“Oh. She hates that kind of book.”
“Aren’t English teachers supposed to like books? My teacher last year used to cry when he read us poetry. All I did was tell her what it was about and before I knew it she was screaming at me.” She broke down again and hid her head.
“You can’t take it personally. It’s how she is about stuff like that.”
“I was trying so hard.” She wiped her nose, which was red and wet, and then wiped her palm on her shirt. It made a long filmy streak. In someone else he might have found that a little disgusting but Fran was exempt in his mind from those kinds of judgments. She did everything with such self-confidence he didn’t dare question her, even to himself. It was this composure that made her tears, her complete lack of control of her mouth, so disturbing to him. She usually operated with such coolness and detachment, like nothing could ever really bother her.
“Things began really well. After I put Caleb to bed, it was just the three of us and Dad seemed happy that I was there, hanging out.” He couldn’t help noticing that her shirt was tighter than most things she wore and he could see, against her thigh, the outline of her right breast. “Daddy told his story about breaking his collarbone on a date in high school and your mother was laughing. Then she told us about a straight-A student who always had to wear this white fur hat of his grandmother’s during tests. But then we started talking about books and she just snapped.” Fran’s face twisted up and her voice creaked but she was determined to get her next sentence out. “My mother never ever …” The rest of her words got lost in another long moan.
Peter touched her back. She was crying so hard he wasn’t sure she could even feel his hand. He gave her a few pats, then began stroking her slightly. Her spine was like a row of marbles down her back, nothing like Kristina’s padded bones. The memory of touching Kristina made his stomach hollow. Why hadn’t he kissed her? What was wrong with him?
“I don’t think my father has the strength to deal with all her problems. He’s been through so much already. It doesn’t seem fair.” She began to cry so hard now that she made no sound at all except a little click click deep in her mouth. Peter let his fingers drift up to the ends of her hair and, on the next stroke, to her head. It was hot and moist at the roots. His heart was pounding so hard, harder than it had even with Kristina. With her head still down, Fran said, “I don’t understand her. She’s not like any other mother I’ve ever known. She’s lucky you’re such a … good kid. You could have turned out really badly. You could fly to the moon and back and she wouldn’t even know you’d gone. She doesn’t wash your clothes or tell you to pick up your room or even kiss you hello or good night or anything. She just reads her books, mixes her drinks, and smokes her cigarettes so she can get cancer one way or another and die, too.” Peter barely heard her through the racing of his blood, daring him, urging him. She was talking and he was touching and she hadn’t told him to stop. He watched his hand disappear into the hair in the back of her head. Then he felt it rising up and she looked at him for the first time that night. His hand was still tangled in her hair. “You’re bleeding,” she said. And he kissed her.
It was wet and salty with tears and blood and when she opened her mouth Peter did the same and their tongues met and it felt slimy, like kissing Walt. It felt like being a tadpole more than being human, a tadpole with a tiny brain and a big mouth and everything wet and silty all around. A rattle of breath from her nose poured out onto his cheek and he was so focused on his mouth he didn’t know what he was doing with his hands though they were moving the whole time. It was noisy, this kind of kissing, and the noise made him like it even more. And then, in an instant, that whole briny, underwater world became memory. She hit him hard on the upper arm and stood up, wiping everything off her mouth. She was still crying as she told him he was gross and shouldn’t be kissing his stepsister. Then she disappeared down the hall to her room.
Peter waited a long time before he got up. In the bathroom, Mrs. Belou was stern.
I thought it might come to this.
I’m sorry.
She’s my little girl.
I know.
You don’t know. What do you or your mother know about anything?
Peter turned away from the picture to the mirror. No wonder you’re so — What had she been going to say? Wimpy? Boring? Dense? “Unfocused” and “distant” were words that appeared regularly on his report cards. Was his mother somehow responsible for that? He’d never thought of his mother in this way. She was like a building to him, tall, brick, permanently adjacent and absolutely necessary, whose shape he had never questioned, whose shadow he had never noticed until he stepped back and stood with the Belous at a safe distance. Now he could see the dilapidated frame, the broken windows, the rotting roof.
He sat on the toilet cover looking at the thin hand towels with the embroidered bluebells and the jar of dried petals on top of the wicker cabinet — decorations his mother would never have chosen. She would have left all those places bare and ugly.
He thought of how, not all that long ago and for as long into the past as he could remember, he used to fear her absence, and how the sound of the Dodge pulling up beneath his window could make him whimper with relief. He doubted he could ever feel that way about her again and for a moment, as the great building was razed swiftly to the ground, he felt guilty and ashamed. Then he turned back to the picture and saw a deepening smile.
Stuart was not in their room, and he was relieved. In his bed in the dark his body reexperienced, in random order, moments of the long night. The bra on the windshield, the smell of stain, the salty metallic slippery kiss, the blue black of Kristina’s hair in his fingers, Jenny Mead’s head tipping back. His mind could find nothing to rest on, nothing that made him feel safe.
SEVEN
VIDA CIRCLED THE CLASSROOM SLOWLY, STOPPING AT EACH WINDOW, feigning interest in the bleakness below. Wendell was out by the pond, raking up the last of the slimy half-frozen willow leaves at its edges. Her freshmen were writing an in-class essay comparing “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with “A&P.” If she looked toward them and not out the windows, their hands would shoot up with a hundred useless questions — Can I use purple ink? Where should I write my name? — questions designed simply to bring her over to their side where just the presence of her body was comforting to them. But they were in ninth grade now, and they needed to be broken of those middle school habits.
Stepmothering, she realized, was not all that different from teaching. It was essential to keep their intellectual development in mind at all times. You couldn’t get all wrapped up in their needs and whims. Stuart and his mysticism. Fran reading The Thorn Birds. They were too old now for that kind of material. A young man needed a hearty Byronic outlook, not this boneless Taoism. And if Fran began to believe in the characters in novels like that, real people were going to be a sore and sorry disappointment. She would have to, once again, urge Fran to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles; that would teach her exactly how far she could trust a man, even a seemingly well-intentioned man like Angel Clare.
Or Tom Belou, who had withdrawn since her blowout with Fran last week. He was angry in a way she didn’t understand — placid, wordless anger. He had behaved yesterday as if he couldn’t see her in the room. She figured that all marriages, if they lasted, ended up here in the land of quiet regret. She and Tom had simply arrived a little early. She had predicted it, but even her own conviction that she would fail did not protect her from the discomfort of having done so. In bed last night she had tried, her heart thumping stupidly, to make a small advance: one brave hand reaching up over the curve of his hip bone and down into still unfamiliar and terrifying ground — but it was soundly rejected and she lay awake for several hours cradling her humiliated fingers.