How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

“Oh, you drive a stick,” she said. “Nice!”

  We drove the turnpike to Hicksville, stopping at every light. For a while I tried to make conversation, but Arthur wasn’t saying much, and Teresa was busy trying to get him to. No one was paying attention to me. The only people out were truckers and kids cruising. All the nice suburbanites were tucked in at home, pretending people like us three didn’t exist.

  Teresa lived in an apartment building behind Hicksville station. It was a hot night and there were people outside with radios, eating ices. Blondie was competing with Maria Bethânia on two different radios, except I didn’t know it was Maria Bethânia until Mrs. Maia told me later. There are all kinds of music in the air of Long Island, traveling the radio waves right through us, and we don’t even feel it.

  When she got out of the car, Teresa leaned in the back window to say goodbye.

  “Thanks for helping me,” she said. She looked at me like she knew what I thought and I was wrong about it, but she didn’t care. It was just the thing that happened and she’d gone with it, but she would have gone with whatever else, too.

  “Now I’ll help you,” she said. “Don’t give up your friend unless you really have to. Hang on to that shit. You never know when you’ll need it, right?”

  “If you were my friend, I definitely would.” We both laughed together then.

  Someone shouted something I didn’t understand down from the balcony. Teresa raised a hand and stood up. She said thank you to Arthur and went up the outside stairs.

  I figured I’d never see her again.

  We took the LIE back. Arthur waited until we were pulling up the ramp before he said, “You gonna explain that?”

  “She works at the Lagoon.”

  “Well, yeah, I got that.”

  “Are you judging the working people, Arthur Harris? I’ll tell your sociology professor.”

  “I’m not judging. But I’m not romanticizing, either.”

  “For your information she’s not a dancer, Mr. Morality.”

  “I’m not moralizing. Work is work. Everybody is alienated. For women, it’s from their own bodies.”

  “Don’t start with your commie shit. She was hanging out with Robbie McNamara. I wanted to get her out of there.”

  “Joan, you can’t rescue every fuck-up you meet. All you’ll do is get yourself in trouble.”

  “How do you know she’s a fuck-up? You are moralizing, you hypocrite. I like Teresa. I just thought I should let her know what Robbie’s like. Something’s going on with him, and Daisy won’t talk to me about it.”

  “When Mom says you should make some friends besides Daisy, I don’t think this is what she has in mind.”

  “If Mom wants to tell me what to do, she should try being around more.”

  “She has work.”

  “What, all night long? She doesn’t work in the city, Arthur. She lives there.”

  “She does not. The theater is just there. She’s doing important things, Joan.”

  I lay down in the back seat then, exhausted. My brain couldn’t contain another pointless conversation. There was nowhere honest to turn anymore. Nowhere clean.

  The Expressway is made of cement slabs, not asphalt. Every few yards there’s a seam where they meet and the wheels clomp over it. Ta dunk, ta dunk, ta dunk, all the way to the Highbone exit. When I was little, my dad’s friend Howard Earle told me that was the sound of horses’ hooves. That was what people meant when they said horsepower. That’s Howard’s version of funny.

  I guess I fell asleep, because when Arthur pulled onto Meadowlark Road I nearly slid off the back seat.

  “Arthur, does Dad talk to you?”

  “What?”

  I sat up and put my chin over the front seat.

  “Does Dad talk to you?”

  “Yeah. He talks to you, too.”

  “No, I mean talk to you. Is he sad? Is she breaking his heart?”

  He didn’t take his eyes off the road.

  “What are you trying to say, Joan?”

  “I’m saying it’s gotta hurt, Arthur. Being left like that.”

  “Girl, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Can’t she just come back? When are things gonna go back to normal?”

  “You need to stop making assumptions and pay attention. Mom hasn’t left.”

  “Are you serious right now?! I am the only one paying any kind of attention. Everyone else is pretending nothing is happening.”

  “What, you think having a mother with a job is the worst thing that ever happened to anyone? That’s a pretty suburban outlook.”

  “It’s not a job, Arthur. It’s a whole life. She hardly even lives with us anymore. Why can’t everyone stop pretending she does?”

  “Enough, now.”

  And that was it. The wall of silence my family was always building together. The ten-ton weight of nothing. The cement sneakers they put on me so I’d sink into their silence and never be heard from again. I stared into the other cars and wondered what conversations were going on inside them. How much truth were all those average people telling each other?

  We pulled up at the light on 25A, and Robbie McNamara turned the corner in front of us. Andre was in his passenger seat.

  “Hey, look!”

  “You should come out to one of Charshee McIntyre’s classes with me one day. She breaks it down. You should meet Professor Von Winbush. You’d like him. He’s a science guy, but cool.”

  “Whatever, Arthur. Why is Andre in Robbie’s car?”

  He squinted at Robbie’s rear window and shrugged. “I didn’t see him. Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure! They hang out now, or what?”

  Robbie’s car disappeared around the corner onto Main Street and Arthur went the back way to Jensen Road. Andre was home when we got there. He said Robbie saw him in Huntington and offered him a ride home.

  “Robbie wasn’t in Huntington.” I narrowed my eyes and tried to see inside him. “He was in the park. I was there!”

  “What is your problem, Joan? Why are you interrogating me about the neighbors?” He looked at me like I was the one lying.

  “I hate all of you.”

  I went up to the top of our outside stairs and looked across the road. There was no light in the McNamaras’ attic window, but that didn’t mean Daisy wasn’t up there. He might be looking down at me right then, wanting to know where I’d been with Arthur. Why I’d gone without him. What we were all saying at my house and how we felt. He’d be hanging on for whatever word we were going to say next. Watching my every move and trying to wish himself back into my life.

  Daisy took his chance a couple days later when Arthur brought me with him out to his campus at Westbury. I don’t know how, but he convinced Arthur to take him, too.

  We drove down the LIE into Nassau while I tried to untangle all the silences around me. Even that car was full of lies. Full of Daisy not saying what was happening with Robbie, and Arthur pretending my parents were just fine.

  “Daisy,” Arthur said like nothing was happening, “what is this book you want?”

  “The Bell System Technical Journal. It probably won’t be there, but it’s worth checking. They cleaned it out of the college libraries before the Greenstar trial, even. People say we should check everywhere, though. In case they missed one.”

  “And you’re gonna use it to be grand master of the phone system, eh?”

  I stopped listening. The light poles went by at exact intervals and cars slid up and down the ramps, in and out of the right lane. There was a cop by exit 22. I felt Arthur freeze up before I even noticed him, but he already had somebody pulled over. Arthur breathed out and went back to talking to Daisy about phones and corporations.

  “Even theft is ideological,” he said. “They want you to believe there’s no difference between stealing from people and stealing from corporations. What corporations do to us isn’t called stealing, even though that’s what it is.”

  “Yeah,�
� Daisy said.

  When Arthur expounds on the meaning of the world and what we should all do about it, Daisy’s eyes glaze right over. You can see him drinking it up. If he told Daisy to jump off a cliff he would. Most of what Arthur says is true, so you can’t even be mad at him for saying it.

  When we got to the campus he parked in a space under some trees near Core West. There was a ring-necked pheasant crossing the lawn. When a guy came around the building on a lawn mower, the bird made a panicked bubbling sound and a pathetic attempt at flight. We all climbed out and Arthur shut the driver’s-side door.

  “Listen.” He rested one hand on the roof of the car. “Shirley doesn’t know who Mom is.”

  “What are you, stupid? You said Shirley wants to be an actress. Tell her who Mom is and she’ll definitely go out with you.”

  Arthur just looked at me, drumming his fingers on the top of the car. He was nervous.

  “Shit! You really like her!”

  “Will you stop it, Joan? Just go find what Daisy wants in the library and then come say hi to everybody.”

  “You’re the one who told me love was a myth created to make us go to work and then go home and make more baby workers. I feel betrayed, man.”

  “Well, I think I also told you if you’re not open to changing your mind you might as well lie down and die. College is supposed to transform your thinking. It’s supposed to change you.”

  “Into what? A railroad mechanic with no dreams and a selfish wife? A sucker with a steady paycheck?”

  “Ease up, now. I didn’t say anything about love, anyway. I’ll tell her. I just want to know why a person’s hanging out with me.”

  Meanwhile, Daisy said nothing. He just stood there with his door open, looking like someone coldcocked him and he forgot to fall down. I guess the idea of Arthur and women hadn’t occurred to him.

  Arthur went into the commons, and I went with Daisy to check for his weird engineering books in the library. He found one, but all he did was pull it out and put it back again. When we came out, Arthur was sitting with a bunch of his friends on some couches in a little room off the commons.

  “This”—Arthur waved an arm around—“is pretty much the Black Student Union leadership.” I gave a little wave and he said, “My little sister and her friend.” Then he rattled off everyone else’s names. One was Shirley, and I liked her, even though I didn’t want to. A little girly, but she looked smart. And she looked at Arthur like he mattered.

  Daisy was heavily contemplating a poster that said Egypt is part of Africa and trying to look like the whole situation wasn’t freaking him out. I walked over behind him and said in his ear, “Now you know how I feel every day in Highbone.” At least he didn’t pretend not to know what I meant.

  “I know you’re mad at me,” he said, “but come to the phone booth?”

  There was one out on the wall under the balcony. Daisy made us wait until the clock was at exactly three p.m., then dialed zero and a long-distance number.

  “I’d like to reverse the charges,” he said to the operator. “My name is Daisy T. J. Westbury.”

  The charges got refused, and he hung up and smiled at me.

  “You’re happy someone rejected your call?”

  “I was telling him the Technical Journal is still here.”

  “Telling who?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “He didn’t even take your call.”

  “He’s not supposed to. The name is the message.”

  “You’re weird. Where even is that number?”

  “Ohio. Listen, I can use the phone to find your mother in the city if you let me.”

  So Daisy knows a bunch of weirdos like himself, all over the country. If you can call that knowing people. They use fake names, communicate by refusing each other’s calls, and draw maps of the phone system. I guess Daisy started one step ahead—he already had a goofy nickname.

  As far as flesh-and-blood friends, though, I was pretty much it. Trying to find where my mother stayed was his way of trying to make up with me. I got that.

  We went back down the Expressway with the falling sun glaring out of the rearview mirror while Daisy and Arthur had another one of their “Yes, Grasshopper” conversations. Daisy was sucking in Arthur’s every word like it was the key to understanding the universe. I looked at the clouds and thought about dinner and maybe going out in the boat. I stared into the other cars and wondered again what conversations were going on inside them. I hoped they mattered more than ours and knew they didn’t.

  We streaked past something dead lying on the shoulder, but it was behind us before I had time to see what it was. Highways mess with your perspective. When you look ahead, they tunnel inward. The same in the rearview. It’s like you could dissolve into some place between the past and the future and get lost there.

  Joan

  NOBODY IN HIGHBONE wanted us for neighbors, of course. Nobody but Daisy. Daisy wanted us for everything. The first time I met him, I was practicing holding my breath in the water. He yanked me out. We were maybe six, and I thought I could learn to live underwater if I practiced. I wanted to travel to someplace without mothers or brothers, someplace where I wasn’t always the last person to get told things. I was so little, I still thought you could change the rules. I didn’t understand reality at all. People call that innocence, but if you ask me, it’s dangerous. Why do people feed kids all that fairy-tale crap about mermaids and learning to fly?

  Anyway, I was on a mission, and Daisy interrupted me and made me choke. I think when I came up I hit him. Then I looked at him and the first thing I thought of was jellyfish. He’s one of those ridiculously blond people who look like they’re made of glass and packed with snow. The blue veins showed through his skin and all his limbs were too skinny and too long, like trailing things that might make sense if he were underwater or in a different kind of atmosphere. Somewhere with less gravity and more grace. His body was built for some other element instead of for air like the rest of us.

  Interesting. You wouldn’t want to be him, but he was ornamental. When I say ornamental, I mean it in a Museum of Natural History way, not a Metropolitan Museum of Art way. Freaky, but freakily beautiful. But, you know, I think octopuses are beautiful, so . . .

  Daisy McNamara was one of the weird things I found by the edge of the water. As far as I was concerned, he belonged under the trees, or out on the harbor bottom. Like a piece of bladder wrack or a misplaced crab. After that first day, he’d be down there whenever I went outside, without a shirt and leaves all in his hair, toes in the mud or scrambling in the branches of our silver beech tree. I didn’t really distinguish him from the raccoons and the occasional heron. He was interesting like moon snails are interesting.

  Mostly we played in the woods and the water, every day. By the time we were eight, we’d already snuck into the abandoned house and dissected a cherrystone clam together, and he knew enough not to bother me when I was practicing holding my breath in the water. Me and him and the tide, that was the whole shape of the world, and I liked it that way. We told each other what we were scared of and then pretended we weren’t. Even then, I was better at that than he was.

  So I knew him already, when he showed up one Saturday morning in nothing but his Fruit of the Looms, knocked on the kitchen door, and asked Gramps if he could eat breakfast with us. We were maybe nine.

  Gramps stood aside and waved Daisy through the door, then he said, “Andre, get the boy a shirt.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. Jensen. I’m not cold.”

  “That’s as may be, but it’s polite to wear a shirt when you’re eating at someone else’s table.”

  I wondered if Gramps’d ever met Mrs. McNamara. Her table was always weirdly perfect, but she might be sitting at it wearing just about anything.

  Daisy sat there like a naked secret at our breakfast table, making me feel like a bunch of leaves had blown in the door, like something had been tracked in and I should grab a broom to sweep it o
ut again. I just wanted to get him away from my family and back outside where he belonged.

  Then he looked up and saw Arthur for the first time, drinking coffee with his chair tilted back. Daisy looked at the two back legs of that chair, gauging the balance and the chances of falling over. You could see the picture of potential disaster pass through his mind, busted head and blood and rushing to the emergency room. You could see him absorbing the fact that Arthur didn’t seem worried about of any of that. Daisy got down to idolizing him right away.

  “Arthur, put your feet down,” Gramps said, and went back to making pancakes.

  “Hi, I’m Daisy.” He smiled at Arthur and put on the shirt Andre handed him. It was from the laundry basket, but Gramps didn’t notice.

  “All right, little brother?” Arthur was fourteen. He was already working hard on his cool.

  Daisy turned around to Andre and said, “All right, brother?”

  Andre just rolled his eyes.

  Daisy ate five pancakes and drank a big glass of orange juice. When he was done, his plate was so full of artificial maple syrup I couldn’t lift it without slopping some on the table. The feeling of my two lives grinding together was making me flinch, like fingernails on a blackboard. The sound of it was so loud I couldn’t hear myself think.

  “Can we go out and play?” I only put one hand with crossed fingers behind my back because Andre had told me it was bad luck to cross both.

  “You and Daisy clear the table, then you can go.”

  Gramps wasn’t even looking at the glasses he was putting in the dish drainer. He just felt his way with his left hand while he stared across at Carter’s Bay, humming to himself.

  I took Daisy down the stairs and out the bottom door, straight onto the mud.

  “How old is your brother?” Daisy said.

  I was looking for clam holes.

  “Arthur? He’s fourteen. They made a big deal on his first teenage birthday.”

  “My brother’s seventeen. Yours seems older.” I could hear the rose-colored glasses in Daisy’s voice.

  “Everyone’s older than us. That doesn’t mean they’re better.”

  “Yeah, but Arthur seems cool.”