Beautiful Girls

Middle of the Night

Wash, Rinse, Spin

Beautiful Girls

Eden

Stew

True

Safeway

Wildlife of America

A
LLIE’S FATHER IS ASLEEP BENEATH THE AZALEA BUSH
. Allie stands on the lawn, barefoot, in her nightgown, watching him breathe. His open mouth vibrates. She plucks a flower off the bush, drops it over him, and watches it bounce off his chin and land on his chest. She kicks him. He doesn’t stir.

A breeze lifts Allie’s nightgown, making her shiver. This is the middle of the night, she thinks. She’s never seen the middle of the night. She darts across the moist lawn, quickly, in a rush of glee. She leaps with her arms outstretched. Then she runs in figure eights until she tumbles to the ground and lies on her back, panting. It is so quiet. Every house is dark except for theirs, which is lit from basement to attic. The stars look icy and far away. Lifting her arm, Allie covers a
handful of the sky. The phone rings and she runs inside.

“Hello,” she says.

“You sound little,” the voice says.

“I’m not.”

“How old are you?”

“Eight.”

“Are you your father’s child?”

“Who is this?” Allie asks.

“I’m the woman your father shtups. Do you know what that means?”

“No,” Allie says, leaning against the counter.

“Where is your father, sweets?”

“He’s busy and can’t come to the phone right now.”

“Well, I really didn’t want to talk to him anyhow. I think I like you better.”

Allie climbs up on the counter, shivering. A breeze blows through the front screen and out the back. Papers on the desk flutter. Allie lunges for a vase of shriveled roses and catches it before it falls.

“What’s your father doing?” the woman asks.

“Sleeping.”

“With your mother?”

“No…” Allie jumps off the counter.

“I didn’t think so.”

Last week Allie’s father staggered up the driveway with the weed whacker, singing the New Year’s
Eve song. Allie’s mother fell to her knees, announced it was the last straw, and said, “How could you sever the heads of my petunias?” Her mother then drew the shades and climbed into bed with a cool washcloth on her forehead. Allie made her mother a Harvey Wallbanger just the way she liked it—a splash of orange juice and Galliano over a tall glass of vodka and ice. But her mother groaned, “I’m on the wagon for good, darling,” and she made Allie flush the Harvey Wallbanger in the upstairs bathroom.

“I knew that union was doomed from the beginning,” the stranger now says. “I bet you live in a real nuthouse.”

“Are you my father’s friend?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“I’m going to hang up. goodbye.” Allie hangs up. She runs outside, taking a leaping jump off the porch. She runs in circles past her sleeping father and gallops from one end of the lawn to the other.

Allie sleeps late. Outside it is already hot. She walks sleepily into the hallway, feeling crabby and wanting to crawl back into bed.

Yesterday Allie watched as her mother moved into the attic. Her mother, pale, with hair springing out of her bun, pulled down the hatch in the upstairs hallway, and the tiny set of stairs tumbled to the floor. She raced up and down those stairs, carrying a thermos, a sleeping
bag, pillows, bananas. Like a squirrel, Allie thought, storing nuts for the winter. “I’m going to live up here for a very short while,” her mother said, rushing down the little stairs, blowing her nose.

Allie watched quietly.

“I need to gather my wits,” her mother said with wet eyes. She lit the flame in the lantern and hurried to the top of the tiny stairs and climbed into the hole. She blew a kiss. The yellow light illuminated the blackness behind her. “Do you have anything to say to me?” she asked.

Allie sensed something final and desperate in her mother’s ghostly face and with a shaky voice said, “I’ve been to Mount Rushmore and when I looked at the presidents’ stone heads I could see their greatness.”

Her mother blinked, but gave Allie a quick smile. Then she pulled up the hatch, and the tiny set of stairs folded back in.

This is Allie’s interesting sentence and before that moment she hadn’t had an occasion to use it. Her second-grade teacher had once wanted an interesting sentence, and at the time Allie couldn’t think of one. Her teacher had said children without imaginations were guilty of sloth and headed for a life of despair.

Now Allie stares up at the hatch. She pictures her mother eating a banana in that spooky light. There are bugs up there and spider webs. Her mother is frightening
her. How long is a very short while? Allie wonders.

Her father is crumpled in the recliner, looking shrunken, as if his skin is too big for him. He’s in the clothes he wore yesterday, and his bare feet are soft and white and thick with blue veins. He smells bad. As Allie sits on the couch, he winks at her. His eyes are wide and alert. “Hey, sleeping beauty,” he whispers. There is a twig in his hair. “Your mother wrote you a letter.” He hands it to her, but she doesn’t take it. Instead, she rests her head on the arm of the couch.

Her father opens the piece of paper with a trembling hand. He winks at her again. The room is bright with sunlight. Allie knows he doesn’t feel well. When she closes her eyes she feels an ache behind them.

“Well,” he says after a moment. “Maybe we’ll read it later.” Allie reaches out for the letter, but her father doesn’t offer it. “What do you say we go to the grocery store and buy a watermelon?”

Allie doesn’t want to go to the grocery store, or anyplace else. She walks over to the window and stands behind the drape. It is hot and quiet in the neighborhood, the kind of day when the cement sidewalk will burn the feet. Later it will cool off. The sun will set and most people will go to bed, but not Allie.

Her father says, “We’ll go buy a watermelon a little later, a nice watermelon for the three of us.” He
sighs and sinks down into his chair. “Honey, don’t marry someone with a flair for melodrama. Get yourself a straight arrow, a beer drinker.” Allie pokes her head out from behind the drape.

Her father sighs again, running his hand through his hair. He plucks out the twig, looks at it in a funny way, and tosses it onto the coffee table. He and Allie glance away from one another.

Allie came into the world too early. At three pounds, she fit into the palm of a hand and was hairy like a monkey. There are many things her parents have told her that she does not believe and this is one of them.

Her parents are older than other parents. They never cook and like to take long drives. They think Allie should do what she likes, whenever she likes. As a result Allie is quiet and shy and self-disciplined.

Until recently the three of them would drive to hotel restaurants or taverns for drinks and finger food. Often her parents’ friends joined them; Allie didn’t like these friends, who always wanted to know why she was so quiet. “Talk,” they would say to her, but instead she would drink her cherry cola or swirl the ice in the glass. What did they want to hear, she wondered. Or they would address her with, “Well, hello!” as if she was small and in diapers, or one of them might swing an arm over her shoulders and
confide, “Love is
not
a many-splendored thing. That’s a crock of you-know-what.”

Allie would then explore the bathrooms, where she would tap-dance on the tile, line up the little soaps, and sit on a lounge chair with her legs crossed, pretending to smoke a cigarette. There were things for her to do in these hotel bathrooms, it was true, even if she did get lonely. But she knew that later she and her parents would snuggle on the couch in front of the TV, her parents peaceful and cheery with liquor, and Allie herself would be happy to be sitting between them, her lids half-closed, on the verge of sleep.

The last time they did anything together was their day trip to Atlantic City to ride in the diving bell. Her father had said beneath the Atlantic was a magical place where sea serpents glided in the waves and where the tentacle of an octopus might wrap around you as a school of stingrays and porpoises swam by. Allie nodded, not quite believing all of it, but liking the part about the stingrays. “Stingrays,” she whispered.

“Remember the diving bell from the days of the Steel Pier?” her mother added. “The diving horse? Mr. Salty Peanuts? Oh, those were the days!”

So on a limp, gray day in the spring the three of them climbed into the car and headed for Atlantic City. A fine mist covered them on their walk to the pier, where the diving bell sat bloated and crusted
with barnacles. They were the only ones in line. An old man with a hacking cough opened the oval door and said, “Hop in.”

Inside smelled unpleasant, like a worn, sweaty shoe. The three of them knelt on the plastic seats with their faces pressed close to the window. Slowly the diving bell was lowered off the pier. They hovered over the water’s edge and then with a jolt plunged into the water. Surrounded by a cascade of bubbles, they descended to the bottom of the ocean.

When the bubbles cleared, there was nothing but green murk as far as Allie could see. She waited expectantly for a squid or a shark with many rows of teeth to come gliding by. Kneeling on the bench, Allie waited until her sweaty knees grew stiff, then she crouched on the seat with her forehead against the glass. She imagined that at any moment they would be pulled back to the pier, but they remained in the pulsating, murky water for a very long time, the diving bell making a low hum. “This isn’t really the sea,” Allie said finally. Her parents continued to stare out the windows, their jaws slack and their skin pasty white.

“Why won’t they lift us?” her father asked, unsteadily, licking his lips.

“I don’t know,” her mother said quietly, opening and snapping shut her purse. Allie’s mother’s makeup seemed to have melted. Lipstick extended past the border of her lip, and her eyeglasses sat crookedly
on her nose.

“I feel sick. You think there’s enough air here?” her father asked.

“Stop frightening us,” her mother snapped. “Can’t we do something?”

“Stop talking.” Her father sat very still and moved only his eyes.

“How do you think we get it to go up?” her mother asked in a small, hollow voice.

Allie looked out the window, willing something to happen out there, willing her body to make something happen. Her damp breath steamed up the window.

“Maybe there’s a lever or a buzzer or an intercom,” her mother nearly shrieked as she turned in a circle inside the diving bell. “Maybe we can find it here, somewhere!”

Her father slumped against the bench, clutching his heart. “Don’t use up all the oxygen. Goddamnit,” he said.

Allie’s mother glared at Allie’s father.

Allie took shallow breaths of steamy air. As she looked out the window at the murk, she felt like she’d been had, and the disappointment brought tears to her eyes.

“You’re a terrible person in a crisis. Why I married you I’ll never know,” her mother hissed into her father’s ear. She adjusted her glasses on her sweaty face.

“You should have had a martini with lunch,”
Allie’s father said in a booming voice. “You’re an awful traveling companion when you haven’t had a martini with lunch.” He stood up, clutched his chest and then sat back down.