by Lily King
I stare at her face. Its flesh is soft and powdery, but no more lined or weathered than the other Miss Vance’s. They couldn’t be more than a few years apart in age. They fuss about the tea together, asking me how I take it—strong, weak, or in between; milk, lemon, lump sugar, or sifted—and then argue pleasantly about the amounts put in and their effects on the hue of the tea. “It’s too pale now!” “It’s just right, just right for me,” the plumper Miss Vance reassures her.
I feel like a character who has stumbled into another world where things are slightly creepy but also beautiful and soothing. The tall flowers in the garden cast long shadows on the grass and everything that is not shadow is gold in the low late-afternoon sun. If they asked me to stay the night, I would.
After he’s finished a second saucer of tea and cookie, Major lays his head in tall Miss Vance’s lap. She bends her head over the dog and strokes him for a long time, then she straightens up to look at me. “I understand if you want to take him back.” She begins the sentence loudly but finishes in a tremble.
“Oh, no. Oh, no.” I shake my head furiously. “I just wanted to visit, to make sure he was really here. I wasn’t very attached to him.”
“Oh,” she says sadly.
“I’d only had him for a few days. I knew even when we got him that I was going to be leaving, but my father didn’t.”
“That sounds like an awfully big secret for one little girl to carry around.”
I’m careful not to nod. I don’t want them to think I feel sorry for myself or anything, which is what Garvey always teases me about. Is widdew Daywie feewing oh so sowwy fo’ hewsewf again? My throat aches, and I wonder if I’m coming down with something.
A warm hand clutches mine. “Father, I think a game of Parcheesi would do us all a world of good.”
On Saturday my father and Mrs. Tabor have friends over for lunch. Some of the guests are old friends of my father’s, people I’ve seen in our living room for years, and some are Mrs. Tabor’s friends, a few married couples and a lot of divorcées like her. The two groups don’t mingle much. Mrs. Tabor is younger than my father; her male friends look like they come from Garvey’s generation with their shoulder-length hair and thick sideburns, and the women wear looser clothes in bolder colors than the wives of my father’s friends in their stiff pastel dresses.
Patrick and I mix the Bloody Marys at a table we’ve set up on the lawn. Elyse turned five this week and rides her new red bike with training wheels around the edge of the pool. By three, no one has had lunch and the adult faces are red and screaming at each other. At least that’s what it sounds like to me.
“What do you mean you’re giving up paddle! Gil, did you hear this?”
“Did I hear what?”
“Your wife. She’s giving up paddle this winter to volunteer at the loony bin.”
“Precisely where she belongs!”
Mr. Porters goes running into the poolhouse and comes out with an umbrella. Then he leaps off the diving board in his clothes, the umbrella open above him like Mary Poppins.
Everyone screams and hoots. A man I don’t know jumps in with a set of golf clubs. More shouting. Wives towel off the clubs and the leather bag and spread everything on the grass to dry. The sun slips down farther and they switch to gin-and-tonics and martinis. Mrs. Tabor sends me inside to make up a platter of cheese and crackers, and Patrick is sent downtown on his bike for more ice. When I come out, I see Elyse ride her new bike straight into the pool. I drop the platter on the grass and run.
“Elyse went in the pool!” I scream, but my voice is swallowed by the boom of the adults’ talk.
I dive in. She’s still on the bike at the bottom, tilted toward the drain. I grab her, expecting her to come free easily. But she’s clutching the handlebars, and though everything is lighter underwater I can’t lift the two at once. I tug at her hard but she’s so stubborn, even underwater, even when she doesn’t know how to swim, and will not let go of her new bicycle. Then the water shudders with a muffled crash and the man who jumped in with the golf clubs is lifting me, Elyse, and her bike to the surface.
Elyse doesn’t need CPR. Her lips are blue, but her face is bright red and she comes up hollering about her bike being wet and ruined.
“Let me take you to your mommy,” the man says to her once we’re all out and dripping on the cement. Mrs. Tabor has her back to the pool, waving an arm in the air, shouting out a story.
“I don’t want my mommy. I want to dry off my goddamn bike!”
I can’t catch my breath but I look at him gratefully and he touches the top of my head before he drips off and blends back in with the crowd.
Sunday is quieter. By noon it has begun to rain. Mallory comes over and we make prank calls in the kitchen. Patrick is really good at voices.
“Is John Wall there?” he asks, becoming a man calling on business. “Then is his wife Susie there?” He smiles at us, then takes the smile right out of his voice when he speaks again. “Well, aren’t there any Walls there?” He tilts the phone away from his ear and we can hear the lady saying no. Patrick switches back to his regular kid voice. “Then what’s holding up your house, lady?”
We always save the best for last. Patrick gets out his stop watch and we each pick a number in the phone book. The minute the person answers, the timing starts. The goal is to keep your person on the line as long as possible. My trick is to always go for the old-sounding names, Lillian or Evelyn or Elijah. Old people are much more trusting and have time to talk. My record is twenty-five minutes. No one has been able to touch it.
Today Mallory goes first. She pretends to be a little girl who burnt herself. “It hurts,” she says. “Mommy isn’t here. She ran away. With the garbageman.” Patrick and I are dying. “They live at the dump now. I don’t like to visit.” And then she slams the phone down fast. “He said he was going to call the police.”
The phone rings beneath her hand and we jump and crack up but don’t dare answer it. It rings five, then six times. Finally I realize it could be about my mother: Car accident. Hospital. I pick it up. There is a long pause at the other end; then a woman asks for Mrs. Tabor. “I wouldn’t have called here,” she adds, “but it’s important.” I recognize the voice but can’t place it.
“Who is it?” Patrick and Mallory whisper as I set down the receiver.
I shrug. “Where’s your mom?”
He points to the den. But the rest of the downstairs is empty. I call up the stairs and think I hear something. I go up. My father’s door is slightly ajar and I can hear the TV.
I knock and no one answers. “Mrs. Tabor?” I say as I poke my head through.
I can’t make sense of what I see except their faces, which turn toward the door in shock and then fury.
“Get the fuck out!” my father hollers at me, and when I don’t move instantly Mrs. Tabor echoes him: “Get the fuck out of this room, Day-lee!”
I’m down the stairs and back in the kitchen before I even know I’ve moved away from their door, before I even register what I saw: my father naked on his hands and knees on the bed, his shoulders between Mrs. Tabor’s spread legs, licking her red vagina like a beast bent over its kill.
“She’s busy right now,” I hear myself say into the mouthpiece.
The woman lets out a sigh. “Will you just tell her to call me about the orange slices for the game on Wednesday?”
“Okay.” My voice wobbles. Patrick and Mallory are staring at me. I don’t want to get off the phone and have to explain.
“Daley, I’m so sorry about your parents. It must be very hard for you.”
“Yeah.” It’s more a breath than a word.
“You can always come talk to me if you want. Anytime. My door is open.”
I still have no idea who she is.
My father, bent over, head low between his shoulders, nothing more than an animal. I didn’t know about that, I want to tell her. I never knew about that.
That night my father and I begin a r
itual that will last until I get my driver’s license. After Mrs. Tabor feeds us, I put my book bag and my suitcase by the back door. My father makes a drink. I wait. He makes another. He snaps at Patrick to turn down the radio. He tells Frank a joke about a black couple going to a costume ball. The punch line is the word fudgsicle. I’ve heard it before. He glances at the clock. I glance at the clock. I play solitaire on the kitchen floor. Elyse kicks all my cards and I tell her to put them back and Mrs. Tabor tells me to pick on someone my own size. Mr. Seeley calls to say the dogs are barking so loud he can’t hear himself think. My father is polite on the phone, then slams it down and marches around the room swearing. My cards get kicked again. He makes another drink. I need to go home and start my homework. The cuckoo clock chirps eight times.
“I’m putting the steaks on now,” Mrs. Tabor says to him, which is his cue.
He puts down his drink and moves slowly to the drawer across the room where he keeps his checkbook. It’s a blue binder and he turns the pages slowly. With the ballpoint pen he keeps in it, he writes out the check for my mother. He folds it in half and hands it to me. He looks at me like I’m draining the blood from his veins.
He doesn’t speak much on the short ride to Water Street. We pull into the farthest spot from my mother’s car. He bought that car for her birthday last year. He doesn’t cut the engine or walk me to the door. He will never once in seven years get out of the car, as if the pavement around my mother’s apartment is radioactive. He keeps his fists clenched on the steering wheel as I kiss him. I get my suitcase out of the back, call out a last goodbye, and walk away. He has driven off before I reach the door.
My mother has put big pots of plants on the doorstep, and there is a window box outside my bedroom. All the lights are on, even in my room. The door is unlocked, the air in the apartment warm and moist. I find my mother in the kitchen, boiling up a packet of chipped beef. She is in a new bathrobe, her hair wet from a shower. The bathrobe is white with a striped sash tied tight to one side. Her waist is tiny. There’s an ashtray drying on the dishrack, though my mother doesn’t smoke.
She hugs me and she feels small in my arms. Her kiss on my cheek is greasy. “How was it?”
The demolished rose garden, Elyse at the bottom of the pool, Dad feeding between Mrs. Tabor’s legs—it all blurs into a feeling that seems to have no name. “I’m tired.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes.”
“Homework?”
“Tons.”
“It’s nearly eight-thirty.”
“I know.”
“Daley, you’re going to have to—”
“I can’t do homework over there.”
“Then come home earlier.”
“I can’t.”
“Then call me and I’ll come get you.”
“No!” The idea of my mother driving that car into the driveway of my father’s house, where she lived for nineteen years, horrifies me.
She smooths out my forehead. “Don’t make that face. You’ll get wrinkles.”
I hand her the check and she unfolds it, then chucks it on the counter.
“It’s fifty less than he owes me.” Her mouth presses into a straight line.
She goes to her desk, writes a short note that begins Gardiner—in her big round letters. When she is done, she rereads and underlines several words, including the word lawyer. Then she slides it into an envelope, puts a stamp on it, and shoves it into her purse on a chair by the door. I don’t need to know all the words now—I’ll hear all about it next weekend. Next weekend my father will be waving it around like a flag.
“Come sit with me while I eat. Then you can start your homework.”
We sit at the shiny dining room table. I hate chipped beef and the smell of chipped beef. It looks like dog food mixed with phlegm. Bulbs of steam rise from her plate but she doesn’t blow on the food and doesn’t seem to get scalded as she eats. Her mood has shifted since the check. My mood is the same—a burnt-out flatness that I know bothers her. My answers to her questions are short and unimaginative. I don’t want to be sitting there watching the chipped beef go into her mouth but I don’t want to do my homework or go to sleep or watch TV. There’s nothing I want to do.
“I saw A Chorus Line this weekend. I really want to take you.”
“You saw it already? With who?”
“My friend Martin and his son.”
Martin. There it was, just like my brother said.
“You said you’d take me.”
“I want to. I just said that.”
“No, you said you’d just seen it.”
“And that I’d like to take you.”
“But you already saw it. And plays are expensive. You’re always telling me that.”
“Daley.”
“I can’t believe you saw it with somebody else’s kid.”
I sit back in the chair and cross my arms over my chest.
My mother laughs. “You’re acting a little bit like a two-year-old right now.”
Before I know it, the chipped beef smashes against the wall. My mother is still holding her fork and knife. Her voice is very very quiet. “Leave this room right now. I do not want to see you until morning. Any privileges you had are gone.”
I stand up and start down the hallway.
“I swear, Daley Amory, you are like a wild animal every time you come home from your father’s,” she says, before I slam my door on her.
6
On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, Garvey comes home from college. A friend drops him off. I hear him shut a car door and shout something. Then he is there in our apartment for the first time, his long lanky body making everything—the sideboard, the desk, the walls—seem smaller. He is growing a sparse rust-colored beard, nothing like the hair on his head, which is thick and dirty blond. His eyes are small chips of blue in murky water. He smells like the sleeping bags in the shed on Myrtle Street. I breathe him in. I cannot get enough of it. I have missed him so much more than I knew. He has to peel me off of him to introduce himself to Pauline, my babysitter. He makes a point of shaking her hand, even though she’s across the room and has to take off the oven mitt for the macaroni she’s just about to take out of the oven.
“So you’re taking care of the pipsqueak.”
“We take care of each other.” She smiles at me. I hear her accent—each otha—more distinctly with Garvey in the room. She comes every day after school until my mother gets home at seven-thirty, and we laugh a lot. At first I didn’t understand why we couldn’t have Nora. She’d moved in with her sister in Lynn and came sometimes to take me out to Friendly’s and didn’t seem to be working at all, but my mother thought I should have someone younger, and less expensive. Pauline is in tenth grade and her boobs are growing so fast they pop the buttons off her shirt. We’re always finding buttons and cracking up. I see my brother taking all this in.
We eat the macaroni on the sofa. Garvey drills Pauline with questions: where does she live, what’s that neighborhood like, does she have siblings, did her parents grow up here, has she done much traveling, where would she like to go most? Maybe we’ll all take a trip there, to California, one day, he concludes.
And then Mom comes home and Pauline leaves.
“Wow,” my brother says, smoothing down the back of his hair. “Va va voom.”
“She’s barely fifteen,” my mother says.
“She’s not going to be able to balance on two feet if she grows any bigger.”
“She’ll manage just fine.” My mother hangs up her coat and gives my brother another hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you,” she says through gritted teeth. She always grits her teeth when she’s feeling affection.
“It’s good to be here. Nice pad, Ma.” He swings his head around. “You got some serious loot from the big house.”
My mother eats the rest of my macaroni standing up. We’re all still standing up. I’m not sure why.
“How’s it going there?” she asks
him.
“Oh, fair to middling.”
“Yeah?” Meaning she wants to hear more.
“I’ve been in school so long.”
“Garvey.”
“I’m just saying. I was in boarding school for four years before this. Everyone else runs around like they’ve been let out of a cage, and I feel like it’s just another cage. A less interesting cage, actually.”
“Three and a half more years. That’s all. Then it’s over forever.”
“Yeah.” He slumps to the sofa and puts his boots up on the coffee table. Mom doesn’t tell him to take them off. He pulls out a new pack of cigarettes, smashes both ends into his palm a couple of times, unwraps the cellophane, then slides one out and lights it. “Then I get to go out and find my perfect career that will swallow up the rest of my promising life.” He blows out a long stream of smoke. “It all may be quite moot. I wasn’t able to register this week for next semester’s classes. Dad’s a little late on the payments, it turns out.”
My mother sits down on the couch beside him. “You’re joking, right?”
“I am not joking.”
“You need to talk to him about that. Tomorrow.”
Garvey taps the ashes onto his jeans and rubs them in. My mother brings him an ashtray but he doesn’t use it. “I don’t need his money.”
“Garvey, you need this degree.”
“I can pay for it myself. Brian Foley pays his own way. He works in the library I think. I visited him a few weeks ago.”
“UMass only costs three hundred dollars a year. Of course he can work it off. Harvard is several thousand.”
“So I’ll go to UMass. Harvard is a bunch of self-inflated morons. They all walk around in tuxes on the weekend. I’m not kidding. I met this bartender last weekend and he’s starting a moving company, furniture and crap, and he asked me to do some jobs for him. Might have to miss a few classes, but it’s good money.”
“Please talk to your father.”
“No.”
“I’m worried now.”
“I’m worried too.”