The Ditto List (15 page)

D.T. glanced around the room. They were alone, so it was all right to lie or be foolish or even wrong. “Well,” he began, “some of these
are
pictures of people. They're just different
kinds
of pictures. They're called Expressionists, these painters. Abstract Expressionism, is what this kind of painting is.”

“What's that mean?”

“Well,” D.T. foundered, remembering the days when he had stubbornly waded through Rosenberg's criticism, determined to learn enough of the lingo to be a factor at cocktail parties. Now he recalled nothing remotely salient. “It means the painter tries to express what's
essential
about a person, what the person is really
like
, without actually painting exactly how the person
looks
. See, like over there. That picture's called ‘Nude Number Nine.' You know what a nude is, right?”

“Jeez, Daddy. Michele paints nudes all the time.”

“She does? Who …? Well, this painter thinks he's captured the real meaning of the nude he's painted by making those stripes and swirls: He thinks you can understand what's important about that nude by looking at the design and color.”

“But, Daddy. I can't even tell if it's a man or a woman.”

“Maybe the painter didn't think that was important, whether it was a man or a woman. Maybe he thought other things were.”

“Things like what?”

“Well, see those swirls? They're kind of wild, aren't they? Crazy. Maybe that's what's most important about that nude. That it's a crazy person.”

“I think it's kind of important whether it's a man or a woman, Daddy.” Her lips twisted with a scorn that would one day wound any male who faced it.

“It usually is important, sugar, I agree. But maybe not this time.”

“Daddy?”

“What?”

“What's the most important thing about you?”

“That I'm your daddy, of course.”

“Really?”

“You bet.”

“That's not what Michele says it is.”

“What does Michele say it is?”

“Michele says you're not happy. She says you're very sad because you're not what you wanted to be when you grew up and that
that's
the most important thing about
you
.”

D.T. reeled away from his daughter and toward an imitation Calder. “She does, huh?”

“Is she right, Daddy? Are you sad all the time?”

“No, honey. I'm not sad all the time. I'm not sad right now. I'm
happy
. In fact, you tell Michele I'm just as happy as she is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure. Why did Michele tell you that, anyway?”

Heather knit her brow. “Because I asked her why you never came to see both of us together and Michele said it was because I made you happy and she didn't. She said almost everything in the whole world but me makes you sad, and you work so hard because if you stopped working you'd just start thinking about how sad you were. Is that right, Daddy? Does Michele make you sad? Is that why you got a divorce from us?”

D.T. moved to where he could drape an arm across the thin ledge of his daughter's shoulders and draw her to him and at the same time hide the hand that wiped his eyes.

His thoughts bludgeoned him as they moved through the rest of the silly museum. Finally, the excursion ended in the tiny gift shop. D.T. offered to buy Heather a print to hang on the wall of her room. She clapped her hands and looked through a pile of them and selected an El Greco. When he asked her why she picked that one she said it reminded her of him. Quickly, he asked where she wanted to go for lunch.

“Can we go to McDonald's? Please? Pretty please? Michele
never
lets me go to McDonald's. Can we? Huh?”

D.T. reviewed every single thing he had ever heard about the place, then concurred, determined even at the risk of nutritional imbalance to deliver something more than Michele for once. Better anything than a mimic or a bore. They got in the car and found some arches that were golden, like the day.

They filled themselves noisily, amid scores of others exactly as happy as themselves. As he watched Heather eat something called a McNugget, D.T. again marvelled at her existence, then despaired at the sociological likelihoods that lay ahead of her. She was such a complex stimulus to him. The morning of her birth he had cried with pleasure for the first and only time. The night of her raging fever he had looked to God as something other than a source of blame. Yet since the divorce he had easily convinced himself that Heather was better off by his absence, that greater proximity would have surely infected her with one of the several afflictions that caused him to drag through life as though his brain were a burden, not a tool.

“Daddy?” Heather asked, her mouth full of McNugget.

“What, honey?”

“See that girl over there? By the plant?”

“Yes.”

“Her daddy tried to kill himself. Do you know how?”

“How?”

“He cut himself on the arm and almost all his blood ran out. So they put some back in before he died.”

“Who told you that?”

“She did.” Heather extended her arm. “Guess who gave me this watch.”

He sagged with relief at the
non sequitur
. “Who? Michele?”

“Nope. George.”

“It's a nice watch.”

“It's okay. Jill Anderson has one with a diamond on it. And Timmy Fredericks has one with a whole
computer
in it.”

He chuckled at this demonstration of the foolishness of wealth. “How do you like George, Heather? Do you and he have fun?”

“Sure. Lots.”

“What do you do?”

“Oh, things.”

“What kind of things?”

“Go places.”

“What places?”

“The zoo. The movies. The park. Places like that.”

D.T. sighed. It seemed he had an understudy.

George. The wedding wasn't that far off. Maybe he should try to do something about it before it was too late. Maybe he should talk to George, to make sure his visitation rights would not be restricted. Or maybe he should keep his smart mouth shut.

“What are we going to do now?” Heather asked after her last gobble of an ordinary cookie made divine by its packaging.

“I don't know,” D.T. admitted. “What would you like to do?”

“Can we go see Barbara?”

He thought of Barbara and of Bernie. Tasting wine; perhaps tasting each other. “Not today, honey.”

“Why not?”

“Barbara's busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Retaliating.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means she's out of town. How about a movie?”

“Which one?”

They talked it over. Heather opted for a special effects monstrosity she had seen six times previously, each with a different adult. Out of things to ask, afraid of what might be asked of him, D.T. abandoned two and a half hours of his judicially allotted parental opportunity to the creators of a glorified cartoon with less story line than a single panel of
Family Circus
. By the time the closing credits wound across the frame of his vision he was frantically planning their next activity.

Outside the movie house, the sun squeezed his eyes like oranges and their juice threatened to spill down his cheeks. He grasped his daughter's hand and led her to the car. “You want to ride around a while?” he asked. “Go out in the country and look at some cows or something?”

“Can we go by the lake?”

“Sure.”

They drove for miles, gazing upon the bucolic edges of the city in what D.T. hoped was a rapt silence rather than an enervating boredom. They saw crops growing and animals feeding and solitary people working at what they worked at every day of their lives. D.T. began to think of seeking out a place to buy. An acreage. Trees, grass, maybe a creek or a pond. He would grow sunflowers, grapes, berries; make his own wine. Heather would spend all summer with him; they would have time to really get to know each other. He could get a goose for protection, a goat for milk, chickens for eggs. Maybe even a black-faced sheep, just for fun, and a dog for Heather. Excited, he glanced at his watch and reluctantly headed back to town, his wake strewn with future plans.

“Daddy?” Heather asked as he approached the house.

“What, honey?”

“What do you do, exactly?”

“You mean my business?”

“Uh huh.”

“I'm a lawyer. You know that.”

“Michele says you help people get divorces.”

“That's true.”

“That doesn't seem like a very nice thing to do, Daddy. Why don't you get a different job? Why don't you start doing something nice?”

“Like what?”

“Like, ah, making ice cream, maybe? Timmy Fredericks' daddy makes ice cream.”

“Ice cream causes cavities.”

SEVEN

I like it when we go places, Daddy,” Heather had said after he'd returned her. “Even that funny museum.”

“I do, too,” he'd responded. And smiled. And hugged her. But their day had ended in a stillness cured only by Mirabelle's heavy voice and embracing flesh, a stillness that failed to mask D.T.'s relief at being able to deposit the responsibility for Heather's future on the lovely portico of a lovely mansion in a lovely neighborhood in which he did not reside. With a kiss, a pat, and a predictable pang of guilt, D.T. had left his only child to grow another week without him.

Now he searched out house numbers in the fading light of evening, numbers pasted to facing rows of bungalows that ranged from crumbling slums to elaborate objects of residential art. It was what the realtors would call a “transition” neighborhood, in which storybook colors and precisely planted flowers vied with shattered windows and rotting shingles to see which would claim the block. D.T. had grown up in a similar neighborhood, amid a similar struggle, in a house that fell somewhere between the extremes of care he was driving through.

His parents had been neither idlers nor artists but workers—his father a grocer with his own store and thus his own prison, his mother a seamstress whose stitches had gathered the pleats and tucks of every formal gown in a town that rarely had a call for formality beyond the New Year's ball at a club that refused membership to coloreds and to Jews, a club to which his parents did not belong. Both of them had spent far more time trying to raise up those beneath them than to climb to those above. Now his father was dead from a stopped heart and his mother lay bedridden with a broken hip, dependent upon people other than her only child for everything but breath. Some day soon he would have to visit her again. Some day before she died he and she would have to share, for one last time, a room and a past and the prospect of a future that would surely disappoint them. Perhaps that was the precise definition of middle-age: when you were as worried about your parents as you were about your offspring.

He stopped at a sign, calculating that Esther Preston lived in the next block. The visit with her would be a painful waste, and she would end up believing that he had somehow cheated her by not being what she needed. It had happened to him before, with clients to whom he was useless but strained to be otherwise.

He hesitated longer than necessary at the stop sign, then spurted rapidly ahead and parked in front of the appointed number. By the time he got out of the car he was feeling better. Perhaps his visit would not be hopeless after all—perhaps in Heather's lexicon it would be defined as something nice.

The Preston house had a blue composition roof and red siding that had begun to blister. It was so small it seemed suitable for a prize in a board game. An ornamental olive tree grew into ten feet of space beside the front walk. Along the foundation were marigolds and zinnias and, at the corner, a box elder bush. The lush lawn seemed extravagantly tended, given the purported handicap of the occupant.

D.T. pressed the bell and waited; pressed it once again and waited longer, and began to hope he had acquired an excuse to leave. Then the door opened noiselessly and he lowered his eyes.

She was sitting in a wicker wheelchair whose yellowed woven back arced above her like a halo. Hands folded, eyes raised, lips smiling, she seemed without affliction but for the narrow band of cloth that passed above her eyes and lashed her head to the high back of the chair. She was younger than he'd pictured, thin and frail. Gray streaks marbled her brown hair. Her flesh bore the etch of age, but her kinetic lips and eyes diverted him from the sags and wrinkles that advanced on them.

“Mr. Jones?” she asked through the smile.

D.T. nodded. “Mrs. Preston, I presume.”

“Of course. Won't you come in? And it's Esther. Please.” Her voice was firm but slightly slurred, as though she were fatigued or flirting. Her dress was candy-striped and festive. She unclasped her fingers and seemingly without effort rolled herself back out of his way. The tires of the ancient chair were as black as licorice and were crumbling like cake.

He entered her house. The air was viscous with the scents of starches. D.T. was reminded of his father's store, his mother's kitchen. “Please follow me,” Mrs. Preston said, and pushed herself easily into the living room. She seemed to sail before him, as though she were only an idea.

The living room was only slightly larger than the foyer. The ceiling was low and gray, the walls an eggshell white. Here and there little wooden niches gleamed of varnished pine and sheltered knick-knacks. The bulb in the center of the ceiling sparkled starlike through cut glass. The floor was polished hardwood. Strips of rubber runners crossed it like canals of black water.

There was a single place for him to sit, a speckled horsehair divan with doilies pinned to its arms. Across from the divan were an iron floor lamp that had once burned oil and a round marble-topped table with a book and a box of tissues on it. Between the table and the lamp was space to park her chair.