Hints of Heloise (11 page)

“You have a nothing face.”

Helen hadn't realized that her father was even in the house. She had come home from school, fixed a snack for herself, and was heading upstairs when she heard his voice from the living-room sofa. He was lying there in the dark, the television on but muted. The remote control was broken, which meant one had to get up to change the channels or adjust the volume. So her father stayed in the dark, stuck on one channel. Helen thought of a saying used by her AP English teacher, the one about lighting a candle rather than cursing the darkness. Her father preferred to curse the darkness.

“I mean, it's just there, you know?”

She stopped, caught off guard. She should have kept going. Why did she stop? Now she was stuck, forced to listen to him until he granted her permission to leave.

“Not ugly, but not really pretty either. Unmemorable,” he continued.

From where she stood, she could see her face in the cuckoo-clock mirror that hung at the foot of the stairs, a curious item to her, because it combined two things that shouldn't be combined. If you glanced at a clock, you were usually running out somewhere, worried about being late. Yet the mirror invited you to stay, linger, attend to your reflection.

“Just another face in the crowd. There must be a million girls that look like you.”

Helen had brown hair and blue eyes. Her features were even, proportionate. She was of medium height, relatively slender. But her father was right. She had noticed that unless she took great pains with her looks— put on makeup, wore something showy— she seemed to fade into the background. It bugged her. And Hector Lewis was very good at knowing what bugged people about themselves. If only he could make a living from it.

“If I looked like you, I'd rob banks. No one would be able to describe you. I can't describe you, and I'm your father.” A beat. “Allegedly.”

Helen knew he was challenging her to contradict him, to defend her mother's honor. But she didn't want to prolong the encounter. This was fairly new, his verbal abuse of her, and she wasn't sure how to handle it despite watching him dish it out to her mother for much of her life. It had never occurred to Helen that he would start to treat her his way. She had thought she was immune, Daddy's little girl.

“What are you gawping at?”

That was her signal that he was done with her. She climbed the stairs to her room and started her algebra homework, which required the most focus. Math did not come as easily to her as her other subjects. She charted her points, drew lines, broke down the equations, imagining the numbers as a wall that she was building around herself, a barricade that her father could not breach. She put an album on her record player, one of her mother's old ones, Carole King. Most of her albums had been her mother's, which wasn't as strange as it might sound. Her mother hadn't even been twenty when Helen was born. The music was yet another boundary, the moat outside the wall of algebra.

But Helen knew that if her father decided to get up off the couch and follow her into her room, continue the conversation, nothing could stop him. Luckily, he seldom wanted to get up off the couch these days.

Helen had been baffled when her father started in on her the week before last. If he saw her eating dessert, he warned her about getting fat. “You're not the kind of girl who can get away with an extra pound. You take after your mother that way.” If she was reading, he pronounced her a bookworm, a bore. If she tried to watch a television show, he told her she'd better bring home a good report card, yet she had been close to a straight-A student for most of her life.

She asked her mother why her father was irritable, but she shrugged, long used to her own up-and-down dynamic with him.

Then Helen finally got it. Her father was putting her on notice because she had seen him at McDonald's with Barbara Lewis, even though Helen hadn't given it a second thought at the time. In a town of fewer than twenty-five thousand people, everyone ends up at the McDonald's at some point. They had been in the drive-through lane.
Why not?
she told herself as she locked up her bike, skirting his eye line as she walked inside. She went to McDonald's with all sorts of people, didn't mean anything. Money went a long way at McDonald's. You could get a large shake and fries for what some places charged for a shake alone. Her father wouldn't want to go someplace expensive with Barbara, because she was always trying to shake him down for money. He wasn't treating Barbara, he was showing her how little he cared for her.

In Barbara's defense, she did have four kids with Hector Lewis. So even though she had a decent job and he had none, he probably should be helping her out, at least a little.

Hector had left Barbara fifteen years ago, after impregnating nineteen-year-old Beth Harbison. Helen was born seven months later. Meghan, Barbara and Hector's youngest, was born four months after Helen, and Helen had no trouble doing that math. “That was the last time he was ever with her,” Helen's mother often said, as if it were something of which to be proud, that he went back to have sex with Barbara only once. “And she still won't give him a divorce. So why should he pay her any support? A woman can't have it both ways.”

But someone was having it both ways, Helen realized that day outside McDonald's. There might not have been another baby after Meghan, but there had been sex. They had probably had sex that very afternoon. Perhaps it was Hector who kept persuading Barbara not to divorce him. That way he never had to marry Beth, whom he blamed for keeping him in his own hometown, an indistinct place just north of the Mason-Dixon Line, not quite a town yet too distant from anywhere else to be a suburb. “Like a wart on somebody's asshole,” her father said.

Helen had not told her mother about seeing her father at McDonald's with Barbara. She wondered if he knew that. If Helen had a secret and another person found out about it, she would be extremely nice to that person. But Hector Lewis didn't behave like most people did. “He just loves us so much,” her mother was always telling Helen. He loved them so much that he left his other family when Beth became pregnant. He loved them so much that he refused to work more than a few hours a week, and then only jobs where he was paid cash money, which he spent on himself. He loved Beth so much that he made fun of her and, on the occasional Saturday night, beat the crap out of her. “He gets frustrated he can't do better by us, but if he got a good job, on the books, Barbara would take everything. He just loves us so much.”

Please,
Helen prayed,
make him love us a little less.

Shoot. She had left her history book in the kitchen. She couldn't do her homework without it, but she couldn't get it without walking through the living room again. She imagined she was invisible, hoping that would make it so. Sometimes if you acted as if something were true, it became true.

“But you better not do anything bad,” her father called out as she walked by. She was confused for a moment. She was in the middle of her homework. What could she be doing that was bad? Then she realized he was still having the one-sided conversation he had started an hour ago, about her nothing face. Having suggested that she had the perfect look for a criminal, he was now outraged that she might become one, which she had no intention of doing. Helen wanted to be a nurse. Actually, she wanted to be a history professor, but she understood that wouldn't be allowed, that it would take too much time in school with no guarantee of a job. A nurse could always find work. Her mother was an RN, and her pay supported the household.

“I won't,” Helen promised, hoping it was the right thing to say.

“You better not,” he said, his voice rising as if she had disagreed with him. She wondered if she should try to get out of the house until her mother came home. It was five o'clock on a winter Thursday, too dark and cold to pretend a sudden errand on her bike.

“I said I wouldn't.” Despite her best efforts, a note of exasperation crept into her voice.

“Are you getting smart with me?”

“No, sir.” Her voice was very tiny now, a mouse squeak.

“I said,
Are you getting smart with me?
”

She tried to speak so he could hear her. “No, sir.”

“ARE YOU GETTING SMART WITH ME?”

“N-n-n-”— she could not get the words out. This was new, at least with her. But this is how the fights with her mother began. Her father kept hearing disagreement where there was only appeasement. “N-n-n-n-”

He threw his beer can at her head. His aim was impressive; the can struck her temple. Empty, or close to, it didn't hurt, but she flinched, then continued to the kitchen, trying to remember why she had started to go there in the first place.

The house was small, but it was still shocking how fast he came up from the sofa and into the kitchen behind her, grabbing her shirt at the collar and whirling her around to face him.

“I— will— have— respect— in— my— house.” Each word was accompanied by a slap. The slaps were surprisingly dainty and precise, as if he were beating out a staccato rhythm on some improvised piece of percussion. Helen had had a drum set when she was a baby. She knew because she had seen the photos of herself playing with it, but she didn't remember it. She looked so happy in those photos. Did all babies—

Now he was banging her head on the kitchen table. Again he seemed to have absolute control. It was so slow, so measured. He was still speaking, but it was hard to focus on the words. Something was bleeding. Her nose, she thought. She heard another voice, from very far away. “Oh, Hector, oh, Hector.” Her mother was standing in the doorway that led from the carport, a bag of groceries in her arms.

Her father acted as if he were coming out of a trance, as if he had no idea how he came to be holding his daughter by the scruff of her neck.

“She was very disrespectful,” he said.

“Oh, Hector.” Her mother put the groceries on the kitchen drainboard, dampened a paper towel, and applied it to Helen's gushing nose.

“I think I might have a concussion,” Helen whispered.

“Shhh,” her mother said. “Don't upset him.”

And that was the day that her father went upstairs and broke every single album she had, cracking them across his knee as if they were very bad children who needed to be spanked. That was okay. Albums weren't cool. Not that she could afford CDs or a player, but she could live without the albums. She liked to listen to WFEN, a station that broadcast from Chicago, available on her little portable radio late at night. It wasn't a particularly good station— it played soupy ballads, things that were old-fashioned even by her mother's standards— but she liked the idea that her radio could pick up something from Illinois, even if it meant a night listening to Mel Tormé and Peggy Lee.

“That's old people's music,” her father said, standing in the door.

She started, but he was already gone. Maybe he had never been there at all.

That weekend her father went out and bought her a Sony Walkman and ten tapes from Lonnie's Record & Tape Traders. Indigo Girls and Goo Goo Dolls and De La Soul, Dream Theater and Depeche Mode. She couldn't begin to figure his selection criteria. He also bought her a heart-shaped locket from Zales. Her mother exclaimed at how pretty it was. She wasn't envious that it was Helen who had gotten all these gifts. She seemed happy for her. Helen understood. Every beating she got was one her mother didn't get. Hector's beatings were a finite commodity. A man had only so much time in the day.

A few weeks later, when her mother fastened the locket around Helen's neck as she prepared to go to a school dance— with a group of girls, because she was not allowed to date until she was sixteen— Helen said, “I saw Daddy at McDonald's. A week or so before.”

Before
was understood. Her mother didn't say anything, just smoothed Helen's thick dark hair, which she was wearing in a ponytail very high on her head, so it cascaded like a plume. With eye makeup and a new dress, she wasn't a nothing-face tonight.

“He was with Barbara,” Helen said. “Barbara Lewis.” She picked up the purse that her mother had lent her for the evening, a beaded bag, one of the few nice things her mother still owned, and sailed out the door.

Heloise stops at one of her favorite sushi places on her way out of Annapolis.
Tsunami, an unfortunate name in 2011. What can the owners do? Heloise is sympathetic to the challenges inherent in rebranding. When she had to change her name, she felt the need to stay connected to her original name, and not just for business reasons.

Why?
Chopsticks poised over her sashimi, she can no longer remember why it was important to her to keep the first syllable of what some might call her Chris tian name while holding on to the surname of the man she despised more than any other.

Is her father the one she despises the most? The competition, after all, is notable. She considers the top candidates. Billy. Val. No, her father's still the champion asshole of the world, because he was supposed to love her and he didn't. The other men didn't owe her anything, except perhaps the money and time stolen from her. Besides, if her father had been a different person, perhaps she wouldn't have ended up with a Billy, much less a Val.

Usually Heloise has no use for the blanket blame applied to parents. This was true even before she became one. Earlier this year she was entranced, almost in spite of herself, in a murder trial featuring a seeming monster of a mother who eventually was acquitted of killing her daughter. The woman's behavior did seem inexplicable— if she didn't kill the child, she did
something.
Yet the hate for the woman is so virulent that Heloise can't help trying to find a way to empathize with her.

Heloise and Paul Marriotti, one of her oldest and favorite clients, had ended up talking about the case in the lazy half hour they allowed themselves after business was done. Heloise didn't linger with many men— most didn't want their paid companions to linger— but Paul enjoyed her company and often bounced ideas off her, paying for the extra time if he went on too long.

“This Florida murder case,” he'd said to her. “It's the kind of thing that makes people want to write legislation just to showboat. I'm dreading the kind of stuff that's going to come through committee next year. As if we need to make it illegal for women to kill their children.”

“Only women?” Heloise's challenge was smiling, good-natured.

“Oh, the bills will be gender-neutral, but this is the case that will be in the back of everyone's minds. The bills will be framed as better oversight of abusive, neglectful parents, but everyone will know the subtext— the next bitch must not get off.”

“You mean the next white bitch. With pretty little big-eyed white kids whose photographs make them suitable poster children. I don't recall the same national outcry when they discovered that child in Baltimore who had been starved and so deprived of basic care that his development was essentially stunted for life.”

“Heloise, if you want clients with bleeding-heart-liberal politics like yours, you're never going to make a dime. Social workers and public defenders can't afford you.”

“I'm a socially progressive libertarian,” she said.

He gave her an affectionate smack on her now-clothed hip. Yes, they had an easy, playful rhythm much like— what? Not a marriage because there were never recriminations or resentments. Not a friendship, although they were friendly. They were collegial colleagues, two people who had worked together for a very long time, with positive benefits for both. She could disappear tomorrow and Paul wouldn't miss her that much.

Yet it surprised her when Paul said, “Next week— do you have anyone new?”

“New?”

“New to me. I need a little novelty.”

“Of course,” she said, conscious not to allow any emotion to show on her face. Would the cashier at the diner care if the man who always bought a York Peppermint Pattie at the end of his meal decided that he wanted a roll of LifeSavers instead? Not if she owned the diner and made a profit either way. Besides, it wasn't the first time that Paul had branched out. One couldn't call it straying, right?

“I'll send you January.”

“January? Get out.”

“We have a new theme right now. January, April, May, June, July. You wouldn't like November, though. She's very frosty.”

The joke, groaner that it was, allowed her to establish equilibrium. Paul wanted to try someone new. That was fine. It wasn't a comment on her. She would bet anything that he would switch back to her after a time or two or three with January. Which was no knock on January, whom Paul really would enjoy. He liked a little ice, a coolness, a reserve. Heloise would never send him June, busty and ripe, a volcanic Italian girl in the mold of the 1950s knockouts Loren and Lollobrigida. Besides, whichever girl she sent, he would return to her. He always did. As much as Paul needs novelty now and then, he likes talking about his work even more. And as smart as Heloise's girls are, they can't sustain long conversations about the inner workings of a statehouse committee, which is really Paul's principal turn-on. He loves to talk about his work, and she, the perpetual student, likes to listen. How does a bill become a law? What does it take to get it out of committee? What will happen if there's a House version of the bill? It's like
Schoolhouse Rock.
With sex. Heloise wouldn't say that the sex is secondary to Paul, not at all. He always gets right down to it, makes sure he gets his money's worth. In that way he reminds her of someone paying for one of the big fancy brunches at a downtown hotel, the kind of guy who loads up on shrimp and lobster, whatever the most expensive items are. But once sated, Paul starts to talk, and she doesn't always bill him for that part, although she would not tolerate that kind of laxness from one of her girls. She especially likes the secrets he entrusts her with, the feeling she has when something she's has known for weeks finally shows up in the news.

No, she'd told herself back in the hotel room. It would all be okay. This was why most madams didn't compete with their own girls, just sat back and took the fee off the top. She had to concede that ego, and even a little greed, had kept her in the game long past the point where she could have retired to a straight management gig. She relaxed, listened to what Paul was saying about a brewing scandal.

Then, all at once, she could barely listen at all. She felt light-headed, heard nothing except her own blood— not so much a pounding in her ears but the sense that all her blood was draining away. She was like an animal in fight-or-flight mode, only she couldn't choose. She jumped up from the bed, saying she had to go, sat back down, glanced about frantically for her purse.

“Hey, don't look so stricken,” Paul had said. “I told you, I just need variety. It's no big deal.”

It had been easier, Heloise thinks now, stabbing at her sashimi, to let him assume that she was unnerved by his request for a new girl. Because she had no idea how to tell Paul that her unmasked moment of panic had nothing to do with him. It was the confidence Paul had shared about an investigation into the faked credentials of a ballistics expert, someone who had testified in dozens of homicide cases over the past ten years. It has turned out that everything on the man's résumé related to his professional credentials is pretty much bogus. So far the gossip has been kept in check, but it's going to get out, and then every case in which he testified will be up for grabs. Possible retrials, petitions for pardons.

Paul had nattered on as if it were just another bit of gossip, an interesting inside story. To him it was.

He had no way of knowing that one of the men sentenced to life in prison, based on the expert's testimony, was Scott's father. But then Paul doesn't even know that Heloise has a son. Scott's father doesn't know either.

She looks around the sushi bar, almost empty at this hour of the day, and fantasizes about jumping a busboy and taking him into the bathroom and telling him her life story. Forget the zipless fuck. What Heloise wants is a
conversation
with no consequences.

Maybe she could start gabbing to the sushi chef, who doesn't seem to have a great grasp of English. Who could be a better confidant, smiling and nodding without comprehension as she tells her life story between sips of green tea.
I never really wanted that much. Maybe that was the problem. My dreams were so small— to be a nurse or a history teacher, to marry a nice boy, to love and feel loved. I might as well have aspired to win a Nobel Prize or fly to the moon. And I never meant to hurt anyone, yet people around me have gotten hurt, over and over again. It's not my fault. It can't be my fault.

Instead she asks for the check. She tips well. She always does. But her hand shakes as she fills in the amount, puts her copy of the receipt in her billfold. If Scott's father was to be released— No, no, no. It's not fair.
Possible,
she corrects herself. It's not possible. Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.