Men came by, looking for Fred. When they pounded on the thin flexible door, I hid beside the oven, praying they wouldn’t come in. I couldn’t put the chain on the door because then Fred couldn’t get back in. Fred let Dolly run wild, but if she was home when strange men came by, she barked and growled, and I held her and she held me, her long legs and splendid cool paws on my chest. It turned out there was room on the brown La-Z-Boy for both of us. I thought Dolly and I were a lot alike. It was the best worst summer of my life.
There wasn’t a particular day I realized my father was wearing women’s clothes—that he wore a bra to leave the house, under his guayabera, that he wore panty hose. At first I thought he had on bandages, then that he had to wear support hose for something medical, something urgent. The realization that he painted his fingernails and toes, shaved his chest, wore women’s clothes when he went out at night (I saw heels and dresses in the backseat of the car—where did he change into them?), seeped into my knowing and I kept blotting it, erasing it. I never saw him in a dress. I assumed, just below the level of conscious knowing, that he was gay. I didn’t know about cross-dressing; I knew, the way kids know, that this way of being had to stay secret. I knew the only way to keep a secret was to pretend I didn’t know. In the weird way of kid thinking, I believed that if I didn’t know, no one would.
And with this mind-set I went through all his things. In his dresser and closet were pornography and ladies’ lingerie, high-heel pumps, gobs of panties, wadded-up dresses, all too large for me—not that I would have put any of these things on my body. I came across a book labeled The Nothing Book, red with a white dust jacket. For a long time, I left it in the box where I’d found it, scared to open it—I assumed it was pornographic. But one night I opened it and it was blank, every page.
This, I knew, was for me.
I wrote and wrote and wrote; I quickly filled the book. Poetry, mostly, filled with flowers and unicorns and knights and stars and phrases like two hearts beating as one. There was sex, but it was subtle. Not like in the porn magazines stacked in the bathroom, in the hall, on the kitchen counter. I knew the poems were terrible, but I memorized them and recited my work to myself in the shower. I thought it was very likely I would be “discovered.”
My poems were all for a boy. A made-up boy, but he didn’t feel made up. He was from England. He was based mostly on Keith Landreu, a tall, gawky boy in my grade who sometimes affected a British accent, wore sunglasses, gave poker instruction in the halls between classes, and bragged about being the youngest member of Mensa. He said he was a member of the Communist Party. I adored him and detested him and sort of wanted to be him.
School started. I was getting rides to Boone from neighbors most days. Fred seemed to have forgotten I was supposed to go to Oak Ridge. One night a pair of headlights came trundling up the drive and around the duplex and beamed into the kitchen. I cowered by the oven in my panties and my dad’s white undershirt. Dolly, like Fred, was out rampaging in the night. Cockroaches flitted. Moths beat against the door. No car door slammed. No one came. I crab-walked across the floor, slowly peeled myself up against the door until I could look through the greasy curtain out the little screen window. The truck was parked under the giant jacaranda. Its long witchy branches made creepy weblike shadows in the light. My father’s rifle stood in the corner by the fridge like a prosthetic limb. I wished I had the guts to kill a man if I had to. I cried if a door banged shut, if there was a gust of wind. I didn’t even like scabs.
The engine cut off. The headlights stayed on. Someone got out of the vehicle. In the headlights I could see only a silhouette of a tiny person. Then I could see that the person was wearing curlers, and a kerchief, and holding a purse in one hand and picking up sticks with the other, as though attempting to clean up the lawn. This could only be my mother.
I went outside. I was so happy to see her. I didn’t want to be, but I was.
“Heather Laurie,” she hissed, “get back in there and put clothes on right now, right this instant, my gosh in heaven!” She looked around frantically.
I wanted to stand in the yard in my underwear. This was how I lived now. This was not her jurisdiction. “Hey, Mama,” I said. I sounded southern from living with my father.
She shielded her eyes. She scuttled back to the truck.
I wanted her to come inside with me, but I didn’t think my father would want me to invite her in. I would have to hide the porn, the gin bottles, the panty hose. So I went around Suzy and climbed in the passenger side.
“Mama,” I said. “What are you doing. It’s about midnight, or after.” I slid my foot against the opposite shin, rubbing out bugs.
“I can’t talk to you in that condition, go put on clothes.” She was still whispering. “I hate these trees,” she said, peering through the windshield into the night. The giant jacarandas loomed over the tiny truck, the trailer. “And I am worried sick about you.” She said the school had called. She knew I was missing whole days. She said she could be arrested.
That made me laugh; I couldn’t help it.
“It’s not at all funny,” she said. “Not remotely.”
But I couldn’t stop. I liked the idea of my mother being arrested.
We had to roll up the windows, the bugs were so bad.
Between us was the box with her thermos, the little packets of food in waxed paper, used waxed paper. “I hate those trees because the root systems ruin septic, they ruin the foundation of houses, they take over the world and cause so much destruction. So much destruction.”
“How are you, Mama?” I said. I had never gone this long without seeing her. Against her, after this absence, I could see how different I was, how much living with my father was changing me. I wasn’t ashamed to walk around in my underwear. I wasn’t eating paper anymore. I had tiny breasts. I was bolder. Keith Landreu had started writing me notes. I had written him back a poem. I had a sense that the way I lived now was preparing me for some great thing. If I could love these people, Fred and my mother, who could I not love?
“How am I? How am I? What kind of question is that? Sick. Worried sick, constantly, every single minute of every single day, that’s how I am. How else could I be? This is not an environment for a child, Heather. As I think you full well know. Your father—his lifestyle . . .”
No, no, I told her. It was all fine. I did not tell her Fred was home all day, that he seemed sick and in pain and spent all his time in the bathroom. I admitted I missed some school. I did not admit I was failing math and maybe other morning classes. I was going to get caught up.
The truck, with no air, was sweltering. My mother stared out the windshield. Her face was a knot, her mouth no bigger than an almond.
She turned to me. She was hard, like a stick. She ticked off a list. I hadn’t been in school. I ran around with boys. She knew for a fact. I couldn’t try to wriggle out of it. I couldn’t lie to her face.
“I’ve followed you, Heather. I have the license plate numbers. I know who those boys are and I know where their mothers live and I am poised to take action. I want you out of this environment. I can’t live like this. My precious only daughter. My gosh in heaven.”
I didn’t want to go back inside alone. Under his ostrich boots, my father wore panty hose. He had taken my brand-new Sally Hansen Sweet Roses nail polish. I’d found it by his shaving stuff, and the next time I saw his nails they were my color. I wanted to tell my mother what I had seen. I wanted to ask her what it meant. But I never spoke of it. This is called loyalty to parents’ pain.
We sat in the truck and cried separate cries.
My mother started coming by regularly. Night after night we sat in my father’s driveway. I remembered my mother’s good things: her white bedspread, her pretty flowered dishes, the way she sprayed for bugs. How the air was close but not smoky: you could breathe. There were a few palmetto bugs, but those you could sweep outside. She always had sweet rolls. She didn’t ever leave the house at night. She was conservative
, strict, but now that seemed good in a parent. I wanted to go back to her house, but I couldn’t go back to her rules: no makeup, no wearing black, no shaving my legs, no telephone talking. Walk, she said, on your knees, in order to protect the carpeting. Walk on our knees? To protect the carpeting? I wanted to please her. I wanted the carpeting to last. But it was carpeting. Surely we were supposed to walk on it upright, like everyone else. I could not crawl through my life.
I’d sit with her in old Suzy until she fell asleep, and then I would sneak back inside and fall instantly asleep in my recliner. When my father roared up in the Olds, radio blaring, I would sit up fast. Sometimes I would see Suzy scuttling down the opposite track of the driveway, rocking slowly over the jacaranda roots with great effort, like an ancient, pea-green lizard.
Then Fred would burst in. “Womp up some breakfast, girl child! Let’s get up! Burning daylight!”
I would cook us eggs and grits and sausage and he would say, “It’s not too bad. It’s not too, too bad. I would almost call it edible.”
Six
I had barely glanced around the crowd in the ballroom downtown where the reunion was being held, when a man in khakis and a blue oxford shirt, a giant backpack slung over his shoulder, came bounding up to me.
“I might owe you a huge apology,” he said. “I think perhaps I treated you a bit badly. But you know your mother.” He laughed, but it was more like polite gasping for air. His curly hair was short on top, long on the sides, a style called mullet. He wore a gold stud.
I smoothed my slippery pink flowered skirt and tugged it back up at the waistband. The reality was that these kinds of snug and fussy-pretty clothes always felt at odds with me, like they were trying to fling themselves off my body.
“Keith Landreu,” I said as I checked his name tag. Curls so soft, they’d called him. He’d been bookish, nasal, inept at sports, rumpled, everything I’d adored. “Oh God. You’re here?”
Bad Company pulsed over the speakers. “She came to our house,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to e-mail you. I’ve Googled you, Heather. Probably too much. Congratulations, by the way. Your book looks fabulous. I have to read it. Anyway,” he said, drawing a sip of beer, “I know I should have handled things better back then. But I honestly didn’t know what to do.” He laughed nervously. He waited for me to say something.
We’d talked, all through tenth and eleventh grade, about getting married. He’d walked me to all my classes. And then one day when I came to his locker before homeroom he didn’t even look at me. He turned his back and walked away. We hadn’t spoken since.
He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Your mother told my mother she would sue for statutory rape if I ever came near you. She scared the shit out of us. My mother forbade me to have any contact with you whatsoever. So that’s why I did what I did. I should have explained. I’ve been wanting to for, like, twenty years.” He managed half a laugh.
I’d never heard any of this about my mother. She went to Keith’s house? How had she known where to go? My mother never went to people’s houses.
I looked around for someone else I knew. But all I saw were strangers. I’d come here to show my high school classmates I’d turned out normal. I wanted them to know that the girl who’d eaten paper and rolled rocks around in her mouth now gave speeches, had published a book. I wanted someone who knew me then to know me now. But I didn’t know any of these people except for Keith.
He tapped my arm. “So, hey. Do you still have our book?” I could smell his beer breath. I took a step back.
“The book?” Of course I still had the book. The Nothing Book.
“Remember our poetry?” He smiled broadly.
“Not really,” I lied. “I don’t know what happened to all that stuff.”
“I still have the jacket,” he said, nodding sagely, conspiratorially, as though we were both in this conversation, together. “The blue jacket? That we—you know. On. You know my brother was in love with you. You knew he named his daughter Heather Laurie, right?”
“No, no,” I said, feeling dizzy. I didn’t know. I wanted a glass of wine. I wanted to go home. I said, “You had a brother?” I stepped back. He moved closer and the mirror ball flashed little pocked diamonds all over his skin.
“You remember Todd and Steven. Steven loved you, too, but not like Todd. Todd’s wife looks exactly like you, it’s so weird. Really, like, weird. We always talk about this. He hasn’t contacted you? Ever? I’m surprised, frankly. I want you to meet my wife, Jane. She’s here. Let’s find her now.” He sounded like a teacher. He slung his backpack over to his other shoulder. “You’re going to love Jane. She’s just been promoted to dean.”
I told him I would be right back, I needed to use the bathroom. I walked, fast, back the way I’d come in, past the registration table. “Forgot something?” the woman said.
I did not need to pee and I was not peeing. I was sitting on the toilet in the cavernous empty bathroom in the Marriott at the Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre, getting my thoughts together. I washed my face and stared at it in the mirror. I studied my eyes, the scars that drew across my cheek, bubbled on my upper lip. I always forgot about the scars, from a car accident I’d had in my late twenties. I never imagined my face with them. This face, these small dark eyes—this was not what I thought I looked like. But no one looks in a mirror and sees what they expected to see. I leaned closer and tried to imagine what Keith saw when he saw me. I put on more pink lipstick, lipstick I’d bought just for this trip, in a shade to match my flowered skirt. I checked my teeth, wiped off the excess. My eyes looked small and hard and wrong, shut down, frantic.
Keith was leaning against the floral-papered wall right outside the ladies’ room. He was alone. He was holding his backpack in front of him, limp in front of his knees.
“So, yeah, don’t go yet,” Keith said. “You just got here.” He seemed to be blocking my way. “I wanted to ask you: Did everyone in your family end up in a mental institution. Or were those just rumors?”
“Keith,” I said. I leaned against the wall opposite him. Clearly, he had a theory about my family, and I didn’t want to hear it. Keith and his wife, I knew, were historians. This is what they did. They constructed histories. I wiped my face and tried to focus.
In my childhood, there was just enough material—a few weeks of piano lessons, a few months of private flute lessons, a short, humiliating season on the swim team, which I dragged down to new lows until I was asked by the coach to quit—out of which I could, when I got to college, and later, when I met Dave, construct a story that both sounded normal and was true. Now, with Keith looking at me, hopeful and concerted, I closed my eyes. I’d left out so much. I’d left out so much for so long. I hadn’t forgotten my history. I’d just worked around it.
There were ways you could know a thing and not know it.
It was like another me knew and that me and this me had never conversed. Compartmentalizing, wasn’t it? Except that when you compartmentalized, you put some things away to concentrate on other things. This was different. It was more like a ship had gone down, long ago. And the surface of the water heaved and changed and darkened and calmed. I didn’t envision what was below. It was another world. There was enough going on in the world above water, getting my Ph.D., getting tenure, writing my collection, trying to figure out how to be a mom to Junior and Jacob, to make things good with Dave. My above-water life was the one I lived. The underwater, dark life—I never forgot about it, exactly, but it had no corresponding parts in the light up above, in my current reality.
And until now I hadn’t run into anyone who held my past and this present in the same light. What I had done, I saw now, was stitch around the dark parts, making a shape, a presentable story of my family. Everything I told was true: I simply found the signposts in my life that other people could reference—swim team, babysitting, kickball, strict mothers, skipping school—and steered my story by them.
“I absolutely have to go now,” I
said.
Keith put his hands on my shoulders, gently. “Heather, no,” he said. “I have so many questions. How did you get out?”
“What do you mean?” I said. Did he think I’d been in an institution too?
He waved his hands around, as though stirring a soup sky. “I find it miraculous we were able to get out. I want to know: How did you do it? You had it so bad. My God.”
I asked him again. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t have it bad. I didn’t have it that bad. Is this what he’d always thought?
His face brightened. He held his pointer finger in the air. I could see him in his classroom at his university. “Remember how you drove me around in your dad’s car, when you were, like, fourteen?” He was smiling and nodding, his mouth open. “God. Remember those horrible clothes you wore?”
Those clothes. The strange, outdated pants and blouses my mother got from the Cancer Society thrift shop. I didn’t know Keith had been ashamed of those clothes too. I didn’t know he’d seen anything at all.
“Aren’t you married?” Keith said. “I heard you were.” He stroked his chin, like an impression of a professor. “Yet you do not wear a ring.”
“I wish you the best. I gotta scoot. I have to see my mom.” I walked toward the front lobby but he tucked right along beside me, loping, matching my steps.
“Your mom. Oh, God. There is so much I want to talk to you about. There is so much I want to know, go over and everything, compare notes. I want to get copies of any letters you still have. The poems. Do you have the blanket? Can we go somewhere and talk, or tomorrow, are you coming to the picnic? Can you come with us?” He dropped down to the floor and unzipped his backpack.
“That house,” he said, digging. “Your mother’s house. My God. It was like a war zone. What was up with your mother? What was she, paranoid schizophrenic?” He peered up at me, mildly curious, mildly distracted. Paranoid schizophrenic? He said it in the same tone of voice you might say, Canadian?
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Page 6
