“It didn’t get…it didn’t start to go so fast until lately.”
“Is it something at school? Is it us, your daddy and me? Or Mommee—”
Mommee. Of course it was Mommee. Mommee, demanding, deposing, dethroning, unstoppable. Uncontrollable. I should have seen that, too; Pom should have.
“It is Mommee, isn’t it? Oh, honey, you should have said something. We could have talked about it—”
“Yeah, but what could you have done about it?” Glynn said. “You can’t change her and she can’t help it and nobody can stop it. I know all that. I can’t blame her, but Mama, she sucks all the air out of the house! She takes up all the space in it! She gets every bit of everybody’s attention all the time! And I work and work and swim and swim and paint and paint and my grades get better and better and I get zero. Zip. Or a little pat on the head, and ‘Way to go, old Tink,’ and then Mommee hollers again.…And I feel so guilty because it bothers me and I know she can’t help it! I feel guilty all the time about the way I feel about Mommee.”
She whispered the last, and the tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks to her chin. She did not move her hands to wipe them away but finally her face contorted and she jerked her hand from mine and scrubbed her face with it and gave a great, rattling sniff.
“I didn’t mean to cry,” she gulped.
My own eyes filled. I found a Kleenex and handed it to her.
“I think you have every right to cry,” I said. “We haven’t been very considerate of you, have we? You must know that we are both prouder of you than of anything we’ve ever done ourselves, or ever will do. I think maybe it’s that you’ve been such a great kid that we take you for granted while we try to cope with Mommee. That’s going to stop, I promise you. The first thing we’re going to do in the morning is have a family conference about this the way we used to do. Daddy said he’d be home all day.”
“No!” Her head came up and her eyes widened. She clenched her teeth so hard that white ridges stood out in her jaws.
“I won’t talk to Daddy about it! You promised! I won’t! I can’t! I know you’re proud of me, but he’ll have an absolute shit fit about the weight thing! You know how he feels about that; you know he doesn’t like Dr. Flint! You know he thought the whole thing was silly and trivial last time, and that I ought to be doing some really important work rather than all that therapy and stuff about food—”
“Glynnie, where on earth did you get that idea? Daddy was terribly concerned about you! He was willing to do anything in the world to get you better; he will be again—”
“I heard him,” she said softly. “I heard him talking to you about it over and over again! There’s a place in the upstairs laundry room where the vent pipe or something acts like an echo chamber and you can hear whatever anybody is saying down in the den; I’ve known about it since I was little. I used to listen all the time. I heard him say that I was impossibly sheltered and naive, and that he treated eight-year-olds at the clinic who could take better care of themselves than I could, and that I ought to volunteer down there and do some real work and see some real misery and forget about starving myself to death.”
She fell silent and I simply stared at her. My poor, good, frightened child, crouched in the dark beside a clothes dryer, straining to hear how she measured up to Pom and me, to hear how her life was working out, to hear what catastrophe would be coming next, so she could begin to figure how she might control it.
“Daddy wasn’t criticizing you,” I said, not bothering to deny that Pom had said all those things, for he had. “He was just frustrated and frightened because nothing seemed to be working, and he didn’t know what to do next. It was during that time when you and Dr. Flint were trying to get used to each other, you remember, and nothing much was happening, and you were still losing weight.”
“I heard him say once that he hated fat women,” she whispered.
“Oh, honey! He didn’t mean little girls!”
Her silence spun out and then she said, “I’m being a real jerk, aren’t I?”
“Not for a second. You need to talk about what’s bothering you. We’ll get started back with Dr. Flint before you leave for camp, and I promise I won’t mention this to Daddy until you’ve seen her. Glynnie, he adores you. I wish I could convince you of that.”
“I wish he would,” she said in a low voice.
Then she laughed and looked up. “Maybe I should get a pet. A dog. I’d love a big old dog—”
“Well, there’s Samson and Delilah.”
“But they can’t come in the house. I wish I had a dog that would stay with me in my room. I always think about a big dog in my bed with me. But if we got one you’d end up having to take care of it when I went off to camp and then to college, along with everything and everybody else.”
“We could have a cat,” I said. “Maybe even a couple of kittens. They could keep each other company, and they aren’t nearly the trouble dogs are.”
She shook her head.
“Jess brought Muffin over here the last time she came. She’d just picked her up from the vet’s. Mommee screamed so she had to take Muffin home.”
And they hadn’t come back, Jess or Muffin either, Glynn did not say so.
“Well, we can easily keep a cat away from Mommee. It can live in your room, or they can. If you’ll see Dr. Flint and really, really try with the eating I promise we’ll go to the Humane Society and pick you out two wonderful kittens when you get back. And Mommee be blowed.”
She smiled, unwillingly at first, and then genuinely.
“Okay.”
“So. Better now?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you, Glynn.”
“Me too you, Mom,” my child said.
Pom wasn’t home that afternoon after all. When we got home, laden like panoplied elephants with Glynn’s booty, Ina told us that he had been called back to the clinic to see a child running a horrendous fever with what sounded, Pom had said, like meningitis. The young doctor on duty had called him to ascertain the diagnosis. He didn’t know when he would be done.
“Oh, Ina, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve stayed two hours past your time already, while we were gobbling our way through Phipps Plaza. Come on, I’ll run you home. I know the bus schedule is awful on weekends.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I think you ought to stay here. Miz Fowler’s awfully antsy today. Looks like she got some kind of motor goin’ cain’t nobody turn off. I wanted to give her one of them pills but Doc he say no, she had one last night. I don’t think Glynn ought to stay with her by herself.”
I sighed. “Well, then, Glynn will run you up to the bus stop. Thanks, Ina. I don’t say it enough, but I don’t know what we’d do without you.”
“Me neither,” she said, showing her gold tooth in a smile. “And you need two more of me.”
“Where is Mommee now?”
“She up there takin’ all her clothes out of her closet and pilin’ ’em on the floor,” Ina said. “I figure let her, it might take some of the starch out of her, and I can put ’em back Monday. Don’t you go botherin’ with that.”
“I won’t.”
When they had gone I went upstairs and into Mommee’s room. Ina was right; the floor and the chairs and her bed and her chaise and her writing desk were all piled with teetering stacks of clothes. She had even piled clothes in her bathtub. She scuttled busily among the stacks, counting them and petting them and bending over to sniff them as if they were beds of flowers. She hummed to herself and kept up the ceaseless flow of sotto voce conversation she had these days with God knew who.
“What are you doing?” I said, smiling at her from the doorway.
“Getting ready to go to Europe.”
“Really? What fun. Who else is going?”
“Papa and Teddy and Big Pom and Lolly and Jasmine,” she said in a playful singsong. “But not Mama. Mama has to stay home.”
Her adored Papa was, of course, long dead, as were
her brother Teddy and her husband, Big Pom. Lolly and Jasmine had been favorite dolls.
“Well, you’re certainly taking a lot of clothes. Are you going to be gone long?”
“Till the end of time,” she said, and turned back to her task.
“You ready for your juice now?”
“No. I wouldn’t say no to an old-fashioned, though.”
She smiled slyly, and looked sideways at me.
“We’ll both have one before supper,” I said. To hell with Pom’s edict that liquor and her pills did not mix. She’d had no pills today, and the drink would make her sleepy.
“Pom too?”
“Pom’s at the clinic,” I said. “But maybe he’ll be home by then.”
“I want Pom.”
“Me, too,” I said, and closed her door softly and stood listening for a moment as the humming and murmuring began again. Then I put my head into Glynn’s room.
She was not there, but all the new clothes were laid carefully about her room, with the accessories that she planned to wear with them. I smiled. I felt somehow safe and soothed when Glynn showed interest in such normal teenage things as pretty new clothes. The careful groupings of clothes and shoes and bags and necklaces spoke of many good times ahead, lighthearted days and nights through which my lovely child would drift like a butterfly, float like a swan. I went downstairs with a lighter heart than I had had the entire day. She was in the kitchen drinking a cola and hanging up the telephone. It was not, I was happy to see, a Diet Coke.
“Is it okay if I go over to Vinings with Marcia and Jess?” she said. “There’s a movie we want to see. I’ll be home way before supper. Marcia’s driving.”
“Sure. Just call if you’re going to be late.”
“I will. Thanks, Mom. For the day and the clothes and everything.”
“It was entirely my pleasure,” I said.
She grabbed up her summer straw hobo bag and went out to wait for Marcia and the apparently restored Jessica by the mailbox. I got the portable intercom speaker that let me check on Mommee and went out onto the terrace by the still blue pool and stretched out on a chaise. I had a sheaf of bills with me, intending to go over them, but instead I laid them on the flagstones and put my head back and shaded my face with my arm and listened to the drone of the too early cicadas and the sulky wallow and slap of the river at its banks. The heat today was thick and wet and heavy, and unlike yesterday there was no wind. I meant to move into the shade of the umbrella table and tackle the bills, but instead I fell heavily asleep and dreamed a boring, long dream about taking a shower. It seemed endless, and did indeed last, I figured later, over two hours.
I heard the screams before I smelled the smoke.
I came floundering up out of my sweaty sleep, trying for a moment to work the screams into the dream of showering, but they would not fit, and even as I sat on the edge of the chaise shaking my head, I knew in a deeper part of me that they belonged outside me, upstairs in my house. I was halfway up the stairs before I realized that they were not Mommee’s screams, but Glynn’s. My heart dropped like a stone and I took a great gulp of air, and thick, sour smoke cut into my lungs. I could see it then, lying in white, roiling strata in the upstairs hallway, billowing from Glynn’s room. I stumbled, caught the banister, and hauled myself the rest of the way up, shouting my daughter’s name: “Glynn! Glynn!” At that moment the smoke detector came on.
“Mama!” came Glynn’s voice, muffled and high with fear. At the same time I heard the thin, henlike squawk that meant Mommee was alarmed, and she shot out of Glynn’s room and scuttled, head down, into her own room at the end of the hall. The door slammed shut behind her.
I followed the smoke and Glynn’s cries into and through her room and into her bathroom. It was so thick with smoke I could hardly see, but I made out her figure bending over the bathtub, flapping at the smoky white mess piled there with a towel. She had stopped screaming, but she was choking and coughing.
“Get out of here!” I screamed at her and began to cough, too. The thick smoke smelled and tasted of fabric.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her out of the bathroom and dashed back in and groped for her shower handle. I turned it and water sprayed down onto the burning cloth. It hissed and spat; the smoke turned gray and the smell became that of charred, wet cloth. I slammed the bathroom door and ran, eyes streaming, lungs bursting, out into the hallway. Glynn leaned against the wall, face in hands, sobbing.
“Go downstairs and wait on the patio,” I shouted. “And call the fire department from the kitchen on your way! I’ll get Mommee.”
“Let her burn,” my daughter shrilled in fury. “Let the old witch burn! Do you know what that is in there? That’s my new clothes! All of them! She put them in the bathtub and lit them with the fireplace starter! I came upstairs just as she was doing it!”
“Go!” I screamed, and she went.
It seemed to me that the smoke was already clearing, but I dashed to Mommee’s room. The door was locked. I pounded on it.
“Come out of there, Mommee,” I shouted. “The house is on fire! You’ve got to go downstairs!”
“I want Pom,” came the fretful wail. “I want Pom!”
“Well, he’s not here! Mommee, open this door now! You’ll burn to death if you don’t!”
“I’m going to tell Pom you yelled at me!”
“Get out here right now or there’ll be no more TV for a month!”
She opened the door a fraction and peeped around it, grinning.
“I made a big fire,” she said.
I grabbed her shoulders roughly and pulled her, whining and wriggling, down the stairs and outside onto the patio, where Glynn was talking urgently on the cellular phone.
“Watch her,” I said. “I think it’s going out, but I have to check. Are they on the way?”
“Yeah, they got the alarm before I called.”
I started into the house again and Mommee started for the river. Glynn sprang after her and jerked her back.
“You sit down and shut up,” she said coldly. “You’re lucky you aren’t ashes along with us and the whole house. I mean it. Don’t you move.”
Mommee began to wail. Glynn sat her smartly down on the chaise and stood behind her, holding her down by her shoulders. Glynn’s face was mottled white and red with out-rage, and tears still ran down her face.
The first fire truck came wailing in then.
The fire was out when they got upstairs, but they doused the bathroom and Glynn’s bedroom with water from their hoses anyway. The hoses were big as boa constrictors; the mess they left was incredible. The clothes were a sopping char, and the walls and mirrors of Glynn’s pretty bathroom were velvety with half-inch-thick soot. The bedroom was not too bad, smoke-wise, but the carpet and curtains and upholstered pieces were sodden. I thanked the firemen and they left and I stood in the doorway, mindless with relief and with anger at Mommee. Shock made my arms and legs weak.
Mommee streaked by me and into the bathroom, with Glynn in pounding pursuit. The old woman stumbled on a wet bath mat and I caught her just as she was about to tumble into the bathtub with her handiwork.
“Look at the fire! Look at the fire!” she crowed with glee, reaching down to pat the blackened mess. Wet soot came away and smeared her arms and hands and streaked her face and matted her hair. She peered sideways at me. She looked like a crazy toddler caught in its mischief—her eyes gleamed and her color was high—and she babbled and laughed and clapped her hands.
“I’m sorry, she got away from me,” Glynn gasped. Turning to Mommee, who was wriggling in my grasp, she shouted: “You like it? Is it fun? You like what you did to my new clothes?”
“Fun!” Mommee shrieked. “I had fun!”
“You old bitch! I hate you!” Glynn screamed into Mommee’s face and burst into tears again, then turned and ran downstairs.
Mommee began to cry too, grizzling and whining like a child. She looked up at me out of the corner of her eye, a
nd dropped her lashes, and turned the crying up a notch. She could always get around Pom this way.
“Come on,” I said angrily. “You can damned well stay in your room while I try to clean this mess up. And you can cry till this time tomorrow, as far as I’m concerned. Pom isn’t here to soothe your butt now.”
I dragged her, kicking and yelling, out of Glynn’s bathroom and down the hall and locked her in her room. She began to kick the door and howl in earnest. I knew that she would go on doing both until hoarseness made her stop. I did not care. I went downstairs, found Glynn in the kitchen sobbing, and hugged her hard.
“We’ll replace the clothes, of course,” I said. “And I promise you we’ll do something about Mommee. This is way, way too much.”
“Daddy won’t let us,” she hiccuped.
“Don’t bet on it,” I said. “Why don’t you call Marcia or Jess and see if you can spend the night over there tonight? I’m going to have to dry your room out before I can clean it.”
“Can I? I don’t think I can go up there again right now.”
“Of course you can. Go on and call and I’ll take a swipe or two at the bathroom. It may not be as bad as it looks.”
“I could help.”
“You can help later. This time’s on me.”
I got some sponges and detergent and buckets and a mop and went back upstairs. Mommee howled on and on; the kicks showed no signs of abating. I ignored them and took a deep breath and went into Glynn’s bathroom.
It was as bad as it looked and worse. I knew that we would have to have professional cleaners, the sort that dealt with fire and water damage. The oily smoke and soot clung to everything, invaded every crevice in the tile. I mopped up a little of the standing water and wiped off a few surfaces, but managed only to smear myself with soot and my shorts and shirt with thick black goo. Wiping off the mirror, I looked in. I looked like an aborigine, black-faced and white-eyed, with wild coppery hair.
I was sitting mindlessly on the floor with my back against the bathtub when Pom came thudding up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
“God in heaven, what happened?” he shouted. “The alarm people called the clinic and said there was a fire; is anyone hurt? What’s the matter with Mommee? Are you all right? Was Glynn here?”
Fault Lines Page 9
