by Lily King
But the circumstances are different now. The last time I was here my dissertation was over two thousand pages of notes in a milk crate in the back of my car and I’d just had a bad breakup. But I am beyond all that uncertainty now. Almost miraculously, I think as I walk up the slight incline of Goodale’s parking lot to the glass doors, I have come back to Ashing whole.
It’s been at least a decade since I’ve entered this store and seen Mrs. Goodale glance up in irritation, as if she needed another customer like she needed a hole in her head. I don’t bear much resemblance to my child self: my hair has grown down my back, my skinny frame has filled out a bit, and the defensive grimace I wear in all the old photos is gone. I planned to be a spy in the aisles, listening for any talk of my father and Catherine, for where she might be and if there is any hope of her coming back. But Mrs. Goodale lifts her head and says, without a moment’s pause, “Daley Amory, back from beyond the beyond.”
It’s a bit like being announced by a footman at the entryway of a ball. Her proclamation carries straight back to meats then ricochets across to frozen foods and dairy. Fortunately the store is nearly empty. There’s only my sixth-grade teacher perusing the tomatoes, awful hard pale balls grouped in threes on green Styrofoam trays and wrapped in thick cellophane. Her scowl has deepened, though I think she’s trying to smile at me now. I see she isn’t as old as I once thought. She doesn’t look more than sixty now. She didn’t like me much. I had her the first year we lived on Water Street, the first year of my parents’ divorce. She called me a sullen little girl in the report card that came home at Christmastime. Garvey taunted me about it. He even called me Sully for a while. When, at the end of that year, I got a perfect score on my math exam, she called it a fluke.
I slip into the narrow vegetable aisle and stand beside her, closer than I normally get to people, especially people I don’t like. “Hello, Miss Perth.” I’m not much taller than she is but I have on my favorite shoes, black lace-ups with a chunky heel, and feel like I’m towering over her.
She startles like a cat and steps back. “Oh, it’s you,” she says, not remembering my name. “Gardiner’s sister.”
That reminds me of another thing she said, a few weeks after school had started in the fall: “Well, you’re nothing like your delightful brother, are you?”
“And what are you doing with yourself these days?” She says these days as if she doesn’t approve of the expression but has forgotten how to better articulate the time frame.
I pause. I want to brag, prove to her that I was no fluke in the end, but I want to do it with humility.
“A bit at loose ends, it seems,” she says.
“Not really.” I laugh, but an explanation is frozen in my throat. Defending myself has never been one of my strengths.
“Daley?” A large woman in a navy dress hurries up to me from the back of the store. “God, it is you! You hot shit. Look at you in your shiny shoes!” She envelops me sideways, my shoulder disappearing between her enormous breasts. “I can’t wait to tell Neal you’re home.” This is Mrs. Caffrey. Since I’ve been back I’ve forgotten to remember Neal Caffrey. Please don’t, I think. Please don’t mention my name to Neal.
“He’s here, you know. I mean he lives here. He has a shop.” She points back toward the middle of town. Neal Caffrey runs a shop in Ashing? He won all those subject prizes at graduation in eighth grade, and the big silver cup for excellence in scholarship, athletics, and citizenship. The Renaissance Cup. “He’d love to see you.” She glances at my left ring finger, finds it bare, and gushes on. “I think the two of you would really hit it off.”
“I’m only here for another day. I’m leaving for California on Sunday morning. I’m a professor at Berkeley.” It’s the first time I’ve ever said it like that, in the present tense. I speak loudly, but Miss Perth has turned the corner.
“Oh.” Mrs. Caffrey looks gravely disappointed. She kicks an unpacked box of leeks on the floor. “He’ll never meet anyone in this town. Everyone interesting leaves. Only the screwups hang around.”
This is as much as I’ve ever spoken to Neal’s mother. I remember her in the carpool line. She’d always be out of the car, leaning into someone else’s window, then leaning back out, howling. She had that large person’s jolliness and warmth. Neal didn’t inherit that. By eighth grade he’d become more of a brooder. A popular brooder, though. He had his pick of girls. I never did speak to him after that summer. He didn’t notice. He thought I was concave. That’s what he told Stacy Miller in seventh grade, that I was so flat-chested I was concave. After eighth grade he went on to Exeter while I stayed at the academy.
Someone comes in the store behind us—I feel the short burst of warmer air—and bypasses the vegetable section. I recognize, just from the dimmest shape at the periphery of my vision, Catherine’s long gait.
“So tell me what exactly you’re a professor of, smarty pants,” Mrs. Caffrey asks, her good humor returned to her.
“I have to run. I’m so sorry.”
“Stop by Neal’s shop on the way home! It’s the one with the lighthouse on the sign.”
I duck down the middle aisle where I saw Catherine go, but it’s empty. At the back of the store, Brad Goodale is behind the meat counter, just where I left him in the early eighties. He’s slicing up something for someone I don’t recognize. In the last aisle there are two men my age, studying the yogurt. I rush past them to the front and see that one has his finger hooked in the other’s belt loop. Despite my frenzy I smile, happy that change has come even to Ashing. I reach the register just in time to see the thick dark hair, more cropped than I remember, beyond the door, turning left into the parking lot. I think of chasing her but I don’t think desperation will help my case. And I feel nothing but desperate at this moment.
“Guess she forgot her list,” Mrs. Goodale says as she rings up Miss Perth’s small batch of groceries.
I stare out the plate glass, breathing heavily, still struggling with indecision. I should go stop her before she leaves the parking lot. But is she, in the end, good for him? Wouldn’t he be better off with someone more disciplined? But without someone he may simply self-destruct. I move to the door. And then I see her car, the little burgundy BMW, and on the back a new bumper sticker that says: I’D RATHER BE DIVORCED.”
My father is watching the news in the den. It’s strange to see him back in that room with his ashtray and his drink, as if he never left it for the sunroom and all those years with Catherine. A couch has replaced the recliners that replaced the couch my mother took to Water Street. The room looks almost back to normal, though the slipcovers are made of a nubby wool, something my mother wouldn’t have chosen. He bends his head down to watch the television, his eyes straining up just beneath their hoods. A woman is discussing affirmative action on some courthouse steps. She speaks articulately, quickly, trying to get the most words into her few seconds of time on national TV.
“Why are black people always talking about black people?” my father says in his disgusting version of an African American accent, though the woman speaking has the regionless accent of a newscaster. “Have you noticed that?”
“Because in this country they are defined by their skin color, and they’ve had to fight for every basic right that we get automatically by being born white.”
“Fight for their rights? This woman is fighting for inequality. This woman wants a black C student to be chosen over a straight-A student. She’s fighting for their right to cheat.”
My retort constructs itself swiftly. I’ve got a lot of ammo now on this question, yet none of my knowledge will help me win a fight with my father. He will cling to his position even when all reason fails him; he will cling to it as if it’s his life and not his opinion that is in peril. He will get vicious and personal, and every negative thing he ever felt about me will pour out of his mouth. Ridding my father of his racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric would take a long time. It would be a whole reeducation. His prejudices are a stew
of self-hatred, ignorance, and fear. If those feelings could be rooted out and examined somehow, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink so much to squelch the pain of them.
“You don’t have much of an answer to that, do you?”
Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice? Would he understand that to argue would be futile, would wound me deeply and do nothing to change him?
“I’m going to get dinner started.” I can hear my mother in my tone with him. “Do you want me to call you when I’m ready to make the hollandaise?”
“The what?” Then he remembers. “Okay. Sure.”
But when it’s time, he slouches against the counter with his hands in his pockets, staring but unseeing as I whisk the egg yolks in a saucepan and add cubes of butter, one at a time.
“It’s so easy, Dad. The only trick is to get the flame as low as possible and keep stirring. It’ll curdle if it gets too hot. Here, you take the whisk.” He takes it and, in a fairly good imitation of me, flicks the wire bulb through the thickening sauce. Hope swells in my chest. I have this idea that if he can make his own hollandaise he’ll be okay. And if he can learn to make both hollandaise and wash his clothes, he won’t need a wife at all.
At the table, A-1 sauce slathered over his rib eye, hollandaise over his asparagus, he is grateful. And very drunk. “You’re a goddamn good cook, you know that?”
I sleep in Elyse’s room, my old room. The rug is green, not yellow, the walls stripped of the daisy paper and replaced by a blue sponge wash. Out the windows are the same trees, though. Pine, beech, oak. One for each window. I get into bed and shut off the light. All my books are in the car. I have nothing to read to make me sleepy.
“Who we got here?” my father would say every time he came to say good night to me in this room. He’d yank Piglet up by the ear.
“No, not Piglet,” I’d giggle.
He’d wind up and hit Piglet in the face with his fist. “Pow!” he’d say. “Right in the kisser.” Piglet would go flying. Then he’d find all the rest of them scattered at the end of my bed and on the rocking chair and, one by one, speak kindly to them, wait for my false protests, then punch them across the room. I’d laugh and laugh.
In the morning I stand in the middle of the bathroom for a long time. It was here at the sink that my mother told me about her plan to leave my father. Eighteen years ago last week. I was wearing a white sleeveless nightgown. She was scared. I can see that now. Her lips were the color of her skin. Her eyes were filled, the brown trembling. She stood right there at the sink, holding her toothbrush, smelling the way she did in the morning, slightly sour. And now she is dead. Has been dead for years, though it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems like she is just off with Paul somewhere. In all my dreams she is away, just about to return. I am often on the way to the airport to pick her up, or on my way to Water Street to clean before she gets back, neither of which I ever did in real life.
Paul writes regularly, calls on my birthday, asks me to visit. I write back sporadically, rarely remember his birthday on time, and never visit when I come to Massachusetts to visit my father. I think I will, and then I don’t. I wonder if he’s on the Cape right now. He spends as much time as he can there, he wrote in his last letter. He and my mother rented a little house in Truro every summer, and last fall the owner sold it to him. The letter was filled with exclamation points, which was not his style, so I knew how excited he was about it.
Now I get back into Elyse’s bed and wonder if I ever wrote back to congratulate him. I have no memory of it. It sets off a whole pageant in my mind of people I’ve let down or underappreciated. An old feeling, a weightless unease, creeps into my limbs. I need to shut my eyes and sleep it off, but I hear water rushing through the pipes for my father’s shower. Morning is always the best time to be with him.
Today, though, he is sullen when he comes down, making his coffee without his usual songs or whistling, calling the dogs sharply to their bowls, opening the sports page and cursing some Red Sox player I’ve never heard of. He’s even angry at his own foot, which he slips out of his moccasin twice to scratch. I notice he has a hole in the toe of his sock. It’s unlike my father to wear anything torn.
“Look at that big toe poking out.”
“I don’t have one decent goddamn matching pair of socks.”
“Well, let’s get you some. Today.”
“Really?” It’s as if I’ve suggested cotton candy to a six-year-old.
“Sure. Is Piper’s still around?”
“It sure is. I could use another pair of pants, too.”
Maybelle bounces at the screen door. “Oh, I sees you,” he says brightly, lovingly. “Here I am.”
And there is Piper’s, right where it’s always been on the first floor of an old house with a big veranda. Through the window I can see the madras dinner jackets, the white canvas golf hats, and the belts with sailboats or trout or tennis racquets on them. I cringe at the sight of it all. But to my father there is nothing ridiculous and foppish about this style of dress, nothing fetishistic about having symbols of wealth, little ducks or martinis, sewn all over your pants. It is all he’s ever known. This is what his whole world wears.
He pulls open the door of the shop and then stands aside to let me pass. But in the equally insulated world I have been in, men do not hold doors for women and, if they do, if they have just arrived from Pluto, women do not walk through them. I want to simply walk through the door he holds for me. Our outing has reversed his mood. I have less than twenty-four hours with him. The socks and pants he needs are only a few yards away and the smell of the store comes rushing at me, the sweet smell of new cotton clothes that brought me so much pleasure as a child. But I cannot do it.
I gesture playfully for him to go through first. He will not.
“C’mon, Dad. You’re the one with the hole in your toe.”
He laughs a disgusted laugh. “I am not going through a door held by a girl.”
“Why not?”
He shakes his head. “Is this the kind of crap you get at your fancy schools? You learn to be rude to every person who shows the slightest bit of upbringing?”
I feel the fatigue of trying to communicate with him. Twenty more hours. I go through the goddamn door.
“Hello,” a woman says to us from the back, where she’s folding cable-knit sweaters. I can only see her dimly but I recognize the voice. My father veers right, into the men’s section.
“Didn’t I go to school with her?” I whisper.
“Her? No. She’s twice your age.”
“I think it’s Brenda McPheney.”
“Oh, Christ, that’s not Brenda McPheney. Brenda McPheney was a skinny knockout of a girl.”
“She had anorexia, that’s why she was so skinny. She almost died senior year.”
“Well, she looked a hell of a lot better with anorexia.” He points to something over my shoulder. “Look at that. Isn’t that great?” On a shelf was a shiny ceramic statue of a black Lab with supplicating eyes and a real leash hanging out of its mouth. “I love that.” And he did. He stared at it like someone else might stare at a Van Gogh.
We pick out pairs of blue, gray, and black socks. We’re going through the pants rack when my father looks over into the women’s section, says, “Duck!” and pushes me down by the shoulders into a little nook.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispers.
“Is it Catherine?”
“Christ, no. You can’t buy muumuus in here. It’s Tits Kelly. If she sees us, we’ll never get out of here.”
The wooden floorboards creak.
“Fuck. She’s coming. Suck in your gut and don’t breathe.”
No one in town ever calls her anything else, except to her face, and I can’t even remember what that name is. She’s a terrible busy-body and, as my father has said a million times, completely humorless. The ultimate condemnation.
Brenda McPheney comes over and asks her if she’s looking for something special.
“No
t really,” she says, more of a sigh than words. Brenda goes back to her sweater folding. Mrs. Kelly cuts a long, low growling fart. Dad looks at me, delighted, making an O with his mouth and squeezing my finger to help him stay quiet. I laugh in silence, my stomach knotted in pain. We are bent over and mushed together to fit in this tiny hole in the wall. I don’t know how it’s possible she doesn’t see us, but she takes her time choosing a man’s shirt. Finally, she brings her selection to Brenda at the register.
“I wonder who she’s buying that shirt for,” my father says on the way home. “Husband Number Two left her last spring. You ever hear the story of little Davy Kelly and the two C-pluses?”
I have, but he’s in such a good mood. “No.”
“No?” He’s thrilled. And he tells me about how in fourth grade little Davy Kelly brought home a report card with two C-pluses in math and social studies. Little Davy, according to his mother, never got anything but As. Then she found out that in both math and social studies, little Davy sat next to Ollie Samuels. So Mrs. Kelly marched over to the Samuelses’ at dinnertime, stood in their kitchen, and demanded that Ollie tell her what he’d been doing to distract her son during math and social studies. Ollie told her he’d stopped talking to Davy long ago, when he realized Davy was paying Lucy Lothrop ten cents for her answers in English and only gave Ollie a nickel for his.
My father laughs like it’s the first time he’s heard it himself. It seems to me a story much older than Davy Kelly, a story my father might have heard on a radio show when he was little. It’s just the kind of story he likes, about people getting their comeuppance. In my father’s culture there is no room for self-righteousness or even earnestness. To take something seriously is to be a fool. It has to be all irony, disdain, and mockery. Passion is allowed only for athletics. Achievements off the court or playing field open the achiever up to ridicule. Achievement in any realm other than sports is a tell-tale sign of having taken something seriously.