The Lost Father (51 page)

“That’s nice.”

Her cake finished now, she lowered a glass cover over it and immediately pulled open a drawer and counted out silverware. Then she began to set the table. “Well, you know, we haven’t seen Mai linn for quite a while now. I’m surprised she even gave out our address because I don’t get a thing from her, never a card on my birthday or the kids’, or even a call on Christmas. Never a word.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

She took a hot pan from the oven, her hand in a quilted glove. She cooked the way she no doubt did other things: with the proper equipment, updated regularly, and in perfect order. The pan held scalloped potatoes she set on a hot plate. From the refrigerator she took out parsley and chopped it, then sprinkled it over the dish. She was a woman unlikely to fault herself. Crouching down on the balls of her feet, she opened the broiler. Pork chops. They smelled good. She poked them with a fork, checking. Then she went into the other room, her hands on her hips, and called, “Daddy, come talk to that little Mai linn’s friend because then we’re going to eat in a few minutes. Scottie,” she called up the stairs, one arm bracing the banister, her back arching, “supper! Get your hands washed now.” A blast from a stereo jolted up in volume.

I bit my nail while she turned away. This wasn’t working out right. They were going to eat and she’d set three places.

Then he came out from wherever he was. I tried so hard to look at him that everything went fast. He was not a large man. He wore narrow, stiff-looking slacks and a button-down shirt under a vest. The vest was mostly wool with two suede panels. His face seemed multi-faceted
like a cut stone, more than octagonal. “I haven’t taken him out yet,” he said.

“Oh, you better hurry. That’s our dog, Moxie,” she said. “Here Moxie. Here Moxie Moxie.” She coaxed the dog from under a low table with her hands, squatting down on her heels.

He lifted the leash from a peg by the door and fastened it onto the collar. He seemed a man of small movements. I walked out with him, down the porch, then left on the sidewalk under bare, high elms. Good, this was the right way. At the end of the road we could see the playground, gold and empty in the still late-afternoon light. I couldn’t see Mai linn but I knew she was there, in the small stand of trees. They were pine trees, not very tall. Beyond them you could see an old and peeling playground merry-go-round, the kind made of wood and piping that you ran to make it go on its own and then you jumped aboard and held on and rode round and round that centripetal whirl.

“So you know Mai linn,” he said. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack from his vest pocket and lit it carefully. “She ran away from here,” he said. “We never saw her again.”

I kept looking at this man, a high school teacher. Band leader.

“Well, she’s doing real well now. She’s a musician. Getting her Ph.D.”

“Is she really? Well, that I’m surprised by. She played that horn here too, but I thought she’d end up in trouble. She was kind of a troubled kid when she was here, always playing her horn all hours of the night, you couldn’t stop her, my wife had to send away for special ear plugs.”

The dog was rooting out a hole under a hickory tree, straining at his leash, then squatted in the compromised position every animal on the earth assumes, relieving himself, glancing back over his shoulder at us curiously.

“ ’At’s okay, Moxie, uza good dog,” he said. When the dog finished and came trotting proudly back to our ankles, he turned again on the sidewalk, my heel hitting an old hickory nut, half eaten out by squirrels, its fibers and planes like the inside of a tiny skull. Oh no, not this way, I was thinking, but we were moving on, the park and its trees glittering in the last gilt light across the shallow street. We didn’t say anything for a while and the corner where we’d turn again to go back to the house came closer and closer until finally I knew there was a
chance nothing would happen. The house would come into vision and loom bigger and bigger and Mai linn would stay hidden in the trees and he would escape inside again without me having done anything.

“Well, give us her address and I’ll drop her a card sometime. I’m glad she pulled herself up and made something of her life.” He shook his head, dropping the cigarette and stamping it out with his shoe. “Like I said, I’m surprised.” He shook his head again as if he still couldn’t believe it.

“I know what you did,” I said.

He didn’t answer. His profile stayed forward as if I hadn’t said anything. But then the dog saved the day, turning and straining towards the abandoned playground. We crossed the road and I wondered for a second if I really had said the words out loud, everything was so much like before. We still didn’t say anything and the air was very quiet and the trees came closer and closer and my throat was closing and then we were there and nothing happened and I thought he would look at me and see through my skin to everything and I would be wrong.

He tapped another cigarette out of his pack and now cupped his hand around it, flicked the match away. He shook his wrist then and profiled the cloudy, darkening sky just the red tip alive, brighting the dusk. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he finally said.

“Yeah you do.” My voice was more level than I’d thought it would be, saying it, and behind him I saw a tire hanging on an old rope from a large oak tree and the strip of worn-away grass below it.

He looked at me sharp like it was easy not to believe me because I was a crazy person. I knew that gaze; I’d been caught in it with people aiming at my mother. And my mother had done it to me.

“Don’t believe everything she tells you,” he said. “She’s a liar. I can’t say we were sorry when she left.”

I blushed. Mai linn did lie, I knew that, I could tell just when she did. She lied when she was bored and wanted to make something a little better, or when she was trying to get out of something. Or when she was really scared.

“But she didn’t lie about this, though,” I said.

Then Mai linn stepped out from behind the broad trunk of a tree and started walking towards us, her hands in her pockets. Her eyes were dark and her chin squared. She looked straight at him, without wavering.

The dog whimpered against his owner’s leg. The man yanked the dog’s leash up and looked down at it, deliberately, he patted the dog’s head so we had to wait for him to finish and look up again.

Mai linn stopped a few feet away from him.

He raised himself up and looked at her and pulled at the dog’s leash again. “Come a Moxie,” and turned the dog away from the trees. He dropped his used cigarette, ground it down with his heel. Then, he looked sideways, as if it were nothing, and said, “What are you doing? Why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

“I wanted to see you myself.”

He shrugged, tapped out a cigarette from his breast pocket again, lit it, scut the match down. “Now you seen me.”

They were at angles. He still wasn’t facing her straight. She knew when to be silent.

“Listen, I don’t know your friend, but talk to me after you’ve raised children and taken in foster kids who are messed up to begin with. I felt sorry for you. It wasn’t your fault you were sneaky. You did what you had to do.”

“But you could have been different. Instead of what you were.”

The dog was rooting in the grass and then he snaked free of the man’s hand and sniffed further, belly almost flat on the dirt.

And then all of a sudden they were alone. He didn’t follow the dog, but moved an increment nearer her. Her head bent down like a flower too heavy for its stem. I was a third. Don’t, I felt like saying, but they started walking away towards the old school. They stood almost like lovers, both their shoulders square and even. I didn’t follow them, I thought I shouldn’t, but I didn’t want to let them out of sight either. I went a little ways and sat down next to the curb. The dog made a disagreeable snuffling sound near my knees.

They walked around the playground lot and then they started down the street towards the house. When he turned and called, the dog ran back, dragging its leash, grateful to be wanted. For a moment I felt an absurd jealousy.

Near the house they stood and waited for me. He was still smoking.

He shook his head, bent down and rubbed the dog. Then the wife appeared on the porch, another mixing bowl in her arm. “There you are. Your supper’s ready. Scotty’s sitting at the table.”

“We’re writing letters to people,” I said in a plain voice.

He was already walking in, mumbling to the dog. He didn’t even say good-bye.

The wife closed the door sealing him inside. She clearly saw Mai linn and closed the door anyway. It was easy to hate her the most of anyone.

We walked back to the car, like a home in the dark. Mai linn shook her head. “Let’s get out of here.”

S
HE DROVE WITH ME
as far as Williston.

We stopped at roadside stands and ate things we knew from childhood: French fries, wrinkled at their ends and translucent with dark grease, root beer floats, biscuits and roast beef sandwiches, even though Mai linn was most of the time a vegetarian.

“Mai linn, you know her homemade cakes are just mixes. Pillsbury. The cheapest kind of mix even,” I said.

“Oh, I know, she always did that. I told you she used powdered milk.”

After a while, Mai linn said, “You know, sex is the thing, though. I can never go through with it without some bad idea.” She jabbed that out, eyes straight ahead, chin fair.

“What do you mean, bad?”

And she said, “No, really bad like one person having power over another or one of them a little kid.” She snorted. “Wonder where that comes from.”

I believed her absolutely and I knew what she meant because her first time with the artist in San Francisco, she’d told me she kept her eyes closed and it flickered back and forth between two ways, the one where she was a girl on an altar, sacrificed, laid on a clean white cloth, and the other, some ancient queen and him a servant, a boy just being used, meaningless, a pure mechanic instrument of pleasure.

“Remember your infection?” I said.

“Sure.”

When Mai linn and the asshole artist started having regular sex, she got allergic. A rash spread all over, her nipples cracked with infection, oozing a yellow liquid, her eyes closed to slits, dry and red. She was going to Berkeley and the doctor at the student health center kept making Kevin June take away one thing at a time: his shaving cream, soap, deodorant, shampoo.

“He doesn’t use shampoo,” she’d told the doctor. “He just washes his hair with Ivory soap. He grew up kind of poor. He’s proud of it. It’s one of his things.”

She bled for nine weeks. The doctor never found what it was. That was around the same time my periods pretty much stopped.

“You think we’ll ever get normal with this?” She opened a window and was dragging her hand outside. The air was cold but the sky was wide and blue with dreamy wisps of cloud.

For me, what I imagined most of the nights, was a first time. A nice good way for it to have been. “I’m not even sure how unusual what we do is.”

“It’s not good.”

“No.”

“I mean it’s not what you’d wish for for your kids.”

“No. I’ve thought of that with Jane, like when she’s old enough. I can imagine her with a guy, like that blond boy who lives next door to them now, and I can imagine them so she’s not more and he’s not more.” They hated each other now and didn’t even know how much they were friends.

“Yeah, but she’s little. Who knows what’ll happen to her.”

“Hope nothing. At least it wasn’t your parents. Your parents would have taken care of you if they’d lived.”

“I know.”

The day seemed to billow out into eternity. We went on like that in our consoling fugue. I thought of her ticklishness but I was afraid to say anything. I couldn’t see how it would be any different.

“I saw this cartoon,” Mai linn said. “At school the professors have cartoons on their doors and you can’t believe some of the stuff they put up, but one was this couple in bed, and the guy looks up and says, ‘Wait! For a minute there I couldn’t think of who to think of.’ And I thought that was really funny but then I thought this guy, he’s a pianist, he has it up on his door, it was printed in some magazine, obviously other people thought it was funny too.”

“Do you think Klicka’s the reason you’re gay? Because that would be something maybe, that didn’t remind you of him.”

She looked at me a way. “That was what he did, most of the time.” She shook her head. “No.”

We stopped at the Alpine Hunter, a supper club that had all the midwestern signs of fancy, for a real meal before her plane. We sat at a square table with paper place mats over a maroon cloth. Our waitress was a large woman bundled into her uniform and apron. She delivered us thick-faceted glasses full of ice water. The ice was crushed and as you held the heavy glass, it tinkled.

I turned the place mat upside down and started scribbling. Mai linn had gone off to find a phone and check the flight schedule.

“What would you like, Dolly?” the waitress said and I told her I was waiting for my friend.

“Sure enough,” she said and swayed off. I liked to watch a woman gracefully manage a large pair of hips.

I drew buildings and a road with tumbleweed. Corners of a room with a fireplace. Mai linn slid back into her chair. “Eight o’clock,” she said.

The waitress returned, bending near. “So where are you kids going?”

“How do you know we’re going anywhere?” Mai linn said.

“Let’s say I have powers.” She smiled.

The restaurant was mostly empty, but a man a few tables away said, “Excuse me, miss, could we get some more sour cream?” and she reluctantly sashayed away, promising to return.

“Which means we don’t look like we live in Williston, North Dakota,” I said.

When she came back, we told her what we wanted. I wanted pork chops and Mai linn ordered a steak and mashed potatoes. For dessert we wanted two pieces of that white cake with yellow filling. I wanted vodka and Mai linn wanted gin.

“So you kids are on some kind of journey, I can tell, you’re not just vacation gals.”