Jenny wakes to “Wild Horses.” When she was little they would slow dance to this song, her feet on her dad’s feet, and when she got older they would still dance a little, in their own private way, to wake her up before school. She knows the deal is that she’ll come downstairs before the song is over, but she stays in bed until the last chorus. He is waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and when he sees her he starts to dance, like he hasn’t been waiting.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says. “Nice monkey PJs.” By now the song has ended. He hunches over the CD player, searching for repeat.
The kitchen floor is cold on her bare feet. He kicks his slippers over to her. They are warm from him.
“Good scavenging last night?”
“I guess,” she says.
“Did those summer kids behave themselves? Was everyone cool?”
She sighs. “Same as always.”
“You got it, my teen. No more questions.”
She can’t make eye contact, but then she does, and he looks back, and the moment moves forward. He is whistling, full of kitchen bustling, flipping pancakes. Sleeplessness tingles in her stomach, clenching it. Her scrambled eggs are wet.
Upstairs she locks the bathroom door and folds her pajamas neatly on the counter. Her nipples are embarrassing. The blonde hair circling her belly button is embarrassing. Her face in the mirror is slack and strange. She climbs into the shower. The earthy sharpness of Jake’s deodorant and sweat is all over her, rising off her shoulders with the shower’s steam. She unhooks the showerhead and holds its weight in her hands, testing the pressure, turning the faucets until the water runs cool. She presses the showerhead gently between her legs. At first the feeling is nice. She pushes the lip of the metal inside her. A fullness snakes through her body, the water a spreading coolness. She thinks of the graveyard, of Adelaide in a dusty blue dress, the color of the fake flower. The same cool stream of water inside them both, cleaning them out. Her body turns the water warm and it drains down her leg. She feels better already.
Drawing Blood
I have a recurring nightmare — I am standing in the street outside my home, as it looked in 1918. A figure emerges from the darkness at the far end of the street, but something isn’t right, and as they come closer I realize it is you. You stagger, as though drunk. Sometimes when I have my eyes closed and nothing at all on my mind, in the midst of all that darkness you emerge in your white nightgown, trailing a fur coat behind you in the dust, stumbling closer until I can see your face, eyes half-closed, mouth slack and glistening.
Nicholas has been dead twenty years, you’ll be glad to know, and like I said he stopped seeing me in a womanly kind of way more than twenty before that.
I didn’t maintain my figure. Mother wore her boned corset into her fifties, long after they went out of fashion, and a girdle in her eighties, even though my father was long dead. Even near the end, when she couldn’t remember our names, each morning she’d remember to put on her girdle. She flirted with her grandsons when they came to visit her, whom she called by my father’s name, and groped when they were alone. They slapped away her hands, but she persisted. She was stubborn.
All growing up I watched your house from my upstairs window. I can remember when I was five years old — this is the age my memories begin — waking up in the night to howling in the street. It was your father, doubled over, from laughter or tears it wasn’t clear, and he was making strange noises, babble strung together with song. In my memory he was perfectly dressed in a dark wool suit, still wearing his hat, which he held to his head while he bent over to vomit. I don’t know how long I watched him performing for the darkened houses on our street before your mother brought him inside.
That scene played out so many times that eventually your mother stopped ushering him in at night. He made noise until he exhausted himself, sometimes singing or talking, more often, as time passed, crying, and eventually he’d lie down on the porch, or on bad nights, when he couldn’t climb the front steps, he’d curl up in the garden. Sometimes when I woke at dawn I’d go to the window and he’d still be outside sleeping, but always by the time I made my way to the schoolhouse he was gone. Over the years I stopped going to the window when I heard his wailing, for even something as terrible and alluring as a man losing his dignity became less interesting in time. Instead of watching, with my toes and fingers pricked by cold, my face pressed to the frozen glass, I stayed under the warmth of my down comforter.
I never saw you or your mother moving around inside your house. It was as though the two of you and the house itself, with its sloping roofline and peeling planks and the yellowed, overgrown lawn, were all part of the set for the show that was your father.
I saw your father asleep in the garden on the day he died, and I’ll never know if he was dead by the time I saw him or if he died shortly thereafter, if perhaps there was a chance I could have saved him. Instead I pretended the dark of his coat was a rock or mound of earth. It was cold that day, or must have been, because although I remember walking swiftly past your house and off to school, sweating under my wool coat and scarf, by the time your mother found him he had frozen to death.
Before that no one really looked at you — gangly and ordinary, twelve years old like me but a head taller. Homeschooled. You used to go to church, until one Sunday your father threw up in the middle of the sermon, right into his hand, then knelt down as if he were praying and wiped it on the kneeler. After that you didn’t go anymore. You always wore simple white dresses, and your mother ironed your pleats and polished your boots. She did the same for herself, and kept the hair on both your heads braided in a tight coil, so that before your father died people felt only small, manageable amounts of pity when they looked at you two. But after he froze the pitiable details emerged, as though you were a picture just then developing. Your boots, with the frayed laces and uneven soles, and your dresses — when one looked closely it was clear the hem had been let out and let out again, though your skirt still didn’t cover your ankles. The felt on your winter coat was threadbare at the shoulder, and after your father’s memorial service I noticed your mother walking with her arm around your shoulder and her hand covering the threadbare spot, whether on purpose or not I wasn’t sure but she stayed like that, stitched awkwardly to your side, even as she accepted handshakes and embraces.
It was unsettling to watch my mother in the throes of her pity. After your father’s memorial service she lingered longer by you and your mother’s side than anyone else, her eyes brimming with a strange and eager softness. It was a look I’d never seen her wear before. And when the bank foreclosed on your house with the intention of demolishing it and selling the land, my mother knocked on your door and implored that we were in need of a servant and our guest room was just sitting empty, which wasn’t true — it was full of many of my books, dolls, clothes, and paintings. Your mother accepted the offer on your behalf, though she would move into the city and stay with her sister. I spent days tromping up and down the attic stairs in preparation for your arrival.
When you first moved in I didn’t like your sudden presence in our home. I didn’t like hearing the sound of you singing in the room next to mine, or seeing your drawers and stockings displayed on the laundry line with my family’s finer things. We were cozily settled before you arrived. Weekends when we were all home together my brother Ben would sit in the grass sketching birds and my father would fall asleep with the newspaper and I’d sing while Mother played the parlor piano. For dinner there was a roast, for dessert a plum pudding, and on occasions that my father had a good week at the office, Mother made her rum-soaked apple upside-down cake. I liked the predictability of my family’s orbits and habits, and I knew what occupied them, as though we were forever rehearsing a staged production.