Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (19 page)

Harriet stared at her father’s hands for a long time, looking at one picture after another. In the cat picture, where she could see him in the hubcap reflection, one of his index fingers was crooked in the act of taking the picture. Something about that gesture seemed both touching and almost horrifying to Harriet. She swept the pictures together again, any which way, tied them together with the frayed length of velvet ribbon, thrust the bundle of pictures in among the others, closed the box lid and latched it, and stood to replace the box behind the wooden heads.

As she shoved the box up onto the shelf, it knocked against one of the heads, which wobbled against another head, which in turn fell against the next head. Harriet caught the last head as it slowly toppled off the end of the shelf, and she heaved it back to its upright position. Holding that last head with one hand, she reached across the row and carefully set the others back in place one at a time with her other hand.

If they had all rolled over the edge of the shelf, she thought, it would have sounded like someone bowling up here. The jig would have been up. Jig as in dance or jig as in saw? Harriet wondered automatically.

She pulled the string to extinguish the light while turning the knob to the attic door. Tobermorey was waiting just outside the door, and Harriet just managed to block his attempt to slither through her legs into the attic.

“Thanks, Tobe, that’s all I needed, to hunt for you in there
all night,” she whispered in his ear as she carried him in her arms down the stairs.

In her room Harriet pauses in front of the full-length mirror on her closet door. The moon is high and the room is filled with tree shadows and patches of moonlight on the walls and rug. She shifts Tobermorey in her arms until his back half hangs down from the crook of her left arm. She attempts a pouty mouth and gazes into her own eyes, envisioning a man crouching down before her with a camera held to his face. His index finger is crooked over the shutter button with grace and wit as he tells her to smile. He is young, he knows how to do things, he is her daddy. He laughs as the cat begins to struggle free, and lovingly he presses his finger on the shutter button and takes a picture of his little girl.

After school, Harriet knocked on the Antlers’ back door. It was a raw, gray November afternoon of one of those days when the sun never really seems to get all the way up in the sky before it starts to set again. Harriet’s hands were cold because she hadn’t worn mittens. Octavia answered the door with the littlest Antler, Jennifer, in one arm and a container of milk in the other. She didn’t really greet Harriet so much as register that she was there before she turned away distractedly, leaving Harriet to close the door and hang up her jacket among the slightly dirty Antler outerwear that took up all the hooks in the hallway.

Harriet’s jacket slid to the floor twice before she found a cranny between jackets in which to wedge a sleeve. Their mitten basket, which tilted from the handle of the laundry-room door, was overflowing with ragged, dirty, mismatched pairs that Mrs. Antler had mated with wooden clothespins. The Antler girls shared these mittens. Harriet couldn’t imagine sharing the way they did: shirts, socks, underpants even. Harriet couldn’t understand why they always seemed so cheerful, all crowded together. They didn’t seem to realize how deprived they were in their shabbiness, how lucky Harriet was in the solitary splendor of her unshared drawers of folded clothing.
She found the Antler children already seated at the kitchen table having their snack.

Carrie didn’t work for the Roses anymore, and now some days there wasn’t anyone home in the afternoon when Harriet got out of school. She wasn’t sure where her mother was when she wasn’t home. Harriet had started going over to the Antlers’ on days like this one, when no one answered the doorbell at her own house, although it had never been particularly arranged. Harriet missed Carrie, Carrie who loved her and called her Rabbit and made tuna fish sandwiches just right. But only a few days after fourth grade had begun, Harriet now knew, there had been some kind of disagreement between Carrie and Ruth involving money.

One day when Harriet came home from school, Carrie was just leaving, earlier than usual. She grabbed Harriet and hugged her tightly and kissed her over and over again. Puzzled, Harriet hugged and kissed her back, but then Carrie abruptly turned away and left the house moments later. Only afterward did Harriet find out that Carrie was never coming back to work for the Roses again, that Carrie had been saying good-bye.

Not too long after that, Ruth threw away Carrie’s old uniform, which had always hung on a bent wire hanger in a closet in the guest room. Harriet stole it from the trash and kept it hidden, wrapped in a plastic shopping bag under her bed. The pale green dress, which had always reminded Harriet of the uniforms on the waitresses at Schrafft’s (where she had gone three times for lunch with Gay; on each occasion Harriet had ordered a club sandwich), gave off a faint smell of Carrie that was a mixture of sweat, deodorant, and hand lotion.

Harriet was secretly glad that her mother wasn’t home this afternoon, because it was more interesting in the Antler kitchen than sitting alone at her own kitchen table with the
glass of milk and cookie that her mother might tentatively offer—is this what you like?—before apologetically creeping back upstairs with a glass of sherry, her reading glasses, and a mystery novel.

The smacking sound that made Harriet jump was Octavia’s big blue-black hand clapping down on Jennifer’s pink sausagey arm. Harriet stopped crunching her graham cracker and tried to catch Barbara’s eye, but with Octavia diverted, Barbara was furtively helping herself to a spoonful of grape jelly from the bowl Mrs. Antler always kept on the kitchen table.

The Antlers’ jelly bowl, and the glass sugar pourer with the metal flap that sat next to it (both of which Harriet had reported to Gay, who seemed delighted to know of their existence), made Harriet think of luncheonettes. Harriet loved the word luncheonette. Carrie took her to a particular one a few times; at this lunch counter the food was delivered to you by an actual model train. There were plates bolted to the flatbed cars; train tracks circled around the counter and through the kitchen. Each hamburger or sandwich was accompanied by a miniature cardboard box that held two Chiclets. Harriet wasn’t supposed to tell her mother about these outings, because Ruth Rose had pronounced the place both unsanitary and unsuitable. There was a black man, named Freddie, behind the counter who would joke with Carrie and refill Harriet’s soda glass over and over. Harriet wondered if she were to go there on her own, now that Carrie was gone, if Freddie would even recognize her, let alone provide free soda. But maybe he knew all about the money disagreement, maybe he would be angry with Harriet.

Barbara watched out for Octavia while she licked the jelly spoon and reinserted it in the bowl. Jennifer had been happily flipping bits of gummed graham cracker from her high-chair
tray onto the floor for the benefit of the Antlers’ mutt, Archie. It took her a few seconds to react to Octavia’s smack. She flapped her arms, drummed her feet, and screwed up her face, drawing a big breath. Then she began to scream in a long connected howl that went on and on and made Harriet want to cry.

Jenny seemed able to sustain her screaming while breathing in and out. Harriet was overcome with sadness the way she had been the time she stood on a Fifth Avenue curb with her grandmother while a parade of piping bagpipers inexplicably streamed by. (It hadn’t been a holiday, as far as she knew.) That relentlessly sad tone, too, had brought her to the brink of tears.

Barbara, Debbie, and Rachel all continued cramming graham crackers into their mouths as fast as they could. Only Harriet had stopped eating; the other children had blank looks on their faces, as if they had agreed in advance to ignore this moment.

Octavia, still standing over Jenny with one hand raised, lowered it slowly while humming in the back of her throat. She sat back down in Mr. Antler’s chair, the one with arms at the head of the table, and baring her mouthful of enormous teeth, she slowly turned her head to beam this spurious smile beacon around the table.

“You be nice like the other children. See how they are bein’ nice?” The other children made no sound other than a steady crunching.

“Tavey, up me?” Jenny reached out and smiled cautiously at Octavia.

“How you askin’ me?” Octavia cupped a hand behind her ear to pantomime her expectation.

“Tavey, up me,
pease?
” Jenny reached out again expectantly. Archie sat gazing up with love at Jenny. At the sight of her upraised arms his plumey tail thumped hopefully.

Octavia’s switch came from nowhere, dividing the air in two with a mean whistle, whipping Archie across the nose. He cowered and whined and slunk down onto his belly, then scrabbled across the linoleum until he was safely wedged behind the thicket of chair legs under the table.

“I do not tolerate a bad animal in this house!” Octavia declared.

For the rest of the afternoon, Harriet played with Barbara and Debbie. Anita Antler worked some days as a volunteer in the charity thrift shop on Healey Avenue, and this was one of her late Fridays. She came home sometimes just as Octavia was serving the Antler children their dinner, but it didn’t matter, because Mr. and Mrs. Antler usually ate together after the children’s bedtime. Harriet had heard plenty of her mother’s dim views of these particular Antler habits; Ruth Rose did not approve of parents who didn’t eat with their children. On the other hand, Harriet dreaded the dinner hour, when the two of them would sit grimly together with the portable television playing at what used to be Adam’s place at the kitchen table. And Harriet certainly hadn’t eaten with her own father in a very long time.

Harriet believed Ruth that in all ways the Rose family of two knew better, had superior and preferable methods for just about every aspect of daily living, compared to the arrangements next door. But Harriet craved something in the Antler household: the jolly carelessness, the sugar and jelly sandwiches, the friendliness of all those dirty jackets jammed together.

Ruth Rose was of the opinion that her next-door neighbor worked at the thrift shop mainly in order to skim off the most desirable merchandise for her own family before it was tagged and displayed for the shop’s customers. This was possibly
the case. When Harriet’s old, beloved, outgrown red party shoes—a pair of shoes that had been controversial in the first place because Gay had taken Harriet to buy them without Ruth’s knowledge or advance consent, and Ruth always said they were too pointy and didn’t have adequate arch supports—were donated to the shop in a bag of clothing Ruth had culled from Simon Rose’s closet when he had been “away” for the better part of a year, they had turned up on Debbie Antler’s feet three days later.

Debbie Antler had very wide feet, and Harriet had rather narrow feet, and as a consequence the tops of Debbie’s feet bulged and overflowed around the ankle straps, and the shoes looked terrible on her. She wore them for everyday, too, which made it even worse. Harriet hated to see Debbie slopping around in those prized red shoes. She wished she had been allowed to keep them in her closet just to look at them. At the very least, her mother should have just thrown them away.

Mrs. Antler’s own feet were amazingly large, and her shoes, among rows of which Harriet now squatted as she hid in the mysterious undergrowth of Mrs. Antler’s closet, were like cordwood. Footsteps sounded on the wood floor, then more muffled on the bedroom carpet, and then the closet door creaked open and light trickled in. Mrs. Antler’s belts and chains that hung on a rack on the inside of the door swayed and clinked together. Harriet held her breath. The door swung closed, though not all the way. Something moved toward her. The rustling dresses in their plastic shrouds parted, and on her hands and knees, Barbara slowly emerged next to her in the gloom.

“I thought you were here,” she whispered to Harriet, and then scooted in next to her. They sat together breathing in the smell of camphor and Mrs. Antler’s shoes.

“Debbie won’t find us. We’ll be here until it’s time for me to go home for dinner,” Harriet whispered back.

“She’s a retard,” Barbara whispered back, and then they both began to giggle as they heard Debbie calling for them downstairs. The slam of the kitchen door vibrated under them, and then they could hear her outside, in the backyard, shouting their names into the late-afternoon November darkness in a still-hopeful voice.

“Forget this,” Harriet decided, and they both crawled out of the closet. “Doesn’t she know any of the rules of Sardines? We wouldn’t be
outside.
”

“She’s a retard,” Barbara repeated cheerfully. She had dragged a pair of her mother’s shoes out of the closet with her, and she sat on the rug, idly inserting her sneakered feet into the gaping maw of these black-and-white opera pumps. She stood up awkwardly and wobbled over to see herself in the full-length mirror on the door to her parents’ bathroom. Standing up in the shoes, her feet slid far down into the toes. Harriet stood up behind her, having helped her to her feet; holding on to Barbara’s shoulders, she stepped into the shoe-space behind Barbara’s feet. Astonishingly, her own sneakered feet just fit.

The two girls admired themselves in the mirror, stepping forward and back together, like a couple learning a dance step. They walked around the room, grandly stepping forward like part of a circus parade, like the tall Uncle Sam who waved his starred-and-striped top hat while striding along with stilts in his pants legs. Harriet’s knees knocked into the backs of Barbara’s thighs, and as she stood just behind Barbara in the uphill part of Mrs. Antler’s shoes, her eyes cleared the top of Barbara’s head in their reflection.

Octavia was coming up the stairs. They could hear her singsong voice addressing Jennifer, whom she must have been carrying.

“You got de bowels, chile? You got de bowels, oh, yes, you do. Your Octavia gone make you fix-up, oh, yes.”

The two girls made an instantaneous and unanimous decision to seek refuge back in the closet, which they did, stepping gracefully together in giant steps, there not being time to get out of Mrs. Antler’s shoes, and they pulled the door shut just moments before Octavia arrived on the stair landing.