by Rachel Simon
Nanna slurped the bottom of her drink. “All his girlfriends have swum up beneath him. They’ve gathered by his chair, and their little fins are flicking back and forth.”
Beth stretched her neck to see beyond the glare. “Come here,” Nanna said, hooking her finger. Beth moved so that she was almost cheek to cheek with Nanna, and so close she felt enveloped by Nanna’s honeysuckle. Nanna pointed her finger like a telescope, right above Beth’s cheekbone. Beth closed one eye and looked. The glare cleared, and yes, beneath the floor Beth saw the flowing hair, as long as her mother’s; the diaphanous dresses; the school of mermaids with slender, paddling tails. “Ooh,” she said, as Nanna lowered her head into the starting position for a nod. “I see them.”
Upstairs, in their room after the party, Beth unzipped Nanna’s girdle. There were still a few guests below, but Nanna and Beth had tired of the floor and the boring talk around them (“Sounds like the TV when it’s just dots,” Beth had said, referring to the time that she and Nanna, unable to sleep, had sneaked downstairs and discovered to their dismay nothing but snow on the television), and besides, they couldn’t find Wally to make any more drinks. So they had picked up the chair and told Richard and Marie good night.
Before Nanna moved into this house, Beth’s mother had said, “What are we going to do?” There was one extra bedroom, but Richard had recently begun working there late into the night, staring at papers with little boxes and numbers so small that Beth didn’t understand how anyone could see them. At Uncle Martin’s, Nanna had had her own room, but last winter Uncle Martin went to teach children on a mountain somewhere and Nanna’s lungs proved too old to get her up the steep trails, so she was going to have to stay with Beth’s family until the end of the summer.
All this Beth heard while she sat at the top of the stairs, listening. “Why can’t we just put your mother someplace, like other families do?” “You think we have that kind of money to spare? Money’s why we haven’t gone to see her for years.” “That’s not why we haven’t gone to see her. We haven’t gone to see her because you’re her unfavorite son.” “I don’t want to get into that now.” “All I know is, I don’t want to take care of her, Richard. Martin says she’s past her prime.” “He didn’t mean she was incapacitated. He just meant she’s an exaggeration of what she once was.” “And you want to subject yourself to that?” “No. But the bottom line is, I’ll feel bad if we don’t let her stay here. She’s my mother, Marie.”
The first night, Beth opened the sofa downstairs. She liked how that felt: she pulled and pulled and just when she didn’t expect it, the frame rose up in her hands like a jaw opening suddenly, and then she had to run away or it might bite down onto her. Beth also helped Marie with the sheets, which was no fun at all because the mattress was rounded and the sheets square. The whole time her mother kept saying, “Your grandmother is a character. Remember how you liked her?” though when Beth last saw Nanna, her grandmother was just another skirt outside the crib bars.
And then Nanna stepped into the house. She wore a dress with blue butterflies and a necklace of white beads and at least one ring on every finger. She closed her eyes as she walked through the door and when satisfied that she was inside, drew a deep breath and said, “Beth.” Over her head Richard pressed his fingers toward Marie, mouthing, “Eight bags.” “Welcome, Harriet,” Marie said, walking close and hugging Nanna. Then she and Richard went to the car, and Nanna crouched down and held her arms out. Beth stepped slowly across the room, and when the arms closed around her they reminded her of the caves she sometimes built with chairs and old suitcases. But Nanna’s arms were softer than a cave, and smelled like honeysuckle. “Your eyes have little birds in them,” Nanna said as Beth pulled her face back. With her right hand she reached toward Beth’s eyes and snatched at the air. Then she turned her hand over and brought it between them. Beth watched closely as Nanna uncurled her fingers, but she must not have been quick enough; Nanna’s hand was empty. “Oh dear,” Nanna said, her eyes darting around the room, her face drooping into Tragedy. “They flew away.”
The music from the party — too new for Nanna, too old for Beth — clicked off downstairs. Beth held up her arms, and Nanna raised the organdy dress over her head. “Could you believe that Wally Robertson?” Nanna said. “Yelling at Charles in the corner like that. Whatever Charles told him certainly made Wally one angry man.” She laid the dress over the back of the chair, on top of her own clothes. “The last time I heard such talk was when I lived in Istanbul. Did I ever tell you about Turkey?”
“You told me about the city that looked like sand castles.”
“I did? I wonder where that was. Well, in Istanbul, the air was full of espionage, intrigue, betrayal. I once saw two men dueling with swords on the edge of the Grand Bazaar. Nepal was a breeze compared to that.”
While Beth pulled on her father’s T-shirt and Nanna slipped on a nightie, Beth tried to imagine what these places with such funny names looked like, but they all merged into one big darkness, somewhere out there. Nanna flopped on her bed, and Beth did the same on hers, and they lay on their stomachs, resting their chins on their arms, and their arms on the long windowsill. The window was open and air was blowing in lightly, just enough to ripple the clothes on their backs. Above the trees — silhouettes now, the leaves at the bottom laced with white from the lantern by the front door — stars blinked across the sky.
“Did you know there are pictures in the stars, Nanna? Daddy told me so.” He did this when Beth was much younger: held her in his arms in the backyard, pointed up, and called out the picture names. Beth liked this game, but with him always working late in the extra room, it had been a long time since he’d said yes when she’d asked him to play.
“That’s what people did for TV before there was TV,” Nanna said. “Just like you do with clouds.”
Beth looked into the sky. It didn’t take much to make out a woman in a rocking chair, or a ballerina, but she didn’t think these were the same things that her father had said he could see in the sky. Beth explained this to Nanna.
Nanna replied, “You see, the sky is God’s sheet when He goes to bed at night, but it’s a sheet with holes in it. The stars are those holes and what you’re seeing through them is God Himself in bed. That’s why the pictures look different every night; sometimes God doesn’t tuck His sheet in properly, so things get shifted around a little.”
Outside, Richard and Marie were seeing off some guests. Marie stood by the curb, saying bye to a car of her friends. Richard stood in the driveway, talking low to Charles. Their heads were bowed together, and Richard was running his hands through his hair.
“Your father and Charles, they speak their own language together,” Nanna said.
Beth listened hard and it was true, she couldn’t make out anything they were saying. Might as well have been bees buzzing far away. “Can you understand them, Nanna?” she asked.
“Goodness, no,” Nanna said, pulling down the shade and rolling onto her back. “I have never understood your father.”
The next morning when they came down for breakfast, Richard was on the phone, trailing the cord through the kitchen archway into the living room. Marie was drinking a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Beth and Nanna sat at the table and poured themselves the cereal that Marie had left out.
“Can’t believe I have to go to work,” Marie said. “Throw a party two nights before we leave, then put off getting anything ready till the last possible day. I must be out of my mind. Think you two could start packing before I get home?”
Nanna said of course. Marie set her cup down on the kitchen counter and walked into the living room. “There’s cleaning up and having our mail held for three weeks.” She came back in, arms full of Hawaiian mugs and beer bottles. “Calling the newspaper, picking up the dry cleaning.” She glanced at them. “And Beth, those bangs have got to go.” She downed the last of her coffee just as Richard rounded the corner and hung up the phone, saying, “Charles called him a
fter the party and laid all the cards on the table.”
Marie blew air out in a stream. “That wasn’t too smart,” she said.
“I told him I wanted to get the paperwork together and report it first. I told him you can never be sure how people will act when they’re confronted. But he got drunk and lost his head and now Wally knows that we know, and, oh, God…”
The two of them talked, and Nanna and Beth watched. Marie stood close to Richard, the look on her face the same soft look she sometimes had when hugging him. Richard kept pressing the skin on his forehead in small circles. “I’m sure I don’t have to worry,” he mumbled. “Wally’s the guy who did something illegal, not me.”
“He’s a powerful man,” Marie said, shaking her head. “And arrogant enough to help himself to company money.”
“But what can he do to me? I have a contract you couldn’t break with a battery of lawyers.”
“I know,” Marie said, sighing. “I know.”
Beth looked away from them to her cereal sponging up the milk. Nanna’s first morning here, she told Marie to go on to work, not to concern herself with Beth’s breakfast. Beth remembered it, Nanna setting the table with the silverware upside down (“Well, what end should face your mouth? Surely not the handle”) and whipping up scrambled eggs that they had colored purple. The dye came from a jar in one of Nanna’s bags; one tiny drop and the yellow in the pan turned purple, as quick as a storm cloud could turn a day dark. Now, Beth dragged her spoon in figure eights around the bowl while her parents droned on.
Richard’s kiss on top of her head came suddenly; his skin was as hot as a fever. “Vacation’s tomorrow, right?” he said. “Right!” Beth replied in her best voice. He stepped toward the back door, saying, “I’ll blow up the inner tube and take you out in the waves, just you and me, like we did last summer.” For a moment he seemed almost happy, the way he used to be before all his late-night working, but as Marie followed him into the garage and the engine revved up, Beth felt two wet imprints in the shape of her father’s hands cooling on her shoulders. She and Nanna watched as the car pulled down the street, and when it rounded the corner, Nanna turned to Beth, clasping her hands together. “Time for an excursion!” she said.
They dumped their mushy cereal in the trash and helped themselves to the leftover candy kisses. Then they dressed and left the house, Nanna holding the beach chair with one hand and Beth with the other. It was a clear, sunny day, and felt nowhere near as deep into summer as it actually was. A nice breeze played around the trees, and roses bloomed in neighbors’ gardens. They walked slowly, talking, and every ten minutes or so Nanna grew hot or tired, and they had to stop so she could sit in her chair. Beth climbed into her lap then, and they waved at the cars that passed by and watched high school boys mowing people’s lawns. The sitting was as much fun as the walking, so a few times they watched as whole lawns got mowed while they chatted. During one such rest, Beth asked Nanna what Richard had been like when he was a little boy.
Nanna paused a minute. “He always thought we didn’t have enough,” she said finally. “Martin was so much easier; things concerned him as little as they concerned me. This is what I tried to teach Richy. But he was so fussy. He hated that I wore fake jewels.” She looked at her hands. “Wouldn’t come with me when I said the heck with stability and took my savings and went to live in Europe. I told Richard it would break the family apart if he didn’t come, but he wouldn’t give up his little security, said he wanted to live a normal life when he grew up so it was more important that he keep making money then. Working in a grocery store was more important? He was still a baby.”
Beth had heard about this store, the grocers with pencils behind their ears, the belts carrying boxes up in the middle of the detergent aisle. She imagined her father there as a baby — What had he looked like then? Was he chubby? Had he always been bald, with no more than a smudge of hair around the back of his head? Beth tried to see him in diapers, waddling through the supermarket aisles, pointing confused shoppers to the tomato paste, leading lost children back to their mothers. She knew that he could have run the whole place, even with a pacifier in his mouth. Her mind came back to Nanna as Nanna was saying, “… and wouldn’t come to Greece that time I got sick, though Martin begged him. One excuse after another.”
“What?” Beth said.
Nanna paused, as if forgetting what she was saying. “Oh, did you hear that? The cars up there are calling to us.”
Beth glanced in the direction of Nanna’s gaze. Yes, she could hear the cars, speeding along the busy road beyond the houses. “That’s the big street, and I’m not allowed to cross it.”
“I won’t make you cross it. Hop down, now.”
Together they wound their way out of the neighborhood and when they reached the big road, they walked along it, not across. They passed the church and the gas station, then walked by the ugly buildings where Nanna said doctors must work, and the smelly place where buses seemed to live, and then they came to a little mall. Here they peered into all the windows, “Just to see what they have,” Nanna said. There was a deli, where Nanna bought Beth a green ice pop (exactly the kind of food Beth’s mother would never allow in the house, and oh, it tasted so good!), and a shoe store with silver pumps that glittered, and a drugstore, where the girl behind the counter had a mustache — from suppressing belches, Nanna explained, it has to come out somehow — and finally a barbershop. Nanna spoke for a while to the barber, a tall man with a white apron and as little hair on his head as Beth’s father. Beth was still sucking on the green ice pop when the barber asked her if she wanted the regular chair — “It does go up and down,” he noted — or the chair that looked like a car. Naturally she chose the car, though she was disappointed to realize, as he lowered her into it and Nanna set her own chair down across the room by the window, that the car was only a metal frame around a regular chair and it didn’t even go up and down. The barber took the plastic tubing from the ice pop away, and snip snip went his scissors. Nanna waved to Beth in the car, and Beth steered an invisible wheel, pretending she really thought it was a car so Nanna would not be as disappointed as she was, all the time wishing the wheel would become real in her hands and the car real around her body, the same way that the floor at the party had become a pool of women. But without Nanna at her side the car was clearly no more than a chair, and Beth’s brown curls fell to the floor. When they walked out into the sun, the air licked the back of Beth’s neck and her face felt larger than ever before. “You look lovely,” Nanna said, turning Beth toward her reflection in the plate glass.
But after they found their way home, there was Beth’s mother, staring at Beth as she and Nanna strolled hand in hand up the front walk. Actually, she was not staring at Beth as much as at her head, and then she was staring at Nanna, and her mother’s face looked as if at any minute it would turn into the scowl of the Hawaiian god mug.
“How could you!” Marie yelled at Nanna after she sent Beth to her room and Beth nestled into the corner at the top of the stairs, watching through the bannister.
“You said she needed a haircut.” Nanna covered her mouth and looked at the floor beyond Marie’s feet.
“But not a crew cut. Do you think this is how little girls are supposed to look?”
“I don’t know. I thought she looked nice.”
“It is not at all what I had in mind. And Richard will be devastated. You know how he loved her hair. I hadn’t cut it in two years.”
“I’m sorry, Marie.”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now.” Marie sat down with a thud on the living room sofa.
“You said —”
“I know what I said. I know what I said, and let’s just drop it.” Marie twirled a tassel from a pillow. The fringe opened like a white dandelion. Marie looked toward the front window and sighed long and loud. “It’s just with all that’s going on right now. And on top of everything, we’re leaving on this trip.”
Nanna stood
up. “We will pack. Right now. We’ll fill up those suitcases, and then you’ll have one less thing to worry about.”
Marie’s gaze lingered out the window for a minute. Then she turned to Nanna as slowly as smoke unfurling. “Excuse me?” she said. “Did you say something?”
Nanna had moved into Beth’s room because the two of them were together so much anyway, it just made more sense than tripping over the convertible sofa in the living room all the time. Nanna did not mind. Neither did Beth. Once their beds were in the same room, they could stay awake talking for hours until one of them fell asleep. There was so much to say — people to whisper about, Nanna’s memories to laugh at, things to see in the ceiling.
On clear nights, the light coming through the window made Nanna’s rings reflect colors onto the ceiling. Reds and greens and blues swirled above them. “Make them chase each other, Nanna,” Beth said this night as the phone rang below. “Goodness,” Nanna replied, hunting her left hand after her right. “Where did you get such a mean streak?”
Right hand hid in the corner. Left hand found it and pounced. “I don’t know,” Beth said, giggling. The red stones closed over the green and blue.
It was still dark when Richard came in to wake them up. He shook Nanna first. “What?” she said.
“We’re going to get an early start,” Richard said, stepping over to Beth.
“But you said eight o’clock. You said eight.”
“I haven’t been able to sleep all night.”
“Can’t you have a little patience? How can we get ready in the dark?”
“Look, I’m sorry, but things are getting weird, and I want to hit the road before the office opens and I get sucked back into it.”
In the bathroom — Nanna left the lights off and the curtains closed so their eyes wouldn’t “sting from the light”—Nanna soaped up Beth’s hair while her own hair set in hot curlers. “Your father is always running,” she said. “When he was in grade school, every day he left an hour before your Uncle Martin and all the other children just to be first in line to walk into the building. He used to arrive before the janitor! I would say, ‘Richy, enjoy life, smell the roses,’ but he would not listen to me. How did he get to be like that? Certainly not from the genes. His father never even stayed in one family, let alone one job. And I have always regarded institutional loyalty as the outgrowth of a fearful and therefore conformist mind.”
