Wish You Were Here

by Stewart O'Nan

  20

  “Whose turn is it to do the dishes?” his mother asked.

  She looked around the porch at everyone, and Justin felt like he did at school when he knew Mrs. Foley was going to call on him.

  “The boys can do them,” Aunt Lisa volunteered.

  “I always have to do the dishes,” Sam whined—something Justin wouldn’t even think of doing. Backtalk, his mother called it. “Ella never has to.”

  “You haven’t done them once since we’ve been here,” Aunt Lisa said. “Now get your tattooed butt in there.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t argue,” Uncle Ken said, and pointed to the door.

  “Don’t go in empty-handed,” Grandma said, holding out her pie plate and her cup and saucer.

  A nod from his mother and Justin cleared her place and followed Sam in.

  Aunt Lisa was right behind them, telling them to shove the food garbage down the disposal. He and Sam stood there while she zipped around the kitchen, throwing away paper towels and dropping forks in the sink. Dirty plates were piled on both counters, and on the table with the sliced tomatoes and the open jar of pickles, the container of potato salad.

  Aunt Lisa stopped flying around and stared at them. She sighed and shook her head and looked at them like they were idiots.

  “One of you rinses the dishes and one of you puts them in the dishwasher. You figure out who does what. I don’t care.”

  “I’ll put them in,” Sam called.

  “Fine, just do it.” She turned the water on and kept her hand under it until it was ready.

  It wasn’t fair, but there was nothing Justin could do. It was like at the video arcade when Sam cut in front of him so he could go on the ski machine first.

  The water was hot, steam clouding up around the faucet. The dinner plates were so heavy they bent his wrist. He used a fork to scrape the fat and potato salad into the disposal, then held them under the running water. All Sam had to do was fit them into the dishwasher. Justin’s fingers were cucky. Between plates he wiped them on the sides of his pants.

  “Turn the light on so you can see what you’re doing,” Aunt Lisa said. She reached over him and flipped the switch, grabbed a scrubbing pad and swirled it around the plate he was holding. “You’ve got to get this stuff off, the machine won’t do everything for you. Don’t be afraid to get wet.”

  He wasn’t. He was afraid of the knives, thin and slippery in the water. He was afraid of dropping a glass and having a piece stick in his thumb. At home he was afraid of their disposal, the blades spinning under the rubber guard. Once he’d dropped a fork in and it had chewed the smooth handle—from then on the scratches snagged the skin of his fingers, and he avoided that fork. He was afraid he’d mess up and get yelled at. He was careful now, cleaning the plates like Aunt Lisa before sliding them onto the counter.

  “Can you go any slower?” Sam asked.

  “God,” Justin said. “You do it then.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Less talk, more work,” his mother said, delivering a cup and saucer they’d forgotten. “Don’t worry about the food, I’ll put it away.”

  Uncle Ken looked in around the corner of the refrigerator. “As soon as you guys are done, we’re going to watch a movie.”

  “They’re getting there,” Aunt Lisa said, and fitted her cup and saucer in by herself, rearranging things.

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” Sam said, and left. The coffee cups piled up on the counter, Aunt Arlene’s with lipstick around the rim.

  “Where’s your helper?” his mother asked. She laughed when he told her. “That’s the oldest trick in the book. Your uncle used to pull that one on me all the time. Don’t expect him to come back.” She leaned over him to see how he was doing, then put the coffee cups in the top. “There’s not much left. You know how to start it, right? It’s just like ours, you just turn the knob till you hear it go on.”

  The last thing in were the big serving spoons. His hands felt like they did after swimming. His mother was right, Sam didn’t come back. Justin popped the nozzle and squeezed the plastic bottle until the lemony soap filled the little drawer. He closed the door and locked the latch the way Sarah did at home. The knob had an arrow on one side. He turned it until it was even with PREWASH and then a little more. The machine gargled on like a faucet, a rushing of water inside.

  He wasn’t sure he’d done it right, and stood there watching as if it might stop. When it didn’t, he went into the living room where everyone else was. Sam was sitting on the couch with Ella and Sarah, all three of them under a blanket. Justin had to step over Rufus to get to an empty seat. He pulled the blanket over his lap and sat back, his shoulder against Sarah’s. At home sometimes she would put her arm around him when they watched TV, but she didn’t now. He smelled her smell and that was enough.

  “Thank you for doing the dishes, Justin,” his mother said so everyone could hear.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  “Okay,” Uncle Ken announced, standing by the VCR, “everybody ready?”

  Grandma stopped working on the puzzle and came over to the couch.

  “Is there room for your old grandma under there?” she asked, and he lifted the blanket and let her in. “Isn’t this nice and cozy,” she said. “Snug as a bug in a rug.”

  It was Toy Story 2, where Woody gets stolen by the collector guy. Uncle Ken turned the TV up so they could hear it over the dishwasher. Even Grandma laughed at Woody riding the dog through the yard sale, and then everyone went quiet when the mother put him up on the shelf with Squeaky the Penguin.

  “They shelved him,” the Slinky Dog said with horror.

  “I’m just amazed how far they’ve come with this animation,” Grandma said across him to Uncle Ken so he couldn’t hear.

  “Who wants popcorn?” Aunt Lisa asked, getting up, and they all hollered, “Me!”

  She went into the kitchen and they went back to the movie. At home his father made popcorn with chili powder on it so you had to bolt a soda. At Blockbuster he let them each pick out one candy; he’d even get Reese’s Pieces for himself and then share them.

  The dishwasher suddenly stopped, making the sound loud. Aunt Lisa stood in the doorway. “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

  Uncle Ken jumped up to help, and Grandma, and his mother. They all stopped in the doorway.

  “For God’s sake,” Grandma said.

  “It’s all right,” Uncle Ken said.

  “Justin,” his mother called him, and he hesitated before going over, afraid of what he’d see, knowing that the others were watching him instead of the movie.

  There was foam all over the floor. Fluffy white mounds covered Aunt Lisa’s feet, reached all the way to the refrigerator. The dishwasher was so full he couldn’t see the plates. His mother put her hand on his shoulder. “What kind of soap did you use?”

  “Just soap,” Justin said, still not believing it. “The yellow stuff on the sink.”

  She looked over his head like she was talking to someone else, then looked at him again.

  “That’s dish soap for when you do them by hand. There’s a different kind of soap you have to use for the dishwasher.”

  “It said right on it—”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s okay. It was an accident.”

  Still, he wanted to show her. And it did say that—concentrated dish liquid. Why did it say it if it wasn’t supposed to go in the dishwasher?

  “I know,” she said, “I know.”

  “I was meaning to wash this floor anyway,” Grandma said, and patted his shoulder.

  “A cup of vinegar’s supposed to cut the suds,” Aunt Lisa said. “You may have to run it a few times to get everything.”

  “We’ve got vinegar, I’m pretty sure. The regular kind or cider, or doesn’t it matter?”

  Uncle Ken was scooping bubbles with a strainer and dumping them in the sink.

  “I’ll take care of this,” his mother said. “You
go watch the movie.”

  “I’m sorry,” Justin said, and felt his throat close, choking him.

  “Hey, come on,” his mother said, smiling, “stop. It wasn’t your fault.”

  He spun out of her hands, cutting around the fridge and hurrying through the living room, his face turned away from Sarah and the others, the light of the TV blinding as he passed and threw open the door to the upstairs.

  “Justin,” Uncle Ken called, but after he closed the door no one opened it, and upstairs in his sleeping bag, all he heard was the movie coming through the floor, and then, much later, the dishwasher turning on, churning. Sam would laugh and call him a crybaby but he didn’t care.

  The door opened then, and footsteps slowly climbed the stairs. It was his mother, not Sarah, who he thought it would be. She sat down beside him on the floor and rubbed his back through his sleeping bag before she said anything.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said again.

  She explained that accidents happened and that was how we learned, that Grandma and everyone knew he was just trying to do something nice. She said it three times after that, touching his cheek so he wanted to scratch it, making him look her in the eyes until he agreed that it wasn’t.

  But it was.

  21

  “How is he?” Arlene asked, stopped in the dark.

  Margaret found a spot by Henry’s workbench and lit up, the cupped flame making her face glow like a moon, then disappear.

  “Still despondent.”

  “I feel bad for him.”

  “He’ll get over it,” she said gently, as if that were sad in itself.

  She passed the lighter back, and Arlene had to use both hands to take it. When Margaret inhaled, her face warmed, a soft orange. The rain played above them, insistent. Tomorrow they were going to the falls.

  Margaret touched a cardboard box on the workbench, a tangled roll of twine. “This place is a total firetrap.”

  “Usually he was so neat, like our father. Shows you how things pile up.”

  She remembered the last time Henry was up here, two years ago. He never lifted a hammer, saving his energy to play with the children. She knew there was something wrong from the way his skin hung on his neck, but he didn’t feel the need to tell her until the fall, before he went into the hospital. He spent that summer on the dock, or napping, wearing the same gray sweater Emily had knitted him twenty years ago, the cuffs unraveling, dragging in the dip. In the middle of the week, Emily made a special trip to the laundromat with it. When she brought it back, he hauled it on sitting down, Emily helping him find the armholes.

  “I remember he used to have everything labeled,” Margaret said. “Every screw had its own little place. And this was always cleaned off, in case he needed to fix something. He used to hide out here when he didn’t want to deal with us. I don’t think he did anything, he just cleaned up.”

  “He always had some project going on,” Arlene said, partly in his defense and partly because it was true.

  “I don’t know, the more I try to think of him, the less I remember. I can’t remember him doing things with us, it was always Mom. I think she made it easy for him not to be involved.”

  “That was how things were then.”

  “I don’t think so. I had friends whose fathers talked to them. It was the sixties, it wasn’t like Father Knows Best.”

  “Well, that’s where we came from,” Arlene said. “You have to remember that. I can look back at my mother and father and see where they could have done better, but it doesn’t do any good.”

  “I’m more worried about now. I worry about Justin, and Sarah. I know this is all affecting them, everything I’m going through.”

  So, Arlene thought, it wasn’t about Henry. The two of them smoked in the dark, the air around them cloudy. One of the secrets of teaching was shutting up, letting the student teach herself. Over the years she’d become adept at recognizing these situations, and now she fell into a ritual of counting silently—six, seven—waiting for the inevitable.

  “But I’m proud of them,” Margaret said, as if she’d thought the argument through. “And I tell them that. I may be a horrible mother—that’s all right, I know I’ve got problems—but I let them know how I feel about them. I know Dad wasn’t proud of me, and I know he didn’t like me as a person—”

  “He loved you very much.”

  “I know, but he didn’t like me very much. I’m sure he wished he had a different kind of daughter.”

  “That’s not true,” Arlene said, but her silence afterward turned it into a lie. She was done with her cigarette, and stood there, trapped.

  “I’m not trying to say he was a terrible person or that I’m scarred or anything, but I don’t think we should pretend that everything was perfect like Mom does.” She found a can on the counter and stubbed her butt out in it.

  “I don’t think anyone’s pretending that.”

  “Maybe she honestly remembers it that way. Maybe she has to. Maybe I’m remembering it worse than it actually was. What do you think, did he like me? I’m sure you two talked.”

  She couldn’t be serious, was Arlene’s first thought. She’d said it offhand, but here she was, waiting on her answer. It was like being attacked, forced at gunpoint. Arlene thought there was a confidence on her part that shouldn’t be breached, for Henry’s sake.

  “He didn’t,” Margaret said, certain, answering her own question. “It’s okay, you don’t have to say anything.”

  Arlene thought it was unfair that she’d taken away her only escape.

  “He said that you were your own person,” Arlene said, aware that in her passion to tell the truth (and shut Margaret up) she’d spoken too loudly. “In our family that was a compliment. He didn’t like it, but he respected it. He cared for you very much.”

  That was all she could honestly say. She hoped it would be enough.

  “I didn’t like him either,” Margaret said. She laughed, just a cough in the dark.

  The surprise of it angered Arlene, as if she’d been fooled all these years.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I know, everyone else thought he was the nicest person. We just never got along. I think he stopped trying after a while, and I think I held that against him, that he’d write me off like that. I know I didn’t make it easy for him, but …”

  Arlene had to restrain herself from shaking her, the ungrateful little thing. Have some compassion, she wanted to say.

  Maybe this was the truth for her, maybe this was her confession, what she would have told him if there’d been time, if things had been different. When her father had died, Arlene had had to forget his disappointments in her, his preference for Henry, his dismissal of women in general. No one had been there to tell her she was justified, and she’d been ashamed of thinking of him that way. Perhaps Margaret was asking her for forgiveness.

  “I liked you,” she said instead. “I always stuck up for you.”

  “I know.”

  “You’d be surprised how much he thought of you. He worried about you more than he worried about Kenneth, and with good reason. Do you remember how happy he was at your wedding?”

  “That didn’t work out, did it?”

  “You remember what he said, that toast he gave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he meant it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then,” Arlene said. “Don’t say he gave up on you. Just because you two didn’t get along doesn’t mean he didn’t love you, or that you didn’t love him. He knew how you felt about him.”

  Arlene wondered if that was true, or true of her own father, a wish spoken out loud.

  “Thank you,” Margaret said, controlled, so it didn’t matter.

  They were done, but now, aroused, Arlene wanted to talk more. She’d been a good aunt, a good sister, and as they moved to the door and through it into the rain (the light from the kitchen reflected in the slick stones, drops dimpling the ima
ge), she was impressed with herself, surprised by how well she could articulate their situation, as if she’d been secretly mulling it for years.

  Inside, in her room, she thought that in a way she had. And yet, alone, the movie playing on the other side of the wall, she remembered her surprise and anger at Margaret’s words, though she knew they were heartfelt, not supposed to be a joke. I didn’t like him either. Arlene pondered her role in Margaret’s life, her years as a well-meaning go-between. She’d known all along and not said anything.

  It wasn’t a secret, not on Margaret’s side. Arlene had put it down to a teenager’s easy scorn, never thinking it would last past twenty-five. But then there was the college fiasco, the string of menial jobs, phone calls in the middle of the night from distant cities.

  Henry was one for making decisions and sticking by them. He’d cut his losses with Margaret, married her off and said good luck. “I hope he knows what he’s in for,” he’d said of Jeff, and all Arlene could do was frown at him, her disapproval expected, easily shrugged off. It wasn’t that Henry didn’t like her. He was just tired of her acting like a child, wished she would grow up so he could stop worrying about her, stop bailing her out. He’d hoped that married life would settle her down. Arlene could see him now, shaking his head at this new turn of events, not at all surprised.

  She didn’t tell Margaret that, and wouldn’t.

  She needed a cigarette, but she’d just had one and didn’t want to go back outside with everyone watching. She’d already walked Rufus once after supper. It was asinine that she couldn’t smoke on the porch, with no one there.

  Quietly she rose from the edge of her bed and made her way to the door, leaning against it to ease it shut while she turned the lock. She crept to the window and slowly raised the sash, as if she were going to sneak out of the house. The trees were dripping, and from the lake came the slop of waves. She knelt down, her ribs pressing the sill, and stuck her face into the cool air, a drop anointing her forehead. She protected the cigarette, dipping her chin as she lit up, then exhaled so the cloud floated out into the night. The light from the living room windows lay faint and elongated on the wet grass, the TV flaring like a fire, casting shadows.