The Sunday that my father decided he’d had enough of the Barrons was like any other. Aunt Ida met us at the door.
“Sophie, honey,” she said to me, “do you want some ice cream?” Aunt Ida’s freezer was always burdened with ice cream, and she was burdened with the duty of giving it away.
“No thank you,” I said, because my mother was there and I was supposed to be losing weight. My mother’s idea of a diet was to make me turn down any food not offered directly by her. This meant I ate only twice as much as most people.
“Sure you want ice cream,” said Aunt Ida.
“Honest, no.”
Aunt Ida stared at my father, as if she were trying to place him. Finally, she said, “Come on in, Frank.” We stepped into the living room.
“She didn’t care,” Aunt Rose was saying. “She just sent that poor woman right out of the house, with a child and everything.”
“She was hard,” said Uncle Mose.
“That’s just how she was,” said my mother, taking off her coat.
“How who was?” I asked.
“Abraham’s wife,” said my mother. “Sarah. From Genesis.”
My father was still by the door. He usually spent these sessions in the kitchen, with Uncle Ellis, Ida’s husband. He looked like he couldn’t decide on the safest path through the Barrons. I was about to go to him—I felt somewhat at peril myself—when Aunt Ida tapped me on the shoulder.
“Would you like some ice cream,” she asked.
“No thank you,” I said.
My father steered me to the kitchen, or I steered him. Uncle Ellis sat at the table, reading a newspaper and fingering a deck of cards. Having been driven to his kitchen, he refused to be forced out the door entirely.
“Howdyadoodle,” he said to me. My father sat down across from him.
“I have some neopolitan, and some sherbet,” Aunt Ida said, leaning over the breakfast bar into the kitchen.
“Sophie doesn’t want any ice cream,” my mother called in from the living room.
“Let her decide for herself,” said Aunt Ida. “You think that’s good for her, just to be led along? What happens when she gets married.” She looked at me, her face grave, as if this were the truest test of my character. “Which one?”
“Neither,” I told her.
“See?” said my mother.
“What else could she say? She’s polite, she doesn’t want to get her mother mad. Later, maybe.”
I heard Aunt Sadie say from the living room, “Rose, you’ve said some pretty crazy things in your life, but that’s about the craziest.”
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” said Rose.
“What?” said Aunt Ida.
“Rose,” said Aunt Sadie, “thinks that Manet is a better painter than Monet.”
“Monet,” said Aunt Rose, “is pure fluff.”
Uncle Ellis shook his head. “Marriage,” he said to me, and laughed. “Your Aunt Ida wants to know about you getting married? Look at me.” He started shuffling the cards. “Here I think I’m marrying one woman, and it turns out I’m marrying half a dozen.”
“Ellis,” said Aunt Ida.
“You didn’t marry me,” shouted Aunt Sadie, who never married. “If you asked, I would have said no.”
“Half a dozen very nice women,” said Uncle Ellis. “And a girl as pretty as you, Sadie? A man as handsome as me? Don’t be so sure what you would have said.”
“Talk sense,” said Aunt Ida. She put down something cold at my elbow.
“What’s this?” I asked.
She had a look of innocence on her face. “It’s the ice cream you asked for.”
Uncle Ellis started dealing the cards. “Just another Sunday,” he said. After he dealt one card he reached out and, with the tips of his fingers, patted my father’s knuckles. “Don’t worry, Frank,” he said. “A couple more hours, that’s all.”
The Barrons themselves did not play cards. They saw gin as simply a distraction to conversation. I sat in the kitchen with Ellis and Dad, happy to listen to the usual Barron mishegoss filtering across the breakfast bar. Somehow, I loved my mother best when she was with her family: she was funny and quick in a way she never was at home; she got mad in a way that thrilled me; she turned beautiful, all her coloring darker and dramatic. Sometimes she took me into her lap and combed my hair absentmindedly. She never got nervous at all. On the way home from Ida’s, I would miss that version of my mother, knowing I would not meet her for another week. It was like a bright light went through my mother when she was at her best, and it lit up all the other holes in her character.
I heard Aunt Ida say, “We’re very worried about Tillie.”
Usually, Aunt Ida and Mom played this game alone when Ida and my cousin Tillie came to visit us. Ida and Mom would pick a worry and describe together what could go wrong. First they’d be serious, but soon as the worries got worse, they’d take a certain odd turn. Bad posture? Tillie marries a hunchback. Reckless eating habits? I run away and join the circus as a combination fat lady, sword swallower, and circus geek, “the girl who’ll swallow anything,” my slogan. Tillie is hit by a car, lives, but has CADILLAC backward forever emblazoned on her forehead. I never get married and eventually open a museum of dirt; I stand on the sidewalk and call people in.
It was our mothers’ way of warding off bad luck, their own peculiar way to tell the evil eye: these are unappetizing children, nothing for you here. They’d learned it from their father, who, when registering his children at school, would not say exactly how many there were; to count was bad luck, and you couldn’t tell who or what would overhear the total, and figure there were extra. “A lot,” he’d say. “Let’s just say enough.”
Today’s future had to do with Tillie’s fear of the boys at school: she thought they were rough and ugly. Soon that moved on to a general discussion of Tillie’s romantic future. Aunt Ida worried that Tillie would marry the first man who treated her with kindness. I went into the living room: I loved to hear Tillie’s ruinations. She was four years younger than me, girlish and stingy with her things and extremely pretty.
Aunt Ida said, “Tillie will fall in love with an organ grinder. The kind with a monkey.”
“Italian,” said my mother.
“Italian,” said Aunt Sadie, “and old.”
Uncle Mose sat up in his chair. “So’s the monkey. Very old. An aged monkey.”
“But he loves Tillie—”
“The organ grinder loves her,” said my mother.
“Yes, the organ grinder,” agreed Aunt Ida. “The monkey can take or leave her. Actually, no—the monkey hates her. The monkey is prone to biting.”
“Worse and worse,” said my mother. “And the organ grinder isn’t very good at his job.”
Aunt Ida regarded my mother. “How can you be bad at organ grinding?”
“His heart isn’t in it. He isn’t jolly. It was his father’s business.”
“A tragic organ grinder,” said Uncle Mose. “Of course.”
“So,” said my mother. “They’re in love, so they get married. But business is off.”
Tillie stood up suddenly. “Stop,” she said.
“And then,” said Aunt Ida.
“I won’t,” said Tillie. She climbed into her mother’s lap. “I’m not,” she said. Poor Tillie. It did seem to me that while I was seen as somebody who’d destroy herself through shoddy habits and worse taste, Tillie merely drifted into bad luck, accepting miserable marriage proposals, dropping herself into the hands of unfriendly mobs.
“Please,” she said to my mother and Aunt Ida, as if she thought they wanted to make her do these things. But they couldn’t stop—if they ended before the worst came, if they left the story when it was merely bad, not impossible, it broke the spell. Tillie had to hear herself taken to the edge of disaster and over, just as she had a million times before. Fire was possible, and there was only one way to keep it from occurring.
Tillie curled up in her mother’s lap, trying to look
like she needed protection, but Aunt Ida could only stroke her hair and offer ice cream, all the time saying, “And then the organ grinder’s monkey dies, tragic, and they are so poor, and Tillie is so thin, she has to wear the monkey’s hand-me-downs. Finally she is buried in a little bell-boy’s costume, her very best outfit.”
“Maammaa,” Tillie wailed.
“A nice outfit,” said Aunt Ida. “The monkey only wore it once.”
My father hated to hear these prophesies as much as Tillie did. I saw him walk to the doorway, frowning. My father was movie-star handsome—that’s what the Barrons said, though they made it sound like a flaw. Now his dark hair was raked down on one side, his blue eyes serious. Bad enough that Ida and Esther talked about such things at home, just the two of them. But here with everybody. He waved at my mother to get her attention and said, “Esther.”
My mother waved back, but Aunt Sadie was talking to her, and she took my mother by the wrist to reclaim her attention.
“Girls are sensitive,” said Aunt Ida, Tillie curled up in her lap.
“Some, yes,” said Aunt Rose.
“Well,” said my father. He cleared his throat. “Can you blame her?”
“Well,” said Aunt Rose, “that’s just the sort of attitude I think spoils children.”
Aunt Sadie, from across the room, said, “Frequently men are awkward with little girls.”
“Not all men,” said Uncle Mose.
“No, not all men, but some. If you haven’t been brought up around girls, sometimes you don’t know how to treat them.”
They turned away from my father and began to argue about what could possibly make a man behave as he just had, never mentioning him again.
I suppose the unhappy prophesies could have frightened me as much as they did Tillie and my father. Part of it was just that—if they bothered Tillie, who I disliked, I wanted to savor them. I could not believe they were really about me, any more than I believed in the card tricks my father sometimes showed me. They were the Barron brand of magic. They were about some poor fatherless girl who happened to have my name and face and all my bad habits. A dirt curator? I’d start in my head to see this museum, the steady heaps of Georgia red clay, of city shmutz, of lint, mud, tar, crumbs. I’d tend them lovingly.
I believed my father would save me from any bad future. I think this might have been one of the reasons my mother played the game: she saw that I was beginning to favor my father, and sending me over Niagara Falls in a barrel was the only way she knew to take me from him. At the moment just before catastrophe, she was my best hope in the world.
On the way home in the car, my father said, “Do you have to do that?”
“What?” my mother asked.
“Those terrible futures,” Dad said. “I can barely stand listening to them. They’re morbid. I don’t see how you can bring yourself to say some of those things.”
My mother turned to look at him. “I have to make myself.”
We turned the corner onto our street. “Why on earth do it?”
My mother set her hands on her lap and stared at them. “Ida and I love our daughters,” she said. “To imagine the worst things that could happen to them . . . well, that’s the worst thing that could happen to us. If we can manage to say every bad thing, we can manage to get through anything.” She turned to me, in the back seat. “It breaks my heart to say those things, you know.”
My father pulled into the driveway and shut off the car. “Esther, Esther,” he said, looking out the windshield. “Why do you have to break your own heart?”
In the house, we drifted off to our usual places. Dad went to the kitchen, I headed for the basement, my mother retreated to her den. While I read on the floor of the rec room, my father appeared suddenly on the stairs. He walked down, deep in thought.
“Perhaps I should do the laundry,” he said, picking up a bottle of detergent from a basket of dirty clothing. He had a way of making every idea seem as if it had just then occurred to him. “Soap, starch, bleach. You shouldn’t mix bleach and ammonia, Sophie. The fumes are fatal.” He started the laundry. Then he wandered through the basement, looking for loose socks, perhaps, one more little chore to do. The washing machine sloshed and choked. Every now and then, Dad would stop and tap my bottom affectionately with the toe of his shoe.
He walked to the far end of the room and peered out through one of the little windows near the ceiling, though all he could see was the length of aluminum fence that kept the dirt back, some rocks, the edge of the lawn.
“Your mother,” he said, “should learn how to drive.”
“Why?” I asked. Mom had never known. It was one of the many things my father took care of; he treated my mother with the sort of deference one awards to great thinkers.
“Well.” He played with the little curtain in the window, then let it fall. “I think she should take the two of you to the Barrons’ from now on. I mean, they don’t want me there.”
“Yes they do.” I sat up and closed my book. But I knew it wasn’t so; I had heard my mother and her siblings talk about their spouses before, as if the rest of the world were part of some other family, a badly raised one. “Well, he’s not as bright as us,” they’d say about a husband—I’d heard it about my father. I’m ashamed to say that something in me might have even believed them, they were so sure of themselves.
“No,” he said. And he turned back and winked. The washing machine kicked into a new cycle. “And guess what? I don’t want to be there myself. They won’t worry me anymore. So. You think she’ll go for it?”
I lay back on my stomach, reopened my book. I wanted to seem casual. “Does this mean I can stay home, too?”
My father laughed and walked toward me. “You,” he said, “are part of that family. You belong there, Sophie, and if I kept you with me I’d never be forgiven. Not by anybody.” He tapped me with his foot; I looked up and smiled. Then he caressed the small of my back with his outstretched toe.
My father loved the pure physical fact of me and did sneaky things to get near. When I did homework at the dining room table, he’d stand behind my chair and lean over. In the kitchen, he’d reach around me elaborately to get a cooking utensil; he’d give me a taste from a spoon, holding my chin to steady. My collars always needed his straightening; my face wanted cleaning with a soft handkerchief he’d spit into. It was as if he realized there was something he desperately craved but could not bear to ask for, and decided to make that thing so unalterably part of his daily job nobody could deny him. He’d bawl me out for messiness, but his voice stayed careful, happy. I let him be the expert: I let myself get sloppier and sloppier, ready for my father’s calm hand to prepare me for the world.
I was, in fact, allowed to come along on most of the driving lessons, and thought that I understood the whole business better than my mother did. She got impatient when my father occasionally turned around and explained things to me—how a spark plug fired, for instance, something my mother felt had nothing whatsoever to do with the business at hand.
For the final lesson, she drove us all the way to Aunt Ida’s one Sunday afternoon. Mom drove the way she did everything. She threw her whole body into it and delivered a running commentary on what was happening. Her foot jammed the clutch; she’d make sudden furtive grabs for the stick shift, as if she didn’t want it to see her sneaking up.
“Oh you,” she said to an understandably wary milk truck. “What are you doing? Come on, guy, just go around me.” We were at a stoplight, on a hill, and my mother, who wasn’t good at hill starts, refused to go with someone right behind her.
“It’s okay, Esther,” my father said. “You know how to do this. Just relax.”
“He’s scared of you,” I said from the back seat.
“Me? I’m scared of him. I’m just a little person. Look at the size of that driver.” My mother believed that with her at the wheel, our large green Chevy became somehow like her: a well-intentioned car, slightly nervous, with beautiful manners
. She stuck her hand out the window and waved him around. This was my mother’s main talent—waiting things out.
When we got to Aunt Ida’s, my mother strolled up the walk waving the car keys, as if they were a lovely piece of jewelry my father had finally given her.
“Are you coming in, Frank,” Aunt Ida asked from the porch.
I looked at my father, who leaned up against the fender of the car, watching my mother flash the keys; I was just two steps behind her. Dad smiled at nobody in particular. Before he could answer, Aunt Ida turned to Mom and said, “Don’t tell me you drove here.”
Mom nodded; I could hear Aunt Sadie, inside, say, instead of hello, “Driving? Driving’s easy, once you know how.” She didn’t know how to drive herself, but it was clear she could have if she’d wanted to.
“Maybe,” said my father, quietly. He pulled himself onto the hood of the car, and looked foolish and happy. “Maybe I’ll come in, and maybe I won’t.”
My father kept good on his promise not to let the Barrons get to him for a while. Or at least he seemed to. He still saw them in small doses or at holidays, and I always thought he seemed more at ease than he had been. Sometimes he made nasty jokes; once, at a diner, he willfully levitated the table and spilled Aunt Ida’s iced tea and wouldn’t stop laughing. Other times around them, he stayed deep in his thoughts, removed himself as much as he could. And though I kept going to Aunt Ida’s, where they never missed Dad at all, I thought the Barrons in this way lost most of their power over me: I grew up my father’s girl.
II
Uncle Benny was the family dandy, the oldest brother. When he visited from Missouri, he always came fresh from the dry cleaner’s. He smelled that way, too, like delicious scorched steam. He was older than my parents by ten years, and a hotshot, a show-off. These were the Barron words for him, said with a combination of admiration and bewilderment. Ben was in real estate, which the Barrons did not quite approve of or understand.
We couldn’t tell whether or not Ben was successful. He lived in St. Louis, with Aunt Lillian, a pale woman entirely eclipsed by her husband. They only came to town every now and then. Ben didn’t settle into chatting; he paced through the house, patting the thick folder of papers in his inside pocket: train tickets, business notes, phone numbers, his own business cards, which he handed to children as if they were an educational toy.
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