Impatient, now fully committed, she rings the doorbell again. She turns and looks at the view from this angle—the bushes pulling out, her car across the street, the empty-looking houses, the wide road. She hears a woman call from inside, “Hold on.”
After excruciating seconds, the same woman appears, a child on her hip and phone cradled in her neck. She opens the door wider and motions with her finger. Eva braces herself and steps into the foyer made bright in the day. She puts her hand to her throat, the words ready to pour out from her. But the woman places her finger to her lips, and Eva waits, immediately comparing herself in attractiveness: Peter’s wife is stout, with short permed hair, a pug nose, and a weary look. Passable, Eva thinks, but not beautiful by any stretch.
“I love you, Mom,” she’s saying. “Tell Dad I love him, too. Make sure Peter holds the ladder when Dad goes up on the roof this time, will you? We don’t want a repetition of events.” Unconcerned with Eva entirely, she turns and walks down the hallway and goes around the corner, disappearing again. Eva inhales, smells rose-scented perfume. She peers into the living room, taking it in full view. A puzzle on the coffee table remains only half-composed—a clown’s face appears appallingly white, his eyes dark and serious. Against the wall, there is an ugly worn love seat with wooden inlay, a ficus tree with brown leaves collected in the base of the pot. Peter’s wife comes back into the foyer a moment later, the baby still on her hip in a diaper, no shirt, a mass of red-yellow hair. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, her breath exasperated. She shoos the cat from under her feet before setting the baby down in a children’s swing next to the sofa. “Right,” she says, turning, placing her hands on her hips. “So, what are you selling?”
Eva feels her stomach turn. “Me? Nothing.”
“Oh. I thought you were selling something. You wouldn’t believe how many people have stopped by in the past month, selling magazine subscriptions, cookies, wrapping paper, Avon, books. I can’t keep up.”
Eva shakes her head and puts her hand to her chest. “I’m not selling anything.”
“What can I do for you, then?”
Eva tries to sound assertive, but she feels her swagger lessen suddenly. “Is your husband home?”
“Peter?”
She smiles. “Peter, yes. Peter.”
The woman seems to regard her finally. Her eyes travel down over Eva’s dress. Later, when Eva will replay this moment, she’ll remember the wary look, the cautious handling of the conversation, how for a moment Peter’s wife crossed her arms and paused. “He’s at my parents’—just left,” she says, and it seems to Eva she stammers a bit, in the same way Eva might. “I’m his wife, Amy.”
“That’s sweet,” Eva says. “That’s nice of him to help your parents, I mean, to care like that.”
Amy pauses for a moment. “Why do you ask?”
Eva tells herself not to flinch, not to miss a beat. She stands up straight, puts her hands on her hips. “I know Peter,” she begins.
“Do you? Well, then, if Peter knows you, I should know you. We have the same friends, mostly, the same acquaintances …”
“You seem surprised.” A moment more passes, and Eva sees something register in Amy, a quiet alarm. There is a broken quality to her expression, a tense hesitation. And, seeing this all, Eva suddenly hesitates, too. She wanted to feel invincible. She wanted this woman to be mean-spirited like she always believed her mother to be. The baby starts to cry. Amy sighs and pulls the child from the swing, pudgy legs kicking. She holds the little girl close, kisses her head.
“I talked to him before,” Eva says, adjusting. Her cheeks flush; she can’t think of the words to be so cruel. “About babysitting.”
A sudden relief seems to come over Amy. “Oh,” she says, patting the baby’s head. “We’ve been discussing a sitter. You know, maybe once a month so we can get out. I didn’t know he’d talked to anyone already. I don’t suppose you’d do light housework, too?”
Eva bends her leg and tries to take on an air of complete casualness. She can feel the words failing her, the stutter in the back of her throat.
“I guess not,” Amy says, waving her hand around. “The house is always a mess anyway, as you can see. I guess at some point it’s ridiculous to bother at all with cleaning. But do you have references?”
“What?”
“You know.” She scribbles an imaginary note. “Someone who could vouch for your reliability?”
Eva hesitates again, thinking. “Yes,” she says, nodding, in what she will remember was a desperate way. “I can bring you names and numbers, I guess.”
“People in the neighborhood? Are you the girl who sat for the Johnsons down the street? Rita Johnson? Their son’s name is Henry. They were so happy with that girl; they said she was a dream.”
Eva shakes her head. “No, I didn’t sit for them.”
“Who do you sit for in the neighborhood, then?”
“I don’t,” she says, straining now. “I live across town.”
“That’s far to go, then, isn’t it?”
“Not really.” Eva’s hands drift upward, into the air. “I love being here. This side of town is so pretty. And the people here, they’re nice. You’re very lucky. I’d give anything for what you have.”
Amy winces and rocks the baby. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, I should write it down. I’ll talk to Peter when he gets home.”
A few moments later, Eva hastily scribbles down the first name that comes to her, Brenda Armstrong. She gives the paper and pen back and then watches as Amy studies the scrawl.
“Are you still in school?”
“A senior this year. I’m almost eighteen.”
“Big year.” Amy glances at her again. “Well.”
“Well,” Eva says, “I should go.” She turns, in that moment, victorious despite everything. It is so easy, she thinks. To slip into someone’s life, someone’s house, and imagine yourself in their rooms. A sense of gloating overwhelms her, thinking how easy it is to fool this woman, how much prowess she herself holds. Her face flushes with the knowledge, too, that it’s a secret, that Peter will never know, that he’ll wonder why on earth Brenda Armstrong would stop by to chat and offer ser vices. She steps outside feeling, for the first time that day, for the first time in many days, a sense of empowerment.
After Natalia sends Sissy out to play, she vacuums and dusts the entire house and arranges the National Geographics according to date, making a thick fan of them across the table. Upstairs, she cleans the toilets, both of which are coated with a red algal film, and she wipes dried toothpaste from the girls’ shared sink. She empties a trash can that has been left to overflow with empty toilet paper rolls and tampons. She makes a quick sweep through Sissy’s room, surveys the posters on the wall, the photographs of television stars around it. She is still a child and, short of her hesitations with Natalia—that awful look of distrust and doubt that Natalia caught earlier—Sissy is mostly the same, a little taller perhaps, a little more gawky and longer in the face, but still a child nonetheless.
In Eva’s room, Natalia sets the laundry basket down. She absently pages through the marbled notebooks left on Eva’s dresser, the copied pages of poetry by Whitman and Yeats. She rummages through the closet, pushes the blouses and skirts across the metal rod, a bouquet of scents wafting toward her as she does. She looks on the floor under boxes and yearbooks. It feels pitiful to do this. No one wants to have to piece together their child’s life, to search for problems, to find out—in a desperate way—who she has become when you weren’t looking.
From the window she sees Sissy playing, collecting rocks and skipping them down the sidewalk.
“Dad doesn’t want us running around,” Sissy said with a despairing look when she was sent out to play earlier.
“Get air,” Natalia insisted, so tired was she of having to explain what she could not. “Go.”
“The madman,” Sissy said indign
antly.
“Don’t talk to strangers,” Natalia told her.
“That’s it?” Her tone was incredulous. She stood with her hands on her narrow hips.
“You’re going to stay inside every day?” Natalia asked. “Is that how you see your life?” She saw a flicker of hesitation. “Fine, then help me scrub the kitchen floor. Inside there’s always work to be done.”
With that Sissy darted into the backyard, calling for the neighbor’s dog.
Now Natalia opens the drawers and combs through Eva’s cotton and lacy underwear. She feels dirty doing it, intrusive, terribly so, and yet something is confirmed for her when, in Eva’s jewelry box, under the foam where Eva has laid her lapis ring, she finds a plastic bag filled with marijuana, which makes the candle on the bureau make sense— scented like cinnamon and burned down to a waxy, messy pulp. She breaks the dope into small pieces, flushes it down the toilet, and scrubs the rim again with a brush. She never would have expected drugs. As a child Eva was brace-toothed, pretty in pigtails, neither timid nor overly demonstrative, worrying Natalia that she hadn’t given Eva enough of what the girl needed. Back in those days, Eva would ask Natalia to read to her each night, preferring books to made-up stories, as if the book, by virtue of black lettering and printed, ordered images, were more truthful than Natalia’s musings. “These stories are boring,” Natalia told her once, of Eva’s fairy tales. “They never change.” And yet, now, as Natalia looks around the room, to the posters (she recognizes the cathedral in Italy) and the records and notebooks, she sees so little of the girl she knew, of the harmony that once existed between them.
She collects clothes and takes the laundry downstairs. In the kitchen she wipes the glass in the door again, removing the flat palm print Eva left when she stormed out. She shouldn’t have derided Eva, but she is still Eva’s mother and it is still her house. The girls will strike out eventually, grown, to go out into the world and find their own places. They will make their own ordinary lives, not ones with magic and husbands who change into bears, not worlds where women flutter about, wearing colorful skirts and twirling around a campfire, in time with drums and harps. They will not dance over white moons or swim across oceans. What she spoke to Sissy was always a lie, wasn’t it? A fabulist’s tale. What is idealized is doomed to be unrealistic. Whatever dreams the girls have will be given up to the practicality of the day. They will be changed as in one of Eva’s old stories from a book: the bucket, the mop, the broom.
She collects Sissy’s drawings from the table, the ones done before Natalia grew weary of Sissy’s questions. There are girls riding bikes across a blue backdrop, a yellow sun peeking out from the corner, spotted by a foreboding cloud. A second drawing renders lions in the jungle, and orange horses grazing by water, their nostrils hidden in the bright grass. She gathers the remnants of crayons, the worn-down yellow and indigo. She places them in the tin lying on the table.
Outside, in the glare, Sissy stands atop the ladder, holding the limp garden hose, pretending to spray water into the pool. She dances back from it, to avoid getting wet. She drops the hose. She leans over, pretending to measure. She climbs to the lip of the pool and walks. Natalia raps on the window. Sissy looks up, toward the kitchen, and inexplicably smiles. Natalia motions that it’s time to come inside. When Sissy doesn’t, Natalia opens the door and yells before Sissy jumps down, landing with a heavy thud on the grass. She holds her arms up as if performing. “We’ve got to go out,” Natalia says.
“Out, in!” Sissy yells. “Make up your mind!” She runs by her, her body smelling of sun. She comes back downstairs a few minutes later, dressed and ready. She eyes Natalia, who is holding Sissy’s drawings in her hand.
“I made them for you,” Sissy says, suddenly shy again.
“I think we should give them to Ginny instead. What do you think?”
“I made them for you. They’re originals,” Sissy explains, her voice rising.
“All the more reason,” Natalia says, “to share them with Ginny. After we go grocery shopping, we’ll stop by her house and see how she’s doing. You don’t think a drawing will make Ginny feel better?”
Sissy stares fiercely. Another hole burned into Natalia’s body. Sissy grabs the pictures from her mother’s hand.
“Do you think she’s dead?” Sissy asks, struggling to keep next to her mother as, later, they jaunt down the tree-lined street to Ginny’s house. The heat hits Natalia, flattening her like a bulldozer and melting the chocolate chip cookies she bought from the grocery store. A pleasant day, yes, were it not for the humidity that she didn’t notice when she got out of the cab earlier, the mugginess over everything that reminds her of so many summer days. She looks up at the sky, the big clouds over her, bright, heartbreakingly still. Is there never a good medium? she wonders. Is there always a drought or flood? All or nothing? And how awful to be caught between extremes, with not enough choices, with not enough reconciliation between disparities. Natalia holds her free hand up against her neck, wiping the sweat from it.
“I told you not to listen to Eva,” she says.
“Eva’s never lied to me.”
Natalia glares at her daughter, catches herself. She’s positively unnerved by Sissy’s new affection toward her sister, her irritating defiance. Before Natalia left, Eva spent most of her time ignoring Sissy, refusing to let her come into her bedroom, screaming when she’d find that Sissy had gotten into her lipsticks again. “Your sister used to lie to you all the time. She told you you were adopted. She told you that we brought you home from a church. Now she’s some moral authority and compass?”
Sissy dismisses this altogether, tucks any cruelties away in the past. “Well, do you think Vicki’s dead then?”
“Don’t you dare say that, Sissy Kisch. Particularly in front of Ginny” She stops, turns, and grabs Sissy’s arm suddenly. “I mean that. Don’t be sassy.”
“I’m not sassy, but you did leave, after all. I don’t know anyone who’s died, but I bet a madman did it. I bet that’s what happened to Vicki. Or, my favorite theory is this: She ran away. I can guess why, if you care. She didn’t like her mother. She thought her mother was a real bitch.”
In this Natalia hears an accusation leveled against her. She eyes Sissy, tells her to watch her language. “I hope you didn’t say that when Ginny visited our house, did you?”
“No.” Sissy stares for a moment before pulling her arm away. “She hardly ever talks to me.”
Natalia falls silent. She opens the gate and climbs up the porch steps. Before she rings the bell, she says, sternly, “Remember what I said. Not a word. Talk less, Sissy, not more.”
When Ginny opens the door, Natalia simultaneously extends the plate of cookies, announces that she’s returned, and goes to put her arm around Ginny in an awkward, loose embrace. She steps away then, brushes back her hair, and raises her chin without meaning to, aware once again of a distance. There was a time when she wanted Ginny’s friendship more than anything. She needed a confidante and yearned for conversations. There was a time when the women were like thieves, spending Saturday afternoons together, awkwardly hatching plans against the neighbors, sipping martinis. Shouldn’t she have expected that a woman like Ginny would sense, in Natalia’s departure, an opportunity? That she would be grateful for a man who, despite any flaws, always provided, without complaint? Natalia might have imagined Frank with another woman in that time she was away. But when she did, the faces were inconsequential: a girl picked up over a drink; someone he met casually; someone who, in the days and weeks afterward, he would have difficulty remembering at all. But that Frank might have taken up with a woman Natalia believed to be a friend—and she must reconsider this now—is something she had not expected at all. Frank and Ginny were never particularly close before Natalia left, though it was true they were cordial and it was true Frank could always make Ginny laugh with a light joke now and then. Still, it was Natalia who took Ginny in when she first moved to the neighborhood. She was the one who d
efended Ginny against the rumors and admonishments leveled by the other women: Ginny’s husband’s suicide, the drinking that ensued, Ginny’s failure to hold a job, her subsequent applications for disability. Then there were the screams the women sometimes heard, the fights with Vicki that created more animosity and disdain, particularly from those women who prided themselves on being good mothers.
She waits, watching Ginny, wondering. Only a moment passes, but it feels like an eternity.
“Thank you,” Ginny says, taking the plate, not bothering to look to see what it is. She sets it down on the living room table, atop a pile of newspapers and flyers. When Natalia is left to linger, she ushers Sissy forward and shuts the door behind them. She surveys the disarray: a vase on the table filled with wilted flowers; the ashtray next to it that overflows with cigarette ends. Ginny’s photograph of Vicki—long-sleeved red shirt, a gold locket around her neck, a dimpled smile, the backdrop blue like a clear sky—stares out from the table, eerily. There are countless photos of Vicki around the room, on tables and chairs. Natalia picks one up and holds it, remembering the girl who tormented Sissy, the girl who was unruly and always in trouble, the girl who, as if taking after her mother, was prone to a recklessness and disorder that matches this very room. “Sissy told me,” Natalia says, not knowing what else to say. She realizes her hands are trembling. She believes if she tries to make pleasantries, she’ll only seem unkind; but if she says nothing, the moment will continue this way: awkwardly, with an unsettling quiet.
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