The Lost Father (38 page)

“But when?”

“Isn’t that the truth.”

“Why don’t you just let me.” I stood up to look for paper. “We can write a note.”

“He’s the boss,” she said, still on the bench, her gloved hands folded. She made no moves, her body or her face.

“Yeah.” Tomorrow and the next day he would be and all the days. My finger tinkled on the keys. I couldn’t help it.

It was a German piano, supposedly the best in the world, and they’d had it here in this house for more than twenty years. No one touched it. I tried a little, from the scales Eli Timber had taught me years ago. It sounded horrible, but it was fun, anyway, trying to put the notes together from memory like a puzzle.

Once I’d slept over, in childhood, and I was the first one up. I walked down the stairs and saw Dorothy testing the keys, she could really play, but when she noticed me, she stood up and pretended to be cleaning it. She didn’t even have a rag with her so she went at it with the hem of her dress. It amazed me then that I could scare someone. I was never a boss.

A clock chimed dumbly on the wall. Two a.m.

“Be right down,” Pat shouted down the stairs.

I heard him step on the scale. The Briggs house had a scale in every bathroom. Those they used. I’d already gained four pounds. I knew it even without the scale. I know myself at a hundred fourteen. Racine bakery.

Dorothy gathered up her things. We both moved to wait by the car. The sky outside swung low and stars swirled close so my balance wavered, my stomach warm and funny. My feet trudged into the firm crusted snow and I felt the first rush of icy water soak through my shoes to touch skin. For some reason that first flush of wet always for an instant felt warm and then you woke up in it. Around us, the sky loomed and hazed, the stars glittered down to bushes, pine trees shed bulks of water whispering, the world turned live and spawning, warm and shocking cold at the same time.

We stood out there on the white gravel driveway. I looked back at the solid house. “Don’t you sometimes wish you lived here too?”

Her shoulders lurched up further and she adjusted the hat on her head. “I live in my own house. With my mamma. Like you lived a lot of time with your granmama.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if I would have loved anyone I grew up with.”

“Your granmama gave you a lot.”

“I know she did, Dorothy.” I would never deny that. I didn’t want to talk ungratefully about her.

Mr. Briggs stepped out of the house in clean, warm clothes, carrying cash in his left hand. Dorothy stood still and he went around and opened her door for her. She got in holding her purse on her lap with both hands and the car went slowly down the hill. And I followed, just walking. I heard snow melting all around, invisible as huge dry owls in the trees and tunneling insects and rodents underground working at their instinctive system of hydrology. I got as far as the highway I would have to cross or hitch at, it was still far to our road, but the highway spread wide and dirty and fenced and semis thundered by cracking wind as if it were wet sheets and leaving no sympathy for straight lines, no wrapping of me in their headlights and the dawn began somewhere else too I could feel it I knew the sky and the moisture of air so well here. I almost started back, but then I ran across. That was a long band of time like a tunnel or a scream.

And then I was in the soft ditchy ground, sinking, over the sewer pipe for the two little rental houses that had been in back with the butter barn. They looked dark and empty now like old jack-o’-lanterns. I walked the small gravel road that in summer would be cricket loud and bright, alive with wind this time of night. It was still and cold, as if the sky itself were cracked frozen. The bare trees and their branches, thinning to a notched delicacy, were very high and taut and everywhere there was the luminous blue sky over the tiny structures, dark with sleep.

At the end there was Stevie Howard’s little brick house, small and low as a matchbox in the distance, completely outscaled by the land here and the trees and, like a mercy, that old soft yellow light was on in the kitchen and that was when I wondered if I’d died and so it had all come back.

But the cinching red wet pain at my ankles was real.

June and Chummy Howard were dark half silhouettes like schoolroom statues in the kitchen window. There was a pot of coffee on the table and three cups. Stevie’s head was there too and his wife, Helen, and his daughter, Jane.

Everything was so much the same it seemed time only happened to me. But once I walked up the one cement step into the kitchen, differences were fluent in the light. Chummy and June sat, their arms propping their faces, not even older but old. And Stevie Howard was here married, his wife’s fingernails hard and long and crimson like
beads on the old gray-flecked linoleum table. Stevie and Helen and Jane had just come from the airport. Their plane had been seven hours late.

Helen was making good conversation, asking us questions, including me. Stevie got up and went back down the low hall to his little bedroom to put Jane to sleep. He came back in a T-shirt, with his suit pants and socks.

I
N A WAY
I didn’t marry Stevie because of his feet. They were white and dry yellow, blue-veined.

I couldn’t love him because I knew him so well. And I was still looking for something new and outside. I looked at the dark window, where the trees and clouds were only indistinct moving shapes, alive.

One thing about people on earth: you know their sounds and body pains. The irritation of their wombs, their feet’s thud, the plink of their parings, the pain of bunions. Especially in houses the size of this. I could have drawn you my grandmother’s feet. She was a majestic-faced woman, easily beautiful, but she did not have good feet. Her feet were the feet of a woman over sixty who had worked all her life in the country and who had not thought too much of herself. Her metatarsus protruded so that the insides of her foot formed a point, the kind of excrescence women of another place and culture would have saved from pain by cutting holes out of cloth slippers. Her toes too bore shapes made by time and the constrictions of hard shoes, and were festooned with bunions and corns. Looked at plainly and together, her feet were strong the way a pair of workman’s hands are at the end of his life.

If I had penciled my grandmother’s two feet, I would not have rendered them staunch pedestals, though they were that too, but never bare, when she stood sturdily working in the kitchen, they were modestly encapped with solid’shoes and even stockings. I couldn’t believe one foot of hers ever, even as a girl, demurely scratched an itch, the toes on the ankle or arch of the other. No, my grandmother was too embarrassed of herself. She was never coy. I think of them roughly parallel, resting on the floor, tilted to each other at the tips slightly, like hands veering but not daring yet to pray. They rested that way when she sat in a chair at night watching her variety show on the old TV.

My mother too, a glorious and vain woman, who hated herself first
and then the world, felt tormented by her feet, which were misshapen, different, and, it seems, in several directions. She too had bad feet. Her toes, she blamed to no avail, again and again, crimped up in a curve permanently from wearing shoes too small that her parents made her walk too many miles in. A driven woman, she spent years of pedicures trying to shallow the rises of bumps and bunions and to candy up the effect anyway, with colored polishes on the nails.

It was not only women. To understand class in America, all you had to do was make everyone in the room take off his shoes. All of us sit for hours with a baby picking up his foot and marveling, taking pictures knowing, it’ll never be this perfect again.

Everyone was a child once with unbent feet. My grandmother always told me about coming to a small rented place I lived with my mother and dad and finding me in winter with no shoes. My mother had defended herself. “Momo says babies don’t need shoes!” My grandmother winced telling the story, how she took me into town to Briggs’s and bought five pairs of socks and shoes. “Over there I bet they don’t
get
any shoes.”

Once when I was young, just before my father went away, he had traced my foot to buy me a pair of shoes from Beirut. I wanted pink slippers or golden. Or mint green. It was plain lined paper, a pencil drawing. He labeled it
my daughter’s foot
, folded it and put it in his pocket. But the shoes never came.

For a long time, Stevie wouldn’t let anyone see his feet. He and Helen made love twice a day for the first year, but always in his socks. He told her his feet were damaged. “High school football,” he said, “my brother’s shoes.” But Jane had seen his feet. “They’re ug-ly,” she said in her shrieky voice. “One thing about kids,” Stevie told me. “They tell the truth. If something’s ugly to them, they’ll say it. They don’t know there’s anything wrong.”

Emily Briggs had the kind of straight long slender foot you could lay on a pure china plate. She took a strange pride in her feet. Even in one potato, two potato, the game children played with their feet in a circle, one child chanting and counting with a hand, seeing on whose foot the rhyme came out, I remembered her once saying, as if it were the most incredible thing, “Some people are ashamed of their feet.”

“I’ll take you home,” Stevie said. “We’ve got to go to sleep.”

Chummy and June were apologizing that there was no place for me
to stay, they had grown children in every small room. In summer they used a tent outside for the young ones. “And that they like,” Chummy said, “oh sure.”

Helen said she was tired. She’d stay with Jane. His wife was like a picture of a wife, her face an oval emblem. Sitting in a chair.

Outside, the wind came up around us like stiff scarves. But I wanted to walk over and look at my grandmother’s house. We walked a little ways up the driveway, under the trees. Shades in all the upstairs windows were pulled down.

“I wonder who lives there now.”

“My dad’s talked to them. The man is a manager at Shopko and I think his wife works there too, in the pet section. They were from somewhere else. I don’t think they have children.”

The house looked still and asleep. We kept walking, trying to be quiet. I opened the garage door. Different shapes loomed than we had had. When I pressed up against the kitchen windows, standing on the flimsy tin drainpipe, I saw they had changed it all, everything. There was plaid wallpaper and a sofa where there used to be the one table we ate on for every meal.

Even the dark trees in the yard looked older and vast. “Do trees live forever?” I asked Stevie. “Or do they die? I mean, if nobody cuts them, would they keep growing?”

“For thousands and thousands of years. They don’t die of old age. But something will eventually get them.”

I
TOOK MY SHOES OFF
outside the Briggses’ back door and carried them up the stairs. I kissed Stevie good night. “Tomorrow I have to deal with the box,” I whispered.

I
WAS THE FIRST ONE UP
. Then Emily stumbled in too, her nightgown frilled from washing, her triangular-shaped long legs seeming uninflected. Emily, what was it about her beauty—it seemed her soul hadn’t inhabited her body yet. She was a body waiting, flexing, living in itself. Her body seemed general somehow, new. I used to think that meant she was a virgin. She really had been a virgin with an unconscious awkward spring in her legs. When she was excited she would stand in one place and jump up and down. But she was still that way
now. I thought some man would fall ravishingly in love with her for that, exactly that. It would madden him that he could look and look and never find her. That wasn’t Tad, though. He didn’t seem to find her mysterious at all.

She sat down on the living room carpet, pitched on her hands. “It’s so early,” she said.

She did headstands, awkward attempts that spurted her bare ankles and feet up into the air. She’d always been a little bit an acrobat.

She did a back roll, tucking her head under. Her face flushed when she came up, her foot bumping on the washstand where they put their keys and mail. From what I understood, that washstand came from Merl’s grandmother and she’d had to argue bitterly with her family to attain it. It was the only thing Mrs. Briggs had from her family.

“You know when Mai linn was away in North Dakota, once I got this letter. We’d been getting all her mail, your aunt brought it over—anyway, she got this letter from Interlochen which is this music camp my grandfather’s on the board of that’s a school too, and they said she could come and audition for a scholarship and it was like a form she had to fill out and when I put it down it dropped behind that thing, and I could never get it. I tried a bunch of times with a knife or a fork or something. I kept thinking tomorrow I’ll get that out and send it to her. But I always felt bad because Mai linn might have had some kind of scholarship but she didn’t even know.”

“You never told her?”

“No, I felt so bad.”

“You should, Emily.”

“Not now,” she said. And then she shot up, she had the longest ankles and they seemed to contain great springs of power, like a kangaroo’s. “Want some coffee?” I heard her banging around in the kitchen.

I stayed on the living room floor, where the furniture loomed rounder and more oddly proportioned from my vantage, and vast spangles of light spurted and broke on the white walls. I did not believe in accidents. I based my life on that, it was the only way I knew how to bear it. I’d always told myself that tiny misunderstandings did not matter. There were always more chances.

In books, I hated things like that. The one letter that could have made a difference. I thought if I opened that as possible, I couldn’t have lived with the regret.

But maybe it was true anyway. Mai linn could have gone to that school.

Emily called me into the kitchen. The room amazed with light. She hurried around the stove, opening the door, turning the gas off under a kettle. Her bones hit the floor hard and erratic. Maybe it wasn’t accident in the world I feared, but malice. But Emily could not be evil. I knew Emily. She was an unlived girl here alone in a white kitchen, elbows and heels, the stove door banging. Still, Mai linn had already had so much taken from her. My mother had hated me sharply, not always, but sometimes with real point and glitter. The moments she came after me rang with terror. I lived with the shards of them. I tried to believe something else was true, but they were there in me, crystallized forever like shrapnel. Emily took a new pan of muffins out of the oven. “No sugar. I used your little bananas.”