Because They Wanted To: Stories (6 page)

So she got cheap state psychiatrists to look at Rick and Robbie. Once a week they would go to a clinic to be examined, while Elise sat in the waiting room with her mother. Elise didn’t mind going to the clinic. She kind of liked sitting on the orange furniture in the lounge, eating candy out of the machine at the end of the hall and observing the mentally ill people who went in and out. She liked her mother’s certainty that, finally, she was accomplishing something.

But the psychiatrists didn’t find anything wrong, and things went back to normal. Then Rick hung Robbie upside down in a neighbor’s barn and made him swing back and forth until Robbie’s head hit the wall and his forehead cracked open. When their mother saw, she screamed and put her hand over her mouth; then she turned and hit Rick in the face. She bundled Robbie up and carried him to the house,
his forehead bleeding onto her pink blouse, one leg hanging limp off to the side. She didn’t cry; she made choking, struggling noises that were terrible and female. Elise ran after her; Rick just stood there.

That night Elise had a dream about Robbie. She was in the fifth grade, and had just learned about how Mount Vesuvius had erupted. In her dream, a volcano had erupted in San Anselmo, and their father came in the car to save them. While they were driving to safety, Elise looked back and saw that they had forgotten Robbie. He was running after the car, screaming for their father to stop. Elise held her hand out the window for him to grab, but their father wouldn’t slow down.

Her dream came true, sort of. Their father married a woman who owned and operated a salon where she tattooed color onto women’s faces so that they would look like they had makeup on all the time. It was decided that Rick and Elise should go live with their father and his new wife and her daughter, Becky, while Robbie stayed behind with their mother. It wasn’t until years later that it had occurred to Elise that the barn incident had something to do with this arrangement.

“I’m cutting his head off! I’m cutting his head off!” yelled Andy.

“No!” Eric’s voice had a shrill, stubborn push.

Swiftly, Elise crossed the room. “Don’t cut off his head!” she said.

There was a burst of silence. Elise felt the boys shrink deeper into their privacy. Stiffly, they moved their toys. She felt embarrassed. She thought of saying, “Be nice to Eric,” but she was too embarrassed. She stood over them, feeling she couldn’t move until something else happened.

“What are you playing?” she asked.

Andy looked up. “The turtle is trying to cut off the mermaid’s friend’s head and Jago is coming to help,” he explained patiently.

“Oh.” She relaxed. They relaxed. She stood there a minute in the new atmosphere. Then she went to check on Penny. The baby was still just lying there. Elise sat on the bed, feeling that everything was okay. She had shown authority and made contact. She thought about picking the baby up and walking back and forth with her, but she’d never picked a baby up before. Instead, she put her hand on Penny’s stomach and rubbed her. The baby smiled and made sounds that were like light, tumbling bubbles. Nervously, Elise stroked the
exquisite little forehead. The baby looked at Elise solemnly and then drew her gaze back inward as she returned to the business of creating a person who could survive in the world. Elise looked out the window. Two shabby old women wearing brimmed hats stood on the pavement, talking. They touched each other and smiled and nodded vigorously.

It was funny, thought Elise, that she had told the children “we have a cat” when she wasn’t with her family anymore. He wasn’t her cat now. They hadn’t discovered Blue under a porch with an orphaned litter, either. And he had never faced down a dog. He was an expensive Persian cat from a breeder. Their father had bought him as a special gift for their stepmother, Sandy.

When she and Rick moved in with their father and Sandy, their father had said to her, “Now you’ll have a sister,” as if she had always wanted one. But she had not wanted, at the age of eleven, to have a nine-year-old stranger dropped into the middle of her life. It was like suddenly having to live with somebody who sat across the room from her at school.

But Becky was nice. She was diffident and she always shared. She was also weird, or, as her own mother said, “neurotic.” She picked the fur off her stuffed animals. All her animals were bald. Her mother said it was because she needed to “act out her anger” at her parents’ divorce. It didn’t look like anger to Elise. Becky would sit with an animal and suck her thumb and pick the fur off it with two fingers, collecting it in her palm until she had a handful. Then she’d put it in a blue plastic bucket called “the picky bucket.” If you wanted to torture Becky, and Rick and Elise sometimes did, you could threaten to dump the pickies in the toilet or throw handfuls about the room while Becky screamed and ran around trying to catch them. Even when she got older and stopped picking the animals, Becky kept the overflowing picky bucket under her bed. Then her mother found them and threw them away, because she said it was “over the top” for Becky to have them. For a while after that, Becky defiantly picked the stuffing out of the mattress and dropped it on the floor, but she was really too old by then, so she didn’t do it long.

Elise came to like Becky and to feel protective of her shy peculiarity. But she was more impressed by her stepmother. Rick had hated
Sandy from the beginning, but Elise found her too strange and fascinating to hate. Sandy was a little younger than their mother, but she had a bright, bristling competence that made her seem older. She was thin and her stomach was hard and she’d had her face tattooed so that she appeared to be wearing full makeup all the time. Even when she got up in the morning, her lips were bright red, her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were outlined in black. “I fixed it so I wouldn’t have to wash my face off at night,” she said. She said it with brisk self-deprecation, as if her face, everybody’s face, was a vaguely ridiculous thing that could come off at any moment. She also said it with pride that she’d acknowledged the problem and then gone right in there to fix it. Her whole being seemed to be bursting with self-deprecation and pride and the need to fix things.

Their father may have gotten Blue as a present for Sandy, but he had grown to like the cat more than anybody did. He thought it was soulful and beautiful. He brought Blue special treats and talked to him, even sang to him. Blue would be resting on the floor, and their father would bend over to look the cat in the face and he would sing: “Six foot, seven foot, eight foot—bunch! Daylight come and Blue wants to go home!”

Rick despised it when their father did that, and would imitate him viciously. Elise defended their father and reminded Rick that he had been in Vietnam, where he’d risked his life and fought.

“Yeah,” said Rick. “The retards are strong.”

This was the thing he said when somebody who was ugly or unpopular did something smart. He could say that and take anything away from anybody. When she was younger, it hurt her to hear Rick talk about their father this way. But when she got older, she saw what he’d meant; their father
was
kind of a retard. She remembered him at the dinner table, yelling.

“You think you’re such a bunch of smart, tough feminists!” he yelled. “But you don’t know anything! About men, about sex!” He grabbed the edge of the table and lunged over his dish. “There’s guys out there who would cut your bowels out to have it!”

Elise looked at Rick and rolled her eyes. Becky, who was fourteen, began to cry. “See!” said their father. “The big feminist! Crying!” But his voice wobbled on the second exclamation, as if it was embarrassed,
and his last word was almost sorry about the whole thing. He withdrew into his chair, wiped his mouth, and ate with the slightly offended air of someone who just wants to mind his own business.

If Sandy had been there, he would never have said those things. But she was at a codependency meeting, which was why he was in a bad mood to begin with.

Elise looked at Becky so she would see that Elise didn’t look down on her for crying, but Becky was busy composing herself and didn’t notice. Elise was angry and disgusted that their father had made Becky cry when he had actually been yelling at Elise for talking about a woman on TV who’d been saying that if girls wanted to dress like prostitutes, they should learn to act like prostitutes. Becky sniffed, tucked her fine red hair behind her ears, and took up her silverware with the delicate resolve of a young cat. Elise furtively tried to meet her brother’s eye so he would see how contemptuous she felt, but Rick was too deep in his own special contempt to respond. He stroked his dyed black hair and fidgeted disdainfully as if trying to locate some small spot worth being in, even though he knew such a spot didn’t exist, at least not among
these people.
One cuff of his angora sweater slid down over one long, severely articulated hand, adding to the exquisite quality of his disdain. Elise felt a pang of admiration for him. She felt dejected that he wouldn’t look at her, but she didn’t blame him. He was seventeen, and not necessarily interested in looks across the dining table, and anyway, if she were as beautiful as Rick, she thought, she’d be stuck-up too.

The next day Elise was watching TV with Becky and Rick when their father walked through the room in a state of mild, enchanted absence. He looked as if he were in a private landscape, a place of secret relief only he knew about. He passed Becky, and as he did, he reached out and, with one finger, playfully stroked the bridge of her nose and said, “Ski nose! Ski nose!” She giggled and forgave him. He patted her shoulder and moved on. Elise had boiled with anger.

Andy and Eric ran around the room, happily screaming. Andy waved the knotted leather cord and banged the marble balls together. Eric beat the cymbal with a colored rock. Their energy unspooled crazily and spilled all over the room. Andy ran up to Elise like a kitten dancing around a cat. He held up the banging balls and
gave a shrill little scream and hopped around. Eric looked on. Elise smiled uncertainly. She wanted to answer their excitement, but she felt too big and stiff. She couldn’t remember that kind of excitement and was tentative and vulnerable before it. The boys ran to the bed and chased each other around it, yelling and banging. Elise remembered jumping up and down on the mattress with Rick, yelling, “Because they wanted to!” The boys pounced on the bed and rolled around, tickling. A little strip of feeling wiggled free inside her. She burst off the chair and jumped on the bed, grabbing Andy and tickling him. He squealed and turned in to her embrace with a shy, writhing twist. Penny began to scream. Everything closed up.

“Stop it,” said Elise. She sat up and pried Andy off her. “Be quiet now.”

The boys looked down nervously. Elise put her hand on Penny and made her rock on the squishy mattress. The baby kept screaming. Elise felt a hard little hiccup of fear. The boys slid off the bed and went away. Her fear got bigger. Frightened, she slid her hands under the baby and took it in her arms. Penny bellowed and wet through her diaper. Elise didn’t know what to do. She didn’t remember how to change the diaper. She walked the length of the floor with the baby, turned and walked the other way. Her heart pounded. Maybe Penny would stop screaming before the pee got sticky and itchy. Then Elise could think about the diaper. She tried to walk slow and soothingly.

Sometimes her father would run around and scream because the dog down the street wouldn’t stop barking. For a while, she would come home from school every day and would find her father yelling about the dog and her stepmother pretending not to hear him. Elise would go upstairs and knock on Rick’s door, and he would let her in, putting on a show of reluctance but smiling. “Hi, Leesy,” he would say. He would sit on the bed and play his guitar, hunching in on himself as he sang her a song. Or they would sit on his orange pile rug, eating candy corn left over from Halloween and making fun of their father for going crazy over the dog.

“I’m going to kill him!” screamed their father. “I’ll beat his skull in!” There was yelling and scuffling, and then the back door slammed.

“Yeah, right,” said Rick.

But when the dog stopped barking, they were fascinated and nonplussed. If their father had beaten the neighbor’s dog to death, what would happen next? “They’d put him in jail,” said Elise.

“Nah,” said Rick. “Just a fine, but it would embarrass him.”

They filed down the stairs in excited apprehension. Elise looked back at Rick; he put his hands over his mouth and bugged out his eyes. He meant to be funny, but with his smirking mouth covered, his distended eyes had the flat hysteria of a mask.

“If he kills that fucking dog I’ll divorce him, and I mean it. I mean it! It’s not normal! What kind of person would go after a dog with a golf club?”

“An asshole,” said Rick.

Sandy banged her hand on the counter and yelled, “Shut up!” Her voice broke; she had hit her hand hard enough to hurt it.

Their father came in the back door. His face wore an expression of gentle puzzlement, his golf club was dozing in his hand. He looked as if he been holding a baby against his breast. “That poor sonofabitch is lonely,” he said mildly. “When he saw me coming, he started jumping up and down, wanting me to play with him. No wonder he barks! They’ve got the sad bastard on a short leash, walking around in his own shit.” The frilly green curtain on the back window flared out behind his armpit, the little brass bell attached to the curtain rod dangled above his head. Elise thought of the frilled collar and silly hat of a clown. “I just petted him for a few minutes,” he said. ‘And listen, he’s still quiet.” He came into the kitchen and put his golf club in a corner. It immediately fell down; he gently muttered “Shit” and bent to stand it up again, and Elise was stricken with unbearable pity. It hit her so fast, she didn’t have time to be furious or contemptuous. She looked at Rick and saw that under his look of bored distaste was a rigid muscular contraction, like a grimace of pain or rage. For a second, it was as if she was seeing through him to his skeleton. Then it was over, and he was Rick again. He was putting Pop-Tarts in the microwave, his long, agile hands moving like they knew nothing about pain or rage.