Something She's Not Telling Us

by Darcey Bell

  Even a neutral goodbye is risky. In the past, Charlotte has said, “See you soon.” And she never saw that person again. So now she says, “It was lovely to meet you.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Ruth bows and rolls her hand down from her forehead.

  “Talk to you soon,” says Rocco.

  No one has to explain that he’s staying with Ruth.

  Kiss kiss, and then the sweet silence after the guests have gone home.

  Charlotte’s thankful that Daisy is so proud of being able to put on her own pajamas that she’s eager to hurry off to her room and change for bed. Her pajamas are printed with little ice cream cones and slices of pizza.

  Charlotte retrieves Moses from the safe, tucks Daisy in with her giraffe, and turns off the light.

  “Wait! Can you read to me?” Daisy’s favorite book is about a pig named Pearl who finds a talking bone. Daisy has heard the story so often she knows it has a happy ending, but she still acts scared when Pearl is kidnapped by a fox who wants to cook and eat her. One night Daisy asked Charlotte if they eat pigs. Charlotte didn’t want to lie, but neither did she want to create a vegetarian, so she said, We eat potatoes.

  “Mom’s tired.” Only now does Charlotte realize how knocked out she is.

  “Okay,” says Daisy. “Then we read two books tomorrow night.”

  “Promise,” Charlotte says.

  “Rocco’s friend is nice,” Daisy says.

  Of course you think she’s nice, Charlotte thinks sourly. She gave you sweets.

  “She is nice.” Charlotte kisses Daisy’s forehead. “Good night.”

  “Good night.” Daisy’s voice is like a tiny hand squeezing Charlotte’s heart.

  Eli’s already in bed. Charlotte puts on one of his T-shirts and a pair of his pajama bottoms. A signal. Sex is out of the question. They’re both exhausted.

  They turn to face each other and don’t speak for a while. Eli smells of toothpaste. What a blessing, to be able to look so deeply into someone’s eyes that he turns into a cyclops.

  “She’s a little much,” Eli says. “Don’t you think?” Which makes her love him even more.

  “Nice enough. Even Daisy liked her.” Charlotte wishes she didn’t feel so proud of herself for being big enough to say that. “And we did great. We welcomed her with open arms.”

  “Your poor brother,” Eli says.

  “Poor everyone,” Charlotte says.

  3

  Ruth

  Everything was fine, or sort of fine, until the Baroness Frieda fired me and left me with thousands of dollars of credit card debt as severance pay. Being the personal assistant to a narcissistic, coke-addled minor celebrity hadn’t been the greatest job in the world, but it was a job, and when that ended, I had just enough money to pay for one more month’s rent—and then I got evicted.

  So I did what I always did when things got really bad: I retreated to my grandparents’ house so they could take care of me and feed me and love me until I figured out what to do next.

  At night, my grandparents’ brownstone is dark. They claim they keep the lights low to save the planet. It’s inspiring to see two elderly people who care about climate change. But I think it’s vanity too. Darkness erases the wrinkles, and in the flickering light, they could almost pass for the young couple who fell in love half a century ago.

  Every time I visit, I always have a moment of dread, of thinking that one or both of them won’t be there. But they’re there. The only ones who love me unconditionally. The only ones I love without reservation. I pray that they’ll live into their nineties.

  Letting myself in with the key I wear on a cord around my neck, I call out, “I’m home; it’s Ruth, it’s me,” so they’ll know I’m not a home invader, a murderer, or a thief.

  Back before I was born, their neighborhood had gotten pretty sketchy, but by now it’s almost totally safe. Emphasis on the almost.

  Last spring, a woman was killed in her own home, a young mother who had just bought the brownstone with her family and was in the midst of renovating it. The dead woman was found lying at the foot of her stairs. At first they thought she’d fallen down by accident, but later the forensic team found signs indicating that someone else—two people—had been in the house at the time.

  I make my grandparents swear that they’ll keep their front door locked, which they forget to do. But they’re not worried. I’m the one who’s scared. Sometimes I’m scared of the dark, though not the dark in their house, which feels like hiding under a blanket.

  When I lived with them as a child, I’d close my eyes and pretend to be blind, which is useful now as I drift past the shadows trying to spook me, the furniture conspiring to trip me. I navigate by smell (furniture polish, floor wax, dust), by sensations (carpet, rug, wood, linoleum) under my feet, and by the muted explosions of the laugh track on TV.

  I’ve learned to move through the dark house without passing the basement door. I’ve always been scared of their basement. It’s one of those childish fears that won’t go away. Granny and Grandpa have shown me countless times: a furnace, old dishes, a shelf of home-canned tomatoes and peaches that no one will ever eat. Nothing to be frightened of! Once, I saw a wolf spider crawl out from under the basement door. Granny Edith says that maybe once, when I was little, I had a nightmare about the basement.

  I don’t remember a dream like that. I don’t want to. I’m just glad to be here.

  In the comfy TV room, Grandpa Frank lies on the sofa, his head cradled in Granny Edith’s lap. They’ve already eaten one of her delicious healthy meals—her cooking is probably why they’ve lived so long. Every evening they watch the news, and later the cable channel I added on for them as an anniversary present. The Time Travel Network shows only old films, black-and-white programs from when Granny Edith was stuck home raising Mom. Even the ads are vintage. Chorus lines of cartoon cigarettes high-kick across the screen; men in shirtsleeves raise beer mugs foaming with brands that no longer exist.

  “Ruthie!” my grandparents cry at once.

  In a heartbeat they’re on tiptoe to hug me. The warmth of their arms makes the world outside disappear. I forget the people who have hurt me, the glances and smirks of the lucky ones who have everything life can offer without having done one thing to deserve it. I forget what the Baroness Frieda did to me. I forget that I’m unemployed. My grandparents rub my shoulders and pat my back until the misery vaporizes like the nightmares I had as a child.

  Granny Edith pulls me into the kitchen. Even though I’ve just eaten. Iceberg lettuce wedges with homemade bleu cheese dressing, crispy roast chicken, buttery mashed potatoes, food so old-fashioned it’s trendy again. They have an extra tray table for me so we can fit on the sofa and watch TV.

  My grandparents’ home is a time machine. Their Hoboken neighborhood is popular now with young families and trust fund hipsters, but once you get past their front door, nothing’s changed. They don’t even have a flat-screen. Surrounding the mountainous TV are two enormous stereo speakers on which Grandpa Frank plays opera and Granny Edith plays Swan Lake or The King and I on records, not (hipster speak!) vinyl.

  Upholstered in an indestructible brownish tweed, the sofa’s in perfect shape, except for one leg scratched raw by the Persian cat I had before Grandpa Frank left the door open and Tabibi ran away. That was the only time I ever heard them argue. Granny asked if he did it on purpose. He’d always hated the cat. Grandpa cried until Granny hugged him and said it wasn’t his fault. A lover’s quarrel, but shocking. I knew my grandpa would never do something like that.

  Grandpa Frank still drives the 2009 Cadillac they garage behind their house. It gets eight miles a gallon, which is fortunate. Driving is expensive, and Grandpa Frank is no longer the greatest driver.

  For a while, he was always losing their car keys, and we’d search the whole house every time. Now he always keeps them on a little ebony table in the front hall, near the door. He picks up the keys, shakes them three times—jingle, jin
gle, jingle—and off we go.

  In case he ever forgets to leave them there, I’ve bought them a GPS tracker so they can find the keys on their cell phone, which I bought them too.

  Granny Edith ties on a scarf with rabbit ears under her chin and tops it off with the ultra-dark glasses she wears because of her macular degeneration. Grandpa Frank wears a fedora in summer, a wool Tyrolean in winter. With a feather! An elderly couple so striking they could get away with anything. Rob banks, swindle pensioners. That’s how adorable they are, with their picnic hamper and the road map they never consult.

  They turn on the classical station. Loud. And Grandpa Frank floors it through Hoboken and onto the Palisades. There’s a landing they like, over the Hudson, with a cute picnic table where they share Granny Edith’s fried chicken, coleslaw, homemade lemonade. Willows dip their branches into the water, and at the edge of the clearing are a few apple trees left from an orchard that the highway authority couldn’t bear to cut down.

  When I ask Grandpa Frank to let me drive, he recites the only poem he knows:

  James James

  Morrison Morrison

  Weatherby George Dupree

  Took great

  Care of his Mother

  Though he was only three.

  James James

  Said to his Mother,

  “Mother,” he said, said he:

  “You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me.”

  James James

  Morrison’s Mother

  Put on a golden gown,

  James James

  Morrison’s Mother

  Drove to the end of the town.

  James James

  Morrison’s Mother

  Said to herself, said she:

  “I can get right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea.”

  “Stop it, Grandpa Frank,” I say. “You know I hate that poem—”

  But he goes right on:

  King John

  Put up a notice,

  “Lost or stolen or strayed!

  James James

  Morrison’s Mother

  Seems to have been mislaid.

  Last seen

  Wandering vaguely:

  Quite of her own accord,

  She tried to get down to the end of the town—forty shillings reward!”

  James James

  Morrison’s Mother

  Hasn’t been heard of since.

  King John

  Said he was sorry,

  So did the Queen and Prince—

  “Okay,” I say, “you have to stop now!”

  Having tortured me enough, Grandpa Frank chuckles and falls silent. A few times he’s gone on to the last verse, the scariest of all, because he whispers the letters that begin the words, J. J. M. M. W. G. Du P. It’s the creepiest thing ever because I know what the letters mean. And because he’s whispering.

  I guess he thinks it’s funny, three-year-old James James bossing his disobedient mom. Did something happen to Grandpa’s mother? Did she leave him, like Mom left me? I never thought it was funny. What is James James supposed to do now that Mother is gone forever?

  But I put up with it. Forcing me to listen to every maddening line is the only annoying thing Grandpa Frank does. It’s his brilliant way of stopping me from bossing him around. Because whenever he recites it, I think: Okay, if he remembers all that, he’s probably good to drive.

  I sleep in my old bedroom, which has become my grandparents’ shrine to me, crammed with relics: my high school spelling trophy, my college degree, school portraits of me grinning as if I’m in pain. Recent photos too: A shot of me on the red carpet with the Baroness Frieda. My certificate from the cooking school. And pictures (I beg Granny to ditch them) of me with various boyfriends.

  I sleep like a baby in that room. No insomnia, no Ambien. No nightmares. Every so often I have this recurring dream that I have a pretty little daughter. We love each other more than anything in the world. I promise I will be good to her, treat her better than Mom treated me. Maybe I’m dreaming about myself at that age. I don’t care. The dream makes me happy.

  I wake up refreshed, basking in the heavenly smells wafting up from the kitchen.

  Granny Edith still loves to bake, but she rarely does except when I’m there. Not being all that active, she and Grandpa Frank can’t do the daily coffee cake without putting on the pounds. But they roll their eyes when I say I’m watching my weight, and they tempt me with bacon, eggs, pancakes, toast, butter, and more butter.

  When I go back to the city, Granny won’t let me leave without a container of her freshly baked sticky buns—a taste of childhood to bring with me into the cold, cruel world.

  She spends hours decorating them with white icing on the golden brown crust, each pastry topped by a small sun and eight rays of iced sunlight, each ray exploding in a starburst of its own.

  “Goodbye, Ruthie,” she says, handing me the container. “Stay happy, dear. Stay safe.”

  I know that’s why she gives them to me. For security, not just pleasure. They’re like the enchanted cloak, the magic shield that the good witch gives the prince heading into the dark forest. My grandmother means the pastry to work like edible charms to watch over me when I’m alone in the wilderness, lost and too far away for her love to protect me.

  Whenever I leave my grandparents’ house, I walk several blocks out of my way to avoid walking past the house in which the lovely young wife and mother of two got murdered.

  I can’t bear to think what it must have been like for the husband who couldn’t reach her, and called and called and finally found her among the paint-splattered tarps and paint cans and carpenters’ tools. She’d been checking out the renovation of the home they were planning to live in. And now their plans had changed. Because now she lay dead, just inside the front door, at the base of the stairs on which the paint was being scraped away to reveal the oak underneath.

  WHEN I HEARD back from the start-up, it was the first response—the first nibble—I’d gotten since the Baroness Frieda fired me.

  I had a good interview. It was a challenge. I don’t have much of a résumé, so I had to explain what I’d done for the past two years since the baroness had refused to write me a letter of reference.

  Sandy—the boss—liked my energy. I’d helped friends grow their businesses, though I hadn’t done it for a living, as he may have assumed from what I said.

  Even so, we got off on the wrong foot. I guess you could say that Sandy sexually harassed me, though I have never been sure, since all he did was give me something to read. If he’d made me watch porn with him, that would be clear. But this was a short story by a writer so famous even I’d heard of her.

  Sandy suggested that I read the story, which is about a secretary who has an S&M relationship with her boss, who makes her crawl around on all fours and spanks her on his desk. Was Sandy hitting on me? Did he want us to have an intimate two-person book group? Or was he just a guy who likes making reading recommendations? Maybe he thought that being a barely glorified secretary, I might like a story about a secretary and a boss. An office romance. How sweet.

  I could have had him busted—maybe I would have if the story weren’t so good. Anyhow, if I got Sandy fired, I wouldn’t have a job, not even a job at an office where no one speaks to me.

  The men (of course they are mostly guys, except for a few women too scared to be friendly to me, or even to one another) work hard to isolate me, to remind me I’m not in their club. They all think I got the job because I had sex with Sandy. But we didn’t have sex, though Sandy may have wanted to.

  One of our projects—Experience Hunters International—was my idea. Before I went to work for the baroness, I spent six months in Europe. My grandparents paid. I went to Berlin, Madrid, Paris. I watched hot young people having fun, and I wanted to have their lives.

  Any desire you have, someone else has it too. Ka-ching! Experience Hunters. The guys at STEP t
ake credit for it. I could fight for my intellectual property rights, a he-said, she-said situation. Or I could shut up and keep my job and hope that someday I’ll get credit. It’ll go on my résumé.

  Whenever I read about a gag rule, I think, everyone’s under a gag rule. There’s so much you can’t say. You have to sort out what you want people to know—and what you never want anyone to know. Ever.

  Every Friday my coworkers get together at the IT guy’s house. I’m not invited. They watch reruns of The Office for tricks to play on me, farting near my desk, turning everything I say into a dirty joke. They actually encased my stapler in a mound of Jell-O, like they did on TV. It hurts that these guys go to so much trouble just to make me miserable.

  Whatever. As soon as I got the job, I found myself a little one-bedroom walk-up in Greenpoint. I made it homey and cute. My grandparents loaned me enough money for the broker’s fee and the rest, since, this being New York, no one will rent you an apartment unless you have enough money to buy it.

  I told myself that all that craziness with the baroness was behind me. New house, new life.

  EVEN THOUGH IT’S hopeless, I keep trying to please my coworkers. So I threw myself into the discussion about Friday lunch. Guys? I’ve been to culinary school. Three Tuscan grandmothers showed me how to make food that will rock your world.

  When they said it was my turn, I should have been on my guard. But I wanted to prove myself and maybe change their minds. Granny Edith says, The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

  I asked each guy what food he’d been craving. It was surprising how many said kale. I described the Kanji kale salad, and they said it sounded great, especially when I name-dropped David Chang.

  They let me go through all the prep work in the open kitchen, chopping all that kale and frying it and mixing it with the raisins, soy sauce, and sesame oil. Delicious!

  I was shocked when they wouldn’t eat it.

  Sandy said, “If I eat that, I’ll grow a vagina.”