No one says anything about me passing up supper; more for them, I guess.
In the attic, I settle cross-legged on the feed sacks under the window under the peak of the roof. I’ve made myself a cozy place to read and daydream, where I can be alone. It’s the only place I can hide from these people I live with. I know they’re family. Well, supposed to be my family, but I have my suspicions that they’re not. Maybe they’re just waiting until I’m older to tell me the truth. Maybe I was an orphan, and my father and my mother took me in. I don’t think I’m a princess or President Hoover’s secret daughter or anything like that. But maybe I’m the daughter of a rich Chicago family. Maybe they lost all of their money and put me up in the orphanage as a baby so someone would feed me. Or maybe my parents are famous jazz musicians, and they couldn’t take care of me with all the late-night gigs.
I think maybe I’m not really a Hanfland because I’ve never felt like I fit in here. Not with these people, not in this town. I’ve never been to Chicago, but I think maybe that’s where I came from. Sometimes I dream about moving to Chicago. If I got a job, I could buy pretty hats and silk stockings and marry a really handsome rich man and live in a big house with maids. And if I married a rich man, I’d make him take me to the picture show every night.
Under the attic window, while the early evening light is still good, I open the book. It was the only French book in the library, which isn’t really a library because it’s in the back of Mrs. Abbiati’s market. Mrs. Abbiati said she only had the one book on how to speak French, but she had two on Italian. She told me Italian was better. She said if I learned to speak Italian maybe I could go to the Vatican and meet the pope. But she’s Italian, so I guess that’s something she would think of.
I took the French one. I want to be able to say something in French when I see Henri again. And I will see him again. I was actually playing with the idea of going back to the carnival tonight. After dark, when it would be easy to slip out of the house. I’ve never snuck out before, but I’m such a ghost in this family since Mrs. Hanfland married my dad that I doubt anyone will notice I’m gone.
On the first page of the Speak French Francophone Language Teacher there’s an introduction. In English, thank goodness. It says I can “manage to speak the language studying only a few minutes a day with the Hugo plan.” It says I could have learned to speak French years ago if I had known I could “without hours of boresome study.” And “The secret to the Hugo plan is its simplicity and naturalness,” and I’ll be speaking in my first lesson as if I was in France. I don’t read the rest of the foreword about how people have been so pleased with the book. I’m too excited.
I stay under the window, practicing my first words of French until it’s almost too dark to find the ladder to climb down. I snitch a block of dry cornbread from the pantry and make my bed on the couch with the pillow and blanket I keep underneath. No one says good night, and I lay in the dark, fully clothed, the book on my chest, and whisper, “Bonjour, monsieur. Ravi de vous rencontrer.” Good evening, sir. So nice to meet you. “Qu’est-ce qui t’amène?” What brings you here?
I debate what to learn next. Can you tell me where is the best place to buy croissants? doesn’t really seem all that useful, but I work on it anyway because I like the sound on my tongue. “Pouvez-vous me dire où le meilleur endroit pour acheter des croissants?” I’ve never had a croissant. I’m not even sure exactly what it is, but I can imagine, if it’s made in France, it must be good. They probably eat them with strawberry jam, or maybe even whipped cream. I think whipped cream must be French.
I wait until the house is quiet and my grandfather has gone down the hall the last time with the kerosene lamp. We used to have electricity, but it got turned off months ago. Papa said it was temporary. That he’ll have it turned back on once he gets a job. I don’t think he’s going to get a job. No one has jobs anymore. The stock market crashed, and then all of a sudden hardworking people didn’t have jobs anymore. Or shoes. Or food. We’re lucky because my grandfather gets a small pension from the railroad. He gets enough money for us to eat turnips and now and then a mess of chicken necks and pan gravy.
Once everything is quiet and my grandmother has stopped coughing and my cousins have stopped crying and gone to sleep, I slip out of the parlor, carrying my shoes. I’m scared when I go out the door, but by the time I reach the field where the lights are still bright and the calliope is still playing, I know it’s what I was meant to do.
8
Abby
I’m brushing my teeth when Drum calls me back. It makes me smile to see his name come up on my phone. I spit and wipe my mouth before I answer. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself,” he says, and I’m surprised by the little shiver I feel when I hear his sexy voice over the phone. It’s hard to believe we’ve been married twenty years and he can still do that to me. For me.
“Sorry. Just got your message. Department meeting this morning,” he goes on. “What’s up?”
“Hang on,” I tell him. I grab my toiletries bag and go down the hall to my bedroom and close the door. Birdie’s down in the kitchen making egg salad for Daddy for lunch. I told her I would run it out to him. Sarah’s in the living room looking through family photo albums, and Celeste went to get cigarettes. In my car.
Mom Brodie is sleeping/comatose right where we left her.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I say, closing the bedroom door behind me with my hip. And even though the door is closed, I keep my voice down. Just in case Birdie’s sneaking around. “Mom Brodie has a tattoo.”
Drum laughs. “No way.”
I drop the toiletries bag on the bed Sarah and I are sharing. It’s covered with a homemade quilt, but not the nice kind made by the Amish in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in one of those cool patterns like a double wedding ring. It’s the kind you buy at a church bazaar that’s made of scraps of hideous polyester fabric. Sarah and I have been laughing about it since she discovered it on one of our previous visits, the orange pieces with Popsicles on them, next to the blue goats with strawberries pattern.
“Swear to God,” I tell him, stepping out of my sleep shorts and into cotton bikini panties. It’s eleven, and I’m finally getting around to getting dressed. I skipped the shower. It’s one of the things I like about being home. No one showers every single day, like in the real world.
“Queenie?” He likes to call her the queen or Queenie, but he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. He always liked her, even after she caught him when we first started dating smoking pot on her back porch and threatened to put the joint out by dumping a bucket of water over his head. Drum never smoked weed on her back porch again. Ever.
I grab a pair of knee-length shorts off the bed and shimmy into them, capturing my cell between my chin and shoulder. “Celeste and I were giving her a sponge bath this morning—well, I was giving her a bath—and we found it.”
“A tattoo. Like a Tweety Bird on her shoulder?” Drum can barely contain himself. I knew he’d get a kick out of this. “No, wait,” he says. “Let me guess. A butterfly tramp stamp. Lower back, just above her butt cheeks.”
Now I laugh. It seems a little sacrilegious to be talking about my grandmother’s butt while she’s dying downstairs, but I can’t help thinking, if our roles were reversed, she’d see the humor in it, too. And this is too good not to share with Drum.
Drum and I sometimes joke about getting matching tattoos. We’re either going with a Harry Potter lightning bolt on our foreheads, or a dotted line around our necks with the words couper ici, meaning “cut here,” in French. Although lately, Drum’s been leaning toward a troll doll in his armpit with his armpit hair for the doll’s hair. I’m not going with the troll doll. Final answer.
“Hang on. I have to put my bra on.”
“You could leave it off, and we could talk dirty to each other,” I hear him say as I set the phone on the bed long enough to pull on my racer-back bra and hook it in the front.
I grab m
y Carey’s Crabs T-shirt and pull it over my head. It’s old and worn; there’s a stain on one sleeve where Sarah wiped her blueberry pie mouth on me years ago, but I’m not ready to give it to the ragbag in our garage. I love my Carey’s Crabs shirt; it feels like home. Mr. Carey’s been dead for years, but we still buy our crabs from his son and grandsons down at the public dock.
“This is going to sound crazy, Drum,” I say when I pick up the phone again. “But it’s beautiful. Her tattoo. I wish you could see it. It’s this . . .” I sit down on the edge of the bed, pressing my bare toes into the ancient carpet. I’ve been begging Birdie for years to pull it up. There’s amazing hardwood under it. But she refuses. She has it in her head that hardwood is for people too poor to be able to buy carpet. She calls it “wall to wall” as if it’s still 1954. “It’s a garter, on her thigh.”
“Holy hell,” he breathes. “I thought you were kidding. Queenie really has a tattoo?”
“This isn’t just a tattoo. It’s . . . a work of art. I’ve never seen anything like it. It looks like a ruffled garter that would hold up a silk stocking. On her upper thigh. There are these little bluebirds, three of them, that have ribbons in their beaks, and it looks like they’ve wrapped the ribbon around the garter. All in blue and green. It’s so beautiful,” I repeat. “Maybe the prettiest tattoo I’ve ever seen.”
Drum gives a low whistle. “Wow. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume no one knew she has a tattoo?”
I make a face as I pull open the heavy drapes on the French doors that lead out onto my second-story balcony. “Of course we didn’t know.”
“Birdie?”
“I’m sure she doesn’t. I mean . . . it’s probably safe to assume she doesn’t. It’s not like Mom Brodie would have ever hiked up her dress and said, ‘Hey Birdie, wanna see my tat?’ Mom Brodie hadn’t been bathed since they brought her home from the hospital, so Birdie wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see it. We didn’t tell her,” I add quickly.
“You didn’t tell her about the tattoo?”
His tone is incredulous, as if I’ve crossed some major line in the sand. And maybe I have, but this is new territory for me. “Uh-uh,” I say.
“Why not, Abs?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
He makes a little sound like a sigh. As if he’s disappointed in me. I hate it when I disappoint him. When I disappoint anyone. I’ve got that firstborn child thing about always wanting to please people.
“Abs, you complain that you and your mother aren’t close, but you never tell her anything.”
“I tell her things,” I defend. “I talk to her at least twice a week.”
“You know what I mean. Sure, you tell her what the kids are doing, what you’re making for dinner, but you never tell her the important stuff. Stuff about you. Parents want the personal stuff. The who-you-really-are stuff.”
I twist my mouth, considering his words. This isn’t the first time he’s said this to me. But I’m not ready to engage. Talking about Birdie is always prickly between us. My mother does that to all of us. “You know how the two of them are, Mom Brodie and Birdie. I just . . . I figure Mom Brodie kept it secret for a reason. It’s not my secret to tell, Drum.”
“But you told me.”
His areas of expertise are chemical engineering and unclogging toilets, but the man I married also has Vulcan logic. Which I love and hate, usually at the same time. I frown and feel around on the floor with my bare foot for my Rainbows. I keep the old leather flip-flops in the closet as part of what Drum calls my “Brodie Island uniform.” “Of course I told you. I tell you everything.”
“You didn’t tell me when you backed into the recycling bins at the end of the driveway and dented the bumper on the Honda.”
“I’ll tell you everything important,” I amend. I don’t care that he’s brought up my little fender bender. It really wasn’t a big deal. I was more upset about it than he was. I just hate it when I do ditzy things. Because I’m not a ditz. “And I got the bumper fixed, didn’t I? And, if I recall correctly, I got the ding in the door fixed, which you did with a shopping cart at Whole Foods.”
He chuckles. “Okay, okay. My point is, are you not going to tell anyone else about your grandmother’s little secret? Your dad? Joseph?”
“That would be weird, wouldn’t it?” My bare feet in my flip-flops, I pace in front of the bed. “Tell a man his dying, one-hundred-and-two-year-old mother has a provocative tattoo on her thigh?”
“I don’t know. He might appreciate it. It certainly says there’s more to Mom Brodie than any of us realized.”
“That’s for sure.” I reach the wall, which needs painting, and turn and go the other way. “I don’t know about Joseph. I guess we’ll tell him. He’ll get a kick out of it. You know how he loves his tattoos.”
“Does Celeste want to tell Birdie?”
“I’m sure she does. Pot-stirrer that she is. We didn’t really get to talk about it. Sarah walked in while we were bathing her and—”
“Wait, so Sarah knows her great-granny has a tat?”
I smirk. “She was so excited. She wants to do some research on the Internet and see if she can find out anything about it. It looks old.”
“Well, it’s got to be. Mom Brodie sure as hell didn’t get it on Brodie Island. Is there even anybody who does tattooing on Brodie?”
“Just JD Morris, in his trailer. They’re not bad, but they’re not of this caliber, and he’s Joseph’s age.”
“How old was Mom Brodie when she married your grandfather? Eighteen?”
“Yup.” I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My long red-blond hair is pulled up in a high ponytail and then looped through the band to shorten the tail. The diamond studs Drum gave me for our anniversary in my ears. No makeup. I look pretty damned good for my age if I do say so myself. I swear it’s the sun here or the salt air or something. I always feel as if I look better here than in my real life. I feel better, more like myself, which is crazy because I hate it here.... Love it here. Hate it here.
Talk about being a ditz. I pick up my sleep shorts and tee and toss them on the bed. “How’s your day going?”
“Fine.” He sighs. “It’s fine. I . . .” He exhales, and I hear a change in his voice, in his demeanor. I know what he’s thinking. We’ve been together that long.
“No one’s said anything about the will,” I say quietly.
“I wasn’t going to ask. I just . . .”
It’s my turn to sigh. My dear, sweet, never-asks-for-or-expects-anything husband is having a bit of a midlife crisis. He’s a full-time professor of chemical engineering at a small college on the Eastern Shore. He used to like his job, but he’s gotten burned-out over the years. About a year ago he came to me with the idea that he wanted to retire early, move to the beach or, worse, to Brodie. And become a glassblower. It’s his hobby, which he swears he could make a living at, given a little time. My dad has even been in on it, saying they can convert one of the outbuildings right on the Brodie farm for Drum to use as a studio.
The thing is, we don’t have the money to make that kind of life change, not with Reed just a sophomore in college and already talking about a PhD. Like his dad. And before we know it, Sarah will be heading off. I mean, I make a decent living, but not enough to support all of us for who knows how long.
A couple of weeks ago, I came home to see Mom Brodie, and she whispered to me when I kissed her good-bye that she was leaving me “a little pin money.” Pin money is an old phrase I grew up with. Once upon a time, it meant money a woman kept for herself for personal use. I think it dates all the way back to a time when straight pins used in sewing were expensive and considered a luxury. In my grandmother’s day, most farm women sold eggs or baked pies to sell to have their own pin money. I got the impression, from the way Mom Brodie said it, though, that she wasn’t just talking about money to buy myself an extravagant pair of shoes. I think she meant money money. But it’s hard to say.
&
nbsp; My family’s wealthy. Really wealthy, though I’ve never seen numbers, and no one would ever have the bad taste to bring it up. Except maybe Celeste. Brodies own almost the entire island between my father and his cousins. My great-grandfather and his brother had a crabbing business and the farms. And because they had their own canneries, they cut out most of the middlemen. They also owned everything on Main Street and the boats and trucks that carried their goods on and off the island. My dad and his cousins went their separate ways in the sixties. The cousins kept the stores, the trucks, the boats. Daddy kept the farms and the canneries. The cousins sold their waterfront land early on, but Daddy hung onto it and ended up making an amazing deal in the nineties. And he didn’t sell all of the beachfront, so God only knows what he’s worth. But Mom Brodie had her own money. Grandpop Joe had enough forethought to know it would be smarter to leave his wife well-to-do in her own right, so as not to put pressure on her or their only son. But to my knowledge, other than for birthday and Christmas presents, she never spent much.
So . . . depending on what she leaves me, we could be making some life changes. But I don’t know. I don’t know about the whole becoming a glassblower thing. My Drum is not a flighty man. And he’s certainly not impulsive. But a glassblower? It sounds a little farfetched and way too hippie-dippie, even for my Drum. Do we really upset our whole world so he can pursue his hobby?
“You okay?” I ask. I felt bad leaving him home alone this week. He’s been so quiet the last couple of weeks and . . . a little sad. I worry about him. We discussed his seeing our family doctor. Talking to her about his depression. Well, I talked about it. Drum just sat there and folded laundry.
“I’m fine. I better go.” He hesitates. “I better go,” he repeats. “Lucy keeps walking by my office door. I think she wants to talk to me about adding that thermodynamics night class this semester. I don’t want to teach it, but I guess I can’t avoid her forever.”
What Makes a Family Page 6