She watched for a while before quietly joining the Moran kids on the floor, and it seemed to me they took just a minute too long to notice her. Suddenly I’d had enough quiet. I clapped my hands and cried out, “Work to do,” which suddenly got them all talking and quarreling again, although Daisy said little.
Later, she told me she was surprised, and, I thought, disappointed, to see Moe and Larry in such happy form.
I toasted nearly a whole loaf of bread on cookie sheets in the oven, sprinkled each slice with cinnamon and sugar, and filled their hands as I herded them out the door. Petey’s rabbit trap was still in the corner of the yard, the cardboard box sagging now and somewhat lopsided after last night’s rain. I could see the limp lettuce leaves still inside. Like so much of the detritus in the Morans’ own yard, it had taken on the look of an abandoned enterprise.
Without the Clarkes’ house on the morning agenda, we were able to take longer with Red Rover and the Scotties, and still get to Flora’s house while the grass was wet. Daisy was convinced that Flora’s mother would be back today—her own experience did not allow for mothers to be so long gone from their children—but Flora was once more placed out on the porch in her stroller. When she saw us, she tossed aside the bottle, which was mostly empty anyway, and strained against the stroller strap.
“Out,” she cried, leaning, her face nearly to her knees.
“Get me out.” As I bent to free her, I saw the cloth strap had been reinforced today with a man’s leather belt that I had to go to the back of the stroller to unbuckle. She needed to be changed, of course, and when I brought her inside, the house was once again utterly silent, the kitchen empty, the doors to all but Flora’s bedroom closed. Only a pair of woman’s red espadrilles under the glass coffee table in the living room. The counter in the kitchen was littered with glasses, wineglasses and highball glasses and the short juice glasses he used for his Scotch, as well as a half dozen empty but still smudged ashtrays.
I sat the girls at the table with some crayons and paper, filled the sink with soapy water, and washed and dried everything.
Then I wiped down all the counters and found some eggs in the refrigerator and scrambled them with lots of butter and cream. I was just spooning the eggs onto saucers for Daisy and Flora when I heard the screen door open and the fat cook appeared in the kitchen door, “Bless your heart,” she said when she saw me.
“I would have done that.” She was breathless and her lip was beaded with sweat. Her husband, she said, had dropped her off at the head of the drive. She’d been here yesterday, there was a get-together—she took an apron from the shopping bag she carried and tied it on, then sat beside Flora at the table—some people from the city, quite a crowd. There had been an argument of some sort.
“I was back in Flora’s room, but I heard it going on.” One of the men hauled off and socked another, and one of the girls got on the phone to call the police. Quite a commotion. Things seemed to settle down after the police came, and there had been only a few people left by the time her husband fetched her at three this morning. She suddenly lowered her voice.
“Have you seen Frenchy yet?” she asked, and I said no, although, I told her, Flora had already been dressed and set out on the porch when I got here.
She nodded.
“She served at the party, but then went off to her room without doing a bit of cleaning up. I did what I could, but I was dead on my feet.” She gestured, raising her plump arm to indicate the cleaned kitchen.
“I thought I’d leave a few things for her. Not for you.”
“I didn’t mind,” I said. I heard footsteps out in the living room, coming forward and then going back. I suspected it was Ana, perhaps just checking to see that I had arrived to take Flora. But then I heard a car pulling into the gravel driveway and Flora and Daisy both looked toward the window with the same bright expression.
“Your mommy,” Daisy said, and Flora squealed. Both girls went to the window together.
It was indeed a station taxi, but it was empty. It sat for a few minutes, its engine idling, and then we heard the footsteps again and the screen door open, then a woman in a rather loose and flowing dress emerged from the shadow of the house. The dress was a pretty shade of dark red swirled with black, more suited to evening than morning. The woman was not thin, but she moved elegantly in the dress, and though it was impossible to tell how old she was—she wore long bangs and dark glasses and pitch-black hair that was cut to her chin—there was something about the brisk way she got into the cab and leaned forward to speak to the driver that proved she was not terribly young.
Behind me the cook said, “Oh brother,” and I turned to see her eyeing me cautiously.
“One of the party guests,” she said in a soft voice, as if the girls wouldn’t hear her. She was looking at me carefully, trying to gauge, it was clear, how well I understood the situation. She knew my mother, she went to our church, she knew I went to the academy. With last night’s party fresh in her mind, wineglasses and highball glasses and loaded ashtrays, loaded men socking one another and a young woman summoning the town police, she was considering whether this place was any place for a girl like me to be. She was considering whether my parents should be informed.
“Lucky they have a guest room,” I said, and the cook smiled as if to say, you’re not fooling me.
“It’s a wild life they lead,” she said, getting up slowly to collect the girls’ plates.
“These artists. If they don’t die young, they go on acting like teenagers till they’re seventy.”
Daisy took Flora out to the yard while I made her lunch and packed it in the beach bag with our own. Today, I had no inclination to linger, although I had already begun to rehearse what I would say to my parents if the cook did indeed call. I was at the beach with Flora every day, I would tell them. What did I care what else went on? He was a nice man, especially nice to poor Daisy. What did some servant’s gossip matter?
As I went to the door, I heard Ana’s voice coming from the back bedrooms, loud and fast. I paused for a moment, and then turned and walked into the living room. It was difficult to know, given her French and its natural changes in pitch and speed, but she might have been sobbing, or just telling him off.
Either way, the more I listened, the more I realized that whatever she was saying, the frenzied sound she was making was a kind of duplicate of his painting on the wall, the one of the woman in parts. I thought it should serve as a reminder to him to stick with pictures that were of nothing at all.
That morning, my father had gone down to the beach before work to set up the umbrella for us—I loved thinking of him barefoot in his suit and his rolled-up trousers, securing the big umbrella in the sand. He’d told Aunt Peg on the phone Sunday afternoon that with the two of us fair-skinned beauties in the house, he’d have to buy stock in Noxzema. When we got to the beach, we lowered the top of the umbrella down into the sand, and then hung our beach towels from it, anchoring them against the quilt with our shoes and our lunches and my book, making a little towel-shaded cave for our changing room.
We changed together, all three of us, in a game I called tops off, bottoms up, the girls laughing as all three of us pulled our shirts up over our heads and pulled our shorts off. Wearing nothing at all, I paused for a moment to help Flora into her suit and then turned to find Daisy sitting beside me with my old shorts set in her lap and her hair fallen over her thin arms and chest, taking me in. I pushed my own hair behind my shoulders.
“I haven’t got anything you aren’t going to have someday, Daisy Mae,” I told her.
“I just hope you get more.”
And she smiled, she may have blushed, in the muted light.
“I get to see the old me in you,” I said.
“When you wear my clothes. You get to see in me the you to come. It’s only fair.”
“I guess,” she said, and giggled. Petey’s bruise was still on her shoulder, might even have begun to spread.
“Sure,” I said. I turned to Flora, who was leaning against me, her hands in my hair, plump and rosy in her skirted suit.
“You and Flora both, someday.”
I picked up Daisy’s suit from the quilt between us, rolled it down a bit.
“Let me help you,” I said, and leaned toward Daisy’s feet and pulled the suit up over them. Even in this light, the bruises looked bad again, maybe worse than they had been. I closed my eyes. I pulled the suit up over her knees and then whispered, Stand up, and pulled it up over her body, one strap and then the other, pushing her hair away. With my eyes still closed, I put my arms around her waist and put my head to her chest, and Flora at my back reached her arms around my head, as if to embrace her, too.
“Hug sandwich,” I said; then the girls said it, too. I could hear Daisy’s heartbeat in my ear, I could feel the quick, lively rhythm of it against the more stately sound of the ocean. For a moment, it occurred to me that it was Dr. Kaufman I had trumped, sitting here behind our beach blankets with nothing on, the voices of other bathers drifting toward us, someone walking right past us on the sand, the sound of the gulls and the feel of the warm terry-cloth-filtered sunlight on my skin. Dr. Kaufman and his dire warnings about baring my breasts on the beach, about my pallid cousin, had been trumped: I had bared every bit of myself, I had shut my eyes, I had shown my cousin what her healthy future held.
I whispered to the girls that it was time to swim, and we broke our embrace and I opened my eyes again. I reached for my suit and dressed quickly, Flora still leaning heavily, comically, against me, as if she were reluctant to lose contact with my skin, Daisy no longer turning demurely away.
At the end of the day, I folded the umbrella down and carried it to the edge of the parking lot as my father had instructed.
He would pick it up on his way home from work and replant it for us again in the morning. Saving himself a bundle, he said, on Noxzema, saving us girls from an old age of wrinkles and leathered skin. We pushed Flora in her stroller back to my house so we could show her the two cats, and just as she was climbing out, along came Rags, running at a mad pace, circling us, nearly knocking Flora over, and then darting away, up the Morans’ driveway. We heard a shout and a curse from the old man, saw Rags come tearing down the drive again. He skirted us, Daisy and Flora laughing, headed up the street, saw something that interested him on another driveway, and disappeared behind a summer neighbor’s hedge.
“That dog really is going to get himself shot,” I said. I saw that Petey’s limp rabbit trap was knocked over on its side, the lettuce gone. I saw, too, first having the impression that someone had scattered a handful of straw across the grass, that Flora’s mother’s hat had been torn to pieces over the side lawn.
“Poor Janey,” I said, and the girls shook their heads solemnly.
“I guess I’ll have to buy one hat for your mommy, Flora,” I said.
“And one for Janey, too.”
Inside, Moe and Larry greeted us with their tails up and their motors already running, no worse for the wear of a new house and a new routine and a change in their number. Flora and Daisy crouched on the floor, Daisy greeting them, perhaps with not quite the warmth and enthusiasm she had once had, disappointed as she was with their indifference. For the first time, I felt a little repulsed, too, as I petted them, remembering the snarl on that horrible skull. It was not Curly anymore, that lifeless thing Debbie had cradled, not in my recollection of it. It was the worst thing. It was what I was up against.
I washed off three ripe peaches and wrapped them in paper towels, and we ate them as we walked back to Flora’s. Both lights were on in the studio and the cook was gone and Ana was not in the house, although the place had been recently cleaned and still smelled strongly of furniture polish and bleach. Flora was sticky from the fruit, so I put her in the bathtub and then slipped her nightgown on while Daisy, still too sandy for a clean house, waited for me on the porch. There was no sign of dinner in the kitchen. I carried Flora out onto the porch. I was prepared to go into his studio again if I had to, but he was sitting in one of the canvas chairs, Daisy in another.
They were sitting quietly, he in that way he had, with his fingers splayed across his cheek. Both of them were looking at the sky above the trees, and at the changing light. Flora and I watched them for a minute, and then Flora said, “Daddy”-or maybe, “Daisy,” it was impossible to tell—and they both looked at us briefly. He put a finger to his lips.
“My redheaded friend and I,” he said, “are waiting for the first star.” And even before he could finish, Daisy had lifted her arm and said, “There.”
I heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel. Ana was scurrying along the path, wearing the same silky shirt she’d had on the other night. She climbed the steps and immediately took Flora from my arms, scratching me a bit as she did with one of her polished nails.
“Merci,” she said, singing it.
“Bonsoir, zee you tomorrow, zame time,” and carried Flora into the house so quickly it was a minute or two before the poor, startled child began to cry.
I took the beach quilt from under the stroller, carried it down to the lawn, where the lightning bugs were already beginning to appear. I shook it out, then folded it up again and carried it back up to the porch.
“Let’s go, Daisy Mae,” I said.