I only bought one, she said. I think. Unless for some reason it was on sale.
We all shrugged in unison. I brushed my teeth with extra paste and went to bed. This incident would’ve been filed away in non-memory and we would just have had clean teeth for longer, except that in the morning there was a new knickknack on the living room side table, a slim abstract circle made of silver, and no one had any idea where it came from.
Is it a present? asked our mother with motherly hope, but we children, all too honest, shook our heads.
I don’t know what that is, I said, picking it up. It felt heavy, and expensive. Cool to the touch. Nice, Hannah said.
My mother put it away in the top of the coat closet. It was nice, but it felt, she said, like charity. And I don’t like too many knickknacks, she said, eyes elsewhere, wondering. She went to my grandmother and brought her a lukewarm cup of tea, which Grandma accepted and held, as if she no longer knew what to do with it.
Drink! my mother said, and Grandma took a sip and the peppermint pleased her and she smiled.
Happened again the next evening when, while setting up for a rare family dinner, my mother stood, arms crossed, in front of the pantry.
Lisa, she said, you didn’t go to the market, did you?
Me?
Hannah?
No.
John?
No.
Grandma never shopped. She would get lost in the aisles. She would hide beneath the apple table like a little girl. Our mother, mouth twisted to the side in puzzlement, found soup flavors in the pantry she swore she never would’ve considered buying. She held up a can of lobster bisque. This is far too bourgeois for me, she said. Wild rice and kidney bean? she said. Lemongrass corn chowder?
Yum, yelled Dad from the other room, where he was watching tennis.
Hannah paused, placing spoons on napkins. I don’t really like soup, she said. I shook my head. Not me, I said. I definitely hate soup.
Our mother tapped her fingers against the counter. What is going on? she asked.
Hannah lined up the spoon with the knife. We’ve been backwards robbed, she said solemnly.
I laughed, but her eyes were serious.
All’s I know is, she said, I did not buy that soup.
Neither did I, said Mom.
Neither did I, called Dad from the other room.
I could tell I was still the main suspect, just because I seemed the most interested in all of it, but as I explained repeatedly, why would a person lie about bringing food and new knickknacks into the house? That is nice. That is something to get credit for.
Dad cooked up the corn chowder after he found an enormous piece of gristle in his mustard chicken. We all watched him closely for choking or poisoning, but he smiled after each spoonful and said it was darned good and very unusual. Like Southwestern Thai, he said, wiping his mouth. Like … the empress meets Kimosabe, he said. Like … silver meets turquoise, he said, laughing. Like … We all told him that was enough. Hannah checked the inside of the can for clues. After dinner, Dad collected water glasses from the rooms, singing.
That night, I kept a close eye on the back door, but it stayed locked; I even fixed a twig at its base to see if it got jigged during the night, but in the morning, all was just as before. I was walking to the bathroom to get ready for school when Mom cried out, and I ran over, and she was standing over the kitchen table, which held an extra folded newspaper. Hannah found a third pewter candlestick that matched the previous two, standing tall in the bookshelf. We ate our breakfasts in silence. Although getting robbed would be bad, there was nothing appealing about getting more items every day, and I felt a vague sense of claustrophobia pick up in my lungs, like I might get smothered under extra throw pillows in the middle of the night. And we couldn’t even sell the new stuff for extra cash, because everything we got was just messed up enough to make it unappealing—the pewter candlestick was flaking into little slivers, and the silver circle thing had a subtle, creepy smell.
For the first time in my life, I cleaned my room after school. I threw out tons of old magazines and trash and dumb papers for school with the teacher’s red pen stating: Lisa, we all know you can do better than this. While cleaning, I found a new mug on my side table, with a picture of dancing cows holding Happy Birthday balloons. It could only have been purchased by Hannah, but when I showed it to her she started to cry.
They’re trying to kill us! she said, sobbing, wiping her nose on her T-shirt.
Who? How? How are they trying to kill us?
The people bringing this stuff in.
But who’s bringing it in? I asked. We’ve been home the whole time.
Ghosts, she said, eyes huge. She stared at the mug. It’s not even your birthday, she said, not for months and months.
I stuck the mug in the outside trash can, along with the extra newspaper. I kept my eyes on all the doors. The twig stayed put.
We had a respite for a week, and everyone calmed down a bit and my mother went to the market and counted how many cans, so she’d know. We ate the food we bought. We stared at the knickknacks that represented our personalities. All was getting back to normal until the next Sunday, when Hannah opened the towel closet and screamed at the top of her lungs.
What? We ran to her.
The towel closet had towels in it. Usually it had small thin piles—we each had a towel and were expected to use it over four days for all towel purposes, and there’d be a big towel wash twice a week, one on Thursday, one on Sunday. We never stuck to the system, and so generally I just used my towel as long as I possibly could, until the murky smell of mildew and toothpaste started to pass from it onto me, undoing all the cleaning work of the previous shower.
Now the towel closet was full, not of anything fluffy, but of more thin and ugly towels. Tons of them. At least ten more towels, making the piles high.
Well, I said. I guess we can cut the Thursday-Sunday wash cycle.
My mother went off to breathe in a paper bag. Hannah straightened taller, and then put one towel around her hair and another around her body, a very foreign experience in our family.
I’m going to just appreciate the gifts, she said, even though her face looked scared. I’ve always wanted to use two at once, she said.
At school the next week, it was past Halloween and we had to bring in our extra candies for the poor children of Glendora. Bags and bags came pouring in, and aside from candy, I brought in an extra bag of stuff full of soup cans and knickknacks I’d salvaged from the trash. Everyone in the family felt funny about it; maybe it was like passing on something toxic. But at the same time, throwing out whole unopened cans of lobster soup struck my mother as obscene. How often does a homeless woman who lives nowhere near salt water get lobster? she asked, hands on hips, as I packed up the bag. We nodded. We liked how her guilt looked in this form of benevolence. I repeated it to my teacher. It’s not a Snickers, I said, but it’s got a lot more protein.
I believe I saw my teacher take that soup can for herself. I watched her closely that week, but she seemed fine, and my dad had never had a single negative symptom from his lemongrass corn chowder. I didn’t eat any Halloween candy. I didn’t want anything from anyone else.
I got a note from the shelter saying my bag was the best.
Hannah got a boyfriend. She didn’t tell anyone, but I could tell because she was using so many towels, making the bathroom a pile of towels, and for some reason I knew the towels were happening because of a boy. Why did she need to be so dry all the time? I asked her about it, when she came home for dinner and looked all pretty with her cheeks bright like that. I had to set the table because she was late, and she apologized and said she’d take dish duty for two days.