This Must Be the Place: A Novel (9 page)

General conversation moved from Arthur Rook to other topics too mundane for Oneida to bother paying attention to. She watched as Bert chewed her lasagna and stared into space. There was something about the methodical working of her jaw that made Oneida think the lasagna was incidental, that Bert was really chewing on the puzzle that was Arthur Rook; from the look on her face, it tasted vile.

By Thursday, Arthur Rook was presumed dead. In a running gag instigated by Mona, mother and daughter were going to have to kick down his door, haul out his corpse, and drag it down the driveway for the trash guys to pick up. Oneida didn’t know why this was the funniest thing she’d heard in forever, but it was—she lost it every time Mona described how the two of them would have to heave his lifeless body down both flights of stairs, arms and limbs flopping like carp, and how, by the time they got to the first landing, they’d be so fed up they’d just fold him into a ball and roll him the rest of the way down.

Oneida was always the first to crack; she couldn’t help it. She’d tuck her chin down, squeeze her eyes shut, and press her lips close together, but a laugh would always burst through the dam, strangled and sharp: a goose honking into a trombone, as Mona had once described it. And Mona would be smiling at her, beaming even, but otherwise a paragon of control in the face of abject hilarity. She didn’t know how Mona did it—how she could be so ridiculously hilarious and never laugh at her own jokes. All she knew was that Mona was the only person who ever made her laugh, really laugh, and she remembered how much she loved her mother—really loved her—every time it happened.

“So what do we think his problem is?” Oneida asked. “Other than being dead.”

Mona shrugged. “Being dead strikes me as enough of a problem, don’t you think?”

Oneida had already peeled more than a dozen carrots and was slicing apples for cobbler. She stared down at the creamy white flesh falling
away under every stroke of the knife. “He’s just so different from the other tenants. Seems kind of weird, is all.”

Mona tapped her spoon on the edge of the pot, loosening blobs of squash. “Don’t worry, Jones. I can smell bullshit a mile away, and Arthur Rook was standing next to me.” Oneida looked up, stricken, and Mona smiled. “I know he’s hiding from something,” she continued. “Maybe his wife kicked him out. Maybe he lost everything in a bad stock trade. Maybe he’s having a psychotic break. A good landlord doesn’t care. He paid cash up front, he was polite, and, in case you didn’t notice, he’s cute as hell. Maybe he’ll liven things up around here.”

Oneida’s cheeks and forehead burned. She hated it when her mother talked about men. It mortified her to think that her mother could be physically attracted to someone, would want to date him, kiss him, have sex with him. Sex as a general topic was embarrassing enough, but as it related to her mother? Insufferable. She tried not to think that she’d been infected with the Ruby Falls groupthink—this was the attitude that got her mother into trouble in the first place—but she couldn’t help it. Even worse was realizing she accepted herself as the Trouble Her Mother Got Into, that her existence had kept Desdemona Jones from going out into the world and having a bigger life. These spasms of baseless guilt overtook her more often as she grew older, as she understood her own mad desire to leave Ruby Falls far behind. She pushed it down into her stomach and swallowed.

She tossed a hunk of apple into her mouth and watched her mother waltz around the kitchen. Mona Jones, cooking, reminded Oneida of a ballroom dancer: she made it look effortless and elegant, something she’d been born to do. Her piecrusts were flaky, buttery clouds of pastry; her homemade pastas were rich but magically weightless; her wedding cakes were elaborate pieces of sugar architecture built on carrot, cheese, lemon, and chocolate—delicate islands of edible ingenuity that had informed Oneida’s first daydreams of fairy-tale castles, imaginary lands, enchanted woods.

Oneida knew her mother could have opened her own restaurant in New York City; she could have built an empire of books and cooking products, her signature on a line of stainless cookware, aprons, and
high-heat spatulas. But Mona was living in obscurity in Ruby Falls, unappreciated, her marvels of gastronomy wasting away in the bellies of ex-hippies and lonely old ladies on Social Security who wanted nothing more exciting to eat than pot roast on Monday, chicken on Tuesday, spaghetti pie on Wednesday, meat loaf on Thursday. Wasting away in her own belly, Oneida thought, and touched her rumbling stomach.

Mona spun between the table and the stove, checking the meat loaf, stirring the sautéing carrots, layering the cobbler in a single fluid motion, a few curls falling out of her ponytail and drifting through the air as she twirled. Mona had had her thirty-first birthday last spring, and she seemed young even to her daughter: she still wore ponytails, brightly colored T-shirts, jeans, flip-flops. Oneida could picture her walking through Ruby Falls High—which Mona said hadn’t changed a bit since she went there—holding a science textbook and humming some old grunge classic. She was pretty, fair and dark-haired, so she’d run with the popular kids—but she’d be nice to Oneida: smile at her in the hall, pass her the basketball in gym, commiserate about the cafeteria food as they stood in line together. All the normal teenage things that Oneida didn’t think she had the capacity to even understand, her mother would teach her to like. Mona would have been her friend, she knew—and she found herself wishing, absurdly, that she could go back in time and be a friend to her mother as well. The kind of friend who would’ve told Mona over and over again, You owe it to yourself to get out of this stupid town; you’re a genius; get out, get out! The kind of friend her mother would call When She Got in Trouble. The kind of friend who would say—what?

Give it up?

Get rid of it?

She shuddered involuntarily, a spasm of the stomach and the spine that had nothing to do with the cool breeze ruffling the white kitchen curtains. Maybe that was the core of her true freakishness, what the world at large recognized in her: she wasn’t even supposed to be here. It didn’t matter how much Mona loved her. Her mother had made the wrong choice.

She set the table and made herself forget that particular truth about herself.

By the time Anna and Sherman were sitting down, Oneida was calmer. She was a little worried she might remember and put herself off dinner entirely, but the arrival of Arthur Rook, looking slightly rumpled and as though he hadn’t actually meant to stumble into the room at that precise moment, was more than a distraction. It had only been a few days since he’d asked her for detergent, and she was surprised how different he looked from the Arthur Rook she’d built in her mind, the Arthur Rook who had taken on comically mythic proportions: who sat in his room and made cat litter and string art on construction paper, who got drunk in the kitchen in the dark; the corpse she and her mother would have to kick to the curb. Arthur Rook, to Oneida’s surprised eyes, looked tired and distant but overwhelmingly a real person.

“Hello,” he said. “Is it OK if I, uh, join—”

Mona pointed to the seat on her left. “Of course,” she said. “Please, Mr. Rook, sit down. We’re having meat loaf. And let me be the first to say that I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Arthur Rook hesitated slightly, looking from Mona to the chair to the other people at the table, and Oneida thought for a second he might bolt. Mona must have sensed it too, because she said, “Welcome back to the world. Small as it may be.”

“Arthur.” He took the seat. “Please call me Arthur.”

“Anna DeGroot,” Anna said, turning to shake Arthur’s hand.

“Right,” Arthur said. “Thanks again for taking me to the store.”

“I’m Sherman Russell.” Sherman waved from the other side of the table and Arthur, still looking slightly dazed, returned the gesture.

“Nice to meet you all.” Arthur unfolded the paper napkin Oneida had placed beside his plate.

Thursday was always meat loaf night, but Mona had decided to switch the usual mashed potato complement for fresh snap peas and carrots and the first acorn squash of the season. Oneida, as usual, had been in charge of the biscuits and was proudly relieved that not a single biscuit had been scorched that evening.

It all smelled fantastic, so Oneida wasn’t the least surprised when Arthur, barely concealing the note of desperation in his voice, said, “When are we going to eat?”

Mona’s face cracked in a wry smile. “We don’t eat it, Arthur. We just like to look at it.”

Arthur’s brow furrowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t—”

Oneida rolled her eyes and blushed when she realized Anna had seen her. She gave Oneida a little disapproving narrow of the eyes and Oneida slumped in her seat.

Sherman, uncharacteristically, threw himself upon the sword of conversation and asked Oneida how school had been that day.

Oneida’s ears detected the
clomp
of Bert’s cane—she was on the first floor and would be in the dining room in another thirty seconds or so, and yet the idea of making thirty seconds of conversation with Sherman about school still seemed interminable. Sherman acted as though he and Oneida were fighting the same war, he a general and she a soldier in the same trench day after day, and he frequently talked to her about the troublemakers in his classes as though they were Oneida’s friends and she could offer them counsel: “Why don’t you tell that Hearst kid to knock it off? He’s pratting around with the lathe; there’s going to be trouble,” or “Can you talk some sense into that Baxter moron? Kid’s gonna lose a finger if he’s not careful.”

She took a sip of milk. “OK, I guess. Pretty boring.”

“Any big tests coming up?” Anna asked.

“Math quiz on Friday about the quadratic equation. And I have my group history project. That’s due in a couple weeks.”

“Is that why that punk kid was here last weekend? That Wendy what’s his face?” Sherman, anticipating Bert’s arrival, pulled her chair out. “That kid’s gunning for trouble. I caught him with a tube of fake blood a week ago; you know what he was going to do with it?”

Sherman didn’t continue. With a start, Oneida realized it hadn’t been a rhetorical question. She shrugged, said that she didn’t really know him, he was just in her group. She neglected to mention Wendy’s new favorite thing to do was grin madly at her if they passed in the hall, after which she’d hear a mocking falsetto
Spooooooooon!
as soon as he glided into her blind spot.

“There’s only so many things you can do with a tube of fake blood in wood shop, none of them good,” Sherman said. Bert accepted Sherman’s
distracted offer of a hand and allowed him to maneuver her to her seat. She thanked him quietly and immediately bowed her head, assuming, as Oneida saw it, that the rest of the Darby-Jones tenants were too far gone to even bother asking to join her.

“Tragic Jigsaw-related Dismemberment,” Arthur muttered. “A hand, a foot, a finger. Kid kind of sounds like fun.”

Sherman bristled. Oneida felt a little giddy. She thought Sherman was a windbag—not a bad guy, but a windbag, and ridiculously out of it—and she agreed with Arthur: Wendy was a jerk, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see the potential for comedy in the situation. She smiled, and when she looked up she caught Arthur Rook watching her, noticing her smile. He looked desperately happy, relieved, almost, to have discovered the appearance of a tiny alliance, and she looked quickly away.

“And who is this young man who sits before me?” Bert Draper, all prayed out, adjusted her glasses on the tip of her nose and squinted at Arthur. “Is this the boy who’s been hiding from us for days? We will overlook your abhorrent rudeness, young man, but only this once.”

“I’m . . . thanks,” Arthur said, more confused than penitent.

“Now tell us about yourself. Where do you come from. Where is your family from. What do you do, and what are you hoping to do, now you are here.” Bert fired statements, not questions.

“Bert,” Mona said, reaching for the platter of meat loaf. “Let’s eat before it gets cold.”

Bert harrumphed and wriggled in her chair. She reminded Oneida of a chicken settling over an egg, fluffing and adjusting herself, anxiously, jerkily. Roberta Draper gave Oneida the creeps. She was practically mummified, her skin wrinkled and parched; the face powder she used flaked off like dust. Her eyes were hard and dark, and that was what bothered Oneida the most: whenever she talked to Bert, she knew—she knew—Bert was withholding information. Bert had seen more people come and go, and more things happen, in their home than Mona and Oneida put together—and for whatever reason, for now, Bert Draper was keeping it all to herself.

It was also terrifying to watch Bert Draper eat. She didn’t have false teeth, but she didn’t possess a full working set of originals, either. Little
flecks of moistened half-masticated food would work their way between her remaining teeth and through her lips, dropping to her plate or dotting the wildly patterned orange and turquoise scarf she wore, not because of drafts but because, Oneida knew, she was sensitive about the folds of skin that hung loosely from her neck. Having to eat Mona’s stupendously tasty dinners within ten feet of Bert Draper was a lesson in culinary sadism: it was painful, but the food tasted too good to stop.