by Sasha Troyan
When Luis has finished hosing the car, we get out. The car gleams in the sunlight and Al and I can see our watery reflections in the door. Luis is singing a Spanish song. Las Campagna della Laura. Las Campagna della Laura. Uno. Dos. Tres. I ask him if his boys miss him and he says that since he’s gone most of the time, they’re used to it. But I think he’s wrong. In my imagination, I picture them weeping, as they wave from behind a window.
Luis scratches his ear with one finger and asks us if we think Miss Juliet is ready.
We run upstairs. We knock on her door, but she doesn’t answer. There’s not a sound, then I hear footsteps. The door opens a crack. She’s in her nightdress.
“Yes?” she asks.
“Luis is waiting,” I say.
“For what?” she says.
“For you,” I say. “For your day off.”
“Well,” she says. “Tell him I’ve changed my mind.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” Al says.
She closes the door and then we hear her stumble into something, her bedside table, perhaps.
Seven
In the night the phone rings. It rings and rings, then I hear Mummy’s piano, but when I tiptoe to the music room there’s no one. I hear Juliet singing. Her voice drifts in and out of my dreams.
When I awaken, I think I can see water reflected onto the white wall in our bedroom, but it’s the shadows of leaves. I jump down from my bunk bed and race down the stairs through the living room. I’m afraid I’m too late to fix Granny’s bandage. Juliet promised I could do it on my own today.
Light filters between the curtains, cutting through the grownups. Granny is already dressed. She’s sitting on the couch holding Mum’s hand. Ethel stands with her back to me, folding Granny’s clothes.
“There you are,” Granny says. “I was waiting for you.”
First, I rest Granny’s foot on a pillow and massage cream into her foot. The cream has a strange mediciny smell that makes Mummy sneeze. I unwind a fresh strip of tan-colored bandage from the roll Juliet keeps on top of Granny’s medicine case and cut a piece. I wrap it around Granny’s foot and ankle, doing it exactly like Juliet, starting with Granny’s instep. I tie the bandage in place with a small clip. All the time I’m doing it, I can feel Ethel and Mummy watching me. It takes me much longer than Juliet, but Granny says I’ve done a fine job.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to be ten again?” Mummy says.
“If you knew what you know now,” Ethel says.
“Don’t be silly. You’re still so young,” Granny says, turning to Mum. “You’re a baby.”
“I’d like to be grown up,” I say.
“It’s always like that,” Mummy says. She tucks a strand of my hair behind one ear.
We watch Ethel fold Granny’s handkerchiefs. She places them in a pink bag with a transparent white cover embroidered with flowers. Granny bought it when she was in Switzerland.
“I don’t know what to do,” Mummy says.
“You must be firm,” Granny says. “At the very least tell him you need a few days to think it over.”
“It’s not like it’s the first time,” Ethel says. “And look what happened.”
“Well, it is a bit different,” Mummy says. She whispers something in Granny’s ear.
I know they’re talking about Daddy. I want to ask them but Juliet and Al appear in the doorway. The top of Al’s head is all wet. I can tell that Juliet has tried to flatten her hair.
“And how are we today?” Juliet asks.
“Better,” Granny says.
Juliet looks at Granny’s bandage. “Not bad at all,” she says to me. “Would anyone like tea?”
Everyone says yes. I like my tea with lots of milk and six tablespoons of sugar. Juliet is always telling me how bad it is to have so much sugar. Ethel doesn’t take sugar. She continues to fold and lets me place Granny’s silk petticoats in a drawer. Mummy looks tired again. She’s wearing the same blue jumpsuit she wore yesterday. Al leans against her legs.
Then there’s a knock on the door. Ethel and Granny and Mummy look at each other.
“Do you think—” Ethel says.
“Surely, not—” Granny says.
“He wouldn’t—” Mummy says. “Gabriel and Al, go and see who it is.”
We run to the front door. I think it might be my father, but it’s the doctor. He’s dressed in a tight blue suit and he’s carrying a brown briefcase. I let him into the entrance hall and run back to Granny’s room.
“It’s the doctor,” I say.
“What a relief,” Ethel whispers.
Mummy laughs.
Mummy and Ethel walk into the living room. Bonjour. Bonjour. Bonjour.
Max barks very loudly. I wonder if he will jump up onto the doctor. Al and I make faces. We don’t like doctors. They give injections. They chop up people and they touch the dead. Through the doorway of Granny’s room, we watch him. He is very old-fashioned and bends over and kisses the back of Mummy’s hand, saying, “Enchanté” He’s going to expect us to curtsy, I bet. Later, Al and I imitate the way he says, Enchanté
Max growls at him and Mummy has to hold him back. She asks me to come get him and say bonjour to the doctor. I drag my feet and look down at the floor, then hold out my hand and say bonjour. His handshake feels like water. I tell Max to come but he won’t. I wish he would pass wind. He won’t come until I give him a piece of bread, then he follows me, his short tail wagging. He used to have a long tail, but he’s the kind of dog that has to have a short tail so they cut some of it off. I don’t understand why sortie dogs have to have short tails and some don’t.
The doctor talks to Mummy but we can’t hear what he says because he talks so softly. Mummy looks surprised. She blushes and touches the back of her hair as if she just remembered she hadn’t combed it. She laughs, then says, “oui.” He walks over to Granny’s room with tiny quick steps.
“I jeest wanted to see how you are faring,” he says. “After three days, the swelling should be down.”
Al and I giggle at his French accent. Al can tell it’s funny by the way his lips and tongue move.
He undoes the bandage slowly and examines Granny’s foot. He asks who did the bandage and I say I did. “Well, done,” he says. I try not to smile.
He leaves his phone number with Mummy, and tells her that if there is a problem to give him a call. “I hate to be any trouble,” Mummy says.
“No trouble at all,” he says. “My pleasure.”
She offers to pay him but he won’t hear of it. He tells her that after all, we are neighbors.
Juliet enters the living room with a silver tray, teacups, and a teapot.
Ethel asks him if he would like to stay for a cup of tea, but he says no, thank you. He has business to attend to.
Mummy walks the doctor across the gravel yard up to the white gate.
“What a nice man,” Ethel says. “So polite.”
“Yes,” Juliet says.
“I seem to remember Mme Daudiet telling us something,” Ethel says. “He used to be married.”
“The wife—” Juliet whispers in Ethel’s ear.
“Poor thing,” Ethel says. “Somehow it seems worse when it happens to a man.”
Al and I run upstairs and jump on our beds. We jump as high as we can. We try to touch the ceiling, but Juliet tells us not to so we lie on our beds with our hands behind our heads. We sing at the top of our lungs. “Les Anges de la campagne ont entonnés l‘hymn des cieux.”
“You’re to stop immediately,” Juliet says, standing barefooted in the doorway.
“There’s nothing wrong with singing,” I say.
“Don’t argue,” she says.
“I can smell your feet from here,” I say.
“Don’t you be rude,” she says. She stands on my bed and I tell her to get off because she’s going to make my sheets smelly. “Stinkpot,” I call her. She beats me with her shoe, but I don’t cry.
Al and I escape to
Mummy’s side of the house. She’s taking a bath. I tell her that Juliet has been beating me with her shoe, but Mum won’t believe me. She says that Juliet would never do such a thing. “She did too,” Al says. “I saw her.”
“What did you do?” Mummy says.
“I said her feet are smelly and it’s true,” I say. “They smell like brie.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” Mummy says.
“But she shouldn’t hit me with her shoe,” I say.
Mummy says why don’t we get in her bath. It’s a big bath because Daddy is so tall he wouldn’t fit in a normal one. I wonder if his lady has a big tub or if he has to sit all scrunched up. Our tub is big enough for a whole family. We make the water as hot as we can bear it. We go bright red and sweat and then we run cold water. We pretend to be opera singers. “Oh my darling, I love you so much.” We sing in French because it sounds more romantic. “Mon amour. Je meurs d’amour pour toi.”
We all sound terrible, not just Al, but Mum and me too because neither of us has a good voice and because we exaggerate. I try to do it the way I heard a real opera singer sing once when I went for my ballet class, and it makes Mum and Al laugh even harder.
After our bath, we go out into the garden and lie in the hammock with Mummy. Al brings her white blanket with the blue flowers. Mum brings her poetry book by Lamartine and I bring the box of dried fruit Granny brought all the way from South Africa. It’s special dried fruit, crushed and then molded into squares, dusted with sugar and wrapped in waxing paper. They’re all different colored squares: some are pink, some are green, some are orange, blue, or purple. I like the red ones best. I’ve asked Granny to send me two whole boxes for my next birthday.
Al asks Mummy to tell us about the times she was naughty, and Mum tells us about the time that she and her sister smoked a whole pack of cigarettes in the back of a car. They were so sick Mum hasn’t tried a cigarette since. Daddy smokes cigarettes. I like the smell in his car in the leather seats. But I don’t tell Mum what I’m thinking. Instead I ask her what her Dad was like. She says she doesn’t remember him very well because he died when she was seven. He was very good at mathematics, but she’s hopeless at it. “I’m no good either,” I say.
“I’m no good either,” Al says.
“Yes, you are,” I say. “It’s so annoying, Mum, the way she always copies me.”
“You should take that as a compliment,” Mum says.
I hate it.
I ask Mum to tell me again the story of how she met Dad even though I know it all by heart. She was in Italy going out with an Italian boy called Enrico and he introduced her to his best friend, our Daddy, and Daddy fell madly in love with her. He followed her all the way to Salzburg in his white Lancia. He went back to university but he couldn’t bear being away from her so he flew over to France where Mum was learning French and then they both flew to South Africa where they got married. Daddy’s father refused to speak to him. He didn’t want Daddy to marry Mum because he said he was too young.
We spend all morning in the hammock and we eat all the dried fruit except for the green squares.
When we go back inside the house, Granny and Ethel and Juliet have already sat down for lunch. Granny smiles at us. She takes Mummy’s face between her hands and kisses her on both cheeks.
“Did you wash your hands?” Juliet asks. We rush to the sink and Mummy follows us and we get the giggles because she says that she feels like a little girl herself the way Juliet speaks to her. She says we’d better eat or she’ll get into trouble and Juliet will give her a spanking.
Al and I take huge servings but then we have trouble finishing. Every time I look up from my dish, Juliet is watching me. I remember reading about a girl hiding her steak in a napkin, but I don’t know how she did it. Once, at school, we had to eat liver and I cut it up into little pieces and my friend Catherine and I flicked the pieces under somebody else’s table.
After lunch, Mum says she really must get some piano practicing in. Al and I march to our treehouses where we play soldiers again. Our wounds are more serious than we thought. “Not just superficial wounds,” I tell Al. I have trouble explaining the meaning of the word superficial. In the end, I tell her we’re missing an arm or a leg. We’re under siege and there are only muskrats to eat. We’re up on the rampart of a castle. I tell Al she has to be vigilant or else the enemy will invade. Soldiers who fall asleep while on duty are shot. I’m a general like our grandfather. He fought in the white army. Daddy says we’re descendants of white Russians. Xorosho, I say to Al.
I climb up a branch and stare at the wild field. I think I see my father. He’s standing on the other side of the river. I recognize his hat and the color of his shirt. I call out to him. “Hey, Daddy. Daddy,” but he drops out of sight and there’s just the sun flickering across the river. I tell Al not to tell anyone. Cross Your Heart and Hope to Die, I say.
In the night, Juliet’s breath falls across my face like a shadow. She mutters something and tiptoes across the room. “Ow,” she says as she trips on my shoes. I wait until she’s left our bedroom before climbing out of bed.
I peer through her open door. Clothes and books are strewn across the floor. Tangerine peels lie in a pile by her bed. She’s sitting on the carpet with her legs spread apart, her back to me. “Juliet, I can’t sleep.” I tiptoe up to her. “I saw Daddy today.” She does not turn. She does not seem to have heard me. A red cardboard box lies between her legs.
“What’s in there?” I ask.
“Go to bed,” she says, without turning round. She tries to open the box but for some reason she has trouble. She keeps fumbling with the ribbon, then she hurls the box across the room. I walk over and pick it up.
“Don’t you touch that. I’m warning you.”
I pass it to her.
She holds it and looks at it as if she’s forgotten what she wanted it for. She hands it back over to me. I untie the ribbon and open it. Inside are cards and photographs of children.
“Pass that to me,” she says. She places the photographs in a row as if she were playing solitaire. She picks up one card and lets me hold it. It’s a drawing of an orange cat with a boy’s face. “Dear Julia,” I read. “I miss you and think of you fondly.”
“Is your real name Julia?” I ask.
“Of course not,” Juliet says. “That’s just what he called me.”
I pick up a photograph of a smiling girl with big white teeth. On the back it says how she wants Juliet to see what she looks like without braces. Juliet grabs the photograph from me.
“What did I say about touching? I don’t know why she sent this to me. I’ve never known her with braces.”
“What was her name?”
“Jenny, or was it Melanie?” she says. “Something like that.”
“Who was your favorite?” I say.
“I don’t have favorites,” she says.
“Yes, you do. You told me once your favorite was Andrew. He was perfect and never did anything naughty.”
Sometimes I was Daddy’s favorite. Sometimes Al was. We never know.
“D’you think Daddy’s coming back?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
“What happened to your bikini?” I ask, wondering if she took it out of the trashcan or if she threw it out the window.
“What do you mean what happened to my bikini?”
I picture it floating down the river. Perhaps it’s met up with Daddy’s brown felt hat. I imagine the hat and the bikini swirling.
There’s a tiny flash as the bulb in her lamp burns out and we’re in the dark. Clouds drift in front of the full moon. At times I can see Juliet very clearly, but then it’s too dark. I lie on my stomach over her red poof.
Eight
Light slides along the hem of the curtain like a snake. First Mummy’s in the sunlight, then she isn’t. She’s wearing a new cream dress with buttons like caramels. She turns her head from side to side so that she can catch sight in the mirror of her hair tw
isted in back. Mummy’s profile is perfect. She has a high forehead and a small straight nose, slim lips. Mummy makes me think of the heroines on the covers of Granny’s novels. Daddy used to tease her and say that she has thin lips while he has big generous lips. He said my lips are like his.
“What do you think? Do you think I look all right?” Mummy asks, swirling around, flaring her skirt.
I remember Daddy saying “you look lovely. Doesn’t she look lovely.”
“You look nice,” I say, staring at my own reflection: my long thin arms and legs, my broad face. I hunch a little more, remembering how my father would always tell me to stand up straight. “If you continue like that,” he would say, “You’ll be like the hunchback of Notre Dame.”
Mummy has perfect posture. Her back is very straight and she holds her head up high.
“Do you really think I look all right?” Mummy asks.
“You look lovely,” I say. “The woman in the store said you look just like Grace Kelly.”
Mummy smiles, then stares off into the distance as if she remembered something. Her hands flutter to her hair.
“I feel so old,” she says. “Isn’t it funny I remember thinking I would never live past twenty-five and here I am twenty-seven.” “But you look very young,” I say. “That man in the café said he thought we were sisters.”
“Oh, that was just flattery.”
“Mummy, why do you dye your hair?”
“Oh darling, I already explained that to you. I’ve been doing it for years. It’s not your Mummy’s fault that she went white at twenty-five. It reminds me of the time I cut my hair. I came to pick you up at school and you burst into tears.”
“But why did you dye it a different color?” I ask. “Why did you dye it yellow?”
Mummy laughs. “I hope it’s not yellow. It’s supposed to be blond.”
“Blond,” I say.
“For a change,” she says. “Oh darling, don’t be difficult. Anyway, there’s something I have to tell you. Your Mummy is going on a date.”
