“A woman is like a lot of things,” said my father. “But mostly she is like the first picture she ever saw of herself where she really thought she looked damn good.” He took a swallow of his beer and propped the empty in a chink in the wall. “If you can find that picture and study it, see what she’s wearing and how her eyes look and if her mouth is open or closed, you can learn a lot about the kind of person she thinks she is going to be.”
He wasn’t really talking to me, but I was there and I was listening. “Pass me that bottle, will you, darling?” my father said, and I bent down and got it for him. For a moment, while he twisted it open, my father held me tightly in the circle of his arms, my face pressed against his chest where I could hear his breath and the beat of his heart. I thought about my own picture. Had it been taken yet? Would I recognize it when I saw it?
I was filled with a terrible fear that I would not, that I would go through life with no image of myself—my head tipped at some characteristic angle, light falling across my cheek and my neck—and so I would be lost. And so there would be no marker of my passing.
In the years before Rosellen, my father sometimes brought women over to the house. It was always the more encumbered ones, the married or engaged, and always at odd times of the day. Sometimes in the early morning before school, while the Pinta bided her time before her replacement arrived by dozing at the kitchen window and scraping the char off my breakfast toast into the sink, my father, who I hadn’t realized was even up much less gone from the house, would come in the infrequently used front door and lean through the passway into the kitchen. Then he would extend an arm back to the dawn-lit living room—our battered sofa, recliner, fireside knickknacks all looking somber and portentous in the new light—and usher her in, whichever her it was.
“My family,” my father might say and the Pinta, who found my father overwhelming, would mottle like an overripe strawberry and sidle into action: toast on the plate, knife in the jam jar, spoon loaded with oatmeal hoisted to my brother’s slack, wet lips.
What must we have looked like to her, to whichever her, who had found this man stranded up against some hard place—the hard work, the deep glass. Now here was this whole other romance to be dealt with. The stupid or very young ones cooed at us and tried to pitch in. “What a smart looking girl,” they might say about me, or they would sit next to Luke and enunciate their names very clearly to him—Bev-er-LY, a-MAN-da, CAIT-lin—or even pick up the spoon and take over his feeding. This was generally all right with the Pinta who by this point would be all but overcome by my father’s presence. She would shuffle down the hall to Luke’s bedroom, a sad, soft specter, and return divested of her bashful flannel nightgown to loiter about the brightening living room in varying shades of denim, a red plastic heart or cherry dangling from her ponytail to catch my father’s eye.
If the Nina were there that day, however, the ground of the kitchen would not be ceded. Where the woman might lift the spoon, the Nina would brandish a damp kitchen rag to scrub over my brother’s lips and chin. Where the woman might look over my shoulder to see what I was reading—I always reading, what else could I do?, a girl child, an ugly one, no mother and a father so lovely he could spin women out of the air like clouds wrapped around a woman-shaped spindle—the Nina would remove a half-loaded plate, clatter a handful of sticky silverware and generally lean, her bony shadow like a bouquet of thistles cast across the table.
Sometimes Thingy spent the night, even on school nights, more and more frequently as her father traveled and no second child came to disrupt her mother’s precise domestic management, and was there in the morning cordoning off her breakfast foods: a tablespoon of cottage cheese, a isosceles triangle of dry toast, five dusky blueberries savored individually from the tines of her fork. If my father was taken aback by her presences, he gave no notice of it. It was unclear if he even recognized that Thingy was not, or should not have been, a regular member of his household. When the woman said, “What a beautiful daughter,” my father did not correct her. Instead he would nod and smile sorrowfully, absent even as his gaze passed over us and lifted up to the hanging kitchen light and past that to the ivy border my mother had painted in lieu of crown molding at the top of the walls while his big, pop-knuckled hand stroked absently up and down the woman’s thigh.
My father’s most successful projects were ones in which he could use some of the same skills his body performed so mechanically at his jobs during the day. In our steep back yard, for example, my father had envisioned some kind of mechanical petting zoo. Using scraps from an array of construction sites, he had welded together a junk-heap donkey, a pig, two oversized chickens and an ambitious and terrifying dragon whose serpentine body, made of oil drums and partially unsprung steel mattress springs, still dives in and out of the slope. Its tail tip is a garden trowel pointing a rusty arrow at Thingy’s back door, and its battered coffee-can head—the eyes bicycle reflectors half lidded by snuff tins, the fangs saw blades that jut over the upper lip—rests on the ledge of the kitchen window where it oversaw my dinner for the entire length of my childhood.
“I tell you what,” my father would say on the evenings he was home with us. “If you don’t want to eat your dinner, you can offer it to the dragon.” My father loved this proposition and, despite no evidence for it, never stopped imagining my delight at the prospect. He would prop both elbows on the table, his hands cupped around his mouth as if this were a secret we shared between us. To be kept from Rosellen was the implication, though clearly she could hear us and did not care.
“Give the green beans to the dragon,” my father would whisper. “Give him the tater tots, the pot roast, the peas.”
There was some talk at this stage of a feeding tube for Luke whose presence was now required at neither family dinner nor the monthly family meeting where Rosellen encouraged us to air our thoughts and express our grievances. “A family is like a business,” said Rosellen who had opened and closed a number of small businesses in Elevation and was running a few more out of my father’s house. “And a business is like a litter of pups. Every one of those little bastards is going to fetch a price, that’s a given. The question is how much are you going to get versus how much are you going to have to put in.”
Rosellen delivered these sorts of pronouncements from the back porch, the kitchen door open to air out the grease and cooking heat of dinner and a cigarette burning between her fingers. She did not talk to me, though it was always only me still at the table, but rather to the air around me as if her words were a part of a contiguous landscape, like a waterfall, which I had just happened to stumble across. Rosellen smoked a generic brand of a slender woman’s cigarette. Today Ultra Slims they were called, each with a long white filter banded at the top by a pastel lemon stripe.
“Are you saying that a family is like a puppy?” I asked, my battle of wills with the baked chicken breast and crinkle-cut carrots momentarily forgotten. I really did want to know. This was shortly after Rosellen had moved in with us, vacating the studio apartment above the video-rental/tanning-salon which was her latest business venture, but before she and my father were married. A condition of her move was the dog run and heated shelter she had my father build out back and into which she promptly installed the breeding pair of pugs she purchased in anticipation of our yard. She bought the dogs from a breeder in Charleston and they were scrupulously pedigreed. While I’m sure they had elaborate, official names in some registry, with us they were just called Bitch and Dog and they looked almost identical—trim tan bodies at odds with their sloppy faces, glassy black eyes and foul rasping breath.
Bitch was pregnant, very close to whelping. They were not allowed inside, so at least once a day I went out to see them, sticking my fingers through the chicken wire enticingly. When that had no effect, I threw clods of dirt over the fence to wake them from their perpetual wheezing naps in the hollow they dug beneath the little peak-roofed house my father knocked together out of plywood and salvaged asbesto
s shingles. I wanted to see Bitch’s belly, which by now was stretched so taut I imagined I could see the press of individual pups against its surface. I wanted to see Dog mount her which, even with the deed so clearly done, he sometimes did, albeit with a perfunctory distracted air, often pausing to rest his short forelegs on her shoulders and gaze about the yard, past the silted creek and over the stone wall as if the main purpose of this position was to appreciate the altered view.
Bitch did not seem to mind, or even to particularly notice. She was cumbersome and always hungry. She ate clods of dirt, blades of grass down to the ground and then dug up the roots and ate those too. She ate the worms she scratched out of the side of the slope, and, when she could catch them, the dragonflies that whirred through the chicken wire and perched too long on the mesmerizing lip of her metal watering bowl. Bitch also ate my dinners which Rosellen, after some unspecified time, would lift away from me in silence and scrape into a battered mixing bowl with the rest of the table scraps. Thus, in the final weeks of her pregnancy, Bitch ate sesame chicken and meatloaf, ketchup, hardboiled eggs, macaroni and butter, cheddar cheese, egg shells, watermelon rind and tomato soup, carrot and orange peels, celery leaves, meatballs, hamburger buns, hot-dog ends, rice. . .It was no wonder she wheezed so terribly; no wonder she dragged herself around.
“Because everyone waits for it for so long,” I tried again, “or because it makes the dog so uncomfortable?”
Rosellen was still fairly new to me. She was a deviation from Dax’s usual routine. For one thing, he didn’t bring her to the house before the day she moved in. Rather, he brought Luke and I and for some reason—probably because she happened to be around, probably because she got in the van without asking—Thingy to meet Rosellen for the first time. He also chose to go on a day that the Sainte Maria was on duty.
Most of the businesses Rosellen owned, managed or worked for were located in the Elevation Business Park at the low end of Top Road, just on the other side of the high school. This was in December, a couple of weeks before Christmas, and someone had decorated the light poles in the parking lot as if they were candy canes, their hooked tips already emitting an unwholesome yellow glow in the early dusk. It had snowed the previous week, thawed and then frozen hard. Dirty ridges of snow were packed between the noses of the cars as if each car were a blind baby animal nuzzled up at the teat. Thingy and my boots tamped the snow down into crenulations like the tower of a castle. The Sainte Maria pushed Luke’s chair over patches of frozen grit and I helped her lever it up onto the curb and through the door of the pizza parlor where Rosellen was waiting, fresh from her managerial shift at Bounce!, the woman’s gym on the other side of the complex, wearing a purple leotard over shiny pink tights and looking at my brother, Thingy and I as if we were a trio of crows that had hopped in from the parking lot. Troublesome, sinister, but not too much bother to push back out with a broom.
Originally, Rosellen came from Florida, a sun-cracked town near the coast that I always imagined in shades of teal and peach as if someone had pressed tape to all of its surfaces and lifted the darker, truer colors away. I don’t know what brought her to Elevation. She probably never intended to stay, but then she met my father and certain compromises were settled for on both of their parts. When I met her, Rosellen was in her early forties, five years older than my father, and was beginning to look slightly preserved. Her face was not attractive, and probably never had been—the eyes too close set, cheeks too thin, chin long and square at once which made her head look like a sickle moon—but her body was phenomenal, a showstopper, all of which she displayed to her best advantage even when seated on a wobbly bench at Stromboli’s holding a limp wedge of cheese pizza up to her thin, frosted lips. She was already on her second slice, mincing it out of the platter with little mouse-like cries as the cheese burned her fingers, while Thingy and I stared and my father tried to fill the silence.
“So what’s new with you, Ingrid,” he finally said to Thingy after several conversational gambits had failed. “Is your father back in town?”
He was not. In fact, only the week before Thingy had told me that her father was renting an apartment in Atlanta to be closer to the office where his company organized most of his out-of-country travel. From now on, he would only be home on the weekends, though this was a weekend and I hadn’t seen his car in the driveway or heard the pop of gravel under its wheels as he edged it around their mailbox and onto the blind curve of the road. This was a sore subject with Thingy, something my father probably knew. She slatted her eyes dangerously and took an overly large bite of her pizza, filled her mouth with cheese and shrugged as sauce spilled from her lips and pattered onto her paper placemat.
“Jesus,” my father said. He hooked his arm over the back of the bench so we could see the torque of his biceps inside his tight, thermal shirt. “Fuck this,” he said.
Rosellen chewed and scratched the back of his hand lightly with her long nails. She was still wearing the leotard, but had thrown a short, leopard-print trench coat over it, belted tightly at the waist. The jacket had an architectural neckline that framed her breasts as they strained against the leotard. She wasn’t wearing a bra and I could see the outline of her nipples, puckered from the chill coming off the window behind her and my father. As she reached across the table for the shaker of red pepper flakes, I found I could also see down the freckled chasm of her cleavage to a pale little triangle of her sternum. When she caught me looking she actually winked; a slow deliberate shuttering that reminded me of the way alligators I had seen on the nature shows slid a clear lens over their eyes before they submerged into the murky waters of the swamp.
“Nice coat,” Rosellen said to the Sainte Maria who, as usual, had worn the faux-fur leopard-print with the matted collar and unraveling hemline as if it were armor, hugging it close over her stomach and breasts all the way to the table where she had shrugged it off and slung it over the back of Luke’s chair. Now, she looked up from Luke’s plate where she was cutting his pizza into tiny morsels with the attitude of a person who has heard a loud noise and is trying to figure out if it is a misfiring engine or a shot.
“It’s cute that we’re wearing the same pattern,” Rosellen said. She dabbed a spot of red sauce from the corner of her mouth with her napkin, then wet it in her water glass and dabbed the spot again. “I wonder what else we have in common.”
There was something wrong with the Sainte Maria’s face. It seemed puffy, swollen as if she’d had a tooth removed. Lately too her eyes seemed darker. If it were possible I would have said she had bruised only her eyes and that they were healing very slowly. Perhaps she had a cold, I thought.
“I got it at St. Francis,” the Sainte Maria finally said. Her voice was low and husky and she took a sip of her soda. “They always have something like that there,” she said. “It’s nothing special. It’s old.”
A truck pulled into the parking spot just outside the window and idled for a moment with its headlights on. The beams spilled around Rosellen and my father’s heads and shoulders, falling on the rest of us with a colder light. I felt caught, frozen like an animal in the field when the machine it’s been dreaming of suddenly chugs to bright, belching life. But it was just a pizza parlor and we were just some people, loosely affiliated, crowding around a table for our chance at the meal. The guy in the truck turned off the engine and sat a little longer in the dark cab. Rosellen nodded her head, as if to say, ‘yes, yes, it is nothing after all’; and the Sainte Maria, her cheeks flushed red, bent over my brother’s plate and continued to furiously cut.
From there things developed very quickly. It wasn’t long before I was used to watching Rosellen’s scythe-like face in profile from my kitchen chair. She exhaled: a thin vapor of smoke appearing between her lips at the last moment, only to be drawn back into her lungs with her next breath. It was almost seven, the light thickening, my dinner cold. Soon, Thingy would trudge up the hill from her house and balance on the stone wall yelling my name until I came
out to her. I would ask her what she wanted to do tonight and she would feign indifference, force me to suggest a number of lame alternatives before she would tell me what it was she had planned all along.
When Bitch had her puppies, Rosellen made sure I was there in the garage. She handed me one of my father’s old handkerchiefs to rub the blood and amniotic slick off of each of them as they slid out of Bitch’s birth canal and showed me how to clear the mucous plugs from their noses and tiny squawling mouths. A few days later when Bitch turned on her litter and devoured every one of them, Rosellen buried them by herself in a corner of the yard and would not let me over to see the glistening tangle of their remains. Thingy and I dug them up—a long enough time later that the pups were largely skeletons, the evidence of their suffering reduced to the slivers of tooth-marked bone—but what I am trying to say is that while Rosellen had no children, and did not ever think of me as a child, she was capable of kindnesses. Subterfuge was something Rosellen understood and respected. As was ambition. As was taking sides.
“No. You know what a family is like?” Rosellen said. She turned to me as if she had reached some new conclusion, but I never did find out because just then my father came in to rummage in the refrigerator for an after dinner snack and slapped Rosellen on the behind in passing.
“Dax,” she said, her face breaking open the way it always did when my father touched her. “Alice is here.”
“So she is,” said my father, and then, as if he had never seen me before, he stood for a moment staring at me. He held the refrigerator door open, chill air pluming out of its lemon light while his eyes traveled over my face and up and down my hunched, spindly body. “I guess that’s her, all right,” he said. “Old Alice.”
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