Claire touched her apron pocket where Tree’s letter was.
“What?” Carmela said.
“No, nothing.”
“Yes, something. You went all white. What don’t you like?”
“Nothing,” Claire lied. “I just wish Zinnie could get in on this. She would be some great Snow White.”
Carmela smacked the table. Dharma jumped.
“Exactly!” cried Carmela. “If you would talk to her, she would.”
“Please. Zinnie does as she pleases. Always has. What makes you think anything I would say would make a dif—”
“You know, I really hate you two.” Zinnie came in shaking her head. “I really do. Plotting and conniving behind people’s backs. Why don’t you just come out and ask a body?”
“Hah,” said Carmela. “As if you would.”
Zinnie said, “How about, ‘Zinnie, I would really like it if you would be in my play.’”
Carmela swallowed. “Why, Zinnie, I really would love it if you would be my Snow White.”
“Well, I won’t.”
“You see!” Carmela shouted at Claire. “You see how she is! She won’t be in it but she wants the chance to turn me down. You’re happy now, you little bitch?”
Claire and Zinnie both looked at Dharma but Dharma, seemingly unmoved, continued to eat her Frosted Flakes.
Zinnie, calm, said, “I said I wouldn’t play Snow White. I never said I wouldn’t be in your play.”
“What?” Carmela and Claire said in harmony. Zinnie’s abhorrence of public attention was well known to them. The idea that she would participate in any way was something entirely new. Their father loved Zinnie’s singing voice so much that he would burst into tears when she went into any refrain. This so embarrassed her that she had simply given up singing around any of them. And so it had been for some years. If ever you wanted to catch her, you had to do it from another floor.
“I would, however,” Zinnie said as she sat down with them, “consider the part of the wicked queen.”
“Would you, really?” Carmela smiled, her eyes twinkling. She gazed off into space and raised up her hands as if she saw some vision. “I can just see it. Yes. We could give all the good songs to you. And give the little ingenue ditties to someone really young and hateful.”
“Portia McTavish,” said Dharma.
They looked at her, as if for the first time.
“Of course,” agreed Carmela.
They all had a good laugh.
“What’s this?” Their mother, Mary, stood in the doorway behind an assortment of boxes and bags from Gebhard’s bakery. “Conviviality?”
“Hi, Mommy.” Up they all jumped and unloaded her of her things. The buttery smells of special crumb cakes escaped through their white paper baggage.
“Let’s get this baby into effect,” said Zinnie and scooped one out and slid it onto the table.
“Mind you only eat the one.” Mary lifted off her hat and patted her hair in the pantry mirror. “The cookies in the box are for the children. The crullers in the big bag there are for Johnny and no one else, and the other special crumb is for your company, Claire.” She knicked her head to the side as though there were water in one ear, indicating the men outside in the garden.
“So you’ve met my guests,” Claire said.
“No, but I nearly tripped over them on my way to wash up in the wee hours.” Mary sat down and faced them, her three longhaired daughters, not one of them in a hurry for once. It seemed to Mary the last time she’d lain eyes on the three of them not running out the door it was last Christmas morning, each one of them busy at opening her gifts. She took them all in like a breath of air.
Claire put a mug of hot tea down in front of her mother.
“Kind of you to think of them, like that, Ma.”
“Where’s Dad?” asked Carmela.
“Where else would he be?” That meant he was at the store, his hardware store. Even though he’d sold out to a family of Korean people, he still spent most of his time there. The customers probably still thought he ran the place, but he didn’t, he had no business there, not even for a small salary. But that was where he would go, every day, climbing the ladder for squirrel screws nobody else would know where to find, chatting with this one and that.
“He’ll be along when it’s time to eat,” Mary said. “Mr. Healy from Jacksonville is stopping in the store, Stan figures. His sister’s on her last legs in Mary Immaculate and they flew up to see her. Helloo, Dharma! There’s a good girl, eating your Frosties. Where are my grandsons?”
“Michaelaen’s having his shower,” Zinnie said. “And Anthony went out with Floozie. I’d better go get Michaelaen out of there before he uses all the hot water.”
“What, in the front or the back?” Mary asked Claire.
“In the front.”
“Do you think that’s wise, dear?”
“I’ll go check on him,” Claire said, then she really had to fry those meatballs. “Anthony!” she shouted out the front door. She saw him leaning on the johnny pump up the block, expressing his views on the-good-Lord-knew-what to busy Floozie, sniffing the information-laden earth.
“Bring her back up here,” called Claire.
“She has to take a dump,” Anthony informed the neighborhood.
Floozie, yearning for oblivion, went round and round in a circle.
“I’m coming,” Claire said between a whisper and a sentence to no one, grabbing a ready penny-candy paper bag and going out to join them.
“Hi, there!”
Claire turned, caught unawares, and was face to face with Andrew Dover. He was a handsome bugger, was Andrew, even at this awkward time of day, but then so many men were like that, she’d noticed, not like women, who had their good hours and their bad. She herself was having a crummy one right now, she knew, sweaty from standing over the stove and all the rest. She stood with the open brown bag in her gritty, eager hand and the letter from his dead wife in her peach-colored apron pocket.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to ring your bell,” he said in confidential tones. “I know you’ve got guests.”
“Just family,” she defended them, forgetting for a moment that Swamiji and Narayan were hardly family in this fellow’s opinion, his daughter inside. He’d caught her, as usual, off guard.
Andrew rubbed his hands together. “So,” he said, indicating Carmela’s silver car, “could you move your guest’s car from the front of my house? I need the space free for a delivery.”
“Oh. Sure. Of course.” Why so formal? He knew it was Carmela’s car. He must. How many brand-new silver British Sterlings with DPL plates were there in Richmond Hill, after all?
He smiled and turned. Was that it?
“Andrew,” she began. She didn’t care now if her tone was harsh. “Don’t you think you’d better go in and say good morning to your daughter?”
Not offended, not at all, Andrew gave a breezy tut-tut-tut and kept on going. Then he stopped. He’d thought of something. He turned and gave Claire his most charming smile. “As long as she’s doing so well with you—” he said. “I mean, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Agreed?”
“No, Andrew, I don’t agree. You’re her father and right now I—”
“Mom!” Anthony interrupted her, “Mom, c’mere with that bag!”
Claire abandoned her disapproval and took care of what needed be, then followed Anthony back into the house. Dharma was leaning up against the table, her mouth full with big buttery crumbs, and across the street you could hear Andrew hammering. Claire felt like screaming. “Carmela,” she said, “Andrew Dover asked if you would move your car.”
“Why?” she looked up, annoyed.
“He’s having something delivered and he would like the front of his house free.”
“Who makes deliveries on Sunday?” she asked. She would have refused, but Dharma stood there still, watching, and she thought twice. She went out, finding the keys in her black Coach bag. Claire had Carmela’
s old brown one, which she cherished. Carmela had literally thrown it at her one day, insisting she didn’t want it anymore. It looked too battered, she’d said, which was exactly why Claire adored it straightaway—it reminded her of an old saddlebag—butterscotch-colored and soft with use. She’d slathered it in lanolin hand cream and buffed it dry with a Turkish towel rag.
Zinnie, inside, smacked Michaelaen on his rear end.
They all looked up. Michaelaen would not cry in front of them, but he wouldn’t come in either. Claire pretended not to have heard. That was Zinnie’s business and she wouldn’t interfere. She wasn’t going to trade horrified looks with her mother across the table, either. If Mary had chosen never to hit her children, that was Mary. Personally, Claire tended to agree with Zinnie, lately. The things her son said to her! Any day now she was going to smack Anthony as well. The only time she’d really done it until now was that time when he was two and he’d raced, regardless, into the street. She’d whacked him good that time. Scared the pants off him, too. Well. At least he’d never gone into the street after that. Not even a little bit. Maybe he was going to be psychologically deranged whenever he crossed the street as an adult, but at least he would be there to cross that street. Claire sighed. Who knew anything?
A long time ago, very pregnant with Anthony, Claire had strolled imperiously, benevolently, down Liberty Avenue. A mother crouched on the ground over her tear-stained three-year-old. She was shrieking, no holds barred, at the stubborn little boy who, even now, refused to have his shoe returned to his foot. The woman’s eye caught Claire’s appalled gape. Never, but never, would Claire subject her precious child to this humiliation and disgrace, and her expression said very plainly so.
The woman glowered at Claire. She looked Claire up and down. Slowly her nostrils flared. “Just you wait,” she rasped.
And so it was. Claire saw that woman’s face each time she yelled at Anthony, by God. Every single time.
“Oh, yeah?” Michaelaen’s whining voice brought her back to the present. “Then I’m not going with him at all.”
“Fine with me,” Zinnie’s voice shot back. “That just means no TV all weekend. No skin off my teeth.”
She came into the kitchen with her lips pressed tight against each other and two bright patches of red on her cheeks. Her dark-blond hair had been pulled from its knot in her rage and she looked, Claire could not help but think, like Jupiter’s symbol itself.
Narayan, disarmed, stood up. Zinnie flushed. Annoyed at herself for standing so still at the sight of this stunning hulk of a man, she threw her strong shoulders back and ripped right past him without so much as a how-do-you-do.
Now most people, when they came in contact with Swamiji, acted differently than they normally would. They pretended to be calm, first off, and made a great show of arranging their auras into decency. So it was a great treat for Swamiji to witness manifest emotion. He smiled, and his little head went back and forth and round and round the way an Indian’s will.
Pleased, Claire presented her sister. “Swamiji,” she said, “this is my sister Zinnie.”
“Delighted.” He bowed. “The tempest from the night.”
“North American wildcat,” Narayan said, his well-bred voice mocking, but his eyes unconditionally sincere. “Very rare.”
“Don’t anybody get up,” Zinnie cracked as she sat down hard on her empty shoulder holster.
When Carmela came back inside, Stefan was with her. He’d been jogging through Forest Park; he did this every day. They all hated him for it. Stefan was fit, something they would all very much love to be. Not enough to do too much about it, but enough, at least, to hate him. The thing was, Stefan was so rich, lived on such another planet, came from such another planet, that it was difficult to know on which level one should hate him. Ah, well. Claire looked around her. This was hardly poverty. And all the money in Stefan’s world hadn’t made her sister happy.
Stefan retired to the kitchen bathroom for a little while, helping himself to a thorough sink bath. He was meticulous, was Stefan. He wouldn’t want to offend. Affectionately, Claire went to fetch her brother-in-law a nice fluffy towel. One of those big bath sheets Johnny had come home from Atlantic City with would be good. She knocked on the door and passed it in.
“Thanks, darling,” Stefan said, and she stood there as he closed the door, washed his hands, and straightened the towels. It wasn’t the darling bit that got her; Stefan called everyone “darling.” No, that wasn’t what froze her momentarily to the spot, it was the alcohol-tinged wind that contained it. Claire walked busiedly over to the kitchen sink and washed the arugula leaves.
There had been a time, quite a long, exasperating time, when Johnny’s and her married life hadn’t been muddled simply by financial woes and everyday arguments. What had started off as Johnny’s occasional beer had become Johnny’s guzzling beer had become Claire spending an awful lot of her pregnant afternoons returning empties. That became gee, this is getting a little ridiculous, which became not only no one to talk to when Johnny was gone, but no one to talk to when Johnny was home.
It was her mother who’d caught on. Mary’s father had been an alcoholic, had abused her whole family verbally, had wound up beating them, she would never forget, and she knew the signs better than anyone. She knew it in her own daughter’s forced cheerfulness, her lapses into dark, narrow facial passages when she thought she went unobserved. Mary had had to shake her to get it out of her, but then out it had come, the lot of it, the whole sorry story. And Mary, instead of giving Claire sympathy, as Claire had expected, had blamed her, had actually shouted at her, as though she were standing there sound asleep. She’d shouted at her that she was enabling him to go on living like that every time she cleaned up his vomit, so he would not be faced with it the next day. Claire shuddered. She remembered it all, all too well.
Claire felt Mary’s watchful eyes even now. “I don’t know why they can’t get the sand out of the arugula before they sell it to you,” she laughed.
“You’d think they would,” Mary agreed. “The prices they charge.”
Claire hoped Mary wouldn’t go quoting those prices just now. She could just imagine Swamiji’s shock if she did. Oh, well. That didn’t matter. It did one good, anyway, to be reminded how ridiculous one’s priorities were. She smiled at Swamiji and he giggled back at her. She had to go over and give him a great hug, which her mother didn’t like at all, but Swamiji squirmed with such happy delight that even she laughed. And Dharma laughed as well, Claire noticed, while the dog dug herself a cozy little spot in the lump of an old couch pillow Anthony had lugged down from the attic.
The front doorbell rang. It was Freddy and Stan, and Floozie went a bit wild in her enthusiastic defense. Any two fellows would have been big enough to start her off, but the fact that Freddy was one of them—Freddy, her betrayer, Freddy, her first great love who had not only left her, but had abandoned her to prison and probable death—well, hell hath no fury.
It took Michaelaen in the end to come downstairs and calm the dog down. Michaelaen didn’t want to come downstairs, and only this mission of mercy would bring him. He’d brought her soothing tick-tock clock and smoothed her fur with gentle words. Floozie finally relented and sighed, point made, family alerted. Claire couldn’t help chuckling to herself. They’d all been so adamant in their insistence to let sleeping dogs lie, as it were.
“Scrappy little bit,” Stan admitted as he moved onto the bench.
“Hi, Dad.” Carmela leaned over and gave her father a peck on the cheek.
“Who’s that?” Stan pretended not to recognize her. He shook Swamiji’s hand. “I know my daughter all these years, and I’ve never seen her in the same thing twice.”
Freddy, more rattled than he let on by the ferocity of this horrendous dog—this, this mongrel—placed himself in between Stan and Zinnie. God. He should have had her put to sleep when he’d had the chance. He’d only taken her to keep in the restaurant overnight, anyway.
> “So.” Stan picked up the first of a row of ironed napkins lined up for the dinner table and dropped it to his lap. “They actually talked you into taking that pup, eh? Zinnie said they would. ‘Just you leave it to me, Dad,’ she said. And she was right. A bit of a risk, I thought, driving it all the way out to that there animal shelter. But Zinnie said, ‘Relax, I know my man. Once a sucker, always a sucker.’”
Claire, who had not really been listening, poured the fat into a cut-off milk container and jolted the hot pan under a steaming sear of water from the faucet. “A sucker?” She looked at Zinnie, who was trying not to laugh.
“Bigmouth,” Carmela mouthed.
“Dad,” Zinnie said as she served him one of Johnny’s designated crullers and poured him a cup of coffee, “Stefan’s here. He’s just primping in the bathroom.”
“Ah.” Stan rubbed both hands together. He approved of this son-in-law. Good Polish stock. “This calls for a celebration. Any vodka in the larder, Claire?”
“Uh. In honor of his holiness, here, I thought we’d wait till dinner.” She didn’t like to mention she’d polished that bottle off before they’d even moved in.
“What about that Wild Turkey?” Zinnie suggested.
“Hmm,” said Claire. That one was gone, too. It wasn’t that she minded having admitted drinking her own liquor. She just would rather not, she explained to herself. And she couldn’t well blame it on anyone else. They all knew Johnny didn’t touch it anymore.
The conversation had moved along to other things. They were talking about cars, now. Stan was explaining to Narayan how you had to have a lot of air and a little gas to be efficient. “A balance, so you completely burn the gas, see. The mixture I had going was just too rich for my old Betsy.”
“Betsy,” Carmela yawned, “is my father’s favorite child. His Chevy.”
“Chevrolet,” Freddy clarified.
“Well, she was blowing black smoke. It was raw gas.”
Stan said, “I had to adjust the choke. The choke controls the mixture of air and gas.
Foxglove Page 13
