Touch of napkin to her lips after each sip of orange juice. All the niceties that Uncle Jack required at his own Formica topped table in the overcrowded kitchen in the overcrowded
She shook her head. Her eyes were tired. I pointed to the fold in the bread.
“Bite it here,” I said, and she did, and then I showed her the perfect hole she had made in the middle. I told her to raise her index finger and I placed the muffin on it like an oversized ring.
“Now you can take it with you,” I said.
“And nibble on it all day long.”
I lifted her plate and her glass and left them both on the kitchen counter as we headed out the back door. I had the Kaufmans’ dog to walk first, I told her. And then the
Richardsons
’. And then we would feed the cats at the Clarke place on the way to pick up Flora. I took her hand as we went through the back fence. She continued to balance the English muffin on the other. The Morans’ house was silent as we passed it, the shades in the front room only partially and unevenly closed, giving it that creepy, stupid look of a person sleeping with one glazed eye half open. There was the perennial rusted outboard motor on the grass, a large and battered cardboard box beside it, an abandoned garden hose beside a deflated plastic wading pool, scattered bits of toys, a few bicycles, a pair of little boy’s white underpants hanging from the hedge and looking for all the world like a popped balloon. I was grateful to see that there was no sign yet of the Moran kids themselves. I wanted Daisy to be the only child this morning.
We walked down the center of the road and sang “Zip-A Dee-Doo-Dah” together, swinging our arms back and forth until she lost her balance in the pink shoes and I had to pull her up by the arm to keep her from scraping her knees-which was not hard to do, of course; she was so light I could easily have pulled her right up over my head. A bit of yesterday’s fear crossed her face as she recovered, but I got her laughing again when I said, “Have a nice trip?” The sun was fully over the trees by now, and the birds were busy in them. There was still some mist rising from the brown potato fields and the green lawns of the larger estates, and the few people who passed by in cars waved casually. There were enough rabbits still about to keep Daisy perpetually charmed.
I have until now kept out of this account and even, mostly, out of my own recollection, the fall and winter that awaited poor Daisy, because while it may well be the end point of this particular story it is not, after all, the reason I tell it, but this is the morning she mentioned on the phone back in Queens Village, in late February—the morning we saw all the rabbits, she said. The morning she wore on her finger, like a garnet ring, the English muffin spread with beach-plum jelly. Until Red Rover ate it. That morning in June.
The Kaufmans’ house was fairly modest, a single-story cedar shake with a curved gravel driveway and white shutters and green flower boxes and red trim. I’d been a mother’s helper here two summers ago, when I had dubbed their twins, Colby and Patricia, Cobweb and Peaseblossom. They’d spent last summer with their mother in
Europe
(my own mother suspected a divorce, and rightly so), and this year they would be at sleep-away camp until August. But their father was out here for the summer and he was the one who had called to ask if I could help him with the dog for the three days a week he needed to be in the city. He was a nice man, short and balding and Jewish, far friendlier than his blond Presbyterian Brooks Brothers madras (and now ex-) wife.
One afternoon when I worked there, while we were sitting around the table beside the pool, just back from the beach, he suddenly leaned over and placed his forearm next to mine. I had the twins, wrapped in beach towels, sitting sleepily in my lap, but they both struggled up to see what their father was doing.
“Look at this,” he said. His arm was deeply tanned, covered in thick black hair, and mine was its usual after-the-beach pale red.
“Did we spend the day under the same sun or what?” he said. Then he leaned over me to pull the children’s thin, golden arms out of their towels, and in our efforts to line up all eight of our arms, he knelt down in front of us, his bare chest just brushing my knees, and took all of us into a kind of embrace.
There began a debate about which of the twins was tanner—I was immediately declared the least, their father the most—and they called to their mother to cast the deciding vote. She had just stepped out of the pool house. She had already showered and was wearing a seersucker kimono and striped slippers and had a Turkish towel around her head. She walked over and bent down to add her own arm to the mix. It was a lovely shade, lighter than the children’s, darker than mine. Her skin was slick and glistening and smelled of lemons.
She held it there for only a moment—her robe fell open for a second and I could see the spidery white stretch marks against her tanned breasts—and then, without declaring a winner, she stood up and said to her husband, who was still pressed against my knees, “Can I talk to you, please?”
Dr. Kaufman leaned across my lap to kiss the hand of each child.
“You’re both beautiful,” he said, and then ran his fingers along my arm as he stood up. He touched my hair and said, “You, too, Irish,” before he followed his wife inside. The twins immediately pulled the beach towels back over their heads and snuggled against me again. Cobweb was still a thumb sucker and Peaseblossom had the end of her braid in her mouth. I hummed some Christmas hymns for them—it was what they liked—“O Holy Night” and “What Child Is This?” and “O Little Town of Bethlehem”—all three of us smelling of pool water and Coppertone, delightfully warm and sun-weary in the shade of the umbrella, in the sweet offshore breeze. And then I heard their mother’s voice calling through the open windows that faced the back of the house. My first impression was that she had dropped something or lost something and was saying, Oh, what happened? or Oh, where is it? Then I wondered for a second—until I remembered who she was—if she might be attempting to sing.
But the sound never formed itself into speaking or singing, and the tone and timbre, the volume, of her voice was something I had never heard before, certainly something that had never drifted through the rose-covered wall that separated my parents’ bedroom from my own. I tried to look down at the children: Cobweb’s wet thumb had fallen into his lap, but I sensed, although I could not see, that Patricia’s eyes were wide open. Their mother’s voice grew louder. Oh, what happened?
Oh, where is it? But in a language I didn’t know. I had only heard voices raised to such a pitch in anger—Daisy’s brothers quarreling, or the worst nuns at school demanding our respect-and although I knew this wasn’t anger, I wasn’t surprised either, when she began to swear, or what sounded like swearing, and then, finally, to cry her husband’s name—Phil, Phil, Phil. Somewhere behind all this I thought I heard him saying, Hush, hush, but then even that sound was wiped out by her voice as it veered into a kind of scream. Well before I had admitted to myself that I understood what was going on, I had an impulse to put my hands against the children’s ears. The scream gave way to a recognizable moan, what seemed an endless series of them, and then—I wasn’t following the logic
here at all—a deep-throated laughter that, even after all the commotion of the last few minutes, seemed inappropriately, falsely, raucous—as if she were making an effort to be heard.
For me to hear. There was silence, and then I heard him cry, Oh, oh, oh, as if someone were bending back his thumb.
It was some time before they emerged from the house, both of them showered and dressed now. The children had slept soundly in my lap and were just stirring again, and there were pins and needles in both my legs. She took them from me gently, led them into the house, where the cook had already begun to fix them their dinner, and then she turned back to ask me if I wanted to take one last swim before I went home, her voice its usual slightly flat and nasal drawl. I dove in, mostly to hide my own awkwardness, and when I climbed out only he was on the patio, fiddling with the grill. I pulled my T-shirt over my wet bathing suit, gathered my beach bag and my towel, and slipped into my flip-flops.
“Good night, Dr. Kaufman,” I said, and he turned to look over his shoulder, not really looking, only putting his face in my direction, not his eyes. He said, “Good night, sugar,” the same endearment he used with the kids.
They were eating toasted cheese at the table in the breakfast nook, and I kissed them good night and then unwound Cobweb from my waist at the front door with a hundred assurances that I would see him first thing in the morning. I walked home in what was fast becoming twilight, something of the encroaching blue-black sky and the lingering scarlet sunset now embedded like a dark jewel in my own vision of married life-of my own, unformed future.
Last summer, when my mother guessed that the trip to
Europe
meant the Kaufmans were divorcing, I thought that afternoon was proof positive she was wrong. I didn’t realize, she argued, how easy a thing divorce had become for non Catholics. She didn’t realize (I failed to argue) what the Kaufmans were capable of doing in the waning hours of a summer afternoon.
The dog kennel was in the back, behind the pool house.
The pool without the children’s toys and swim rings seemed desolate, and Red Rover threw himself against the fence when he saw us as if I had orchestrated their return. He was your usual jittery Irish setter, but mostly pretty well mannered, so I wasn’t prepared for the way he rushed for Daisy as soon as I opened the gate, devouring her English muffin in an instant and then nearly knocking her over with his wiggling and wagging. She was startled, but not frightened, and although she backed away, she was closer to laughter than to tears. I grabbed him by the collar and snapped on his leash, while he took a minute to lick the jelly from his chops. And then he turned his head toward me and seemed to say, “Oh, it’s you!” and, nearly beside himself with joy, began to lick my face and my chin, his paws on my chest. I had to push him off me, and push him out the kennel door, Daisy all the while hanging on the fence and now laughing breathlessly.
We continued on, down toward the Coast Guard beach, where I was able to unleash him and let him run. Daisy was still a little overwhelmed, and I told her to sit on a stone and take off her shoes and socks before she walked in the sand.
“Maybe tomorrow you’ll want to wear your sneakers,” I said.
She sat down as I’d told her, but she made no move to take off the pink shoes. I had one eye on Red, who kept turning back and going forward, more or less waiting for us, but running off a little farther each time. I knew he was too much of a coward to run very far, but I didn’t want to be stuck walking to Ama Gansett to retrieve him—I had to be at Flora’s by nine.
I turned back to Daisy, but she had still made no move to take off the shoes.
“The sand will ruin those, Daisy Mae,” I said, and I bent down to pull them off myself. Abruptly she scooted her feet away from me, and when I looked up at her, somewhat startled, she had her nose in the air, one of those bratty, overacted poses I had seen plenty of other kids strike, but never her.
“What’s the matter?” I said, and to complete the picture she folded her arms across her chest, across the bodice of the sweet-collared dress, and said, stubbornly, “I don’t want to take them off.” The sun on her wiry, uncombed hair brought out the reds and the
golds
and the possibility that she did indeed, as her mother and Bernadette had assured me, have a redhead’s temper.
I stood up straight and shrugged.
“Suit yourself,” I said and, without another word or look, kicked off my own battered Keds and ran down toward Red Rover, who saw this as his signal to take off full tilt ahead of me. I ran after him for a while, the leash in my hand, and then slowed down to a walk as he began to nose and sniff at whatever he could find along the shoreline, playing his own game of keeping me near without seeming to. When I finally turned to look back, Daisy was running toward me down the beach. It took a few minutes for me to see that she had her pink shoes in her hands and her white socks still on her feet, and that she was crying. I held my arms out to her as she grew nearer, and when she reached me, I lifted her and spun her around. When I put her down again, she sobbed into my hip.
“Were you afraid someone was going to steal them?” I asked, and she waited a moment before she nodded.
“Do you want to take off your socks, too?” I said, and she whispered, “No.” Red came bounding toward us, and I picked up a piece of driftwood and tossed it to make him head back toward the road.
“All right,” I said.
Sitting on the same stone, Daisy brushed the sand off the thin socks and slipped them back into her shoes.
“You still don’t want to take those off?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“You don’t have sand between your toes?” Smiling, she shook her head again. I shrugged. With kids, you never knew. It could have been a broken toenail. It could have been that her brothers, or Bernadette, had told her she had stinky feet. It could have been that she did indeed fear that her magic slippers would be stolen. It could have been a whim.