” Erik said. His face was thoughtful as he took another sip. “It’s slippery in your mouth but then bone dry after you swallow it.”

  “Exactement,” Joe said.

  Dark, unsweetened chocolate, however, was a bust. Erik screwed up his face and shook his head. “No, that’s too much.”

  “So interesting,” Francine said. “A sweet boy with a bitter palate.”

  “You don’t like sweets, now that I think about it,” Daisy said, back in the carriage house.

  “Only yours,” he said, sliding her out of her clothes, looking for his dessert.

  Lucky drove down for the weekend. She’d had a horrible fight-laced week with her mother. Her eyes were circled. Her curls drooped.

  Francine believed in the healing power of small, important tasks. Lucky was sent to gather eggs. She held the warm spheres to her a cheek a moment before putting them carefully into her basket, her face absorbed and purposeful. She cut flowers for the table, folded the napkins and sang to herself as she swept the back steps. After lunch, she and Francine made a cherry pie. As it baked the kitchen smelled brown with pastry and almond, sweet-sour with sugar and fruit.

  “Check it out.” Lucky’s cheeks were pride pink as she set the bubbling, lattice-topped dessert on the windowsill.

  “A pie on the windowsill,” she said. “What is more all-American, I ask you?”

  That night the three friends built a fire on the patio and sat around the flames, eating pie. Erik played guitar, sloppy in an old plaid shirt and a backwards ball cap. His face shadowed with three days of beard growth. Every now and then he stopped to take a sip from the glass of Cabernet at his elbow. He moved his closed mouth around in dry appreciation, smiled at Daisy and went back to playing.

  The girls talked and sang. Wrapped in a quilt, her curls backlit by the flames, Lucky looked beautiful. At peace. Reborn with a new nickname. Joe called her Lulu.

  “This place is magical,” she said. “It’s so full of love and kindness and support. Your parents, Dais. I mean they’re… It can’t have been perfect. Tell me they tortured kittens in your presence or something.”

  Daisy laughed. It was an observation she’d been experiencing since high school. Everyone wanted her parents to be theirs. She could either feel guilty about it or share them. She brought everyone home.

  “Here?” Erik said. “No, your parents didn’t move here until you graduated.”

  “Our old house in Gladwyne,” Daisy said against her fingers. She’d found a pit in her cherry pie. She threw it into the fire. “And even before, in the house in Fairmount—it was a stream of people coming in and out. And food. My parents are rabidly social but they really don’t go anywhere. They like people to come to them. Pop jokes that no dining room table is big enough for my mom. So I did as they did and brought my friends to me.”

  “You know what’s funny?” Erik said, firelight in his eyes as he smiled at her. “You call your father ‘Dad’ when you’re talking to him. But when you’re talking about him to other people, you call him ‘Pop.’”

  “I know,” Daisy said, laughing. “Like he has a personal name and an anecdotal name. I don’t know why I do that.”

  “And you call your mother ‘Mamou.’”

  “It was my first word and it stuck.”

  “Just you, right?” Lucky said. “You’re an only child.”

  “Their only child,” Daisy said. “Pop has a son. In France.”

  “Really?” Erik said, his fingers stopping mid-strum. “Have you met him?”

  “No. Pop got his girlfriend pregnant before he left France. I don’t know all the details—whether he said he would marry her then or if she said she wanted to wait. He was planning to join the army because it was a fast track to citizenship and he could go to college on the GI Bill. Anyway, he went back to see her after he finished his tours and found she’d had the baby and married someone else. And I gather her attitude was ‘move along, Joe. We’ll pretend this never happened, goodbye and good luck.’”

  “Nice,” Lucky said.

  “He’s turned the earth over to make a relationship. And been thwarted at pretty much every turn. Passively by the mother and aggressively by the stepfather. So he did a little side-stepping and forged an alliance with the grandmother. She sneaks letters in. And sneaks pictures out. Pop has a couple in his study. I’ll show you.”

  “And you grew up knowing this?” Lucky said. “It was out there in the open?”

  Daisy nodded. “It was my job to dust pictures when I was little. ‘Who’s this?’ I’d ask and Mamou would say, ‘That’s Dad’s son. He lives in France.’”

  “Jesus,” Lucky said. “Something like that would be silenced in my house. Stuffed under the bed or buried in the basement.”

  “What’s his name?” Erik asked.

  “Michel.”

  He smiled. “Maybe he’ll come here someday.”

  “He knows he can.”

  “I want a house like this,” Lucky said, her shoulders rising and falling. “A house people feel safe coming to. Where they can be themselves.”

  “I WOULDN’T SAY MY CHILDHOOD WAS MAGICAL,” Daisy said. “Or perfect.”

  “Nobody gets out of childhood unscathed,” Rita said.

  “But I certainly wouldn’t trade it for anyone else’s. I knew I had it good. Better than a lot of my friends. My parents are special people. I was treated as an adult at an early age. I wasn’t left out of decisions. I wasn’t sheltered from problems. I knew when money was tight or when Pop was having one of his episodes.”

  Rita’s eyebrows raised. “Episodes?”

  “Something happened to him in Vietnam. It’s one of the few things I was never privy to. Something he saw. Or did. Or had to do. And it involved children. He could not cope when a child was screaming. I don’t mean crying. Crying babies don’t bother him. It’s the fine line between a cry and a…a shriek. A scream of genuine distress. My father goes pale. You can see the blood drain away from his face. And his eyes go to a place so far away. I don’t know what happened there and I’m not sure I wa
nt to know.”

  “Soldiers are no stranger to PTSD,” Rita said. “Unfortunately the more generations you go back, the less it’s talked about.”

  “He’s a lovely man,” Daisy said. “I love him so much. But he needs to have things a certain way and as soon as I was old enough to understand, my mom made sure I knew it.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “His personal things. My playroom could be a mess, the kitchen could be a mess—it didn’t bother him. His office was sacrosanct space. Everything in his study at La Tarasque is alphabetized. Every knick-knack, every book, every object is placed in a deliberate spot and cannot be moved. The rugs are aligned with the cracks in the floor. The fringe on the rug is flawless—not one piece longer or shorter than the other. He maintains it himself. The cleaning lady wouldn’t dare go in there. It’s the holy of holies.”

  Rita nodded. “Traumatized soldiers are often painfully ritualistic. Or painfully reckless, in the other extreme.”

  “One time, I was about five. Maybe six. I went into his office. He had a set of netsuke—little Japanese sculptures. Tiny, exquisite things. Carved out of wood or ivory. Little people. Little animals. Little magic objects.” Daisy’s hands cupped, remembering their charm. “They begged me to take them down from his shelves and play with them. And I took them out in the living room and had a ball. And then my father found me.”

  “Oh dear,” Rita said.

  “I think it stands to this day as the angriest I have ever seen him. He hollered from his office, ‘Marguerite Chantal, you come fix this right now.’ You know when you hear your full name you’re in deep shit. I almost peed my pants. He comes out with his hair on fire, standing over me and pointing at his office. ‘You fix this. You fix this right now.’ I’m grabbing netsuke with both hands, bawling my eyes out because I don’t recognize this yelling man as my father. Hands full, I run out of the living room and crash into my mother. And now she’s pissed because…”

  A pause.

  “Because?”

  “We had certain rules in our house,” Daisy said. “It was a relaxed atmosphere but good manners prevailed. Not just table manners or being polite to company. Certain little courtesies my parents insisted on. Like thanking my mother for whatever she cooked. I don’t think I ever got up from the table once without saying thank you. And whenever I left the room where my parents were, either parent, I said ‘excuse me.’ I didn’t have to wait for their permission. I just had to say the words.”

  “I see.”

  “So I crashed into my mother and she took me by the shoulders and kind of whirled me around to face my father again. She said, ‘Say excuse me before you turn your back on your father.’ And her voice was something I’d never heard before either. I said it. Or sobbed it. And Pop pointed at the office like ‘Get out of my sight, stupid child. Go fix it.’ And I turned around again and my mom caught my arm and smacked my butt. Wham. I don’t need that kind of shit twice to learn a lesson.”

  Rita laced her fingers around her knee, looked about to say something but didn’t.

  “To this day,” Daisy said, “my father’s study is not a room I find welcoming. My mom has a nice comfy chair by the window where she reads the paper. But I go in there and automatically tiptoe.”

  Rita smiled.

  “But look, it’s one room in the house, not the entire house. It’s knowing he’s sensitive to certain things. Helicopter rotors make him tense up. Thunder makes him uneasy. If he goes to a crowded venue, he always searches for the exits. And screaming children stir some dark memory I’ll never know.” Daisy rolled her shoulders. “He never took his demons out on me. Ever. But I knew these things. They weren’t hidden from me. And I grew up gravitating toward stillness rather than chaos. No big shock I turned out to be a homebody instead of a party girl. I wanted to help make Pop’s life sweet and restful. I guess because I saw the kind of atmosphere my mother created so effortlessly, and I wanted to be part of it.”

  “You’re quite fortunate. Your family and your home…whatever home it was, in Philadelphia or at the orchard today. You’re bonded to it. You have a deep sense of belonging and, what did Lucky say? It’s a place you can go to and be safe. And your friends felt that way too, apparently.”

  “I loved to bring them home,” Daisy said, her voice a dreamy, silk ribbon of memory. “I loved when the porch light would go on and Mamou would appear at the door. Waving as we fell out of the car. ‘Hello, darlings. Come in, come in.’ Staggering into the hallway which smelled like lavender and lemon and whatever she was cooking. She’d kiss and hug and fuss over us, shoo us into the kitchen like we’d been pulled from a shipwreck. And within minutes everyone would be her kid. She’d have someone setting the table and someone else fetching a platter or the gravy boat. We’d sit at the big table and eat and laugh and talk. For hours. And I’d see my friends looking around the table, looking at each other like they’d never known anything like it. And I’d be so proud it was my house making them feel so good.”

  Daisy touched her eyes, filled with unexpected emotion. “Someday I want to be that woman. Waving from the screen door as my children and their friends come to our house because it’s safe and lovely and fun there, with wonderful things to eat.”

  DAISY EMERGED FROM THE LIBRARY, taken aback as she heard the clock tower chime nine-thirty. She’d been holed up in a windowless study room, working on an art history project. Shut off from the outside light, the hours fell away.

  An unexpected cold front had come through Philadelphia, along with a mean rain. Without an umbrella, gloves or a hat, the walk back to her dorm was brutal. The raw wind blew hard in her face and she tucked her mouth under the collar of her jacket. Trudging chin down through the damp chill, she reached her dorm and put her hand on the side door’s handle just as it opened into her.

  It was Erik.

  He grabbed both her upper arms tight and turned in a quick half circle so her back was against the bricks. He stared down at her, his breath making clouds in the cold night. His face wasn’t angry, but it was hard, as were the hands squeezing her upper arms.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, heart pounding against the wall of her chest.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” he said.

  Her mouth fell open, at a loss. “I’m right here,” she said, stupidly.

  “But I didn’t know where you were,” he said. His mouth was partly open too, working around words he couldn’t find.

  She looked in his eyes, stunned and confused. Jealousy wasn’t like him. He blinked back at her, looking far younger than his nineteen years. Then she remembered what his mother had said: how a parent’s greatest fear was not knowing where their child was.

  Or not knowing where your father is.

  Or not knowing where anyone you love is.

  It hit her all at once. How for some people, the not knowing was a mere nuisance. For others, it was a dire strait.

  Daisy closed her eyes as understanding flooded her. This wasn’t resentment of how she spent her time or who she spent it with. It was her whereabouts. The fixed constant of her place in his universe. The knowing was dire for Erik, this boy who was abandoned overnight.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, opening her eyes. “I’m so sorry. It was thoughtless of me. I should have let you know.”

  His fingers let up and his shoulders dropped. He swallowed, looking away. “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s fine, it’s just that—”

  “It’s not fine.” She put her hands on his face. “You need to know where I am. I didn’t understand but I do now. I’m sorry.”

  Some deep, fear-based emotion had coiled around him like a snake. His eyes blinked rapidly in the cold. He wasn’t crying but he was held up tight in a vise.

  He was eight, Daisy thought, her cold hands running gentle along his shoulders and arms. His father was there one night and gone the next morning.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t disappear like that again.”

&nb
sp; He put his arms around her, pulled her tight to his body. “You’re freezing,” he said. “Come on, get inside.”

  HE LOVED HER HARD that night.

  “Turn over,” he said softly, digging a hand beneath her shoulder blade and rolling her on her stomach. He knelt across her legs and worked himself inside her, his palms warm on the small of her back. His hungry body a sweet, crushing weight pinning her to the mattress, fixing her in place.

  “I want you all the time.” His mouth whispered along the nape of her neck. His teeth touched her skin. “I want you right under me.”

  Finding the hook of an orgasm while Erik was inside and getting it to stay with her was more chance than skill. Often it slipped from her grasp, or danced just out of reach. Now something within her shifted and sank deeper. It put down roots in the cradle of her pelvic bones, and started squeezing. A hand into a soft fist. Beneath the pillow her fingers wove tight with Erik’s.

  “Don’t stop,” she said. “It’s so close.”

  “I can feel you,” he said. “Let it go.”

  It was on her, rising up as Erik pressed her down. He slid into her faster. Deeper. The Christmas lights swam in her eyes, a twinkling blur cascading through her chest and belly and head as he pushed her harder. Threaded her through the needle and pulled her out long on the other side.

  “Come,” he said, his voice collapsing. “Come to me.”

  Their fingers clenched. She reared back into him, kicked up her hips and came in pieces. Her teeth rattled together. All the air pulled back through her throat, leaving nothing but a thin cord of sound wrapped around the shape of his name.

  “God,” he said, gasping against her head. “It’s so good…”

  She lay trembling beneath him, closed up in his arms, his heart thumping on her back. Her own heart like tympani beneath her ribs. His mouth soft in the tangle of her hair. Little nonsense noises as their bodies and their breathing quieted down. Together they floated in the dozing zone of contentment where time had no place.

  Her body shivered awake.

  “Are you cold?” he whispered.

  “A little.”