All the Houses (6 page)

“This room, it was a little office or something, was connected by a glass door to where Dad was having his meeting, but there were curtains over the glass, so you couldn't see what was on the other side. I sat on the sofa for a while. I didn't have anything to do. Then I saw this pink eraser on the desk, and I went and got that. I played with it on the floor, I don't know what I was doing, whatever a bored kid does with an eraser.

“It wound up under the sofa, I guess it rolled there, so I had to get it. I lay down on my stomach and tried to reach. It was dark under there, I couldn't see much, so I was just feeling around with my hand. Then I heard this
pop!
At first I didn't feel anything and then I did. It was a mousetrap. It closed on my hand. Right at the base of my thumb.

“I didn't know what to do. I opened my mouth and then I remembered what Dad had told me. Don't make a sound. So I didn't. I got myself back up to sitting. That metal bar was pressed into my thumb, I remember the skin bulging around it. I tried to pull it off, but that hurt even more, so I just sat there, and tears were running down my face, and I was wiping snot on my sleeve, but I was quiet the whole time. I don't know how long I waited there like that. It could've been five minutes or it could've been an hour.

“Finally Dad comes out to check on me and when he sees me he freaks out. Freaks out. I've never seen him look that way, like, I don't even know how to describe the look on his face. ‘Oh Jesus, Jesus,' he was saying. He got the mousetrap off, and then my hand started to hurt even more, and he picked me up and I think I might have peed on myself. He carried me out, he carried me all the way back to the car, and I mean that must have been hard, I was a decent size, and he was—well, definitely upset. I know we went to the emergency room, but I don't remember that much about that part, except I think I was bummed when I didn't get a cast. It turned out nothing was broken. I had a huge bruise, was all.”

*   *   *

“I can't believe I didn't know that,” I'd said to her when she was done.

“You were only five.”

But it wasn't that I couldn't remember it, it was that I'd never heard the story retold. In my family we hardly ever recalled our past to one another. We compartmentalized.

“That's so crazy.”

So crazy but so Courtney: the wanting to go where our dad went, the wanting to please him, the tremendous will she had, the tolerance for pain. After she told me, I switched off the TV and went to pour myself a glass of water, bothered in a way that I didn't understand. I suppose it bothered me that I'd never heard that story before, but then I turned around and never spoke of it again.

 

 

I left my father at the AU campus and went to a movie, and afterward I walked past a bookstore and saw James Singletary's memoir stacked in the window display,
A Call to Honor A Call to Honor A Call to Honor A Call to Honor.
Between piles of books, a placard announced that the author would soon do a signing there at the store. Singletary's photograph was at the bottom of the sign, his wrinkled face like a face etched on money, weighty and remote. Or it was trying to be such a face. He had a small mouth and a large forehead, and though you couldn't see his arms I imagined that they were folded across his chest. He looked every bit the hard-liner. While I couldn't say for sure based on that one image, it seemed that even his skin had a hard quality, like old rubber.

It started to rain, and I went inside. During the short journey from the store entrance to the shelf of new releases, I started to concoct a fantasy in which I would attend the Singletary book-signing and ask piercing questions on Dad's behalf, questions that exposed the author as full of shit. A revenge fantasy, even though I didn't know what it was I'd be seeking retribution for: I would get back at this man I'd never met for various unspecified lies from twenty years ago? It was a desire that had less to do with Singletary than with a certain impression I had of Dad's career. For my father hadn't been utterly disgraced, he'd led a perfectly decent life, and still there was something I wanted to avenge. Some kernel of shame that he and maybe our whole family had never managed to disgorge: Who was responsible? Maybe this crusty would-be pundit? Once I had the actual book in hand, the specific fantasy of debunking him at his book-signing faded, for what did I know, compared to the admiral, the columnist, the CEO whose accolades appeared on the back of the dust jacket?

The darkness outside made the store a bright shelter, and people twisted and sidled to pass one another in the narrow aisles between the shelves, readers floating in and out of worlds. A Leonard Cohen album played softly in the background. I scanned the book's chapter titles, oblique and portentous.
Saigon 1973. Phoenix Rising. Morning in Central America.
The cost was $24.95. Then I saw someone I knew, or had once known.

I didn't even see him so much as I intuited him viscerally. An intuition of a fancy coat and the shaved back of his neck. It had been years, but his name dropped into my brain like a raider from the clouds, like a Meal Ready to Eat, even though the names of people I'd met more recently so often escaped me. Rob Golden, golden boy. At seventeen he'd been a heartthrob and well aware of it. My father and his stepfather had been friends, and so we knew him that way too. He'd gone out with Courtney for a little while, and I'd been jealous but also anointed, cool by association.

To say he was the same, what does that mean? That he was the same person? That he had the same effect on me? A river I stepped in again, maybe. Or a pile of shit—I would argue that you actually can step in the same pile of shit twice.

Having been around each other so long ago, it was as if we'd known each other intimately, though that was in no way the case. I'd had a crush on him, and my sister had dated him, so he'd been very present in my life for a minute or two, but I hadn't been a part of his life at all. As though that crush had just been in remission for two decades and now had returned, I had trouble saying his name. I gurgled it—“Rob?”

And then he turned around.

“Helen?” he said, and I was all too flattered, that he remembered my name after so many years. That he'd even known it to begin with. He'd been considered gorgeous, though it was more his energy and the twinkly leer in his eyes than his features, which were slightly skewed, as though someone had come along and tried to adjust something and done a poor job of it. And he had a heavy face; it would've been no surprise to find he'd grown fat since high school. In fact his body was lean as a runner's. Other than the shadow of a beard that covered his fleshy jaw, he looked exactly as he had, down to the clothes, which were the designer versions of what he might have worn in high school, high-end jeans and sneakers.

He asked whether I lived in D.C. and told me he'd only just come back there himself. I pretended to know less than I did about him, for the truth was that news of Rob had continued to circulate, just as it had in high school, when his activities—fucking a girl in the darkroom, casual drug sales—had been widely noted. Later, instead of courting detention (or worse) he did work in far-flung countries, Bosnia for one, and in the Green Zone he'd been some kind of consultant, and now he was back here, doing something else weighty and unclear.

Your hair is short, he said. As if the only thing I'd accomplished in the meantime, while he was intervening around the globe, was to get a haircut.

Yeah, I said. I was in L.A. but now I'm here, I said. There was no way to explain all that had led up to this shorter haircut, all the styles and colors preceding, the layers, the products. I had this impulse to apologize for it, for my hair, that is, because of the way he was looking at it and at me with his head atilt. I've never been able to acknowledge attraction as such, not until a person is actually kissing me (and sometimes not even then), and so I couldn't have said for sure whether the tilt of his head and the steadiness of his stare expressed sexual interest or mere curiosity. I only knew that I myself felt all the old tingling and that it was uncomfortable. Even when he asked for my number, I told myself he was just being polite.

*   *   *

My parents used to throw pool parties. All through the late spring and summer they heaved these outdoor occasions into precarious existence, inviting a handful of people over for a “casual” afternoon party and then straining from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon to ready the house and yard and bar. Up until the last minute they would go on desperate hunts for a missing chair cushion or count the number of good towels. The narrow strip of flowerbed had to be weeded, the pool vacuumed, leaves and dead insects (and once, a drowned rat) removed from the drain baskets. My mother would make curried chicken salad and walnut brownies. My father would undertake last-minute runs for more gin, lemons, ice.

There had been summer vacations when my sisters and I never had dry hair during the daytime, when we were continually diving into the pool, lifting ourselves back onto the flagstone, racing in and out of the house, trailing little puddles behind us. But then Courtney started high school, and she would “lie out” for hours, trying to tan herself, which was slow going in muggy D.C. Not me: I burned before I tanned, and I'd become self-conscious about how I looked in a bathing suit. Even when I went in the pool I would wear an enormous T-shirt, which billowed around me in the water, trapping spheres of air. The T-shirt said
RELAX
in big black letters, but in the pool that message was distorted into something splotchy and sinister. After I hoisted myself out of the water, I would wring out the bottom of the T-shirt and then pull the wet cotton away from my body to keep it from clinging. Once Dad had started to ask why on earth I was wearing clothes in the pool, but Mom had shushed him.

I'd just finished eighth grade, and my father was everything at once: the dad of my childhood, who knew all there was to know, who could fix anything, and the clueless dad of my teenage years, who understood nothing, and the elusive dad who was seldom home. I would seek his attention, but on the rare occasion I actually won it I wanted only to shuck it off again.

The first time I spoke to Rob was at one of those parties. Dad's friend Dick Mitchell had brought along his infamous stepson. Rob was older than I was, but friends of Courtney's talked about him and sometimes bought pot from him, or so I'd overheard them say. The common understanding was that he had slept with a teacher. In person, he was dimpled and cocky in a way that maybe only a teenage male in a letter jacket can manage without coming across as a pure numbskull. He had black hair and eyes so intense that I would think of them as green until I studied him again and found that they were brown.

Because of his reputation I was fascinated. Trying not to look while he moseyed along the pool's edge and sized up the water. Trying not to look when he pulled one-handed at his red T-shirt and then lifted it—and yet I did see the patches of brown hair under his arms and the strip that began below his navel and ran on downward. A smirk bided its time on his face, illuminated from below by the reflections off the pool.

Underneath my own large shirt, there was not much difference between me at fourteen and me at eleven, aside from the fact that I was a couple of inches taller. I imagined that I had made an impression on him, though, that he was secretly intrigued by my androgynous style, that if I were to duck inside the house he might follow—though my idea of what would happen next was indistinct. (There was a television commercial in which a woman would take off a baseball cap and toss her head so that her hair swooped in slow motion around her face. In my dream life I did the same, despite the fact that my own hair wouldn't swoop at any speed.) I was able to partially sell myself on notions that some boys did like me,
in secret
, and maybe if I hadn't had an older sister I could have insulated myself with those notions, kept up a belief that I was
secretly very attractive
, but the fact was that without leaving the house I could easily observe the way boys, sometimes the very same boys, treated certain other girls. It wasn't the way they treated me.

Rob nodded at my hat. “Are you an Orioles fan?”

I shrugged. “We went to a game. I got a hat there.”

“I used to play baseball.”

“Why'd you stop?”

“The coach had it out for me. I was more serious about wrestling anyway.”

Was Jodi Dentoff at that party too? My parents' friend Jodi, who was a reporter for
The Post
, would show up in her giant sunglasses, wearing a sarong tied over her black one-piece. A tiny woman, she would sink into a chair with a Bartles & Jaymes and pronounce her contentment—“Oh Eileen, I feel like I'm in the
Bahamas
, not Washington.” But she would've left our number with someone, and as soon as the PIO or Deputy Assistant So-and-so called, she'd dash inside and take a seat on the stairs with the phone cradled against her neck, a notepad balanced on her petite knees.

Courtney strolled outside in a terry-cloth cover-up, and as soon as she appeared, Rob had no more use for me. I remember him cannonballing into the pool right near where she was standing, and her hopping back as though the splash might singe her. “Don't be a jerk!” she called when he came like a seal to the surface. “Don't be a jerk!” he echoed in falsetto. She rolled her eyes
.
They didn't speak beyond that, but it was obvious that everything they did was for the other's benefit. And when she went back inside, he waited maybe a minute or two before asking where the bathroom was. That was almost a year before they actually started dating, but there you have the humid onset.

I held on to the edge of the pool and kicked, gradually increasing the force of my kicks to see how much of a wake I could generate, and forgot the party, briefly, until my mother told me I was splashing too much. I climbed out of the pool and volunteered to go inside and get more ice.