Father of the Rain (3 page)

He stands all the way up, walks around the outside of the circle to me, takes my hand, pulls me up, and kisses me. It’s a warm kiss, not quite as quick as Mallory and Patrick’s. He lets go of my hand last. I know my face has flamed up and I keep my head down until the burning stops.

Gina kisses Teddy. Teddy kisses Mallory. Then it’s my turn. Neal, Neal, Neal, I beg but the shoe points at Teddy.

“Hat trick,” he says, meaning he’s gotten to kiss all three of us.

I get it over with fast. His lips are wet and flaky, like soggy bread.

When it’s Neal’s turn again, it lands between Gina and Teddy.

“Your choice,” Gina says, hopeful.

“Daley.”

And this time he leads me even farther away from them, nearly to the trees.

“You got a bed in the bushes?” Teddy says.

“I don’t like an audience,” Neal says. And to me, quietly, “You mind that I chose you again?”

I shake my head. I want to say I was hoping for it, but I can’t get the words out before he kisses me, longer, opening his mouth the slightest bit.

“That was nice,” he says.

“It was.” Everything feels so strange, like I’m walking into someone else’s life.

“Teddy says you meet here every week.”

“This is only our third time.”

“You coming next week?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Hey, stop yacking. It’s my turn,” Gina says. “And Patrick has to meet his grandmother at the beach club for lunch.”

They’re all turned toward us now. “Try,” Neal says quietly.

The game breaks up soon after that. We smoke a few more cigarettes and watch the seagulls drop mussels against the rocks and then fight over the smashed pieces.

“Can you imagine that being your life?” Patrick says.

“I’d throw myself off a cliff,” Teddy says.

“But you’re a seagull so it wouldn’t work,” Gina says. “Your wings would just start flapping. Are you taking sailing this year?”

“Yeah,” Teddy says. “You?”

“All three of us.” She points her thumbs to me and Mallory.

“Do you think any animal in the history of animals has ever committed suicide?” Neal asks.

“No. Their brains aren’t big enough to realize how stupid their lives are,” Teddy says.

I don’t know if it’s the cigarettes making me feel funny, but they all seem far away. If I spoke I would have to scream for them to hear me.

When we go, I let the others ride ahead, the five of them weaving around each other, taking up the whole road. I look back at the cove.
I thought I had the whole summer for cigarettes and spin the shoe. A seagull lands where Teddy left a plum pit, pecks at it twice, then lifts back up into the air. The water is higher now, creeping up the barnacled sides of the rocks. Neal looks back for me through the opening between his right arm and the handlebar of his ten-speed, casually, as if he’s just looking down at his leg.

In the driveway my mother takes a wrench to my bike. I’ve never seen her use a tool from the garage before. She removes the two wheels easily and loads them along with the frame on top of our suitcases in the back of her convertible. She’s wearing a kerchief around her hair, the way she does when she gardens. Her movements are sure and studied, like a performance. She presses down on the trunk several times, and when it finally clicks a laugh bursts out of her, though nothing is funny.

Sometimes, when no one else can come get me, a teacher drives me home from school. It feels like that now, like a teacher, a stranger, is taking me somewhere.

“Hop in, sugar,” she says.

The ugly puppy is scratching at the screen door. My father will come home to his bright yellow urine and soft shit all over the newspaper I just spread across the whole kitchen. An hour ago I promised him I’d keep the puppy outside most of the day.

“You have to give him a lot of attention every time he goes to the bathroom outside,” he said. He was dressed in his summer work clothes—a tan suit and a light blue tie—his hair still wet from his shower, cleanly parted on the right. “You’ve got to go like this: good boy, good boy, good boy”—and he rubbed my belly and back at the same time, hard and fast, practically lifting me off the ground.

I laughed and said, “Okay, okay.” I held onto his arms after he stopped, dangling from him.

“You sure you can do that?”

“Yes.”

His hands were wide, tanned and bony, the nails bitten down, the veins sticking out blue-green and lumpy. He said goodbye, and I kissed his hands and let go.

In my mother’s car, the radio is always tuned to the news, WEEI. “Only five days after completing a tour of the Middle East,” a reporter is saying, “President Nixon arrived in Brussels, Belgium, today to confer with Western European leaders before going on to Moscow on Thursday.”

My mother speaks directly to the radio. “Oh, you can run, Dick. You can run, but you cannot hide.”

At the four-way stop, I look down Bay Street. Mallory’s house is the big white one on the corner, and Patrick’s is the last driveway on the left, across from the beach club. They will both call my house today, and no one will answer.

“As the president flew across the Atlantic today, his physician told reporters that he was still suffering from an inflammation of veins in his left leg. The president has known about this ailment, known as phlebitis, for some weeks now, but ordered that the condition be kept secret, his physician said.”

My mother snorts at the dashboard.

We drive through town. In the park, trailers have arrived with rides for the carnival that comes for a week every summer. Men are taking off enormous painted pieces of metal and setting them in the grass. The big round cars for the Tilt-a-Whirl, with their high backs and red leather seats, lie splayed out near what is normally first base. But once the rides, the stalls, and the vans with pizza and fried dough are set up, you can’t find the old park anymore. A few little kids look on, from the bleachers, like we used to.

Downtown is small, just one street with shops on it. Neal’s mother sometimes works at the yarn shop. Her car is outside it now, an orange Pinto with a small dent on the driver’s door. Traffic is slow
coming from the opposite direction, tourists heading toward Ruby Beach. People wave to us—Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Buck—but my mother is gnawing on her lip and listening to the news and doesn’t pay attention to them. When we reach the highway she takes my hand and guns it to seventy-five.

We stop at the Howard Johnson’s for lunch. I like their fried clams because they’re just the necks, no bellies. The bellies make me throw up. But there is a mountain of them. They look like fat fried worms. I eat three. My mother can’t eat much of her club sandwich either. The waitress asks if we’d like to take the food home with us, and we both shake our heads no.

“We are going to be okay, you and I,” my mother says, rubbing my arm.

“I know,” I say, and my mother looks relieved.

Back in the car, she lets me put in an eight-track for a little while. I play John Denver singing about his grandma’s feather bed. I play it over and over until she asks me to stop. It makes me happy, that song, all the kids and the dogs and the piggy in the bed together.

We cross into New Hampshire. Until she got married when she was nineteen, my mother spent every summer of her life on Lake Chigham. She says I’ve been there before, but I can’t remember it. I can only remember my grandparents in our house for Thanksgiving or Christmas, sitting in chairs. I have no memory of them standing up.

After a while we get off the highway onto narrow then narrower roads. The trees seem to get taller. We turn onto a dirt road with a small white sign with blue paint:
CHIGHAM POINT ROAD
. Below it, in much smaller letters:
Private Way
.

My mother sucks in a deep breath and says, letting it out, “Here we go.”

I look down the road. There are no houses, just trees—pines and maples—blocking out every drop of sun.

“Remember it now?” my mother asks.

“No.”

We drive in. It’s a very long road with other roads leading off it, long driveways with last names painted on wooden boards nailed to trees. Occasionally, through all the trees and bushes and undergrowth, you can see the dark shape of a house or the glint of water. We turn down one of the last driveways and park beside a brown sedan. The house, made of dark brown wood, is only a few feet from the lake, which is still and too bright to look at after the dark road.

“Home again, home again,” she says in a sigh.

My grandfather comes out. His mouth is all bunched up like he’s angry and he moves quickly down the porch steps and my mother practically runs to meet him and they hug hard. My mother lets out a noise and Grindy says, “Shhhh, shhhhh now,” and strokes her hair until the kerchief falls on the grass. She says something quietly and he says, “I know. I know you did. Twenty-three years is enough trying.”

He motions to me with an arm and when I get close enough he pulls me into their hug and kisses me on the forehead.

Nonnie is in the doorway when we come in with all our bags. She kisses us both on the cheek. Her skin is fuzzy and she smells like one of those tiny pillows you put in your drawer to scent your clothes. She isn’t really my grandmother, my mother tells me that night, when we are lying in our twin beds in the room we share. I have never known this. It turns out I’ve never met my real grandmother. She lives in Arizona, and my mother hasn’t seen her since Garvey was a baby.

Nonnie still has a young face but old hair, completely white. She keeps it pinned up, but if you go down into the kitchen early enough you can catch her in a blue plaid robe and her hair, brushed to a shine, spilling down past her waist. The rest of the day it’s gone, braided and coiled behind her head.

At dinner that night, Grindy argues with my mother about Nixon. “All these testimonies and hearings are just putting a stopper
on everything else. These ridiculous tapes! The country doesn’t need to listen to all that nonsense. We are in a serious recession. Let the man deal with things that matter.”

“Nothing matters more than this, Da. People need to be held accountable. Otherwise we’re paving the way for another Hitler.”

Grindy shakes his head. “Little girl,” he says, and then his voice grows very sharp. “You mustn’t ever speak of Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler in the same breath. Ever. Richard Nixon did not know about Watergate.” My mother tries to interrupt but he holds up his hand. “He did not know about it, and all he is guilty of is trying to protect his own men from going to prison. You are naive, little girl. There is
always
internal spying.
Always
. These people got caught. But the president needs to be able to get back to the business of running the country.”

My mother looks like she’s looking at my father. Nonnie asks if anyone would like more beans.

After dinner my grandfather watches the Red Sox. I stand behind his chair and polish his bald head with my sleeve. I’m fascinated by the sheen of his scalp, the white age spots, the brown age spots. My mother tells me to leave him alone but he tells her it feels nice. The thin layer of brown shiny skin smells like mushrooms before they’re cooked. When I go to bed, he puts his hands over my ears and gives me a hard kiss of bristles on my forehead.

My mother insists that my father knows where we are, but I can’t understand why he hasn’t called or driven up. I pick up the phone every now and then, to see if it really does work, then hang it back up. He must be so mad at me.

On the map of the lakes region in my grandparents’ dining room, where we are is circled in red. Our point looks like a little tonsil hanging off the north side of the lake.

“It’s like being in a bunker,” my mother says to someone on the phone, probably her friend Sylvie. “No light comes in the windows. You have to go out into the middle of the lake to see the sun.”

In the upstairs hallway there is a photograph of my mother standing on the dock in a white two-piece bathing suit, scratching her leg. Her skin is brown against the white and she is smiling. In the background a few girlfriends are waiting for her in the water. Those friends still come back here, with their own families, and my mother wonders aloud to me in our slope-ceilinged room how they can do it, return each summer, year after year, to the same people, the same cocktail parties, the Fourth of July picnic, the August square dance, the endless memorial services for all the old people who died over the winter.

Eventually my mother drags over a girl named Gail to meet me. She’s going into sixth grade too, but looks much older. I take her up to my room to show her my albums.

“You’re tiny,” she says, wrapping her fingers around my wrist. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and we smoke a few on the third floor next to an old seamstress’s mannequin. The taste reminds me of kissing Neal.

She comes over nearly every day after that. I’m the only other girl her age nearby. When it rains we play Spit and War in our living rooms and on sunny days we swim out to the float that is for all the families on the point or play tennis on the disheveled court in the woods. She introduces me to the other kids. Most of them are my second cousins, though they don’t really believe that. Or maybe they don’t care. Even though we aren’t in school I can tell Gail is the popular type. She has that thrust of personality that matters so much more than looks. I follow her around, the tail to her kite, grateful to be mysteriously attached.

After two weeks my father calls during dinner. Nonnie answers and returns quickly.

“It’s Gardiner.” She stands in the doorway, waiting to see if my mother will take the call.

“I’m not sure you should,” my grandfather says, but my mother gets up and goes to the phone, which is below the stairs in the living room. She speaks so low we can’t hear much, but I can see her straight stiff back and the way she holds the receiver several inches from her ear. When she calls me in and passes the heavy black receiver to me, my father asks me to come home.

“That’s what I want. I want you and your mother to come home.” His voice is high, like he’s making fun of something, but he isn’t. He’s almost crying. I smell him, smell the steak and the A-1 sauce and the little onions in his drink.