A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (17 page)

It was only with the coming of Sunday night that the panic and the gloom set in, when the sun went down and the guests started to arrive and Candida didn’t come back.

The more voices I heard crowding into the living room up the short flight of stairs from my room, the worse it would become.

My parents had no idea how seriously I took my Sunday night trauma.

“Mommy,” I’d say at bedtime in a worried voice, “I think I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

“You just miss Didi,” she’d respond offhandedly. It was the nature of my mother to be lackadaisical, disorganized, and lighthearted. I wanted her to take me seriously but nothing I could say or do, short of really hurting myself, worked.

She’d ask offhandedly, “Did you brush your teeth?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl. It’s very important to brush your teeth.”

I never brushed my teeth. Later, it was the same with homework.

“Did you do your homework?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

There was no such thing as negative reinforcement in my family. If, for attention, I responded, “No, I didn’t do my homework,” her reaction was also indifferent. “Well, don’t you think it’s about time you did?” she’d say, and immediately move on to something else, while she sent me off to my room.

“You want to be thrown to the sharks tonight?” she’d ask me on Sunday night, since my parents were the ones who put me to bed.

“Oh
yes!”

My mother clasped my hands and my father my feet, and they swung me, One, Two, Three, into my big double bed. This was called throwing Channe to the sharks, and although it only lasted a moment, it was a most exciting event.

“If you can’t sleep, don’t worry about it. Look at a book. If you
really
can’t sleep, come upstairs and lie on the couch,” my mother said.

Which I invariably did, dragging my blanket behind me. I waited a few hours, which was the appropriate amount of time. Anything short of that would have angered my parents.

The grown-ups looked on in glassy-eyed wonderment. “Is this healthy?” they’d whisper. “Are you sure you shouldn’t send her back to bed?”

“What the hell?” I’d hear my father say. “She’ll fall asleep on the couch in two minutes.”

Later in the night, he’d carry me back to my bed.

My parents worried, but not excessively, about this bad habit of mine. It was as I grew older and continued these Saturday night tantrums that they began to show real concern. Meanwhile, my brother Billy had fallen quite naturally into the rhythm of our lives. Now we had two of everything, but only one Candida, whom I would not share with him.

I turned seven, eight, nine, and still could not sleep on Sunday nights. My parents had hoped that Billy’s presence would alleviate my feelings of loneliness and my attachment to Candida, but he only turned me into a jealous, raving lunatic. My mother had taken to favoring Billy because I seemed stronger on the outside, more outspoken, more controlling—and I had Candida on my side, who protected me fiercely against him. I came to cling to Candida in an even more desperate way.

At ten, I was still sucking my thumb and throwing tantrums on Saturday nights. My father, checking in on Billy and me one night, found Candida asleep in my bed. His rage was so enormous it engulfed the room like a sudden fire.

Candida awakened terrified. My father had thrown the covers back and was pulling her out of my bed by both arms. With curses and brandishing fists, he chased her from my room into her own. She locked herself in while my father kicked and pounded on the door.

“DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOU’RE MAKING A MESS OF HER? I’M SICK OF IT! YOU’RE FIRED!”

“Bill—” I heard my mother mumble behind him. I had barely noticed her before that; she’d faded completely in the presence of my father’s wrath.

“YOU SHUT UP! AND
YOU!”
He kicked Candida’s door. “I WANT YOU OUT OF HERE BY THE CRACK OF DAWN! DO YOU HEAR ME? NO MORE FUCKING AROUND!”

Once he’d stormed off, my mother in tow, I tiptoed to Candida’s door and knocked, crying out in a tiny voice, “Didi! Didi! Let me in!”

Candida was sobbing, too frightened to move.

Suddenly Billy was standing in the doorway of his room—the old nursery that stood between Candida’s room and mine—barefooted, half-asleep, and blinking at me, stupefied.

I hated him at that moment for being so independent, never needing anybody, for being able to sleep anywhere, anytime, as soon as you told him to lie down.

“Go away!” I said, glaring at him. I collapsed in a ball at the foot of Candida’s door, and wept. He stood over me for a long time. Finally, I fell asleep. In the morning, Candida found me curled up like a cat on her rubber welcome mat.

She began to pack her bags.

“But where are you going to go?” I asked, wringing my hands. I was trying to think fast—what could I say to my father to convince him to change his mind?

She shed the largest tears I’d ever seen; they were like clear marbles rolling from her eyes. Her face was set, and she was biting her lips so that her mouth twisted downward in one thin curving line.

She packed all the gifts my mother had given her—the shoes, the fancy Italian handbag, the wool sweaters. At the bottom of her suitcase she’d laid out all my chefs d’oeuvre from art class, categorized by year.

My father was just waking up about then. More than a little hung over, he couldn’t remember exactly what had been said. He put on a robe and came down to the back of the apartment.

He stood in Candida’s doorway for a moment. I glared at him, paralyzed with hatred. He cleared his throat and said, “Don’t go.” He insisted that he had not intended to be cruel although he knew we both thought so—but that my well-being was at stake.

“She’s not growing up normally because she’s too attached to you,” he said regretfully. “And you’re the grown-up here. You have to take responsibility. Channe, leave us alone, will you?”

I left the room. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about and at that moment found him to be the cruelest, most awful, most unloving person in the world.

“There won’t be a next time, Didi,” I heard him say as I closed the door, his voice grave and sad.

I only recall one further occasion in which Candida fell asleep in my bed. It was a spring night, and a terrible lightning storm swept through the city. My mother, to avoid another explosion, alone came to check on us when my parents got home.

“Vite!”
I heard her whisper as she shook Candida awake.
“Vite
, go back to your own room before Monsieur finds out!”

Candida left in a hurry, mumbling, “
Merci, Madame
.”

My mother sat down beside me.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Channe,” she said, shaking her head.

“Stay with me till I fall asleep,” I asked, without much hope.

“I’ll stay for a little while. Your daddy’s waiting for me.” After a moment, she added, “If he catches her in here again he’s going to send her back to Portugal. Don’t you understand that? What’s wrong with you?” She sounded worried, the way she did when I had a fever.

“It was the storm,” I said flatly. “We were scared.”

“She’s just a little girl,” my mother said to herself. And turning to me, said, “Just like you.”

Soon after that, Candida developed an allergy that made her eyes swell up so that she couldn’t open them. The family doctor tested her for everything by giving her little shots in the forearm. The only elements her skin reacted to were feathers and dust, and the reactions were in no way compatible with the swelling of her eyes. The doctor told her the allergy appeared to be psychosomatic, and suggested she find another, less trying line of work. Candida told him that this was simply impossible and would not hear another word. She began to sleep with ice packs over her eyes and stuff her pillows with synthetic sponge instead of feathers.

Then, while cleaning a shelf, she smashed a magnificent Roman amphora my father had brought up from the sea on a scuba diving expedition. She cried bitterly over her clumsiness. She had hit the amphora with her hip, she told us, and it had slipped off the shelf and shattered on the floor.

Candida hid in the kitchen, weeping and wringing her hands in a dish towel, while in the dining room Billy and I sat quietly and watched our father try to put the amphora back together. He laid the jagged, ancient, sea-bleached pieces of clay out on a newspaper, and sat at the head of the table, staring at them hopelessly.

“See these tiny worms?” he asked us, holding up a large fragment. The worms looked like bloodless veins on the smooth, beige surface. “These worms are so so old the sea turned them into part of the clay.” He said this without emotion, although a tear, which he ignored, dropped out of his eye.

“You know what I believe? I believe people do things subconsciously on purpose. Like when people get hit by a car when life’s not going their way. Now, Didi knew how much this meant to me. Diving for it, bringing it up; it’s part of my being a man and all that kind of crap, but I was damn proud of this thing.

“It’s irreplaceable,” he added flatly. “But I’m just not going to get upset.”

“Didi’s real upset, Daddy,” I said quickly.

“I know. I know she is. But I’ll tell you something. She thinks her life is hard because of me. She doesn’t have control of things the way most grown-ups do. See, I make all the decisions around here.