by Sara Levine
I knew him. Not right away, of course, but as the tableau dissolved, his face was plain to me. He was the principal of the middle school where my father taught and a friend of my parents. In fact, now that I thought about it, I had been to this house as a kid, once or twice, to trim the tree.
It’s shocking and unpleasant to see your sister getting eaten out by anyone, let alone an old man. I screamed; she screamed; I gagged a little; then he, Mr. Tatum, got up, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, and tried to pretend this was the kind of situation where people can look each other in the eye.
“Did you follow me here?” Adrianna said. Then—I forget her exact words—she called me a stalker and said some more in that melodramatic vein. Mr. Tatum tried to calm her down.
“Is something wrong?” he asked. “Everything all right with your folks?”
My parents’ health was everything we would wish it to be, I admitted.
“Then why are you here?” Adrianna said.
“Because I thought you said you had a boyfriend. And I wanted to make sure you weren’t in over your head or needlessly debasing yourself.”
“Shut up,” she said. “I am not debasing myself!”
“But Adrianna!” Obviously it was an effort not to say terribly rude things about Mr. Tatum as he stood right there, fussing with his belt buckle, but I did my best. I alluded to him not by name. I called their relationship ‘this.’ As in “This is a terrible mistake. This is one of those instances where you’re confusing age with experience. Maybe this is something you ought to discuss with a licensed therapist.” Here she clearly took offense, but in an effort to keep things civilized she said, “Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black.” “Well, don’t you think the old grey mare just ain’t what she used to be?” And so on and so on, strangling our points in a hideous macramé of clichés. I wouldn’t judge a book by its cover. I’m not judging the book by its cover, I’m just saying all that glitters is not gold. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I had only cried, “Don’t blame the messenger,” when Adrianna grabbed a Lucite paperweight from the coffee table. “Somebody has to send for a messenger,” she howled.
“Ladies!” said Mr. Tatum.
There were no ladies present—it was an imaginary appeal—but it got her to put the paperweight down. They had a brief struggle themselves, which involved an embarrassing number of clutches and endearments I tried not to witness, and then Adrianna tore out of the house and drove off before I could explain—especially that she was my ride.
Mr. Tatum looked at me with quiet dismay.
“Do you want to sit down?” he said.
“Not where she was sitting.”
I was aiming to lighten the tense situation, but he didn’t get it. He was so old.
“You’ve had a shock. Why don’t you sit down on the Chesterfield?” He indicated a high-backed leather sofa, tufted and cracked. “I’ll get you some water.”
Once he had passed me the green rippled Depression glass, he began: “It’s not what you think . . . ”
“You don’t know what I think, Mr. Tatum.”
He raised a purple-veined, age-spotted hand. “Please. I’ve known you forever. Call me Don.”
“And I’ve known you,” I scoffed, “since you were fifty.” I sat with my arms folded, ankles crossed. “Where is Mrs. Tatum right now? Tutoring refugees? Shopping for Christmas presents? Taking your grandchildren to dinner?”
“My wife died eight years ago,” he said softly. “I believe you came to the funeral.”
“Did I?” Oh god. There rose a dim memory of being dragged to a funeral parlor for some lady’s untimely demise, a vague recollection of a woman who had somehow seemed to die of her femaleness. I couldn’t recall the details, but I wasn’t about to be disarmed by pity, so I expressed my condolences to Mr. Tatum swiftly, and then reminded him that this match with my sister was hardly what anyone in my family might have hoped for. The fact that he and Adrianna were carrying on in secrecy indicated that he already knew as much.
He answered my objections in the blustery pseudo-sophisticated way you’d expect. A matter of privacy, not secrecy. Two consensual adults. An unexpected and noisy bit of sunshine in his quiet not to say cloudy life. Once I took a moment to collect myself and understand the facts, I might even discover I wanted to apologize for my intrusion. I imagine this is how he spoke to the delinquent adolescents he met in his office: reasonable, slightly disappointed, even-handed, with a note of self-pity, convincing you that he was the wronged party.
“Mr. Tatum, are your hands shaking right now because you’re nervous, or because you’re old?”
He withdrew his hands, in surprise, and folded them in his lap. “My dear, I do think you’re over-reacting. Your sister isn’t underage.”
“No, but she’s under-used. She’s never had a boyfriend. Has she told you that?”
He smiled indulgently and tsk-tsked me. “You always were the provocative one.”
“I was the good-looking one, if you want to know the truth, and I don’t like your thinking you can mess around with Adrianna just because she’s the ugly duckling.”
He looked taken aback. “You underestimate your sister, surely. She is anything but ugly.” He rose to indicate our interview was over. “I think you should have the rest of this conversation with Adrianna.”
“Fine. But I don’t have a way home.”
“How did you get here?”
And then that old embarrassing conversation. You didn’t drive? No, didn’t drive. Don’t you drive? Well, yes, can drive, but don’t have a car. No car? Well, phobic about driving. “All right,” he said icily. “I’ll drive you home.”
That was a fun ride.
CHAPTER 15
Adrianna didn’t talk to me for two weeks. In the absence of her explanations, I began to consider her “love affair” in new lights. Maybe, I reasoned, she was sitting on his face for monetary reasons. Maybe she let him do things to her in exchange for cash, with a long-term plan to pay off her credit card debt and move out of our parents’ house. And yet, however hard I tried to imagine Adrianna as a player—someone who would trade sexual favors for cash—I stumbled on her basic goodness. She had spoken of love as a flower that might be crushed underfoot. More likely she thought she loved Mr. Tatum and was oblivious to how large a role his financial steadiness played in the attraction. I once used the term “Sugar Daddy” in her presence and she missed my meaning entirely, recalling instead, with childish enthusiasm, the milk caramel lollipop of the same name.
Still I needed to understand the contours of this affair. How long had she been seeing Mr. Tatum? Was she seeing only him or might there be other old unattractive men involved? To answer these questions I ventured into her room when she was at work. I was looking for a diary; instead I found a batch of letters. Pathetic things! She had wrapped them up in a gold ribbon from a chocolate box and hidden them under her mattress. Reader, you can imagine what an old man writes a young woman when he thinks nobody else is going to read the dreck. Last night was unforgettable (and then tedious quasi-poetic, quasi-porno reminders of what he couldn’t forget). Foreign-language endearments: mi muñeca, mon petit canard en plastique. Places he wanted to take her, show her, touch her, et cetera. His penmanship was all right, but he probably wrote the letters wearing his best bifocals. Was it my imagination, or did the very pages smell of milk of magnesia, glycerine soap? Adrianna hadn’t arranged the letters in chronological order, but gradually I began to make out an emotional pattern. On the left hand of the desk, I placed the booty letters: Thank you for last night, You are so lovely I hardly believe I deserve you, et cetera. On the right hand of the desk, pleas and promises: Give me time, Tell me what I did wrong, I know I can make it up to you, et cetera. And in the chaotic middle, everything else: a photocopied Shakespearean sonnet (the one about “bare ruined choirs,” for obvious reasons); the lyrics to “Ain’t Misbehavin’”; and a memo from The Board of Education about school
lunches regarding the importance of incorporating whole grains.
I thought I was interested in playing detective, but by the third encomium to a salty pair of Adrianna’s underwear, I couldn’t bear to read another word, let alone arrange the letters in order and figure out the dates.
I knew enough already: the affair was farther along than I’d even feared.
“Mom, do you know who Adrianna is seeing at nights?”
“Oh, is she seeing someone?” My mother looked up from the apples she was coring on a medieval-looking appliance she had clamped to the counter.
“Someone you know. Don’t you want to ask her?”
“If she wants to tell us, she’ll tell us.”
“‘When she’s ready,’” I mocked.
“Exactly!”
That’s the thing with liberal parents. Proud of their so-called respect for boundaries, they averted their gazes while we stepped in the dog shit. Did they have curiosity? If they knew their youngest daughter was fucking an old family friend, would they care? Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d say, Well, I’m sure if it’s not a match made in heaven, she’ll figure it out for herself. “We’ve always believed in letting our children find their own way,” I can hear my mother saying.
I’m sorry to say that despite the shocking discovery of Adrianna’s affair, things carried on much as usual. Adrianna avoided my company, and I kept her secret, annoyed as hell, but confident that its value might appreciate in time. I got used to a certain companionable rhythm with my mother, who divided her time between cooking, laundry, housework, water aerobics, dance lessons, trips to Costco and Wild Birds Unlimited, and tutoring Latin stragglers. On weekends my father and Adrianna fell upon us, boring us with their lesson plans, scrounging through the kitchen, watching TV. Some nights all four of us would eat together and then sit in the main hold to watch Moulin Rouge or whatever was on television; other nights I would eat with my parents alone, imagining Mr. Tatum eating Adrianna. Then my mother would get out the classifieds and in her discreet way try to excite me about future employment.
“All right, here’s one.”
“One what?”
“CROWDED CLOSET. Experience with sales. Ask for Doug.”
“I’m not interested in retail. Especially a thrift store. Dead people’s clothes and other people’s cast-offs? I’ll stay in my own closet, thanks.”
“Which reminds me,” my mother said. “I did some reorganizing for you. Just went through and pulled out very worn things, your hoodie from high school, the drama T-shirts, old socks with holes.” I nodded. She read on:
Want a job that will “MEAT” [she spelled this out and winked before continuing] your expectations? Local grocery needs MEAT CUTTER.
HOUSEHOLD HELP. Fun loving family of 6 needs help keeping home running smoothly. Please have superb laundry skills, including washing, ironing and mending.
THE PRETZEL PLACE looking for upbeat, high energy people to fill counter positions. Apply at mall location.
“You like soft pretzels,” my mother added, eyebrows raised.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “If you want to work on someone’s problems, look to your other daughter.” But she never took my hints.
CHAPTER 16
Richard was molting, and scruffy as he was, there was something enviable in his ability to start fresh. I opened my book, but couldn’t read a line. The room felt stuffy and hot. “It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!” Richard said, dragging out a chewed feather.
After further thought, I took the bright green feather to Adrianna’s room.
“Want a bookmark?” I said, holding it aloft. She closed the door.
I tried reading in the living room, but my father had the TV on loud enough to reach the Dry Tortugas. In the kitchen, my mother scraped carrots and listened to The Fabulous Danny Boy Album: one song; twelve artistic interpretations.
“How long am I to lie here in this old berth?” I said, slumping on the breakfast bar.
“Are you sick?” my mother said.
“No.”
“It’s cabin fever then.” She stopped scraping carrots. In a minute she had found her purse, tucked a few bills into my hand, and advised me to get out of the house. The weather was miserable, but off I went. I tramped a few blocks, pretending to enjoy the open air, before making a beeline for a shopping center, where I found a newly opened sandwich shop.
A small and predominantly plastic place, the shop boasted a service counter, three booths sticky enough to discourage loitering, and a vinyl menu board with changeable white letters, most of which spelled something fatally wrong (i.e. “wheat, white, onion role, or rye”). Not the sort of place I would go twice. But as fate would have it, I knew the girl behind the counter—a plump person with one blue eye and one green eye. One glance at her and I seemed to have dropped to all fours and was tunneling deep into the past.
“Patty Pacholewski! What are you doing here? This is a stunning stroke of luck.”
“Do I know you?” the broad-shouldered girl said, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Mrs. Buskirk’s class! Fifth grade, and beyond. Don’t you remember?”
Once she recovered from the surprise, we fell into easy and affable conversation, reminiscing about the afternoons I had spent at her house (she lived in a carriage house by a lake, with a glamorous spiral staircase, and a mother who descended from it, scowling). I asked how was her little brother (fine), and her dog (dead), and her mother and father (fine and dead, respectively), and she asked why I had been so mean to her in seventh grade, to which I had no answer. I ordered turkey bacon and tomato, but what I really wanted to know was did she remember reading Treasure Island and how all us girls had sat with our hands below desk level, passing around her bracelets and rings.
“No, but I kind of remember my rings.”
“Your jewelry never looked like it came from a bubblegum machine,” I said with admiration.
“You drew pictures of it, do you remember? You had a notebook and you made an inventory of all the girls in the class and their clothes.”
“No,” I said, marveling. “But that sounds like me.”
I recalled how Long John Silver says to Jim Hawkins, “You’re a noticing kind of person.” A lot of times I’ll be out for a walk and somebody will point out something that escaped me: sky seems hazy, crocuses in bloom, just passed a burrow which belongs to some kind of small animal, your guess is better than mine. Since the break-up with Lars, I had been worried that I was not a noticing person, but of course, I am; I just notice different things.
“Who?” my mother was saying to me a few hours later, as she bent over and stuck her head into the dryer. “This lint trap is eating our towels. No, I don’t remember. Well, the name sounds familiar. One of your elementary school friends?”
“Honestly, Mom. How could you not remember? Patty Pacholewski was a deity in fifth grade.”
I pushed aside an empty basket and sat down on the counter, thinking about Patty. How we had shared her heart-shaped bangles, her dolphin rings. Her puffy-sleeved, round-collared, pastel-colored blouses. The holiday concert to which she wore a blouse of slippery, white sateen. Her charm bracelet with a heart toggle clasp, my own parrot green windbreaker whose white hood ties I had chewed to a pulp, her pale pink car coat made of light brushed wool which hung on the peg in the cloak room three pegs down from mine. And her umbrella! Also pink, with a white handle in the shape of a swan.
“I used to move my desk around the classroom, to get a better view of her blue eye or a better view of her green one.”
“Was she the diabetic?”
“No, that was Johanna Miller,” I said testily.
“Sweetheart.” My mother dropped a dark globe of lint into the trashcan and turned to me with an openly worried face. “Did you feed Richard today? When I went in your room to get your clothes, he looked lackluster. I took him the left-over tabbouli.”
“Okay, whatever.”
“Darling, a bird
is a responsibility. You have to feed him every day, not just when you feel like it.” Insert lecture on nutrition here. “Your father thinks he needs exercise.”
When my mother first mentioned Richard, the sternness of her gaze had given me a pang; I felt like Jim Hawkins, pinned by a knife to the mast. But now I started to laugh. “Daddy said that?”
“You know how he is. Why are you laughing?”
“No reason.”
But later I marched into Adrianna’s room and said, “How many times has Mom pulled you aside, and told you in a calculatedly casual way, ‘Your father feels this,’ ‘What’s important to your father is that’?”
“I thought we weren’t talking.”
“Oh, let’s give that up,” I said. “I’m sorry if I barged in on you on top of old Smokey, but when I followed you to his house, I didn’t know what I was going to see. Anyway, I haven’t told Mom and Dad. So your secret is safe with me.”
She regarded me warily. Lately her “dates” had been a bit erratic and there had been some late night muffled phone calls. I’d gathered the affair wasn’t going all that well, but had strategically made a point of not prying. Now I lay down on the rug of her room and gently guided my legs over the back of my head. “If you can’t afford the healings,” Bev had said, “take up something you can afford,” and she had demonstrated, quite powerfully, a yoga maneuver called “the plough.” I often did the plough while reading Treasure Island, but it made my neck hurt.
“Anyway,” I panted, “you do know what I mean about Mom. It’s like she radios into headquarters for Dad’s feelings, when she senses hers need backup.” I lowered my legs back to the rug and exhaled.
“You need a job,” Adrianna said. “You need a wider perspective on life and a wider range of interests.”
“A materialist way of looking at things. Right now I’m on a spiritual journey and not so naïve to think a job is going to solve my problems. When the log-house fills with smoke, and Jim Hawkins and the crew think they’re trapped, the captain cries, ‘Out, lads, out, and fight ’em in the open!’ So Jim grabs a cutlass.”
