“At school they said it was an emergency!” Paula said, happily.
“It’s the best kind of emergency,” her mother said. “I love it when everything just stops, don’t you?”
They ate dinner at four o’clock. Jean retreated upstairs to her room. Paula was allowed to watch television due to the special nature of the day. Since Connie’s father had fallen into a nap in his chair, Paula had to keep the volume low, and all afternoon and into the evening the house was filled with a low hum punctuated by the boings and pops of cartoons. Connie searched for things to occupy her. The house had not so much changed over the years as accrued, the surfaces becoming covered with more and more layers like barnacles. Books sat on top of books, bills on top of bills. Sometimes on a Saturday, or during the long summer months, her mother would have a burst of energy and decide to organize a closet or their tax files, but she usually stopped these activities midway through. A row of worn shoes would stand near the front door for many months, waiting to be taken to Goodwill, or stacks of papers would occupy one side of the dining room table, forcing the family to eat their meals crowded together at the opposite end. Connie decided that her bassoon would be too loud, so she sat at the piano and played a few songs she had memorized. Then she opened up the piano bench and pulled out old sheet music whose pages were brittle and chipped. Underneath the music for “Oranges and Lemons” lay a kindergarten drawing she’d made of a skeleton. She felt the same kind of wonder an archaeologist might experience uncovering a thousand-year-old cup, awed by the evidence of life so fully lived, and then forgotten. She put the picture back where she’d found it so that it wouldn’t get lost or disappear.
“I’m going outside,” she said.
“It’s cold out there, Con,” her father said. He had woken and was idly watching the television with Paula.
“I just want to look around.”
“You’re going to freeze yourself to death,” her mother said. She was lying on the couch, a pillow on her stomach, her glass and a book balanced on top of it.
Connie waited for someone to tell her she was not allowed to leave the house, but when no one did, she put on her coat and wrapped a scarf around her face.
She walked across the street and climbed down the embankment toward the river. Ice had gathered at the edges of the water but it was thin and it broke easily when Connie touched the surface with the toe of her boot. The water moved in the direction of the current. Little white sailboats glided along where snow had adhered to a gathering of sticks and leaves. The wind was strong and it found its way into every small crevice of Connie’s body that was not fully covered—the triangle at her neck where her zipper left off and her scarf began, the bands of skin between her mittens and the cuffs of her jacket. The cold felt like small arrows piercing her and she knew that she should go inside but she didn’t want to just yet. She slipped off a mitten and held her bare hand out and watched the snow accumulate on it. Then she ate the snow, biting down so that it hardened between her back teeth before it turned to water. The air smelled sharp and empty and she took it into her lungs until it stung.
The doorbell rang after midnight. Connie was in her bed but not asleep. She was dressed in the next day’s school clothes—a habit she’d adopted that made things easier in the morning. She left her room and stood at the top of the stairs. Paula had fallen asleep on the couch, her head in her mother’s lap.
“Don’t open it, Claude,” her mother said as her father went to the door. “It could be anybody. A tramp or anybody. In this weather, too.”
“Who’s there?” her father called through the door. The muffled sound of a voice came across. “Who? I can’t hear you.” He was speaking too loudly and Paula woke up with a moan.
Connie’s father opened the door. A man in a red ski parka stood in the doorway holding a small child in his arms. A woman and two other children were crowded behind him.
“We’ve gotten stuck. The car stalled out,” the man said. He wore a skier’s headband around his ears. His hair stuck up on his head like grass. “We were wondering if we could use your phone.”
“You won’t get help in this weather,” Connie’s father said. “They won’t send out any tow trucks tonight.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, we’d just like to try.”
“Let them in, Claude, for God’s sake,” Connie’s mother said. She slid out from under Paula and stood up. Her shirt was only halfway tucked into her skirt.
“So sorry to disturb you,” the woman said, when she came inside. “We couldn’t get any service on our cell. Oh no,” she said, when she saw Paula sitting up on the couch. “We’ve woken your daughter.” Her voice faltered as she said this, as if she was suddenly uncertain about Paula being on the living-room couch at that hour. She looked up to see Connie, fully dressed, at the bottom of the stairs. She glanced around the room and at Connie’s parents, and her expression shifted to make way for some new understanding.
The man put the little girl down. She was younger than Paula, maybe four or five. She stared into the room, stunned by exhaustion. The other children were girls as well, older than the little one, but not as old as Connie. Maybe they were nine and eleven, Connie thought. They had blond hair that showed below their hats. All three girls wore ski parkas and matching ski pants. They each had a different-colored hat topped with a tassel. Connie imagined the tassels flying in the wind as the girls skied down the mountain. Their ski lift tickets were attached to the zippers of their jackets like price tags.
“The phone? Could I?” the man said.
Connie’s mother reached for the phone but it wasn’t sitting in the cradle where it usually was. She turned this way and that, her hands on her hips. “Girls,” she said, coquettishly. “Always jabbering away to one boyfriend or another.” Connie felt ashamed of her mother’s lie. Her mother finally located the phone beneath the couch cushions and handed it to the man.
“We don’t charge for sitting,” Connie’s mother said to the wife.
The woman smiled uncomfortably. “All right. Thank you. Girls?” The older ones seemed reluctant but she put her hands on their backs and gently prodded them to the couch. The woman looked down before she sat, the way Connie’s mother had taught her to do in the movie theater to make sure there was no popcorn or gum on the seat. The smallest girl climbed onto her mother’s lap, while the older girls looked around the room, taking in the piles of papers on top of the piano, the old shoes standing in pairs along the wall, the carpet, which was darker in the places where people walked most often. Whisper got up from his dog bed and walked over to smell the new people. One of the girls held out her hand to pet him but her mother stopped her.
“What did we say about strange dogs?” she said.
The man made the call. “How long?” he was saying. “It can’t be sooner than that?” He ended his call and spoke to his wife. “I called for a cab to take us to the fire station. I guess people are collecting there. But they don’t know how long it will take.”
The wife stood, lifting the little girl onto her hip. The other girls stood with her. “Thank you,” she said to Connie’s mother. “Sorry to disturb you.”
“You can’t go back out there,” Connie’s mother said.
“We’ll wait in the car,” the man said.
“You’ll freeze yourselves to death!” Connie remembered her mother saying the same thing earlier that day when Connie wanted to leave the house.
“It’s no problem. We’ll just run the heater,” the man said. “They’ll be here in no time.”
“For God’s sake, you can wait right here,” Connie’s mother said, too loudly.
“No!” the woman said.
Connie’s mother looked at the woman carefully. “Why would you want your girls to wait in a cold car when you can wait in a warm house? That’s irrational.”
“I guess you’re right,” the man said.
“Tom?” his wife said.
“How about a drink?” Connie’s father offered. “Take the chil
l off.” Before anyone answered him, he walked to the sideboard where the bottles were kept. “You gin drinkers?”
“That sounds good,” the man said.
Connie’s father made two drinks and gave one to the man and one to the wife. She held the glass in the air as if she were waiting for someone to take it from her. One of the girls whispered something to her mother. The woman shook her head and told the girl she would have to wait. Connie had the feeling the girl wanted to use the bathroom. Didn’t the woman think they had a bathroom?
“I’m cold,” the little girl said.
Paula took the old crocheted quilt from the back of her father’s chair and tucked it around the girl as if she were a doll.
“That’s so nice,” the woman said, smiling at Paula the way teachers often smiled at the kids at school who got free breakfasts, as if they wanted to give them so much more than an egg-and-cheese sandwich.
“Looks like we have a party all of the sudden,” Connie’s mother said. “An impromptu Christmas gathering.” She went to refill her glass, and then turned on the CD player. She began to sway a little back and forth to the beat. “It’s a strange night,” she said. “An upside-down night, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is,” the man said. “An inside-out night.”
“See? Tom gets it. Don’t you, Tom?”
Connie’s heart shrank as she recognized the timbre of her mother’s voice.
“How about a dance? Claude, dance with me,” Connie’s mother said.
“Not now, honey.”
“Well, who needs you?” Connie’s mother said. She grabbed Connie by the hands and began to dance with her. At first Connie was embarrassed, but when she saw that the girls on the couch were smiling, she felt suddenly graceful and pretty. She tried to follow along as her mother moved her around the room. Paula got excited and started dancing, waving her arms the way she had learned in the ballet class she’d taken at the YMCA.
“Mom? Dad?” It was Jean, standing on the stairs. She was wearing an old T-shirt and gym shorts that rose high up on her thighs.
“Jean! Come down!” Connie’s mother said. She let go of one of Connie’s hands and twirled Connie around. Connie got tangled up and she and her mother broke apart. Connie kept twirling and dancing for the girls.
“Stop it, Connie!” Jean said. “Stop it right now!”
Connie stopped dancing. Suddenly, she realized that the girls were not smiling at her but were trying to hide their laughter. Connie felt humiliated. She looked at Jean and widened her eyes, giving Jean their signal that she needed to be saved. But Jean did not come to her rescue. Something in her face shifted and Connie thought she was seeing a much older version of Jean, as if time had jumped ahead and here was Jean, maybe someone’s wife, maybe somebody’s mother, maybe living somewhere very far away. In that moment, Connie had the idea that she wouldn’t know Jean when they were older, that when Jean left the family, she would leave Connie, too, because Connie would remind her of things she didn’t want to remember.
The snow stopped sometime during the night. The sky was so bright the next morning that when Connie looked outside the kitchen window her eyes grew teary. She poured out the bowls of cereal. Jean came into the kitchen, carrying the glasses that had been left in the living room, the three empty glasses and the full one. While Connie washed the glasses, Jean packed Paula’s lunch.
On the way to school, the girls stopped to watch a tow truck driver working to hook a station wagon to his truck. The high whine of his winch sang out into the brisk morning as the back end of the car tilted up higher and higher. Skis crowded the windows of the station wagon. It had been nearly two in the morning when the taxi finally arrived to take the family to the fire station.
The tow truck maneuvered back and forth until the car broke free of the snowbank. When the truck drove off, the car followed along like an unwilling child. Connie realized that had the car not become stuck, it would have gone off the edge of the road and fallen down the embankment that led toward the river. She remembered how fragile the ice had been the day before. She imagined the car sliding beneath the water and the ski hats—blue, green, and yellow—floating out of the windows and rising to the surface, their tassels wavering atop the water like small flags. She pictured the three girls sitting in the backseat of the submerged car holding hands. They would have been a help to one another, the way sisters can be.
Pond
“I’M TOO YOUNG TO HAVE A BABY, THAT’S FOR SURE,” MARTHA said, staring at the sphere of her stomach as if it were a sea creature that had crawled up onto the shore and she were witnessing evolution. “I’m just a baby myself.”
“You’re twenty-four,” her mother said. Julia stood in the front courtyard, holding a pair of gardening shears. Already, she could feel her optimistic impulse to get things to bloom in this shady place evaporating. When friends came over (which they did less frequently as the years passed), she’d excuse the skeletal growth of the Japanese maple, or the sparseness of the fire-orange bougainvillea by admitting that she just didn’t have the knack. “Brown thumb!” she’d say, gaily, so that her friends could not guess at her desperation.
“Babies having babies,” Martha singsonged. She liked to repeat the things she’d heard others say about her, as if these damning banalities were compliments.
Julia looked over at her daughter, who sat in the child’s inflatable play pool they had kept all these years along with the dollhouse and the E-Z Bake Oven Martha had not grown out of. Martha’s brown hair was wet and fell across her pale, freckled back in spikes. She collected water in a red plastic cup, then tilted the cup over her belly, letting the thin stream plash onto her skin where it split apart into rivulets that ran down the sides of her pregnant dome. Julia noticed the line that started at Martha’s navel and disappeared underneath the bottoms of her white bikini. Julia inadvertently touched her own stomach, remembering how marvelous all those changes had been—her breasts growing pornographically heavy, her skin so clear after a lifetime of blemishes, the unnaturally hard shell of her stomach a protective armor within which tiny, unknown Martha swam and flipped.
Martha was no more aware of these changes in herself than she had been of her body when she was three years old and paraded around with her lovely balloon of a belly pushing out against her T-shirt, the lines of her underwear showing recklessly beneath her grass-stained pants. It had been easy for Julia to pretend that Martha was like all the children who wandered playgrounds talking to themselves like inmates in an asylum. But as they grew older, those same children started to make a different kind of sense, began to control their bodies in self-conscious ways. A little girl might hook a lock of hair behind an ear with a kind of dormant sexuality that would make Julia gasp. Most children began to understand how to read more than one expression on a face, how to react to a facetious tone of voice with a volley of their own nascent sarcasm. It was as if they’d crossed an invisible border, but when Martha approached it, she got smacked in the face, as if she’d walked right into a plate glass window.
Julia heard the door of Burton’s Toyota slam shut. She counted to twelve, and then his keys jingled as he shook them, separating the garden gate key from the ones that opened his house, his office at the university, his safety deposit box. Burton carried every key he had ever owned on his chain, ones for padlocks he’d since lost, for offices he no longer occupied. Julia complained that this habit was needlessly space- and time-consuming, but her frustration was underscored by the knowledge that Burton had secrets he did not want to let go of. The lock in the garden gate turned and there he was, his wrinkled sport coat hanging in the crook of one arm, his worn leather briefcase suspended from the opposite shoulder by a fraying strap.
“Daddy!” Martha rose like a whale cresting the surface of the water, seemingly ignorant of her ninth-month ungainliness. She skipped out of the pool and ran to him. Burton dropped his briefcase just in time to take her into his arms. Martha’s bikini bottom rode up over a che
ek of one buttock and the flesh wobbled excitedly then settled.
“How’s my girl?” Burton said.
“I’m happy, Daddy. I’m happy!”
“You’re always my happy girl.”
He looked over at his wife and smiled. As he aged, the flesh of his face had migrated south so that his jowls formed soft parentheses around his generous mouth. The folds of his eyelids had grown heavier, and his melancholy, forgiving smile warmed Julia each time she saw it, even though there were times she felt his expression worked tactically to his advantage, and that he should not be doling out generosity but asking for it.
Martha turned toward her mother. “Mom! Dad’s home!”
“I see that,” Julia said. “Looks like Dad needs to change his shirt.”
“Why?”
“Because you forgot to dry yourself off before you gave Dad a hug.”
Martha brought her hand to her mouth and giggled.
“You have to try to remember that next time,” Julia said, picking up the bath towel from the garden chair and holding it out for Martha. Martha walked into the towel and Julia folded the ends around her daughter’s girth. Burton’s gaze fell on Martha’s stomach for a long moment before he looked away. Despite his good cheer, he could not hide his ambivalence. Before the pregnancy, he had urged Julia to let Martha live at the residential home. It was time for Martha to try things on her own, he’d argued, it was time for all of them.
Julia rubbed Martha’s back through the towel and Martha pretended to be cold, the way she had done ever since she was small, making a muffled roar through locked teeth to fight off the make-believe chill.
“You’re not really cold, are you?” Julia said.
“Nooooo,” Martha said in a shivery voice.
“You’re just faking.”
“Yesssss!”
Julia couldn’t help smiling at her daughter’s determination to carry on her small, pleasurable deception. She anchored the towel so that it stayed put around Martha’s shoulders. “Go change your clothes now, and then I want you to set the table.”
Alone With You Page 7
