Lone Star

by Mathilde Walter Clark

  Glasses were brought from the kitchen, a cork popped, and someone poured the contents into nine glasses, and then she raised hers and proposed a toast: To Mathilde!

  When we were given a tour, it was my boyfriend she guided around, maybe believing that I’d seen it all before. But it was the first time I’d seen the entire house. I’ve dreamed of the house so often, I think, that it appeared less real than in my dreams. The room on the second floor where I’d once caught a glimpse of the never-worn dresses was empty but for a double bed, which seemed to be there only for appearance. Dust was everywhere, decay. The strange, soulless atmosphere one finds in abandoned houses.

  She said: I don’t like it here anymore. America is not like it used to be. You wouldn’t believe it, the change. She spoke to me. It’s horrible, jöst hor-ri-ble.

  She was the only one left in the house. Many years earlier my dad had moved into an apartment around back, which had been built when the garage was expanded, and which we never saw.

  Afterward, outside, Sabrina’s husband turned to me and with his frank, slightly melancholy eyes said: Mrs. V is always so interesting.

  •

  A year later she moved to Belgium, and the house has been for sale ever since. The sales sheet calls it a “Venetian architectural masterpiece” and goes on to say that Theodore Roosevelt was once a guest in the house, but even a deceased president hasn’t been able to sell the house, not even when the author behind the copy uses the familiar ‘Teddy.’

  My dad and Jessica, who divorced her husband in the meantime and returned to St. Louis, live in separate apartments in the garage complex, but the big house sits empty. The roof needs to be replaced, and someone stole the thirty-five-foot-long copper drainpipe. Most of the furniture remains, and my dad’s books are still behind glass in the mahogany cabinets in the library. I assume that my inheritance is still sitting in the top cupboards of the butler’s pantry, too.

  Otherwise it’s just dust, dust accumulating day by day, billions and billions of microscopic particles traveling on an endless journey through the rooms …

  in the new house there’s a shoe cabinet next to the back door, just as there was in the old house. Somehow they brought the shoes to the new cabinet, and I wonder if they’d brought them over in a box, or if they’d carried the shoes across the lawn, maybe in plastic bags, or a pair in one hand and one in another, a little at a time since they were heading that way anyway. How many hours would it have taken to transport them? How many shoes could fit in fifty cubic feet?

  I still don’t put my shoes in there, I don’t want them to drown, so I bring them with me to my room, to safety, my practically new, white Nikes with light-blue stripes.

  The stairs in the new house function differently. They aren’t next to each other. You can’t dart across to the other if you hear someone approaching. Suddenly, she stands before me, their mother. We’re the same height, she stands a few steps below me, in one of her sleeveless dresses, her blond hair piled high on her head like a crown.

  Have you gotten your menstruation already?

  I have. I’m fourteen, on my way down the stairs, and unprepared to discuss my menstrual cycle with her. But I also know that no matter how I respond, it will lead to something uncomfortable. She’d cast her hook, and it dangled right in front of me, the only question was whether or not it’d be my flesh to hang from it. The scornful way she’d emphasized already. We look at each other, waiting, she won’t budge until I’ve responded. Finally, I give up and say yes, quickly, and try to slip past her on the stairwell.

  When? she presses.

  I don’t think it’s any of her business, but I don’t tell her that. Instead I tell her that I can’t remember.

  You can’t remember at which age you had your menstruation? Mein Gott, this is something that I will always remember!

  She adds: I wasn’t so young when I first had it.

  I don’t respond, burning inside I just wait to get around her. It makes her upset.

  I jöst asked to know when Carissa would get hers.

  Then she lets me off the hook, and she continues up the stairs, her back erect.

  That summer a headless girl was found in a basement. At the end of the street, behind some trees and dense bushes, was the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the street, and behind that, on the other side, there were apartment complexes. They’d found the girl in one of these apartment complexes. I didn’t know that it was this girl, or rather this girl’s body, that would haunt the same policeman who’d interrogated my dad and his wife the last time I visited them. I didn’t even know that the murder of Tiffany and her mother had happened while my siblings and I were at McDonald’s with our grandmother. We knew almost nothing, only what sifted down from the adults and emerged in us a blur, vague and formless, a Black girl abandoned in a dark basement, without a head. The head, a headless girl, they never found the head, and they never discovered who the girl was. The girl was missing her head—the thing that tormented the policeman was the same thing that tormented us: How come no one missed the girl? How could a thirteen-year-old girl just disappear, and no one missed her?

  We were not allowed to play over there, had never been, the adults didn’t think those apartment complexes were a proper place for kids. Which was strange because that was exactly what attracted us: there were children there we could play with. Every time we scurried through the fence I thought of the girl. My head was getting too large, and it got stuck between the bars, so that I had to wriggle it through. The others still bolted in and out easily, as I once had, but with each passing day it took several extra moments for me, working different angles, to wind my head through. The others were short on patience with me, the little ones were already far away, and my sister, with her long, firm strides was right behind them, tilted forward, on her toes, her arm like a pendulum, she was always in such a damn hurry. Wait! I shouted, wait for me! My head! But she was already too far away to hear me. Then I’d wrench my head loose, and I ran after them. I knew it was only a question of months, maybe even weeks. Next summer, if there was to be one, I’d have to remain on my side of the fence.

  My dad was obsessed with securing the house against hostile intrusion. Both before and after the murder of Tiffany and her mother, Washington Terrace was plagued by a slew of unresolved break-ins. He came home and nailed all the first-floor windows shut, so they could no longer be opened.

  One day he came to the third floor, where we never usually saw him, with a piece of paper, a sign, on which he’d written off limits! with a thick marker. He taped it to a cabinet in one of the rooms that none of us used and went out again without a word. There were workmen in the house, and some important papers had gone missing, irreplaceable papers. I assumed that it was some of his research, but I didn’t know. He seemed unapproachable; he’d hardly spoken to me all summer. There were, by the way, no workmen on our floor. So who was the sign directed to? It stayed there, accusatory, off limits! Was it a hint? Did he think I’d messed with the cabinet? That I’d taken his papers?

  •

  He brought me along to a public office downtown to get a gun license. We walked up and down a broad stone stairwell to find the right office. Then we found it, a waiting room teeming with people, but we squeezed onto a rigid sofa by a low table with various forms fanned out across it. Though the air conditioner was pumping cool air, it was stiflingly hot, and there was something else in the air, too, an atmosphere of bureaucracy at work. All around us others waited, trying to seem calm and ordinary, as if they were bored, but panic clawed and scratched just under their surface, they fiddled with the corner of a form, clicked a ballpoint pen, tapped a foot. Across from me a man sat and ran his hand over his bald head, while a dark flower of sweat grew from his solar plexus.

  I didn’t know whether my dad saw what I saw. For some time, during the summer, I hadn’t had the same sensation of being able to walk into a room with him and be noticed. He’d filled out the form before we arrived, and he
had a letter in his hand indicating that his license was ready for pick up. After half an hour our number was called. We stood and went to the counter. It was screened off with a glass partition, and behind it sat a woman wearing an orange bead necklace over her blouse, slumped in her office chair. My dad pushed the letter through the slot. Um, I’m here to collect my gun license. The woman picked up the paper and glanced at it, wearily, then stood and crossed to an open cabinet full of files, where she retrieved something. She returned to her chair and pushed it through the slot, a laminated plastic card with a photo of my dad. Here you go, sir. Have a good day! Next! She called out a new number, and my dad scooped up the card and slipped it into his shirt pocket. Soon after, we were outside once again in the oppressive July heat looking around for where we’d parked the blue Ford.

  •

  The wind caused the tiny hairs on my arm to flutter like a small forest of reeds on a windy day. We drove in the Ford. During the summer, the sun had turned my skin so dark that the hairs seemed almost white. In winter it would be the opposite, the skin would be completely white, the hair almost black. It was as if you were comprised of two different people, a summer and a winter person. I would transform soon. I wished it would last a little longer. Without being able to put a finger on how, this summer was moving faster than the previous one. It hadn’t really started, and soon it would be over.

  My dad now had authorization to go out and buy a pistol. A handgun. My dad. I tried picturing him, his long, lanky figure, his hands so clearly designed to write—with a handgun. I tried to imagine him tearing off his glasses the same way as when he sat with his camera on the other side of the table at the Chinese restaurant. Fumble near-sighted with the safety as with the lens cap. What did he intend to do with a gun? Would he store it at the house?

  Of course, he said, that’s the whole point.

  But what if a burglar enters the house—or a vagabond! Would he use it then? Of course … look. My questions made him irritable. He knew where they were coming from, they were coming from Denmark. The United States is just not the same as Denmark. It’s just not. You can’t compare the two. Things are getting worse here … by the minute. His voice became a deep bass. You have no idea …

  He changed gears. We’d reached the gate to Washington Terrace. No ice cream. We drove through the wrought-iron arch to the right of the gate building, past the clock with roman numerals, and he said: I’ve got to be able to protect my family.

  My sister and I had grown too big to sleep in the same bed, so now I slept in my own room with the brown leatherette suitcase. I couldn’t find my shoes, my almost brand-new Nike sneakers, they weren’t inside the door where they usually were. I found them out in the bathroom soaked in perfume. Or rather they had been soaked, the perfume had since leaked out through the canvas fibers and had left a few piss-yellow stains that smelled so strong they made me gag.

  The sneakers were in the sink, and I scrubbed and scrubbed, but the yellow stains wouldn’t go away. Carissa and Jessica stood outside the bathroom laughing, but I didn’t think it was funny. My almost brand-new Nike sneakers would never be white again, and they smelled so badly that I had to pack them inside two plastic bags to even stomach having them in my room. My sisters didn’t understand all the hullabaloo over a pair of sneakers. They didn’t understand that I didn’t have a cabinet filled with shoes. I had two or three pairs, four or five if you counted my winter boots and sandals too. We lived on my mother’s salary as a secretary. We went shopping once a week, on Saturdays, and we bought only what we needed, no more, no less. Lugged the groceries home in plastic bags, shifting them now and then to take the weight off. Put everything carefully away in the cupboards. There were no overfilled carts, no enormous refrigerators with food going bad in the back of the shelves. No rooms filled with never-worn dresses.

  My dad heard about the fuss from his wife. He came upstairs to the third floor. I never would have believed it, but the hands that struggled to remove a camera’s lens cap had no problem striking a blow. Carissa and Jessica were taken to the bathroom and spanked. In my room, where the stench hadn’t completely dissipated, I could hear it was now their turn to cry.

  Afterward, he popped his head into my room and said: Are you satisfied now?

  He left before I could reply.

  ◊

  He’d hardly spoken to me during the summer. Maybe he’d forgotten that I was on borrowed time, that we only had a short summer together, before I was gone again? Followed by a long winter. I knew about those, but what about later? I tried to imagine what would happen. But the future with my dad was foggy, it was impossible to imagine it becoming recognizable again. Whether I would be invited back, for example. Maybe we would revert back to canal tours and dinners at the Chinese restaurant. I got the sense that maybe he’d come to agree with his wife. That he’d decided she was right, that she’d finally convinced him I was spoiled and greedy, not worth the effort. A child who cries over a pair of ruined sneakers. A child who is satisfied when her siblings are spanked.

  The inevitable end of summer arrives, the trip to the airport. The endless rounds of goodbyes in airports, the coordination of cars and airplanes, is an impossible dance, a circle dance, a never-ending airport les lanciers. Our parting takes place in something called a terminal. I’m not afraid of flying, but I’m afraid of saying goodbye, afraid that he will forget me, that I will drift into the darkness, that I will hang there while time runs away from him.

  The sand in the hourglass, the ash in the lantern.

  Don’t worry, nothing will happen to me.

  If something does happen, Sabrina will surely contact you.

  It starts the minute we get in the car. My dad drives, I sit beside him, and in the trunk is my big brown leatherette suitcase. Now it begins, something shifts in my chest, it’s large and shapeless. I fight it. It has come alive like an animal fetus, immediately it tries to tear itself free, but it can’t, mustn’t, it’s much too soon, much too naked and pink. The green signs above the highway undoubtedly show the direction to the airport, but I can’t see what’s on them, my vision greases over. I try to think of something else, I know that when the first teardrop plops from the rim of my eye it will be too late. The water brims, it trembles, and then I blink, and it overflows like an over-filled glass of milk. I dry my cheeks with the sleeve of one arm and then the other, until they’re both too wet to dry with.

  After we walk through the airport and get in line, it’s impossible to restore my dignity. My cheeks are salty and chapped, eyes surely both shiny and red as I hand my passport to the woman behind the counter. I try to think of something else. I try to look like someone suffering from allergies.

  As soon as we’ve checked the brown leatherette suitcase, we stand under the departure board to see how long we have left. Like my dad, I hate to be late. I can’t see my departure time, I blink, and the dots on the board blur into huge, impossible stars.

  We sit on a bench and wait. Last time he’d accompanied me to New York City. This was right after the murder of Tiffany and her mother, but I didn’t know that, and I still don’t know it now. I know only what we saw on our trip, the images that are still in me, the streets we walked on, me with my head tilted back, the skyscrapers around us so high that it made me dizzy to look up. We’d scraped the sky, stood atop the Empire State Building and looked down, moved from elevator to elevator as if we were part of a very slow millipede. We’d been on the ferry to Staten Island and had gone up an endlessly long spiral staircase under the Statue of Liberty’s boiling copper skirt, my dad soaked with sweat behind me, and we’d seen Manhattan in miniature through the holes in her crown.

  I still had the piece of jewelry he’d bought for me from a street vendor for my birthday, with the words love written on it, split into two lines, four intersecting letters, instead of the pale blue check.

  Then he’d taken me to the airport. We were flying on separate planes. I’d return home, and he would fly to a conferen
ce. I hadn’t had time to fight the animal, and I ran after him on the curving concrete sidewalk between two terminals. The distance between us already growing as we ran. I saw his stooped, shirt-clad figure getting smaller and smaller before me. His carry-on suitcase was in his hand, bouncing up and down like a flat, hard nut with a handle. Me on his heels with the monstrous brown suitcase and the princess bow that had come undone and hung limp in the heat. The suitcase felt larger than ever, I almost couldn’t drag it, and definitely couldn’t run with it, it came up to the middle of my waist, but my dad, his head thrust forward like a turtle, couldn’t see that. He turned halfway in my direction. Hurry up! I could taste the panic in my throat. I could taste the price of a plane ticket. I could taste the money he’d already spent so that we could run here, so that we could run there, endlessly toward a goal ahead of us, the hazy point on the horizon that was our separation.

  And now. I’m almost certain that I’m no longer his girl. Now I have to ask. My chest beats so hard that I can hardly speak, it’s all so croaky, I can’t breathe, but these are details, and I can no longer allow myself to be so particular. There’s no more time.

  When will I see you again?

  Soon, I hope.

  Next summer?

  I sure hope so.

  We sit there. He looks at his watch. Just being here makes him nervous. All the connections that can go wrong, that can be missed. He looks at his watch again. Okay, I think the time is up, he says, almost in a whisper. We stand, and he accompanies me to the escalator. Hugs me and gives me a kiss and says: I love you, Sweetie Pie. It sounds as if he actually means it. Then it’s up the escalator. Through the blur I see him down there, getting smaller and smaller. He suddenly seems shy. He remains standing there until I’m out of sight. I have a terrible feeling. I feel as though I know it for certain. I will never see him again.