Because They Wanted To: Stories (8 page)

Every summer Elise went to stay with her mother. She lived with a man who had custody of two sons from a previous marriage because their mother spent so much time in mental hospitals. Elise liked the man and the sons okay. Robbie had turned into a strange, fat kid who read philosophy books that were beyond his age range, but she liked him too. She spent her summer days sleeping late, making blender drinks, and staying out late with her friends. She would come in after midnight and find her mother sitting in the warm dark, watching a late-night talk show in her peignoir and a nightie. Her mother would turn her head to greet Elise. It was too dark to see her expression, but Elise saw in her profile a mix of love and sadness, of gratitude to see her daughter arrive home safely and forlorn bewilderment at the way everything had turned out. The expression repelled Elise and then drew her in. She would go into the kitchen and make them both hot chocolate. They would sit at opposite ends of the couch, drinking cocoa and commenting about the people on the talk show. They showed off for each other, trying to be smart. Elise’s repulsion would slowly dissolve into deep comfort, becoming part of and affecting the texture of the comfort.

When the talk show was over, her mother got up and turned on the
light and came to kiss Elise good night. Her peignoir would open slightly as she bent into the kiss, showing her neck and sun-reddened upper chest. The diaphanous yoke of her gown was embroidered with small, plain flowers bearing four round petals apiece. Elise imagined how much her mother must’ve liked the peignoir when she bought it. She imagined her putting it on for the first time, her shy vanity at the way it looked with her skin and chestnut hair. Her mother had been beautiful, and her beauty still whispered in her eyes and skin. When she wore the peignoir, her whispered beauty aligned itself with the coarse redness of her middle age and made it better than beautiful.

A breeze came into the room and dispersed the heat. There was a burst of fractious traffic noise, people honking and playing their radios loud. Someone screamed at someone else that he was a moron, a jerk-off, a spastic freak. Under the light across the street, a girl Elise’s age was walking in a short, filmy dress that played about her slim legs. There was a funny strut in her hips and haunches, as if she was very proud and very ashamed at once. She turned around to smile at someone behind her, and the light caught her teasing eyes and dark, shoulder-length hair in motion about her face.

Elise wondered how her mother would react if she knew about the man in the park. She couldn’t picture any reaction. She could only envision her mother sitting on the couch, waiting for her daughter with that stoic look of love and sadness. It was a look that was already hurt too much to be surprised by the man in the park, a look that even anticipated him. It was the shadow of the way she used to look at Rick.

Elise thought of her father. She imagined him walking around the house with his fists balled, yelling that the world was a shit pot and his daughter was a whore. But that image quickly dissolved to an image of him sitting alone on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. She imagined him feeling the way she felt when she had walked through the park alone. He would feel shocked and scared and angry. But he would hold on. Inside, he would have a hard little rock of love for her, and he would hold on to it.

Like an echo of that image, she thought of Robbie, crouching by the TV and doing his drawings while the world threatened to crush him. She thought of Becky, moving through the room with her light-footed,
absent grace. She thought of Rick turning away from her, except she only pictured one shoulder and the side of his face, as if he were someone she’d dreamed of and forgotten.

It was eight-thirty and dark outside. “That bitch,” whispered Elise. “Where is that fucking bitch?”

Andy ran up with a tiny red thing in his hand. “This is Little Friend!” he said. “He’s in big, big trouble! He’s always, always lost!”

“Oh!”

“Hide him!” said Andy. “You hide him and we’ll try to find him!”

She put Little Friend beside one of the kitchen table legs; it took them a surprisingly long time to find it, and when they did, they wanted her to hide it again.

“Put him someplace bad!” they said. “Someplace scary!”

She put him in the sugar bowl. They looked all over, screaming, “Little Friend! Little Friend!” until Penny woke and began to mumble irritably.

“Be quiet,” said Elise sharply.

Eric quieted, but Andy kept screaming.

She knelt and grabbed him by the shoulders. “If you want to play you have to be quiet. Okay?”

He looked at her to see if she meant it. She tried to seem stern, but it was halfhearted and he could tell. As soon as she let go, he began to yell again.

“All right,” she said. “I don’t want to play.” She went and sat by the window. In the window across the street, a woman was standing at a table and folding clothes. Even from a distance Elise could see that she was frowning resentfully. The boys yelled and ran. She ignored them. It was nine-thirty.

At her father’s house, Elise had liked to climb on the roof at night. Her father’s upstairs den had a sunporch affixed to it, a small, roof-tiled square with a wooden railing that they lovingly called “the balcony.” One evening she discovered that if she stood on the railing she could get up on the roof, using her sneakers for traction. She climbed right to the top of the house and straddled it, gazing about the neighborhood.
She felt very pleased with herself; with a slight maneuver, she had made a special pocket hidden in ordinary life.

The roof had a number of peaks and flat surfaces, and she explored them all. She found she could sit comfortably outside Rick’s room and look in. She could see part of Becky’s room, and she could look right into the bathroom. Eventually, she grew bold enough to spy on her family. This gave her a strange pleasure she could not have explained. She could see Becky walking around the room listening to music, not dancing or singing but just pacing with an intent, furiously inturned face. She watched Rick while he wrote a song, crouching on the floor and rocking himself, gazing up with big, rapt eyes as he worked his lips, his pencil poised above the page. She watched her stepmother use the toilet. She watched her father sit on the tub and pare his nails. Seeing these things made her feel closer to her family than she did when she was in the same room with them. It made her like them more.

But they got suspicious when they kept hearing muffled noises overhead, and one night her stepmother went out and saw her on the roof. Then they were all mad at her.

“God,” said Rick. “What a freak!”

“This is not normal behavior,” said their stepmother. “This is sick.”

Their father stood and wiped his mouth.

It was ten o’clock. Andy grabbed her arm and yanked it. “Come on!” he said. “Hide him again!”

“No,” she said, and she pushed him.

He thrust his little face into the air and sang his nonsense song as loud as he could. Penny began to scream.

Elise stood. “Stop it,” she said.

“Daylight come, banana wanna go home!”

“Shut up!”

“Daylight come daylight come!”

She slapped him in the face. She slapped him so hard his head snapped around. He shut up. He looked up at her and smiled, tremulously.

“I said stop it,” she said.

He put his thumb in his mouth and went and sat in an armchair in the corner. Eric went and sat with the toys. Elise sat back down. She hoped Penny would stop crying without her having to do anything. It was after ten o’clock. She didn’t know what to do. She got up and put an unfinished bottle of formula back on the stove to heat. There wasn’t much of it left, she noticed.

Her stepmother loved it when things were sick. Her favorite books were true-life stories about drug-addicted fashion models who died horribly or prep school boys who turned out to be murderers. She loved TV movies about people who seemed okay until they became obsessed with a coworker and wound up killing everyone in the office. She was always saying, “That’s not normal!” in a thrilled, disapproving voice. She could say it about a magazine story that described a jealous wife who stalked her husband’s lover so she could make her get on her knees and stick a gun in her mouth. She could say it about Becky sitting in her room and playing the same song over and over again.

She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too.

Once, Elise heard her talking to a client about the woman’s step-daughter, who was crazy even though she was on Prozac. Elise had stopped by the salon to borrow some money, and she had to wait because Sandy was tattooing the client’s lips. The client’s lips were swollen and bleeding from the needle, but she wanted to talk anyway.

“I just feel so bad and so helpless. It turns out she’s been cutting herself like that for at least a year. All over her arms and her stomach, with a razor.”

“You know,” Sandy had said, “there’s a whole article on it in
Focus
this month. It’s just fascinating. It says they do it to distract themselves from the terrible pain they feel inside.”

Penny didn’t want to take the bottle. Elise pushed the nipple against her lips again and again, but she kept turning her head and crying.
“Come on,” Elise whispered, low and angry. “Shut up, come on.” It wasn’t fair, she thought. It was ten-thirty. She didn’t know what to do.

She thought of her father yelling at Rick. “You vain, conceited little prick!” he screamed. “I’d like to see you out in the trenches with the artillery coming in! What would you do, little prick? Dye your hair?” He crouched over Rick so that he could yell at him better. “Nobody out there would give a fuck about your hair!”

She slammed the bottle on the little bedside table. She yanked the diaper off the baby. Penny screamed angrily. Elise stopped. She put her hand on Penny’s stomach. “I’m sorry,” she said.

When she had finished the bottle, Penny was quiet. It was eleven o’clock. Elise walked up and down the room. If Robin came home now, Elise was going to yell at her. She went to the dresser and began opening the drawers, starting with the top ones. She saw Robin’s nylon underwear, a grubby address book, a rubber band, a button with thread still attached. Eric was looking at her from the floor; when he saw she saw him, he looked away. She found a piece of paper; it was the torn-off half of a form letter asking for money for breast cancer research, with phone numbers and a grocery list written on it in chartreuse ink. There was a ballpoint on the bedside table. She sat on the bed, turned the letter over, and wrote on the back: “It is 11:00 and I am leaving. You said you would be back at six and you are five hours late. Almost anybody else would’ve left after two hours late. I took this job for no money and I did everything I said I would do. What you’ve done is wrong. You have acted like an asshole. I’m sorry to do this, and I hope nothing bad has happened to you. But I have to leave. I am not coming back tomorrow.”

She put it on the table. First she put it down flat, then she stood it up between the clock and the bud vase. She decided to wait just five more minutes. The noise from the street was a cool, soothing mumble. The breeze from the window was almost chilling on her lap. Andy had fallen asleep in the armchair. Eric was moving a toy around and humming softly to himself. She thought about herself in the future. She could only imagine loud music and quickly changing pictures, like an advertisement for something on TV. That was okay;
it seemed like fun. She imagined herself having fun, then making money, then going back home and buying everybody presents. She imagined how grateful they’d be.

It was eleven-thirty when she left. Penny was deep in her thoughts. Andy was asleep. Eric was still playing and humming to himself. She crouched beside him to say goodbye. He looked at her with somber eyes. He looked like he’d just recognized her. “Bye,” he said. She touched his arm; he looked down.

The hall was hot and stuffy. It felt like she was already miles away from the apartment. She padded quickly down the stairs. When she reached the next floor, she saw that the people in the apartment directly under Robin’s had left their door wide open. She looked in and saw a group of men sitting in shirtsleeves around the kitchen table, playing cards. They had big arms and broad, jovial faces. A woman with her back to the door was moving vaguely at the sink. The men laughed and drank as they played. “Excuse me,” she said.

A man got up and came to the door. His face was pockmarked, with little whiskers in the pocks. “Yes?” He was foreign, she couldn’t tell which kind. He wore a red kerchief around his neck, and his nose was big.

“There’s kids in the apartment right above you. I’ve been taking care of them all day, but now I have to go. I don’t know where their mother is. She said she’d be back, but she’s not, and now I have to go. Could you be sure they’re okay?”

He put his hand on his chin and looked past her as if considering.

The woman glanced past the man at Elise; from her expression, it seemed that Elise made no sense to her.

“One of them’s only a baby.”

“Okay,” said the man. He pointed upstairs and nodded. “I check.”

When she got home, she found Mark sitting in the living room, sewing patches on his jeans. She told him what had happened. “What do you think I should’ve done?” she asked. “Do you think it was okay to leave?”

He shrugged. “What else could you do? She didn’t come back.” He concentrated on his pants, very meticulously working the needle. “She shouldn’t have left you there like that.”

Elise sat on the couch. “Well, but one of them was a baby.”

“You told the neighbors. They’ll be okay.”

“I guess.” She stared at the frayed old carpet. There were tulips on it. She felt grateful to be back in her living room, even though it wasn’t really hers. “The thing is, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t keep panhandling forever. I have to find work somehow.”