Elise came to like Becky and to feel protective of her shy peculiarity. But she was more impressed by her stepmother. Rick had hated Sandy from the beginning, but Elise found her too strange and fascinating to hate. Sandy was a little younger than their mother, but she had a bright, bristling competence that made her seem older. She was thin and her stomach was hard and she’d had her face tattooed so that she appeared to be wearing full makeup all the time. Even when she got up in the morning, her lips were bright red, her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were outlined in black. “I fixed it so I wouldn’t have to wash my face off at night,” she said. She said it with brisk self-deprecation, as if her face, everybody’s face, was a vaguely ridiculous thing that could come off at any moment. She also said it with pride that she’d acknowledged the problem and then gone right in there to fix it. Her whole being seemed to be bursting with self-deprecation and pride and the need to fix things.
Their father may have gotten Blue as a present for Sandy, but he had grown to like the cat more than anybody did. He thought it was soulful and beautiful. He brought Blue special treats and talked to him, even sang to him. Blue would be resting on the floor, and their father would bend over to look the cat in the face and he would sing: “Six foot, seven foot, eight foot—bunch! Daylight come and Blue wants to go home!”
Rick despised it when their father did that, and would imitate him viciously. Elise defended their father and reminded Rick that he had been in Vietnam, where he’d risked his life and fought.
“Yeah,” said Rick. “The retards are strong.”
This was the thing he said when somebody who was ugly or unpopular did something smart. He could say that and take anything away from anybody. When she was younger, it hurt her to hear Rick talk about their father this way. But when she got older, she saw what he’d meant; their father was kind of a retard. She remembered him at the dinner table, yelling.
“You think you’re such a bunch of smart, tough feminists!” he yelled. “But you don’t know anything! About men, about sex!” He grabbed the edge of the table and lunged over his dish. “There’s guys out there who would cut your bowels out to have it!”
Elise looked at Rick and rolled her eyes. Becky, who was fourteen, began to cry. “See!” said their father. “The big feminist! Crying!” But his voice wobbled on the second exclamation, as if it was embarrassed, and his last word was almost sorry about the whole thing. He withdrew into his chair, wiped his mouth, and ate with the slightly offended air of someone who just wants to mind his own business.
If Sandy had been there, he would never have said those things. But she was at a codependency meeting, which was why he was in a bad mood to begin with.
Elise looked at Becky so she would see that Elise didn’t look down on her for crying, but Becky was busy composing herself and didn’t notice. Elise was angry and disgusted that their father had made Becky cry when he had actually been yelling at Elise for talking about a woman on TV who’d been saying that if girls wanted to dress like prostitutes, they should learn to act like prostitutes. Becky sniffed, tucked her fine red hair behind her ears, and took up her silverware with the delicate resolve of a young cat. Elise furtively tried to meet her brother’s eye so he would see how contemptuous she felt, but Rick was too deep in his own special contempt to respond. He stroked his dyed black hair and fidgeted disdainfully as if trying to locate some small spot worth being in, even though he knew such a spot didn’t exist, at least not among these people. One cuff of his angora sweater slid down over one long, severely articulated hand, adding to the exquisite quality of his disdain. Elise felt a pang of admiration for him. She felt dejected that he wouldn’t look at her, but she didn’t blame him. He was seventeen, and not necessarily interested in looks across the dining table, and anyway, if she were as beautiful as Rick, she thought, she’d be stuck-up too.
The next day Elise was watching TV with Becky and Rick when their father walked through the room in a state of mild, enchanted absence. He looked as if he were in a private landscape, a place of secret relief only he knew about. He passed Becky, and as he did, he reached out and, with one finger, playfully stroked the bridge of her nose and said, “Ski nose! Ski nose!” She giggled and forgave him. He patted her shoulder and moved on. Elise had boiled with anger.
Andy and Eric ran around the room, happily screaming. Andy waved the knotted leather cord and banged the marble balls together. Eric beat the cymbal with a colored rock. Their energy unspooled crazily and spilled all over the room. Andy ran up to Elise like a kitten dancing around a cat. He held up the banging balls and gave a shrill little scream and hopped around. Eric looked on. Elise smiled uncertainly. She wanted to answer their excitement, but she felt too big and stiff. She couldn’t remember that kind of excitement and was tentative and vulnerable before it. The boys ran to the bed and chased each other around it, yelling and banging. Elise remembered jumping up and down on the mattress with Rick, yelling, “Because they wanted to!” The boys pounced on the bed and rolled around, tickling. A little strip of feeling wiggled free inside her. She burst off the chair and jumped on the bed, grabbing Andy and tickling him. He squealed and turned in to her embrace with a shy, writhing twist. Penny began to scream. Everything closed up.
“Stop it,” said Elise. She sat up and pried Andy off her. “Be quiet now.”
The boys looked down nervously. Elise put her hand on Penny and made her rock on the squishy mattress. The baby kept screaming. Elise felt a hard little hiccup of fear. The boys slid off the bed and went away. Her fear got bigger. Frightened, she slid her hands under the baby and took it in her arms. Penny bellowed and wet through her diaper. Elise didn’t know what to do. She didn’t remember how to change the diaper. She walked the length of the floor with the baby, turned and walked the other way. Her heart pounded. Maybe Penny would stop screaming before the pee got sticky and itchy. Then Elise could think about the diaper. She tried to walk slow and soothingly.
Sometimes her father would run around and scream because the dog down the street wouldn’t stop barking. For a while, she would come home from school every day and would find her father yelling about the dog and her stepmother pretending not to hear him. Elise would go upstairs and knock on Rick’s door, and he would let her in, putting on a show of reluctance but smiling. “Hi, Leesy,” he would say. He would sit on the bed and play his guitar, hunching in on himself as he sang her a song. Or they would sit on his orange pile rug, eating candy corn left over from Halloween and making fun of their father for going crazy over the dog.
“I’m going to kill him!” screamed their father. “I’ll beat his skull in!” There was yelling and scuffling, and then the back door slammed.