“She doesn’t need to be going out on a school night,” Massey said, by way of not answering.
“I suppose she doesn’t need to go away to college either.”
“That’s not for another year.”
“And by that time we’ll have provided her with sufficient guidance and progressive amounts of responsibility and independence so she can handle it.”
“Didn’t colleges used to have curfews, codes of behavior? No boys in the rooms, three feet on the floor in the lounges, that kind of thing?”
Lila actually laughed at him then. “I’m sorry, but you’re just being ridiculous.”
“I hope I am. I really do.”
Later on, in bed, the lights off, the two of them rolled into the quilts and blankets, the furnace thrumming against the cold, Lila said, “She’s a good girl and you shouldn’t worry about her.”
“She’s not the one I’m worried about.”
Lila’s hand found its way through the blankets and rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t believe that when you were that age, you were really so bad.”
Her breathing slowed and lengthened and she slept. Massey knew that was exactly why he worried. He had not been so bad, not at all.
The next morning Phoebe was still mad at him, making a point of ignoring him as she fixed her toast and ran up and down the stairs, assembling all the components of her day. Kevin ate his cereal in front of the television, watching some show that looked like one of his video games, muscle-bound robots warring with each other. Lila was getting ready for work in the half bath off the laundry room, the only place in the house, she said, that she could call her own. Massey stood at the kitchen counter making his lunch. Phoebe stalked back and forth often enough to make her point, and Massey accepted this as his punishment. When he was ready to leave the house, he waited for her to come downstairs again, hoping to cross paths with her one more time and say something that might make things good again between them. But she eluded him and he drove off without speaking.
Massey didn’t buy the idea that kids were so different nowadays. Sure, they had their phones and everything that went along with the phones, and it was easier and quicker to do themselves harm with pictures and words. But there had always been a stream of private, subterranean talk, excluding parents, teachers, and those unlucky or uncool kids who existed as objects of pity and scorn. Just as there had always been needy, complicated friendships, alliances, feuds, outright wars. And the great confusion of sex gilding everything, its dramas played out in ways that were entirely private yet entirely public, and the best you could hope for, as a parent, was that the damage be survivable.
The summer that Phoebe was eleven, Massey was sent to pick her up from a day at the swimming pool. He parked the car and went out to the raised concrete walkway, looking down. It was late afternoon and a line of shadow moved almost perceptibly across the water.
Crowds of kids were still in the pool, or quick-walking along the concrete apron. Every so often one of the bored teenage lifeguards would rouse himself to yell “No running!” Or “No cannonballs!” In the single lane roped off for lap swim, a very old, pale man wearing a bathing cap swam up and down so slowly it looked as if he was drowning.
It took Massey a minute to spot Phoebe’s bright green two-piece swimsuit. She was sitting on the edge of the pool with two other girls, their feet dangling in the water. A boy swam up to them and scooped handfuls of water their way, making them squeal. Then the boy propelled himself halfway out of the pool and made a grab for Phoebe’s swimsuit straps, trying to pull them down. More of the squealing. The girls kicked water at him.
“Phoebe! Get over here now!”
She squinted up at him. They all did. The boy pushed away from the wall and dove smoothly underwater. Phoebe got up and came to stand directly beneath him. “Hi Dad.”
“It’s time to go. Get your things.”
“Can we give Shelby a ride?”
“All right. Hurry up.”
“We have to take showers first.”
She’d wrapped herself in a beach towel. Her small, wet head protruded from the top, her bare feet from the bottom. The sun was fading fast and her teeth chattered.
“Make sure you dry your hair,” Massey told her, and she headed off for the locker room. Massey found a spot at the pool’s entrance and waited. He watched other people leaving, including some of the kids Phoebe’s age, but he couldn’t tell if the boy who had grabbed at her swimsuit was one of them.
Phoebe and her friend came out, dressed in shorts and T-shirts. Their hair was damp and combed and they carried their wet suits and towels in printed canvas backpacks that resembled toys. “That doesn’t look like dry hair to me,” Massey said.
“The dryers weren’t working right. It’s pretty dry.” She spotted the car, and the two girls went on ahead of him. Phoebe was taller and her bare legs and backside were taking on the first signs of definition, though she still had a child’s skinny, breakable-looking body.
When they reached the car, the girls got into the back seat and Massey told them to make sure they fastened their seat belts. He asked where Shelby lived and set off in that direction. And though he knew better, he could not keep from asking, “Who was that boy, the boy who was into all that horseplay?”
“Horseplay,” Phoebe said, trying out the word, and she and Shelby had to giggle at it, and pretend to be horses, nudging each other and neighing.
“Phoebe? You know the boy I mean? Who is he?”
“Oh, Billy Robillio.” Shelby made another horse sound, cracking Phoebe up.
“Well you tell him to leave you alone. I don’t like that kind of carrying on.”
In the rearview mirror, Massey saw the two girls rolling their eyes and making comical faces at each other. “Phoebe? If I see him putting his hands on you again, or any of the other girls, I’m going to report him. There’s no place for that kind of thing.”
That turned them quiet. They rode along in silence for a few minutes, until Massey, attempting to lighten things, said, “Phoebe and Shelby. That practically rhymes. You’re like, the BB twins.” Nobody laughed.
They dropped Shelby off at her house. Massey said to Phoebe, “You want to come sit up front?”
She got out and opened the passenger door and settled herself next to him. Massey reached out and brushed a piece of her hair from her forehead. “Did you have fun today at the pool?”
“Yes.”
He waited, but she didn’t say anything more. He said, “I didn’t mean to make it sound like you were doing anything wrong, honey. But you have to make sure that boys know the limits. That they respect you. Pretty soon you’re going to be a grown-up young lady, and it’s going to be important. Okay?”
“Okay,” Phoebe said, but it was clear he’d missed by a mile, and when they arrived home she went upstairs to her room, and later, after dinner, Lila said to him, “What did you say to Phoebe to get her so upset?”
“She’s upset? I did something?”
“She says you yelled at her about some boy at the pool.”
“I didn’t yell at her. The boy was trying to pull her swimsuit top down.”
Lila considered this. “Well, that’s not so good. But it happens. Swimming-pool stuff.”
“She needs to know what is and isn’t acceptable.”
“She also needs not to feel guilty, or self-conscious about her body. You don’t want to be one of those kinds of dads, do you?”
“I’m not sure what kind you mean,” Massey said, but his wife was done talking.
Of course he knew what she meant. He was exactly that kind of dad. He always had been, and he saw no reason to apologize for it. His daughter was eleven, twelve, thirteen. Already there was reason for caution. Phoebe and her friends engaged in superheated yearning over each insipid, overpopular boy singer who came along. They moone
d over the music, the videos, the online dribblings of other fans. Massey guessed these fantasy boys were less of a problem than real ones, but still. She was growing up pretty, giddy, gossipy. He worried that she would turn out superficial and empty-headed, too easily led into bad decisions, or rather, no decisions at all, only the giving way to impulse and vanity. He was stern with her about homework and about chores, and of course there were things like sleepovers and nights out that received extra vigilance. She might outgrow her flightiness in time, and part of a parent’s job was to provide sober, rational, killjoy guidelines in the meantime.
His son? He was different, less worrisome. Kevin, two years younger than his sister, was smart, nerdy, wiseass. His friends were the same way. They all spent too much time indoors playing their computer games, they had bad complexions and wore sloppy T-shirts printed with cartoon characters. No girl would have looked twice at any of them. Massey had not been that kind of kid—he’d never been one to sit still for long—but he knew that boys could more easily make up ground. Kevin wouldn’t cause anyone problems, and eventually he’d find himself some well-paying, incomprehensible job, and everything else would sort itself out.
Of course he loved his children. But that love was always balanced against dread.
He enrolled both kids in karate classes, hoping to toughen them up some. The classes were advertised as “No Contact, High Impact,” and taught all the traditional poses and kicks and blocks. There was emphasis on good citizenship, respect, self-confidence. Massey watched the first session through the glass window of the waiting room. Kevin and Phoebe were in different age groups at different ends of the gym. Both groups lined up in their white, pajama-like uniforms, bowing to their instructors. Then there were drills, with the students encouraged to plant their feet, lunge, shout war cries.
Kevin plodded through the exercises, dutiful but uninspired. Phoebe barely went through the motions. She stood in the back row and fiddled with her hair while the instructor spoke, looking around the room as if for escape. When she had to assume poses, she slumped and drooped. The instructor came over to her and positioned her arms and legs, which Phoebe allowed, but in a passive, deadweight fashion.
After the class, Massey asked both of them how they liked it. Kevin said it was “okay.”
Phoebe said it was “totally stupid.”
“What didn’t you like about it?”
“All of it. I’m not going back.”
“Phoebe.”
“You know who’s in that class? Caitlin Donovan. And she is gross!” Phoebe rolled her eyes to indicate grossness. She had the kind of mobile, sharp-featured face that did almost too good a job of showing disdain.
“What’s so wrong about Caitlin?” Massey asked, honestly curious. “What do you mean, gross?”
“She just is. She has zits that look like hamburger.”
This cracked Kevin up. He snorted and wheezed. “Hamburger,” he managed.
“Well it’s not like you’re going to catch her zits,” Massey said. “Besides, if Caitlin takes the class and you don’t, she could learn how to kick your butt.”
“Kick your butt,” Kevin said, doubled over.
“You need to give it a chance, Phoeb. You don’t want to be a quitter.”
“Caitlin’s going to tell everybody I was there! With her!”
The next week when it was time for karate class, Lila said Phoebe had cramps and didn’t feel like going. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Massey said, confronted and confounded by one more universal female trump card, the declaration of weakness. Kevin went to two more classes until he broke his big toe attempting a flick kick.
But wasn’t he also glad that Phoebe was pretty and queenly? What if he had a daughter with zits like hamburger?
Phoebe was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. She poked along in school, getting good enough grades, though never entirely good ones. She was passionate about clothes, makeup, hairstyles. So far there had been boys on the periphery, packs of boys who showed up at movies and football games, boys on the other end of a phone. But no actual boyfriends. Phoebe was not allowed to be in a car alone with a boy, or to give boys rides when she drove. Only through his wife’s intervention had she been permitted, on this particular night, to travel in a vehicle with a boy-who-was-a-friend, along with another couple. Massey pointed out to Lila that groups of kids often enough did stupid, dangerous, even criminal things, the herd instinct. Lila told him he was being unfair and unrealistic.
It wasn’t an argument he was going to win. “Stop right now,” Lila said. “Stop making such a huge deal out of this.” Phoebe’s friends were due to pick her up soon, and the three of them were standing in the front hallway, where Massey was still making a huge deal out of it.
“Do you know the accident rates for teenage drivers? Would that be of any interest to you?”
“It would not,” Lila said. “I have to finish the laundry. Do you know the divorce rates for couples where men don’t help with housework? I thought not.” She left and a moment later the heavy-duty noise of the dryer started.
Phoebe and her friends were headed to a cookout at someone’s house. The parents would be in attendance. Massey had already spoken to them, further mortifying his daughter. The driver had been told to go straight to the party and then straight back, with no furtive detours. “I’m going to wait upstairs,” Phoebe said. “Planning my elopement.” She had her mother’s gift for sarcasm.
“Funny,” Massey said, but she was already on the upper landing, and a moment later her door slammed.
Left alone, Massey surveyed the hallway and the living room. A pair of tennis shoes had been left at the foot of the stairs. He kicked at them, and at a pile of newspapers in one corner, scattering pages, and then he picked up the shoes, hurling them against a wall.
“Dave?” Lila came back in then. “What in the world?”
“How can you have people over here when the place looks like this? Huh?”
“What is the matter with you?” Lila bent to retrieve the papers. “Seriously.”
“It’s a goddamn pigsty,” Massey said, but his anger was draining away, replaced by shame.
“Then clean it up instead of having a stupid tantrum. And stay out of the way if you’re going to be unpleasant.”
So Massey went out to the garage and sorted through the drills and drivers on his workbench. A car pulled up in the driveway, the front doorbell rang, and he heard Lila greeting someone, the mumbling, moony boy whom Massey had met before and was forced to dislike mostly on principle. Then Phoebe came downstairs, and there was a brief bit of conversation, Lila cautioning, Phoebe saying sure, sure, obviously anxious to be gone, and then the front door closed again.
Massey stood to one side of the garage door’s window, looking out. The boy’s car idled in the driveway, its headlights two narrow beams. Phoebe crossed in and out of them, running down the front path. She leaned down to wave to somebody in the car’s back seat, then opened the passenger door. Music, loud and hectic, escaped through it, then the door slammed shut. The car backed out onto the street, shifted gears, and headed off.
Massey took his car keys from the rack next to the workbench. He started his car and drove off after them. He saw their taillights far ahead and sped up. Then loitered at a stop sign so as not to get too close. The house with the party was on the other side of the freeway. He lost them once they reached the on-ramp, but once he got off again and reached the house itself, he saw the boy’s car parked on the street behind a line of other cars, and he turned and drove home.
Once he got there Lila asked him where he went, and Massey said he’d needed sandpaper, and Lila said she hoped that meant he was finally going to finish one of his famous woodworking projects. And she would wait up for Phoebe, no, she didn’t mind, she was going to read, and he should just go on to bed.
This was how he began the habit of following
her, waiting for her, keeping watch. He ran through all manner of excuses, how he had to go out to buy one thing or another, how he just happened to be at the same gas station, just happened to be arriving home the same time she did. He guessed he should have felt some dread or particular worry on these nights, Phoebe loosed upon the world, but no. As long as he was nearby, no harm would come to her, and he could breathe easy.
Of course he got caught out, and then caught again, and there were scenes, and this most recent time, when he was pretty sure he had used up the last of his meager excuses.
Lila was waiting for him when he got home from work that night. “The kids are out,” she told him. “They’ll be back after dinner. That’s all you need to know. Let’s go sit in the den.”
Massey followed her. Lila was still in her work clothes. She was the customer service manager for a loan company and she always dressed up, because, she said, it made people who came in to argue or beg about their payments behave better. Today she wore a gray tweed jacket and a slim gray skirt and heels. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a clip. Massey wished she’d changed clothes. He felt like one of the bad customers, attempting to wheedle his way out of the late-payment charges, someone who had spent all his money in a tavern.
“So I’m in trouble, huh?” he said, trying for a jokiness that might make it all more bearable.
But Lila wasn’t having any of it. She stared him down, her look equal parts sadness and distaste. “I want you to go see a counselor. The insurance covers it.”
“Like, a shrink?” He hadn’t expected this. He didn’t want to let on how much it alarmed him.
“No, not a psychiatrist. A counselor. There’s a difference. It’s just talking.”
“This seems a little extreme, don’t you think?”
The Witch Page 14
