The Rules List went up the next morning.
I think I already mentioned that when you came into the house the first thing you saw was a staircase going up to where the bedrooms were. The side of the staircase formed a passageway that led to the kitchen, and was paneled with wood. Mr. Stenner had decorated the wood paneling with black-and-white enlargements of pictures he had taken, though he was afraid Mr. Mauley would come in one day and tell him to take the pictures down.
Mr. Mauley had come around on New Year’s Day to wish us a happy new year, and while he was in the house, he’d gone up to my room to check on a storm window that was flapping. He’d noticed that Mr. Stenner had put up a mobile I’d made, and he started fussing and fretting about making holes in the ceiling, and about how difficult it was to repair ceilings when tenants put holes in them. Mr. Stenner very slowly and precisely told Mr. Mauley that the mobile was made of string and cardboard and was light enough to be held to the ceiling with a simple straight pin. Mr. Stenner had, in fact, very carefully and gently hammered the straight pin into the ceiling for me, being careful not to damage anything up there — as if a straight pin could damage anything. He had in fact bent fourteen pins before he got one to go in right.
Mr. Mauley hemmed and hawed and harrumphed a lot, but I think he got Mr. Stenner’s message about not bugging us over a simple little pinhole in the ceiling. But Mr. Stenner was worried now about the photographs he’d put up on the side of the staircase. Anyway, that’s where the Rules List was. Mr. Stenner had taken down one of the photographs, the one I loved of the swan, and had put the Rules List up in its place. The list was hand-lettered. He was pretty good at stuff like that, though not as good as Dad. This is what it looked like:
They called me down for breakfast, and the very first thing I saw on the way to the kitchen was the list. I read it silently, and then I went into the kitchen. Mr. Stenner was at the stove, making pancakes. Mr. Stenner considered pancakes quote a family tradition unquote. All he knew how to cook was pancakes. My father could cook sea bass and quiche and all sorts of things. In fact, before the split, one of the few times my parents didn’t argue was when they were planning and cooking a meal together. Mr. Stenner made pancakes every Sunday morning. That’s because he used to make pancakes for his sons every Sunday morning. The one thing he didn’t realize was that his sons really were his family whereas I was not his family. Mom wasn’t either. So the quote family tradition unquote was wasted on us. Or at least on me.
They were playing it cool, both of them. They knew I’d seen the list, knew I’d read it, and were waiting for me to make the first comment. I didn’t disappoint them.
“What do you mean swear words cost ten cents each?” I asked.
“If you swear,” Mr. Stenner said, “we’ll deduct ten cents from your allowance for each...”
“Why?”
“Because it isn’t nice for little girls to use the kind of language you’ve been using,” Mom said.
“Language like what?”
“You know what,” Mr. Stenner said.
“Give me an example of the words I can’t use,” I said.
Mr. Stenner looked me straight in the eye and said, “Shit.”
“Okay,” I said, and shrugged.
“And I think you know the other words,” he said.
“Can I say them now, just to make sure we re both thinking of the same words? I mean, will it cost me a dime if I say them now?”
“Yes.”
“Then how can I be sure...”
“You can be sure we’re both thinking of the same words,” Mr. Stenner said.
“It didn’t cost you anything,” I said. “When you said...”
“Careful,” he said.
“Can I spell it?”
“No.”
“Well, it didn’t cost you anything.”
“When you get to be forty-three years old, you can say whatever you want, too. Meanwhile, it’ll cost you a dime.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Who says it has to be fair?”
“Huh?”
“Nowhere is it written that grown-ups have to be fair to children,” he said, and flipped a pancake.
“Boy!” I said.
“Right,” he said, and flipped another pancake. He was smiling, the rat.
“And what’s this about doing my own homework? I do do my own homework.”
“Mommy and I do it,” he said.
“You mean because I ask a simple question every now and then?”
“Always.”
“Only every now and then.”
“Always. There are three things going on every time you do your homework, Abby. The first thing is the television set...”
“I don’t even watch it. I just like to hear the voices. Television helps me concentrate.”
Mr. Stenner rolled his eyes.
“It does.”
“No television,” he said.
“Okay, no damn television.”
“And that’s ten cents,” he said.
“Shit,” I said.
“And that’s another...”
“All right, all right!” I said.
“And no doing your homework in the living room. That’s the second thing that’s going on, all the chatter between Mommy and me, which you re just dying to hear. You’ve got the television on, and you’re listening to our conversation...”
“What’s the third thing?”
“The third thing is constantly asking us what a word means, or how to do an arithmetic problem, or where India is...”
“I know where India is.”
“I think you understand what we’re trying to tell you, Abby,” my mother said.
“All right, I’ll turn off the television, all right? But I’ll do my homework down here.”
“No, you’ll do it upstairs in your bedroom. There’s a desk in your bedroom, that’s what desks are for.”
“I like to spread out.”
“No, you just like to be in the middle of things,” my mother said.
“There’s too much happening down here,” Mr. Stenner said. “You can’t possibly concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing when...”
“I promise I won’t ask any more questions while I’m doing my homework, okay?”
“No,” Mr. Stenner said.
“Well, why not? If I turn off the television, and I keep quiet...”
“We want some time alone,” Mr. Stenner said.
“What?”
“I said...”
“I heard what you said. You’re alone every night after I go to bed, what do you mean you...”
“When I get home from work,” Mr. Stenner said, “there are lots of things I want to discuss with Mom, most of them private. If you’re sitting here in the living room, with your books sprawled all over the floor...”
“Well, if you’ve got something private to tell her, why don’t you go upstairs, instead of me?”
“Because you’re the poor, put-upon little kid,” Mr. Stenner said, smiling, “and I’m your mean old stepfather.”
“You’re not my stepfather yet, thank God.”
“I will be soon.”
“You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to save all my homework and do it at Daddy’s when I go to see him. Because when I ask him questions, he always...”
“That’s rule number ten,” Mr. Stenner said.
“Huh?”
“No contests,” he said. “Would you like another pancake?”
“No,” I said. “I hate pancakes.”
Two days before the end of January, they left me with a woman named Mrs. Cavallo while they went down to Haiti for Mom’s divorce. They were only gone overnight, but I must’ve called Dad at least a dozen times while they were gone. Mrs. Cavallo didn’t know what was going on. They had told her about the Rules List, and showed her where it was tacked up to the side of the staircase, but I took the list down the minute they drove off, and when Mrs. Cavallo looked for it I told her the wind probably blew it off the wall while the door was open and they were carrying their bags out. Miraculously, the wind blew it back onto the wall, pushpins and all, just before they got home the next day. Mrs. Cavallo told them I’d been a good girl while they were gone, and she also told them I’d spent a lot of time on the telephone with my father.