Shem Creek (9 page)

“Okay,” she said, “Gracie and I got to Dad’s new house and in two seconds realized he had moved Patti in and they had redecorated like, I don’t know, like some television program was going to do a big story on them. At first, we were furious—Gracie, especially. She takes one look at Patti and walks out of the house. Daddy started yelling
how dare she walk out like this
and then the next thing I know, Patti is defending Gracie because she realizes Dad didn’t tell either one of us that they were living together.”

“Poor Patti,” I said. “She should’ve interviewed me before she moved in with Fred. I could have told her a thing or two. But then, like my momma used to say, one woman’s trash is another woman’s treasure, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “So then I went outside to talk Gracie into coming back into the house. You see, we were formulating a last-minute plan to get back at Dad for being such a creep to us but Gracie was so pissed off at the world, I couldn’t get her to move.

“We saw that he was so involved with Patti that he didn’t give a damn about us and so we both got pissed off in advance of him proving it.

“I remember that Gracie said,
Does Mom know about this?
And I distinctly remember that I said,
I don’t think so.
”

“You’re right. I mean, I suspected he was seeing someone for a number of reasons. First, he seemed, I don’t know,
cheerful,
that is to the extent that your father can seem cheerful. And, when he bought my ticket to South Carolina, I knew something was up. But, I never thought in a million years that he was involved with someone at that level. It was shocking.” I looked at Lindsey and realized she felt sorry for me for getting bamboozled and I hated that. To make things worse, I had given Fred a little jab, and I knew that was in poor form to speak badly of him to the girls, but now and then I couldn’t help myself. Hell, I wasn’t a saint, you know. But I tried to redeem myself by saying, “Look, it’s okay now. I am happier and so is your father and so are we all . . . so continue!”

“Okay. Eventually, we went back inside and Operation Kill Thanksgiving continued but, with slightly less enthusiasm, because it was pretty depressing. Our next step was the silent treatment. Whatever Patti asked us, we gave her one-word answers. It was truly a beautiful thing. I loved it.

“We could tell by her body language that Patti was uncomfortable because she had failed to charm us right off the bat. Daddy shot us multitudinous looks of threatening anger and we would stare back at him with innocent blank faces. I knew he thought we were torturing her, when actually we were torturing him
through
her. We didn’t give a damn about her. He, however, was supposed to care about us. Eventually, in between flipping channels on the television, he finally started getting mad, which was what we had hoped for.

“Patti said something like,
Do you girls like the turkey livers fried?
To which we both replied with a loud
Ew!
Gracie made some extreme gagging noises for special effect. Anyway, Dad slammed the remote so hard on the arm of his chair that the batteries fell out. Patti left the room to baste her bird.

“
Dinner’s almost ready,
she said over her shoulder in an exasperated voice.

“Rather than deal with Dad exploding, we quickly changed tactics.
Come on, Gracie,
I said,
let’s go help Patti in the kitchen.

“Daddy eyed us with suspicion. Who could blame him for that?
Sure,
Gracie said,
why not? You’re right
.

“Silence for a moment from Dad. Then he sat back down and prepared to resume ignoring us as humans. But before that he hurled us a threat.

“
Finally!
Daddy said, and took a deep breath.
You had better be nice. She means a lot to me. Bring me a beer and help Patti. Your old man needs a moment of peace around here.

“Not for nothing, but what would he do if we were
not
nice? Withhold our allowance? Um, he didn’t give us one?

“Anyway, Gracie took Daddy a Budweiser and I leaned against the counter watching Patti. She was peeling carrots, letting the skins fall into the garbage disposal.

“
You’d better grind them as you go,
I said.

“
Why?
she said.

“
I dunno,
I said, and shrugged my shoulders.
It’s what Mom does though
.

“That was when the nice Patti left and the real Patti looked me right in the eye and said,
Look, sweetie, I don’t give a damn how your momma does things, okay?

“I thought,
Well! Jeez! How about that?
Hmmm, Patti Elliott had a temper after all. But as a member of the Breland clan, I’d been dealing with angry adults all my life and mood swings were my specialty. I took a deep breath and rose to it. I wasn’t ready yet to remind her that as far as we were concerned she was still below insignificance in our world. So I quickly said,
I’m sure you don’t
. Before she could show me some more tooth, I added,
Want me to put plates on the table?

“
Suit yourself,
she said.
Dinner’s in thirty minutes
.

“Just then, Gracie came back and I said,
Hey, Gracie, grab four dinner plates from the cabinet, okay? I’ll get glasses.

“
Sure,
Gracie said.

“The silence from the sink area was deafening. She was scraping carrots with a vengeance. Gracie gave me an elbow and mouthed,
What’s going on? It’s all good,
I mouthed back, giving her the
okay
hand sign. I opened the cabinet where the glasses used to live and they had been replaced by vitamin pill bottles and dried spices. So I said something like,
Hey! Where are the glasses?

“
Over there,
Patti said and pointed to the other side of the kitchen.
The plates are over there too.

“
Why’d Dad move everything?
Gracie said.

“
He didn’t,
I said,
I’ve got five bucks that Patti Elliott did. That’s what women like her do. They move in and take over.
I was mumbling loud enough for her to hear because I was now officially furious. I mean, who did she think she was?

“Gracie stopped breathing and looked at me in surprise. Full assaults were not part of our plan. We had agreed to be just obnoxious enough to drive them crazy, but not rude enough to truly piss anybody off. Patti stopped and turned to us.

“She had her hand on her hip and there we stood, waiting for Miss Chitlins to rip us a new one. All she said was,
Your daddy doesn’t cook. I cook. So, therefore, I rearranged the kitchen to suit me. Y’all got a problem with that? Let’s hear it, right now.

“
Makes sense to me,
Gracie said, and I wanted to kill her for agreeing with Patti.
No problem here
.

“Both of them waited for me to say something.
Whatever,
I said with a trace of a sneer and felt lousy for giving away a point. But, let’s face it. We still had to get through Thanksgiving dinner, dishes, Friday, Saturday, and we couldn’t get out of that hellhole until Sunday when you came back. That was a long time to concentrate on being obnoxious, even for us. And, stupidly, we hadn’t calculated in the part about Patti Elliott having a mind of her own. Who knew?

“Anyway, I realized Gracie and I were going to need an escape strategy. Being in the house twenty-four-seven was going to be too much. So I decided I’d find the newspaper and check all the listings. Maybe we could go to the movies Friday night. I would call around and see if I could get us a ride to the football game on Saturday. Sunday, I would sleep until noon.

“I took the dishes and set the table with Gracie, whispering to her that we needed to talk. She pointed upstairs.

“
Gonna go unpack,
I said out loud to anyone who cared to listen.

“
Me too!
Gracie said.

“We passed Dad when we went through the living room.
How’s it going?
he said.
Perfect,
I said,
everything’s great
. Gracie said,
Yeah, everything’s great,
and followed me up the steps.

“When Dad first moved into the new house, he had set up a room for us. Twin beds, one end table, one chest of drawers—no layout from
Architectural Digest,
okay? But, we had a room and a place to put our stuff. All of a sudden this Patti person moves in and she’s flitting around like I don’t know what, decorating everything in sight with a monkey-something. So when we opened the door to our room we should not have been surprised to see that everything was changed. But we were. Our bedroom was now an office slash storage room, with moving boxes piled up to the ceiling.

“
Maybe we’re in the wrong room?
Gracie said.
Wasn’t this our room?

“
Try next door,
I said.

“She opened the door and peeked in.
Aw, God! Aw, shit! Lindsey!

“She stepped aside for me. I took one look and said,
Oh, hell!
The bedroom had been completely redecorated for us. There were pictures of the Backstreet Boys over my bed and a poster of Christina Aguilera over Gracie’s. The beds were covered in these wild geometric, primary colored, tacky comforters and pillows. I thought I was going to throw up on the lime-green carpet. So Gracie says,
What are we gonna do?
And I said,
We’re gonna raise some hell, that’s what. What did she do? Go through all our stuff?

“Gracie and I were snorting around, getting madder by the minute. We opened the drawers and what do you think we found? Our underwear, pajamas, T-shirts and socks were there, newly laundered, pressed and folded. In the closet, our sneakers had been washed and our clothes hung on plastic hangers, all in one direction, hung by category. Not that we had that much stuff there, but it was as neat as a pin and mysteriously correctly divided between what I owned and what Gracie owned. However, and I mean the
big
however, we now had the ammunition we needed. But then I worried a little about starting a full-scale battle on Thanksgiving, so I said to Gracie,
Well? At least it’s clean and at least we got a bigger room?

“Gracie said I was always making lemonade out of lemons and it had to stop.
Look, Lindsey,
she said, and believe me she was in no mood to be grateful for anything,
here’s my problem. She’s out of control! You don’t just go in somebody’s drawers, rearrange everything and organize it like this! I freaking hate Christina Aguilera and you haven’t listened to the Backstreet Boys in a thousand years! I mean, she might have asked us if we wanted puke-green carpet!

“So I said,
You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. But we gotta do something!
And she said something like,
So what should we do, genius? Burn the place down?
I mean, if she’d really study, she could make better grades, Mom. I wish she wouldn’t call me names like that.”

I looked at Lindsey’s face, so filled with passion, and tried to imagine what it must be like to be a child of a divorce, and to be the more academic one, the more reasonable one. I didn’t blame her at all for having been angry, but at the same time I knew Patti had probably had good intentions. And, well, Gracie called Lindsey names but Lindsey had a few choice ones for Gracie too.

“Lindsey, baby, your sister is just insecure, that’s all. She’s really proud of you, you know.” I reached over and squeezed her hand. “I am too.” My poor daughters! What havoc had I brought into their lives with the failure of my marriage? Growing up was hard enough when everything was in place. More and more, it seemed to be the way of the world that nothing lasted as long as it should.

Lindsey shrugged a few times, looked out the window and then continued to tell me her story.

“Anyway, Gracie was getting seriously crazy. She was ready to rip the room apart and tear the posters off the wall
. Tell her to stay out of our room!
She was screaming loud enough for everybody from Essex Fells to Newark to stop what they were doing! So I said,
No! Let me tell her. You’re too angry!

“She said okay, I could. Eventually, we had dinner, which I basically pushed around the plate, even though what made it into my mouth was delicious.

“All the while Daddy talked to us about how wonderful Patti was and to Patti about how wonderful we were. He was in selling mode, which was completely unnecessary, because we would never like this woman. Ever. Even if she could cook like I don’t know who. The entire time we ate, Buster went from one of us to the next, hoping against hope that some crumb would fall his way. I was biding my time.

“Finally, at some point I said something like,
You know, Patti, we appreciate what you did to our room.
Old Patti brightened up for a second and Daddy said some inane thing about how it was nice that we had the presence of mind to say thank you. But then I dropped the small bomb, saying,
But since you don’t have teenage girls, you probably don’t understand how sensitive we can be about someone we don’t even know for two minutes going through all our things, moving our room around, decorating without asking us what we liked and we were pretty upset when we saw it.
Then I paused and added,
But, we appreciate it.

“Well, that was it. Daddy slammed his napkin on the table and stood up.
You girls have no idea how hard Patti has worked! Why, she agonized over every little detail. I’ve had just about enough of both of you. . . .

“
We wouldn’t go through her stuff, Dad,
Gracie said, in a quiet little mouse way
. It’s a violation of privacy. It’s like reading someone’s diary.