by Noley Reid
Enid
Today the forsythia bush is moving. Floey is on the other side of the yard, in the blackberries. So is Basey. They’re both rooting around over there: Floey taking a few steps and Basey coming up behind to sniff her parts.
I climb our tree and from up high I can see people in the hollow center of the bush. They move sort of herky-jerky. I’d know that blond ponytail anywhere. And I know the other one is Clint. What I don’t know is why in the world.
Vivvy’s the first to stand up and high-step out of the center of the bush. Her face is as pink as Ma’s lipstick. Her hair is hanging down from the rubber band in streaks around her cheeks. She looks right up at me, makes sure I’m paying attention, says, “You’re dead, Enid.”
I pretend I’m only swinging in the tree. I let my knees take the limb and let my hair fall. I watch Clint come out of the bush, grabbing hold the zipper to his olive-green Scouts shorts with the clip and patch pockets all over them. Dorkus Welby, MD, was what we were calling him last night in our bunks. There’d been a light on in his upstairs and Vivvy could see it through a bare place in the sycamore. I started to climb up into her bunk to see but she pounded my fingers off the rim of the bed.
“Get off,” she said. “You’re too young.” But then she said, “Close your eyes and I’ll tell you like you’re blind.”
I made silent kisses on my knuckles. I wouldn’t shut my eyes for her.
“He’s reading in the window seat. Lying back on a pillow.”
“What’s he reading?”
“Enid,” she said.
I couldn’t see him. Couldn’t picture any of it so I did shut my eyes.
“Does he like the book? Can you tell?”
“I think so.” She moved closer to the glass full of night. The bed creaked over my head. “He’s getting up.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He went out of the room.”
“I bet he went to pee,” I said and we laughed but I pulled the sheet up and turned on my side, thinking of Clint and what he reads and what makes him smile.
“He’s back!” she said. “Walking around with a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth.”
“How uncouth,” I said.
“Who do you think you are, Mom?”
“Shut up.”
“He’s combing his hair,” she said. “Setting his part just so.”
“No mirror?”
She didn’t answer. She was quiet a very long time.
“Now what?” I asked. I opened my eyes.
After a bit she said, “He’s gone to bed.”
“In his clothes?” I said, because it didn’t make sense. “That’s it?”
“He already undressed,” said Vivvy, and we left it at that last night.
•
Sometimes Shelly is pushing through the porch door or calling after Floey. I can smell him near me—when my eyes are shut and I’m in the sun, swinging in our tree or pushing my bare toes into the mess of dropped crab apples the brown-tailed thrashers turn over for grubs. He smells like sand and like dirt and leaves sitting over roots for more than a year.
•
“What’s wrong with you?” Vivvy says tonight, brushing her teeth. She stands behind me so all there is of her in the mirror is her head looking around my shoulder. “Enid,” she says, spitting out my name along with the paste suds.
“What do you want?” I say and go to our room because I’m through getting ready for bed.
Vivvy comes in after me and I see her look for Clint’s light on, even though she knows he has Scouts campout starting today. So she looks back at me because me is what there is.
“You’re a wreck,” she says and we’ve heard that in our house before and we know who’s who and we know where it leads. Her hand is on her hip and my fist is over my heart.
“What’s there?” she asks and pulls my hand to her, pries open my fist. Inside, she finds one smooth, perfectly triangular driveway stone.
Tate
Holly took my phenomenology seminar last quarter. How could I not notice her? In the beginning she stopped in before class and after class. She used to ask for help.
“Explain phenomenology to me again, Dr. Sobel?”
Again and again.
“Pull up a chair,” I’d say.
One day, she dragged it behind my desk.
3
Enid
Daddy isn’t allowed to take us anywhere now so he comes over for dinner.
“I’ll clear if you want, Enid.”
It’s my turn to clear and Vivvy’s to wash so she’s trying to trick me.
“Nuh-uh,” I tell her and start stacking up dishes and silverware. Daddy’s and my plates look licked clean like they’ve already been set down for Floey, who knows not to even fool with begging from either of us; she goes straight to Vivvy’s elbow and lies there throughout the entire meal, then trots behind her into the kitchen.
I hear Vivvy sloshing and clanging in the kitchen sink and Floey’s tongue pushing her plate around on the linoleum floor, hard up under the lip of the stove drawer, where she always winds up, in the corner.
Tate
I am lying on our bed. Above the covers, of course that goes without saying, and Francie beneath. The brass bed, just a headboard we bought at an auction near her dad’s place in Boone—the one I told her was ostentatious, the one she said she loved.
The list of what I would like to ask her is endless but I know better. She has gone to bed in her green tennis skirt and white Izod shirt. She doesn’t even play tennis; she runs on the old campus courts—sprints square laps around the base- and sidelines because she thinks runners are fanatics, which is what she wants to be.
Francie lies stiffly on her back now, maybe sleeping.
“I don’t know how to find you,” I say.
Her eyes flash open once, then shut and open again.
I don’t move, like to pretend it was somebody else waking her.
She turns her head, looks straight at me. “Stop trying.”
I shift my head from its nook here between her arm and the layers of fabric covering her tiny breast, the string of rib bones pushing up through the cobbly cloth of her shirt.
This is not the first time we get exactly nowhere doing this.
“Please go,” she says, but I cannot move.
Not from her.
•
I wake alone in the bed so I leave it. On the landing outside our, or rather Francie’s, bedroom door, Enid’s body is like a puddle. I scoop her up as best I can.
“Sweet,” I tell her and she turns in her sleep to suck a little at my shirt. “Love.” I kiss her face, which is hot like mine. I put her into her bunk and drag the covers around her. The girls are never more opposite than when sleeping: Vivvy lies as if thrown into bed and tosses about with absolute knowledge of her right to the world; Enid curls into herself like a plateless armadillo.
•
Francie is in the living room reading. The night air is muggy but she has a blanket draped over her lap. She has changed for bed and I wonder if she shut herself in the bathroom or risked undressing in front of me.
“Thursday still okay?”
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll put something in the oven.”
I feel foolish standing in my own living room, a room that now isn’t mine. But it is: there’s the Staiger landscape I got signed for Francie’s birthday, and the little glass-and-chrome tables we picked up in Philadelphia at a design festival, and Floey on her side like she’s been shot dead.
•
I drive to the apartment, drop my satchel and keys at the door, and head for the kitchen. I open the fridge door and pull a tube of biscuit dough from the shelf. I warm it in my hands. I twist it to pop the side seam and it splits open. I pull the doughy rounds free of one another, layer by layer, and they are gone. In my mouth, just gone.
“Stop this,” she says into the phone. And I nearly object, thinking she has called me; but no, I remember my
fingers pressed the square buttons.
I just want some quiet on the other end. Not the way she lets out all her air at once in accusation. “Please.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Could we just sit here?”
“What is it you want, Tate?” She is walking, pacing.
“You’ve taken away every last thing,” I say. “You stopped my fucking heart.”
Vivvy
I have the only photograph. In it, Sheldon looks like the neighbor boy. Like Clint, and I like that. Shell had hair so yellow Mom called him butterhead and butterball and Dad pretended to lick him. In the picture, Shell is in the yard at Grandpa Raymond’s, running around tearing at long grass shoots that smell of onions. He gave us this picture when Mom took Enid and me once, down to her dad’s house in Boone.
At home I have always had the top bunk and nobody is allowed up here. Mom makes us make our own beds so I slip the picture beneath my pillow when I sleep and beneath the mattress when I am gone.
He was sick. He always needed something more to eat and ate like a dog. Whenever he spoke it was a question: “Juice? Mama, juice? Juice?” And if he found a bit of cracker or dried-up cube of cheese, he hid himself in a corner with it. She watched him constantly, keeping a list of each bite he had in a day. There could be only so many, and she ticked them off on her scratch pad until they were all gone and she turned the dials on the cupboard locks.
He and Enid were always together. I was in the middle. I was so close to him in age—just a year away—but it was always Enid whose hand he held.
And I am the only one who saw it happen. Not even Mom did—because that is just it: she didn’t see him.
I saw her in the car, before she turned the key and was just sitting there as if waiting for one of us to come get in the car with her. The engine pinged. The taillights turned his hair orange. She looked straight ahead and the car rolled back until it stopped. He fell backward, his legs still folded Indian style.
Sometimes I look at squirrels that are roadkill and put their legs just so and loll their heads over to their right shoulders.
She hit him, waited and then hit him.
Enid
I remember he was strange. Sometimes he couldn’t get the spoon to his mouth without leaving a trail of Cheerios from his bowl to his lap.
Ma’d clean closets at the start of a new school year and anything he’d outgrown she boxed for the thrift store. But he screamed and shook and threw books at her when all she wanted was a pair of holey socks and a blue T-shirt that had gone white around the collar from him wearing it all the time. Vivvy and I hid, watching.
“No!” he hollered and slammed his door but the latch never properly closed without locking, so he used to slump against the wall behind the door and kick it shut each time it worked its way back open. Click, creak, kick.
“Sheldon,” said Ma, calmer than made sense because she’d just been through Vivvy’s and my clothes. “I won’t have this behavior in my house,” she told him. “You hear? This is my house. Give me back the shirt.”
He kept on with the door. Click, creak, kick. Click, creak, kick.
“I won’t have this. I won’t entertain your notions. I will most certainly not.”
Click, creak, kick.
Then she barreled into his door and I could hear it bang into his right knee, but he didn’t say a word. She picked him up by one arm and dragged him to the bed.
“Find it,” she said. “Give it to me.”
He’d hidden it. He was always hiding things.
She left after that. Got in her car and drove somewhere and Daddy made soft spaghetti and we stayed up late asking him to read over and over from the fairy-tale book that was big and broken-spined; but really we were waiting for her.
4
Vivvy
If he likes me, Enid will shove off today.
If he likes me, Mom will take us to the pool.
If he loves me—that is not what I meant. If he likes me, then . . .
These are too hard. Okay: if he likes me, I will find a penny today. And Mom will smile.
Fat chance.
Enid
“Waffles or pancakes?” Ma asks, pulling the Bisquick off her tidy shelf.
Vivvy and I answer at the same time: “Pancakes,” she says, to my “Waffles.” We look to see what Ma will do, if this’ll make her set the box back down and snatch out the Quaker Cream of Wheat.
But she’s sort of dancing in her stepping, crossing the floor like she’s good and happy and will be awhile. “Both it is,” she says and Vivvy and I laugh. She lugs the waffle iron out, the big skillet too, and starts measuring up the batter into two different bowls. “Eggs, girls!” she says. “Mother needs eggs.”
I hop to it and grab the milk too, because I know that’ll be next.
“Good girl,” she tells me.
Vivvy gathers the butter plate and our silverware for the table.
I get syrup and napkins, ask, “Could I have a banana on mine?”
She turns around to face me, touches the bits of my bangs going every whichaway, picking strands off my forehead. She’s about to tell me to wash my hair.
“Enid,” she says, “I love you,” and out the door she goes.
“Why do you have to be so stupid all of the time? Couldn’t it just be some of the time?” Vivvy runs the spoon through the eggs, breaking the yolks but not really mixing them. She lifts the spoon and the gloppy strands of egg white hang heavy then drop. She lets the spoon clang back down in the bowl and turns to see me. She smiles.
We can finish the recipe. We’ve done it a hundred times. I move closer.
“Couldn’t it, Enie-Weenie? Couldn’t it just be some of the time?” Vivvy hits me fast in the belly.
Vivvy goes straight for the back door without even a word. Good, is all I can think. I look on top of the fridge. I let myself read the names on the bags, look for the chips and then pull out the stool to get that bag down. Tostitos. Not as good as potato chips, but we’re only allowed potato chips at Daddy’s. I’m the only one left but I still take the bag downstairs to eat in the basement where crunching can’t be heard—the entire bag. Salt rubs between my wet fingertips. When there is nothing left but the bottom of the bag, I will roll up the sack and take it out to the trash can under the carport and bury it under the bathroom trash, all wadded Kleenex and smashed paper cups.
Vivvy
No one is around so I walk the perimeters of Clint’s yard, our side and the two other sides. The air is thickly quiet like being underwater. I head back to our yard but when I get to the pine trees, I stop moving. I stand in their shade, think I will climb one, but still I don’t. I simply stand here, one hand on a tree trunk, fingernails caught in the bark where I try to skin the tree.
I go back inside to read but look, instead, out my window and I can’t help but think I have seen Clint moving around up there. His trip has been over for four days, five if you count the night he got back—it was not even dark yet—and I haven’t seen him or talked to him. Enid said Basey was around here chasing Floey yesterday, but that is it.
Stupid boy.
Even though she smiled today. Even though I have four pennies in my pocket.
Stupid, stupid boy.
Enid
Upstairs, the door slams. I freeze except that I’m holding the Tostitos bag and it’s nearly empty but not quite so I roll down the top and stuff the bag under the sofa cushion. But that’s no good, she’ll sit and hear the crunching. I grab it back out and rush to slip it behind the TV.
Footsteps cross the floor overhead. I stand still in the middle of the room and unroll the bag, slip my hand in, and eat and eat until the chips are all in me. The footsteps don’t come back so she’s either upstairs or in the living room.
I press the bag slowly against me and roll it up, making the crinkles as soft as I can. I slip it inside my shirt and creep upstairs and out to the trash. There is nighttime garbage instead of bathroom. I lif
t a bloody Styrofoam meat tray and set the chip bag beneath it.
What if Ma needs me and I’m here in the carport with chip crumbs down my shirt?
I go back in. The house is so quiet. I start pulling everything out on the counters. The muffin mix. More eggs, milk, the grater and hunk of colby. The strips of bacon and pack of sausage links. The jam. Honey. And cinnamon sugar. Lemon curd and chocolate sauce, too. I grab the bowl Ma had for the waffles and her swirly spring whisk, I crack a carton of eggs, being sure to scoop out any bits of shell, and start beating up the batter with one hand and sprinkling salt and pepper in the other bowl of so many broken yolks all smearing together. I grate the cheese over the eggs, careful of my knuckles and thumbnail. I pour in some milk. I beat the eggs. I beat the corn mix, love that scrapey sound of the metal whisk against the clumps of corn and the side of the bowl, love sounding like Ma.
I pour the mix into the muffin tray and know I’ve forgotten something: the paper cups. So I dump it back into the bowl, wash the tray, and put in the little pink and blue and yellow papers, make an orderly design of alternating colors, and then rescoop the batter. My skillet’s hot so in goes a wad of butter and then the eggs. The frying pan’s hot too, so in goes a wad of butter and then sausage and bacon that instantly start disappearing like baking up Shrinky Dinks. I pour orange juice and I pour milk. I get fork, knife, and spoon and start loading up the sick tray.
The eggs are going too fast, turning brown on the bottoms though I scrape through them to make fluffs as quick as I can. The bacon’s charred solid and the sausage is all foamy where it sits in the black butter. I turn off all the burners because the cornbread’s only near done. I go to the pantry shelf, get Ma one of her maroon vitamins, and put that on the tray. Sometimes she likes things underdone so I chance it with the muffins and take them out, put three on her plate where I’ve made little puddles of jam, honey, lemon curd, and chocolate syrup.