But now, now she’s running through the streets like a little wanton, fifteen years old and you’d think she’d never been fifteen before, her slip showing, her feet a mad dancing blur and something in her hair — chocolate, the chocolate she ate day and night and never mind the pimples sprouting in angry red constellations all over her face and pretty little chin. And there she is, just ahead of me, running her hands through all the bowls of fighting fish poor Leandro Mopa has put out on display — and worse, upsetting Benedicta Moreno’s perfectly proportioned pyramid of mangoes.
And what am I thinking, all out of breath and my lungs heaving like things made of leather? When we get home — this is what I am thinking — when we get home, I will spank her.
There was a sudden thump on the front porch, an ominous thump, ponderous and reverberative, and it resounded through the empty house like the clap of doom. John sat up, startled. It sounded as if someone had dropped down dead on the planks — or been murdered. But there it was again, not just a single thump now but a whole series of them, as if the local high school were staging a sack race on his front porch. He glanced at the clock on the mantel — eight-forty already, and where had the time gone? — then set the book down and rose from the couch to investigate.
As he approached the front door, the thumping became louder and more insistent, as if someone were kicking snow from their boots — that was it, yes, of course. It was Barb, the car was stuck in a drift someplace and she’d walked the whole way, he could see it already, and she’d be annoyed, of course she would, but not too annoyed, because of the magic and romance of the storm, and she’d warm herself by the fire, share a brandy with him and something they could heat over the open flames — hot dogs, whatever — and then, then he could go back to his book. But all that, the elaborate vision called up by the sound of thumping feet, the comfort and rationalization of it, went for nothing. Because at that moment, just as he reached his hand out for the doorknob, he heard the murmur of a man’s voice and the high assaultive giggle of a female, definitely not Barb.
And then the door stood open, the keen knife of the air, the immemorial smell of the snow and the whole world transformed and transforming still, and there was Buck, home from college in a snow-shrouded ski jacket and a girl with him, a girl with fractured blue eyes and a knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows. “Hey, Dad,” Buck breathed in passing, and then he and the vigorously stomping girl were in the hall and the old dog was wagging her tail and attempting a puppyish yip of greeting.
“Jesus”—and Buck was shouting suddenly, his voice gone high with enthusiasm—“you ever see anything like this? Must’ve taken us twelve hours from Plattsburgh and the only thing moving on the Northway was the bus. Good old Greyhound, huh?”
John wasn’t thinking clearly. He was still in the book, or part of him was. “You didn’t flunk out, did you?” he said, throwing his hands out, as if for balance.
Buck gave him a look, the narrow eyes he’d inherited from his mother, the beak of the nose and the cheeks flushed with the cold — or drink, hard liquor, and that was all they did up in Plattsburgh, as far as John had heard, anyway. “No,” Buck said finally, a hurt and sorrowful expression clouding his features, “I just thought I’d come home for the weekend, you know, see how everybody was … oh, this is Bern.” He indicated the girl, who reached up to tear off the knit cap and shake out a blazing head of white-blond hair.
John was impressed. He snatched a quick look at her breasts and her slim legs rising out of a pair of slick red boots. This was the sort of girl he’d wanted in college, lusted after, howled to the moon over, but to no avail. He’d been a nerd, a math nerd, the kind of guy who got excited over cryptography and differential equations, and he’d wound up with Barb. Thankfully. And he wasn’t complaining. But his son, look at his son: Buck was no nerd, no sir, not with a girl like—“What was your name?” he heard himself asking.
A final shake of the hair, a soft cooed greeting for the reeking old dog. “Bern,” she said evenly, and she had a smile for him, wonderful teeth, staggering lips, pink and youthful gums.
The door was shut now. The hallway was cold. And dark. He was smiling till his own teeth must have glowed in the dim glancing light of the fire in the other room. “Short for Bernadette?” he ventured.
They were moving instinctively, as a group, toward the fire — even the dog. “Nope,” she said. “Just Bern.”
Well, fine. And would she like a drink? Suddenly, for some reason, it was vitally important to John that she have a drink, crucial even. No, she said, looking to Buck, no, she didn’t drink. There was a silence. “And how’s school?” he asked finally, just to say something.
Neither of them rushed to answer. Buck, alternately warming his hands over the fire and stroking the old dog, just shrugged, and the girl, Bern, turned to John and said, “Frankly, it sucks.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Buck murmured.
John was puzzled. “You mean—?”
“Aw, shit.” Buck spoke with real vehemence, but softly, almost under his breath, and he rose tumultuously from his place by the fire. “We’re going to hang in my room for a while, okay, Dad?” His arm found Bern’s shoulder and they were gone, or almost, two shadows touching and melding and then slowly receding down the dark hall. But then Buck hung back a moment, the shadows separating, and his face was floating there in the unsteady light of the hurricane lamp. “Where’s Mom?” he said.
When she was twelve, she began to lose her breasts. I would put my arm round her in a restaurant and feel like a child molester, and when we went to bed together I had to keep reminding myself that she was a younging twelve, which actually gave her some eighty-eight years of worldly wiles and experience, at least seventy-five of them enlivened by venereal pleasures. (I never fooled myself into thinking I was the only one, though I wanted to be. She’d been married and separated before I met her, and when she was young the first time, there had been a succession of lovers, a whole mighty tide of them.) She’d begun taking a rag doll to bed — and crunching hard candy between her dwindling molars or snapping gum in my face whenever I began to feel amorous — and this just intensified my feelings of jealousy and resentment.
“Tell me about your first,” I would demand. “What was his name, Eduardo, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t!” She would giggle, because I was stroking the soft white doeskin of her belly or the silk of her upper arm, and then, blowing a pink bubble with her gum, she would correct me. “It wasn’t Eduardo, silly, it was Armando. I told you. Silly.” And it would become a chant—“Silly, silly, silly!”—till I sprang up off the bed and chased her round the room, through the apartments and past the maid’s quarters, and only then, when I was out of breath and half spent, would she give me my pleasure.
And then came the day, the inevitable day, when she was no longer a woman. Her breasts had disappeared entirely, not even the tiniest bud left, and between her legs she was as bald as an apple. Of course, I’d known all along the day was coming, and I’d tried to prepare myself as so many before me had done, watching soap operas and reading the great tragedies, but the pain and disillusionment were more than I could bear — yes, disillusionment. Here was the woman I loved, the woman who could talk all day of the books of Mangual and Garci-Crespo, make love all night to the sensual drone of Rodriguez’s Second Cello Concerto and cry out in joy at the dawn as if she’d created it herself. And now, now she sat Indian style in the middle of the bed and called out for me in a piping little singsong voice that made my blood boil. And what did she call me? Fausto, or even Faustito? No, she called me Daddy. “Daddy, Daddy,” she called, “read me a story.”