The Belief in Angels (9 page)

I nod.

“Does she have a problem driving?”

I think about that one for a bit before I answer. “Nooo,” I say hesitantly.

She stares at me hard, then she speaks real softly and says, “Rest your eyes. I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”

She tells me to close my eyes but stay awake, and she will watch for my mother.

We wait like that for a very long time. During this time, Mrs. Dougherty speaks to Mr. Bellami, the school principal, about the conversation with my mother. His office is in the middle of a short hallway running between the main office and hers. I can hear everything, even though his office is closed.

Mr. Bellami already knows Wendy because she came to the parent-teacher meeting last fall. I can tell Mr. Bellami doesn’t like her by the way he talks with Mrs. Dougherty now, but at the parent-teacher meeting he talked with her more than any of the other mothers. Probably because she was wearing one of her see-through blouses and a miniskirt. He stared at her breasts practically the whole night. It’s mortifying, and I wish she’d stop showing up at our school, but for some
bizarre reason school and our grades is the one thing she gets
parent freaky
about. She gets all As in her college classes, and if I don’t pull As she’s mad at me
and
my teacher. I got a B in Science and she argued with my teacher about it for like an hour. It was so embarrassing.

I keep falling asleep. Mrs. Dougherty keeps waking me up and telling me not to nap but to keep my eyes shut.

I start to think about the trip we took in February to Key West.

After all these years, this unexpected trip remains the only time I have traveled beyond Boston. Amazingly, on our spring vacation, we were flying to Miami, Florida and then driving south to the Keys. My grandfather paid for the whole thing, of course.

Once we got to Key West, I figured out why Wendy took us there under the guise of a family vacation: so she could be with her boyfriend, Jack.

Jack lives with us. He moved in about three months after Howard left. He grew up in Withensea—on our side of the island, down the road from us—and moved from his mother’s house into ours. He hardly ever works, since Wendy supports him with my grandfather’s money. He scores all his drugs, drink, and food for free, and Wendy takes care of him with a surprising amount of mothery care.

He’s become a fixture, literally. He almost never moves from Wendy’s bed during the day. He sleeps, watches TV, does drugs, drinks, and eats. All in that bed. Mostly he sleeps. He seems to sleep all the time. He barely speaks to us kids. He barely speaks at all unless he’s really lit on alcohol. He’s usually high.

There are a few things that inspire him to move from the bed. I’ll list them in order of frequency: going to the bathroom, riding his motorcycle, and doing art projects. One day last fall he got out of the bed and actually started taking classes at an art school in Boston. He turned the basement into his studio, which includes a dark room. He works nocturnally. We barely see him.

Everything Jack produces is beautiful. He makes stained glass windows and lamps and sand paintings, and after taking the photography classes he started making great photos, which he sells to pay his bar tabs.

I like the creative part about Jack. I still draw and I’ve started oil painting this year. So we have something in common. But he hardly ever speaks to me, and I mostly avoid him.

The artistic part of Jack is the reason Wendy puts up with his lack of ambition, his sleeping around, and the fact that he’s catatonic. She loves the idea of having an artist boyfriend.

Also, and most importantly—in Wendy’s mind, at least—Jack is handsome.
I don’t think he’s heart-stoppingly handsome like Omar Sharif or Cat Stevens, but he looks like a surfer version of the Marlboro Man. This is important because even though Wendy has a lot of self-esteem about her intelligence, she was a fat kid, and she’s really self-conscious about her weight, which is why she’s always on a diet. I guess she figures people won’t think she’s that bad-looking if somebody she thinks is handsome, like Jack, likes her. So I think she overlooks the parts of Jack that don’t fit with an ideal mate.

In my opinion, she looks just fine. People sometimes tell her she looks like Jennifer O’Neill when she straightens her hair with the big pink soup-can curlers.

She’s weird about my weight too. People constantly tell me I’m too skinny, but whenever Wendy hears them say it she goes crazy. “She’s perfect at this weight,” she yelled at our pediatrician when he tried to lecture her about feeding me. I had to go see him for a tetanus shot when I stepped on a rusty nail and the whole way back from my visit she kept ranting that it was better to be thin than fat and I should consider myself lucky. She told me that even if I didn’t turn out pretty, if I was skinny I’d be considered attractive.

I could care less about that stuff.

That January, when I was eight, Jack got hired to sail a boat from Massachusetts through the Panama Canal to California. Key West was a port stop for him. Wendy managed to weasel his sailing information from the boat’s owner, even though Jack told her he wanted privacy, and she surprised him with a visit. Jack likes women, and Wendy grabs every opportunity to interrupt his “adventures.”

It’s a long drive down to the Keys, and when we checked into a hotel it was almost midnight. Wendy told us she was going to see Jack and we should go to sleep. Four hours later, she came back to the hotel a Complete Emotional Mess. She woke me up and proceeded to have a meltdown. She didn’t bother to keep her voice down, but my brothers, in the other double bed, slept right through her yelling.

I guess when she arrived at the dock Jack was partying with the crew and his new girlfriend who had been sailing with them for a few days.

“I can’t believe I trusted that asshole. He’s fucking her while I’m waiting for him to call me. I will never trust that bastard again. Never trust men, you dig me? Their penises do all their thinking for them.”

I didn’t understand what she meant by “thinking with his penis,” but I tried to give her good advice. I told her what I’ve heard my teenage neighbors say to one another when they get mad at their boyfriends: “You can find another boyfriend. You don’t need him.”

Wendy, apparently, thought this was a good solution. The next day, she paid for our breakfast and gave me the room key after we changed into our swimsuits to go down to the hotel pool.

“Watch your brothers and be good. I’ll bring back dinner.”

We had fun swimming and watching the TV in our hotel room, but Moses and I got sunburned, unlike David, who tans. When Wendy returned she carried in tons of bags with clothes she’d bought for herself, but she’d forgotten to bring dinner. She got mad at me for getting us sunburned and told me we’d better stay out of the sun the next day. Then she told us someone was coming to pick her up later for a date.

This is the part where we started calling my mother Wendy.

She told us to call her Wendy and pretend she was our sister—a practice I’ve continued since we got back from Florida. Calling her “Wendy” helps take the “mother” expectations away. She doesn’t usually mind it, and it fits us better.

A very, very young man named Danny showed up a few hours later. I answered when he knocked. Wendy was still getting ready in the bathroom. When she came out she smelled like patchouli incense and was wearing a sheer, navy-blue blouse with a fringed vest made from a leather American flag. The miniskirt she wore barely covered her butt and her knee-high boots were a shiny, white plastic material. She wore her hair all curly-frizzy with a leather headband tied around her forehead.

I behaved like an obedient sibling. “Wendy, could we have money to order a pizza for dinner?”

David and I had already figured out how to charge food to the room, but they only accepted cash for pizza delivery. Wendy gave me a totally fake smile and handed me a fiver from her new purple-suede fringed pocketbook.

The rest of the week of vacation went pretty much the same way. The boy/man was different every night, though. She came back late every night except for one night, when she didn’t come back until the next morning. Then she locked us out so she could sleep all day.

My brothers and I ate more pizza that week than we’ve ever had in our whole life.

Something interesting I discovered is that Florida has scads of elderly people. We met lots of grandparent types staying at the hotel who sneaked us forbidden food like Twinkies and Orange Fanta and slathered sunscreen on us. I got a splendid gift from one old lady, an art history book about Edvard Munch called
Things That Make You Want to Scream.
Her husband kept joking with me and asking if I was Veronica Lake’s granddaughter.
Sullivan’s Travels
is one of my favorite old movies. I was totally flattered.

We made one trip to see downtown Key West—mostly the bars Wendy had been hanging out in, and she got mad when we slipped and called her “Mom” in front of the bartender.

We also saw Hemingway’s home. I had just finished reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and it made a huge impression on me to see his home and especially his
writing room. He left lots of inheritance to his cats, which had extra toes and ran around everywhere. I met a cat there named Rothko, who is pretty much my favorite artist. I especially love his painting
Blue, Green, Brown.
The strange thing is, that very day, the day we visited the Hemingway Home, Mark Rothko died. One of the guides at the Hemingway Home told me. I wondered if Hemingway and Rothko were friends.

After about two hours of waiting, the final school bell rings and it’s the end of the school day. Mrs. Dougherty calls Wendy again. The music on the other end of the phone sounds even louder.

“Hello, this is Mrs. Dougherty from the school. School is over now. We can’t keep Julianne here any longer. You need to come now.”

Wendy shouts, “I can’t come. Let her walk home now. I’m sure she’s fine.”

“I still can’t let her walk home. She’s been struck and as I said earlier, I think she may have a concussion. You need to bring her to your doctor to examine her. She’s got a large bump on the back of her head.”

Wendy doesn’t say anything, but the music blasts through the phone.

“Is there a problem, Mrs. Finn? Because I could have you talk with Mr. Bellami, our principal, if you would feel more comfortable.”

Mrs. Dougherty is trying to scare Wendy with the principal, but I know Wendy isn’t afraid.

Nobody scares her. Not even my father.

Wendy is wicked smart and belongs to a club for Einstein geniuses. Sometimes it takes me and my brothers a while to figure out her tricks, but after a while, we do. We’re not stupid; we were all above average in intelligence according to the test she gave us, but we don’t have genius IQs like her.

“It’s not a good idea to coddle children when they injure themselves, you know,” Wendy says.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Dougherty says sharply.

“It’s called negative reinforcement. Read Skinner. It’s a form of operant conditioning. If you give kids attention when they become sick, they relate the injury to attention and manifest illness with more frequency. Surely you learned a bit of childhood psych development when you got your nursing degree? I mean you do work as a school nurse!” Wendy’s voice rings out in the room.

I think Mrs. Dougherty’s head might pop off she gets so angry-red in her face.

“Mrs. Finn, I do know quite a bit about children, their behavior, and their needs. Your job as a parent is to make sure her needs are met. Bringing her to the doctor to be checked out isn’t spoiling her, it’s protecting her. Your daughter needs your attention right now.”

“I’m not sure,” Wendy says. “I read Erikson, and I think he’s been interpreted in too linear a fashion. The stages of development aren’t necessarily sequential. There’ve been studies that show abandoned children manage to raise themselves in the wild. It follows that children, given food and shelter and surrounded with many more tools for survival, can raise themselves without the interference of adults who think they know what they’re doing.”