Glitter and Glue (5 page)

Day two is quiet. Just me and Martin.

John’s gone to a half-day safety seminar at Qantas, and Milly’s down at the park with Emma 1 and her mom. Pop’s door is closed, and Evan, the stepson, has yet to surface. I can’t believe John didn’t feel obliged to involve either one of them in the interview process, at least
a sniff test
, as my mother would call it. And now that I’m here, are they not remotely curious that someone new has moved in? You wouldn’t be in my house for three minutes before I’d want to size you up.

“You need anything?” I ask Martin as I shake his pillow back into its case.

“No,” he says without looking up from his LEGO men in race cars. “Faster! Faster!”

I fold his camo blanket and pick up around him—socks, playing cards, an apple core, a couple of glasses on the windowsill. The room instantly looks better, cared for.

In the kitchen, I run a damp rag over the counters and close the drawers and put a pencil back in a cup jammed with pens, crayons, and markers. My eyes dart around the room. What else should I do?

On slow babysitting gigs in high school, I was what you’d call a classic snooper. One long night at Mrs. Battel’s, I went through her whole makeup bag, trying on all her lipsticks, then
moving on to eyeliners and shadows. At the Perrys’, I discovered a stack of
Playboys
under the bathroom sink that made my hands sweat, along with an eye-popping hardback book featuring pencil sketches of people having sex in every conceivable position and location, including on a motorcycle. In my own house, when my parents went out, I opened all the drawers and cabinets in their bedroom, flipping through boxes of canceled checks, appointment books, manila envelopes marked
Buick Roadmaster
and
Basement Leak
, eager to place my family on some continuum. Were we broke? Did my parents have sexy secrets?

In my mother’s bottom desk drawer, I found two flip sleeves of three-by-three photos with dates stamped in the white margin, mostly of my brothers and me when we were cute—no hair in our eyes or big clipboard teeth coming in at off angles. The second sleeve was more of my mom and her friends, who anointed themselves the Pigeons in the early seventies, a self-effacing downgrade from the Hens. In one picture, my mom and her pal were wearing rented black-and-white maid uniforms and had pots upside down on their heads. They were laughing so hard my mom’s face was bright red, and tears ran down her cheeks. Her friend was crossing her legs like she might pee right there in the living room. What were they doing?
Oh God, I couldn’t begin to tell you
, my mom said when I asked. I looked at the photo so many times. I’d never seen the madcap woman my mother appeared to be in that photograph.

There was a copy, unopened, of
I’m OK, You’re OK
on her nightstand. The back cover posed two questions in all caps:
ARE YOU FEELING OK ABOUT YOURSELF? OR STILL PLAYING DESTRUCTIVE GAMES?
I remember cracking the spine and flipping through the pages. I liked the idea that all interactions could be described in one of four ways. Most people, the author said, are trapped in
I’m not OK; you’re OK
from age three on. My mom would definitely
say she was OK. She did not play interpersonal games, destructive or otherwise. My guess was that the book was foisted on her by a freshly converted evangelist for transactional analysis, and she tucked it in her purse, knowing she’d never read it. But then, it was on her nightstand …

There was also a hardback copy of
Your Erogenous Zone
—or
The Erogenous Zone
or
Her Erogenous Zone
—something about bodily hot spots, which implied that my parents had sex, and with the intention to please. But we won’t be going into any of that, as that is
nobody’s damn business
.

I had no sense of what my mom did when she wasn’t standing in front of me. I don’t know how fulfilled she was or wasn’t, whether the designs she had for her life were coming along nicely or growing more laughable every day. I’m not sure she even had designs for her life. But I can tell you this: If my mom wrote a book, it would not be about feeling OK or perfecting the sex act.
Certainly not!
My mom’s book would be called:
Work Hard, Save Your Money, Go to Church
.

On the Tanners’ shelves are books on camping and New South Wales hiking trails and lots of how-to titles. In a row of hardback novels, I see the spine of
My Ántonia
by Willa Cather, one of the few books I know my mother thinks highly of (along with anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the New Testament, which she gave me as a Christmas gift the year I specifically asked for magenta moon boots). Blame the distance, but for the first time, I’m curious to know what kind of book my mom thinks is
absolutely marvelous
. I take it down.

In a drawer, I find a shot of Milly as a toddler, holding her baby brother “in hospital,” as the Australians say. The image is shadowy, and the paper is covered with fingerprints, big and small, like scuff marks on the floor of a dance studio.

In the next photo, Milly is wearing a dark green sweatshirt
with a pink satin bow—an actual bow, sewn on, at the base of a bouquet of roses. You can tell she loves it by her posture. She does not wear it in the rain or sleep in it. It is her special top, and it defines her, like my red-and-orange-zigzag poncho in grade school.

In a third shot, a close-up, Milly is cheek to cheek with John, and I can see she has his eyes. Her cheeks are full, and her teeth are tiny and new. She looks happy, unguarded; it’s an old photo.

The last picture in the drawer is of Ellen Tanner. I’m sure of it.

“Hi,” I say quietly to the woman in my hands.

She looks about thirty. She’s wearing pearls and, from what little I can see, a plain white dress. Her hair is short, a cute, unassuming cut. Though there’s nothing glamorous about her, she’s not unattractive. She looks sweet. Her head is tilted in toward a man I assume is her father. He has his arm around her and is bald, with a comically hooked nose, like a Muppet. Her eyes are closed—the photographer caught her in a blink—but their crescent shape reminds me of a girl I knew in college, a backstabber named Becca who all the boys loved because, whenever she laughed, her quarter-moon eyes made her look totally adorable. The association makes me wonder if Martin and Milly’s mother was as lovely and loving as I’ve made her in my mind. For all I know, she was manipulative, judgmental, exacting. Or things less damning but less endearing: gossipy, edgy, long-winded. You never know after a person dies. There are no narcissists in eulogies. Nobody raises a glass to Aunt Joanie, passive-aggressive, at a wake.

But I can tell that she
was
lovely and loving because this is the picture she kept, the one with her father, the one with her eyes closed, the one with the lean.

That’s it. Four photos. No vacation shots, not climbing a mountain or running in the waves, no record of the big, exciting days, just a random assortment of nothing much.

Rather than settle in front of the television to see how Bonnie Blair and Kristi Yamaguchi did last night in the Olympics, I decide to catch up on my journal in the living room so I can see people coming: John, the stepson, the old man. I put a red blanket over my legs. It’s not nearly as warm in Sydney as I expected. Every day starts at sixty degrees, and it takes hours for the sun to fill the house. Leaning over my notebook like I’m ninety, I wonder who knitted this blanket—a grandmother, an auntie, some housebound octogenarian neighbor.

I hear a noise, a window opening, maybe a door.

Do I look too at home? What if Pop walks in and finds a stranger wrapped up in his favorite blanket? What if it was his daughter’s? What if this was her spot, the place she rested after surgery or chemotherapy, under her best wool blanket?

Impossible. No one would leave a reminder of that magnitude lying around where any ignorant visitor might casually put it into rotation. Someone thoughtful would have boxed up all the emblems of her illness.

Just in case, I stand and fold the blanket and slip back into my room.

I hate this.

I’ve just about made it through my first week. Tomorrow is Friday.

After the kids head to school with John and I’ve washed all the breakfast dishes, I settle into one of the four boxy gold velvet chairs in front of the TV to start reading
My Ántonia
. The wide flat arms of the chairs are dotted with marker. The welting is colored in by hand.
Scribbling on furniture
, I hear my mother say.
What’s next? Painting the carpet?

Though maybe the free-for-all started after the mother got sick. I bet you’d do that. I bet you’d stop saying no all the time so that, later, if your kids were thinking about you, they’d remember you smiling, thumbs up, being the Fun Mom, the Best Mom, the mom with the singsong voice who says,
Go ahead, sweetie! That’s great, honey!

I would. If I got sick, I’d say yes to every last thing until the day I died. Hot dogs for breakfast, bubble gum in school, sleepovers on weeknights. No more teeth brushing or bed making. Turn up the music, break out the pottery wheel, pass the markers. Indelible? PERFECT. I’d hang up all their drawings and photos and certificates and ribbons until the walls were covered from floor to ceiling. I’d surround myself with evidence of life, proof that my kids were waxing even as I waned.

I’m only a page in when a guy who looks about twenty-one
comes through the sliding glass door in shorts and nothing else.

“Hi, I’m Evan,” he says. “The stepson.”

“Oh, hi, I’m Kelly,” I reply, keeping my eyes from drifting over his bare chest.

I close my notebook and we shake hands, which feels courtly and silly, considering his near-nakedness. We’re right around the same height—five-seven, five-eight. He has long, loose hair that falls just past his shoulders; it’s brown, but you can tell he was blond as a child. He’s taut and muscular, vacuum-packed, like the soccer players I knew in high school. He has perfect teeth, and dimples. Dimples kill me.

“Uh, excuse me.” He disappears down the hall and comes back wearing a T-shirt. My eyes relax.

“I was gonna stir up some eggs,” he says, pulling his hair into a ponytail. “You like eggs?”

“Oh, thanks, no, I’m good.” Why am I nervous?

In a minute, he’s back, sitting behind me at the kitchen table with a pile of eggs that nearly covers the plate. “Mind if I turn on the TV?” he says.

“Not at all.”

He clicks through the stations and stops on a laundry detergent commercial. “Does that say Channel Ten?” he asks, squinting.

“Where? Oh, yeah, Ten.”

“Ever watch
Santa Barbara
?” Evan asks.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“It’s from America. They live in California,” he explains, in case inference was beyond me.

On the screen comes a blonde named Eden, who, I quickly surmise, has been raped. Her husband, Cruz, a bulky Mexican guy, kneels beside her, running the backs of his fingers along
her cheek as she weeps, tending to her perfectly, like people do on TV.

I’ve never known a guy who watches soap operas.

At a commercial, Evan ferries his plate into the kitchen and comes back with the newspaper and a pencil.

“U.S. Great Lake, four letters,” Evan says, sitting down, leaving an empty chair between us. I’ve never known a guy who does the crossword.

“Uh, HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie.”

“Yep. There she is.”

Evan checks off the clue with a
tcht
of satisfaction and pulls a bag of sunflower seeds out of his pocket.

I try him on in my mind. Me and Evan, Evan and me. It could work. I could see it. He’s young, but what’s a couple of years at this point? We could bump into each other over dishes, yard work, laundry. We could have a beer one night, wait for John to go to his room, make out in front of the TV, sneak back to wherever Evan sleeps, get horizontal, roll around for a while, spoon, do it all over again the next day.

I know, I do this with everyone (well, not John), but someday one of the people I mentally audition will become my actual boyfriend and then my fiancé and then my husband and it will have started just like this. Hi.
Hi
. I’m Kelly.
I’m
______.