Saint Maybe (8 page)

She carried the diaper down the hall to the bathroom, holding it in a clump far out in front of her. She lowered it into the toilet and swished it around. All the ick started crumbling away. She flushed the toilet and swished again in clearer water, back and forth, dreamily.

Sometimes their mother said “soose” and sometimes she said “soother.” Maybe they were both the same
word. People here in Baltimore said “pacifier,” and so did Thomas and Agatha, trying to fit in; but their mother was not from Baltimore. She was from out in the country where they used to live with their father in a metal-colored trailer. Then they all got divorced. This was when Thomas was just a baby. He couldn’t even remember. And then later they moved to Baltimore in Mr. Belling’s long black car. Everything was going to be wonderful, wonderful, their mother said. She got so many new clothes! Their apartment sat over a drugstore that stocked every kind of candy, and when Mr. Belling visited he sent Thomas and Agatha downstairs with a dollar bill each and they could take as long as they liked deciding. Thomas did remember Mr. Belling. He didn’t like him much, though. When Mr. Belling stopped coming, Thomas asked if he could have the Baltimore Colts mug Mr. Belling used to drink his beer from, and their mother started crying. She snatched the mug from the dish drainer and slammed it against the sink until it broke in a million pieces. Thomas said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t
really
want it!” After that their mother had to get a job and leave them with Mrs. Myrdal, but then she met Danny. She acted more like her old self once she met Danny. On her wedding day she said it was
all
of them’s wedding day. She gave Agatha a little pink rose from her bridal bouquet.

Thomas said Danny was probably their real father. Agatha knew he wasn’t, though. She told Thomas their real father was nicer. In fact Danny was the nicest man she had ever known—nicer than their father, who had never had much to do with them, and certainly a whole lot nicer than Mr. Belling, with his two fat diamond rings and his puckered eyes the color of new dungarees. But she wanted Thomas to feel jealous over what she could still remember. Thomas had a terrible memory.
Agatha’s memory was letter-perfect; she never forgot a thing.

Thomas forgot three separate times, for instance, three different days in a row, that Danny had gone and died. Three mornings in a row he got up and said, “Do you think Danny will fix apple pancakes for breakfast?” The first day she could understand, because the news was still so fresh and neither one of them was used to it yet. So she just said, “No, did you forget? He went and died.” But the second day! And the third! And those were weekdays, too. Danny would never have fixed apple pancakes on a weekday. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked Thomas. “Can’t you get it into your head? He had a car crash and he died.” Thomas just took on a kind of closed look. He didn’t seem to miss Danny as much as he missed the pancakes. It made her furious. Why did she have to be the only one who remembered? She said, “He gave Ian a ride home and we had to stay by ourselves. Not answer the phone, not open the door—”

Thomas clamped his hands over his ears.

“So when the phone rang we didn’t pick it up,” Agatha said. “And when the door banged we didn’t unlock it.”

Thomas said, “Nee-nee-nee-nee-nee!” but she rode over it. “Mama had to crawl in a window,” she went on, “and she tore her sleeve and she was crying; she was worried we’d been murdered, and then the phone rang again and—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

She just had these urges to be evil to him. She couldn’t say exactly why.

The water in the toilet was so yellow now she could hardly see the diaper, so she flushed once more. Then it felt like someone bossy and selfish reached up and grabbed the diaper away from her. She gave a little gasp
and let it go. The water rose calmly higher and higher; it reached the rim. She had never guessed what a scary thing a toilet was. Thick yellow water slopped over the edge and spilled across the floor while she stood watching, horrified.

“Mama!” she shrieked finally.

Silence.

The water in the toilet slid down again.

Agatha stepped out into the hall, shaking, and went to her mother’s bedroom door. She gave a tiny tap with her knuckles and then placed her ear to the door and listened.

They used to go straight in without a thought. They used to play among her bedclothes till she woke. But lately they’d stopped doing that.

(You could almost think, sometimes, that their mother wasn’t there behind her face anymore.)

Agatha went on down the hall to the children’s room. As she walked in, she saw Daphne roll onto her stomach and drop like a stone out of the crib. Agatha flung herself forward in a silent rush and caught her—an armload of bare-bottomed, clammy baby. She sank weak-kneed to the floor. Still busily sucking her pacifier, Daphne crawled away to a jack-in-the-box. Thomas sang to his doll, “My aunt gave me a nickel, to buy a pickle …”

All of a sudden, Agatha seemed to see things so clearly. Daphne’s bottom was stained yellow. Thomas’s shirt was splotched with food. The floor was covered with toys and dirty clothes and a cantaloupe rind on a plate beneath a cloud of fruit flies. Milk was dripping down the wall behind the crib.

She stood up and collected Daphne and staggered over to the crib with her and plopped her down. She wrestled Daphne’s diaper around her, being very, very careful with the safety pins, and then she raised the
railing and locked it. “Stay there,” she told Daphne. “Put on a different shirt,” she told Thomas.

“What shirt?”

“I don’t care. Just different.”

He laid Dulcimer aside, grumbling, and slid off his bed. While he was rummaging in bureau drawers, Agatha returned to the bathroom and stirred a towel through the puddle around the toilet. Then she hid the towel in the hamper. She went out to the kitchen and put the milk back into the fridge. “Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chewing gum,” Thomas sang, while Agatha spread his coloring book on the windowsill to dry. One by one she plucked his crayons from the pool of milk on the table. They were beginning to dye the milk all different shades, lavender and pink and blue. She dumped them into the waste can under the sink.

“What are you
doing!
” Thomas asked, coming up behind her. He was wearing a green shirt now that clashed with his blue shorts, and it was buttoned wrong besides.

“Button your buttons over from scratch,” Agatha told him. She unfolded a cloth and started wiping off the table.

“What did you do with my crayons?”

“They were all wet and runny.”

“You can’t just throw them away!”

He started rooting through the waste can. Agatha said, “Stop that! I just got everything nice again!”

“You better give me back my crayons, Agatha.”

Their mother said, “Is it still daytime?”

She was standing in the doorway in her slip. Her pillow had made a mark across one cheek and she didn’t have any makeup on. “I thought it was night,” she said. “Is that Daphne I hear?”

“Make Agatha give me back my crayons, Mama!”

But their mother was drifting down the hall, heading toward Daphne’s “Oho! Oho!”

“Stealer!” Thomas hissed at Agatha. “Crayon stealer!”

She put the wet cloth in the sink. “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” she said, “but names will never—”

“You can go to jail for stealing!”

“Is this my little Daphne?” their mother said, back again with Daphne in her arms. “Is this my sweetheart?”

She sat in a kitchen chair and settled Daphne on her lap. Daphne’s diaper was dry but it was so loose it pouched in front of her stomach. The table was clean but it was damp where Agatha had wiped it. Everything looked fine but just barely, like a room where you walk in and get the feeling something was rustling and whispering till half a second ago. But their mother didn’t seem to notice. She stared down at Daphne with her face bare-naked and erased and pale. “Is this my Daphne?” she kept saying, “Is this my baby Daphne?” so it began to sound as if she really did wonder. “Is this her?” she asked. “Is it her? Is it?” And she looked up at Thomas and Agatha and waited for them to answer.

When the hottest part of the day was over, they got ready for their walk to the typewriter store. This was something they’d started doing just in the past few weeks, but already there was a pattern to it. Agatha liked patterns. So did Thomas. Together they hauled Daphne’s stroller out of the coat closet and unfolded it. Daphne watched from the rug, flapping her arms up and down when she heard the wheels squeak. Maybe she liked patterns, too.

They went to see if their mother was ready, but she
was shut up in her bathroom. When she came out, she wore her white blouse that wrapped and tied at the side and her watery flowing India skirt. She blotted her lipstick on a tissue and asked, “How do I look?”

“You look nice,” they both told her.

From the living room, Daphne made a fussy sound. Their mother sighed and picked up her bag. “Let’s go,” she said.

The air outdoors felt heavy and warm, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down so hard anymore. Their mother walked in front, wheeling Daphne in her stroller, and Thomas and Agatha followed. Thomas’s shirt was still buttoned wrong. Agatha’s playsuit bunched at the crotch. She thought she and Thomas should have been dressed up too, if they were trying to make friends with the typewriter man, but that didn’t seem to have crossed their mother’s mind. Sometimes lately there were these holes in the way she did things, places she just fell apart. Like last night, when she got lost in the middle of what she was saying and couldn’t find her way out again. “Do you believe this?” she had been saying. “That I’m back to … back to …” Then she’d just stared. It had frightened them. Thomas started crying and he flew at her with both fists. “Back to nothing,” she had said finally. She was like a record player you had to jostle when it hit a crack. Then she’d said, “I think I’ll go to bed,” although it wasn’t even dark outside and Daphne hadn’t been put down for the night yet.

They passed the house with all the statues in the yard—elves and baby deer and a row of ducks. Agatha wished their own yard had statues, but her mother said statues were common. “Right now,” she said, “the last thing I can afford is looking common.” She talked a lot these days about what she couldn’t afford. Danny hadn’t left them well provided for.

They passed the house that said
MRS. GOODE, PALMIST—FORTUNES CHEERFULLY TOLD
, but their mother didn’t stop. Agatha was glad. Mrs. Goode was gray all over and her parlor smelled of mothballs. They came to where the shops began, shoe repairs and laundromats. At Luckman’s Pharmacy Thomas and Agatha slowed hopefully, but their mother said, “We’ll go to Joyner’s this time.” She rotated her drugstores because she didn’t want people thinking she bought too many pills. It was a pity, though. Luckman’s had one of those gumball machines with plastic charms intermingled. Thomas and Agatha let their feet drag and sent a longing gaze backward.

Traffic in this area was busier, and the bus exhausts made the heat seem worse. Thomas wore a smudgy mustache of sweat. Each click of their mother’s heels shot something like a little sharp paring knife straight through Agatha’s head.

On Govans Road the long, low front of Rumford & Son’s Office Equipment took up nearly half a block. They stood facing it across the street, waiting for the light to change. Thomas said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if typewriter stores had gumball machines?”

“Well, they don’t, and I don’t want you asking,” their mother said.

“I wasn’t going to ask!”

“Just be very, very quiet, so I won’t be sorry I brought you.”

In the olden days, she didn’t have to bring them places. She’d say, “Oh! I’m going stir-crazy, I tell you.” Or, “I’m getting cabin fever.” She would ask Ian or Mrs. Myrdal to baby-sit, because back then she could afford it. She would go out all afternoon and come home happy and show the children what she had picked up for them—candy bars and lollipops, sometimes even toys if they were small enough to fit in her bag. But
now she had to take the three of them everywhere. She took them to her doctor, even, and when she was called inside Agatha had to watch the other two. “Can’t we go back to having sitters?” Agatha would ask, already knowing the answer. The answer was, “No, we can’t. Face the facts, sweetheart: we’re in the Department of Reality now.” Their mother’s favorite thing to say. Agatha hated hearing that and she would cover her ears like Thomas, but when she took her hands away her mother would still be talking. “You think I like having you with me every single second? Think I wouldn’t rather just leave on my own any time I get the notion?”

Their mother loved them, but they kept trying to make her
not
love them. That was what she told them. “You want me to walk out on you,” she told them, “but I refuse to do it.”

Whenever she said that, Thomas would take hold of some little part of her clothing, down near the hemline where she didn’t notice.

The light turned green and they crossed the street. Their mother’s heels sounded daintier now. When they stepped inside the store, cold air washed over them—lovely, cold, blowing air—and Daphne said, “Ah,” which made their mother laugh. Wasn’t it wonderful how quickly she could change! To laugh like that, her best little husky-throated laugh, the instant she walked through the door! And the typewriter man wasn’t even listening yet, although he came over soon enough. He said, “Why, look who’s here!” You could see how pleased he was. He was a blond, pale man with skin that flushed when he smiled. “What brings you out on such a hot afternoon?” he asked their mother.

“Oh, we were just taking a stroll,” she said. All of a sudden she seemed bashful. “We were passing by and I said, ‘Shouldn’t we visit my typewriter, kids?’ ”

“Absolutely. You don’t want it feeling neglected,” he said.

He beamed down at Agatha. She gave him her biggest smile back, all teeth.

The showroom was filled with desks, and a typewriter sat on each one. Some were big complicated electrics and some were little low-slung manuals. If it were up to Agatha, they’d have a manual. Those looked easier. But her mother’s was electric, with keys that chattered loudly almost before you touched them.