Three girls, not very different from Giordana, but completely clueless, acting like they were on a break from making a music video. They were being so loud. They had their high heels up on each other’s laps. They probably had cocktails for breakfast. The urge to sit down with them, to continue as if the summer hadn’t been fatally interrupted, was wiped out by the desire not to be seen by the boss she had left without warning. Plus, there was the promise of listening in on her friends.
There were no surprises. They were talking about people walking by, about the mascara Emily had shoplifted last week, about all the dirty dishes they had left in the kitchen. About nothing.
If she were in a party dress and high heels, Giordana was sure she wouldn’t have been this frivolous. If she had slept over the night before, she might have had a sip of one of the blender concoctions (even though she had looked at her father on more than one night and vowed never to drink). But she would not have been so giggly.
A need to say good-bye to them was one of the reasons she snuck onto the bus that morning, but that had evaporated. It was replaced by the thought that her friends should be paying closer attention to real things, those random events that could change the arithmetic of their lives. The girls weren’t talking about Dee almost getting pregnant by Chris last month. They weren’t talking about Emily, who was going to get caught stealing someday soon. They weren’t talking about Thea, who was cushioned from the world by money—a fate that was starting to look pretty good. And worst of all, there was no mention of their missing friend. They probably just thought she was sick. Or they didn’t care that she wasn’t around.
Giordana grabbed the side of their table and lifted it, enough to tip their water. As the glasses slid close to the edge, she let go, slamming it back down. The water poured off the table and they scrambled to clean it up before anyone saw. The girls were freaked, but looking at each other kept them smiling. Giordana waited half a minute and did it again, harder. That made them silent. There, Giordana thought, that’s what the world is like.
On her father’s street, the creepy guy was sitting on a car. One day last year, when she was walking home with groceries, he came up to her and said, “Whoa. You’re nearly ripe, aren’t you?” Close enough now to smell his ripeness—cigarette skin and a sunny day of drinking beer—she took his can from the top of the car, disappearing it and then making it reappear in the rubbish on the street corner. She watched him hunt all over the street, cursing creation for having stolen his drink.
Using her keys to get into their building, she climbed the three flights to their apartment. It was the middle of the afternoon, so there was a fifty-fifty chance her father was awake. As if she were cracking a safe, she listened at the metal door for any sounds before turning the key to let herself in without a click.
There was the possibility that he would be sitting in his wicker armchair by the television, deadened, and watching the door to the apartment open and close on its own. If he did, she hoped he would chalk the vision up to too much whiskey.
All the blinds had been raised, as if to highlight the need for a good cleaning of all the surfaces.
His chair was empty. Maybe he was invisible too.
What had she come here for? Every single thing looked secondhand, like it had been left behind on purpose. An enormous punch bowl her parents had been given for their wedding, the painting of the knots of a rosebush that Natalie had done when she and Ruth were girls, even a box of chocolates on the kitchen counter that were being saved for some happy occasion that wasn’t going to come. The place smelled like a thrift shop.
There were two half-full bottles of Jim Beam, one in the bedroom and one in the hall. Giordana carried them both to the kitchen and threw them into the sink, breaking them, splashing everywhere. The room seized with the essence of Dad.
He would come back from wherever he was and stare at the shards in the sink. Maybe he would think he had done it himself in some theatrical bid to quit. Maybe he would take it as a sign and never drink again. Maybe he would sell the punch bowl for as much as he could get so that he could keep drinking for another few days. Maybe he would cut his wrists with the broken glass at the mind-boggling idiocy of losing his family over booze, or over losing the booze. Giordana pretended she didn’t care which path he took, that she’d be detached enough to make perfect triangle sandwiches with the crusts cut off. To prove her toughness, she grabbed a handful of the chocolates and pushed them into her mouth, strawberry cream, coconut, and coffee truffle all mushed together.
Still chewing, only tasting the sugar, she went to her bedroom. Her red backpack was hooked on the back of the door. It was the house-on-fire decision: What do you take with you when you have less than a minute? How much can you carry? Sifting through the room with a glance, she felt restrained as she only picked up her photo album. Even its pinkness was juvenile now, but she wanted the pictures as proof. Heading through the living room again, she wolfed down another handful of chocolates.
Her father’s halfhearted footsteps echoed on the stairs.
Without even thinking about it, she backed into the hallway near her bedroom and went invisible. It would take concentration to stay that way with him in the room. His keys clanged on the side of the door.
He came in, alone and aimless at two in the afternoon. A little disoriented, a little disinterested in it all. When Thea met him for the first time, she had said with innocent surprise, “My dad’s forty too, but he’s not as leathery in the face.”
He had a newspaper and a bag of groceries with him, if you called a six-pack groceries. It all looked like an ordinary afternoon, except for the placid expression, which she had never seen before. She recognized it immediately as the feeling of sanctuary you have when you come home to an empty apartment.
He would never call them again.
What had she expected? It had always been her mother’s job to mend but she wasn’t going to do it anymore. So this was it, right here. When would Giordana see him next? Would he show up at her graduation, at her wedding? Would she meet him on his deathbed or maybe go to his funeral? Maybe he would try to kidnap her, like divorced dads did on the news. No. He had the anger but he wasn’t, her mother was fond of saying, particularly goal-oriented.
Giordana let him see her. “Dad?”
Barely surprised to find her there, his eyes went to the photo album in her hand. He nodded. “The minute you left, you remembered what you forgot, am I right?”
Sometimes his rhetorical questions were tricks. Giordana took a second to think.
“Am I right?” He was in her face.
“You’re right.”
“I’m right.”
She stayed in the hallway by the kitchen, not knowing where to stand. Her father started to clear the older newspapers and cans from around his chair, as if that had been his plan for the afternoon. Not looking up, he told her, “You’ll be a grown-up soon and you’ll have your own relationships. You’ll see that we did this for you too. Staying together would have been no favor to you and Ben. And no picnic for us.”
On other afternoons when he spouted off like this, she had been respectful, acting as if she was being enlightened to the facts of adulthood. Noblesse oblige, she had thought when she used to nod, keeping her opinions to herself; but now she wondered who the good manners protected.
He nodded intently, checking that she was with him on this. She kept her expression flat, unsympathetic. That was reason enough for him to stop what he was doing. He took the beer he had bought and came toward the kitchen to put it in the fridge. It was what he wanted to do anyway.
“We’re not being selfish. We’re being realistic,” he said as he passed her, not caring if she believed him or not. “You’ll see.”
“Tell yourself whatever you want,” Giordana said.
He stopped. He didn’t face her but he lingered, challenging her to say more. She looked at his stubble, the flecks of white. He must have stopped shaving the day they left. And show
ering too.
Her head turned back and forth in a slow no—the same way her mother did when she’d had enough. It denied whatever it was he was saying. It denied the person he had become.
He recognized the gesture and waved his arm at the door. “Get out then, if you don’t approve. Ask your mother exactly who left who.”
Getting ready to say good-bye forever, she took two shaky steps away from him.
“You know what happens if you leave like this?” Without using force, just his advancing steps, he cornered her against the door. “None of you better come back. Tell her it’s too late for any patch job. The air’s already come out of the tire, the tire’s torn. It’s totally flat. Tell her that,” he said.
“I’ll tell her.”
“And tell your brother too. He’s going to have to learn and he won’t learn anything from her. Tell him this: A marriage is two different individuals trying to be the same one. Humans weren’t made that way.”
“I want to go,” she said.
“Tell me you understand what I said.”
“No. Let me out of here,” she said, her hand on the doorknob. He barely budged.
She tried to push him off and he pinned her arms. The shoulder of her shirt tore a little. He didn’t care and pressed her harder, as if that would make her listen.
Giordana lunged at his chest to make him move, pushing him around till he was the one against the door. He was still blocking her way.
He laughed at her effort, but he was getting impatient. “You don’t get it,” he said. “That’s what the problem is. You’re going to grow up believing whatever she tells you. I feel sorry for you, I do.”
“I feel sorry for you too,” she said, crying, pulling on the doorknob pointlessly.
His eyes were shining too—with sadness, with anger?—but he wasn’t letting go. “Would it kill you to stay and listen to your father a minute?”
He wanted to talk more. All these adults expected her to console them for screwing up her life.
He said, “It’ll be all right, darling. It will.” His arms were around her, acting as if she were the one who wanted a hug. She didn’t.
She pulled one arm free, raised the photo album up, and brought its hard edge down against his forehead. He stopped to feel the spot she’d hit.
“Hey!” he said, his hands up in a truce.
She roared into him, slamming her body against his chest again and again, trying to get him away from the door, even as he was trying to calm her. Finally she pushed herself against him with such force that at the point of contact everything went still and suffocating.
It was dark for a flash, but then there was air again.
She was standing in the hall, breathing hard. She had gone through him, gone through the door.
If you want something badly enough, it turns out.
Behind her she heard him call her name into the apartment. Mystified, he called her again, and swore. He opened the door behind her as she vanished, and he yelled right into her ear, “Where are you?”
The ride back was easier. Giordana caught an express, which had fewer people trying to sit on her. She had two seats to herself for most of the way and sat there, her hands crossed over the photo album to keep it invisible. It had lost some of its value in the fight with her father. It had gone from being a girly keepsake to a weapon. Were all the pictures inside similarly tainted? Would they still show birthday parties and school trips or would they show a screwed-up family and a girl who was desperate to escape? She resolved not to look at the photos for a while.
Reading the highway signs was the only way to tell where she was. Buildings and tunnels gave way to trees and then shadowy buildings and then neon. The small towns dragged on, dark silhouettes on a dark sky.
Even so, if she stared hard she could see that the bus was keeping still and everything else was racing past her. Giordana’s friends and their sleepovers, her mother out begging for work at the hospital, Ben and Janelle on a blanket in the bushes, her father out buying more alcohol or joining AA. They were all separate, scattering like planets without even asking each other if it was okay.
It was nearly ten when she made it back to the house. Spying first could have helped her gauge what sort of scene she was in for, but she didn’t see the point. Ben had come back from the pool almost as late. Any lecture she was going to get was irrelevant. She didn’t have to listen to anyone.
Her mother and Natalie were sitting on the porch. They leaped off the sofa like they were synchronized, and rushed up to meet her.
Giordana walked up the steps saying, “I should have.”
“That’s not the point,” they said in near unison.
“Where were you?” her mother demanded.
Giordana saw Ben and Janelle sitting on the sofa watching TV, close to each other, almost touching. Ben grinned at Giordana because she was in trouble. She kept her grin about him to herself. She called to Janelle, “I’m sorry I stood you up this morning. I had to go home for this.” She waved the little photo album.
“It’s okay,” Janelle said, half-watching the television, probably adding this new neighborhood gossip to her repertoire.
Her mother went off. “Home? Giordana! Your father could have done anything, do you understand? He could have kept you there and all of this could have become ten times worse.”
“You’ve brought us here now, so it already is ten times worse.”
“Don’t tell me what’s right. You shouldn’t have run away like that.”
“I didn’t run away. And what was Dad going to do, anyway?”
Uncle Peter stood at the back of the hallway, waiting for his turn to play the father. “Your mother, all of us, we were extremely worried. We didn’t know where you went or what had happened to you.”
“Nothing happened to me.”
Her mother said, “I’ve been waiting for hours for the phone to ring.” She sniffed the air. “Is that alcohol?”
“I broke all his bottles in the sink. Some must have got on me.”
“Oh baby,” her mother said, hugging her. Giordana knew exactly where this was headed. The upset was going to turn into an opera, which meant Giordana would spend the evening assuring her mother that leaving him was a brilliant thing to do and that it didn’t hurt a bit.
“And what’s this?” Natalie asked, holding the rip in her shirt.
“I don’t know.”
Peter piped up and came forward. “‘I don’t know’ isn’t an acceptable answer in this house.” He looked in at Ben and said, “You too. Come here,” waving him into the hall. “I know you’ve both been living through difficult times at home and being here is not what you envisioned for yourselves, but you’re both nearly adults.”
Alek appeared at the top of the stairs wearing only his Superman underpants. Giordana had to think serious thoughts to keep from cracking up at the sight of him. His little legs were doing a jig, as if there was music playing somewhere.
These people around her loved her and that’s why they were so worried. Uncle Peter was trying to be sensible. He was looking out for her. She had to remember that.
He went on. “While you are here, we will not tolerate bad behavior. And we’ve got a wide definition for that. It includes drinking alcohol, taking drugs, not doing chores when asked, and going off without leaving a note.”
With one hand on his hip, Alek wagged a finger at Giordana in a tsk-tsk rhythm. She had to limit herself to only quick glances at him or Peter would have turned around and seen. Alek’s attitude would have made him go up another octave.
The boy’s face was sedating. It said, This is temporary. All of it—Uncle Peter, the house, the street, the country, the world. Any single element might change in an instant. Because it was pushed one day, because it wanted to or because it was simply time to go. The good news was that she could do the same. And that would cause other changes to happen, things she couldn’t imagine. Someday she and Alek would be grown-ups and remember this together.
They would be somewhere else entirely. France, the moon.
Her mother took over. “You have to keep in mind that we are guests here and there will be no more disrespect and no more vanishing acts. Is that clear?”
Everything was clear. In another minute it might not be. That was clear too.
Her mother put her hands on Giordana’s shoulders. “Is any of this sinking in?”
Natalie
At the end of what should have been a peaceful Sunday lunch, she and Peter had tried to discuss with Alek a stream of absences from school and from the swimming team, but after five minutes of sulky silence, they were nowhere. Peter, caught in some father-son game, would be willing to let the battle go on indefinitely. Alek was content to win through silence, which of course twisted Peter into bigger knots. The entire confrontation drained Natalie and she wished it would end. Her sole desire for the afternoon: a nap on the veranda, a half-opened book in her hand.
Alek stretched his arms open across the table toward his parents. It was the position of truce but not the spirit: “If I say anything, I’m in trouble. If I don’t say anything, I’m in trouble. I’m not saying anything.” And then he checked out, as per usual.
When Peter replied that he wasn’t to leave the room until his conduct was explained in full, a jolt of common sense took over. She pushed her chair back, excused herself, and went straight upstairs to Alek’s bedroom. In the back of his closet, behind the curtain of old coats, she found his porn burrow and, from underneath it, retrieved the navy leather-bound diary. She was appalled at what she might be unleashing.
For months she had known of its existence—once even flipping through its pages—but she had prided herself on having the appropriate detachment to let him become his own man. Her present weakness shamed her. Evidently not enough. She had already committed the crime—taken it from his room and locked herself with it in the hall bathroom—so remorse would achieve little. An old shoelace tailed out of the book as a placeholder. She rationalized: There was a defensible and very straight line from the act of breast-feeding to this. She turned the shower on for the noise, braced herself for unimaginable adolescent horrors, and opened to the saved page.
What the Family Needed Page 4