Outside the upstairs front window, I could see the line of poplars that swayed in the breeze. Their remaining leaves were golden and peach, and fluttered on their stems. Years ago I had thought that getting away from my mother would be only a matter of time, that fleeing meant taking a car or an airplane, or filling out an application for the University of Wisconsin.
I could hear Jake stir in the kitchen. The creak of the floor under my faux-terra-cotta-tile linoleum. Would he stand at the sink and wash out the mugs? Would he watch the jays and the cardinals in their daily clamor for food underneath the crab apple tree? The views from my windows, whether leaf-turning poplars or birds at their feed, often felt like the farthest distances I’d ever traveled. I tried to imagine the Helen who had taken the wheel from her father that first Christmas vacation when he had driven all the way out in the Olds to get her. “I’ll drive this leg,” I’d said as we headed toward the interstate. “Our road trip,” my father had called it in the years that followed, as it became increasingly clear we would never have another.
I went into the bedroom and quietly closed the door. In the bathroom, I turned on the shower to let the water heat. While standing on the rug in front of the sink, I realized that I was undressing in the way one would if her clothes were caked with winter grime or the remains of heavy yard work. I rolled my pants down carefully to the ground and slipped them over my socks, stepping gingerly out onto the rug, as if, by disturbing the trouser cuffs, the silt of a dead body might escape into the air. I peeled off my socks. On my toenails, I wore my mother’s color-that muted coral I detested-which I had put on two weeks before on a long afternoon during which we watched television together. The sound of the PBS program about stock trading was like a dentist’s drill boring into me while my mother napped in her red-and-white-flocked wing chair.
I was still, I knew, the woman Hamish had wanted to make love to. Still the woman to whom girls at Westmore routinely said, “When I’m old, I want to look as good as you,” not realizing the insult. But whereas I felt my mother had possessed, throughout her life, true beauty, I had always believed that I lived on borrowed time. I knew that the same bones that made my mother a domestic Garbo underpinned my more average looks. My father, though delicate around the eyes, was also long-jawed and bulbous-nosed, and so I had inherited just enough of his qualities to blunt my mother’s. I believed it galled her that a painting of me existed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And I had rushed to point out that it was only my body. “My face wasn’t interesting to Julia Fusk,” I said, trying to please her when I saw on her coffee table a monograph of the exhibit that Mr. Forrest had brought.
The steam from the shower filled the bathroom. I thought of the box of my mother’s slips that I’d stolen from the basement some years before. I had put them in tissue paper in the bottom of a spare bureau in the walk-in closet. Sometimes, I would open the drawer and stare down at the rose-petal pink. It was such a simple thing, the satin piping on the bodice that became the spaghetti straps that looped over her shoulders. The slight swish and sway of the silk around the middle of her body. The tug of it when it met her hips.
I could see the general outline of my body in the fogged-up mirror. Having lost all shyness by having spent my career taking off my clothes in public, I enjoyed how demure the steam made me seem. Quickly, just before stepping in the shower, I leaned into the mirror and drew a smiley face. In the clear spots, I saw my reflection. “Ugly is as ugly does,” my mother would say.
I heard Jake coming into the bedroom as I closed the frosted shower door. The idea of him being so close by after all these years both scared and delighted me.
At some point my father began sleeping in the spare room. Every morning he would wake up and make the bed perfectly as if no one had lain down there the night before, as if the empty bed waited for a never-invited guest. Even I believed this for a very long time until, like my mother, I began to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the house. When my grandfather’s rifles were pulled off the rack, I could hear from my room the popping of the clasp that held the stocks. At least once every few months, I noted this distinctive sound, and in September of my senior year in high school, I decided to investigate.
It was unusually hot for September, and the humidity seemed only to increase after dark. The night noises coming through the open windows made my progress across the hall and past the top of the stairs go undetected. When I reached the spare room, I opened the door as quietly as I could.
“Go back to bed, Clair,” my father said in irritation. He was looking down at the rifle, which lay across his lap in the deep blue of his terry-cloth robe.
“Dad?”
He looked up and came to standing immediately.
“It’s you,” he said.
The rifle dangled from his arm, its barrel pointing toward the ground. Behind him I saw the rumpled sheets of the bed. The pillow, I knew, he had brought in from the master bedroom. The case matched the sheets on my parents’ bed. On the table was a tumbler of orange juice.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m cleaning them,” he said.
“Cleaning them?”
“Guns are like everything else, honey. They need to be cleaned to keep them in working order.”
“Since when do you care about guns?”
“Right.”
“Dad?”
His eyes seemed far away. He would focus on me for a moment and then drift.
“Why don’t you just bring your stuff in here? You’re not fooling anyone.”
“No, honey, that’s silly. I come in here sometimes when I can’t sleep. So I won’t disturb your mother.”
“Are you done with that?” I said, indicating the rifle with the thrust of my chin.
“I can rely on you not to tell your mother about this, can’t I? Her father’s guns are very precious to her, and I wouldn’t want her knowing that I was fooling around with them.”
“But you’re cleaning them, you said.”
“Right.” He nodded his head in agreement with himself, but I was unconvinced.
I could not bring myself to move away from the door and go over to him. Seeing him in the soft clothes of pajamas and terry-cloth robe had always been strange for me. He was up and dressed before I was, and he changed into his pajamas only after I went to bed. On the rare occasions when I saw him like this, I didn’t know how to classify him. He wasn’t the father I knew but more of the caved-in man who had appeared on and off since I was eight years old.
He took the rifle and returned it to its rack, then shut the clasp that held the barrel.
“Someday I’m going to convince your mother to get rid of them.”
He walked over toward the head of the bed, picked up the orange juice, and drank it down all at once.
“Let’s put you to bed, okay?”
We walked out into the hallway and across to my side of the house.
I lay down on my twin bed. “How about a round of waft?” he asked.
And though this was a routine that we had abandoned years ago, I nodded my head. Anything to make my father stay longer in the room. Anything to make him focus back on me.