by Lily King
Since then I’ve often thought proudly back to those twenty days of pure mind-life. Jonathan and Julie refer to that time as the lock-down, and I freely admit I became a freak, but I liked it. There is a part of me that could live in my head quite happily, a part of me that longs to return there, that doesn’t need or want the body. But now on the sidewalk in Ashing, removed from any intellectual demands and thrown back into my child mind, which senses only the visceral—the smells of my father, low tide, wet dog, and the sounds of seagulls and church bells and station wagons—I feel the need to let my mind wander. Does it know how to wander anymore? Do I know how to think without a book or a notebook or a computer screen? I think of Wordsworth and Coleridge and their walks through the chalk hills. I suppose a walk would be a good start.
The sun has dropped behind the library and the sky has gone lilac white, waiting for night. Most people are home, fixing dinner. The library is closed, Goodale’s too. Only the gas station is open; a man in a loosened tie is filling up his Audi, his gaze unnecessarily fixed on the task. The sub shop has lights on, teenagers in the booths. Then there is a row of dark storefronts, places and awnings that didn’t used to exist: a kitchen store, a pizza parlor, a fancy stationery shop. There is only one light at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. As I get closer I see it is a small wooden sign lit by a bulb above it. LIGHTHOUSE BOOKS.
Concave. The creep.
His store is tiny, not much bigger than a walk-in closet. All the walls are shelves; a freestanding bookcase runs down the center. Books, new and used, are squeezed in tight, their spines carefully aligned with the edges of the shelves. More books are stuffed in horizontally above them, and even though it’s all neatly done it has the chaotic feel of a professor’s office. There seems to be no cash register, no counter, and no owner.
My educated adult self pleads with the adolescent to step out of the shop. Proving to a jerk that you have finally developed breasts—not huge ones, by any means, but proportional—is a stupid reason to be in a bookstore. But then my eye catches on a Penelope Fitzgerald novel and what looks like a new Alice Munro collection, and soon I’m squatting on the floor, trying to find Independent People, which Jonathan is always urging me to read; it’s there, and so is Song of Solomon, which Julie worships and I haven’t read yet. Then I see that there’s actually an anthropology section all on its own, not combined with sociology or general science, and there are both volumes of Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology and The Collected Letters of Franz Boaz. They are not the rarest of finds, but I specialized so early in Zapotec children that I didn’t get a very broad base in my own field. There’s even Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, my first bible, which I lent to someone once and never got back. I have a tall stack of books in my arms when Neal steps through the door. I completely forgot about him.
“Sorry about that. I meant to leave a note,” he says, not looking, putting a sub wrapped in tinfoil on a little card table in the far corner. “You finding everything okay?”
He has his back to me. I assent with the slightest murmur.
His voice is exactly the same. Why are voices so distinct, so recognizable, when all they are are vibrations against two reeds in the throat? It’s understandable that there can be a few billion variations of the face, given all the variables, but the voice? Neal’s is smooth, like skates on fresh ice. It hasn’t deepened much, though he has grown tall. And there is his hair, the same brown curls Miss Perth used to tease him about. She called him Shirley Temple when he was bad, which he sometimes was. Shirley Temple, go sit on your stool, she used to say without turning from the blackboard. I have eyes in the back of my head, Shirley Temple. In second and third grades we had red math workbooks and we used to race each other to finish one and get the next. We were paired together, pitted against each other. In those lower grades we were sent out of our classroom and into the next grade up for English. In fifth grade we were captains of opposing spelling teams. And then my parents divorced and my grades slipped and Neal’s never did.
He was small and narrow, almost scrawny, when he was younger, with square teeth too big for his face, but now he is long and broad, shirttails hanging out, an overgrown prep-school kid. I know the type and avoided them in college, those guys who never quite adjust to the world that isn’t boarding school, who can’t believe their angelic faces, long bangs, athletic achievements, loose-limbed walk, cow eyes, and quick sardonic responses are no longer enough to impress every teacher or get every girl. They have a knack for sniffing me out, those disillusioned preppies, sensing my background despite all I have done to disguise it, and I run from them as fast as I can. Boys like that turn into men like my father.
I keep my back to him, moving toward poetry at the back. I hear him sink into a cane chair, prop up a book in front of him, unwrap the sub.
“I’m ready to settle up,” I say, after I hear the foil crumple and drop into a trash can.
His head jerks up from his book. I suppose my voice hasn’t changed either. “Jesus. I thought my mother was delusional. Daley Amory’s in town, Neal. That go-getter is a professor at Stanford.” He does a pitch-perfect imitation of his mother. But I don’t like being used as a prod. I didn’t realize she had a cruel streak. She seemed glad to have him home, proud of his store. The brief performance leaves me at loss.
“Berkeley, not Stanford,” I say, finally. And then, looking around, “This is a great store.”
“Yeah, well, I think I should call it Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow, but maybe everything is like that.” He clears a spot on the card table. “Here, put those down here.”
I slide my stack of books onto the table, nudging off a receipt pad. I bend to pick it up, noticing that the last person has bought The Pickwick Papers for $3.95.
“Your dad okay?” he asks as he writes down my books, his tone already apologizing for the question. How much has he heard? What does the town know?
“Yeah, I think he is.” I want to tell him that my father is at his second AA meeting, that he dresses for them like he’s going to a cocktail party, and who knows who is in there or what they talk about. I want to ask him if he has known anyone who has gone to that meeting in town and if it really might work—no, I don’t want to hear any stories of failure. “How are your parents?”
“They’re all right. They endure.”
His mother was such a presence that I barely remember his dad. A beige windbreaker is all that comes to mind.
I don’t know what to say after that. I watch him write, the handwriting familiar, bunched.
“Congratulations on the job at Berkeley,” he says, handing me my books, the receipt stuck in the middle of the one on top. “That can’t have been easy to get.”
I smile more than I should. “Thanks.” That job is my talisman against all this. “Take care of yourself, Neal.”
I look back before stepping off the stoop, but he’s putting the cash box back on the floor.
I head back toward the church. “Well, that was awkward,” I say to the empty sidewalk. “Not sure he even noticed the boobs.”
And then I hear it, the sound of heavy pieces of metal knocking against one another. I’m flooded with an old feeling, a delicious anticipation. It’s coming from behind me, across the tracks. I turn and, sure enough, the trucks and trailers have just arrived. The true sight and sound of summer in Ashing: the carnival is being set up.
I wish I could go watch like I used to with Patrick and Mallory, straddling our bikes outside the fence, sometimes for hours at a time, mesmerized by all the trailers and what came off of them, the enormous limbs of rides like the Scrambler and the Salt ‘n’ Pepper Shaker, the horses for the merry-go-round on their poles, the big crowns of lights and mirrors, upholstered seats, little boats and planes. Once a boy about our age brought us some fried dough from his family’s stand a day before the carnival actually opened. We devoured it and asked him questions about his life, if he got to ride for free, what was
his favorite ride, his favorite food, his favorite town. “Not this one,” he said. “Rich towns like this keep all their pennies up their asses.” We laughed hard and a couple of other boys came over, but that caught the attention of a big guy attaching the fake balcony to the haunted house. “Hey,” he called down to us, “don’t harass the kids. They got work to do.” Rich towns like these, Pennies up their asses, and Don’t harass the kids all became refrains for us for years.
I sit on the bench outside the library until the clock strikes eight, then I cross the street and wait in the car until my father comes out. I recognize hardly any of them from the night before, but again they all make a point of saying goodbye to my father.
“All righty then,” he says when he gets in. “Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”
“How was it?’ I think I can risk it, given his good mood.
“Good.” He looks at the door of the rectory.
I can’t tell if he’s faking it all for me.
“Not too much God?” This is one of the things I’ve been worried about. My father hates God almost as much as he hates Democrats.
“No.” He’s still looking out the window, away from me. “To each his own.”
To each his own? I think of quoting this to Garvey and have to clench in a laugh.
The light is out at Lighthouse Books.
“I walked down here while you were in your meeting. To the bookstore.”
“Oh yeah? Never been in there. Nice place?”
“Small, but good books.”
“That poor kid.”
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head. “With a mother like that.”
“I like his mother.”
“Yeah, well, let me advise you right now, stay away from her. She’s got a big screw loose in her head.”
We pull into the driveway, and I realize I forgot to check the sign in the park that tells the day the carnival will open. I hope it’s before I have to leave.
I have Dad cook his own pork chop and show him how to poke holes in the potato before baking it.
We eat by the pool. The dogs swim. When we’re done, I ask him how he feels.
“Good,” he says, in his new preemptive way.
I can tell he doesn’t feel good. His right leg bounces incessantly, like Garvey’s, his eyes flit from thing to thing, and his skin is gray, not the purple gray it gets after many drinks but a pale ash. He smokes one cigarette after another, their tips trembling. I got a book out of the library to help me understand what he might be feeling, but all I learned was that each body reacts differently to the sudden absence of alcohol.
“I know it has to be really hard right now.”
He jiggles his leg. Many times he looks at me like he is going to say something and stops. Finally he says, “I’ll tell you what. I need you to sweeten the deal. I do this for you, and you come to the club with me on Saturday morning, just to hit a few balls.”
“First of all, you are not doing this for me. You are doing this for you. And second, we made our deal. I stay for six more days, and you don’t drink.”
“If I make it to Saturday, will you come? I can’t miss another week.”
I point to the court in his backyard. “We can play right there.”
“I like playing at the club. I like clay.”
“Dad, I haven’t played tennis since I was sixteen.”
“Please?” He needs me in case Catherine is there. He needs someone beside him when all eyes are on him. “Please, elf?”
It won’t kill me to be for an hour the daughter my father has always wanted. I can give him that memory before I leave. But the idea of going up the long private drive to the white columns of the brick clubhouse is almost enough to make me wish my father won’t hold up his end of the bargain.
14
But he does. After probably more than forty years of vigorous daily drinking, my father goes six days and six nights without alcohol. On the phone Jonathan suggests that he could have a stash somewhere. But I know the difference between my father drunk and my father sober. I know the sated smugness of the early drinks, the agitation that turns to wrath of the next few, and the slack yellow-eyed hollowness at the very end. I’ve also cased the joint. I’ve rummaged through his closets and cars, through the basement, attic, shed, and garage. Nothing. And I stay up late, hours after he does, hearing only the heavy, steady throttle of his snore.
On Friday night, after his meeting, he takes me to the Mainsail for dinner. It’s the only fancy restaurant in Ashing, with a dining room that overlooks the harbor. The entrance is a dock that rises up from the parking lot and makes everyone’s footsteps ring out. I wear a blue dress, wrinkled from days in my hot car. My father is nervous and cups his hands tight as he walks.
“Well, hello to you,” he say to the wooden statue of a boy holding a net with a wood fish in it. “That’s probably a six-pounder you got there.”
He’s worried Catherine will be here, but I’ve reassured him that she knows this is his restaurant, his territory, and she won’t dare. I hope I’m right.
Harold, the bald obsequious manager who has been stationed at the podium in the entryway all my life, bows to us. “Good evening, Mr. Amory. Good evening, miss.”
“Oh for chrissake, Harold, it’s Daley.”
He bows again. “Good evening, Miss Amory.”
“Ms., if you wouldn’t mind.”
My father lets out a small groan.
“Oh, did you get married?”
“No, but please, just call me Daley.”
“I will do that,” he says, lifting two long leather binders out of the holder on the side of his podium, his lips tightly pinched, clearly displeased by how unsmoothly this interaction has gone.
“Daley,” my father says when we slide into our chairs beside the enormous window, “please don’t go around trying to paint this town Commie red. Someone calling you miss is not trying to harm you in any way.”
“I don’t care if they’re not trying. It does harm me.”
“Why?”
“Because the terms Miss and Mrs. are like branding cattle. No one needs to know I’m unmarried.”
“Yes, they do. People want to know these things.”
“There’s this tribe in New Guinea where the available women are given a suffix to their name that literally means tight vulva and the taken women are given a suffix that means floppy vulva. Should we do that, more to the point?”
“You are making me sick to my stomach, for chrissakes.” But he is amused. He is having fun.
“Here you are, Mr. Amory.” Harold drops a vodka martini on the rocks with two onions and an olive beside my father’s right hand. “And what can I bring your lovely daughter?”
I can feel the vibration of my father’s jiggling leg on the wooden floor beneath us. I can feel the attraction between him and the martini, and his restraint, everything it takes to not get that martini down his gullet and into his blood system. He lifts it up and hands it back to Harold. “Sorry about that, sir. She’s keeping me clean tonight.”
Harold glances at me—haven’t you made enough trouble already?—and then sympathetically back at my father. “Excuse me, Mr. Amory. I shouldn’t have presumed.”
I watch over my father’s shoulder as Harold goes back to the bar with the drink. I can’t remember the bartender’s name but I know he has a tattoo of a submarine on his upper arm and a roll of crystal mint Lifesavers in his pocket. His head jerks up toward us when Harold speaks. He shakes his head, then dumps the drink in the sink.
My father doesn’t need to look at the menu. He always orders the filet mignon with béarnaise sauce. I hurry to figure out what I can eat. All the writing is in big slanted script. I worked in a restaurant like this in college, waited on people just like my father, with their regular drinks, their regular cow parts.
There is vichyssoise, but when I ask Harold if it has chicken stock he returns from the kitchen quite pleased to tell me that in
deed it does. My father shakes his head. He apologizes to Harold when I order a plate of steamed rice and french-cut green beans.
“To each his own, Dad.”
Across the harbor, the Ferris wheel begins to turn. Its red and blue lights smear slowly into huge purple rings. It’s the first night of the carnival.
“Oh, Christ,” my father says, briefly eyeing the door. “They won’t leave me alone,” he whines, though his face betrays nothing. I wonder who it is but he’ll be furious if I turn around to look. “Here they come,” he whimpers, and then he glances up, feigns convincing surprise, and leaps to his feet to shake the man’s hand firmly and kiss the woman on the cheek. I know them, her squat forehead and his puffed-out chest. I kiss them both as they marvel at how long it has been and what a lovely girl I’ve become, and my father shoots me a look because he knows how I feel about being called a girl at the age of twenty-nine. I ask them about their kids, hoping to jog my memory. Carly was in Woods Hole, Scott was working for Schwabb, and Hatch was in Colorado “doing who knows what,” the woman says, laughing.
