Mother cleared the table, picked up the fallen chairs; her determined disapproval of her family’s inner violence registered on her face as enforced silence, bitter and hurt and full of dread.
“Try a deeper breath, now,” Coach Bob advised Frank; Frank tried and coughed. “Okay, okay,” said Iowa Bob. “Stick with the little breaths awhile longer.” Frank moaned.
Father examined Franny’s lower lip while her tears streamed down her face and she made those gagging kinds of sobs, half strangled in her chest. “I think you need some stitches, darling,” he said, but Franny shook her head furiously. Father held her head tightly between his hands and kissed her just above her eyes, twice. “I’m sorry, Franny,” he said, “but what can I do with you, what can I do?”
“I don’t need stitches,” Franny mourned. “No stitches. No way.”
But on her lower lip a jagged flap protruded and Father had to cup his hand under Franny’s chin to catch her blood. Mother brought a washcloth full of ice.
I went back to my room and coaxed Lilly out of the closet; she wanted to stay with me and I let her. She fell right asleep, but I lay in bed thinking that every time someone said “Hotel,” there would be blood and sudden sorrow. Father and Mother drove Franny to the Dairy School infirmary, where someone would stitch her lip together; no one would blame Father—least of all Franny. Franny would blame Frank, of course, which—in those days—was my tendency, too. Father would not blame himself—or at least not for long—and Mother would blame herself, inexplicably, for some while longer.
Whenever we fought, Father usually cried at us, “Do you know how this upsets your mother and me? Imagine that we fought all the time, and you had to live with it? But do your mother and I fight? Do we? Would you like it if we did?”
We would not, of course; and they didn’t—most of the time. There was only the old argument, the living-in-the-future-and-not-enjoying-today argument, which Coach Bob expressed more vehemently than Mother, though we knew it was her opinion of my father, too (that, and that Father couldn’t help it).
It didn’t seem like a big thing, to us kids. I rolled Lilly on her side so that I could stretch out flat on my back with both my ears off the pillow, so that I could hear Iowa Bob coaching Frank upstairs. “Easy, boy, just lean on me,” Bob was saying. “The secret’s in the breathing.” Frank blubbered something and Coach Bob said, “But you can’t grab a girl’s tit, boy, and not expect to take a shot in the balls, now, can you?”
But Frank blubbered on: how Franny was terrible to him, how she never let him alone, how she was always turning the other kids against him, how he tried to avoid her but she was always there. “She’s in the middle of everything bad that happens to me!” he cried. “You don’t know!” he croaked. “You don’t know how she teases me.”
I thought I knew, and Frank was right; he was also rather unlikable, and that was the problem. Franny was awful to him, but Franny was not awful; and Frank was not really awful to any of us, except he (himself) was, somehow, awful. It bewildered me, lying there. Lilly began to snore. I heard Egg snuffle down the hall and wondered how Coach Bob would handle it if Egg woke up hollering for Mother. Bob had his hands full with Frank in the bathroom.
“Go on,” Bob said. “Just let me see you do it.” Frank sobbed. “There!” cried Iowa Bob, as if he’d just discovered a fumble in the end zone “See? No blood, boy—just piss. You’re okay.”
“You don’t know,” Frank kept saying. “You don’t know.”
I went to see what Egg wanted; being three, he wanted something unobtainable, I thought, but I was surprised that he was cheerful when I came into his room. He was obviously surprised to see me, and when I returned all the soft animals to his bed—he had thrown them all over his room—he proceeded to introduce me to each of them: the frayed squirrel he had vomited on, many times; the worn elephant with one ear; the orange hippopotamus. He was upset whenever I tried to leave him, so I took him into my room and put him in my bed with Lilly. Then I carried Lily back to her room, although that was a long way for me to carry her and she woke up and became irritable before I got her in her own bed.
“I never get to stay in your room,” she said; then she was asleep again, instantly.
I went back to my room and got in bed with Egg, who was wide-awake and talking nonsense. He was happy, though, and I heard Coach Bob talking downstairs—at first, I thought, to Frank, but then I realized Bob was talking to our old dog, Sorrow. Frank must have gone off to sleep, or at least gone off to sulk.
“You smell worse than Earl,” Iowa Bob was telling the dog. And, in truth. Sorrow was dreadful to smell; not only his farting but his halitosis could kill you if you weren’t careful, and the old black Labrador retriever seemed viler to me, too, than my faint memory of the foul odors of Earl. “What are we going to do with you?” Bob mumbled to the dog, who enjoyed lying under the dining room table and farting all through mealtimes.
Iowa Bob opened windows downstairs. “Come on, boy,” he called to Sorrow. “Jesus,” Bob said, under his breath. I heard the front door open; presumably Coach Bob had put Sorrow out.
I lay awake with Egg crawling all over me, waiting for Franny to get back; if I was awake, I knew she’d come and show me her stitches. When Egg finally fell asleep, I carried him back to his room and his animals.
Sorrow was still outside when Father and Mother drove Franny home; if his barking hadn’t woken me up, I’d have missed them. “Well, that looks pretty good,” Coach Bob was saying, obviously approving of Franny’s lip job. “That won’t leave any scar at all, after a while.”
“Five of them,” Franny said, thickly, as though they had given her an additional tongue.
“Five!” Iowa Bob cried. “Terrific!”
“That dog’s been farting in here again,” Father said; he sounded grouchy and tired, as if they’d been talking, talking, talking nonstop since they’d left for the infirmary.
“Oh, he’s so sweet,” Franny said, and I heard Sorrow’s hard tail wagging against a chair or the sideboard—whack, whack, whack. Only Franny could he next to Sorrow for hours and be unaffected by the dog’s various stenches. Of course, Franny seemed to notice smell, in general, less than the rest of us. She had never objected to changing Egg’s diapers—or even Lilly’s, when we were all much younger. And when Sorrow, in his senility, would have an accident overnight, Franny never found the dog shit displeasing; she had a cheerful curiosity about strong things. She could go the longest, of any of us, without a bath.
I heard all the grown-ups kiss Franny good night and I thought: Families must be like this—gore one minute, forgiveness the next. Just as I knew she would, Franny came into my room to show me her lip. The stitches were a crisp, shiny black, like pubic hair; Franny had pubic hair, I did not. Frank did, but he hated it.
“You know what your stitches look like?” I asked her.
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
“Did he hurt you?” I asked her, and she crouched close by my bed and let me touch her breast.
“It was the other one, dummy,” she said, and moved away from me.
“You really got Frank,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Good night.” Then she peeked back in my door. “We are going to move to a hotel,” she said. Then I heard her going into Frank’s room.
“Want to see my stitches?” she whispered.
“Sure,” Frank said.
“You know what they look like?” Franny asked him.
“They look gross,” Frank said.