by Deb Caletti
I first appreciated, a great deal, the fact that Michael talked about his feelings. But eventually I realized that I had entered a whole land called Michael’s Feelings, a land we explored every corner of until the soles of my shoes were thin. His feelings, not mine. Or, my feelings about his feelings. Or, about me hurting his feelings, which I apparently did quite frequently. I could hurt his feelings by blinking incorrectly. He became upset once because of a dream he had where I had betrayed him. He’d analyze a statement of mine to get the real meaning behind what I must have meant, and this would go on to the point where I didn’t know anymore what I meant and didn’t care. And then the criticisms began. If I cared about other people, he said, I wouldn’t dirty that chair by curling my feet underneath myself when I sat. I didn’t offer the juice bottle to him before I took a drink first, how selfish. I talked too long to a friend and made him feel ignored, how insensitive.
It became a moral nightmare. His last girlfriend was much more caring, he’d say, than I was. I didn’t respond immediately to his calls, so obviously I didn’t love him. I didn’t say thank you when he brought over the blanket—was I always so ungrateful? My relationship with him felt less like love than a chronic condition.
I would like to say that I cured this condition with a decisive break, but I did not. He had, after all, been so nice when we met, and so why had he changed? How had this turned so horrible? I had wrecked things, I was certain. I wasn’t handling it right. I was inexperienced in relationships. Or perhaps he was depressed—as a child he was relentlessly criticized. I was selfish. We needed more time together, perhaps, or less time together.
Many years later I realized that there was only one reason why he acted as he had, and that was because that’s who he was. We were both having a relationship with his issues, not with each other. And because he was nice in the beginning did not mean he was a good man. Most everyone is nice in the beginning. Underneath all Michael Banks’s sensitivity and unselfishness was a very insensitive, self-centered person. There was no mystery there. Only a person who was not what he seemed at first.
When I understood this, I created The Stain. It is a clay figure of a woman on her knees. Her head is bent down and her hands are on her chest as if trying to see a mark of some kind.
I wish, too, that I could say that I never again got in the open, dangerous car of that song…But it would be a long while before I moved from sculpting in clay to sculpting in metals.
Grandma came home from the dollar store just before Mom was expected back from work.
“That Bernice Rawlings is a nutcase,” she said. Bernice Rawlings, our neighbor, was a librarian at the Nine Mile Falls library. If you went there and asked her for a book about race relations, you’d somehow leave with The Tormented Childhood of Marilyn Monroe.
“Did she take our mail again?”
“Worse. She was hauling our garbage cans into her garage. She’s got Old Timer’s disease, I just know it. My God, we almost wrestled. I nearly had to grab that swag of flesh under her arm before she stopped.” Grandma set her purse on the kitchen table with a clunk.
“What, no bags?” I said. “Use an oven mitt, for God’s sake, Sprout,” I said. She was surprising Mom by cooking dinner and I was supervising. This was usually my summer job, supervising Sprout, but I was guessing this would be my last year of it. I started the job when I was twelve.
“I’m not stupid. The oven’s not even on yet,” she said.
Grandma, I noticed, was sneaking out of the kitchen and hadn’t answered my question yet. “I thought you went to the dollar store,” I said.
She turned around, and her cheeks were flushed. Of course, she had just nearly wrestled Bernice Rawlings. “There was nothing of interest,” she said prissily.
“No figurines of praying dogs? No Fourth of July hats?”
“I was tempted to get the Bible on CD for the house—Thou shalt mind your own business, and all that.”
“Ooh, low blow,” Sprout said from the sink. She was filling a pot with water for spaghetti, her specialty. Of course, spaghetti is everyone’s specialty because it is pretty hard to mess up.
“Huh,” I said. “Interesting.” I remembered what Mom said, about secretive people having secrets. You don’t go to the dollar store without coming out with something, you just don’t. It’s not exactly one of those places you go in and tell some salesgirl, No thanks, I’m only looking. At the least, you buy a pack of batteries and a picture frame.
Grandma’s sneaky back was already making a beeline out the door. I didn’t have time to think more about it, though, because right then Sprout lifted up the wrong end of the spaghetti package, the strands cascading and sliding out the hole in the bottom and onto the floor. We’d picked up the last of it just as Mom and Annie came in the front door.
“She asks for a no-foam cappuccino, which always pisses us off, because a cappuccino by its definition is espresso with foam!” I could hear Annie say. “You want no foam, then you want a cup of freaking coffee, okay? She wants it extra hot, and with one and a half packets of Equal, as if she’s going to know the difference between one and two, and then she says it’s too hot and wants it done again. Her life’s so miserable that she needs to come kick a barista? Get her little boost of four-ninety-five power? Control in a cup. Wearing this little freaking tennis outfit, too.”
“Man,” Mom said. But you could always tell when Mom wasn’t really listening, because it was like her voice had left the room. She poked her head in the kitchen. “Hi guys.”
“Last day of school surprise!” Sprout shouted. Steam was coming off the pot, and Sprout’s face was red and shiny from heat.
“Wonderful,” Mom said. “Wonderful kids.” She beamed, as if seeing our greatness for the first time. She gave us each a squeeze.
“You’re in a good mood,” I said.
“And why not? It’s the last day of school and my kids made dinner,” she said.
“Grandma went to the dollar store and didn’t buy anything,” Sprout said.
“She’s being so fiscally responsible these days,” Mom said. She sounded a little prissy too, just like Grandma.
Aunt Annie kicked off her shoes. “You never go to the dollar store and not buy anything,” Aunt Annie said. “Batteries, at the least.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Remember when Grandma decided to start a business making hats?”
“And then she wanted to do that dog walking thing,” Annie said.
“That would have been cool.” Sprout said. She stirred with the old wooden spoon we’d had forever. It had burn marks all over it.
“Maybe she’s starting a new business. Selling stuff on eBay, or something,” I said. This would explain all her recent behavior. “Maybe she was at the dollar store looking for good stuff to sell for three dollars,” I said.
“She should sell some of the hundreds of balls of yarn she bought to make those hats,” Mom said.
“We’ve still got the flyers for the dog-walking business,” Annie said.
“She walked Tucker a few times,” Sprout said. “When Will Green was on vacation.”
“I just wish she’d get off the computer every now and then,” Annie said. “Give someone else a chance.”
“You just want to investigate Quentin Ferrill. Cheaper to do it yourself,” Mom said. She tore off the end of the French bread and took a bite of it.
“No, I don’t,” Annie said. Which meant, yes, she did.
“Sprout, you’re cooking from now on. That smells fabulous.” Mom sat in a kitchen chair. She really was in a good mood.
“One and a half packages of Equal. God, what a bitch,” Aunt Annie said.
MARY LOUISE HOFFMAN:
Here’s something I definitely never told my daughters, and never will. I had a one-night-stand in college. I don’t even remember his last name. Brad. I would have been the first person to have said how stupid that was. The first. I went to a fraternity party (what a cliché) with my fr
iend Nancy. I got to talking to this guy, Brad, and the next night we went out. It happened in his car. I’ve never told anyone, not even Nancy, who was my best friend then. I was too ashamed. I don’t know what I was thinking—I wasn’t. It seemed like one of those experiences you were supposed to have in college, I guess, was how I rationalized it later. God knows what could have happened. I was lucky. I was stupid. The sum total of things I knew about him: He was a business major. He liked Billy Joel. He skied. His brother had cerebral palsy. I remember that. Now, somewhere in the world there’s a guy named Brad who shared this moment with me in a car. Maybe he lives in this city. Maybe he lives in Kansas, or Berlin. Maybe he remembers or has forgotten. Maybe he has kids he’d never tell either.
Again—you want them to know, but don’t want them to know. Too often in my life, love has been defined as “humiliation with occasional roses.”
We look down our noses at people who’ve made mistakes in relationships. She’s so stupid! How could she do that! Our superiority makes us feel better. But I’d bet everything I have on the fact that people who claim to have a perfect record in love are either lying or have very limited dating experience. People who say, I’d never do that! Some day, unless you are very, very lucky, you’ll have a story to tell. Or not to tell.
That night at dinner, Mom discussed with Sprout all of the Parks Department activities she could sign her up for that summer. Pottery. Horseback riding. Swim team. Sprout kept catching my eye, making hers big with Do Something urgency. I knew what she was thinking. We had to keep the time open for Frances Lee. The karmic quest could not be interrupted for a coil pot.
“What’s going on with you two?” Mom said.
You couldn’t get anything past that woman. “Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing,” Sprout said.
Mom rolled her eyes. There was no way we were going to pull this off.
“You’re awfully quiet, Mom,” Aunt Annie said to Grandma.
“Sore throat,” Grandma said. She put her hand to her neck. “Eck, eck.”
Under the table where he lay, Ivar sighed through his nose.
Right then, every one of us had a secret. Every single one of us in that kitchen.
Chapter Seven
After dinner, Sprout came into my room, shut the door. She leaned her back against it and folded her arms.
“Well?” she said.
“Well, what?”
“I want to go on a karmic quest with Frances Lee. I want Brie to get her statue back.”
She sat down, right there by the door. She circled her arms around her knees. She was wearing her pink bathrobe with the butterflies on it. On the collar she’d stuck a pin that had a picture of a dog in sunglasses.
“I’ve been thinking. This isn’t an overnight trip. We don’t know where these women live. Brie and Joelle—right there, that’s a day.”
“So, we do it when we’re at Dad’s. We’re with him on those weekends anyway. We tell Mom we’re with Dad. We tell Dad we’re with Mom.”
It had possibilities. “They don’t talk to each other anyway,” I said.
“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing,” Sprout said. Grandma always said this too, especially after she watched the news.
“Okay.” My mind was clicking. I got a pen from my desk—sometimes I thought better with a pen in my hand.
“Don’t write anything down. We can’t leave evidence.”
“You’re right,” I said. “The weekend with Dad…What if it takes longer? Plus a day or so? Who knows.”
“He’s taking us on a trip,” Sprout said.
“She won’t like it, but we’ll tell her we feel we need to go. All those missed years, getting to know him, blah, blah.”
“I can cry if we need,” Sprout said.
“Subtlety is best.” I sat down on my bed. I realized I was still holding that pen, and I tossed it back to the desk. My aim was bad and it hit this stuffed bear, Ariel, I’d had since I was little.
“He can take us to Paris,” she said.
“Subtlety.”
“Disneyland.”
“Better.”
“She always knows when something’s going on,” Sprout said.
“I know.”
“Like she’s got some Early Warning Detection System. I can’t even think about doing something wrong and she knows.”
This wasn’t helping. “This isn’t helping,” I said.
“We just gotta be like spies, is all. Outsmart the enemy.”
We only had a few more weeks with Dad before he was gone for the rest of the summer. He’d perform at local outdoor theater for a while before taking off on the “World Tour.” Mom would know this. We’d have to leave soon, if at all. Maybe Frances Lee wouldn’t be able to make it right now. I shouldn’t be getting Sprout’s hopes up, I knew that.
And what about the bigger picture? We were getting swept up in the energy of a Great Idea. But what about that pesky little concept of post Great Idea consequences? Alienating Dad forever, lying to Mom—none of it was in the realm of good choices.
“I’ve got to think,” I said. “I’ve got to be the responsible one here,” I said.
Sprout stood up. “I hate it when you do that,” she said. Her arms were crossed, her eyebrows down in a fierce V. “Hate.”
“Shh, for God’s sake.”
“I’m not a little kid,” she said. I thought she even stomped her foot, but I might be remembering wrong. Her words were a foot stomp, anyway.
“Relax,” I said.
“You treat me like I’m two,” she said.
“Stop acting like it, then.”
“I’m not acting like it, you’re acting like it.” We were starting the downhill slide into a serious fight, proof right there what a disastrous idea this could be. The insults had already degenerated into I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I territory, the vicinity of Nuh-uh, uh-huh. She could send me instantly to that place of fury I was in when I was eight and saw my favorite Barbie floating in the toilet, thanks to her.
And then, right then, my phone rang. Over on my desk. Like a referee blowing a whistle.
The fight was instantly over. Sprout’s eyes widened. “Frances Lee,” she said. The words sounded religious.
“Maybe she changed her mind,” I said.
“Maybe she wants an answer,” Sprout said. The phone rang again. “Get it, Quinn!”
I snatched the phone from my desk, looked at the screen. “Oh shit,” I said. “Oh shit, oh shit.”
“What?”
“It’s Dad.” Ring.
“He never calls,” Sprout breathed. Ring.
“Oh shit.” The phone rang again and stopped.
“He knows,” Sprout said. She was there beside me now, on the bed. We were both staring at that phone like it might burst into flames.
“They wouldn’t tell him,” I said. But I wasn’t too sure. I didn’t know Frances Lee or Joelle, either. Maybe Joelle got pissed. I’d certainly seen my share of pissed with Mom and Dad to know how that went. She wasn’t going to talk to him and then, bam, before you knew it, she was slamming down the phone after yelling at him.
“He never calls, Quinn. When has he ever called?”
I thought desperately. It seemed hugely important to find an answer. “He wanted me to bring my CD player that time. To go jogging. Remember when he jogged?”
“For, like, a month,” Sprout said.
“He called then.”
“We’re doomed,” Sprout said.
I stood and paced, the phone in my hand. I opened it and looked—no message. “No message,” I reported.
“You gotta call him back,” Sprout said.
“God damn it. I should never have called Frances Lee. Never.” I punched in Dad’s number. Fine. If this was it, this was it. Might as well get it over with. Worse case scenario, I could lie. Lying was beginning to seem like some friend I could always count on.
Ringing. Sprout stared her support my way. I pace
d around. God oh God oh God.
“Quinn!” he answered. “Quinn-y, Quinn, Quinn.”
I squinched up my face in confusion, shrugged my shoulders Sprout’s direction. What was going on? Dad sounded happy. Really happy.
“Sorry I missed you. I was in the bathroom,” I said. Ha, lies were already rolling off my tongue.
“No problem!” Maybe he was high. He sounded cheery as a Christmas carol. “Hey, I had something I needed to talk to you about.” I held my breath. It was some trick. His voice would turn nasty, and then he’d skewer me.
“Okay.”
“About the weekend after next,” he said. “You guys are supposed to come over?”
“Yeah.” My chest tightened. I waited for the blow.
“I was wondering if we could reschedule. Remember when you were over last? That reporter came by?”
“The reporter for the Portland Journal?” My heart climbed from ground to sky in seconds. It was suddenly a seagull, doing a gleeful swoop. He didn’t know anything about Frances Lee and Joelle. This was about Dad and that junior reporter. I could jump up and down. Sprout’s jaw dropped, her eyes got big. She put her hands near her chest, pretended to grab big boobs. She looked as giddy as I felt.
“That’s her. She took me to some party and I met this woman there.”
“A woman?” I gave Sprout a confused face and she gave me one back. The boob-grabbing hands went back down to her lap. This was a little hard to follow.
“I met a woman at this party the reporter took me to. We talked on the phone a few times…. See, she’s got three kids, but they’re going away weekend after next, when you’re coming, and I was just wondering if maybe we could postpone. You know, until I’m back from tour.”
