He had a long thatch of white hair that seemed to rise over his head like a pure white tongue of smoky fire. I don’t think I ever figured out just where it took root, but it seemed to me that his hair moved constantly, like a flame—perhaps fanned by the constant stirring of his artistic brain. My parents said he was supposed to be a genius. He painted huge abstracts in a garage-sized studio beside the house, and sometimes out on the gravel driveway itself. They weren’t particularly colorful or interesting pictures, but he had done some sketches of Flora and his wife that hung in Flora’s bedroom, and these were good enough to make me believe he actually knew what he was doing.
The first time I baby sat for Flora he gave me a bit of his work. It was an evening in the early spring, the April before Daisy came. They had called me at the last minute because their housekeeper had missed her train from the city and they had an affair to attend (or so it was put to me by my mother, who took the phone call) in
Southampton
. My father dropped me at the door and the cook let me in. I found him sitting at a narrow desk in their long, low living room. He was waiting for his wife and he was drawing, scrawling really, two or three charcoal lines on sketch paper. As soon as he had done one, he threw it on the floor and began another. I introduced myself and he said, still drawing, that the girls would be right out. He sat sideways at the little desk, his long legs crossed, drawing, tossing, drawing again. As I waited (sitting on the edge of what seemed a quite modern and impractical white leather couch), he must have gone through fifty pieces of paper, and from what I could see, the pattern of marks on each one was exactly the same. When Flora toddled into the room, he barely looked up, not even when she stepped on some of his strewn papers. She was in a white nightgown and her thin hair rose straight up like her father’s. A pretty child in her own, odd way. I showed her the magazine I’d been paging through, and without hesitation she leaned against my knees. She was on my lap by the time her mother came in (dressed, as I recall, in something elegant and vaguely Chinese), and as I received my usual instructions about where they would be and what lights should be left on when Flora went to sleep, I noticed that he continued drawing and tossing his drawings on the floor. Then suddenly, without a word to him, his wife leaned down to kiss her daughter’s head, turned her long nose toward the front door, and followed it out. I had a moment when I wondered if he was going along. I even wondered if he was the husband at all and not some visiting grandfather I’d be expected to mind as well. I kept talking to Flora about the pictures in the magazine, keeping her distracted from her mother’s departure but watching him, too, from the corner of my eye. He drew a few more sketches and then, answering to no call, like a man alone in a room, he slowly stood, paused, and then, still standing, leaned over the desk to draw the pattern once more. Flora and I by this time had gone through the magazine and she now had me by the hand and was pulling me toward a basket of books beside her father’s desk. He looked up and saw her and smiled distractedly, and then he looked at me. He took off his glasses. He had that delicate, almost crinkling, thin skin you see in old men. The piece of charcoal was in his hand and had dirtied his fingertips. He gave me a different kind of smile, rolling the charcoal between thumb and forefinger, taking me in. His white hair moved as if caught in a soft breeze.
“I hear you’re a babysitter par excellence,” he said—not the way I would say it, but the way someone who really spoke French would say it.
I told him I just liked children. He nodded slowly, as if this were a sad but complex piece of information, and then, putting on his glasses, he turned back to his sketch. He signed it with the charcoal and then handed it to me, over Flora’s head.
“Take this home and frame it, then,” he said.
“It’ll help you put all your own kids through college.” It was unremarkable enough—a loop, a line, a thing like a chicken leg—also vaguely Oriental. The paper was thick and lovely, though. After he left (strolling toward the door as if it were an arbitrary destination, although I could see when he opened it the headlights of the car where she sat, I could hear the impatient idling of the engine), I placed it between the pages of a Life magazine and put it on the table by the front door so I wouldn’t forget it. I thought less of how it would help me to put my kids (all my kids) through college than of what an embarrassment it would be to him if I didn’t bother to take it home. He might well have been a genius, a famous artist, a man whose signature and doodles were valuable, but I was fifteen and pretty and I didn’t doubt for a moment that I was the one with the advantage here.
The next morning, Flora asked for me as soon as she woke up and then cried when she understood that I wasn’t still in the house, and so her indulgent mother called me to ask if I’d like to take Flora for a walk in her stroller, and then asked if I would do the same every day after school and then full time when summer came. If summer comes, she said, with some melodrama, because it had been cold and damp and overcast for weeks, and she was, she said, bored, bored, bored to be out here so early in the season. Out here only so her husband could work. She turned her nose toward the gray studio, where you could see two single light bulbs hanging in the window, burning into the driveway’s gloom. It was a new use of the word for me: I had never before associated drawing and painting with “work.” I liked the idea. And I was beginning to like their house, which was long and low and full of plate-glass windows and smelled delightfully of her Chanel and his pipe smoke. I already liked Flora.
My parents were none too pleased with the arrangement, since it didn’t seem to offer as many opportunities for mingling with wealthy potential boyfriends that sitting for stockbrokers or lawyers or plastic surgeons did, but I reminded them that Daisy was coming and that spending the day with Flora would mean spending the day with Daisy, too, whereas any of my usual mother’s helper jobs would leave Daisy on her own until I returned. Poor Daisy, I said, deserved a good summer for a change, and my mother—whose pity for Daisy was a marvelous vehicle for her disapproval of my father’s sister—rolled her eyes and repeated, “Poor Daisy,” and the course of my summer was determined.
The first thing we have to do for you, I told Daisy, is not so much unpack your clothes as unwrap them. She sat on the floor beside me, her thin legs straight out so we both could admire the hard pink shoes. I had tried to convince her not to wear them with socks, it was summer, after all, I said, but she had shyly insisted that the socks made the shoes more comfortable.
There was an iridescence to them, I saw, in the sunshine of my bedroom, a bit of metallic blue beneath the pink, and when I pointed this out to her she said, delightedly, that she hadn’t noticed it before.
“It probably wasn’t there before,” I told her. Softly, she asked me what I meant.
“They’re changing,” I said bluntly.
“They’re not the same shoes they were when you found them at Great Eastern. They’re not even the same shoes your mother put in the suitcase this morning.
They’re becoming something else. I don’t know what yet. We’ll have to wait and see. Maybe by the time you go home, they’ll be all blue, or even silver. Maybe these,” I leaned over and tapped one of the turquoise gems glued to the cheap leather, “will have become real.”
I sorted and stacked her outfits—four shorts sets, three tennis sets, a pedal-pusher set, underwear, pajamas—and then unwrapped them one by one, pulling out straight pins and pieces of odd-shaped cardboard. I had her try each one on and was dismayed to see that not only would each of them have to be ironed to get out the factory-sealed creases and wrinkles but that each was at least a size or two too big. Here was my Aunt Peg’s logic, here was evidence that her grudging sense of life’s unfairness had seeped into everything she did. She would not send her middle child out to the hoity-toity
Hamptons
for the summer with a suitcase full of Bernadette’s hand-me-downs.
Oh no. (I could hear her say it to Uncle Jack, at their kitchen table, over his favorite dessert of canned fruit salad sprinkled with tiny marshmallows.) No, siree. Daisy would go with new clothes, still in their wrappers. But neither would she want me or my parents to forget that life was not easy for a transit cop with eight kids, not nearly as easy as it was for a working couple with only a daughter, and luxuries like one-season shorts sets bought from racks, not bins, were simply not in the cards for this hardworking family. The “poor Daisy” refrain had its benefits, no doubt—a few weeks in summer with one less mouth to feed, for instance, one less child to keep track of but even in her harried, downhill existence, Aunt Peg would want to mark her child with evidence of both her dignity and her practicality.
Poor Daisy stood in my bedroom in her pink shoes and hooked two thumbs into the drooping armholes of her sleeveless tennis dress, like Mr. Green Jeans pulling at his suspenders.
“It’s a little big,” she said, laughing at herself, at the way the pleated skirt nearly touched her knees. Beneath the white polyester cotton of the cheap dress, I could see her skinny chest with its shadowy hollows and pink nipples and nearly translucent glow. Even at eight, her skin gave off the peculiar, new-to-the-light aura of a newborn’s.
“Let’s save it for Bernadette,” I said, and stood.
“This way, Daisy Mae,” I said.
Our house was so small that both bedrooms led directly into the living room, and the place where the living-room ceiling dropped down to accommodate the attic stairs delineated the extent of the dining room. A fisherman’s cottage to be sure, built in the late 1900s, we were told, with one stone fireplace and wide-plank floors and a walk-up attic that smelled of cedar and mothballs and dust, and, on sunny days such as this, the warmed breath of old wood. The stairs to it were steep and curved a little at top and bottom, and when I reached the top and leaned down to take Daisy’s hand, I could feel she was trembling.
When she reached the last two stairs, she pulled her hand away and kind of scrambled on all fours onto the attic floor, getting, as she did, very little traction from the pink shoes. When she saw that the floor was safely beneath her, and the entrance to the attic stairs a good enough distance away, she turned and sat, her legs spread, as if she had arrived there after a fall, not a climb.
“Are you all right?” I said, laughing a bit, just to dampen her panic. She nodded, breathing heavily, the too big dress now spread around her like a gown.
“I’m fine,” she said softly.
This attic was my favorite place in the house—and I loved every corner of that house, even then. It was all rafters and ancient treasures and chinks of broken sunlight coming through the walls and the one tiny window. Two old iron beds that had belonged to my mother’s parents were set up under one eave, covered with two ancient quilts and two somewhat wilted feather pillows—our guest suite, as my mother called it (my Uncle Tommy being the only guest it had ever accommodated).
There was a faded Queen Anne chair, some old-fashioned lamps with tasseled lampshades. A dresser. A full-length standing mirror. A steamer trunk that opened sideways.
My father’s army footlocker, stenciled with his name and rank and the yellowed cargo tag from the Queen Mary. There were a number of rolled-up rugs, a couple of antique pitchers and basins. Boxes of old photographs, of Christmas decorations, of magazines and books. My disassembled crib. My black baby carriage draped with an old sheet. My pale blue teeter totter, my rocking horse. A stage set of an attic in every way.
My stage.
Under the other eave there was a long metal rod that held our winter coats in cloth wardrobes, and, for the rest of its length, my biography in clothing. My mother had all my dresses and tops and slacks and skirts and shorts arranged in chronological order down the expanse of the bar, so that behind my father’s overcoat there was my Catholic school uniform skirt, abandoned just a week ago when vacation began, my uniform blouses and sweaters, my Easter dress and coat, my green St. Patrick’s Day shirtwaist, my velvet Christmas dress, my fall kilts and cardigans, followed by everything I had outgrown from last summer, followed by my freshman-year uniform, another Easter dress, etc. It was all orderly enough to merit documentation, and I only had to count off velvet dress sleeves or the yellow, green, pink, or blue shoulders of my Easter coats to know exactly where I needed to look to find something for Daisy.
I pulled out the first dress I recalled, a white one with pale yellow flowers and a green velveteen sash, puffy sleeves, a sweet collar, a full skirt. Daisy was still sitting on the floor, but when I held it out to her, she rose slowly, walking carefully toward me over the warm, worn floorboards, as if she were not yet sure she trusted them. Kneeling in front of her, I unbuttoned the tennis dress and slipped it over her shoulders.
“Arms up,” I said, and pulled my old dress over her head. I turned her around and buttoned up the back and tied the sash.
“Beautiful,” I said, turning her again, and she was: the yellow and white and green and her flushed cheeks and bright red hair.
“I could wear it to church on Sunday,” she said, a little breathless.
And I said, once again, “Why wait till Sunday?”
I showed her my baby clothes, at the far end of the long rack. The little dresses on their hangers, the boxes on the shelf beneath them with the sweaters and the sleepers and even a handful of worn cloth diapers, all wrapped in tissue paper, weighed down with pieces of cedar. I held the box to her nose and told her to breathe in. I said, Isn’t it something, how all my baby clothes smell like that? As if my parents hadn’t gotten me from the hospital at all but from some old forest. Found on a bed of moss, perhaps, cradled in the roots of an ancient tree. It makes you wonder, I said mysteriously, loving her for the way she was taking me in, her mouth opened and her eyes bright. I put the lid on the box and slipped it back onto its shelf.