Greedy Little Eyes (13 page)

I started down the steps, paused, and then took them as quick as I could. “Daddy?”

He kept moving around the edge of the lawn, touching the flowers.

“Daddy!”

He turned finally and smiled. “Hello. Are you here to see me?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked softly as I came near and draped my arm across his back.

“Suzette. Oh, look at you, you’ve grown your hair again. A woman with long hair is—”

“Daddy, it’s me. Clarisse.” I steered him toward the house.

“Who?”

We walked up the steps. “Clarisse. I’m your daughter.”

He giggled and told me he didn’t have a daughter.

“Yes, you do, you big silly. This is your house and I’m Clarisse, your little girl, except I’m big now, remember?”

“Where’s Suzette?”

I brought him through the door. “Suzette passed away.”

“What?”

I sat him at the kitchen table.

“Suzette died, Daddy.”

“No, that’s not true.” His eyes pleaded with me until they shone.

I felt sick. For him she was still alive and I had killed her in three words. Why hadn’t I said she was at the movies, or she’d gone on a cruise? I touched his sleeve. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Who would want to kill Suzette?” He began to sob.

This was something else again now, a reference to an aunt I’d never met who had been murdered back in Quebec when she was a teenager—a memory from before I was born.

“Nobody hurt Suzette. Remember? She got breast cancer. She didn’t hurt; we got her good drugs and we told her jokes and she was happy right up till the end.” Then I started to cry, too.

Old enough to be our grandmother, my father’s sister, Suzette, had moved into the house after my mother died and raised us herself. According to Suzette, my father was numb the first two or three years of our lives, mumbling day after day to his sister about his wife’s youth, how he’d had twenty-five years’ more time on this earth than she did, how he should have called an ambulance right away.

I came first, Suzette told me, at seven o’clock in the evening, slipping toward the birth canal as my mother’s cervix dilated in an unexpected yawn. No time to get a doctor, no time for much of anything. She’d been arguing for a natural birth all along and now her babies were coming and there was nothing anyone could do to thwart her plans.

My mother had been lying on the couch listening as Aunt Suzette read aloud from an old Nora Ephron essay about Ayn Rand. Suzette hollered down the hall to my father, “See, I told you, Marcel, it’s Ayn Rand, pronounced
ine
not
anne
—Ayn rhymes with
pine
! It says so right here.” She shook her head at my mother. “He never listens to me. He’s always so sure he’s right.”

My mother screamed. Suzette laughed until her eyes bugged in realization. She called out to my father, who bellowed, “All right, I get it, I’m wrong!” But Mother continued to scream as the ocean in which my brother and I had been floating for eight months and two weeks chopped
and heaved around us, then drained in a rush, leaving us heaped on each other, clammy and agitated in her belly.

Finally my father rushed in and, seeing his young wife, the flooded couch, he picked up the phone. My mother cried and laughed at once and told him to put it down, said she could feel us wrestling with each other, trying to wriggle free—we would be out any minute. My father announced that he was going to call an ambulance anyway, but before he could do much of anything my soft head began to nose from her body.

Suzette says I hesitated as though making sure it was the best move, then came all at once in a slippery rush. When they saw what was coming after me it became clear from whom I was rushing. What they feared might be a deformity was actually James’s hand; his red fingers had an iron grip on my ankle. The fingers could not be pried loose and it was thought, at first, that we were conjoined. Suzette shouted for my father to cut the cord, to make sure I was breathing, while she worked to free James, fearing for my brother’s neck—with an arm and shoulder coming first, his head might snap sideways.

There was no laughter now; my mother’s screams grew to a cataclysmic pitch. My father called the ambulance while Aunt Suzette tried to pry James’s fingers from my ankle, to no avail. She then reached her small hand inside and manipulated his head and shoulders, tried to make them slide out together. Squealing, she pulled her hand from my mother, claiming something had bitten her. Till the day she died she would not be persuaded that my brother had no teeth.

My father hung up the phone, picked it up again, put it down. He knelt by my mother and looked up at the ceiling, praying for help, his atheist leanings set aside for the moment. His wife’s pelvis began to buck, guttural howls wailing from her body, as James’s head emerged in a tide of blood, his body lurching out, dragging the walls of his former home with him.

Our mother died before the ambulance arrived, James still holding fast to my ankle and the uterus he refused to leave behind.

My father blamed himself and he blamed James, who he believed embodied everything terrible he’d had to carve from his own soul before he was good enough to meet someone like our mother. For the first few years he wanted nothing to do with his son for fear he might try to beat his own demons out of the boy.

On our sixth birthday, Aunt Suzette hired a clown named Cheeno for the party. Cheeno was clever and silly and made a dizzying array of balloon creations. Our friends all told us it was the best party ever as they traipsed down the sidewalk after it was over, balloon bracelets on their wrists, balloon swords in their hands. Cheeno stayed behind, and James and I were stunned to discover that it was our own mumbling, sad father under all that greasepaint.

It was something of a turning point, this sort of whimsy. Prior to the birthday party, our father had been
a ghost to us, a nine-to-five, depressed, alcoholic ghost who avoided us at all costs. Now we begged circuitously through Suzette for clown lessons, and suddenly James and I had something in common with this man we hardly knew.

Daddy earnestly taught us how to twist and squeeze the long airy tubes into puppies and dragons and daisies. He showed us how a clown applies makeup using a template made especially for his or her face, how to trace each feature so that the clown-face was the same every time. We were enthralled. Nothing could break our focus from these magic secrets, secrets we kept from other children as though their release could mean the end of the world.

Still, our clown lessons were about the only times we got near our father. Outside clowning, his sorrow never lifted. And if it’s true that depression is only anger turned inward, James grew into a more extroverted version of our father. There were no moody silences in James, just broken windows, schoolyard fights, stealing and cursing and yelling.

The final blow-up came when we were twelve. James and I had been arguing all the way home from school, James yelling that I thought I was better than him, me saying I didn’t think any such thing. I did explain, however, that if he would just act more like me in the first place, he wouldn’t get into the trouble he was always in.

“Like getting suspended today, for example,” I threw at him as we came into the house. “What you did to that boy was extortion. You’re an extortionist.”

Livid that I’d nailed him with an insult he’d never heard of, James told me to shut my trap and gave me a good shove. I turned and slapped him the way any decent movie heroine would. He tried to retaliate with a swing, but missed and called me a bitch.

I replied with, “Asswipe!”

He took another lunge but I knew his moves better than he did. His knuckles slammed into the wall and the look on his face sent me into paroxysms of laughter. Tears started to come as I cackled “Asswipe” again for its pleasing sibilance. James’s face shone like a blister. Seeing him lose control—the rage, the seething fury—always gave me a greater sense of accomplishment than anything else in my world.

His eyes flicked sideways and filled with hope. I saw the baseball bat leaning against the wall and took off down the hall. He grabbed it and tore after me through the kitchen and back into the front room.

His first swing took out a lamp. It was old with a faded shade and only worked now and then, but it had belonged to our mother. The shock of its body exploding against the bat, falling to the floor in pieces, stunned us into temporary paralysis, our mouths stuck in an O, our arms frozen mid-air.

Aunt Suzette called down from upstairs. Our father called from the back porch.

James moved first, his eyes darting up from the shattered lamp as he hissed, “It’s your fault—you’re
dead
!”

I backed up. They were going to get him for this and he was going to get me first. He moved slowly,
matching me step for step. We could hear my aunt coming down the stairs and our father coming through the kitchen, and we both leapt into motion, me rushing toward the bay window, James hurtling after me just as Suzette and Daddy’s shock pierced the room. Their voices worked like a cattle prod on James and he swung the bat, missing my head and smashing the window.

Daddy had hold of him before he could even drop the bat. He grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the wall three times, cracking a picture frame’s glass with my brother’s head before tossing him down on the floor. The baseball bat lay near him. Our father picked it up and held it in both hands over James as though he were about to batter his son to a pulp.

“Marcel!” Aunt Suzette screamed.

He glared down at my brother. “You’ve been rotten from the start. You’ve always been rotten! I should have drowned you like a rat the first time I saw you!”

“Enough!” Suzette yanked the baseball bat away from our father and ordered him out like a dog. Stone-faced, he turned and left the room.

Suzette pulled James up off the floor, took his head in her hands and looked into his eyes, feeling around for injury, asking if he was all right. He solemnly nodded. She started to cry, to beg him, “Why? Why?”

She tossed me a look. I was still cowering by the broken window.

When she turned back to James, he shouted, “Why can’t I be like Clarisse? Clarisse is a fucking saint!”

She grabbed him by the muzzle. “If you ever speak to me that way again, you’re on your own. Whoever wants you can have at you!”

If she was talking about our father, she needn’t have worried. It was the first time we’d ever seen his temper and it would be the last. So shocked was he with himself, so afraid of the reflection he saw when he looked into James’s face that day, that he went away to France, to the resort town where he’d met his vacationing bride-to-be back when he was still clowning.

It would be eight years before we saw him again.

I set a cup of tea in front of him. “Daddy, maybe I should call Mountainview. I bet they’re worried.”

He sipped from his cup. “You’re a very nice girl. Are you French?”

“French Canadian.” I smiled. “On my father’s side.” I got up to get the phone just as the front door opened and James came ploughing through.

“Goddamn pigs!” He dropped everything in the usual heap. “Pigs!”