Because They Wanted To: Stories (5 page)

“It sounds fucked up,” said Mark cautiously. His face had the abstract look of someone who has just categorized something and then quickly stepped away from it.

“I think she’s just freaked out,” said Elise.

“I guess she would be.” Mark scratched his stomach and blinked at the sunlight trembling on the table.

For some reason, this conversation made her more determined to make the job work. She lay in bed that night, imagining herself going to the apartment every day, playing with the children and caring for them. She imagined greeting Robin as she came home from work with that tremulous smile on her face, her shoulders drooping as she stooped to take off her shoes. They would form a team. Elise would save money. Years later, Robin would still write to her to tell her how the kids were doing. Elise lay awake under the curtain all night, thinking these thoughts and listening to people walk up and down outside the window. Every now and then, one of them would yell terrible abuse, and she would strain to hear it.

In the morning she had some of Mark’s bread and cheese for breakfast, along with olives snuck from an old jar, and left to baby-sit. There were only a few people on the street; they seemed random yet deeply set in their private purposes. Two men with big blunt faces walked along drinking beers and talking about how some ridiculous awful thing that was always happening had happened again. “Pop goes the weasel!” said one. “Yeah, pop goes the weasel,” said the other. A pretty, peevish young man in a dress and a wig swiftly padded along in his stockinged feet, his tiger-striped pumps and matching purse in one hand. A middle-aged woman carrying three heavy bags pressed forward as if she had decided that no other direction was allowed.

The front porch of Robin’s apartment building was bare except for a child’s red plastic bucket with some dirty water and a dead gold-fish in it. Robin let her in, greeting her as if they were both already far away in some happy future. The two boys, however, were sitting at a rickety table eating bowls of cereal, and the baby was sitting up on the bed, flailing its tiny fists at the present. The older boy, Andy, stopped his spoon in midair and watched her. His eyes made her feel guilty, even though it wasn’t her fault.

“Penny’s just dropped a load,” said Robin, “so I can show you how to change her.”

They sat on the bed, and Robin laid the infant on her back, supporting her head with one slim, splayed hand. She unfolded the diaper
as if it were a little paper puzzle. The smell of perfect shit rose into the air. The baby’s private body was blank as the flesh of a plant. She kicked her legs, working the fierce new engine of her body. Robin’s hands were deft and quick, and Elise thought their movements pleased the baby. Elise expected that Robin would want her to redo the diaper, to show that she had learned, but instead Robin just smiled and said, “See?” The baby gurgled at her mother’s big smile. Robin showed her the bottles of formula she had prepared and told her how to heat them. Then she opened a badly dented tin cupboard and showed her a jar of peanut butter, some bread, and a yellowing orange that they could eat for lunch.

“I know you’ll do great,” said Robin. She turned to the boys; her smiling profile tingled wildly. “Be good for Lisa,” she said.

When she left, the air felt roiled, like water in the wake of a furious propeller. Elise sat on the bed. The boys sat at the table with their eyes down. Eric, the little one, fiddled with his spoon as if he were rubbing a secret comfort spot. Elise looked at the baby; it dispassionately stared back. She looked at the boys. She had lied about her baby-sitting credentials; she had had very little experience with children. She went and sat at the table with them.

“Hi,” she said.

She felt something move between the brothers, invisible and cellular. Andy looked up and back down. Eric watched him.

“Do you like animals?” she asked.

“Um hm,” said Andy. His brown eyes showed intelligence and strength, veiled by a thin, protective opacity.

“We have a cat,” she said. “His name is Blue.”

“We have a dog at home,” said Andy.

Eric looked up suddenly and said, “His name is Roscoe.”

“He’s a genius,” said Andy. “For a dog.”

They both looked at her. Eric had a delicate elfin chin. His intelligence seemed more fragile than his brother’s.

“Blue was an orphan when we found him,” she said. “He was living with his brothers and sisters under a deserted house.”

“What’s an orphan?” asked Andy.

“Children with no parents. The mother cat had left them, and my brother Rick found them when his friend’s dog ran up to the house
and started barking because he smelled cats. Blue was just four weeks old, but he came out and stood up to the dog. He arched his back and spat, and the dog was so surprised he just stopped. Rick saved the litter and we adopted Blue.”

She expected them to cheer Blue, or to ask about him, but instead they abruptly slid off their chairs and ran to play with their toys. She was puzzled and even a little hurt; she thought they would like the story. She walked over to where they played and crouched beside them. They had a strange assortment of toys, some of which weren’t even toys. They had rubber dinosaurs, colored rocks, a metal truck, a turtle with hair, a cymbal with a pink elastic wrist strap, a stuffed dog, a battery-operated gorilla, a knotted leather cord with two marble balls on either end, a wind-up chickie, and a ceramic mermaid. Alex had the metal wind-up chickie and Eric had the mermaid. They talked urgently in cartoon voices and marched their toys around so that they acted out a story. They talked loudly, as if they were putting on a show for her and, at the same time, using their loudness to shut her out. On impulse, she picked up the gorilla and made it walk up to Eric’s mermaid. “Hey, good-lookin’,” she said. Eric tensed. “Hey,” she said. She wiggled the gorilla. Eric ignored her; she blushed. She felt as if she were trying to squeeze into a spot too small for her. She decided to do the dishes, even though there were only two of them.

She washed the cereal bowls with a little bit of green steel wool. Then she wiped the counter with it. She looked at the baby, who wasn’t doing anything. She sat at the table by the window. On the table was an old digital clock and an empty bud vase made of clouded plastic. The clock said 9:41. Elise looked out the window. There were people out walking around now, and she watched them. Normally at this time of day she would be walking up and down Granville, asking people for change. Most of the panhandlers her age sat on the sidewalk and begged in groups. They sat huddled as if they were glad to have arrived at the absolute bottom, where it was nice and solid and they could sit. They sat huddled as if protecting something very special, and their begging seemed like an after-thought. Elise much preferred the walking method. People were more apt to give you money if you went up to them and asked them
for it, and besides, she liked the big dumb rhythm of everybody going in the same two directions and, inside that, all the tiny, concentrated rhythms of different walking styles. She liked moving quickly in and out of other people’s rhythms.

Sometimes she’d have a conversation with someone who gave her money or insulted her, and for a moment that person would loom out of the generality with a loud blare of specificity and then fade back as Elise walked on. Once, she had approached a young guy who had come out of a fast food store and was opening the box of fried chicken he’d bought there. He gave her a dollar. He said he was giving it to her because she reminded him of a girl he knew in San Francisco. “She’s a sex worker,” he said, “a pros-tee-tute.” He dragged the word out singsong style and smiled at her with an aggressive, bristling air as rank and particular as a deep body smell. “I’ve thought of doing that,” she said. His aggression turned into surprise and then into a funny, sour acceptance. He asked her if she wanted some chicken. She said yes and tore all the fried juicy skin off the breast. “Hey,” he said, “it’s no good without the skin,” but he still let her sit with him and eat, even though she’d ruined his chicken.

Andy ran over to her with his metal chickie. “This is Jago,” he said. “He’s a fighter orphan bird. When the hunters come into the forest to get birds and they see Jago, they scream and run away!”

“Oh!” said Elise.

“You pretend to be the hunter,” said Andy. “You’re coming in the woods and you see this bird and you don’t know it’s Jago so you start to shoot, okay?”

Elise pretended that her finger was a gun and pointed it at the metal chick.

Andy flipped up one of the chick’s metal wings to reveal
Jago
written on the underside in felt pen.

Elise waited.

“It’s Jago!” prompted Andy.

“Oh, no!” said Elise. “Jago!”

Andy ran back to his game in triumph.

Little kids always wanted to set things up so they got to yell a certain satisfying thing or to make you yell it. When she was little, she
or her brother Rick would yell something like, “Why did Miss Grinch and Miss Butt take all their clothes off?” and the other would yell back, “Because they wanted to!” Then they would roll around, tickling each other and giggling, yelling more questions and yelling the same answer again and again.

The sunlight shifted, and the surface of the table became warm and bright. Elise extended her arms into the warmth; her pale arm hairs stood up in the air, and the sight made her feel tender toward herself. All those thousands of tiny hair follicles, each earnestly keeping its special hair going. She lifted her arm and rubbed the soft hairs against her lip. Outside, a child flashed down the street, waving something bright in his hand.

When she was seven and Rick was eight, they would dress in skirts and hats and dance around the mulberry bush in the backyard of their old house, picking the berries and singing, “Oh, we haven’t got a chance for our vegetables! For our vegetables!” Their mother had taken pictures of them in their outfits, each holding a plastic bucket of mulberries. Elise stood with her stumpy little legs apart and made her stomach stick out on purpose. Rick posed with one hand on his slim hip, his smile innocent and arrogant and glad. His bare legs were long and finely shaped and made him look more delicate than he was.

With a soft blending motion, that memory turned into another one. She and Rick cuddled on the couch while the family watched TV Their mother sat on the end of the couch with her legs tucked up under her; Rick leaned against her hip and Elise sat against him. They were eating sticky refrigerator cookies and watching
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Through her thin nightgown she could feel his warm haunch and his bare foot, cool and faintly sweaty against her thigh. He was radiant, thoughtless, quick, and very male. His heart was tender, but the rest of him was darting around too fast for him to feel it. Elise could feel it, though. Their mother’s old knit afghan covered their laps and legs, and while their heads were busy watching TV and eating the special cookies, under the afghan she was knowing him and letting him know her, in an invisible way too complicated for words. Meanwhile, their father presided in his leatherette recliner.
Their little brother, Robbie, sat close to the TV, but instead of watching the movie, he was concentrating on his red crayons and his drawing. They were safe in their lair.

It was very hot in the apartment, hotter than outside. She was already sweating around the waistband. She glanced at the boys; she wished she could take off her shirt but she wasn’t sure it was right, even though it was natural.

In Seattle, she had stayed for a few weeks in an apartment with ten other kids. It was okay to take off your shirt or change your clothes there, whether or not you were having sex with anyone. She’d had sex with a boy named David who stayed there sometimes. Even before that they saw each other naked sometimes because they liked each other so much, like brother and sister. He had green eyes with black eyelashes, and a wine-colored birthmark on his prominent right hipbone. He had written a whole page in his journal about her and then read it to her. But the day after they slept together, he took acid and went off with some other guys to steal animal statuary, and she never saw him again. It was all right; she understood that they were both traveling. But she wished she had an address where she could write to him.

“No! No! No!” Eric’s whine was smothered and aggrieved. Elise sat up and listened alertly to see if Andy was picking on him. “Okay,” said Andy. “Now they’re going to attack the mall.” “Okay,” said Eric. Elise relaxed.

Rick had picked on Robbie a lot when they were little. Before their parents got divorced, he picked on him just by laughing at him. Then the divorce happened. The children went to live with their mother, even though she couldn’t afford them. Everybody was upset and unhappy. Their mother cried all the time. Elise had bad dreams. Robbie wet the bed. Rick began hurting Robbie. He slammed the car door on his leg. He punched him in the stomach while he was asleep. He peed on his drawings.

Their mother would yell and then she’d cry, and for a while Rick would try to be nice to Robbie. He would put his arm around his little brother and share his ice cream cone and smile like they were in a secret league together. There would be two feelings in his eyes when
he did this. One of the feelings was mocking, as if his kindness was just another, more complicated version of his meanness. But the other feeling was pure sweetness for Robbie. It was so sweet Rick couldn’t resist feeling it, and so sweet that he couldn’t quite stand feeling it. So he would just taste it, like a piece of candy, and then throw it away. But Robbie couldn’t help reaching out for the sweetness. He would look up at Rick and then look down and reach for the ice cream cone and politely eat at it with the shy tip of his tongue. Rick would look at him, and tenderness would shimmer under his eyes, trying to get out. But then he would go back to being mean again.

Their mother would yell when Rick was mean, but she loved him too much to really punish him. She loved his boyish arrogance and his radiance. When he bragged about winning in sports or outsmarting somebody or even being mean, she would look at him as if he had something she needed more than anything in the world. And he would bathe in her look. She would come up behind him and stroke his hair, and he would act like he wasn’t paying attention, but really he would lean into his mother, welcoming her. She would ask him to do things: Open a can, carry a bag of groceries, kill a big bug, rub her feet with oil. And he would do it with an air of chivalry, even though she was the bigger and stronger one. Maybe their mother had been afraid that if she lost the meanness, she’d lose the chivalry, and she couldn’t bear to lose that. But she loved Robbie too, and she was frightened by the way Rick treated him.