Just Like Other Daughters

by Colleen Faulkner

  I think about Thomas’s arms around Chloe. There wasn’t really anything inappropriate about his embrace, other than that he hasn’t known her twenty-four hours yet, but . . .

  She said she was going to marry him . . .

  I push the thought aside. It’s beyond the realm of possibility.

  I start the engine, but I don’t pull away from the curb. I rest my hands on the steering wheel. What kind of mother am I that I’m not thrilled my daughter has a new friend?

  My cell rings and I pick it up from the console. The caller ID says DAVID. “Hello?”

  “Alicia . . . hi, it’s um, David.”

  I smile. “David, hi.”

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “No,” I say, checking the time on the dash. “I just dropped my daughter off and I’m on my way to work. I have office hours, then two classes, back to back. Women Writers and a Byron Seminar.” I’m tickled he called. Is it because I really like him or is it just that it feels good to have someone interested in me?

  “I was wondering . . . the 1939 Wuthering Heights is playing Friday night at the old cinema downtown. Would you . . . like to go? I mean . . . if you can find someone to stay with your daughter. Unless . . . you think she’d like to come?”

  I laugh and turn up the heat in the car. There’s snow in the forecast. “Chloe’s strictly a Disney girl. But I’d love to, if my girlfriend can keep Chloe. Jin’s always bugging me to go out and do something, so as long as she doesn’t have plans, I’m sure it’ll be fine.” I feel like I’m rambling. “So that’s a yes. Probably.”

  “Great,” David says, sounding a little less awkward.

  Did he think I was going to say no? I smile at the thought that I could make anyone nervous like this. “So how about if I call you tomorrow?” I turn down the blower on the heater. “And let you know.”

  “Seven o’clock. That’s what time the show is,” David says. “We could go out for something to eat before . . . or after. Whatever you’d like.”

  I’m still smiling when I disconnect.

  I’m glad when Mom leaves. I’m glad she doesn’t come in Miss Minnie’s. Miss Minnie’s is my college. I went to high school. Then you go to college. But Minnie’s isn’t Mom’s college. She goes to her own college.

  I always liked my college, but now I like it better. I like it better because Thomas is here.

  I look at Thomas and he smiles at me. His smile is so big that I can see his teeth.

  I sit next to Thomas at the big table and wait for Miss Minnie to give me a paintbrush. Usually Ann sits next to me, but today I tell her no. Today I tell her not to sit in Thomas’s chair. This is Thomas’s chair next to me now. Not hers.

  Ann was nice and didn’t cry when I told her to sit in a different chair. I’m glad she didn’t cry. Sometimes I want to cry when I can’t sit in my blue chair.

  Ann was my best friend but now she isn’t. Now Thomas is my best friend.

  Miss Minnie gives me a paintbrush. She gives Thomas one, too. And Ann and JJ and Melody. She doesn’t give Abraham a brush because he sits in a wheelchair and his hands don’t work good. Sometimes I let him use my hands, but not today. Today I want to paint a picture for Thomas. Usually I give my pictures to Mom, but this one will be for Thomas.

  I always paint clouds. Blue. Mom says clouds are white but I like them blue. I stick my brush in the blue paint.

  “You like blue clouds, Thomas?” I ask.

  He looks at me and his mouth smiles and his eyes smile at me.

  I want to paint blue clouds every day so Thomas will smile at me every day.

  I walk into the house that evening, Chloe in tow, and see water dripping down through the ceiling onto the hardwood floor of the foyer. “Jeez,” I groan.

  I’m already in a bad mood. I had a student stay after class to argue over a grade. It happens all the time, but this little chit practically threatened me with responsibility for her impending suicide if I didn’t give her a B+ on her C paper about nature and society in Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”

  Then I picked up Chloe and she talked nonstop about Thomas all the way home. He wants her to go bowling with his church group. It was all she could talk about. Bowling on Wednesday. With Chloe, anything that’s going to take place in the future is on Wednesday. She can recite the days of the week, in order, and she can pick out a numbered day on a calendar, but she doesn’t really understand the calendar.

  Then, at the grocery store, Chloe tried to carry a glass container of orange juice and dropped and broke it. Then she cried and made a scene. It’s amazing how far a quart of orange juice can go.

  As I pull off my scarf and hang it on the coatrack, I look up at the spreading stain. I just painted the ceiling in the fall. After another leak in the pipes.

  “Mom, it’s dripping. Mom,” Chloe says, standing in the puddle of water in the center of the foyer. She looks up and a big drop of water hits her in the forehead. She bats at her face but doesn’t move. “Mom.”

  I grab her arm and pull her back. “Get out of the water, Chloe.”

  “It’s wet,” she says heavily. “Wet.” She smiles. “Rain in the house.”

  “It’s a leak. It doesn’t rain in the house.” I sigh and add my coat to the coatrack. “Can you put the groceries away?” I point to the cloth bags we set down inside the door. “I’ll call the plumber.” I start for the staircase to double-check that the leak is coming from a broken pipe rather than a bathtub overflow, which Chloe has done before. But I don’t hear any water running, so I’m not hopeful.

  “Tacos,” Chloe says.

  “Yup. We’re making tacos. I’ll show you how to brown the meat. You can make the tacos.” I head up the stairs. “Take off your coat. Take the groceries into the kitchen and start putting them away.”

  A minute later I’m headed back down the steps. No bathtub overflow. I can’t see any water, which means it’s probably the bathroom pipes in the wall or floor again. Chloe is standing in the foyer, coat still on, groceries still on the floor. And she’s still looking up at the water dripping from the ceiling.

  “For heaven’s sake, Chloe.” I drop two towels in the puddle of water. “I thought you wanted tacos.” I rest my hands on my hips, knowing impatience gets me nowhere with my daughter. “If you want tacos for dinner, you have to get out of your coat. Take the groceries in the kitchen. Put them away.” I point at her, at the groceries on the floor of the foyer, and then in the direction of the kitchen.

  She shuffles backward and begins to struggle out of her coat. “I want to go.”

  “Go where?” I ask. I grab one of the bags of groceries but make myself leave the other for Chloe. “I’m going to call the plumber.”

  “Bowling. I want to go bowling.”

  “You don’t even like bowling.” I head for the kitchen.

  “I like bowling with Thomas,” she says firmly.

  “We’ll see, Chloe. I’d have to get the details from Thomas’s mother.” Chloe’s not good on details or following up. I don’t see this whole bowling adventure with Thomas ever happening because Chloe won’t be able to get the necessary information and I’m just not that interested.

  I flip the light on in the kitchen and set the grocery bag on the counter. A can of black beans rolls out, off the counter, hits the hardwood floor, and rolls under the table. I leave it, going to the phone. If Chloe really wants to go bowling, I wonder if I should look into it. I wonder if I’m letting my feelings against organized religion keep Chloe from doing things she’d like to do. The bowling trips are, apparently, sponsored by Thomas’s church. There are several churches in town that sponsor activities for mentally handicapped adults. Is my anger with organized religion getting in the way of my daughter’s happiness?

  Truth be told, I’m not so much angry with religion as I am with God. I just never got over Him making Chloe the way she is. I never quite bought the whole “she’s a special gift from God” thing that people tried to tell me wh
en she was born. Would any mother, given the choice, choose a handicapped child over a healthy, normal-brain-functioning child? I know. Totally politically incorrect. But it’s not about me. It’s not that I care how hard this is for me. It’s about Chloe and the way she has to struggle to understand the simplest task. How frustrated she becomes with her own limits.

  Jin says it’s a karmic thing. That Chloe’s soul has been sent to earth in her body, with her limited mind, to teach her lessons she’ll be able to use in her next life. That idea actually appeals to me. Am I a closet Buddhist and I just don’t know it? I wonder if there’s a sangha that would take Chloe bowling.

  I was born a Quaker. As a child, I grew up in a Quaker congregation. I drifted away from my Quaker roots in college and never found my way back. Never wanted to, though lately, I’ve found myself thinking about those days. About the peaceful silence of Meeting and how it made me feel.

  I pick up the cordless phone and scroll through the saved numbers. My plumber’s on speed dial. I hear Chloe knock over the coatrack. It happens sometimes. “You okay?” I call. I can’t find the number.

  I hear Chloe upright the coatrack. “Okay,” she calls. She’s grumpy. Probably hungry. Tired. I know how she feels. I finally find the plumber’s number and hit the CALL button.

  I assume I’ll have to leave a message. I’m surprised when the phone clicks and I hear an actual, live human voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Mark. It’s Alicia Richards.” He lives on the street behind us. I can see his back door from mine. Handy, considering how often I need a plumber in this house.

  “Hey, how are you?” he asks pleasantly. He has a nice phone voice.

  “Um. Okay. Good.” I see Chloe tromping into the kitchen, carrying the grocery bag. She sets it on the table rather than the counter and begins to unload it. She carries one item at a time from the table to the refrigerator or a cabinet. At this rate, it will take her half an hour to unload one grocery bag. I turn my back to her so I don’t have to watch. “I’m well,” I say, “but there’s a pipe in my foyer ceiling that apparently isn’t.”

  He chuckles at my bad joke. “Gushing or dripping?” he asks.

  I don’t know why, but I laugh. Maybe because the first time I called him in the fall for a leak (our previous plumber retired), he had to tell me to go shut off the valve under the kitchen sink so the water wouldn’t continue to pour into the cabinet and onto the floor. “Just dripping,” I say.

  “I’m on a call right now, but I can be there in about an hour. Will that be okay?”

  Somehow, his cheerfulness makes me feel better. “Sure. An hour it is.”

  “See you soon, Alicia.”

  “See you soon.” I hang up and look at the phone. That was easy. I always expect there to be problems, no matter what I’m trying to do. When there isn’t, I guess I’m pleasantly surprised. When I return the phone to its charger, I’m still smiling.

  “So, Chloe.” I clap my hands together. “How about tacos?”

  She’s struggling to get a half-gallon milk carton on the shelf in the refrigerator door. “How ’bout bowling?” she answers, surprising me with her cleverness.

  “How about we see?”

  4

  An hour and a half passes. Chloe and I make ground beef tacos. She goes upstairs to put on her pajamas and then we begin to clean up from dinner. Mark-the-Plumber still hasn’t shown up. I pick up a wet towel from the foyer floor and add a dry one. The steady drip, drip, drip is giving me a headache. My own personal Chinese water torture.

  When the phone rings, we’re doing dishes. I’m rinsing; Chloe’s loading the dishwasher. Chloe is an excellent dishwasher loader. Better than most. It took her a while to learn how to arrange the dishes, but once she knew how to do it, she did it exactly the same way every time. And exactly right. Her father never learned to load the dishwasher in our six years of marriage. I suspect he’s still doing an equally poor job on marriage /dishwasher number four.

  The phone continues to ring as I dry off my hands on a Cinderella dish towel. Chloe’s purchase, not mine. I hope Mark isn’t calling to tell me he won’t be able to make it tonight. If he can’t make it until tomorrow, I’ll have to shut off the water pump. Chloe hates it when I shut the pump off. (It’s an old house; they leak. It’s part of the charm, I tell myself all the time.) No matter how many times I tell her there’s no water, she tries to get water. She tries to flush the toilet.

  The phone is still ringing.

  “It’s for me,” Chloe says, placing a white plate just so in the lower wire rack.

  “It’s not for you.” I frown as I pick the phone up off the counter. She always says the phone is for her, but it never is. Her father doesn’t call her. My father doesn’t call her. She has no friends, except for those at Minnie’s, but they’re not the kind of friends who call. “Unless you want to talk to the plumber,” I tell her.

  “It’s for me,” she repeats. “Not a plumber. Not.”

  “Hello?” I say into the phone.

  “C . . . can . . .”

  It’s a heavy, male voice. Loud. I recognize who it is, even though I’ve only heard him speak a couple of words.

  I hear a woman in the background.

  He starts again. “C . . . can I p . . . please talk to K . . . Ko-ey?” He’s speaking at a deafening volume.

  “It’s Thomas,” Chloe says. She jumps up and down and claps her hands. “I told you. It’s for me.”

  “Thomas?” I say, holding the phone a little bit away from my head so he doesn’t damage my eardrum. I can’t hide my surprise. “Is this Thomas?”

  “This is T . . . Thomas,” he says. Then his voice is muffled as he speaks again, obviously to someone else in the room with him.

  There’s a pause and then I hear a female voice. “Hello, this is Margaret Elden, Thomas’s mother.”

  “Oh, hi. This is Alicia, Chloe’s mother.”

  “Thomas is trying to get ahold of Chloe. Is she there?” the woman asks. She sounds older than me. Quite a bit older. “He’s nervous.” She chuckles. She sounds nervous, too. “Calling a girl. It’s his first time.”

  “Um . . . Yeah. Sure. Just a moment, please.” I cover the receiver with my hand. “It’s for you, Chloe. It’s Thomas.”

  She shakes her head. “I told you,” she says loudly, with excitement. “Thomas. I told him to call me.”

  “You know our phone number?” I ask, suddenly seeing my daughter in a new light. She’s never been good with numbers. She can count, but the actual digits and their meaning evade her.

  “On my bag. Inside.” She puts her hand out for the phone. “In case I get lost. In case I can’t find my mother. Call this number. My number.”

  I’m still staring at my daughter. Some of her hair has fallen out of the elastic at the nape of her neck and brushes her cheek. Something about the kitchen lights, maybe, but she looks different to me. “You wrote down our phone number for Thomas?” I ask incredulously.

  “Hello?” I hear Thomas say. He’s back on the phone again. Still loud. “K . . . Ko-ey?”

  Chloe giggles and claps a hand over her mouth. “Thomas called,” she says in a stage whisper.

  “Just a minute,” I tell him. I hold the phone out to my daughter. “Chloe? You wrote down your phone number for Thomas? You copied the number off your bag?”

  She wipes her hand on the same pink and white towel I used, only she’s more meticulous. She’s drying each finger. “I showed Thomas.” She nods emphatically. “Thomas, he wrote it. With his blue pen. He likes blue pens.”

  “Here.” I offer the phone.

  She tentatively holds it to her ear. “This is Chloe. May I ask who’s calling?” she says, as I’ve taught her to answer the phone.

  “It’s okay, hon. It’s Thomas. He’s calling for you. You can just talk to him.” I close the dishwasher door that’s between us.

  “Thomas?” she says into the phone.

  “K . . . Koey!” He’s so loud
that I can hear him four feet away.

  Her face lights up. “Thomas!” she says. “You called me. On the phone. You called me.”

  I can’t help smiling because she’s smiling. She’s been saying she wants a friend. Maybe this will be nice, having Thomas for a new friend.

  I cross my arms over my chest, watching my daughter as she grins from ear to ear.

  “You called me,” she repeats. She’s apparently as surprised as I am. “Thomas.”

  “I ate . . . ate d . . . dinner,” I hear him say after a long pause.

  “I ate dinner,” she says. “Tacos.” She hesitates, trying to think what to say next. “I made tacos. Did you eat tacos?”

  His mother must have told him to speak more quietly because I can still hear the rumble of his voice, but not what he says.

  Chloe turns her back to me. I fold the dish towel.

  Then Chloe walks out of the kitchen, scuffing her bunny slippers as she goes. I watch her go, resisting the urge to follow her and listen in on her conversation. She certainly has the right to a little privacy on the phone.

  Five minutes pass as I finish cleaning up the kitchen and start the dishwasher. I hear Chloe giggling. She sounds the way I imagine a teenage girl must sound on the phone with a boy. It’s the kind of experience I’ve missed out on, my daughter being different from other people’s daughters. She’s never had a boyfriend, never gone to a homecoming dance. Certainly never had the thrill of a first kiss.

  Chloe’s in the living room. Another five minutes pass. I flip through the day’s mail: electric bill, Visa bill, and a bunch of junk.

  I can’t imagine what Chloe and Thomas are talking about. She can certainly ask and answer questions, but she’s not much of a conversationalist. It’s just not the way her mind works.

  “Chloe!” I call. “The plumber might be trying to call. If the phone beeps, it means another call is coming in.”

  She doesn’t answer me.

  “Could you tell me if the phone beeps, Chloe?”

  She comes back into the kitchen and lowers the phone stiffly to her side. “I want to go bowling.” She blinks, her lips pursed. She’s looking very serious. “Wednesday.”