“Pussy.”
By the time we got comfortable, the wind was picking up. The tops of the trees were waving and tossing their branches against the sky. Daisy’s eyes were wide and far away, watching his world get churned up.
“Teresa’s nice,” I said.
“She works at the Lagoon.”
“Cleaning. So? What if she was a dancer? Who the hell are you, Jerry Falwell?”
“I’m just saying, your mom and dad don’t even like me. What are they gonna think of her?”
“You’d like her if you met her. Absolutely no bullshit about her. It’s almost scary.”
“Beatrice says people’s eyes are like diamonds. If you look at their eyes in the light, you can see the flaws. She said honest people’s eyes are as rare as perfect diamonds.”
“Beatrice isn’t real, Daisy.”
“Yes, she is!”
“You made a bunch of calls around the world and accidentally found some married lady in Italy who talks the exact same crap you do? In English?”
“Yes,” he said. “I guess that’s what a miracle feels like.” Then he looked out at the storm and smiled.
Before Beatrice, everything Daisy knew was inside the circle of that window. Sometimes he stayed up all night, looking out of it. He likes my microscope for the same reason he likes that window. Not because he can see what’s invisible, but because he can’t see himself while he’s looking through it. When you think about it, it makes sense that he’d make friends through the telephone, with people who couldn’t see him.
Later when I couldn’t picture where he was, I worried about what he’d do without the attic window. Without a frame for the world and a piece of glass to keep him separate from it. Right then, he put his hand up against the pane, millimeters from the hurricane, and looked like he was trying to breathe in the storm. I heard the front door slam.
“Is that your mom?”
“Maybe. Or it could be Robbie.”
I should have realized there was something wrong with his voice then, but my mother’s notebook was burning a hole in my backpack, distracting me. I hadn’t even looked at it yet. The whole world was pounding onto the window six inches from our heads. Gusts of wind slapping it and raindrops falling on the roof so hard they sounded like a thousand rocks a minute.
“Daisy, what kind of thing could happen and you would keep it a secret, even from me? Something bad or embarrassing or dangerous or what?”
“I don’t know, Joan. That’s a weird question. I’m gonna go down and make hot chocolate. Stay here and make sure the roof doesn’t blow off.”
As soon as his head disappeared down the stairs I took the notebook out, but it was too dark to read it. All I could make out were a few parallelograms. I ran my hands over the pages trying to imagine what kind of secrets were spilled out on them. Just before you get ahold of something, answers seem so possible. Like you’ll actually be able to fill in all the blanks and understand. You don’t realize how stupid that is until later, do you? While the words in that notebook were still unread, they held every answer I needed.
I looked up and thought about the light switch. Then I fished in my pockets for matches.
Just as I struck one I heard the crack and then the crash. I thought someone’s house had fallen down. I looked out and the glare nearly blinded me. An oak had split and dropped a branch onto the power line over Jensen Road. Daisy came running back empty-handed and pressed his face up to the dormer window. I sat back, but he grabbed my hand and pulled me up next to him. The power line was writhing around on the asphalt, sending out sprays of blue sparks. Daisy was mesmerized. It was even better than lightning.
When we were little, I used to think he was some sea creature that got lost or robbed of his gills and wound up trapped in the world of air. That night, when I watched his face bathed in the electric light from our power lines, I realized it wasn’t water he was made for. It was electricity. In Daisy’s perfect world, electricity wouldn’t be trapped in circuits; it would be free and everyone would breathe it. The air would crackle, and Daisy’s weird transparent arms would wave around, full of charge, looking for contact.
We must have stared at that power line for an hour. It kept snaking around, and the cold fire kept spitting out of it. Sometimes it caught the water and the raindrops lit up all around it.
I look back on myself in that dormer window and all I can think is how blind I was. It wasn’t that what I knew about Daisy wasn’t true, just that each thing was hiding something else, something worse and deeper that had nothing to do with me. If I couldn’t see anything that was happening to him, how was I supposed to rescue him like the helpful sidekick from the movies?
I didn’t save anybody. I’ll tell you that up front.
The electricity went off about three in the morning. The cable in the road flopped and went still, then disappeared into the dark. Then the world was nothing but sound, nothing but wind and pounding water and Daisy’s hand on the window.
We had to light a fire in the fireplace to warm up the hot chocolate. Daisy got out a flashlight he’d made out of a Palmolive liquid bottle and the bulb from a brake light, but it kept dying if you squeezed it the wrong way. We lit candles and went down the stairs with our shoulders against the wall so we wouldn’t fall. We burned the sides of the saucepan and the hot chocolate came out lumpy, but we put it in a thermos and took it back up to the attic anyway.
When Daisy went down to the bathroom I pulled out the notebook again and tried to make the flashlight work so I could look at my mother’s handwriting under the flickering bulb. I didn’t even read the words. I just kept studying the loops and curls to see how she made her Js and whether her Rs were always the same. I thought about changing my name to Joan Jensen. Then I thought about changing it to something that had nothing to do with my family at all, just scrubbing them and their weird silences out of my life completely. If I moved to a city somewhere, I could make up a life and change it every time I met someone new. Hiding the notebook from Daisy was my first lie, but I could feel the attraction right away.
When I heard Daisy coming back up the stairs, I panicked and shoved the notebook behind the insulation. I tried to act normal while I thought about how I was going to get it back out again without him knowing.
Why should I tell him? I was Daisy’s friend, which is why his brother came to my house looking for him and ended up dripping blood on my life. But when he needed someone to talk to, he picked Beatrice instead of me. She was too far away to get caught up in his mess. I was right in the middle of it, and he left me blind.
Daisy lit a lighter and then a candle. He held his hand in front the flame so I could see the red glow of the blood inside him. Then we took turns holding our hands over the candle while the other one counted. That was the first time Daisy ever won that game. I guess I was tired of being tough. Anyway, neither of us was tough enough for what came next.
Let me tell you what happened that night. A chaos of wind and water and power came in off the ocean and ripped the surface off our world. Stripped us bare. That’s not even a metaphor. After that night everything was raw, wide-open, and exposed to the pitiless sky.
School was closed for two days while LILCO fixed the power lines and they cleared the trees off the roads. The morning after the hurricane, we went out to look at all the things that had been picked up and tossed all over Highbone. Roof tiles and clapboards and pieces of birch bark. Sail covers and hubcaps and tar paper. The tide was in, so we walked around the harbor over to the Narragansett, but it was closed. There was kelp up on the road, which is weird because it’s deep-water stuff and doesn’t even grow in the harbor.
We were examining our beech tree for damage when I heard my mother honking a horn up on the road. Well, I guess it wasn’t her honking because there was some other guy driving with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. When I got to the top of the steps she had the back window rolled down and her head laid down on her arms.
“Joan! Gi
mme some sugar,” she said.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi? That’s it? Did the house blow away? Please say the house blew away. Morgan and Marian and I risked life and limb getting out here to check on you. Give me more than ‘hi,’ girl.”
“Hello? Are you okay? Did you see any dead people on the highway?”
“Where is everybody?”
“Hi, Mrs. Harris.” Daisy was still three steps down, looking over the edge of the road and wondering if he should keep coming up. My mother always stopped Daisy at the threshold. If she’d been around more, we might never have been friends.
“Joan! I said, where is everybody?” She ignored Daisy like he hadn’t even spoken.
“They went to Howard Earle’s.”
She rolled her eyes. She thinks Howard is a philistine. “And left you here alone?”
“I was at Daisy’s.”
She gasped. Very theatrically. “You were—we’ll talk about that later.”
Then she pulled her head in and opened the door, jumped out, and stuck her head back in the car. “Come on, you two. My industrious young daughter will make us some coffee inside.”
She had on a skirt and about six necklaces. Her hair was in two braids and she had red boots. At first I thought the boots were cool, but when I looked closer, they weren’t.
In the kitchen, I sat with the lady who turned out to be Marian while Mom showed Morgan up to the attic.
“So, Joan, is it? You’re in high school? What’s your favorite subject?”
“Facts.”
That stopped the rest of whatever bullshit Marian was going to hand over, and I looked out the window while the water boiled. Daisy was trying to be useful, looking for a milk pitcher. I didn’t point to the right cabinet because I figured the longer it took him to find one the less time he’d have to spend figuring out what else to do.
After I put a cup in front of her, Marian came up with, “Facts are good, but what about feelings? People your age should read poetry. You’re the perfect age for poetry.”
“Just poke around up there, Morgan,” I could hear my mother yelling up from the bottom of the stairs. “You’ll find something good, I promise!”
“Poetry is a scam,” I said to Marian.
She gave up then.
Mom came back in and took over the coffee like I wasn’t all the way qualified. She put cinnamon in it.
“Morgan is writing a piece for us,” she said. “I’ve been telling him he needs to come out here and riffle our attic for material.”
“So you thought a hurricane would be a good time?”
“The phones are down. I was worried about you all.” Even Marian didn’t seem convinced by that.
By the time Mom put Morgan and Marian back in the car, they were carrying a whole box of irreplaceable things that belonged to my family. The tide was on its way back out.
My mother folded her arms on the car door and laid her head on them again.
“You two be careful. I’ll be back Wednesday for rehearsal.”
She stood watching their taillights.
“You’re staying?”
“Well, try not to sound so thrilled about it. Tell me who the hell thought it would be a good idea for you to be sleeping over a boy’s house? You’re fourteen, for Jesus’ sake.”
“Fifteen. And it’s not a boy; it’s Daisy.”
“Well, I’m sure even Daisy McNamara has working parts.”
In case you’re wondering whether my mother ever had “the talk” with me, that was it right there. Hope you didn’t blink and miss it.
“I’ll be speaking to Dad later. Let’s make some hot food for when the boys get back.” Now she was Susie Homemaker?
When she said “Dad” she meant Gramps. When she said “the boys” that included my dad. Like he was just one of the cumbersome children she had to cluck over half-heartedly every once in a while.
“I gotta go out, Mom.”
She yelled after me, but I ignored her. I found Daisy on Arthur’s bed turning the pages of The Stranger like he was reading it.
“Arthur said I could. He said I could read his books whenever I wanted.”
“I don’t care. Help me find an eel, come on.”
“I’m reading, Joan.”
“No, you’re not.”
“How’s your mom?”
“I don’t fucking know. Come on, I went over your house for the hurricane; now you have to help me find an eel.”
There wasn’t an eel, but there was a bicycle wheel, two different shoes, a young dogfish, and about nine tons of plastic garbage. We took the dogfish to the floating dock, and I went back in the house for my encyclopedia and my new scalpel. I’d oiled it, like the guy said.
“Look at the gills,” I said to Daisy.
You have to make the cut down the side, not in the stomach like you do when you’re cleaning a fish to eat.
“Why, Joan? Why would I want to look at the gills?”
He was rolling the bicycle wheel around the floating dock. It was so bent it wobbled and made wavy lines in the mud.
“See how many gills there are? That’s because dogfish are old.”
“Some of them must be babies.”
“Stop being stupid on purpose. This one is a baby. I mean old in evolutionary terms. Sharks are like roaches, man. They’ve been here forever.”
“They’re squidgy.” But he leaned over to look while I pulled one of the gills back with my new scalpel.
“Why are you cutting it open? Just hang it up and all the guts will fall out the mouth. Remember?”
We saw that once, me and Daisy. After Jaws came out, they used to get people to hang around the fishing tournaments by bringing in big sharks and hanging them up. No one was going to eat them or study them. They just killed them for crowd pleasers and hung them up until the guts fell out of their mouths. Go figure. The insides fall out because sharks have no bones to hold them together. Sharks have been around longer than bones.
When I draw my own anatomy book, the pictures will look like big a pink-and-gray mess you have to pick through. Because that’s what it’s actually like. Not all neat and color-coded. Death is wet and messy and confusing. It took me fifteen minutes to find the long, skinny lungs and lift them out. Daisy wouldn’t even look at the pipe that carries the water through between the sets of gills.
The dogfish’s skin was like sandpaper, and the pink inside of it was fading into no color at all. Even the sky over us seemed like it had been dredged up and then drained. The mud at the bottom of the harbor smelled terrible. I remember Daisy’s breath, sounding slow and damp and then getting faster when I opened up the shark and showed him the truth inside.
Daisy
AUNT REGINA MAKES braciola and manicotti. Every time I go out and come back, there’s some dead thing roasting in the oven. Beef joints and chickens and one time a whole octopus in a pot, I swear to God. I can never get away with taking my dinner up to my room; I have to sit at her table that is permanently set. I get up in the morning and everything is already there, the place mats and the ceramic salt and pepper shakers and the bowl of fake dahlias. She crochets covers for the spare toilet paper.
I eat it all and look in the mirror every day to see if my arms are filling out. She tickles me, counting my ribs like I’m five years old. “I’m breaking the bank, trying to put some meat on you,” she says.
I wonder if my mother grew up in a house like this, with plastic over the furniture and everyone endlessly cooking. Sometimes I shut my eyes on my square window with its view of all the other square windows and try to picture it. Frank Sinatra on the radio in a house somewhere in Astoria. My mother in bobby socks, trying to breathe.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what Beatrice had said, about housewives and hopelessness. She said the reason my mother was drifting away was lack of hope. My dad shipwrecked our family and left her stranded on the rocks. That’s why I called home and pretended to be someone else, so I could make her feel lik
e a rescue was coming. I was trying to help. I swear.
I went all the way to Greenport, on a day when the sky was one big cloud and the wind was relentless. It was one of those middle-of-the-day trains with hardly any people on it. I stood between the cars and did some math in my head: the population of Long Island divided by the number of calls I made a month. How many people could they rule out? How many calls did the average person make, daily? How many pay phones were there on the whole island? I should start going into Nassau, maybe Queens. I should have been going to other states, but even my family might notice that.
It was a few days before the hurricane, but the waves in Greenport were already huge. All the summer places were closed, and the sand from the dunes had blown onto the edges of the road.
I made the call from a boarded-up clam shack across from the beach. Sea gulls came screaming around me, thinking maybe French fries were coming back early. I had to wait half an hour for them to give up and go away.
Then there was the wind. I could hear it whistling through the receiver and up into my ears, so I took my jacket off and made a little tent over the phone. Then I could hardly see. I had to work the blue box by feel.
My mother’s voice went to Illinois and came back to me sounding higher and thinner than it really was. It made me wonder how different Beatrice would sound in person. How I sounded if you were sitting in a window in Italy.
“Hello? Hello!” my mother said. “I can hardly hear you.”
I had a handkerchief over the mouthpiece and I was doing an English accent. I don’t know why. I couldn’t think of anything else but truck driver, and that seemed too obvious. Too much like a movie about gangsters.
“He’ll be out soon, Mrs. McNamara.”
“What? Who is this?”
“Don’t you worry about your husband, ma’am. We’re taking care of it. He’ll be coming home soon.”
There was a long silence and then she took in a big, slow breath. When I heard her crying, I hung up.
I came out from under my jacket and the seagulls started screaming again. I used up nearly all my matches, trying to light a cigarette. The wind was forcing every breath of ocean air back down my throat. Finally, I went into the dunes and lay in a hollow. I was out of the wind there, but if I reached up I could put my hand in it. I looked up at the silhouettes of the birds against the sky, thinking I’d done something good. I’d made the world better. Thinking, Wait till I tell Joan.
How We Learned to Lie Page 11
