Object Lessons

by Anna Quindlen

  “Tom,” Connie said, trying to wriggle out from under his hands.

  “Where were you? I got scared.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I went for a walk.”

  “A walk? Who walks in our neighborhood? Who? Even people with dogs don’t walk.”

  “I wanted to be by myself.”

  “You’ve been by yourself your whole life. Now suddenly you like being by yourself? Then be by yourself.” He let go of her and she stumbled backward, falling against Maggie. Connie looked down at her daughter, as though she was seeing her for the first time. “You’re back,” she said, and Maggie began to cry.

  “Stop it, Tom,” Margaret said, stooping to cradle Maggie in her black gabardine arms.

  “She shouldn’t be in here,” said Connie, and she took Maggie’s hand and moved away from her husband, turning toward the door. “This is no place for children.”

  “Where else should she be?” Tommy said. “Her grandfather’s dying.”

  The tears had started to run down Maggie’s face, soaking the neck of her cotton shirt. She looked through the glass again and saw that what her father said was true. Mary Frances was staring at all of them, her eyes enormous, but Maggie couldn’t tell whether it was because of the dumb show of anger and grief she could see before her, or because of some dumb show of her own playing itself out inside her head.

  “Send Maggie out to sit with Monica,” Uncle James said.

  “No,” Maggie said. “I want to stay here.”

  Connie dropped her daughter’s hand and sat down heavily in a straight chair.

  “Ah, to hell with it,” Tommy said, all the heat and anger gone from his voice, and he leaned his head against the glass and began to cry. Maggie could see Mary Frances’s mouth behind the glass forming the word “Tom” over and over again, but there was no sound except that of Tommy sobbing. Finally Connie went over to him and put her hand gently on his arm, his arm with its pale down and tiny freckles.

  “Go home, Concetta,” he said in a small voice, and then he moved away.

  10

  HOW DO I SMELL?” DEBBIE ASKED.

  Outside, the crickets were so loud they sounded like construction machines; the air was heavy with the heat and the cologne the two girls had put on before they left the Malone house. Debbie had been able to find only her mother’s Chanel No. 5, a full bottle Mrs. Malone had gotten for Christmas once and never used; Maggie thought she smelled like a grandmother going to church. Maggie was wearing Tabu, from a little sample bottle belonging to her aunt Celeste. Every time she moved she thought of Monica, and the white flash of bare buttocks on the beach, and she felt hot and then cold, as though she had the flu.

  “You smell sophisticated,” Maggie said, and she could tell by the look on Debbie’s face, with its saddle of freckles and snub nose, that she’d said just the right thing.

  The development behind Maggie’s house had grown rapidly from nothing into something, more rapidly than Maggie’s mother could turn being sick in the sink into another baby. The skeletons of the houses were ranged around the fields, stretching far into the woods at the end of their street. The construction crew had framed in at least two dozen buildings, carved streets in red mud out of the gray-brown earth, left packing crates full of bathtubs and hot-water heaters scattered here and there. The noise was no longer deafening—all the foundations had been dug—but it was persistent and annoying, like the little circular clouds of gnats out back in the late afternoon.

  The children had been strictly forbidden to play there, which was one of several reasons why it had become the focus of neighborhood activity after dark. As soon as dinner was over and the sounds of hammering and basso conversation had ceased, anyone over the age of six would slink down the street and around through the woods and swarm over the insides of the skeleton structures, chasing one another up half-completed staircases, looking at the stars through roofs that were nothing more than two-by-fours every two feet, sitting against the concrete in the cool basements and pitching bent nails at one another’s ankles. For the first time in their lives they became occupants of houses that were theirs alone.

  That first night after Maggie got back from the beach, Debbie had taken her to a split-level house near the edge of the development. It had space for a picture window that would look from the kitchen into the front yard. There was no glass in the windows, and sometimes the lightning bugs and the mosquitoes flew through the rooms and then out again. The little things that lived in the fields had moved back to the edges where the tractors had not yet gone, the rabbits and the field mice and the occasional raccoon that foraged through the garbage cans, only to be taken away in a trap after someone called the ASPCA. The butterflies were still there, but they seemed to be just passing through, settling on a stack of sheetrock and then moving on in a flurry of black-and-yellow ruffles. Only the stream had stayed the same, a narrow sluice of water that ran through Kenwood and into the next town, threading its way beneath the stone abutments of the railroad trestle. Debbie and Maggie had wandered its edges for years, playing with the clay that shone blue-gray in pockets around its banks, lifting rocks and grabbing for the crayfish as they shot out in explosions of silt and water, searching for newts to put in jelly jars, their suction pads pressed to the glass.

  The split-level seemed like a big doll’s house without furniture, as they sat crosslegged in the master bedroom, a yellow summer moon shining through the square where the window would be. They were waiting for the boys to arrive—the infamous Richard Joseph, and Bruce Stroud, who always went every place with Richard, a kind of Robin to his friend’s Batman. The Ouija was balanced on their bony knees and a flashlight lay between them, its beam illuminating the little table from beneath, and sending the heart-shaped shadow of the pointer slanting steeply across the sawdust and the nails lying scattered about the plywood. The air smelled like Christmas trees.

  “What is the name of the man I will marry?” Maggie asked darkly, and Debbie giggled. Deep in her heart Maggie had always known that the Ouija only worked if someone pushed it, although at pajama parties she insisted she believed in its magic. Now she wondered why neither of them had decided to push it around to spell out the name of some imaginary future husband.

  “Maybe you’re not going to get married,” Debbie finally said. Maggie lifted her hands and then asked what the future would bring for her parents. “Dumb question,” said Debbie, wrinkling her nose and pulling her hands away. “Who cares about the future of parents?”

  “I care about the future of your parents. I like your parents,” Maggie said.

  “I like my parents okay,” said Debbie, “but, it’s like, they’re all taken care of. They know what their future is, who they’re married to, how many kids they’re going to have, what they wore to the prom. They’re sort of finished.”

  “Something could happen.”

  “Like what?” said Debbie, and she sounded so doubtful that Maggie could not bring herself to say, What if they start to hate each other? What if one of them starts to love someone else? What if they never talked to each other, or to you? Debbie’s life seemed so simple to Maggie; how could she tell her friend that she and her mother didn’t even belong to the same family?

  They were silent for a minute, the sounds of distant television sets carrying to them faintly through the development, and then Debbie said, “Want to go to Bridget’s tomorrow? She’s got a Princess phone.” Bridget Hearn was fourteen and lived next door to the Malones. She had taken Debbie up in a desultory fashion in the first weeks of summer vacation, because her own best friend was at the shore until Labor Day, and because she wanted a chance to go through Helen’s drawers.

  “No.”

  “She called Richard the other day and asked if he had Prince Albert in a can.”

  Maggie groaned. “You have to call a store to do that joke.”

  “But wait, wait, guess what he said? She goes ‘Excuse me, but do you have
Prince Albert in a can?’ And Richard says, ‘No, I already let him out.’” He said the perfect thing without even knowing she was going to call.”

  “She’s stupid,” said Maggie. “She only cares about boys and clothes. And Helen.”

  “Her parents go out a lot,” Debbie said. “She had Richard and Bruce over one night until midnight. She went down the basement with Richard for an hour and Bruce had to sit upstairs and watch television alone.”

  “And?”

  “And how do I know? She didn’t tell me.” In the silence, they could hear someone laughing nearby. Finally Debbie said, “She said Richard tried to French-kiss with her.”

  “And?” said Maggie.

  “She said she didn’t let him.”

  “What a lie,” said Maggie, whose parents had told her she couldn’t hang around with Bridget Hearn after seeing her one day at Mass with a Band-Aid incompletely covering a hickey on her neck. Maggie thought of Monica again. “Do you think Helen has done it?” she asked.

  “God, Mag, are you crazy? She’s not married.”

  “So. People who aren’t married must do it sometimes.”

  “Yeah, and wind up like that girl two years ago, what was her name? Who had to go to a home and then her parents moved away? Forget it.”

  “Maybe doing it is better than we think it is. Our parents do it.”

  “Because they have to.”

  “Maybe they want to,” Maggie said.

  “You’re nuts,” Debbie said, flicking off the flashlight. Maggie put her hands back on the Ouija. “Let’s ask if I’m really moving,” she said.

  “Doesn’t your grandfather say that you’re moving?” Debbie picked idly at a scab on her knee.

  “He bought us a house but my mother says we’re not going to move into it. My father says no, too. Anyway, my grandfather’s sick now.”

  “Sick or not, if your grandfather bought you a house, then you’re moving,” Debbie said.

  Maggie wondered why everyone else in the world suddenly seemed so sure of themselves, and only she felt that every answer was the wrong answer, every situation a strange one. That morning, remembering the scene at the hospital the night before, she had thought about going to see her grandfather Mazza at the cemetery. But she thought of her set of tools, her square of fabric, and they seemed to belong to someone she had once been friendly with but who had since moved away, or gone to another school. This morning she had even felt out of place on the familiar streets of Kenwood. The air had been filled with the buzz of bulldozers, and the familiar curb where she and Debbie had written their initials in wet cement when they were nine had been crushed to pebbles by the wheels of the dump trucks pulling in between two houses. When she finally arrived at the Malones, the front door stood open, as though the place had been abandoned.

  On the way over, scuffing her sneakers along the cement, she had begun to think of the summer before, when she and Debbie had lain in sleeping bags in the Malone backyard and listed the things they no longer believed in. They had decided they no longer believed that if you held a Milky Way in front of the open mouth of someone with a tapeworm, the tapeworm would leap out. They no longer believed that someone with four children had done it four times. (“Or someone with six children six times,” Maggie had added, not wanting her parents to appear to be the only sex maniacs in Kenwood.) They no longer believed that heaven was in the sky, or that nuns had crewcuts. (Maggie had seen her aunt Margaret’s hair one day when they were both in the bathroom at her grandfather’s house.)

  Maggie had been thinking of that night as she dragged along in the heat, because she was no longer sure what she believed in. She had dreamed about the hospital room, and the plastic tubes winding round and round the bed like the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty. In the dream Monica was lying there instead of John Scanlan, and her eyes were staring straight ahead; she looked as if she was dead, except that she was smiling. When Maggie drifted up from the dream, the light hazy through her gingham curtains, she wondered how much of what happened yesterday had really happened, and how much was the dream, or something she’d seen on television, or read in a book. She knew the fight between her parents was real because she could still remember how good it felt when she held her mother’s hand, and how long it had seemed since that had happened. She remembered her fear and disappointment when Connie let her go.

  But when she tried to think of telling Debbie about everything, about her cousin lying on the beach beneath a boy and the moon, about her grandfather lying there drooling, about her mother disappearing and her father fogging up the intensive care waiting-room glass as he sobbed, she could not think of a way to make any of it sound like part of the life they had both known up until then. And she could not bear to think of a different kind of life, a life where things went bad and fell apart all the time, in which people stepped over, trampled really, all the lines she had counted on to give order and shape to every day. She wondered how much of what she felt was her imagination. On the way to the Malones she stared into the sun, as though to burn up what was in her brain; she wondered if she had, as her grandfather Scanlan often said, “spun a bit of a yarn into a sweater.”

  But when she saw the open front door of the Malone’s house, she knew that the one place she had counted on always to stay sane had gone crazy, too.

  In the center of the hallway, where someone could trip over them and break a leg if they weren’t careful, were two pale blue Samsonite suitcases and a box of books.

  Maggie peered into the box: the top two books were Wuthering Heights and something Maggie had never heard of called The Prophet. The suitcases smelled like new plastic, like Christmas morning, and had the gold initials HAM stamped on the combination locks. Anyone but Helen Malone would have faced ridicule about those initials, but she never even seemed to notice them. Debbie’s initials were DAM, of which she was rather proud. With all the rest she had to do, Mrs. Malone could not be bothered dreaming up middle names: all the girls got Ann, and all the boys Robert.

  Maggie stood in the hallway for several minutes, alone, wondering whether she should go around and come in the back door as usual, when suddenly Mrs. Malone came running down the stairs. Her face looked bleached in the morning light, and she moved so quickly that her belly bounced and swayed separately from the rest of her body. She scowled at the sight of the suitcases. “The hell of it is,” she said, “that I bought her those damn suitcases for a graduation present. I should have bought her the desk lamp instead.” She noticed Maggie standing there. “You’re back early,” she said. “Miss Debbie is upstairs. Ask her if she’s flying to Paris this afternoon.”

  “Helen’s moving out,” Debbie said, as soon as Maggie opened the door to her bedroom.

  While she was at the beach Maggie had missed the two most exciting days in the history of the Malone household. On Monday afternoon, on their way home from the Kenwoodie Club, a striped towel draped around her long neck, Helen had informed Mrs. Malone that she had gotten an apartment of her own. Mrs. Malone had never been considered a stupid woman, but it took her a full five minutes to puzzle out what Helen meant.

  It turned out that when Helen had taken a special English literature enrichment course at Fordham that spring, she had met a student who had rented an apartment in Manhattan, near Columbia University. The girl had offered Helen one of the bedrooms in return for half the rent. Helen had cleaned out her savings account and packed her clothes before anyone knew what was happening; her closet was empty except for her Sacred Heart uniform and the long dotted-swiss dress she had worn three weeks before for her graduation. She had given Aggie her jewelry box, and Debbie her dictionary.

  “I asked for the bikini but she just laughed,” Debbie said.

  Mrs. Malone had been wild. For two days, she had slammed around the kitchen late into the night, cleaning the refrigerator, her flip-flops slapping the linoleum as though she was spanking it. Even now Maggie could hear intermittent ranting from downstairs, part of a monologue
about how people didn’t know when they had it good, how they always wanted what they didn’t have, how they would have to learn the hard way. Mr. Malone had found the decision complicated by the fact that the other girl was the daughter of a judge with whom he had long wanted to be on speaking terms. The two men had met at the apartment, turned on the faucets to check the water pressure, talked sternly to the superintendent, and agreed that they would put up with this nonsense until the girls’ money ran out, which was expected to happen just in time for the Christmas holidays.

  “She’s coming,” Debbie said suddenly, in the middle of describing all this to Maggie, and they heard the sound of footsteps walking down the hall from Helen’s room. The two girls followed her soundlessly, watching her back as she trotted downstairs. Mrs. Malone stood in the hallway next to the suitcases, her hands on her hips.

  “Did you take my blue blouse?” she asked.

  Maggie stood at the top of the stairs and heard Helen laugh, and behind Helen, through the open door, Maggie could see sunlight. At the curb was a car as blue as the sky. Helen put her arms around her mother’s shoulders. She towered over Mrs. Malone.

  “Your blue blouse is safe upstairs. I will be safe at 113th Street and Broadway. I will come home soon. I will call every day.”

  “I don’t want to talk to you every day.”

  Helen laughed again. “I know,” she said, “but I’ll do it anyway.” She looked up to the head of the stairs, and her face glowed pink, as though she’d been running.

  “You’re back early,” she said to Maggie. “What happened—did Monica drown?”

  “No such luck,” said Maggie.

  “Come see me,” Helen said, and Maggie wondered if she meant it. “I’ll teach you two how to smoke cigarettes.” Mrs. Malone hit Helen on the shoulder and then she started to laugh herself. Maggie could see tears in the eyes of both mother and daughter.

  “Oh, you,” Mrs. Malone said.

  The car at the curb beeped its horn twice, and Helen picked up the suitcases. “Debbie, could you get the box?” she called, and Debbie sailed downstairs, away from Maggie, into the midst of it all. As Helen started to walk out, Mrs. Malone turned and went into the kitchen, her head down. Debbie was already out the door.