by John Fulton
I still didn’t understand. I looked over my shoulder at my mother, who was blushing, ashamed as hell. “Please don’t tell me anymore,” I said. “It’s none of my business. I don’t want to know it.”
Curtis’s knee began motoring up and down again. For such a thick-bodied man, he was an emotional weakling. Both he and my father had that in common. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate”—he stumbled on the word—“understand—the morality of it.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t understand anything.”
Because he couldn’t look at me anymore, he looked at my mother. “Maybe you should show them around the house now, Mary.”
* * *
We followed our mother up a flight of polished stone steps, the open space of the first floor yawning beneath us. It was still drizzling outside. Tiny beads of rain accumulated on the black rectangular skylights in the ceiling above. The second floor was a balcony that circled the entire house, leading at both ends to staircases. A little white box on the wall flashed a red light at us as we passed. “What’s that?” Jenny asked.
“That’s a motion detector,” my mother said. “It’s part of the security system.”
The air of that house smelled of Windex, of clean glass and cold, freshly scrubbed porcelain. “It’s not comfortable,” I said. “It’s too damn big.”
“I like it okay,” Jenny said. “Can we see Andrea’s and Curtis’s bedrooms?”
“We can peek in,” my mother said.
Little Curtis’s room had a walk-in closet about the size of our rooms at home, a glass door leading out to a balcony, an attached bathroom with a tub the shape and size of a whirlpool, and a large mirror above the copper basin of the sink. He had Mickey Mouse stuff all over the place—Mickey Mouse sheets, a Mickey Mouse alarm clock and a set of ears on his dresser, a poster on his wall of Mickey and Minnie Mouse hugging each other, pressing their mouse ears together and knotting their mouse tails up in this very loving way. Andrea’s room was the same as little Curtis’s—with a bathroom and balcony and large walk-in closet—only it was all pink, pink walls, carpet, and bedding. Right away Jenny started touching stuff. “Andrea’s bed has a canopy,” she said, letting her hand sink into one of the large pink pillows. She turned the closet light on, walked in, and came out with a bright red dress. “How many dresses does she get to have?” Jenny asked no one in particular. She was just looking at that dress in her hand, studying it.
“That’s not your dress,” I said, because she needed to hear that. “Put it back. Tell her to put it back,” I said to my mother, who had wandered into Andrea’s bathroom.
I picked up a pink cordless telephone on the bedside table, turned it on, and listened to the dial tone. “She has her own stupid pink telephone,” I said, surprised that it was real, more than just a toy. “She’s only ten.” I was listening to the dial tone, still amazed.
“That’s not yours,” Jenny said, mimicking me. “Put it back.”
“I know that,” I said. “Don’t you think I know that?”
“Come look at this,” our mother said, calling us to the bathroom door. She was sitting on the edge of Andrea’s huge oval bathtub, water running from the brass faucet as she passed her fingers through the stream. She lifted her hand and showed us the water dripping from her fingertips, as if to prove the reality of it. Jenny walked over to the copper sink, turned the water on, and touched with her fingers—as if she, too, could not quite believe it—a bar of soap in a marble dish. Looking at herself in the mirror above the sink, she started washing her hands.
“That’s not your soap,” I said.
“This towel is so soft,” she said, drying herself now.
Jenny walked out of the bathroom then, through a sliding glass window, and onto the balcony—also not hers—that overlooked the backyard. “The yard is huge,” she said. “Huge.” She was standing out there in the drizzle, looking down on an expanse of grass lit by these little lamps sunk at intervals into the ground. She filled her lungs slowly with air. Above her, an umbrella of yellow light spread and turned the tiny beads of rain to flecks of gold. Below, the pool was uncovered and also lit—a strange, otherworldly slab of glowing blue from which steam as thick as rags rose into the wet air. I stood out there beside her now in the bright rain, looking over the yard and picturing something I shouldn’t have been picturing, seeing it almost as if it were real—Noir out there running, devouring all that space, leaning into the ground and a little sideways the way he does when he really sprints, his tongue dangling out of the side of his mouth and his eyes focused and dark. That was a terrible thought and I tried to put it out of my mind. He’d have loved it, though. No more hours tangled in his chain. He really would have loved it.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” my mother’s voice asked from behind us.
“It’s a stupid outdoor pool,” I said, remembering that none of this was ours, remembering that what we wanted was an indoor pool just off the living room. “An outdoor pool is no good in the winter.”
“He keeps it heated in the winter,” she said. “He says it can be nice to take a swim in the snow. You could even swim in the rain. You could swim right now, if you wanted.”
“I don’t want to,” I said.
Just then, as if to prove her point, Andrea, little Curtis, and Curtis walked outside in their swimsuits. They were all plump, white, and very pale in the electric glow of the lamps. Curtis carried little Curtis, who was sucking his thumb.
“Hi,” Jenny said, waving down at them.
Little Curtis saw us first. “Why are they standing on Andrea’s balcony?” he asked. He got mad or scared. “Get off her balcony!” he shouted.
“Curtis,” Curtis Smith said.
My mother stepped out then. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I’d show them around before I took them to their rooms.” I couldn’t believe she had said that, actually shouted it. Our rooms. What the hell did that mean?
“Great,” Curtis said. “Go right ahead. Then come down and join us, if you like.” He waved up at us.
“They don’t have rooms here,” little Curtis said, looking at his father. “Do they?”
Curtis Smith didn’t know what to say, and neither did my mother. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Andrea, who had run on ahead of her father and little brother and had been about to jump in the pool, turned around then and saw all three of us standing on her balcony. “They’re in my room!” she shouted. “Why are they in my room?” Then she looked right at me. “He’s got my telephone.” I looked down and noticed that I still had her pink cordless phone in my hand. She began bawling. “Tell them to get out of my room! Out! Out!”
“Jesus,” my mother whispered.
She pulled Jenny in and then came out for me, tugging on my shoulder. Only I didn’t move. I looked down at that screaming girl and her father, who was saying, “Shush, shush, you be nice, Andrea. You calm down.” I didn’t know why Curtis Smith was telling her to calm down since I understood Andrea completely. I understood that she felt—and should have felt—completely violated by us. I understood that we had trespassed. I understood that a little girl living in a fortress like that with motion detectors, an alarm system, heavy doors with deadbolt locks, telephones in every room, a girl who had a lawyer for a father and lots of money and two new cars in her horseshoe driveway and a large pool heated during the winter was used to feeling safe and was probably getting one of her first real lessons in fear from me. I didn’t mind that at all. I just stared her down while she screamed at me. I let her know that I was trespassing, that I knew it, and didn’t give a damn. I let her know that she should be terrified of me, that she had every reason to be. I stood there like that until she couldn’t scream anymore, until she ran up to her father and hid her wet face in his belly, and until my mother finally grabbed the back of my neck and said, “God help you if you don’t get inside this minute.”
* * *
Out in the hallway, m
y mother was pacing. Jenny and I looked over the railing onto the expansive first floor—the kitchen, the dining room, the entryway into the living room. “Maybe,” my mother said. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?” I asked.
“Maybe we should go,” she said. “Maybe this arrangement isn’t going to work.”
I stood away from the railing and looked at her. She was hugging herself with both arms as she paced. She stopped, took a cigarette out of her purse, and was about to light it. “Oh, Christ,” she said then, and broke the cigarette in her hand and stuffed it back into her purse. “No more smoking. Curtis doesn’t want me to smoke.” She laughed. “How long have I been trying to quit smoking?” she asked me.
“A long time,” I said.
“I don’t follow through with things, do I?” she asked.
I didn’t know why she was asking that. It seemed like a dangerous question to answer one way or the other. “I think we should go,” I said.
“I know what you think,” my mother said. She put her hands on the railing and looked down over the first floor. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. She seemed to be considering the furniture down there—the thick wooden dining room table and the heavy-looking chairs surrounding it. “I thought I knew. I thought I’d made my decision. I was sure I had.” She brushed a hand through her hair and closed her eyes. “I was going to be decisive,” she said. “I was going to be strong and just do what I needed to do.” Jenny walked over to my mother and put her arms around her. “Your mother’s a basket case, isn’t she?” my mother asked her.
“No,” Jenny said.
“We should go home,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I am. I’m a basket case.”
“We should get in the car and go home.”
“I don’t think you are,” Jenny said.
“Please listen to me! Please!”
I hadn’t meant to raise my voice so suddenly. But I had, and my mother lifted her head in anger and said, with all the strength back in her voice, “Don’t you dare speak to me like that, Steven Parker. Don’t you dare.”
“Nobody’s listening to me,” I said softly.
“Shush,” she said, her voice as soft as mine. “Let’s all just be quiet for one minute.” My mother put her head down now on Jenny’s and closed her eyes. It was a strange, silent moment that seemed to last a long time, maybe because the silence drew it out, or maybe because we didn’t belong in that place, that enormous house where my mother and sister stood with their eyes closed, holding on to one another, and where I stood apart from them, leaning against the railing with my bad arm in a sling and my good arm holding my bag of shitty clothes. I felt far away from them then, as far away from them as I can ever remember feeling, and maybe that’s why I did something I’d thought I’d never do. I looked up at the ceiling and into the black glass of the skylight, in which I could see the first floor reflected in a broken, unrecognizable way, and I prayed. I don’t remember the words of my prayer, though I do remember how odd the word God felt in my mind, how odd that word was when you used it as a name, when you called out with it. No doubt I said other words, as well. No doubt I asked God to help me know what I could do to change the course of that day. Because that’s all I wanted. I wanted the strength to know what I needed to do and I wanted the strength to do it. But the one thing I remember was the name of God and how, after saying it, nothing came back to me, no voice, no words, no whisper or sign, no feeling or sense or idea, nothing, just as earlier that day my sister and the bum with the beautiful voice had gotten no reply to their prayers. And I had to wonder how that Mormon kid, that missionary, no more than two years my senior, could have said that God spoke to him and would have spoken to us if we’d keep our hearts open. I had to wonder if I had a closed heart, an unapproachable and Godless heart, a heart of stone so that when I spoke the name of God in the dark of my mind I got nothing in return but silence. The missionary had lied to us, I decided. And his lie was as wrong as anything my family or I had done or ever would do.
“What do we want?” my mother said, though she wasn’t really asking this question to me or Jenny or anyone. She was just saying those words out loud with her eyes closed.
“I want to go home,” I said quietly. “Please.”
My mother opened her eyes and looked at Jenny. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You want to go home, don’t you?” I said. “Don’t you?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” Jenny said. She saw the threat in my eyes. “Tell him to stop looking at me like that.”
“Steven,” my mother said, “leave your sister alone.” Then she looked down at Jenny again. “Do you want to go home or do you want to try and stay here for a while?”
“I don’t know,” Jenny said. “Don’t ask me. Please don’t.”
“Okay,” my mother said.
Jenny looked down at her purple Swatch, though she didn’t say the time. She was thinking about our father, about the fact that he had bought her that stupid watch, that he had spent money we had not had on it, that he would do damn near anything for her. I knew she was, and so, it seemed, did my mother. “You know that you’ll be able to see your father whenever you want, even if we do stay here. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I don’t want to think about it,” Jenny said. “Please let’s not think about it. Please.”
“I think we need to think about it,” I said.
“No,” Jenny said.
“Leave her alone,” my mother said. She let go of Jenny and took another cigarette out, but then put it back in her purse. “Curtis wants me to quit smoking,” she said. “He cares about that. Your father never cared one way or the other.”
“That’s not true,” I said, though I knew that it was true.
She looked down at herself. “I’ll probably get fat if I quit. But at least he cares if I’m healthy.” Then she looked at both of us, sighed, and said, “Would you like to see your rooms now?”
“No,” I said.
“Maybe,” Jenny said.
“I’m going to the fucking car,” I said.
My mother dug the keys to the Buick out of her purse and plopped them in my hands. “You can come back in,” she said, “whenever you’re ready.”
“I’ll wait for you in the car,” I said.
I’d gotten halfway down the staircase before I stopped, giving my mother a chance to call me back, to say something that would stop me from leaving. But she didn’t. So I turned around and hurried after them.
* * *
“It’s so soft,” Jenny said, falling backwards into the lavender bedding. Lavender was her favorite color. The carpet and wallpaper were also lavender. It was clear that they had prepared the room for her. “Soft, soft, soft,” Jenny said. “It doesn’t have a canopy like Andrea’s. Do you think we could get a canopy?”
“We’ll see,” my mother said.
Jenny shot up from her bed, walked over to the sliding glass door that led out to the balcony, and flipped the light switch on and off. “I have my own balcony light,” she said. “Look.” The darkness outside her window flashed with light. Then she slid the door open and closed, open and closed. “This is my balcony door, isn’t it?” She walked out onto the balcony and looked over the backyard again. Curtis and his kids had gone back inside. We could hear them down in the kitchen making a racket. “They can’t tell me to get off my balcony, can they?” she asked. For some reason, Jenny had started doing jumping jacks out on her balcony.
My mother smiled then and said, “Your room is next door, if you’d like to take a look.”
“I’m not interested,” I said.
“It’s just down the hallway.” I looked over my shoulder in that direction. “Go ahead,” she said.
I shouldn’t have, but I did. I walked down the hallway and opened the door—my door to my room—and looked in. It was the same as the others except for the rus
set brown carpet and the bedding—a down comforter and sheets that had all sorts of airplanes on them—biplanes, prop planes, fighter jets, the Concorde, the Boeing 747. Those sheets made me feel ashamed for ever having dreamed so stupidly of being a pilot, for ever having labored as a kid over model airplanes, for ever having uncapped tubes of epoxy, sorted through the little plastic parts—the wings, the rudder, the fuselage, the cockpit, the propellers—before gluing them and scraping the excess glue from the seams with an edge of cardboard, my fingertips hardening, red and irritated, with that harsh adhesive, then applying tape, carefully painting, finally soaking the decals of stars and American flags in water and applying the fragile skins to the painted plastic. I had never flown, never been up in a plane. Our family had rarely taken trips. And when we did, we drove. Maybe that’s why I stood there over those silly bedsheets—too young, I thought, for a fifteen-year-old boy, too stupid, insulting to my intelligence, I felt—and nonetheless wondered what it might be like to sit behind Curtis Smith in his vintage P-38 with a flight suit on and a crash helmet while we looked down on the curvature of the Earth below, the geometric cut of fields and farmland, the ground as seen from the air, a view I had only had from a TV screen or from my dreams before, the ripple of mountains on all sides, the city reduced to a mere texture of buildings and streets from which you could never distinguish your tiny house, even if it was a mansion like Curtis’s. To the west and south beyond the city, where a desert as white as moonscape went on forever, you’d see the smooth expanse of the Great Salt Lake stretching like sheet metal for miles and the great iron-ore crater of the Kennecott Copper Mine gouged into the mountainside. It would all look perfect, sculpted and polished. I don’t know why I saw it all so vividly—myself and Curtis way the hell up there with sunlight beading through the cockpit. That strange man’s face—his eyes concealed in a dark aviation visor to protect them from the rays—glowed in a hard, clean light, the sort of light, I imagined, that you only got at ten or fifteen thousand feet. I had no doubt that he was a good pilot. I even had no doubt—seeing the way he’d hugged his frightened kid and gently prevented him from picking his nose in front of us—that he was, as my mother had said, a good man. I hoped I was wrong. All the same, I imagined him piloting that plane, looking over at me in this platinum, high-elevation light, and giving me the thumbs-up sign, the way pilots supposedly do, to which I gave him the same sign back. Everything’s A-okay, it meant. Sometimes you can’t help imagining things. Sometimes things just flash through your head, like that thought about Curtis and me in his plane. It depressed me, though, and after it was gone, I walked over to a desk made of a thick, blond hardwood. I leaned against it and pressed on it with my full weight, surprised by its solidity. My desk, I thought. Those words just came to me, too. I don’t know why. They made me feel dark and greedy and somehow more powerful. I put my white garbage bag on top of my desk and then picked up a cordless phone. My phone, I thought as I listened to the dial tone. That felt good, so I thought it again. My phone. I had never had a phone before, not even the crappy kind with a cord. Then I walked over to the sliding glass door where I couldn’t help mimicking my little sister, turning the balcony light on and off, and thinking, My balcony light. My balcony light. Only when I turned it off, I saw my bony, white face floating in the black glass. In my blue institutional pajama bottoms, I looked sick and skinny. I remembered my father, standing out in the rain, soaked, his shoe untied, water dripping from his wet hair. I remembered how he had made me think of the bum with the plastic bags on his feet. My father would never be a pilot. About that, I had no doubt. He would never, I knew, own a house even remotely like Curtis’s, no matter how good the times were or how big the boom was. Even then I knew he wouldn’t ever buy us that house. My glass door, I thought. I walked over to a corner and picked up a new baseball glove and bat. Mine, I thought. For a second, I even imagined myself up at the diamond slamming a home run over middle field, then running backwards over the bases and waving at the small bleacher of parents, all of whom cheered for me, the winner, the big hitter. It was a ridiculous thought. Baseball didn’t mean a thing to me. Nonetheless, I wanted to feel greedy and powerful again, and looked around the room once more. Mine, mine, mine, I thought about it and everything in it. But I just felt sick and empty and very tired.
