The Dwelling: A Novel (31 page)

What?

When he looked back, the kids were gone.

He twisted his head to see as much of the hedge along the side of the house as was possible, but there was no sign of them. He opened his mouth to call them, trading glances between where the two had stood and where the boy had pointed. He stuck his head up close to the screen, but they were gone.

They disappeared.
He kept looking for them, twisting his head on his neck to see as far along the house as possible, but they were nowhere to be seen. They’d run away when he looked the other way.

Not enough time.
His glance away from the hedge had been nothing, a shifting of his eyes.

They disappeared. Because they weren’t there.
His mind had played a trick. With unease, he turned away from the window. His eyes landed on his closed door.

He got up and opened it. He ate his pudding looking out into the hall, almost as if he were expecting to see something.

Barbara sat on the couch in the quiet living room for half an hour. She only cried for a few minutes, but the tears had served what the lashing-out at Petey had not: she had calmed down.

After several minutes of staring blankly out of the front window, looking barely out past the hedge, feeling both terrible and better, she got up. It was time to start supper.

The door to the goodie cupboard was still open. As she went to shut it, mentally going over the preparations for dinner, she glanced inside.

What she saw: Kraft Dinner. Alphaghetti. Bugs ’n’ Dirt. The space where the puddings had been was empty. A can of Pringles had been jammed into the back beside a jar of chocolate spread. Quik-drink mix. Kool-Aid (with added sugar, no more measuring!). Even the tinned fruits were in syrup rather than juice.

She stared into the cupboard as though seeing food for the first time. She reached in and pulled out a bag of Gummy Bears. The label said they were made with real fruit juice. The miniature boxes of juice also claimed
(claimed?)
to be made with real fruit. Weren’t they? Weren’t they
supposed
to be made of fruit? An opened bag on the bottom shelf spilled Reese’s peanut-butter cups, only two left. When had she bought those? Saturday morning when she went for milk. Three mini-Oreo bags were missing, too, and those were supposed to be for lunches (but she didn’t watch, did she?). The case of Coke she’d bought on Saturday was also nearly gone, and she’d bought those for herself. A bag of cookies had not been properly shut, and when she reached out to close it she found it empty. A whole
bag!
She hadn’t had even one.

This was the form her mothering had taken.

Oh god I’m sorry I’m so sorry.

Barbara closed her eyes and pressed her forehead for a moment against the hard, cool edge of the pantry door, pressing until she could feel a mark forming. Her lips felt numb, her stomach/womb—something—full of stones. It lasted just for a moment.

She could throw it away. Throw it out into the garbage: that was what it was, after all. Junk. She could pull jars and bags and boxes and packets of sugar-laden, fat-laden foods, useless but for the soothing quality of the fat as it rolled over your tongue and slid down your throat, kissing visceral boo-boos away when your mother was weeping in the bathroom with the door locked until supper. When your mother is sitting in her lawyer’s office begging for some way to hurt
really hurt
your father. For when your mother stares at the wall for two hours, her mind a blank except for pain. Pain. Pain.

How many times had he come to her in the last year, when she sat in her fog.
Mom?
And she had looked up at him seeing not her son at all but Dennis’s face. And how many times had she answered with,
I bought some ice cream would you like some?
How many trips to the grocery store had been for junk food? She herself had gained twenty pounds since that first horrible night that she’d learned about the affair. How many suppers had been canned spaghetti, Kraft Dinner, beans on toast with hot dogs, served singly because she had no appetite and it was easier to just open something for him? How many? How many nights had he eaten alone in the kitchen and where had she been? How many late nights had Barbara looked up from the television to find that a whole Sara Lee cake was gone? How many times had there been only half a cake to start with? How many times had she come across Petey in the kitchen, in front of the open fridge, spooning cake, ice cream, pudding into his mouth, a vague blank expression on his face, chewing incessantly…eyes half hooded in something akin to pleasure? Or maybe just a brief absence of pain.

Oh god. Fat kid they called him.
Her fault.

She could throw it out.

Her eyes drifted away from the cupboard to the little window that looked out into the backyard. The tangles of bush and dead flowers that were there would bloom soon. There was a lot of work to be done in the yard. She could throw out all the junk, and they could start eating the right things. She could make Petey help her in the yard. They could go bike riding. She could talk him into Little League, or at least swimming lessons. She could start right that moment.

The kid had so few pleasures.
Cruel to be kind.

Barbara closed the door on the pantry and started supper. Upstairs she heard water running into the tub, splashing as it hit what sounded like a half-full bath. A few seconds later the accustomed
pop!
and the sound of water draining. She ignored it. They were having pork chops.

“Do any of the kids from school live on the street?”

Petey jumped. “Huh?”

“Do any of the kids from school live here, on our street? Anyone you might like to invite over?” He stared at her, his forehead furrowed. She thought he was thinking about it. He was thinking about the kids he’d seen in the yard. He hadn’t mentioned it to her. There had been little conversation.

Petey’s grounding lasted only until supper time, and while she hadn’t relented on calling Jeremy, she’d let him watch TV. He was watching
Sabrina the Teenaged Witch.
It was a rerun. He hated it anyway.

“No,” he said slowly, after carefully judging her face, deciding if she was trying to get him to tell her something. “Nobody.”

In the dark of his bedroom, Petey dreamed.

Come play.

Peter stood at the edge of a wide field overgrown with witchgrass. It was summer, or at least the sun was high and bright: he could feel himself squinting against it, the corners of his eyes getting sore with the effort.

“Peter!” someone shouted. In the middle of the field a little girl waved. She smiled widely. The hand that waved held a bundle of grass that she had braided into a sheaf.
Come play!
she called. Other voices rang out. Singing? From behind the girl came an older boy. Peter shrank back, but the boy smiled and waved.
Come on!
he yelled.
You’re missing it!

He’d waved back, suddenly realizing he was smiling. They wanted him to join them. To come play. He started across the field, feeling the witchgrass slapping at his hands as he ran.

He topped a rise in the field and looked out over the expanse of grass. He felt like he could see for miles. The girl giggled and ran, waving him to follow. Behind her were other kids, all of them different ages. There was the older boy, maybe as old as twelve, and four other boys. There was only one girl, and she was about five. Her hair was wispy and soft like a baby’s. Her dress reached to her knees and past, he couldn’t really tell: the wind blew it every which way so that it never looked the same way twice.

Come play. Come play.
The six of them formed a circle and chanted it.
Peter, come and play with us.

He got over the rise and ran the rest of the way. The circle broke to let him join in. The hands on either side of him were warm. On his left was the older boy, the leader of the group. “We like you, Peter,” he said, and his voice was like singing.

They spun around in their circle, laughing when it made them dizzy.

The girl made a circlet of her braided witchgrass and put it over Peter’s wrist. It was scratchy. “If it itches, it means you love me,” she said coquettishly, although Peter didn’t have a word for it. “Does it itch?”

“Yes.”

“You can stay here forever,” she said. He nodded happily. Yes. Yes.

They raced across the grass, the sting of it nice on his legs. He looked down at the grass, so tall, and wondered where they were, and saw that he wore his pajamas and was embarrassed.

“It’s okay,” one of the other boys said.
Ethan is his name,
Peter thought clearly. Ethan. He opened his arms as if to show Peter what he wore and Peter saw that his pants were too short and one knee was gone. It made Peter smile.

“Let’s run!” The six of them ran together, collapsing in a pile.

“You can come all the time!” the little girl said. “You can even bring your mama.”

The others nodded.

From far away there was a booming sound. The six children looked up when it sounded. They jumped up. Peter didn’t.

“We have to go!” said the oldest boy, Jack. The girl was Mariette. They ran away.

Come back!
he shouted. They turned and looked, but only waved. They were all smiling at him. They were disappearing into the distance while Peter lay in the deep grass, trying hard to follow them with his eyes because he could not move.

Your mother is calling you,
he heard Mariette say, deep in his ear, even though she was a speck in the distance.
Your mama is calling.

“Time to get up, Peter.”

He opened his eyes to morning and the smell of witchgrass in his bedroom.

There were three jobs in Monday’s paper that Barbara thought she might have a shot at.

She took over one end of the long dining-room table, a fresh package of printer paper—she wasn’t even sure they sold typing paper anymore, but the twenty-year-old clerk had assured her that they were one and the same—opened next to her portable typewriter from college. Among the things stashed in the attic she had found a dried up bottle of Wite-Out, useless, and Correct-It tape, also likely dried out, but she wasn’t about to scour the city searching for antiquities. She would just have to be careful, and accurate.

Two of the ads were her “safe bets”: they were in childcare. At very least, she could claim eight years’ experience. Her work history over the last ten years was sketchy to nonexistent. She didn’t even have a résumé, résumés not being a necessary requirement in the volunteer sector. That was all she was going to have for previous experience, and she was smart enough to know how to play it up. She’d had some good volunteer positions, including an impressive year during which she (almost) single-handedly organized the “Festival of Learning,” a combination career-symposium-cum-adult-education-cum-elder-learning weekend at the community center in their neighborhood the year Petey turned three. She would see what she could make of that. The other job was slightly more interesting, a part-time secretarial position in a church office only a couple of blocks from the house. That would not only be more interesting than the day-cares, but also was close enough (and had boasted “flexible hours”) so that her own childcare requirements might be nil. It would be ironic if she had to hire childcare during the week so that she could care for other people’s children, but she had to do something.

There was twenty thousand dollars in savings and another two thousand in checking. She had some mutual funds and other small investments, and Petey’s child support was just under five hundred dollars a month. All of it was adequate for now, but not for long. She had to get a start, some experience, so that she could move on. Work was good for the soul.

The typewriter was a very old manual, and in addition to noting her poor, mostly forgotten manual skills, she noted with dismay how old-fashioned and small the letters were, as made by the keys. The secretarial ad had suggested that a knowledge of computers was an asset, but not essential. She hoped that meant she didn’t have to have a home computer to qualify. While she wasn’t exactly computer literate, she had rarely used theirs when she’d had the opportunity. Dennis had gotten the computer.

Does he have a jewelry box, personal drawer, something like that?
The morning after Dennis had left, after Petey had gone to school so that he wouldn’t see his dad walking out with a suitcase and have to explain, Barbara got on the phone to Debra, hysterical by then, having watched Dennis leave without so much as a backward glance. In fact, his very walk to the car had seemed…jaunty.

Right from the start Deb had insisted there was another woman. Barbara, smug and foolish, had claimed vehemently that he would never do that, bolstered with a petulant, and in retrospect, naive
I would know.

She underscored her name on the résumé and decided after the fact that she should have centered it. She yanked the paper out and carefully added another sheet, beautiful, clean, white and centered and underscored her name; then her address, 362 Belisle Street. It looked strange and unfamiliar on the page.

There had been nothing in his drawer or in the little wooden box that Barbara had given him for Christmas around the time Petey was four. Debra stayed on the phone and coached her through the little pieces of paper, the search through the jacket pockets of his suits, his shoeboxes on the floor in the back of the closet, and made her shake books from his side of the bed table. She was astounded at the variety of hiding places Debra came up with, and began, by osmosis almost, to feel suspicious herself. She would never have thought to look in his books. What a tremendous hiding place they would have made. But there had been nothing.

What else has he got that’s only his, that only he uses?

She filled in her education, excluding her dates of graduation, a moot point since she had added her date and year of birth. She toyed with the idea of starting over again, putting her vitals (other than the pertinent like her address) at the end of the résumé, after she’d dazzled them with her abilities.