The courage to tell her mother hit her like a thud on the back. It came just as she heard her mother leaving the house.
Her mother was always busy sneaking small pieces of furniture and things out of the house and giving them to her brother—Sophie’s uncle. After all, her brother had been her first family. She carried something wrapped up with her now. When Sophie was in her uncle’s house, she would feel suddenly jolted, out of whack, by finding pieces of her mother’s home in his. But it was her mother’s way of keeping the original family together—giving to her brother kept him indebted to her. Twenty-eight years of marriage and Sophie was eighteen; still her mother seemed unsure of her husband. If she couldn’t be a wife, by staying close to her brother she could always be a sister again.
The split in Sophie’s bedroom window curtains was pinned together so no one could see her. She could not stand for her mother to know anything about her. She pulled one pin and looked out. Outside smelled like scorch. Then there was the deep fermented odor of the river down the bank. Today, the wide river lay flat as cloth. She would miss the river; she had always loved it, but she had never swum in it. She would not submit to the water, and could never be baptized, for that meant immersion.
Her mother’s wide car crept past, close, at a walker’s pace, the engine off. Her mother would coast down the slight tilt of the driveway until she got the car out of Sophie’s father’s hearing. In the back seat was a piece of furniture, a side table, draped in cloth, like a small person, a child riding crouched behind her.
“Why, don’t tell us, Mrs. MacEvoy,” one of her mother’s lunch-out friends had said in front of Sophie, the group waiting to hear, their hands always moving, their fingers weaving in and out of their bracelets, necklaces, jewelry, “don’t tell us you just had one child.” Sophie’s mother, indignant, had pulled in her stomach and said, “I had two. One abortion and then Sophie.”
Sophie stuck the pin back through the curtain. She lay down with the dog, pressing her chest to the dog’s long, flat skull. The hardness of the dog’s head made her chest feel like pudding. She loved her parents, but she loved her dog more.
She lifted the dog to kiss her on the mouth and the dog seemed empty as a doll and didn’t even stop dreaming. The older the dog got, the longer her dreams got. Recently, she had begun sleeping with her ears up.
Sophie brushed dog hair from the front of her T-shirt, which was blank with no sayings, names, or pictures printed on it. Then off the bed, walking around on the rims of her bare feet, not yet giving herself completely to being up, she was thinking there were only three people in the family and she was going to move out.
Somewhere in the house her father was drinking coffee and lighting cigarettes. She’d go brush her teeth (he loved hygiene), then she’d tell him she was going and he’d tell her mother. She could just listen. As she moved, her image crossed the floor-length mirror and she could see peeking from under her shorts the bottoms of each buttock. They’re as smooth as stones, she thought—it looks like I’ve rubbed them and rubbed them. She was wearing her favorite shorts that she had outgrown last year.
Her hair had been red for months; she had dyed it to match the color of her mother’s tomcat. It was hard to figure out where to begin with a comb, so it stayed like strands of fine, unbraided rope. Her face was too soft, and pale white as the tall goblets of milk that she got tremendous cravings to drink. There was a swollen look around her mouth, as though she was always just about to ask a question.
In the bathroom, the tile was a sharp pink color and the cabinet mirror was hung at her mother’s height. She brushed her teeth with a dry toothbrush.
In the living room, the radio was playing too low to make sense. She could barely hear the station sign itself, “WIRA Wonderful Indian River Area.” Then she could hear only the low notes of the music. The varnished shutters let daylight in as straight sticks all over the tile floor. The high ceilings were very dark.
Her father’s back was to her, rounded in a curve of love for what he was doing, working over the papers of his “bidness.” He had a Southerner’s pride in mispronouncing words. Today was Wednesday, the traditional day for grocery store managers to take off. Always, even as a boy, Sophie’s father had wanted to go to work instead of play. Often he’d say, “Did I tell you I made history? I was the youngest manager in the state. I wanted so badly to be manager so I could be the first one in the store in the mornings and get to eat the candy.” He’d laugh. “As an adult, I have never risen past that position.” He was puzzled at himself.
Young girls had always been attracted to him, and he’d worn his hair parted in the middle for them. It was there that his hair was thinning.
He wore only white shirts because he didn’t like colors. Colors made his hazel eyes change from brown to green to blue, whatever color he wore close to his face. White short-sleeve dress shirts kept his eyes constant and showed off his arms, tanned from the shirtsleeves down.
Her father pulled back from his work now and felt his arms as if he were repelled by them. “I’m drying up,” he said. He worried a lot about himself. He treated himself so tenderly, as if he were made of the most perishable emotions.
He left what he was doing and started for the kitchen. Sophie went directly into his bedroom, to his side of the bed, and pulled out the drawer in his night table. In the drawer he kept three secrets: his half-moon glasses for seeing close up; a Detective Special, loaded but on safety; and a pack of prophylactics.
She came in here often, to count the bullets in the gun and the prophylactics in the pack, hoping to see if he’d used either one. She had never once remembered exactly how many had been there last time.
There was her straight pin she kept in her father’s drawer. Sometimes she left an invisible hole in a rolled prophylactic, sometimes she slipped off the Special’s safety.
The bottoms of her feet felt sticky on the tiles of the floor and when she got to the kitchen, which smelled of last night’s dessert, she knew they felt sticky because she was nervous looking for him.
He was in the pantry; the whole house was warm, moist, and too quiet.
On this hot zenith of a South Florida afternoon, a spasm rode her back. She quivered under it. Her own excitement had given her a chill.
Inside, the pantry was as white as the sink. The shelves looked thin as pages of a book and held filled glass jars and china with dark rims, and fine, clear stemware. It seemed so insubstantial that the slightest shock of motion would make it fall.
“Hi, Daddy,” Sophie said.
She’d caught him drinking out of the cap of the whiskey bottle. The drink was in his mouth. He looked like it had knocked his head back.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
“When?”
“Now.”
“Wait. This whiskey is scalding me.” He took a shallow breath. “You are making me nervous,” he said.
“I’m leaving home,” Sophie said. Tears flushed up through her so fast that it scared her and she was afraid the tears would get into her lungs.
“Back,” he said.
“Sir?”
“I mean move back.”
“Move back where?”
“You’re getting too close. Are you having as much trouble breathing as I am? I’d better have another.” He drank from the cap again.
Sophie looked away and watched the glass jars: one gallon of sweet gherkins, one gallon of dills, two gallons of olives, quarts of peaches in vinegar and sugar. “What are we stocked up for?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “I bring them home when I’m drinking. I steal them from my own store. This whiskey spins me around inside. It scares the hell out of me, Sophie.”
“I’m going away,” she said. She blinked hard, but everything she saw now had silver, ragged edges.
“The joke’s on both of you,” he said. “Nobody noticed that I gave up drinking; that’s the joke. For a month, I didn’t drink. But I had to quit that, too.
Without whiskey, I drank hundreds of six-packs of Pepsi. I just like the act of swallowing,” he told her.
“Nothing’s happening to me here,” Sophie said. “I already graduated school, and that’s over. I don’t love anybody new—just my relatives, and I’m too old to love just my relatives.”
“Whiskey makes my mouth numb,” her father said. He rubbed his hand up and down the whiskey bottle. His eyes drifted toward her face. “Even if you’ve done something wrong, you can stay with us. Remember?” He seemed very hopeful. “Remember that little girl with the baby that’s just hers and nobody else’s, so she says? She’s staying and they’re just calling the baby her sister. Have you been fooled with?”
“Daddy, I’m almost a virgin.” She had experimented with sex in the same way that she had tried fried liver three times without really enjoying anything but the excitement of the try. “I was afraid that if I had sex with a boy here, I’d never want to leave Florida.”
Sex was the wrong subject. It gave her father a chance to sidle into his quick, hushed stories of women who knelt to him in bars and gave him lap kisses, and who wouldn’t let him come home until he was almost asleep. He talked of sex as if he couldn’t get his fill of it. Slow dancing, girls bumping him with their cup-shaped pelvises—girls Sophie’s age from another town or having quit school long before she could know them. He told her the same stories again and again.
His concern with sex set off an alarm in her that weakened her so she couldn’t leave the room and get away from her father. “Please stop,” she said. “I’m worried about my airplane reservations. I made them and they’re no good if you don’t pay for them. The airport’s not even here, it’s in West Palm.”
“I know where the airport is,” he said, “but you don’t know how to drive a car to get there.”
“I thought you’d drive me.” He hadn’t even asked where she was going.
“You don’t have any money.”
“You told me I didn’t need money—you’d get me what I wanted. I’d only have to ask. You said I couldn’t get that job at the hospital because I’d see somebody die.” She hadn’t moved; she was paralyzed with determination. “I got the airplane reservations, you can make them here, downtown. I have to pay forty-five minutes before my flight. Will you give me the money?”
“Where in the world are you going?”
“New York City.”
“New York City? You know how big it is?”
“I know,” she said. “The librarian helped me. I got some books on it and the name of a club for girls only, but I’m going to make them let my dog stay with me.”
She was about to begin pleading when she looked out the pantry door and saw a tiny hummingbird at the kitchen window. It slipped its thin beak deep into a high blue flower and held still for a fraction of a second, then flew backwards out of sight.
She said, “I want to sell Granny’s bed. I could sure use the money from it.”
All this was making her feel so awful that she was about to give up on herself when he pushed past her and over the dog and out the pantry door. Not knowing what he was thinking, she followed, afraid not to be with him.
By mistake, they both sat down on the divan in the living room at the same time. Sophie felt it would be impolite if either got up now. They sat stiffly, looking straight ahead as if they were passengers in the back seat of a car. The familiar smell of whiskey had stayed on him, faint and subtle as cologne.
“You’re moving to some place you got out of a book?” he said.
She turned to him and nodded.
“When dreams get too strong, you just aren’t satisfied, are you, until you actually do it?”
The upholstery in the living room was covered with clean white bed sheets. In the dim room, they looked brilliant, stretched tight and tucked into the furniture. It was her mother’s idea of covering up things so nothing would ever look used. Only on weekends did they sit on the real upholstery.
The sheet stuck to Sophie’s thighs and the texture was abrasive.
Her father rubbed the insides of his hands together. “I guess there’s no acting jobs here. Not in Fort Pierce, huh? That’s what you want, isn’t it? You couldn’t do something else, could you?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to be just one person—I want to be a lot of different people.”
They looked out through the one opened shutter at the biggest tree in the yard. The afternoon light was congealed between its leaves.
“Please,” she said. “I’ll get a job in New York as soon as I figure out what I know how to do. And I’ll go to acting school.”
“I knew one day you’d be gone and free,” he said. “When you go, I’ll be free, too.” He touched his lips tenderly. “Your mother always makes me worry about you. She tells me I’ll ruin you, ruin you as a person forever. I try to look like I’m being good for your sake. She watches me. If you leave, I won’t have to be careful at all.”
She watched his eyes looking at her, their changeable color adding to how confused he could make her feel.
“Your hair,” he said sadly. “You’ve been making yourself look different again.” Her hair had made him unhappy. “I hate change,” he said. “Even for the good.”
The dog had not followed them, but she had rolled over so she could still see them.
“You can’t go. You’ve got a lot to lose by going,” he said. “Your mother does everything for you. You don’t know how to comb your hair. She lays out your clothes and mine in the mornings. Sometimes, doesn’t she dress us in pants and shirts to look alike? You don’t comb your own hair. You’re going to look like hell.”
“If you didn’t want me to go anywhere,” Sophie said, “why did you buy me new luggage for my graduation?”
“I was just joking, I got drunk for your graduation and I was just joking. Sometimes I thought I was drunk, sometimes I didn’t know it. That pew I sat down in, I wondered if they had fixed it to make it swing. When I sat down in the pew, it went back and forth under me. I could smell whiskey on myself. And everything was funny. The pew kept swinging under me through your graduation.”
“I liked the way you dressed,” she said. “Do you remember wearing your cream-colored suit and white suede shoes and white shirt and tie?”
“Your mother gets so jealous of me. I always get all the attention because I’m always high.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sophie said. “I loved to look at you. I love you very much.”
“Watch out.” He didn’t really grasp the difference in kinds of love. He’d explained to her when she didn’t want to hear. Love confused him and he was so susceptible to any kind that it felt as insecure and uncertain to him as a physical fall. He was worried that he loved any kind of love.
He got up. She could feel the sheet pulling under her. He picked up and pushed aside half-opened cigarette packs until he found one brand he wanted; he opened too many packs at a time, and he never found a brand he liked enough to stick with. He smoked his cigarette and long ashes flew off the tip in front of him and he lost them or rubbed them carefully into the furniture and against the tile floor so they would disappear.
“You can’t go,” he said. “You’re an only child. You’re your mother’s only real friend.” He looked like he was getting sick, his whiskey coming back up. Peculiar things made him sick. If he found a pit in her mother’s Best Ever apple pie, he’d leave the table saying it’d been sharp as a toenail and he wouldn’t come back to the table. “It will be so quiet with you gone. Your mother and I talk easier to each other if you’re in the room with us.”
They were concentrating so on each other that they didn’t think of her mother coming back until they saw her coming toward them, looking liquid through the thick fishbowl glass of the hurricane jalousies on the door. Her mother pushed the door back with a package in her hand and the tomcat came in first.
“I almost never come home without bringing som
ething back with me,” her mother said, and they didn’t answer her.
Nobody kissed even lightly for hellos. Her father was very gentle with people, but he rarely reached out. Often, when someone came into the room he was in, he would put his hands behind his back.
The cat rubbed up against the furniture and went and found the dog.
“Who’s sick?” her mother said. “It looks to me like somebody’s sick.” She took her earrings off and clipped them to the front of her dress. “They hurt me.” Her beauty hadn’t lasted long enough. She and her brother had begun to look exactly alike.
Today, on her forehead, under her makeup, was a bruise; it appeared like dirt stuck to her head. Sometimes Sophie’s mother would get so disappointed in herself that she’d strike herself in the face.
“Nope. It’s something bigger than being sick,” her mother said. “Which one of you is leaving me?” She gave a nervous laugh. It was her nerves that made her charming.
Sophie raised herself to answer. “It’s me.” While she was standing, she pulled at her shorts. Sitting so long, she’d almost cut herself in two.
Nerves always made her mother laugh and she did again. “Do you believe you’ll actually go?” She sat and pulled off her shoes. “I wish I could stop wearing high heels.” She had little feet. She put her feet on the edge of the divan between Sophie’s father’s knees. It made Sophie instantly angry, and she felt funny in her stomach. “I wish I could put my weight on the ground.” Her mother’s tendons had drawn up and would not let her heels touch down anymore.
“I don’t mind losing so-called friends,” her mother said, wiggling her toes. Her feet pulled at the sheet and the fabric of his trousers. “Sophie, you’re a part of me.” Sophie sat with her hands under her. “I can replace any friend. But not you. It’s family that I’m losing with you. You don’t think you’ll need a mother? I know better because now my mother is dead. All my family is slipping off the chain. I can’t catch them. My baby sister died before me. My brother is getting smaller than his clothes; the older he gets, the thinner he gets. If you leave home, something awful will happen to you. You’re going to end up on the Six O’Clock News.”
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