How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  I was never going to keep Daisy out of my house now.

  “Can we go back inside?” See.

  “I’m looking for clams. It’s important. When you dig down where the holes are, you never get to the clams. Are they running away? Are they digging deeper? Did Gramps lie to me about the holes being for clams to breathe?”

  “He doesn’t seem like a liar.”

  “I’m getting evidence. You don’t go on what people say. Science is evidence. Don’t you remember what Mrs. Gandy said when we looked in the microscope?”

  After that first breakfast, Daisy started hanging around the edges of our family as much as he could get away with. I told him everything, right from the beginning, because he wouldn’t settle for anything less. He asked me where my grandmother was and how long we’d been in the house. He asked why my dad slept in the morning and went to work in the afternoon. He asked me how I combed my hair. He was clueless and pushy, but he wasn’t trying to be mean.

  Maybe something snapped between us the night I met Teresa. I don’t know. He was being an idiot and I was mad, but neither of us was trying to hurt the other one. Keep that in mind as we go along. Remind yourself: Joan and Daisy were never nasty. Whatever the world threw at them, they weren’t asking for it.

  Daisy

  THE FIRST TIME I met Joan I grabbed on to her shirt, and I guess I didn’t let go for at least ten years. One summer morning when we were six, I went down through the trees and she was lying facedown in the water, perfectly still. I thought she was dead. The water was up to my knees, but we were only little so maybe it wasn’t that deep.

  Joan had on overall shorts and a T-shirt that said something I couldn’t read yet. Anyway, the front of the T-shirt wasn’t showing because Joan was facedown. At first I thought she was looking for something on the bottom, beach glass or green crabs or shiny quarters, but after a few minutes, I started to feel like she’d been still for too long. I don’t know how long it was; time is weird when you’re six.

  Her arms were floating down by her sides. Little circles of her skin and wrinkles of her clothing were dry above the surface, but the water was sinking into the rest of her, making her heavier by the second. Little bubbles of light and shadow hit the bottom all around the shape of her arms and legs. She was so still even the minnows were fooled. They were slipping along her arms and nibbling at her. I thought, they must tickle. She should giggle and come up sputtering. I looked to see if her back was rising and falling with breath, but it wasn’t and I panicked. Okay that doesn’t make sense, but I was six and the main thing I knew about water was that it drowned people.

  I didn’t know her yet, so I didn’t know she practiced. I didn’t know the purple spots in her vision and the crushing in her chest were what she was after. I didn’t know that she could hold her breath for superhero amounts of time. I didn’t know she could walk through water and come up the other side, still burning. I didn’t know she was Joan.

  So I ran down and grabbed the back of her overalls and started pulling as hard as I could. Well, that made her gasp, probably scared the crap out of her, so then she sucked in water and really started drowning. I put my arm around her neck and pulled her head up and she coughed and spit up a load of water and bile all over my arm.

  “Get off me!”

  “You were drowning. I had to get you out.”

  “I wasn’t drowning, you stupid. I was going somewhere.”

  When she said that, all kinds of possibilities flashed in front of me, like maybe the layers of the world weren’t as separate as I thought they were. Maybe she knew the way between them. I decided that first day that Joan had special powers denied to the rest of us. Which is kind of true, but they don’t always help her. I only figured that out just this year.

  So, that is the series of things I felt when I first met Joan: curiosity, then worry, then panic, my stomach falling away and my lungs bunching up like a fist, my heart trying to push up my throat. Then wonder. Then awe. That was pretty much the recipe for hanging out with Joan. For ten years I woke up every morning ready for all that. Now I wake up every day looking at a strange ceiling and feeling the hole it left inside me. I’m just like Robbie. Jonesing.

  She turned into a woman at some point, but I’m pretty sure I’m still not a man. I don’t feel like one, even now. I don’t feel like anything without Joan or the music from Arthur’s window or the ring of lights around the harbor, showing me the shape of my world in the dark.

  Daisy

  THE MORNING AFTER we went to Westbury with Arthur, I went around to Joan’s window and chucked some pebbles at the glass. I stood behind a maple tree, so Mr. Jensen wouldn’t see me if he came out onto the porch. While I was waiting, the first red leaf spiraled down and landed at my feet. The water was lapping in to lift up all the little boats, including ours.

  I heard Joan’s feet hit the floor in her room and threw another pebble, in case she was planning to ignore me. She pushed the window up and stuck her head out, then emptied a glass of water onto the leaves.

  “Hey.”

  She looked at me and pulled her head in. I heard the water glass clunk onto the table before she reappeared.

  “I know you’re still mad at me.”

  “Her name was Teresa, since you never asked.”

  “Whose name?”

  “The girl your brother was trying to pimp out in the park.”

  “He was not, Joan. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “He’s dangerous, Daisy.”

  She was wrong. Robbie was never dangerous to anybody but himself. He tried to be, but he couldn’t manage it.

  “Arthur gave her a ride home. She’s nice, Daisy. I liked her.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re mad at me. You never like anybody.”

  “I like her. You would, too. Your brother should leave her alone.”

  “Get your backpack and come outside. We’re gonna take care of this thing with your mother.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. I’ve been following you around my whole life. It’s your turn. Let’s go.”

  She gave me the finger.

  “Bring your mom’s number. The one you call her at in the city.”

  She shut the window and I waited. And yes, I held my breath and prayed.

  After ten minutes Joan came out the kitchen door and sat down on the steps to put her sneakers on. We took a bus over to Deer Park Avenue so we could catch another one down to Babylon. Joan wouldn’t hitchhike.

  “Tell me again why we’re going all the way to Babylon just to make a phone call?” Joan said.

  “You can’t do this shit in your own house, Joan.”

  “You need a pay phone? There’s one behind the Narragansett. We could be inside eating popcorn in front of All My Children right now.”

  “So, every time I make an illegal phone call you want me to do it behind the Narragansett? Even Highbone cops would figure that one out eventually. Anyway, you’ve never watched All My Children in your life.”

  “I was trying to make a point. There’s nothing good on in the daytime.”

  “Exactly. Which is why we’re having this adventure.”

  She rolled her eyes and I smiled to myself. Every once in a while, I won the argument.

  I had my blue box in my backpack, but I didn’t tell her about it. We stopped at every light between the north shore of Long Island and the south. By the time we got to Babylon I felt like puking.

  We stood by the inventory house behind Babylon station and I tried to tell Joan about the computer inside. Robbie used to have a girlfriend who worked there. I went in one time and saw the big stately tape drives, turning behind the glass wall.

  “People made a brain, Joan. A big electric brain. People made it and it thinks. It’s like that Richard Brautigan poem we read in Mr. Driscoll’s class, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.’”

  “It’s capitalism, not poetry, Daisy. Don’t get sucked in by that crap.”

>   “Nothing is like poetry until we make poetry out of it.”

  “Pretty sure that right there is what Arthur calls sophistry.”

  Then we were starving, so we went into a diner for fries and lemon Cokes. Joan is the one who taught me about lemon Cokes, in the Harpoon when we were maybe ten. This was one of those diners with little juke boxes at the table. We spent a quarter on “Come Together” and “Cherry Bomb,” then paid and went outside. I got out my blue box, which was actually red.

  “That’s what you were making?”

  “Yes. I told you. It’s an audio oscillator, basically.”

  “Oh, an audio oscillator. Of course. What is it for, McNamara?”

  “You think I don’t listen? It’s a blue box. It talks to the phones.”

  “It’s red, Daisy. Are you color-blind? That is cool.”

  “I’m not color-blind! Blue box is just what it’s called. Phones talk to each other with pitch-perfect beeps. Guys used to just whistle or play flutes into the phone, but then AT&T started using multifrequency, two beeps at a time. More, sometimes. You need the box so you can mimic them and make the phones do stuff. The first guy who made one, it was blue.”

  “See? That’s ridiculous. Why can’t people just use accurate labels?”

  “Did you bring the phone number?”

  “Yes. Are you gonna tell me why?”

  “Stand behind me so no one can see.”

  “Okay, Serpico.”

  “What’s their name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The people your mother stays with?”

  “I can’t remember. I don’t really care.”

  “Think! I need a name.”

  I opened a long-distance line and called a Missouri inward operator, then channeled the voice of the guy who fixes our boiler. I asked for the New York City test board.

  “Test board?” I waved my free hand at Joan, telling her to hurry up. “Checking some lines. Need a reverse directory on a Manhattan number.” When Joan heard my short-tempered repairman voice, she craned her head around and raised her eyebrows at me.

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece and glared at her. “See, I can do shit,” I whispered.

  “Weird, pointless shit.”

  “Name!”

  The operator asked why I hadn’t called some other tech-board something and I braved it out. “Because I’m calling you. It’s raining out here, honey. You mind hurrying up?”

  Joan opened her mouth, but I put a finger on her lips and gave her a Magic Marker. She wrote NOVAK on the window of the phone booth.

  The operator put me through to some kind of internal directory assistance, and that was it.

  “She’s at 331 Central Park West. Apartment 5B.”

  I don’t think Joan believed it would work. She looked scared and sad, like she didn’t really want the information after all.

  I looked out the phone booth at the line of cars waiting for the light, stretching past the diner with their windows down and their AM radios barking out into the road. Our eyes slid away from each other in different directions, and I opened the door onto the smell of exhaust and hot tar.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  “We really did come to Babylon just to make a phone call.”

  “Yes. You’re welcome. Now, when are we going to the city?”

  But the days kept getting shorter and Joan kept avoiding our trip to the city.

  I went out one Saturday in late September and the smell of mulch blew over me from between the trees. The sun was still shining but the world was starting to die. Soon everything would be sleeping—all the life would be buried under the dirt and the ice. The tide was out that morning, and little pockets of mist hung over the muddy harbor bottom.

  The quiet lady was wandering around with a hoe, using it to turn over little clods of mud. She’d bend over and peer down into the holes she made, looking for treasure. Usually she had a metal detector; maybe she’d run out of batteries.

  I waved at her and went over to the Narragansett to get two coffees, light with extra sugar. When I came back to the dock, the quiet lady smiled and held out her open palm. There was a rusty ball in it, bigger than a small marble and smaller than a big one. She pushed her hand at me and made an impatient sound with her breath so I’d take it from her. It was heavier than I thought it would be.

  Then she raised both her arms and made like she was sighting down a gun barrel.

  “Oh,” I said. “Musket ball.”

  She smiled and staggered back, clutching her chest and making choking noises.

  “I brought you some coffee.”

  But she kept playacting until I laughed. Then she smiled and walked over to the floating dock. It was sitting on the mud with just a puddle of water around it. We splashed over and sat on the edge, facing out toward the Sound.

  When we were halfway through our coffees, the sun cleared the trees and flooded down onto the glistening mud. I looked over at Joan’s window, still closed above her back stairs. I didn’t want to knock in case her Dad was sleeping. Mr. Harris doesn’t really like me. Mr. Jensen, Joan’s grandfather, does like me. I don’t know why.

  It was Mr. Harris who turned out to be right, of course. I’m the poison, the source of all the lies and the blindness. The violence leaked out of my life into hers and I couldn’t stop it. Every lie I told just made it worse. I was the thing weighing Joan down.

  At the time, though, I just thought, I hope Mr. Harris has work today. I can go get Joan as soon as he leaves. The quiet lady slapped my arm, so I must have said it out loud. We finished our coffee and I went through the woods to the bench on the Harrises’ stairs. There was a note. “I went to Hicksville. They think I’m with you. Don’t call me,” it said.

  Everything was different already. It wasn’t that Joan had changed and I didn’t know who she was anymore. It was that when she started walking away and leaving me notes like that, I didn’t who I was.

  When I went up my driveway, Robbie was on the ladder climbing up to the roof. My mother was standing below him in a trench coat and dark glasses, singing Peggy Lee.

  “Daisy,” she breathed out as soon as she saw me. Her voice was so soft I had to read her lips. They were pink, the exact color of the chiffon scarf she had over her hair.

  “Hey, Mom. What’s going on?”

  “Daisy, make him get down.”

  The pink was bad on her; she looked better in dark red. Anyway, the leaves were about to change, and soon the world would turn orange and yellow. And she was forty-six years old. Pink was the wrong color. She usually knew stuff like that.

  “What are you doing, Robbie?”

  He turned around to answer me, then slipped and grabbed the gutter. My mother hid her eyes with one hand and I saw her pink nail polish, the exact same color as the scarf and the lipstick.

  “It’s fall. I’m cleaning the gutters.”

  “Robbie, look around. The leaves are still on the trees.”

  “I’m doing it early. I’m staying on top of shit, Daisy.”

  If you didn’t know him, he would have looked the part. His arms were still strong and his voice carried down into the road, deep and loud enough to scare away the sparrows. Judging us both on looks alone, Robbie was the one you’d trust. The one you’d turn to for protection.

  “Daisy, make him get down.”

  She still had her hand over her eyes. One nail was ruined. She must have brushed it against something while it was still wet. When I was little, she never had a broken nail or a millimeter of brown hair along her scalp. Sometimes she stayed up all night, trying lipstick and touching up her roots, painting her nails and using Nair on her legs. In her bathroom there was one of those frames of round lightbulbs they put all around the mirrors in master bedrooms so housewives can feel like movie stars.

  She never wore burnt orange or candy pink. She wore fire-engine red every day and never left a crack for the world to work its way into. She blotted
it on tissues and left piles of red paper kisses in the garbage pail. Living with my mother was like having a movie theater in your own house. In my dreams, she materializes out of a beam of dusty light.

  Sometimes in those dreams she bends down and brings her face close to me. If she lifts up her sunglasses and I see into the gold circles at the middle of her eyes, I know don’t have to wake up. I can just sink through those eyes into the next dream without even trying.

  I looked away from the candy-pink smudge of her nail and went over to hold the ladder for Robbie.

  “You’re freaking Mom out, man. Maybe do this later, okay?”

  “I’m done, kid. It’s all taken care of. I checked and there’s nothing up here.”

  He fell the last couple feet but I caught him. He was so solid he nearly knocked me over. So full of gravity and strength. How did we come from the same mother?

  “That’s cool, Robbie. Maybe get some sleep now? Let’s go to the deli, Mom.”

  “I can’t go out like this, sweetie. Look at me.”

  She patted her hands over her scarf and then down her trench coat like she was trying to make sure nothing was falling away. No stuffing coming out of her.

  “You look great. Anyway, I’ll run in. We all need some breakfast. We could get egg sandwiches and take them to the beach.”

  She loves egg sandwiches. Loved, I guess. I don’t know.

  We both went to the deli and I kind of overdid it. I got egg sandwiches and bagels and orange juice and the paper. Two large coffees, light no sugar. They gave us a box.

  I opened the back door of the car and put it on the floor. “Beach, James.” I was trying to make her laugh.

  “I’m a little tired, honey.”

  “Please, Mom?” I got inside and shut the passenger door.

  Mom fell into the driver’s seat, then reached over and held a piece of my hair.

  “It’s turning brown,” she said.

  “Didn’t that happen to Robbie when he got older, too?”

  “You won’t be my Daisy anymore, without the yellow on top.”

  She smiled at me like saints smile in paintings. Like they love you but they’re keeping it inside. You can’t have it.