Authors: Susan Palwick
“I have to leave now,” I said. Jane hated me. I could tell from the way she looked at me, her face perfectly still and her jaw clenched; she’d beat me into a pulp if Myrna weren’t holding her, and she’d be right to do it. I’d made her promise not to tell about the ladder, and then I’d gone and told about the boat. I was slimier than Snarky’s dead skunk.
“Wait,” Myrna said. “Emma, it’s a great gift to realize when you’re in danger. It’s an even greater gift to be able to get yourself out of it. We all need to know how to do both of those things. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, and ran out of the kitchen. There was no way I could get myself out of it. He’d outthought me a long time ago.
On my way out I collided with Tom. He’d been coming in the front door and I hadn’t even seen him, because I was so desperate to get out of the house that I hadn’t been looking at what was in front of me. He was wearing smelly work clothing, and when I ran into his stomach he grabbed my shoulders and said in his characteristic near-bellow, “Whoa. Whoa there, little Emma! What’s the hurry?”
“I’m late for dinner,” I said, and wrenched myself away from him. I couldn’t stand anything about him: his hands or his stink or the way you could hear his heavy breathing under each syllable whenever he spoke. How could Jane and Myrna stand to listen to him breathing like that?
“Careful,” he told me, laughing, and moved aside to let me pass. I skittered across the porch and down the steps, and tripped and fell spectacularly onto the Hallorans’ front walk. My palms and one knee took all my weight, and I lay collapsed on all fours for a moment, stunned and helpless, Tom Halloran would see me lying here and come pick me up, and I wouldn’t be able to run away from him because I couldn’t even stand—
But he had evidently already gone into the kitchen, because I heard his voice from the back of the house. “Karate lessons again, Myrna? Jane, you’re wet. And why did Emma Gray just go streaking out of here like a bat out of hell?”
Myrna murmured something I couldn’t make out, and then Jane’s voice rose, wounded and angry. “If you’d heard what she
said—
”
“What?” Tom’s voice was sharper now. “She insulted you? What?”
Myrna was murmuring again and I was on my feet, somehow, my hands scraped raw and my knee oozing blood through torn denim. I half-ran, half-limped the few feet home, afraid I’d hear Jane in pursuit at any moment. My father’s car wasn’t in the driveway; he was still at the hospital, then, and I wouldn’t have to explain why I looked this way. Good.
But Mom was home, sitting at our huge polished wooden dining room table. In front of her were two lit candles, a bud vase with a single white rose in it, and a sheet of paper. She’d taken her hair down, and it shone reddish gold in the candlelight. She jumped when I came in, and stared as if I were the ghost, and swept the paper into her lap. Poetry, no doubt. The stuff she wrote to Ginny. I’d found some of it once when I’d been looking for the key, but for all the hours Mom spent on it, she wasn’t giving Tennyson much competition. Lots of angels and flowers, and Ginny a bland simpering presence amongst them. Even if I only wrote poetry about dumb TV shows, I knew that Mom’s stuff was fifth-rate Hallmark card.
“Sorry,” I said, breathless. “Did I interrupt your seance?” She was eating cottage cheese and honeydew melon from our best china, and her fork was part of the solid sterling set that had been her mother’s. She ate by candlelight whenever she could, but she must have been feeling really snooty about the Hallorans’ vegetables, if she couldn’t even use normal plates. “I didn’t mean to break the mood, Mom.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, standing up and snapping her napkin. She clutched the piece of paper in her other hand. “I wasn’t expecting you home, that’s all.” She took a step closer, peering at me in the flickering light, and said, “My god, Emma—what have you done to yourself?”
“I fell on the Hallorans’ steps.”
I was expecting a lecture about how Ginny never would have been clumsy enough to fall down a few steps, but instead she said, “Well, that’s hardly a surprise. Their property’s a gigantic obstacle course. Myrna Halloran didn’t even offer to clean you up? She’s a nurse, isn’t she?”
“She didn’t know I fell,” I said. “I was leaving their house. I came straight home.” Aren’t you going to offer to clean me up? You’re my mother, aren’t you?
She sighed. “You’re certainly a mess. Go into the bathroom and scrub those scrapes out with peroxide. You didn’t break anything, did you?”
If Jane had come home bleeding, Myrna would have cleaned the wound herself, as gently and quickly as possible because she knew it hurt. She cleaned everyone’s cuts that way. But I couldn’t go to Myrna, because I’d tattled on Jane.
“No,” I said, and limped into the bathroom. I was gingerly dabbing at the deepest scrape with a washcloth when I heard the front door slam. He was home. I started working faster, too fast, scrubbing even though it made me wince and cry, because the last thing in the world I wanted was for him to do it.
“What a nice surprise,” Mom said, her voice suddenly high and girlish. “Everyone’s back early tonight. I thought you had emergency surgery?”
“The appendix ruptured. The internal medicine people waited too long to make their diagnosis, as usual. We can’t operate until the patient stabilizes. Emma’s here too, I take it?”
I opened the bathroom door and walked out into the hallway. “Hi,” I said. “I fell, but I cleaned the cuts. I have a math test tomorrow and I have to study, so I’m going to the library—”
“You’re going to eat dinner first, young lady. Especially since your father’s home. You don’t get to see him very often.”
That’s because I don’t look. I wish I couldn’t hear him, either. “Don’t I get a hug?” he asked.
You get too many. But I gave him one of those quick, wooden embraces reserved for people you have to be nice to, and he laughed. “That’s a little better. How’d you hurt yourself?”
Don’t you remember? It was only this morning. “I told you: I fell.”
“She tripped down the Hallorans’ steps,” my mother called from the kitchen. “They probably had a loose board or a nail sticking up or something. Maybe you should give her a tetanus shot.”
He’d be delighted if I got tetanus. Then I’d have lockjaw and couldn’t tell anybody anything, and I’d lose weight the way he wanted me to. And I’d die, like Ginny. Maybe then Mom would love me.
He’d seated himself in one of the dining room chairs, where he sprawled, langorous and handsome in the candlelight, as sleek and long-boned as one of those men you see in ads for expensive cars. “Mmmmph,” he said, pretending to listen to Mom, but he was watching me, staring at me the way Tad had stared at Jane. Even if he stopped breathing in my bedroom, even if he never made me bleed again, I’d never be able to get away from his eyes.
“And she’s a nurse,” my mother complained, with a vigorous rattle of saucepans. “Living in that filth—”
I found my voice for a moment, hoping conversation would make him stop looking at me. “It’s not filth, Mom. It’s just mess.”
My mother snorted. “I’m sure you feel completely at home there, Emma, the way you keep your room.”
He still watched me with a faint smile, absentmindedly rubbing one thigh exactly the way Tad had. I started to shake, and the smile deepened, “Well,” he said, “Myrna can’t be very serious about nursing, or she’d be working at the hospital, instead of babysitting children with runny noses and scraped elbows.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said hoarsely. “That’s like saying that no one who knew anything about poetry would teach junior-high English instead of high school or college.”
Come on, Mom. Start talking about the importance of education. Help me distract him. Please…but I wasn’t even sure she’d heard me in the clatter of dishes, and my father only looked amused. “That’s not a bad point, Emma.”
Trapped. Trapped. I’d been disagreeing with him, but he was going to make it look like I’d been insulting Mom’s intelligence.
“Yes it is,” I said. “It’s wrong. You have to teach kids things when they’re young—”
He threw his head back and laughed soundlessly, shaking with mirth but doing it so discreetly that Mom would never hear it from the kitchen, any more than she heard the predawn gasping in my bedroom. “Literature,” I said, shaking in earnest now. “Nutrition and stuff. That’s what I was talking about—”
“Nutrition,” Mom said proudly, carrying a steaming platter into the dining room, and I remembered our conversation that morning, several lifetimes ago. She was congratulating herself on how well she fed me again. “A good hearty pot roast; I thought I’d have to save it for Sunday dinner, but since everyone’s home—”
She was cut short by a bellow from next door.
“No,” Tom Halloran said, projecting as clearly as if he were speaking through a bullhorn, “No, Janie’s not going to apologize and I’m bloody damn well not paying your dental bills! Now get the hell off my porch!”
“Heavens,” my father said, raising both eyebrows. “What’s all this about?”
“Whatever it is,” Mom said, “it sounds too good to miss.” She put down the roast and blew out the candles so that the room was completely dark, and then moved to the window and pulled aside the Morris-patterned drapes. I reluctantly moved to stand next to her, unwilling to be alone in any unlighted room with my father. Edward Ewmet, even less appetizing than his son—would Tad be that hunched and bald when he was older?—stood wringing his hands on the Hallorans’ front steps. His melodious voice, the pride of the local Lutheran church where he was a deacon, was too soft to understand, but the tone managed to be both obsequious and condescending.
“Ooh,” my mother said, “Oh, he’s just like Uriah Heep, isn’t he? Look at him!”
“And Tom Halloran’s like Falstaff,” my father answered. He’d come up behind us; his hand brushed the back of my neck, and I jerked away from him as if I’d been shot. “He’s going to have a real beaut of a coronary one of these days. I hope Myrna’s taken out a good life insurance policy on him.”
Another melodious murmur from Ewmet wafted across the lawn, interrupted by an even louder bellow from Tom. “Now look here, man: if you’d done that you’d be called a child molester and thrown in jail and butt-fucked by a bunch of jailbirds—and probably get your jewels sliced off and stuffed in your ears, “cause they don’t like child molesters either! If you can’t teach your kid not to do things that’ll get him thrown in jail when he grows up it’s your own damn problem. Don’t expect me to feel sorry for him,”
“Emma,” my mother said, “what’s been going on over there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really? Jane doesn’t tell you about her little adventures? I thought you were with her after school?”
“I told you, I don’t know anything.”
My father had started his soundless laughter again. His hand, as persistent as the mosquito you never manage to kill, the one whose whine drones through all your summer nightmares, casually brushed my back. I leaned forward as if to hear better, trying to get away from him, wondering if he could smell my sweat and the stink of blood underneath it. Yes, of course he could. He’d described the smell of the operating room once, the sharp scent of disinfectant mixing with the metallic tang of blood, the reek of cauterized flesh.
“The same
age
?” roared Tom Halloran. “They’re the same age, and that’s supposed to excuse it? Oh, that’s a good one. So he’s only going to molest women his own age when he grows up: real model citizen you’re raising here, you know that?”
Ewmet’s words, raised from murmur to whine, became audible now. “But he’s only a child! He didn’t know any better!”
“So’s Janie only a child,” said Tom Halloran, “and she taught him better, didn’t she? For that matter, she bloody well saved his life, which is a good sight more than I’d have done in her position. While you’re teaching your boy not to molest the ladies, you’d better teach him to swim,”
Ewmet, as red-faced and spluttering as if he’d just been hauled out of the lake himself, said, “Well, sir, I didn’t want to say this, but if you send your girl out in this warm weather without a bra—”
“Oh?” answered Tom Halloran, rising on his toes. “Oh, excuse me, and if I do that—what does it mean,
sir
? That the neighborhood is thereby invited to grope her howsomuchever they desire?”
“One can’t blame the boys for presuming—”
“Yes,” Tom Halloran said, “one can. One can blame
your
boy for being a rude little shit. Billy Washoe didn’t try to grope Janie, and he’s the same age your Tad is! What you can’t do,
sir
, is blame my girl for defending herself. And you can’t blame her for not wearing some asinine piece of clothing she doesn’t need and doesn’t like. If Janie walked outside buck naked and somebody touched her without her permission, she could knock all his teeth down his throat and I’d tell her she was right to do it! And if you give me any more bullshit, I’m going to do the same thing to you she did to your asswipe son, you bastard! Get out of here!”
Ewmet got, muttering hostilities over his shoulder. Next to me, my mother shook her head; my father, chuckling, stood behind us, an arm around each of us. “Well,” he said. “That was quite a show, wasn’t it?”
“What horrible people,” Mom said. “That man must drink, the way he screams all the time. You were over there, Emma. Was he drunk?”
“No, Mom.” This was one of my mother’s pet theories about Tom Halloran, and she never listened when I told her she was wrong. “I keep telling you that. He gets drunk about as often as Dad does.”
I’d never seen my father drink at all. Sometimes I wished he would, even though I knew it made other fathers mean; maybe he might have slept more. But my mother took a step backwards, as spooked as one of Aunt Diane’s horses in a thunderstorm, and said, “What did you mean by that? Tell me why you said that! Who—”
“Pam! Take it easy. She didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t even born then, remember? She was just talking. Would you please relax?”
“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing, Emma. She’s not talking about anything.” My father’s hand brushed my hip and I shoved it away, but it came back.