Roy answered the phone and said that Delia was in the shower. Wendy imagined that rusty metal stall with the tattered curtain and the stained walls and was impressed by Delia’s devotion. “You want me to have her call you back?” Roy asked.
“I’ll hang on,” she said, and they chatted for a few minutes. Roy’s parents had, like Wendy’s, been divorced for years. When Delia had raged and cried over her family’s disintegration, Wendy and Roy had comforted Delia together and smiled at each other ruefully. Wendy had thought, but not said, that Delia was acting like a child.
“Here she is,” Roy said, and then Wendy heard her cousin’s voice.
“What’s up?” Delia asked. “You want to come over here tonight? We can go out, maybe hear a little music …”
“I can’t. My mother went away overnight and I have to watch Win.” Wendy didn’t explain what had happened; she could hardly sort it out herself and figured she’d tell Delia the details later. “I was wondering if maybe you guys wanted to come over here. I can’t stand sitting around all night by myself.”
“No problem,” Delia said.
Wendy hung up and then went to change her clothes. She hated the neat things her father and Sarah had bought her, but she knew why she wore them: these were the clothes that had said, I won’t cause any more trouble, I promise, when her mother had returned from the Healing Center. They’d said, Dad and Sarah don’t have to guard me anymore. I can make a new life, I can behave, but what they said to her now was, asleep. She was seized with a craving for the outfits she used to patch together during the years when she’d run wild. Men’s suit jackets and overcoats, rhinestone pins and feathered hats, black high-tops and torn long underwear flirting beneath skirts so short they were almost belts — she wanted her old clothes back. She wanted her old life. She wanted the time before her mother had caught them at their party and then cracked, and the minute before she’d made the mistake of calling her father this afternoon.
She dug out a pair of jeans, a clean shirt, and the list of rules she’d folded between her sweaters. The list began:
1. I will stop stealing
2. I will stop lying
3. I will learn something useful
4. I will make some friends
But there was no point in reading on, she’d already broken the first two rules. On her way out of her basement office, her hands had almost absentmindedly brushed the two rag dolls on her desk into the embroidered sack she used as a purse. She was furious that she’d taken them, and she dreaded the lies she’d have to tell to protect herself. She comforted herself with the thought that the rules were for her other life, her real life, which could not begin until she got away.
Everything was spoiled, she thought, as she dressed and then tucked the list back into her closet. Grunkie was missing, her mother was crazy, her father was involved. Her father was involved because of her. She flopped down on the bed her father had made her, a raised, carpeted platform with a hollow in which her mattress rested. The surface of the mattress was level with the surface of the platform; sleeping there was as safe as sleeping on the floor. Her father had made this for her because, years ago, she had so much feared falling out of bed that she sometimes fell. She’d never had the heart to tell him that now she longed for a proper bed with legs.
Below her she heard the kitchen door crash, and when she went downstairs she found Win bouncing up and down on his toes in front of the refrigerator, reading their mother’s note as the yellow plugs of his radio poured music into his ears. “Hey,” she said, but he couldn’t hear her. “Win!” she said more loudly.
He plucked the note from the refrigerator and turned to her, slipping the headset down until it hung like a collar around his neck. “Take care of Win?” he said. “What is this? You think I’m ten? What’s going on?”
Wendy tried to bring him up to date. “Grunkie took off. Or something.” She explained about the phone calls — the administrator’s to their mother, their mother’s to her, hers to their father — and watched as Win’s face changed from disbelief to disgust. They hardly talked at all anymore. Since their father and Sarah had cleaned them up and remade them, they’d been strangers to each other. They never discussed what they used to do; they never spent time alone together. Win was wrapped in a web of lies at least as dense as hers, and when he looked at her now his eyes shot off to the sides.
“So they went chasing after him? Why don’t they give the old guy a break?”
“I don’t know,” Wendy said. “Mom’s real worried about him — you know that healer of hers is supposed to start on him tomorrow. She sounded like she was losing it again. I shouldn’t have called Dad, but I thought he’d just talk to her or something — calm her down. You know. I didn’t expect him to come over here. And I don’t know how she talked him into driving her to Massachusetts.”
Win opened the refrigerator door and stuck his head inside. “She threw a fit,” he said. His voice was muffled by the metal. “That’s how. Just like she always does. Except she did it in front of him instead of us.”
Wendy came up behind him and peered into the coolness. Low-fat milk, some old pears, bread, cottage cheese, carrots. Broccoli casserole as promised, the stems swimming milkily under a scattering of whole-wheat crumbs. Their mother skimped on the groceries; that was one of the ways she tricked their father. She sent his food allowance to the Church and fed them all on the slim checks she got from teaching workshops to the new recruits. “Mom thinks Uncle Henry kidnapped Grunkie,” Wendy said over Win’s shoulder.
“Mom thinks the world is out to get her,” Win said. “Mom thinks everyone is as crazy as her, and that if she doesn’t watch everyone all the time, they’ll nut out on her when her back is turned. She makes people crazy.”
He slammed the refrigerator door. “There’s nothing to eat. You want to order a pizza?” He had a girlfriend, Wendy knew. When their mother went out, he slid a dark-eyed girl a year younger than him into his room. She was almost sure they were sleeping together. Win and his girl, like Delia and Roy, meeting secretly but at least meeting. Whereas she — and Lise, Lise was always lonely and always complaining about it — had been left with no one. She wondered if this meant that she and Lise were somehow alike. It was Delia she wanted to mimic, Delia with her thick, red-gold hair and her arm draped around Roy’s waist.
“Pepperoni,” Wendy said. “And sausage.” At least she could eat.
“Great. Then you can make sure I take a shower. Then you can watch me.”
“She didn’t mean it that way.”
“The hell she didn’t. She wants you to sit in a chair and stare at me all goggle-eyed, the way she does—Are you happy? Are you well?” The way he mimicked their mother’s voice was uncanny. “I swear. I swear — I’m going to that party.”
“Don’t,” Wendy said before she thought about it. “Couldn’t you stay in tonight? Keep me company? Delia’s coming over later with a friend of hers — you could have some people over too, if you want. I’d feel better if you were around.”
Win made a face. “Guilt, guilt, guilt — you sound just like Mom. Oh, take care of me, I need you.”