“We started on the cake,” Ronda says, still tearing at the wrapping paper. “My mother and father wanted a piece before they left.” She holds the book up and shows it around. “This is great.”
“The cake smells good,” Lily says. “I didn’t think I was hungry.”
Mr. Stapleton comes in, bending repeatedly to pick up the wrapping paper Ronda has dropped. “Sloppy,” he says, shaking his head. “Sloppy.” He puts the pieces into a plastic bag and then sits on the couch, puts a pair of glasses on, and opens a magazine. Newsweek.
“Aren’t we going to sing happy birthday to Lily?” Christine asks.
“Well,” says Lily, “I haven’t sung it to Ronda.” She begins to sing, facing the other girl, who joins in, with Christine and the boy Brian, while the others stare. Mr. Stapleton looks over the top of his glasses, holding the magazine open on his knees, smiling tolerantly. Finally the boy named Dominic takes up the song, on the last line. They get the names mixed up. Lily sings Ronda’s name and Ronda sings Lily’s. The other girl sings Ronda’s. Dominic sings a mumbled combination of both names and then laughs. Drinda says, “Okay. Now. Are we finished? Jeez.”
“When’s your birthday?” Lily asks her.
“A thousand years ago. I’m a witch.”
“She’s a witch,” Ronda repeats, laughing.
“It’s a sin to believe in witches,” says Christine.
“Who said anything about belief?” Drinda asks her.
“That’s a bad thing to say,” Mr. Stapleton puts in. “Your parents ought to know you talk like that.”
“Hey,” Drinda says. “They talk like that. Somebody cut the cake. Jeez.”
“I’ll cut it,” Lily says. “I want some. It’s my birthday, too.” She picks up a plastic knife and makes a wide swath through the left side of the cake, then lifts the piece, most of that side, as it begins to crumble, onto one of the paper plates. She hands the plate to Drinda.
“You don’t think I’ll eat it,” Drinda says.
“You’ll make it disappear,” says Lily, grinning out of one side of her mouth, as her father has said she does so charmingly.
“Here,” Ronda says, handing her a wrapped book. Her one present. She opens it while the others watch. It is one of those serial books, written for young teens. Lily reads the title: Great Explorers. She flips through the pages to the picture section. A woman catches her eye, among all the faces of men. The face is narrow, the eyes dark, the hair wispy and dark-looking under a bonnet. The picture must have been taken just before, or just after, the woman smiled. It shows in the dark eyes and in the lines of shadow bordering the eyes—the suggestion of a smile, a ghost smile. Lily stares. The name under the photograph is Mary Kingsley.
“Thanks, Ronda,” Lily says, and puts the book down on the table, next to the cake.
They go down to the basement to listen to music. It’s low-ceilinged and dark, with pictures on the walls of the Beatles, and Bob Dylan—Ronda’s parents’ pictures and this is her parents’ recreation room. There is a pool table, a large-screen television, and a sound system, complete with tall speakers and amplifiers. There are bookcases all around, and a big desk stacked with papers in apparent disorder. Ronda turns music on—The Bee Gees—and then decides to make out with Dominic. They sit on the sofa and do this, while the others stand around in the noise. It’s as if they’re playing a love scene in a movie. Lily sits next to Christine at the other end of the sofa, and the two of them begin to laugh at their own awkwardness, their own inability to keep from attending to what’s going on. Across the room, Brian is looking through the books. Then he selects a pool cue and begins to shoot pool. Drinda, who has been standing off to one side, hands folded at her waist and looking very uncomfortable, joins him.
Mr. Stapleton comes partway down the stairs, clearing his throat loudly. It’s clear he doesn’t want to come in on anything. He leans down and looks at them. Ronda and Dominic have separated and are sitting apart. The music stops, the end of a song.
“Everything okay down here?”
“We’re shooting pool,” Lily says, rising from the sofa.
“All right. Be good, you-all.” He turns on the stairs and ascends, slowly, clearing his throat and coughing once, deep.
“He’ll be asleep in five minutes,” Ronda says.
“It’s a bet,” says Dominic.
For a time everyone takes turns shooting pool, and then they are all sitting in the shifting light of the television. Nothing good is on, but they watch anyway. Lily walks upstairs and retrieves her book from the coffee table, and has another bite of cake. Mr. Stapleton is dozing on the couch. He wakes and looks at her. “What?”
“Just had a piece of cake.”
He closes his eyes, seems to sigh, and then is gone in sleep again, making a raw, scratchy, bronchial sound with each inhalation. She backs away and returns to the basement, carrying her book. Dominic is sitting on the bottom step, reading the back of a record album. He’s smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the heat vent.
“Old man’s asleep, isn’t he,” he says to Lily.
“Yep.”
“I can hear him. He sounds like a lung patient.”
A second later, she says, “Aren’t you afraid of getting caught?”
“Hey, he smokes. Smokes like a train. I see him sitting out on their front porch, blowing smoke like a chimney.”
She sits on the step next to him and opens her book. In the room, there’s the sound of television gunfire and car chasing, brakes squealing, sirens. It’s a repeat of The Dukes of Hazzard. Lily can tell by the music, and the voiceover.
“Want a drag?” Dominic asks her.
“No, thanks.”
“Ever try it?”
“Yes,” she lies.
“Ever smoke weed?”
She shakes her head.
“Bet your folks have. Bet they have a lot. You know how it’s defined in the dictionary in my father’s library? ‘A mild hallucinogenic smoked by jazz musicians in the United States.’ Isn’t that great?”
“My parents aren’t jazz musicians.”
“They’re actors. Next closest thing.”
“What about you?”
“I’m clean. Mean and keen.”
“Not stuck on yourself or anything.”
He laughs. The reaction surprises her. Soon they’re talking about their schools and the teachers they have, and she discovers that she likes him. There’s something sharp-edged about him that interests her, and, like her, he has done more reading than most adolescents, and isn’t afraid to talk about it. He’s not doing well in school, but this doesn’t worry him. Together, they look through her book of explorers. He stops on the photograph of Mary Kingsley. “Looks like she just laughed.”
“I had the same thought,” Lily says. “Like she just did or is about to.”
“Exactly.”
She feels relaxed with him, and wonders how it would be to have a brother. This is more comfortable than anything she has experienced at her school, where the other children often treat her cruelly: because she’s bookish, and is faintly secretive-seeming at times; because she prefers Ella Fitzgerald to Pat Benatar; because she has a large vocabulary and on occasion uses it to talk about whatever excites her, or interests her; because she’s an only child; because she’s more developed in the chest, or wears the wrong clothes, or too many of the right ones; because she has freckles over her nose; because she doesn’t watch much television; because her parents are actors and therefore merit either envy or suspicion; and so on and so on—for any of the thousand unfathomable reasons a group of children, forming a pecking order, decide that one among them is strange, not like them, or not enough like them.
The party ends with the parents of the others coming. They talk of the fact that the roads are indeed icing over. Ronda’s parents haven’t returned, and neither have Lily’s. The boy Dominic Martinez stays on for a time, and then wanders on out across the street, hands in his pockets against
the cold. Lily watches him go, and sees that he slips several times.
“Where are your parents?” Ronda wants to know. “It’s past eleven.”
“Where are yours?”
She yawns. “They’re always late.”
“Well.” Lily looks around the room. The old man is drowsing again on the couch, making that asthmatic sound with each breath. The remains of the cake are on the table, the plates, all the debris of the party. Ronda’s collecting her presents.
“I’m really exhausted,” she says.
“You’re not going to bed, Ronda. Come on.”
“I’ll just fall asleep right here. Where are your parents? Aren’t you worried?”
Mr. Stapleton sits up, mumbling, glassy-eyed. “What the hell. I went out again. What time is it?”
Lily tells him. He rises, scratches his head, and moves to the hallway, and the front door. “Where is everybody?”
“They should be here any minute,” Lily says, beginning to worry.
At midnight, there’s no answer at the theater, and he calls the police. Lily sits on the couch listening to his side of the conversation, and she hears car doors outside. She tells herself that if she looks, it will be Ronda’s parents, so she waits, listening to the footsteps, and allowing her imagination to present her with Scott and Doris, invincible, as usual, arm in arm, coming carefully up the walk, to the front door. But it must be neighbors, someone on the other side of the street. No one comes. As the minutes go by, Lily begins to feel an unreasoning terror. It clutches at her heart: it is only a little more than thirty minutes past the time Scott and Doris would ordinarily arrive; yet she can’t undo the strands of conviction in her soul that both of them are dead, now. That this night has taken them away from her. She keeps seeing the image of her father, dying as Edmund, sprawled out on the stage. She can’t get it out of her mind—the whole violent wrack and turmoil of the play, even as she understands that none of it is like life as life is, now. Sitting in Ronda Seiver’s living room, she experiences a terrible dread of the particulars of existence: the world outside, with its glitter of ice and roar of wind, is too big, too immense, a darkness she can’t get her mind around.
There isn’t anything to do but wait.
They sit in the living room. Lily and Ronda and Mr. Stapleton, who says he’s sure it’s all right, a simple explanation, and nothing to worry about. Lily forces herself to smile, barely holding on, being polite.
“It’s only a little past midnight.” Ronda holds Lily’s hand.
“Would you like something to eat?” Mr. Stapleton asks.
“No, thank you, sir.” Lily begins to tremble, deep down, where she can’t reach with will or determination. It comes over her like a fever, but she says nothing, sitting in the false light, looking at Mr. Stapleton and waiting for the phone to ring. She can’t draw in air, and then when she does manage to do so, she can’t quite let it out. The shaking begins to cause the muscles of her back to seize up.
When the phone finally does ring, all three of them jump. Mr. Stapleton actually emits a sound like a gasp. He’s the one who answers. Lily feels the cold on the inside of her skin, and realizes that she has put her hands to her face. The calm in Mr. Stapleton’s voice makes her give way a little, and in the next moment it’s clear that her father is on the other end. They’ve had a slight accident—no one hurt. Lily hears the words. No one hurt. She stands, and then sits down, and then stands again, and Ronda embraces her so forcefully that both of them fall back onto the couch. Ronda’s crying. And then they’re all standing, and Mr. Stapleton says, “He wants to talk to you. You’re welcome to spend the night.”
“Hello?” she says into the phone, trying not to cry.
“We’re fine, everything’s fine. The play went fine.”
“Daddy?” she says.
“We’re fine, sweetie. Really. We hit the curb and we couldn’t shake loose. It’s too icy. We’re at the Willard. Can you stay there tonight?”
“Yes.”
“And on your birthday, too. We’ll make it up to you. Promise.”
“It’s okay.” She can’t keep the tears from her voice. But she’s happy—relieved—and yet oddly still frightened. It has never before entered her mind in such a palpable way that anything might ever happen to her parents.
“We’ll come over there as soon as the weather clears up in the morning,” he says.
A little later, Ronda’s parents call to say that they are stuck at the house of the couple with whom they had dinner. The streets are too treacherous for any-one to take a chance. Ronda lends Lily a nightgown, and Mr. Stapleton makes himself a whiskey to celebrate that everyone’s all right. He pours Cokes for Ronda and Lily, and asks them to sit up with him awhile. Ronda yawns, and says, “Okay,” clearly reluctant. Lily, still feeling the fright along her nerves, is glad to stay up.
They sit in the living room and watch late news reports about the storm, and the old man sips his whiskey. Between sighs of satisfaction, he talks about how bad the winters are in Syracuse, where Ronda’s mother grew up, how the snow can pile up to the windows with a single storm, and how it stays on the ground until the spring. “You’ve heard the stories of parents saying they walked five miles in the snow—well, Ronda, your mother did just that. No kidding about it.” He drinks, looking happy.
“I’ve heard,” Ronda says.
He laughs softly, to himself, and drinks again. After a time, he says, “Well, no sense keeping you girls up. You go on to bed. But don’t keep me up, either. This is no pajama party or anything like that.”
In Ronda’s room, they lie side by side in Ronda’s bed in the light from her reading lamp, and she whispers stories about her parents—the arguments she hears between them concerning her grandfather’s presence in this house. It’s not such a big house that you can get out of someone’s way, and the old man watches too much television. Also, he drinks. Tonight, he broke a rule—he’s not supposed to have anything when he’s baby-sitting. Sometimes he sits up late and you can hear the tip of the bottle touching the lip of the glass as he pours. He’s a bad sleeper. Ronda often wakes in the middle of the night to hear him moving around. “Once he wandered in here by mistake. Scared me to pieces. He’s had heart trouble for years, and I never go into any room where he’s at that I don’t expect to find him dead.”
“Oh, come on,” Lily says. “He’s not that old. How old is he?”
“He’s sixty-two.”
“That’s not that old anymore, Ronda. You’re being silly.”
“You try living with someone like that.”
“I think he’s nice,” Lily says.
Ronda stares dreamily at the ceiling. “I want to be a movie star when I grow up. If I was your father, I never would’ve stopped.”
Lily says, “He likes what he’s doing.”
“Are you going to be an actor? Mother says you’re gonna be a writer. I mean, she says you already are.”
“It’s just a—a journal.”
Ronda turns the light off. “Will you write novels, do you think? Maybe I’ll write them. I can write, you know. I just don’t find it easy.”
“Well, neither do I,” Lily says.
“I think you should write plays. And your parents can act in them.”
They’re quiet for a time. Lily’s still feeling the residue of the fright, and she entertains a waking dream of her parents acting in a play of hers; she sees herself, grown, no longer afraid, standing in the wings while they take their bows. She murmers a prayer she has said each night as long as she can remember: “Bless everyone I’ve laid eyes on, and everyone they’ve laid eyes on.”
“That’s nice,” Ronda says. “I shouldn’t talk about Grandpa Stapleton. But he’s old and he drinks, and I worry about him.” She sighs. “I can’t sleep.”
Yet in the next moment, Lily hears her breathing become slow; it deepens, and there’s a small snoring sound issuing from the back of her throat.
The house grows quiet. She list
ens, tries to sleep, and her mind is too restless, still turning on the images of her father as Edmund, dying in rehearsal. It’s as if she has never thought of death, the fact of it in the world—its irremediable remorseless power over her and everybody she loves—before now. Her heart races. She sits up, hearing sounds downstairs. Mr. Stapleton walking into the kitchen. She thinks of the book of explorers, something to read. When Mr. Stapleton goes to his room, she’ll sneak downstairs and sit reading until she gets sleepy. The time crawls by, while Ronda emits her little sleep sound, and sighs. Lily moves from the bed, and stands at the door of the room, trying to hear. Silence. Finally she opens the door a crack. There’s a light on downstairs, but no sound. She waits, listening. Nothing stirs. She steps out into the darkened hallway and moves to the top of the stairs and down, along the downstairs hall to the living room, where one lamp is on, and the television, without sound. Mr. Stapleton sits up from the couch and sees her, a look of startlement on his face. He reaches for his eyeglasses, and nearly falls to the floor, righting himself with an extended hand, and then working to sit up. On the table before him is a bottle of whiskey, and a cocktail glass. He peers at her. “Hey.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Lily says.
“Can’t sleep?”
“I thought if I could read…”
“I leave the TV on without sound,” he says. “Isn’t that something? It’s like watching a painting get made because I can’t see shit without my glasses. Just colors. It—it lulls me to sleep at night. I’m sorry for the language.” He puts the glasses on.
“Well,” she says. “Sleep well.” She starts back toward the hallway.
“Don’t go. Where you going?”
“Upstairs.”
“Why?” He moves over. “Sit down. Watch a little TV. Maybe that’ll make you sleepy.”
“TV keeps me awake.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 2