Precious (17 page)

She plans what to say, what to do. A sense of alarm grows in her, a sense of danger. She knows he is married. She knows he has a daughter he’s talked about frequently in class and once or twice, more tentatively when he was alone with her. She knows all of this, and yet in light of her mother’s return and his callous response, her mind turns over new questions: Why
should
his wife have all of him? Why, if he and Eva are together, shouldn’t he be there for her when she most needs him? She’s filled with a sense of undoing and daring. What would happen if she walked up to the door? Knocked? Rang the bell? Announced herself as Peter’s lover, told his wife about their exchanges, their bodies pressed together slick with sweat? She might say,
Do you know where he goes when he says “to the library”? Do you know the things that happen behind your
back, when you aren’t watching?
Thinking of all this gives her amused satisfaction. How liberating it would be to say these things aloud. If he thought he could keep her from his life, if his wife thinks their life so perfect, so immune to hurt and disruption, how wrong they both are. Eva lacked the bravery to say what she thought to her mother—her mother who in one moment managed to silence her yet again—but she could say what she thinks to a stranger, to this wife. The thought is simply tantalizing.

Resolved, Eva primps her hair and checks her face in the mirror. She gets out and sprints across the street, smoothing her dress as she ascends the walkway. She passes the kiddy pool, realizing that sand, not water, fills it, along with two plastic shovels and a bucket.
What kind of mother would let her little girl play in dirty sand?
Eva wonders, her sense of entitlement and swagger growing. She inhales deeply, hesitates only for a moment, and presses the doorbell. She waits, peering in through the columned windows on either side of the door. She views the front entrance, the curved wooden railing that leads upstairs. To the right, she catches sight of a dining room that has, in the corner, a desk with a reading lamp and envelopes stacked in thin slots. She imagines Peter sitting there, back turned to his wife, his attention consumed with his poetry his sestinas. Around the desk, toys lie scattered on the floor. She holds her hand up to her forehead, cutting back the glare.

Impatient, now fully committed, she rings the doorbell again. She turns and looks at the view from this angle—the bushes pulling out, her car across the street, the empty-looking houses, the wide road. She hears a woman call from inside, “Hold on.”

After excruciating seconds, the same woman appears, a child on her hip and phone cradled in her neck. She opens the door wider and motions with her finger. Eva braces herself and steps into the foyer made bright in the day. She puts her hand to her throat, the words ready to pour out from her. But the woman places her finger to her lips, and Eva waits, immediately comparing herself in attractiveness: Peter’s wife is
stout, with short permed hair, a pug nose, and a weary look. Passable, Eva thinks, but not beautiful by any stretch.

“I love you, Mom,” she’s saying. “Tell Dad I love him, too. Make sure Peter holds the ladder when Dad goes up on the roof this time, will you? We don’t want a repetition of events.” Unconcerned with Eva entirely, she turns and walks down the hallway and goes around the corner, disappearing again. Eva inhales, smells rose-scented perfume. She peers into the living room, taking it in full view. A puzzle on the coffee table remains only half-composed—a clown’s face appears appallingly white, his eyes dark and serious. Against the wall, there is an ugly worn love seat with wooden inlay, a ficus tree with brown leaves collected in the base of the pot. Peter’s wife comes back into the foyer a moment later, the baby still on her hip in a diaper, no shirt, a mass of red-yellow hair. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, her breath exasperated. She shoos the cat from under her feet before setting the baby down in a children’s swing next to the sofa. “Right,” she says, turning, placing her hands on her hips. “So, what are you selling?”

Eva feels her stomach turn. “Me? Nothing.”

“Oh. I thought you were selling something. You wouldn’t believe how many people have stopped by in the past month, selling magazine subscriptions, cookies, wrapping paper, Avon, books. I can’t keep up.”

Eva shakes her head and puts her hand to her chest. “I’m not selling anything.”

“What can I do for you, then?”

Eva tries to sound assertive, but she feels her swagger lessen suddenly. “Is your husband home?”

“Peter?”

She smiles. “Peter, yes. Peter.”

The woman seems to regard her finally. Her eyes travel down over Eva’s dress. Later, when Eva will replay this moment, she’ll remember the wary look, the cautious handling of the conversation, how for a moment Peter’s wife crossed her arms and paused. “He’s at my parents’—
just left,” she says, and it seems to Eva she stammers a bit, in the same way Eva might. “I’m his wife, Amy.”

“That’s sweet,” Eva says. “That’s nice of him to help your parents, I mean, to care like that.”

Amy pauses for a moment. “Why do you ask?”

Eva tells herself not to flinch, not to miss a beat. She stands up straight, puts her hands on her hips. “I know Peter,” she begins.

“Do you? Well, then, if Peter knows you, I should know you. We have the same friends, mostly, the same acquaintances …”

“You seem surprised.” A moment more passes, and Eva sees something register in Amy, a quiet alarm. There is a broken quality to her expression, a tense hesitation. And, seeing this all, Eva suddenly hesitates, too. She wanted to feel invincible. She wanted this woman to be mean-spirited like she always believed her mother to be. The baby starts to cry. Amy sighs and pulls the child from the swing, pudgy legs kicking. She holds the little girl close, kisses her head.

“I talked to him before,” Eva says, adjusting. Her cheeks flush; she can’t think of the words to be so cruel. “About babysitting.”

A sudden relief seems to come over Amy. “Oh,” she says, patting the baby’s head. “We’ve been discussing a sitter. You know, maybe once a month so we can get out. I didn’t know he’d talked to anyone already. I don’t suppose you’d do light housework, too?”

Eva bends her leg and tries to take on an air of complete casualness. She can feel the words failing her, the stutter in the back of her throat.

“I guess not,” Amy says, waving her hand around. “The house is always a mess anyway, as you can see. I guess at some point it’s ridiculous to bother at all with cleaning. But do you have references?”

“What?”

“You know.” She scribbles an imaginary note. “Someone who could vouch for your reliability?”

Eva hesitates again, thinking. “Yes,” she says, nodding, in what she will remember was a desperate way. “I can bring you names and numbers, I guess.”

“People in the neighborhood? Are you the girl who sat for the Johnsons down the street? Rita Johnson? Their son’s name is Henry. They were so happy with that girl; they said she was a dream.”

Eva shakes her head. “No, I didn’t sit for them.”

“Who do you sit for in the neighborhood, then?”

“I don’t,” she says, straining now. “I live across town.”

“That’s far to go, then, isn’t it?”

“Not really.” Eva’s hands drift upward, into the air. “I love being here. This side of town is so pretty. And the people here, they’re nice. You’re very lucky. I’d give anything for what you have.”

Amy winces and rocks the baby. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, I should write it down. I’ll talk to Peter when he gets home.”

A few moments later, Eva hastily scribbles down the first name that comes to her, Brenda Armstrong. She gives the paper and pen back and then watches as Amy studies the scrawl.

“Are you still in school?”

“A senior this year. I’m almost eighteen.”

“Big year.” Amy glances at her again. “Well.”

“Well,” Eva says, “I should go.” She turns, in that moment, victorious despite everything. It is so easy, she thinks. To slip into someone’s life, someone’s house, and imagine yourself in their rooms. A sense of gloating overwhelms her, thinking how easy it is to fool this woman, how much prowess she herself holds. Her face flushes with the knowledge, too, that it’s a secret, that Peter will never know, that he’ll wonder why on earth Brenda Armstrong would stop by to chat and offer ser vices. She steps outside feeling, for the first time that day, for the first time in many days, a sense of empowerment.

After Natalia sends Sissy out to play, she vacuums and dusts the entire house and arranges the
National Geographics
according to date, making a thick fan of them across the table. Upstairs, she cleans the toilets, both of which are coated with a red algal film, and she wipes dried toothpaste from the girls’ shared sink. She empties a trash can that has been left to overflow with empty toilet paper rolls and tampons. She makes a quick sweep through Sissy’s room, surveys the posters on the wall, the photographs of television stars around it. She is still a child and, short of her hesitations with Natalia—that awful look of distrust and doubt that Natalia caught earlier—Sissy is mostly the same, a little taller perhaps, a little more gawky and longer in the face, but still a child nonetheless.

In Eva’s room, Natalia sets the laundry basket down. She absently pages through the marbled notebooks left on Eva’s dresser, the copied pages of poetry by Whitman and Yeats. She rummages through the closet, pushes the blouses and skirts across the metal rod, a bouquet of
scents wafting toward her as she does. She looks on the floor under boxes and yearbooks. It feels pitiful to do this. No one wants to have to piece together their child’s life, to search for problems, to find out—in a desperate way—who she has become when you weren’t looking.

From the window she sees Sissy playing, collecting rocks and skipping them down the sidewalk.

“Dad doesn’t want us running around,” Sissy said with a despairing look when she was sent out to play earlier.

“Get air,” Natalia insisted, so tired was she of having to explain what she could not. “Go.”

“The madman,” Sissy said indignantly.

“Don’t talk to strangers,” Natalia told her.

“That’s it?” Her tone was incredulous. She stood with her hands on her narrow hips.

“You’re going to stay inside every day?” Natalia asked. “Is that how you see your life?” She saw a flicker of hesitation. “Fine, then help me scrub the kitchen floor. Inside there’s always work to be done.”

With that Sissy darted into the backyard, calling for the neighbor’s dog.

Now Natalia opens the drawers and combs through Eva’s cotton and lacy underwear. She feels dirty doing it, intrusive, terribly so, and yet something is confirmed for her when, in Eva’s jewelry box, under the foam where Eva has laid her lapis ring, she finds a plastic bag filled with marijuana, which makes the candle on the bureau make sense— scented like cinnamon and burned down to a waxy, messy pulp. She breaks the dope into small pieces, flushes it down the toilet, and scrubs the rim again with a brush. She never would have expected drugs. As a child Eva was brace-toothed, pretty in pigtails, neither timid nor overly demonstrative, worrying Natalia that she hadn’t given Eva enough of what the girl needed. Back in those days, Eva would ask Natalia to read to her each night, preferring books to made-up stories, as if the book, by virtue of black lettering and printed, ordered images, were more truthful than Natalia’s musings. “These stories are boring,” Natalia told
her once, of Eva’s fairy tales. “They never change.” And yet, now, as Natalia looks around the room, to the posters (she recognizes the cathedral in Italy) and the records and notebooks, she sees so little of the girl she knew, of the harmony that once existed between them.

She collects clothes and takes the laundry downstairs. In the kitchen she wipes the glass in the door again, removing the flat palm print Eva left when she stormed out. She shouldn’t have derided Eva, but she is still Eva’s mother and it is still her house. The girls will strike out eventually, grown, to go out into the world and find their own places. They will make their own ordinary lives, not ones with magic and husbands who change into bears, not worlds where women flutter about, wearing colorful skirts and twirling around a campfire, in time with drums and harps. They will not dance over white moons or swim across oceans. What she spoke to Sissy was always a lie, wasn’t it? A fabulist’s tale. What is idealized is doomed to be unrealistic. Whatever dreams the girls have will be given up to the practicality of the day. They will be changed as in one of Eva’s old stories from a book: the bucket, the mop, the broom.

She collects Sissy’s drawings from the table, the ones done before Natalia grew weary of Sissy’s questions. There are girls riding bikes across a blue backdrop, a yellow sun peeking out from the corner, spotted by a foreboding cloud. A second drawing renders lions in the jungle, and orange horses grazing by water, their nostrils hidden in the bright grass. She gathers the remnants of crayons, the worn-down yellow and indigo. She places them in the tin lying on the table.