This Is My Daughter

by Robinson, Roxana;

  “Harold?” Amanda said.

  He nodded. His dark eyes were very bright, his mouth small and thin. There was a pause.

  “My brother told me about you,” said Amanda. Her voice sounded strange, as though she were out of breath. “Or, her brother, actually.” There was another pause. Harold stared. “We’d, uh, like to buy some stuff from you.” She swallowed.

  Harold smiled at her, his small mouth red and moist above the dust-colored fur of his goatee.

  “Great, great,” he said fast, nodding. “Let’s just step into my office.” He led the way out onto the grass, into some trees.

  Amanda kept her eyes on the ground. Her heart was pounding, she felt the danger of the open space. She felt suddenly, overwhelmingly, the presence of the city police force all around her. She was filled with dread, with certainty. Over and over she heard the approaching buzz of the little scooter, saw the plastic windshield, the helmet, the implacable black and white sign: POLICE. She saw the neat black boots of the policeman appearing next to her. She did not look up.

  When they reached the trees Harold stopped.

  “Okay,” he said, “great.” He watched the girls too closely. He shook his head interrogatively, baring his teeth in a tight-edged smile. “What are you, prep-school girls?” His overcoat was long and dirty, with military stripes.

  Courtney nodded. Amanda, hating him, said nothing.

  “Great, great,” Harold said, talking fast. “Now, look, this is really great shit I’ve got here. I want you to know that Harold always has good stuff. The best. Tell all your little friends.” He turned severely from girl to girl, serious. “Got that? The best.”

  The girls said nothing. Courtney nodded again, squinting.

  “Great,” Harold said. “You got the money?” The smile had gone.

  In her pocket Amanda’s fingers were already curled around the twenty-dollar bill. Her heart was pounding. David had told them how to do it, but suddenly it seemed impossible, a roaring chasm lay between her and the act itself. The tiny folded bill in her hand now was something she could not lift, in fact she could not move it at all. If she pulled it out it would fall to the grass, would suddenly be carried off by the wind, the policeman would appear, the shining blackness of his sunglasses concealing his eyes. Taking the plastic bag she would fumble, it would open, everything would spill out, the policeman would arrive as her fingers tightened around it. This was excruciating, she thought, she would never do this again. Her chest felt tight, cramped. She looked into Harold’s eyes. He was watching her closely.

  Amanda nodded stiffly, and Harold’s mouth slid into a smile, a real smile this time. “Great,” he said softly.

  The apartment was dark and silent. Amanda called out, “Mom?” when they arrived and went down the hall and looked in her mother’s bedroom, to be sure. It was empty, the bed unmade.

  “It’s okay. She’ll be gone until six,” Amanda reported. “We have almost two hours.”

  In the kitchen they turned on the lights and dropped their jackets and book bags on the floor. They turned on the small TV on the counter and tuned it to a soap for company. Courtney found a bag of Fritos. Amanda found matches and brought the china ashtray from her mother’s room. Her mother was always planning to stop smoking but so far had not. The girls sat down on either side of the small kitchen table.

  “Okay,” Amanda said, ceremonial.

  Apprehensive, Courtney lifted her hair from her shoulders with both hands, shook her head and resettled her hair. Amanda put the plastic bag between them: it was half full of dried weedy-looking bits. Brown seeds drifted through the mass. Courtney put the book of papers on the table, and the two girls began awkwardly to roll cigarettes. The marijuana formed awkward heaps, the seeds stuck to the girls’ tongues when they tried to lick the paper’s edge, the paper did not meet properly.

  “How do you do this? It looked so easy when David did it,” said Amanda.

  “Shit,” said Courtney, starting over.

  Finally Amanda made a cigarette, bunched and bulging, that stayed rolled.

  “There,” she said. She set it down. The girls stared at it.

  “I can’t believe we really did it,” Courtney said.

  “I can’t either,” said Amanda.

  They looked at each other. Amanda shook her head.

  “I kept hearing policemen;” she said.

  “I kept thinking he was a policeman,” said Courtney.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Amanda said.

  “Oh, I’m really going to,” Courtney said, rolling her eyes.

  “Just don’t,” said Amanda. “Don’t tell your brother.” She picked up the lumpy cigarette and put the end gingerly in her mouth. She took it out again and looked at it. “Does it matter which end you put in?” she asked. They both stared at the joint.

  “No,” Courtney said, uncertain. “I don’t think so.”

  Amanda put it back in her mouth and lit it. She drew in a long hot breath, held it, and handed the joint to Courtney. Courtney drew a deep breath of her own. The two girls stared solemnly at each other, the blue smoke expanding inside their chests.

  “I meant to tell you,” Amanda whispered, trying to hold on to her breath. “Emma’s asked me to go Christmas shopping with her on Friday.”

  “Emma?” Courtney frowned. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Amanda said. “Will you come with me?”

  “But you hate her.”

  “I have to go.”

  Courtney frowned. “But she’s awful.”

  “I know,” said Amanda, “but she won’t be to you. Please, Courtney,” she said, and closed her eyes. “If I have to go alone I’ll commit suicide.” She opened her eyes again. “If you come it will be fine. She’ll be really nice to you. It will be fine, I promise.” She put her head down on the table again. “I can’t go alone.”

  Courtney frowned. “I don’t know,” she said. “What will you do for me?”

  “Anything. There is no favor large enough,” Amanda said, her head still down on the table. “Plee-ease, Courtney,” she said again. “I’ll commit suicide, and then you’ll have to be friends with Tina.”

  Courtney shuddered. “Okay,” she said. “When do we do it?”

  Amanda raised her head from the counter and took a Frito. “Friday,” she said again. “She’s coming here at five. Mom won’t let her up in the elevator, so we’ll have to wait in the lobby.”

  “Why can’t she just call upstairs?”

  “Mom won’t speak to her on the phone. We have to be in the lobby. Tell your mom you’re coming.”

  “She’ll be delighted,” Courtney said. She frowned earnestly, imitating her mother. “‘I just wish, I just wish you had more friends. It’s not that I have anything against Amanda. I just wish you had lots of friends. Don’t you have anyone else to do things with? Not that I have anything against Amanda.’” They both laughed.

  “‘I just wish you were more suitable,’” Amanda said. “‘As a friend.’” Imitating her mother, she said, “‘I think it’s a good idea to have a circle of friends. It’s more broadening.’” She picked up the joint and drew in another hopeful breath. She handed it to Courtney, who sucked on it hard. They stared at each other.

  “Do you feel anything?” Amanda asked.

  “I don’t think so,” said Courtney.

  “He’s such a nerd,” Amanda said suddenly.

  “Who?” Courtney said. They spoke in high little gasps, trying to talk without letting the smoke escape.

  “Harold,” gasped Amanda. They both began to laugh.

  “This is really great shit, Amanda,” said Courtney, nodding like a marionette. She waved the joint grandly in the air. “Really.”

  “Great, great,” Amanda said, nodding back, frowning. She pressed her lips together tightly. She took another breath, sucking in the hot smoke, holding it inside the hollow of her chest, holding and holding it. Inside, she could feel it expanding, burning mysteriously, enlarging and d
arkening. At last she coughed, letting a gout escape.

  “What are you, prep-school girls? You know, you girls are so great,” Courtney said. She had stopped nodding and was now shaking her head goofily from side to side. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her chair. She began to laugh, her eyes still shut. “You girls are really something,” she said. “What are you, prep-school girls?”

  They both laughed helplessly.

  “What are you, slime?” Amanda said, and they laughed more. “So great.”

  They each took another long gasping breath on the cigarette. Amanda’s vision seemed strange, her eyes were beginning to lose focus. She took another belt of smoke and looked around the kitchen. She was surprised to realize that things were changing, in fact they were completely different, all around her. She felt an overwhelming need, both to let everyone know about this—about the hilarious absurdity of the great white refrigerator, humming by itself in the corner, for example—and at the same time to keep all this to herself, to hoard and savor it, as she—alone, she saw now—could do.

  But if she tried to tell all this Courtney would not hear her. Courtney was leaning back against the kitchen chair, her eyes closed, nodding to a rhythm only she could hear.

  They finished the Fritos, got out the sodas. They gorged. David had told them about the munchies. They sat chewing solemnly, staring straight into each other’s strange powerful eyes. They watched a soap, laughing uncontrollably. They had never understood the soaps before, never realized how breathtakingly funny they were. The things they all said to each other were uproariously funny, or amazingly profound, sometimes both at once. They talked and laughed and closed their eyes. Amanda went to sleep in little intermittent dips.

  Later, it slowed and stopped. The room returned to its normal proportions. Everything was once again ordinary: the kitchen furniture, the soaps. Their eyes were now well known, familiar, no longer magical. Amanda stood up and slid open the kitchen windows, wide. The cold evening air swept through the room. She stood in the open window, waiting, shivering. Outside it was dark, and the kitchen was full of shadows. The room seemed altered, contaminated by their afternoon there.

  “You think we should spray with air freshener?” asked Amanda, uneasy.

  “Won’t your mom smell it and wonder?” Courtney asked.

  “Won’t she smell the grass and wonder?”

  “Tell her it’s room freshener? A new flavor? David says that at boarding school they hold the joint out the window. They pull it inside to take a puff, and then they exhale into socks, so all the smell goes into the socks. Then they put the socks in the wash.”

  “Yuck,” said Amanda.

  “I knew David’s socks always smelled bad,” Courtney said.

  “They’re high,” Amanda said, but nothing seemed funny now.

  The kitchen had turned bleak and desolate. It was past six, and the afternoon was over. Amanda carried the ashtray to the garbage can and threw in the crumbly ashes, rustling the papers around so the ashes would sift invisibly into the trash.

  At the sink, she held the empty ashtray under a heavy stream of hot water. It was her mother’s favorite, a white porcelain saucer. In the center was a bouquet of dark pink roses. From this fluttered a few petals, a leaf or two; ribbons trailed from the stems. Amanda hated it, and she hated hearing her mother say it was sweet. Amanda hated hearing her mother say things like that. It made her feel pulled back, against her will, into the time when she, Amanda, would have looked up at her mother’s face and agreed with anything her mother said. She would have said that she loved the roses too. She hated that, she could not even bear the thought of it anymore.

  A dark smudge of greasy ash stubbornly spread across the center of the ashtray, resisting the hot water. Amanda, one corner of her lip curled up in concentration, scrubbed hard at the stain with the sponge. She felt the ashtray slip in her fingers. She felt it slide from her grasp; grabbed at it, found it, clutched it, and felt it—smooth and slippery—slide again from her fingers. Amanda’s fingers closed desperately on themselves and she saw the ashtray hit the white porcelain sink, saw it split, beautifully, into clean narrow shards, as simply and quickly as though it were meant to.

  Amanda stood in front of the sink, the cold kitchen behind her. The ashtray lay in pieces, the bouquet with fluttering leaves and streaming ribbons now shattered, indecipherable. The water ran over the jittering shards, steadily, as though all of this were all right, this sudden terrible sense of aftermath and letdown. As though Amanda were meant to stand here like this, the kitchen bleak, and flooded with the evening chill, she herself flooded with failure, with this black black grief suddenly crowding around her, enveloping, everywhere.

  17

  On Friday, at five o’clock, the girls were not waiting for Emma down in the lobby. They were upstairs in Amanda’s room. This still had the blue-and-white-checked curtains and bedskirts that Amanda had had as a child, in the old apartment, when Maeve and her father still lived with them. They had been in the new apartment for five years, but the curtains still drooped below the windowsills. Caroline had stopped saying she was going to have them taken up.

  It seemed that there was plenty of money for some things and none at all for others. In the summer, Caroline and Amanda flew to Louisville to visit her parents, and sometimes to a ranch in Wyoming with Caroline’s brother and his family. At Christmas they flew down to Barbados, where Caroline’s parents rented a house every year. There was money for these trips, which were expensive, and there was money for expensive clothes. But it seemed that there was no money for things like Amanda’s curtains. Amanda would not bring it up, because asking for anything that cost money made trouble. Caroline gave Amanda pocket money whenever she asked, but if Amanda asked for an allowance, or for money to be spent on something larger, then Caroline’s mouth grew tight.

  “Your father should really be paying for this,” she would say, and the way she said the words made them sound poisonous. Amanda hated hearing her saying those words in that way. She didn’t want to hear Caroline talk about her father at all, she didn’t want to think about her father. Hearing Caroline refer to him in that voice made Amanda feel as though she were being whipped. She didn’t want to think about her father, or hear his name spoken, or see him, if she could help it.

  Amanda didn’t care about her curtains being too long. She didn’t care what her room looked like. It was always messy. Three days a week Maria made Amanda’s bed and picked up her clothes. The other days the room stayed untouched. Amanda liked having the bed made for her, but she wanted the clothes left where they were. She liked knowing where everything was, finding her clothes just as she had left them. She hated order, disorder seemed safer. Caroline rarely said anything about Amanda’s untidiness—she seldom made her own bed. But sometimes, for no reason, Caroline came into Amanda’s room and flew into a rage. She stood with her hands on her hips and shouted at Amanda, and then Amanda had to pick up everything, every single thing that was visible. What Amanda did was throw all her shoes into the closet, and then stuff everything else into the laundry hamper, everything: clothes, belts, comic books, tapes, magazines.

  At five o’clock, when Emma arrived, Amanda and Courtney were sitting on Amanda’s bed. They were wearing their school uniforms. Their book bags and jackets lay on the floor, and their shoes were scattered on the needlepoint rug. They each had a can of Coke, and a box of Oreos stood on the bedside table. They were arguing over a model in a magazine. “It is clearly Cindy Crawford,” Amanda said, leaning forward to look. She knew her models.

  Courtney was sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed. She was unconvinced. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Look at the nose. That’s not how Cindy Crawford’s nose goes. It goes like this.” Courtney drew a line in the air.

  “You know nothing at all about it,” said Amanda loftily. “Her nose goes like this.” She drew a different line in the air.

  “No, it’s like this,” said Courtney
, redrawing her own line.

  “Like this,” Amanda said, pushing at Courtney’s hand in midair. Courtney pushed her hand, and they began to laugh. Down the hall the buzzer sounded.

  “Oh, my God,” Amanda said, sitting up. “It’s Emma. We’re supposed to be downstairs.” She jumped up. The magazine slid to the floor, and she scrabbled wildly for her shoes with her stockinged feet.

  “So what?” Courtney said, watching her. “We’ll just go downstairs.”

  But Amanda had already left, her feet stuffed halfway into her shoes, running on tiptoe down the hall to the kitchen. She pushed open the swinging door and saw Caroline already standing there, by the wall telephone that went to the lobby. Caroline had just come in from somewhere, and she was in a dark suit with gold earrings. She stood very straight, holding the phone to her ear. As Amanda pushed into the room Caroline looked at her and opened her fingers. The telephone receiver fell with a hard clatter from the height of her head onto the counter. Caroline walked past her daughter without looking at her.

  “It’s for you,” she said, pushing through the door and walking out.

  Amanda picked up the battered phone. She heard a tiny voice repeating, “Hello? Hello?”

  Amanda said nothing until Caroline had left the room and the door had swung shut. Then she put the phone to her ear.

  “Hello?” she said. She was listening for her mother. She heard no footsteps retreating down the hall; Caroline was standing outside the kitchen door.

  “Amanda?” Emma said.

  “Yes,” said Amanda.

  “What is going on?” Emma asked her, cross. “Didn’t you say you’d be down here at five? The doorman called upstairs and then he handed me the phone, and when I said hello someone dropped it. My eardrum is practically shattered. What’s going on?”

  “Sorry,” said Amanda, watching the swinging door. “I dropped the phone. I’ll be right down.” She hung up.