Lamon took up painting. Lucile paced around in her darkening silk pajamas. Liberty concentrated on her homework.
“For special credit, I’m going to make up a country,” Liberty said. “I’m going to have a page on education and a page on religion and a page on weather. I’m going to make up a flag and a language and I’m going to draw the clothes they wear and their methods of transportation. I’m going to—”
“Oh, can’t you relax,” her mother said.
Liberty was an avid student. She loved school, she loved her teachers. She longed to tell her mother that the flowers depicted on her silk pajamas were four-o’clocks. Four-o’clocks had been one of the answers on her science test. Four-o’clocks hinted at the fathomless mysteries of genetics and fate, dominance and happiness. Liberty refrained from mentioning the four-o’clocks.
One evening during the long spring of the family’s disgrace, Liberty went outside to the picnic table and sat down beside her father who was tracing Elihu Vedder’s The Lair of the Sea Serpent out of an art magazine.
“That’s nice, Daddy,” Liberty said.
The painting was a pleasant landscape of sand dunes, beach, water and brilliant sky. Everything was rendered realistically, even the gigantic griseous lizard slithering toward the sea.
Lamon looked at the painting and then at Liberty. He poured bourbon into a tall orange glass that said FLORIDA THE SUNSHINE STATE on it. On the glass, the sun had a face. It had no nose or ears but it had a big smile and eyes with eyelashes.
“You understand life, don’t you Liberty?”
“I don’t think so, Daddy.”
“You understand that lurking in the heart of each pure, pretty day that is given to us is a snaky, malevolent, cold-blooded, creepy, diseased potentiality.” He patted her head, then cleared the picnic table of brushes and paints and set out plates for supper. It was a warm night with thunder, and the grass was long and yellow. Her father lit the charcoal in the grill and made another brown drink in the happy glass. Liberty went into the house to sharpen her pencils for school the next day. On the patio just to the side of the sliding glass doors was a planter in the form of a ceramic burro pulling a cart. The planter was full of leggy geraniums and the tip of the burro’s left ear. When Liberty had been smaller than she was then, she had sat in front of the burro every morning and attempted to feed him grass.
“Mommy,” Liberty called upstairs, “do you want one hot dog or two?”
“Two,” Lucile answered.
“Potato chips or potato salad?”
“Chips,” Lucile said and descended the stairs, smiling grimly. She wore nylons and heels, her good linen suit and the top to her flowered pajamas. A stole of several minks was draped around her shoulders, and she wore gloves.
“Are you going out, Mommy?” Liberty asked, perplexed.
“Yes, I am,” Lucile said, raising her eyebrows, which had been recently and severely tweezed. “I am going out.” Her thin, annoyed face was rouged, and her neck shone with perfume.
Well, if she is, she is, Liberty thought.
She followed her mother outside and the three of them sat down at the picnic table. Lucile pressed her gloved fingers together and gave a long, rambling, conversational grace that was equal parts prayer, complaint and nostalgia. She complimented God on certain things, expressing her appreciation of night-blooming flowers, the color violet and the vision of the world offered through snorkeling. She recalled Liberty’s birth and her craving, after its accomplishment, for a coffee malted. She remembered a vacation she and Lamon had taken to Mexico in the days when they had money.
“I thought I would have adventures,” her mother said. “I thought I would have experiences and make memories. But all I met there was Mr. Hepatitis. Your father took me all the way to Mexico to meet Mr. Hepatitis.”
This recollection seemed to stop her. She said “Amen,” nodded, opened her eyes, adjusted her mink, and began to eat her hot dogs. She ate ravenously. Ketchup dotted her gloves. The light dimmed and they finished their meal. A child in a house nearby began practicing the trumpet.
“I think we need a change,” Lucile said. She stood up. There were moth holes on the sleeve of her jacket and bun crumbs on her lap.
“Please, darling,” Lamon said. “I’m drunk and unhappy and I’m sure I won’t be able to react as swiftly as I would like.”
Her mother walked in her mink through the warm grass into the garage from which she emerged a moment later with a red six-gallon gas can.
“Oh please, Lucile, please, please, please.” Daddy lay his head on the picnic table.
“Do you have any matches, Lamon?” Lucile asked smiling.
“No, darling, I don’t.” His head was pressed against the picnic table as though glued. “I used them all up lighting the charcoal. There are no matches here or anywhere in the world.”
“Things come to an end,” Lucile said. “You have made us pariahs in this town. There is nothing in this town anymore for us but pity.”
“I bet you haven’t taken your pill,” Lamon said.
“Liberty’s teachers give her A’s out of pity,” Lucile mused.
“Please take your pill, darling, and you’ll go to those nice movies. You know that you enjoy that, darling. It will be like going to a pleasant movie.” Lamon sat up and tipped the ice from his empty glass into his mouth. Lucile turned abruptly and tottered toward the house, tipped toward the weight of the gas can in her right hand.
“Just remember that I love you, Lamon,” she yelled without looking back. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” The sounds of the trumpet ceased. Dogs began to bark. She went into the house.
Liberty hurried in after her. The gas can sat on a wicker love seat at one end of the living room and her mother sat in a chair at the other, smoking a cigarette.
“Mommy,” Liberty said. “What’s the matter? What are you going to do?”
“Do you know about the Buddhists, Liberty?”
“They meditate.”
“What else?”
Liberty chewed strenuously on her thumbnail. “They believe that there’s something other than existence.”
Her mother sighed. “What do they do to themselves sometimes, Liberty?”
“I don’t know,” Liberty said.
“You’ve never understood me,” her mother said.
Liberty, nine years old, bowed her head.
Lucile stubbed out her cigarette and twisted the little scowling minks from her shoulders with a strangling motion that, Liberty thought, must have terminated any illusion of life they might have had left.
“What the Buddhists do upon occasion is immolate themselves, Liberty.” She looked at Liberty expectantly, then sighed. “You’re too young to understand love,” she said.
Things seemed better the following day. The gas can was back in the garage where it belonged, beside the lawnmower. When Liberty returned from school, her father was standing in the backyard at an easel facing a blooming poinciana tree. Liberty approached the canvas, expecting to see a likeness.
“Daddy,” she said after a moment. “That’s a lot of teeth.”
“Fred Huxley’s mouth from memory,” her father said with satisfaction. “I’ve never seen such a mess before or since. He was playing catch with his son and the ball hit him smack in the mouth.”
Liberty wandered into the house and into the kitchen where she went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of 7-Up. Her mother stood washing dishes in the sink. She wore a pair of dazzling white shorts and a clean, blue shirt. Her hair was washed and neatly braided. She seemed happy and relaxed.