Angels in the Morning

by Sasha Troyan

  Ethel stands beside Mummy who is holding a blue jug my father bought on their honeymoon in Italy. Ethel’s cheeks are almost purple. She walks over to the shade. I lie beside Al. We both rest our heads on Max’s stomach. It’s making funny noises like he’s hungry.

  “I’m afraid there’s not much food,” Mummy says. “Some tomatoes from the vegetable garden and some lettuce. I found a can of tuna. A baguette. Juliet’s gone with Luis into town to buy food, but they won’t be back for some time.”

  “It’s so hot no one’s hungry anyway,” my father says. He crushes his cigarette in a saucer, then plays with his cigarette pack. He twirls it round and round between his fingers.

  “I’ll be right back,” Mummy says. We watch her walk through the long yellow grass where giant poppies with centers like spiders have multiplied. The sunlight makes Mummy’s hair look gold and her dress very black. She walks very straight. We watch her disappear into the house.

  “Such a hot day,” Ethel says, from the shade. Without knitting needles, her hands look strange resting on her lap. She’s sitting in one of the blue chairs. The one next to her is empty. It makes me think of Granny. I picture her wearing her mauve hat, knitting very fast.

  “Yes,” the doctor says. “It is a hot day.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such a hot day,” Ethel says.

  “I would have thought you would be used to the heat,” my father says.

  “The heat in Johannesburg is different. It’s dry, not humid like this,” Ethel says, sitting up straight.

  The sky hangs over us like a low ceiling, a perfect blue with not one scratch. It’s so quiet the buzzing of wasps and bees seems loud. But you can hardly hear the river. It flickers in the distance.

  Everything else droops—the roses, the bushes, even the ivy leaves on the house.

  When Mummy walks out of the kitchen, carrying a silver tray, she’s accompanied by a man who seems familiar. As they come closer, I realize that he’s the tramp we saw coming out of our house the first day and then from our tree. “I’ve invited him to have lunch with us,” Mummy says. “The poor man hasn’t eaten in more than a week.”

  The tramp bends slightly at the waist. “Bonjour,” he says. “Bonjour. Bonjour.” He’s wearing a blue shirt that’s ripped at the armpits. His pants are black and made of wool. He holds a brown hat in his hands. He stares at us, but you can’t tell where he’s looking because of his glass eye. He walks over to the only free chair besides Ethel. She draws herself up and looks the other way.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mummy says. “Today we don’t have as much food as we usually do.”

  She prepares a plate with salad and tuna and some baguette and brings it over to the tramp.

  She sits down between my father and the doctor, but closer to the doctor. As she passes the bread to my father, her sleeve dips in the dressing and my father reaches out. “Thanks,” she says, smiling first at my father, then at the doctor. I heard Mummy tell Ethel that the doctor is a very jealous man because of his ex-wife. She had lovers come to their house.

  “Why the hell did you invite him?” Father whispers.

  “I felt sorry for him,” Mummy answers.

  “You could have given him a piece of bread. You didn’t need to invite him to lunch.”

  The doctor mops up his salad dressing with a piece of bread.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” My father asks. “It looks like he’s even wearing some of my clothes.”

  “Oh no,” Mummy says, but then she laughs and says he is. “I promise you I didn’t know.”

  Maybe Mum didn’t just float Dad’s hat down the river. I picture his pants and his pink, white, and blue shirts swirling in the water by the dam.

  Max’s stomach is making all sorts of gurgling noises. Al says she can feel his stomach vibrating.

  When the doctor finishes what is on his plate, he walks over to the tramp. He stands talking to him. He asks the tramp what he used to do. The tramp says he used to be a successful businessman. He had a beautiful wife. Three beautiful children. Then one day, he was backing his car out of the garage when he ran over a little girl. After that, he lost everything. The tramp asks the doctor if he has cigarettes but the doctor doesn’t smoke. My father walks over and gives him two.

  “Thank you,” the tramp says. “I’ll be going now.”

  “If you need help,” the doctor says. “You can always stop by the clinic.”

  “I like to be outside,” the tramp says, then he spits right by Daddy’s feet. We watch him cross the yellow lawn, disappear round the side of the house.

  “What a relief,” Ethel says. “Really, Claire, what on earth—”

  “She has to apologize even to a tramp,” Father says.

  “Gabriel, don’t you want some tomatoes?” Mummy asks.

  “No, thank you.” I think of Granny eating tomatoes up in the vegetable garden, the way she ate them so fast as if she knew she didn’t have much time.

  “What about you, Al?” Mummy says.

  “No thank you.”

  “We’re not hungry,” I say.

  My mother whispers something to my father.

  “Come over here, girls,” my father says. “I have a surprise for you.”

  “A good or a bad one?”

  “Why a good surprise,” my father says. He reaches into a pink bag with yellow and purple peonies that must belong to his lady. He holds out cameras for each of us. “They’re Polaroids. All you have to do is push the button and the pictures come out right away.”

  He takes one and photographs me and Al. Then we wait. The paper is gray. Gradually, we can see our heads, the outline of our silhouettes. Everything is under water and then it’s not.

  I tell my mother and my father and the doctor that I want to take a picture of them. Mummy smiles and looks straight at the camera. Father looks down at his cigarette. The doctor at my mother. I try to focus the camera so that Dad and the doctor’s heads are chopped off, but I can’t without cutting off Mum’s too. I take a photograph of Ethel but she gets annoyed because I took the photograph while she was picking her teeth.

  Al and I walk around the garden taking photographs of everything: the stone house with its ivy leaves, the river and the wood bridges, the bank of silver willows, our treehouses, even the cross where we buried our rabbit, the monkey, and Al’s blanket. Al wants to know if they would be all right if we dug them up or if they would have been eaten by worms. I tell her they would have been eaten up.

  When we get back, everyone has disappeared except our father who lies on a yellow deck chair, his long feet sticking over the edge, his face covered with little red blotches and his mouth wide open, letting out a soft regular snore. His book, its leaves awkwardly bent, lies like a dead pigeon next to a tube of cream.

  We tiptoe around him. Our shadows pass over him, but he does not wake.

  We take pictures. I focus one picture on his white stomach. It has lots of hair. He even has hair sticking out of his ears like Luis.

  Al and I sit by the pool with our legs dangling in the water. I stare at my reflection, seeing one long braid, my black dress broken into pieces by the water. Al and I look like twins.

  When my father wakes, he dives into the pool. Al and I watch him swim laps.

  “Don’t you want to take a dip?” he asks. “It feels great.”

  Al and I look at each other, then we jump in hand in hand with our clothes on, even our shoes.

  “What’s this?” Daddy says. “It’s becoming a bad habit.”

  “We like swimming in our clothes,” I say.

  But the water feels warm and oily and our clothes weigh us down. Soon we get out and stand in our wet clothes. I hope they’re dry by the time Juliet gets back.

  Father dries himself off and pulls on his clothes. He suggests we go for a walk. We walk along the bank of silver willows. He keeps stopping, though, and passing his hand through his hair, looking back at the house, as if he’s changed his mind.
I pull on his jacket sleeve and he turns and looks at me and says, “Yes?” and I say “Nothing.”

  “The doctor seems like a nice man,” my father says.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “He brushes his teeth every few hours,” Al says.

  “Does he?” Daddy laughs.

  “And he doesn’t like Max,” Al says.

  “Well, Max can be a nuisance,” Daddy says.

  “And he has to pee a lot,” Al says.

  “Boy, the things you girls find out,” Daddy says. “I’d hate to hear what you say about me.”

  “We don’t say anything about you,” I say.

  “Not one thing,” Al says.

  “I don’t know if that’s good or bad,” my father says.

  “It’s good,” I say, running ahead.

  There are no shadows today. The sun is so bright the leaves of the trees seem as if they were made of metal.

  “Come back,” Daddy calls. “Why don’t we skip?”

  “It’s too hot,” I say.

  “Come on.”

  “I’m too old.”

  He laughs. “Well, I’m not.” He takes Al’s hand and they skip through the grass. He stops halfway down the bank and gestures for me to catch up, but I won’t. I’m too old to skip and jump. I’m going to be eleven in two months and eight days.

  Al and my father are sitting on one of the wood bridges staring down at their reflections on the water. I sit next to Al.

  “You both know that I’m not perfect,” he says. “But your mother isn’t either, you know.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” I say.

  “Yes, I know, but I think it’s time you girls heard my side of the story. After all, there always are two sides to a story.”

  “I don’t want to know,” I say.

  “Do you remember that ex-boyfriend of hers who came to visit us? Let’s see, about a year ago?”

  “What did he look like?” Al asks.

  “He was tall and blond. You know, he was the man from Africa.”

  “The one she fell in love with when she was sixteen?” Al says.

  “The one she fell out of love with because he shaved his beard,” our father says.

  I stare at my father. He has turned around and is now facing us. I notice three lines stretching across his forehead. The one at the top is the same length as the bottom one.

  I focus on the sound of the water rushing; then I pretend I’m deaf.

  “Yes,” he says. “In our bedroom. I even lent him a pair of socks.”

  I try to imagine the bedroom with its pale yellow wallpaper and bright blue flower design, its gold carpet and my mother with the man from Africa wrapped in a white sheet, lions lurking behind the dark wood closet. But I can’t really picture it. All I remember is the smell of bacon in the morning when the man from Africa appeared, and the little bracelets of black elephant hair he gave us.

  I lean against Mummy the way I used to with Granny but she’s talking with the doctor, so I join Al by the pool.

  We lie on the smooth stones that surround the pool’s edge. I rest my cheek on the stone. It’s hot.

  Ethel is nodding to sleep in her chair. From time to time, she wakes up with a start, just the way Tiger, the cat, wakes when she lies under a lamp and it suddenly gets too hot.

  “Would you like some tea?” Mummy asks Ethel.

  “Oh no,” Ethel says. “Thank you.”

  “I wonder what could be taking Juliet and Luis so long,” Mummy says. “It’s just as well we didn’t wait for them to eat.”

  “Yes,” Ethel says. “I wonder—”

  “Let’s just hope they didn’t stop in a cafe-bar,” my father says. “I’ll never forget the time I picked her up at the airport.”

  “Or maybe they got lost,” our mother says. “You know what Luis is like.”

  “What did you say about the airport?” Ethel asks.

  Mummy places one finger over her lips.

  “I was just saying that you should allow for plenty of time,” our father says.

  “I’m not going to the airport,” Ethel says.

  “Oh that’s right,” Daddy says. “I’d forgotten about your fear of planes.”

  I put my hand in the water, but it’s so warm it doesn’t cool me. “You’ll have to meet Françoise,” our father says.

  The doctor looks down at his cup. Mummy puts her hand on the doctor’s forearm.

  My father takes out a cigarette and offers one to the doctor, who says no thanks.

  Then it’s quiet and we can hear the wasps and the bees. There’s no sign of Max. I wonder where he could be.

  Mummy’s hand moves from the doctor’s forearm to his hand.

  “I don’t understand,” Ethel says, suddenly, from the shade.

  Nobody asks her what. Mummy walks over and puts her arm around Ethel, but she continues to look straight ahead as if she doesn’t recognize Mummy. She allows Mummy to take her inside.

  In the garage sunlight filters through cracks. The orange canoe gleams. We have scrubbed it and patched the hole. It’s all ready. We’re just waiting for the right time. We can’t decide whether to leave in the day or the night. We’ve placed our belongings inside: the jar with the brown beads, Mum’s doll with no eyes, Daddy’s cracked binoculars, Granny’s bandage, the box that used to hold the dried fruit. We even found a black and white photograph that’s missing just one corner of Granny and Ethel standing on the QEII; Granny is smiling and has one white gloved hand in the air and it looks like she’s waving to us, saying toulalou.

  We climb into the canoe and read our books. We’re both reading The Wolves of Whilloughby Chase. But we each have our own copy. It’s all about these girls who get left behind with their evil governess who puts them into an awful orphanage when their parents are reported dead, but then the girls escape and it turns out the parents are alive and the governess is punished.

  I ignore the grownups calling for us. “Gabriel. Al. Come and say goodbye to your father.” I stand up on a box and peer through the window streaked with mud. I can see the doctor and our father standing beside his green Porsche.

  “Still no sign of Juliet and Luis,” our father says.

  “No,” Mummy says. “Who knows when they will be back. But where are the children?”

  “They’re probably up in their treehouses,” Daddy says. “Gabriel. Al.”

  I picture Daddy searching the garden, walking along the bank of silver willows, not finding us in our treehouses, checking the house, peering behind doors and inside closets. But he calls our names again then stares through the garage window. I stare right at him. I can make out his beaked nose and his wide forehead and his lips, but he can’t see me because I’m in the dark. I imagine the glass shattering. I think I hear it cracking. I picture shards of glass on my father’s shirt and in his hair. But then I recognize the sound of his Porsche, the vroom it always makes and I wander over to the other side of the garage, where muskrats used to hang. They’re gone, but it feels as if they’re still there. Al asks me to help her with the word predicament.

  Around four, I hear a car drive across the gravel yard. Al and I rush to the window of our bedroom. We watch Juliet climb out of Luis’s car. She’s wearing her wig and her favorite black nylon dress with the gold chain.

  “We were so worried,” Mummy says as she comes out of the house. “What happened?”

  “We had some car problems,” Juliet says.

  Luis says something in Spanish and waves his hand in the air. He looks very angry, then he says, “She make me wait and wait. I do not know what to do.”

  “Oh Juliet,” Mummy says.

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Juliet says. “I was waiting for him for hours and hours.”

  “Well,” Mummy says. “I suppose there’s no point in getting into an argument. Everyone is here safe and sound. Juliet, are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “Never felt better,” Juliet says, as she stumbles into the
house. Soon we hear her stomping upstairs. She stops outside our door, but doesn’t come inside. She knocks something over, then curses. I lipsing her curses to Al.

  Mummy just misses hearing them.

  “Gabriel,” she says. “Would you go and tell Ethel the car is ready? Be especially nice. Poor aunt, I don’t know what she’ll do without Granny.”

  I walk slowly down the stairs. I don’t want to be the one to get Ethel. I wander through the living room where the curtains hang limply and roses droop over the rims of vases, their petals dropping onto the wood surfaces covered with pollen. I pass one hand over the coffee table and my palm comes away green. Even the flies circle listlessly. They fly into the glass panes, then lay stunned on the window sills before starting once again.

  I stare at the portrait of the little girl whose head is too big for her body. But now, it’s her eyes I notice, tiny mean brown eyes which seem to stare at me.

  Ethel’s not in Granny’s room.

  Granny’s hat lies on top of one of the suitcases. I put it on my head and stand in front of the mirror. Over the summer my nose and forehead seem to have broadened. My eyes are the same color as Daddy’s. I look like him. I wish I looked more like Mummy and Granny.

  Ethel’s sitting on her bed in her room, legs stretched in front of her, her hands resting on her knees. She seems to be staring at her feet, but as soon as she sees me, she straightens up. She stands and twists her skirt around her waist.

  “I suppose it’s time.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You be a good girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t suppose I will see you for a very long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Come here,” she says.

  I walk over to her. She presents her brow and I kiss it. She smells of peppermint, but of something else. Like Granny. I try to give her a hug, but she holds herself stiffly away. She’s not used to hugs.

  “Go and tell Luis to come for the suitcases,” she says, turning away and bending over one of them. Her shirt has come undone in back and you can see the knobs of her spine. She sobs. I wonder whether to say something, but then I run out.