A Patchwork Planet (15 page)

“Kirsten,” Len said offhandedly. “Barnaby has this incredible car that’s totally wasted on him,” he told Kirsten as he pulled out a chair for her.

“Yes, you mentioned that,” she said. She draped herself on the chair and reached idly for the drinks list that stood in the middle of the table. Her nails were cut in U-shapes, dipping in the middle and sharp at the corners. They made me want to curl my own fingers into fists.

“So, you and Gaitlin been going out long?” Len asked Sophia, but meanwhile he was gesturing for a waiter. She said, “Oh, five months,” and he looked at her blankly. Then he asked Kirsten, “What are you having?”

“A mineral water,” she told him, although she was still studying the drinks list.

He ordered two, along with a snack called Wrappin’s, which he swore we were going to love. Then he turned back to Sophia. “This guy’s a nut; I hope you know that. Complete and utter nut,” he said. “Did he tell you about his life of crime?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling.

“Barnaby here is the Paul Pry Burglar,” Len told Kirsten.

Kirsten merely raised her nonexistent eyebrows and turned to the other side of the drinks list, but Sophia said, “The what?”

“That’s the name the newspaper gave him,” Len said. “People would come home and find their silver still in place, stereo still in place; but all their mail had been opened and their photo albums rifled.”

I said, “Len,
she
doesn’t want to hear this.”

Sophia’s lips were slightly parted.

“Guy was insane!” Len told her. “Love letters missing from closet shelves, locks jimmied on diaries—”

I wanted to strangle him. “Who are you to talk?” I asked him. “You were with me! It’s just pure luck you weren’t arrested too!”

“I always tracked down the liquor cabinet,” Len told Sophia smugly.

I don’t know why liquor should have sounded any more honorable, but right away her smile returned. I said, “Goddammit, Parrish—”

“Oh, tut-tut, Barnaby; language,” he said. He told Sophia, “They sent him to a special-ed school to straighten out his evil ways and teach him not to curse.”

“It wasn’t special ed, for God’s sake!”

“No, right, I guess it wasn’t,” he said. “They did make you repeat tenth grade. They must have had
some
kind of standards.”

Sophia looked at me. I said, “I had played hooky the entire year before that, see.”

I just wanted to dispel any suspicion that I might be mentally deficient, but Sophia read more into it. She got a softness around her eyes, and she said, “Oh, Barnaby. Had something gone wrong in your home life?”

“No, no.
I
don’t know why I did it,” I said irritably. By now I’d developed more of an appreciation for Kirsten. She was so plainly bored with all this, letting her gaze roam over the crowd that stood at the bar. “Thanks heaps,” I told Len. “I just love digging up ancient history.”

Len said, “Hmm?” and leaned back so the waiter could set his drink in front of him. Next came the Wrappin’s, which turned out to be a sort of roll-your-own arrangement—miniature flour tortillas with an assortment of different fillings. Ordinarily I’m allergic to dishes with dropped g’s in their names, but at least these gave us something to focus on besides my unsavory character. We all sat up straighter and reached for the baby corncobs and the salsa verde. It was kind of like the activities table in kindergarten. The women fell into a separate conversation (“How long have you known Len?” I heard Sophia ask, and Kirsten said, “Um, three days? No, four.”), while Len and I experimented with various fillings. The two of us got to flipping crudités off the backs of our spoons, aiming for the sauce cups. We developed an actual game with complicated rules. “No fair!” we were telling each other. “You hung on to your broccoli floret way past the legal limit; I saw you!” I enjoyed myself, in fact. You miss that kind of thing when you’re not around other guys a lot. Yes, I’d say the evening ended better than it began.

Sophia thought so too, evidently. When we said good night to them, out on the sidewalk, she told Kirsten, “We should do this again.” (It showed how little she knew Len Parrish. If we did do it again, it would probably be with a different girl.) And in the car, she asked, “Do you think Len liked me?”

“I’m sure he did,” I told her.

Actually, I doubt he more than registered her presence. He had summed her up with a look and then dismissed her. But who cared? At that particular moment, driving up Charles with the windows down and Sophia sitting next to me, I felt completely happy.

Toward the end of July, Opal came for a week’s visit to Baltimore. It was the first time she’d been allowed to do this, and judging by all the precautions taken, you would have thought she was being handed over to a serial killer or something. For starters, on the morning she was arriving I had to telephone Natalie as soon as I got out of bed, just to let her know I was really and truly awake. (The train was a super-early one, 7:52 a.m.) Then I had to phone again from Penn Station, not even waiting till we reached home, to say I’d met the train okay and Opal was safely accounted for. (“Let me speak to her,” Natalie ordered, and Opal took the receiver and said, “Yes,” and, “Uh-huh,” and, “I guess so,” all the time eyeing me narrowly, as if she were reporting on my general fitness as a father.) Also, she was required to stay at my parents’ house. This was only reasonable, since I’d have had to sleep on the floor if she had stayed with me; but still I put up a fuss. “What,” I had said to my mother, “you all think I live in a slum, is that it?”

“Now, Barnaby. You know you’re more than welcome to move back into your old room while she’s here,” Mom told me. But of course, the very thought gave me the willies.

Opal seemed a lot older, suddenly. Maybe it had to do with being away from her mother. She was letting her hair grow out—it nearly reached her shoulders—and she wore a straight, dark dress, not so little-girlish as her usual clothes. I said, “Hey, Ope, you’re getting to be a young lady!” She grimaced, clamping her mouth in a way that turned her dimples into parentheses, and I saw for the first time how much she resembled Natalie. Funny: Natalie was a beauty, but now I realized that she must have started out with Opal’s plain, smooth face—unsettling in a child but attractive in a grown woman. Well, attractive in a child too. In fact, this Opal was … pretty, actually. I cleared my throat and said, “So!” Then I picked up her suitcase—molded blue Samsonite, an old person’s suitcase—and we headed out to the car.

First I drove her to my parents’ house. Big to-do: toast and home-squeezed orange juice, new doll propped against the pillows in the guest room. (Mom was really into this grandma business.) Then I took her to my place, because she’d never seen it before. I had cleaned it up spick-and-span and borrowed a few board games from Martine’s nephews—Monopoly and Life and such—and alerted both the Hardesty kids, who were hanging out on the patio in this artificial way when we arrived. Joey was lying on a chaise longue with his ankles crossed, and Joy was jumping rope. Both of them were younger than Opal—I’d say six and eight or so; two tow-headed, stick-thin kids in shorts and T-shirts—but somehow they seemed the ones in charge. Joey started shrilling questions at her (“Did you come on the train? Did you ride in the engine?”), and Joy flung aside her jump rope and executed a set of brisk, efficient cartwheels across the flagstones. Opal, meanwhile, shrank closer to my side and grew very quiet.

“I’ll just take her in and show her where I live,” I told the Hardestys. “Then maybe you could all have Kool-Aid here on the patio.” I’d mixed up a jug already and put it in my fridge—Sophia’s suggestion. Sophia had been very helpful with the preparations for this visit. The board games were her idea. She had said we needed activities, something that would let us get to know each other better. That evening she was having us to dinner, and she had canceled her weekly trip to Philly.

Every day, it seemed, I saw something new to appreciate about Sophia.

Opal didn’t comment on my living quarters. I showed her all around, but she said nothing. I worried she was storing up criticisms to pass on to her mother. “I know it’s not fancy,” I told her, “but it’s affordable. And the Hardestys are super-nice landlords.”

“Where’s your
bathtub?”
was all she said.

“Um, I use the shower upstairs.”

“Do you have to knock on the door before you go up?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “I just walk on in. I mean, it’s only their kitchen. Then I go down the hall to the bathroom. It’s no big deal.”

She didn’t say anything more.

I brought the Kool-Aid and three paper cups to the patio, with Opal trailing behind me, but then she said she wasn’t having any. She waited till I’d filled all three cups before she told me this. I felt a little put out, but I didn’t show it. I said, “Okay. What would you like instead?” She said she wasn’t thirsty. Both Hardesty kids sipped their Kool-Aid, watching Opal with round, sky-blue eyes over the rims of their cups.

After that, I took Opal to work with me. We went first to Mrs. Alford’s, because today was the day her nephew was coming and I had promised to help him load his truck. He was hauling her husband’s tools to his cabin in West Virginia. Mrs. Alford immediately gathered Opal under her wing. “Come see the quilt of Planet Earth that I’ve been working on,” she said. “Come see the teeny tea set my granddaughters like to play with when they visit.” Opal went willingly—too willingly, I thought—not giving me a backward glance. It seemed to me she felt more comfortable with women.

Ernie, the nephew, was a beefy, muscular guy, and we made short work of the loading. He told me most of the stuff would probably have to go elsewhere. “I live in a place the size of Aunt Jessie’s kitchen,” he said. “No way can I fit all this in! But she’s my favorite relative. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

After Mrs. Alford’s, we stopped by the Rent-a-Back office, and I introduced Opal to Mrs. Dibble and a couple of the workers who happened to be there—Ray Oakley and Celeste. Mrs. Dibble invited Opal to stay and play with the copy machine while I went on my next job, but I said, “Maybe another time”—plucking a house key from the pegboard. “We’re off to visit Maud May after I pick up her mail,” I said. “I figure Opal will get a kick out of her.”

“Well, you come by later, then,” Mrs. Dibble told Opal, and Celeste gave her a stick of sugar-free gum.

But things didn’t go as well with Maud May as I had expected. First off, the nursing home had all these folks in wheelchairs lining the hall. I was used to them; I hadn’t thought about how they might affect Opal. She drew so close to me that her feet stumbled into mine, and she kept one finger hooked through a belt loop on my jeans. And then Maud May was in a fractious mood. Pain, I guess. She was sitting in a chair by her bed with her shiny new walker parked alongside, and, “Who’s this?” she barked when we entered the room.

“This is my daughter, Opal. Opal, this is Ms. May.”

“You never told me you had a daughter.”

“I told you lots of times,” I said. In fact, maybe I hadn’t, but I didn’t want Opal to know that.

“You absolutely did not,” Maud May said. “I haven’t turned senile quite yet, you know. What have you brought me?”

“Mostly junk, it looks like. Bunch of catalogs and stuff. Somebody left a plant on your stoop; so I took it inside and watered it. Here’s the card that came with it.”

“What kind of plant?” she demanded. She accepted the card, but she didn’t open it.

“Something with white flowers. I don’t know. I put it in the sunporch with the others.”

“Did you
go in my house?” Maud May asked Opal.

Opal nodded, still hanging on to my belt loop.

“Did you touch anything?”

“No, she didn’t touch anything. Who do you think she is?” I said. “Why would you make such an accusation?”

“Good Gawd, Barnaby, simmer down,” Maud May told me. “It wasn’t an accusation. I was merely inquiring.”

But I was mad as hell. I tossed her mail on the nightstand and said, “So anyhow. We’re leaving. What am I supposed to bring next time?”

“More cigarettes?” she asked. She was using a meeker tone of voice now. “And that plant, besides, to brighten my room?”

“Fine,” I said, and I walked out, with an arm around Opal’s shoulders.

In the car, I said, “Next stop is Mr. Shank. You’re going to like Mr. Shank. He’s lonely and he loves to see kids.” My voice had a loud, fake ring to it that I couldn’t seem to get rid of.

“Maybe I could just go back to Grandma’s,” Opal said.

“Go
back now?”

“I could watch TV or something.”

“Well,” I said. “All right.”

It was almost noon, anyhow. I figured we could have lunch there and she’d get her second wind.

At my parents’ house, I phoned Mr. Shank to push his morning appointment up to early afternoon. Then I went out to the kitchen, where Mom and Opal were mixing tuna salad. “Barnaby Gaitlin,” my mother said, “what could you have been thinking of?”

“Huh?”

“Taking a nine-year-old child to a nursing home!”

“So?” I said. “You have a problem with that?”

“She says there were people in wheelchairs everywhere she looked.
Old
people! A woman with a tube in her nose!”

“Geez, Mom,” I said: “What’s the big deal? We’re keeping it a secret there’s such a thing as old age?”

Yes, we were, evidently, because my mother threw a meaningful glance toward Opal, who kept her eyes downcast as she stirred the salad. “We’ll just let Opal stay with me the rest of the day,” Mom said. “I’ll take her to see Gram and Pop-Pop.”

“Well, I don’t know whit you’re so het up about,” I told her. But I didn’t argue.

I noticed a hollow feel in my car, though, for the rest of the afternoon. It seemed that just that quickly, I’d grown accustomed to Opal’s company When I was at Mr. Shank’s, I thought how she could have looked through his coin collection. And I knew she would have liked playing with Mrs. Glynn’s little dog.

In the last days of my marriage, Opal was just reaching the stage where she recognized my face. I’d approach her crib, and she’d crow, “Ah!” and start wiggling all over and holding out her arms to be picked up. Then they left me. When I walked into the apartment after that, there wasn’t just an absence of sound; there seemed to be an
anti
sound—a kind of, like, hole in the air.