Fastidious little miss Ellie is already starting to turn her nose up at Uncle Eddie. She’s imbibing Angie’s attitudes and opinions apparently. But his presents always wow her. Like Uncle Eddie always knows just what you really want, not what your mom thinks you should have, like the fringed cowgirl vest from his trip to Vegas, or the red, glittery Dorothy shoes with straps he bought one time in New York City. You can watch Ellie’s ambivalence play out right on her face. First, she’s loving the car and then she’s hating the cigar, then she’s loving Eddie’s booming laugh, but hating his big belly and his stubbly face and his grimy fingernails. When he picks her up and calls her pumpkin, she wrinkles her finicky little nose. He’s on to her, too. “Don’t be a simp,” he tells her. “What are you so afraid of, a little dirt?”
Angie is at the front door.
“Eddie, can you lose the cigar?”
“Hi, sweetheart.”
“Hi, Eddie. The cigar . . .?”
“It looks good, though, don’t you think?”
“Niiiice set of wheels,” Angie says.
Eddie does a little shimmy and shake. Right there on the sidewalk. Angie can’t help herself; she smiles at him, covering her mouth with her hands. He’s unbuckling his belt in preparation for dropping his pants.
“No! Eddie! It’s broad daylight!”
“I just want to get a laugh outta you.”
She’s laughing and shaking her head—who knows at who? Eddie? Herself? At the fact that she’s laughing at all?
“I heard your washer’s on the fritz.”
He reaches into the backseat and takes out his tool kit.
“So I’m gonna fix your washer and then I’m gonna take you out to dinner, gorgeous. Alice can babysit, right?”
“Why can’t we come?” Ellie wants to know.
“Oh, so now you like me?”
“I like you,” she says, a little too slowly.
“Your mom needs to put a dress on and go out someplace where she can turn heads and drink a martini. This is my big secret, the reason so many beautiful girls go out with me. I improve their looks. Next to me they look even more gorgeous than they already are.”
And then he’s inside their little house, bumping into doorjambs, knocking the pictures out of whack on the walls. When Eddie stumps down the basement stairs, the whole house shakes. Angie clucks, she actually clucks, but Alice thinks the house is doing a little happy dance, just like Uncle Eddie.
“I need an assistant!” he shouts from the basement.
Alice looks at Angie who raises her eyebrow, as in, who me? Are you kidding?
So it’s Alice who clumps downstairs. It’s an act, the clumping. She loves hanging out with Uncle Eddie. Every time she sees him, there’s always one shocking thing he tells her and the promise of more revelations to come.
He turns off the water and disconnects the hose. “Pay attention,” he tells her. “You could learn something.” Alice does not really need to be told to pay attention to Uncle Eddie.
“Okay, that’s the intake, that’s the outflow. My guess is, it’s the outflow. Let’s take a look.”
He inspects the hoses.
“Hoses look okay. You see anything I’m not seeing?”
It’s a rubber gasket that’s shot; that’s what he figured it would be. He took the liberty of bringing a few basic supplies with him, including a gasket. How does he know these things? He takes the hose and tells Alice to pull off the old gasket.
“It’s stuck.”
“Yank it! Give it a real tug.”
“It’s really stuck.”
“Yeah, they get corroded.”
He zaps it with some WD-40 and it comes right off.
He hands her a new gasket: “Fit that one on.”
She slips on the new gasket.
“Like I said, it’s not rocket science. Now reconnect it.”
When he squats down to test the connection, she wishes he’d wear his pants a little higher. He turns his head, catches her looking at him, and gives his jeans a hoist.
“Sorry about that, kiddo.”
“Oh, it’s nothing, I . . .”
“Nobody wants to look down an old fart’s butt.”
This cracks her up.
“Actually nobody wants to look down anybody’s butt. Way too much of that these days. It used to be your old man had to tell you to keep your pants on, now they gotta tell you to keep your pants
up
, too. Not that kids are listening. What did your pop tell you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Words of wisdom. Advice. That kind of thing.”
She thinks for a minute.
“I don’t think we got to that phase, yet.”
“Sure you did.”
“What, like how to live my life and stuff? I’m in the tenth grade. It’s a little early!”
“No. The basics. Like don’t kiss a girl if you just ate garlic pizza.”
She thinks again. She can’t believe she has to think about this! There should be a list, a list that comes trippingly off her tongue, of all the great things her dad told her.
“Marigolds are a natural insect repellent?”
“Apropos of . . . ?”
“How to lay out a garden?”
“Exactly! What else?”
And Uncle Eddie, unlike most adults, is not impatient for her answer. It’s okay that she’s taking her time. He just hangs in there.
“Let’s give her a little test run,” he says, and turns the washer on.
So now they’ve got the snug basement and the friendly washerfilling-up sounds and Uncle Eddie is the first person to ask her a direct question about her dad, to assume, of course they’ll talk about her dad, like it’s totally natural to talk about her dad, no problem, bring it on.
“He told me, never sell yourself short.”
“You’ll find yourself thinking of that one even when you’re forty.”
“Don’t let anybody make up your mind for you.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re as good as anybody else.”
“Right.”
“He gave me a compass when I was twelve.”
“Cool.”
“He said when I don’t know what to do, I should just stop and close my eyes for a minute and see if I can hear my inner voice. And that voice, that’s my compass.”
“Your dad loves that stuff—maps, compasses . . .”
“Yeah.”
“He’s a good dad.”
God bless Uncle Eddie for talking in the present tense.
“You know how you feel about your mom right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Like she’s this huge pain in the ass?”
“How do you know these things?”
“She’s my big sister. She’s been a pain in my ass my whole life! Anyway, you’re not gonna feel this way forever.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Couple years . . . it’ll all be different.”
“I really don’t believe you.”
“And right now, you’ve got a choice about how you want to feel and be around her.”
“I do not!”
“You do. I’m not saying it’s easy, but you’ve got a choice.”
“Like what, suddenly she’s gonna be nice to me?”
“Like maybe you could have a truce. A little cease-fire.”
“Did she tell you to do this?”
“Nope.”
“’Cause it’s really making me mad.”
The washer spins to a stop. They both turn to look at it. No leaking.
“Let’s load her up.”
They both start tossing darks into the washer.
“Uncle Eddie . . .”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not that I hate her. . . .”
“I know.”
“I just don’t love her right now.”
“That’s all I’m trying to tell you, Alice. Right now doesn’t go on forever.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Hey—that’s a good piece of advice.”
“From me? Hell, no.” He grins.
Upstairs Angie has put on a silky dress and red high heels and dangly earrings and lipstick. Uncle Eddie gives Alice a little nudge.
“You look nice, Mom.”
Her mom actually smiles, after she gets over the shocked surprise.
“Thanks, honey.”
“Your mom’s a party girl. I bet she never told you that.”
“Eddie!”
“Perfume, too. Wow!”
“Are you going like that?” Angie asks.
“How’d you pack so much disapproval into five little words?”
“Thanks for fixing the washer.”
“I’ve got a clean shirt—Ralph Lauren—whoo hoo—and a sports jacket in the car.”
“Always ready for a good time.”
“That’s me. Life is short. Let’s go.”
Alice watches them walk to the car, their heads close together, laughing at something she can’t hear, and she thinks she doesn’t really know anything about her mother. She never thinks of her mother as being a sister and that she had this whole other life in her own family, until she sees her link her arm through Eddie’s arm and lean into him. Why didn’t she ever see this before? She sees that her mom loves Uncle Eddie even though all she ever does is give him a hard time and complain about him. And she’s happy to be going out. Putting on some high heels and going out.
“What’s for dinner?” Ellie shouts.
“Come into the kitchen and help me figure it out,” Alice shouts back at her.
Ellie stomps in.
“I bet there’s nothing good,” Ellie says.
“You’re not helping.”
“We could call Gram. She’d come over. She might even take us out.”
“We’ve gotta finish all that laundry.”
Alice opens the fridge. Why is she bothering to do this? She knows she’s not going to find some yummy leftover casserole, or even fresh sandwich fixings. She slams the door.
“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do: Backwards dinner. In front of a movie.”
She takes inventory: one tired banana, some ice cream; she knows how to make fudge sauce. She tests the whipped cream canister; it’s not full, but it’s promising.
“I’ll make chocolate sauce.”
“Can we make it peppermint?” Ellie asks.
“Yeah. You peel the banana and get it into bowls.”
“Can I scoop the ice cream?”
“Sure.”
“Make it really chocolaty, Alice.”
“Okay.”
“Make lots.”
“I will.”
So Alice melts chocolate chips and stirs in half-and-half while Ellie stands on a chair to scoop ice cream onto banana halves.
“I wish we had a cherry for the top.”
“How about walnuts?”
“That’s what Daddy likes!”
“I know.”
“Okay! Do it like Daddy does.”
They sit down in front of
Clueless
for the five hundredth time and eat banana splits and talk back to the movie and say all the lines they know by heart. They pause the movie so Alice can go downstairs and put one load of laundry into the dryer and start the next load.
She gets back upstairs to find Ellie standing on tiptoe on a kitchen chair with the longest wooden spoon in her hand, trying to reach the popcorn maker, and finally managing to pull it toward her by the cord. Alice waits and is rewarded by the sight of Ellie, popcorn maker clutched to her chest, grinning from ear to ear.
She hands the popcorn maker to Alice and says, “I love backwards dinner.”
“Me, too.”
“Will you make mac and cheese later?”
“If you’re still hungry.”
“Lots of butter for the popcorn, okay? Not the skinny way Mom does it.”
“Okay. You do the butter.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll show you.”
They manage to fold two loads of laundry in front of the movie before Ellie falls asleep. Ellie was so proud of herself for having given up the baby habit of sucking her thumb in kindergarten, but there’s that thumb now, while she’s sleeping. Alice brushes the hair off Ellie’s sweaty forehead. Ellie is wearing her favorite plaid skirt with pleats. Alice thinks of these clothes as throwback clothes. Maybe her mom wore a skirt like this when she was in second grade. Ellie’s bony knees are scraped and scabby, and both kneesocks have scrunched down around her ankles.
When Angie and Uncle Eddie get home, the girls are both sound asleep on the couch. Uncle Eddie picks Ellie up in his arms and carries her upstairs. Angie wakes Alice. Alice was dreaming, she was dreaming about Small Point; she was dreaming about a sliver of moon hanging low over the water; she was dreaming that she and Dad were walking the beach in the moonlight; she’s following in his footsteps, and he was just beginning to turn around to say something to her when her mom wakes her up.
“Alice . . . honey . . .”
When she bends over like that, Alice can smell her perfume and the faint scent of her lipstick, and maybe that other smell is a martini or two.
“Time for bed.”
“Okay.”
Alice sits up and her mom surprises her by sitting down beside her. Close beside her.
“You folded the laundry.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“Ellie helped.”
“You guys make out okay?”
“Yeah.”
“No fighting?”
“Nope. We had backwards dinner.”
“Perfect.”
“Did you have a good time, Mom?”
“I had a really nice time.”
Uncle Eddie clatters downstairs and sticks his head in the doorway.
“We danced,” he says.
“You did not!”
“Yeah, we did.”
“Where were you?”
“That little roadhouse out by the lake. They’ve got a dance floor the size of a postage stamp.”
“And a piano and this old lady with dyed red frizzy hair who does jazz standards,” Angie says.
“How do you dance to
that
?” Alice wants to know.
“Your Uncle Eddie’s a good dancer.”
“Sure he is,” Alice teases.
“He taught me everything I know.”
“I thought Dad taught you how to dance.”
“That was more like refining what Eddie had already laid down.”
“Alice, I’ll pick you up tomorrow for your first driving lesson,” Uncle Eddie says.
“What?!” Angie can’t keep the shock out of her voice.