Fair Warning

by Robert Olen Butler

  “And you can’t even spray, like, Black Flag or anything,” Lydia said. “The poison’d go through her pores or into her lungs and there you are.”

  “So you just keep away from the trees and so forth?”

  “Sure. That’s just fine, except in the city you’ve got the cockroaches and the rats and some jerk dancing around your apartment on Ecstasy knocking over furniture and thinking your baby wants to be thrown up in the air and caught. Which Winter laughs about, and that’s a whole other thing, me worrying she’s going to grow up to be a slut.”

  A feeling was starting to come on me like in those nightmares. I stood there utterly unprepared for what was expected of me. But I did manage to say, “All babies like to be thrown into the air, I think. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Lydia shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  Now I was definitely out of advice. I placed Winter’s picture on the desk, gently, and I said, “She’s a wonderful baby.”

  Lydia squared the picture around before her. “She’s got her daddy’s eyes.”

  It wasn’t clear to me whether that was supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing, and I didn’t inquire. Lydia took us both off the hook. “Well, back to work,” she said and she turned to her computer screen. I escaped into my office.

  I sat at my desk and all around me were heavy oak shelves filled with books about the world of collectible objects. I loved the preparation for the auctions, the deep plunge into the world of things, and I swiveled in my chair to look at the familiar row of terra-cotta lion heads across the street, and all I wanted to do now was think about Utamaro woodblock prints, dragonfly Tiffany lamps, Quimper pitchers, Allen & Ginter tobacco tins, a fully restored Hispano Suiza drophead coupe, a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle, the Boni and Liveright true first edition of Hemingway’s In Our Time. Whatever. Things. I just wanted to do my work. But there was messy stuff in the way. With all the bits and pieces of wisdom about auctioneering rattling around in my head, I’d somehow lost the one about never fucking your clients. I wasn’t going to be able to simply ignore Trevor’s calls. I had to get this over with. I pulled up his file on my computer and found his business phone number. Better to talk with him there. For a moment I thought of the alternative, and I pictured him speaking to me in the midst of all his mother’s things. But he didn’t live at her place. There had to be a Trevor apartment somewhere. The fact that such a place existed and I’d never been there—it had never even been referred to, between us—made me even more angry at the way he’d handled things.

  I dialed and his secretary seemed to know my name, instantly putting me through, and that made me angrier still. He said, “Amy. I’m desperately happy you’ve called.”

  “Desperately?”

  “I know something’s suddenly changed between us, in a bad way. I’m afraid it’s my fault somehow.”

  I turned to the window again. It was a lousy view. I deserved better. These lions roared on forever, quietly, dispassionately. They could well have been yawning. This struck me quite vividly now. They were fucking yawning.

  “Amy?”

  I’d been silent for these moments while I thought about my Greek chorus of lions, yawning a commentary on my life. But what I was really doing was avoiding going on in this conversation. My impulse was to explain to Trevor what had happened. How thoroughly he’d blown it. How I’d come to make an important choice about myself. It was his fault somehow? Either he was clueless or pretending to be so and I had no interest in telling him anything important. Not to mention I was only beginning to figure out what that choice meant for me.

  “You walked out on him, too,” Trevor said.

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then it struck me. My abrupt departure at Fellini’s. He thought Alain had been the winner of the auction.

  “Look,” I said. “The whole elevator thing was a big mistake. Like the cable snapping or something. You’re a client. We’ve got a bias against clients fucking the staff here. No hard feelings, Mr. Martin, but I’d really like to get us back on a professional footing.”

  Now it was his turn to be silent. I thought I could hear him breathing. It was measured, cool. Finally he said, “You gave me plenty of signs … ”

  “Did it sound as if I was laying blame? I wasn’t. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  “That’s not my point, Amy.” He purred this out and I had the faintest little tremolo of regret at putting the man aside.

  It ceased at once. Still, with the prospect of a drawn-out discussion before me, which I had no stomach for at all, I offered a gambit. “I’d rather us not even talk about this anymore, at least until the auction of your mother’s things is over.”

  “That’s reasonable,” he said. “You’re right, of course, about needing to remain professional through this event. Till it’s over, then.”

  “Till it’s over.”

  He hung up without another word. I’d put him off, but not for long. Fair warning.

  I sat sweating on the train to Missy’s that Saturday—it was a diesel that ran the Jamaica–Oyster Bay route and the air-conditioning was on the fritz and the open door of the car just brought in more heat—and I thought about how I’d not seen or talked to Alain all week. I wondered why I hadn’t sought him out one way or the other, since he was pretty clearly waiting for that, still feeling that he’d intruded on Monday night. The ragged run of the Long Island Rail Road right-of-way clicked past outside and I was tired of thinking about all this. Maybe Missy’s way was the best. I resolved to keep my mind open this weekend.

  They all met me at the Sea Cliff station. Missy and Maggie and Molly and Jeff and their BMW SUV and their bichon frise Matilda. My visits were just infrequent enough that each time I was greeted, I was awhirl in what felt like first impressions. All but the pup were on the platform, though Molly, who was six, seemed to have learned some moves from her pet, breaking from the rest when I came down the steps from the train car and bouncing up and down pawing at me to pick her up. Which I did, with pleasure. “Aunt Amy Aunt Amy,” she cried throwing her arms around me, “save me from my horrible sister.”

  “Molly,” Missy said sharply.

  Even as I pressed Molly to me, I winked at Maggie, not wanting to take sides in a battle that was much more covert the last time I was here. Maggie, ten now and newly gangly, was standing a little apart, near her dad, and she winked back at me. The restraint of her gesture was also new.

  “Molly,” Missy snapped again, stepping forward and grabbing at her. “Don’t jump on your aunt. You’re too big for that.”

  Molly was peeled off me and deposited on the platform and Missy and I leaned forward at the waist and bussed each other on the cheek. When we straightened up away from each other, Jeff began his approach, opening his arms for a hug that was always just a little too tight and lingering, to my mind, though he’d never flirted with me, really. He was closing in on me now. He was a reasonably handsome man in a gaunt, patrician sort of way, but his eyes were slightly too small for his face—very nearly beady—and they were fixed determinedly on mine. Then his face slid past and his arms came around me. I braced myself, returned the hug left-handed only.

  “Good to see you, Amy,” he said.

  I grunted an assent and I felt the fingers on my right hand, which hung at my side with my overnight bag, being pried open. Jeff had my face trapped on the wrong shoulder to look, but he finally let me go and Maggie had my bag. I turned to her and offered a hug, which she took demurely. She was way taller than the last time. At the end of our I’m-a-young-lady-now embrace, she whispered, “Don’t believe anything she says,” not waiting for an answer but pulling away and slinging my bag over her shoulder and moving on ahead of us. I presumed she meant Molly.

  And so we were off to the BMW, which was new, and Matilda’s greeting, which consisted mainly of leaping into my lap in the backseat and trying to lick up my nostrils. “Oh gross, Matilda,” Maggie said, leaning across Molly, who was between us, and tugging at th
e bichon, who I’m sure wanted to be a wildly shaggy little dog but who Missy kept carefully groomed like the show dogs, sharply modeled like a topiary. Going up the nose was probably compensatory behavior for her. She did not yield to Maggie.

  “Here, Matilda,” Molly said, brushing her sister out of the way and offering her own nose, which Matilda took one look at and joyfully began to ream.

  “Gross gross gross,” Maggie chanted, turning away from the spectacle.

  “Stop that, Molly,” Missy cried from the front seat.

  “It’s love,” Molly said as loud as she could with Matilda in her face.

  “It’s gross,” said Maggie.

  “It’s Matilda loving me.” Molly gasped for breath.

  “Do you like the new SUV?” Jeff asked, looking briefly over his shoulder at me.

  “She can love you another way,” Missy said.

  “It’s great,” I replied to Jeff.

  “Oh, Matilda, I love you so much,” Molly said extricating her nose and hugging the bichon close.

  “I waited for the Beemer,” Jeff said. “I thought they’d never introduce it.”

  Matilda started barking.

  “All girls shut up!” Missy cried.

  “It still has that new-car smell,” Jeff said. I figured the floor of the stock exchange taught him how to keep his focus in the midst of chaos.

  Matilda barked louder and Molly started barking with her and so it went, up the hill and along Sea Cliff Avenue to my sister’s house.

  Which was a late Queen Anne that rambled in its multiple-personality disorder all over its lot, with Norman towers and Romanesque arches and fish-scale cedar shingles and verandas all around. Inside, I tried not to look too closely at Missy and Jeff’s things. It was like seeing the two of them stepping from a shower naked, out of shape, overweight, and their hair plastered to their faces. In their decorating tastes they were, to put it gently, eclectic. In the parlor, where I was parked for a long while, I could not avoid registering the Federal eagles in the wallpaper and a large and intricately patterned braid rug—the work of an idiot savant of a grandmother on speed—and Sheraton side tables flanking a vast scimitar of a leather couch with recliners built in at each end. The recliners triangulated a black hulk of a TV with a screen nearly as big as my apartment door. And it was ready for digital, as Jeff pointed out when we toured the new stuff in the room.

  I sat in the center of the couch while Molly brought me her every doll, one by one, and I addressed each by its name. And she brought me her school artwork, piece by piece, sunny skies and solitary little girls with white dogs. After showing each thing to me she scrambled around the curve of the couch to her father, who sat at one of the recliners with his feet up. Each time I visited he’d have occasion to grab Molly onto his lap and run minor variations on the same words: That’s swell/ great/ terrific, Pumpkin/ Sweetheart/ Mollymonster. This visit, it was swell and Pumpkin. Meanwhile, Maggie was perched on a blue velvet wing-back chair across the room, watching the spectacle, occasionally observing, dryly, “That’s my doll, actually.” Molly ignored her. I caught Maggie’s eye a couple of times to give her another wink, but mostly it was Molly at the center of the universe. Missy would stick her head in now and then to remind us how sad she was to be missing the fun but she was working real hard in the kitchen to make our great dinner. I offered several times to come and help—Maggie, to her credit, even offered once, as well—but Missy emphatically rejected these offers. Each time Molly scampered off to get another object for our examination, I’d ask Maggie questions—about school; about her friends; about soccer, which I knew she’d been doing—but she’d answer only very briefly, as if these were secrets that she and I shared and I should know better than to bring them up in front of others. And over all this Jeff kept his own conversational track going with me—about stocks; about the international balance of trade; about that monster digital-ready TV there before us; about football, which he forgot whether or not I followed but how ’bout them Dawgs, meaning, I vaguely remembered, the bulldogs of the University of Georgia, where he’d been a business major even as an undergraduate. And speaking of dogs, in the midst of all this, Matilda did what I was told was common to her breed, something called the “bichon buzz,” a wild, top-speed race around and around the room and out into the hallway and beyond and back again, growling in faux viciousness all the while, with a dog-toy clamped in her mouth, often dashing out with one toy and reentering with another from some unseen cache of them—a latex hamburger or octopus or carrot or foot—the toy squeaking in protest—and Molly joined in, chasing her pup until Matilda finally wore out abruptly and dropped the toy and threw herself onto her back in the middle of the parlor floor. As Molly crouched over her, rubbing Matilda’s tummy, I decided that the pup in fact was deeply in touch with a cosmic truth about the way life is lived on the planet Earth and she had simply acted it out for us. Growling, running, grabbing toys. You got that right, girl.

  As Molly cooed over Matilda, and Jeff headed off on some point about the University of Georgia endowment office, I looked over to Maggie and we knew it was time, she and I. We both rose and headed for the door. Simultaneously, I said to Jeff, “I’m going to visit with Maggie now” and Maggie said to Molly, “You’ve had her long enough.”

  Maggie’s room was a sweet mixture of child and young woman, a bed full of stuffed animals, a perpetually burning Little Mermaid nightlight, posters of Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, her computer whirring away showing her My-Yahoo home page. We were in a corner of the third floor and she had a tower alcove, where she led me by the hand after closing and locking her door.

  We sat on the built-in bench with more stuffed animals and the tops of maples and walnuts quaking outside the window and she drew her legs up and put her chin on her knees and she didn’t start talking right away. I was touched by that, and I kept the silence with her. We watched out the window together for a few moments. A blue jay darted past and Maggie turned her head to follow its flight. She said, “Did you know that blue jays can talk as good as mynah birds, if you catch them and train them? Though you can’t, since it’s illegal to keep a songbird.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “About blue jays.”

  “I sometimes think I’m living with a family of blue jays,” Maggie said, gravely. “Though, like, somebody’s taught them how to say some things, which they do over and over.”

  “And you got yourself into the wrong nest?”

  “Yes.”

  We fell silent together for a few more moments and then I said, “Since you’re not a blue jay, if I tell you something, you’re not going to repeat it.”

  “I’m a swan,” she said. “Swans don’t even have a voice.”

  I wanted to say something encouraging about this. Impulsively I almost said, But they’re very beautiful, but I stopped myself. That was part of the bullshit I’d recently wiped off my own shoes. Before I could think of something else, Maggie took over the point.

  “They can be fierce, though,” she said. “They hiss.”

  “You can hiss.”

  “I hiss a lot.”

  “I like that,” I said. “A hissing beauty.”

  Maggie giggled at this. I giggled with her. Then she said, “So tell me the secret.”

  “You’re four years older than Molly,” I said. “Well, I’m four years older than your mama. When we were growing up, she and I fought all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. She was always elbowing her way into the center of things.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m like you?”

  She asked this with such a sudden brightness in her eyes and lilt in her voice that I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then I drew back and I said, “Yes. Like me. I loved my daddy very much—that was your Grandpa Dickerson—but he was always putting your mama on his lap and making little googoo sounds at her and it drove me crazy.”

 
; “Oh, Aunt Amy,” Maggie said and it was her turn to do a kiss on the cheek. This time we turned it into a hug and before she let go, Maggie said, “Do you still can’t stand her?”

  I hadn’t expected this question, would never have started this whole thing if I thought I’d have to answer it. But instantly I said, “No, sweetie, no. Everything’s fine now.”

  What else was I going to tell a ten-year-old?

  So, the dinner. Jeff said grace, which surprised me because Missy hadn’t talked about going back to church. I thought she’d left that behind in Houston, as I did. I was sure of it. It was one of those rare things that we saw eye-to-eye on. When we’d argue about men or Mama or mascara we could always turn to religion to get us away from controversy. Oh I believe in God all right, she’d say. Oh me too, I’d say. It’s just that the churches believe more in themselves, she’d say. That’s so true, I’d say, they worship the worshiping. They worship an image of their own self-righteousness, she’d say. They’d better pray they’re wrong about God, I’d say, He’s on record as going pretty hard on that. Right, she’d say. “Oh dear God,” Jeff said, “thank you for this food and this good fellowship within our family.”

  He prayed with his eyes open and looking sort of partway up the wall toward the ceiling. Missy had her head bowed. So did the girls, sort of, though Maggie shot me a quick glance to check on my attitude, which was a little bit bent over at the waist, my face angled slightly down but with a good view still of everyone else. Molly had her fingers intertwined tightly before her, and she was looking sideways away from the table, probably trying to find Matilda, who was in fact sitting at my feet. Matilda was also checking out my attitude—about doling out table scraps, not religion, though perhaps the two were tantamount for her.

  I was ready to give her plenty, for Missy had prepared chicken pot pie and mashed potatoes and a green bean casserole with mushroom soup and canned onion rings on top. This was definitely a page out of our mama’s cookbook. “Dear Father, help those who are hungry,” Jeff said and I thought I heard Matilda moan faintly. “Help those who have no family,” he said. Next I expected, Help those whose portfolios are overcommitted in new technology, but instead he wrapped it up quickly. “In Jesus’ name. Amen.”