by Deb Caletti
“Oh, honey,” Mom said. She set down her bowl, squeezed in between me and Grandma on the couch.
“Ow,” Grandma said. “You’re squishing me.”
Mom picked up my hand, gripped it hard. “I thought Daniel was foolproof,” I said. My voice was small. It knew enough to be embarrassed, knew enough to hide.
“No one is foolproof,” Aunt Annie said. She was hunting under the coffee ice cream for the butterscotch too, just like Grandma.
“We all make mistakes,” Liv said. “And hey, Daniel was a small mistake! Look at me with Travis. I could have ended up in jail.”
“That Otto gave me a run for my money,” Grandma said.
“You just have to be careful,” Mom said. She was holding back, you could tell. You could almost hear her adding on to her list in her thoughts.
“Hey, Mom—all I got to say is O-C-D Dean,” Sprout sang. This made me smile.
“Don’t remind me,” Mom said. “We got along fine when I didn’t want to kill him.”
“He alphabetized his underwear drawer. Fruit of the Loom before Jockeys,” Aunt Annie said.
“My car was never clean enough. He always picked lint up off the floor mats like it meant my life was getting out of control,” Mom said.
“Once I caught him looking in the microwave and staring at a little melted cheese like it was a terrorist. I wanted to sock him,” Gram said.
“W. is in alcohol treatment,” Liv said. W. was this guy she dated from a different high school who only went by his first initial.
“You never told me,” I said.
“Too embarrassed. But now that we’re confessing…”
“He was always having a crisis. Car accident, remember? Didn’t he almost run over a crossing guard?”
“Not a crossing guard,” Liv said. “Construction guy. Different orange vest.”
“Is he the one who punched his boss? When he worked at Wendy’s?” Sprout said.
“Were you snooping in on our phone conversation?” I asked. “Were you listening in while I was on the phone?”
“No,” she said.
“Sprout,” Mom said.
“It’s just tempting,” she said.
“Jack Xavier told me we needed to stop and get my coat pressed before we met his friends at a party,” Aunt Annie said. “It was wrinkled. I took it off and scrunched it in a ball and said, ‘You want to see wrinkled? Here’s wrinkled.’”
“Jack Xavier was the biggest narcissist next to you-know-who,” Mom said. Of course we knew who. You-know-who was Dad, and so was HIM and so was we-won’t-say-who-I-mean and so was that-man-I-gave-all-those-years-to.
“Jack Xavier spent more time on his looks than a fashion model. He smelled like frou-frou water. He looked at his reflection in the microwave,” Grandma said.
“Maybe we ought to look at a guy’s response to our microwave from now on,” Aunt Annie said.
“Really,” Mom said. “The narcissist looks at his reflection in it, the OCD guy thinks you don’t keep it clean enough, the Antisocial—”
“Puts his fist through it because it reminds him of his father,” Annie said. She’d read all of Mom’s books too.
“And the paranoid one would be jealous of the amount of time you spent cooking,” Mom said.
“Were you using that microwave again? Is something going on between the two of you? I caught you looking right at its clock,” Aunt Annie said. They cracked up. You could see the way they’d been when they were two younger sisters, like Sprout and me. “I hope you girls are paying attention.”
“Just because he’s good in bed doesn’t mean you can live with him,” Grandma said.
“Mom,” Mom said.
“Oh, gross,” Sprout said.
“It’s shocking, the things we call love,” Mom said.
“The best defense is a good offense,” Grandma said.
“You sound like ESPN,” Aunt Annie said.
“Daniel was vomit,” Sprout said again. She was stirring her ice cream all up, into ice cream soup.
After a while, Mom eased herself back up and made tea and Liv asked if anyone wanted seconds. She was the only one who could eat more. After she was done, she had to loosen the drawstring of her penguin pants. She was the type of girl who could eat and eat and never gain an ounce, but you didn’t hate her for it because you loved her so much.
“I feel like an alien might burst from my stomach,” Liv groaned.
“God, that was good,” Grandma said. Even her little slippers looked happy.
“Butterscotch swirl never lets you down,” Aunt Annie said. She stretched her legs out.
“You don’t need to hire a private investigator to check up on butterscotch swirl,” Grandma said.
Aunt Annie sat up suddenly. “What?”
“I saw the phone book open on the table after you left the room. I saw the ads. ‘Surveillance begins where trust ends.’ Who uses a phone book anymore?” Grandma loved the Web.
Mom stopped midway back from the kitchen, abruptly halted her tea bag bobbing. She looked at her sister with a look I knew well. It was a look I probably first got when I had a crayon in my fist and was heading for the wall. “Annie, no.”
“I was just curious. I would never do that. For God’s sake, people.”
“Why do you need a private investigator?” Liv asked.
“She doesn’t need a private investigator,” Mom said.
“Quentin Ferrill is giving Annie a run for her money,” Grandma said.
“Like I could even afford a private detective,” Annie said.
“If you need to pay a private detective to feel like you’ve got the truth on someone…,” Mom said.
“I know,” Aunt Annie said. “I wouldn’t do it! I promise.” She sounded like Sprout. “He’s just so freaking secretive.”
“People are secretive when they have secrets,” Mom said.
“Stay clear,” Liv agreed.
Grandma looked at her watch. “Oh my,” she said. “eBay time.” She bolted from the couch, hurried her quilted-robed self toward the office where the computer was.
“Wow, an item must be ending soon,” Annie said.
“I haven’t seen her move so fast since she caught that kitchen towel on fire,” Mom said. She sipped her tea.
“Thanks for making me tea,” Annie said to Mom.
“Get it yourself,” Mom said.
“Gram likes those salt-and pepper shakers that look like chefs,” Sprout said. She was petting Ivar with her foot.
Annie leaned back against the couch. “She must suck at the bidding thing.”
“Does she always lose at the last minute?” Liv asked.
“I guess so,” Annie said. “Has anyone ever noticed that nothing comes in the mail? No packages from somewhere in New Jersey or Iowa? Nothing shoved so tight in the mailbox you can’t get anything else out?”
“Yeah, we all remember your purse-buying spree,” I said. “It felt like FedEx headquarters here.”
“Nothing comes,” Annie said. “We should have a kitchen full of mini chefs by now.”
Mom sat down in the rocking chair, gave a few thoughtful rocks. “You’re right.”
“Highly suspicious,” Liv said.
“I think it’s great, personally,” Mom said. “She hardly has any discretionary income. If she won all the time, she’d be into her Social Security check.”
“How many chefs does a person need?” Aunt Annie agreed.
“One would be good because of Mom’s cooking,” Sprout said. “Ah-ha-ha.”
“Let’s get your mom one of those hats,” Annie said. “The poofy white ones.”
“Or cooking lessons,” I said. Mom was actually a great cook.
Mom grabbed a pillow and flung it at Sprout, causing Ivar to flee as fast as Grandma had.
“You’re all hilarious,” Mom said. “Bunch of comedians.”
DOROTHY HOFFMAN SILER PEARLMAN HOFFMAN:
I was eighteen when I got married the first
time. In my day, you married the man before there was any hanky-panky, but it makes more sense what the young girls do now. Just because you’re having fun right then or you want to go to bed with him doesn’t mean he’ll be a good father and someone you’ll want to spend the next sixty years with. Rocky Siler was a looker, and at eighteen I wasn’t thinking about what sixty years meant. That he might grow fat and snore and that I’d see his black socks pulled up high on white legs and that I’d have to one day maybe nurse him when he got his prostate out. I liked his shiny black hair and his dark eyes. Like a movie star’s. He had big, strong hands. I didn’t notice right then that I didn’t even really know who he was, or that we didn’t have the same type of humor. You’ve got to be able to laugh together. Anyway, I didn’t nurse him through anything, because he ran off and left me with Mary Louise when she was three months old. I don’t like to talk about it. That’s water under the bridge.
Otto Pearlman, he was a looker, too, a lot like my father—he was a businessman, though I wasn’t even entirely sure what business. Real estate of some kind, both of them. Otto was like my father in that he was the man of the house, and he never had nice things to say about women. Women were out to trick some man with money into marrying them. All they cared about was a big ring, and once they got it, the sex was over, la-la-la. You’d have thought those attitudes disappeared with Women’s Lib, but you’d be surprised. You still have these big shots thinking they’re so special and telling you how to dress because they’re so afraid of your own power.
My mother always said, “Love is work,” and I worked with Otto Pearlman. I wanted him to know I wasn’t like those other women. It got to where I didn’t have a voice, and I think even way back then, I liked my voice. I’d tell him what I thought and his temper would flare, and the way I saw it, he had a problem with his anger. He raised his hand to me, but it’s nothing I like to talk about now. With him, I’d keep quiet and keep things nice until one day I realized that he didn’t have a problem with his anger, he had a problem with mine. My anger meant I had power.
I had gotten so I trapped myself, though—with my silence, with trying to be so good and ladylike, with the fact that I had two babies and no job. Back then, that’s what you did. He was your job. I had no money of my own. But Hoffmans have always been strong women. Even my mother.
I started saving money in a sock until I had enough to leave. I took my babies and left, which is not something you did in those days. But let me tell you, if you don’t keep hold of your own power and strength, you’re lost. Your own voice. Your own money. You can get stuck somewhere you can’t get out of. You don’t want to think about these things when you’re “in love.” But I always tell the girls, you’ve got to keep enough F-You money in case you ever need to leave.
Liv went home, and we all got up and put our dishes away, except for Grandma, who’d ditched hers on an end table in her rush. I went up to my room. I was suddenly all alone, as if the funeral was over and the people were gone and now it was just me and the knowledge that someone had died. Everyone else had done their job, and it was my job now to do the moving on.
I would miss…I would miss Daniel’s hand. Holding a hand. I would miss him sitting on the couch beside me on the weekend. Wait—weekends. There would be no plans when there were always plans! No more movies, no more filled Fridays and Saturdays. No more nightly phone calls. No more having the spot of boyfriend filled. I was used to having him around, and now he wouldn’t be. He’d had a place in my life, like homework or volleyball practice. It was similar to the feeling you get when it’s summer and there’s no school or homework and there’s this sudden space where school was. There was a sudden space where Daniel was.
Some kind of construction equipment, a bulldozer, was digging a deep trench in my internal foundation. God, it hurt and I hated to hurt. Hurting made me aware of bad choices, made me feel like I’d messed up, like I wasn’t capable of proper functioning. It suddenly felt like Daniel was really and hugely important to me. Like maybe if I felt like this, I had really loved him after all. I decided I should write to him. Express how I felt. I took out a piece of paper. I’d write him a poem. I’d never written a poem in my life. I don’t even like poetry. I wrote his name at the top. Daniel. I looked at all of the white space there underneath. I crumpled up the paper, threw it toward the wastebasket, and missed. I would call him instead. I would call him and tell him how I felt because maybe I had missed my chance at love by being too distant. We could have had something great if I’d have let it be great, instead of…
Instead of not really liking him, I remembered.
I needed to get myself together. I needed to take some action. God, I was one step away from pleading with Daniel for something I didn’t even want! Liv had sobbed over Travis Becker. Aunt Annie had sobbed over Jack Xavier. Mom had sobbed over OCD Dean. I was not going to sob over Daniel Jarvis.
Rejection might make you feel small and crappy, and rejection might call for all those who love you to gather around and prop you up. But rejection could do something else, too. I felt some weird stirring of courage, or maybe just recklessness gathering, building from the night before when Dad put those brownies in the oven to now, when I refused to make Daniel Jarvis some altar I’d throw myself on.
I had the sense again of being an art film, of pieces of me in some confusing order. I wanted one truth, my own truth. A single diamond.
Mom wouldn’t like me doing what I did next, and neither would Dad. But if the Hoffmans were strong women, that meant you did what you needed to.
Directory assistance.
“What city?”
“Orcas Island, Washington,” I said. “Joelle Giofranco?”
“I have a J. Giofranco.”
“Okay.” My heart was beating, thudding away with some kind of guilty importance. Bravery was speeding through its phases right there while I held the phone—the wild moment of yes, the certainty of your own stupidity, the realization that you’d just assured yourself either terrible regret or great triumph, no in-between. It was late, and Frances Lee might not even live with her mother anymore, far as I knew. I’d have to explain myself to Joelle, a woman my father had been married to but whom I didn’t know at all—a woman with whom he’d shared Christmas mornings, a bed, divorce papers with their signatures side by side.
“Hell-o.”
I was struck dumb. I instantly understood what that expression meant then. Thoughts had completely vacated the premises. The idea of stringing words together in some meaningful way seemed like figuring out one of the mathematical equations that only mini genius Victor Wattabe and our teacher, Mr. Evanston, could solve.
“This is Quinn Hunt,” I said. “Barry Hunt’s daughter? I’m looking for Frances Lee.”
“This is Frances Lee. Who is this?”
“Quinn?” I hated the question mark in my voice. As if I wasn’t quite sure who I was, which was maybe the truth. Which was maybe exactly why I was calling.
“Quinn-Quinn, as in my father’s daughter?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Whoa, okay. This is sort of a surprise. Is Barry okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. He’s perfect,” I said.
“And he’ll be the first to tell you so,” she said.
I smiled. “It’s just…me,” I said. “I was just hoping maybe I could talk with you.”
“Thank God you’re not calling to say he needs one of my kidneys,” she said.
“I didn’t think I’d even find you there.”
“I’m home on break. But you almost missed me, because I’m just heading out. Friends, bonfire, cha-cha-cha. Can we talk tomorrow?”
“Sure. No problem.” My heart was beating ridiculously. I felt like I was some twelve-year-old, calling a boy for the first time. But this was my…The word felt strange. The word belonged to Sprout. Sister.
“Phone number,” she said.
There was a broad span of silence, because nerves had made me stupid. I was sitti
ng on the other end of the phone with a pen in my hand, thinking she was going to give me her phone number, something which, of course, I had just dialed.
“Your phone number?” she said. “So I can call you back?”
“Oh, right,” I said. My face got hot. I was blushing with weird-awkward humiliation. God, I was stupid. Stupid, stupid. I’d always been the older, capable one, the one who held Sprout’s hand and told her what to do. I wasn’t used to feeling so young.
Still, when I gave Frances Lee my number, there was something else besides humiliation that I felt. Some twist of hope. The sense that the velvet cord had just been lifted up, and that I would now be allowed through.
“Tomorrow,” Frances Lee said, and then she was gone.
Chapter Six
That morning, the last day of school of my junior year, I came downstairs for breakfast and saw that Grandma had snuck something onto Mom’s list again. Underneath He is in any way violent or explosive, Grandma had written, You feel you need to pay a private detective to get the truth about him.
The list was getting pretty lengthy. Two pages now. Our fridge was looking like a self-help book. I left the house, walked into the kind of dewey-grass, sunny-sky day that made you feel like the summer had already promised you something. We had to be at school for only two hours, which seemed stupid. Two hours, and all that really happened was yearbook signing and locker cleaning, which really meant kids dumping stuff on the hallway floors, making the last day hell for some weary custodian. Two senseless hours—made you wonder if some rigid rule-freak was in charge over at the school-district office, someone who probably had thousands of those little KEEP THIS TICKET tickets.
I didn’t see Daniel, or rather, I saw the back of Daniel’s head once, and Daniel’s car in the parking lot, but he must have been avoiding me, because the locker we shared was cleaned of his stuff; the pictures of his friends were gone and only the bits of tape that held them up were left. He didn’t take any of the pictures of us, which meant that either he was being kind or cruel—giving me them, leaving me with them, who knew which.
