“What am I going to do without you, Daisy Mae?” I asked.
“What am I going to do when you go home?”
“I don’t know,” she said, but I picked her up and put her over my shoulder so her words fell off into a delighted squeal.
She was so much lighter than she’d been last night, although a good bit squirmier. I jogged with her over my shoulder, along the path through the trees, and she exaggerated the way the bouncing disrupted her words.
“You’ll just have to remember me,” she said.
When we came out, I was relieved to see that Macduff’s car was gone.
The lights were on in his studio and the side door open. Although I could smell the paint, I didn’t glance inside, just put Daisy down and let her walk along the gravel, her shoes crunching, letting him know we were here. Flora was not on the porch, I was relieved to see, but inside, in the kitchen with Ana, eating a bowl of cereal. Ana was sitting beside her, leaning close, both elbows up on the table, and speaking French to Flora in what seemed to me an overly sweet and childish way. She pretended not to notice us at first, and only sat up after she laughed delightedly, as if over something Flora had said—although Flora had said nothing, only turned to Daisy with her spoon held out—and kissed the child on the forehead. Then she looked straight at me, smiling, as if to say she was prepared to beat me at my own game, to out-babysit the babysitter.
“Good morning,” she said. She pushed herself out of the chair—she was in her blue uniform, but she had opened it at the collar, enough to show cleavage—and then went to the counter, where she’d already filled a baby bottle with Hawaiian Punch. She waved it in the air.
“Are you thirsty, Flora?” she said, in English, and Flora held out both hands.
“Red juice,” she said.
“Give me.” Ana walked across the floor and handed it to her. Flora grabbed it, stuck it in her mouth.
Smiling, Ana put her hands on her broad hips and turned to me as if to say, Want to make something of it?
I shrugged, refusing to meet her eye. But Daisy spoke up and said, “Her mother doesn’t want her to drink bottles.”
Ana frowned. She was good-looking, I suppose, that olive skin and those brown eyes, but there were two lines like dark gashes on either side of her mouth. Not laugh lines, it seemed clear, but lines of anger or trouble or grief. They were drawn clearly on her face now.
“Her mother is not here,” she said to Daisy, her voice going up the scale. She turned to me, her hands on her hips, that coquettish tilt to her head.
“When she gets here, you can tell her I give Flora bottles.” The lines grew deeper as she pretended to smile.
“And I will tell her you have stolen her hat.”
We looked at each other for a moment, and then I threw back my head and laughed. I can’t say it was a conscious imitation of the way he laughed, his true laugh, but I heard an echo of it in my own voice, and I think maybe Ana did, too. An echo of our complicity, a complicity even I didn’t understand, but one that I saw now left Ana, left any number of things, well behind. I was nobody’s rival. Daisy, her eyes full of concern, smiled, watching me, and Flora pulled the bottle out of her mouth to laugh, too.
I moved to the table to lift Flora out of her chair.
“We’re going to take a walk into the village,” I said, and then carried Flora, still attached to her bottle, out to the porch. Daisy followed.
“Why’s she so mad at you?” she asked as I put Flora into the stroller.
I shrugged.
“That’s what I get,” I said, “for driving Ana crazy.”
Daisy thought for a moment, looking toward the canvas chairs. Then she said, as if recalling his words, “Oh yeah.”
I pushed the stroller down the steps on its back wheels, and then over the gravel drive the same way, Flora’s little feet straight up in the air and her voice, from deep within the stroller, from behind the scarlet juice, humming and bouncing.
It was a good walk to the village, and whether it was from the wind or the walk, halfway there, I heard the breathlessness come into Daisy’s voice. I took Flora out of the stroller and told Daisy to get in, and then put Flora on her lap and pushed them both. Looking down at the two pairs of little-girl legs, I saw that Daisy’s, in contrast to Flora’s plump and browned knees and calves, were not only thin but colorless, despite the time we had spent in the sun, as if the Noxzema had bleached not only her sunburn but any trace of natural color as well. I stopped to ask Flora if she wanted to walk, and so for a while she scurried ahead of us while I continued to push Daisy in the stroller. At one point, I reached down to feel her forehead, but she pushed my hand away. She said she was just tired.
At the five-and-dime we bought a kite and some string and enough lollipops and liquorice shoelaces to decorate one of the weeping cherries. As we left, I saw Dr. Kaufman just coming out of the A&P across the street. He had a brown grocery sack in his arms and a woman beside him. She was holding on to his free arm with both hands and she was laughing, they both were. She had dark red hair, something like Red Rover’s, teased into a high crown at the top of her head. She was short and a little heavy, dressed in gold pedal pushers and a gold top, a black sweater thrown over her shoulders—about as different as he could get, I guessed, from his wife and their mother.
Erase it and start over again. I suddenly recalled seeing the web of white stretch marks on Mrs. Kaufman’s chest that summer I had been their babysitter, like the lines left on a piece of paper that had been crumpled up and then unfolded. It was skin, of course, that resisted, refused to relent: Daisy’s bruise, Flora’s growing, her father’s arms turning to dust. You could reimagine, rename, things all you wanted, but it was flesh, somehow, that would not relent.
I paused to put our purchases in the basket beneath the stroller, waiting for them to round the corner into the parking lot, hoping they wouldn’t see us, but we were barely out of the village, had just paused to let Daisy sit in the stroller a while longer, when he pulled up in his car. She was in the passenger seat, smiling at us, and he leaned across her lap to call my name. He began to say something, but the wind was still gusting and he held up his hand to say, Wait a minute, and turned off the engine and got out. He ran around the back of the car and then opened the door for her. She got out slowly, as if she were at the end of a long ride. She wore black high-heeled sandals and her toes were painted bright red, and she was smiling at us all the while, the black sweater over her shoulders and her gold clothes nearly iridescent in the sun.
“This is Jill,” Dr. Kaufman said, his chest puffy in his pride over her.
“She just got in on the train. This,” he said, introducing her to me, “is the girl I was telling you about, Theresa.
She’ll be taking care of the twins that week.”
Jill held out a well-manicured hand, her wrist full of bangles.
She asked me a sudden series of questions—pointless, most of them: what grade are you in and what’s your favorite subject and what singers do you like—as if she felt obliged to interview me there on the spot. She was perfumed and overly made up, but pretty, already tanned, a general impression of red and gold and auburn. As she grilled me, Dr. Kaufman crouched down on the sidewalk to talk to Flora, who was showing him the candy bracelet I had bought her, and then, still squatting, he turned his attention to Daisy, and I saw her hold out her candy bracelet, too. He took her hand to look at it, and then he reached up and put his fingers to her throat, just briefly, as if he were taking her pulse. He straightened up and interrupted Jill’s conversation to introduce her to the two girls.
“What grade are you in?” Jill asked Daisy.
“What’s your favorite subject?”
Dr. Kaufman turned to me. I found myself not wanting to meet his eye.
“Do you girls want a ride?” he asked softly, as if this were something just between the two of us.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said.
“Thanks, though.” I told him this was our morning excursion, meant to get Flora ready for a nap.
He nodded, his hands on his hips, as if he understood.
“She okay?” he asked. I knew he meant Daisy.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. The wind was blowing my hair across my face.
“She may be getting a little head cold.”
He frowned.
“You mention what I said? To her parents?”
I let the wind obscure a yes or a no.
“As soon as she gets home,” I said.
This seemed to satisfy him, because he looked at Jill, who had run out of things to say to the two girls, questions to ask.
“Shall we go?” she said. And then to me, “I’m glad we got a chance to meet.”
We waved to them as they pulled away, and then Flora and I pushed Daisy for a while, and then Daisy helped me push Flora. When we reached the driveway, I felt the wind fall away, much as it had this morning, when we took the caretaker’s gate and the path through the woods, and the feeling was so much like coming into
harbor
that I said to Daisy and Flora, as my father always said when he docked his boat, “All ashore that’s going ashore.”
He had the sawhorses set up in the driveway, the old door stretched over them, but there was no other sign of him.
Flora climbed out of the stroller eagerly, and Daisy said, smiling at me, “Finally returned.” The girls wanted to decorate the tree first, so we pushed the stroller right over the grass, right up to the middle of the three trees, the one they had chosen.
I took the beach quilt from the porch and spread it out, and then the girls spread the liquorice and lollipops across it. I went into the house for a pair of scissors—Ana walking past me as I took them from the desk drawer, looking over my shoulder to see what I was up to—and then sat with them on the quilt, unwrapping lollipops and tying each with a little piece of kite string. One by one, they carried the lollipops to the tree and tied them to its lower branches, Flora holding the thin branches still while Daisy tied the bow, then coming to me to help them, all of us with lollipops in our mouths as we moved back and forth from the quilt to the tree, “working.”
Once or twice I became aware of him behind us, as he stood in the doorway of his studio or carried small cans of paint out to the driveway. I let Flora stand on the seat of her stroller to reach some higher branches, and then lifted her up when she wanted to go higher still, Daisy on the quilt, tying more strings to the remaining lollipops. He carried the canvas through the door of the studio and placed it against the wall, the sun catching it as he did, making it seem to me as I hoisted Flora into the leaves that someone was waving to get my attention. I turned and saw what it was. He had a cigarette in his mouth, his shoulders were stooped, and there was something of Petey’s boneless, disappointed slouch to his stance as he looked at his handiwork, the canvas filled with black and gray and white paint, slashed and smeared. He threw his cigarette on the driveway and went into his studio again.
Daisy brought us the liquorice strings, and we began to add these to the thin branches as well, draping them just above each lollipop. Although the wind here was only a breeze, Daisy’s cheeks were bright red, but then, I noticed, Flora’s cheeks, and eyes, and lips were bright, too. Positively windblown.
We tied the red liquorice to the branches, which seemed heavy now with the weight of the candy, even threw some in the air to get them caught at the top of the tree. He came out of the studio again, carrying a few more small cans of paint, and in an instant, it seemed—I had only turned to take some more liquorice strings from the quilt—there was a red stroke across the canvas. The girls were laughing now, doing a little dance around the tree as they tossed the remaining strings of liquorice as high as they could. I touched their shoulders and told them to stand back, to get the full effect of their work, and to check for any bare spots, as you do with Christmas trees. We made a circuit of the tree, its branches hanging a bit lower now but full of odd colors, purple and green and bright orange, that caught the sun as the breeze passed. I pulled the quilt out from under the tree a bit and we stretched across it, our backs to the house, and viewed our masterpiece. Then we all three fell back and studied the sky. The clouds were high and still moving swiftly, and we spotted a face and a fish and a crocodile’s shape, a lady floating sideways in a long dress that became a tall ship with its sail being bent by the wind. Flora was between us, and Daisy and I raised our arms, pointing, while she followed suit. A castle, Flora said, her little arm in the air, a birthday cake, a pig—although Daisy and I couldn’t see them.
“Are you making this up?” Daisy finally asked her, and Flora said, “Yes, I am.” Delighted, Daisy curled herself sideways, holding her stomach while she laughed, knocking together the hard sides of her magical shoes.
Flora sat up and said, “Daddy, do you see?”
He was standing just behind us, and as he moved closer in his soft shoes, Flora leaned over me.
“Do you see the clouds?” she said.
I’m not sure he understood her, because he simply stood there beside us, his hands in his pockets, and said, “Pretty fancy tree.”
Flora leaned closer to me, her hands on my stomach.
“Look at the clouds, Daddy,” she called.