Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  The children were seated across the aisle from one another, the boys on the left and the girls on the right, and each was given a set of junior airman wings, which only Cal refused to wear. They were glad to be on the plane, glad to be free of direct supervision for six hours. As much as they hated to leave their mother—they were unquestionably loyal to their mother—the four Cousins children thought of themselves as Virginians, even the youngest two, who had been born after the family’s move west. All of the Cousins children hated California. They were sick of being shoved down the hallways of the Torrance Unified School District. They were sick of the bus that picked them up on the corner every morning, and sick of the bus driver who would not cut them a break, even thirty seconds, if they were made late by Albie’s dawdling. They were sick of their mother, no matter how much they loved her, because she had on occasion cried when they returned to the house after missing the bus. Now she would be late for work. She went over it all again in the car as she drove them to school at terrifying speeds—she had to work, they couldn’t live on what their father gave them, she couldn’t afford to lose this job just because they weren’t responsible enough to walk to the goddamn corner on time. They blocked her out by pinching Albie, whose screams filled the car like mustard gas. More than anything they were sick of Albie, who had spilled his Coke all over the place and was at this very moment kicking the seat in front of him on the plane. Everything that happened was his fault. But they were sick of Cal too. He got to wear the house key on a dirty string around his neck because their mother told him it was his job to get everybody home after school and make them a snack. Cal was sick of doing it, and on most days he locked his sisters and brother out for at least an hour so that he could watch the television shows that he wanted to watch and clear his head. There was a hose on the side of the house and shade beneath the carport. It wasn’t like they were going to die. When their mother came home from work they met her at the door screaming about the tyranny of their situation. They lied about having done their homework, except for Holly, who always did her homework, sometimes sitting Indian-style under the carport with her books in her lap, because she lived for the positive reinforcement her teachers heaped on her. They were sick of Holly and the superiority of her good grades. Really, the only person they weren’t sick of was Jeanette, and that was because they never thought about her. She had retreated into a silence that any parent would have asked a teacher or a pediatrician about had they noticed it, but no one noticed. Jeanette was sick of that.

  They reclined their seats as far back as they could go. They asked for playing cards and ginger ale. They reveled in the sanctuary of an airplane which was for the time being neither in California nor Virginia, the only two places they had ever been in their lives.

  Fix would take his week’s vacation to be with Caroline and Franny when they went to California in the summer, whereas when Bert’s children arrived in Virginia, Bert told Beverly his caseload at work had mysteriously doubled. Bert worked in estates and trusts law in Arlington, having decided the life of an assistant district attorney was too stressful. It was difficult to imagine how so many people needed new wills drawn up on the very day his children arrived. He sent her to the airport alone in the station wagon. He had thought that he was going to be able to pick them up himself but at the last possible minute a motion that no one was expecting had been filed, and not only could he not get to the airport, it really didn’t look like he was going to make it home for dinner. Beverly had picked Bert’s children up at the airport before, but in reality she had been going to pick up her mother or Bonnie or Wallis who had kindly agreed to come and visit her on a free ticket. It had been such a joy to see any one of them getting off the plane that she could very nearly overlook the children. She would lock arms with her mother or sister or dearest friend and together they would shepherd the lambs through baggage claim and out to the parking garage. It had been something to look forward to.

  But now Beverly felt oddly paralyzed as she waited at the end of the jet bridge alone. When all the other passengers had disembarked, the stewardess brought the Cousins children out and she signed for them. Four little stair-steps, boy-girl-girl-boy, each one a glassy-eyed refugee. The girls gave her a disappointed hug at the gate while the boys hung back, walking behind her to baggage claim. Albie was singing some indecipherable song, possibly Cal was too, though she wasn’t sure, they stayed so far away from her. The airport was noisy and crowded with happy families reunited. It was hard enough to hear herself think.

  They waited at the baggage carousel and watched the bags rotate past. “How did the school year turn out? Did you make good grades?” Beverly launched the question to the group but the only one who looked at her was Holly. Holly made A’s in every class except for reading and there she’d made an A-plus. Beverly asked if the weather had been good when they left Los Angeles, if they’d eaten on the plane, if it had been a good flight. Holly answered everything.

  “The flight was delayed thirty minutes out of the gate because of traffic on the runway. We were twenty-sixth in line for takeoff,” she said, her little chin lifted up, “but we had a good tailwind and the pilot was able to make up most of the time in the air.” The part that divided her pigtails was wildly uneven, as if it had been made by a drunken finger rather than a comb.

  The boys had wandered off in opposite directions. For a second she caught sight of Cal standing on the conveyor belt of a luggage carousel three carousels away, gliding by with the bags from Houston. No sooner had she seen him than he hopped off to avoid the charge of an oncoming skycap.

  “Cal!” Beverly called out over the crowd. She couldn’t yell at him, not publicly, not at a distance, and so she said, “Go get your brother!” But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also named Cal. He turned away. Jeanette stood just beside her, looking at the strap of her little shoulder bag, staring at it. Had anyone had this child tested?

  Finally, every last bag from the nonstop TWA flight from Los Angeles to Dulles had slid onto the conveyor belt and been pulled away by the waiting travelers. There was nothing left to claim. The crowd dispersed and she caught sight of Albie trying to pry an ancient piece of chewing gum off the floor with what from a distance almost looked like a knife. She turned away.

  “Okay,” she said, calculating the time of day and the traffic back to Arlington. “I guess the bags didn’t make the flight. That’s not a problem. We’ll just have to go to the office and fill out some paperwork. Did you keep the claim checks?” she said to Holly. Best to just direct everything to Holly, who seemed to have a natural desire to please. Holly was her only real chance.

  “We don’t have any claim checks,” Holly said. She had very pale skin and dark straight hair, a face full of freckles. She had the kind of Pippi Longstocking looks adults found charming and other kids made fun of.

  “But you had them at some point. Didn’t your mother give you the claim checks?”

  Holly started again. “We don’t have any claim checks because we don’t have any luggage.”

  “What do you mean you don’t have any luggage?”

  “I mean we don’t have any.” Holly didn’t see how she could be any clearer than that.

  “You mean you forgot it in Los Angeles? You lost it?” Beverly was distracted. She was looking for Cal and didn’t see him. There were signs every ten feet warning people not to sit or stand on the carousels.

  Holly’s lip trembled slightly but her stepmother failed to notice. Holly had thought there was something fishy about taking a trip without bags, but her mother had assured her this was the way their father wanted it. He wanted them to have everything new—new clothes, new toys, new bags in which to carry home the loot. Maybe he’d just forgotten to tell Beverly. “We didn’t bring any,” she said quietly.

  Beverly looked down at her. Goddamn Bert for saying she could manage this no problem. “W
hat?”

  It was terrible to have been made to say it once, unforgivable to be made to say it again. Tears welled up in Holly’s eyes and started their run across the freckles. “We. Don’t. Have. Any. Luggage.” Now she would be in trouble with her father and she hadn’t even seen her father yet. What was worse, her father would be mad at her mother again. Her father had been calling her mother irresponsible forever but she wasn’t.

  Beverly’s eyes shot from one end of the baggage claim to the other. The passengers and the people who had met them were thinning out, two of her stepchildren were missing, the third stepchild was crying and the fourth was so consumed by the vinyl strap of her handbag it was hard not to assume she was handicapped. “Then why have we been standing at the baggage carousel for the last half hour?” Beverly didn’t raise her voice. She wasn’t mad yet. She’d be mad later when she had time to think about it but for now she simply didn’t understand.

  “I don’t know!” Holly screamed, her eyes streaming. She pulled up the hem of her T-shirt and wiped it across her nose. “It’s not my fault. You brought us down here. I never said we had luggage.”

  Jeanette unzipped the zipper on her little purse, dug around, and handed her sister a tissue.

  Every year Beverly’s second trip to the airport was worse because she always thought it was going to be better. She left her four step-children at home (first with her mother, then Bonnie, then Wallis, and now under Cal’s supervision. They stayed home alone in Torrance after all, and Arlington was safer than Torrance) and drove back to Dulles to reclaim her girls. While Bert’s children came east for the entire summer, Caroline and Franny traveled west for two short weeks: one with Fix and then one with her parents, just enough time to remind the girls how greatly they preferred California to Virginia. They shuffled off the plane looking like they were in an advanced state of dehydration from having cried for the entirety of their flight. Beverly dropped to her knees to hug them but they were nothing but ghosts. Caroline wanted to live with her father. She begged for it, she pleaded, and year after year she was denied. Caroline’s hatred for her mother radiated through the cloth of her pink camp shirt as her mother pressed Caroline to her chest. Franny on the other hand simply stood there and tolerated the embrace. She didn’t know how to hate her mother yet, but every time she left her father crying in the airport she came that much closer to figuring it out.

  Beverly kissed their heads. She kissed Caroline again as Caroline pulled away from her. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she said.

  But Caroline and Franny were not glad they were home. They were not glad at all. It was in this battered state that the Keating girls returned to Arlington to be reunited with their stepsiblings.

  Holly was certainly friendly. She hopped up and down and actually clapped her hands when the girls came through the door. She said she wanted to put on another dance recital in the living room this summer. But Holly was also wearing Caroline’s red T-shirt with the tiny white ribbon rosette at the neck, which her mother had made Caroline put in the Goodwill bag before she left because it was both faded and too small. Holly was not the Goodwill.

  Caroline had the bigger room with two sets of bunk beds, and Franny, being smaller, had the smaller room with twin beds. The two sisters were connected by neither love nor mutual affinity but by a very small bathroom that could be entered from the bedroom on either side. Two girls and one bathroom was a workable situation from the beginning of September through the end of May, but in June when Caroline and Franny returned from California they found Holly and Jeanette had made themselves at home in one set of bunk beds while Franny had lost her room completely to the boys. It was four girls in one room and the two boys in the other with a bathroom the size of a phone booth for the six of them to share.

  Caroline and Franny lugged their luggage up the stairs. Luggage: that which is to be lugged. They passed the open door of the master bedroom where Cal was lying across their mother’s bed, his dirty feet in dirty socks resting on the pillows, watching a tennis match at top volume. They were never allowed to go into the master bedroom or sit on the bed, even if they kept their feet on the floor, nor were they allowed to watch television without an express invitation. Cal didn’t lift his eyes from the screen or give the smallest recognition of their arrival as they passed.

  Holly was behind them, close enough to bump when they stopped walking. “I was thinking that all four of us could dance in white nightgowns. Would that be okay? We could start practicing this afternoon. I’ve got some ideas about the choreography if you want to see.”

  As for there being four girls in the dance recital, only three were in evidence. Jeanette was MIA. No one had noticed she was gone, but Franny’s cat Buttercup was missing as well. Buttercup had not come to the door to greet Franny as surely she would have after two weeks away. Buttercup, the lifeline to normalcy, was gone. Beverly, drowning in the sea of child-life, had no clear memory of the last time she’d seen the cat, but Franny’s sudden, paralyzing sobs prompted her to do a thorough search of the house. Beverly found Jeanette beneath a comforter on the floor in the back of the linen closet (how long had Jeanette been missing?). She was petting the sleeping cat.

  “She can’t have my cat!” Franny cried, and Beverly leaned down and took the cat from Jeanette, who hung on for only half a second and then let go. The entire time Albie followed Beverly around the house doing what the children referred to as “the stripper soundtrack”:

  Boom chicka-boom, boom-boom chicka-boom.

  When their mother stopped walking the soundtrack stopped. If she took a single step it was accompanied by Albie saying only “boom” in a voice that was weirdly sexual for a six-year-old. She meant to ignore him but after a while he proved too much for her. When finally she snapped, screaming “Stop that!” he only looked at her. He had the most enormous brown eyes, and loose, loopy brown curls that made him look like a cartoon animal.

  “I’m serious,” she said, making an effort to steady her breathing. “You have to stop that.” She tried to find within her own voice a sound that was reasonable, parental, but when she turned to walk away she heard the small, quiet chug, “Boom chicka-boom.”

  Beverly thought about killing him. She thought about killing a child. Her hands were shaking. She went to her room, wanting to close the door and lock it and go to sleep, but from the hallway she heard the thwack of a tennis ball, the roar of a crowd. She stuck her head around the doorframe. “Cal?” she said, trying not to cry. “I need my room now.”

  Cal didn’t move, not a twitch. He kept his eyes on the screen. “It’s not over,” he said, as if she had never seen a tennis match before and didn’t understand that when the ball was in motion it meant the game was still going on.

  Bert didn’t believe in television for children. At its most harmless he saw it as a waste of time, a bunch of noise. At its most harmful he wondered if it didn’t stunt brain development. He thought Teresa had made a huge mistake letting the children watch so much TV. He had told her not to do it but she never listened to him when it came to parenting, when it came to anything. That’s why he and Beverly had only one television in this house, and why it was in their bedroom, which wasn’t open to children, or wasn’t open to her children during the regular course of the year. Now Beverly wanted to unplug the television and cart it off to what the realtor had called “the family room,” though no member of the family ever seemed to light there. She went down the hallway, Albie following at a safe distance, churning his music. Did his mother teach him that? Someone taught him. Six-year-olds didn’t hang out in strip clubs, not even this one. Beverly went into the girls’ room but Holly was there reading Rebecca.

  “Beverly, have you ever read Rebecca?” Holly asked as soon as Beverly stepped into the room, her little face bright, bright, bright. “Mrs. Danvers is scaring me to death but I’m going to keep reading it. I don’t care if I had the chance to live in Manderley. I wouldn’t stay there if someone was being that creepy to me.” />
  Beverly nodded slightly and backed out of the room. She thought about trying to lie down in the boys’ room, the room that had once been Franny’s, but it had a vaguely nutty smell reminiscent of socks and underwear and unwashed hair.

  She went downstairs again and found Caroline banging around the kitchen in a rage, saying she was going to make brownies for her father and mail them to him so he’d have something to eat.

  “Your father doesn’t like nuts in his brownies,” Beverly said. She didn’t know why she said it. She was trying to be helpful.

  “He does too!” Caroline said, turning on her mother so fast she spilled half a bag of flour on the counter. “Maybe he didn’t when you knew him but you don’t know him anymore. Now he likes nuts in everything.”

  Albie was in the dining room. She could hear him singing through the kitchen door. His single-pointed focus was astounding. Franny was in the living room, pulling the cat’s front legs through the armholes of a doll’s dress and crying so quietly that her mother was sure that every single thing she had ever done in her life up until that moment was a mistake.

  There was no place to go, no place to get away from them, not even the linen closet because Jeanette hadn’t come out of the linen closet since surrendering the cat. Beverly took the car keys and went outside. The minute she closed the door behind her she was underwater, the summer air hot and solid in her lungs. She thought about the back patio of the house in Downey, how she would sit outside in the afternoons, Caroline on her tricycle, Franny happy in her lap, the smell of the orange blossoms nearly overwhelming. Fix had had to sell the house in order to pay her half of what little equity they had and make the child support. Why had she made him sell the house? No one could sit outside in Virginia. She got five new mosquito bites just walking to the driveway and each one puffed up to the size of a quarter. Beverly was allergic to mosquito bites.