How We Learned to Lie

by Meredith Miller

  “I just want to know why. I’m not saying I’m going to do anything.”

  “You’re gonna have to tell someone eventually, Daisy. You can’t live alone in that house forever. You’re fifteen.”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you some time. On one condition.”

  If any of it came out, they’d take me away from Jensen Road. When it came out. Because it would. Arthur was giving me some time, but that was all. The only way I wasn’t going to get pulled away from Joan was if I ran away myself.

  He turned to face me so I had to look him in the eye. “One condition.”

  “What?”

  “Leave Joan out of it. Got it?”

  “Yeah, but she won’t stop asking questions. You know what she’s like.”

  “Say you got it.”

  “Okay, I got it.”

  The quiet lady was walking toward us.

  “Hi, Ms. Goldin,” Arthur said. “Everything okay?”

  She’d been there my whole life, but I’d never heard anybody call her by name before. She pointed at the place where the sun had just disappeared and then back at the floating dock, then she nodded and pointed at the sky again. We looked up at the blue creeping across from the west, washing away the light as it came.

  “Mom’s fine,” Arthur said. “I’ll tell her you said hello.”

  She nodded again, then turned around and walked toward Carter’s Bay.

  “The quiet lady knows your mom?”

  “Sure. They both grew up here.”

  I had a feeling then, like we were just a place on a turning wheel inside the tides. Me and Joan, Mrs. Harris and the quiet lady and whoever came before them and before them. All playing in the water and coming together and hurting each other and falling away. The ice jerked up and the sky heaved out at me. I put a hand down on the step so I wouldn’t tumble down.

  “Joan goes to see her, you know.”

  “Ms. Goldin? She’s all right. Just sad.”

  “You ever think there’s something that soaks into us down here? Sometimes I feel like this place is just made out of sadness.”

  “Don’t know why they call you Daisy. You’re not exactly a ray of sunshine.”

  “Anyway, I didn’t mean the quiet lady. I meant your mom. Me and Joan went to see her in the city. They had a fight.”

  “Mom’s cool. They’ll work it out.”

  Joan always gave me shit about Arthur. She said I hero-worshipped him. Well, yeah, I did. That’s because Arthur is a hero. You’ll see.

  He handed me a Marlboro and took out a lighter. I pretended I was fine while we blew smoke up into the sky. Andre opened the window and we could hear Boney M. coming from his room. First “Rivers of Babylon” came out, then Andre’s arms and his head.

  Arthur looked up. “Boney M.? Really?”

  “Don’t let Gramps see you smoking with Daisy. You’ll get the look.”

  Arthur just raised one hand and waved it without looking up.

  “I gotta go in anyway,” I said. “See you later, Arthur.”

  “Remind me what you’re not gonna do?”

  “Not gonna say anything to Joan.”

  I got to my feet and stepped on the edge of the ice. I thought about the inside of Joan’s dogfish, then I thought about Robbie, about drowning and burning and being out of water with gills.

  If he was still alive when the fire started, he would have felt the burning air pressing in, getting heavier and emptier. With the windows rolled up, he would have felt something hungry, sucking all the oxygen from around him. He would have realized, right in that last second, the meaning of time.

  I went into my house and I could tell Joan was in the attic. She didn’t know it, but by then we were the only two people who were ever in the house. I guess I pretended to myself we had a home together, like I always assumed we would when I was little. Sometimes when she was in the attic I went downstairs and fell asleep listening to the sound of her up there.

  I tried reading some Steinbeck, because I was eating and studying and washing the dishes like a perfect teenager. Like maybe if I did everything right, no one would come and take me away.

  Then Joan stopped pacing. I knew all her kinds of silence, so I held my breath and listened. She was lost in something up there. When I came up the attic stairs she didn’t even hear me. It was February, and the light at five o’clock was orange. It striped in through the window exactly parallel to the attic floor and across to the eaves on the other side. I used to think about the way the sunlight traveled to that window, all the way from space and then through Queens and Nassau to get to us. Joan was sitting in that light now, with a marble notebook on her lap and her eyes full of water. There was a tear on her cheek shining like a red star. I held my breath.

  I’d seen Joan nearly drown herself, and break her collarbone falling out of a tree. I’d seen her when we both got beat up in sixth grade for being freaks, when she stepped on a nail in the abandoned house and had to go to the emergency room for a tetanus shot. I’d seen her almost every time her mother drove away. Never once had I seen her with water in her eyes.

  It was like all the ice and the rest of everything solid in the world was melting too.

  “Joan, what is that?”

  She jumped.

  “Nothing.” She closed the notebook and turned around like she was going to put it away behind her, then didn’t. She just shoved it under her drawn-up knees.

  “It’s not nothing. If you don’t want to tell me, just say so.”

  She looked up and I saw myself come into focus in her eyes. Then she turned back to the window, let out a breath, and said to the trees outside, “It’s my mother’s.”

  I went and sat down next to her, but not too close. I was afraid she’d close up again. I didn’t really deserve the truth from her and I knew it. How many things was I hiding from her? I couldn’t even count them at that point.

  She was about to tell me something. Something she hadn’t told Teresa. Or Mr. Tomaszewski. She was about to tell me. I felt like I was crossing a tightrope back to where we used to be.

  “Your mother’s what?” I said it with hardly any breath at all, like the connection between us was made of spun sugar or dust and even the force of a whisper might break it apart.

  “I don’t know. It’s like a diary but it’s not. It’s just a few pages.”

  “It’s freaking you out?”

  “She had a brother, Daisy. He was my uncle. I mean, he wasn’t, because he died, but he would have been. Nobody told me. My dad knows, right? Remember, she said she talked to him. And Gramps, of course. Gramps had a son, Daisy. Does Arthur know? Why do they all lie to me?”

  “Maybe it’s too sad for them to talk about.”

  “That’s not a reason. Is that why she won’t stay here? I’ve been thinking about it for months. One of us lives in his room, Daisy. Which one?”

  I ran through the Harrises’ house in my mind, thinking about the old pictures on all the dressers and the mantel. They must have put all the dead uncle’s pictures away.

  “Also, she had a friend named Deborah who wanted her to run away.”

  “Where’d you get the notebook?”

  “I found it in my dad’s room. Right before the hurricane.”

  “You’ve had it all winter.”

  There was so much more she wasn’t saying, but of course I didn’t know it then. Even now, I couldn’t exactly tell you how it all fit together. The thing is, it didn’t fit together. It was the mess that made us. You couldn’t measure it or draw a diagram. It was like the difference between the picture of dogfish anatomy and the thing Joan opened up on the dock after the hurricane. Slippery and confusing and full of blood.

  “It sounds crazy,” she said.

  “This is me, Joan. You’re allowed to sound crazy.”

  “I don’t want to be crazy; I just want to be a person. Why are everyone’s horrible secrets always falling out of the corners onto my fucking head? It
isn’t fair.”

  I took a little breath and reached over. She turned her head away, but I didn’t pull back. I used one finger to wipe away a tear. It left a streak on her face and salt on my fingertip. I wanted to put it in my mouth but I didn’t. Whatever else happens for the rest of our lives, I thought, one time I had Joan’s tears on my skin.

  Joan

  THERE WAS ANOTHER storm before I finally made up my mind to go into the city again. I had to wait two days for the LIRR to start running. When I came up out of the subway at Ninety-Sixth Street, there was still snow drifted on the stairs, but it was raining. I sat on a bench on Central Park West and watched the door until she came out. The rain made dirty slush for two hours while I smoked seven cigarettes. There were trees over me, but they weren’t much protection.

  Our eyes met before she had time to pretend not to see me. She stepped out the door, crossed between the lights, stood in front of me with an umbrella, and said, “Now what?”

  “Fine, thanks. How have you been?”

  “You know I love to see you, so stop it. You came all the way here by yourself; I’m just asking why.”

  “To see you. Do I need a better reason?”

  “You look like a drowned rat. Come on, you need soup.”

  She turned uptown and starting walking so fast I had to skip every third step to keep up with her. The sidewalk was salted ice with rain on top. When we got to 112th Street she plowed around the corner and into a diner. She let the door swing back in my face.

  “Why are you wearing Andre’s old coat? We bought you a perfectly nice one of your own.”

  “That coat makes me look like I’m on my way to church every time I go out.”

  She made me take off the duffle coat and sit in a booth, then asked for two coffees. The white guy behind the counter called her by name, pronounced it right and everything.

  “Sit here and get that in you. I need to call the theater and say I’ll be late.”

  She got on the phone in the vestibule and I watched her turn into someone else while she talked. She waved a hand around, making gestures I’d never seen before. When she got back, she ordered soup.

  “Please, God, tell me you’re not gonna have a baby,” she said when the waitress walked away.

  I took the notebook out of the bag and put it on the table in front of her.

  “Jesus.” She laid one hand down on it. “You see what this family is like? Nothing’s private. Not even your thoughts.”

  “Well, not if you write ’em down and leave them in the desk in a room you don’t even live in.”

  “Stop it. I do live there and you know it. Anyway, it’s just a story, Joan. I was just practicing.”

  “It says about how you met Dad.”

  “Yes, well, we were different then.”

  She didn’t look at me when she said it. She looked out at the water running off the edge of the sidewalk, over at the streetlight and into the traffic. We could have been strangers, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me this time.

  “Did you . . . I mean, was he different than other people?”

  She shook her head and shrugged, like that wasn’t really the right question. “The thing is you’re just so grateful. I don’t have to tell you what it’s like growing up in Highbone. You spend your life trying to blend into whatever is behind you, with some kind of voice-of-God soundtrack telling you no matter how hard you try you’ll never be invisible enough. When somebody actually looks at you on purpose, it throws everything out of perspective.”

  “Would it have been better if you didn’t have us?”

  She ignored me.

  “They only let me go to Brooklyn College because I said I’d study nursing, be a good charitable person and have a pension, too. They were always giving me the ‘This house won’t take care of itself, Eva’ speech.”

  “I mean, do you think you got derailed? Were you supposed to be somebody else?”

  “Me? No. Your father, he was supposed to be somebody else. He was doing political science. Arthur Junior happened, and he had to stop everything and be a mechanic working for the same company as his father.”

  “He’s sad. I only noticed it the other day. You broke him.”

  “I did not. He just rolled over. His books got dusty, and he let other guys run the union. He started hanging around with Howard Earle and talking about baseball.”

  “I like Howard.”

  “Howard’s fine. He just isn’t important.” She said it like she was the one who was qualified to make that call. Like God went on vacation and asked her to do the sorting while he was away.

  “Your father judged me for hanging on to what we’re supposed to be. He blamed me for all the things in me that would have been poetry if I wasn’t busy dying of meaninglessness. ‘Life is real, Eva.’ Like I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s not wrong, Mom. You did kind of produce three incontrovertible facts. He’s the one dealing with that, so you can hang out and make metaphors in darkened rooms.”

  “Listen to me, girl. People have to make stories and light them up and get people to sit in the dark and take them in. That’s power. If you have a dreaming mind, it’s a crime to waste it, especially in this country.”

  “God, I am so tired of people telling me not to waste my fucking mind.”

  “Joan, when you use language like that you’re inviting people to underestimate you.”

  “What if I want to waste my mind? What if I just want to take in some facts and let them sit there without moving around and changing all the time?”

  “When I go out in the street now I’m aiming for people to look at me, and I do my best not to be grateful. People can think whatever they want, but they’ll have to think something because I’ll be in the way of whatever they’re looking at. That’s my job. I give things up for that, yeah. Of course I do. It hurts to do it too.”

  “First you said you just wanted to get away. Now you want to claim it’s a holy mission?”

  “It’s both, honey. Listen to what I’m telling you. Just being who you are is a holy mission if that’s how you want to put it. Nothing holier. If your father were brave enough, we could have all moved up here and done it together.”

  “What did you mean, ‘everything is the future’?”

  She was quiet for a minute. Remembering, I guess.

  “I meant your brother. And mine. When people die and get born, time changes. There’s the things that happened before the babies and the things the dead will never see. I don’t know how to put it. I wish I did. I’ve spent enough time in that theater trying.”

  She called home and told them I was staying with her, then she made me come to the theater. I didn’t talk to her about Nick Tomaszewski or what I’d seen that night at Fiddler’s Cove. We ended up talking about her life instead of mine, because that’s how it is with her. And she’s right. What she does is important; I get that now. So I can’t even be mad at her for it.

  There was some kind of tech rehearsal going on. The theater was so cold you could see everyone’s breath. They were blocking a scene and trying different lights on it. Three actors, a bunch of crew people, and two white ladies in camel-hair coats who were probably deducting the whole thing from their taxes. Behind them, a bare brick wall stretched up past the catwalk into the darkness. The seats were velvet and the balconies had ridiculous cherubs on them.

  I sat in the tenth row and tried to put my feelings back together. My mother had a way of landing on your mind and shattering it like a mirror until all you reflected were pieces of her. They didn’t even fit together.

  So I wasn’t paying attention to the stage or the actors, because I was thinking of everything I’d really come to talk about. Whether I should go to Woods Hole, if I could call Nick without making him not like me or getting him in trouble, what I’d seen at Fiddler’s Cove and what it meant, and how the hell I could get through the next two years without ever running into Officer Kemp alone again. I was trying to piece together Rob
bie and Nick and Ray’s disappearance and the kind of people who keep human bones in their lockers. How was I going to ask her about any of that? Where would I start?

  When I looked up there was just one person on the stage. She was wearing a nightgown and sitting on some wooden stairs under a window.

  “I grew up right here on the edge of the harbor,” the actress said. “On the edge of town. On the edge of history. There are ghosts leaking out these windows.” She pointed up at the window above her. It had a scrim over the inside with a blue light behind it. “The ghosts from the house are calling to the ghosts of boats that threw the ghosts of sailors into the water a hundred years ago. Every day the water tries to reach us, wash us away. Maybe twice a year, it comes as far as the bottom step.” She looked down and picked up her feet like they were getting wet. “But there’s always a big moon to shush it back.”

  Jesus, I thought. It’s true. That house, you can leave it but it just comes with you. That little closed world of tides we live in washes time around in circles. Nothing ever goes away and nothing moves forward. If you grow up there, it shapes your mind. My mother wasn’t lying. Wherever she is, she’s there with us the whole time, too.

  We slept in that big half-abandoned apartment, in one of the dusty bedrooms full of other people’s things. She cleared a double bed, made me use cocoa butter, and gave me a nightgown made of gauze and satin ribbon. It was the girliest thing I’d ever worn in my life.

  “Why won’t you grow your hair, Joan? I can fix it for you.”

  “I’m not your project.”

  “I’m trying to be helpful. God knows you spend enough time telling me I don’t act like a real mother. Real mothers spend half the night fixing their daughters’ hair.”

  “I like it short.”

  The traffic on Central Park West sounded like the ocean and there was light all night long. We listened to each other’s breathing and tried not to brush up against each other.

  “Mom, what happened to Deborah?”

  “What do you mean, what happened? I saw her last week when I was home. Her and that damn metal detector.”