Now I have a new room, and I keep it clean, even though I don’t like it. Roy changed all the boards on the floor and put new paper on the walls. He even made me a big bed with a picture of a fairy princess carved into the headboard, but I still don’t like it, or him. My old room was right next door to Mom’s, against the same side of the house where the wind always blows, and on the nights when Mom slept downstairs I would go up to my room after doing the dishes and lie in bed, listening to the wind talk to our house by blowing against it and our house talking back by creaking and moaning. Most of the time, if I got scared in the middle of the night, I could knock on the wall by my bed and Mom would knock back. Now my room is bigger and I have a bathroom of my own, but I’m too far away to knock on the wall and have Mom hear me, and I’m not far enough away to keep from hearing her and Ray when they go to bed.
I’m never having sex. Never. No one thinks I’m pretty, but I suspect boys try to have sex with ugly girls if pretty girls won’t let them. Mom tells me I’m pretty, but I know she tells me that because she loves me. I looked at myself in the mirror once, before Ray came, just to make sure that I am ugly. My hair is blond, and a little curly, but I don’t have any breasts yet, and I hope I never do. My eyes are a little funny-looking, and my chin doesn’t stick out like other people’s do. Some of the girls in my class laugh at me and ask me if my mommy is my sister, too, but they’re just dumb. Mom was young when she had me, and I know I’m part of the reason that her mom left right after I was born, and why my mom never finished school.
Mom talked to me about it, about sex, once. We were eating sandwiches on the card table in the kitchen and talking about the other kids in my class, and when I told her that a boy had been caught with a girl’s panties in his pocket she asked me if I knew why boys liked girls. She said I was too young to have anything to do with it, but that there things I needed to know. She told me how my body worked and different things that a boy might want to do, including all the really dirty stuff. She said that you didn’t have to love someone to have sex with them, but that you better know about all the problems that it can cause. She told me three times to remember that sex made babies, and that it can make a baby no matter how much you don’t want it to. Mom said that she made some mistakes about that when she was younger, and she didn’t want me making them too. After Ray started sleeping in her bedroom, I asked her if she was making a mistake again, and she laughed, her dumb laugh, and she told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.
As soon as I hear him in the hall, I go to my door and open it just a little bit. I crouch down on the floor and watch him while he measures a thick board with the old metal triangle that he brought with him. He’s always smiling. He’s pulled up all the boards in the floor that had splinters sticking out, replaced the shingles on the roof, and done something down in the basement that made the front door and the door in the kitchen not stick anymore. It’s taken him six months, and he’s smiled the whole time. If I have to be around him while he’s working, he smiles a different smile while he sneaks looks at me. One time I told Mom about that other smile, the one that makes me feel funny and makes my face all red, and she got really mad and told me to stop distracting Ray when he’s working. So I took the picture book that I had made for her, the one with all the stuff from when I was a baby, and burned it in the oven one night after they had gone to bed and were making lots of noise.
I lock my door and go over to the corner of the room where I keep my house. It has three stories, thirty-five rooms, and an attic. All of the doors really open, and all of the furniture is real. I can leave it together and feel like a great big giant looking inside our house, or I can open it all the way up where it covers my whole table and pull my chair up and imagine that I’m inside a perfect house, a house that no one ever changes. There are lots of old pictures in the real attic upstairs, and I know that my house looks just like ours used to look, a long time ago.
My house has a family, too. Victoria Lee lives inside it, along with her mother, Grace, and her sister, Mandy, who is just a baby. They each have their own rooms, and Victoria Lee has a tea room with a table and cupboard, and Mandy has a playroom with lots of toys.
My house came from the attic, along with Victoria Lee and her family. Mom said that my grandmother, and her grandmother, and little girls in our family going back over a hundred years have played with it. There’s a trunk up in the attic with other people, too. It has fathers, and uncles and aunts, and grandmothers, and dogs and cats, and even a couple of old cars. Mom has said that I can play with any of them, but that I have to be careful, because they’re all made of wood, and they were all made special, not like they make stuff now. That’s part of the reason our house used to look so bad. Mom says even back when our family could afford to fix it, it was hard to find someone who knew how to do it the right way.
But my house doesn’t look bad. I keep every room dusted and wiped. I never take it outside and I never let anyone else touch it before I make sure that their hands are clean. Mom used to wash her hands after lunch and play with me, but she usually takes a nap now. Ray has only looked at my house once, and I didn’t let him touch it because he had dirt all over his hands. He looked at it a long time, not saying anything, and when he was done he just smiled at me with his dumb smile, but he smiled at me like I was dumb too.
I’m not dumb. I know he’s making my mom make another mistake.
We have chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner that night. Mom stayed in the kitchen, cooking, ever since we got home, and she made too much. Ray has been making tables and chairs and selling them to the people in town, so we have more money than we used to, and he’s always hungry. Now Mom has to cook a lot more than she used to. She says she doesn’t mind, but I can tell that she worries when she cooks.
“How are your beans, sweetie?”
“They’re okay.”
“Your mom sure is a good cook, Becky. If we keep eating like this, pretty soon we’ll have to butter ourselves up just to fit through the door.”
I don’t answer. I want to finish and take Victoria Lee out to the back porch before it gets dark. She can be the only passenger on a giant ship that is stranded in the middle of a huge, empty desert.
He just keeps talking.
“You know, it’s not too early to start thinkin’ about somebody’s thirteenth birthday. There’s a place in the backyard, in the corner of the old fence, that would look awfully pretty with a swing set.”
“I’d really like a CD player. My radio is starting to sound funny.”
“A big one, like a bench, that you and some of your friends could fit in. I’d put a roof on it, too, just like the old ones.”
I look at him, right in his stupid face.
“No.”
“Honey, CDs are expensive. We’re doing a little better than we were before, but we need to get the rest of the house fixed up. Then we can get more boarders.”
“Aw, let’s just see how the place looks with just us first, before we go talking about that.”
“If Ray made you a swing set, Becky, you could have some of your friends from school over.”
“Yeah! You could have a big, fancy party and all dress up!”
I feel my face getting red, and it’s their fault.
“No one can come to my party because my birthday is on a school day.”
“Then we can have it that weekend. Becky, you need to start trying to make friends at school. You need to find other places to spend time.”
I eat another spoon of mashed potatoes, and then I very carefully wipe my hands on my napkin. I take Victoria Lee out of my pocket.
“May I be excused, please?”
“Sweetheart, you’ve hardly eaten anything.”
“Don’t you wanna try some of that good chicken?”
“I don’t like fried chicken. It gets my hands all greasy.”
“Becky, your momma worked really hard to cook that for you.”
“She made it for you! S
he does everything for you! You get to make her cook all day, you get to cut up our house, and you get to fuck her all night! I hate you!”
I push away from the table, but my chair is one of the old ones, and I feel one of the legs break as I lean on it. I don’t want to fall on the floor and get my dress dirty, so I grab the table. But all I get is the tablecloth, and I fall anyway. A plate of greasy fried chicken, sticky mashed potatoes, and sloppy kidney beans comes down on top of me. A glass of cold milk falls on top of everything.
“Oh, Christ.”
I feel a piece of chicken on my neck. There are potatoes and beans all over me, and I can feel the milk soaking the dress against my skin. Mom is still in her chair with her hands over her mouth.
Ray is smiling, the other smile. He looks like he just stole a cookie from someone else’s jar.
“Bastard.” I want to scream at him, but the words don’t come. My right hand is shaking, because I have Victoria Lee in it, and I can feel that something is wrong.
“Don’t move, honey. I’ll get a towel.”
Mom runs into the kitchen, but I’m not paying attention to her anymore. I’m sitting up in the filthy puddle and holding my hands together. They’re shaking, but I’m holding them together as gently as I can. I know what happened, but I want it to not have happened. I want it more than I want a CD player, or my old room, or than I want Ray to go away and for Mom and me to be together again. I want it more than anything else in the world.
But even before I open my hands and see it for myself, I know what I have. Victoria Lee, her head broken off and rolling around in my palm.
I lie in bed, trying to fall asleep and not caring if I do or not. I know Victoria Lee is broken, and even if I dream of her I’ll wake up and remember that she’s broken.
I hate my mom. I hate her, and Ray, and all the kids in my class, and all the rest of the world. If Mom or Ray owned a gun I’d steal it and kill them, then I’d stand outside in the morning and wait for the school bus like everything was okay. When I got to school I’d shoot every dirty boy and dumb girl in my class in the stomach and spit in their faces while they were dying. I would kill as many other stupid people as I could before they killed me. I know that’s mean, but I don’t care.
I hate Ray so much. I remember the first night he was here, he spent all the time from lunch until dinner cutting the dead trees in the backyard into firewood. He ate his food on the back porch, and then went back to work. He cut and sawed until the sun went down and I had to go to bed. I could see him from the window of my old bedroom, and when he was done Mom invited him in to share some iced tea. He took off all his clothes and poured a bucket of water over his body. Then he walked inside and I heard them talking downstairs. When they went into Mom’s bedroom next to mine I could still hear them, and I thought about how Ray was so skinny with lots of lines from his muscles. I listened to them, and I made fists with my hands and my stomach got tight. I started squeezing my arms and legs and my head, and I thought I was trying to break all my bones, until I started to shake and it felt like I wet the bed. Then I threw up.
The house is quiet. If I tried, I might be able to imagine that Mom and Ray are gone and I can go sleep in my old room, but I know they’re still here.
Then I hear them coming down the hall. I can hear both of their footsteps, and I can hear Mom whispering something to Ray.
When he knocks on my door I don’t answer. I know he’ll come in anyway.
“Becky? You up?”
Mom whispers something to him again, and my door opens. I don’t move and keep facing the wall. He comes in and gets my chair, then sits down by my bed. Even with my back to him I can tell he still smells like grease and chicken.
“Your mom’s worried about you. She has been for a while now. I guess I knew that. I just wanted everything to be OK. But it isn’t, and it’s time I did something to fix it.
“I guess it’s been hard on you, not knowing anything about your dad. I knew mine. He was the best man I ever knew. I try to think about what he would say every time I talk to you. You and your mom have been getting along just fine all these years, and then I walk in. I guess that’s pretty scary.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking half the time, and that’s ’cause you tend to keep your mouth shut. You only talk when you’ve got something to say, an’ then you say it, an’ that’s that. I guess that’s another reason you don’t like me. My mouth runs all the time, an’ don’t I know it. You say you hate me for making your mom cook, an’ because I keep fixing up the house like it used to be, an’ well, for that other thing you said. If those are your reasons, those are your reasons. I can’t change how I am.
“But I don’t think you say everything you want to say. If you did, I don’t think you’d start screaming at your mom an’ me for asking you to eat some fried chicken. You’re a lot smarter than me, so I don’t know what you’re afraid of. But I can guess. An’ if I had to guess, I’d say you’re afraid of your mom lovin’ me. You’re afraid of her lovin’ me every day and every night and every next day that there ever will be. An’ if that happened, you think that one day she’d decide that she loves me more than she does you, an’ that morning you’d come downstairs and there wouldn’t be breakfast on the table. There wouldn’t be a car in the drive and there wouldn’t be anyone in the house, except you all alone.”
I know he can’t see the tears that come out of my eyes, but I choke just a little bit, hoping he doesn’t hear it.
“Becky, honey, that’s not ever going to happen. You’re never going to be alone in this house, I promise. I think you’re jumping the gun just a bit, thinking you know how things are gonna work out with your momma and me. Sometimes grown-ups get lonely, and what they do isn’t the same as when two people are gonna get married and have a whole, wonderful life together. I know you don’t have a lot of friends of your own at your school, probably ’cause you’re smarter than everyone there all put together. Your mom worries about that, but I don’t. I know you got your own friends, like that pretty lady you always carry in your purse. Friends like that can do more than people think. The first friends I ever had were a bunch of marching soldiers carved out of wood, just like your lady. I know how much they can mean.”
He gets up, and his hand feels like sandpaper as he puts something in my palm and folds my fingers over it. I can feel what it is, but I sit up and cradle it so I can see by the light from my window.
“You fixed her.”
“Aw, she wasn’t broken that bad. I just drilled a hole in both pieces and tapped a peg in there with some glue to hold it. I hope you like how she looks, ’cause I had to repaint her, too.”
I don’t forget how he looked at me at dinner, or that other way he looks at me sometimes, and I try to think about all the reasons I have to hate him. But now he’s looking at me like a little boy who doesn’t have any friends, and think about how much I hate that feeling while I hug him.
“I don’t want to take your mom away from you, honey. I don’t want you and me or her and you to fight any more. Everyone gets sad when people fight. I just want to stay here an’ do the work that I should be doin’ and watch you grow into a special little lady.”
“Promise?”
“I promise, Becky. Now you go ahead and get some sleep. It’s getting late.”
I lie there in the dark, holding Victoria Lee against my chest and listening to the wind blow against the house. I know that I’ll still get mad at Ray tomorrow when I see him kiss my mom, and I don’t think I’ll ever like the way he smells, but maybe I don’t have any real reasons to hate him. Maybe I made up some of those reasons.
I’m almost having a beautiful dream where our house is a giant castle in the middle of an enchanted forest with elves and fairies and dragons when I wake up. I was trying to imagine what a magic swing set would do, a magic swing set that had a roof, when I might have remembered something. That part didn’t feel like imagining.
I find my nightgown, and take a pee
k out my door before leaving my room. There are no lights on anywhere.
I tiptoe through the house, feeling like a ghost in my old white gown as I float up one set of stairs to the third floor with all the empty, quiet bedrooms. I can see well enough from the starlight coming in through all the windows to find the second set of stairs, hidden in the back of the hall.
In the attic, I have to stop and wait for my eyes to get used to the dark. This is the part of the house where there is never enough light. After a minute, I can just barely see the chest at the side of the walkway between all the boxes.
I open it carefully, crouching so I don’t get the dust from the floor on my gown. There are people inside, daddies and mommies and sisters and brothers. There is a funny-looking bicycle with a big front wheel and lots of horses with pretty saddles. I remember coming up here a long time ago to choose the beds and chairs and all the other furniture that I wanted to have in my house. Mommy helped me carefully pack all the old things away, all the things that had been sitting in my house in the years before I was old enough to play with it.
I find the bed, the one with the princess carved into the headboard. Even wrapped up, it still has dust on it. The wood is old and dry.
But I keep looking. I take out carriages and soldiers and dogs and tables until I find what I’m looking for. It’s wrapped up in an old cloth napkin, and it looks just like I dreamed it. If it was real, there would be enough room for four little girls to swing inside it, four little princesses swinging under a white roof.
Handsome Devil: Stories of Sin and Seduction Page 30