Object of Your Love (20 page)

I said, “Who,
Stirling?
”

After he'd gone away, we went outside again and tried to play but Bonita's heart somehow wasn't in it. Around five o'clock, her father, who managed the Metropolitan store, came home. We heard the
thunk
of his car door slamming and then we saw him come around the corner of the house. He always came to see Bonita before going inside. He was an extraordinarily tall and heavyset man, well dressed, with size twelve shoes, nice suits, and ties with pictures of Canada geese or racing cars or baseball players all over them.

“How are you girls? Did you get to the store today? Here's a dollar each. Go and buy yourselves something.”

Bonita would pretend she didn't hear him and just go on playing even though he called her “my little white butterfly” and often had something for her from the store.

“Here, Bonita, I've brought you some sunglasses,” he said one day, but Bonita didn't pay any attention even though he kept standing there, holding them out to her. They were beautiful too, turquoise with rhinestones in the corners. We were sitting on the ground and he was towering over us, throwing a long shadow between us, across the lawn. There was a terrible emptiness in the air while his hand hung there offering the sunglasses. I looked up at his big Irish face and I was torn by the bewilderment on it. It was more than I could stand. “Take them, Bonita,” I finally said, so she took them all right and she threw them across the grass. Mr. Connor turned red and gave a little laugh. Then he went up the porch steps, took in a big gulp of air, like a swimmer about to plunge underwater, and opened the screen door.

After he was gone I said to Bonita, “What did you do that for?” But she just said, “Oh, never mind!” and her face was angry and sad.

I didn't understand Bonita and her family but I didn't want to figure them out. They were so unusual. I just liked to have the mystery of them sitting in my head, undisturbed, like something beautiful and uncommon resting on a shelf, something you don't know how it's made and you just don't want to know, you wouldn't take it down to find out because that might spoil its specialness, its magic.

*   *   *

In August, the heat waves came, the sidewalks shimmered, dogs crept in under the cool of porches. The sky got bigger and at noontime it burned like a furnace, yellow at its apex. It seemed there wasn't a sliver of shade to be had all day and everything looked harsh and sapped by the heat. The sun beat down and the grass jumped up out of the ground. Stirling would come down to breakfast and we could see from his face he'd been praying for rain so he could take a day off, but it never came, only brief showers at night, just enough to settle the dust, as Dad would say. Stirling couldn't get a rest from the lawn-cutting. Dad would elbow Stirling and say, “Gonna be another cooker. No rest for the wicked, eh, Stirling?” He was cheerful because he knew he'd been right about the weather, he was like a prophet. “Lawn mower's gonna be smokin', you're not careful,” Dad told him.

Stirling was overworked but he seemed to have plenty of time to kill when it came to cutting the Connor yard. He'd find us sitting out on the blanket and say, “Move along, little girls,” because he could see it infuriated Bonita.

“Don't call me that.”

“What you want me to call you, then? Little queen? Queen Bonita? Will that do?” It was sickening, the way he talked.

Stirling's arrival interrupted Bonita's train of thought. She lost interest in playing. “It's too hot,” she'd say to me. “I'm going into the house where it's cool.”

“I'll come too,” I'd say.

“No, I'm tired. I think I should lie down.”

One day when I went to Bonita's she said, “I don't want to play paper dolls any more. You can have them for keeps if you want. I'm going downtown.”

I went along with her even though she didn't invite me. At the Metropolitan store I watched her pick out a pair of nylon stockings, an eyebrow tweezer, a lipstick, a compact of clay-coloured face powder. She told the clerk, “Charge this to Mr. Connor.” We passed the lunch counter on the way out. I said, “Let's have a Coke float,” because I knew we could charge that too.

“No,” said Bonita. “I'm too fat.”

“Oh, Bonita!” I told her. “You are not. You're skinny as anything.”

*   *   *

With Bonita being tired and hot and headachy so many afternoons, I was spending more and more time at home. I went downstairs and found Dad working at the metal desk under a bare light bulb. I sat with my chin on my hands and watched him drawing. On the corner of the desk was a stack of finished diagrams. He let me look through them. They were done in heavy lead pencil, showing complicated interlocking wheel systems, belts, motors, pistons, carburetors, spark plugs. All the parts were neatly labelled. I read out loud: “Compression-ignition engine. Float pump. Camshaft. Universal joint. Flywheel. Differential.”

Now and again, Mom would come downstairs to fetch something, the laundry or a jar of preserves. If Dad said to her, “Come over here and look at this,” she'd scowl and answer, “I'm busy working, as you can see. I haven't got time to look at pictures.” Through the openings in the stairs, we'd watch her go back up.

“Your mother has legs like stovepipes,” Dad said once. Another time he forgot to hide his whisky bottle and Mom noticed it at his elbow. “I haven't got food to put on the table and you come up to a meal with booze on your breath. I'd love to know where you hide it,” she said.

Later, around dinnertime, I'd find her sitting unhappily in the kitchen, drawing circles over and over on the table with her index finger.

*   *   *

On the last day in August, Dad and I were in the basement late in the afternoon when the telephone rang upstairs. We heard the basement door open and Mom called down in her stiff and dignified company voice: “Farrel, it is Mr. Connor on the phone wanting to speak to you.” Dad went upstairs, took the receiver from her and sat down at the kitchen table. From the living room, Mom and I listened.

“Yes, this is Stirling's father. Yes. Yes. When exactly was this? You're sure about it? I understand. Yes, I realize it's a very serious matter.” His voice was meek, eager to please. “I'll certainly talk to him. I'll do more than that, you can be sure. I promise you I'll follow it up. Thank you for calling. Thank you, Mr. Connor. It won't happen again, don't you worry about that. Yes, it's unfortunate. No, I don't. No, I agree, it should be kept quiet.”

Dad hung up and from the living room I saw him look around quickly, like someone waking up from a dream, and he said, “Where's that goddamned Stirling?” After that, Mom and Dad talked at length in their bedroom with the door closed.

At five thirty, Stirling came in with his chest bare and tanned and his shirt flung over his shoulder. Dad met him in the front hall. “You've cut your last lawn, my boy,” he said. Then he opened the cellar door and pushed Stirling down there.

I went and sat on the floor in the living room where I knew Dad's and Stirling's voices would rise up to me through the furnace vent.

“We were only kissing. We weren't doing anything wrong.”

“And her with all her clothes off.”

“She took 'em off, not me.”

“That's not what Mr. Connor said.”

“Mr. Connor wasn't there. She was naked of her own free will.”

“You must have had something to do with it.”

“She wanted me up there.”

“No decent girl wants that.”

“How do you know she's decent?”

“Don't give me any of your lip.”

Then Mom saw me there and knew what I was doing. “You come out here in the kitchen with me and help with dinner,” she said.

That night, Stirling and I were upstairs, ready to go to bed. He hadn't spoken to me all evening, but before he went into his room he said to me, “I got something to show you. Take a look at this.” He turned around and drew up his pajama top, showing me his back. There were welts all over it, bands of red from Dad's belt, some of which had been bleeding. I started to cry when I saw it and Stirling said, “Oh, shut up. You're such a crybaby. I don't know why I tell you anything.” He laughed at me, angry and proud.

*   *   *

The next day, Stirling went out without telling anybody where he was going, and neither Mom nor Dad called after him to explain himself. Mom didn't talk much. I could see from her face that she was bursting with recent events and I knew all I had to do was chip away, chip away, and soon I'd have the whole story. All morning, I kept saying things like, “Stirling didn't look too happy when he went out,” and “Dad is sure quiet downstairs,” my voice calm and detached, as if I didn't really care.

What I finally got out of her was this: Every time Stirling went over to Bonita's to cut the grass, she went upstairs to her room, which overlooked the backyard. She took off her clothes and stood at the window bare naked until Stirling looked up and noticed her. After this happened a few times, Stirling got the idea that Bonita wanted him up there with her, so he slipped into the house through the back door. Mom didn't know the exact circumstances of Mrs. Connor's discovery of Stirling and Bonita: whether she found them after returning from the liquor store in a taxi and, seeing the lawn mower idle in the yard, traced Stirling to Bonita's room; or whether she heard something suspicious from upstairs while she was watching television and decided to investigate.

The longer I thought about it the easier it was for me to picture Stirling out in the August sun, bare-chested, pushing the mower around the lawn in smaller and smaller squares, at some point looking up, perhaps when he made a pivot, thinking the first time he noticed Bonita in the window that he had sunstroke, wiping the sweat out of his eyes and looking again. It did not stretch my imagination to think of Bonita standing in the window, her body, white as a slug, pressed against the screen, her breasts like small, firm, ripening apples, maybe her triangle showing too, above the windowsill, a thin and catlike smile on her face, and her mother downstairs with the television going full blast.

The day after the beating I didn't want to speak to Dad. I felt so ashamed of what he'd done to Stirling. And he might have been thinking himself that he'd gone too far because he went out before lunch in the car and Mom and I had to eat alone. During dessert, I said to her, “Dad hides his whisky bottle in the coal bin. He said you'd never look there.”

Luckily, Dad never knew I told because that afternoon the coal man came. It was the first of September. Mom went down and opened the cellar window so that the man could fit the chute in. She put cloths over the heating vents upstairs, so that when the coal came thundering into the basement and a cloud of oily black dust boiled up and settled like ink over everything, including Dad's drawings, it did not ascend into the rooms upstairs.

After Mom let out the whole story about Stirling and Bonita, she looked relieved and guilty and she said to me, as though it was my fault she'd told, “I'm just telling you because I want you to realize what happens to girls like Bonita. You stay away from her.”

*   *   *

But even if I'd wanted to stay friends with Bonita, I couldn't have because that fall at school she started to run with a wild gang that was loud and rebellious. They shouted in the halls and shoved each other and skipped classes in the middle of the day to go downtown and sit in the Metropolitan store smoking and drinking coffee. I wondered what Mr. Connor thought of that. Soon we heard that Bonita had gotten herself pregnant.

That fall, a change came over Stirling too. He went outside after supper to join the other boys on the street, grouped under a lamppost, laughing and smoking and avoiding homework, until long after the leaf rakers had gone inside and darkness had fallen.

Mom worried about Stirling out there. “Tell him to come in, Farrel,” she said, but Dad told her, “Stirling's going to do what he's going to do. We can't stop him,” and Mom sat in the kitchen and drew circles on the table.

It was as though the beating Stirling got from Dad was an initiation, a rite of passage, a coming-of-age, setting him free from Dad's power. I envied Stirling his newfound liberty, his deliverance from something I did not yet understand. I could not help but feel that the important events of the summer had somehow passed me over. I sensed that the grass-cutting, innocent as it seemed, had only been Stirling biding his time until something happened, some door opened and set him loose. Bonita, with her fruity breasts and enticing hips, with her body luminous and dreamy beyond the screen window, seemed to have been that door. I wondered if she had ever considered me a friend or if I'd been nothing more than a tool in her hands, an agent for her grand plot, a way of getting to Stirling. How gullibly I'd played along, sympathetic to her as she lay in bed on those hot afternoons with one of her headaches manufactured in order to get rid of me so she could display herself to Stirling.

Late in the afternoons when I was coming home from school, I sometimes saw Mr. Connor in his driveway, getting out of his car in one of his quality suits, a tragic and meticulous man. He would raise his hat and say, “Good afternoon, Marie. You are looking well. Fine October day,” but I noticed a sadness and fixity in his smile, and when he turned and walked to the house his step was slower and less buoyant than before. I believed that he must have known, back on that day when Bonita threw the sunglasses across the yard, that the incidents of the summer and fall were going to unfold the way they did but he was helpless to stop them. It amazed me that such a tall, broad-shouldered man could be so powerless.

Sometimes in my dreams the image of Stirling's back, with its pattern of raised welts and blisters, flew up in my mind. And Dad too may have been haunted by the memory of the beating he gave Stirling. He didn't go back into the basement for a long time. He picked up a job again at the garage, working as a mechanic. He went back to calling Mom June, instead of speaking to her through me, as he'd done all summer.