All the Houses (36 page)

Nina checked the mirrors every few seconds. And then we passed through an intersection, pleasure overcame her, and she said, “I'm driving!”

Because it was Dad's car, and I hadn't told him why I was borrowing it, I was especially cautious. First I directed Nina to a supermarket parking lot to practice, but there were so many shoppers and little children barely over bumper-height, and Nina was looking every which way, not at the shoppers and their kids but at entrances and exits and occupied cars. She was at an age when the world is small and run-ins are common, and you are always hunting for your classmates, your crushes.

But there we were, and we drove on, the river to our left with its drowned garbage and fallen tree limbs, the parkway below, a cloud-blanket drifting slowly to the east. People were pitched forward in the chill. A man in a long coat spit onto the sidewalk. When I'd learned to drive, I couldn't get out of my head how easy it would have been to kill myself and/or another person with a mere spasm of the wrist. Nina, however, seemed immediately confident.

I could've sworn that no time at all had passed since I had learned to drive, and yet red lights took forever to turn green.

We drove up into Northwest, and as we neared a playground she said she wanted to take a break. We let ourselves in through a chain-link gate, passed a stone water fountain—the sight of which recalled me to the smell of playground water fountains I'd drunk from twenty years earlier—and sat on the too-small swings, knees level with our bellies, chomping on Orbit but earthbound, our legs too long.

I picture us now not beached on a playground swing set but sitting high above the city on hanging platforms, the entire government small beneath us, grit raining from our shoes. She was smart, smarter than I was, she asked me what I thought of artificial intelligence and whether I liked Thoreau, who in her opinion was boring, and whether I believed in an afterlife and what was my take on some band I'd never heard of. Notions rolled out of her in one long stream. To be honest there's nothing that looks that good to me right now, she said. I used to want to be a professor like my dad used to be but then he became a lawyer. I don't know, maybe I could be a lawyer. Too many lawyers as it is, I said. But then I saw her face and backtracked and said some of them do cool things.

“It must be nice to have a sister,” she said.

“Sisters are hard sometimes.”

“What's hard about it?”

“I don't know. I have two, and sometimes we get along and sometimes we really don't.”

“You mean you fight?”

“It's not even fighting. It's that you're bound to this person who you would probably never otherwise be friends with. And you bring out the worst in each other a lot more than you bring out the best in each other. My older sister still thinks that she knows better than me about everything.”

“So do you wish she wasn't your sister?”

“I might as well wish that I'm not me.”

Nina and I slid slowly from the swings and walked out of the park. My phone tickled my thigh, and it was a text from Rob.

Whassup?

I'm with Nina. My high school girl

What're you doing

Swinging

I heard Nina giggle. She had gone on ahead and appeared to be bumming a cigarette from some random guy, who must have been thirty at least. He seemed all too happy to oblige. What got me was the way she had positioned her hand on her hip, or maybe it was the way he was leaning over her. I froze: oh crap. Then I said her name, too loudly. Nina turned, and I saw she had the face of someone who knew exactly what she was doing, although she didn't really know, she couldn't have.

It happened so quickly, the transition from plastic horses and jumbo drawing pads to lingerie and lip gloss, from playing Marco Polo and holding tea parties underwater to lying beside the pool, soaking in the light. The magazines disclosed ten awesome beauty secrets and ten ways to tell if he really does like you and ten top accessories for fall. No more “tummy,” “poop,” or “mommy,” but instead “bogus,” “spaz,” and “dick,” or whatever they said these days.

Another text from him.

Let's meet up

Nina had only just passed through it, the time of girls' disappearing. They fell from the sky, from greater and lesser heights, and slid out of their girl-selves on the way to becoming someone's girlfriend or the vice president of the French Club. At high schools the expired shells were molted off every which place, in bathrooms and classrooms, stuffed into lockers, useless. One moment you were adrift in the airspace above the field hockey field, and then down you came, tumbling, nauseated, Icarus in kilt and cleats.

The man walked away from us. I told her to lose the cigarette.

“Why?”

“I just can't condone that.”

“I could hold it farther from you.”

“Put it out,” I said, and then I asked whether she wanted to get dinner. A friend of mine might join us, I said.

*   *   *

I was driving now, because it was getting dark.

“So is this guy your boyfriend?” she asked.

“Unclear. Not exactly.”

“What's it like to have a real boyfriend?”

Did I even know the answer?

“My dad is never going to get me a car,” she said. “It's the Metro for-evah.”

Eventually, I told her, you will have a car. And a nonsecret boyfriend.

The “pan-Asian” restaurant occupied a long narrow room with booths on either side, low-hanging lamps sheltering each booth from the darkness of the unfinished ceiling. Beautiful young women brought pots of steaming tea and bowls of food on wooden slabs to husbands and wives, to bright-faced students, to old friends. There was a sweet, hot smell. Rob had said to meet him there, and we found him at a table engrossed in his handheld device.

As we said our airy hellos and then read our menus, it was as though I knew every one of his motions already, each rustle, each breath, and I knew, therefore, that I was hardly out of the woods when it came to him. In fact I had barely entered them. In winter: storms coming and going, wires down, lines crossed.

I told him we'd been learning to drive.

Oh, where did you go? To Turtle Park and back again, up Reno and down Nebraska, over hill and dale and Rock Creek. Which we all agreed was a poor name for a waterway. I ordered stir-fry and they ordered soup, or was it the other way around, but theirs looked right and mine looked wrong.

“Can you do this?” Rob asked, and he took a few twined rice noodles from his bowl and stuck them above his lips, so that they dangled down like the tusks of a noodle walrus.

Nina copied him. I couldn't have joined in if I'd wanted to, not with what I'd ordered, but then again I didn't want to. I wanted them to stop. My companions suddenly seemed tipsy, though they weren't drinking. Nina was pink. Rob was tilting his head right and left, so that the noodles swayed. I was quiet, waiting for a beat I could catch, but I had no rhythm at all. Once again she ought to have been teaching me, as I was going about it all wrong and steering her toward the dragons besides.

Rob asked her what school she went to, whether she liked it there, what bands were her favorites. This had the feel of teasing more than questioning, which is to say I don't think he cared what the answers were. His directness made her shyer than she'd been a moment ago, and she answered shyly—coyly?—consulting her soup bowl before she spoke. Rob was an opportunistic listener, waiting for her to say something that grabbed him and then jumping in with his response, no matter whether she had more to say. He did the same with me, I realized, but when I was talking to him I got too tripped up to notice things like that.

When she was in the bathroom, I told him that Nina had a secret boyfriend. “Or not a boyfriend exactly. It's her former math teacher. Or tutor.”

“What's his name?”

“Sam, or Samed.”

“Am I supposed to choose?”

“He has two names. And he's older, which I don't know, is that bad?”

“Yes.”

“I just mean, like, two or three years older.”

“If I had a daughter, I wouldn't let her go out with some older guy with two names. No way.”

Because I thought he was joking, I waited for him to ease up. He didn't.

“This guy is like a nerdy student from Turkey. I don't think he's too dangerous,” I said. Rob didn't seem at all swayed by that. I saw Nina come out of the bathroom and lowered my voice. “Don't tell her I told you.”

He drew his finger across his lips.

*   *   *

Although I offered to split the check with Rob, I found myself, in the bathroom afterward, resentful that he hadn't insisted on paying for all of us. By the time I walked back out to the dining room, he and Nina had already left the table. I could see them standing outside with their backs to the door of the restaurant. She was nearly his height, and they stood close enough that their silhouettes had merged into one. Granted, it was dark out, and they were wearing bulky coats, and as soon as I stepped out the door it seemed to me I'd been too sensitive, imagining things.

While Nina was distracted by something on her phone, I asked Rob did he want to get together later, after I dropped Nina off. He told me he had a breakfast meeting the next day. In other words, no.

I didn't realize how late it was until Nina and I started back. On Vane Street, Daniel opened the door to the building just as she hit the steps. “Long lesson!” he said, with false cheer.

“We had dinner too,” Nina said.

“No accidents?”

“She did great,” I said.

“Bye!” she said, walking past him, through the door.

I stood beneath him, at the bottom of the stairs, and though I might've come up or he might've come down, we both stayed where we were. “She did all right?” he asked, wanting more reassurance than I could possibly give him, not just about her driving but about her entire state of being. His worries were vast.

“She's a natural.”

“I've been meaning to teach her, but it was just one thing after another, really. Thanks so much for offering.”

“No problem.”

“Maybe next time, if you do it again,” he began, tentatively. “If you do go to dinner or something, if you could let me know…”

“I should've called you about that. I'm sorry.”

“You have my number, right?”

“It's in my phone, yes.”

“It's just that she sometimes forgets to let me know—”

“She's sixteen, I guess.”

“Right! But she did okay?”

“She did.”

*   *   *

I entered my own building, and as I went up the stairs something started to squeeze my insides, I was tetchy on the landing and passed through the door to my apartment with a full-blown sense of grievance I couldn't assign to anything specific. Since I'd come back to Washington I'd become more quick to anger, I noticed, and maybe that had a positive side—I wasn't depressed anymore! I was fucking pissed off!—but it wasn't so positive overall.

I got down on my belly next to the bed and looked for my gun. It wasn't there. I started to worry, until I remembered that one night I'd become unnerved by its presence and had stuck it under the kitchen sink, behind the spare paper towel rolls. I'd put it inside of a large freezer bag, like evidence in storage. I fetched it and eased it out of the bag and held it in my palm, then held it with two hands, posing.

I walked around like that, wanting to shoot, feeling like Elvis as I aimed at my pillow, my small TV, my refrigerator, my dirty dishes.
I have to stop digging in the muck
, I thought. A little less conversation, a little more action!

My head hurt. I put the gun down. I sat down. I looked out my window at the windows of Nina's apartment, where the lights were already off.

 

 

The next day I wished I were a wanderer, a rambler, a hobo out of an old song or a folk tale, nobody's daughter. I wished I were not in our nation's capital but out on the plains, or in some bleached-out motel on the Mexican side of the border. Instead I parked my dad's car on Albemarle Street. I was returning the car and meant to return something else too.

The neighbors' houses, stripped of their holiday lights, squatted grimly on hills of ivy. The steps to our own house needed hosing down. I didn't want to go inside. Much as I understood that my failings and failures couldn't be blamed on this house, I still felt as though it had sapped too much out of me and that I'd been hobbled by it. I bided my time in the car, the little gun in my purse.

Or was I just avoiding my father? His sudden outbursts, his unacknowledged, indescribable needs, his heavy heart—I didn't know what to do with him.

No one answered the door, and I let myself in. “Hello? Dad?” I heard footsteps on the basement stairs and then there he was, stumbling up from underground in his rowing singlet, his face reddish and sweaty and suddenly too large, with too much of that damp skin on it.

“Hello!” he said.

“Hi. I brought the car back.”

“You didn't have to—I could've come out on the Metro to get it.”

“That's okay,” I said. I knew he would've done it, had I asked. “Thanks for lending it to me.”

There was a basket of clean laundry by the stairs, not yet folded. I still wasn't used to it, his doing his own laundry. And out of nowhere I had the thought,
He needs someone over here taking care of him
, though it wasn't the laundry that was the issue, he was perfectly capable of laundry, and there was nothing about that basket of clothes or about the house generally or the way he himself looked that suggested he needed any special help. Even so, I understood in that moment why it had bugged Courtney when I'd moved out.

“Are you sure you don't need it for longer? You could keep it for the weekend.”