Glitter and Glue (6 page)

“John went to get paint,” I tell Evan.

“Pfft,” he says in a way that begs interpretation. Unimpressed? Dismissive? Whatever it is, I am not inclined to mention John again.

Evan asks about my travels, so I launch into
Things happen when you leave the house
and then fast-forward to selling Tracy on the trip, arriving in Sydney, hitting all the bars and restaurants, getting hired and fired by human-rights violator Eugenia Brown, seeing John’s ad, and Tracy’s gig in Beecroft.

“It’s weird to go so many days in a row without seeing her. We were together so much in college, people called us Trelly.”

Just then, Pop shuffles out of his room. He is, as photographed, almost entirely bald, with a nose that draws a second look. His skin is pink, and his eyes, small and set back, are Paul Newman blue.

“Well, hello,” he says, looking down at the two of us in front of what my mom calls
the idiot box
.

I stand to shake his hand, which is cool and smooth, like a river stone. “Hi, I’m Kelly.”

“Yes, I see. You can call me Pop. Evan,” he addresses his grandson, “how was your trip? You back at work tonight?” It turns out Evan was camping the past few days and has a job stocking shelves at a grocery warehouse from eleven
P.M.
to five
A.M.
, which explains why he’s so muscular, not that I’m fixated on his body or anything, but, I mean, he is very fit.

“Can I make you some coffee?” I ask Pop.

“No, thank you, I’m out here to get the laundry going,” he says, patting the last of his hair absently.

“I can do that—”

“Pop does the washing,” Evan cuts me off, sounding almost paternal.

Pop makes his way slowly down the hall toward the kids’ room, making an airy whistling sound. When I ask Evan if I should gather all the dirty clothes, he assures me that Pop doesn’t need any help.

So now I’ve met all of Ellen Tanner’s people. The newish husband. The young children, the nearly grown son, the father. If this family were a poker hand, you’d fold. Without that middle card, you’re drawing to an inside straight, and that almost never works out.

It isn’t long before John pulls in the driveway. I hear him at
the front door. I’m not eager to be found sitting in front of the TV with Evan while an old man does the washing. I walk to the hall to see if I can help carry anything, but when John gets inside, he nods at me, steps into his room, and shuts the door, just like yesterday.

Back in the TV area, Evan’s seat is empty, the newspaper gone, Pop is back in his space, and I’m alone in a house where one seven-year-old girl and three grown men sequester themselves voluntarily. I itch for Martin, easy Martin, who needs me to listen to his piano piece and buckle his seat belt. If no one will take my help, at least give me some pool tiles to scrub.

I suppose my job here could be to help John see his children as irresistible rascals again before he starts to resent their youth and ignorance and untimely needs. Maybe the great service I can offer John is to take over the crap parts, the stuff my mom did—
No no no
and
Eat your beans
and
Stop that right this minute
—so he can be a beaming dad who tickles and brings home presents from gift shops and says,
Come here, Lovey! Give your old man a hug
.

Tracy’s here to meet everyone.

“You must be Martin,” she says, bending down with her hand out.

“Of course I am,” he says. “What’s your name?”

“Tracy Tuttle.”

“What’s your mum’s name?” Tracy looks stricken, but I give her a
don’t worry, he does this
smile. To him, there’s nothing sad or heavy about it; it’s an old rubber band that he shoots at people for fun.

“Michele.”

“And this is Milly,” I insert before Martin can reload.

“Hello, Milly.”

“Hi,” she says, dead to Tracy’s warmth, as she falls back on the couch like a thirteen-year-old whose mother just suggested, say,
a nice pair of denim gauchos
for the school dance. Though, of course, she never will be.

While Martin pulls Tracy into his room to meet his cast of dinosaurs, I walk around the back, looking for John, who is sanding the window trim.

“Hi Jo—”

He spins around. Even though he put the ad in the
Herald
and interviewed me and prepared the guest room for my arrival, I am still a constant surprise.

“Oh, sorry, hello,” he says, blinking at me.

“I didn’t mean to startle you. My friend Tracy’s here, and we’re headed into the city, but I wanted to introduce you and ask if she could spend the night in my room, maybe.”

“Of course, right, good.”

Tracy finds us out back. She and John shake hands and she compliments the new paint color. He says thanks, like he knows she’s just making conversation because that’s his whole life now.

On the way out, we pass Evan in the driveway. I introduce Tracy, but we can’t hang around and talk because we’re catching the 5:18 to Kings Cross.

On the way to the pub, we stop in a pharmacy to primp. Terra-cotta bronzing powder, purple eye shadow, a spritz of Calvin Klein Eternity. Once we’re properly
tarted up
, as my mother says, we walk faster, the sad, screwy life of the Tanners falling off me with every step. We pass three tattoo parlors, a leather store, and a record shop spraying punk music onto the street. A bohemian at the bus stop is reading Sartre. Now
this
is what I left home for.

At the Den, we settle in with two pints of Victoria Bitter to hear a singer-songwriter we saw advertised on a flyer in the train station bathroom last week. Tracy takes out our box of Parliaments, a jumbo pack with an incredible
fifty
cigarettes. Smoking is idiotic, I know. I’ve seen the pictures of dirty lungs, but I’m young, and we don’t have cancer in our family. Anyway, I’ll quit before I have kids.

It’s a relief, being at the pub with Tracy. The Australian code of conduct—backslapping, high-fiving, nicknaming—is pure Corrigan. The louder, the better. The only time I feel like I’m in a new country altogether is in the Tanner house.

Before we finish our first pint, we get talking with some Irish
guys who ask what we’re doing in Sydney. We tell them about
our kids
. When I explain the Tanner situation, the one guy says, “God, my house woulda gone straight to pieces. My ma did everythun.”

“While your da and my da were down the pub,” the other says, laughing. “I’ll tell ya this straight: I don’ think there’s a fader in our whole village coulda raised his own kids. Most of ’em were a sorry fookin’ mess half the time.”

“My dad didn’t go to bars, but he didn’t do much of the dirty work, either,” I say, stopping to look at the truth of that for the first time. He blew in at the end of each day, fresh from the club—steamed, showered, and doused in Clubman aftershave—after a game of tennis or squash on the way home, looking for two boys to roughhouse and one girl to hug and squeeze until she laughed and said
Daaad
.
That schedule left all unpleasant tasks to my mom, who liked to point out,
Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue
. I never knew how their roles were distributed, whether they fell out naturally from the get-go or they evolved over time, one creating the other through negotiations and tiny adjustments along the way. I suppose early on she got a sense of what Greenie could handle, and what she could tolerate not being done her way, and compensated accordingly.

However it emerged, my mother was the lead on matters requiring adult intervention, and as such she came to have a high tolerance for crisis, something I learned the fall of my sophomore year when, one afternoon for no good reason, I skipped field hockey practice to go shoplifting at Sears with my friend Louise.

I only signed up for field hockey because my dad got a kick out of me playing sports, and on game days I got to wear the team uniform, which involved a very short kilt that my mother
could not ban me from leaving the house in. Other than flashing my bloomers, I hated it—the running and crouching and whacking—and was terrible at all of it.

That Friday, Louise and I looked at each other as we headed to the locker room and decided to keep walking, past the showers, out through the smoking section, up the back hill, along the baseball field, across the street, through the giant double doors into Sears, where apparel spread out before us like a field of cornstalks. We ran our hands along the shirts and sweaters, making snobbish noises to signal our superiority to these garments and the people who bought them. We went down to the basement, past the portrait studio, to the candy counter. I took a pack of gum and slid it into my pants pocket. Just because. For kicks, Louise lifted a roll of Spree and slipped it into her oversize acid-washed jean jacket.

We went back to Jewelry. Long gold chains hung in clusters by length. We tried on three or four of them, moving away from the counter to see ourselves in the full-length mirrors, making sure, I guess, that the necklaces worked with our wide-wales and Docksiders. I unclasped one of the hooks and dropped a chain into my book bag. I could hear my new necklace slide down my world history textbook, along the cover I made from a brown Acme bag because Momma Pennywise didn’t believe in buying glossy Go-Go’s textbook covers from the school supplies store.

Next, we went to Hosiery, pulsing with anarchy. I saw my mom’s standard panty hose hanging on a rack. Suntan, control top, reinforced toe. Her birthday was in a week. I took five pairs. I could picture her face as she opened them. She wouldn’t be happy I’d spent so much money on her, but she would love the practicality of the gift. Everyone needs a good supply of hose.

We crossed the aisle into Accessories. I hung a denim purse over my shoulder and walked back and forth, modeling for Louise. She said it was super cute and a good size. I pulled out the paper wadded up inside and stuffed it in a rounder of dungarees. I folded the purse in half and pushed it deep into my book bag. It was so easy, we were laughing.

“Holy shit!” we whispered to each other on the way to the exit. “What a joke.”

We passed through the first set of doors, ready to scream with relief. As we pushed against the rail that opened the second set of doors and the air of freedom hit us, a man took both of us by our elbows and said, “Okay, girls, you can come with me,” and I wanted to fall over so he couldn’t take me to wherever he was leading us.

I hated myself.

I hated both of us.

The man guided us through racks of winter coats until we got to a door with no trim, no doorknob, and no sign. He unlocked it with the smallest key on his giant ring and sat us down in an office. “Empty your bags.”

We poured everything onto his desk. He patted down our bags and opened zipped compartments, even the pocket where Louise kept tampons. He didn’t care that we were crying. He made a list of everything we’d stolen and tallied up the value. My pile was worth almost fifty dollars.

He asked how old we were, and when we said fifteen, he shook his head and pushed clipboards toward us. “Write down your name, address, and telephone number.”

I watched him dial Wooded Lane. It was so awful to listen to his deep, imperial voice telling my mother her daughter had been shoplifting and was “in his custody” that I sobbed. My nose was running, but the man didn’t offer me a Kleenex, or
push the box on the desk closer to me. I didn’t deserve a tissue. I wiped the snot on my sleeve.

Louise’s mom, whom I loved, came first. She glared at both of us and said she was
disgusted
. She did not like me anymore, I could tell. She would never again say, “Hey, Lou Lou, why don’t you see if Kelly can come up to the lake with us this summer?”

They left, and I was alone with the security officer.

It was getting dark outside. Must’ve been thirty minutes since Lou’s mom came. When my mother finally arrived, she did not look at me. She shook the officer’s hand and said, “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you called the police and sent her to jail.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She said nothing.

We walked through the parking lot to the station wagon. She unlocked her door and got in. After sitting alone in the car for a moment, she slowly leaned over to pull up the lock on my side. I slid in and pulled the door closed. My mom put the keys in the ignition and then fell back in her seat.

“Mm,” she said without starting the car. “Mm-mm.”

“I took the panty hose for you—”

Her hand flew across the space between us and she slapped me across the face. I cried, turning toward the window to look at the empty black parking lot, and on the glass there was a little splatter of blood. I touched my nose. It was bleeding. “I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m so sorry.”

“Mm-mm,” she said again, shaking her head, her lips tight.

At last she turned on the car. “I’m not going tell your father one word about this. I don’t think he could handle it. Honest to God, I don’t.”

Shoplifting was so bad that she could not tell my dad, my booster and biggest fan. The fall would be too far. It would hurt too much. He would love me less if he knew. Which meant that either she loved me less as of that moment, or her love was different than his. Our relationship started pristine but was pretty beat-up by that point, like an heirloom tablecloth that, after years of hard use, was tired and stained. Maybe she was hoping that didn’t have to happen with my dad just yet. Or ever.