Things You Should Know (10 page)

“The house feels better now, doesn’t it? Airier, almost like it’s glad to be rid of all that crap,” her mother says.

“Where is this mini-storage?” she asks.

“Somewhere in Rockville. Ray found it. Ray took care of the whole thing.”

“Have you ever been there? How do you know your stuff is really there?” She is thinking she’s figured it out, she finally has something on Ray.

“I have the key,” her mother says. “And Ray made an inventory.”

“Fine, first thing in the morning I’m going there. We’ll see what’s what.”

“Why are you so suspicious? Your father doesn’t have many friends, this is nice for him, don’t ruin it.”

“What do you even know about Ray—who is he really?”

“He writes,” her father says.

“Yeah, he keeps a journal, I saw it downstairs.”

“You shouldn’t be poking around in his room,” her mother says. “That’s invasion of privacy.”

“He’s written five books, he’s had stories in the
New Yorker,
” her father says.

“If he’s a world-famous writer, why is he living with you?”

“He likes us,” her father says. “We’re common travelers.”

“We should all be so lucky to have someone willing to pay a little attention to us when we’re old—it’s not like you’re going to move home and take care of us.”

“I came home because I wanted you to take care of me. Steve and I are having a hard time. I think Steve may move out.”

“You have to learn to leave people alone, you can’t hound someone every minute. Maybe if you left him alone he’d come back.” Her mother pauses. “Do you want Ray to go back with you?”

“And do what, help Steve pack?”

“He could keep you company. I’m not sure he’s ever been to New York. He likes adventures.”

“Mom, I don’t need Ray. If I needed anyone, it would be you.”

“No,” her mother says. Simply no. She hears it and knows that all along the answer was no.

Her bedroom is simultaneously big and small. She is too big for the bed and yet feels like a child, intruding on her own life.

She pulls the shade and undresses. The night-light is on, it goes on automatically at dusk. She lies in the twin bed of her youth, looking at the bookcase, at the bear whose fur she tried to style, at her glass piggy bank still filled with change, at a
Jefferson Airplane—White Rabbit
poster clinging to the wall behind the dresser.

Stopped time. She is in both the past and present, wondering how she got from there to here. The mattress is hard as a rock. She rolls over and back. There is nowhere to go. She takes a couple of the new pills—Products for Modern Living.

She dreams.

Her mother and father are standing in the front hall with old-fashioned American Tourister suitcases.

“I’m taking your mother to Europe,” her father says. “Ray is going to keep an eye on the house, he’s going to take care of the dog.”

“He’s lonely,” her mother says. “He came for coffee and brought us a cat.”

She is hiding in the woods behind the house, watching the house with X-ray specs. Everything is black and white. She calls her brother from a walkie-talkie. “Are you out there? Can you hear me? Come in, come in?”

“Roger. I am here in sunny California.”

“I’m watching Ray,” she says.

“The mail just came,” he says. “Ray sent me a birthday card and a hundred dollars in cash. That’s more than Mom and Dad ever gave me.”

“Do you know where Mom and Dad are?”

“I have no idea,” he says. “They didn’t even send a card.”

And then Ray is chasing her around the yard with the cymbals on his fingers. Every time he punches his fingers together—
ping
—she feels a sharp electric shock. Her X-ray specs fall off. Everything changes from black-and-white to color.

Ray runs into the house and closes the door. The deadbolt slips into place.

She is on the other side of the glass. “Open the door, Ray.”

She finds the key hidden under the pot. She tries it. The key doesn’t work—Ray has changed the locks.

“Ray,” she says, banging on the glass. “Ray, what have you done to my parents? Ray, I’m going to call the police.”

“They’re in Italy,” Ray says, muffled through the glass.

She is on the walkie-talkie, trying to reach her mother in Italy.

“You’re not understanding what I’m saying,” she says. “Ray stole the house. He changed the locks. I can’t get in.”

“You don’t have to yell, I’m not deaf,” her mother says.

She wakes up. The house is silent except for two loud, sawing snores—her parents.

In the morning, she dresses in her room. With Ray in the house, she feels uncomfortable making the dash from the
bedroom to the bathroom in her underwear. She gets dressed, goes to wash her face and pee, and then heads down the hall to the kitchen.

“Good morning,” she says.

Ray is alone at the kitchen table.

“Where is everybody?”

“Your father had an art class and your mother went shopping with Mrs. Harris. She left you her car and the key for the mini-storage.”

Ray holds up a string, dangling from it is a small key. He swings it back and forth hypnotically. “I’ll give you directions,” he says.

She nods.

“Would you like some herb tea? I just made a pot.”

“No thanks.” They sit in silence. “I’m not exactly a morning person,” she says.

As she steps outside, Mrs. Lasky is across the way, getting into her car.

“How are you?” Mrs. Lasky calls out. “How is life in New York?”

“It’s fine. It’s fine.” She repeats herself, having nothing more to say. “And how are you?”

“Very well,” Mrs. Lasky says. “Isn’t Ray wonderful? He keeps my bird feeder full. The most wonderful birds visit me. Just now, as I was having my breakfast, a female cardinal was having hers.”

The mini-storage facility is called U-Store It. “U-store it. U-keep the key. U-are in charge.” She locates the unit, unlocks the padlock, and pulls the door open.

There was something vaguely menacing about the way Ray was swinging the key through the air—yet he drew the map, he seemed not to know or care what she was thinking.

A clipboard hangs from a hook by the door. There is spare twine, tape, and a roll of bubble wrap. She recognizes the
outlines of her grandmother’s table, her father’s old rocking chair. Each box is labeled, each piece of furniture well wrapped. On the clipboard is a typed list of boxes with appendices itemizing the contents of each box: Children’s Toys, Mother’s Dishes, World Book Encyclopedia A–Z (Plus YearBook 1960–1974), Assorted From Kitchen Closet, Beach Supplies, etc. She pries open a box just to be sure. She’s thinking she might find wadded up newspaper, proof Ray is stealing, but instead, she finds her book reports from high school, a Valentine card her brother made for her mother, the hat her grandmother wore to her mother’s wedding.

She seals the box up again. There is nothing to see. She pulls the door closed, locks it, and leaves.

Driving home, she passes her old high school—it’s been gutted.
BUILDING A BETTER FUTURE FOR TOMORROW’ S LEADERS. READY FOR RE-OCCUPANCY FALL
2002.
GO BARONS
.

She drives up and down the streets, playing a nostalgic game of who lived where and what she can remember about them: the girl with the wonderful singing voice who ended up having to be extricated from a cult, the boy who in sixth grade had his own subscription to
Playboy,
the girl whose mother had Siamese twins. She remembers her paper route, she remembers selling Girl Scout cookies door to door, birthday parties, roller skating, Ice Capades.

She goes home.

Every time she comes to visit, it takes twenty-four hours to get used to things and then everything seems less strange, more familiar, everything seems as though it could be no other way—entirely natural.

She slides the car into the driveway. Her father is in the front yard, raking leaves. His back is toward her. She beeps, he waves. For a million years her father has been in the front yard, raking. He has his plaid cap on, his old red cardigan, and corduroys.

She gets out of the car.

“Remember when I was little,” she calls down the hill. “And we used to rake together. You had the big one and I had the small bamboo…”

He turns. A terrifying sensation sweeps through her. It’s Ray.

“I want you out,” she says, shocked. “Now!” He intentionally misled her. He had to have known what she was thinking when she drove in, when she beeped and waved, when she said, remember when I was little. Why didn’t he take off the hat, turn around, and say, I am not who you think I am?

“Where is my father? What have you done to my father? Those are not your clothes.”

“Your father gave them to me.”

She moves toward him.

Ray is standing there, her father’s cap still on his head. She reaches out, she knocks it off. He bends to pick it up.

“It’s not your hat,” she says, grabbing it, throwing it like a Frisbee across the yard. “You can’t just step inside someone’s life and pretend you’re them.”

“I was invited.”

“Get your stuff and get out.”

“I’m not sure it’s entirely up to you,” Ray says. This is as close as he comes to protesting. “It’s not your house.”

“Oh, but it is,” she says. “It’s my house and it’s my family and I have to have some influence on what happens here. They’re old, Ray. Pick on someone else.” She grabs the rake and uses it to shoo him inside. “It’s over. Pack your bags.”

Her mother comes home just as Ray is trying to put the cat into his travel case. The cat is screaming, howling. The cab is waiting outside.

“What’s going on? Did something happen to the cat? Does he need me to take him to the vet?”

“He can’t stay,” she says. “He was in the yard acting like Daddy, he was wearing Daddy’s clothes. He can’t do that.”

“He’s your father’s friend. We like having him here.”

“He can’t stay,” she repeats.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come home,” her mother says. “Maybe it’s too hard. You know what they say.”

“I’m just visiting,” she says.

Ray comes up the stairs. He has a single suitcase, the cat carrier, and a brown paper bag filled with his supplements, his wheat germ, and the red and the green stuff.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” her mother says.

“It does,” she says.

“Good-bye,” Ray says, shaking her mother’s hand.

There’s something about his shaking her mother’s hand that’s more upsetting than anything, it’s heartbreaking and pathetic, it’s more and less affecting than a clinging hug.

“Don’t forget us, Ray,” her mother says, walking him to the door, letting him out almost as easily as they let him in. “I’m so sorry, I apologize for the confusion.”

And then he is gone. She goes down to his room. She checks the doors. He has left his key on the bed along with her father’s clothes, neatly folded, his bedding all rolled up.

She comes back upstairs.

“Now what, Mrs. Big Shot?” her mother says. “Now who’s going to take care of us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your father didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye.”

“I’m not saying they can’t be friends—I’m sure he’ll see him at the next vitamin meeting—just that Ray can’t live here. This isn’t a commune.”

She is sitting in the den. Her mother is knitting.

Her father comes home. “I made a nice drawing today,” her father says.

“That’s nice,” her mother says.

“Were there any messages?”

“No,” her mother says.

They sit in silence for a few minutes longer.

“Where’s Ray?”

“She made him leave,” her mother says, gesturing toward her with a knitting needle.

“He was in the yard, raking. He had your clothes on. I thought he was you—he scared me.”

“He did a good job,” her father says. “The yard looks good.”

Again there is silence.

“Where’d he go?” her father asks.

“I have no idea, it all happened so quickly. Maybe back to the vitamin store,” her mother says.

She feels as though she can’t stay. She has shaken things up too much, she is really on the outside now.

“I guess I should go,” she says.

Later that night she will take the train back to New York. The apartment will be empty. There will be a note from Steve. “I thought I should go. If you need me I’m at Bill’s. Hope you had a good weekend.”

“You come home, upset everything, and then you just leave?” her mother says. “What’s the point of that?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says.

“So talk,” her mother says.

We were the boys of summer vacation, Henry Heffilfinger and me. It was my fifth summer at my father’s house, six years after my parents divorced, three years after my mother remarried, the summer of ’79, the summer I was twelve, the summer the world almost stopped spinning round.

Henry’s mother picked me up at the airport. “Hello! Hello!” she called from the far end of the terminal, waving her arms through air, as if simultaneously fanning herself and guiding me in for landing.

“Oh, you look tall,” she said, trying to wrestle away my carry-on bag. “Your father was busy; he asked me to come. So, that’s why I’m here.” She stopped for a minute, combed the hair out of my face with her fingernails. “We’re so glad you’ve arrived; we’re going to have a fine summer.”

For that moment, while her pink frosted nails were tickling my skull, I believed her.

Luggage spun on a wide stainless-steel rack; suitcases slid up, down, sideways, crashing into each other with the painless thud of bumper cars. We stood watching until everything had come and gone, until there was nothing left except a couple of old bags that probably belonged to someone who’d died in a plane crash, who’d left their luggage forever going round and round.

“Where’s Henry?” I asked.

Maybe Henry was my hero, maybe just my friend, I don’t
know. He had a mother, a father, and a little sister, all together, on one street, in one city. He had no secrets.

“Guarding the car. I’m parked in a terrible place.”

While I stood by the carousel, hoping my suitcases would home in and find me, Mrs. Henry took my luggage checks and went off in search of information.

If you’re wondering what the point is calling Henry by his own name and then calling his mother Mrs. Henry, well what can I say, all the Heffilfingers were Henrys to me. Mr., Mrs., baby June, and Henry himself.

I rolled my eyes in a full circle counting the brown-and-yellow spots that made up the tortoiseshell rims of my glasses. They were new glasses, my first glasses. No one in Philly had seen them yet except Mrs. Henry, and she was sharp enough not to say anything.

A couple of months ago my school borrowed vision machines from the motor vehicle department and lined us all up. I looked into the viewfinder and said to the school nurse, “I can’t see anything, it’s pure blackness.”

“Press your head to the bar, wise guy,” she said.

I pressed my forehead against the machine and the screen lit up, but all that light still didn’t do much good. The nurse sent me home with a note for my mother who simply said, “You’re not getting contacts; you’re too young and too irresponsible.”

I thought of not taking the glasses to Philly, of going through one more blind, blurry summer, but the fact was they made a real difference, so I wore them, and kept the unbreakable case and a thousand specially treated cleaning sheets jammed into my carry-on bag.

Four-eyed, but alone in the Philadelphia airport, I may as well have been a boy without a brain. Like a sugar doughnut, I was glazed. Stiff.

It was the day after school ended. My mother had put me on the plane with a list of instructions/directions for my father, written out longhand on three sheets of legal paper,
stuffed into one of Dr. Frankle’s embossed envelopes. I was to be returned on or by the twenty-first of August, in good time for the usual back-to-school alterations: haircut, fresh jeans, new sneakers, book bag. I was only just becoming aware of how much everything was the product of a negotiation or a fight.

“Let’s find Henry,” Mrs. Henry suggested.

Let’s not, I thought.

We were at the age where just showing up was frightening. You never knew who or what you might meet, a twelve-foot giant with a voice like a tuba, or Howdy Doody himself. Without warning, a body could go into spasm, it could stretch itself out to a railroad tie, it could take someone familiar and make them a stranger. A whole other person could claim the name, address, phone number, and fingerprints of a friend. There was the possibility that in those ten missing months a new life had been created, one that intentionally bore no relation to the past.

“Don’t worry, they’ll find your luggage,” Mrs. Henry said. “They’ll check the airport in Boston and the next plane coming in, and when they’ve got it, they’ll deliver it out to the house. You’ll have it by suppertime. Let’s go,” she said. “Makes no sense to wait here.”

The automatic doors popped open. Henry stood there, arms open, exasperated.

“What the hell is going on?” he screamed. “They’re about to tow our car. They asked me for my license!”

Mrs. Henry turned red. She tugged on the strap of my shoulder bag. We ran forward.

“I’ve never heard of anything taking so long,” Henry said when we got outside.

There was no tow truck. There was nothing except a long line of cars dropping off people, and men in red caps going back and forth from the cars to the terminal wheeling suitcases that weren’t lost yet. There wasn’t even a ticket on the Henrys’ windshield.

And Henry wasn’t a giant. He wasn’t six feet tall, either. He was skinny, with shoulders that stuck straight out of him like the top of a T square.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The airline has misplaced your friend’s luggage.”

He turned to me, finally noticing I was there, I existed. “Why’d you get glasses?”

“Blind,” I said.

Five years ago, before I ever met him, Henry was offered to me by my father as a kind of bribe.

“Philadelphia will be fun,” my father had said. “We bought this house especially for you. There’s a boy your age living next door; you can be best friends.”

My first day there I stood three-foot-something, waiting smack in the middle of the treeless, flowerless, nearly grassless front yard as nonchalantly as a seven-year-old could. I knew no other way of announcing myself. When the sun had crossed well over its midday mark, when what seemed like years had passed, a station wagon pulled into the driveway just past me and the promised boy jumped out and without stopping ran toward the kitchen door of his house. The screen door opened, but instead of admitting him, a yellow-rubber-gloved hand pushed the boy out again. The body attached to the hand followed and Mrs. led Henry to the edge of their yard and nodded in my direction.

“Henry, this is your new friend. He’s here for the whole summer,” she said.

“Bye,” Henry said, taking off again in the direction of the kitchen door, whipping open the screen, and vanishing into the house.

“You can’t stand outside all summer, you’ll be a regular Raisinette, go on, after him,” Mrs. Henry said, clapping her hands.

The geography of the Henrys’ house was the exact same
as my father’s house, but theirs was more developed. The top floor had blue carpet; the middle level, yellow; and the lower level was green. The sky, the sun, the lawn. It made perfect sense. It was beautiful. Everywhere I’d ever lived the floors were wooden or carpeted a neat and dull beige or gray. Here I had the sensation of floating, skimming through the rooms like a hovercraft. I went through the house, stunned by the strangeness of being alone among the lives of others.

I found Henry on the lower level setting up a Parcheesi board.

“Do you know how to play or do I have to teach you?”

“I know how,” I said.

“That’s a relief. You don’t look like you know anything.”

I didn’t answer.

“Can you swim?”

I nodded.

“Tomorrow we’ll go to the pool.”

He hurled a series of questions at me like rockets, little hand grenades. I ducked and bobbed; I answered as best I could. It was a test, an application for friendship.

“I’m allowed to go off the diving board but I don’t like it,” he said. “But I don’t tell anyone that. If someone is going, I go too, but it’s nothing I’m in a rush to do. You first,” he said, dropping the dice into my hand. I started to shake them. He immediately stopped me.

“We don’t play that way,” he said. “You go like this.” Between his thumb and forefinger, he held one up in the air then dropped it with a whirling twist. Before the first one stopped spinning, he dropped the second one the same way. The dice splashed down onto the board, knocking over my marker, giving me a six and a four. “See,” he said, moving my marker for me. “It’s better that way.”

“I should go home,” I said when the game was over, when he’d played the whole thing for both of us, when I’d never touched the marker or the dice.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have a snack?” Mrs. asked me as I headed for the screen door. “I made cream-filled cupcakes.”

“The ones with white stuff inside,” Henry said.

“You can make cupcakes like that?”

“Yes.” She smiled at me.

Every year just as I started to have a sense of how things were laid out, of where Philadelphia started and stopped, it was time for me to leave. The Henrys’ car wound down the streets with me pressed to the window, wondering where the hell we were.

“Where’s baby June?” I asked, my twelve-year-old voice cracking with what I thought was middle age or Parkinson’s disease.

“Day camp,” Mrs. Henry said.

Baby June’s real name was Constance, but since her mission in life appeared to be a well-studied imitation of Mrs., everyone except Mrs. and Mr. called her baby June.

Henry and I were quiet. There was the familiar awkwardness of beginning again, of seeing a body once more after months away. In between, we’d talked a couple of times, signed our names to birthday cards picked out by mothers in a hurry, we’d given the okay to a present we knew would be perfect only because we wanted it so bad for ourselves. But that was about it.

“You’d better check in,” Mrs. said when we pulled into the driveway. “Then come over for lunch. We’ll be waiting.”

“You’ll be waiting,” Henry said, slamming the car door. “I’m eating now.”

Except for the hum of the air-conditioning, which was running even though it was only seventy-some degrees out, my father’s house was without signs of life.

I left my carry-on in the hall and called my mother. Dr. Frankle answered the phone. I didn’t tell him his luggage was missing.

“Is my mother there?”

“She’s on the Lifecycle,” he said, and then there was silence.

“Could I talk to her please?”

“I’ll have to get the cordless.”

“Thank you,” I said. There was the longest silence, as though Dr. F. thought if he waited long enough to get my mother, I’d grow up and be gone.

“You’re there,” my mother said, out of breath.

“I’m here.”

“That was fast.”

“They can’t find my suitcase.”

“Don’t worry, they will,” she said. “They have to. Did your father pick you up?”

“No. Mrs. Henry did it.”

“What the hell’s wrong with him. That’s part of our agreement.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Have you spoken to him?”

“I called you first.”

“When you talk to him, tell him to call me right away. That’s all. I’ll deal with him. I don’t want to drag you into this.”

“What if my stuff doesn’t show up?”

“Your father will take care of it,” she said.

According to all reports—except my own—by marrying Dr. Frankle, my mother had done well for herself. On the other hand, my father seemed to have taken a small financial slide. Even though Dr. F. could more than cover the world with money, my father still sent my mother a check every month, supposedly for me.

“Did they leave you lunch?” my mother asked.

“I’ve been invited out.”

“Well, have fun. I’ll talk to you Saturday morning before my hair appointment. If you need anything just call.” I could hear air rushing through the sprockets of the Lifecycle.

My father answered his own phone at the office. “Hi ya, sport. Get in okay?”

“My suitcase is temporarily dislocated.”

“Happens all the time.”

“Mom wants you to call her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said, lying.

“Well, I gotta get to work,” he said. “There should be something there for lunch if you’re hungry.”

“I’m invited to the Henrys’.”

“Oh, that’s good. Well, run along. Don’t keep people waiting. And don’t forget, Cindy’s making dinner tonight.”

“Great.”

Every year Cindy made dinner my first night in town. “A real dinner,” she called it: sitting down, plates, glasses, a meatlike item, strange salad—one year with flower petals in it—doctored brown rice, and herbal iced tea. After that, for the rest of the summer, eating was pretty much something I took care of at the Henrys’, where they seemed to have a firmer grasp of what was food and what was indigenous vegetation, animal habitat, something to be seen, perhaps cut and put in a vase, but certainly not eaten. Sometimes, I’d ride to the grocery store with Mrs. and buy real food, making sure to get enough for my father and Cindy, who ultimately ate more crap than anyone.

Cindy was ten years younger than my dad, and all they’d talked about when they bought this place was how great it was for kids. For these five years, I’d felt the burden of making that seem true.

“He shops,” I once overheard Cindy tell someone. “And he’s such a pleasure to have around.”

A pleasure because I was hardly around. Plus, I was household-oriented. I liked things clean and neat. I found comfort in order. I was also used to being around people I didn’t know, living with people I wasn’t related to. I kept my own secrets. I’d taught myself to be a little less than human.
I’d taught myself to be a person whom people like to have around, half boy, half butler: half, just half—no one wanted the whole thing, that was one of the tricks, if you wanna call it that.

I pulled the box of chocolate I’d brought for Mrs. H. out of my carry-on. I’d picked liquor-filled, thinking it was safer than milk chocolate in terms of keeping it from Henry and baby June. Liquor-filled tasted so foul that only an adult would eat it. I washed my hands and face and set out for the Henrys’.

Lunch was like something out of a commercial or a dream, although I suppose there was nothing unusual about it. Baloney-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread—mayo on one side, mustard on the other, and pale pink meat and yellow cheese in the middle. Heaven. In Dr. Frankle’s house the only baloney was verbal, and in my father’s the only meat was a soy-based pseudohamburger mix called bean-burger.