The Book of Fred

by Abby Bardi

  The girls turned to each other and high-fived, which Puffin had evidently taught Mary Fred to do. “We're divas,” Puffin said, and the two of them clumped away up the stairs. Puffin had always made a lot of noise going upstairs, and for a second I was able to pretend she was just eight again, but then I remembered her face in the mirror.

  “Roy, do I just go through life not looking at anything?”

  Roy glanced up from the news. Another mass grave hadbeen discovered in Kosovo, and there were piles of bodies on the TV screen. “Al, you didn't know this about yourself?”

  “Know what?”

  “Oh, Al.” Roy gave me a kind look, not exactly a smile but a faint dimpling of his cheeks. “Don't ever change.”

  “Change from what? What am I like?”

  “I don't know, Al. What can I tell you. You're a little bit— foggy.”

  “Foggy?”

  “You move in mysterious ways. Ways known only to you. You see what you want to see.”

  “Oh, I do, do I?” I felt myself getting a bit annoyed. “Like what?”

  “Like what, she wants to know. Please, Al. Don't make me say any more.”

  “Go on, Roy, say it. What's the matter with me?”

  “I don't know, Al. You're—”

  “What?”

  “Well, okay. Take Peter, for example.”

  “What about Peter?”

  “I can't stand it, Alice. The guy has a new wife, new kids, you've been divorced for how long is it? And you still drift around like he's going to change his mind and come back.”

  “Roy, that's not true. I know he's never—I mean I don't think—”

  “Maybe not consciously, Alice, but can you explain why you haven't slept with anyone but Peter in seven years?”

  “Roy, please. That's kind of personal, isn't it?”

  “The guy dumps you for your best friend, and you're just waiting around for him like some demented high school chick.”

  “Jemma was not my best friend.”

  “Okay, whatever. Even if she was just an acquaintance, or your hairdresser, or the queen of Belgium—it just sucks, Alice. And you're—you're better than that. You deserve more.”

  “Oh, Roy.”

  “Really, Al. You're a beautiful woman. You're smart, you're nice, you have a charming brother. But you're—languishing. And you don't see any of it.”

  “We're back to seeing now.”

  “Seeing, Alice. You need to just see things. As they are.”

  “Oh, God, Roy,” I said, sitting down on the arm of his chair and putting my hand on his shoulder. I looked at the piles of bodies that still covered the TV screen. “Oh, God. I just don't want to see any of it.”

  Roy reached for my hand, patted it, and said, “I know.”

  It took the girls a few weeks to figure out where to do their community service. Puffin was adamant about avoiding old people—she said they smelled bad and were boring. I tried telling her that she too would be old someday, and that she would be glad then if some nice young girls came and got to know her. She said she'd rather be dead.

  “Live fast,” Roy said to her. “Die young. That's my advice.”

  “Oh, Roy, for God's sake,” I said.

  “It's okay, Mom,” Puffin said. “I never pay attention to advice. In fact, I'm likely to do the opposite. I'm a rebellious teen.”

  “Yeah, right,” Roy said. “You're about as rebellious as our aunt Tootsie.” Tootsie was our mother's sister, who lived in New Jersey.

  “Whatever,” Puffin said, glaring at him, then turned toMary Fred and said, “Positively no old people. What about day care?”

  “Well,” Mary Fred said. “That one we visited—it made me sad, Heather. That one little guy reminded me—”

  “Okay,” Puffin said. “Well then, I guess it's the soup kitchen.”

  “Oh, that's wonderful, girls,” I said.

  “And the benefits are great,” Roy said. “You get a lot of soup there.”

  “I'm not sure they really serve soup,” Puffin said. “I think it's mostly stew.”

  “Sounds great,” Roy said. “When do we eat?”

  “Oh, Uncle Roy,” Mary Fred said. “You can't eat there. You have to be poor.”

  “I'm poor,” Roy said.

  “Yeah, he doesn't have a job or anything,” Puffin said. “Don't worry, Roy, we'll give you some stew.”

  The girls started work at the soup kitchen the next afternoon, and when they came home, they were talking excitedly about recipes. Mary Fred said she knew how to make a great fruit bread and that the people there would certainly like it, especially the little kids. They went into the kitchen and baked five loaves of bread using a bunch of rotting peaches and what was left of our flour, and the next day they brought them to the kitchen.

  “We taught them the Beautiful Prayer,” Puffin said when they came home the next day.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. M.F. said it would be nice for everyone if they had a prayer to say before eating, so we taught it to them.”

  We had been saying the Beautiful Prayer, or as Mary Fred sometimes called it, the B.P., since Mary Fred had been withus. I had never liked the idea of praying before meals, or of praying in general, since I had no idea who I was praying to. Roy had told me once that his conception of God was a big tattooed bearded guy in a sleeveless undershirt with mustard stains on it, and I had a hard time shaking that image from my mind. But Mary Fred seemed to love doing the B.P., and we all liked doing anything that made her happy. Sometimes I could see from her face that she was sad, and I could tell she was thinking about her other family. When we all said the B.P. together, it seemed, at least for the moment, like we were approximating for her what a family should be.

  In general, though I grew to kind of like the B.P., I had a lot of trouble with what I could discern of Mary Fred's religion. Ever since Paula had told me about the story behind Mary Fred's brothers' deaths, I had found the whole picture increasingly sinister. I never really asked her much about her beliefs, or the structure of the religion itself, since I guess I was afraid of what her answers might be—I didn't want to get into a disagreement with her, so I just kept silent when she came out with her strange proverbs. When she talked about lambs, lepers, dragons, and angels, which she occasionally did, I never asked her to elaborate. One good thing about her religion was that it was evidently not evangelical; in fact, it seemed quite the reverse, like only a select few were able to participate. I was glad about that, and I'm sure Roy was too.

  The soup kitchen kept the girls occupied for the rest of the summer, and it cut their TV watching way down, which I was also glad about. Every summer, I had despaired of poor old Puffin, who always started out reasonably perky, as perky as Puffin ever got, but grew increasingly miserable with each day. All her friends went on European vacations with their parents, or to camp, but even if I could have afforded to send Puffin tocamp without Peter's help (and I never liked to ask him for extra money—in fact, I hated taking his child support payments as it was), she flatly refused to go. She had gone to camp the first summer after Peter and I had separated, and had been so unhappy there that finally in the middle of the second week, I had brought her back to our house, which had suddenly seemed terribly empty, dark, and sad. I had persuaded Roy to move in with us the following year so the house would not be so alarmingly still, and while Roy was not the most ebullient person in the world, he was company. I never tried making Puffin go to camp again, but neither of us could ever think of anything else for her to do during the summer.

  So this was the first summer that Puffin had done something constructive to occupy her time, and even after the first couple days of the soup kitchen, she seemed less edgy, even fairly cheerful. Mary Fred seemed more comfortable too, as if she had gotten into the habit of serving others and preferred to keep doing that. I loved to see the two of them sitting on the couch with the TV off, talking about their day, about how the old man with the eyepatch had had two helpin
gs of their potato salad, and how they had showed some of the new volunteers where all the serving spoons were. They went to the soup kitchen every day for lunch, stayed till midafternoon, and then went back again for dinner. We all ate together when they got home and they would recount their adventures to us. Roy said they ought to write a book called Girls on Stew. After dinner, they would help me clean the kitchen—I didn't even have to beg Puffin anymore—and then we would go sit on the front porch. The girls would sit in the swing, and I would sit in an old wicker chair, watching the fireflies in the trees as it got dark. When I was a child, I had always wanted to live in a house like this, with a porch. We had lived outside Baltimorein an apartment that got unbearably hot and airless in the summer, and it always felt to me like there was some perfect life outside, on some other street, that other people were living, the kind of ordinary life that I would never be entitled to. When Peter and I found this house, bought it, fixed it up, I was reaching for that perfection, that ordinariness, and there had been times years ago when I thought I had found it. Now when I sat on the porch with the girls, I had brief moments of it again, glimmers of ecstasy that glowed and instantly dissolved again like the light from fireflies.

  July turned into August. It got hotter and more humid, and the cicadas came. We sat on the porch practically shouting over their constant chirping. One weekend, the temperature reached one hundred degrees, so I decided to take the girls down to the beach. We rented a room in Ocean City in the cheapest hotel we could find and spent three days on the boardwalk, eating shaved ice and crabs. Mary Fred seemed to love all the crummy little stores that sold T-shirts, hermit crabs, temporary tattoos. She especially liked the amusement park at the south end of the boardwalk, and we spent a lot of time on the Ferris wheel there. Whenever we got to the top, she would shriek that you could see the whole coastline and that the people looked like ants. Another of her favorite things to do was to have her fortune told by a mechanical woman named Esmerelda, a life-sized doll in a glass case. Heather's fortune would say that she would be rich and famous, and Mary Fred's that she would travel and find romance, and then they would put more money in and their fortunes would be exchanged, and their lucky numbers shifted so by the time we left they had ended up with all of them. They would roll their eyes (Puffin) or giggle (Mary Fred) at each fortune, and Mary Fred would speculate about precisely how she would becomerich, or famous, as if she took these predictions absolutely seriously. One day, Mary Fred's fortune said that she would have an enormous trial but would emerge triumphant. She said this was exactly what The Book of Fred predicted, so it had to be true.

  On Monday, just before we left, I got a fortune that said I would have a strange visitor, so I wasn't too surprised when I came home and found a scrawled note from Roy saying that Diane had called and that she needed to come over for the eight-week interview. I wasn't too worried about this, since Diane had more or less pressured me into fostering Mary Fred in the first place, but I found that I was a tad nervous when I called her back. Roy always said I was just too darn eager to please, and I found myself wanting Diane's approval. Diane sounded brusque on the phone, but then she always sounded brusque—she was always in a hurry, or her feet hurt (she had fallen arches), or she'd just had a big fight with Sandy. I invited her to come the following day and to stay for dinner, and she said that would be fine, and hung up. Diane had a way of hanging up while you were in the middle of a sentence, but I had known her long enough that it didn't bother me.

  The next day, I left work early so I could stop at the store, and by the time Diane arrived at six, I had arranged a big salad in a blue ceramic bowl and was marinating the tilapia filet. The girls were still at the soup kitchen but were expected back any minute. I figured this would give Diane and me a chance to talk privately.

  When I opened the front door, she came partway in and then stood in the entrance, looking around the living room as if checking for land mines. “What happened here?” she asked, taking a step forward rather gingerly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It's so clean.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it's amazing. Everything's sparkling.”

  I was afraid Diane was thinking that I had forced Mary Fred into some kind of slave labor, but she just said, “Excellent,” and wrote something on the clipboard she was carrying.

  “Come on in, Diane. Can I get you something? Some juice?”

  Diane said she wouldn't mind some juice, so I went into the kitchen and poured some in one of my crystal glasses. We had taken to using the wedding crystal for ordinary occasions, since Mary Fred had pointed out that it was just going to waste otherwise. When I came back out, Diane was standing there, still writing on the clipboard as if she were taking inventory of the room.

  We sat down on the couch. “How are things going?” she asked. She had a slight New York accent, though she hadn't lived there in twenty years, and it always made her tone sound clipped and sarcastic.

  “Well, Diane, actually, things are going really well. Mary Fred is a great girl, and we all get along famously. She and Puffin are out at the soup kitchen now, and they've been volunteering there every day.”

  “Good, good,” Diane said, looking very serious and writing some more.

  “Yes, things are just fine.”

  “Really? No conflicts?”

  “Well, every now and then she gets upset about—things. Her family, you know. The situation. You know, Diane, I wish you had told me the whole story. I didn't know any of it— about her brothers dying, and her parents being tried for second-degree murder.”

  “I thought it was felony child abuse.”

  “Not according to Paula. She said she saw it on Dateline.”

  “Paula,” Diane sniffed. She did not like Paula any better than Paula liked her. Though she would have denied it if I'd asked, I think there was something about transsexuality that she found unsettling, as if she felt it should be more difficult to become female than that. “Well, Alice, would it have made a difference if you had known?”

  “I don't know, Diane. I just wish I'd had all the information.”

  “Why?” Diane had an intimidating way of looking at a person. She had small brown eyes that were slightly too close together, and they seemed to bore into you. Her face was small, framed by her frizzy gray-black hair. Roy said she looked like a rabid mouse with feathers.

  “I just like to know things.” Of course, the minute these words were out of my mouth, they felt like a lie. Roy would say that I didn't really want to know anything at all, that I'd sooner not be told.

  “We didn't have all the details at the time,” Diane said, as if that put an end to that discussion. “How's her health?”

  I told her that Mary Fred's health was good, her hygiene was excellent, and that she seemed happy. At that moment, Mary Fred and Puffin burst through the front door, both crying hysterically. When I was able to get them to speak coherently, they explained that one of their favorite soup kitchen people, an old man named Buddy, had died in his sleep the night before and they had just found out about it. They threw themselves down on the couch, still sobbing, and through their tears, they talked about Buddy for a while, and about how he had always thanked them for his dinner and given them each aquarter, which they had tried and failed to refuse. The whole time they were talking, Diane was taking notes.

  “Girls, could you go put the fish in the oven?” I asked, and they scurried away, still sobbing, into the kitchen.

  Diane stared after them. “I can't believe it,” she said.

  “Oh, Diane, she's not usually like this, she's just upset—”

  “No, I mean Puffin. What's happened to her?”

  “What do you mean, Diane? Doesn't she seem—”

  “She went right into the kitchen when you asked her to.”

  “Does that seem odd?”

  “It seems odd for Puffin.”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course it does, Alice.” Diane
sighed and put the cap back on her pen. “Does she do this all the time?”

  “Puffin? I guess so. I hadn't really thought about it.”

  “Would you say that Mary Fred has had a positive effect on her?”

  “Well, now that you mention it.”

  “I notice her hair is all one color now.”

  “True.”

  “Do they have any conflicts?”

  I thought about it for a minute. “Actually, no. Not really. I think Puffin is a little jealous of Mary Fred's figure, but apart from that—” I stopped myself, realizing that Diane would think it was highly politically incorrect of Puffin not to embrace her own body image.

  “And would you say Mary Fred is happy here?”

  I thought about this too. The truth was, she seemed happy enough, but I could see shadows pass over her sometimes. I knew how that felt, how you could be scouring a pot at the sink when suddenly you were transported into your memory, and light began to stream through the kitchen windowand give everything in the past a golden glow, like at sunset, and you would feel warm and safe, and then just as abruptly, you would snap back into the present and everything would be blanched and empty, and you'd have a weird sense of dislocation just before color returned, as if you'd been kidnapped by aliens for a minute or so and then dumped back on Earth. “Yes, she's very happy here,” I said to Diane.