“Oh, cooking dinner and going to movies and driving around and playing Monopoly…he’s really mean when he plays Monopoly, but he says we have to learn that’s the way the world works, that people are out to get you and you have to get them first, and if you start feeling sorry for them you slow down and lose your advantage and then they move in for the kill.”
There was a pause as they absorbed this. Finally, Will said, “He sounds like Saddam Hussein.”
“He does not!”
“He does to me. I mean, do you like him?”
“I love him. He’s wonderful. That’s a terrible thing to say: he’s not anything like Saddam Hussein; he’s really sweet, and fun to be with, and he tells the most wonderful stories, from his travels, you know, all around the world, and he bought Abby a car, and then he bought me this—”
“A car?” The group was suddenly silent, awed at the thought of a car. Abby wasn’t even a senior! And it wasn’t Christmas or— “Was it her birthday?”
“No. He just bought it.”
“Wow.”
“I wish he was my brother,” said Brad at last.
“What’s he like, Carrie?” asked Joanie.
“Oh, tall and handsome and he’s got blond hair that he kind of musses up when he’s thinking about something…he’s like a prince, you know, who sort of just appears from nowhere and makes new things happen, and tells fantastic stories—”
“You told us about the stories,” said Will, bored and disbelieving when it came to princes. “What else does he do?”
“Well, he works…somewhere; he didn’t tell us where. But he must make a lot of money because he buys all these things and he takes us to movies and restaurants, and out for ice cream sometimes after we have dinner at home, and he buys CDs for himself and for us, too—”
“And you really like him?” pressed Will.
“YES! How many times do I have to tell you? I love him. We have fun all the time because we’re so much alike. I mean, you know, he’s really our brother. Sara’s different, ’cause she’s not really our sister—”
“What?” Joanie screamed. “She’s not your sister? Since when?”
“Well, she is, but not really. Not fully, that’s what Mack says. She’s our half sister ’cause she has a different father from us. We all have the same mother, but, you know, her father, like, died, and then Mom got married again and she had Mack and Abby and me and Doug, so we’re like a full family and Sara’s kind of not part of it. Not fully.”
Brad looked worried. “That doesn’t sound right, you know, I mean, she lives there and takes care of you, I mean, you always said she’s in charge…”
“It sounds awful to me,” Leonora declared. “Like you don’t love her anymore.”
“I do love her!” Carrie began to cry, tears running down her face. “She’s wonderful, and I always love her!”
“Sure you do,” Joanie said firmly, once again coming to her rescue. “You talk about her all the time, and you love her and respect her and… you know, like she’s more your mother than your mother is.”
“Mother can’t be our mother!” Carrie cried wildly, feeling everything had gotten totally out of control. “She wants to, but she’s sick!”
“Right, we know that,” Joanie said soothingly. “It’s okay.”
“And I don’t want to talk about Mack or Sara or Mother or …any-body!” Carrie wailed. “I’m going in.”
“It’s time, anyway,” Brad said, looking at his watch. “Like, the bell is going to ring…right…now.”
The bell rang. Triumphantly, Brad looked around to bask in admiring faces, but no one noticed; the whole group was walking along the brick path that skirted the pond and led to a large doorway in the wall of windows on this side of the school. Carrie walked with them, her head down, feeling helpless because she hadn’t done anything right. How could she say those things about Sara? Of course Sara was their sister; the best sister they could have, even, sort of, their mother, and they loved her more than anyone. She started crying again; she was a failure at everything.
Doug was running through the corridor, and he stopped short when he saw her. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m not!”
“You are!”
“I was sneezing.”
“Sneezing?”
“Hay fever. Don’t you have art class? You’re going to be late.”
“Right, see you later,” he said, and dashed off, so happily focused on himself that it never occurred to him to point out that Carrie did not have hay fever, and even if she did, the end of May was the wrong time of year for it.
But half the time he couldn’t understand Carrie anyway. They were really good friends most of the time, but then all of a sudden—and you never had any warning—she’d sort of disappear inside herself. She always said she was thinking of a new story, but it was weird and kind of scary the way she’d just all of a sudden be gone, like she couldn’t even see him and he was right in front of her, waggling his fingers and dancing around and sort of singing, up and down the scale, Hel-lo-o and I-see-you-do-you-see-me and then shouting BOO!! but nothing worked, she’d be frowning and talking to herself, not him, and finally he’d give up and go somewhere and be by himself. So if she wanted to cry or sneeze or whatever, that was up to her; he couldn’t figure it out anyway.
He was late, slipping into the classroom after everybody else was in place, taking out charcoal pencils. Oh, good, he loved charcoal almost as much as carving. He didn’t like painting; no way could he make anything look the way it did in his head; the paints always seemed to do their own thing and it didn’t matter what he wanted, but charcoal always did what he told it to. He was really good with charcoal, and that always made things more fun; how could you like something you weren’t good at?
“Sorry,” he mumbled to Mr. Albert as he sat down at the drawing table he shared with his friend Jeff Vox. “My sister needed some advice, so I had to stop and give it to her.”
Mr. Albert raised his eyebrows. He always raised his eyebrows when he didn’t believe you but wasn’t going to make an issue of it because it was what he called a trivial prevarication (one of Doug’s favorite words ever since he learned it from Mr. Albert) and relatively harmless. “The subject is a person who is afraid,” he said mildly, and Doug set to work, excited because he would rather draw people’s faces than anything else. Lots of times he went to Oz Park, or Lincoln Park near the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, or the lakefront where people went to make out, and sat on a bench or a rock filling his sketchpad with quick drawings of people who didn’t know he was even interested in them. Sometimes they’d look up and see him, and then he’d turn around and begin drawing a tree or something, or he’d move to a new place and start again. He liked real people doing real things. He carved people, too, but so far he hadn’t learned how to do it right, and it was always a relief to go back to animals.
It wasn’t always bad, being ten. Nobody expected you to be an expert at anything, so you could experiment a lot and make mistakes and people said you were great for trying. Well, Sara always said that. Mack sort of made fun of him when he did something wrong, like spilling things in the kitchen, or carving a man who was all lopsided, or losing his house key that day and Mack got really mad at that, really mad when Doug asked him to loan him his; he said he couldn’t give up his key, how would he get in the house, and Doug said he could ring the doorbell and they’d let him in, and Mack said he had no intention of depending on anybody in that house, that’s what he said, just those words, and Doug and Carrie were really scared because he looked so mad, Abby wasn’t there, she was somewhere with Sean so she couldn’t help, but then all of a sudden Mack laughed, just like that, and said he’d get Doug another key with a gold chain so he could wear it around his neck…and he did! And they joked around the rest of the evening and had a lot of fun.
Mack really was a lot of fun, and when he made fun of Doug he wasn�
�t really making fun of him, he was just sort of teasing, and everybody does that. Sometimes Doug thought Mack was the best friend he had because they could talk about things; Mack would sit in Doug’s room, sprawled out, his feet crossed at the ankles, hands behind his head, and tell stories about his travels and he’d talk about women he’d known—he really made Doug feel grown up when he did that—and Doug could tell him about the kids at school he didn’t like, the ones who made fun of him, calling him pissy-ass and other words they learned from their big brothers that he couldn’t even understand (and a lot of the time he was pretty sure they didn’t understand them, either) just because he liked to draw and make carvings and not get into wrestling matches at recess, and Mack would give him advice, like, Tell ’em to fuck off; they’re totally clueless assholes, and Tell ’em they think with their pricks because they haven’t got any brains, and even though Doug knew he’d never have the guts to say those things out loud, it was almost like he didn’t have to, because talking about it to Mack made him feel better and that was all he needed.
Sara would never say he should tell somebody to fuck off; she was too straight.
At that disloyal thought, Doug’s pencil skidded. Shit, he thought, just as Mack had taught him (because, Mack said, it makes you feel better, which it didn’t, really; it made him feel bad, because he knew Sara would be unhappy, but he said it anyway, because Mack knew more about these things than just about anybody), and he carefully erased the errant line. It was true that Sara never said he should tell somebody to fuck off, but she did talk to him a lot about feeling good about himself, feeling proud of himself for the things he was good at; she always said that’s what he should remember when anybody tried to make him feel bad. He couldn’t always do it, but when he did remember, a lot of the time it worked.
Mr. Albert was at his shoulder, bending down and taking off his glasses to study his sketch. (“Why do you take your glasses off to read?” Doug had asked, and Mr. Albert had said something about elasticity of the aging eye muscles, and Doug thought it might be interesting if you were old, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do with him, so he tuned out.)
“Excellent, Doug, quite, quite good,” said Mr. Albert. “You can see he’s frightened half out of his wits, but it isn’t all in the mouth or the eyes, it’s his entire face, even the angle…A very mature concept, I congratulate you.”
“Mr. Albert,” Doug said, following Mack’s advice, “would you get me a show in a gallery?”
“A gallery. You mean an art gallery in town somewhere?”
“Right.”
“Well, I can’t do that, Doug. You’re very good, very good, and you’ll certainly be in shows we put on here at school, but you’re quite young, you know, and still maturing—”
“You said this was a mature concept.”
“And so it is. But you would not call yourself an accomplished artist, would you? You’re still learning, you have a long way to go, years of studying the work of other artists, of wide reading and extensive observation to learn as much as you can about people, about life…My boy, you’ll be a great artist someday, I predict it with confidence, and when it happens I will be proud to say I was your first teacher, but that time is not yet.”
Doug scowled, and bent over his drawing. Mack thought he was good enough for a gallery show; he’d said so just last night. Mack didn’t think ten was young and not mature. Mack thought he was grown up and a real artist.
But then, that night, Sara agreed with Mr. Albert. “Doug, sweetheart, there aren’t many ten-year-olds who show their art in galleries; how many can you think of?”
“Maybe I’m better than all of them.”
“You probably are, but are you at the same level as the twenty-and thirty-and forty-year-olds who finally have their own shows?”
Doug scowled, as he had done that morning in art class.
“It isn’t that you’re not good,” Sara said, sitting beside him at the round table in the breakfast room. “You know you are, and so do we. But it takes time to find your own special style and point of view, to settle on what you want to express with your art—not just a pleasant picture, but something with depth that gives viewers new ways of seeing the world. That’s why people love art; because it makes their worlds larger.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“One of these days you will. You’re smart and talented, and the more you keep your eyes open and see everything around you, really see it and absorb it and think about it, the more you’ll develop into an artist who helps us understand ourselves better, our emotions, and the things that make us behave the way we do.”
“You, too?” Doug asked.
“Of course. I can learn about myself; we all can. And art is one way of—”
“So you’d figure out why you’re not here all the time, why you spend so much time with what’s-his-name?”
There was a pause. “His name is Reuben Lister,” Sara said evenly. “I think I’ve told you that about forty times, every time you’ve pretended to be dense about it. And I already understand why I spend time with him; for the same reason you spend time with your friends: you like them and it makes you happy to share your life with them.”
With his finger, Doug drew imaginary beasts on the pine table. He scowled again. Sara waited. “You won’t get me a gallery show,” he said at last.
“I can’t, sweetheart; we’d be turned down flat. When you’re ready, we’ll find the right place for you.”
He drew another beast. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He wanted to tell Sara that Mack said he deserved a gallery show, but something stopped him. He was never sure how Sara would react when he repeated things Mack had said to them. It was confusing, because he’d always thought Sara was the smartest person in the whole world, but sometimes, as he was regaling her with Mack’s ideas or suggestions, or his stories (well, sometimes they were a little wild), her face would tighten up and then he didn’t know who was smarter, Mack or Sara. It was too confusing, so lately he just kept quiet a lot of the time.
Instead, he shrugged. “I guess,” he muttered.
Sara looked at him closely, puzzled by his quick retreat—Doug, who usually fought tenaciously until the last argument had been exhausted—but just then the pot of pasta began to boil over, and with a quick kiss on Doug’s cheek, she returned to the stove. “How about setting the table?” she suggested casually, thinking she would have to return to this subject at some time in the future; such an odd idea for a ten-year-old to have. Unless, she thought, it came from someone else.
“I love having you home,” Carrie said, bouncing in with her new journal. “Look, look, look what Mack gave me. I got it last night, but you were out, and then you left so early this morning…”
Sara dried her hands and took the journal. “How beautiful, Carrie. It’s wonderful. A very generous gift.”
“Isn’t he great? He saw me writing in those awful notebooks we get in the grocery store, and he said my stories deserved an elegant home. That’s what he said, I really like that, an elegant home.”
“It certainly is that. A wonderful place to write your stories.”
“And poems and just…thoughts. You know, something to write in whenever I feel like it.”
“Too big to carry around,” Doug observed.
“It’s perfect,” said Carrie defensively. “Anyway, I’m going to keep it on my desk, so when I have an idea I can write it down and then later write it into a story.”
“What happens when you use up all the pages?” Doug asked.
“You buy refills. I’m keeping this forever and ever. Do you need help?” she asked Sara.
“Sure. We’re ready to eat.”
Carrie laid the journal gently on the desk in the breakfast room, and helped Sara carry the food to the table. “Where’s Abby?”
“At a movie with Sean,” Sara replied. “She’ll be back by nine-thirty, and it seems Mack is out, too, so you two will be alone, but only for an
hour and a half.”
“Do you really have to go out?”
“I’m meeting a client who’s only here for today. I’ll make it short, I promise.”
“I like it when you’re home.” Carrie watched Doug slurp strands of pasta so that the ends did a frantic dance in the air and flecks of sauce flew merrily about. “You are really gross.”
“Tastes better this way.” He mangled through a mouthful of pasta and puttanesca sauce. “And”—he swallowed, gulping for air—“I’ll bet Sara’s not really seeing a client; I’ll bet she’s going out with what’s-his—” He saw Sara’s sharp look. “Reuben Lister,” he said, exaggerating it. “Right? He’s more fun than working, right?”
“He certainly is,” Sara said, amused. “But unfortunately, tonight is really work. A very boring client, and I’d much rather be with you than with him.”
“Would you rather be with Mack?”
“Of course. This client is truly boring, but I’m stuck. So—I’ll say it again—I’ll be home as early as possible. No later than ten. You can wait up for me if you want.”
“On a school night?”
“Come on, Doug, you read in bed long after you’re supposed to be asleep every night.”
Doug grinned through another mouthful of pasta. “You’re not supposed to know that.”
“Reuben is an unusual name,” Carrie said judiciously. “It means ‘behold a son.’ ”
“What?” demanded Doug.
“It also means ‘youthful, enthusiastic, ambitious. A born leader and organizer.’ So, is he really like that, Sara?”
Sara smiled, but she felt a small chill of being behind the curve. How do I keep up with them? How many thoughts do they have, and plans, and fears and even joys, that I know nothing about, and can’t know unless they let me in on it? “I’d say he is, from what I know. We haven’t been friends very long, you know.”
“It also means,” Carrie proclaimed dramatically, “ ‘rather wary of women unless he knows them well.’ So is he like that?”
Sara laughed. “Where in the world did you find that?”
The Real Mother Page 15
