Their father stood and wiped his mouth.
It was ten o’clock. Andy grabbed her arm and yanked it. “Come on!” he said. “Hide him again!”
“No,” she said, and she pushed him.
He thrust his little face into the air and sang his nonsense song as loud as he could. Penny began to scream.
Elise stood. “Stop it,” she said.
“Daylight come, banana wanna go home!”
“Shut up!”
“Daylight come daylight come!”
She slapped him in the face. She slapped him so hard his head snapped around. He shut up. He looked up at her and smiled, tremulously.
“I said stop it,” she said.
He put his thumb in his mouth and went and sat in an armchair in the corner. Eric went and sat with the toys. Elise sat back down. She hoped Penny would stop crying without her having to do anything. It was after ten o’clock. She didn’t know what to do. She got up and put an unfinished bottle of formula back on the stove to heat. There wasn’t much of it left, she noticed.
Her stepmother loved it when things were sick. Her favorite books were true-life stories about drug-addicted fashion models who died horribly or prep school boys who turned out to be murderers. She loved TV movies about people who seemed okay until they became obsessed with a coworker and wound up killing everyone in the office. She was always saying, “That’s not normal!” in a thrilled, disapproving voice. She could say it about a magazine story that described a jealous wife who stalked her husband’s lover so she could make her get on her knees and stick a gun in her mouth. She could say it about Becky sitting in her room and playing the same song over and over again.
She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too.
Once, Elise heard her talking to a client about the woman’s step-daughter, who was crazy even though she was on Prozac. Elise had stopped by the salon to borrow some money, and she had to wait because Sandy was tattooing the client’s lips. The client’s lips were swollen and bleeding from the needle, but she wanted to talk anyway.
“I just feel so bad and so helpless. It turns out she’s been cutting herself like that for at least a year. All over her arms and her stomach, with a razor.”
“You know,” Sandy had said, “there’s a whole article on it in Focus this month. It’s just fascinating. It says they do it to distract themselves from the terrible pain they feel inside.”
Penny didn’t want to take the bottle. Elise pushed the nipple against her lips again and again, but she kept turning her head and crying. “Come on,” Elise whispered, low and angry. “Shut up, come on.” It wasn’t fair, she thought. It was ten-thirty. She didn’t know what to do.
She thought of her father yelling at Rick. “You vain, conceited little prick!” he screamed. “I’d like to see you out in the trenches with the artillery coming in! What would you do, little prick? Dye your hair?” He crouched over Rick so that he could yell at him better. “Nobody out there would give a fuck about your hair!”
She slammed the bottle on the little bedside table. She yanked the diaper off the baby. Penny screamed angrily. Elise stopped. She put her hand on Penny’s stomach. “I’m sorry,” she said.
When she had finished the bottle, Penny was quiet. It was eleven o’clock. Elise walked up and down the room. If Robin came home now, Elise was going to yell at her. She went to the dresser and began opening the drawers, starting with the top ones. She saw Robin’s nylon underwear, a grubby address book, a rubber band, a button with thread still attached. Eric was looking at her from the floor; when he saw she saw him, he looked away. She found a piece of paper; it was the torn-off half of a form letter asking for money for breast cancer research, with phone numbers and a grocery list written on it in chartreuse ink. There was a ballpoint on the bedside table. She sat on the bed, turned the letter over, and wrote on the back: “It is 11:00 and I am leaving. You said you would be back at six and you are five hours late. Almost anybody else would’ve left after two hours late. I took this job for no money and I did everything I said I would do. What you’ve done is wrong. You have acted like an asshole. I’m sorry to do this, and I hope nothing bad has happened to you. But I have to leave. I am not coming back tomorrow.”
She put it on the table. First she put it down flat, then she stood it up between the clock and the bud vase. She decided to wait just five more minutes. The noise from the street was a cool, soothing mumble. The breeze from the window was almost chilling on her lap. Andy had fallen asleep in the armchair. Eric was moving a toy around and humming softly to himself. She thought about herself in the future. She could only imagine loud music and quickly changing pictures, like an advertisement for something on TV. That was okay; it seemed like fun. She imagined herself having fun, then making money, then going back home and buying everybody presents. She imagined how grateful they’d be.
It was eleven-thirty when she left. Penny was deep in her thoughts. Andy was asleep. Eric was still playing and humming to himself. She crouched beside him to say goodbye. He looked at her with somber eyes. He looked like he’d just recognized her. “Bye,” he said. She touched his arm; he looked down.
The hall was hot and stuffy. It felt like she was already miles away from the apartment. She padded quickly down the stairs. When she reached the next floor, she saw that the people in the apartment directly under Robin’s had left their door wide open. She looked in and saw a group of men sitting in shirtsleeves around the kitchen table, playing cards. They had big arms and broad, jovial faces. A woman with her back to the door was moving vaguely at the sink. The men laughed and drank as they played. “Excuse me,” she said.
A man got up and came to the door. His face was pockmarked, with little whiskers in the pocks. “Yes?” He was foreign, she couldn’t tell which kind. He wore a red kerchief around his neck, and his nose was big.
“There’s kids in the apartment right above you. I’ve been taking care of them all day, but now I have to go. I don’t know where their mother is. She said she’d be back, but she’s not, and now I have to go. Could you be sure they’re okay?”
He put his hand on his chin and looked past her as if considering.
The woman glanced past the man at Elise; from her expression, it seemed that Elise made no sense to her.
“One of them’s only a baby.”
“Okay,” said the man. He pointed upstairs and nodded. “I check.”
When she got home, she found Mark sitting in the living room, sewing patches on his jeans. She told him what had happened. “What do you think I should’ve done?” she asked. “Do you think it was okay to leave?”
He shrugged. “What else could you do? She didn’t come back.” He concentrated on his pants, very meticulously working the needle. “She shouldn’t have left you there like that.”
Elise sat on the couch. “Well, but one of them was a baby.”
“You told the neighbors. They’ll be okay.”
“I guess.” She stared at the frayed old carpet. There were tulips on it. She felt grateful to be back in her living room, even though it wasn’t really hers. “The thing is, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t keep panhandling forever. I have to find work somehow.”
“You’ll find something,” said Mark. “It’ll be all right.”
She sat a moment. “I once blew a guy for money,” she said. “In San Francisco. It was a nightmare. He said he’d give me fifty bucks, but he only gave me ten, and then he hit me.”