Love Walked In (4 page)

Clare
sat on her bed with her notebook, sorting examples. The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck.
Little Women
contained both kinds of girls. Beth March was gentle and shy, so scary Mr. Laurence next door gave her a piano. When Jo March looked him right in the eye and told him he wasn’t as handsome as her grandfather, he laughed and said she had spirit.

It was important that Clare figure out how to get a man to like her, because she had decided to call her father. Clare’s father wasn’t frightening in any ordinary kind of way. He wasn’t ugly with wild hair, he didn’t shout, and she couldn’t remember him ever getting angry at her. Clare wasn’t even sure that she was scared of him, but the thought of calling him made her heart pound. She had never called him before. When she told Max the cleaning lady this, Max started puffing and sputtering and cleaning the kitchen table with swipes that were more like slaps.

“Jesus Christ, almost eleven years old, and you’ve never called your own father! The bastard must go out of his way to make you feel pretty goddamn comfortable with him.” Clare smiled at Max’s back, jolted out of her fog of worry for a few seconds by Max’s rapid-fire tirade. Clare thought Max had the most unexpected voice to ever come out of a person. While Max was all cool, art-girl edges to look at—skinny, pierced, inky black bangs in a mid-forehead, straight-across chop above cat’s-eye glasses—her voice was a cartoon airhead chirp. Instead of sounding harsh, her expletives streamed like little silver bubbles in a fish tank.

“Guess he thinks he can just write a check, and his fatherly duties are done. Forget connection. Forget sharing your child’s life.
So
wholly fucked-up, as I’m sure you’ll agree.” She paused and looked at Clare.

“Pretty fucked-up, I guess,” said Clare with a shrug, enjoying the tang of the forbidden words in her mouth, but not really sure they were accurate. Clare hadn’t called her father before not because he’d told her not to but because it hadn’t occurred to her before. She wondered whether she was supposed to want to call him up to tell him about a new friend or a good book or her role in the school play. Maybe she was the one who was fucked-up. Clare considered asking Max about this, but decided against it.

As Clare watched Max, she thought about how Max dusted in the same way she did everything, with square-shouldered authority, but also with care. She imagined the little muscles of Max’s arms rippling under their tattoos. What if Clare scrapped the whole idea of calling her father? What if she just told her problem to Max instead? Maybe Max could help.

But Clare decided not to tell Max, after all. Although she considered Max an adult, Clare knew that not everyone would; some people would think of her as a kid, and kids had trouble getting listened to, especially if they had tattoos and funny glasses. Besides, even if someone would listen to Max, in order for Max to get someone to help Clare’s mother, she’d have to tell them how wrong things had gotten, how Clare’s mother wasn’t being a very good mother anymore, and the thought of this scared Clare.

Clare tried to imagine living with her father instead of her mother, and she just couldn’t; she was sure her father couldn’t imagine it either. If Clare knew anything about her father, it was that he would never let anyone take Clare’s mother away from her. If he decided to help, he’d figure out a solution that would keep them together.

“I’d truly love to get my hands on that asshole,” tinkle-belled Max, and Clare thought maybe Max would be just what her father needed. That she’d be like Maria bursting into the Von Trapp household with her satchel and funny haircut, waking everyone up, making clothes out of curtains, and making Captain Von Trapp fall in love with music, his children, and her. Clare doubted it, though. She remembered how the captain’s lips twitched when his little daughter Gretel forgot to say her name during roll call. You got the feeling right from the beginning that Captain Von Trapp had a soft heart under his cold, unsmiling exterior, and Clare had never gotten this feeling from her father, even though he smiled all the time and called her “Clare-o the Sparrow.” Besides, Captain Von Trapp had the excuse of being grief-stricken and a widower, and Clare’s father wasn’t either of those things.

“He’s not mean to me or anything,” said Clare. “He just has this…”

“This what?” said Max, stopping her cleaning and turning to look at Clare. She pulled off her fisherman’s sweater and sat down on the floor next to Clare, sticking her blue-jeaned, pipe-stem legs out in front of her. Max was usually bundled in layers of clothes: hoodies, long underwear, flannel shirts, child-size tank tops, and sometimes an oversized funny purple-and-green poncho on top of it all. Once Max had left the poncho at Clare’s house and Clare had walked around her backyard in it, loving the way it made her feel cuddled and safe and, at the same time, like a butterfly. Now Max wore a tiny black T-shirt that said
HAUSFRAU
in pink gothic print.

“This way of looking at me. The way my mom looks when we go over to the Shrewsburys’ for dinner; she smiles and talks and laughs, but you can tell she’s really bored. That’s how my dad looks at me, like he can’t wait for me to be over,” said Clare. She was glad she’d told Max this, and glad she’d thought of the right way to say it. She hadn’t actually put it into words before, even inside her own head.

Max put her arm around Clare and said, “His loss, honey-pie.”

When she was nine, Clare’s best friend Molly had moved to Taos, New Mexico. Among all the losses this meant for Clare—and it ranked, until recently, as the heartbreak of her life—the most painful loss was Molly’s family and her great, ramshackle Tudor house.

Clare’s mother had owned a party-planning business—still did own most of it, in fact, though she’d gradually turned the day-to-day work over to her partner Sissy Sheehan and had become a kind of figure-head. Back when she was running it, though, Clare’s mother did most of the planning, ordering, arranging—the daylight work, she called it—but sent Sissy to the actual event. Clare wondered how her mother could stand it: choosing the candles, food, plates, flowers, music, sometimes even creating a theme like Ali Baba or the Roaring Twenties, paying attention to details like the color of the lighting or whether to hang tapestries on the green walls to keep everyone from looking jaundiced, but then never getting to see how it all turned out. When Clare asked her about it, her mother had said, “I do see it, Clare. In here.” She’d tapped her head, then smiled and tilted up Clare’s chin with her finger. “Anyway, I’d rather see
you,
” she concluded, so that Clare understood why her mother did the daylight work.

Sometimes, though, especially during the holiday season, an event was so important that Clare’s mother had to be there herself. Then she would put on a long crepe or jersey dress, usually black, nothing bright or sparkly, except maybe her chandelier earrings if the event was very special. The point was to be invisible, Clare’s mother told Clare, even though Clare knew her mother would shine like a star no matter what. And she would drop Clare off at Molly’s house, sometimes coming out to talk to Molly’s mother, Liv, or her father, Jim, maybe doing a funny, self-mocking spin or curtsey in her dress, and then would pick Clare up the next morning. Her mother usually arrived when they were still at the breakfast table, and she would sit for a minute and have coffee with Liv and tell vivid little stories about the party: a minor avalanche of profiteroles, a drunk guest’s profanity-studded toast, a hostess swooning in her tight-cinched corset-bodice dress. Clare treasured these moments: the taste of cinnamon toast, flowers on the table, her mother’s dancing laugh, the two girls, the two women, happy and friends.

When Molly’s family moved, Clare had no place to stay, so her mother hired an assistant named Seth for Sissy and they began doing all the night work. First, though, Clare’s mother had to attend one more function—a big getaway weekend at a mountain resort to celebrate the marriage of the children of two feuding society families.

“I have to be there to make sure they’re not slipping poison into each other’s martinis. When the guests leave the party on a stretcher, it’s bad for business.” Her mother’s voice softened. “It’ll just be this one time, Clarey.”

So, after six years of short day visits, Clare had ended up at her father’s apartment in the city for an entire weekend. It hadn’t been so bad, at first. Clare’s father had filled every second with activity: the Natural Science Museum, the art museum, a picnic in the park with restaurant food in fancy little boxes instead of sandwiches, a shopping trip during which her father bought her a pair of high-heeled leather boots that her mother thought were unsuitable for an eight-year-old and never let her wear and a red double-faced wool coat embroidered with flowers around the cuffs and a matching hat that might have come right out of Sara Crewe’s closet. The first night, they had gone to dinner at the Four Seasons and afterward Clare had fallen asleep with a new white teddy bear the size of a three-year-old child.

But the second night, she’d awakened around midnight and felt suddenly scared of the unfamiliar room with too much light coming in through the tall windows. She stepped over to one of the windows and looked down at the moving cars and the people on the sidewalks. It felt lonely to be in the room, with all the lit-up busyness down there, all its noises she couldn’t hear. She thought about why she wanted to go home, even though her father was nice to her. Maybe it was because he forgot the names of people she’d just finished telling him about and because he sometimes asked the same questions twice. But the thing that made her feel dull and almost invisible was the way his gaze would drift sideways or over her shoulder as she spoke. His attention was like a child’s when there’s a television on in a room, and Clare could sense his eyes scanning as though another, better daughter might skip into view at any moment.

After a while, Clare had decided to get a drink of water and glided carefully past her father’s bedroom door to the kitchen. It had taken her a while to find a glass and just as she finished filling it, she heard a low, animal-like sound coming from the living room. She almost made a run for it, back to the guest room, but thought of Mary Lenox from
The Secret Garden
, how she’d heard crying somewhere in the English manor house she’d been sent to after her parents died of cholera and had marched boldly down spooky hallways looking for the source of the sound.

Clare had held her breath and inched into the living room, holding the glass of water in front of her as though it were a candle lighting her way. She’d almost dropped it when she saw the woman, a stranger, half-lying on the loveseat, hair tumbled to one side, a hand dangling, face slack, mouth wide open as she snored. A sharp noise jumped from Clare’s throat, and she ran to her father’s bedroom, water splashing over her hand onto the floor. The room was empty. Crying, she called her mother’s cell phone, and her mother left the mountain retreat that minute. Clare packed her bag, heart banging, and took the elevator to the lobby where she waited for her mother. In the two hours it took for her to get there, for Clare’s hot face to be pressed against the soft wool of her mother’s coat, her father never came back, and the woman he’d left to watch her never noticed she was gone.

After that, Clare felt something new for her father, something that might have been anger but that came out as unease and watchfulness and didn’t leave much room for sweetness.

So it would have to be pluck, Clare decided. She sat looking at the phone. The vacuum cleaner was a distant, reassuring whine and tangled up with the sound was Max’s sprightly, off-key soprano: “You are lost and gone forever! Dreadful sorry, Clementine!” Max’s voice made the words sound jolly.

Clare listened to Max sing a second longer, then shoved the books off her bed with a decided bang; plucky or not, she’d rather call with Max in the house.

Besides, her mother might be home soon, with bags full of quirky, expensive food she’d culled from various groceries and specialty stores. The past week or so, Clare’s mother had been on a cooking tear, had taken to buying armloads of cookbooks, issues of
Food & Wine
and
Gourmet
, as well as cooking tools that were expensive and exquisitely specific in nature, like a huge paella pan with its own circular propane burner.

Clare would watch her mother unpack grocery bags, cradling the food in her thin hands as though each item were a fragile precious gift, an offering: morels; saffron; white truffle oil; Dover sole; a bag of small, purple potatoes; a long, thick stalk with Brussels sprouts growing around it like a spiral staircase. Then, she’d cook in a fevered, chattering way, sometimes tumbling half-finished dishes into the sink and beginning over, sometimes pulling golden, fragrant soufflés or loaves out of the oven and arranging them before Clare in a gesture that seemed oddly far removed from feeding someone. Sometimes, Clare would wake up in the middle of the night and hear her mother chopping. On these occasions, Clare would wait until her mother went to bed, then would tiptoe downstairs to turn off the lights and, once, two of the burners on the stove.

Clare dialed her father’s office, and when his secretary answered, Clare said firmly, “This is Clare. Please put my father on. It’s imperative that I speak with him right away.”

There was a pause, and then the secretary said, “Oh. Well, how are you, Clara?” She sounded young, not intimidated by what Clare hoped was her own forcefulness, and also…what? Sympathetic, maybe. Despite getting Clare’s name wrong, the secretary sounded nice. Clare felt a little thrown off. It was easier to be plucky in the face of opposition.

“Fine,” said Clare, the edge in her voice smoothing in spite of herself.

“Your father’s not in the office, but I can have him call you back. OK?”

Clare felt deflated. No. She didn’t trust him to call back, but even if he did, it might be too late. Her mother might be home. Her mother might even answer the phone.