How the Light Gets In (18 page)

It’s nearly midnight and I’m lying face down on my bed, reading a letter from my mum. In it she tells me about my dad’s recent heart operation. I didn’t know he was sick. I didn’t know he needed an operation. Maybe there was something about it in one of the earlier letters I read quickly and threw out. Maybe there was something about him being ill in one of Erin’s letters that I didn’t read at all. I feel awful. Maybe I should write to them, or at least call.

As I read this letter, I want to feel sad for my dad and I want to miss him but I can’t help seeing them all sitting in the flat in front of the TV chain-smoking and eating junk food and talking rubbish. My sisters are wearing heaps of make-up and tight tops and long feather earrings. My mum is wearing a shower cap and filing her nails with an emery board. My dad is wearing the tracksuit bottoms that haven’t been washed for years because he says, ‘That’s what I’m wearing on Saturday morning when your mum does the washing.’

I remember the rancid smell of them when he used to wrestle me when I was small. ‘I’m the boogie man!’ he’d yell as he chased us around the house. ‘Here comes the boogie man.’

I write something in my notebook that my science teacher told us yesterday:

Human beings share over 98% of the DNA of chimpanzees
. But he didn’t mention that human beings also share 50% of the DNA of bananas.

Two weeks later, and my behaviour, as far as the Hardings are concerned, has been impeccable. It’s six-thirty a.m. and I’m
going downstairs early to make pancakes for breakfast as a surprise for Margaret and Henry. James and Bridget won’t be down until seven-thirty so I have nearly an hour alone with them.

Our S.A.T. scores are out and Henry and Margaret have promised to take ‘us kids’ out for a celebratory dinner tonight. The atmosphere is right.

Margaret comes into the kitchen first.

‘That smells great, Lou. What a treat.’

‘Good,’ I say.

Henry comes into the kitchen wearing his dressing gown. I can’t take my eyes off his hairy white legs.

‘Isn’t this a nice way to start the day,’ he says.

I am still grounded and have run out of money again. I have a dress rehearsal in five days and no alcohol to get me through it. Tom lent me some money so I could put twenty dollars back in Margaret’s purse, which I’ve done. I gave her a little extra too, but it has been two days since I last had a drink and my whole body vibrates with unease. I’ll need to borrow some more.

I have started drinking on days when there are no rehearsals because I can sleep better when I’ve had something to drink. Even though my sleeping problem seems to be solved, I find it hard to concentrate in class, find it hard to focus, and my face aches. My teeth feel too big in my mouth, and my mouth doesn’t belong in my face; as though it has been roughly transplanted where there’s not enough room for it. I can sense the relationship between my jaw and teeth and brain, which seem suddenly to be too close together. My nerves are camouflaged by drinking, but my body still suffers.

Margaret and Henry are more cheerful towards me now that my S.A.T. scores are out, and I am officially in the top one per cent of the country. This seems to prove that I can ‘fit in’.

I put the pancakes on a plate and slice a banana, pour some honey, and cut a lemon in half.

I watch Henry pour maple syrup on his pancakes. ‘We should have pancakes more often,’ he says.

‘I wondered if we could talk about something,’ I say.

Margaret puts her knife and fork beside her plate.

‘Of course. You can talk about anything at all, you know that.’

‘Better out than in,’ says Henry.

This is exactly what my mum says about pimples when she’s trying to encourage Erin and Leona to burst them.
Better out
than in
.

I look at the floor and then I say it.

‘I don’t want to go home. I want to know whether you can help me stay in America?’

Henry’s reply is far too quick, as though he knows I was going to ask this question.

‘Oh, Lou,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure about that. There’d be all sorts of difficulties with immigration laws and visas and as far as I can recall, there’s a strict policy …’

I look at him.

‘But there’s
always
a way,’ I say. ‘What if you could sponsor an application for me to get permanent residency? I could go home for a week or something and then come right back. I wouldn’t expect to stay
here
in this house. I’m not an idiot. I’m not asking to stay with
you
. All I wanted to know was whether you could help, that’s all.’

Margaret wants to keep me happy, to shut me up. She gives Henry a conspicuously coded look.

‘All being well,’ she says, ‘I wouldn’t say that it was out of the question.’

I know she is uncomfortable. What she wanted from me was the short-term experience of a quaint and foreign visitor.
She does not want to be involved in changing somebody’s life.

‘Margaret and I have talked a great deal about your situation,’ says Henry. ‘We can see that it’s not fair that somebody with your intelligence should have to study in a country with relatively few opportunities or resources compared to this country.’

Bloody hell, it’s not the
country
that’s the problem. I decide not to purge him of this narrow-minded untruth, especially since he seems to have spent some time working out how to say it. Still, I’d love to spit at one of them for so completely missing the point.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘Forget it.’

Margaret stands up.

‘Oh, you’ll be okay. How about if we forget about you being grounded?’

‘Thanks,’ I say and leave the kitchen so that they will not see my face.

The weather is cold now and every morning there is ice on the cars. It’s Saturday. Tom and I are at his house, watching TV. His mom and the cook are making dinner for us. We’ve been together all day, playing Scrabble and watching videos. His mom has been home for an hour or so, and his dad, whom I’ve not met yet, is due home from a meeting in about half an hour.

‘What’s the meeting your dad is at?’ I ask. Tom shakes his head and looks grave. ‘You really don’t want to know.’

I decide it must be a Ku Klux Klan meeting or something equally stupid, and that even if it is, I’m still going to ask if I can move in. I’ll tell him what I think of bigots and racists after I’ve got a green card and I’ve got into a good college on a full scholarship.

Besides, I need to ask Tom for another loan and wonder if now is a good time.

‘You can come sit over here on the couch with me,’ says Tom, a terrible grin on his face. ‘My mom won’t mind. She’s extremely liberal actually.’

‘Oh,’ I say. I’d rather stay where I am. If I move to sit with Tom, I’ll be sitting directly beneath an enormous chandelier, which sways when somebody walks across the floorboards and sways even more noticeably when Tom’s mom plonks herself down on the settee.

Tom calls out, ‘Mom, you wouldn’t mind if Lou and I sat close together on the couch, would you?’

‘As long as I can see where one body starts and the other stops,’ she calls out, laughing, as always, unduly amused by her own wit.

I move across and sit with Tom and he drapes his arm heavily over my shoulder. His shirt smells damp, as though he hasn’t worn it for a long time. He smells like a box of broken crayons.

I don’t like Tom a lot of the time and I don’t like the person he is right now. I don’t like his at home with Mom personality. It’s infuriating and childish; always trying to sell his family to me, telling me that they worked hard for their millions, telling me that they struggled to make it here in the new country. But he’s beautiful and I am more confident around him than I am with the Hardings, and around Tom, I do not blush. My body feels at home near him, even if I do spend a lot of time thinking he’s an idiot.

‘I bet she’d mind if I had a smoke,’ I say.

Tom calls out, ‘Mom, can Lou smoke in here?’

‘I don’t mind if she smokes herself to death, but I’d prefer if she did it in the old nursery.’

‘Let’s go,’ says Tom.

The old nursery is behind the kitchen. I haven’t seen, until now, any signs of the maid’s four-dollar-an-hour industry, but
this is where broken things are kept and where the maid stores her buckets and mops.

This room is also stuffed ceiling high with boxes and furniture. Tom takes two chairs. ‘I’d like to sit on the floor,’ I say.

‘Wait,’ he says, ‘I’ll get you a rug and a cushion.’

The smell of cooking meat fills the air. We sit against a wall, shoulder to shoulder, our breathing in unison, Tom talking about how happy he is to be with me.

He grabs my hands and says, ‘I want to wake up every day with you and look into your eyes and say something good to you.’

‘Me too,’ I say, wondering if I could think of enough good things to say.

Even though there’s risk involved, I’m too curious not to ask.

‘Tom, did you move here from another state last year?’

He stares at his lap.

‘I know you’re repeating your senior year. I don’t really give a shit, but I just want to know.’

Tom suddenly grabs my face and kisses me for a long time, desperately, pressing his lips too hard. The inside of my lip is cut by my teeth.

‘Stop,’ I say.

Tom stops.

‘I’ll be twenty in three weeks,’ he says.

‘You’re such a liar,’ I say.

Tom grins. ‘As if you care about lies.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, wondering why he never looks embarrassed. ‘You’re right.’

Then he stares lovingly at me and I think I know what he’s about to say.

‘Lou, I want to marry me.’

‘Typical,’ I say, hoping to make a joke of his slip of the tongue.

‘You know what I meant to say. I mean I want
us
to get married. I want you to marry me. Then you can stay.’

He adds this last sentence as though to suggest this is the only reason he’s asking me to marry him. I look away and reach for another cigarette. He kisses my face and neck and the back of my hands, like an actor, and is so soppy all of a sudden that I don’t like him at all. I feel repulsed.

‘Maybe I should think about it,’ I say, even though I know I should say yes.

‘How long for?’ He is angry in typical Tom fashion; too quick to joy, and too quick to anger if he doesn’t get his way.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Just a while.’

But Tom wants to talk about us and marriage and how we could give it a few years and I could move with him to the East Coast.

He talks far too long in a persuasive and argumentative way as though I am an idiot and he needs to make me see things clearly. I don’t think he’s ever tried to twist somebody’s arm without success before. If he only knew what I really think. I am tired of his monologues, which are really always about him even though he pretends he is talking about us. The whole thing with Tom is fast losing its deranged charm. Besides, his eyes are glassy, a mixture of self-pity and anger, and I want to kiss him again just to stop him from talking. So, I look at his beautiful face, which is by far the best thing about him, and I pretend he’s a better, wiser person.

‘I’d love to,’ I say. ‘I’d love to marry you.’

A few minutes later Tom’s dad arrives home and we go out to meet him.

‘Dad, this is my girlfriend, Lou,’

Tom’s dad takes his jacket off and says, ‘Nice to meet you. My name’s Gerald.’

Tom takes his dad’s jacket and we follow him, a few paces
behind, like little children, and sit down at the dining-room table, even though dinner isn’t ready yet.

‘Switch off the TV please, Tom.’

Tom returns and his dad uses a remote control to play some classical music on a machine behind him.

Tom’s dad is tall and large. His arms and legs are thin but his neck and belly are fat. He has eyes so brown they are almost black.

Tom’s mom, Betty, comes in and asks me if I’d like some wine. ‘Yes, please,’ I say.

She doesn’t say hello to Tom’s dad. I wonder where the cook will have dinner. Only four places are set.

‘Do you have a preference? Red or white?’

I shrug as if to say I don’t mind and Tom kicks me. ‘Red, please.’

The cook serves dinner and we begin to eat. I drink my wine too fast and finish before the soup is gone. Tom’s dad looks nothing like Tom and, unlike his son, eats his dinner slowly, with impeccable manners. Tom, like James, almost inhales his food. It’s terrible to watch.

‘What are the two of you going to get up to this evening?’ asks Tom’s dad, his knife and fork laid carefully beside a large plate piled with roast lamb and vegetables, his hands in his lap, ready to converse between thoughtfully arranged mouthfuls.