How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  “This way.” Mrs. Harris stood back and pointed down into the dark on the right. “All the way back.”

  The hallway smelled like dust and cigarettes and naphthalene. We passed a series of shadowy rooms full of boxes, with old tennis rackets and school uniforms piled on the beds. There were bookshelves and dead plants and mirrors reflecting the light that leaked from Central Park West around the drapes.

  “This is where you live?” Joan said.

  “I don’t live here; I live with you. The Novaks like my work, honey. They invited me to stay so I could be closer to the theater. But I only live when I’m with you all.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Watch your mouth. And sit down.”

  We passed a little kitchen and stopped at a room with the blinds up and the surfaces mostly cleared. There was a table and a desk looking out over the park.

  “This place is creepy.” Joan sat down so hard the chair jerked back and scraped the floor.

  “It reminds me of home,” Mrs. Harris said. “Did you see those rooms down the hall? Full of empty husks, full of ghosts. Doesn’t it remind you of Jensen Road?”

  “So, you don’t want to have the same name as us?”

  “I use Jensen for the theater. It’s the name I grew up with. It feels right.”

  I just kept quiet and worked on being invisible.

  “The same name as your brother, you mean?”

  I didn’t know what she was talking about at the time. Joan didn’t tell me about the notebook or the dead uncle until everything was over.

  “What are you . . . ? Who talked to you about that?” Mrs. Harris looked like someone had taken the life right out of her, like there were big sad oceans in her eyes.

  “So, what, you thought I would never find out? You think that’s okay?”

  Joan wasn’t trying to be mean. She was just feeling around trying to find out where everything was. She was just trying to pull the blinders off.

  Mrs. Harris said, “Daisy, do you like sugar in your coffee?”

  I just nodded. I didn’t want to add a single breath to that situation. I wanted to go out the window, scale down the wall of the building, and run away into the park.

  She put coffees in front of us and got out a box of cookies.

  “Okay, honey, what do you want to know?” She turned the desk chair around and sat facing us.

  “Seriously?! Where do I start? Why the hell is everyone lying all the time?”

  “No one’s lying, Joan. What did anyone lie about?”

  “Fucking everything!”

  “I said, watch your language. Not talking about something that happened before you were born isn’t the same as lying. Your gramps has suffered a lot of grief. I guess we started by not wanting to upset him, and then it just became a no-go subject.”

  “That’s a cop-out. What about you? You don’t talk about anything. Why don’t you live at home?”

  “I do live at home. I just stay here for work. And I did talk, to your father.” She went quiet for a minute. “I used to talk to your father about it all the time, when Arthur was a baby.”

  “You talk to Andre, too. Why not me?”

  “You’re not understanding. The minute I saw Arthur I was terrified. I could just see him falling and crashing and breaking apart. I was afraid to hold him, even.”

  “Jesus!” Joan stood up. “Get over it. People need you.”

  “I know that. And I’m doing what I can about it. Being myself is part of it, honey. One day you’ll see.”

  “No, I will not. I have no interest in seeing.” Joan got up and turned toward the doorway. “You can fuck off.”

  I started to follow her, then turned around in the hall. Mrs. Harris didn’t even get up. She just put down her coffee and looked out the window. The way she stared made me think of Joan. The two of them are bigger inside than other people.

  By the time I caught up with Joan, the elevator man was already sliding back the folding door of his cage. He pulled the lever and looked at the wall. The weights rose and we dropped to the lobby. Downstairs, we crossed the street and stood on a bench to climb over the wall into the park. There were bag people everywhere. It seemed like somebody was living in every hollow under the trees. We found an empty spot though, on a slope under some sycamores. The ground was freezing. We could see the tops of people’s heads and the taxis going by.

  I’d never been to the city without my mom before. The people made me dizzy. Not because there were so many of them, exactly. It was because every single one had a story. They all had voices and histories and pain, sparking over the surface of Manhattan in a pattern so complex no one could read it. I was thinking how every time they crossed over or into each other, a whole new set of futures was born.

  It was like the phone lines. It occurred to me they must be more complicated in Manhattan than anywhere on earth. I thought about the old movies where the exchanges still had names. “Murray Hill three-two-nine,” a lady with marcelled hair would say, and another lady with a cheaper dress and a Brooklyn accent would unplug a wire and plug it in somewhere else. My mother told me my grandmother had that job. She worked in a big exchange wearing roller skates.

  “Let’s go to the museum,” Joan said.

  She jumped over the wall and down off the bench and headed downtown before I’d even stood up.

  I just sat there for a minute, caught in a sea of voices and multifrequency signals, crackling through wires underneath and above me. Every one of them was carrying a conversation as inaccurate and painful as the one I’d just seen. The world was made of strangled voices and tears and blue sparks.

  We walked in and stood under the murals, looking up at the T. rex. The main thing I remember now is the musty darkness. The light was just like in those bedrooms at the Novaks’ apartment. The Museum of Natural History goes on forever, chock-full of the suspended dead. Leopards stuffed with straw and skins flattened all over the walls. The whole place is cold and shadowy and full of marble eyes.

  Joan wanted to see some jellyfish that were made by glassblowers in Massachusetts. They were pinned up on boards, sparkling against black velvet. It was the only place in the whole museum that seemed to have enough light. The only place where I was pretty sure I wasn’t breathing in the skin cells of dead animals.

  Joan walked all the way around the room once fast, and then started again slower.

  “I hate them,” she said.

  I was bent over a Portuguese man-of-war. “No, look! They got all the details.”

  They’d even tried to make movement in wavy glass.

  “I am looking. You can see they weigh a hundred times more than real jellyfish. If you dropped one of them in the ocean it’d sink straight to the bottom.”

  “I think they’re graceful.”

  “They made it all, except the most important thing.”

  Joan was looking for the motion, the resistance, the watery breath that shaped them.

  “They look all correct, but it’s a trick.”

  She was right, of course. They had the wrong weight, the wrong gravity, no motion, no cell division, no change.

  “Everything is dead, Daisy.”

  “Okay, you had a weird day. It’ll be better tomorrow.”

  “No, I mean, everything is frozen. Stopped. Like all those jars of pickled things upstairs. Time isn’t right in here.”

  “I thought you’d love it here. You’re always cutting up dead stuff.”

  “I never want to do this. I was wrong. I’ve been wrong the whole time. I want to look at stuff that’s alive.”

  “Cool. It’ll be so much less gross for your friends.”

  “I don’t give a shit what my mother does anymore.”

  “Okay. Maybe you’re just pissed off at her right now?”

  “Actually, no. I just don’t care.”

  It was dark by the time we got back to Penn Station. We came down the stairs in the middle of that sea of commuters in suits, all taller than u
s. “Baaa-aah,” we said to their backs. Nobody even turned to look.

  We couldn’t find a seat, so we stood at the end of the smoking car, flashing through Woodlawn and Forest Hills and into the tangle of tracks outside Jamaica.

  “They have dead people, you know.”

  “What?”

  “In that museum, they have dead people. They don’t put them on display anymore. They keep them in the basement. Arthur told me.”

  “Jesus! Isn’t that illegal?”

  “They’re not white people, Daisy.”

  I looked over at Joan, straining like a hot air balloon with one of the strings cut free. Someone had thrown some weight off, tilted her sideways and lightened her. She was breaking loose, from Jensen Road and childhood and the laws of gravity. I couldn’t see the whole thing yet, but it was beginning. I felt it.

  Daisy

  IT WAS JUST before Christmas the night Robbie came home with his hand bandaged up and his neck covered in purple fingerprints. I was in my mother’s bathroom when I heard the front door slam.

  She wasn’t there on the bed behind me, sleeping. She wasn’t downstairs making artichoke quiche. Her bedroom was starting to smell like dust, but the lights around the mirror were still warm and yellow. They still made whoever stood in them glow like a movie goddess. The thing was, we weren’t in a movie. Not even my mother. Nothing was going to tie up neatly and make perfect sense after an hour and a half.

  “Daisy!” Robbie’s voice sounded hoarse but it didn’t really register. Why would it?

  I was thinking about doing something with that circuit that lit up the mirror. It had to be pretty complicated, because if you unscrewed one bulb the others stayed lit. What kind of things could you put in there? Fans and pinwheels and different colored lights and maybe the speakers from phone receivers.

  “Daisy! Need to talk to you.”

  I looked down into the front hallway and saw the blood on his shirt before I saw the bandages. I could see his nerves singing and twitching too, but it turned out he wasn’t high. Or anyway that wasn’t the reason he was humming like a LILCO wire.

  You couldn’t live with Robbie unless you learned not to panic too quick. Whatever it was might get better or it might get worse, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with how you reacted to him. Mainly I was thinking, God damn it, Joan’s coming over. Not now, Robbie.

  “Come in here,” he said, and went through the living room doorway.

  By the time I got down there he was pouring double shots of Jameson into our grandfather’s Waterford glasses. Whatever it was, he thought it was big. I noticed he wasn’t breathing all the way.

  “Sit down.” He was hurt bad. When he saw me staring he said, “For real, you shoulda seen the other guy.”

  “Robbie, we need to go to the emergency room.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I got seen to already.”

  “By a doctor?”

  “Sort of. Listen, Daisy. I’m gonna have to do something a little dangerous. If I don’t come back, you need to be careful. I’m pretty sure no one’ll bother you, but if you don’t see me just watch out.”

  “Robbie, I think you probably need to calm down. Who’d you get in a fight with?”

  “You’re gonna have to take some of this on, Daisy.” He waved his hand around at the house.

  “What? I’m doing more stuff than you, Robbie. Who do you think raked the leaves? Who do you think keeps putting stuff in the dishwasher?”

  “You know what? Before you came I was the golden boy. When I was little Dad used to look at me like now that I was in the world, he could stand up straight and feel no pain. Later, he started staying away, and Mom kind of went to sleep and stopped taking care of her hair.”

  “I’m sorry, Robbie. But none of that is our fault.”

  “When you came, it cheered us all up for a while, even her. By the time you could walk everybody could see you were smarter than me. Weedy, but smart as fuck. Mom said it wasn’t just your yellow head that made her call you Daisy. It was your weedy sweetness, she said.”

  He put a hand out toward me. “I just always wanted them to look at me again the way they did before you were born. But I love you though, man. I want you to be okay.”

  I looked at the rug and then out the window, because I couldn’t stop myself thinking, You’re just making excuses for why you’re a fuckup. It isn’t their fault, and it definitely isn’t mine. Get a grip. If I opened my mouth, that was what would come out, and I didn’t want it to.

  I picked up the glass. “What happened today, Robbie?”

  “Mike Johnson was disrespecting Dad.”

  “Who’s Mike Johnson?”

  “I guess I was so mad my body was moving faster than my brain. By the time I even noticed what I was doing, there was blood everywhere. I had one hand around his throat and I was hammering him with the other one until his eye socket cracked.”

  He held up his bandaged hand and said, “That’s how this happened. I might have used a piece of the chair, too. I don’t remember. I stood up and went out to my car, and no one even tried to stop me.”

  “Jesus, Robbie!”

  “Dad’s in jail because he’s a soldier. Mike Johnson shouldn’t have been disrespecting him.”

  “This isn’t an Al Pacino movie, Robbie. Dad’s not a soldier. He’s an accountant.”

  “Okay, see?” He was pulling on a clean T-shirt. Moving his arm made him wince. “Everybody always protects you, Daisy. That’s gotta stop now. I’m sorry man; I love you as much as they do, but it’s time to step up.”

  “I stepped up, trust me. I’ve done plenty. You just need to calm down.”

  “We need more cash. I’m gonna have to do some drastic shit, and it might not work.”

  “No, Robbie, you don’t have to do anything. You could just get a job.”

  “That wouldn’t be fast enough. It wouldn’t be enough money. You’re gonna have to grow up a little, man.”

  He said it like he was equipped for survival and I wasn’t. Like he had the skills to even walk down the road without falling down and breaking something. And he believed himself too.

  “Mom could come back anytime; you just gotta hold down the fort. I’m leaving you the checkbook.”

  “Robbie, you can’t leave.”

  It wasn’t me I was worried about. Robbie could barely tie his own shoes without hitting himself in the face or swallowing poison. How was he gonna survive whatever crazy crap he was planning?

  “Don’t spend too much. If this doesn’t work, there might not be more for a while.”

  Robbie went into the garage and came back with the big crescent wrench. I looked down at my glass and realized it was empty, except for the syrupy liquid that clung to the sides. I’d never drunk whiskey before. It tasted like vinegar and dead leaves at the back of my throat.

  He actually hugged me before he went out the door and got in his car. In the driveway he said, “I should be back in the morning, but if I’m not you can totally do this, man. You’re smarter than all three of us put together.”

  He had to reach over and shut the car door with his right hand. The window was rolled down even though it was cold. I opened my mouth and nothing but condensed breath came out.

  I tried to yell but I was trapped in a vacuum. No medium for sound, no air in my throat, and my ribs collapsing under the pressure differential. I wanted to grab at him and scream for him to stay, but I couldn’t move.

  Finally, I shouted something useless like, “Please don’t, Robbie.” He was already hyped up and crazy and bleeding, and he was going for more. He was half-dead already, and he thought he was on a roll.

  Did I love Robbie? I don’t know. I just wanted my world to stop tearing apart. I love him now. He was my brother.

  Robbie’s instinct for self-preservation was just missing. Even before he started trying to fry his own brain and get himself mangled and crushed, he got his kicks from doing crazy shit other kids wouldn’t do. My first memory of
Robbie is him standing out on a branch over the harbor while another bunch of kids stood around shouting. I was maybe three. He jumped into the water and it was only three feet deep. One of his ankles twisted on the bottom and swelled up. Dad was home, and Robbie sat around the living room smiling with his foot up for a week.

  Later he climbed the water tower, rode his bike down the steps and right out onto the curve of Jensen Road, raced his car without a seat belt, and started dealing speed in the Lagoon. The shape of Jensen Road was how Robbie saw the universe. He was always riding a curve.

  I watched him pull into the Narragansett and sit there for a while, then pull out again. As soon as his taillights disappeared, I started counting the minutes until Joan got to me. I watched until all the lights in the Harrises’ house went out. I wanted her to come in my front door and shove my arm and explain why I didn’t need to be scared after all. I wanted us to stay up all night telling each other everything, behind the attic window where nothing could touch us.

  None of that happened because she never showed up that night. The next time I saw her she was sixteen, walking up the road wrapped inside a whole new world.

  Joan

  WHEN TERESA CALLED, I was standing at my bedroom window with my mother’s notebook, looking at the water rising and the light stretching out sideways through the cold atmosphere. The tiled roof of the abandoned house was showing through the branches, and there were a few scraps of cloud sitting on the harbor.

  My mother had written in the notebook about the day she met my dad, and then some other things after. About her college friends and how she was only studying to be a nurse because her parents wanted her to. How she had to do whatever they wanted now, because of the dead brother.

  I jumped when Andre opened my door and said, “Phone.”

  There was coffee in the kitchen, so I poured some and pulled the telephone through the storm door. The heat rose out of my cup into the air. The weatherman had said we’d get the first snow before morning. I had to dangle the receiver over the back railing to let the cord untwist. A little tinny version of Teresa’s voice came out of the mouthpiece, circling over the harbor.