“All of it, dear.”
The teapot’s whistle barges in from the other room.
Madeleine hops off the chair. “It’s my tea. I’ll take it off the stove.” She opens the door and Pedro pounces in.
Her father’s eyebrows jolt toward the ceiling. “What is that?”
Madeleine calls Pedro back into the other room but he ignores her, sniffing the legs of her father’s chair. Pedro has had a rough day that involved, among other things, incarceration via leash. He wants to bound and spring and hope and the time is now. He leaps onto a bookcase shelf but finds no solid ground. He pedals against a stack of comic books. Dog and shelf crash unceremoniously down, narrowly missing Madeleine’s father. A journal catapults, tizzying the record needle.
There’s a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man
Brown-eyed handsome man
Madeleine’s father shrieks, atonal with fear. She debates whether to go after the record or Pedro or the teapot. Her father picks up an alarm clock and throws. It hits Pedro on his side. The dog squeaks in pain and leaps through the open window.
“Pedro! No!” Madeleine runs to the window in time to see the dog bound past the Dumpsters toward the twinkling of Ninth Street.
Her father is standing. He palms the swell of her neck and pins her against a bookshelf. His cheeks tremble. His eyes, shot through with blue, are focused on some unseen slight. Madeleine can smell his hand lotion, anisette and vetiver. His thumb presses into her windpipe and she begins to choke. She clasps onto his elbow, as if to help him.
“Dad,” she says, to remind him that she is his daughter.
He blinks, clearing whatever spell has him. He releases her and sits on the chair, in shock. He begins to cry. Madeleine darts to the kitchen and slaps off the burner underneath the teapot, which pitches and empties its water onto the stove. It takes her years to wrench the front door open. Her father’s bellowing gains velocity and chases her down the hallway. She runs behind the building, but the dog is gone.
Back in the apartment, the sound has ceased. Her father has retreated into his bedroom and locked the door. Madeleine pours a cup of tea and calls Mrs. Santiago, who immediately becomes overwrought and hangs up. Two roaches charge down the kitchen wall in a race they abandon halfway through. They idle.
Madeleine stares through the window into the courtyard. On most days she feels something staring back: a God or a mother-shaped benevolent force. Today, nothing reciprocates. The streamers on the chained bicycles lift in the indifferent breeze. She is alone in old stockings she’s repaired twice but still run. Life will be nothing but errands and gray nights.
Madeleine cries. Cries more when she asks herself what she could be doing while the tea is brewing, more when she fastens the clothespin onto her nose, more when she remembers the word ungrateful, more when she thinks of the caramel apples. She longs to hear her mother’s voice: a round, dulcet sound, ridged with spice. Madeleine pities her classmates, whose mothers’ voices are wry or weak, eliciting no allegiance from family members or vendors no matter how loud they yell. Madeleine’s mother was, at her quietest, her most powerful. Her voice could reverse the terms of every unfair transaction.
She thumbs through her mother’s recipe box for anything that will help: HOW TO SEW A BUTTON, HOW TO MAKE WRAPPING RIBBON INTO CURLICUES, HOW TO CHECK CAR OIL, HOW TO TALK ABOUT A BOOK YOU HAVEN’T READ.
Finally, she finds:
HOW TO GET OVER THE POETIC HORRORS,
Ice cream
Chocolate
Whiskey
Nina Simone, “Live at the Village Gate”
Dance
National Geographic
Get your hair and nails done
Sing
Madeleine brings her tea to the mirror where a girl with a freshly bowled haircut stares back. All she sees is nose. She adjusts the clothespin. She selects a record and waits for the song to begin.
Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes.
It is impossible to be sad when she is singing, even if the song she’s singing is sad. She marks “You with the Stars in Your Eyes” down in her notes. C minus.
She wants to keep practicing, but she is tired. Pedro is loose in the city. Her father is fastened to his room, with his records and his drugs and his quiet. She crawls under her covers. It is her fault for triggering one of his spells. At least it had been brief. She knows most girls do not have to deal with a father like hers. Most girls would be scared of his fits, and the way she lives, lawless in a roachy apartment. Madeleine would be scared too, she thinks, falling asleep. If she had only experienced finished basements and dads who acted like dads. But Madeleine loves her father, and how can you be scared of someone you love?
6:30 P.M
Sarina chooses a bottle of wine for the party at the corner store. Tinsel glints on the door and windows. The tree in the produce aisle revolves on its pedestal, reflecting red and silver light onto whoever buys grapes. “Surfer Girl” plays on the overhead speakers and everyone Sarina passes in the aisles is singing.
6:40 P.M
Good-bye, children, good-bye. Tucked into your buses, secured into the hands of your parents or guardians on the approved list of who can pick you up. Principal Randles walks the halls of Saint Anthony, tapping off lights and shutting doors. Except for the art projects that flutter in her wake, nothing moves. The chalk dust has settled.
In her office, Principal Randles pours a glass of single malt. At home, a sink full of dishes and a poster of Paris at night. On Christmas she will volunteer at the convent, collecting the old nuns’ drool with cheap napkins.
What had the Altimari girl said? Santa doesn’t exist, with the same flip tone her mother, Corrine, had. Like her mother, this girl has no appreciation for a principal’s job. Someone has to enforce lines and ring bells and guide and discipline. The way that woman walked, like she was paying the sidewalk a favor. She hadn’t believed Corrine would actually die. But what had the girl called her? A bitch rag?
Principal Randles is going on a date tonight with a tax attorney who described himself on his profile as a culinary enthusiast. Ha-ha, she says to the empty office. Bitch rag, indeed. She wears a new dress the color of cornflowers and they are going to a restaurant whose patrons eat in plastic, glowing pods. She wants to show off the legs she maintains with Olympian discipline.
Principal Randles stands in the doorway to the main office, mood buoying. She watches her secretary, Regina, count pretzel money, all the hemming and hawing parts of her; the unexplained bag of yarn, the Christmas gifts heaped upon her in card, ceramic, and doodad form, the battery-powered vest that exclaims: HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Then goes quiet. HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Then goes quiet. Regina is in teaching for the outfits. By her elbow a pile of erasers waits to be clapped.
“Regina.” The principal wags her scotch. “Go home.”
“But the erasers.”
“Forget them.”
The secretary has too many bags, so the principal follows her through the schoolyard to her sagging Nissan. She watches Regina drive out of the parking lot, the reflection of her vest insisting HAPPY HOLIDAYS! against the windshield.
A figure crouches near the trees that border the yard.
“Who is that?” she calls.
It is a boy she doesn’t recognize. He considers her, then scurries away. She walks to where he had been kneeling. A line of trees dusted with dead leaves. A piece of chalk, a drained soda can, and a phrase written on the asphalt.