All the Finest Girls (2 page)

“How?” I asked, lying still beneath the covers.

“You remember she couldn’t swim?”

“No.”

“Well, it seems she drowned.”

My mother paused. The upset I heard in her silence rattled me. She wanted me to ask for details. She would have liked, I’m sure, to simply
talk
with me. And I did want to know more, but I was too far gone, too deep in my campaign of truculence to make the long march back.

After a moment, she continued.

Here we were, then, playing our parts.

“She hadn’t been doing well, physically, for some time. Something about her heart, I think. The night before, her sister put her to bed but, in the morning. Well. Oh, Addy, I think it was just awful. They couldn’t
find
her, if you can imagine. Someone, two boys, I think, discovered her body a mile or so down the beach. She was dressed as if she were going somewhere.”

I could feel my mother straining through the telephone wires, trying to make contact with me. The phone itself seemed water-logged with her need. I worked to put all the pieces together in my sleep-bent head.

“Isn’t that the oddest thing?” she said, her theatrical voice now in its upper, excited register. When I said nothing, she exhaled and regained herself.

“Anyway. I just thought you ought to know.”

“Thanks for calling,” I said. “I appreciate it. Really.”

“How are you feeling? Can I do anything for you?”

“Nope.” I reached over and banged on the radiator, which sometimes helped to draw the heat up from downstairs. “I’m fine.”

“Well, OK then. Love you,” she said, her last words trolling along hopefully.

I lay in bed and felt the world zoom into excruciatingly sharp focus. A garbage can rattled. Two dogs barked. A dark, ineffable thought coiled, hissed, collapsed. I’d been sick recently, and undone more than I cared to admit. The virus had flattened me physically, but beyond that another, more persistent and scarier, germ had spread. Whatever it was had rattled my self-confidence and made me uneasy, as though someone or something were always at my back. I got better, but I wasn’t the same. I felt hunted, and haunted. That morning, when my mother’s news reached me, I had the distinct sensation that I’d at last been caught.

I told my boss that there had been a death in my family. “Dreadfully sorry, Adelaide,” she whispered, tucking her head down with perfect English reserve. Since I’d been out sick — my first leave of absence in four years with the museum — I’d detected an almost fearful courtesy from Emmeline. She gave me a wide berth, rarely checking on the progress of my work and encouraging me each day to go home early and “have a lie down.” She’d even tried to pass on to someone else the painting I was restoring, evidently suspicious that the little predella itself was the cause of my undoing. But I’d refused. I needed in some insistent way to see the job through. When I decided to go to St. Clair for the funeral, Emmeline offered me as much time as I needed.

A screen door whined and banged shut as I got back in the car. From a cluster of bougainvillea Derek emerged, balancing a small boy in the crook of his arm. The boy, four or five years old, wore a baseball cap and red sneakers. Derek held him with casual pride, and the boy giggled and squirmed in his confident grip.

“This is my son,” he said brusquely, as he lowered the boy to the ground and opened the back door of the car. “Cyril, this is Adelaide. Now get on in.”

Derek walked around to the driver’s side. I watched the boy as he twisted himself onto the floor to get at a plastic dump truck. When he sat up again, he looked frankly into my eyes.

“My granmumma died,” he said. “She drownded.”

“I know,” I replied. Was I shouting?

“She was a great friend of mine,” I ventured again, more quietly.

Cyril nodded and ran his dump truck along the vinyl seat beside him. Derek backed quickly down the street, then peeled out again on the main road.

“Wow. He looks just like you did,” I said to Derek, taken by the resemblance.

For the first time, Derek looked directly at me. His eyes, like a Rousseau tiger’s, reflected the light. They prohibited investigation.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Pictures.”

He turned his attention back to the road.

“She had them up in her room.”

The road snaked north, pulling away from the coast and up a mountain pass. Every few miles, a group of weather-beaten houses appeared in a small cluster, and here and there men sat about under the high sun doing what looked to be nothing. Derek turned on the radio. A disc jockey spoke rapidly in the local dialect, and I felt the hair rise suddenly on the back of my neck.

Lawd, look me gwan on in dis kotesi kotela ya catch me happosite, an anyway me needin to mek dis girl her supper

Lou, on the phone, and me with an ear bent to the musical notes of her voice, suddenly in a language entirely other — French inflected, a word or two I’d learned in school. The sounds come out happy and loose, like dropping change.

Her voice seemed to come from somewhere inside the car — the vents, the speakers — then just as quickly disappeared, fluttering out the window into the warm air. I was tired, surely. Not myself. I fixed my eyes back on the road and we rode along, the three of us in our separateness, northward through the lush hills.

2

M
Y MOTHER AND
I stand on the stairs outside the Rubinsteins’ big brick house and listen to the doorbell’s tinkling chime. We have driven down from Coldbrook to New Haven in the old green station wagon, running out of gas halfway there. Before we were rescued, Mom poked gingerly with one finger under the car’s hood, looking for engine trouble. Now her blouse is stained, the collar turned up on one side. She pushes at her hair and dabs at the corner of her mouth, puckering her lips hopelessly.

For a moment her hand hovers over my head. She wants to do something about my hair. I haven’t allowed her to brush it since last winter, when the electricity from the brush stood my hair on end and shocked me so that I tasted metal on my tongue. The broken strands are thick and matted and won’t now, I’ve discovered, yield to even the most gentle grooming.

My clothes, too, are long overdue for cleaning. I’ve taken to wearing outfits again and again, dressing myself in the half-light of morning from a pile on my desk chair. Sometimes my mother notices. Sometimes not. When she does
Snooks, I think you might want to go up and change that blouse
I explode with all my gathered strength. I howl and bare my claws.

I screech just like Cat. Cat, who shows himself only to me, circling my room at night. Howling like a dying witch when my father shouts at my mother. Plucking his way around the carpet until darkness gives into morning. I watch him all night long.

I scream until I’ve spent myself, till my voice is nothing but scratchy air and my head feels like a new bruise. There is no end to it, my screaming. My mother begs me to stop, in tones both gentle and harsh. She offers me things, ignores me, shouts back.
Why? Why are you like this?!
she implores, fist to her forehead, hot tears running down her cheeks to match my own.
I don’t know!
I shout, each scream feeling as though I were shredding myself, piece by flaming piece.

That is it. I don’t know why I am like this. I don’t know why Cat torments me, why I torment my mother. I don’t know at all.

“So, my lamb,” she says, “you’re not going to … are you? Remember what I said?”

I run my toe along the plastic bristles of the doormat.

“Anyway,” she says, straightening up at the sound of approaching footsteps, “June is making lunch for us. Yum yum. And Max and the boys aren’t home.”

Finally the door opens, turning out the scent of pine and something in the oven. June, the Rubinsteins’ housekeeper, stands to the side in her crisp white uniform.

June cares for the Rubinstein boys — Teddy, Ben, and Maxie — who are older than I, roughhouse boys who always smell mossy from outdoor adventures. They seem to be one unit of rapidly spinning dust and noise, like characters fighting on Saturday morning cartoons. Teasers and practical jokers, the boys give everyone a stupid name and a hard time. When June tells them what to do, they sass her, voices pitched high, imitating her accent.
All right, you buggah!
they cry, chasing her through the kitchen, breaking things as they go.
But me tellin yah, yah nutting but a tief! June, yah been smokin’ dat reefah again.
They call me Sadelaide, when they call me anything at all.
Hey, Sadelaide, why are you so sadelaide? Is it because you look so badelaide?

We haven’t seen much of the Rubinsteins since last April, when Mrs. Rubinstein died. Thin and wobbly as a baby deer, the boys’ mother was the only person they didn’t harass. Crashing into a room, they hushed the instant they saw her. Usually, Mrs. Rubinstein was perched on the window seat or being swallowed by the living-room couch.
How are you feeling today, Mommy? Do you need anything, Mommy?
they’d say, one on top of the other. The boys fought, as they did with everything, to be the first to prop a pillow or get their mother her tea. When her heart finally gave out, Big Max, a colleague of my father’s at the university, came to our house and cried in my mother’s arms. Now it’s just him, the boys, and June, and nobody makes jokes anymore.

“Hi, June, I’m so sorry we’re late, the car just went kerflooey!”

My mother’s hand darts out, nudging me along into the Rubinsteins’ foyer, newly polished and still. I envy the uninterrupted quiet of this motherless house.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness, a sickening fizz rises again in my stomach. It has been sloshing inside me most of the morning.

“She’s up in back. Why don’t you go on and say hello?” says June to me, splitting the quiet with her brassy voice. She shouts at children, I think, out of habit.

I walk slowly through the kitchen toward the back staircase to June’s room. During dinner parties, I sometimes crouch there on one of the spiral steps, hoping no one will find me until it’s time to go home.

Upstairs, a woman is sitting on the edge of June’s single bed. She watches a soap opera on a tiny black and white, her hands cradling a glass of water. A white cardigan sweater is buttoned around her shoulders like a cape. She turns slowly toward me. She is the darkest person I’ve ever seen.

Standing dumbly in the doorway, I suddenly have no idea what to do. The woman is a friend of June’s from St. Clair, and Mom says we have to see whether we like each other well enough for her to come live with us. Her eyes, enormous behind their thick lenses, fall on me and hold me in their gaze. She doesn’t look a bit like June, who moves about quickly, all angles and ironed edges. Instead, this woman is curved and upholstered, her lap like a love seat. She doesn’t speak to me. I think to turn and run back down the stairs, but I don’t. Can’t. With her huge brown eyes, she’s making a picture that I can see, as though her eyes are my own. I’m where she is, and across the room stands a bony girl, smudgy and colorless as cigarette smoke, done out in dusty corduroys and a crown of fermented hair. The rims of my ears go hot with shame.

We stay that way, waiting for each other, and when I think I won’t stand it any longer, the woman turns back to the television. I sit down on the threshold and stare hard at the tips of my sneakers until my vision blurs.

“Louise,” June calls from below. The woman walks toward the stairs, stopping for a moment in the doorway. I squint up at her, this time wearing my most terrible face. She looks back at me, soft and bottomless. Something is pulling at me, dragging me down. Afraid of crying, I turn away. The seconds tick. She moves past me to the stairs. When I hear the back door open, I stand and look out the window onto the porch below.

My mother is extending her hand to Louise, drawing her into the crazy light that seems to attract most people to her. The two of them sit down in a square of sun at the outdoor table and Mom begins making sweeping movements with her hands, talking excitedly. Louise nods. Around her I see a bright space, a reflection from her sweater, perhaps, where, in spite of myself, I want to be. June appears with a platter of sandwiches, and I drift downstairs. Taking a little triangle of peanut butter and jelly, I make a seat for myself and dangle my legs over the edge of the porch.

My mother talks and talks
A good winter coat makes all the difference. We’ll take care of that lickety-split. We go away to my mother’s house at the beach in the summer if I’m not working. Of course our produce is never any good up here, but we can order lots of things
as though to stop would be to die. She skitters from subject to subject, describing Coldbrook and asking about life on St. Clair. Every now and then, she offers up bits of information about me, wildly inflating my talents.
Oh, the water in the Caribbean is so lovely. Addy’s a terrific swimmer, just terrific. She’s like a water bug.

I don’t turn around when my mother says my name but instead count the seconds of silence before she goes off on another tangent. Louise says almost nothing, and the quiet she leaves begins, little by little, to soothe me like a language all its own. I have begun to feel drowsy and follow the progress of a slug along the weathered porch railing.

Then I hear, “… June says you have children?”

“Mmhmm, yes I do,” replies Louise.

“Girls or boys?”

“Two boys. The oldest is Philip. Then Derek, he’s the baby. Coming on seven next week.”

I stop moving my legs. A black circle grows around me like spilled ink. Like an inner tube. I am set adrift. There is at once the faintest sound I must strain to hear. I pray I am mistaken. My skin prickles. Yes, it’s there.
Hoosh
goes Cat’s tail, snaking through the reeds beyond the lawn, trampling the pacific afternoon. Climbing over the lip of the sun and into the dark, empty space around me. Getting ever closer.

I stand and drop my plate, turn around in my dark circle, searching for him. The yard, with its budding cherry tree and neglected vegetable garden, vanishes. My mother calls my name, a thousand miles away. Cat hangs above, his teeth like white needles, and now I’m screaming, to scare him away. He draws closer and I look away. That’s when I see Louise, motionless, across the empty space, her magnified eyes drinking me in. Her hand is over her heart. The black circle lifts as harmless as steam from a kettle, leaving me inside the palette of peanut butter and jelly I’ve splattered on the porch floor.