She thought Robin must sleep in this bed with Penny, curled round her protectively as you would sleep with a kitten. Eric and Andy must sleep with them too. The bed was big, but still they would have to sleep close. She wondered if they wore pajamas. That would be uncomfortable in the heat, but it might be even more uncomfortable to touch sticky naked limbs. She pictured them all lying together, the children asleep and Robin awake and blinking in an oscillating band of street light. She wondered if Robin had a light, lacy gown to wear, or a nylon shortie.
Fleetingly, she thought of her mother in the short cotton gowns she called “nighties.” She wore them with a white rayon peignoir that she had bought when she was eighteen. Elise remembered her mother’s short, thick calves, the little hood of fat covering each round knee. Her mother’s legs were middle-aged and ugly, but there was something childish and sweet about them.
Every summer Elise went to stay with her mother. She lived with a man who had custody of two sons from a previous marriage because their mother spent so much time in mental hospitals. Elise liked the man and the sons okay. Robbie had turned into a strange, fat kid who read philosophy books that were beyond his age range, but she liked him too. She spent her summer days sleeping late, making blender drinks, and staying out late with her friends. She would come in after midnight and find her mother sitting in the warm dark, watching a late-night talk show in her peignoir and a nightie. Her mother would turn her head to greet Elise. It was too dark to see her expression, but Elise saw in her profile a mix of love and sadness, of gratitude to see her daughter arrive home safely and forlorn bewilderment at the way everything had turned out. The expression repelled Elise and then drew her in. She would go into the kitchen and make them both hot chocolate. They would sit at opposite ends of the couch, drinking cocoa and commenting about the people on the talk show. They showed off for each other, trying to be smart. Elise’s repulsion would slowly dissolve into deep comfort, becoming part of and affecting the texture of the comfort.
When the talk show was over, her mother got up and turned on the light and came to kiss Elise good night. Her peignoir would open slightly as she bent into the kiss, showing her neck and sun-reddened upper chest. The diaphanous yoke of her gown was embroidered with small, plain flowers bearing four round petals apiece. Elise imagined how much her mother must’ve liked the peignoir when she bought it. She imagined her putting it on for the first time, her shy vanity at the way it looked with her skin and chestnut hair. Her mother had been beautiful, and her beauty still whispered in her eyes and skin. When she wore the peignoir, her whispered beauty aligned itself with the coarse redness of her middle age and made it better than beautiful.
A breeze came into the room and dispersed the heat. There was a burst of fractious traffic noise, people honking and playing their radios loud. Someone screamed at someone else that he was a moron, a jerk-off, a spastic freak. Under the light across the street, a girl Elise’s age was walking in a short, filmy dress that played about her slim legs. There was a funny strut in her hips and haunches, as if she was very proud and very ashamed at once. She turned around to smile at someone behind her, and the light caught her teasing eyes and dark, shoulder-length hair in motion about her face.
Elise wondered how her mother would react if she knew about the man in the park. She couldn’t picture any reaction. She could only envision her mother sitting on the couch, waiting for her daughter with that stoic look of love and sadness. It was a look that was already hurt too much to be surprised by the man in the park, a look that even anticipated him. It was the shadow of the way she used to look at Rick.
Elise thought of her father. She imagined him walking around the house with his fists balled, yelling that the world was a shit pot and his daughter was a whore. But that image quickly dissolved to an image of him sitting alone on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. She imagined him feeling the way she felt when she had walked through the park alone. He would feel shocked and scared and angry. But he would hold on. Inside, he would have a hard little rock of love for her, and he would hold on to it.
Like an echo of that image, she thought of Robbie, crouching by the TV and doing his drawings while the world threatened to crush him. She thought of Becky, moving through the room with her light-footed, absent grace. She thought of Rick turning away from her, except she only pictured one shoulder and the side of his face, as if he were someone she’d dreamed of and forgotten.
It was eight-thirty and dark outside. “That bitch,” whispered Elise. “Where is that fucking bitch?”
Andy ran up with a tiny red thing in his hand. “This is Little Friend!” he said. “He’s in big, big trouble! He’s always, always lost!”
“Oh!”
“Hide him!” said Andy. “You hide him and we’ll try to find him!”
She put Little Friend beside one of the kitchen table legs; it took them a surprisingly long time to find it, and when they did, they wanted her to hide it again.
“Put him someplace bad!” they said. “Someplace scary!”
She put him in the sugar bowl. They looked all over, screaming, “Little Friend! Little Friend!” until Penny woke and began to mumble irritably.
“Be quiet,” said Elise sharply.
Eric quieted, but Andy kept screaming.
She knelt and grabbed him by the shoulders. “If you want to play you have to be quiet. Okay?”
He looked at her to see if she meant it. She tried to seem stern, but it was halfhearted and he could tell. As soon as she let go, he began to yell again.
“All right,” she said. “I don’t want to play.” She went and sat by the window. In the window across the street, a woman was standing at a table and folding clothes. Even from a distance Elise could see that she was frowning resentfully. The boys yelled and ran. She ignored them. It was nine-thirty.
At her father’s house, Elise had liked to climb on the roof at night. Her father’s upstairs den had a sunporch affixed to it, a small, roof-tiled square with a wooden railing that they lovingly called “the balcony.” One evening she discovered that if she stood on the railing she could get up on the roof, using her sneakers for traction. She climbed right to the top of the house and straddled it, gazing about the neighborhood. She felt very pleased with herself; with a slight maneuver, she had made a special pocket hidden in ordinary life.
The roof had a number of peaks and flat surfaces, and she explored them all. She found she could sit comfortably outside Rick’s room and look in. She could see part of Becky’s room, and she could look right into the bathroom. Eventually, she grew bold enough to spy on her family. This gave her a strange pleasure she could not have explained. She could see Becky walking around the room listening to music, not dancing or singing but just pacing with an intent, furiously inturned face. She watched Rick while he wrote a song, crouching on the floor and rocking himself, gazing up with big, rapt eyes as he worked his lips, his pencil poised above the page. She watched her stepmother use the toilet. She watched her father sit on the tub and pare his nails. Seeing these things made her feel closer to her family than she did when she was in the same room with them. It made her like them more.
But they got suspicious when they kept hearing muffled noises overhead, and one night her stepmother went out and saw her on the roof. Then they were all mad at her.
“God,” said Rick. “What a freak!”
“This is not normal behavior,” said their stepmother. “This is sick.”