Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  I pantomimed palming the lid, turning it, plucking out the alarm’s batteries.

  Above its shriek, Cammie screamed, “A potato! That’s all I was trying to do! This is about a fucking potato!”

  The spud flew past us and thumped against the wall, hard, and awfully close to the cat.

  •

  We were on the way to the girls’ cocktail party. Cammie had her car in a tight alley, competing with a cab. Usually I enjoyed riding with Cammie. Her driving included many tricks she’d learned in her days of pizza delivery.

  Now we were caught with the cab side by side at the alley’s end. The cabby hauled himself out and came around to argue.

  I said, “How about if we just—”

  “In fairness, I think he started it,” said my dad.

  “It doesn’t matter who started it!” I said.

  The cabby was yelling. Cammie geared into reverse.

  We arrived for the party at the same time as a lot of guests. Some were carrying drinks, coolers, and bags of ice that they dumped into the sinks in the kitchen.

  My dad wove through the room, chatting and introducing himself and shaking hands.

  I knew no one. While I was traveling, the girls had picked up a whole new crowd.

  And they had redone their loft—lacquered the floor tiles, painted murals, stenciled the woodworking.

  “The guy behind you,” said Cake. “Not straight behind. Five o’clock.”

  I turned, turned back. “He looks like Aldo Ray,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Cake said. “But Mom, he is the sweetest person.”

  “He certainly does have a lovely tan. Golden! Your grandfather must’ve got to him. He’s older than your grandfather.”

  She said, “The sweetest. You know, the last time he stayed over—because he lives out in who-knows and some nights it’s too cold. The next day he kept apologizing, ’cause I guess he’d been snoring. Saying, ‘God, I’m a warthog! Honk, honk!’ Saying that over and over.”

  “All your guests are old,” I said.

  Cake looked at me as if I’d burped.

  I could hear my dad behind me. He was talking to somebody, asking, “How could you tell? You remember these? Nineteen forty-three, in fact. They’re my war shoes. Old, but they are perfect shoes to this day.”

  I thought I saw someone. I went stiff and wheeled slowly around like a rotating store-window mannequin.

  “Tell me that isn’t,” I said, and grabbed Cake by the wrist.

  “Well, yes,” she said, “I’m afraid it is. We have a party, they come if they want. Mom, pretend you don’t notice.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Easy,” she said. “Just pretend.”

  •

  Now the crowd had me cornered. My husband and his friend were dancing close by. Their moves had flourishes, and the lacy tops of the woman’s thigh-highs showed with her every turn.

  I tried to look engaged. I leaned to the ear of a woman who was reading her watch. I whispered, “I, too, need to know the time.”

  “This won’t tell it,” she said, and finger-snapped the watch face. She was bare-legged. She wore a cocktail dress, a bowler hat, ugly black shoes.

  “Would you just talk to me for a second?” I asked.

  The woman pulled back. She said, “Glow-ria. You don’t remember me. We used to be best friends.”

  “Oh,” I said, “Bonnie. I’m sorry. I didn’t see it was you.”

  “Catch your breath,” the man with her said kindly. Rhinehart, I believe, was his name. He stared off at the speaker system and nodded at its song. As it ended, he looked back to us, still nodding. He said, “Love is a lie. One big lie.”

  “It’s like you’re holding an egg yolk in your hand,” I said in a low voice.

  Bonnie said, “You mean the other person’s holding the yolk.”

  “You two are psychotic,” said Rhinehart.

  “Gloria,” someone whispered, and took me by the shoulders and turned me around. It was Aldo Ray. “I’m Sasha. I just wanted to introduce myself.”

  I said, “It’s nice to meet you. I already know who you are. Cake was telling me. About the night you stayed over? The honking and snoring. Not that she thought you were, by any means.”

  •

  Dad found me in the dining room, on one of the spindle-backed chairs at the banquet table. Before me were ice buckets, and the girls’ new pairs of tongs, many kinds of liquor, glasses, and drinks paraphernalia.

  “I did a terrible thing,” I said.

  My dad said, “I heard.”

  “Oh my God, no. He’s telling people?”

  “No, I overheard,” said my dad.

  He sat across the table from me. He said, “I finally found a remedy for that jumpy stomach of yours. It’s a tumbler of gin. You get into bed, you’re half lying down, you gulp the whole glass, you’re cured.”

  “No, Dad, that’s being unconscious. It’s not a remedy for anything.”

  “It works, little lady. I ought to know.”

  “Of course it works! You’re passed out!” I said. “You’re in a coma!”

  After a bit, he said, “One evening, I remember coming home from work. You must have been in your room upstairs. A banana peel shot straight out your window and landed on the roof.”

  “Those were the days,” I said.

  “Well, it took me all next morning to get it down. Assembling the ladder, crawling out on those old shingles. Some of them loose.”

  I said, “Dad, you choose now to reprimand me?”

  “No. I’m saying, Gloria! There’s a point at which your kids aren’t who they were anymore. They aren’t even kids. They’re over there, a couple of people.”

  •

  It was Cammie who joined us and warned that we were abandoning too many traditions. She said, “This is why tribes die.”

  “Which traditions?” asked my dad. “Cultural? Religious ones? Our family?”

  “Those’re they,” Cammie said.

  Cake was there also. She said, “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “Okay, Easter dinner. It used to be a ham covered with pineapple rings and cloves,” said Cammie.

  “Even if I didn’t think this idea dangerous,” Cake said, “I wouldn’t eat ham.”

  She said, “And you’re not going to get me out caroling. Nor do I see myself wearing a hat in church.”

  “Not rules, you’re thinking rules. More like customs. Like holly. Or breaking the wishbone on Thanksgiving,” Cammie said.

  “Spankings on my birthday,” said Dad.

  Cammie said, “Or how about quarters under my pillow? I just had this wisdom tooth yanked.”

  “You floated through that on Percodan. You weren’t even there,” said Cake.

  “Cards,” Cammie said. “I will buy you all gift boxes of greeting cards to send to me.”

  “I like jelly beans and Easter candy,” my dad said. “Not marshmallow chicks. Nobody likes those, they’re always stale. Though they look good.”

  “Hershey’s a decent company,” said Cake.

  I said, “Maybe you’re right about traditions. What I missed in Mexico was anything familiar.”

  “Live at Five,” Cake said. “Denny’s.”

  My husband and his woman friend entered the room. My dad sought to distract me by starting a loud complaint about the wine in my glass. He said, “Gloria, honey, stop! I tasted that wine you’re drinking. It’s gone bad. And besides that, the girls say it’s all full of sulphitates. You better excuse yourself immediately. Take a word of advice and go heave.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Let me finish.”

  I said, “You know, when you’re a kid, how you want everything to move really fast. So you can grow up, or get to change classrooms, or you want to have more gears on your bike. Plus, the bad things. You chip a tooth, or the way the UPS man ran over Pumpkin.”

  Cammie looked deep into me. She said, “You were a piece of wood when that guy killed
Pumpkin.”

  “No, no, that’s just what you saw. I was devastated,” I said.

  Now Cake was crying and writing our dead dog’s name on a table napkin.

  “Aw, little baby,” my dad said to her, or to any of us, or to all.

  He removed his war shoes and moved them along the carpeting and presented them to me.

  “Gloria,” he said, “put these on.”

  He said, “I’m serious. Just try them.”

  “All right, I have to admit they’re pretty good,” I said.

  He said, “I want each and every one of you to wear them.”

  The girls were nodding. Cammie said, “Me, next.”

  11

  Trying

  FRIDAY NIGHT, BRIDIE’S ROCK group were into their second set at the K. of C. dance. They were an all-girl band that went by the name Irish Coffee. They did popular songs and a handful of simple electrified versions of Celtic songs they’d been able to learn.

  Some boys in St. Augustine’s School jackets crashed the makeshift ticket gate, which was two girls at a card table with a spool of purple tickets and a glass jar of dollar bills. A couple of the boys had beer—bottles of Killian’s Red. “You don’t want to drink that,” Bridie O’Donnell said into the microphone during a break between numbers. “It’s made by Coors.”

  Three of the St. Augustine’s School boys moved up front and stood there, facing the stage. They did a prepared jig during the group’s next song—a three-chord, just-the-chorus rendition of “The Lads of Bofftae Bay.” On the last note—a dominant chord from Karen Jorry’s bass guitar—the boys whirled and let their trousers drop.

  Some pushing and pulling ensued. Karen Jorry and the group’s drummer, Ellen Gautier, left their equipment and stomped off the stage.

  At the microphone, Bridie said, “Come on, please. No kicking. You don’t need to kill them—just get them to leave. Guys? Take your teensy imaginations out of here.” But the shoving went on some more.

  “Save my amp from getting knocked over—that one, not this one!” Bridie shouted now to Proudbird.

  He jumped onto the stage, spun, and crouched. The big amplifier was still attached to its wires, but Proudbird got it up and onto his back.

  “What was all that stuff—mirth?” Bridie said.

  “Yeah, I guess mirth, man,” Proudbird said. He shrugged under the amplifier.

  The two watched as the annoyed dance crowd began to flow out of the K. of C. hall, observed by a brown-uniformed security guard.

  •

  Bridie was sitting tilted back on a folding chair, reading a basement-press newspaper she’d smuggled into the convent in a leg of her jeans. It was the day after the K. of C. thing, and she was serving detention for class truancy or some other infraction—she wasn’t even sure.

  The convent, an ordinary two-story wooden house on the St. Benedict’s grounds, was home for a dozen Benedictine nuns. Also on the grounds, in a kind of cluster around the Romanesque cathedral, were the two school buildings, a rectory, and a gymnasium. St. Benedict’s was in northern Virginia, not far from D.C.

  Today Bridie was supposed to tidy the convent’s kitchen and straighten the contents of cabinets and drawers. She’d been told to box up some canned goods that were in grocery sacks dumped in a corner—donations from parishioners for the Afghanistan Alliance.

  Proudbird appeared at the kitchen’s screen door. He was carrying a thin branch with a couple of apple blossoms on it. “Hallo,” he said to Bridie.

  Proudbird was a St. Benedict’s senior, an exchange student from Lagos. He lived with the fathers on another part of the grounds. Bridie—she was a day student who commuted to St. Benedict’s on the Metro from Washington—had got to know him gradually, from serving detentions here on Saturdays and after school.

  “You driving me home? Will Father Tournier lend you a car?” she asked him. She ground open a can of apricots as she talked. The other cans she’d unbagged were arranged on the long table so they spelled out “X NUKE.”

  “Oh, sure, I guess,” Proudbird said. He brought another young man into view behind the screen. “A surprise for you, man. My brother.”

  “What do you say?” Bridie said.

  “Johnson,” said the brother. The three of them beamed.

  Bridie was seventeen and still freckle-faced. Her reddish curls were brushed into no specific shape or style. She had a wholesome look she often tried to sabotage. Above her jeans today she wore a T-shirt with a tiny stenciled reproduction of the Bill of Rights on it.

  “I’ll be damned,” Sister Elspeth had said that morning, seeing the shirt. Bridie always reported to her to begin her detentions. Sometimes she automatically turned up at Sister Elspeth’s room on Saturday even if she had managed to stay out of trouble for a whole week.

  “Killer, huh?” Bridie said. “I can’t take full credit, though. My mom ordered this from someplace.”

  Sister Elspeth had Bridie’s homeroom and also her American history class. The nun suffered from giantism. She was six feet eight inches tall. Her hands and feet were absurdly large, and her face was oversized as well. Her expression—from carrying around such a large mouth and nose and brow, it seemed—was amused as well as tired.

  “You want temperance or fortitude? We’re still on the cardinal virtues, right?” the nun asked. She always gave Bridie something to contemplate while serving detention.

  “Either,” Bridie said.

  “We’ll hold off on fortitude,” Sister Elspeth said. “That leaves temperance. That’s finding the middle ground—the trick against going to extremes, you know?”

  “Not sure I do,” said Bridie.

  The nun thought a minute. She said, “You’ve maybe seen a man being very rash, and he seems brave. A general, let’s say. A boss. Maybe somebody’s father. Instead, with temperance, he goes along steadily but doesn’t omit anything that needs to be done.”

  “Cool. I can get that,” Bridie said.

  “Can you? It’s sort of Aristotelian. But morals have to come before faith or the other theologicals. You could be moral but still not believe in anything, see?”

  Bridie said, “Yeah, I learned all that with justice. Remember, I said in class a guy might be cheating his workers, then suddenly give them a Christmas bonus? Before he’s charitable, he’s got to be just.”

  “Right,” Sister Elspeth said. “Not bad at all.” And with a gesture she sent Bridie off to her detention.

  Now, a couple of hours later, Sister Elspeth was in the dining room. “Who’ve you got in there?” she called to Bridie in the kitchen.

  Bridie swallowed an apricot half. She said, “There’s nobody else, Sister.” This was true. Proudbird and his brother had just wandered off over the back lawns. The whole area behind St. Benedict’s steep-roofed church—the rectory, the elementary school, Bridie’s high-school building—looked snowy, it was so littered with apple blossoms.

  “Then to whom were you giving that speech a second ago?” the nun asked.

  “To me,” Bridie said. “I mean, no one. That’s how I always talk to myself.”

  “Yipes,” said Sister Elspeth.

  •

  In front of the line of mirrors in the third-floor green-tiled girls’ room, two sophomores were exchanging space-shuttle jokes. Bridie shoved between them. She said, “Did you read how they’re saying that explosion put plutonium into the atmosphere? And it could give cancer to like five billion people?”

  “Don’t tell them that, O’Donnell. They might believe you,” said Tasha.

  Bridie said, “That could actually happen sometime—the plutonium?”

  “You’re always trying to scare us,” said one of the sophomores.

  “Yeah, who are you?” the other girl said. “We’d have heard of something giving people cancer if it was true.”

  “You go right on believing that,” Bridie said. “Sure, they’d have heard,” she murmured to herself.

  “You slave to style,” Bridie said, and touched
the single tiger-tooth earring Tasha wore.

  Tasha picked up Bridie’s handbag and plopped it down again. “Thought you never wore leather,” she said.

  “I don’t. That’s from a rubber tree.”

  “And what’s this? Where do you get such stuff?” Tasha said. With a fingernail, she ticked the button stuck to the lapel of Bridie’s cardigan. The button read WORK BETTER—GO UNION!

  “My parents,” Bridie said.

  “Who are?” asked Tasha.

  “Saints. I’m being raised by saints. Honestly. I screw up totally on my own, and they punish themselves.”

  •

  Bridie’s hand had been raised a full sixty seconds. Her Latin teacher, Mr. Lefan, shook his head at her: no.

  He had his chair turned around and he was straddling it, facing the class. He leaned his arms on the back of the chair and addressed the students in confidential tones. “You’ve seen art renderings of the Seven Hills—the architecture and the rest. The Roman baths. But what went on behind that spectacular surface, you ask. Don’t you ask?”

  Bridie’s hand again went into the air.

  “I’m not calling on you, O’Donnell, ’cause you’d filibuster until the bell,” Mr. Lefan said.

  “Please don’t,” moaned a boy in the front row.

  Mr. Lefan said, “Romans were like present-day bulimics, in that they’d overindulge unbelievably. They’d get drunk, stuff themselves. Then they’d deliberately throw up and go right on back to eating.”

  Bridie stopped hearing him. She laid her head on her oak desktop. She was in the last seat, next to the rear door. She listened instead as the rough-voiced boy in front of her and the girl to his left quietly traded insults.

  “Looks excellent,” the boy murmured. “Nice to know you can walk into a pharmacy and buy yourself a tan.”

  “Shut up, troll. Lizard. You tick,” the girl said.

  Mr. Lefan was printing declensions on the green chalkboard.

  Bridie scooted her desk, by inches, toward the open door. She did this most days, and most days she got caught. One time, she’d made it into the hallway unobserved. She had walked around out there in the empty corridor and taken a drink at the water fountain, waiting the time away.