Marrow (11 page)

The eating house rattles around us, the panes on the windows humming from the pressure within. It agrees with me. The eating house knows what a corrupt deadness my mother has become. The insipid wasteland of a woman who gave her best years to a man who treated her youth like it was a weekend at the casino. It’s seen her invite other men in while leaving her only child out. I feel a camaraderie with the eating house just then—a oneness instead of an oppression. My mother flinches away from the question. She glances at the rattling windows, probably wondering if I can hear it too. So, I pretend that I can’t, allowing my eyes to bore into her sallow skin, making her fidget and squirm in her seat.
Let her think she’s going mad,
I think.
Let her think she’s the only one who can hear the eating house.

“I have half brothers and sisters?”

“Yes.”

“And my father is the mayor?”

“Not anymore. He’s retired now.” Her tongue reaches up to touch her tooth.

“And his … children … he’s close with them?”

I want her to say no. That he’s estranged from those children as well. That he didn’t go to their baseball games, and ballet recitals, and sit around the breakfast table staring into their sleep-crusted eyes every morning.

“Yes,” she says. And that yes is her last and final word on the matter. She stands up, and she looks a hundred years old. She’s to the stairs when I call after her.

“If he comes here again, there will be no more silence from me,” I say. “Let him know.”

I hear the creaking of the stairs as she climbs back to her room. Slowly … slowly.

IT’S SATURDAY
, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I cleaned the bathroom, then called work to see if they had a shift for me to cover. Sandy told me to stay home and live a little, but Judah is spending the weekend with his dad, and life feels dry when he isn’t here. I study the peeling plaster in the living room for what seems like hours before I decide to cook a real meal. My mother has old cookbooks on top of the fridge. I pull them down and flip through the pages, sneezing when the dust crawls up my nose. I find a recipe I like and pull out my mother’s notepad to make a list of the things I’ll need. I’ve never cooked before, but there are a lot of things I’m doing lately that I’m new to. Judah, for example.

“Yo,” I say to the stove. “You alive in there?” I kick the door of the oven with the toe of my boot and hear a crash. I have the eerie feeling that someone is watching me. But my mother is sleeping; I can hear her soft snores from upstairs. I shiver as I lower myself to my haunches and open the oven door. Inside is what looks like a metal box, sitting on a collapsed rack; the rack depresses me. I look over my shoulder just to see if she’s there before pulling it out. Something is behind me; I can feel it. The box is heavy. I carry it to the table, my plans of cooking forgotten. Something shifts inside it—rough and smooth grating together—and suddenly the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.

Why would my mother put a box in the oven? And how long has it been there? I try to remember the last time I saw her cooking. Was it right after she lost her job and stopped leaving the house? I sit with both hands on top of the box and my eyes closed.
Put it back. Put it back. Put it back.
I want to. Hidden things should stay hidden. There are hinges and a latch. I lift the latch. My hands are shaking. My reaction is pathetic, like my body already knows what’s inside of this thing, but it doesn’t. At least not that I can remember. I push back the lid. Everything after that happens to someone who isn’t me.

Bones. Tiny human bones. I am frozen. My hands claw the air above the box. I don’t know how much time goes by with me looking into the coffin. I’ve seen this before.
Haven’t I?
It feels familiar—the panic, the disgust, the slow numbing. All of it. Even as I close the lid and walk stiffly back to the oven, I have an eerie sense of deja vu. What am I supposed to do? Confront my mother? Call the police? I stare down at the oven door, the tomb to this tiny human. The box is heavy; I rest it on my hip and feel the bones slide around. I quickly adjust the box, instead cradling it in my arms like a baby. The doorbell rings, and all of a sudden I’m shaking.

I open the oven and carefully slide the child inside. I feel as if I am going to be sick. A knock at the door. I have to answer it before my mother wakes up, angry. I run to open it, glancing once more over my shoulder at the tiny coffin in the oven.

It’s the mailman. He has never come to the door before, let alone rang the bell that hasn’t worked since before I was born.
The eating house,
I think.
It’s up to something.
My face must show my surprise. He rubs a hand sheepishly across his face and clears his throat.

“It wouldn’t fit in the mailbox,” he says. For the first time I notice the package in his hands. I make to tell him that it’s not ours. We don’t get packages, but he reads my mother’s name off the label, so I unlatch the chain.

He nods at me before he walks away, and now I am holding a different box in my hands, my knees knocking beneath my white dress. There is a ball of tension inside me. It pulls tighter and tighter until I walk back into the house. I carry the box to my mother’s door. I can hear her stirring inside her bedroom, so I leave it there for her to find, and tiptoe downstairs and out of the house.

When I talk to my father for the first time, I think he’s going to fall backward down the stairs. I wait for him near the front door, on the usual night his cherry red Mustang pulls along the curb. He doesn’t see me when he comes in, carrying a brown paper shopping bag, ignoring the lightless room to his left, which is usually empty. I sit on a threadbare piece of furniture, left from my grandmother’s days, and wait for him to reach the stairs. I want to observe him without him observing me. When he’s two up, I say his name. The sound of startled paper lets me know he’s jumped in surprise.

“Howard Delafonte,” I say. He stays where he is, the back of his heels hanging off the second-to-last stair. “I imagine I get my shoulders from you. Did you play football in college? Shit, what a waste if you didn’t. I don’t really know anything about football. I don’t have a television, you know. Oh yes, you do know, don’t you? Was that your awesome idea?”

I hear him setting down his bag, while the floorboards creak overhead. I imagine that my mother is the one with her ear pressed to the walls now. Too frightened to put a stop to our meeting, but perhaps a little curious as well.

He comes to stand in the living room, his eyes searching for me among the shadows. When he sees my form, sitting quietly on the couch, he clears his throat and walks over to turn on the floor lamp.

“May I call you Daddy? Or does it sound odd coming from a white trash girl like me?”

He says nothing. There is a greasy yellow light between us now.

“Never mind,” I say, standing up. “I’ll stick with Howard. Or Mayor Delafonte. That’s what everyone else calls you, isn’t it?” I get up and walk around the couch ‘til we are standing face to face. It’s the first time I’ve been this close to him, and I can actually see his features. He looks like me: broad face, eyes spaced too far apart, so lightly blue they almost blend into the whites. He’s ugly, and strange, and striking, and I want to hate him, but I can’t, because he has the same flaxen hair that I have. It falls in the same odd way around his eyes. I look into his eyes, hoping to see contrition, a fondness he harbored without words. But what I see there is fear of me. Fear of what I can say about him—how my words, if directed the right way, can reach his friends at the country club, his cow-faced wife at home who never did die of her illness, his legitimate children at their Ivy League colleges. The thousands of voters … the news.

It’ll be out of the bag now
,
Papa
, I want to say. Except I don’t make empty threats, and I have no intention of ratting out the secret life of Howard Delafonte.

I wait. I’ve daydreamed about this moment for so long, the moment my father says honest to God words to me. But, he says nothing. He’s waiting for me to speak, and without that he has nothing to say. I feel a crushing truth that can’t be reversed or unseen. It’s a black hole that starts near my heart and moves outward. I thought that when I met my father—the obscure man who I pictured having a broad, smiling face—he would embrace knowing me. He’d be delighted at this new relationship prospect, the chance to know his offspring, a girl who got excellent grades and was capable of taking care of herself. In my daydreams, my father never rejects me. I am ill prepared for this reality. He has nothing to say. When I realize I’m not going to get what I want, which at this point is a simple acknowledgment, I take a step back. My insides feel oily. There are too many paths of disappointment, too many ways that this can make me disappear.

“All right,” I say. And then again, “All right.”

My backing off has unsettled him. I see his Adam’s apple bobbing around his throat.
Say something.

“Give me your watch.” I am startled by my request. Probably more so than he is. I can see it glinting out of the corner of my eye, that heavy thing I once held in my hand. I hadn’t known then that it belonged to my father, yet I felt strangely drawn to it. He doesn’t move, still doesn’t say anything. It’s a standoff—a battle of wills. He’s determined not to acknowledge me, even with his words. I stand there for a few more seconds before I am exhausted. I walk backwards to the front door, never taking my eyes from him. Committed to getting one last look at the man who was responsible for making me, yet responsible for nothing else.

The night air hits my shoulders. I feel the rain before I see it. My last glance before the door shuts is of my father, Howard Delafonte, walking back up the stairs, unperturbed.

The box, the box, the box,
I think. Did the person inside belong to him? I go back inside to check on it—kneeling down in front of the oven and flicking on the oven light that has miraculously not yet burned out. It’s there.
He or she
, I think, resting my forehead against the door.

I go to Judah’s because I can’t stand to be within the same walls as them. He’s sitting by the window, his usual spot. I don’t bother to go inside. I slide down the wall until I am sitting directly beneath the window. I can hear him messing with something that sounds like a plastic wrapper.

“I have Cheetos,” he says.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You don’t have to be hungry to eat Cheetos, just depressed.”

“I’m not…” and then my voice drops off, because who am I kidding? I was born depressed. “I don’t eat that shit anymore.”

“Well la-ti-da, fancy pants. Didn’t know you were a health nut. Excuse me while I eat my orange-coated shit.”

I smile. All of a sudden I feel like Cheetos, because Judah makes me want things I have no place wanting.

“Judah, you suck.”

I hear him move away from the window, the clean squeak of his wheels on the linoleum. Then the door opens, and I feel something hit my arm. Judah leans out the door a little, and I catch sight of his wet hair.

Then the door closes, and he’s back at his post.

I reach down for what hit me. It’s a Ziploc bag of mini carrots. I smile as I open it. That’s more like it.

“We are both eating orange-colored food. I feel all close to you and shit.”

“And shit,” he says. And then,“Why you all sad and shit, Maggie?”

“Eh, just life. You know.”

“I know,” he agrees. “But sometimes it’s still beneficial to talk about it and shit.”

“And shit,” I say. “I met my dad tonight. He’s the worst kind of cracker jack loser lobster.”

“I’ve never met a cracker jack loser lobster. Is that like an asshole?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”

“You know,” says Judah. “I know you’ve never met my dad, but he’s kind of a cracker jack loser lobster, too. He left my mom because he didn’t want kids. Didn’t even come see me at the hospital when I was born. Sent her the child support check every month though. The first time I met him was after my first surgery. He felt guilty and decided to start being a dad to his cripple son. Sometimes I wonder if he would have contacted me if I didn’t get the tumor. Sometimes I’m even grateful to the tumor for giving me my dad. It makes my mom’s life easier … the help. And he’s all right. But, I always feel like I’m disappointing him.”