Set This House in Order (19 page)

“Time to wash up, Mouse,” her mother repeated, her vicious good humor dimming by a fraction. Mouse took a last swipe at her eyes and hopped out of the chair, moving quickly towards the hall.

Instead of stepping aside, Mouse's mother continued to stand in the doorway. This was another game: to get out of the room, Mouse had to flatten herself against the doorframe and edge past her mother's broad hips, quietly accepting any pinches or slaps her mother chose to inflict as she did
so. This time, rather than lay a hand on her, Mouse's mother simply waited until she was halfway through the door and then leaned sideways, crushing Mouse into the doorframe with her full weight. Mouse gritted her teeth, knowing that to cry out was a violation of the rules. After a brief eternity the pressure eased off enough that she was able to finish squeezing through; she scampered up the hall to the bathroom.

Dinner that night was veal stew, served on the good china. There was no bad china in the Driver house; only good china, for ordinary meals, and very good china, for special occasions. Mouse knew the china was good because her mother never stopped commenting on it, or on her and Mouse's good fortune to live in such a nice home surrounded by such fine things.

“We're very lucky, aren't we,” her mother said even now, “to live in such a nice home, with such fine things in it?”

“Yes,” said Mouse, by rote, “we are.”

“Yes, we are. And we're
very
lucky that your father was so careful to provide for us, so that we can afford those fine things.”

“Yes,” said Mouse.

A photograph of Mouse's father hung on the dining room wall. The photo showed Morgan Driver standing on a hill in front of a castle somewhere in the English countryside. His image was slightly fuzzy, as if the picture-taker couldn't decide whether to focus the camera on him or the grand edifice behind him, but by looking closely you could make out a solemn expression on his face—surprisingly solemn, for a man just married.

A honeymoon in England: that was among the first, and still one of the finest, of the fine things Mouse's father had provided. Mouse's mother had always had a passion for things British, “ever since I was a little girl, smaller even than you, little Mouse,” and those weeks touring the British Isles remained one of the high points of her life. “So wonderful,” she said whenever she mentioned it, which was often, “so fine, and with a fine gentleman to escort me.”

A fine gentleman to escort me.
Morgan Driver was not a rich man, though you'd never know that to hear Mouse's mother talk about him. He sold insurance for a living, and because his business required him to travel a lot, he knew how to get good deals on airfares and nice hotels. And he did have
some
money; but he wasn't rich.

What he was, though, was well-insured. Probably the single most important thing he'd ever done, as far as providing financially for Mouse and her mother, was to board a commuter jet plane with a faulty engine mount.
That had happened when Mouse was only two, so she never actually got to know her father as a real person. To her, he was a series of stories, some told by her mother, some by her grandmother, and a few more speculative tales delivered as memoranda. Mouse liked her grandmother's stories the best, but it was her mother's that loomed largest—stories of Morgan Driver the valiant knight, the gentleman who had died tragically, but not without first ensuring that his family would always have fine things.

“So good to have one's needs provided for,” Mouse's mother said, spooning stew onto her plate. “So good to live in a nice house with fine things.” Whenever she went on like this, her voice affected a phony aristocratic diction and lilt that Mouse secretly detested. But Mouse couldn't very well tell her mother to stop putting on airs, and besides, affected and irritating was better than plain-spoken and violent. Much better.

“So good…”

“Yes,” said Mouse.

“Good to have fine food, and fine furniture, and fine clothes…”

Mouse, whose attention was beginning to drift, came alert again at the mention of clothes. Though she'd cleaned herself up as best she could in the bathroom, she knew her mother would not have failed to notice the dust on her blouse and skirt, or the rip in her stocking—and of course girls who were fortunate enough to be provided with fine clothes were not supposed to ruin them by crawling around in the mud.

Mouse gazed furtively across the table and wondered if she was about to be punished. Her mother was unpredictable that way: the same thing that made her horribly angry on one occasion might move her to laughter on another, and go totally unremarked on a third. And sometimes she seemed to overlook something only to bring it up later, in a totally unrelated context.

For now, Mouse decided, her mother wasn't going to make a fuss about the clothes—she'd already moved on in her litany of fine things, and her attention seemed to be focused on the food in front of her rather than on her daughter. Mouse allowed herself to relax a little.

“Ben Deering,” her mother said suddenly, and Mouse felt a trapdoor open in the pit of her stomach. “Ben Deering, Ben Deering,” her mother repeated, making it a singsong, “all the ladies love Ben Deering.” She cocked her head, like an owl staring at something small that cowered at the bottom of a well. “Ben Deering, you know, I didn't think I knew that name—I certainly never heard it from
you
—but then I remembered, there's a Ben Deering
Senior
who manages a junkyard over in Trash Town.”

Trash Town was Mouse's mother's name for Woods Basin, the part of town located below South Woods Park. It was a poor neighborhood of rundown one-bedroom houses and trailer lots, where only the worst sorts of people lived. Mouse's mother knew just how bad the Trash Towners were because, through an indignity of fate, she herself had been born in Woods Basin, and had languished there for thirty-two years until her superior character showed through and she was rescued by her marriage to Morgan Driver. Though she had finally escaped their clutches, the residents of Trash Town remained jealous of Mouse's mother and continued to conspire against her, seizing any opportunity to cause her grief. Whenever something went wrong in or around the Driver household—when a tree blew over in the yard, or the basement flooded, or a light bulb burned out ahead of schedule—Mouse's mother usually found some way to blame it on the Trash Town conspiracy.

Needless to say, Mouse was forbidden to go anywhere near Trash Town. And actually fraternizing with a Trash Town resident—even unintentionally—was a form of treason, a mortal sin against her mother. The trapdoor in Mouse's stomach swung wide as she realized just how much trouble she was in.

“A
junkyard
manager!” her mother exclaimed with mock cheerfulness. “And
you
know his
son.
”

“No!” Mouse squeaked. “No, I—”

“No?”

“I don't,” Mouse protested meekly, quailing under her mother's steady gaze, her voice falling almost to a whisper. “I don't…”

“Don't
what?
” her mother demanded. “Don't
know
him?” Her left hand dipped beneath the edge of the table and came up brandishing the memorandum. She lifted the piece of paper above her head, twisting her wrist as though she were shaking a tambourine. “You
don't know
him?”

And Mouse was lost, she knew she was lost, but still she managed to say, gesturing halfheartedly at the memorandum: “It was just a trick…”

“‘It was just a trick,'” her mother mimicked her. “Why would someone try to trick you unless he thought you
could
be tricked? Hmm? What were you doing with this boy that made him think you'd hold hands with him?”

“Nothing.”

“‘Nothing.'”

“I never even
talked
to him before.”

“I see. So I suppose he was just sitting around one day, wondering who he could get to hold hands with him, and suddenly a light went on and he
said, ‘What about Verna Driver's daughter? She's never even talked to me before, never shown any interest in me at all, but why make things easy on myself?'”

“I don't know why he picked on me,” Mouse said sadly. “Maybe…maybe like it says, maybe Cindy Wheaton—”

“Who's your little friend, by the way?” When Mouse blinked uncomprehendingly at this, her mother gave the memorandum another shake. “Your
friend.
The one you sent to spy on Ben Deering, even though you weren't interested in him.”

“I don't know,” Mouse said, understanding even as the words left her mouth how crazy that must sound, and not just to her mother but to anyone who heard her say it.

“You don't know,” her mother echoed. “Of course not, you don't even know Ben Deering, so how could you know who you sent to follow him?”

“I didn't—”

“You know what
I
don't know? I don't know if you're telling the truth when you say you understand how lucky you are. I don't know if you really appreciate all the fine things you've been given. I think maybe you're a worthless, ungrateful, lying piece of
shit
who wouldn't think twice about fucking up her life by fucking around with some gutter boy from Trash Town. I think—”

The cruel words hurt Mouse, and she began to tremble from the effort it took to keep from bursting into tears. There were places in the world where a display of tears would evoke pity, but this was not one of those places—there was no surer way to push her mother over the edge than by crying. Even as she fought to maintain her composure, she tried to think of some way to refute the terrible accusation her mother had just made. She hadn't even held hands with Ben, she'd barely even talked to him, and yet here her mother was suggesting that she…that she…

Mouse made the mistake of lowering her eyes for a moment; when she looked up again, her mother was no longer seated across from her.

Mouse screamed and tried to duck under the table, but her mother was too quick, catching her and tossing her back in her seat, then pitching the whole chair over backwards. The impact with the floor stunned Mouse, and by the time she recovered her mother had planted a foot in the center of her chest, pinning her.

Like a heavy stone weight, the foot on her chest made it difficult to breathe. “What's that?” Mouse's mother said, as Mouse struggled to fill her lungs. She reached back to the table, scooped up a handful of hot stew, and
flung it into Mouse's gasping, upturned face. “Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed. “Who did that?
I don't know.
” Another handful. “What about that?
I don't know.
” Then she took her foot off Mouse's chest and—before Mouse could draw a full breath—swooped down, clamping one hand over Mouse's mouth and with the other pinching Mouse's nose shut. “Mommy, why can't I get any air?” she whispered in Mouse's ear.
“I don't know.”

After that, she pounded Mouse's head against the floor. Or maybe the pounding sensation was just lack of oxygen; it was hard to be sure, because by that point Mouse was leaving her body, sliding down into darkness. She curled up in the dark and went to sleep, and whatever else her mother did had nothing to do with her.

When she woke up nineteen hours later, she was sitting on the edge of her bed in her room. Even before checking the clock-radio, she sensed that no more than a day had passed: her nose was still tender from having been pinched so roughly, and she could feel a bruise where her mother had stood on her breastbone; the scratches on her arms, though faded, were still there too. (There were also some more mysterious aches and pains, in particular a raw soreness between her legs that made her want to dive straight down into the dark again—but she didn't let herself dwell on it.)

The first thing Mouse did after getting her bearings was make sure she was really alone. She looked in the closet three times and under the bed twice before accepting that her mother was not in the room. That led naturally to two more questions: where
was
her mother, and what mood was she in? One drawback to blacking out during her mother's rages was that Mouse could never be sure what sort of closure, if any, had been reached.

She checked around her room for a few more minutes, hoping to find a list that might offer her some clues, but her mother's reaction to the memorandum had apparently scared off the list-maker for the time being—either that, or her mother had gotten to the list first and destroyed it for spite. Whatever the reason, Mouse found nothing, and so she could only cross her fingers that her mother was not lying in wait for her as she slipped out into the upstairs hallway.

Her mother was not in the hall. Mouse moved quickly to the bathroom, shut the door (there was no lock), checked the corners, tub, and shower stall, and opened the hot-water tap in the sink. She sat on the toilet and peed, once more pointedly ignoring the soreness between her legs; by the time she was finished, the mirror over the sink had fogged up, and she stared into it for a long while in hopes that a graffito would appear. None did.

When she finally got up the nerve to go downstairs, she found her mother in the kitchen, chopping away at something on the cutting board by the sink. “Little Mouse,” her mother said, without turning around. The words sounded neutral, her mother letting her know that she knew Mouse was there, but beyond that neither threatening nor welcoming. Mouse wanted to run and hide anyway, but she forced herself to loiter for a few minutes, to see if her mother would say or do anything else to her. She didn't, just went on chopping, and eventually Mouse slipped away, still uncertain whether the storm had passed.

On Sunday afternoon, Mouse's mother gave her a playful shove in passing that tumbled her down the stairs and sprained her wrist. That night at dinner, she served Mouse a side dish of frozen peas topped with a slab of unmelted butter, and pretended not to understand why Mouse didn't want to eat her vegetables (at first she played it like the joke that it was, but when Mouse wouldn't swallow even a spoonful of the gravel-like peas, she became genuinely angry, and ended up ordering Mouse from the table and sending her to bed hungry). These incidents were unpleasant, but they were also unexceptional—typical everyday fun and games—and thus not especially indicative of her mother's mood. It wasn't until Monday morning that Mouse got a clear sign that her mother was still upset about Ben Deering.