How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  I hung around after class to talk to Mr. Tomaszewski so I wouldn’t have to walk home with everyone else. I guess you could say I was avoiding Daisy.

  Mr. Tomaszewski was trying to convince me to do an independent study.

  “Okay, here’s what you do.” He was stuffing a pile of pop quizzes about cellular energy into his bag. “Go to the library and write me a report about Aristotle.”

  “What’s Aristotle have to do with biology?”

  “Go find out.” Subtle guy, Nick Tomaszewski.

  When I came out of the side doors of school, Officer Kemp was parked across the road. He turned off his engine and raised one hand at me without waving it. I looked at the reflection of the science wing in his rear window and buttoned my jacket.

  But Officer Kemp wasn’t the only reason I said yes when Mr. Tomaszewski invited me into his car. I let him drive me home because I knew he wasn’t going to give me the lecture about the value of education or the one about how I’d see things differently in ten years’ time. Not even the one about the value of truth and beauty. Science teachers don’t usually do that one. Anyway, at that point he seemed like the only person who would look me in the eye.

  “I told you, you should call me Nick,” he said, “at least while we’re in the car.” He laughed. “It saves a lot of time; my last name takes a while.”

  “It’d be weird, calling you Nick.” I shuddered a little, even. Not because it was creepy, because being in his car did something to my nervous system. The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck and I felt hollow inside.

  “Why is it weird, though?” He turned the engine over and looked at me. “Think about it. Isn’t that just a way to enforce hierarchy? I visited a school in the city where all the teachers went by their first names.”

  “Wow, can I go there?”

  “It costs five grand a year. Seems like only the rich can afford to be egalitarian.”

  “Yeah, because they’re already not.”

  He laughed. “Were you born like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “You see right through everything. That’s a valuable quality—you get that, right?”

  “Yeah, it means people don’t want to talk to you or tell you anything. It’s really great.”

  “Well, you’ve earned the right to call me Nick. Once you say it a few times, it’ll stop being weird.”

  He wasn’t that much older than me. Twenty-four, maybe, but I’m just guessing. He never told me. Nowhere near thirty, anyway. Not even ten years older than me, which is why it was so ridiculous for Daisy to freak out about the whole thing.

  “Mr. Tomaszewski’s a communist,” Daisy said later, like that was the same as serial killer.

  “Daisy, you don’t even think there’s anything wrong with being a communist. Say what you really mean.”

  “I mean it’s creepy, Joan. He’s old enough to be your . . . He’s a teacher. He has authority and shit. Also, socialist is what I said there wasn’t anything wrong with. Get it right.”

  “You only said that because Arthur said it. All your ideas are really Arthur’s ideas.”

  “What’s wrong with Arthur all of a sudden? What did he ever do to you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with Arthur. Except he’s not the one who’s supposed to be your best friend.”

  Inside Nick’s car there was no Daisy. No family. No bullshit. That’s what I thought, anyway. When I was around him it was like none of that had to exist at all.

  His car was French. He called it a deux chevaux. Two horses. When you sat in the front seat your legs were so close to the road you could practically feel it scraping by underneath you. The seats were made of thick foam. You could see it through the rips in the leather, because Mr. Tomaszewski’s car had clearly been lived in. Possibly fought in and slept in, and definitely partied in. Sometimes you could smell the weed.

  He had peace signs and anti-nuke stickers all over the dashboard, and there was always a load of flyers on the floor in back, shouting in big letters about railroad strikes and No Nukes demonstrations and strontium 90 in mother’s milk. He had a forked piece of deer antler hanging from the rearview.

  I had him drop me by the Narragansett, so no one would see us. I didn’t want to hear about it from my brothers, and Daisy was already mad at me for trying to be friends with Teresa. I stayed out on the mud until dinnertime, then went through the back and knocked on Andre’s door.

  Maybe Andre is the thing that changed the most last year. By New Year’s he had a fade and pipe-leg jeans and wouldn’t listen to anything that wasn’t an import. He had a job on Saturdays, stocking the bins at Nervous Records. He thought working at Nervous Records made him cool, and Nervous Records thought hiring Andre made them cool.

  “Enter.” Who says that when you knock on their door? Andre.

  He was stretched out on his bed with a sketchbook, wearing his Japanese house socks with the separate space for his big toe. He has long skinny legs anyway. The socks don’t help.

  “You look like a tree frog.”

  “Thanks. You look like a homeless person.” He shut his sketchbook and raised an eyebrow. “Anything else?”

  I glanced around and realized I hadn’t been in there in a while. There was a big poster of David Bowie on the back of the door, and his records took up practically a whole wall. Above his bed were all the black-and-white prints he’d made in the darkroom at school. Pictures of Gramps and Arthur and me and the quiet lady. There was even one of Robbie, getting out of his car.

  “Okay, so this is creepy.”

  “Creepy, how? You’re my family.”

  “Robbie McNamara is not your family, Andre.”

  “Yeah, but I love the way that jacket shines in the street light. If you use a long exposure it makes him look like he’s about to dematerialize, like on Star Trek.”

  Down in the corner, I noticed my mom. She was out on the floating dock at low tide, with her legs drawn up and the sun shining on the stretch of mud between her and the camera. It was recent; I could tell by her hair.

  I pointed. “She let you take that?”

  “Yeah, I asked her where she wanted to pose, and she said the floating dock.”

  “She actually posed for you?”

  “She said when she was my age she used to lie out there all day, reading.”

  If you didn’t know her and you looked at that picture, you’d never guess she had a husband and kids. She looked all the way inside her own self, like no one had ever been ripped painfully out of her.

  “She never tells me stuff like that.”

  “Maybe you don’t ask,” he said.

  “What is going on with Mom and Dad, Andre?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seriously? You too? She stays away for weeks at a time.”

  “She works in the city. What’s weird?”

  “They never even touch each other!”

  “How do you know that? Personally, I’m good without them making out in front of me. They’re fine. Have you heard the way other people’s parents talk to each other?”

  I opened Andre’s window and took one of his cigarettes off the night table, then lit it with a wooden match from his brass box. Andre is the kind of guy who keeps his matches in an antique box.

  “They’re not in love, Andre.” I dropped the match and watched the ember disappear into the dark.

  “How is that any of your business? Show some respect.”

  “Respect? They’re my parents.”

  He laughed, but not like it was funny. Someone made a splash out on the water but I couldn’t see who, or what they were doing.

  “They’re supposed to be here for us, Andre. If it’s all so perfectly fine, why won’t anybody admit it’s even happening?”

  “There’s a difference between being private and denying something. You have a house and clothes and food, and you can go to college. You can’t really accuse them of slacking. They both work their asses off. For us.”
<
br />   I stared straight into the lamp on Andre’s bedside table and then out into the dark at the image it left burned into my eyes.

  “Do girls at school like you, Andre?”

  He was quiet for so long I turned back around and blinked at him. He was smirking at me.

  “I didn’t ask if you liked them. I asked if they liked you.”

  “Sometimes, I guess. Ruth Carter likes me, but as a friend, I think. I hope.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It isn’t hard to figure out, Joan. Mostly, nobody in school looks at me like I exist. Except Mrs. Farrow.”

  “That’s bleak.”

  “Yep. At least you have Daisy.”

  “Not really. Not anymore. He’s in love with some Italian lady he talks to on the phone.”

  “Seriously? Don’t you think that’s a little far-fetched?”

  “No. He can do all kinds of stuff with phones for free.”

  “I’m telling you, he probably invented her to make you jealous.”

  “What were you really doing in Robbie’s car, Andre? Taking his picture?”

  “I already told you, Joan. Get a life and stop spying on people.”

  I like Andre, but me and Arthur have always been closer. I’m looking back and thinking maybe even that is because of Daisy. Daisy barnacled himself onto Arthur when we were about nine, and I was always with Daisy.

  I don’t know. Andre is just one of those kids who seems like he got pasted into the wrong family. At least I always thought so, until that night when I realized he’d been hanging out doing arty shit with my mom the whole time. I guess he belongs in the city, too, with his 501 button-flies and his 2 Tone Records.

  He loves me, though. They all love me, like Daisy keeps saying. Well, good for them. Turns out, once I step outside my own front door, all that love is worth exactly nothing.

  Joan

  WHENEVER MY MOTHER was there, all the questions just drained out of me. Then as soon as she was gone, they rushed back up into my chest and started suffocating me. Meanwhile, she hung out with Andre posing for pictures and communing about truth and beauty or whatever people like them think is important. Me? I needed some solid evidence.

  I spent a whole day going through stuff in the attic. That’s where our family keeps all the pieces that don’t fit. Our attic is just like everything else in our family. It’s full of more gaps than facts. You read letters you just know your grandparents would never write, but that’s their signature at the bottom. You look at pictures that can’t possibly be your parents. They look so happy, so relaxed. Something a little bit badass glinting in their eyes, even. Then the dust makes you cough and it’s too hot up there and you go back downstairs into the silence. At least down there I know what to expect from people. Pretty much nothing.

  One Thursday after school I went into my dad’s room. He leaves for work at two thirty, and Gramps doesn’t get back from playing chess with Mr. Johnson until it’s time to cook dinner. I grabbed a dust rag and a broom so I’d look industrious if anyone caught me.

  My father’s room faces the woods. The maples and beeches were turning red and gold outside his window that day, but it was still open. He always leaves it open a crack, even in the winter. Like my mother is a feral cat and maybe she’ll jump back in and curl up on the bed if he pretends he isn’t looking.

  There is a picture of my mother on the dresser in there. She has some kind of fifties hairdo and gold earrings on. The photographer had her turn three-quarters then look around at the camera so it’s like you just said something interesting and she’s caught by it. Listening and looking at the camera like whoever is behind it matters. She has beautiful eyebrows.

  Every time I look at that picture, I feel like a failure. I’ll never be that interesting or that beautiful. I don’t even want to be.

  The frame is older than the picture. Everything in our house is old. I don’t mean shabby. I mean passed-down objects and secret histories. Everything whispers at you, telling you all the time that you only know half the story. I wish my ancestors had left a catalog with detailed descriptions, so you’d understand exactly what kind of happiness or pain you were lifting when you moved something to dust the coffee table.

  First, I went for the shoeboxes in the back of the closet. My father thinks shoes should always stay perfect and last your whole life. He keeps his wrapped in tissue paper. He was fashionable once, in about 1955, and he’s sticking to it. Turned out there was nothing in the shoeboxes but shoes.

  What was I looking for? I don’t know. Maybe I thought she was really from another family. I’d find a document with her picture and some other person’s name and I could wave it at her and call her bluff. Maybe I thought they were divorced already and I’d find the decree. Then Andre and Arthur would finally have to believe something was wrong. Maybe I was going a little crazy. It’s possible.

  I gave up on the closet and went to Dad’s desk. There it was: her geometry notebook. I could have missed it, except I looked twice because it was such a weird thing to save, in among the birth certificates and Gramps’s discharge papers. So I flipped through and saw the pages in the back, filled with words. The date, just the year, was added later with a different pen. The clock in the living room struck five, and I took the notebook out of the room with me. I stuffed it in my backpack, thinking I’d bring it in and stash it in my locker at school.

  Then the hurricane happened, and school got cancelled.

  Daisy called while we were sitting in front of the six-o’clock news, waiting for the weather report. The preview said the hurricane was a category three, out to sea off Hatteras Island.

  “You have to come over for it.”

  “I can’t, Daisy. They’re not gonna let me stay at your house overnight, not even during a hurricane.”

  I’d pulled the phone around onto the back stairs and shut the door on the cord.

  “Think of something.”

  “Why?”

  “What if a tree falls on your house, Joan?”

  “What if a tree falls on your house?”

  “You’re farther down.”

  “So, you’re saying I should leave and let the tree fall on Dad and Gramps and my brothers?”

  “No, I’m saying the tide is gonna come way up and they should all leave. You should come here. We can watch from the attic.”

  “You’re the one that loves storms. I just want to take a sleeping pill and wake up when it’s over.”

  “I love thunderstorms. There’s not gonna be any lightning in a hurricane.”

  “Bummer for you. Also, incidentally, people might get killed.”

  “What happens to everything in the water, anyway? Where do the fish go?”

  “They go way out and then dive. They probably felt it coming last week. Humans are complete morons compared to octopuses. Even clams have more common sense.”

  “I gotta go tape up the windows. Think up an excuse, Joan. Come over.”

  When I went back in the living room, Andre said, “It’s gonna hit Jones Beach tomorrow at lunchtime. We staying here or what, Gramps?”

  In the morning, a fireman came while Dad was sleeping and told Gramps we should leave. Later, they were arguing about whether to go to the church because there wasn’t enough room at Howard Earle’s apartment. It turned out to be easy for me to say I’d just go up the hill and stay with Daisy and his mom.

  Andre spent a while freaking out about his records and moving them all up into the attic in case it flooded. Then he decided the roof might leak and put them down in Arthur’s room. In the end he took the British imports with him. Gramps gave him a twelve-record limit and he practically hyperventilated.

  Arthur just brought The Prison Notebooks and a box of Marlboros. Panic was beneath him. He was more worried about getting bored. Gramps packed all the food into the picnic basket. Hamper is maybe a better word; our picnic basket is the size of Rockefeller Center. He made Andre walk me up to Daisy’s before they left. Mom’s notebook
was in my backpack with volume five of the Encyclopedia of Animal Life.

  Andre was supposed to check with Mrs. McNamara when he dropped me off, but Daisy said she was still sleeping. He was in the kitchen making macaroni salad with the radio on, some newscaster circulating panic and pretending it was helpful. I turned it off.

  “People lived through hurricanes before they had radios.”

  “Cool. Let’s pretend there’s no electricity and no news. We have to look at the sky and smell the air to figure out what’s going to happen.”

  “What would you do without electricity, Daisy?”

  I kept my backpack on and looked out at the dark sky. There wasn’t any wind yet. The drops pattering onto the window were like any old rain. The ocean was taking a big breath and getting ready to slam into us, but you wouldn’t have known it.

  We brought the macaroni salad and two sleeping bags up into the dormer window. Daisy’s attic was the opposite of mine. It’s just as old, but completely empty. There was no history up there, nothing to weigh us down.

  “The little stuff will die,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “You asked what happens to everything that lives in the water. The big stuff goes way out and dives. That’s how the fishermen used to know a big storm was coming. But a lot of the little stuff dies.”

  “Don’t cry, Joanie.”

  “Fuck off. There’s gonna be a lot of cool stuff out on the mud tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, like pieces of your house.”

  “My house has been through at least twenty hurricanes, Daisy. Think about it. Gramps said there was one in 1938 that was so bad a bunch of people died. Tomorrow, there’ll be dead stuff that doesn’t normally come this far in. I’m hoping for an eel. I really want to look inside an eel. Maybe another spider crab, or even a horseshoe crab this time.”

  “Horseshoe crabs are gross, Joan.”

  “Shut up. They’re amazing. They have the best defense mechanism ever. Hide everything but the weapon, then stab first and ask questions later.”

  “How is that cool? It’s insane thinking of something that looks like that being vicious. Does it even have a brain? There’s a reason why Hollywood aliens look like the underneath of horseshoe crabs. I still have nightmares about the freaking spider crab.”