The Full Cleveland

by Terry Reed

  I leaned in and whispered, “What you have to do is, outsmart the Bible. Just make it a big needle! Or a small camel! Then the rich man can go to heaven!”

  She took her own gulp of white wine. “Are these some of the things you’re learning in school?”

  “No, Mother. I don’t learn anything in school.”

  Then, just like that, I started doing what I’d planned to do all along out by the school pond. I started crying. I mean, not sobbing; I even caught one of the slippery tears in time, but the one on the other side dashed through my fingers.

  Mother put down her fork. “Oh, no.”

  So then do you know what I did? I started laughing. I mean not roaring. Just another hiccup first off, then a chuckle, then a small sob, then ha ha, then a couple more pond-size tears. “Honey, get ahold of yourself. Are you happy or sad?”

  I said, “I don’t even know, Mom. I’d have to ask Mary,” I sobbed, “Parker.”

  • • •

  Christian appeared at the wave of her hand. Mother reached over, picked up my wineglass, and turned it in. Then she stood up, took me by the sleeve, and paced me like a pony to the ladies’ room. As she dabbed my face with cold water, it looked as if she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry herself. “You may have to run that by me again, about the small camels.

  “It’s my fault, but you’re going to have a headache in the morning.”

  But I didn’t think it was her fault and I’d have a headache in the morning. I thought, in the morning back at school, and then at night between The Twins, I’d be thinking what a night I’d had in New York at dinner with my mother. I guess sometimes you can watch your mother cry for the first half of the meal, and then cry yourself for the second, and still have quite a laugh together.

  I giggled.

  After we finished the hot, luscious chocolate soufflés Christian deftly served us, and then stood to leave, the male angel smiled at me. Mother saw. “I think that good-looking young man there has eyes for my girl.”

  Then we went back to the hotel and both crawled into the same bed together and slept, determined to close our eyes, and keep on dreaming.

  When Dad arrived at school for his restaurant scene a month later, he didn’t do it in a blue Buick but in a black limousine.

  He didn’t go to the dean’s office first; he simply rode up, strode into the bottom of the Administration Building, and stood there like a cowboy in his Sunday clothes, looking from one face to another, stubbornly waiting to claim me.

  Dotti and Ditto saw him first. Their lockers were on either side of mine. They pushed their glasses up their noses. “Who is that?” they said. They were pretty blind.

  I turned to see the tall, handsome man in the business suit, standing in the middle of the noisy hall, searching faces. Nothing looked so utterly alien amid all those swarming girls in uniform as a real man, an actual father. I felt a pang, something thrilling as I realized I knew him. I ran to hug his waist in the middle of the hall.

  “Do you have to ask the dean?” I asked after he said he would take me to dinner.

  “I did that, from the car.”

  You knew he would have. He hated even the idea of asking a dean, let alone going, hat in hand, to get permission to take me to dinner. “I’ll just go sign out then.”

  He flipped his topcoat over his shoulder, holding it with the little rope they put in the collar so men can hold it that way. “Good. Dress for dinner. I’ll be in the car.”

  For some reason, I couldn’t achieve the same effect with my black dress with the leg-of-mutton sleeves. It looked more like the dress I thought it was when it first came out of the box, a dress for a young girl. I started wondering if my mother had known the dress would self-destruct like this, had seen right through the plans I had for it and Thanksgiving Day and Rey McDowell.

  Dotti and Ditto sat on the ends of their beds to watch me get ready. When I was all finished, I held out my arms. “What do you think?”

  “It’s adorable.”

  “It’s adorable.”

  Twice as bad as I thought. I dragged the wooden chair so I could stand and see in the mirror. At least it was black.

  For jewelry, I wore the pearls my grandfather had given my father to give me for my thirteenth birthday. Fixing the clasp, I remembered what Mother had once said about pearls, that “pearls are a sign of tears.” Now I asked Dotti and Ditto, “Did you hear that pearls are a sign of tears?”

  They both turned to check with each other. “Who said that?” asked Dotti.

  “My mother. But I forgot to ask her what kind of tears, happy or sad.”

  Ditto said, “So ask your mother.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I looked at them both. “But I was asking you too.” I added, “You two,” just to be amusing and all.

  They looked flattered, which was so sad. All night, they’d try to come up with an erudite answer. I felt so bad about it I got right out of there.

  Dad was doing paperwork in the back of the car, jiggling a glass of ice and Scotch he’d gotten from the little limo bar. I climbed onto the jump seat to face him, then changed my mind when the car glided forward, and slumped like he did against one of the doors.

  “I love limos,” I said, stretching my legs.

  “I don’t,” he said, not looking up. “They only look right at weddings and funerals. But I didn’t feel up to the drive.”

  When he said weddings and funerals, it reminded me of Mary Parker and All stories end in death or marriage. “All stories end in death or marriage, Dad.”

  Dad looked up from his writing pad, thought about it, then decided to take his briefcase off the floor and pack his papers in. I opened and closed a cupboard on the little limo bar. “Refreshing change from a Buick, is that what you’re thinking?”

  “May I have a Scotch?”

  “No.”

  “Mother let me have white wine when she was here.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know how old you are.”

  When we got to the restaurant one town over, it was a different scene from the one with Mother. The room had low green lamps and leather club chairs. Nobody appeared about to burst into tears. Most of the men were with men, and while I wouldn’t say they looked totally happy, they sure didn’t look totally sad. I was the only girl.

  The waiter came but didn’t smile and announce his name like my favorite waiter Christian had. This one just stood there, very large and most disapproving, looking at me and shaking his head. “Escargots, for the little lady?” He covered his mouth, stifling a yawn.

  Dad said, “Wrong. Right?”

  This surprised me, that he remembered how I felt about snails. As a child eating out I’d protested it was wrong to eat something as small, not to mention as slow, as a snail.

  I said to the waiter, “I’d like something large.”

  Dad said to the waiter, “She has convictions.” He handed his menu in, reached over and took mine. “The young lady will have the sixteen-ounce New York strip steak, very rare. I’ll have the same.”

  The waiter didn’t have to write it down, he’d heard it before.

  “I’ll finish it,” I assured my father.

  He laughed. “If you do, you do, if you don’t, you can take it home in a bag for the dean.”

  I got it, and grinned. A doggie bag. He’d remembered what I’d written home about the dean. Although he and Mother had phoned to say that calling a dean a dog did not indicate a major improvement in attitude.

  Dad said, “Interesting dress.”

  I held out an arm. “They’re called leg-of-mutton sleeves.”

  “Well, that’s a good name for them. It makes you look like a lamb.”

  I stared down at myself. It was hard to believe it was an inanimate object, this dress. It had deconstructed even further during the ride from school, and was now completely sexless. “Mother bought it.” I sighed.

  Dad sighed. “Where?”

  “In New York City, at Saks Fifth Avenue.”

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nbsp; He said, “I see. And how did you come by those pearls?”

  I said, “Dad. Grandfather. My thirteenth birthday.”

  He leaned over and lifted them up off my dress, studied them as if appraising their value, said, “I’d say seven millimeters,” and let them drop.

  I said, “What? Are you going to sell them?”

  He just scowled at that.

  Then, while Dad drank his Scotch, I played with the necklace for a while, remembering how I’d written my dead grandfather the letter in which I’d rhapsodized about pearls. How they’re both hard and fluid at the same time. How they’re rough but smooth, solid yet watery in your hand. And thank you, because really, nothing else on earth from a grain of sand is so astonishing as a pearl.

  I hadn’t known what we would say to each other during a whole dinner. But Dad seemed in a talkative mood. He asked me a lot of questions about school, and how bad the dean was really, because he said I made her sound pretty bad. Naturally I didn’t tell him about her lecture, though it was one of the best examples I had. He asked how were The Twins and said he thought they seemed like interesting girls. I assured him they were. Then he said, sort of gamely, “Uh, Zu. Did your mother discuss finances when she was here?”

  “No.” She had never, in my life, discussed finances. As a matter of fact, neither had he. Not to mention, Don’t mention money.

  “Hmmm.” He hesitated, fiddled with the ice in his drink. Then lifted the glass, took a mouthful and swallowed hard. “She was supposed to. She was on a mission.”

  “She said she was on a shopping trip.”

  “Did she now.”

  “Yes. And why are you here?”

  “Business.”

  It was believable. He sometimes went to New York on business. But I watched his hand. His fingers were strong, well developed yet graceful, the hands of a piano player. But his knuckles were white and he appeared to have a death grip on his rocks glass. “And where did you stay with your mother?”

  “She didn’t tell you? At the Pierre.”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “It’s a good hotel, Dad.”

  “It’s an expensive hotel.”

  “Are you still fighting about boxing?”

  “What? Boxing?”

  “Oh. Then are you getting a divorce?”

  “Are those the two options? Whatever put that thought in your head?”

  “Well, I know you had a difference of opinion.” When he didn’t say anything to deny it, I added, “Dad, a house divided against itself cannot stand.” That wasn’t even Mary Parker’s, it was mine.

  Dad looked slightly amused. This was a bad sign. He hardly ever told you anything when he was looking slightly amused.

  Then out of the blue, for no reason on earth, just a wild stab at thin air, I said, “I know. You’re broke.”

  I had never used the word before in my life. I don’t think I had ever even thought it before. But when I said it, my father grinned, as if I’d just hit the jackpot. You could almost see cherries register in a straight line across his eyes. And he was still like that when he said, “I might be, quite soon.”

  I didn’t like the cherries. Cherries eclipsing the beautiful blue centers I loved so well. I frowned at my father, to make him stop grinning. “Is that what Mother was going to tell me?”

  “Your mother has put some kind of restraining order on useful information.”

  I said, “But …” But, you know, look at you.

  But the waiter came. When he delivered my plate, he winked at Dad, as if planning to make the size of my steak their private joke. I liked Dad again when he didn’t wink back.

  I watched him cut into his steak, testing the color. It didn’t seem quite real, that he could be what was called “broke.” What was the definition of that to someone like him? He’d arrived in a limousine. He was wearing a good suit. We were eating thick steaks. “So is that the problem then, Dad?”

  Dad said, “No problem.” I watched in silence as the blood trickled out from the center of the meat and spilled over the edge of his plate. He didn’t even attempt to mop it up. He just dug in, holding a piece on his fork. “Maybe Mother’s right. These things are best left to those at the top. I’m here only to take you to dinner and see how you’re doing.” Then he added, “I miss the young lady of the family.” And he chomped on the meat and smiled.

  He’d never said anything quite put like that before. It was kind of a rare compliment, so it kind of shut me up for a while. I surveyed my steak. I knew the waiter was watching, circling, lurking sneakily around behind. I whispered to my father, “To save face, you sure have to do stuff around here.”

  Dad laughed, amused.

  The waiter made a point of not noticing how light my plate was when he picked it up. Sixteen ounces lighter, to be precise. He simply yawned, snatched it up, and carried it off.

  I said, “I did it.”

  Dad said, “And he had you pegged for snails.”

  But the waiter got me back when I ordered the ice cream parfait, or if you prefer, the passive-aggressive parfait. He went to the kitchen and made sure it was the size of a champagne bucket, and wheeled it out on a cart with another guy to guide it and hauled it over to the table with two hands as if the whole thing was just too heavy for him, and slammed it down as if he couldn’t have carried it another inch, and good thing he was such a good and manly waiter, because a lesser one would have let it go in a bad little girl’s lap. I had no idea what I’d done to deserve this.

  As I was sizing up my dessert, my father was ordering yet another Scotch. I thought it was strange when he was suddenly over saying his words. The words were coming out all right, but a split second after his lips had formed them, like in a foreign movie with a bad dubbing job. And if you watch a movie like that, you can’t even listen to what the actors are saying, because you’re so caught up thinking how weird it is to watch their lips move. My father was there, he was speaking, but now his sound track was slightly off.

  So what I did, I started pretending I was in a movie with my father, but the movie was slightly messed up, because of the bad dubbing job. I thought of the million movies Mary Parker and I had taken the Rapid downtown to see, and tried to remember some of their titles, but the only title I could remember at the moment was of the movie I still hadn’t seen no matter how many times it was on TV every Christmas: Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. I watched my father’s lips, and pretended he was Jimmy Stewart in the movie, and I was this Zuzu character he’d named me after, except we couldn’t understand what the other was saying, because the sound track was slightly off.

  Later, when he disappeared into the night in the chauffeur-driven car, he left me standing on the porch of Peabody Hall, knowing I could go in and tell The Twins with some confidence that pearls were a sign of the wrong kind of tears.

  There was one other scene at school too, just not a restaurant one. I guess you’d call it a Dean Scene. Still to be avoided, though.

  It was second semester. I had the Dream Machine, because, over Mother’s not so strenuous objections, Dad had promised it as a kind of consolation prize for having to leave home again after Christmas and go back to boarding school. They had it delivered, because no one wanted me driving all that way in such an old car on my own.

  It didn’t arrive until after I was back at school after break. The humble assistant came to class with a note saying it was there, and where it was parked, and here were the keys and all. That’s the kind of note you waste no time passing around. I was blanket pardoned for The Twins after that. In fact, even The Twins themselves enjoyed a surge in popularity due to the Dream Machine. They usually had to sit in back, but they sometimes got a window, and considering they had no chance of getting a ride, ever, to anywhere, until, at the eleventh hour, I came up with everybody’s favorite car.

  A strange coincidence happened the day the Dream Machine arrived. I got a postcard from Mary Parker. And oddly enough, it said, Dream Big. A cliché.
And Mary Parker never sent clichés. That is, she had sent You can’t go home again before Thanksgiving, right as I was packing to go home. But that was just her sense of humor. But Dream Big, clearly, was not. Sure, you could shrug and say it certainly went well with getting the Dream Machine, and maybe Mary Parker had decided this one time to send an old but sweet and relevant cliché. Except she didn’t know I was getting the Dream Machine. I hadn’t seen her at Christmas, and since even before that, my letters had been returned Addressee Unknown.

  The last time I saw her was Thanksgiving, when I slipped out of the house at eleven-thirty at night and took the Rapid Transit downtown to meet her halfway, and we stood on the train platform and talked for just a few minutes before we both had to go back in the directions we came.

  She was smoking a cigarette when I got off the Rapid and found her, dressed all in black, in the dark.

  She sure didn’t step conveniently into the light. She stood back and waited until I found her, in black, in the dark. If it hadn’t been for the steady little glow at the end of her cigarette, I may never have found her at all. “Happy Thanksgiving,” I said when I found her.

  “Really?” she said. “Did you have a turkey?” You could tell, maybe she thought a turkey was not a good thing. A bad one, actually, really no excuse for it, especially on Thanksgiving Day.

  “Yes,” I said uncertainly. “We had a turkey.”

  She blew some smoke and shook her head and looked up at the stars, which were all out tonight. “I guess we had one too.”

  “See?”

  She kind of shrugged, like maybe she did, then she flicked the cigarette onto the platform and walked over and killed it with her black high-top.

  “So when I get back to school, are you going to send me a postcard saying, Did you have a turkey? Like, Hey, How’s your horse?”

  She really smiled at that.

  “Your postcards, Mary. Boy, are they mysterious. Sometimes it takes me weeks to figure one out.” When she didn’t say anything to deny it, I added, “Short too.”