Madame Mirabou's School of Love

by Barbara Samuel

  “Okay. I was thinking something sort of Art Deco, you know?”

  “Like those French posters? Lautrec and those guys?”

  “A little later than that. The 1920s or so?”

  She nodded. “I’ll make some drawings, pull up some fonts on the computer.”

  “That’s great.” I touched her arm. “Thanks.”

  To my surprise, Wanda was coming up the sidewalk, and with her was her husband, Tommy, looking a lot more comfortable and relaxed, in a pair of worn-out jean shorts and a plain blue tank top. He was still unmistakably a soldier, with the dog tags and haircut and sunglasses, but he looked cheerful. “How ya doing?” he said.

  “I’m so amazed to see you guys! You don’t have to help, Wanda! You didn’t know your husband was coming home so soon!”

  “I was going to have Tommy hang out with the kids, and cancel the babysitter, but he remembered you were the one who helped me with the boys when they were sick, and he wanted to come help, too.”

  I grinned. “Cool. Well, heaven knows, I’ll be able to use you.”

  Roxanne joined us. “Hi, Tom,” she said, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head. “You might not remember me, but I’m one of your neighbors, too.”

  The spark in the air was almost purple, the length of time they held eye contact a bit too long for my comfort. “I remember you,” he said, and shook her hand.

  I glanced at Wanda, but she was smiling benignly. Maybe I was imagining things. “Don’t be silly, Roxanne. You had dinner with us three times.”

  Roxanne tilted her head and smiled in her slow, seductive way. “Well, it’s been a long time.”

  “I remember you,” he drawled, and looked away.

  Danger, Will Robinson, I thought. Danger, danger, danger.

  No. I was not imagining things. I didn’t know if they’d had a little fling before, or if there was just a lot of sexual tension between them, but I didn’t like it. “Let’s start. It gets hot in there once the sun moves.”

  As we headed into the shop, Kit and Evelyn came from the other direction. Evelyn dragged a red wagon full of supplies—I thought I even saw paint. “Oh, you angel!” I cried, and hugged her. I introduced everyone to everyone else. Kit and Roxanne greeted each other stiffly, the two most beautiful women in a room now jockeying for who was the fairest of them all for today.

  I shook my head and ducked into the shop. At least I didn’t have to compete.

  It was an embarrassment of riches. Evelyn, the taskmaster, had drawn up a list of necessary steps—remove all trash, sweep floors, scrub walls, wash windows—and assigned tasks. The girls were put on window detail, and once they polished the shopfront, they washed the tiny panes in the back room, then went upstairs and washed the ones in the apartment. Kit got to work on drawing patterns for the floor according to a grid Evelyn had mapped out. Roxanne, Wanda, and I were put on washing duty, then polishing details. Tom was sent to the basement to check wiring, plumbing, heating, and pronounced it all fine. He brushed spiderwebs from his body as he emerged, however, and I winced. “It must be awful down there,” I said.

  “Not that bad, really. You probably need to know where everything is. Let me show you.”

  I shuddered inwardly. “Can you draw me a map?”

  “I guess so.”

  “For God’s sake,” Roxanne said in her smoker’s rasp. She was high atop a ladder, scrubbing off what appeared to be a couple of centuries’ worth of grime from the upper-level walls. A hundred miles of legs were displayed. “Just go with him, then you’ll know where it is.”

  From the middle of my chest came a dull, froglike glub. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to at least see it, and if I went one time with somebody else, it wouldn’t scare me so much the next time. “All right.”

  He didn’t grin at my wimpiness, and I remembered he’d just come back from a war, where people carried guns all the time and little children lost arms and the next car could hide someone who’d blow himself up. “I’m sure spiders are way down your list of things people should be afraid of,” I said as we came to the open cellar door, “but I swear to heaven, I get hives thinking about spiderwebs.”

  “You’d be surprised at the things I’m afraid of, ma’am,” he drawled.

  I stood at the top of the stairs, and a gust of cool air billowed up from the darkness. I thought of buried bodies and ghosts—and unexpectedly, of lying in the grass with a jammed finger, smelling damp earth and fire while the ashes of my house drifted down out of the sky around me like snow.

  I swayed dangerously, and gripped the threshold. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said.

  “You look bad.” He touched my shoulder. “Take long, slow, deep breaths. In through your nose, out through your mouth.”

  I put my hand on my upper tummy, and met his eyes, trying to follow directions. He had good eyes, very dark blue with dark lashes, and I saw his children would all look like him when they grew up. In, out, I breathed.

  “That’s it. Keep at it.” He reached around me, and clicked on a switch. “This is what we’re gonna do,” he said. “There’s a set of stairs, then we’re going to turn right to look at the furnace. I’ll show you where the pilot light is.”

  A little voice screamed inside of me, and I scrambled backwards. “I can’t.”

  He seemed to get that I meant it. “All right.” He touched my shoulder. “Really scares you, doesn’t it?”

  I snorted in uncomfortable laughter. “You could say that.”

  “Remind me in a few days, and I can show you some things to let that go.”

  “Can’t a person just have some things they don’t want to do?”

  “Sure can. But what if you’re here all alone and the water line breaks? Better to know how to turn it off.”

  I breathed out. “Yeah. Well, I’ll work on it.”

  For now, though, I was saved.

  By the end of the day, not only was the shop clean, but two walls had been painted white, and the entire grid for the floor painting had been laid out and begun. The apartment upstairs was clean, the bathroom scrubbed, the kitchen ready to be used eventually. I made plans to bring a few things over tomorrow—some plants for the roof, maybe something to sit on up there, a few things for the bathroom.

  When we got back to the other apartment, Giselle and I had showers and made some salads for supper to go with the pie Mary had sent. While I tossed greens and cheese and tomatoes, she sat at the breakfast bar, bent over her phone, sending text messages. She’d done the same thing at breakfast, off and on.

  “You know,” I said finally, “that gets a little old, that you have that thing going sixteen hours a day.”

  She looked up, her attention still on the phone. “What? It’s just that a friend of mine is having trouble with her boyfriend.”

  “Can you put it away until after we eat?”

  “I guess so. If it bothers you.” She thumbed in a message and closed the phone. It made a little musical noise as it shut down. “I won’t even turn it on until after supper. How’s that?”

  “Better.” I spread place mats on the bar. “Don’t you get tired of being in touch all the time?”

  “No. It wasn’t pleasant when I was in London and couldn’t talk to anyone at all for weeks.”

  “You know,” I said, “you might try doing it on purpose, just one day a week or something.”

  “Why?” She was aghast.

  “It’s not natural for people to be in touch with one another all the time like that.”

  She lifted her fork. “Why? Humans are pack animals, you know. We’re like dogs, wanting to sleep on top of one another.”

  “Maybe. You just might try it once in a while, and see what happens if you’re not talking to someone all the time.”

  Clearly, she thought it was an idiotic idea, and I let it go. “Do you want to rent a movie or something?”

  “Not really. Maybe I’ll just go to my room and hang out, if that’s okay.”

  “Is
everything all right?”

  She gave me a classic teenager look, that half sneer that says you’re crazy. “Yes. Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  “I’m a teenager, Mom. We don’t like to be with adults all the time. Two days in a row is a lot.”

  I laughed. “All right.”

  Her retreat gave me time to catch up on a few chores that had been neglected. I started a load of laundry and mopped the kitchen floor and turned the computer on to check e-mail, only realizing as I sat down that I was extremely tired. It had been a very long week, and I had to get up and open the restaurant tomorrow morning. Sundays were not such an early start—we didn’t open until eight-thirty—but it was still another workday.

  It felt good to just sit down and let go of things. I told myself I was checking to see if my sister had put anything together, but I was really looking for something from Niraj.

  There was nothing from either of them. In the other room, I heard Giselle talking on the phone, and shook my head. It was amazing how much time she spent on that thing. I sat there, bemused, thinking I ought to send an e-mail to Niraj, at least thanking him for the Ganesha statue. As I thought about him sitting at the bar today, my thoughts wandered back to the night at his house, the feeling of his arms around me, his chest against my breasts, the sound of his breath in my ear—

  He scared me. It would be okay to have a fling, but all this emotion filling me was too much, too sudden, too everything for a rebound thing.

  “Mom!” Giselle said behind me, and it sounded like it was the second time she’d said it, with that slight impatience. “Dad wants to talk to you.”

  She held her phone out, and I took it without much excitement. “Hello?”

  “How you doing?”

  “Fine. What’s up?”

  “Nothing, really. Sounds like Giselle’s having a nice time there.”

  What was this about? “Good, I’m glad.”

  “She said you’re opening a shop?”

  Giselle hovered in the room, pretending to pluck dead leaves out of the pots on the floor. “I told you that the other day. A perfume shop.”

  “She said you’re seeing someone, too. A dark guy.”

  I narrowed my eyes. He sounded . . . jealous. “That’s none of your business.”

  He chuckled, as if he knew me better than I knew myself. “Ah, baby, you always did have a streak of independence I liked.”

  Something in me snapped, a vial containing some acidic emotion. “That’s why you didn’t want me to work or have my own income or have any kind of life?”

  “It wasn’t like that. I wanted to take care of you.”

  He didn’t even seem to hear the dichotomy in the two desires. And maybe that was the whole trouble. I thought about making a sharp comment about him dumping me, but I would not fight with him. Not with Giselle in the room.

  Actually, not at all. I didn’t care enough. “You know, Daniel, I’m tired tonight. If there’s something you want to talk about regarding Giselle or anything like that, I’m happy to discuss it, but otherwise, I’d just like to go.”

  It was quiet on the other end of the line. “Baby—”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to tell you that I made a big mistake.”

  I felt punched. “I have to go, Daniel.” Without waiting for his reply, I handed the phone back to Giselle.

  “Jeez,” she said, her little cheery face sliding away. “You don’t have to be mean.”

  I didn’t answer. “Go talk to him in your room. I’m not part of that any longer.”

  Giving in to my weariness, I let Giselle have the computer so she could talk some more to her friends, via Instant Messaging and e-mail, and went to watch television in the living room. Despite the awful colors of the couch, it was deliriously comfortable, and I dozed off watching a rerun of ER. When my phone rang, I thought it was part of the show at first, and I didn’t stir. It stopped, then started ringing again.

  I grabbed it off the coffee table and peered hard at the caller ID. EL PASO COUNTY POLICE DEPARTMENT. Alarmed, I picked up. “Hello?”

  “Oh, thank God,” Roxanne said. “Nikki, this is Roxanne, and I need a little favor.”

  “Are you in jail?”

  “Um, yeah, but don’t worry. There’s not money involved.”

  I sat up straight. “What do you need?”

  “Can Amy spend the night with you?”

  “You’re in jail for the night? What did you do?”

  “It’s a long story, and I don’t have much time, but can you take care of my daughter and we’ll talk about the rest tomorrow?”

  “Of course. She’ll be here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Roxanne . . .” I paused, not sure how to express my concern for her. It wasn’t as if we’d known each other a long time, after all.

  “I know,” she said. “I need to get my act together. I know I do.”

  “I’ll take care of Amy tonight,” I said. “You take care of yourself.”

  When I hung up, I padded to Giselle’s room and knocked. “I’m going down the hall to get Amy,” I said.

  She yanked open the door. “Get her? What do you mean?”

  “She’s going to spend the night here. On the couch, I guess.”

  “It’s like ten feet down the hall!” she said with a curl of her lip.

  “She can’t handle it?”

  “I’m not asking your permission. But I do expect you to be nice.”

  “Mom.” She rolled her eyes. “Have you noticed that she’s a Goth? That she cuts herself? That she smokes? I don’t hang out with people like that.”

  “You are not to make judgments, and you are not to be unkind, do you hear me? I won’t hesitate to soap your tongue if necessary.”

  “What am I, five?”

  “She’s a nice girl who is doing the best she can under difficult circumstances. Not everyone has a father who sweeps them off to London and Spain.”

  She ducked her head. “Fine.”

  Barefoot, I went down the hall. Through the front door of Roxanne’s apartment, I heard shouting, one-sided, as if Amy was yelling into the phone. I knocked hard.

  Amy swung open the door as if she were a hurricane. Her mascara was smeared, and it was plain she’d been crying. She put the phone on her shoulder, fury coming off her in pale red waves with a scent of gunpowder. “What do you want?”

  “Your mother called me. She wants you to come over to stay the night with us.”

  Her eyes on my face, she lifted the phone and said succinctly, “I hate you.” She clicked it closed. “You know who that was? My loser dad!”

  With a wild cry, she turned around and knocked everything off a table that stood in the foyer, and when that crash wasn’t enough, she kicked the table over, too.

  Then she stood in the middle of the room, her arms at her sides, looking like she was three and had lost her kitten. “He didn’t want me to come over because his wife is afraid of me, but not because of me, because my wacko mother is stalking them! My mother is in jail, and all my dad can say is, ‘Sorry, you can’t come here.’ My brother is there, he can be there anytime he wants, but I can’t! You know why? Because Lorelei doesn’t like me! Would he send me to a foster home rather than let me live with him?”

  There was such anguish in her voice that I moved forward and took her into my arms. “It’s awful. I’m sorry.”

  She clutched me, her hands in fists, a deep keening cry coming up from her chest. “I hate them all.”

  “I know.”

  “I want everything to be normal. How long does this part have to last?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie.” I rubbed her back. “I don’t know.”

  Giselle sulked into the room and sat at the breakfast bar while I fixed some French toast for Amy. She had her phone in her hands, however, and kept tip-tapping text messages as we sat there. I finally turned around and snapped, “Giselle, that’s enough.
It’s rude!”

  “At least I’m not talking on it all the time!”

  “I wouldn’t like that, either.” I scowled. “If you can’t stay off it, you’re going to have to give it to me for the duration of the weekend.”

  She huffed, but pushed the OFF button. “I’m the only kid I know whose non-custodial parent disciplines her at all.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world,” Amy said.

  “Discipline?” Giselle asked.

  “Custodial and non-custodial parents. Don’t you get sick of it?”

  Giselle had to duck her head very fast. “Yeah.”

  “Come on, guys,” I said, blinking back tears. “I’m not saying we can’t talk about that at some point, but could somebody please tell a joke? I’m going to start bawling my eyes out.”

  Giselle said, “What did your mom do to go to jail?”

  “Giselle!”

  “I’m just asking.”

  Amy flipped a penny in the air, over and over. “Not that much. She just goes and sits across the street from their house, which used to be our house, and smokes cigarettes in her car.”

  Despite herself, Giselle let go an earthy giggle. “That could drive you crazy, all right.”

  “Which person?” Amy said. “I think it’s hurting my mom more than it’s hurting my dad.”

  Giselle glanced at me. “Yeah.”

  The girls settled in to watch a movie on HBO. I had to work in the morning, and they had their instructions for breakfast, reaching me, what to do and not do. They weren’t toddlers. If they stayed awake all night, so be it.

  But I was stirred up by the excitement and decided to go play computer games for a little while. Check e-mail.

  When there was still nothing from Niraj, I realized I was being an idiot, and opened up a new file.

  TO: niraj.bhuskar@blipdata.com

  FROM: nikki@scentofhours.com

  SUBJECT: thanks and apologies

  Hi, Niraj,

  Thank you so much for the Ganesha statue. He’s wonderful, and it’s fortuitous that you bought him in San Francisco before I ever even thought of opening the shop. I’m going to put him in a special place of his own.