She dumped the grocery bag on the table. She wore a T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was pulled back with a rubber band, but still sprang out of bounds.
“Hello, Aunt Clare,” I said.
She spun around. “Phoebe?” she said quickly.
I nodded. My heart was still jumping about in an irregular way.
“Three weeks,” she said, as if we were in the middle of a conversation. “Is that it? Three weeks?” And she made a grotesque face, like a child, screwing down her mouth and crinkling her forehead so that her eyes almost disappeared. And then she shut her eyes entirely, as if the thought of the three weeks with me frightened her beyond words.
Later, when we were eating the spaghetti she had fixed, she asked me if I liked my name. “Fee-bee,” she said on two notes, like a birdcall. “Do you like that name?”
No one had ever asked me. In fact I had often wished for a name like Jamie or Toby or Wendy. Or if it had to be something like Phoebe, why couldn’t it have been Amelia?
“Phoebe is a bird name,” Clare said. “Phoebe bird, Phoebe bird, Phoebe bird. Phoebe bird, what do you think of the name Clare?”
“Fine,” I muttered.
“Phoebe says Clare’s name is fine,” she mimicked. “Little liar!” Then she really frightened me by looking into my mind and saying, “What are you afraid of, Phoebe?”
“Nothing,” I said numbly.
“Liar,” she said again. “Liar, and dope,” she added calmly. She leaned so close to me that I closed my eyes so as not to fall into hers. “You don’t have to be afraid of me,” she said. “Better look around and see what you really ought to be afraid of.”
“What?” I whispered. “What do you mean? What should I be afraid of?”
There was a half-smile, triumphant and knowing, on her face. “Everything,” she said. “Everything.”
The next morning, again Clare was gone before I was out of bed. And, again, I prowled the apartment, even to opening the closet door with many loud cheerful cries. Empty. “You’re acting crazy,” I told myself. And I decided I would not talk to myself, but the silence of the apartment weighed on me. Before long I was consulting myself about everything. “Cold spaghetti for breakfast? Oh, well, why not.” “Wonder if the boy in the red shorts is coming out again. Nope, not there yet.” “Check the kitchen window—oh, goody, there he is.”
Aunt Clare returned in the middle of the afternoon with groceries again. Since she was crazy, I believed she spent all that time buying food, and cautiously I asked if it was hard for her to make up her mind.
“Why?” she said, pouring a glass of milk.
“Well … because … uh … it takes quite a while,” I said delicately.
“It doesn’t take me any time at all to shop.” She pantomimed snatching cans and boxes off the shelves at a great rate. “But you have trouble making up your mind?” she said, as if sympathizing with a private nuttiness of mine that she didn’t share, but would try to understand.
This irritated me. “If you’re not shopping, where do you go in the morning?” I said, abandoning delicacy.
“To work.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere.” She grabbed a broom and danced with it. “Everywhere and somewhere and nowhere and here and there and yonder and so forth,” she sang, dancing with the broom. “Get it?”
I shook my head and she sighed. “What do you do with a broom? Clean. Right? That’s the clue, Phoebe bird. I clean with brooms and mops and rags and buckets.”
“You clean what?”
“Houses.”
“Houses?”
“Now you’ve got it.” She narrowed her eyes, tapping her forehead with a single finger to tell me I was catching on fast.
“Why couldn’t you just say so in the first place?”
“Because it wouldn’t have been as much fun.” She stuck out her tongue at me.
Oh, God. She was so childish. Childish and crazy.
“Now why don’t you ask me if I like cleaning house, like your mother asks me all the time. ‘Clare, you could do something better with yourself,’” she said in an eerie imitation of my mother’s falsely cheerful once-a-month telephone voice. Her face twisted. “Cleaning houses is good. People leave me alone. They don’t know how to clean worth a shirt. Cleaning makes me strong.” Pushing up her sleeve, she showed me the muscles in her arm. “Feel it, go ahead, squeeze it,” she demanded. Then rolling down her sleeve, she said, “What about you? What do you do?”
“I go to school, Aunt Clare.”
“I know that! What else? What about the clarinet?”
Then I had to bring out my instrument, put it together, and let her try it. “Owww!” she cried at the sound she made. She laid the instrument in its velvet case. “I was never musical.” Then, leaning toward me as if I were about to tell her a spectacular story, she said, “What else, Phoebe? What else do you do?”
And I couldn’t resist whispering my secret dream, telling her about the thing I longed for and feared. “Someday, I’m going to be a pilot. I’m going to get my flier’s license.”
“Fly? A flier? Oh, Phoebe.” Her face opened, her huge dark eyes became even larger. “You’ll fly like a bird!” She flapped her arms. “Your name is just right, after all.”
That night she came into my room after I’d fallen asleep. I woke up—I must have sensed her staring at me—and saw her standing over my bed, a dark shadowy figure in the dim light from the kitchen. She wore a nightgown, and her hair, with that weird energy of its own, seemed to jump out in twists and snakes all over her head. Why was she staring at me? What was she thinking? Did she have a knife in her hand? Every horror movie I’d ever seen raced through my mind. Would my parents ever see me again? A thrill of pity for my helpless, lost-lamb self washed over me. I quivered beneath the sheet. “Amelia Earhart,” I whispered. “Amelia Ear-hart!” And I made myself say, “What do you want, Aunt Clare?”
She was startled, took a step backward, muttered something about pictures, and went out. After a while I fell asleep again. The next day I asked her why she had come into the room. “I just wanted to see you sleeping,” she said.
“I don’t like to be watched when I’m sleeping.”
“Oh. Okay,” she said reasonably.
Every day was the same as the day before. Hot, slow, dusty. I watched the weight lifter and carried on imaginary conversations.
Hello, down there.
Hello, up there.
My name is Phoebe and I’m a prisoner.
You mean that crazy woman?
Yes. She’s got me locked in this terrible attic place.
Good grief. Phoebe! What do you want me to do?
Could you possibly walk up the side of the building with your fantastic legs so we could get better acquainted?
Other conversations didn’t end so well.
Hello, Weight Lifter. You have nice legs and great pectorals.
Hello, girl-in-the-attic. What’s your name? Who are you?
Phoebe. I’m visiting my Aunt Clare. You’re cute.
You’re cute, too, Phoebe.
Woo woo, want to get to know each other?
Sure, tell me all about yourself.
Well, my hero is Amelia Earhart.
Who’s she, a model?
A flier! Everyone knows Amelia Earhart!
Oh, yeah? You know you talk crazy, just like your coo-coo aunt.
A few times I went down into the street and wandered around. Where I lived, the neighborhood was just houses with green lawns and Tarviaed driveways. But on this street, one next to another were little factories, stores, big rambly dusty houses, and little houses painted pink and yellow that leaned to one side and had tiny yards in which flowers and bushes grew in every inch of space. There were kids around, but I didn’t know anybody.
One day Clare returned from work scowling and muttering to herself. “You,” she cried accusingly, and for an hour she followed me around, commenting on everything I did. “She’s op
ening the refrigerator.… She’s taking out a bowl. Cold potatoes in the bowl. Putting the bowl on the table … Now she’s eating from the bowl. She’s chewing, chewing, chewing … She’s going to the sink.…”
How furious I was with my parents! At that moment I hated them as passionately as I hated Clare. “Shut up,” I cried.
Then an even stranger thing happened as she followed me into the bathroom. “Just ignore Clare,” she advised me in a hasty whisper. And then, in the other voice, droning, ironic, “She’s washing her hands.… She’s rubbing them hard … putting on soap …”
Just ignore Clare.… As if she were two people, one caught in her obsessive detailing of my actions, the other an interested bystander full of helpful advice.
I’d always been aware of the strange people in the world, the ones I saw from the corner of my eyes. The old woman who patrolled the gutters for cigar butts. The man who barked like a seal from his front window. The two faceless old people who lived in a house so overgrown with vines you couldn’t see a single window from the street. But those people had nothing to do with me. I had never liked to even think about them, and so I didn’t.
But I couldn’t “just ignore” Clare. I was in her house, sleeping in her bed, eating at her table, and listening to her strange noises. My chest ached. My parents had abandoned me to this crazy woman! For the first time, tears filled my eyes. Oh, Amelia Earhart, where are you when I need you?
I wrote my mother impassioned letters—“Can you come for me sooner than three weeks?” “I can’t stand this anymore! If you leave me here, I’ll be crazy like her.” “She’s awful, she’s loony, and I hate her. Come for me right now!” Then I tore them up and wrote another letter. “How is Daddy? I think of you both all the time. I’m getting on okay with Aunt Clare. One thing you’ll be glad of, she doesn’t have a TV, so don’t worry, I’m not sitting around just watching the boob tube.”
A day or so later the landlady came knocking at Clare’s door for the rent. “I see you have a visitor, dear.” Mrs. Bidwell, fingering a stone necklace, stepped into the living room, looked carefully around and then coolly surveyed me from head to toe. Did she think I was crazy, too? She didn’t come close to either of us. My head grew hot and I knew, just knew, that in a moment I might do something awful and rude, burp loudly or make other inexcusable noises.
“That’s Phoebe,” Clare said. “My niece—Mrs. Bidwell.” Her voice was neither loud nor low, neither derisive nor apologetic. It was almost not a voice, but more the polite and right sounds and sentences that might come from a computer or a robot. And she stood like a robot, too, her arms stiffly at her sides.
“Must be nice for you to have company, dear,” Mrs. Bidwell said, looking into the kitchen, then the bedroom. What was she searching for?
“Yes, it’s nice for me to have company, Mrs. Bidwell. Here’s the rent money, Mrs. Bidwell.” Clare smoothed out the bills she took from the pocket of her orange Chinese-lantern skirt.
“All ready as usual. Your aunt is one of my very best tenants,” she said to me with a gracious smile. “So neat and clean.”
I smiled back like a robot. It was catching. Afraid to move, afraid anything I did, scratch my nose, scuffle my feet—anything at all—would look crazy to Mrs. Bidwell.
As soon as the door closed behind the landlady, Clare’s face went into high gear. Her eyes rolled, she smirked and grimaced. “If I tell you something, will you keep it a secret? She’s a snoop,” Clare whispered hotly in my ear. “When I’m not here, she comes up and snoops all over.”
“That’s terrible,” I whispered back.
“Don’t—tell—that—I—know.”
“I won’t, dear,” I said, mimicking Mrs. Bidwell.
“You’re so sweet, dear,” Clare responded with a gracious Mrs. Bidwell smile.
“And so neat and clean.”
“The very best tenant,” Clare cackled, and for the first time we laughed together.
That afternoon we began our marathon Monopoly game. “You want to play?” Clare said. Why not? It was something to do. She sprawled on the living-room floor, white legs waving in the air. I sat cross-legged, tending the money. The set was old, Community Chest and Chance cards all softly worn. We played all afternoon and left the game to finish the next day. But the next day we were still at it, and the day after, as well.
Monopoly with Clare was like no other Monopoly game in the world. She was so excited the entire time. She bought and sold feverishly, collected rents, built hotels, mortgaged properties, and crowed every time she collected two hundred dollars at GO. Our games went on for hours, for days, we began to eat supper while we played, and played after supper, forgetting the dishes. Monopoly came to be the center, the highlight, of my day. As soon as she returned from work, Clare said, “Ready?” Her feet danced. If I was eating, or rinsing a dish, she pulled me impatiently. “Come on, Phoebebird.”
She was especially wild about the railroads. They were her favorite properties. If I had a railroad card, it drove her to passionate wheedling. “Let me buy the B and O from you, Phoebe. Phoebebird, Phoebebird, you can have anything of mine.”
“Why do you want the old Body Odor Railroad?”
“Phoebe. I’m offering you good money!”
“Well … I’ll think about it …” A moment later my Chance card told me to “Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.”
“You see! That’s what you get for being stingy!” Clare put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. Sulking, I made my token, the man on the horse, drag his feet. Which made her laugh, big easy guffaws. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! And I joined her, whooping, too, a new laugh, loud, free, crude.
The life I was leading with Clare began to seem realer than my “other life.” I felt a loosening, loosening, as if I were a boat coming unmoored. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter what I did, what I said. After a lifetime of being lovingly watched and supervised, I could walk around naked, pick toejam in the living room, or, if it suited me, eat nothing all day but pumpkin ice cream on white bread.
I stopped playing my clarinet, got up later every day, sometimes didn’t bother getting out of my pajamas. I didn’t wash my hair, forgot to brush my teeth, and looked blankly at the letter I’d been writing my parents for days, wondering how to fill the page. They were so far away, so distant.
“Of course, I had a boyfriend once,” Clare said one afternoon as we played Monopoly. It was a habit of hers to start talking as if I knew what she had been thinking.
“Was he handsome?” I lay on the floor eating popcorn.
“Who?” Her hand hovered over Community Chest cards.
“Your boyfriend.”
“Oh, Egbert! Phoebe! I was pretty—” She flung her head back. “I had to have a handsome boyfriend, didn’t I? I called him Egbert Custard. Only he wasn’t custard.” She looked at me sideways. “He was very tasty.” And she laughed. Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Then, leaning across the board toward me: “After he went away, I used to say, ‘Egbert, come back.’ I’d talk to him. I’d tell him, ‘I won’t ask you all the time if you love me. I promise I won’t. Come back, please, you could give me a baby and we’ll be so happy.’”
Why had I never imagined Aunt Clare with a past any different from her present? Why had I thought of her only as “crazy”—as if that were a total definition of the shimmering, wavering, deep-water self that was Clare. “Didn’t he ever come back?” I wanted a happy-ever-after ending.
Clare shook her head. “Let’s not talk about it anymore!” But later that night she brought out a round, flowered tin box stuffed with photographs. “I’ll show you my pictures,” she said. “But you have to be careful. You hear me?”
“I won’t mess them up.”
“I don’t mean that, you goose. Pictures can hurt you.” She handed me a snapshot. “Be careful,” she warned again. I took the picture under the light. There was my mother—young, grinning, wearing a sweat shirt and holding a baseball bat jauntily over
one shoulder. I stared, amazed. Next, a picture of Clare and my mother sitting on the hood of a car, their knees crossed, arms behind them, each wearing peasant blouses pushed down on young shining shoulders.
“Here! Look at this one!” Clare was excited. A young man with sideburns, soft eyes, clasping a trumpet in his arms. “Egbert! Sweet Egbert!” Then another of Clare and my mother, and another, and another. Where was Crazy Clare in these old photos? Were her eyes a little shadowed? Her smile not quite so frank as my mother’s? Did she hang back a bit more than necessary? I studied the faded pictures, hunting for clues to Clare and, yes, to myself.
My mother. My aunt. The words seemed mysterious, full of meaning. My heart pounded strangely. And a strange thought occurred to me—could not Clare have as easily been my mother as my mother?
I picked up another picture—the two sisters, one standing on each side of a slight man with a small dark mustache. My grandfather. He had died when I was an infant. “What was he like?” I said. “Grandpa—was he wonderful?”
Clare’s eyes darkened, became that bottomless well. “He didn’t like me.” She snatched the picture from me, then scooped up all the pictures and shoved them into the tin box. “Why did you make me take them out?” she said accusingly.
“I didn’t. That’s crazy,” I said.
Clare backed away from me, her long face closing down, collapsing.
“Aunt Clare, I didn’t mean—”
She threw up her arms. “Go away.”
“It was just—”
“You said it.” Turning, she pressed forehead and palms against the wall and stood there, rocking.
“Aunt Clare, come on.”
“Go away.”
“You want to play Monopoly?” No answer. “I’ll sell you the B and O Railroad.” No answer. “Let’s sing some songs.” (We had done that the night before, and I had taught her all my old camp songs.) No answer. “Clare, please,” I said desperately.
“Go away, Phoebe.” Dull voice, drowned in grief. I wanted to beat myself in the face for my stupid mistake.
“Clare, Aunt Clare—I’m sorry.” So I was. Sorry for having hurt her; sorry for being thoughtless; and, not least of all, sorry for loving her and yet, somewhere inside me, still—still!—being afraid of her craziness.
Summer Girls, Love Boys Page 11
