Stop That Girl (5 page)

“What are you doing?” he calls.

“Trying to make a barbecue.”

He says what he’s required to: “You shouldn’t be playing with matches.”

“Well, they’re all gone now,” I tell him.

Roy doesn’t often get mad. I remember how much I tried to hate him, but he’s really not very hatable. Last year he sent my school picture to his mother (not just a wallet-sized one but one of the big ones!), which made me feel so good, when I learned of it, I had to turn my face to the wall.

He crosses the yard now and inspects my work. “Not a bad idea,” he says. “What do you say we bring out some fresh charcoal and lighter fluid?”

“Sure.”

“We’ve got ketchup and mustard, relish, the rest?”

“Yeah, I checked,” I tell him.

“What should we make for a side course?”

“We have potato chips,” I say.

“Okay, we’re set,” he says. “Come on.”

I follow him into our garage, which has never been used to park a car in. It’s full of boxes and furniture and tools. “Disaster area,” he says, rooting around. “Never find what I’m looking for.” He always says this, every time he ventures in there. He shoves boxes aside, tries to lift the lawn mower out of the way. He kicks over a bag of steer manure and hangs a rake on a nail. He cleaves a space between two old dressers full of fossils and rocks. “Bunch of pack rats,” he mutters.

Mom has a little area in the corner for projects. She has a pink Formica table, our kitchen table from the old days, and on it is a wooden box filled with different kinds of scissors and supplies. For some reason she really loves scissors. You can’t even touch her scissors, she thinks they’re so great. On the wall is a bulletin board rustling with articles about newly discovered perils in the world, such as pesticide levels in farmed salmon and botulism in dimpled cans. Today there’s something there I’ve never noticed before. It’s a hard little suitcase, and I lift the latches. Inside, fitting perfectly, is a small blue typewriter, so compact it looks like a toy. Smith Corona. I take a piece of paper and roll it in crookedly. I start trying to type.

“What in God’s name is this?” Roy says, holding up a big green bubble of melted glass and wire that my mother found once at the scene of a fire.

I say, “I think Mom wants to make something out of that.” Then I add, “If she ever comes out of her cave.”

It’s not our code to mention Mom’s cave, and it stops Roy cold in his tracks. “Listen here,” he says. “Your mother is a very special person. A very sensitive person, and things get to her in a way that they might not get to you or me. And when that happens, she needs to relax and recover.”

“Right.” He wants me to understand, be compassionate, rise above it all like a saint. Or maybe he’s mad, I can’t tell.

“And she’s had a very hard time, and even though she doesn’t talk much about it, we need to remember what she’s been through with that mother of hers,” says Roy.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay. Good girl. Now, let’s find that charcoal.”

I’ve been nervously poking at the typewriter. The keys have been overlapping and striking one on top of the other, smudging or missing. Now they’re stuck together in a wad, and I reach in and try to pull them apart. My fingers are mottled with ink.

“Can you come here a second?” He’s rummaging still. “Roy?”

He says, “I’m busy! What is it now?”

“I just need you,” I say.

He stops and regards me, and he’s hot and sweaty, but he makes his way over, straddling and shoving as he comes. “What now?” he asks, and when I point at the tangle in the typewriter, he takes the chair and digs in and quickly restores the machine to a usable state. Then he leans forward and straightens the piece of paper and types this:

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR PARTY.

“What’s that mean?”

“Just habit,” Roy says. “Some kind of political slogan from the turn of the century.”

He’s just warming up. He types some other things then. Part of the Gettysburg Address, then some verse like
Doubledouble, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,
then
I am the captain of the Pinafore, and a right good captaintoo, I’m very very good, and be it understood
—He’s making the little typewriter come alive, every finger flying and the carriage riding out to the side, ringing the bell, and then getting slapped back into place, all in one motion so he doesn’t ever have to stop. “What should I type now?” he asks me. “Anything!”

“How about the names of all the teachers at my school?”

“Okay, call ’em out,” he says, and I do, and into the typewriter they go by way of his madly octopoidal fingers. Then I start shouting out really goofy things I make up right then, and he types those too. Things like
We are the cows, we are
the best, we’re getting numerous, we will infest!
By the time he stops, he’s almost filled the whole piece of paper, single space. The paper is punctured and bumpy.

“My top speed was one hundred thirty words a minute,” Roy says. “I was in the army, but I was stuck in an office.”

“Oh,” I say, and nod eagerly. My pigtails flop against my shoulders like paintbrushes.

“I’ve got a lot to learn,” Roy says to me. “You know that. I’m not perfect. Not even close!”

I smile and nod some more.

“Well, better find the charcoal and get it going,” he says. “This will cheer up your sister. Maybe even your mother.”

“And me too,” I say.

“And you too,” says Roy. “Go in and talk to her, will you? See what you can do?”

This type of assignment makes me feel like I possess the key to our family’s happiness, so I head straight inside while Roy fires up the grill. In the garden, near the faucet for the hose, I pass the bed of gray rocks that look like brains. They get wet whenever we water the yard because the faucet drips on them. Mom collected them in Utah. When I was younger and we lived in Long Beach, Mom had the rocks next to our steps there, too. I remember looking at them and thinking how great they were, and saying to Mom, When I grow up I want to be a geologist, just like you. And Mom said, Silly girl, you don’t have to be what I am, you know. And I remember that I said, in terrific confusion,
I don’t?

We have some things to be proud of here. In our dining room is a bowl, and in the bowl are some orange petrified disks Mom calls
crinoids.
Crinoids are a life form that took over the world in the Paleozoic era, and Mom used to collect petrified bits of them, all over the Southwest. She has hundreds of pieces of crinoid stems but has never found a prized crinoid
head.
I like grabbing handfuls of them and rattling them like dice, which makes Mom say, “Stop shaking my crinoids!” which is funny.

In our kitchen, in the pantry, are about ten paint-can-sized containers of liquid cane syrup, which my grandmother Dr. Frost used to send us every year for Christmas. She likes doing things like boiling cane and making syrup in her spare time, but she doesn’t send it anymore. Not since the falling out, two years ago and counting. Every so often, Mom pries open a can with a screwdriver and harvests the sugar crystals that form continually near the lid. The crystals are in a clump the size of a piece of candy, and we sit on the cool kitchen floor and hold the sticky crystals and chew them up. Then we seal up the cans for next time, and sometimes, when she’s doing this, she seems very sad.

“Mom?” I whisper, at her door.

“Come in,” she says. This is a good sign: she’s talking!

It’s dark because the blinds are old and yellowy, and her green blanket covers her like sod. Except for the Seth Thomas clock humming on the nightstand, it’s a silent world, away from our neighborhood and every little clang outside. Once, when Mom was upset and I was sent in on a mission like this, I found her staring at the ceiling in a way that made me think, for a moment, she wasn’t breathing anymore. I said, “Mom?” and she didn’t answer. I really overreacted. I heard a roar in my ears like a waterfall and fainted onto the floor.

Today she pats the bed on Roy’s side. I climb up and lay my head on his pillow.

“What’s going on out there?” she mumbles.

“We’re making a barbecue,” I tell her.

“Do we have anything?”

“Hot dogs.”

“Don’t ever eat them while rooting for a team at a baseball game,” she says. “I knew a boy who choked on one and died.”

“I know.”

On my mother’s nightstand is a moth-eaten buff-colored Steiff lion cub that Dr. Frost gave her when she was a girl, which Mom uses now as a pincushion. Full of pins and needles from head to tail, it makes me mad every time I see it. I say, “Hey, is today the day I can pull out the pins?”

She rolls over and looks at it. “What should I use instead?”

I don’t think animals should be used as pincushions, even Kathy’s blind animals. For some reason she always pulls the eyes off every animal she gets. All these creatures with empty sockets or scabby old glue where the eyes should be.

“Don’t we have a
real
pincushion?”

“Probably,” Mom says. “I don’t know why I started that.”

She’s warming up, so I’m quick to say, “Sorry about that thing last week.”

“What thing?”

“The thing at school.”

“Mmm,” she says. “Good. I was hoping you’d regret it.”

“I do.”

“I was hoping you weren’t embarking on a life of crime.”

“I’m probably not,” I say.

“But what an old battle-ax!” she says.

“Yeah!” I laugh.

“And is that her real name?” Mom says. “
Wrist?
What kind of name is that?”

I’m laughing really hard now. “She’s a creep!” I scream. “A creepy old wrist!”

Suddenly, Mom frowns. I’ve noticed this before. The happier I become, the faster her good humor drains away. “What, is Roy doing all the work out there alone?”

“No, it’s almost ready.” Then I say, “Mom, do you think Roy wants people to think he’s not my stepfather?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you think he wants them to think he’s my father?”

“He doesn’t care what people think. What are you getting at?”

“I’m just saying, should I be telling people he’s not, so they don’t think it?”

“Why wouldn’t you want them to think it?”

I feel confused now. “I don’t mind if they think it, I’m just wondering if
Roy
wants them to think it.”

“I’m not going to live my life trapped by what anyone in this neighborhood thinks about
anything
!” Mom says. “Now come on, up up up,” she says, as if she’s been the one tending to me.

A barbecue it is. The hot dogs grilled with black stripes, just right. Mom up and going, her regular self, our queen. Kathy leapfrogging all over the grass. “Look!” she calls. “I’m on a lily pad, look!” We play catch after dinner with a red rubber ball, which Mom likes to see. “I’m so happy you girls have each other,” Mom often says. I see my little sister across the yard, trying to catch the ball as if her life depends on it, and wonder if she’s actually having fun. I like it better when we’re not trying to prove our sisterliness. But the twilight lingers until late, the crickets chirp merrily, and the smell of other barbecues in the neighborhood doesn’t rip us in two with loneliness, at least not tonight.

That fall, the Footes start the construction of an addition to their house: a family room in every sense of the word. For Mr. and Mrs. Foote, there will be a wet bar. For Mr. Foote, there will be an enormous closet, with special racks and fixtures to hold his various pieces of sports equipment. For Mrs. Foote, rather than the rickety card tables of yore, there will be a big glass table for her jigsaw puzzles and bridge games. Plus a built-in sewing table and ironing board, a window seat with a telephone, a toy chest, a flagstone fireplace, and a huge console color TV.

It takes four months for everything to be completed, from the pouring of the foundation to the first drinks poured at the bar. I’m over there, playing with Leslie and some other kids, the day they christen the new room. They’re having a spontaneous little party. Neighbors are popping in, bringing bottles of Beefeater and Gilbey’s and Johnnie Walker to stock the new bar. Mr. Foote takes me aside and says, “Why don’t you bring your folks over for a look?”