The Shark Curtain

by Chris Scofield

  It’s hot, but we roll them up. We want her to be beautiful too.

  She takes a long drag on her cigarette, cracks open her window vent, and pushes it through, dropping it on the road.

  People stop eating when Mom walks across the large, dark-carpeted room behind the maître d’. A familiar-looking guy with white wavy hair, thick black eyebrows, and a flat nose turns on his barstool to watch her pass. When a woman walks up to him with an autograph book, he smiles.

  We’re seated at a low round table next to the dance floor, with a little kerosene lamp that lights our silver table settings and linen tablecloth.

  “Isn’t this elegant?” Dad drapes her black lace shawl over the back of her chair, and lights her cigarette.

  I look up at the thick wood beams and say, “I bet it was a barn once.”

  Dad winks. He likes it when I make normal conversation.

  The jazz trio’s good; it’s fun to watch people dance. I’ve never seen Mom so happy. She talks about the “beautiful people” and the “gorgeous menus,” orders two martinis, dry with a twist, and prime rib, medium-rare.

  Lauren orders a small sirloin from the kid’s menu and, when it arrives, smothers it in ketchup. She scrapes the sour cream out of her potato and fills it with whipped butter.

  Dad orders a T-bone steak with caramelized onions. I stare at the T in the T-bone for a long time, then growl quietly. It’s a little growl, but my parents look at me nervously.

  I reach for Mrs. Wiggins’s tooth, though Mom made me leave it at the motel. The growl is growing inside me, yet for now I can swallow it. And I do—over and over until my dinner arrives, and the waitress ties a bib around my neck. It’s my first lobster and I don’t know what to do with it.

  Mom points at my platter. “They’ve already cracked it for you so all you need to do is take your nut pick and gently separate the meat from the shell. Cut off a bite with your steak knife, squeeze the lemon wedge over it, and dip it in the drawn butter. Like this,” she demonstrates.

  When the lemon squirts a sticky stream of juice up Mom’s arm, the man at the next table laughs too. He’s watching her.

  I growl again.

  Mom looks at me nervously and wipes her arm on the linen napkin. “I think I better clean up,” she giggles. Her nylons shh as she walks away.

  As she crosses the room, one man’s jaw falls to the floor like in the cartoons. He thumps his foot until it becomes a blur, steam shoots out his ears, and the top of his head blows off. Another man’s eyes pop out of his head, bouncing off the rug like basketballs, then run up and down Mom’s legs, striping them like a barber’s pole. “Hubba hubba,” a chorus of hungry wolves (in zoot suits) call out.

  “How you doing, Lily?” Dad asks. I show him my teeth. “Lily?”

  “What sweet young girls,” a waitress says, arriving with another tray of drinks. And ice cream. Lauren smiles, but I don’t.

  I can’t. My mouth doesn’t work that way.

  The sundaes aren’t that good. I’m bored and drag my spoon back and forth through the coconut and pineapple making chunky tread marks in the ice cream until Mom tells me, “Stop and sit up straight.” I wish we were watching Mrs. Ford and the Cheyenne Squares.

  Mom stubs out her cigarette when Dad asks her to dance. “Thank you, sir, I’d love to.” As they step on the dance floor, the familiar man with the white wavy hair taps Dad on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me,” he says. His voice is deep. “May I have your permission to dance with your beautiful wife?”

  It’s Ben Cartwright.

  Mom gasps. “Aren’t you . . . ?”

  Lorne Greene. Ben Cartwright on TV’s Bonanza. Father to Adam, Little Joe, and Hoss Cartwright. Owner of the Ponderosa Ranch; widower of three beautiful young wives who died in childbirth. If you’re a beautiful young woman, marrying Ben Cartwright will kill you.

  Maybe dancing will too.

  I stand up and look across the table at the adults. Spit swamps my mouth, a growl sits on the back of my tongue. We should go. “I’m not feeling good,” I say.

  Mom glances at Dad.

  “Why, you must be this young lady’s daughter,” Ben Cartwright says, first nodding at Mom, then me. “You’re almost as pretty as your mother.”

  Creep. He’s just like Mr. Marks. “I’m not pretty,” I say plainly. “And my mom’s married.”

  Both men laugh, but Mom scowls. “Don’t be rude, Lily,” she says.

  “That’s all right,” Ben smiles. “Our show’s considered family fare, though children are often scared of me. I think it’s the eyebrows.”

  All three grown-ups laugh this time.

  “I’m not scared of you,” I say.

  Dad grips my arm tightly then clears his throat. “Of course you may dance with my wife. What I mean is, Kit has my permission if she’d like to.”

  “I’d be honored,” Mom says. Dad kisses her cheek and hands her off to the cursed Ben Cartwright who leads our beautiful mother, blushing and giggling, to the center of the dance floor. Where she floats in his arms after two vodka martinis—dry with a twist, of course.

  Back at the table, the muscles in my legs flex and tighten, and I imagine bounding out of the chair, pulling Ben Cartwright to the floor, and tearing a hole in his soft white belly. Later, people would read about actor Lorne Greene bleeding to death in a freak restaurant murder.

  “Too bad bo-bad, banana fana fo-fad.”

  “Dad?” Sleepy Lauren says, nodding at me.

  “Give her five, ten minutes, Lily, okay?” But it isn’t a real question and he doesn’t wait for an answer because, like Lauren and me, and most of Morgan’s Roundtable that night, he’s watching Ben Cartwright press Mom against his chest and whisper in her ear as they float across the dance floor. Couples stop dancing to watch.

  Mom laughs her martini laugh across the room. It springs over our little round table to the barstool where Ben would be sitting if he weren’t dancing with her. It bounces out the front door, past the teenage boy with our car keys, down the hill to the underwater window and the glittering danger of the shark curtain.

  Tonight I wish my beautiful mother looked like Mrs. Ford.

  The jazz trio stops playing (to thank the waitress, who hands each musician a drink), but Mom and Ben Cartwright remain on the floor, barely moving, talking and laughing with their arms around each other. Her gold hoop earrings and long tan arms glow. When Ben moves a hand down her bare back, a shark fin breaks through his dinner jacket.

  Dad stands up. “Pardon me, girls, I think it’s time for our last dance.”

  The microphone crackles and whistles when the goateed saxophonist announces, “There’s been a request.” A record needle hits a well-worn groove, and a single drumbeat erupts.

  Before Dad gets far, a woman cries out, “Conga!” and giggling, squealing grown-ups pop out of their seats, hurrying onto the dance floor.

  A woman signals Mom, who takes the lead with evil Ben’s hands on her waist. Mom laughs and shakes imaginary maracas as she leads the snakelike procession around the dance floor. Overhead, a spinning ball of colorful lights splashes the conga line, and I remember the striped blinds in Mr. Marks’s bedroom.

  Ben is striped too; only it’s one wide stripe down his back like Pepé Le Pew.

  Cowboys on Bonanza say skunk instead of coward. Ben Cartwright is a skunk. When he can’t get a wife of his own, he steals other men’s wives. Is there a ring in his pocket? Has he asked Mom to marry him yet?

  My teeth itch, the hair on my neck stands up, and I crouch in my chair, ready to pounce when Ben Cartwright dances by. I feel the glance of the baldheaded man next to us. Dad sees him too.

  “Sit down, Lily,” Dad says sternly. “Don’t you dare ruin this night for your mother.”

  “Sit down, weirdo,” Lauren adds.

  I want to, I really do, but I can’t. I know that what’s going on between Dad and Mom and Ben Cartwright is about sex and none of my business, but I have to protect Mom. Mrs. W
iggins is inside me, and she took care of all of us once.

  Things get out if you’re not careful, things get in.

  The bark is building up inside me. I bite my tongue to hold it back, but it doesn’t help. It hurts and a tear rolls down my face. Please, I pray, but the prayer train’s been racing around my bedroom since Ben Cartwright first showed up, and it just flew off the track and out the window, landing in Mom’s rosebushes.

  My lips twitch and my nose flares.

  The conga line is coming. As it nears, Mom sees me crouching in my club chair, frowns, and shakes her head.

  I see me in her eyes—a pretty, tall, teenage girl in a turquoise dress (she didn’t want to wear), baring her teeth and squinting her eyes as she hugs her knees.

  Mom tries to steer the dancers away from our table, but Ben is flirting with the redheaded woman behind him, and the laughing, dancing procession plows on, pushing Mom ahead of it. Someone in the conga line has a tambourine.

  The room is loud, even louder when I bark. Two short angry barks, startling Dad and Lauren and even me. A leave-my-family-alone bark, a somebody’s-breaking-in bark.

  Dad can’t reach me before the third bark but Lauren hits me with her ice cream spoon. There is no fourth bark, only panting and coughing, only my red-faced Mom (with Ben Cartwright beside her) who says, “For God’s sake, Lily.” She takes a deep breath. “Apologize to Mr. Greene.”

  “That’s all right,” he says, wrinkling his hairy eyebrows. “She’s just feeling the music. Like Spike Jones.”

  The conga line continues, weaving in and out of tables. People laugh. A woman with an autograph book taps Ben’s shoulder.

  “To whom should I make it out?” he asks.

  “Apologize to Mr. Greene!” Mom snaps.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, but she can’t hear me over the music and drunk giggling. I ruined Mom’s dance with Ben Cartwright; I ruined our trip to Lake Tahoe. The conga line passes by. Waving martini glasses and high heels over their heads, the dancers don’t notice us at all.

  “Lily?”

  Everything is different now. I barked in public. “I’m sorry,” I mumble again. Then, “Sorry, Mr. Greene.”

  “Now, sit down properly, please,” Dad says.

  “Do as your father says,” Lorne Greene adds.

  My parents instantly glare at him.

  “We’ll discipline our daughter, Mr. Greene, not you,” Dad says. “This is family business, our family business.” He slips his arm around Mom’s waist and pulls her close. “Ready, sweetheart? Shall we head back?”

  Mom nods. She’s embarrassed; the tear in her eye is embarrassed too. Over her shoulder, Jesus stands behind the bar, garters on His shirtsleeves, wiping glasses with a clean towel like the bartender in Bonanza’s Silver Dollar Saloon.

  No one stares at my beautiful mother when Dad covers her trembling shoulders with her black lace shawl. No one looks at me strangely, either.

  By the time we pay the bill, Lorne Greene has signed another autograph. And someone else is sitting at our table.

  I pretend to be sleeping when we drive back to the motel.

  “He did not,” Mom whispers.

  “You may not remember it, you may not have felt it,” Dad says,“but I saw it. That man, that television star, touched your ass, Kit. I saw it. Lily saw it. The whole damn restaurant saw it.”

  Mom opens her purse, shakes a pill into her hand, and swallows it.

  “I don’t know how you can do that without water,” Dad whispers. He taps the steering wheel nervously, then throws me a glance in the rearview mirror. He thinks I’m sleeping but a dog’s eyes are always open a little. “What should we do about—”

  “I’ll call Dr. Fraud in the morning,” Mom says. “Of course, he’ll probably say what he always says. That she’ll probably grow out of it. That she’s not dangerous. And not to anticipate. Lily can’t predict what she’ll do next any more than we can.” She pauses. “I thought we were past Peace Lake and Mrs. Wiggins.” She lights a cigarette and rolls the car window all the way down. She doesn’t care what her hair looks like now. “What if seeing a psychologist isn’t enough, Paul? What if she gets worse? Tonight was . . . embarrassing.”

  Dad remains quiet.

  “Weren’t you embarrassed?” Mom asks.

  A car joins us at the intersection. The driver honks and looks over. “Hey, baby,” he says to Mom. “You busy tonight?”

  She drops her cigarette to the street and rolls up the window again.

  “I’m sorry, Paul,” she says.

  And crosses her legs with a gentle shh.

  * * *

  “They’ve moved.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Markses.” Mom points the flashlight toward Judy’s house. “They didn’t answer the phone so I walked over. They left our mail in the milk box.”

  “What?”

  “They’re gone, Paul. The house is empty, the garage too.”

  “Maybe they’re away for the weekend or bug bombing the house.”

  “You’re not listening. There’s not a stick of furniture, not a note on the door. Even the backyard construction projects—nothing is finished. No one is living there. They’re gone.”

  Dad stands on the patio sipping a beer. He looks over the rosebushes Mom and Connie Marks once shared, past his new toolshed (with the new lawnmower) to the Markses’ abandoned house.

  Lauren stands next to them. “Rusty too?” she asks. Mom touches her shoulder.

  “Your manuscripts came back, Paul. Unopened. I put them on the kitchen table.”

  Dad shrugs.

  They act like they don’t care, but they do.

  He sends out the same two manuscripts every six months. Mom posts them with the most interesting stamps she can find. She says he writes like Gay Talese, whoever that is.

  Gulliver, Rusty’s old yellow cat, crawls out of Mom’s hydrangea, meowing hungrily. Lauren smiles and kneels beside him. “Rusty is gone,” she tells him, walking inside for a dish of milk.

  It’s the last week of our last summer on Aiken Street. I hear sprinklers, car radios, and squeaky screen doors. I smell kerosene and burning charcoal. I’m glad I’m going to a different school where no one will know me as Judy’s crazy neighbor, the “retard” who killed the family dog, got the Savage Boy in trouble, and barked at Ben Cartwright. When we get to the new house, I don’t know what I’ll be, but I won’t be that person anymore.

  Suddenly more tired then I’ve ever been, I sit down at the picnic table. In the dusking light I hear Mom sob.

  “I’m sorry, Paul. We loved this house. This isn’t the way I wanted to end our time here.”

  “Nothing happens in a vacuum, Kit. Especially marriages.”

  They’re quiet until Mom says, “I know you had . . . relations with your secretary, Paul. It’s okay. After all I’ve put you through—”

  “I had cards, Kit. I had craps, poker, Portland Meadows, even the horses a couple of times, but I never had Toni, or any one else for that matter. Why would I want another woman when I can’t take care of the one I’ve got?”

  In the movies, people usually hug when someone says something like that, but in real life people stand silently side by side.

  Next door in the overgrown lot, a young buck stands in the dappled darkness of the trees. It catches me looking at it and makes a break for it, leaving its safe camouflage to bolt past Mom’s roses to the rock garden pool—where it pauses to take a deep noisy gulp—then trots down our driveway, past the family car, finally disappearing into the neighborhood. In the ten short days we were gone, it grew accustomed to passing through.

  And Judy moved away, as if my family and I never lived here, and she was never my best friend.

  Dad’s eyes burn a hole in the Markses’ house. “It’s over then?”

  “There never was an it, Paul.” Mom’s shoulders droop and her voice falls down her throat. “Just that time . . . I told you about . . . when Lily—” Her breath
catches. She holds out a hand to Dad. “I’ll miss Connie and the kids.”

  “We were moving anyway,” Dad says. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Mom spreads her fingers wider. When Dad slips his hand in hers, she cups it but leaves it loose, like the broken catch in the redwood gate.

  “Let’s never lock it,” Mom said to Connie the day the fence was built.

  Dad throws his empty beer bottle at the Markses’ house. “He always was a bastard.”

  Chapter 19

  Pretending

  Dr. Giraffe told Mom to never confront me directly. “Be matter-of-fact,” the psychologist said, “pretend you’re making a suggestion to a friend,” which explains why Mom didn’t look at me when she cleaned her paintbrushes in the kitchen sink.

  Mom pretended not to confront me twice this week already. Once while folding clothes, another time unloading groceries.

  This time Mom has more to say. She says I’ve been spending too much time in my room, and when I’m at the dinner table, I’m usually daydreaming and not paying attention. She says I’m too serious and don’t laugh enough. She wants me to get more fresh air, join the chess club, or play tennis after school. Maybe even get back into swimming.

  “Didn’t you love it in Tahoe?” she asks.

  “No,” I answer.

  Everyone’s pretending today. I’m pretending I didn’t like Tahoe when I did, pretending it didn’t feel good to bark at Ben Cartwright or help rescue Janis.

  Mom pretends she took her happy pill when I saw her throw it away.

  Dad’s pretending he can help Lauren with “new math,” and Lauren’s pretending the lightning and thunder don’t bother her. A bad storm has been parked over Portland since breakfast and our parents have unplugged almost everything electric.

  The house is growing dark inside. The radio says the storm will be gone by dinner, but what it if isn’t? What if the storm never goes away?

  The house is half-packed; it’s been that way for a month. The original deal on the new house fell through at the last minute, but the new one stuck. The moving trucks will be here in ten days.