Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (11 page)

I mumbled something again, this time a kind of apology.

“Somewhere I have the musical,” she said. “A friend found it for me. You can see it if you like. I’m not terribly good. Now, sweetheart, I’m off to bed.”

She kissed me carelessly on the lips and we each went to our bedrooms in the vast silent house. Outside was darkness: dark trees, dark sea in the distance. The next day, Liliana gave me a Betamax tape, and after dinner I watched the movie alone, on a television deep in the house. It was a banal musical about a convent girl in the big city, except that it was in German and therefore ominous and scary. At one point the girl was threatened by a Gypsy. My father had made it sound like
Triumph of the Will
, and maybe it was, if you could understand what they were saying. Liliana had a sweet, clear voice and a fetching smile. I could see why men left their fortunes at her feet.

Years later, when my father died, Liliana—who had by then buried four husbands and divorced two—sent me a thick, cream-colored, black-bordered note of consolation. She gave her regrets for the funeral, and ended with the hope that I had not learned very much either from my father or from her.

Now my own small family, which I had built on the model of buttered saltines in front of the TV, was piled on our secondhand couch with that same distant grandmother. There was nothing about Liliana on the news, of course, but she seemed inclined to watch the sitcom that followed. Marcus and Bethie drew nearer to her as she giggled at the screen. Mina brought out praline ice cream, and soon the children were leaning sticky-fingered against their great-grandmother, one on each side.

“That’s what I wanted!” I told Mina in the kitchen. “A normal childhood, a granny to eat ice cream and watch TV with. I wanted it so much.”

“Why isn’t she dead?”

“It was the caretaker’s wife in her clothes.”

Mina rinsed a plate. “You have to explain it to me when I’m not so tired,” she said.

I made up our queen-sized bed with the clean sheets, and Mina loaned Liliana a nightgown. When everyone was packed off to sleep—Mina in the children’s room, to their delight—I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling, thinking about my grandmother giggling on this couch and holding contests with the children to see who could stretch the mozzarella the longest.

In the morning, after Mina went to work, Liliana announced that she had a car coming and she was taking Marcus and Bethie shopping in Beverly Hills.

“Everything costs a fortune there,” I said.

“It’s where I used to go.”

“The kids don’t last long, shopping,” I said. “They start to melt down.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s time for them to learn.”

I watched the three of them climb into another shiny black town car, and wondered if my grandmother knew about taxis.

“Don’t lose my kids,” I said. She patted my cheek.

I WENT BACK
in the house and shaved close, to get rid of the gray in my beard, for my own morale. It was exhilarating to have a kid-free morning, and I pulled up my résumé on the computer and changed the font. It looked much better. I started moving my accomplishments around.

At noon, though, I started to worry, and thought I should have told my grandmother to call and check in. At one, I made a sandwich and imagined telling Mina that I’d let the kids go off alone with a woman who had never been known for her judgment. At one-thirty, I tried to distract myself by raking leaves in the backyard, and at two, I came inside to find my children in a screaming tussle with a white yapping dog, while my grandmother looked on, beaming.

“What is this?” I asked.

Marcus and Bethie, with their finely tuned receptors for parental opinion, froze. The dog kept whirling and barking, then stopped, confused.

”It’s a new doggie!” Liliana said, still beaming.

“Is it yours?” I asked.

“No, darling, it’s theirs.”

Marcus and Bethie were on the verge of tears now, full of the misgivings they’d ignored at the pet store.

“We can’t have a dog, Liliana,” I said. “I have to go back to work. There’s no one to take care of it.”

“
We’ll
take care of it!” Marcus said.

“You’ll be in school,” I reminded him.

My grandmother looked around the living room, as if for the dog-loving servants who might be hiding behind the furniture. She looked back at me, wide-eyed. “Every child should have a dog,” she said.

“I’m sure that’s true,” I said. “We just can’t right now.”

“But the children are so happy!”

The children did not look happy at all. Here was their great-grandmother, returned from the grave, just to give them an animal they couldn’t keep.

“Have they had lunch?” I asked.

“Yes, of course!” Liliana said, then she looked at the children, considering. “No,” she said. “Perhaps not. I think someone at the pet store gave them a cookie.”

“Let’s get lunch,” I said. “We’ll talk about the dog when Mina gets home.”

While I fed the kids, the dog chewed a hole in the seat of the big yellow chair.

“We can just flip it over,” I said, trying to be magnanimous, but when I turned over the cushion, there was a hole chewed in the other side. I looked at Liliana, who shrugged.

“I had the same idea,” she said.

By the time Mina came home, it had been decided: Bethie was allergic, with angry red welts on her throat and chin and wrists. She was noble and brave, willing to suffer all manner of torture for the still-unnamed dog, but the hives were spreading.

Mina had brought Chinese takeout from the good place, in violation of the New Austerity, and we ate at the kitchen table. Liliana sat archly beside me, her hair tied back with a pale blue ribbon of Bethie’s. When I met her eye, she raised her painted eyebrows, as if catching a stranger staring.

Bethie, her neck ringed with hives, was still working the angles. “Is there,” she said, “a different doggie I can have?”

“One that won’t make her sick?” Marcus asked.

“No, babe,” Mina said. “No dog.”

They knew that was it: Mina’s word was the law. Bethie frowned mournfully at her plum sauce–smeared plate, and her brother shot her a resentful look.

IN THE MORNING
, Liliana waited in her black coat, with her handbag packed, for the car service. The children were in the backyard, saying goodbye to the dog: Bethie with socks over her hands and a bandanna tied over her nose and throat.

“I hoped you might stay,” I said to Liliana. “The kids are just getting to know you.”

“We have your daughter’s health to consider,” she said primly.

“The pet store might take the dog back.”

She looked astonished. “That would be cruel,” she said. “He has a home, with me.”

“Where will you go?”

“My lawyer found me an apartment in Paris,” she said. “He’s very contrite. And the RSPCA is beginning to be reasonable. I’ll be fine.”

I nodded. I had no doubt of that. Even when she was dead she had been fine. Another black car pulled up to the curb, and Liliana stood and clapped her hands. The dog came running through the back door to her heels, as if it had always been hers.

“Come, darling,” she said to it. “We’re on our way.”

The children and I trailed her out and watched as she eased into the car after the dog, swinging her high heels gracefully in.

“Can we come visit the doggie in Spain?” Marcus asked.

She laughed. “I don’t even have a house yet,” she said. “I’m going to France now. Come give me a kiss.”

The children did, and then I did, too, leaning into the car. I smelled her perfume and her wool coat, and the faint staleness of the dress worn three days in a row. The dog climbed into her lap, and she rubbed its ears and cooed at it. Then she smiled her film-star smile at me, squeezed my arm with her elegant, twisted hand, and pointedly let go. I was blocking the car door, holding her up.

“Why did you come here?” I asked, risking annoying her.

She looked startled, and blinked once. “I wanted to see you,” she said. “To see how you had grown up.”

“And?”

She tilted her head as if to see me better. “Well, you aren’t very much like your father, thankfully,” she said. “But you aren’t very much like me, either. Maybe there’s something your mother isn’t telling us.”

I could feel my face doing something unattractive. “You think she was cheating on my father?”

“Oh, don’t be such a bore,” she said. “It was a joke!”

I wanted to be light and flippant, as she was, but I felt cold pass through me. It was like people described the presence of ghosts. Disillusioned with the effect of her gift to the animals, she had come to check out her biological legacy, and decide if I was a worthy heir. I tried to keep the neediness out of my voice, but it wasn’t neediness, it was need.

“Will I see you again?” I asked.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m not
dying
.” She waved to the children, behind me. “Goodbye, darlings.”

“Liliana,” I said.

“My flight, darling,” she said. “I’ll write to you soon.”

Then she pulled the door closed, and the car slid away from the curb. With my children at my side, I stood watching it cruise toward the end of our block. She wouldn’t send for us when she had a new house. She wouldn’t be calling for my Social Security number when she wrote her new will. She had appeared on my doorstep only to dismiss me a second time, more decisively now that she had made a careful inspection, and recognized nothing of herself in me. I tried to say, like Mina,
Good riddance
, but I was not as sensible as my wife. I felt a rising anguish in my chest. We hadn’t made ourselves as vivid to Liliana as the fate of some unneutered cats. We had failed, even in overtime, and she was gone.

WHEN VALENTINE WAS NINE
, her mother’s new lover took them one night to a bonfire the college kids had at the lake. He carried her in her nightgown from the house to his faded red convertible, and put her in the back seat with his son. They parked between two pickup trucks and walked toward the blaze in the dark. The air smelled like woodsmoke, and the students stood in a circle, lit up by the fire, drinking beers and talking. Carlo was the Italian teacher at the college, and some of the students said “Ciao” and laughed and shook his hand, or gave him five. His son, Jake, who was ten, wandered to the other side of the fire. Valentine sat on a patch of grass in her nightgown, still sleepy.

“College was the best time,” Carlo said, hugging her mother around the waist. “It never gets any better.”

He hadn’t yet spent a night at their house. Valentine’s mother said he was the dangerous kind of handsome, and that his name was really just Charles. He would look hard at the person he was talking to, as if what they were saying was supremely important, then lose interest and drop the conversation. His son, Jake, was beautiful, everyone said so.

Across the fire, Jake was talking to a ponytailed college girl, both of them sitting cross-legged on the ground. Their faces were rosy orange in the firelight, with the dark water of the lake behind them. Jake made the older girl laugh, and she put a hand on his cheek. Valentine watched them. Her mother’s last boyfriend had a daughter, who asked if Valentine really liked her mother, and why her bedroom was so small. The girl asked what she called her
unit
—what word she used—and laughed when Valentine didn’t know what she meant.

“Are you bored, honey?” her mother asked.

Valentine shook her head, stretching her nightgown tight over her knees.

Carlo drove them home, and in the back seat Valentine fell asleep. In the morning she came out of her room to find Jake awake under blankets on the couch. She opened her mother’s door, and Carlo was in her mother’s bed. He lifted his head from the pillow.

“There’s money in my jeans,” he said. “Two maple bars and a newspaper for me. Gwen?”

“I’ll make breakfast,” her mother said, but she didn’t get up. Her hair spilled out on the pillow, and her shoulder was bare. She usually wore her hair up and a nightgown.

“The kids are going for breakfast,” Carlo said. “And how about knocking next time.”

On the walk to the store, Valentine had to run in skipping steps to keep up with Jake. He knew how to order at the pastry counter, and he added an apple fritter for himself. He knew which newspaper to buy.  Valentine watched him pay, and thought of the girl touching his face.

Back at the house, they knocked on the bedroom door. Valentine’s mother came out in a robe and went to make coffee. Jake and Valentine climbed over the bedcovers with the bag of maple bars and the newspaper. Carlo pulled  Valentine close, squeezed her shoulders and spoke into her hair.

“Sorry I said that about knocking,” he said. “Your mom just needs her privacy. I want us all to be friends.”

Jake didn’t look in their direction, but ate his apple fritter, inspecting the inside between bites.

When they had gone, Valentine’s mother pulled the covers off the bed. She looked dreamy and happy; she wore lace underwear under her untied bathrobe and her hair was brushed.

“He said I have wonderful cleavage,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s the space between your breasts.”

Valentine thought about this information, and about the word. Her mother’s breasts were small, compared to other women’s, and separated by several inches of breastbone that might have been Valentine’s own.

“He said it was surprising that I didn’t shave under my arms,” her mother said, shaking a pillow out of its case. “So I shaved.” She laughed. “So much for my feminist principles. I kind of like it, though. I told him I didn’t think Italian women shaved, but he said they did. I’m not sure he’s right. They’re more natural in Europe.” She shook the other pillow out, and dropped the pillowcase on the floor. “So what did you think of Jake?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think Carlo’s a good father.”

Valentine tried, as she sometimes did, to remember her own father living in the house. He had been too tall for the overhead light fixture in the kitchen, and swore when he bumped his head but never took the fixture down. Her parents had fought, but that was just part of life. Then he was gone, living in California. When Valentine asked why he had moved so far away, her mother sat down on the couch to answer. She said that they just couldn’t stay in the same town, divorced. His pull on her was too strong, and he couldn’t stand her having a new relationship, so neither of them would have been happy. When Valentine asked her father the same question on the phone, he said, “I had an important job to do in California.” Then he asked what her mother said about it. Valentine said she didn’t know. For a while, at night, she would hear the phone ring and then her mother crying, but that had stopped.

Her mother bundled up the sheets, and carried them past Valentine into the kitchen.

THERE FOLLOWED
a difficult period, as Gwen ran through her divorce settlement. She polished her wedding silver to have it appraised, but came home from the jeweler’s crying, unwilling to sell it. She was happy in the mornings after Carlo stayed, but whatever he did wore off, and she was miserable again. They ate from her wedding china, with the silver scrollwork around the edges, because those were the only plates. She grew vegetables to sell to a local organic café, and they ate what was left. When Valentine found a steamed white worm on her broccoli, her mother said, “It’s from the garden.”

“It’s a
worm
.”

“Just take it off.”

“It’s gross.”

“I ate my broccoli already,” her mother said, smiling wanly, making a joke. “At least you found your worm first.”

“I don’t want to eat things from the garden anymore.”

Her mother stared at her, looking lost. Then she stood, dropped her plate in the sink, and shut her bedroom door.

Summer days, Valentine went to the public library downtown. She sat in the empty children’s section, reading comic books:
The Incredible Hulk
, and the
Archie and Veronica
s her mother said were sexist. A bearded man in a jean jacket sometimes sat close to her, and brushed against her once as she leaned over a table, reading. The librarian came over and asked him to leave. After that, Valentine would glance around the library, to see if he was there. She looked forward to school starting in the fall.

ONE DAY SHE WALKED
home to find Carlo stalking back and forth across the living room, and her mother sitting on the couch. He was angry.

“Rich brats,” he said. “It’s worse in summer school. Everyone indulges them.”

“Did you sleep with one of them?” her mother asked.

“No!” he said. “Jesus.”

“What did you do?”

“I gave them the grades they deserved. I wouldn’t take late papers. They complained to the fucking dean.”

“They can’t fire you for grades.”

“Maybe I yelled a little.”

“Is there some kind of probation?”

“I was already on that.”

“Jake’s outside, baby,” her mother said to her.

She found Jake bouncing a volleyball on his knee, on the other side of the big pine tree. The sun lit up his dark hair, and Valentine wanted to touch it, he was so beautiful. She wondered if Jake were the dangerous kind of handsome, if that was why she had a nervous feeling in her chest.

“Is he still mad?” Jake asked.

She nodded.

“He made dinner for some students and they got drunk,” he said. “One hit a tree in her car. Angie. She’s okay, though.”

“Does my mom know?”

“She doesn’t know
anything
.” Jake kicked the volleyball into the lilacs, and Valentine watched it disappear. “What’s there to do here?” he asked.

“We can go up on the roof.”

The old maple tree was easy to climb, and its branches stretched out over Valentine’s bedroom. There were maple seeds scattered on the flat roofing, and she showed Jake how to spin the dried ones like helicopters to the ground.

“This is so cool!” Jake said, running up to the roof’s peak and leaping over it, arms in the air, then skidding down on his rubber-soled  Vans to where the asphalt shingles flattened out again.

“We’re not supposed to be up here,”   Valentine said. “There are live wires.”

Jake spoke to the lines that ran over their heads. “General and Mrs. Electric!” he said. “We want permission to be on the roof !”

Valentine sat on her heels on the incline, watching him act out all the parts—the general barking orders, long-suffering Mrs. Electric, Jake the boy who had come to play on the roof—and she wished she could make up things like that. He kept going until his father yelled, “Jake!” from below.

Then Jake’s face grew solemn, and they climbed in silence down the tree.

Gwen said, “There are live wires up there,” and Jake sneaked Valentine a look. Carlo wasn’t speaking to anyone. With Jake in the car, he drove away too fast down the gravel alleyway.

THEY READ
about the accident in the newspaper. Angela Ellberg, twenty-one, had been charged with DUI. The instructor who provided the alcohol, Charles Gregory—that was Carlo—had been fired. Valentine’s mother was furious, red-faced and crying.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” she demanded.

Valentine thought of Jake saying her mother didn’t know
anything
.

Carlo and Jake came to the house that night with two bottles of red wine and a sack of groceries. Gwen stopped them at the door. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“The college wanted to keep it a secret,” Carlo said. “They asked me not to tell.”

“But I listened to you talk about
grades
!”

“I’m sorry,” Carlo said. “I should have told you. Can I come in?” He walked past them with the groceries. Jake sidled over to the stereo to look at the records. Valentine followed her mother and Carlo into the kitchen.

“What are you going to do?” Gwen asked.

Carlo picked Valentine up and spun her around, saying, “
O donna di virtù, beata e bella, loda di Dio vera
!”

“Please speak English,” Gwen said.

“Instead of Dante?” he asked. “I like your hair like that, Val.”

Valentine touched her braids, and he put her down and started unpacking the groceries.

“I’m filing a lawsuit,” he said. “They should never have fired me. I’m going to rake them over the proverbial coals.”

Her mother frowned at the filmy plastic produce bags on the counter, and Valentine knew she was thinking that she already had lettuce and good tomatoes, her own. “A lawsuit for what?”

“Wrongful termination.”

“Who’s Angela Ellberg?”

“My best student. I had no idea she was drunk.”

“You gave them alcohol.”

“A glass of wine,” Carlo said. “Anyone who got an
A
on the Italian midterm got an Italian dinner. This is not a crime. They were all of age. Angie has a bump on her head and a scratch on her arm, and it’s her own damn fault. They were drinking
before
.”

“You could have asked me to the dinner.”

“Oh, boy,” Carlo said. He set a can of tomato paste on the counter. “Are you mad because you disapprove of the event, or because you weren’t invited?”

Valentine’s mother said nothing.

“I thought it would be more of a drinking-type social thing if you were there,” he said. “I was trying—God help me—to be appropriate. Now close your eyes.”

She stared at him a minute, and then did close her eyes, and he took a necklace of tiny dark-red beads from his pocket and hooked it around her neck.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I know this is an embarrassing mess. That looks nice.”

She went to look in the bathroom mirror, and Carlo gave Valentine a funny, apologetic smile and shrugged. Her mother came back and kissed him, and he opened a bottle of wine and started to cook. He was short enough for the low ceiling, and never hit his head on the light.

They put out the china plates for dinner, and Carlo added two more wineglasses, pouring some for Jake and Valentine.

“Carlo, please,” Gwen said.

“I refuse to pretend it’s an evil,” he said. “Kids drink it in Italy from their baby bottles. I’ve given them a tiny bit. Now sit down and
mangia, mangia
. How is it?”

“Aside from the tomatoes?”

“You haven’t even tried them yet. Valentine, what do you think?”

Valentine glanced at her mother. The tomatoes didn’t have worms. Nothing had worms. “It’s good,” she said.

Her mother looked betrayed, but a minute later she was laughing at something Carlo had said.

THAT NIGHT AT BEDTIME
, Jake laid out his sleeping bag on Valentine’s bedroom floor, saying that the couch was lumpy and her room the only one with carpet. The carpet was made of sample squares, glued together in a checkered grid, green and red and blue.

“What if I sat up at night with a dream,” Jake said, “then cracked my head open on the hard floor out there?”