Five Tuesdays in Winter, page 10
“Now it’s twelve nineteen!” It was the older boy.
“Stop. My mother is below.”
He didn’t stop. “I don’t have to do anything you say. You haven’t even babysitted before.”
“I did.”
“No, you haven’t. I heard your mum say.”
“She doesn’t know. I did before.”
“Where. Are. My. Parents?” He gave a whack of the cow with each word.
The two other children were fighting over something.
“Stop it you both. Stop. Muffin has first, then you.”
“She’s had it all morning!”
“Where. Are. My. Parents?”
“You just like her because she’s a girl. All girls everywhere are like that. They hate boys.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
The banging grew louder. The children were screaming to be heard above it. Hanne tried to placate them one at a time with no success. Oda knocked but no one heard.
“Stop it! You must stop!” Hanne was yelling, too, now. “I will tell if you stop.”
They stopped.
“Come sit,” she said. “I have to tell you something I do not want to tell you.”
Oda’s insides went cold.
The children fought about who would sit where on the sofa. Above the arguing Hanne said, “Your mami and papi, they have died.”
“No, they have not.”
“Yes, they have.”
“Like animals die?” the little girl said in a squeak.
“You’re lying,” the older boy said.
“The phone call,” Hanne said.
“You said it was the innkeeper calling about our grocery order.”
“I didn’t know how you to tell.” Her English was breaking down.
“They went to the caves. Just for a little while.” His voice grew higher and higher.
“They have a bad guide who tooks them wrong. Too much water.”
“They drowned in a cave?”
“Yes.”
Once the older boy started to cry the others did, too.
“Come here,” Hanne said. “Come up here to my arm. All of you. Come. Let me hold you.”
Oda had gotten the call about the accident in the morning while Hanne was at school. She went to identify the body and sign the first batch of so many papers, as if death were just another business deal to push through. When Hanne came home she led her to the sofa and wrapped her arms around her and told her she had to tell her something she didn’t want to tell her. Hanne had leapt up and run to her room. Don’t tell me, she’d screamed. But Oda did. She sat on Hanne’s bed. Don’t touch me, Hanne said when Oda tried to stroke her hair. So Oda had sat in a chair beside the bed like a visitor in a hospital room. She’d ached to hold her. To be held. Let me hold you, she’d asked again and again.
She went up the rest of the steps. She knew she had to stop Hanne, but she was lulled into place outside the door by her tender voice, her soft cooing. “It’s going to be all right. We will be all right. I will take care of you.”
It was almost like hypnosis, like Hanne was playing Oda’s part in a trance.
“Where will we live?” the older boy wailed.
“You’ll come live with us.”
“Here? In this house?”
“No,” Hanne said. “But we can move here. Would you like? I could teach you to ride horse.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like that,” the girl said.
“I can teach you German. We will be fine.”
From the foyer, Oda heard the Australians’ voices. The wife said something and the husband laughed. Oda’s limbs went cold, as if she were alone with ghosts.
They came up the steps quickly.
“Oda,” the wife said. “I’m sorry we’re so late. How did it go?”
Oda could find no words for them. But she didn’t need to. The three children sprang out of the apartment, shrieking at their parents. Oda slipped around them into the apartment. Hanne was still on the sofa in the new bright light. Her skin had a feverish sheen.
Oda sat beside her.
“Mutti,” Hanne said, and fell sideways and heavy into her mother’s arms.
TIMELINE
My brother was helping me carry my stuff up to his apartment. “Just don’t talk about Ethan Frome, okay?”
“What?”
“It’s a thing of hers,” he said. “She gets drunk and we fight and she says, ‘Just because I haven’t read Ethan Frome.’”
“Wait, seriously?”
We’d stopped on the landing. He could see how delicious I found this detail.
“C’mon. Just don’t,” he said.
If the situation were reversed, he’d be memorizing passages from that book already. “‘Okay,’ she said, quite reluctantly.”
He made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “This may be a complete disaster.”
We headed up the next flight. They were outdoor stairs, like at a motel. We dragged my garbage bags of clothes and books in. My room was straight through at the back. His and Mandy’s was off the kitchen. I never went in there the whole time I lived there, so I can’t tell you what it was like. From the kitchen, when they left the door ajar, it looked like a black hole. My room was bright with two windows looking out onto North Street, not the parking lot, and plenty of room for my desk. He thought it was funny I’d brought a desk. It was a table really, no drawers, with legs I had to screw back on.
I’d moved a lot but this time it was more like self-banishment. I didn’t have the same feeling I normally did, setting up my room that night, twisting the legs back into the underbelly of the plank of wood and pushing it against the wall between the windows. That fresh start, clean slate, anything’s possible feeling. I didn’t have that. I knew I was going to write a lot of stupid things that made me cry before I wrote anything good on that table.
My brother came in and laughed at my only poster. It was a timeline of human history. It was narrow and wrapped around three walls and went from the Middle Paleolithic age to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a few years earlier. It comforted me.
He put his thumbnail on a spot close to the end. “There I am. Born between the first manned spaceflight and the construction of the Berlin Wall.”
We hadn’t lived together since I was seven and he was thirteen. Now I was twenty-five and he was ancient. He sat down on my bed. “Does that guy know where you are?” he said.
“No.”
“Will he find out?”
“Probably.”
“Am I going to have to fight him?”
“More likely you’ll have to listen to him sing ‘Norwegian Wood’ on the sitar under my window.”
“Then I’ll really have to beat him up.”
“Your neighbors will probably beat you to it.”
He laughed, hard. “They really fucking will.” He looked around. “Mandy is not going to like all these books.”
I didn’t have bookshelves so I’d stacked them in columns in various parts of the room. They looked like a grove of stunted trees. “No Ethan Frome as far as the eye can see.”
“Shut up. Now.”
“Just tell her that,” I said, louder. She wasn’t even home yet. “Tell her I’ve never read it.”
“No. We cannot mention it. Don’t you get that?”
“I’ve never ever wanted to talk about Ethan Frome more than I do right now.”
“She is going to fucking hate you.” But he was leaning back against the timeline on the wall and laughing again.
* * *
I got a job at another restaurant, the most expensive one I could find. It was out on the way to Lake Champlain and farm country and didn’t look like much from the outside but inside it was still a house, divided up into small rooms. Some rooms only had one table, some had a few. The restaurant was intimate. People came there for its intimacy. During the interview I was asked if I would be available to work graduation weekend, May 12 through 14, doubles if necessary.
“I can’t give you this job unless you can promise me that,” Kevin, the baby-faced manager, told me.
I promised. I was supposed to be the maid of honor at my friend Saskia’s wedding in Massachusetts that weekend. In one of my unpacked garbage bags was the lilac dress she’d sent me to wear.
* * *
“Your brother is the kindest, most generous man,” Mandy said. “I know because I’m an empath. My mother always told me, find the man with the biggest heart. Do you know, he scrapes the ice off my windshield every morning?” It was April in Vermont and still snowing some mornings, so we were not talking a few months of scraping. More like six or seven. That was kind of him. But her Wes and my Wes were entirely different people. My Wes was guarded, razor sharp, all edge. Her Wes was a “cuddle bear,” so open, so sweet. Sweet was not a word we used in our family. Sweet was for suckers. Honesty, generosity, tenderness were not valued either. We had been raised to sharpen our tongues and defend ourselves to the death with them. We loved each other, we amused each other, but we were never unguarded, and we were never surprised by a sudden plunge of the knife.
Mandy was tall and sexy and worked as an assistant in a physical therapist’s office because, she said, it was the place she’d been treated after “an accident in the home” when she was seventeen. Wes told me later her father had kneecapped her with her brother’s baseball bat.
Wes and Mandy had no books. I couldn’t even find a pen. That whole side of him—the awards at boarding school, the plays he wrote and directed in college until he dropped out—he’d buried to be with her.
I didn’t see him much. He worked days putting electricity into ugly new houses on beautiful parcels of land, and I worked nights running up and down stairs, serving families in their best clothes and couples getting engaged in the small rooms. Kevin didn’t fire me when I told him about the wedding in Massachusetts. But he was angry and put me on probation and made Tiffany give me the worst tables, the ones on the third floor. But we all drank together after the restaurant was closed, after we’d set the tables for the next night and tipped out the kitchen and bar. One night we all ended up on the floor of the Azul Room, the fanciest of all the rooms, the one where we put the governor and the provost of the university when they came in. We got into a big argument about something, the assassination of JFK, I think. We were all pretty drunk and shouting at the same time and Reenie, who’d studied child psychology but couldn’t find a job, took one of the long, narrow porcelain vases off the mantelpiece—the Azul Room had a working fireplace and the waiter in that room always had to be stoking the fire on top of everything else—and said that only the person holding the vase could speak. She called it a talking stick, but I renamed it the Vessel of Power, and Kevin, who was trying hard to ignore me, laughed and I knew my probation wouldn’t last much longer. I don’t remember too many nights at that restaurant in Shelburne, Vermont, but I remember that one. I remember feeling happy among strangers, people I’d only known for a few weeks, which made me feel like things would be okay in my life after all.
* * *
At the last restaurant I’d worked at, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I’d fallen for the bartender. Hard. I hadn’t expected it. William was as quiet as his name and easy to work with. He wore vintage women’s clothing to work, mostly Asian pieces—kimonos, sabais, qipaos—but on occasion a Chanel suit or a fluttering flamenco dress. He swept through the dining room in silks of sunflower yellow or scarlet red, delivering a bottle of wine or the gimlet you forgot about. He didn’t seem to want attention for his clothing, and the one time I complimented an outfit—an embroidered turquoise sari—he thanked me curtly and said my six-top was waiting to order.
I ran into him at Au Bon Pain on a Sunday morning. He let two people go ahead of him so we could stand in the long line together. He was wearing men’s corduroys and a wool sweater. Everything in my body shifted, as if it had known, as if it had been waiting. The way he put his hand in his pocket for his cash, the way he handed over the money and slid his coffee off the counter, the way he stood at the condiment stand and poured in some cream. The dresses had hidden the span of his scapulae, the narrowing of his waist, the hard muscles of his ass. Fuck. I’d heard he had a girlfriend. I left without milk for my tea.
He caught up with me, though, and we walked together with our hands on our hot drinks on the cold day. He asked if I’d seen the new sculpture outside Widener and veered into the yard to show me. We sat on the steps of the library and pretended we went to Harvard. “What’s your major?” I asked him and he said “art history” and I said “me too” and he said “no way” and we tried to figure out if we had any classes together. We made up our courses: Hangnails in Modern Sculpture, Western European Scowls Versus Smiley Faces. Not surprisingly, he was good at getting into a role. I felt like I was in college again, that he was a cute boy I’d just met and he was about to kiss me. And he did. At 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in November. It was the first time a first kiss made me want sex. Immediately. He looked at me like he felt the same and like it was nothing new. He relaxed against me, like my father sinking into the couch with his first drink. In the distance there was the sound of a little kid squealing, and William pulled away. It was a little boy, just entering the gates, running toward us. William took my hand. “C’mon.” He tugged me down the steps toward the boy and the woman who trailed him. They were both dressed up, the boy in a silk bow tie and a tiny camel hair coat and the woman in heels and a black mackintosh and a flash of turquoise between.
“How is God?” William called.
“Good,” the boy said, still running. It took a long time for him to reach us on his very short legs. “He’s very good,” he said crumpling his face into William’s thigh.
He was still holding my hand when he introduced me to them, his son, he said, and his wife, Petra.
He insisted she didn’t care, that their relationship had absolutely no restrictions, that they let each other be exactly who they were at any given minute. He always said that, any given minute, as if after sixty seconds you became someone else, wanted something different. I wished that were true. I only kept wanting him.
He liked to quote Ralph Ellison: “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
He wore nothing under his dresses, it turned out. Up they came, so easily, in the handicap bathroom stall, the coatroom, the walk-in. Petra and I got pregnant the same month.
A robust month for my spermatozoa, he said. He loved it. He saw nothing wrong. My abortion made him sad, but he didn’t argue and paid half.
In early April she came into the restaurant before we opened for lunch. She was only there a minute, handing him a set of car keys, but it was a warm day and I saw the curve of her belly below the belt of her wrap dress. I put down the tray of salt and pepper shakers and walked out. I called my brother, stuffed my crap into Hefty bags, and drove up to Burlington.
* * *
A week before Saskia’s wedding, Wes and I made plans to go to the movies. I had a night off and Mandy was visiting her sister in Rutland. I met him at the bar he went to after work. He was in the corner, playing pitch with Stu, his work buddy, and Ron, the one who was always going into the hospital for his heart, and Lyle, who’d just gotten out of jail for a drug transport gone wrong at the Canadian border. I sat and waited for him to play out his hand. There was another guy at the table I didn’t recognize. He was young, probably still in college. He and Wes were both chewing on toothpicks.
Wes won the trick with the jack of clubs.
“That’s bull crap, Wesley Piehole,” Ron said.
They all called him Wesley. He never told them his first name was Westminster. He got up to pay the tab.
“So how do you know Wesley?” the kid with the toothpick asked me.
“He’s my brother.”
The kid laughed.
Across the room Wes nodded toward the door and I followed him out.
A few days later he asked if I remembered the young guy from the bar. I pretended I didn’t.
“College kid,” he said, as if he’d never been one. “Lots of hair. He said he didn’t believe you were my sister.”
“I told him I was.”
Wes smiled. “So you do remember him. He thought you were joking. About being my sister. I had to bet him a hundred bucks.”
“Wes.”
“All you have to do is come by the bar and show him your driver’s license. When’s your next night off?”
I gave him a look.
“C’mon. Easiest cash I’ll ever make.”
I went by. His name was Jeb. I brought my passport because the photo was better. He seemed bizarrely impressed by the passport, more impressed than a guy with a good haircut and a prefaded T-shirt should have been. For no good reason he showed me his license. His full name was Jebediah. The photo must have been taken when he was sixteen. He looked like hope itself. He counted out five twenties for Wes.
“I don’t know why you’re smiling when I’m getting all the cheddar,” Wes said.
“I thought you grew up under a rock, man. I thought you grew up out of the earth like a mushroom.”
After I left, Jeb asked my brother if he could ask me out.
We went to a candy factory out of town on a hill—everything was on a hill or nestled in a valley there—on a Thursday afternoon. Three old ladies in plastic caps gave us a tour and we ate warm dark chocolate nonpareils and soft peanut butter cups from a brown bag on some playground swings. All the facts of my childhood enthralled him not because they had happened to me but because they had happened to Wes. Wes had put a bit of a spell on him. To him, Wes had crawled out from under his rock and appeared at the bar with tarred teeth and BO and riffing on everything from Hume to Hendricks, gathering the young and the old, the honest and the corrupt, the dead broke and the slumming elite. Jeb had grown up wealthy in Connecticut. He said his nickname prevented people from seeing the Jew in him. His brother Ezra had had a different and more difficult childhood. Jeb had had plenty of exposure to Wasps, but he’d never met one like Wes who’d repented, recanted, who said when pressed that he grew up in Lynn, not Marblehead, who would never admit to tennis trophies or snorkeling in Barbados.
