Water Balloon (2 page)

It always requires a mental adjustment when I see him in sunshine, or even in short sleeves. But if ever there was a man meant to take care of lawns, it's my dad.

He waves his hand in front of my face. "Are you listening?" he asks.

I give my head a quick shake, a little like a dog myself, and look at him.

"I
said,
" he starts, all put out, "you'll be babysitting during the week, from the morning until sometime after lunch."

"What? When? For who?"

"When? The summer."

"You mean more than one day?"

"I mean more than one day. Yes. For the summer. While you're here. I worked it out so you'll have a place to be while I'm working," he says.

"I thought I'd just be hanging out."

He makes his cough sound of annoyance. It's all air, no throat. "We talked about this. I asked if you'd be interested in babysitting and you said you would."

"What?! I meant like once or twice. Not—You mean every
day?
"

"Yes. I mean every day. Well, not weekends, of course."

"Can't I just hang out? Or help you at your jobs?"

"I've already promised Lynne Kroll that you'll do this."

"I can't believe this. I don't even know a Lynne Kroll!" I'm getting louder. I take a deep breath and stop. It's almost like anger doesn't exist in our family. If I yell or stomp, Dad throws up his hands like a disgusted old man with no patience for the young. I lift the hair up off my neck. When did I start sweating?

He's just sitting on his couch, watching me, waiting for me to catch up, to get past this bit of disbelief, to accept. Usually I do, but this is crazy. Am I some kind of servant, some no-vote-permitted, do-as-you're-told little-kid servant?
Think!
"I thought this summer was all about living with you. Why can't I just help you out on your jobs? We could spend more time together that way."

He straightens newspapers on the coffee table, no longer even looking at me. "I have to give the appearance of being professional; these people don't want teenage girls lounging on their lawns, Marley. It's not a good place for you—I use saws and dangerous tools. It wouldn't work out."

I would like to point out that if I'm old enough to be in charge of someone's stupid kid, I can probably handle being near a lawn mower.

He looks at my face and something in his own softens. "Marley, I promised Lynne you'd help her. She's counting on you. It will be fine. You'll make money—I'm sure you could use some money—and you'll probably love what you're doing. It'll be great."

For you,
I think.
Great for you.

***

I stomp into the bedroom to call Jane.

"When do you start?" Jane asks. "That's so lame. I can't believe your dad would do that. I thought your parents were cool."

"I'm supposed to start on Monday. I can't believe this. It's so not right."

"I wish you could come with Leah and me to Curtain Call."

"Because that's so me?"

"It would be better than babysitting."

"Being with you guys, yeah, definitely. But you know I can't act. I don't want to act. I'd rather..."

"What?"

"I don't know ... anything? I mean, I think what you do is amazing," I say. "Your version of
Cinderella
in sixth grade was the funniest thing I ever saw in my life."

"CinderELLA! CinderELLA! Go get my dress! CinderELLA! CinderELLA! Fix my hair."

"You know, maybe I
should
just see if my dad would pay for me to—"

"Actually, I don't think there are any spots left in our division. I'm pretty sure Leah said she got the last one. I'm sorry. Did you really want to—"

"I'm just desperate, no. I don't think I would. Ugh."

"Ugh is right."

"So are you and Leah coming over tomorrow?"

"Yeah, after orientation, okay?"

"You have orientation on a Sunday?"

"Just a quick thing in the morning. We'll be there sometime in the afternoon."

"Cool. Then whose house for the Fourth this year?"

"We'll figure it out tomorrow. I'll see ya, Marley."

***

When I wake up in the morning, I have that freaky pat-the-blankets, look-at-the-walls moment. Where am I? My room does not have light blue walls. The sun does not filter in beneath my window shade and shine directly on my head. Rig arches his belly up toward the ceiling, his paws stretching straight out. Rig, with his steady eyes. Rig with me here. Where? Right. Dad's.

I walk into the kitchen. Actually, a little morning-groggy, I walk into both bathrooms before I find the kitchen. Dad is standing at the counter, holding a container of the wrong kind of orange juice. I hate pulp. Odd little plates are on the counter next to weird little juice cups. The odd clear-glass plates are piled high with scrambled eggs. At least he got the egg part right.

Rig's nails click into the room and Dad kneels down and starts to rub his ears. Then he looks up and sees me, and there's all this love in his eyes. Oh, my dad.

I'm such a mess. A kind look from someone—from my
dad
—and I'm ready to burst into tears. It's just everything, too much change at once. I can't even figure out—like, at all—why my parents aren't together. Watching a relationship go bad might be like watching something grow. If you're there all the time, you can't see it happening. Rig weighed only eight pounds when we got him. I could hold him in my hands. Now he's this big black mess of a dog. It was slow, bit by bit. With my parents, there must have been changes over time. They were just invisible to me. It was hard to notice because they didn't yell a lot. In the end, they didn't talk a lot, either. There was a lot of silence those last months, but it wasn't the peaceful kind. It had weight, an angry silence.

"Morning," I say. I walk over to the counter and start to move things to the table. Odd plates. Weird juice cups. Napkins.

I sit at the table and watch him butter his toast with painterly precision, up to but not including the crust. Behind him on the wall there's a clock shaped like a coffee cup. It is so weird to me that Dad lives in this place. I keep glancing back from the plates to the cups. Oh, and those forks. Where did they all come from? Were they always in this house? Did he buy them? I picture him with this empty shopping cart, setting out to buy all the things he'll need to live by himself. I see him looking at different cups and plates and putting them in his cart and then, maybe thinking of Mom and me, putting them back on the shelf, and then back in the cart again. I picture him walking slowly down a wide aisle, pushingth at new-at-living-alone-dadc art.

He places his toast, perfectly centered on a plate, on the table and goes to the fridge. "Since we're both free today," he says, his face actually in the refrigerator, "I thought we could do something fun. Something together."

I nod until he pulls his face back out and can see me. "Leah and Jane are coming over this afternoon. After Curtain Call."

"We'll be back. Did you bring a bathing suit?" He puts two unopened jars of jam on the table—strawberry and grape.

"Why?"

"I thought we'd take Rig to the lake. Maybe get a rowboat and fish for a while. Maybe you could swim, too. It should be warm enough later."

Really? Because you said something fun.

I never used to complain about fishing days back when we lived our old life, our Perfectly Good Life. Because a fishing day never had anything to do with fishing for Mom and me. We'd send Dad off with his pole and he'd fish while we did normal things. We'd talk, swim, eat. I always had a good time.

But his won't be anything like that.

This—this!—seems like a whole new world with a set of rules that no one remembered to share with me. If we were in our Perfectly Good Life, it would be a day that just happened, natural. I chew the toast, disgusted by how dry it is in my mouth.

"I'll get ready now," I say. Like a line in a play. On this strange set with these weird prop plates and little prop glasses filled with pulpy orange juice.

***

We pack a cooler with drinks and snacks and a container of water for Rig, then drive for a very long time, out to a lake I've never seen before.

It looks like a postcard of perfect summer. There's a dock, an area for swimming, some boats, and picnic tables painted bright white. It must be too early for normal people, because it's deserted. But then, normal people are home in bed. Or hanging out with their friends.

Okay. I just have to survive fishing. Then Leah and Jane will come over and start to make this summer bearable. I can almost see Leah, sprawled on my new bed with a magazine quiz open in front of her. Jane will have a notebook open to a page divided into three columns, our names in neat letters at the top of each, to record our answers. Okay. Who can't survive one fishing trip?

Dad loads himself up with stuff from the car—fishing poles crossed over his shoulder, container of bait in one hand, the cooler pulling down the other. I run ahead with Rig while Dad pays a guy in a little shack. We all slog through the mud to the water's edge, and I watch as Dad loads everything onto a rowboat. Rig looks around, as though he's trying to figure out what's expected of him here. Dad snaps his fingers and points at the boat and Rig splashes into the water and clambers aboard. The boat tips back wildly and Rig gets this crazy look in his eyes, this
How could you ever put me in this situation?
look, this
I'M IN DANGER, PEOPLE
look, and hoo boy, do I ever get how he feels. I grab the splintery oar, then the side of the boat itself, to still the rocking. I climb in and put a steadying hand on his neck. He thumps his tail once and sits at my feet, his chin on my left knee.

Dad fiddles with the oars and starts rowing out. There's the
shplush
sound of the oars hitting the water, then a
thluup
as they come out. Dad's looking back toward the dock we just left. I'm looking at Dad's old Yankees baseball cap, scratching Rig's ears until his left rear paw is thump, thump, thumping. Every time I rub his ears just right, his left rear paw just does that—it's some kind of reflex that signals dog bliss.
Shplush ... thluup. Shplush ... thluup. Thump thump thump.

I'm waiting for the right moment. I figure maybe out here, in Dadland, I can get him to see how unfair he's being about this stupid babysitting thing. Even
he
has to be able to see that normal people do not surprise their children with unwanted jobs.

When he gets us to some place that must seem right to him (it looks like the rest of the lake to me), he stops rowing. Rig lies down in the bottom of the boat, his head readjusted to rest on my right foot. Dad digs a worm out of the container. Ew.

So this is what I've been missing when I hang out with Mom on fishing days. I watch my dad impale one creature to catch another.

He throws the line back over his shoulder and swings it into the lake.
Splish!
Then he hands me the rod to hold.

"Did you bring a radio to listen to the game?" Sports radio chatter and baseball games have been the background music of all my summers. Dad shakes his head. I don't exactly like listening to all that baseball talk, but it gives me a lot to discuss with my dad: this one's hitting streak, that one's trouble with the inside fastball.

"How's the gardening stuff going?" I ask. "Is it fun or anything?" From Dad's summer job it's just one more conversational step to the babysitting thing. I can do this. I'm almost there.

"We can't talk, Marley." He points down. Huh? Is there some new way Dad and I are supposed to communicate now that he doesn't live with Mom and me? He sucks in his lips and crosses his eyes. Is he dying? Has he lost his mind? He points out at our lines, just sitting in the water. I still don't get it. Finally, exasperated, he says, "The fish."

Oh. Duh. The fish. But ... but, but, but!
Dad! Are you at all sorry about making me do a job I don't want? Have you missed me? Do you wonder if maybe someday things might get back to our Perfectly Good Life? Do you ever think about Mom?

I look out at my line, unmoving in the still waters. So this is it? Fishing is about silently holding something? Wow.

I wonder when the Curtain Call orientation will end, how much longer until I'm finally hanging with my friends again. I wonder if Leah will like it. Jane's been going since she was six, but Leah always used to spend a ton of time visiting her grandmother on Cape Cod, so she never signed up for Curtain Call before.

I bet she'll love it.

Leah and Jane spent almost all of seventh grade in drama club together. They were so into it at the end of the year, with all the extra rehearsals and performances and cast parties, that I hardly ever saw them. Acting might not be my thing, but it's clearly theirs.

Much to my guidance counselor's obvious disappointment, the things I like to do, other than just hang with my friends, are kind of solitary things, like reading and writing and doodling. I was the poetry editor of the school's literary magazine (creatively named the
LitMag)
with this amazing writer, Callie, who was fiction editor. The issue we put out at the end of the year was kind of incredible and intense, but really, I'd rather not be part of the
LitMag
at all. I think I'm just not an organized activities kind of girl. There's this unspoken rule, though, that you have to do
something.

There must have been a bunch of kids in our school who didn't, but when I try to think of them, the only one I can picture is Elsie Jenkins, this über-pale girl who wears a tan windbreaker year-round. It's an outer garment in the spring and fall and an extra layer indoors during the winter. Elsie, as Jane once pointed out, is monochromatic. Her hair and her face are all this washed out, unnameable color, a hue that blends right into the windbreaker. I don't think she has ever had a friend. As far as I know, she has never joined a club. I've only heard her speak once, when she asked me something about submitting a poem for the literary magazine. She never did, though. She's quiet and kind of painful.