All the Finest Girls (17 page)

Constable barks, once. Splayed beneath the studio stairs under which he spends his days, he cocks an eye in my direction, snorts, stretches, and falls asleep again.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, another feat of derring-do by the one, the only Rat Girl!
I’m Harriet the Spy, hand inside the window’s empty pane, fingers around the interior knob, pushing the rotting door toward me. Heavy mildew works its musty fuzz up inside my nose, coats my throat, and makes me cough. I’ve upset the dead. I can see only shapes, my pupils open slowly, slowly. Now more, and more still.

Two broad shafts of light thrust down from the highest windows, making dueling swords of dancing dust. Up above, in the rough-hewn beams, a nestful of barn swallows has been awakened.
Chee chee
. One bird makes a break for it, darts over my head and out the open door. A cannon goes off in the harbor, the beginning of a boat race.
I did, I got you, dickweed! You’re it. Bwah-hah!
. I poke my head back outside, check across the lawn, swing closed the door.

The place is tall and deep. Like a cathedral, filled somehow with echoes I feel but can’t hear. When it was still a barn, the studio sat at the back of Edith’s property, but my grandfather had it moved to the cliff’s edge long ago. It’s bigger than I ever imagined when I only peered in the window, obeying Edith’s command not to go inside. But that was then, before there was nothingness, when I was still a little girl. Now I’m Bond. James Bond.

Holding my breath, I take it all in. It looks as if Edith has left the barn just as it was the day my grandfather died. The afternoon he went for his daily swim, came in for lunch, and dropped dead at the kitchen table.
Never one to make a fuss,
Mom said once, with an angry laugh. Someone came and took his paintings to a museum, except a couple of unfinished works up on easels. The room, half undone, reminds me of a person who stops his sentence mid-thought.

A long, low wooden table pushes up against the bank of windows turned out to sea. Messy piles of sketches, charcoal and ink, are scattered like leaves. An ashtray filled with old cigarettes is hard by a scallop shell, nearly overflowing as well. One two three four — four empty mugs. A shredded candy-bar wrapper, spotted with mouse poops. Pushy vines have made their way beneath the windowsills and climb up the walls, where my grandfather pasted and tacked pictures, postcards, maps, pinup girls in old-fashioned torpedo-bosomed bathing suits. A paint-smeared transistor radio sits on a high shelf next to a jar of Postum and a ceramic monkey. The flash of something human-shaped catches the corner of my eye. I wheel around —

A knight. In armor rusty and netted with cobwebs. Guarding the corner, holding an old straw hat instead of a sword. I’ve seen, in a picture, my grandfather in that very hat, on an empty beach. I hold my bony chest while my heart rackets around inside it like a squash ball. Beyond the soldier is an old bed, covered in ticking and a passel of small pillows thrown every which where. Up close, I can almost see the outline of Noah Kane’s enormous body. How he lay there, one leg over the other, arm across his forehead, dreaming beautiful pictures. Thinking great thoughts. I lie down there myself, lie that very same way. My enormous nothingness grows bigger with every slow breath I take —

How do you do that? Hmm? Jesus, how

This. This voice cuts through the hollow in my brain. Sticks like a knife in my nothingness, my zero. I hear it all the time, can’t make it go away. Like a trick candle I can’t put out, it sparks and flares over and over. And to go with my father’s voice, so soft and strange behind his study door, is my memory like a movie playing back in my head. Mom’s on the phone, calling from California. I’m walking to his study to tell him. The hallway tilts crazily in the dim light of early morning. Is he sick? So soft, his voice a whisper, unlike him. Talking to himself.

You’re like a flower, someamazingflower

My hand is on the knob, yes, I’m certain my hand is already on the knob, turning it to open, pulling the door from its latch, before the queer sound reaches my ears and makes me think of Cat. A cry but no, not. Something different but yes, animal. Have I called him? Have I spoken? I think I have but no, I must not have called his name. Dad. Can’t now because my voice has gone away. I mustn’t have said anything at all but only seen not Cat but something it takes me I don’t know how long but feels like forever to understand. Shapes I can’t untangle but then do. My father’s naked back and bottom, on his knees, and before him a woman crouched like a four-legged thing. He’s touching her hair like a petal, rubbing it like a leaf, and pushing up against her darkest place. Her eyes are closed, head turned back toward him, face strange and red, twisted mouth open, sweat dampening her long black hair. Her tiny breasts hang down like tulip bulbs. Is he hurting her?
Godyesjustlikefuckthat
no, I know it’s something else. I don’t know. The sound like Cat comes again from her mouth, and I close the door as she reaches back and holds my father’s hairy hanging between his legs —

I’m looking at the studio ceiling. The baby swallows chirp for their mama, who reappears, darts back up to the rafters. I lie still on my grandfather’s bed, a heavy feeling between my legs that makes me want to touch there, where I am still smooth. My hand is dusty, stained pink with raspberry juice. I tuck it beneath my shorts

—
someamazingflower
in the bathroom, the cereal I puke up swirls around the toilet bowl, little o’s I haven’t chewed spinning around whole. OOOOOOO.
Addy, where did yah get to, yah mumma’s still on de phone. Dilly’s waiting on yah, time for school! Addy!

The ocean’s an angry tangle in the painting on my grandfather’s easel. One high window casts its beam, and I can see men lost at sea. A sinking boat broken in two. I can see what isn’t yet on the canvas. I’m inside that graygreen sea, sinking down.

“Gotta light?”

I start, flip over onto my belly, tug my hand from my shorts. In the doorway of the studio is an older boy with a cigarette behind his ear. Constable stands behind him, tongue out, back end wagging. I’ve seen the boy before.
Townie,
I heard Sarah Conway shout at him. He’s always alone, stands at the lip of the seawall, on the end of the dock, outside the movie theater. He hangs around, edgy as a Buck knife blade.

The boy wanders in, tossing things about on my grandfather’s desk. Reaching into a drawer I hadn’t noticed before, he pulls out a box of kitchen matches. He seems to know his way around. When he leans into the flare, a greasy sheet of hair hangs down over one eye. The other eye, the one I can see, is flat and dark as a coat button. A stain of mustache hair smudges his upper lip, threaded by a scar coming down from his nose. He tosses the match on the floor and looks out the window on the dazzling day. The tips of my fingers burn.

“Hate those fuckers,” the townie says, tossing his head toward the army of kids on the beach club dock. He turns to me, looks me over where I lie.

“Know what I mean?”

My fingers glow like coals, hot like the trigger of a gun. I nod in ready assent.

16

M
Y FIRST MORNING
on St. Clair, a heavy rain spilled down on the Alfreds’ roof like marbles on a can. From Lou’s bed, I watched the old man I’d seen on my arrival riding his mule across the ridge road. He tilted his straw hat over his eyes and tapped the animal’s haunches with a piece of cane. The mule flicked a long ear and continued, bent under the rain, as slow as time. It was still early, barely light, but Marva was already up and gone. Through the wall, I could hear her in her father’s room, her patient tone rising and falling with the strain of moving him about.

I felt entirely hollow lying there. Cored like an apple. My head hurt; I remembered the beer I’d drunk the night before. The rest of my body was heavy with sleep. I lay still beneath the thin blanket, pulse throbbing slowly against my temples, and took some time to try and parcel out what had gone on around me for the last twenty-four hours.

That’s not to say that I understood much. The scene between Derek and Philip on the walk back from Clifton’s seemed like a squall spun off from a much larger storm. I doubted that when Derek had implicated his father in Lou’s death, he was being literal. It seemed that her accidental drowning was an established fact, a terrible mistake precipitated by her unsound mind (or body, if Marva’s intuition was right). But something had Derek convinced differently, that the malignancy lay elsewhere. Maybe his was just the bitterness of an angry son. Or maybe he was right. What did I know? Nothing.

I lay on that white sheet, bedded down in my nothingness like a pair of old pajamas, for I don’t know how long. I looked above me at the news about Lou’s life and the lives of those she loved, smelled her musky scent still on the bedclothes, and felt as perfectly alone as I’d ever felt in my life. There was virtually no one to whom I felt bound. No place, physical or spiritual, where I connected with anyone in the world. I was, it came to me like a vaporous genie rising from a bottle, inessential. And if I’d hoped to make my mark with Lou’s sons, I’d surely blown it by acting the night before like a drunken boob. The bottom line was never simpler to me than at that moment. God, I was sick of myself.

The sound of an engine turning over finally rousted me, and as I sat up, I saw the little blue car heading down the road. Derek, in shirtsleeves and a tie, reached behind himself to adjust a jacket that was swinging from a hanger, and then took off. Not surprisingly, he looked as if he was in an awful hurry to get away from home. What
did
seem strange: I felt a little sorry to see him go. As I dressed, Mr. Alfred and Marva moved around outside the bedroom. Their conversation reached me in little threads.

“Dey might have right to de tree of life, and may enter tru de gates of de city.”

“Yes, Papa, yah right. Hush now.”

“It was Vain-Hope, de ferryman, dat helped him ovah.”

“Come in de kitchen,” Marva whispered. “Me fix yah up someting.”

“De ferryman. I’m de ferryman. Toot-toot. Memba how we used to call it? Toot-toot, Marva.”

Mr. Alfred laughed and shuffled slowly along the hallway.

“Yes, Papa. Toot-toot. Commere. Philip and Floria are in de living room. Let’s not wake ’em up, now.”

I sneaked out of the house through the front door. The sun coming up over the mountains had broken through the rain clouds and warmed them to a Vermeerian pink and amber, promising another hot day. I followed the sound of children’s voices around to the dirt yard where Marva and I had sat the day before and found Cyril with a barefoot bean stalk of a girl.

The two children stood face to face. The little girl, her skinny arms stretching out of a soiled yellow dress, held the boy’s hands and stomped her foot against the packed, wet earth.

“Little Sally Water, sittin’ in a saucer,” sang the girl in a quick, brassy voice. “Cryin’ and weepin’ for someone to come.”

Attentive and quiet, Cyril looked up at the girl and let her swing his arms.

“Rise, Sally, rise, Sally, wipe your weepin’ eyes, Sally. Turn to the east, turn to the west, turn to the very one that Sally loves the best.”

The girl kept singing, and as she did so, I heard Lou again, smelled the lilac bushes of a Connecticut spring.

Me sing you de song. But we cyaant really play de game witout tree people to make a circle.

Sing it anyway, Lou, please sing it.

Dere’s a brown girl in de ring, tra-la-la-la-la, dere’s a brown girl in de ring, tra-la-la-la-la; dere’s a brown girl in de ring, tra-la-la-la-la, for she look like a sugar and a plum, plum, plum. Show me —

Hey, what’s so funny out here?

Good, here’s yah mumma now fi join in. Den we’ll have a circle and one fi be in de middle. Come on, Addy, come be in de middle! Show me yah motion, tra-la-la — Addy, commere! Put yah hands on yah hips like I showed yah — ADDY!

It’s all right, Louise. You all go ahead.

But we cyaant, witout dere bein’ tree to play de game. She’s just showin’ off for you. Addy? Arright, den, nevah mind. Yah gwan and play by yahself, den.

I walked up to the children and slipped inside the circle.

“Let your backbone shake,” I sang, tipping forward and back in the tiny space between their arms.

Cyril broke free and jumped back, giggling and holding his head.

“Come on, Cyril,” I shouted, planting my feet and letting my hips go. “Shake it to the east, shake it to the west, shake it to the very one you love the best!”

Cyril busted up laughing and looked at the Crazy White Lady with astonishment. The little girl took my hands in hers and swung me out wide.

“Went to Jamaica, to buy brown paper!” I called, my memory working itself out of some deep groove.

“Magazine and me and you!” responded the girl, using her foot to change the tempo of the dance. We began to move around in a circle, half skipping, half dancing, and I followed her moves with surprising ease. The song was fast and tricky, but the harder it got, the more confident — and louder — I became.

The boy’s eyes sparkled. He rushed at me and reached up to clamp his hand over my mouth in protest of my lousy singing, but his face was flushed with mirth. I had bobbed out of his reach and started the next verse when the screen door whined and Floria appeared, taking in the spectacle. She hung in the doorway, a shawl around her shoulders. With the exception of her bare feet, the pink soles like ballerina slippers against the brown of her skin, she was as perfectly arranged as the evening before. If I hadn’t seen her asleep on the couch, I’d have thought she’d passed the entire night upright, surveying the house in some swamilike posture of calm and wisdom.

“Cyril,” she called, politely averting her gaze as if I were a naked bather, “it’s too early for such noise. You all go play somewhere else.”

Cyril flashed his eyes and screeched one last time before running out of the yard with his friend. I remained frozen, mortified, my hands still high on my hips.