“Will your husband be paying for this service?” the woman in the business office asked.
“No, he will not,” Mom said. “I just told you we’re separated.” She was beginning to realize where the woman in the business office was going, and she didn’t like it. “I’ve had my own telephone for the past thirteen years,” she said. “I certainly...”
“Yes, but it was in your husband’s name,” the woman said. “He was paying the bills.”
“So what? I was doing the dishes and changing the diapers,” Mom said.
“Have you any credit references?” the woman asked.
Had this been last month, or the month before, Mom could have reeled off at least a dozen credit references, because that was how many little plastic cards she’d carried in her wallet. But my father had cut off all her charge privileges the moment she’d told him she was leaving him. She now told the woman in the business office that she did not at present have any credit references.
“I see,” the woman said. “In that case, we shall require a sixty-dollar deposit from you. Before we can begin service in your name.”
That was when Mom slammed down the telephone receiver with all her might. At dinner that night, Mr. Stenner said, “One of these days the United States is going to declare war on the telephone company.”
3.
Mr. Stenner was in control in the new house because he was the one paying the rent, and so he was the one telling me to put my napkin on my lap and not do this or that. But my father was in control when he picked me up every other weekend after school on Friday, and then brought me back to the house on Canterbury Road after dinner Sunday night. I did not think of that house as home. But I didn’t think of my father’s house as home, either.
I didn’t know where home was.
I knew only that my mother and my father had separated, and that they would never get back together again, and Mom was going to marry Mr. Stenner, who would become my stepfather, and I would have two stepbrothers, who were anyway almost all grown up and wouldn’t be any fun. My mother tried to help me with all this. That’s why she had all those long serious conversations with me. I remember one conversation — she came into the bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed, and I knew immediately it was going to be a serious conversation. Instead of a bedtime story, she was going to start a serious conversation which I needed like a hole in the head.
“Do you remember the first time you met Mr. Stenner?” my mother asked.
“No, I don’t remember,” I said.
“You were just a little girl. You were five years old, I think.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Yes, and he came to the house with Mrs. Stenner for drinks one Sunday afternoon. There were quite a few people there, Abby, but you took to Mr. Stenner right away, and singled him out, and began talking to him.”
“What’d we talk about?”
“Sharks.”
“Sharks?”
“Well, not immediately. First you asked each other what your favorite colors were, and your favorite games, and which television shows you liked to watch, and so on. And then you told Mr. Stenner that you hadn’t gone in the water at Martha’s Vineyard that summer because you were afraid a shark would bite you. You told him you loved to swim, but only in the Koenigs’ pool next door, and then you asked him if he ever swam in the ocean.”
“What did he say?”
“He said yes, he did. And you asked him if he was afraid of sharks, and he said of course he was afraid of sharks, but he liked getting knocked around by the waves, and so he went swimming in the ocean, anyway.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You asked him what would happen if he ever got bit by a shark, and he said, ‘Well, I guess that would be that.’ But you were very persistent. You told him he really shouldn’t swim in the ocean, and he shouldn’t allow Mrs. Stenner to swim in the ocean, either, because if a shark ate either one of them then they’d have to get a new wife or husband. That was when you asked him whether he’d get married again if anything ever happened to Mrs. Stenner.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said yes, he supposed he’d get married again if anything ever happened to her. And then you asked him who he would marry. And he said, ‘Who would you like me to marry, Abby?’ He was flirting with you, I think. I think he was half-hoping you’d say you wanted him to marry you.”
“What did I say?”
“You said something very peculiar. You said, ‘I’d like you to marry Miss Hayes.’ ”
“Who’s that?”
“Hayes was my maiden name,” my mother said.
“I don’t remember saying that,” I said.
“I think you remember saying it,” my mother said.
Maybe I had said it, and wouldn’t admit it, or maybe it hadn’t been as important to me as it had been to Mom and I’d simply forgotten it. You’ve got to realize that before the separation Mr. Stenner was just another person who came to the house every now and then. It wasn’t until after we all began living together on Canterbury Road that he became such a big deal in my life. So whereas Mom insisted I had said that business about Miss Hayes when I was five years old, I wasn’t sure I had. I knew her maiden name was Hayes, of course, because Grandmother Lu was Lucille Hayes, but I doubt very much if I’d have told a perfect stranger (which Mr. Stenner was, after all) that I wanted him to marry my mother, who anyway wasn’t Miss Hayes anymore, but who was Mrs. O’Neill, my father’s wife.
When I was in kindergarten, there was a little girl whose parents were divorced. The first thing she said to me was, “I’m Karin, my parents are divorced.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged.
And in the third grade, there was a little boy who used to cry all the time. I asked him once why he cried so much. He said, “My father lives in a hotel.”
I said, “What’s so bad about that? I was in a hotel once.”
He said, “They’ve got a separation.”
Well, now I had a separation, too, and I didn’t like it. I wanted my mom and my dad to get back together again. I mean, I was glad Mr. Stenner hadn’t turned out to be the kind of man who beats his stepchildren on television or anything like that, but I missed my father, and I wanted Mom to go back to him. As far as I was concerned, “the separation” was responsible for any and all of the ills plaguing my life — like a T-shirt shrinking in the wash, or one of the kids at school calling me a moron. If it weren’t for “the separation,” there’d be no problems in the entire universe. “The separation” was responsible for everything. If a button fell off my coat, I knew the button would not have fallen off if only it weren’t for “the separation.” It was as simple as that. All the promises of marriage, “once Mr. Stenner and I get our divorces,” made no sense at all to me. If they wanted to get divorces, then why didn’t they just go out and get them? Instead of hanging around all the time? And hugging and kissing? And doing whatever they were doing behind their closed bedroom door (as if I didn’t know).
The last time my mother, my father, and I had been a family together was on Thanksgiving Day, when they’d taken me into the city to see the annual parade. We’d had a good time that day. When we got back home, Mom went into the kitchen to get the turkey going, and Dad and I walked in the woods behind the property. There were leaves all over the ground. Dad and I shuffled through them. He told me that one day he was going to design a house made entirely of leaves. I said, “Dad, you can’t build a house of leaves,” and he said, “Oh, no? You can’t, huh?” and he scooped me up in his arms, and we tumbled to the ground, and rolled around in the leaves, laughing.