Once, in Lourdes

by Sharon Solwitz

  When he’s gone, she looks for nightclothes. Her baby doll summer pj’s are flimsy, her winter flannels too hot. She puts on underpants and a long blue bathrobe that came from her aunt in L.A. She ties the sash tight around her waist on her way downstairs. Between the living room and the kitchen is the door that leads to the basement room where the traitor Garth abides. Certain things seem clear now. Toward Garth she feels only rage.

  In the kitchen her father is at the table drinking orange juice. She glides around him like a capable housekeeper, clicking on the gas, melting butter in the frying pan—wanting to get this done, for the night to be over. The place is clean like her mother left it—her mother, owning less and less of herself, who can still muster enough to put dishes away and sweep the floor. It’s almost a violation to rummage through the orderly drawers, to take eggs and butter out of the refrigerator, and Vera maintains her mother’s system, washing and drying everything as soon as it’s used, wiping down jars, lids included, even when they’re not sticky. Her robe slips down her shoulder and she pulls it closed. One of her Band-Aids has lost its stick. Turning her back to her father she presses the end to her chest ferociously. Stay put!

  He wanted his eggs over hard, and he waits for them at the table like an ordinary father, one who loses his temper from time to time, regrettably. “I was lying in bed,” he says, “but the old brain won’t let go. They’re sending me down to Chicago for training. Things are changing, honey, and I’m changing with them. Do you know that, except for the army, I’ve lived in this town all my life? I didn’t go away to college. That’s an advantage you’ll have.” He laces his fingers in front of him, then cracks his knuckles one by one. “God,” he says, “if I could talk to your mother like this.”

  His voice hums with sudden respect for her, for what, she can’t tell. Within his beer smell is the faint chemical sweetness of maraschino cherries. An ache gathers at the base of her throat. She’s repelled and soothed. She pierces a yolk, mashes it down. The hardening whites of the eggs slap against the pan. In this mood of his, she might not even be grounded. In the morning he’ll have forgotten it. He shouldn’t drink, she thinks; he’s almost sweet when he’s sober. She remembers mowing the lawn with him on bright summer Sundays, her small hands between his large ones on the handle of their old push mower. She flips the eggy slab, slides it onto his buttered toast: “Chow’s on.” He laughs. She turns away from his bright eyes.

  “You’re something, daughter,” he says. “Not just pretty, but smart like your mother. And stubborn as a mule. You’ll go somewhere, no doubt about it!”

  He plants a kiss inside her wrist. She retrieves her hand, but gently. Was her mom once smart? She quit school when she got pregnant.

  “She was a brain,” he says, as if he knows what she’s thinking. “I was lucky she looked at me. She could have married a college professor. She used to say, anyway.”

  Then how did she get to be the way she is now? Vera says to herself. Her robe has loosened again; the silk is slippery. She yanks it closed. There’s egg on her father’s lower lip. She hands him a napkin, washes her hands.

  “Don’t go. Please?”

  The eager, plaintive note in his voice surprises her. But before she can take the seat across from him, he pulls her toward him and kisses the side of her mouth. Stifling a gasp, she jumps away. He booms a laugh. “I thought you liked romantic kisses. That’s what you called them. You’d climb on my lap and say, ‘Kiss me like the movies.’ Those were your words. If I tried to put you down you’d have a fit.”

  She wraps the sash twice around her waist and knots it. She folds her arms across her chest. “How old was I, five?”

  With a face of mild and courteous regret, as if for a memory lapse, he gets up, washes his plate, and sets it in the rack. He cleans the frying pan, dries it over a burner, and sponges the sink with the slow care of a drinking man who is respectful of his wife’s wishes, all the while describing Vera’s future as he sees it. Business or politics, she has a head for both, unlike Garth, who was behind the door when they handed out brains. The kid’s out of control. Old enough to get a job, and bolts—skips town like a felon!—when he gets what he deserves for disrespecting his father. Yvette is no help. He’s thinking of military school for Garth, though it will cost. “You have no idea,” he says to Vera, “what it’s like to be a parent.”

  You didn’t have to use your belt, she thinks but doesn’t say. She says quietly, “I don’t think you should send him to military school.”

  Drying his hands, he sits back down at the table, his eye-beams like a net around her. He’s worried about Garth. Is the kid doing drugs? What kind of friends is he hanging out with? He knows how close they are, so maybe she can help him. What the hell happened down in Florida? If only he could talk with Garth like he can with Vera.

  Vera looks hard at her father, who, in her opinion, knows her no better than he knows Garth. But before anything smart-ass can come to her lips, he’s on to Deedra, his newest honey. He’s a family man, but her mother doesn’t really love him—Vera knows that, doesn’t she?—and Deedra doesn’t have Yvette’s brains, but she’s crazy about him. He’s on the verge of weeping now. He wants a divorce, but how can he ask, with her mother sick like that? Once before, he wept in front of Vera, for angry envy of his two hotshot older brothers, who work for their wives’ fathers and make big bucks sitting on their tails. Now across the old kitchen table Vera resumes her seat. She puts her head down on the varnished hardwood, trying not to think about anything at all while he praises her understanding of the world and of him.

  She must have nodded off during the barrage, because when awareness returns, the tribute is over. He’s standing over her, angry again. “Do you think I don’t know what time you walked in tonight?” She shuts her eyes, then reopens them; he’s still there. “Let’s have the truth for a change.”

  A laugh starts, very deep down in her. This is how it starts.

  “Vera, I’m responsible for you, until you’re eighteen I’m responsible. We both know your track record.”

  She wishes for a moment she could just tell him the truth. What was wrong with driving down to Chicago with her friends? He didn’t punish Garth when he got back from Florida. But lying is what she does with him, her part in their unfurling drama. “I was at Kay’s.” She swallows, takes a breath, then hands him another crumb of information lackadaisically, as if it’s beneath her interest and ought to be beneath his. “We watched a movie on TV, and in the middle of it”—she simulates a yawn—“we both fell asleep. I know I should have called, but it was late, I didn’t want to wake Mom.” She presses her lips together against the seepage of irony. “I could have slept at Kay’s, but you know how you get when you wake up and I’m not home. I’m really sorry.”

  He scoots his chair to her around the table, hoists her leg onto his lap, and begins to massage the ball of her foot. This too has happened before. As always, bumps rise on the back of her tongue. “You shouldn’t be smoking,” he says.

  “We shared one. One cigarette! It gets in your hair. But you’re right, I know that.”

  He presses on her arch with both of his thumbs, prodding deeply this side of pain. It feels good and it feels worse than awful. The leg not attended to begins to tremble, and she folds it onto the seat of her chair, wraps it in the slippery cloth of her robe. What would a normal girl do right now?

  “It’s my last one, I swear,” she says.

  “Do you think I don’t know when you’ve been smoking? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that?” She smiles quickly, defusing her joke. “I know I shouldn’t smoke. I know I should have called.”

  “One of these days, you’re going to learn respect, Vera. If I have to take you over my knee.” He has the ball of the foot of her extended leg in his hands. He pulls the shelf of her toes back, hard. She waits for the crack of the little bones. “You were with the Mick tonight, don’t you dare lie to me.” At t
hat, she opens her mocking eyes wide upon him. He has iron-gray hair thick as a rug, a wide, sloped forehead, and the strong, dull, single-minded glare, she thinks, of a Viking. There are things she can say to him, snottinesses so subtle he won’t even know to be pissed. His gaze lifts to the V of her robe. “What’s that?”

  She pulls it closed too late. A Band-Aid is sticking out.

  “What the fuck,” he says, “have you done to yourself?”

  “Would you believe open-heart surgery?”

  His ears redden.

  She has no heart for this. She wants to get back into bed and think about Saint. But it’s a game they’ve been playing for years. She’ll tell him the story eventually—of the car trip, the baseball game, the tattoos, the shooting, with a final crack about trigger-happy cops. Then he’ll ask who drove, who paid, who all went, who sat where. And eventually she will supply those answers as well, countering his incipient rage with her mildness successfully, until she admits that Saint was with them. Now she goes straight to the end of the story. “We got tattoos, all of us: Kay, CJ and I, and Saint.”

  “Saint? What kind of name is that?”

  “Dad,” she says softly, “why do you like to pretend you never heard of him? He’s been our friend for two years. His name is St. John. Scully,” she adds.

  She’s as sincere and respectful as she knows how to be, but it seems to come out snarky, or maybe it isn’t, but it’s tainted with the snark of times past.

  “It makes me sick!” he shouts. “It breaks my heart! You’re balling a piece of shit that calls himself Saint!” He stands over her chair and his head seems to brush the ceiling. Other things in the room look large as well: table, refrigerator. With the tips of his fingers he slaps her face, not hard, nearly a pat, the way you chastise a lapdog.

  “Stop, please, Dad.”

  His face is so close she’s bathed in his maraschino breath, a metallic sweetness. Does she want to be hurt? She’s tired of pain. Bone-tired. Nerve- and brain-tired. Her good hand raises her weak one in front of his eyes, where it dangles limp as a hankie. He pauses, then slaps her hand down. “Really, Dad. You don’t want to do this.”

  They eye each other like boxers circling in the ring; both are panting. Then he puts a hand to his head. “Do you know how important you are to me?” he says. “You’re the most important thing in the world.” He pats her arm. There are tears in his voice. “I don’t want you to make mistakes. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”

  She regards his massive hand on her arm, regards his shame and apology. When he lets go, her arm bobs a moment, testing its freedom. She stands on wobbly legs.

  “I’m sorry. But Jesus, Vera, don’t ever lie to me! It screws up everything.” His voice trails off as he rises and walks away, back to his bed in the den. “You’re a beautiful girl. You’ll grow up and meet lots of men who’ll appreciate you. Don’t waste it on…”

  She holds on to the back of a chair while his door clicks shut.

  Then behind the closed door between kitchen and living room she hears the scramble of feet descending stairs; she flings the door open. It’s dark but she feels his presence, the shithead who started this. She can’t find the light switch, but she shuts the door behind her and makes her way down. There’s no light from Garth’s room either, but she strides in that direction; she shouts into the darkness, beyond caring, “You fucking spy!” Feeling her way along the side of the ping-pong table, she arrives at his doorway. “If you keep following me, Garth—if you say one more word to Dad about what doesn’t concern you—”

  “It all concerns me,” he says.

  They are face-to-face on his threshold, though they can barely see each other. Garth’s voice trembles with emotion, but she’s too angry to take it in; she hisses into the dark, “If you stick your nose in my business, if you fuck with me and my friends one more time, I will come to your room at night and put my hands around your neck and strangle you!”

  “Feel free,” he says. “Sweet death at your hands.”

  “Stop that! What do you know about anything? It’s sickening, this idolizing love shit. It’s mental!”

  Perhaps cowed by her force, he has stepped back into his room, which seems alien to her without music playing. She steps forward—she has points to make, things he has to understand—and her foot hits something large and light. It scrapes the cement floor. “Turn on the goddamned light,” she says, then finds the wall switch.

  On the floor by the wall lies the guitar he bought last year with money he earned shoveling snow. Knobs and bits of plastic surround the body of the instrument, which is cracked down the middle, attached to its neck only by the strings. It’s like a dead thing—or worse, and though she steels herself against the image of a murder committed, she can’t escape the resultant horror and fear. Uncharacteristically, she wants to cry. “Oh, Garth, you love your guitar.”

  “I love lots of things.”

  “You moron. You’ll get yourself locked up.”

  “In a cell with you, big sis.”

  She makes a fist with her strong hand and punches his shoulder.

  “Did you learn that from Dad?”

  She snorts fiercely, helplessly. “Do you think that’s clever?” She folds her hands across her chest. “Understand, Garth. You don’t know anything.” Her brother, who seems to be losing his mind, stands loose and limp like a rag doll. She says, more gently, “What do you want from me?”

  He looks straight into her eyes. “Do you think you can do…whatever you want with me, then act like nothing happened?”

  “Please,” she says.

  “Why are things different now? Don’t you love me?”

  “Love you? Of course I love you. I’ll always love you.” She pats his shoulder where her fist was.

  “More!” he says. “I like your silky robe thing. I’m feeling swoony. I’m going to faint, Vera.” He hangs in her arms. She settles him onto the floor. “You’re just pretending,” he says, “to be a hard-ass.”

  “I’m getting out of here.”

  “Don’t. Please don’t.” He lies on the floor in a pile of himself. “Vera, we’re perfect for each other. We fit together like yin and yang. Like Ian and Sylvia!” He smiles loosely, as if whatever she wants to do with him is A-okay. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “You’d take care of your stuff. You’d go out and play basketball.” She pats his cheek, feels his shudder of gratitude. She rises quickly. “Come on, let’s restore, you know, normalcy?” With the side of her foot she begins pushing the breakage toward a central pile. “Get a shopping bag. We can finish before Mom gets up. Otherwise you’ll have to pick someone to blame it on. One of your druggie friends came over and had a meltdown?” She picks up his guitar, neck and body, and sets the pieces on the shelf beside the record player. “What did you take, Garthy? More acid or something? Or is this your natural psychosis?”

  He picks up one of his records and Frisbees it across the room. It hits the wall and breaks.

  She feels a rush of what might be despair and wonders for a moment if this is what her mother feels when she opens a door onto mess. The floor of his room is awash in dirty clothes, books, crumpled pieces of paper, the detritus of his hopelessness. In frustration she kicks at a pile of rubbish and something spins across the floor. It’s a pistol, smaller than their father’s, like a well-made toy. She picks it up—hard, black, and heavy for its size. “Where did this come from?” She holds it by the butt, careful to point it at the floor. “Garth,” she exhales, “what is this for?”

  “Holding up banks.”

  “Oh shit. Oh shit.”

  He walks to her, breathing on her the warm, sweet, small animal breath of someone with outstanding teeth who never brushes them. “It’s for protection. So I can walk the streets of Lourdes without being afraid.” Is he telling the truth? He presses his lips to her cheek, then offers his cheek to her lips, at the same time grabbing for the gun. She turns and blocks him.


  Guns are not unfamiliar to her. When she was seven or eight their father would empty his service revolver and let her open the chamber and look inside. She’s not sure if Garth received the same training. Once, under her father’s supervision, she loaded it, cocked it, and pulled the trigger, aiming out at the lake, and she laughed with the blast and muscle of it, though the recoil hurt her arm. But this one looks even deadlier—its very smallness, its anonymous density. Circling to keep her back to Garth, she clicks open the chamber. Her hands work together, the small and the large, master and servant comfortable with their roles. A single bullet falls onto her palm. “Where did this come from? Florida? Or do you have some new friends? Tell me, Garth. Are there more bullets?” He doesn’t answer. Her voice thins and rises to a soft wail. “You know, you would’ve fallen asleep and forgotten about it! Mom would have found it when she came to clean!” What their mother might have done with it, she will not think about. With the gun in one hand and the bullet in the other, she makes for the door. He runs in front of her.

  “Kill me. Come on. I dare you.”

  “Stupid talk.”

  “Vera, listen to me. We did it once and the gates of hell didn’t open! This floor didn’t split open and swallow us down.”

  The gun rises in her hand, points at her brother. Both know it’s empty, but he stands with a little martyred smile on his face, arms out. When after several moments she lowers the gun, he remains before her, head high, eyes open wide, looking straight at her like a brave man facing a firing squad. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “Ever again.” Her knees are shaking. Sweat drips down her sides.

  He gazes on her brightly, with his eyes that take in the world’s sadness and turn it hard and clear as crystal. She touches his arm, his skin softer than a boy’s is meant to be. She lets go. “Chill, brother. Don’t act weirder than you absolutely have to.” She walks to the door, then turns around. Her heart is beating neutrally now, rationally, the heart of a normal sister. Please, God, may it remain so. “Whatever you think you know about me or my friends, keep Dad out of it. Okay?”