by Lily King
Catherine finally notices that her boobs are hanging out of her robe and pulls it tighter. “We leave tomorrow, Daley. Could you just keep your trap shut until we drop you off at Water Street?”
The blond boy is at the pool, hanging his feet in at the deep end, talking to three sisters from Wisconsin who arrived yesterday. They all look at me as I go down the shallow end steps, then he says something and they all burst out laughing. I go under quickly. They are still laughing when I come back up. The youngest girl swims toward me.
“Is your name Prudence?” she asks, and the others behind her crack up again.
“Go to hell,” I say, before I register how young she is, not much older than Elyse. Her eyes widen and fill with tears. She didn’t know what she was asking, and I feel terrible.
I skip lunch and spend the afternoon in the cottage alone. I don’t care if my heart starts to pound. I’m not scared of that anymore. I look at the phone and think about calling my mother at work, but there’s the disapproving Jean to get past and I know I won’t be able to speak anyway. I’ll just cry when I hear her voice and she’ll get worried that something is really wrong. Or I’ll yell at her for telling me he was an alcoholic in the first place.
Frank leans in the doorway of my room, clucking. “Namin’ the names.”
“What?”
“Callin’ spades spades.”
He’s wasted. I’ve seen him high, but not like this.
“Puttin’ on the labels. Big white and red Campbell’s soup labels. Splat. Right on the ‘rents. You should have seen them wriggling under the pin. Fucking eels. Someday we’ll cut off their heads and their tails and see if anything grows back.” He undoes the button on his jeans and starts unzipping his fly and I’m just about to slam the door on him when he rolls around the doorjamb and heads for the bathroom.
In the taxi we watch the sun seep up over the water. It is still dark on the roads, but the water and the sky just above it are starting to glow. My father is up front, talking to the driver, who is a black man about his age. My father is turned toward him, fully awake. “Holy smokes, you can’t beat that!” he’s saying, and the driver is laughing. My father is wearing bright red cotton pants, a white oxford shirt, and blue blazer. His smell of Barbasol, Right Guard, and Old Spice fills the van. It is his morning smell, the smell that obliterates the A-1-cigarette-vodka smell of the night before. He is close-shaven, squeaky clean. We all admire him. We cannot help it.
The airport doesn’t have walls, just a long red roof and palm trees on all sides. The driver unloads our bags onto a long cart. My father hands him a thick wad of money and the driver smiles and pats my father on the arm. My father pats him back and tells him to take care of himself and his family. The man cannot seem to take his eyes off my father and stands there by the side of his car long after my father has moved away.
Beneath the roof it is chaotic, with one checkin counter open and about fifty families trying to leave the island. We stand in the same place for a long time. We are hungry and it is starting to get hot. Our sunburns begin to throb beneath the stiff New England clothes we have not worn in thirteen days.
Patrick goes to sit on Frank’s duffel bag and Frank swats him hard.
“Sit on your own fucking suitcase,” he says.
Catherine’s head snaps around and she fixes her meanest stare on Frank. “Chh,” she says, spraying my arm with spit.
There are several boys my age in line but I do not look at them. I worry the blond boy is here somewhere or is about to arrive. I look down at my suitcase. It’s my mother’s old blue suitcase. I remember her taking it when she went on trips with my father, and then, when they returned, there would be presents nestled in it for me: an enameled ring from Venice, a cloth doll from Acapulco. I drape my parka over it, just as I did on the way down, hoping my father will not recognize it.
Another line opens up, then another, and we are through— our bags tagged and tossed down a chute—and sent to security. It’s not like regular American security with one guy taking your ticket and asking you to step through the metal detector. Here there are many men in uniform with big gold badges and dogs on complicated leashes, dogs not panting in the heat but eyeing us seriously.
One of them twitches and the other two bristle in response. Their ears lift and their wet black noses flare and tremble. Then they are all barking at once, showing their long yellow teeth, straining on their leads, yanking the men who hold them across the brick paving to Frank. The dogs surround him. The rest of us watch from the other side of the metal detector. Frank and his duffel are taken out of line immediately and led away. The dogs follow, their barking drowning out all other sounds except one loud brief, “Mom!” before Frank is shoved around a corner and disappears.
Catherine stands with her hand over her mouth. On the loudspeaker our flight to Miami is announced.
“I’m getting on that fucking plane no matter what happens, you hear me?”
Catherine nods her head slowly.
“This is not my fault. I have nothing to do with this. Nothing.” My father looks down the corridor and laughs his disgusted laugh. “Jesus Christmas. What kind of idiot would—”
“Shut up.” Her voice scrapes viciously, like she learned it from my father.
“You,” he says quietly, sifting through the pile of tickets he is holding with shaking fingers, “have a nice trip home.” He hands her four tickets. “C’mon, Daley. I’m getting you out of here.”
We follow the flow of people out across the tarmac, up the flight of metal stairs, and inside the small plane.
My father stops halfway down the small aisle and points to two seats on the right. “Here we go.”
“You can have the window,” I tell him.
“You take it.” He is trying to be nice but he looks like he wants to lift me up and shove me in the seat.
I slip in and buckle up.
My father pushes the stewardess button next to the light above us, but she is busy directing traffic up front and doesn’t come. He pulls down the tray even though he’s not supposed to. He puts his hands on the tray and wipes it with his palms in wide sweeps. The backs of his hands are wide and brown, with veins bulging up, crisscrossed around the fine bones that connect to his fingers. I remember what it feels like to hold his hand, something I always did— crossing streets, walking through stores, driving in the car—but now never do. And then to my surprise he reaches down and takes my right hand in his. It is as warm and large as I remember.
“We’s going to be okay,” he says, and pushes the button again.
Nearly an hour later, after there has been an announcement about mechanical difficulties, after the stewardess has brought me a Coke and my father three tiny bottles, two of vodka, one of vermouth, Elyse comes running down the aisle.
“Gardie!” she says, and climbs carefully into my father’s lap without knocking the tray with the bottles on it. I’ve never heard her call him that before—I’ve never heard anyone ever call him that.
“Hello, little peanut,” he says, and pushes some hair back into her headband.
Catherine and Patrick appear at the front of the plane and look down the aisle nervously until they see us. Patrick’s face relaxes immediately and he nudges his mother toward us. Despite all the sun she’s gotten, her skin has gone sallow, dark gray beneath the eyes. She takes the seat across the aisle from my father but does not look at him. Elyse climbs off my father and takes the window seat next to her mother, and Catherine fusses with their seatbelts much longer than necessary. Patrick sits in front of me and I see his eye peering through the crack in the seat. I stick my finger in and touch his cheek. “Ow,” he says and we laugh. And then Frank slumps into the seat beside Patrick, rattling everything on my father’s tray. My father reaches out to steady the bottles, then lifts the plastic cup, still half full, and hands it to Catherine.
“I bet you could use this even more than me.”
Catherine snorts a laugh and takes the dri
nk. Then she reaches for my father’s hand.
“Big pussy,” she says.
“Little pussy,” he says.
“What happened?” I whisper to Patrick when we are in the air.
“They couldn’t find anything. They made him strip twice, they sent his clothes through this machine, the dogs were going wild, but they couldn’t find a thing.”
I peer through the crack at Frank. An unwashed, unbrushed clump of hair covers one eye. The other is shut. The skin of his face is blighted with zits and the scars from zits. His thin lips are bunched tight. Even in sleep, he looks like he’s scheming something.
I’ve saved most of my last book for the two flights home. It’s by Edith Wharton. Paul gave it to me for Christmas. He said it was just the beginning of the edification of Daley Amory. I’d had to sneak off and look up the word edification. When I get home from St. Thomas, my mother will tell me that Paul has asked her to marry him.
I pull out the book. When Catherine notices she elbows my father and points, and my father mutters, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph— another goddamn book.”
But I don’t care. Archer has just sent the Countess Olenska the yellow roses, and my father and Catherine’s world is already slipping away.
II
9
I didn’t want a party, but Jonathan insisted.
“Just let people be happy for you,” he said. And now he’s created my favorite kind of evening: our closest friends, his homemade $3 spaghetti sauce, and a round of Oh Hell before dinner. It’s June in Michigan. All the windows in the apartment are open. Bugs thrum and snap at the screens. There’s wine, but not enough for anyone to get drunk.
At dinner we end up counting how many of us have lost a parent. Out of the seven of us, five parents are already dead. Dan’s date, an earnest undergrad in shorts and a baseball cap, asks me how my mother died. Normally I just say she was hit by a car, but tonight—maybe because I’m leaving, maybe because she seems so young and doe-eyed—I tell her about the awful days that followed, how my father didn’t even come to the funeral. I don’t talk about my father much anymore, and I see him once a year at most, but I can feel a certain charge begin to run through me.
“He never called me or my brother to say he was sorry our mother had died,” I tell her. “Never came by. Never wrote a note. We were at her place—a mile away from his house—for a week and we never heard from him. To this day he’s never even mentioned her death to me.”
“Maybe it’s too painful for him.” Her name is Janine, I think. A psych major.
“They split up when I was eleven. They hated each other.”
“Still. Unresolved relationships can be the hardest to grieve.”
I look at her hard because she should know this if she’s going to be a shrink someday. “Some people are just assholes.”
She looks ready to argue the point, but something behind me catches her eye and her expression is forced into a smile. It’s Julie, coming into the room with a cake. Jonathan, behind her with three boxes of ice cream, starts singing, “Happy Berkeley to You,” and everyone else catches on and I try to wave them silent but they just get louder. I’m not sure I’m done complaining about my father.
Julie sets a banana cake, my very favorite dessert, in front of me. She’s decorated it with plastic palm trees and people on surfboards.
I hug her and she whispers, “I can’t believe you’re leaving me in this hellhole.”
I laugh, because I’m not. She landed a job at the University of New Mexico and is moving to Albuquerque in two weeks.
Jonathan wraps his arms around me from behind, kissing the back of my neck as I cut the cake. “Can you make them all leave now?” he says in my ear. “We only have a few more hours together.”
“This was your idea, Magoo.” He is nearly a foot taller than me and I can feel him pressing against the base of my spine. “Get ahold of yourself.”
We aren’t going to be separated for long. He’ll come out to California as soon as he finishes teaching the first summer session next week. I still can’t quite believe he’s coming with me. At the last minute Jonathan Fleury, who, as Dan likes to say, planned his bowel movements three years in advance, took the job at San Francisco State and turned down the one at Temple. Now it’s up to me to screw the whole thing up.
“You’re not going to screw it up,” Julie said a few days ago.
“How are you so sure?”
“Because it’s Jonathan. He won’t let you. He’ll be eight steps ahead of you.”
“You’re right. He will.” It felt a little suffocating, actually, when she put it like that.
When everyone has a piece of cake, Dan lifts his glass in my direction. “Here’s to Daley,” he says, “who soundly rejected me five long years ago in the middle of our first date.”
“Second,” I say.
Dan lowers his wine. “What was the first?”
“Coffeehouse.”
“Oh. Right.” He raises the glass again, resumes his stentorian tone. “All because my car wouldn’t start.”
“Not because your car wouldn’t start. Because you started pounding on the steering wheel and screaming fuck fuck fuck about fifty times.”
“I was trying to impress you with my manly bestiality.”
“Beastliness. Bestiality might have impressed me. Why is it that writers have such a lack of precision when it comes to the English language?”
“By the way, can you shut up? I’m actually leading up to saying something nice about you, so stop heckling me.”
“It’s so hard. You remind me too much of my brother.”
“So you have said. Many times. Just what a rejected suitor wants to hear. Anyway, despite your strange and inexplicable impulses”— he looks over at Jonathan, who grins at me; Dan introduced us: by accident, he always insists—”you have been a comrade to me through dark times and light, and I will miss you more than I will ever let on.”
Dan reaches across the table to hug me. His BO is as strong as always, and the grass smell of his hair brings back that first date when he kissed me in the middle of a conversation about Saul Bellow and my stomach spun for days at the memory—until the second date, when I had to get out of the broken-down car and walk away.
Julie clears her throat dramatically. Since Mallory, she’s the closest thing I’ve had to a sister. We’ve shared an apartment for four years. Even the way she holds up her glass now, crooked, as if she doesn’t care if it spills a little, is familiar to me. “I think we all know that Daley’s name will soon be in textbooks, so this may be our last evening with her as a humble mortal. Anthropology professors at Berkeley rarely fade away.”
“But they do get washed away,” Dan said. Last year one of them jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.
“She’ll have Jonathan to hold her back.” Julie looks down into her glass. The sentimental part is coming. “I just want to say how impossibly proud I am of you, Daley. You’ve been working toward this moment from the day I met you. And here it is.” Her big smile rearranges everything else on her face. Even her hair shifts. She has the most amazing ability to reveal her emotions without embarrassment. She cried when I got the call from Berkeley about the job. I’d never seen anyone actually cry for joy in real life. And there Julie was, crying for mine. “I wish you, as my father used to say to me every night”—her smile twists suddenly and her voice frays—”the sun, the moon, and the stars. You deserve them all.” I glance at Jonathan then. I can’t help it. We have a joke about how often Julie mentions her father. But he won’t meet my eye. He probably doesn’t think we should enjoy an inside joke about Julie at this moment.
Nico says he will miss eavesdropping on my conferences. “You wouldn’t believe the things her students tell her. It’s like sharing an office with Sigmund Freud.” He’s not comfortable speaking to a group, even this small group around Jonathan’s table. It makes me wonder how he gets through his lecture classes. “But the real testament to your character, Daley
, is that you got the best job of all of us and nobody even resents you for it.”
“I do,” Jonathan and Dan say at the same time.
Kira says she wishes me the best but will not raise a glass because of the ritual’s patriarchal roots. The concept of toasting, she explains, evolved from the custom of flavoring drinks with spiced toast, and when the toast ran out, she says, a woman’s name would be called out to flavor the drink. “Yet another example of men attempting to consume women,” she says. Dan pretends to slit his wrists with the cake knife, which he often does around Kira.
When it’s Jonathan’s turn, the room gets quiet. People tend to listen to Jonathan a little more closely. When I accused him once of having this effect, he said that white people in academia always have to pretend they’re listening to the black man. He pulls a piece of paper out of his back pocket, glances at it in silence, then stuffs it back. He turns to me and speaks quietly. “I wrote down some things. I even had a quote by Bronislaw Malinowski for you.” He laughs. “But what I really want to say is that I just feel so glad that, that somehow,” he rubs his finger on the tablecloth, “you showed up in my life. I didn’t expect that. As you know.” He smiles. He tips his glass over to tap mine. “Here’s to you and me and our unanticipated future.” I’m surprised by the emotion in his voice. He’s usually so controlled in public. I put my arm around his neck and he pulls me tight against him. I feel how fast his heart is beating and I think, briefly, the smallest pulse of a fear, that I am not worthy of that heart.
It’s true that Dan introduced us by accident. Nadine Gordimer came to campus for a reading last fall, and there was a reception afterward at the chancellor’s house. It was crowded, everyone hoping for a closer look at the writer, who was tucked away in some alcove at the back. Dan and I were at the buffet table when he saw a woman he was interested in across the room.
“We gotta get over there,” he said, and yanked me smack into Jonathan. A few cubes of cheese from my plate bounced off his shirt.