Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  My sister was unlocking the door and speaking to a figure in the dark she didn’t ask into the light of the hallway. She left him standing outside in the cold while she ran for her coat and grabbed the keys to my mother’s used pink Plymouth that was mysteriously harbored in the rivulet of our driveway. How had Polly gotten to work, anyway?

  “You’re taking Mom’s car?” I was horrified.

  “I told you, Molly, he likes cars. He loves to drive. He’s a really great driver, too. We’ll be back before they know it’s missing.”

  “Put those car keys on the hook!” I hissed as she swung out the door. She knew I wouldn’t tackle her on the front steps. She knew I’d be afraid of the nineteen-year-old boy. She knew I was confused and couldn’t decide whether I was her mother or her sister, and she knew I wouldn’t tell Polly because I was supposed to act like Polly. And somehow she also knew that my mother’s car would be there for the taking. The Plymouth wheeled out of the driveway with the wild teenage daughter I couldn’t control.

  —

  Ted reeled home, obedient to some unknown-to-me command from my mother that he pick her up at the store and bring her home. I said Gail was at her girlfriend’s house. Just after he left, Gail came back with my mother’s car, and there the two of us sat, watching Adventures in Paradise, when my parents drove up at 10:30. How had Polly gotten to work without a car, how did Gail know this, and how had my father so easily understood the arrangement? Nothing I kept an eye on stayed still; it vaporized. Yet I had to keep my eye on my sister, and especially on my father. If I took my eyes off him, he might kill me.

  Ted, the luckiest man in Buffalo. How can he be alive when he drives like that? It had been about a year since I started trying to get him into Alcoholics Anonymous. I campaigned to my mother every morning in the car. We’d sit there freezing while the car warmed up, and I would beg her to leave him. “We’ll be free, Ma! We’ll never have to see him again!”

  “There’s plenty you don’t understand, Mols.”

  “I understand this! We’re in a hell hole!” The car was toasty as a parka by the time we got to Kenmore East Senior High.

  “I’m picking you girls up for a fish fry tonight,” Polly announced as I clambered out. “Flo said she’d relieve me at the store. Your father can drink himself up and us three’ll go out to Ricky’s where Ann Louise works.”

  “Us two,” I said gleefully. “Gail’s got horse lessons.” My sister was in a baking group that sold brownies at lunchtime to get the money for horseback riding lessons. After a series of allergy shots she’d been allowed to ride.

  “She’s not getting that horse. We can’t put gas in the cars, let alone get a horse. Well, tonight I guess it’s you and me, Mols.”

  It would be just us. And the Formica tabletops and linoleum floors of the fish fry place. And the baked potato and the salad and me and Polly all alone, having dinner with no one to cook for and no one to clean up after and Ann Louise to serve us. Heaven on a plate.

  “If you ever get pregnant like Judy with the boobs in La Grange, you come right to me—OK, Mols?”

  “I’m not getting pregnant like Judy with the boobs, Polly!” I was indignant as we sat in the booth waiting for our fish while car headlights flashed outside in the cold dark beyond the big restaurant windows. “I don’t even have a boyfriend!”

  “But if you ever do, Mols.”

  “Will you drop this subject, Ma? We’ve got something more important to talk about.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your husband. You have to leave him, Polly.”

  “You know nothing about this, Molly. Why, no one ever was divorced at La Grange!” My mother’s eyes were wide and green.

  “He’s an alcoholic, you know. It says so in the Buffalo Courier Express. Walter Winchell’s column gives you ten questions and if you answer yes to any five you’re an alcoholic, and Ted has at least nine!”

  “Oh, Molly, eat your fish.”

  “Your husband is an alcoholic, Polly.”

  “What’ll we have for dessert?”

  “Hot fudge sundaes!” The heat of the restaurant had steamed up the windows. Polly and I had coffee. I was allowed to drink it now. And the vanilla ice cream and steamy chocolate arrived underneath the whipped cream and maraschino cherry. Tomorrow was Saturday. Sleeping in. The week was over. I’d made it through only cooking four meals. Polly had rescued me. There we sat, our waitress, Ann Louise, beaming at us. “You girls joined the clean plate club!” she said.

  “Hey thanks, Ann Louise, and I guess you’ll see us on Monday for dinner, too.” Ann Louise, Flo’s sister, was Polly’s second best friend. She was skinnier than Aunt Roberta, and, according to Polly, looked just like Ava Gardner. Ann Louise had two kids, too. She’d been a waitress all her life. (“And saved every nickel she ever earned,” Polly would say enviously.) Both Ann Louise and my mother lit up Lark cigarettes from my mother’s pack.

  “Well it’ll be good to see you again. Ricky will be cooking. That means you’ll get extra-big portions!”

  “Flo said she’d relieve me at the store so I can take Gail to the doctor,” Polly said importantly.

  “Is she sick?” both Ann Louise and I asked.

  “I’m taking her”—Polly lowered her voice and continued—“to the gynecologist.”

  “No!” Ann Louise widened her eyes. I narrowed mine. It had to be something to do with those underpants.

  “Gail’s got something wrong up there.”

  “How do you know? Did she tell you?” Whose daughter was she, Polly’s or mine?

  “That’s none of your business, Molly, keep your nose out of this.”

  —

  On Sundays Peacock’s Superette opened at noon, so the four of us had breakfast at home. Polly cooked. Ted was sober. Poopsie squawked and ate Rice Krispies. We all read parts of the Buffalo Courier Express. The ten questions that were in Walter Winchell’s column were in the Sunday paper, too!

  “Here, Dad,” I said. My pulse popped in my wrist. If Polly wasn’t doing it, I would. Whose job was whose, anyway? We weren’t going to be helpless. “Listen, here are the ten questions that if you answer yes to any five you are an alcoholic.” Our elbows were in the toast crumbs. The cups had little rings of cold coffee at the bottoms. “Come on, Dad, you could answer most of the questions yes.” Ted looked at me the way he looked at Gram, fear in his eye.

  “It says here that you should join Alcoholics Anonymous if you can answer yes to any five!”

  “I’m not that bad!” Ted said.

  My sister skittered away from the table, but to my surprise Polly stayed. After I rehearsed my plea again, and my father rehearsed his answer, she said, “You’re hurting your father.”

  “Kids!” he said. “You have ’em and they turn on ya.”

  Not me, they weren’t going to turn on me because I was never going to have them. I was going to get out. Soon this would be none of my business. I was going to sail.

  Neither Spindle nor I had been rushed by a sorority. Spindle became a creep, but I escaped creephood by being yearbook editor and by, as Polly put it as she sipped her instant Maxwell House and ate a peanut donut, “not being a sheep.” I would have loved being a sheep, but instead I had Spindle, who looked up to me, actually, down, since she was way taller than I was, and she believed every word I said, just like a little sister, except that she was my own age. In fact, by the time I had reached my junior year, I hadn’t saved a single real friend. All the phone calls and checking in to see if we had gotten our periods that charged my group of girlfriends in junior high were gone. The years of friends squealing on the couches of our living rooms were long over. I had no group but those artificial clubs institutionalized by the school. The main problem was: I could not invite anyone home, even Spindle. I especially could not ask her, to whom I had lied horribly and unconsciously.

  “I hate my father,” she said as we trudged through the ice of an un-shoveled sidewalk, thrown shoulder to shoulder. “He drinks
too much beer and he’s mean. Mean to me and my brothers. He’s not like your father. I know how much you like your father. I know how nice he is to you, Molly. You probably don’t even understand how I could hate my father so much.”

  Absolutely stunned, I stammered, “I…I…can…sort of understand, Susie,” then said, “I mean, my father isn’t that nice.”

  “I know he like brings you presents and stuff, like when he comes back from business trips and everything.”

  BUSINESS TRIPS! Oh God, how much had I lied?

  My mother dies. My sister is sent away. My father stops drinking, becomes an executive, and buys a penthouse apartment where I keep house for him, and wait in glorious solitude above downtown Buffalo—the traffic spinning below me, reading on our charcoal gray sectional couch surrounded by our shell pink walls—for him to come home.

  How much had I actually told her? Carefully, I questioned her. When I referred to my mother and the store, Spindle nodded. At least I didn’t tell her my mother was dead. When I mentioned my sister, Spindle talked about her sister. OK, sister here, not sent away. “I’m going home,” I snuck into the conversation, “to Pilgrim Road.”

  “Where the hell do you live but on Pilgrim Road?” Spindle snorted. She was tired of this ridiculous conversation. She only thought my father was kind and didn’t drink. Well, that was the main part of the fantasy anyway. Like urine spreading through the seat of my pants, the realization, fast, warm, embarrassing and untellable, spread through my consciousness: I had fantasized, and I had told. I couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy. I was crazy. I had lied. My father drank. He was mean to my mother. He was just like Spindle’s father. I was just like Spindle. I was a creep, too. And I was crazy. At least Spindle told the truth. I was lying. There was no shell pink room.

  Except the one inside me. Was I crazy? OK, I hadn’t lied all that much. Only to Spindle. God, don’t see her anymore, avoid her. At all costs don’t walk home from school with her again. Stay longer after school. Work on the yearbook, hide in the stairwell, do anything. Now I would have no friends at all, not even a creep to hold in contempt.

  The room inside me was empty. There was just that faint glow of pink in the air around the trees that means eventually, after two more months of mud and cold and disbelief it will ever come, there will be spring. With spring came my self-imposed deadline. I was going to be asked to the Junior Prom. I was going to get dressed up in something those sorority girls never thought of and I was going to go. And not alone, either. I was going to get someone to ask me. This was reality and I was going to face it. No more fantasies, Molly. Forget the penthouse. Get going. It is February 19. The Junior Prom is in June. You have three months to get a boyfriend and keep him until the Junior Prom. So do it.

  Michael Groden was the smartest boy in my class. He had the kind of mind that snaps back like a brand new window shade. He had gotten perfect scores on both his Math and his Verbal PSAT’s. No one in the history of the school had gotten perfect scores. Aside from doing the impossible, he was Jewish. Polly said Jewish men were nice and always took out the garbage, bought their wives diamond rings, and did not drink. I wasn’t going to go after a fraternity boy. That was a lost cause. But not just anybody was taking me to the Prom. I didn’t think I was very pretty, as my sister was, off in the wilds of junior high, but I was going after Mike Groden anyway. I was going after him and I was going to get him. I would focus on him as I focused on my fantasy, but he was real. And I was going to get him, because he was lonely. His loneliness was a force field around him. His hands jerked and shook when he answered questions in his nervously fierce intelligently shaking voice. I was going to set my hair, and put on makeup and reach out to him. And he was going to fall.

  —

  How glad I am that we are fallen. Fallen in the back seat, fallen on the high school lawn. We have fallen on the plastic seats of the couch in your basement. We have fallen on my living room floor. I have reached you. And I have brought you home. Polly was always at work now. Gail was always out. Ted stayed later and later at the bars. It was…a little bit safe…I was calculating. I was loved, so together we calculated…what would we do if my parents appeared? I did not tell him all the really terrible stuff. What was I, crazy? I couldn’t even tell myself that terrible stuff! But in all the calculating I had not counted on falling myself.

  Mike Groden, your shirts smell so good. When we dance my nose fits under your shoulder hone and I drink in the smell of Tide soap and skin underneath. Skin. I had one. He had one. We had borders to our bodies. Oh, honey, I wear a black dress to the Prom and carry a rose instead of a corsage and you cooperate. We were smart. I was not wearing pink carnations and a pink pouffy dress. I was an artiste. (An artiste of what it didn’t occur to me to determine. An intellectuelle.)

  Steady Mike Groden worked after school and bought a car. A car was my equivalent of Polly’s diamond ring. He delivered me to my stream of dentist appointments. This was my equivalent of taking out the garbage. He carried a condom in his wallet, just in case.

  —

  Gail was off with the cheerleading squad. Ted was at his bar. Polly was at the store. Late spring. Mike Groden stood at the screen door on which I had posted a note: Come in. Lock the screen door behind you. Then go to the kitchen table and find another note. I heard him come in from where I was ensconced: in a bubble bath with nearly three times the recommended dose of bubble juice to achieve the right effect—covered in stiff whipped foam as in a Playboy photograph. Mike Groden in the kitchen read the next note instructing him to proceed to my room and take off all his clothes.

  “Molly, are you here?”

  “Yes, yes,” I whispered, “I’m here in the bathroom, but don’t come in here!” (He wouldn’t have dreamed of coming in.)

  “Where’s your parents? Are we alone?”

  “Yes, we’re alone. They won’t be home for hours. Do what the notes say!”

  Take off all your clothes but your underpants, come to the bathroom.

  And so he did. And so his eyes popped out of his sockets because there I was, naked in the tub.

  “What if your parents come home?”

  “Well, I don’t think they will, but we’ll have to listen for them and then run to my room.”

  “I’d better go get our clothes to have them ready just in case, Molly.”

  I knew he was right. What on earth had I been thinking of to trust fate so? When I’d looked in the full-length mirror on my closet door at my seventeen-year-old body trying on my swimsuit for the coming summer, I thought of the Empress Li Ching Chao who lay with her orchid boat open. How ripe I am, I thought. Ripe for what I wasn’t exactly sure.

  “Let’s just wash each other first. All over. Then we’ll get out together.”

  “OK,” he said as I gave him the washcloth and the soap.

  He was real. He was as real as my father, and as different from my father as he could be. When he touched my shoulders with the soapy cloth and proceeded down my breastbone and around each breast, I remembered Aunt Roberta. Twelve or thirteen years before, she gave me a bath one night. How extraordinarily lightly she swiped the cloth over my arms and legs. “Howie’s always covered in scrapes and bruises and scabs from the rough way he plays,” she said. “I wash him very lightly, so he doesn’t hurt and so all the bruises can heal.” I was astonished.

  “Does he get clean?” I asked her.

  “Clean enough.” I thought you got clean only if you really scrubbed, and held my aunt suspect, but loved the sensuous treat of elaborate care and the safety of the big towel she wrapped around me before she led me off to bed and thoroughly undisturbed sleep. And here Mike was, so lightly easing the cloth down my belly and around what the Empress Li Ching Chao called my orchid boat…and here I was, trying to slide my soapy cloth around his back and down his spine toward his buttocks and to reach underneath to his balls and then to what Lawrence called his cock, and trying to do it gently, like Roberta did.

  Her o
xblood Kotex landed in the waste can. Polly rose from the toilet, took another one from the box, fixed it into place by inserting one end into the back tab, then the other into the front tab of a little elastic belt that came with the box. She didn’t believe in Tampax. “That dinky little thing? Why, it’ll get lost up there!” Polly was naked except for the elastic and the menstrual pad. Her breasts pointed directly down to the belly which, when she sat back on the toilet, sat itself comfortably on her thighs, like a globe of the world in its special stand. Gail sat on the edge of the bathtub, trying to extort money for her cheerleading outfit. I leaned on the bathroom sink, looking into the mirror, holding my hair up, then back.

  “I don’t know, Gail,” my mother said, accompanied by a loud stream of pee, “we’ve got to save money for Molly’s college stuff. If your father doesn’t drink it all up.” Then she wiped herself and flushed and sauntered across the hall to the bedroom where she put on her extra-large white cotton underpants and cotton bra. “Come on, kids, get going or you won’t get a ride to school! I’ve got to open up the store on time.”

  Pauline’s door was usually open, and she shared the musk of adulthood, the tinny smell of monthly blood and Arpège.

  “Look, Molsie, I gotta get your sister to school and open the store. Are you going to get dressed or what?”

  I stood before her with half a head of rollers wearing her bathrobe, a royal blue tent with satin ribbing that Ted had presented with a flourish a couple of Christmases before. But Polly almost never wore it, preferring her nakedness, even in winter. My face felt stiff and blank as a plate. “I don’t think I can do it, Mom, I just can’t do everything, apply to colleges, I don’t even know which ones, and get my schoolwork done…” I whined in a stiff white voice. And leave you. I just can’t leave you. It was the voice of a plate, rigid and breaking.