I’M NOT LONELY WHEN I’M WITH YOU
It’s all I want to say, but I wash and condition and pull out more in the rinse. I gather it into a loose disc the size of my palm and smush it onto the wall in case she needs it.
THOMAS THE LIBRARIAN has written down some names and numbers on a piece of paper for me. I’m searching them out with the grave intensity of an Indiana Jones type, imagining the reward to be bigger than a bunch of books. It was endearing to watch him do his job—his face wrinkling with thought, writing with one of those little golf pencils. He sends me to Fiction first, then Science/Health/Medicine and Biography, then back around to Poetry. It feels like I’ve been given a map to a foreign city or a set of very complicated instructions. By the time I’m done, my arms and chest ache with the books’ weight.
It would be easier if it were just one book, I say, relinquishing the pile to him.
What book would that be? he asks. His smile is soft and curious. He scans the books, one at a time, dissembling my stack on one side then making a new one on the other.
How to Be , I say, shrugging. How to Get from Here to There . How to Help Yourself … or Others .
Well, here’s a good place to start, he says, and slides them to me.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK I’m sitting on the edge of Emily’s hospital bed, surrounded by pink balloons, pink cards, and a spray of boldly, unnaturally colored flowers in a vase. I made the mistake of talking to Cousin Stacy when she called me the other day, and now it feels like a bunch of people have come over uninvited.
I’ve got an idea for a movie, I tell Emily. She’s tired but awake, quiet.
She sighs, less annoyed than usual, which for her is like saying, Yes, please tell me all about it.
Things keep going wrong, I say.
She nods her head and swallows, a movement she makes look painful. They put a tube down her throat for the anesthesia. It’ll be a week or two before we know for sure how everything went.
But then maybe at the end things start to go right again, I say.
There’s a quiver at the side of her mouth. That’s stupid, she whispers. Her eyes are down.
Why?
Because you can’t just tack a happy ending onto something like that. It’s cheap. It’s not real. She closes her eyes and swallows again.
I regard all the balloons and flowers on the two side tables. Pink, I think. Nobody knows us. I grab a gift mug from behind one of the vases. It’s big and white with pink, looping script on it, filled with candy wrapped in gold, crinkly plastic.
Hey, look at this! I say. I can’t tell in which way I’m trying to cheer her up. The ironic, Can you believe this shit sort of way, or the Hey, believe this way.
She takes it in her hand, reading the inspirational message on the side. No doubt she’s wondering when these words ever worked or what simpleminded soul they might have worked on. She turns the thing over and drops the candy into her lap, rears back, and, despite the bandages, throws the mug across the room. It hits the opposite wall with a ping. I go over and pick it up. It’s mostly fine, save for a spot on the rim, now chipped like a tooth.
I look up at her with golden eyes. Now we’re talking!
I bring the mug back and set it on the table in case she wants to throw it again. Emily doesn’t know, but I made a few phone calls earlier. One to the man she used to be married to and the other to you-know-who. Will’s voicemail voice sounded needlessly chipper, like nothing even close to bad had ever happened to him before. You-know-who was a muffled ghost, her voice startlingly the same, as familiar to me as my mother’s or Emily’s. I don’t know when they’ll get back to me or what will happen when they do, but I’m trying to manage my expectations, to think about it in such a way that any outcome will be desirable. Like this vase of flowers. After the leaves fall off the stalks and the night nurse comes and throws it all away, dumping out the stinky water, I tell myself it won’t be such a big deal.
THE SUMMER FATHER
THE FATHER ARRIVES every dead summer to drive the girls west. No destination named, only a direction and the promise of mesa, mountains, stone-dry heat. Two weeks—the longest uninterrupted time they spend with him all year. They pack sleeping bags and pillows, Roald Dahl books, T-shirts, and bathing suits. It is the four of them in the cab of his truck, the short trailer hitched behind. A tape deck and three tapes. The shift from mother to father is swift. Do you have everything you need? A hug, a hug, a hug, and a wave.
At rest stops the girls imagine a mirror family on the other side of the highway, except they envision a father and a mother, a son or daughter or both at the end of her hand or hands. The girls do not need to say or even think that a father with his daughters is not like a mother with her daughters. At the stops, losing him for minutes, they coalesce, become a team. Three girls among women washing their hands, three girls among women’s bodies, the air thick and hot, the sweet smell of a stranger’s shit. In the lobby they look at state maps set behind glass, the red You Are Here dot. We’ve gone this far, are going to go this far .
In the afternoon, the father gives the oldest a thin fold of bills, and the girls run into a gas station to gather Corn Nuts and Twizzlers, Milk Duds and fun-sized bags of chips. They each choose the same kind so regularly that the father made a song of it. Or the father made the song and the girls oblige it. When they return to the truck he snaps his fingers and whisper-sings, FRI-tos / CHEE-tos / And po-TA-ta chips. They like the way he defines them, even arbitrarily, even through slippery plastic bags of processed corn and sodium. This is who you are, who you can continue to be. He isn’t there at home. He doesn’t know how the middle daughter has been taking hour-long showers at night, how nobody knows what she does in there for all that time. How the oldest, only twelve, came home from the movies with a hickey not two weeks ago, and then sulked at a family party in the backyard, eighty degrees and she red-faced and sweating in a turtleneck. The youngest, the mother has determined, will need braces, despite having quit sucking her thumb last year. He no longer day-to-days it with them, never really did even when he was in the house, and so the jingle. My little munchkins, he says, getting back on the highway, as though tickled at being a father, at having these three separate pieces of him beside him reading books, housing secret desires and preferences each her own. He sets the cruise control and turns on the music, a favorite song with funky piano and brass. Hey, he says, and bobs his head until the youngest and the middle join in. It’s like this, he says, gesturing with his hand, and they mimic him, as obedient as backup singers. The oldest, only twelve, nearly thirteen now, sometimes sullen, sometimes pouting, looks out the window, crosses her arms over her breasts, breasts she’s been hiding under big white T-shirts, breasts whose sudden existence has the father calling the girls’ underwear unmentionables: Don’t forget your unmentionables. I’ve washed your unmentionables. C’mon, the middle says, pushing at the oldest’s shoulder. She hates how the oldest must now be convinced to participate, hates her creeping sense of power, as though her presence were a gift and one to be doled out judiciously. They have to make her forget the girl she’s becoming at school, the girl who quietly gets straight As but who hangs out with the tan, popular girls, is one of the tan, popular girls now, girls getting new bras, girls who let boys suck on their necks in the back row of their small town’s single-screen movie theater. At home her sisters try to coax her into her previous self, an old dress that still fits but which she is sick of. What’s wrong with it? her mother would say. You used to love that dress. C’mon, the middle says, and bumps her again. The middle shakes her shoulders, as if the oldest—only twelve yet moving exponentially beyond her ten-year-old sister—merely forgot how to do it. Cut it out, she replies, and the middle says, Fine, jeez, and keeps dancing. Her movements are more contained, now only pretending to have fun, so as to show the oldest she doesn’t need her.