Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (7 page)

This time she didn’t look up. “I’m reading it so I don’t stay a moron like everybody else in this town,” was her answer.

This was something that might have come straight out of my mother’s mouth, and recognizing that, I felt an arrow to the heart. It shocked me to hear somebody who wasn’t certifiably nuts, like Mother was, slag the old home town. In my experience, if you couldn’t say something nice about Groveland, you had better not fucking say anything at all if you knew what was good for you.

The aroma of superheated grease began to challenge the dirty-underpants odour. Cooking appeared to be underway. From the kitchen, Mrs. Koenig hollered, “Bert, go get your lazy so and so of a father up!”

None of the television watchers moved a muscle. The mystic communion with the screen continued.

“Bert,
now
! And I mean it!”

Little Bert grudgingly hoisted himself to his feet and moved out of the living room, casting regretful glances over his shoulder at the
TV
. Sounds of coughing, grumbling, and cursing came from somewhere off in the back of the house. Bert reappeared, sullenly sank back down on the floor, and lapsed into his former semi-comatose state.

In a bit, Mr. Koenig appeared in the doorway and shot me a vaguely hostile stare, a bald guy nearly as fat as his wife. Stinky and Smelly had clearly got their fashion sense from their father, although his windowpane polyester pants were even more crotch-baggy and severely distressed looking than his sons’. Yawning hugely, he gave a conspicuous scratch to his balls before plodding off to the kitchen, where a low-voiced, heated discussion started up between husband and wife. I presumed it had something to do with me, the stranger in his house.

I wanted to bolt. Minutes crawled by as I struggled to come up with a plausible reason to offer Mrs. Koenig for having to excuse myself. I had taken too long. Suddenly she hollered, “Come and get it!”

The
TV
-drugged kids sprang to life, scrambled up from the linoleum, and stampeded for the kitchen. Sabrina, however, didn’t move; her nose remained buried in her book.

I got up and dragged my feet after the others, pausing beside Sabrina’s chair to ask, “So what gives? I mean, aren’t you going to eat?”

“I guess
not
,” she snapped. “I make my own suppers.”

“What do you mean you make your own suppers?”

“Just what I said. I buy my own food, make my own suppers.”

“You
buy
your own food?”

“Yeah, with the money I make from babysitting. So I don’t have to eat the crap they do. Any more stupid questions?”

This was both astounding and intriguing. But the best I could produce as a follow-up inquiry was, “So who do you babysit for?”

“What’s it to you? You need somebody to babysit you with Daddy gone?”

The message was clear.
Get lost
. As I left the room, Sabrina flung after me, “Oh yeah and if you’re
wondering
, I do my own laundry too. None of this is mine.”

The family was clustered around the stove, where two cast-iron fry pans were sending up smoke signals. Mrs. Koenig was loading slabs of fried baloney and charred potatoes, as black and hard-looking as the skillets she was scraping them out of, onto the plates her brood were eagerly thrusting at her.
As soon as the food hit their dishes all the Koenigs, Mr. Koenig included, scattered for the living room at top speed. I was the last to be served, and once I had been doled out my share of charcoal and grease, the enormous Delphine immediately fell to it, forking up her supper straight from the pans.

The kids were back on the floor in front of the
TV
, bent double over their plates, filling their faces. Mr. Koenig had expropriated the place on the sofa I had earlier cleared. I hovered in the doorway, wondering where I was going to plant myself.

All at once, Sabrina erupted, boosted herself out of the armchair with an exasperated, “Oh for chrissakes,
here
!” and lurched out of the room. None of her family paid her explosive exit the least attention.

We all ate in silence. When I had made a polite and minimal dent in my food, I excused myself, Mr. Koenig grunted, and I carried my plate back out to the kitchen. Mrs. Koenig was nowhere to be seen; her hunger appeased, she had disappeared.

The prospect of another dining experience at the Koenigs’ kept me on edge all the next afternoon. Around four o’clock I heard a knock at the door. This was surprising, my family never had visitors. I parted the curtains, looked out, and saw Sabrina Koenig on the step, visible to anyone who might be passing by, a brown paper bag clutched to her chest. I rushed to the door, wrenched it open, and barked, “
What!
” straight into her face.

She didn’t flinch; she grinned. “Hello, Billy Dowd, today’s your lucky day,” she said.

“Get in here.” The instant she crossed the threshold, I slammed the door, panicked somebody might see me and her together.

“Where’s the kitchen?”

I pointed. I didn’t know what else to do. She set off in her halting, wincing stride. After a few moments of bewildered indecision, I followed, found her unpacking canned goods, fresh vegetables, and a package of meat.

I asked her what she thought she was doing.

“Making a trial run.”

“Trial run of what?”

Sabrina toyed with the groceries, shifting them about on the countertop as if she were trying to arrange them in a pattern that matched the logic of her thoughts. “I thought I’d cook for you tonight. You like your supper, then we can work out a deal. Maybe.”

“What kind of deal?”

“Ma cashed your daddy’s cheque today. Fifty bucks. Which is way, way too much money. She took him to the cleaners. What is he, stupid?”

“Yeah. Pretty much.”

“I pinched the money out of her dresser, used some of it to buy these groceries.”

My mind was revving frantically, but it wasn’t going anywhere, was still stuck in neutral. “And what kind of shit are you in when she finds out you stole it?”

Sabrina dismissed that with a wave of the hand. “I’ve got a clean record as far as Ma’s concerned. She won’t
suspect me. It’ll get pinned on the twins. They deserve some payback; the creeps have been helping themselves to my babysitting money for years.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Okay, so here’s what I was thinking,” she said, adopting the bright, chirpy tone in which things get explained to very small children. “What if I make you your suppers over here? I’m a decent cook, better than Ma. We can both eat pretty well on fifty bucks, and there’ll be a little cash left over for me. You know, call it wages. Plus, I get some peace and quiet for a few hours of the day. It’s a madhouse over there.” Sabrina faltered for a second at the comparison, probably recalling where my mother happened to be, then resolutely kept going. “And your old man has already paid for it all so he isn’t out anything. Just Ma. And she was screwing him anyway.”

I considered this. “Yeah, but aren’t they going to miss you at home? Wonder where you are?”

“It is to laugh. Everybody comes and goes just as they like at our house. Maybe you noticed that last night? No twins, no Jenny. Nobody gets missed over there.”

I had one more objection, a big one. “But someone’s going to see you. I mean, going in and out of here.”

Sabrina lifted her gaze to the backyard, surrounded by an eight-foot-high lilac hedge Mother never let Father trim because she said she didn’t want
anyone spying on her
. A Great Wall of China to hold the snoopy barbarians at bay.

Sabrina gave me a knowing smile. “I watched you leave last night, Billy Dowd. Weaving and ducking down the alley like some cat burglar making his getaway. Just so nobody would see you’d been at our place. You think I can’t do
likewise? Those lilacs will give me all the cover I’ll need. Don’t worry, your precious reputation is safe with me.”

I flushed and blurted, “You’re wrong. I wasn’t weaving and ducking because –”

She cut me off. “You think I was born yesterday? Hey, I’d do the same thing in your shoes. No problem.”

And that was how Sabrina Koenig tangled her life up with mine. That first night she made me a tasty beef stew, a supper Father would have approved of, something suitable for a growing boy. She did the dishes, left the kitchen spotless, then went out the back door, across the yard, and out the gate like a cat burglar. Full marks there.

What surprised me was how quickly I began to look forward to Sabrina’s visits. And she began to make them earlier and earlier in the day, sometimes she showed up by one o’clock. For several weeks that summer the local
TV
station showed matinees that alternated Abbot and Costello movies one day, Dick Powell films the next, and we fell into the habit of watching them together. Abbott and Costello killed Sabrina, their antics made her yelp with laughter, squirm on the sofa like a little kid. The other side of her loved the Dick Powell musicals, the song-and-dance routines, the moony, dreamy, fairy-tale sundaes the old-time studio soda jerks served up.

Sabrina was a lot less chippy, a lot less belligerent off her home turf. By turns she could be goofy and serious, playful and big-sisterly stern. When it came to playing big sister, it wasn’t long before she started to ask me
What are you going
to do with your life?
I was fifteen, my ambitions didn’t extend much further than getting my driver’s licence in a year and maybe, if I could summon up the guts, inviting Jenny Likes to Play the Squeezebox to go for a ride with me in my father’s half-ton.

Sabrina put the big career question to me just after Dick Powell had finished singing and tripping his way through
42
^nd
Street
. As usual, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, all the curtains were drawn for security reasons, to make sure that nobody out on the street spotted who was hanging out at the Dowd residence. The room was full of heat and very dim, but in a little sparse light filtering through the drapes I could see earnestness gleam on Sabrina’s face.

“I don’t know,” I said, resorting to flippancy. “Be a fireman. Be a cowboy. Indian chief.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “Don’t act like a bonehead. You’ve got to think ahead, Billy. You’ve got to plan. At least start treading water now or you’ll sink.”

“That’s pretty extreme.”

“No, it isn’t. You think you can just float along and one day you’ll just float to the top of the world? No way, Billy, you’ll end up sinking like a stone. You’ve got to set your sights on something.”

“Okay, so tell me, what have
you
set your sights on?”

“Getting out of this town. Away from
them
.”

“That’s not much. Boy, what a huge ambition.”

“One thing at a time, Billy. One thing at a time. I’m saving money for the day I can wave goodbye to Groveland. That’s the first step.”

Setting your sights on something wasn’t the only thing Sabrina harassed me about. She was big on me improving myself. In fact, sometimes I got to feeling I was no different than a project for a science fair. Here’s this bucket of gritty sand and look what you can do with it, blast it with ambition, blow the glowing, heated mass into a very nice glass vase you can stick a flower in. Beautiful.

One afternoon she picked up the paperback copy of
Goldfinger
I was reading, started turning the pages, stopping here and there to skim a passage. When she finally put it down, she was in full big-sister mode. “Why do you waste your time reading this crap?”

I was annoyed. “Because it’s entertaining. I like it. That’s good enough for me.”

“No, it isn’t good enough for you. That’s my point. It’s idiotic. James Bond boinking women with names like Pussy Galore. How old is the guy who wrote it? Ten?”

In my defence, I dredged up something I had heard or read somewhere. “President Kennedy loved James Bond. If it was good enough for the leader of the Free World, it’s good enough for me.”

“Yeah, but he had already got to where he was going. He was entitled to do a little slumming. You, on the other hand, seem pretty much to be spinning your wheels.”

That was the problem with Sabrina; she had an answer for everything.

But mostly things went smoothly between us. At her prodding, I even started to read some of her favourite books that she borrowed for me from the library because, needless to say, I had never bothered to get a card. Sometimes we talked
about them. An air of quiet domesticity established itself. Sabrina even began to do a little housecleaning, occasional vacuuming, giving the bathroom a swab, putting things back in place that I left lying around.

During our supper conversations I relaxed, did start to open up, did say a few things that, when voiced out loud, took on an air of plausibility. I even volunteered that maybe going into business would be the thing for me. “I like math; my marks are all right in geometry and algebra,” I said modestly. “What’s business but numbers and figures?”

Sabrina pursed her lips. “I don’t know. I think business is more than that. More than numbers and figures,” she said. “It seems to me you’ve got to be a tough nut in business, be ready to use people without thinking about it too much. You need to be selfish.”

I didn’t say I suspected I was just that, selfish. The thought made me uncomfortable so I switched the spotlight to her. “And you? You never say anything about what you want to do once you beat it out of Groveland. What are you going to be good at?”

“I could be good at a lot of things.” Sabrina could say something like that without sounding conceited. On her lips it was a statement of fact, hardly different from declaring,
I weigh 123 pounds
. “I don’t know. I like to draw and paint.”

I was incredulous. “You mean you want to paint pictures for a living?”

“I said I didn’t know. Just something different. Not run of the mill,” she said, suddenly irritable.

We left it at that.