Better Times

by Batkie, Sara;

  “Colin. Go upstairs.” Her voice was so meek it frightened her to hear it.

  “You can’t keep me here, Mom. You don’t keep anything. You see these walls, these shelves? They used to have things on them. Do you remember that?”

  “Do you?”

  Rebecca remembered very well the day, in the wake of her abandonment, she took the family photographs down from the walls and then, frames and all, stuffed them in black garbage bags along with his paperbacks with the shaggy spines, his gym shirts with the sandpapery pits, and took them to the city dump. She could recall looking over the hillocks of eviscerated furniture and cremated clothing and feeling as though she were part of some collective exhibition of feminine revenge. She remembered the blankness of the house afterward, that sense of purity, of possibility, that she’d lost almost as soon as she’d recognized it, replaced by the sudden oddness of her habits, still washing her hands in the sink, still stripping the sheets every week in a house with one less person in it. But how could Colin remember those things, or remember enough to believe he was a part of them? He’d been a child then, hadn’t he?

  “I’m going,” he said, shrugging further into his sweatshirt before pushing past her. “I’ll be back before anyone comes tomorrow. Don’t worry about that. I can do my time.”

  “Okay,” was all Rebecca could muster for the front door’s clanging backside.

  She must have gotten over there somehow, though she wouldn’t remember what mechanics led her movements, even much later. She was first aware of the sizzling sound of crickets as she ducked past the police barrier and glided up the path to the front door, which someone had divested of its knob.

  Inside the house had the air of a ransacked mausoleum; a ruptured heaviness lay over the toppled furniture and scattered curios, still throbbing like an open wound. It made her tread delicately through the rooms, as if a further disturbance would rob the wreckage of its meaning. The soft buzz of silence tickled her ears. It was strange to enter a place she’d so often imagined and find it in ruins; she felt she was imagining it still.

  The layout was not unlike her own home and she wandered toward the back and into the kitchen. Outside, past the sliding glass doors, she could make out the slurry ripples of the pool, its surface now a carpet of foliage. The tiki torches had been bundled together like driftwood and left to lean against the fence, awaiting a party that would never resume. It was her first sense of truly trespassing, not on a place so much as on a moment in time. Her reverence was quickly conquered by her curiosity; she turned away from the window eager to see more.

  Pots and pans were strewn about the kitchen floor, but the placemats on the dinner table had been left untouched, as had the silverware, lined up on napkins that had been folded into triangles. The fridge released a sour honey stench when she opened it; she leaned in to inspect the fur-coated fruit and shriveled vegetables inside. Someone had stuck a Post-It on the milk carton; its end curled up at her, beckoning like a finger. Even though the note was written in the inscrutable building blocks of Cyrillic, she pocketed it anyway.

  In the wake of the fridge’s fluorescence, the rest of the house seemed mordantly dark. She drifted into the front parlor and pulled the little brass cord on a Tiffany desk lamp, trapping her surroundings in amber light. She could see Eusapia’s house across the street, its brightness spilling all the way to the empty sidewalk. How long had the old woman stood at the window and watched what the boys were doing? There wasn’t much in the room that hadn’t had a good going over. The stuffing had been pulled loose from the couch cushions, puffing up like smoke from a plaid chimney. Entire books had been de-spined, their pages laid out nakedly on the floor. Rebecca shivered at the sight of some derogatory slang scratched into the walls. It was the city dump domesticated, but there was nothing redemptive in this disarray. Whatever secret shame the Demidovs had been harboring had now transferred to her and she would have left immediately if she hadn’t noticed Zora’s backpack.

  It was slumped against the legs of a desk and seemed not to have drawn the boys’ notice. Until Rebecca opened it and found Zora’s math homework, the equations now resolved into cartoons of genitalia. She dug deeper, past the stapled piano scores and school supplies, as if the backpack held something essential to Zora’s being, the catalyst for the hunger she held inside herself were Rebecca to only look hard enough.

  When she reached the very bottom, all she found was a brightly colored figurine shaped like a galloping horse. It stood no taller than her hand; when she picked it up she was surprised by its lightness. As she ran her fingernail over the surface, its skin flaked away like soap. She had seen this sort of thing before, years and years ago, in the old notions shops her mother frequented down south. Normally her memories came to her dyed in iodine, like old photographs. But suddenly her childhood was before her in vivid Technicolor. She remembered the bleached white of the store’s counters, the sly cat-eye pattern of the buttons her mother bought, the dark green of the Skee-Ball prize tickets that she hoarded to trade for trinkets. Her mother appropriated any tickets that went unused, a circumstance she only became aware of when a neighborhood girl tore open her teddy bear and a strange spinach stuffing emerged from his guts. When Rebecca mentioned this incident at a PTA meeting years later, the other women had given her wrinkled-nose looks, as if she were speaking another language.

  Zora would remember this place, this neighborhood, whether or not she ever considered it a home, but what would she actually think of it? As she grew older, would she look back with fondness, if she looked back at all? Would she feel like Rebecca felt now, as if she’d been mugged by the passage of time? She had been so careful to shed every skin of her past but what did she have to show for it? How could they, everyone said, when the Demidovs were found out. But how could any of them? Surely someone in the neighborhood could remind them all of the things they’d given up, of the people they could have been. Perhaps it could be her. She was the only outsider left now. Was that footsteps she heard at the door just then? She would invite them all, she thought. She would invite them all in.

  No Man’s Land

  Later, after I’d had a few years to get used to the idea, I wouldn’t think of that summer as the one when my parents started sleeping in separate beds. I would think of the twenty-seven days of cold rain in June and how once my sister Addie and I ate popsicles while wearing mittens. I would think of the rap-rap-rap of the choir conductor’s baton and the clear roving eye of the Ouija board planchette. Mostly, though, I would think of Ms. Flox, our brief and bewildering caretaker, who smoked cigarettes at windowsills and knew things about the world.

  It was the first and only summer of Desert Storm and my father had recently been made a senior drill sergeant at Fort Dix in New Jersey. We moved into a complex just outside the base, set up for “Families of the Army” and composed of slapdash regulation houses that were issued a tri-fold flag. The unmarried soldiers called it “No Man’s Land.” We woke up to a recording of a bugle calling Reveille and kneeled down to pray to Taps.

  In those early days, before school allowed us to define ourselves in our own terms, Addie and I became known as the “marching girls” for the way our father ran formations with us every morning. Left-left-left-right-left we’d clomp about the lawn in our nighties, thin will-o’-the-wisps that threatened to fly away at any moment, distracted by a butterfly or a bike with streamers. We were disappointing cadets and he had little hope for us.

  Though anticipation of war had sharpened the air, making the adults move around more carefully, all I cared about was making friends. The children in the neighborhood were reckless and terrifying. They called me “Loose-End-Up” instead of Lucinda, an insult I didn’t quite understand but that hurt just from the snarly way they said it. One boy, whose legs were cross-hatched with pink poison ivy scars, told us with ravenous glee about the wounds his father had sustained in Vietnam. “The blood kept coming from his stomach,” he said, demonstrating with accompanying mot
ions. He looked like a magician pulling a scarf from his coat.

  Eventually, our mother tired of “picking our skulking faces off the floor” and we were enlisted in the Fort Dix Children’s Choir. On the second Tuesday of June, dressed in white tights turned transparent by the rain, we shuffled into the chapel with a group of children varying in size and level of enthusiasm. The chapel was a small building at the edge of the base, made from the same mold as the barracks that stood beside it. In the coming months it would hold three weddings, one baptism, and a funeral, but all I knew of it then was that it had the atmosphere of an armpit.

  The man behind the upright piano had a face like a full moon, pale and bright and cheesy. His name was Mr. Giletti, and by way of greeting he rapped his baton on the wood and cried, “Boys here. Girls there.” We parted. “Now show me your lungs!”

  “Oh, my little Maria Callases,” our mother said, when we returned home.

  “Show me what you’ve learned,” said our father.

  The notes hit some snags as they left our throats but our mother applauded anyway. Our father nodded curtly, then went back to the New Hanover Gazette. He set his jaw so his chin stuck out, a sure sign that something wasn’t right in his world.

  “I think you both show a lot of promise,” our mother said.

  That night the news was fiery and grim and Addie and I got two scoops of ice cream in our bowls. Chocolate moustaches stained our upper lips. When we showed them to our mother, she could barely even smile.

  In those days, when I was eight and Addie was six, we could have passed for twins. But neither of us looked like our mother. She was a regal woman with fox-fur hair and thick plump lips that she dressed in scarlet. She wore high heels while grocery shopping, and even when she changed into slippers at home she walked as if strings were holding her up, with an awareness of self that she didn’t seem to have learned so much as simply known.

  She hadn’t always been so graceful, our father often told us. When they met at an Army mixer, she danced like a duck and he let her know. She walked back to her seat quacking and he followed her. “On our first date, we went ice skating and I got all the bruises” was how he always ended the story; soon enough we were finishing it for him. It seemed like a novelty, our father getting hurt, a man so steely I used to imagine knocking on his leg and hearing armor echo. In the photo from their wedding day they stand together in the city hall lobby, my mother in a flowered dress, my father in a suit, both arms wrapped around her waist, his eyes bright, his face broken by a rare smile. Behind them is a drinking fountain, the only other object in the room.

  Our father also said our mother was a woman who didn’t always know herself. So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when we came in from running drills one morning to hear her announce that she was going to start looking for work. “All the other wives here do something,” she explained. “It just doesn’t look right, me staying home.”

  As far as I knew, my mother had never gone to work before, though she had often threatened to do so. None of us seemed to know what she was qualified for, either, and we sat eating breakfast and mulling over the want-ads, my mother’s red marker uncapped and ready. I knew she had stuff for cuts that stung like crazy, that she could whistle the opening bars of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” that she was once the lead baton twirler in her town. But converting these skills to money was another matter, my father said.

  Nevertheless, she was determined and, like our father, she couldn’t fail at something once she’d begun trying. So every Tuesday and Thursday, after dropping us off at the church, she would go out and perform feats of employability, interviewing anywhere she sensed a spark of interest. And every time she came to pick us up she looked a little more dejected, a little more faded, became a little more difficult to find in the crowd.

  But then, we were dejected too. Addie and I still weren’t making friends. Even outside of the neighborhood, the other children traveled in preexisting packs. They played games we didn’t know the rules to and sang songs we had never heard, songs about fighting the power and sexing people up. At the choir practices they swarmed around each other like bees, their whispers buzzing, their looks barbed. Once when I asked the girl beside me to move her coat, she stood up and saluted me, a sneer singeing her lips. “Yes, drill sergeant,” she barked, and the other girls tittered into their fingers.

  In the last week of June our mother got a secretary job in a law firm and Marjorie Flox entered our lives. Our father complained that she was a hippie; she was rumored to have made disparaging remarks about Schwarzkopf. But our mother appreciated her “spunk.” The night we were told the news, I was carried into my dreams by the magical lilt of her name, which sounded like it belonged to someone who never came out from under a spotlight. The next morning she appeared in our house. She carried a purse the size of a doctor’s kit. As the grown-ups got acquainted, Addie and I tried to guess what was in that purse. First she said stuffed animals; then she said board games. I guessed a bugle and told Addie that she’d been hired to play in our yard.

  Marjorie Flox was in her late twenties, living on the base alone, her husband having been one of the first deployed. She had a thick waist and a warm manner and I could tell immediately she made my father nervous. We were only just getting used to the house ourselves and she had suddenly filled it up. She moved about us effervescently, in stark contrast to the careful motions of my mother, who tucked us into bed like we were letters being slipped into envelopes. When they were introduced, Marjorie took my father’s hand like a man, pumping it up and down with enthusiasm.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Walt,” she said. “I’m sorry you never got to work with my Harry before he went abroad.” I had never heard anyone call my father by his first name, not even my mother. To her he was Dear, to us he was Daddy, and to everyone else he was Sir. The two intimacies so close together—Walt, my Harry—made us all take a step back and hold our breath. Marjorie’s hand returned to circling her stomach, as if she were searching for a fortune in it.

  “No television,” my mother instructed. “Don’t take them into town unless I say so.”

  Chief among my mother’s concerns about town was the Veterans’ Hall. Addie and I had heard it spoken of in italicized tones by our parents. We had listened carefully. In peacetime it was merely a distraction. They hosted dances that no one attended, potlucks to which no one brought food, movies for shuffling janitors. But in wartime, it had become a vice, a place to stay away from. We were covertly curious.

  “And their lunches are in the fridge,” my mother continued. “That’s what they’ll eat; don’t let them tell you otherwise. Girls, be good to Ms. Flox.” She cupped both our chins in her two hands, kissed our cheeks, and then followed our father into the new sphere of her life.

  Ms. Flox turned to us, a mischievous flash in her eye. “Don’t tell your mother, but I don’t mind if you call me Marjorie.” It seemed a small but precious privilege. I grasped it, said her name all the time, even whispered it to myself when she wasn’t in the room.

  A blatant disregard for my mother’s rules quickly became the norm. It turned out that there was a game in her bag, a Ouija board she had brought from home and hoped would entertain us. At first the concept was baffling; we had never played anything without instructions before. She laid it out on the kitchen table, smoothing it over like she would a bed sheet, and went to pour herself a cup of coffee. We navigated over the letters and numbers with our hands, hovering over the “Yes” and “No” and the ominous “Good-Bye” that lurked at the bottom, dismissing who or what I couldn’t say. I felt we had stumbled onto something secret and serious.

  “Marjorie, what’s an oracle?” I said, pointing to the only word on the board I didn’t know.

  “Someone with the gift of second sight,” she replied. “They can see things that we can’t. They can communicate with other realms.”

  “Realms? What are realms?” Addie asked, the strand of hair she’d been suckin
g falling from her lips. I hated when she did that; it made me want to pin her to the floor and tie up her hair.

  “They’re like other worlds, right?” I turned to Marjorie for confirmation. “Like where angels go?”

  She set down the planchette and showed us how to position our fingers on it by perching them right at the edge. “Ask it anything you want and it will tell you what it knows.”

  “You first,” Addie said.

  “All right. Should I have a cigarette?”

  “Marjorie, you can’t smoke in here,” I said.

  “Well, let’s just see what the board says.”

  We gathered above the glass eye and waited to be guided. When the planchette first sparked into action, Addie whimpered. I could feel her fingers shivering, but the movement did not seem to throw the diviner from its path. “Don’t be scared,” Marjorie said softly. “It’s not a question of life and death, after all.”

  In the end, it proclaimed “Yes” and Marjorie propped herself in an open window. The smoke wreathed itself around her neck, which she offered to the warmth of the sun. Even though I could smell the woody poison of the smoke on her, even though I knew it was bad, I thought she looked glamorous, like she belonged on the cover of a magazine our mother would never buy.

  “Do you not play games like this with your friends?”

  “Friends?” Addie asked, in the same way she had asked about realms.

  “We don’t really play with the other kids around here,” I said. “I don’t think they like us.”

  “How silly,” she said. I didn’t know if she meant us or them.

  “It’s not silly. They’re mean. And they make me feel mean too.”

  She came back to the table, stubbing her cigarette out in the dregs of her coffee so it sizzled. “Don’t ever let anyone make you feel something about yourself you don’t want to feel,” she said. Something flashed across her eyes like a shutter clicking over a camera lens, capturing a moment whose meaning was lost to us. We must not have looked convinced by her words because she changed the subject: “What about a game you two play together?”