by Lily King
“All right,” my mother says, and as she is speaking I hear a little click. “I have to go into town in the morning. Bob’s lined me up a few interviews, bless him.”
The click is probably my father listening in on the extension in the sunroom. I wish she hadn’t mentioned Bob Wuzzy.
“Okay. I’ll see you in the afternoon then.”
“We’ll have to get you some back-to-school clothes. When do you want to do that, Thursday?”
I just want to get us all off the phone. “Sure. Sleep tight.”
“Sleep tight, baby.”
I wait. Mom hangs up loudly. Dad’s is the tiniest tic.
We come into the kitchen at the same time. He goes to the bar to make a drink and drops the jar of onions. It doesn’t shatter but he shouts, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” in a kind of wild strangled voice as if the bottle had sliced him open. Elyse, holding out a fan of cards, scoots closer to her brother.
“Oh, knock it off, Gardiner,” Mrs. Tabor says, spooning tuna noodle casserole onto three plates.
Frank comes in then, tossing a tennis racquet toward but not in the coat closet.
“Pick that goddamn thing up and put it where it belongs,” his mother says, much more sharply than she’d spoken to my father.
“Hello, Frank. How are you, Frank?” Frank mutters from the closet. It’s my brother’s Davis Classic he’s been playing with.
“Why hello, Master Frank,” my father says, bowing. “How kind of you to grace us with your presence this fine evening.”
Frank smirks, about the nicest response you can get from him.
“And what, pray tell, has become of your opponent?”
Surprising me, Frank plays along. “He has entered an insane asylum, so profound was the psychological blow of losing to me.”
“You beat him?” my father says, no longer in character.
“Six–three, six–O.” Frank looks like a little boy then, waiting for my father’s reaction. Their father, Mr. Tabor, hasn’t been around in a long time. He moved to Nevada even before Elyse was born.
My father’s face lights up. I remember that face. I remember what it feels like to receive the full glow of that face. “Six–three, six–O. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. You clocked him. You really got his number. He couldn’t get a game off of you, could he, once you figured him out.”
Frank shakes his head and then takes his enormous smile out of the room before too many people see it.
We are all handed our portions of the casserole and some sliced cucumbers on pink plastic plates. We eat in the pantry; the plates clash with the tablecloth. My father and Mrs. Tabor take their drinks into the sunroom. You can see the backs of their heads through a window in the kitchen. They’re watching the news. It’s weird to see my father and all the dogs in there. It was always my mother’s room because there was no TV in it.
“So, Daley,” Frank says. “Here you are, after—what—three months?”
“Two.”
Frank and Patrick are over three years apart in age but, because they’re nearly the same height and have the same straight brown hair, people always get them confused. I never do; Frank is mean, and his meanness is the only thing I ever see.
“And now you’re here, back in your old house. Looks pretty different, doesn’t it?”
“Never ate in this room before.” I scrape another forkful of noodles together and hope he’s done with me.
“You like my mother’s taste?”
My heart begins to thud. “It’s different.”
“You think your mother is classier, don’t you?”
“Leave her alone, Frank,” Patrick says.
“Protecting your girlfriend, Weasel?”
“Shut up.”
“Well, she can’t be your girlfriend now, can she? Pretty soon she’ll be your—”
“Shut the fuck fuck up!”
Frank laughs at the two fucks.
I’ve never heard Patrick swear before.
Elyse eats. She finishes her casserole and moves on to the cucumbers. Her mouth does not reach the table so all her food has to be brought down to it unsteadily. She’s spilled all over the place. I ask her if she wants a cushion but she shakes her head without looking at me.
After dinner Frank goes outside to shoot things with a BB gun, and Patrick and I play the game Life in the living room. Elyse comes through every now and then, dragging a little beagle on wheels by a string. Sometimes she drags it right through our money piles to get our attention, but we don’t give it to her. Through the swinging door I can hear Mrs. Tabor making her and my father’s dinner, and Dad mixing more drinks at the bar on the other side of the door. Their voices rise, as if drinking made them deaf.
“Oh, that ass. I can’t believe she said that to you!”
“I was just minding my own business. Standing in line at the drugstore, for chrissake.” My father is enjoying himself. “But I set her straight.”
“I bet you did, pet.”
A while later his voice drops to a scratching sound, his attempt at a whisper. All I can hear is something like alcar over and over again.
“What’s alcar?” I ask Patrick.
“You don’t know who Al Carr is?”
“No, obviously.”
“He’s your mother’s lawyer, and he’s trying to take Gardiner to the cleaners.” Patrick says this wearily, without accusation, as if he’s tired of the sentence.
My father’s voice scrapes on. It sounds like he’s choking on his sirloin.
Mrs. Tabor doesn’t bother to lower her voice. She just says mm-hmm and of course and you’re right about that.
Outside you can hear BBs slicing through the leaves in the trees.
If you play all the way to retirement, Life is a long game. My car is full of babies. I’ve had two sets of twin girls and a boy I have to lay down the middle.
Mrs. Tabor comes into the living room and asks us where Elyse is. We don’t know.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? I thought she was in here playing with the two of you.” She is speaking with her eyes shut, but when she starts to tip forward she opens them and catches hold of the back of a sofa.
“Nope,” Patrick says.
“Nope,” she mocks, badly. “Get off your ass and find her!”
Her words are so slurred I can’t take her anger seriously. I want her to leave so Patrick and I can laugh about it, but he gets up and leaves the room.
“There are responsibilities, Daley, if you want to stay here.” Her eyes are shut again. She pronounces my name Day-lee.
I almost say Fuck you. It almost flies out of my mouth.
“Catherine,” my father calls. “He’s got her.”
I get up and follow her in. Patrick is holding Elyse, who is sound asleep.
“She was under the dining room table.”
“Let me have her, pet,” Mrs. Tabor says.
“No, I’ll take her up.”
“I’ll take her.”
“You’ll just wake her up.” Patrick moves quickly to the back stairs. “Or drop her,” he mutters.
“C’mere,” I hear my father say. I turn—I thought he was talking to me—just as he is wrapping his arms around Mrs. Tabor. He puts his face close to hers and waits for her to kiss him. Her lips separate and I watch her tongue go into my father’s mouth. He grabs her by the butt with two hands and shoves her into him. “I love this ass,” he says, not even trying to be quiet. “I love this fucking ass.”
I go out the back door. I have the idea that I will walk home to Mom’s, but then I hear a BB hit the side of the house and don’t want to risk it. It’s too dark to see where Frank is. I push out the little chest of drawers that has some gardening stuff in it from against the wall and sit behind it for protection.
My father is always in a good mood in the morning. He is up before anyone else, showered, shaved, and dressed in bright colors. He sings in the kitchen as he makes coffee and feeds the animals.
I can hear him hummi
ng below my window in the guest room, on his way to clean the pool. I slept in my clothes, so I catch up with him before he reaches the poolhouse.
He stops humming; then he says, “Does it look a little cloudy to you?”
The water is its usual rich clear turquoise, but I want to do the chlorine test with him afterward so I say, “A little.”
He connects the pieces of the vacuum cleaner, the long silver shafts and the rectangular head, then sidesteps slowly along the edge of the pool, the long pole sinking as the vacuum travels toward the drain in the middle, then rising up over his head as he brings the vacuum closer, directly beneath his feet at the bottom of the pool. He gives me turns, helping me when I let it out too far and don’t have the strength to pull it back, and for brief flashes I feel just like I used to feel when this was my only home and my mother was still asleep upstairs and nothing had changed. Even though it’s going to be a hot day, it still feels like the beginning of fall. The leaves are brittle and loud when they shake in the breeze.
My father used to sing a back-to-school song he got from an old ad on TV. He changed the words and put our names in it. He always sang it when my mother and I came home with shopping bags in early September. The tune would linger in the house for weeks, someone breaking out singing it just when the others had nearly forgotten. The tune is in my head now, but I know if I sing it, it will be a betrayal. I know—I sense all the new rules, though I could never explain how— that I’m not allowed to refer in any way to the small particular details of our past life together, the details that made it uniquely ours. We had an array of refrains among us, my father, my mother, Garvey, and I, clusters of words repeated so many times I thought they were universal clichés until I slowly learned, one by one, that they belonged solely to us. I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time, is one. It came from my parents’ honeymoon in Italy. On their third day in Rome, my father returned to the hotel room with a puppy. My mother was not happy about this and the puppy sensed it. He bit her little finger, which is why my father named him Pinky. I was born twelve years after their honeymoon, but the expression was still very much alive, used by all of us in our sulky but self-mocking moments. But I know this expression and all the others have to be buried now. They are a dead language. If I ever said, I don’t like you, I don’t like Pinky, and I’m not having a good time to my father, something would perish between us, as if I had broken a blood oath.
And so I do not sing the back-to-school song as I push the vacuum toward the middle of the pool and pull it back to where I stand at the edge. And I do not ask about Nora, whose bureau has been cleared off, her Jean Naté, silver pillbox, and photograph of her and my father in Maine gone, her drawers empty, and even her soft blue bathrobe no longer hanging in her bathroom.
“You missed a spot,” my father says of a thin line of dirt I was just going back to get.
“Okay.”
“How’s Mr. Morgan doing?”
This surprises me, for I would have thought that speaking of my mother’s father would be completely against the rules. “He’s good,” I say, then wish I’d just said okay, in case my father was hoping my grandfather missed him.
“Still playing a lot of golf?”
“Every morning. He won the tournament this year.”
My father laughs. “You know, all his life he was a terrible golfer. Never got better. Year after year.” I know this story well, but my chest swells at my father’s telling of it, my father talking about my mother’s father, those two smashed sides of me fusing briefly. “And then”—my father lets out a shrill wheeze of delight—”he had that stroke, remember, in ‘sixty-seven, and suddenly he could hit that ball like nobody’s business. He was hitting in the seventies.”
I laugh as if I’ve never heard it before. I feel like I’m glowing. I don’t want him to stop talking about Grindy. “He still has that smelly old spaniel.”
“Oh yeah?” he says, but he hasn’t heard me. His attention has moved on. “You missed another spot right there.” He takes the vacuum from me and finishes the rest of the pool. We do the chemical tests but he won’t let me hold the little vials or squeeze in the drops. Then Patrick comes out and he and my father start talking about grub control and some sort of seeder or feeder. My father wants to show Patrick something in the machine room. It’s hot and electric-feeling in that room and they stay in there for a long time, my father wanting to know if Patrick thinks the pressure on the something-or-other is too low. I go to the minifridge and pull out a tiny can of V8 juice. Then I go into my mother’s rose garden.
The regular flower beds—daffodils in early spring, then tulips and peonies, daisies and lilies—begin outside the living room’s French doors, where they curl around a stone terrace, drop alongside a set of stone steps, spread along the edges of another, smaller terrace, then drop again to fan out along the stone walls that are the border of the main body of the garden, an English garden with a floor of grass and two long, squat hedges whose ends are scrolled toward each other. On either side of these sculpted center hedges, in long dense prickly rows, are the beds of roses. At the far end of the garden is a small fountain painted robin’s-egg blue with a centerpiece of two pudgy children holding a large fish that spurts out water. Behind the fountain are two sets of moss-covered steps that lead to a black wrought-iron door, which opens onto that patch of woods on the inside of the curve of the back driveway. The garden and the door seem to belong to something much more ancient than the house and the driveway.
On a summer day, in full sun beneath a dark blue sky, this garden is magical. My mother is normally in it somewhere, crouched down beside a rosebush with her gardening basket, a kerchief holding back her hair, her gloved hands digging deep into the dirt. She has many varieties of roses and knows all their names: Southern Belle, Black Magic, April in Paris, Mister Lincoln. If I don’t understand the name, she’ll explain it to me. A full pale pink rose with a tiny yellow center is called Christopher Marlowe, and she tells me all about his plays, the one about the doctor who exchanged his soul to the devil for twenty-four years of magical powers, and the one about the queen and the sailor who fall in love in a cave during a storm. Her roses are different colors and shapes, some thin and delicate like a teardrop, others thick and fluffy with a million petals. They are pale yellow, dark pink, deep red, salmon, lavender, and white. The white ones are the puffiest. They look like they’re made of meringue. I used to play around the fountain, trying to catch the eyes of the smiling children wrestling their fish, running up one set of steps to the black door and down the other, around and around, until I got so hot I’d fling off my clothes and slip into the cold, ice cold, fountain water.
But now everything in the garden is dead or dying. The heads of the roses, if they have not already fallen off, are dry and drained of color, their leaves hole-punched by insects. Every plant is encircled by a wreath of its own debris. The grass is burnt, the shrubs white with aphids. The fountain water is olive green. A black sludge covers the bottom. Nothing trickles out of the fish’s mouth. This whole spectacular place, the most spectacular thing about the property, is being punished for having been my mother’s.
While my father and Patrick move from poolhouse to shed, drive off someplace and come back, and operate many machines all at once, I try to resuscitate the garden. I drain the fountain, scrape out the slimy leaves and dirt, and refill it. I spray the shrubs and rake up all the death. And then I water. I press my thumb down on the lip of the hose to create a spray like my mother always did. I can feel the leaves and roots of the plants thanking me as they gulp the water down.
“Well, you’ve been a busy little bee this morning,” Mrs. Tabor says when she brings lunch out to the pool.
“It will perish if no one tends it.” I’ve been reenacting scenes from The Secret Garden as I work and haven’t completely stepped out of character.
My father puts the back of his hand to his forehead and tips his head to one side. He�
�s taken my accent for southern and become Scarlett O’Hara instead. “Oh, my. It will simply perish. Whatever shall we do?”
“I could think of a thing or two,” Mrs. Tabor says in her regular voice, smiling at my father as she sips her drink.
She drinks vodka like my father but mixes it with orange juice during the day. My father used to have a rule about waiting until five o’clock on the dot before having a drink (sometimes we’d watch the clock on the stove and count down the last minute together), but now I wonder if that had been my mother’s rule. Today he drinks two martinis with lunch.
After he’s finished his sandwich, he pushes his plate away, sits back, and sighs. “I wonder what the poor people are doing today.”
Mrs. Tabor chortles.
Then he stands up. “Well, I think it’s time for a swim.” He pulls down his swimming trunks in one fast motion.
Patrick and Elyse erupt in laughter at the sight of his bare bum and floppy brown penis.
“Well,” Mrs. Tabor says, and stands up unsteadily, “I guess I will too.” Off comes the top and then the bottom to her bikini. Her breasts hang square and low, and her pubic hair is not black but salt and pepper, like Mallory’s grandmother’s old schnauzer.
Patrick and Elyse, howling, struggle to inch off their own wet bathing suits, the struggle only increasing their laughter.
The four of them splash around together at first, then Patrick and Elyse go to the diving board to do naked jumping and screaming, and my father and Mrs. Tabor hang onto each other in the shallow end.
“Look at the old prude in her chair,” Mrs. Tabor cackles.
My father doesn’t look. He’s touching Mrs. Tabor’s breasts.
“Watch out, Gardiner,” Elyse says, looking down from the diving board, wearing only a life jacket because she can’t swim yet. “You’re gonna get a boner.”
Everyone but me bursts out laughing.
“What’s a boner?” I ask, and that puts them over the edge. Even if it’s at my own expense, I like making my father laugh. He has a lot of pretend and halfhearted laughs, but his real one makes a clicking sound in the back of his throat that I love to hear.
