by Lily King
“She was right about that. I would have hit her. Cowardly bitch.”
Garvey laughs. My father joins him. My heart is racing and I scrub the scalloped sweet potato dish as hard as I can.
We leave as soon as the kitchen is clean. I mention to Dad that I’ll be back up here Saturday morning and he just shrugs, like he couldn’t care less, which is a lot better than getting yelled at.
We are late, very late, getting back to Mom’s. I can see her trying not to let it bother her, but she’s been cooking alone all day and now the dishes that she covered with tinfoil are cold and she sits down and picks up her fork without saying grace either.
“Where’s Mrs. Waverly and Cousin Morgan?” Garvey asks.
“Oh, Mom,” I remember the placecards in my dress pocket. “Look what I rescued!” I spill them onto the table. The wooden fruits clatter together.
She shakes her head at them. And then scoops them up and throws them all in the trash in the kitchen. “Sorry,” she says to me, “but they give me the willies.” And then she says to Garvey, “I thought it would be better to just have it be us this year. I’m not used to this electric oven and I didn’t know what time to invite them for because I didn’t know what time Catherine would be serving lunch up there and they never stick to a schedule anyway and I just thought it would be easier, but now I’m feeling so guilty. Who knows where they’re eating. Probably at a restaurant. And they could have kept me company while I waited for you two.” She looks sad, sadder than I’ve seen her since we moved here.
Garvey doesn’t seem to notice. He puts his fingers to his Adam’s apple. “You/didn’t/want/to/hear/Mrs./Wa/ver/ly/com/plain/a/bout/her/an/gi/na/this/year?”
“Stop it,” she says harshly. “Stop that right now.”
Garvey just laughs at her tone. I wish I could do that. “Oh my God, Mom, it’s a scene up there. Catherine’s walking around with her boobs falling out of her dress and they’re both pounding down the martinis and her kids seem kind of shell-shocked. Frank is high as a kite and little what’s-her-name is like a feral child. She’s like Helen Keller.” Garvey shuts his eyes and gropes around for my hand and when he finds it he moans and scribbles in my palm with his finger. Mom can’t help laughing.
“You shouldn’t let Daley spend too much time up there,” he says.
I flail around blindly, too, but when I open my eyes no one is laughing.
They start talking about politics, about congressional seats and public funding. They can flip into this language I don’t understand so quickly. When Garvey asks Mom about her boss, things get more interesting. Garvey has a way of sniffing out the real story. For three months, all I’ve known is that he is a lawyer named Paul Adler, and when you call his office you get a lady named Jean who is never pleased you are calling. I know that Mr. Adler is involved in politics, too, and that my mother often has to stay in town for fundraisers. But Garvey, in a matter of minutes, susses out that he is thirty-six, Harvard undergrad and law, unmarried, handsome, Jewish, and has a crush on my mother.
“I think you like this guy. I think you like him a lot more than Martin.”
“Oh, Martin.” My mother waves him off.
“You like your boss,” he says in playground singsong.
“He’s much younger than I am.”
“Five years. And look at you. You look like a coed.” It’s true. Garvey has more wrinkles around his eyes than she does.
“It’s all that grease she puts on her face at night,” I say.
“Like a bug in amber,” my brother says.
“He leaves me these little cryptic notes on my desk.”
“I can just see him. Some poor kid in jail’s life hangs in the balance, but he’s busy at his desk composing the perfect little bon mot for you. Has he made a pass at you yet?”
“No.”
“Oh c’mon. He hasn’t even kissed you yet?”
“No. On the cheek.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am lying.” She bursts out with a huge long laugh. She is happy again, and relaxed, her hands dangling off the arms of the chair, her head off to one side. She keeps laughing, her mouth wide open, her front teeth slightly bent together but still white and pretty and young.
7
It turns out it’s serious with this guy, Paul. Mom brings him home one Thursday night to meet me. He reminds me of a greyhound, lean and quick. He wears glasses. He notices everything.
“How do you like Ashing Academy Founded in 1903?” he asks when my mother has abandoned us to arrange the take-out on plates.
“You’ve done some research,” I say.
He tips his head toward the corner of the room. “I saw it on your bookbag.”
“I like it. I’ve never gone anywhere else so I don’t have anything to compare it to.” There’s something about him that makes you sit up straight, makes you want to say things right.
He looks at me like he’s really taking it in. “It’s funny that way, isn’t it? I’ve only worked for this one law firm, so I don’t know any better either.”
“Do you like it?” I’ve never asked a grown-up if they like what they do. I just assumed they all came home and complained about their work like my father did.
“I have a ball at work.”
I must have given him a face without knowing it because he says he’s serious; he loves his work. He tries to tug his pant cuff down closer to his shoe. He looks like he’s a tall kid pretending to be a grown-up. Then he asks me if I feel cut off from the town, going to private school, and I tell him I didn’t used to, but living down here has made me realize how few of the neighborhood kids I know. “Pauline, my babysitter, knows everyone,” I say. “It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird. It’s to be expected.”
I stand corrected, my math teacher says when someone finds a mistake on the board.
My mother puts the food on the table and calls us over.
“You are here,” she says to Paul, patting the top of the chair she usually sits in.
“Couldn’t I be over there?” he says, pointing to a side spot, next to the wall.
“No, no, you’re the guest of honor,” she says.
Paul sits but keeps looking up and flapping his hand above his head.
“What on earth are you doing?” my mother says, smiling, looking up to the ceiling, too.
“Just checking for swords hanging by hairs.”
My mother bursts out laughing but I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“They haven’t taught you about Damocles yet?”
I shake my head.
In the fourth century B.C., he tells me, there was a terrible tyrant of Syracuse named Dionysius. He was brilliant in battle and mean as a snake to everyone around him. He liked to surround himself with intellectuals like Plato, but he also liked to toy with them. Paul leans back in his seat, as if he’s telling a story about his own family. Dionysius once read some of his poetry to the famous poet Philoxenos, and when Philoxenos didn’t like it much, Dionysius had him arrested and banished to the quarries. A couple of days later, he had the poet brought back to hear some more of his poetry. Once again he asked Philoxenos what he thought, and Philoxenos whimpered, “Take me back to the quarries.”
We laugh, and Paul helps himself to the food my mother passes him.
“But why were you looking for a sword?” I say.
“Dionysius had a big court full of people and this fellow Damocles was the most obsequious courtier of all. He laughed when Dionysius laughed and hung on his every word—kind of like me with your mother.”
“Ha,” my mother says.
Dionysius got tired of it, Paul continues, and told Damocles he could wear his crown and sit in his seat and be king for a meal. Damocles was thrilled. But the crown was very heavy and he had to wait a long time for all the tasters to taste the king’s food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned, and then, in the middle of the meal, he leaned back and saw a double-edged sword just above him, po
inting directly at the middle of his skull and hanging by one long horse-hair. He begged to change places, but the king refused. He said he wanted Damocles to become closely acquainted with the fear that a great king lives with every minute when he is surrounded by his so-called friends. “I didn’t bring any tasters with me tonight,” Paul says, “but let’s eat.”
My mother has put food on my plate, noodles with crumbs all over it and some sort of soupy thing over rice.
“What is this?”
“It’s Thai. You’ll like it.”
It smells very spicy. I don’t like spices except oregano and basil in spaghetti sauce, but this is not bad. The crumbs in the noodles are crushed-up peanuts, and the sauce is sweet and creamy.
“Now, not to undermine your story,” my mother says.
“Uh-oh, here we go,” Paul says to me.
“But I do think you are conflating the two tyrannical Dionysiuses of Syracuse. Dionysius One banished the poet, and Dionysius Two hung the sword.”
“She thinks I’m conflating,” he whispers to me, then turns to my mother. “There was only one. You’re thinking of Hiero One and Two.”
My mother pats her lips primly with her napkin and Paul laughs. He was right—he does laugh at everything she does. Then she stands up and goes to the bookcases and pulls out our huge Columbia Encyclopedia. They flip through it together, giggling when a page tears slightly in their haste.
“Dionysius,” Paul says loudly, then he looks at me. “One and Two.”
He reminds me of a younger, more playful Grindy. “How on earth did you know that?” he asks her.
“My classics teacher at Miss Pratt’s School for Girls wrote a book on Greek history. She branded every name and date on our hide.”
After my mother puts the encyclopedia away, she asks about the Delaurio boy, but Paul puts up his hand and says, “We’re not going to inflict our work on Daley.”
We eat a little more and then he asks, “So who are your friends and enemies, Daley?”
Even my mother looks surprised by this one. I look across at her and she shrugs.
“‘You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends,’” he explains to us.
“Who was that?” my mother asks.
“You promise not to correct me?”
“No.”
“Joseph Conrad, I believe.”
“Plausible,” my mother says.
He bows his head briefly to her. And to me he says, “So tell me.”
“I don’t know. My best friend is Mallory. I’ve known her since nursery school.”
“What do you like about her?”
There’s something about the sound of his voice that pulls more words from me than I mean to give. “She’s kind of unpredictable. I’ll go over to her house to make chocolate chip cookies and we’ll end up wearing wigs and pretending we have our own cooking show. And then we pee our pants because we’re laughing so hard. Who is your best friend?”
He smiles. He wasn’t expecting the question back at him. “That’s a tricky one. There’s Eddie, who was my Mallory growing up, but he lives in Chicago so I don’t see him much. Here I have some good buddies from law school, and this new friend who appeared in my office last fall, but I probably can’t tell you anything about her that you don’t already know.”
They smile at each other. It’s weird. The whole thing is strange, but not awful. He has barely touched the glass of wine my mother poured him.
“Any other friends you want to mention?”
“Not really. There’s Gina and Darcie, but I only call them when Mallory’s busy.”
“And there’s Patrick,” my mother says.
It’s funny to hear her say Patrick’s name. It reminds me that there was a day last spring when she took us to the Mug for donuts and Patrick asked my mother if he could drink the extra creamers beside her cup of coffee and the cream left a tiny crescent of white above his lip and my mother wiped it off for him with her napkin. He told me that afternoon that he thought my mother was the most beautiful mother he’d ever seen. He said she looked like a prettier Jackie Onassis. Now he doesn’t dare say her name.
“And Patrick,” I say. But that’s weird now, too.
“And your enemies?” Paul says.
All I can think of is Catherine Tabor. But my mother wouldn’t like me to say that. “With a family like mine, who needs enemies?”
“What’d she say?” my mother says, but Paul is laughing a loud hiccuppy laugh. I feel all warm inside, making him laugh like that. It’s almost as good as when I can get my father going. But that’s becoming harder and harder.
My mother serves dessert in the living room area. Paul takes a seat on one side of the sofa and my mother folds her legs up beneath her on the other side so I sit on the middle cushion. I catch them smiling at each other.
“What?” I say, but they won’t tell me.
“No homework tonight?” my mother asks.
“I did it in study hall.” The ice cream is coffee and I swirl it around until it’s soup. Paul has big shoes, dark brown leather with laces, and thin socks that show the boniness of his ankles. He jiggles his leg a bit, like Garvey. Everyone seems to have run out of things to say.
When he stands to leave, Paul puts out his hand and we shake. “You are everything your mother said you were, only more so.”
“You too.”
I don’t know why he thinks I’m so funny, but it’s nice.
My mother has a huge grin on her face when he says, “Adieu, m’lady,” and doffs a pretend hat.
“Not quite so fast,” she says. “I’ll walk you out.”
They put on their coats and shut the door behind them. I race to my room. The lights are off and I have a perfect view of the parking lot where they stop beside his car.
I know they’re talking about me. He’s pointing back toward the door and she’s laughing. I hope I’ve made a good impression. They talk for a long time, leaning against the door of his car, looking down, looking up, looking at each other. He takes her hand and then the other hand and when he tells her something she nods and says something and they laugh at the same time. He bends down and they kiss on the mouth, not for a long time, not any longer than my last kiss with Neal. They end up in a long hug. She pulls away to look at him and says something and I wonder if she’s telling him she feels like she’s in a novel. I do, just watching them.
8
“Oh my God, it’s not possible,” Catherine says. “Gardiner, look at this. She’s got another one.”
My father looks up from where he’s spreading the large hotel towel on the chaise. “Oh Christ. What’s that called, Out to the Out-house by Willie Makit? Overpopulation in China by Wee Fuckem Young?”
I’d heard these jokes so many times. “It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume.”
“Blume,” he says and shakes his head. “You’re always reading the Jews. Just like your mother.”
He has no clue about Paul yet.
“What’s it about?” Catherine says.
“A kid whose parents get divorced.”
She snorts. “What would you want to read about that for?”
She doesn’t like all the reading I do. Neither does my father. They say it’s rude. They make fun of the titles, the covers, and the way I chew on the skin of my lower lip when I get deep in a book.
But I have nothing else to do. We’re in St. Thomas for spring vacation, and Patrick has made friends with the golf pro and now drives his own little cart, picking up elderly players at their cottages and driving them around the eighteen holes. He gets paid for this in snack bar tickets, so every afternoon when he gets off work we go have peanuts and papaya juice by the pool. Elyse has attached herself to another family for the ten days, a couple from Salt Lake City and their one-year-old son. Elyse loves babies. The mother from Salt Lake sensed her usefulness immediately, and now Elyse spends her days under their cabana on the beach. No one knows where Frank goes. He leaves after brea
kfast and comes back before dinner with a secretive smirk and half-shut eyes that scare me.
Almost everything scares me these days. I have been on planes before, but this time I was terrified of the distance from earth, the smallness of the plane, and the flimsiness of its metal walls. When we actually landed, my gratitude didn’t last long. There are lizards on the floor, red jellyfish at the shore, and shark fins farther out. I don’t want to snorkel or water-ski or windsurf. And it isn’t just the outside world I’m scared of. I’m scared of inside of me, too. On the second day I ran back to our cottage to go to the bathroom, and as I stood there on the tiles pulling down my suit, a feeling wrapped around my chest like a boa constrictor. The dead star feeling, out of nowhere. I struggled to breathe. I knew I was alone in the cottage and yet the bathroom felt crowded. My heart began to pound and made me so scared it pounded harder and harder until I thought there was no way my body could withstand the force of its beating. I’m just going to the bathroom, I kept telling myself, but my body felt something completely different, as if it were having a whole other invisible experience. Back on the beach, I felt weak and shivery and wrapped myself in a towel. I’ve been in the cottage alone since then, but at night the feeling edges in and I have a hard time falling asleep. Reading is the only thing that calms me down.
“You have your Jews,” my father says to me later, when we are all showered from the beach, waiting to go to dinner, “and I have my magazines.” He picks up the Penthouse he got Frank to buy at the airport.
“Read another letter, Gardiner,” Patrick says.
“All right.” My father flips through the pages. “Dear Penthouse Forum,” he begins. “I never really believed these letters were written by real people, but since last Thursday night, I’m ready to believe anything.”
“They always start like that. It’s so fake,” I say.
“Shhh,” Patrick says
“Yes, Daley, shhh. This is serious literature.” My father grins at me. He is in a good mood, with his drink at his elbow and the magazine in his hands. He reads about a girl who describes everything in her life as boring—her job, her boyfriend, her dog. My father thinks this is hilarious. “Even the fucking dog is boring!” She works in an office building in Chicago.
