Sixteen Page 6

  Miranda said things like, “I’m thinking of staying here in town for a while.” And, “It’s a nice town actually. I mean, I’d have never said that before I left, but it is.” She said, “It’s such a nice place to raise kids.” She seemed oblivious to what her comments might mean to my mother.

  I wanted my mother to explode at her, to say, “Of course it’s nice! It’s where I raised you! It’s where I told you to raise Marco!” But my mother only encouraged her, talking about the parks and the recreation leagues as if she were informing a new neighbor of all that was now available to them in the land of plenty.

  Miranda turned to me halfway through dessert. She said, “So, are you seeing anybody?”

  I looked at my mother and then back at my plate. I could feel the cinched elastic of my throat, a small tug, a pull.

  “What?” Miranda said, glancing from my mother to me and back again. “Who is it? Anyone I know?”

  “No,” I said, meaning No, I’m not seeing anyone, but also meaning No, you don’t know him, because I knew that my mother wanted to think I’d found a boyfriend in Justin Gunter.

  My mother said her lines, as I had expected. “I think that Emily has a special fella at school. Justin Gunter. He lives just three streets over from us!”

  “Oh, Justin,” Miranda said, pointing her fork at my mother. “The one you told me about a while ago, the one she kissed at the Christmas party.”

  This, I wasn’t expecting—a departure from the script. I stood without thinking about it, a natural reaction to my body’s stiffening up. I stared at my mother, who was tsk-tsking with a little shake of her head, meaning Oh, no, no, Miranda, you shouldn’t have mentioned it. You’ve spilled the beans, dear. I glared at one face and then the next, the next and back to the first. I wanted answers. When had my mother told Miranda about Justin Gunter’s kiss? A while ago? Not at the funeral; I’d barely known Justin then. I imagined Miranda and my mother’s conversations. How many had they had? Had there been months’ worth of them, more than a year? I could just imagine their dialogue.

  “Poor Emily!” my mother would say.

  “Why doesn’t she get a life?” Miranda would answer.

  Had they been having these sneaky conversations since the funeral or before? Is that how Miranda knew?

  I turned to my sister. “And who are you seeing these days? Tommy Eldridge types? Dirty high-school dropouts?”

  “I see people all the time!” She gave a laugh that was more a bark. “I’m not like you, Emily. I’ve had my share. I’ve been there and done that!” Again, she barked loudly, but she looked tired, too, older suddenly.

  I felt sick. I could feel the caramel and butter and gravy rising in the back of my narrow throat. I swallowed hard.

  “Are you a dog?” I said. “Are you some sort of dog now? Barking at the table?”

  I glanced at my mother, but she couldn’t look me in the eye. It wasn’t the best exit line, but I picked up my plate anyway, piling it neatly with my silverware and my glass. I walked into the kitchen, letting the dishes clatter in the sink.

  “Emily!” my mother called out.

  But I was already at the closet fishing through hangers for my coat. I heard my mother say, “Excuse me.” And then her feet shuffled through the kitchen. But by the time she appeared, I had already put on my coat and was buttoning it up.

  I said, “You’ve been talking about me? How long have you two been talking about me?”

  My mother said, “Emily, no, we don’t talk about you. She calls me sometimes during the day when you’re at school. I just never mentioned her calls. It hasn’t been easy for her. It hasn’t.”

  She wiped her hands on her skirt and held them out to me. She wanted me to rest my head on her chest and cry and cry until the shiny duck pin on her sweater made an imprint on my cheek—just like I had after not getting a real part in Oklahoma!, after being pushed into the stupid chorus, where I only wandered around in a herd like a singing cow.

  I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have! You broke our promise!”

  My mother paused. She looked confused. “What promise?”

  I couldn’t answer. It hadn’t been the kind of promise that had been put into words. But it was a promise, an agreement. Oklahoma O.K.! I turned and walked out the front door into the night, which was much, much warmer than anywhere in Michigan.

  At first I didn’t know that I was heading toward Justin Gunter’s house. I could only think of how my mother had never slipped, not once. I thought back to her tearful performance in the kitchen. Hadn’t she known for some time? Hadn’t she decided that it was time to tell me? How long had I been lifting my mother up, sticking with her all of the time, denying my life for hers, and all the while she was keeping secrets from me? She’d lied to me. Why? Because I’m so fragile? What does she know about my life? She was a remarkable actor, I decided. Remarkable. So good, in fact, I’d never known she was acting at all!

  Soon I found myself rounding the corner of Briar, starting my march uphill toward Justin Gunter’s house. I wanted to see him with my own eyes. I wanted to have my own life, and in this life, I was the kind of person to march over to Justin Gunter’s house if I wanted to.

  It was a ranch. The first floor was nearly dark. I could hear a pumping base line coming from the basement, where Justin’s older brother lived. I could hear the dog, Arlen, bark once, twice, but then he gave up, probably flopping to the floor in a tongue-lolling, heavy-breathing heap of fur.

  I walked up the cement path. The screen door squeaked as I opened it. Here, tucked inside the screen door, I could imagine Justin’s face appearing in the cracked door, his chin above a chain that he would quickly unlatch. I knocked. But there was no answer. I knocked again and took a few steps back, looking over my shoulder across the street to the other houses, their blank windows staring at me like a row of my classmates all screwed into their desk chairs, their implacable faces, the vacant stares. Are you watching me? I wanted to ask. Can you see me?

  No, I decided, no one ever watches me, except my mother. No one could ever really see me. I was nearly invisible. How else could I steal so very many things? I stepped off the porch and onto the Gunters’ lawn. I walked through the side yard to the only lit room. Ducking behind a bush next to the house, I leaned up to the window, my knuckles poised over the glass.

  And there was Justin Gunter. He was sitting at his desk, his head resting on the fold of his textbook, his arms sprawled out. Was he asleep? And here I was: Emily Milty in the dark, looking in his window. Had my mother ever done such a thing? My dithering mother? Had Miss Finch ever found herself in a situation like this, breath-minty, mothbally Miss Finch? It dawned on me at that moment that maybe there was some other future version of Emily Milty, besides my mother and Miss Finch, out there in the distance . . . a crazy woman who knocked on windows in the middle of the night. I am not the person I’ve always known. That’s what I said to myself. And then I knocked.

  Justin’s head popped up. His face was flushed and there was a line running down his cheek from the center of the book. He looked around. I waved. And he drew back, surprised, but then loped to the window and opened it up.

  “Were you asleep?” I asked. This was an odd thing to say, in the dark, outside of Justin Gunter’s window.

  “No,” he said, which was a lie.

  “Well, I just wanted to tell you . . .” And here I realized that I didn’t really have anything to tell Justin Gunter. “I just wanted to say . . .”

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he said, with a hint of happiness, with a kind of I-can’t-believe-my-luck ring to this voice.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I should probably explain . . .”

  “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t need to have permission for everything. We aren’t Inuits, contrary to what you have to say about it.”

  “You know, Emily Milty, I was asking you out. I was saying you should go to the movies with
out your mother. And, instead, with someone like me. That’s what I was saying.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling hot and nauseous and tight in the throat and happy, too.

  “But you got mad and you stormed off.”

  “Oh,” I said again. Was I an Oh-machine? Only capable of Oh-ing?

  “What did you want to tell me?”

  “See, I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to tell you that I’m a thief, and no one knows that.”

  “Are you going to rob us?” He smiled. “You don’t seem like a cat burglar.”

  “I don’t seem like who I really am,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” Justin said.

  “Oh,” I said, again with the Ohs, and we looked at each other for a moment. We just kind of stared at each other the way people do, I guess, when they recognize something of themselves in the other person. “Well, I should go.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, though, right? In bio?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Good,” he said.

  And then I didn’t walk away. I asked him a question: “Are you going to ask me out again?”

  “I didn’t ask you out in the first place.”

  “Well, are you going to?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Then I walked away and he shut the window.

  But the window quickly flew back open. “Did you steal my sneaker at the Christmas party?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “And four bonnets from backstage at Oklahoma!and one of the phones from the main office, but I never told anybody any of it.”

  “Wow! You know, I’ve been looking for that sneaker. Can I have it back?”

  “Sure.”

  And that was it. I thought of my sister’s long hair swinging across her back and Tommy Eldridge’s motor and how everything had changed. I thought of my mother’s meat loaf and little Marco under the table. I started to cry, sharp little bites in my chest, but not because I was sad. I wasn’t. Miranda was home. My sister had come back to us. And Marco was here now, and I am still a wool coat and gray soup and Sears carpeting, but not as much as I was just that morning when I woke up. I was becoming someone else. I could feel it.

  By the time I walked down Justin Gunter’s street, I was heading home. Soon I was at my front door, fishing a key from under a clay flowerpot. And that’s where they found me, my mother, my sister, and my little nephew with his lumpy dark hair. And I realized that, no, they didn’t really know me, that I hadn’t ever really been all that honest with them, and maybe more important, I didn’t really know them. Who was this woman with her red nose and her hands clasped nervously at her chest? What did my mother really want? And my sister. She was older now. She was tired, a little heartbroken maybe, but stronger. She was a mother, and her son— who’d stayed up too late—was wrapping himself around her leg, saying, “That’s her. That’s Aunt Emmy from the picture.”

  What picture? I wanted to know. Had my sister packed a picture of us away in her bag when she left with Tommy Eldridge? Had she missed us?

  I didn’t know very much of anything at all. But I was forgiven, awash in the porch light, redeemed by nothing more than my arrival. My eyes shined into their eyes, back and forth, from one to the other, like a roving spotlight.

  Rutford Becomes a Man

  Ned Vizzini

  “Rutford! Time to get up! It’s your birthday!”

  I have no intention of getting up. I do not care what day it is.

  “Rutford?”

  I am not moving.

  I have been awake already for a number of minutes—perhaps one hundred—but this does not mean that I am fully conscious. I like to spend my time in a blessed half-sleep where I am in touch with and in control of my thoughts but also free to let them roam. In this state I am very aware of sounds inside and outside the home. Inside sounds of food cooking and family members murmuring to one another. Outside sounds of birds and crickets that did not manage to finish chirping during the night, and small bells tinkling as patrons move in and out of local shops for early purchases. These are pleasant sounds. When loud, unpleasant voices interrupt my mental explorations I am very perturbed.

  “Rutford!”

  Now there is the sound of steps, hard wooden steps that bang as if the person climbing them were wearing shod boots— except Ma has such tough feet and unbelievable heft that she can bang like this with her bare soles. She goes up the nine . . . ten . . . eleven stairs before reaching my door and giving it a sharp and similarly powerful bang, as if using her thick feet.

  “Up!”

  “I will not be getting up this morning,” I announce. Except I announce it lying down, and something about that position causes the words to squeak out of my thorax. That mimics the mousy sound I make when creeping up and down the stairs with my small, weak feet.

  “Oh, your voice is crackin’,” she says. “Still a small one after all. C’mon, Rutford, get up, don’t tryin’ spoil this day for all of us.”

  I sit all the way up in bed to announce with full force, deeply: “I will not be getting up at all.”

  “Rutford!” More banging.

  “I told you no—” I begin, but suddenly there is a new sound, that of rapid-fire feet carelessly flapping up the eleven steps. A voice erupts that is two octaves higher than Ma’s, but with the same intonation.

  “Rutford! Ma won’t give me my special present for your birthday lessn’ you get up and come down and make it like a normal birthday and I already know what I’m gettin’ and I want it bad and I don’t care if you’re so crazy that all you want to do is spend time in your room, you still count for having a birthday so I still get a present so you might as well not even try because I’ve been thinking about this all—”

  I wage that my mother is coaxing her, holding her hand or patting her small back. Ma knows that when there is no work with my father, one of the only ways to get me out of bed is to bring my sister into the fray and encourage her to screech; her pitch triggers low and primal responses in my brain, and it is nearly impossible for me to remain in the vicinity of its source. So I put my feet on the warm floor (an advantage to never getting out of bed in the early morning—the floor is comfortable when I finally do) and walk to the door, careful as always not to get splinters. I pull it open.

  “I do not care if it is my birthday.”

  Ma is smiling in a dopey way that I suppose all mothers smile. Even surrogate ones. “Well, hurry down, like it or not,” she says. “We’re having breakfast.”

  “You’re odd,” my sister says, holding Ma’s hand, in a similar bathrobe to hers. They turn and walk down the stairs. I turn back and close the door and wash my hands in the bucket that I keep under the bed for the purposes of washing only. I do not keep any of the other kinds of buckets, the ones that some use for waste or the effluvium of self-ruination. These are reprehensible buckets.

  I walk down the stairs sullenly, which is how I do everything and which I feel is a much underused word.

  One can eat sullenly.

  One can walk sullenly.

  One can do a drill sullenly.

  One can even sleep sullenly, with practice, hating the institution but desiring its release.

  Sullenness is an attitude, a worldview that I espouse proudly. And I like the way it sounds. It sounds like how it is. This is a phenomenon called onomatopoeia, which is another underused word. I used to have a good dictionary in my room. It was a comfort.

  Down the stairs is a wooden door frame with a hook in it but no door. I touch this hook for good luck even though it has never given me any.

  In front of me, the wooden table has eggs on each plate and an orange and a cup of tea by the seat that was obviously meant for me, the one at the head of the table, because I am the birthday boy.

  “Took the liberty of accommodating myself to your seat,” my father says. “Since you declined to wake up at a decent hour and then gave your mother trouble.” He sips my tea and gulps d
own the word Happy.

  “. . . Birthday,” he says.

  My mouth is open at his insolence.

  “Shut that, you’ll get flies,” he says, and drinks more of his tea. My tea.

  “Ma, why is he sitting in my seat?” I ask, putting my hands over the top of the other seat, where I usually sit on all days that are not my birthday.

  “I thought that you weren’t gettin’ up, anyway. It shouldn’t matter what seat your father’s in,” she says, bringing food to the center of the table. The food is always the same—eggs and eggs and biscuits and biscuits and, when we are lucky, bacon and gravy. Today we have a plate of bacon and a decanter of gravy.

  “Well, I do not care,” I intonate, “but why must we tamper with tradition? It is tradition for everyone in the family to sit in that chair on their birthday.” I point at it.

  “Why don’t you sit down where you are?” my father says lowly and quietly, and I do because I know to listen to him when he sounds that way, even if it is in the form of a question. I know there are certain questions that one should respond to as if they were orders. They are rhetorical with an added touch of dread. There is no word for them. Gravorhetorical questions, I suppose. Brutal-rhetorical.

  I sit. Ma sits across from me and my sister piles in at the end opposite my father. It is amazing how she can fold herself into a seat as if she were three small people, bunching up her arms and legs to make it a complex process. Once I am seated, my father’s hand and my sister’s reach out in unison for us to all say Grace. My father’s hands have gotten rougher in the thirteen years I have known him (the first three years do not register), but they are still not proper Texas hands; they are the hands of a clerk, which makes sense, since that is what he is.

  “Bow yer heads,” Ma says.

  Grace is ridiculous because obviously there is no God, but I have learned to make certain compromises with my family. I bow my head and Ma begins:

  “Bless us, O Lord, through these thy gifts and thus to thy service. Amen.”