by Deb Caletti
“Sprout, he hasn’t done anything to you,” I said.
“You’re kidding, right? Christ Almighty, Quinn,” she said. Another one of Grandma’s favorite expressions.
“I don’t know why you’re always on his case.”
“I don’t know why you never see a bad thing he does.”
We’d had this argument before, and it never went anywhere. And it would never go anywhere, as long as she kept listening to Mom. “He’s a great dad, even if he isn’t like other fathers. He’s different, that’s a good thing. He loves us,” I said.
“Right. He talks to us, and it’s like we’re not even really there.”
“That’s crazy. Of course we’re there. It wouldn’t kill you to make an effort,” I said as she rolled the dice and won a painting—the Jackson Pollock that looked like a square of crinkled aluminum foil.
She looked under the painting, at its hidden value. “Forgery,” she announced. She wasn’t supposed to tell, but she always did.
“Put it back. Go again,” I said.
“I wish you’d open your eyes,” she said.
FRANCES LEE GIOFRANCO:
When I was in the fifth grade, I had a thing for Carl Davis. Everyone had a thing for Carl Davis, so I guess you can say I lacked imagination. We were still making those frilly-assed paper hearts for Valentine’s Day in our class. Those big envelopes you stuff the valentines in. Mrs. Becker told us that we had to give every kid a valentine if we were going to give any, making sure some kid didn’t get so rejected he’d shoot up a school later.
But I wanted to give Carl Davis something special. More than just one of those cards with the pukey-tasting red suckers stuck through two holes. I begged my mom to take me to Bartell Drugs so I could get him a present. You could tell she didn’t think this was a great idea, but she was managing to keep her mouth shut. If you know my mom, though, you know she can’t manage to keep her mouth shut for long.
So, we’re standing in the pink-and-red aisle, you know, the one with the bears and the chocolate and the hearts and roses, those bizarre proof-of-love objects, and she says, “Frances Lee, why is it that you want to do this?” And I say, “Because I am in love with Carl Davis.” And Mom looks at me, and she’s very calm, and she says, “Frances Lee, I’ve been in over my head and in trouble and in need and in danger and incomplete, but I’d never been in love until I was forty-two and finally figured myself out.”
And it wasn’t meant to be mean or to kill my enthusiasm or anything, I know. And we did buy a big heart box of chocolates that the next day joined a deskful of presents for Carl Davis. She just said it to get me to stop and think. It did get me to stop and think. It still does.
Sprout and I finished the game of Masterpiece and then played another. After a while, Dad popped his head in the door.
“Let’s go out!” he said. “Let’s try something totally new. Celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?” I asked.
“Celebrate anything. Our life! The fact that we’re luckier than ninety-nine percent of the population. Name the cuisine,” he said to Sprout. “Name it. Something we’ve never had.”
“Holland,” Sprout said. She’d just done a report on it in her fifth-grade class.
“Dutch,” Dad mused. “Do they have Dutch food? Dutch restaurants? Waitresses in clogs? I’m not sure we’ll have much luck with that one, Charles. How about African? Pakistani? Korean? Afghani?”
“Afghan,” Sprout agreed. “Like the blankets.”
“Or the dogs with floppy ears,” Dad said. He flicked Sprout’s braid, and she reached up and flicked his in return. It was a small surrender. She needed him, too, even though she didn’t like to think so. Everyone needs their dad. I was glad we were all friends again.
Dad bounded down the stairs, and we grabbed our shoes and followed. He opened another dark wood drawer by its iron handle, the one where he kept the phone books. He pulled out the fat lump of the Yellow Pages and slopped it open. His Internet use was still at the first-grade level. “Afghan, Afghan…Ha! Basmani. Over on twelfth. Excellent. I’ve heard it’s got the best Afghan food. Buraani bonjon, qaabuli pallow. I love to say those words.” He said them again, added a midair curlicue flair. “Sounds like I’m casting a spell. Buraani bonjon!” he said fiercely, and thrust his fingertips at us.
“Ribbit,” Sprout croaked.
“Beautiful, it worked,” Dad said.
We squashed back into the car and headed to the restaurant, the bottom level of a Victorian house, with tables outside and strings of lights hanging all around. Dad parked in the handicapped space just outside the door.
“Handicapped,” I said.
“No one cares,” he said. “Anyway, people love it when I park my car out front. Brings in business.”
The inside of the restaurant was candlelit, with orange walls and ceilings draped with fabric. Crowded, and humming with noise. That night, he was Dad at his best, when he drew you in and you had more fun than you knew you could have. Dad of energy and big ideas. One time, Dad decided that we’d go in a restaurant and order the first six things on the menu, no matter what they were. Another time, we had a Yellow Party, where we ate yellow food and dressed in yellow and then left in the evening to find a yellow Rolls Royce we could test drive. Another night, we ate six brands of frozen Salisbury steak dinners to see which was best. At Basmani, Dad ordered more food than could fit on the table and told us stories about all the famous people he knew, and about the time the Jafarabad Brothers had tried a trapeze act, but only until he’d broken his arm in two places. He told us about his father, the diamond merchant. How a diamond was the hardest and most perfectly imperfect substance on earth, an object of beauty forever, its crystals forced up from the depths of the earth by erupting volcanoes. He drank a couple of glasses of wine and flirted with the waitress, and we all laughed loud, and quiet couples looked at us with envy. Then we carried a stack of Styrofoam boxes full of food home again, and they were still warm when I carried them on my lap.
Sprout went up to bed and so did Dad, but I promised Daniel I’d call him as I did every night, so I stayed downstairs because there was more privacy there. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to hear all the passion and desire and sexual longing in our conversation. How was your day? Fine, great. How was yours? Oh, pretty good.
I took the phone from the cradle in the kitchen, settled into the big leather chair in the living room. Dad’s living room was as creative and patchwork as the rest of the house—the ceiling was covered in squares of tin pressed into elaborate designs, which had been taken from an old bank in New York that was about to be demolished, and the rug was a worn Oriental one covering the floor, which was made of the sort of polished, bumpy wood you’d see on an old ship. The room was full of objects he’d gotten on his travels—a music box, an ancient globe, a red tribal mask—and there was a painting above the fireplace that Sprout hated, a naked woman in cubist style, with one pointed, triangular breast, one rounded, oblong one. Dad loved these things—whenever there were visitors, he’d show them his objects, like a hunter in his trophy room. I got this when I was in Africa…. I got this when I met the artist in New York…. I put my feet up on the fringed, velvety footstool, got comfortable for the intelligent and stimulating conversation that was coming. So, what’d you do today? Oh, track practice. Mowed the lawn. You? Train ride—did my homework.
I was feeling the tumbling irritation of boredom, and the need to shake myself out of the kind of bad mood that would lead to the inevitable What’s wrong? Nothing conversation that would be full of edges and politeness and something close to cinched-in homicidal urges. I didn’t know what my problem was. Daniel was a great guy, and everyone told me what a great guy he was. I tried to remember what I liked about him. He was nice. That’s right. He had good legs from running track. We both liked math, and not many people understood that. He was…My mind snagged. Well, he was clean. Clean in all ways. His thoughts were as clean as his freshly showered hair. Which
I think I liked. I was pretty sure I liked.
I leaned my head against the high back of the chair, holding the phone in my palm, and that’s when I saw it. Something that hadn’t been in the room the last time we were here. It was a small statue on a black square, a glass statue. It was a curve of glass about ten inches tall, something that managed to look both delicate and strong. I could see that there was a brass plate on it, with some sort of writing, and I got up to see what it said. I left the phone in the soft squish of the chair, squinted at the words. Humphrey Bogart, I read. Lifetime Achievement Award. Film Artists Association of America.
Okay, this was strange. Why would my father have a statue belonging to Humphrey Bogart? Why would it appear here suddenly? If he bought it somewhere recently, wouldn’t he have shown it to us or told us about it? It wouldn’t have been like purchasing a new pair of shoes or a garden tool not worth a mention.
I looked at it, and there was a part of me that did not want to touch it, did not want to do what I did next, which was to pick it up and look underneath. I think I must have already had the sense that something was wrong, that this object had no place here. That the reasons it was here were bad reasons, ugly ones. But I was curious, too. And so I held the bottom of the statue up close so that I could read the words taped on a tiny note at the bottom of the statue. To Hugh Jenkins, it read. And to scotch on the rocks…Humphrey Bogart.
Humphrey Bogart! Jenkins. I felt something heavy and dark in my stomach, some whirling mix of questions and the dread of their answers. It was Brie’s statue. Something that had belonged to her father. So, why was it here? Maybe she had given it to Dad. A present. A going-away thing. A good-bye, something-to-remember-me-by thing. People did that, right?
But I had a stronger, whispered thought. One of those whispers that are less curtains fluttering in a breeze than lawn chairs being tossed across patios in a windstorm. I knew that Brie did not know my father had this. That Brie might never know my father had this.
I knew because I remembered another object in the room. A bust of a woman’s head that I had always found slightly eerie, made out of some kind of clay, with initials scratched into the base. A.R. I knew those initials. A.R., Abigail Renfrew.
Two things that belonged to women in his life. Was this a crazy thought? Was I nuts? That I thought there were maybe more things in this room that belonged to other people? Other women?
I did something else then, and I don’t even fully know why I did it. It was a hunch, if a hunch is ever just that. I lifted up other objects and looked underneath. A globe, no, nothing. A paperweight, just a paperweight. A book end shaped like an elephant. Nothing. I looked with growing unease. And then, there it was. Just like that. A name scratched in the bottom of a tall, brightly colored vase. Jane, age six, it said. And there, too, under the red tribal mask, the name Olivia Thornton. Written with blue ink on a piece of masking tape in handwriting I didn’t recognize. Under a mantel clock, its hands stopped at 3:30, one word, Elizabeth. I pulled the footstool to the mantel and lifted down the painting there. I got this when I met the artist in New York…. It was large and heavy, and I struggled with it. But there, tucked into the corner of the frame was a business card. Joelle Giofranco, it read. Costume design and alterations.
Inside, I felt as if something were falling and about to crash: He had taken something from every woman he’d been involved with. Isn’t that what he had done? It was too eerie and disturbing not to have an explanation, right? What was the truth here? I suddenly wanted that, no needed that, more than anything else. I felt my breath in my chest and my heart beat as if a thing had crashed and landed just there beside me. And, too, right then as my sister and father lay sleeping and I stood on a footstool with a painting in my hands, there was a softer, quieter realization: that the truth I wanted so badly was likely as hard and faceted as one of the diamonds Dad told us about—perfectly imperfect, formed somewhere deep within and existing there, until it was brought to the surface by volcanic eruptions and simple need.
Chapter Three
“Jesus, you scared me.” Grandma minimized the computer screen in a flash, whirled her fluffy-white-haired head around. She looked guilty. She put one veiny hand against her pink sweatshirt. “You almost gave me a heart attack. Don’t you know better than to do that to an old lady?”
Gram sat at a desk in our office/spare room, one of those spaces that collected everything that had nowhere else to go—Mom’s sewing machine, Aunt Annie’s weights, this huge “Leprechaun trap” glued to green Elmer’s-and-glitter cardboard that Sprout had made in the first grade for St. Patrick’s Day. I put my hands on Gram’s shoulders, kissed the top of her head. “I just needed to work on a paper. Film studies…‘Phantom of the Opera as an example of Classic Horror Cinema.’”
“eBay,” Gram said, tilting her head to the computer, which now held only the blue desktop with white clouds. “Don’t tell your mom. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like chefs. Adorable.” She looked at her wrist, but she wasn’t wearing a watch. “Ten more minutes until the bidding’s over. Can you come back?”
“Sure,” I said. She waited with her hands in her lap. Stared at me intently. “I’m going,” I said.
“It’s just I get nervous when the competition’s hot,” she said.
I tried to call Liv, but she didn’t pick up, and I left a message for Daniel to tell him I was thinking about him, because I felt guilty for not thinking about him. I went back into the office fifteen minutes later—Gram had left, so I settled into the chair. It had been five days since I had seen the names under the objects at Dad’s house, and for those five days I had felt oddly fragmented, as if a piece of my mind was constantly at work on something else. It was that sense you get after you’ve lost something—your car keys, say, and you’ve decided to give up looking for a while. You go on with other things, you make a sandwich, pour a glass of milk, but there’s still a part of you going, Maybe I left them in the pocket of my black jacket. Maybe I dropped them down between the couch cushions…. My mind was doing some kind of indistinct nagging that I didn’t want it to do, some off-duty work it could have been paid time and a half for.
I typed a few lines of my paper; listless, have-to lines, flat and uninspired lines. I looked up “1920 Horror Cinema” on the Web. I switched back to the mostly blank page I was working on, watched the cursor blink on-off, on-off. I swapped back to the Web. I typed “Jafarabad Brothers” into the search box. I was aware of the silver ring on the middle finger of my right hand, two arms that made a circle and held a heart, a ring my father had given me on my sixteenth birthday. I pushed enter and a list of results came up—newspaper articles, reviews of shows, interviews. I clicked one at random. Anoush Hourig began the troupe just out of college, when he needed money to fund a round-the-world sailing trip with a friend. The first show, at a campus dormitory, was so financially successful that the sailing trip was cancelled.
I knew this story. This was where Dad would joke that the audience was so sloshed that they started throwing things, and he and Uncle Mike had to run for their lives, empty-handed. Financially successful? Broke, I thought he’d said. I read on: “That the audience members were severely intoxicated helped with tips,” Hourig joked. “One guy threw his wallet at us…We walked out of there with more money than either of us had ever seen.”
This was what you did when you were a performer, I guessed. You acted out a good story. Maybe you’d change it a little, depending on who was in the audience. Dad on a sailing trip? We could barely get him on a ferry. He was afraid of boats, he said, a fear instilled in him by his mother, after his diamond-merchant father was nearly lost at sea. I guess the main thing was to give a good show. Dad could keep you right there, listening and laughing, and maybe you didn’t always think about exactly what he said until later. Maybe the details didn’t matter, because you were just so entertained. Or maybe I had just remembered the story wrong.
I looked at all the search results, all the entries. Pieces
of my father known and unknown. If I put my own name, Quinn Hoffman Hunt, in there, I know what I’d get. One entry, from the time I organized the food drive for Honor Society and it got written up in the Nine Mile Falls paper. One me, hundreds of hims. I felt the huge space between those numbers, the known and the unknown; I saw that space, and it looked like it stretched for miles.
MARY LOUISE HOFFMAN:
The first boy I ever liked was Sam Jaeger in the ninth grade. I should tell my girls about this. We had this class called Home Economics. Apparently there isn’t a Home Economics anymore—my daughter Quinn once got stuck in some elective called Life Skills, but it wasn’t the same. They balanced a checkbook, that kind of thing. But ours, you learned how to be a nice little housewife. The classroom even had all these mini-kitchens and sewing machines, and they taught us how to sew a pillow that looked like an animal and plan a meal that was varied in color and texture. We made a grilled-cheese sandwich using an iron, although I must say I never again made a grilled-cheese sandwich using an iron. You wrap it in aluminum foil; I still remember that. Anyway, boys who wanted to meet girls would take the class too, and Sam Jaeger was one of those. Now that I think about it, he was a perfect start to my romantic history, because he was a player. One of those guys who’s sexy already at, what, fourteen. The ones you pray will never cross the paths of your daughters. Not thin and short and awkward, but aware of his body and knowledgeable about the way eye contact can make you want someone before you realize who they even are.
We had to plan and cook a breakfast in our group, which included Sam Jaeger and Renee Harding and Wendy Sylvester. Funny, girls named Wendy also sort of disappeared, same as Home Ec, haven’t they? Anyway, who knows why, maybe because I was the only one with breasts, but Sam Jaeger decided to fix me with his long dark gaze of wanting. I didn’t stop to ask myself if I wanted him back, because it was enough to have someone focus his desire on me. Me, who was so ordinarily unnoticed. I was sure those long looks were going to save me from my drab existence. Being saved—always a big romantic motivation. When you’re young, you hope he’ll save you with his excitement or his way out, and then, later, you hope he’ll save you with his…Well, those things still, but maybe too you hope he’ll save you with his money or his tool box, or his extra set of hands with your kids. You can want the saving more than you want the actual person.