by Anne Tyler
Thomas’s page was boring too, but at least there were more shapes to it. His undressed man had different organs—pipes and beans and balloony things. He got to do that page because the coloring book was his, but then he pretended the organs didn’t exist. He smeared over them every which way with a purple crayon, giving the man a suit that ended jaggedly at his wrists and bare ankles. “Now you’ve gone and ruined it,” Agatha told him.
“I did not. I made it better.”
“You’re bearing down too hard, too. Look at what you did to your crayon.”
He looked. Earlier he’d peeled the paper off and now the crayon curved sideways in the heat from his hand, like their mother’s poor bent candles in the napkin drawer.
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Your last purple crayon!”
“I didn’t like it anyhow,” he said, “and this coloring book is stupid. Who gave me this stupid coloring book?”
“Danny gave it to you,” Agatha said.
He clapped a hand over his mouth.
Danny hadn’t given him the coloring book; it was Grandma Bedloe. She’d picked it up at the Pantry Pride one day when she went to buy their mother some food. But Thomas always worried that Danny was listening to them up in heaven, so Agatha said, “He bought it as a special, special present, and he hoped very much you would like it.”
Thomas removed his hand and said loudly, “I do like it.”
“Then why’d you mess all over it?”
“I made a mistake.”
Daphne said, “Oho! Oho!”—not laughing, as you might imagine, but starting to complain. The next step would be real wailing, all sad and lost and lonely. Thomas and Agatha hated that. Thomas said, “Go tell Mama.”
“You go.”
“You’re the oldest.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Last time I went, she cried,” Thomas said.
“She was having a difficult day.”
“Maybe this day is difficult too.”
“If you go,” Agatha said, “I’ll give you my patent leather purse.”
“I don’t use a purse.”
“My plastic camera?”
“Your camera’s broken.”
Daphne had reached the wailing stage. Agatha started feeling desperate. She said, “We could stand next to the crib, maybe. Just talk and smile and stuff.”
“Okay.”
They got up and went down the hall, past the closed door of their mother’s room and into the children’s room. It smelled of dirty diapers. Daphne was sitting in that superstraight way she had with her fingers wrapped around the crib bars, and when they came in she grew quiet and pressed her face to the bars so her little nose stuck out. She had been crying so hard that her upper lip was glassed over. She blinked and stared at them and then gave a big sloppy grin.
“Now, what is this nonsense I’m hearing?” Agatha said sternly.
She was trying to sound like Grandma Bedloe. Grownups had these voices they saved just for babies. If she’d wanted, she could have put on her mother’s voice. “Sweetheart!” Or Danny’s. “How’s my princess?” he would ask. Used to ask. In the olden days asked.
Best to stick with Grandma Bedloe. “Who’s this making such a hullabaloo?”
Daphne grinned wider, with her four new crinkle-edged teeth shining forth and her lashes all wet and sticking to her cheeks. She wore just a little undershirt, and her diaper was a brownish color—what their uncle Ian would call Not a Pretty Sight.
“Give her her pacifier,” Thomas suggested.
“She gets mad if you give her a pacifier when she wants a bottle.”
“Maybe she’s not hungry yet.”
“After her nap, she’s always hungry.”
Daphne looked back and forth between the two of them. It seemed to be dawning on her that they weren’t going to be much help.
“Just try her pacifier,” Thomas said.
“Well, where’d it go?”
They reached in between the bars and patted the sheet, hunting. Some places the sheet was damp, but that might have been the heat, or tears. The smell was terrible.
“Found it!” Thomas crowed. He poked the pacifier between Daphne’s lips, but she spat it out again. Her chin began quivering and her eyebrows turned bright pink.
“Phooey,” Thomas said. He picked up the pacifier and jammed it in his own mouth, and then he backed off till he was sitting on the edge of his bed with his arms folded tight across his chest.
“Maybe we could feed her in her crib,” Agatha said.
Thomas made noisy sucking sounds.
Agatha went to the kitchen and dragged a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator. She set the jug on the table and took a cloudy nursing bottle from the jumble of unwashed dishes next to the sink.
Daphne was back to “Oho! Oho!”
First Agatha tried pouring very, very slowly, but milk got all over the table and soaked Thomas’s page of the coloring book. When she speeded up she did better. She replaced the nipple and carried the bottle down the hall, de-chilling it in her hands as she walked. Outside her mother’s door she paused and listened but she didn’t hear a sound. It must be a two-pill nap, or even three-pill. She went on into the children’s room.
Daphne’s mouth was an ugly shouting square now and she was red-faced and snotty and sweaty. Thomas had his eyes squeezed shut. “Wake up,” Agatha told him roughly as she passed. She fitted the bottle between the crib bars and held it toward Daphne. “Here.”
Daphne flailed out and the bottle went flying. Off popped the nipple. Milk splashed the decal of the rabbit in pink overalls on the headboard. “Stupid!” Agatha shouted. “Stupid fat old baby!”
Daphne cried harder. “Help me reach this bottle,” Agatha told Thomas, but Thomas had pulled his bedspread up over his head. She turned back to the bottle. It lay on its side toward the rear of the crib, and every time Daphne bounced another glug of milk would spill out onto the sheet. Finally Agatha pressed the two clamps on the railing to lower it. There was Daphne, no longer fenced in, quieting slightly and hiccuping and looking interested. There was the bottle, within easy reach. Agatha found the nipple in a fold of wet sheet and put it back on, and then she tipped the bottle toward Daphne. This time, Daphne accepted it. She drank sitting up, blinking at the first cold swallow but after that making do. One hand clutched over and over on Agatha’s wrist. “Mm,” she said at each gulp. “Mm. Mm.” Agatha suddenly felt the most enormous thirst.
Behind her, she heard the slithering sound of Thomas coming out of his bedspread. She heard the smack as he pulled the pacifier from his mouth. “She sure does stink,” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“You going to change her, Agatha?”
She stood firm, cupping her elbow with her free hand. She did know how to change a diaper. She had often helped her mother—fetched the powder or the washcloth. Yes, she thought she could do it on her own. But still she didn’t answer. She tossed her head to flick her hair off her face. She felt Thomas come up cautiously to stand next to her. He was twiddling the pacifier between his fingers. Just as Daphne let go of the nipple after her last gulp (Squirrel-oh! the nipple said), he reached over and plugged her mouth with the pacifier. Daphne went on sucking. Thomas and Agatha took a step back, but Daphne stayed quiet.
“Soose,” Thomas said happily.
That was what their mother called a pacifier: soose.
Agatha took a clean diaper from the stack on the bureau. She tipped Daphne onto her back and slid the diaper beneath her. The pins were no trouble. This was going to be easy. But the poo was disgusting. She wrinkled her nose and folded the dirty diaper inward. Thomas said, “Yuck!” and went back to his bed.
She carried the diaper down the hall to the bathroom, holding it in a clump far out in front of her. She lowered it into the toilet and swished it around. All the ick started crumbling away. She flushed the toilet and swished again in clearer water, back and forth, dreamily.
Sometimes their mother said “soose” and sometimes she said “soother.” Maybe they were both the same word. People here in Baltimore said “pacifier,” and so did Thomas and Agatha, trying to fit in; but their mother was not from Baltimore. She was from out in the country where they used to live with their father in a metal-colored trailer. Then they all got divorced. This was when Thomas was just a baby. He couldn’t even remember. And then later they moved to Baltimore in Mr. Belling’s long black car. Everything was going to be wonderful, wonderful, their mother said. She got so many new clothes! Their apartment sat over a drugstore that stocked every kind of candy, and when Mr. Belling visited he sent Thomas and Agatha downstairs with a dollar bill each and they could take as long as they liked deciding. Thomas did remember Mr. Belling. He didn’t like him much, though. When Mr. Belling stopped coming, Thomas asked if he could have the Baltimore Colts mug Mr. Belling used to drink his beer from, and their mother started crying. She snatched the mug from the dish drainer and slammed it against the sink until it broke in a million pieces. Thomas said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t really want it!” After that their mother had to get a job and leave them with Mrs. Myrdal, but then she met Danny. She acted more like her old self once she met Danny. On her wedding day she said it was all of them’s wedding day. She gave Agatha a little pink rose from her bridal bouquet.
Thomas said Danny was probably their real father. Agatha knew he wasn’t, though. She told Thomas their real father was nicer. In fact Danny was the nicest man she had ever known—nicer than their father, who had never had much to do with them, and certainly a whole lot nicer than Mr. Belling, with his two fat diamond rings and his puckered eyes the color of new dungarees. But she wanted Thomas to feel jealous over what she could still remember. Thomas had a terrible memory. Agatha’s memory was letter-perfect; she never forgot a thing.
Thomas forgot three separate times, for instance, three different days in a row, that Danny had gone and died. Three mornings in a row he got up and said, “Do you think Danny will fix apple pancakes for breakfast?” The first day she could understand, because the news was still so fresh and neither one of them was used to it yet. So she just said, “No, did you forget? He went and died.” But the second day! And the third! And those were weekdays, too. Danny would never have fixed apple pancakes on a weekday. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked Thomas. “Can’t you get it into your head? He had a car crash and he died.” Thomas just took on a kind of closed look. He didn’t seem to miss Danny as much as he missed the pancakes. It made her furious. Why did she have to be the only one who remembered? She said, “He gave Ian a ride home and we had to stay by ourselves. Not answer the phone, not open the door—”
Thomas clamped his hands over his ears.
“So when the phone rang we didn’t pick it up,” Agatha said. “And when the door banged we didn’t unlock it.”
Thomas said, “Nee-nee-nee-nee-nee!” but she rode over it. “Mama had to crawl in a window,” she went on, “and she tore her sleeve and she was crying; she was worried we’d been murdered, and then the phone rang again and—”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
She just had these urges to be evil to him. She couldn’t say exactly why.
The water in the toilet was so yellow now she could hardly see the diaper, so she flushed once more. Then it felt like someone bossy and selfish reached up and grabbed the diaper away from her. She gave a little gasp and let it go. The water rose calmly higher and higher; it reached the rim. She had never guessed what a scary thing a toilet was. Thick yellow water slopped over the edge and spilled across the floor while she stood watching, horrified.
“Mama!” she shrieked finally.
Silence.
The water in the toilet slid down again.
Agatha stepped out into the hall, shaking, and went to her mother’s bedroom door. She gave a tiny tap with her knuckles and then placed her ear to the door and listened.
They used to go straight in without a thought. They used to play among her bedclothes till she woke. But lately they’d stopped doing that.
(You could almost think, sometimes, that their mother wasn’t there behind her face anymore.)
Agatha went on down the hall to the children’s room. As she walked in, she saw Daphne roll onto her stomach and drop like a stone out of the crib. Agatha flung herself forward in a silent rush and caught her—an armload of bare-bottomed, clammy baby. She sank weak-kneed to the floor. Still busily sucking her pacifier, Daphne crawled away to a jack-in-the-box. Thomas sang to his doll, “My aunt gave me a nickel, to buy a pickle …”
All of a sudden, Agatha seemed to see things so clearly. Daphne’s bottom was stained yellow. Thomas’s shirt was splotched with food. The floor was covered with toys and dirty clothes and a cantaloupe rind on a plate beneath a cloud of fruit flies. Milk was dripping down the wall behind the crib.
She stood up and collected Daphne and staggered over to the crib with her and plopped her down. She wrestled Daphne’s diaper around her, being very, very careful with the safety pins, and then she raised the railing and locked it. “Stay there,” she told Daphne. “Put on a different shirt,” she told Thomas.
“What shirt?”
“I don’t care. Just different.”
He laid Dulcimer aside, grumbling, and slid off his bed. While he was rummaging in bureau drawers, Agatha returned to the bathroom and stirred a towel through the puddle around the toilet. Then she hid the towel in the hamper. She went out to the kitchen and put the milk back into the fridge. “Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chewing gum,” Thomas sang, while Agatha spread his coloring book on the windowsill to dry. One by one she plucked his crayons from the pool of milk on the table. They were beginning to dye the milk all different shades, lavender and pink and blue. She dumped them into the waste can under the sink.
“What are you doing!” Thomas asked, coming up behind her. He was wearing a green shirt now that clashed with his blue shorts, and it was buttoned wrong besides.
“Button your buttons over from scratch,” Agatha told him. She unfolded a cloth and started wiping off the table.
“What did you do with my crayons?”
“They were all wet and runny.”
“You can’t just throw them away!”
He started rooting through the waste can. Agatha said, “Stop that! I just got everything nice again!”
“You better give me back my crayons, Agatha.”
Their mother said, “Is it still daytime?”
She was standing in the doorway in her slip. Her pillow had made a mark across one cheek and she didn’t have any makeup on. “I thought it was night,” she said. “Is that Daphne I hear?”
“Make Agatha give me back my crayons, Mama!”
But their mother was drifting down the hall, heading toward Daphne’s “Oho! Oho!”
“Stealer!” Thomas hissed at Agatha. “Crayon stealer!”
She put the wet cloth in the sink. “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” she said, “but names will never—”
“You can go to jail for stealing!”
“Is this my little Daphne?” their mother said, back again with Daphne in her arms. “Is this my sweetheart?”
She sat in a kitchen chair and settled Daphne on her lap. Daphne’s diaper was dry but it was so loose it pouched in front of her stomach. The table was clean but it was damp where Agatha had wiped it. Everything looked fine but just barely, like a room where you walk in and get the feeling something was rustling and whispering till half a second ago. But their mother didn’t seem to notice. She stared down at Daphne with her face bare-naked and erased and pale. “Is this my Daphne?” she kept saying, “Is this my baby Daphne?” so it began to sound as if she really did wonder. “Is this her?” she asked. “Is it her? Is it?” And she looked up at Thomas and Agatha and waited for them to answer.
When the hottest part of the day was over, they got ready for their walk to the typewriter sto
re. This was something they’d started doing just in the past few weeks, but already there was a pattern to it. Agatha liked patterns. So did Thomas. Together they hauled Daphne’s stroller out of the coat closet and unfolded it. Daphne watched from the rug, flapping her arms up and down when she heard the wheels squeak. Maybe she liked patterns, too.
They went to see if their mother was ready, but she was shut up in her bathroom. When she came out, she wore her white blouse that wrapped and tied at the side and her watery flowing India skirt. She blotted her lipstick on a tissue and asked, “How do I look?”
“You look nice,” they both told her.
From the living room, Daphne made a fussy sound. Their mother sighed and picked up her bag. “Let’s go,” she said.
The air outdoors felt heavy and warm, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down so hard anymore. Their mother walked in front, wheeling Daphne in her stroller, and Thomas and Agatha followed. Thomas’s shirt was still buttoned wrong. Agatha’s playsuit bunched at the crotch. She thought she and Thomas should have been dressed up too, if they were trying to make friends with the typewriter man, but that didn’t seem to have crossed their mother’s mind. Sometimes lately there were these holes in the way she did things, places she just fell apart. Like last night, when she got lost in the middle of what she was saying and couldn’t find her way out again. “Do you believe this?” she had been saying. “That I’m back to … back to …” Then she’d just stared. It had frightened them. Thomas started crying and he flew at her with both fists. “Back to nothing,” she had said finally. She was like a record player you had to jostle when it hit a crack. Then she’d said, “I think I’ll go to bed,” although it wasn’t even dark outside and Daphne hadn’t been put down for the night yet.
