Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  “Yeah,” he says, “I will.” He’s not going to argue. He looks at me with that mix of hard and soft in his eyes, and he won’t look away.

  I open the refrigerator and reach into it like there’s something I need. “We’ll be fine,” I say.

  There’s a silence, like he’s waiting for me. “All right, Lark.”

  Termite is still. I can feel him, tuned in to us, to the spaces between our words, and I rattle the loose metal shelf in the fridge, shift jars and milk bottles, before I shut the big door.

  Solly is moving the water jugs, lining them up beside the wall. “You’ve got plenty of bottled water now, anyway,” he says. Then he moves past me and crouches by Termite’s chair. “Hey Termite,” he says, “you like rain? It’s raining. No wagon today.” He puts his hand on Termite’s shoulder. “That wagon would fill up and float,” he says softly, then he looks up at me. “He used to talk to me. He doesn’t answer me anymore. I know he knows me.”

  “Of course he does. Just not so used to you as he was.”

  “Yeah. That wagon. I see you pulling him in it, up the alley. He still likes it. A couple more years though, he won’t even fit. He still like the radio? Termite, I know a station you might like. Jazz, with voices but no words.” Solly pulls the radio toward Termite across the kitchen table, but Termite looks away. And I know he won’t eat. It’s too different that Solly’s here. I’ll have to make him food later.

  “He’ll listen another time,” I tell Solly. “It’s just, he’s listening to the rain. Like he thinks he can hear when the sound of it is going to change.”

  “Change? He’s a weatherman now? Maybe he could stop it raining. Someday it’ll stop. Things do stop.” Solly stands. “You need me to go to the store for you? Anything like that?”

  “We’ve got plenty of food from the restaurant. But there’s water coming up in the basement. I wonder if you could help me move some boxes. I don’t want to ask Nonie, and I can’t lift them by myself.”

  “Lights working down there?”

  “By the workbench. But I’ll get a flashlight.”

  I get into the drawer for the flashlight and I feel Termite start to nod and rock in his chair, like he does if there’s a new hum of energy, anything strung out.

  “Yeah, Termite, it’s me.” Solly touches Termite’s back, a man’s touch, quiet and still, and Termite stops.

  I turn away from them and start down the basement steps. “Termite is all right up there,” I call back. “He’ll let me know if he gets bored.” I hear Solly on the stairs behind me in his boots and I feel a shudder inside, like he’s come back and we’re both much smaller, together all day like we used to be. I pull the chain over the workbench and the light goes on over words we carved in the wood, our names, a little family of stick figures, and the requisite bad words, s-words and f-words. We wrote prayer words too. We wrote “Jesus.” Angled into a corner, small, like a flower almost, is Joey’s faint drawing of a cock.

  Solly runs his hand over the scarred wood, over Joey’s little hieroglyph. “Joey,” he says. “Always such a father figure, wasn’t he.”

  I shine the light where the dark is darker, and I hear the slip of water. I see it’s higher than it was two hours ago. “There are eight boxes,” I tell Solly. “Big ones, stacked up.”

  “She used to have a bedspread over these,” Solly says.

  “How do you know?”

  “I remember a big shape in the corner, and the cloth of the spread was red checks. Don’t you remember? We bounced balls against it. We climbed on it.” He looks at me, unsmiling. “What is it with you? Holes in your head?”

  “I never paid much attention, I guess. But there’s no cloth now, and I’ve been home with Termite, and I noticed the boxes, the return addresses. Florida. I opened one, and I think they came from my mother. I can’t imagine why else Noreen would be keeping them.”

  “You ask her?”

  “I’m not ready to ask. I want to go through them.”

  “For clues.”

  “Maybe.”

  Now he smiles. “Don’t you ever think our mothers might be drifting around a swimming pool together on one of those blow-up floats, sipping cool drinks under palm trees?”

  “They didn’t know one another, did they?”

  “No, they didn’t, but it doesn’t seem like that, does it? My dad, he knew them both, and they both left, and left their kids. Remember that next time Nick gives you the eye.”

  “You think it was all about Nick?” I smile, to show him it’s a joke.

  “No. He’s just another link between them. But doesn’t it seem sometimes like they were sisters under the skin, or maybe even the same person?” He pulls the slicker hood off, unzips the front of the jacket. “After she was gone awhile, I started pretending that. It made you and me more the same.”

  He looks at me so hard I step back. But he’s already grabbed me, without ever moving. It’s because of the room. Now I remember the red-checked cloth, with lawn chairs leaning up against it, and a couple of old cot mattresses thrown over the top. Nonie kept the storm-cellar doors open in the summer, and we came in and out that way, under the branches of bushy lilacs that hung over both sides. They’re gone now. “You think you need me to help you with those boxes?” I ask him. “They’re pretty heavy.”

  “I think I can manage, Lark,” he says, with an edge. “You want them in the attic?”

  “It’s the only second floor we’ve got.”

  “Don’t worry. The water won’t get that high unless most of the town floods. Which might not be a bad idea. We could all float away.”

  I hear the bell on Termite’s chair. He rings it once. “He wants something. I’ll go up.”

  “Yeah, go on up with him.” Solly pulls off the slicker and he’s wearing a flannel shirt with the arms cut out. His arms are tight. For so many years, even though he was a year older, he was my size. I’m always surprised at how tall he is, muscular and lean, like I turned around and he changed. He does all the sports with the dumb jocks and he gets what the dumb jocks get—the blond girls with their flipped hair and a job at the gas station the summer after graduation. I suppose now he pretends he’s like those girls, with their sweater sets and college funds, like he lives in that secondhand convertible of Joey’s that he keeps so clean, driving girls here and there. Probably a good plan. Even if their Mommies and Daddies figure it’s high school stuff. They’ll ship their girls off now, get them away from Saul Tucci. Solly is not what they want.

  “You going off to school, Solly?” I can’t help asking him.

  “Like the rest of the sheep? Go play some football fifty miles from here? Nah, I don’t think so. There was one letter I answered—Fort Lauderdale. Lure of the sea. My own palm tree.” He rakes his fingers through his wet hair and I see the darkish roots at his hairline. One of those girls bleached his hair like hers, playing at twosies. My twin. He looks straight across at me. “Shot in the dark. We’re only a double A team. Wasn’t like I had endless offers.”

  Solly in Florida, I think. Solly in Florida.

  “Don’t know about that one yet,” he says. “I haven’t told Nick about it, or anyone.”

  “Well. Let me know, when you hear.”

  “Yeah?”

  I want to get away from him. “Sorry it’s so close down here. Gets hot, with the windows shut against the rain.” I turn and start up the stairs and he stands there like he’s watching me walk out of a story. For a weird moment I think I hear his heart beating, but it’s my own head pounding, a thud I only notice when I get up the steps and back into the kitchen. Things stop, Solly said. I think about living here on and on, and he wouldn’t. I think about going away myself, living a whole different life, like I could exist on a different planet and this life wouldn’t know about me, and I wouldn’t know about it. I sit down in a kitchen chair close beside Termite and I see his toast on the table where he dropped it. “You hungry yet?” I ask him, but my voice has a dead, automatic sound, and
he puts his arms across my knees. He smells of the baby powder Nonie and I still dust across his shoulders after baths. I realize I’m never going to leave him, not in this life. He’s so quiet, listening. His open hands in my lap barely move, so faintly, like his thin fingers touch a current of air I’m too thick and gross to feel. The undersides of his fingers are white as alabaster, unlined between the knuckles, like he’s always just born. There’s a faint pink blush under his skin. When he has a fever, his skin gets dappled.

  We hear Solly coming up the stairs with the boxes. I feel him look in at us. He turns in the little hallway, walks into Termite’s room and on into the attic, up the pull-down steps in Termite’s ceiling. Termite hears Solly in his room. He likes the attic steps, the creak they make pulling down, how they sound under someone’s weight. It’s like the air in the attic falls down those stairs in moted streaks cast through the dormer window above. Termite can smell it and feel it, but he doesn’t stir now.

  “I want you to have a real breakfast,” I tell him. “I’ll make you and Solly something.” He lets me talk.

  I peel some peaches and start the toast again. All the time I’m cooking the eggs, Termite touches one wrist to the radio, but he leans away when I move to turn it on. I get the food on the plates and I hear Solly, up and down the basement steps. Then he’s in the kitchen.

  “I lined up the boxes along the wall by the attic window,” he says. “You’ll have enough light to sift through the evidence. May as well leave them up there. Safer. Nonie’s basement takes in water, any big rain.”

  “Thanks, Solly. I made you some food.” I’m washing the cast-iron skillet in the sink and Solly comes over near me and puts his hands on me, up under my hair, on my neck, just for a second, as though to move me aside. He’s taken his shirt off and tied it around his waist, and he leans in to splash his face in the stream of water.

  “Those boxes were dirty,” he says. “I kept wondering why. Like mud splashed up on them. Then I realized the backs were covered with crumbled hornets’ nests. Old ones. Muddy dust.” He unties the shirt and wipes his face with it. Then he sits down by Termite, puts the spoon in Termite’s hand, starts helping him. The water is running, but I can hear Solly talking. “We used to go down by the rail yard, Lark and me and you, or down under the railroad bridge by the river, and we’d take bottles of soda pop and those cans of ravioli Joey heated up for Tucci dinners when the old man wasn’t home. I’d feed you and we’d wait for trains. Bet you don’t know that. Bet you don’t know that anymore.”

  By the time I’m finished cleaning up, Termite has eaten and Solly’s plate is just sitting there. Solly is tuning the radio.

  “Joey used to listen to this station. Jazz piano, and someone singing scat vocals. That’s sounds, no real words. Termite might like it. If he wants to listen.” Solly’s talking to me, but looking at Termite. He wipes Termite’s mouth with his fingers, touches his face. I see Termite lean so slightly, rest his jaw on Solly’s palm, and stay quiet. Like he’s reading something he remembers. Someone he lost.

  I never even thought, all this time. Termite lost Solly too. He just didn’t know why.

  I see Solly realize. His face changes and he puts his hands flat on the table, like someone’s punched him and he needs a moment. It’s something else between us, all we’ve done and all we didn’t know. He looks over at me, but he keeps his voice smooth. “Joey’s down at Camp Lejeune, getting an education. Left last month. You knew he was going down there, didn’t you, Lark?”

  I nod. Termite turns his head to listen, hear our voices, but we’re not talking. The radio is playing low, like whispering. I move to turn it up.

  Solly stops me. “Here, let me. Listen to these voices, Termite. They sing the way you talk. No words.” He stands and moves the radio across the table to Termite, turns the volume louder. Piano, horns, voices trilling low and high, bebop and fluttering, then sliding long. Wail of a sax. The voices solo, join, move apart, rippling like instruments. Termite leans forward and touches the knobs, both wrists, turns the volume steadily, slowly, all the way up. Then he rests his head on the box itself, one ear pressed tight. Turns away from us, into the sound.

  “He likes it.” I look at Solly. We’re by ourselves now.

  Solly signals he can’t hear me and moves us back from the table, out of the kitchen. “Anybody would,” he says, “like it.”

  “You better go, Solly.”

  “I was going to. As soon as I finished with the boxes. But I kept thinking about what was in them. I never saw a picture of your mother except this one that you keep in the kitchen, her as a kid with Nonie. When she looks like you. I get you confused with her.” He steps close, so that we can hear each other over the music. “Then when I can’t picture your mother, I get to not quite picturing mine.”

  I don’t answer. We’re in the living room now. I want him to go.

  “We used to get in bed with my mother.”

  “You told me that. I don’t remember her.”

  “You were three. I was four. It must have been soon after you came here. Probably with those boxes.”

  “I don’t know when the boxes came. Maybe they came with Termite.” I look past Solly, out the living room window into the rain. But he keeps talking.

  “She’d have Zeke asleep in the crib beside us and we’d get in bed with her and she’d let us nurse what was left. She was in your mouth and she was in my mouth. It kept us quiet and it calmed her down. We’d fall asleep, and she would.”

  “How could you remember that?”

  “Because I know I crawled over her to get to you. That’s where I slept, next to you.”

  I look at him. Then I can’t look away.

  “Do something to me,” Solly says.

  “You’ve got girls to do that.”

  “I want you to. Do what you used to do.”

  “Not anymore. That was a long time ago.”

  “I’m like your brother, even if I’m not. I’m like Termite except I can talk to you. I can touch you back. I remember things.” He’s so close I feel the words on my face. I can see Termite in the kitchen, holding the radio now, ear to the speaker in front, eyes closed. I look at Solly. He’s so familiar, like he’s me, he’s mine, like he’s my child, but he’s a stranger, the cold, hot look he gets, like any of them. If I let him do what he wants I’ll get that look too, the look that cancels everything. It’s like a pit I could fall into. I need to keep out of it.

  “Let me,” he says.

  Solly could talk me into things because in my mind he still wore the face he used to have, behind the older face I saw. I forgot and I thought doing things with him was like doing things to myself. I got my period early and he was drawn to me then. I was eleven and kept myself so clean, but it was like he could tell. He would come and tease me and talk at me. It wasn’t just looking. He would try to get me to want to be touched, he would show me things. I liked it, thinking about it, liked watching his body work, how he delivered himself into it so quickly, so easily, what he could do to me, how my not letting him do what he wanted just extended everything, how he’d find some other way to get around what I wouldn’t let him do. He’d hold on to my wrists and mouth, the backs of my legs, I’d be blue on that soft skin behind my knees. He’d get to me, talking without words, with sounds. I’d have that achy, crampy feeling in my belly and he’d say he knew it hurt, he’d pull me across him and stroke the bones of my hips, those socket bones the belly sinks between, until the pain turned syrupy. I lay there feeling him harden under me and I thought about his hands, about bleeding into them. He wanted me to, he said. And other things. Lots of things.

  He’s looking at me and his eyes are tawny and gold, flecked with green. His lashes look wet. “Lark,” he says.

  I shake my head. “Solly, it’s not true.”

  “What’s not?”

  “We don’t have the same mother. You know we don’t. But it’s like you said: Nick knew them both. And Nick says things, about my mother.�
� I’m looking at Solly like he can tell me. “Suppose it’s Nick. Suppose Nick is my father, and he’s a reason your mother left, and mine did.”

  “No,” Solly says. I can feel the tension in his shoulders and chest, his clenched hands, even though he’s not touching me. “If that were true, and he looks at you the way he does sometimes, I’d want to kill him.”

  “If we’re related by blood—”

  “We’re not, Lark.” He closes his eyes, opens them. “But if we were, it wouldn’t matter. What they did, any of them, doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters what we did, Solly, why we wanted to.”

  We must have stopped when I was thirteen or so, when we weren’t kids anymore. There was that one time, the last time. I told him so. After that I stayed away from him. Then he got angry and stayed away from me. Or not away, but we were never alone anymore, or trying to be. I’d left him, so he left me. He had this one and that one. I’m sure he got to a lot of them. He was too young, but that’s how he was; I guess it’s how I was, but only with him. It was like we ruined each other. I’d see him and I’d look away, but I always knew if he was in a room, or across a street or in a hallway at school, or tackling sandbags at a football practice, outside some classroom window. I’d sense him lunging and hitting, pounding at all the anonymous smeared bodies in their pads and helmets.

  “Lark,” he says.

  He puts his finger in the center of my chest like a hard little point, and moves it down like he’s writing a line on me. It’s the storm, I think, the storm has closed us off here, the rain has drowned everything out. I can hear the rain, pouring behind Termite’s music. The voices are chiming, high, sharp sounds against the rolling, the long low slide of the music.

  “Don’t put your hands on me, or your mouth,” I tell him.

  He knows this game. It’s an old game. He opens his mouth slightly and breathes, like he’s filled with some horrible relief. I feel like something has got us, just swallowed us.