“Oh come on,” he said, his thumb against my skin.
“She can have one.”
“My leg does hurt a little,” Daisy said; and she touched the leg that was drawn up under her skirt.
“Your foot’s asleep,” I told her, more harshly than I intended.
“You said so yourself.” And then I added, “They’re not candy, Daisy. They’re medicine.” They looked at me, both of them, surprised and disappointed. There was a tightness in my stomach and in my chest, and I felt as constricted by my own prim, close-fisted humorlessness as Flora had been by her mother’s silk scarves. It was, I suppose, a learned response, how one behaved in the face of potential lechery. If I was not the most popular girl at school, I was, perhaps, the most attentive, especially when the talk turned, delicately, to sex. I could hear Sister Alphonse Marie: “Stand fast, girls.”
He shrugged and closed his hand, pulling it away. Daisy slumped at my feet, returning quietly to her books. Then I said, into the silence, “Okay, just one,” which made him suddenly throw his head back with laughter, a shout of laughter that I feared for a moment would wake Flora—although Flora waking would be the very thing that would allow us to leave.
He leaned forward again and Daisy took one of the aspirins from his palm and put it in her mouth.
“I can tell what kind of mother you’re going to be,” he said, smiling at me—fondly, it seemed.
“A dozen kids who can get away with anything.” His eyes went to my hair, which at that hour of a summer day was probably as wild as Daisy’s, then to somewhere around my mouth, and then my throat. He wore a thin white shirt, open at the collar. I thought he was about to tell me I was pretty—I knew the look, a gift about to be delivered—but instead he leaned over and took the book from my lap. He pushed his glasses to the top of his head to read the title, and suddenly I saw in his face little Flora’s features, worn out by tears.
“Hardy,” he said, turning the pages, his nose raised so his eyes could focus. An old, old man after all.
“Egdon Heath.
Lovely Eustacia.” I told him it was for school, and he nodded, of course it was.
“At least it’s not Jane Eyre” he said. But I told him, “I like Jane Eyre, too,” as if I had missed his irony. He handed the book back to me, over Daisy’s head, and I did not look away. There was black paint under his fingernails, splatters of gray and white on the back of his hand. He plucked the glasses from the top of his head, placed them on his knee, and then ran his hands up over his face, through the tongue of smoky white hair.
“Twelve children,” he said, as if to himself.
“And a clam digger for a husband.” He reached for his drink and took a sip and once again swished it around in his mouth.
“Pain,” he said as he swallowed.
“Someone should write a history of the world according to the toothache. What kingdoms lost because of a toothache. What romances gone unconsummated.
Ships sunk. Masterpieces left unfinished.”
Daisy was looking up at him with quiet concern, and noticing this, he reached down and touched her hair.
“Never get old,” he said again.
“Sell your soul if you have to.” He looked at me, Flora’s face, worn out, receding, the skin grown yellowish and paper thin. But the weak eyes were his.
“What I wouldn’t give to have the time you’ve still got, kiddo,” he said.
“Kids, clam digger, and all.”
I lowered my eyes and shrugged, as I might have had he delivered the prize of admitting I was pretty. I’d lost my fear of him, I knew, the knot of it in my stomach and chest, its ricochet in my fingertips. There was a trace of Uncle Tommy’s third-drink philosophy in what he said, and it reminded me once again of my own capacity to embarrass him, to feel sorry for him. The advantage I had of youth and beauty and time left. I wasn’t even startled when he slowly, maybe a little drunkenly, leaned toward me once more and took my wrist and gently insinuated his paint-spattered finger into my closed fist, prying it apart. In my palm was the bit of cotton from the aspirin bottle. He took it from me, dipped it quickly into his drink, and then pressed it into his mouth, into the corner he had favored as he’d chewed the aspirin. He moved his tongue around a bit, tasting—his eyes let me know—not just the whiskey but the warm salt of my skin.
I shrugged again and reached back to lift my hair off my neck, twisting it, as I had done this morning, into a loose bun.
The day was growing warmer.
“Flora’s worn out,” I said, and Daisy at my feet murmured, “I’ll say. We’ll never get to the beach.” She put her chin on her hand and idly turned a page. I could tell she was familiar with this kind of disappointment, the disappointment brought about by the endless and inevitable accommodation of younger children.
“Sure we will,” I said. Now he was simply watching me, sunk back in the canvas chair, his fingers on the side of his head, watching but no longer smiling. Even as Ana pulled the car into the drive, his eyes were still on me.
Ana climbed the steps and looked at the three of us, surprised and not pleased to see us there, her hands on her hips.
“Baby asleep?” she asked me, and I said yes. She gestured toward the house.
“Inside?” I resisted saying, where else?
“Yes,” I said.
“In her crib.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue and looked at her watch.
“No good,” she said.
“Too early. She’ll be too tired for her dinner tonight.” She was a nice-looking woman, although I had never thought to notice before. She had olive skin and softly per med hair and large, dark eyes, a small gold cross on her neck. Plump in her pale blue servant’s dress, an ample figure, I suppose it would be called. I was under the impression that she had a husband in the city.
“You should wake her up,” she said, gesturing toward the street; she might even have been angry at me.
“Go for your walk.”
Flora’s father said, “Nonsense,” from his chair. He put on his glasses and then stood up slowly, wearily, a tall, thin man getting back to work. His drink was still in his hand.
“Let her sleep,” he said to me, and then, as he walked past her, something in French to Ana. She stood there for a few minutes as he walked down the steps and back to his studio, her head turned over her shoulder but her eyes on the floor, her mouth pensive, her hands still on her hips. Even if she wasn’t French, and despite her middle-aged figure, you’d have to call the pose coquettish.
She threw a final glance at me and went into the house. I wondered what last-minute instructions Flora’s mother had left for her before she boarded the train. Or what Ana herself had planned on, with the wife safely on her way and the child and the babysitter and her redheaded shadow off to the beach for the day. The French maid and the aging artist frolicking under the weeping-cherry trees.
“Jeepers creepers,” I said to Daisy after the screen door had slammed, and Daisy rolled her eyes and said, “What’s she so mad about?”
“Beats me,” I said. I sat with her on the floor of the porch.
Flora’s books were mostly new, and, Daisy pointed out, many of the pages were scratched over with crayons, an infraction Uncle Jack would never have allowed, which seemed to take Daisy’s breath away.
“She’s spoiled,” I explained.
“Only children like us usually are.” Daisy considered this for a moment and then, afraid, I think, that she had given some offense, said, “Well, her dad is an artist, after all. Maybe she can’t help it.”
I laughed and leaned forward and kissed her forehead, which was warm. Then I scooted around behind her and drew her between my legs and began to braid her tangled, heavy hair. Ana appeared behind the screen door once or twice to see what we were doing—I wondered if she was going to go in and shake Flora awake—and then came out with a lunch tray held high between her hands. She crossed the porch with it and went down the steps and the path and then into the side door of the garage.
While she was still inside, Daisy and I moved out to the lawn, where we ate our own lunches in the scattered shade of one of the small cherry trees. The day had grown warm, but it was perfect June warmth, soft as water on our skin, and with the low house and the woods and the high green hedge, the blue sky was just a lovely canopy over us alone. Lying on the grass together, Daisy’s head on my thigh, we were quiet enough to hear the ocean.
My advantage, I realized, was not only that I could embarrass him or pity him, or recognize his foolishness—a supposed genius, a rich man with a young wife—not even the years I had left while his were spent. My advantage was that I knew what he was trying to do, here in his kingdom by the sea, where art was what he said it was and the limits of time and age were banished and everything was possible because everything that mattered was inside his head. My advantage was that I knew what he was trying to do—and I was better at it.
When Flora finally woke, she was hot and sweaty but happy to see me, and Daisy with her shoes, so I gave her a quick lunch and packed up her towel and her bathing suit and plopped her into her stroller.
“Should I put my suit on?” Daisy asked, and then looked at me warily when I said we’d change on the beach.
“You don’t want to walk all that way in a tight bathing suit,” I said.
And then, by way of further explanation, “Under a towel, Daisy Mae.
It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
Ana was back in the kitchen by then, more pleasant, perhaps, but mostly because she was ignoring us. I stuck a sun hat on Flora’s head and borrowed another one for Daisy. And then, on a whim, because I usually, wisely, never borrowed anything from the people I worked for,
I plucked Flora’s mother’s straw hat from its hook by the door and stuck it on the back of my head. I’d only seen her wearing it once, when I brought Flora home one afternoon and she was having drinks out on the lawn with another old guy (a Broadway person, the cook was pleased to tell me) and his also-too-young wife. It was on one of those cool and overcast days she had been so miserable about when I first started, and so the hat was mere costume, worn, perhaps, for the benefit of her theatrical friends. I saw
Ana glance at me over my shoulder as I took it. I realized I wouldn’t mind in the least if she told; I might even want her to. Daisy looked up at me.
“You look nice,” she said.
I laughed.
“I look like Huckleberry Finn,” I told her.
She smiled wryly.
“Huckleberry Hound, you mean.”
I paused. In the shadow of her sun hat, her eyes were rimmed in pale blue. She was grinning with all her crooked little teeth.
“You’re getting there, Daisy Mae,” I said admiringly.
“You’re getting there.”
Flora’s habit, a trick I’d taught her, when I pushed her stroller down the gravel drive, was to hum in a monotone, open-mouthed, so her voice would tremble and shake with the vibration of the wheels against the stones. Daisy thought this deliriously funny, and her laughter made Flora more pleased with herself than ever. Her bumpy song grew louder and Daisy’s laughter more uncontrollable as we passed the dribbled canvas, the burning
lightbulb
in the window, the scent of paint, and headed toward the road.
Daisy walked beside the stroller—Flora had reached up and taken her hand—and although she still favored one foot, it did not seem as prominent a limp as before. Testing her, I paused, put my hand to the road, and then announced that I was taking off my sneakers. I tied them together and put them over my shoulder. The tar was warm, but not too hot beneath my feet. I elaborately wiggled my toes.
“Feels real good,” I said in a fake Southern accent.
“Better than being civilized.” But Daisy did not follow suit.
There were already a few scattered bathers on the beach. I pushed the stroller into our regular corner of the parking lot, and Flora, accustomed to our routine, immediately scooted out and headed, with Daisy, into the sand.
“There go your shoes,” I called, and then decided not to puzzle over it anymore. In my own childhood, my mother often told me, I had once worn a flamboyant red Gypsy skirt, the remnant of my Halloween costume, from October 31 to Thanksgiving, night and day, over church clothes and play clothes and pajamas, with no other explanation for why I kept it on (or why I finally took it off) than that I wanted to. She told the story without ever once questioning why she had indulged me in this, questioning only what it was that had possessed me to insist that I not be parted from the gaudy skirt, with its swirls of gold and black and its itchy red net ruffles—the very skirt that hung at this moment in my attic wardrobe, just to the right of a row of blue-and-green uniform jumpers, size 7.
On the beach, I spread out the soft blue quilt Flora’s mother had provided and then pulled our towels and our suntan lotion from the beach bag. I opened the thermos of lemonade and gave each of them a drink. I told them I just remembered a story one of the nuns at my school had told us, a story about a little girl—this was years and years ago—who was given a beautiful white slip, hand-embroidered and made of the softest, finest cotton in the whole world. It was made by some nuns who lived upstate and came out of their convents only once a year, when they traveled around to churches to sell the things they made after Mass—children’s clothes and altar cloths and doilies. The slip was pure white, and the little girl was meant to save it to wear on her First Communion, in May, but one cold night in February, just as she was getting ready for bed, she opened up her bottom drawer and took the slip out of its tissue paper and put it on. The next morning, when her mother saw what she had slept in, she was really angry, but the little girl said, “But, Mommy, I wanted to show it to the angels.”