Hardly Children
Page 12
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO TALK
It seems clear, but I worry about how she might fill it in: I have the number for a great therapist. You should try journaling. Maybe Will was just kidding!
I LIVE DOWN THE HALL
And I can’t help but wonder how long it will be true. That maybe if I don’t break any of her vases, she’ll keep me on as a partner, a sort of life assistant. Sometimes I go to the store and buy these gluten-free crackers I know she likes (though I often end up eating half of them when I’m home alone). I let the water run a half hour more and splash some onto the wall to make sure my message doesn’t fall away.
* * *
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER Emily and I are lying out on the side of the La Quinta swimming pool. Short green bushes run along the perimeter, and on the other side of them we can see the tops of semis as they drive by. It’s barely eleven on a Monday and we’re the only ones out here. Tiny speakers hidden in the bushes pump out crackly dance tunes—a little Motown, a little funk. A man is singing about how his woman is as sweet as or sweeter than honey.
Emily’s wearing a white short-sleeve button-up and a pair of loose chambray pants. When we arrived and she didn’t undress, she said that even on her day off, her employees should not see her in a bathing suit.
You’re going to get an awful farmer’s tan, I said.
She only shrugged and opened up a magazine.
Hey, Emily, check this out. I stand up and take a running dive into the deep end of the pool. When I come to the surface and look up, her head is still tilted down, her eyes covered by her big sunglasses.
Did I splash?
You jumped into a pool of water. Of course you splashed.
But a big one? I ask, hoisting myself up onto the side of the pool.
Yeah, a big one.
I want her to rank me—8.3, 9.2. Like I said, these small things, these seemingly small things, are important. I walk over to the table between our chairs and open up a bag of salt and vinegar chips. There’s something satisfying about my body dripping wet and the chips being dry and crisp inside their bag.
This is fun! I say, sitting down in my lounger. We never get to hang out.
We hang out all the time.
I meant before, I guess. I crunch into a chip. Aren’t you having fun? I ask.
Not really, no.
Emily’s phone rings on the table between us. She looks at its face then presses a button on the side, silencing it and turning it over. It could be La Quinta or the deep voice from the other day or someone else entirely. Emily rubs her eyes then moves her hand to her chest, letting it rise and fall there.
Emily, I say.
What. Her head is down, her face hard beneath her sunglasses.
The music has clicked over to a funk song with lots of bass and brass. I stand up and start doing this dance I made up where I pretend my arms don’t work. I leave them dead and hanging and get them flopping around by moving my legs and torso.
Emily.
I’m not looking at you, she says.
I move so that my shadow is cast over her. I twist back and forth so hard that my arms fly up and hit their opposite shoulders.
Stop it, she says.
Em, I don’t know what’s happening—my arms don’t work.
You look like an idiot, she says, but I know she doesn’t mean it; her mouth is smiling without her permission and her shoulders start to shake. This is my favorite part. When she’s laughing at me but doesn’t want to. When she tries not to encourage me, but her smile keeps cracking through.
Stop it! she cries. She pushes her hand into her smile as though to crank it back down, unable to stand the way we give each other joy.
* * *
BACK AT HOME, I pass her room on the way to the shower. The door is cracked and I can hear her soft crying.
Em? I push open the door.
She’s sitting on the edge of her bed. She raises her face, eyes red-rimmed and too wide, like I’ve caught her at something. I walk in and lower myself next to her, and the depression of the bed sinks our shoulders together. The water in my hair, full of chemicals from the pool, has bled through my T-shirt and dampened my back.
Will was never really my favorite person, I say.
She lowers her head and sniffs.
He was always a little goofy, a little cheesy for my taste.
She slowly shakes her head.
Didn’t you tell me once that he got all of his jokes from a book? A joke book?
She puts her hand to her brow.
And, truly, the incessant video game playing was a little tired, like maybe he was kind of a cliché? Of a dude? Who plays video games?
It’s not Will, she says, breathing deeply. She rubs at her eyes and gets to telling me some things. She goes back in time and then moves forward. I sit beside her, and it takes so long, me not saying a word, that my hair dries up into its natural curl and the light of the day passes over us.
* * *
IN THE SHOWER, I don’t have much loose, so I work my fingers through my hair and tug. I tug and tug until I have enough.
I’M NOT LONELY WHEN I’M WITH YOU
It’s all I want to say, but I wash and condition and pull out more in the rinse. I gather it into a loose disc the size of my palm and smush it onto the wall in case she needs it.
* * *
THOMAS THE LIBRARIAN has written down some names and numbers on a piece of paper for me. I’m searching them out with the grave intensity of an Indiana Jones type, imagining the reward to be bigger than a bunch of books. It was endearing to watch him do his job—his face wrinkling with thought, writing with one of those little golf pencils. He sends me to Fiction first, then Science/Health/Medicine and Biography, then back around to Poetry. It feels like I’ve been given a map to a foreign city or a set of very complicated instructions. By the time I’m done, my arms and chest ache with the books’ weight.
It would be easier if it were just one book, I say, relinquishing the pile to him.
What book would that be? he asks. His smile is soft and curious. He scans the books, one at a time, dissembling my stack on one side then making a new one on the other.
How to Be, I say, shrugging. How to Get from Here to There. How to Help Yourself … or Others.
Well, here’s a good place to start, he says, and slides them to me.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING WEEK I’m sitting on the edge of Emily’s hospital bed, surrounded by pink balloons, pink cards, and a spray of boldly, unnaturally colored flowers in a vase. I made the mistake of talking to Cousin Stacy when she called me the other day, and now it feels like a bunch of people have come over uninvited.
I’ve got an idea for a movie, I tell Emily. She’s tired but awake, quiet.
She sighs, less annoyed than usual, which for her is like saying, Yes, please tell me all about it.
Things keep going wrong, I say.
She nods her head and swallows, a movement she makes look painful. They put a tube down her throat for the anesthesia. It’ll be a week or two before we know for sure how everything went.
But then maybe at the end things start to go right again, I say.
There’s a quiver at the side of her mouth. That’s stupid, she whispers. Her eyes are down.
Why?
Because you can’t just tack a happy ending onto something like that. It’s cheap. It’s not real. She closes her eyes and swallows again.
I regard all the balloons and flowers on the two side tables. Pink, I think. Nobody knows us. I grab a gift mug from behind one of the vases. It’s big and white with pink, looping script on it, filled with candy wrapped in gold, crinkly plastic.
Hey, look at this! I say. I can’t tell in which way I’m trying to cheer her up. The ironic, Can you believe this shit sort of way, or the Hey, believe this way.
She takes it in her hand, reading the inspirational message on the side. No doubt she’s wondering when these words ever worked or what simpleminded soul the
y might have worked on. She turns the thing over and drops the candy into her lap, rears back, and, despite the bandages, throws the mug across the room. It hits the opposite wall with a ping. I go over and pick it up. It’s mostly fine, save for a spot on the rim, now chipped like a tooth.
I look up at her with golden eyes. Now we’re talking!
I bring the mug back and set it on the table in case she wants to throw it again. Emily doesn’t know, but I made a few phone calls earlier. One to the man she used to be married to and the other to you-know-who. Will’s voicemail voice sounded needlessly chipper, like nothing even close to bad had ever happened to him before. You-know-who was a muffled ghost, her voice startlingly the same, as familiar to me as my mother’s or Emily’s. I don’t know when they’ll get back to me or what will happen when they do, but I’m trying to manage my expectations, to think about it in such a way that any outcome will be desirable. Like this vase of flowers. After the leaves fall off the stalks and the night nurse comes and throws it all away, dumping out the stinky water, I tell myself it won’t be such a big deal.
THE SUMMER FATHER
THE FATHER ARRIVES every dead summer to drive the girls west. No destination named, only a direction and the promise of mesa, mountains, stone-dry heat. Two weeks—the longest uninterrupted time they spend with him all year. They pack sleeping bags and pillows, Roald Dahl books, T-shirts, and bathing suits. It is the four of them in the cab of his truck, the short trailer hitched behind. A tape deck and three tapes. The shift from mother to father is swift. Do you have everything you need? A hug, a hug, a hug, and a wave.
At rest stops the girls imagine a mirror family on the other side of the highway, except they envision a father and a mother, a son or daughter or both at the end of her hand or hands. The girls do not need to say or even think that a father with his daughters is not like a mother with her daughters. At the stops, losing him for minutes, they coalesce, become a team. Three girls among women washing their hands, three girls among women’s bodies, the air thick and hot, the sweet smell of a stranger’s shit. In the lobby they look at state maps set behind glass, the red You Are Here dot. We’ve gone this far, are going to go this far.
In the afternoon, the father gives the oldest a thin fold of bills, and the girls run into a gas station to gather Corn Nuts and Twizzlers, Milk Duds and fun-sized bags of chips. They each choose the same kind so regularly that the father made a song of it. Or the father made the song and the girls oblige it. When they return to the truck he snaps his fingers and whisper-sings, FRI-tos / CHEE-tos / And po-TA-ta chips. They like the way he defines them, even arbitrarily, even through slippery plastic bags of processed corn and sodium. This is who you are, who you can continue to be. He isn’t there at home. He doesn’t know how the middle daughter has been taking hour-long showers at night, how nobody knows what she does in there for all that time. How the oldest, only twelve, came home from the movies with a hickey not two weeks ago, and then sulked at a family party in the backyard, eighty degrees and she red-faced and sweating in a turtleneck. The youngest, the mother has determined, will need braces, despite having quit sucking her thumb last year. He no longer day-to-days it with them, never really did even when he was in the house, and so the jingle. My little munchkins, he says, getting back on the highway, as though tickled at being a father, at having these three separate pieces of him beside him reading books, housing secret desires and preferences each her own. He sets the cruise control and turns on the music, a favorite song with funky piano and brass. Hey, he says, and bobs his head until the youngest and the middle join in. It’s like this, he says, gesturing with his hand, and they mimic him, as obedient as backup singers. The oldest, only twelve, nearly thirteen now, sometimes sullen, sometimes pouting, looks out the window, crosses her arms over her breasts, breasts she’s been hiding under big white T-shirts, breasts whose sudden existence has the father calling the girls’ underwear unmentionables: Don’t forget your unmentionables. I’ve washed your unmentionables. C’mon, the middle says, pushing at the oldest’s shoulder. She hates how the oldest must now be convinced to participate, hates her creeping sense of power, as though her presence were a gift and one to be doled out judiciously. They have to make her forget the girl she’s becoming at school, the girl who quietly gets straight As but who hangs out with the tan, popular girls, is one of the tan, popular girls now, girls getting new bras, girls who let boys suck on their necks in the back row of their small town’s single-screen movie theater. At home her sisters try to coax her into her previous self, an old dress that still fits but which she is sick of. What’s wrong with it? her mother would say. You used to love that dress. C’mon, the middle says, and bumps her again. The middle shakes her shoulders, as if the oldest—only twelve yet moving exponentially beyond her ten-year-old sister—merely forgot how to do it. Cut it out, she replies, and the middle says, Fine, jeez, and keeps dancing. Her movements are more contained, now only pretending to have fun, so as to show the oldest she doesn’t need her.
The middle sister was there that night at the theater. She sat up front with her best friend, who, a third of the way in, nudged her and whispered, Look, and the middle turned to see her sister in a far corner with some skinny, freckled boy on her neck, her face stiff, eyes open. The middle looked back to the movie, now lost as to who the characters were, why they were doing what they were doing. The middle did not tell the mother, though she wished for her sister’s punishment. She watched her mother discover the thing on her neck the next morning, breathing the oldest’s name like a curse, and dig out the turtleneck so that she could play ping-pong and eat potato salad and sit on the backyard swing staring into nothing.
When the song ends and the father rewinds the tape, the intro building again, the middle says, Come on, one last plea that’s no longer pleading, a tone that says, I know what you’re doing, I know why you’re doing it, but isn’t this more fun? The oldest angles away from the middle then looks back over her shoulder. She smirks and moves her eyebrows up and down. The middle snorts.
Stop it, she says.
What, the oldest says. I’m dancing. She shakes her shoulders slyly.
Dance normal.
I am dancing normal. She closes her eyes and shakes her head back and forth, hopping in her seat, her hair whipping around her face. It’s a real freak-out! the oldest says. Seeing her, the father hams more. He closes his eyes and uses his fist as a microphone. The middle joins in as the brassy payoff returns, and for a moment, they all coordinate, punching their fists in time to the chorus. This will be the last summer like this. Next year, the oldest will insist on cheerleading camp and the father will instead have them for a week at his house. There will be trips to the park district pool, where the girls will eat nachos and Italian ice and look at boys and call their father to delay when he’ll pick them up. The music is just louder than loud, and it opens up a good feeling inside the middle’s chest. It makes her uneasy. As on the last day of school when she and her classmates had written their names and addresses on slips of paper tied to balloons and released them in the parking lot. She watched her balloon rise—one among the dozens—up to the tops of trees and beyond, a shrinking yellow dot.
* * *
THEY DRIVE THROUGH the night. The father buys coffee; the girls run into gas station bathrooms—tired yet alert and giggling—the dull yellow lights swirling with mosquitoes. The girls go into the back of the capped truck, where the dad has laid out a futon and a pile of blankets. The highway lights run one after another over the truck as though propelling it forward. The middle loves the late-night driving hours, hours usually kept away from her. Fifteen years later, after the father will complete his slow, early death, the middle sister will think of those together-yet-separate hours on the night drive: she and her sisters dozing, her father up front, a slit in the window for his cigarette smoke to slip out of. Always there will be the same wonder: What did he think in those adult hours? Who was he then?
* * *
The middle takes the youngest a block down the street to a park, clambering up the curving metal slide, running across a wobbly wooden bridge. They climb on top of the monkey bars and crawl on hands and knees. She sends the youngest back, watching her dash across the empty street, and walks over to the swing set on the other side of a tall, needle-thick pine. They learned it as an accident, at the beginning of the summer at the playground across the street from the mother’s house. A swing set with a metal trapeze bar hanging from two chains. The oldest sister and her friends would, one at a time, wrap their legs around the angled support beam and slide up, so they could sit on top of the high bar and swing. After a while they stopped going for the bar, only sliding up then down the beam. It tickles, one said, and the others laughed, the middle standing, watching. Three weeks, three bored summer weeks while the babysitter and the youngest sister stayed back home under the ceiling fan, eating ice-cream sandwiches and watching music videos. Then the oldest sister and her friends stopped going to the park. There was a girl down the street with a pool and a mother who worked nights. You can’t come, the oldest said, and bought a bikini with her own money. The middle sister felt betrayed but knew she would have repeated the betrayal to her younger sister if she’d been allowed to join them. The next week, on the night of the movie, the oldest and the middle stood outside the theater waiting, and when the oldest sister’s friends arrived, she joined them in a circle—arms crossed, their long, thin legs sprouting out from bright cotton shorts. A girl one grade ahead of them passed by, a girl with big brown hair and a cropped white shirt, with pink and purple beads at the ends of its tassels like a jeweled curtain. She walked with one hip out ahead of the other, and it made her look at once filled with attitude and injured. That girl is a cunt, one of them said matter-of-factly, and the others snorted. The oldest looked behind her, and the middle, leaning against the theater’s brick exterior, turned her head to pretend she hadn’t heard. The unknown word put a blood-taste in her mouth. Metallic like the smell of the bar she leans her body on now. She closes her eyes. Her breath is slow and quiet, the only sound she hears but the wind in the trees, the distant whisper of a car. She slides herself up the bar until the tickling feeling leaks out of her. She slides down, her feet crunching into the bed of pebbles, and her older sister is behind her saying, You shouldn’t do that.