And when he came back in from outside, he simply looked like he was in one of his brooding states. When he sat, his elbows dug forlornly into his navy knees.
—Were you with him that night? Eleanor said.
I stuttered and she cocked the gun. I couldn’t believe it. She repeated the question angrily.
—Yes, I said. We had drinks and he walked me home.
—Do you remember him taking a phone call?
I nodded.
—I called to tell him Mom tried to kill herself. I called from the hospital in Anguilla that looked like a run-down motel and nobody wore gloves and Robbie was screaming so loud, Momma’s dead, Momma’s dead, and beating himself and slamming his head against a wall over and over and I was so scared, and I want to know, did my father take the phone call before or after he walked you home?
She was crying and her face was mottled, white and red. I thought about what to say. I almost always lied. Did that make me a bad person? I don’t know the answer.
—Answer the question, she said, her hands trembling with the gun. If you lie to me, I’ll fucking kill you so slow, man!
—He walked me home, I whispered, after he found out your mom tried to kill herself.
19
MY FATHER RETURNED TO THE Poconos the following afternoon. In my memory it was the sunniest day. They asked me if I would like to get dropped off at the pool. Later I would realize it was because they needed to talk, but in the moment I remember thinking they were going to have sex. Sex defined their relationship, at least in my mind.
I couldn’t believe they were willing to drop me off without supervision. I was excited by the prospect but more so wounded. My mother had exiled me from her bed the previous night. And now this. That was when it dawned on me, the unsettling feeling that my parents’ lives did not revolve around me. I’d grown up thinking I was the center of their world. Even when my mother yelled at me or locked me out of her bedroom, it was because I had the power to infuriate her. It was because she loved me. It could be argued that my learning it when I did, at the age of ten, was perfect timing. Old enough to have experienced cozy solipsism for many years, young enough to change the way I walked through the world. To be cautious.
I went to my room and put on my black two-piece with the Technicolor butterflies. I applied coconut-flavored lip gloss and clopped out in my wood and leather Candies with kitten heels. I said, I want to go to the Top of the World.
My father acquiesced and took me to the rich pool. Rich! To think of it now. Perhaps it was the drab tiki bar that attracted me. All my life I have been charmed by the trappings of the South Seas. I’ve looked for establishments with lighted puffer fish in tanks, with towering fake palms, rock walls, and outriggers dripping down from the painted ceilings. And it started with that tiki bar at the Top of the World.
In the car my father was not himself. And yet my father was always my father in a way that my mother was not always my mother. There were hours, entire days, that my mother was an individual apart from me. I think it’s mostly because of this—and not the devastation that would happen very early the next morning—that I thought I would always love my father more.
—You’re not going to leave the pool area, you understand?
—Yes, Daddy. What if I want a snack?
—I’m giving you five dollars. You can buy a snack and eat it in the pool area.
What he didn’t know was that there was no traditional snack bar at the rich pool, only a vending machine indoors, up two flights of sapphire stairs. It wasn’t part of the pool area. Only the tiki bar was in the pool area. I was always making sure to follow rules, but I knew how to bend them. They were so strict, and my mother was so observant, but there were hours, like I said, when her eyes were closed to me, and these were the hours I figured out how to lighten my arm hair and have an orgasm.
—Daddy, I’m sorry about Grandma.
He kept his eyes on the tree-lined roads ahead. He nodded and swallowed.
—She’s going to be fine, he said. My father accepted succor from no one. I can’t imagine what it was like for a man like him to know his elderly mother was raped. To what extent the reel of that scene would play in his mind.
—Is she… scraped up?
—Not too bad.
—Does it look like she fell down some stairs?
He looked at me. He had no conception of what I knew. Fathers never know that about their daughters. Partly it’s because they don’t want to know, but really it’s because they cannot know. It’s psychologically dangerous to see inside your daughter’s brain. And I knew so much more than most girls my age because of the way I listened.
—Tonight do you want to go to dinner at Villa Volpe?
—Yes!
—Maybe just the two of us? We’ll give Mommy a break, let her take it easy at home.
My shoulders fell far down beneath my neck. I nodded. I longed for something that was in the past, only I didn’t know it yet. Vic once said to me, Families are silly. The whole concept is silly. He said that because he didn’t want his family. But he would have wanted one with me. Me and him at the supermarket, pushing around a pudgy Vic Jr. in a cart, buying grape tomatoes.
We pulled into the parking lot. I was saddened by the glass of sunlight on the macadam, by the fake smile on my father’s goateed mouth. He would have died for me, but because he was a man, he didn’t know how he was hurting me by doing the things he thought had nothing to do with his daughter.
—I’ll pick you up at four thirty. Right here. The car will be right here, but I want you to wait inside the gate, do you understand?
—Yes.
—No disobeying.
—No disobeying, I repeated. He kissed my forehead.
I brought the book I was reading. All the books I read were hand-me-downs from my parents. My mother’s V. C. Andrews, my father’s Dean Koontz. In this case it was Stephen King’s The Stand. I liked how massive it was, that it would last me a month.
I chose a chaise longue near the tiki bar. I removed my terry jumper and laid myself down like my mother, legs bent and knees pinched together. I read my book and concentrated on the way I looked reading it. I was only ten years old and yet I remember having that thought that day. Only a few years earlier I’d been a pure child. Reveling in the space between the Christmas tree and the corner of the wall where the colored lights blinked for me alone and it looked like heaven. Or wearing a princess dress to go to Maggie’s Pub, this seamy place with a green plaid carpet and high-top tables. We’d go when my mother was in the mood for chicken wings. She loved the cheap parts of an animal, all varieties of offal, but wings were the easiest parts to come by, and we’d go for nickel-wing nights and I’d play on the crummy carpet beneath our table; they would talk and I would play with my dolls down there. Their voices, their love, above my head. Below, all the independence I needed. I didn’t yet know my mother was a hypochondriac or that she could be crueler on occasion than she already was. I didn’t yet know my father’s secret, or maybe he didn’t have it yet. There is nothing in the world better than the past.
That day at the rich pool, as I moved my body like an older girl, I noticed a man at the bar, perhaps because he noticed me. He had a mustache and wore a white linen shirt and khaki swim trunks. He was in his mid-forties, the age of my parents. He was sitting sidesaddle on the stool so that he could take inventory of the landscape. He was sipping something tall, reddish, and tropical. His bare knees made something thump inside of me. The way he held his drink. I could see up the hollow of his shorts, a miraculous darkness. I imagined my parents a few miles away, rustling in a hot, damp bed. I imagined my grandmother in Orange, pinioned against her brown couch with the Doberman piss.