Nobody's Family is Going to Change

by Louise Fitzhugh

  Willie stared, his mouth hanging open. Mr. Sheridan turned and walked heavily out of the room.

  Swell, thought Emma. She had a vision of her father wearing the headdress of a gypsy fortune-teller and looking further into their futures than they could, into Willie’s future, anyway. He hadn’t mentioned any future for her. She didn’t have a future.

  “Don’t feel too badly, Willie,” purred Mrs. Sheridan.

  Looking at Willie, Emma could see that it was not a question of feeling badly. It was not a question of feeling at all. Willie was totally defeated. He was a limp doll. He didn’t sit in the chair, he hung in it, his head rolled to one side as though he didn’t have the strength or the amount of caring it took to hold it up. He looked as though he would never care about anything in the whole world again.

  “You mustn’t be so sad about it,” Mrs. Sheridan went on. “You’ll understand when you’re older, and perhaps not that much older either. Perhaps when you’re fifteen or sixteen you’ll be old enough and your father will feel differently, it’s not as though this were the only job in a musical you’ll ever be offered.”

  Something about this last remark created a change in Willie. He sat up straight. “I’m going to do it,” he said. He stood up. “I don’t care what you say, I’m going to do it!”

  He ran toward the front door. Mrs. Sheridan gasped. He ran out into the hall.

  Only Emma realized what was happening. She ran after him. She grabbed him just as the elevator door was opening.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” she said, holding him as he struggled.

  “Leggo me! I got to go! I got to get out of here!” Willie was yelling. Emma dragged him back toward the apartment. Mrs. Sheridan was coming down the hall.

  Willie was hysterical, screaming and crying at the top of his lungs. “Leggo! Leggo! You all hate me. Nobody cares what happens to me! I got to do it myself! Leggo me, let go, Emma!”

  Mr. Sheridan appeared in the doorway. Emma was almost up to the door, dragging Willie.

  “Give him to me,” said Mr. Sheridan.

  “No, Emma, don’t let him!” Willie was a mess, bawling, crying, and drooling.

  Mr. Sheridan pulled Emma’s arms away and picked Willie up like a handkerchief. He was back inside the apartment before Emma or Mrs. Sheridan moved.

  Emma ran back into the apartment. Mrs. Sheridan followed and closed the door.

  Willie was still screaming. He was furious and miserable, punching out at his father’s face as his father held him at arm’s length.

  “You bastid!” Willie shouted. “You don’t understand anything. You never think about nobody but yourself. I’ll kill you!”

  Mrs. Sheridan looked terrified. Mr. Sheridan looked angry and puzzled at the same time. He still held Willie away from him, as one would hold an angry alley cat determined to scratch.

  Willie landed his fist next to Mr. Sheridan’s nose. Mr. Sheridan said, “You’re hysterical,” and gave Willie a slap across the face.

  Willie dissolved into a bath of tears.

  “Stop that!” yelled Emma. “Stop hitting him! You can go to jail for that, and besides, he’s right. You never think about anybody else.” God knows, you don’t think about me, she thought. God knows.

  Willie fell down into a little pile next to the couch. “You never think about anybody, but just how you think they should live. You don’t even know us! You don’t know what we think!” Emma was livid. She didn’t even know what she was saying, she was so angry.

  Mr. Sheridan was looking at her in surprise.

  “You just stand up here and tell us what your life was like! Who cares? You don’t care what our lives are like!”

  “Emma! Stop it,” Mrs. Sheridan said anxiously. “You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  “I do too know what I’m saying! And as for you, what are you but a fink? You go right along with whatever he says, and you think everything he does is wonderful, even all his dumb talking about what kind of hard time he had as a kid. What about the hard time we have? Just because we aren’t starving doesn’t mean everything is great. That’s what he thinks. We get a nice hot meal at night. Is that it? Is that all we get? Is that all life is about?”

  “When you don’t have it,” said Mr. Sheridan steadily, “you’re damned right, that’s what life is all about. You’re so fat and spoiled you wouldn’t know what life is about if it came up and hit you in the face!”

  The word fat went through Emma like an ice pick. “Spoiled! That’s a word you made up to make yourself feel better. What am I spoiled for? You mean because I don’t think you’re wonderful, because I don’t wallow all over the floor after your stupid speech about your life and say, ‘Daddy, Daddy, you’re wonderful.’ Well, you know why, don’t you? Because I’ve heard that damn speech five thousand times, and I’m sick of hearing it.”

  “Shut up,” said Mr. Sheridan.

  Emma couldn’t believe the hatred she saw in his eyes. He’s looking at me like that, she said to herself, that hate is for me.

  Her knees began to shake and all courage deserted her. “It doesn’t make any difference anyway, your speech, because what has that got to do with us? You never even look at us!” She tried, but her voice shook and she knew she was finished. She knew the look of hatred would be forever in her mind, that nothing would ever take it away. She knew that it was all proven now, all the thoughts she’d had, all the guesses she had guessed about his hating her. It was true. He hated her.

  “Shut up and go to your room,” he said, his eyes the same.

  “Don’t leave, Emma!” screamed Willie. “Don’t leave me here!”

  “I’m not going to leave my brother,” said Emma, looking at her father with the same hatred he’d given her.

  A memory came over Emma, suddenly, of her father the way he had been before Willie was born. In those days he had taken her downtown with him, sometimes, way downtown to his office. He’d held her up to let her look out the big windows at the people, small as toys, and at the boats on the river. That was before he talked about nothing but my boy this and my boy that, after Willie was born.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, little girl,” her father said heavily, “but you got a lot of problems. Look at her,” he said to Mrs. Sheridan. “Look at the way she’s looking at me.”

  Emma turned her back on him.

  Willie thought she was leaving. “Emma!” he screamed.

  She stood there with her back to her parents. “I’m not going anywhere. Come to my room with me.”

  Willie scrambled toward her across the floor.

  “Hold it,” said Mr. Sheridan. “This family is going to talk. We are going to sit right down here in this room and I don’t care if it takes all night. We are going to understand what is going on here.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” said Willie, clinging to Emma’s leg, “you being a bastid, that’s what’s going on.”

  “Stop using that word, right now!” said Mrs. Sheridan.

  “Mama, go make me a pot of coffee, will you, and see if there’s some ice cream in there for the kids.” Mr. Sheridan spoke gently to his wife. She hurried to the kitchen.

  He sat back on the couch and put his legs up on the footstool. He looked tired. He examined the ceiling thoughtfully, then brought his gaze down slowly, very slowly, until it fastened on Willie and Emma. They watched.

  “You kids sit down over there.”

  “Willie,” said Emma, “you don’t have to answer anything and you have the right to have a lawyer present.”

  Mrs. Sheridan came back in. “I put the coffee on.” She handed a dish of ice cream to each child.

  “Now that you’ve informed Willie of his rights,” said Mr. Sheridan to Emma, “I want to remind you that I am not arresting him. I want all four of us to sit down here and have a conversation, that’s all.”

  Emma and Willie ate ice cream, saying nothing, not looking at him.

  “You sit down too,” he said to Mr
s. Sheridan.

  “Now,” he said, unbuttoning his vest, “this family seems to have quite a few misunderstandings going on here.”

  Quite a word to describe hatred, thought Emma. I know hatred when I see it, and nothing he’s going to say is going to make any difference.

  “First of all, I gather I’ve been boring Emma with stories of my life.”

  “Oh, she didn’t mean that!” said Mrs. Sheridan.

  “Oh, yes, she did.”

  I’ll give him that, thought Emma, he’s right on that one.

  “She meant it. She doesn’t like hearing that her father had a hard life.”

  Willie and Emma sat eating dutifully, looking down into their bowls.

  “Second, she thinks her life is just as hard, maybe even harder, right, Emma?”

  Emma didn’t answer, didn’t look up.

  “And I gather my son here thinks I’m ruining his life.”

  Willie said nothing, just kept eating ice cream.

  He doesn’t even like ice cream, thought Emma. He’s just doing that to have something to do so he won’t have to look at Dad. I told him to keep his mouth shut and he is.

  She took courage from this. She decided to keep her mouth shut too. What would their father do confronted by silence? What could he do?

  Unless he puts us on a rack, she thought, and tears out our toenails, there’s no way he can make us talk. She decided to let him rave on.

  “I gather,” he continued, “that I am regarded, by this family, as the worst excuse for a father the world has ever seen.”

  Emma recognized, and noted, the lawyer’s technique of exaggeration.

  “I gather that you two, at least, would like to have nothing more to do with this poor excuse for a father.”

  Emma realized what he was doing. He wanted to be corrected. He wanted somebody to jump up and say, “Oh, no, Daddy, we love you.”

  “Oh, no, dear,” said Mrs. Sheridan, “I don’t think they mean that at all.”

  There she goes, the jack-in-the-box. Emma watched her mother with contempt. How could she fall for such a stupid thing? How could she constantly reassure this man that he was an okay person, when he wasn’t, he wasn’t at all. He didn’t know what he was talking about half the time, yet up she’d pop, still agreeing with him. Could it be that she was dumb?

  She’d never thought about this. She’d never thought about either of her parents being dumb or smart, but just there in some way, like the sun was there, or a rock, or the sky. Her father couldn’t be that dumb, she reasoned, because he was a lawyer. But what about her mother?

  It was hard to think about her mother at all. Something hurt inside her when she tried to think about her mother. There were things she never wanted to ask her mother. There were answers she never wanted to hear. It was one thing to think about her father hating her. She hated him too, but she never wanted to know what her mother thought of her. She’d just as soon never find out about that.

  “All right,” said Mr. Sheridan. “You’ve finished that ice cream. You can stop looking in those bowls. You can look up here at me and tell me what all this is about.”

  Willie and Emma kept looking down.

  “Got that coffee ready, Mama?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Mrs. Sheridan came back into the room with a mug from which steam rose. “It’s past Willie’s bedtime, dear.”

  To hear her, thought Emma, you’d think there was nothing happening at all.

  Mr. Sheridan took a sip of coffee. “Mmm, that’s good, good hot strong coffee. You always did make great coffee.” He smiled at his wife and she smiled back at him.

  Emma sneered. Look at that, she said to herself, look at them smiling at each other. Look at my mother, happy for a pat, like a good dog. Look at my father, thinking about coffee at a time like this, always thinking about his stomach.

  “You can stop staring at your feet now, both of you.” Mr. Sheridan sounded almost cheery now. “The big bad wolf isn’t going to eat you up.”

  Emma groaned. She couldn’t help herself.

  “What’s that for?” he asked. “Am I boring you again?”

  Now she was in for it. She never should have uttered a sound. She decided she would make her speech on Willie’s behalf, then get up and go to bed. Tomorrow she would organize a committee to come and talk to her father.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she began calmly, “that Willie cares a great deal about this musical and about dancing in general. I mean that he is going to be a dancer and that nothing you can do or say is going to change that. You can’t stop him. If he has to wait until he’s grown, he’ll still do it. I don’t think you see that.”

  Mr. Sheridan had obviously not seen it. He blinked his eyes. “I don’t think, Emma, that you know very much about seven-year-olds. They don’t always want to do what they think they want to do at seven. For instance, when you were seven, you wanted to be a shoplifter.”

  Emma’s eyebrows flew up. “What?”

  “You sat down and told me very seriously that you had seen a shoplifter on television and that you didn’t understand what was wrong with that because all those things were out there for people to take and so why was this lady arrested when she took something. Furthermore, you thought you’d be a shoplifter when you grew up, because the lady had gotten a lot of nice things.”

  Emma was mortified. Her mother and father were laughing. Willie was looking up at her with sleepy, surprised eyes. She sat, her hands holding her ice-cream bowl, watching her mother and father laugh. It was not only not funny, it wasn’t fair, bringing up something one had done when one was seven. She didn’t think he’d proved his point, either.

  “I may yet be a shoplifter,” said Emma, and stood up. She loved watching their faces fall. “I’m going to bed now and Willie is going with me.” She took Willie’s hand and together they left the room and marched down the hall. There, she thought, see how they like being talked to the way they talk to us, see how they like a taste of their own medicine.

  At Willie’s door, she stopped. “Willie, go to sleep. If either one of them comes in and tries to talk to you alone, then you yell for me and come into my room and get me if I’m asleep. Tomorrow I’m going to do something. You’re going to keep that job, so go to sleep and don’t think about anything.”

  Willie smiled. “Thanks,” he said simply. “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry. Just believe me. It’s going to work out.”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He went into his room. Emma walked down the hall. She could hear her mother and father muttering to each other in the living room, but she didn’t even care what they were saying.

  Emma lurked around the front of the luncheonette for five minutes, peering through the foggy window at Harrison Carter’s Adam’s apple making swift movements up and down as he drank his Coke.

  She finally propelled herself through the door, feeling like the lead in a spy movie.

  His greeting, a brief nod, did nothing to dispel this illusion.

  “Sheridan, isn’t it?” He nodded, jerking his long red head convulsively. He did look like a flamingo. His acne was fierce. His eyes, behind his glasses, looked like raisins.

  It took her less time to explain the situation than she had thought it would. What seemed so complicated to her was evidently second nature to him. All the small details which seemed so interesting to her were dismissed by him. He got the point quickly. Emma was, evidently, not the first one to bring it up.

  “We can’t help you,” he said shortly.

  “Why? I thought that’s what this Children’s Army was for!”

  “No.” He sighed. “I seem to spend half my time explaining this. Unless a child is actually being damaged for life, we can’t intervene.”

  “But … can’t you see that this attitude toward Willie would be damaging to him?”

  “Yes. Of course, I can see that. Look at it this way:
if your father were planning to have his feet amputated, we’d do something.”

  “Oh, swell.”

  “Or even if he were kicking Willie around. But he’s not. He’s simply saying he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for his son to be taking dancing lessons. And”—Harrison Carter took a deep breath—“I’m not sure I don’t agree with him.”

  Emma’s mouth fell open.

  “Now, before you call me a male chauvinist pig, let me explain. I don’t know how it happened, but it seems as though your brother is off on the wrong foot. He seems to be identifying with his mother, not his father. I can understand, therefore, that his father might want to stop this and get him back on the right track.”

  “You’d have to know Willie,” said Emma. She felt tired. This wasn’t getting anywhere at all. She was, in fact, beginning to dislike Harrison Carter. He seemed to have everything wrapped up.

  “What do you do?” she asked. “Just take nice safe cases you know you can win?”

  He frowned, looking down into his Coke. “You know, Sheridan, we’ve handled some very difficult situations. You haven’t been with us long—”

  “So far, nothing applies,” Emma interrupted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “So far, nothing that’s bothering me or my friends can be handled by the Army, that’s what.”

  “The Army is always open to complaints. I’m always ready to listen to grievances.” Harrison Carter’s glasses seemed to grow thicker.

  “Everything that’s bothering us has to do with parental attitudes toward us. I mean, nobody is actually doing anything to us, but they’re just ruining us, that’s all.”

  “How?”

  “By the way they think about us. It’s the way they see us. After a while you can’t help it, you start to see yourself that way.”

  “Oh. You mean, if your father keeps acting like you’re a thief, you finally steal?”