Megan Tucker
THE TELEVISION IS on but no one is watching. The end of the day at the end of October and our mother closes the door to the den and tells us what she has done: “I’ve switched it on so the man who is coming will think your father is home.”
We try to imagine our father as someone who watches television behind a closed door at six o’clock in the evening. Light shines around the door in thin lines. The noise comes through in full. Together we watch the door to the room where our father might be.
The voice coming from the television that no one is watching is Dukakis. We know it is sad to be for Dukakis, as we must. We know who will win: Bush will win. Even here in California. It will be a landslide.
When the doorbell rings, we scatter to the brown-tiled kitchen where our mother has abandoned a skinned pineapple, angular and wet, cupped pores left behind in the yellow meat. The pineapple sits up on a chopping board on the counter with an old serrated paring knife, the pale plastic handle pocked from turns in the disposal. Later, we will try to eat all of the pineapple, even the core.
Our mother answers the door and on the porch is more than a man. Three people walk down the hall toward our bedroom, where our bunk beds are stacked. One person is our mother. One is the man. One is a very pregnant lady. She asks to use our toilet.
One minute for the vice president.
I think the foremost . . . Can we start the clock over? I held off for the applause.
Bush.
In our bedroom, the rails on the disused crib are badly bitten. “Look at what you did, Nicola,” our mother had said in lighthearted disbelief that afternoon. “No, Claire was not a baby in America,” she insisted. “It would only have been you.”
Earlier that day she had arranged a time for the man who responded to her classified ad to come to our house.
We see what our mother cannot: us looking at each other through those bars, wanting to come out, wanting to get in. Alone in our room, we had both chewed the railings, toward each other.
Our mother wants $50 for both pieces—crib and matching dresser—and the man on the phone agreed, but now that he sees the extent of the damage and our mother sees the extent of the pregnancy, neither is sure that the arrangement will hold.
We two add up this way: one sister is six and one sister is twelve. Together, that is an eighteen-year-old. Together, we could leave home; go to war. Our brother was never born; he gets zero. Our mother’s bothersome belly has already receded. She says the sale is less about the money and more about someone being able to put the furniture to good use.
We look back and forth between the bathroom door and the den door and the open door to our bedroom where the man is standing on our oval braided rug. He does not seem concerned that his wife has been in our only bathroom a very long time.
The room where people are is quiet and the room that is empty is loud with voices; our mother had created an illusion.
There was a time when we were allowed to watch shows. Alone with the Americans on the television, we saw lives that were like ours, but with more music. Roller skates. Kind puppets. A pastor. Meals. Spanish.
“Do you have a newspaper in your house?” the man on the television had asked. “Can you go get it? I’ll wait for you.”
We ran. The man was already folding paper hats when we returned. Real sailor hats with a point and a brim. We spread our papers out, eyes moving wildly between our own hands and the good hands of the man on the television. Finished, the hats opened on to our heads widely, but held. But then there was our mother. She snatched the hats away, crumpled them angrily. She walked out to the street bin, the pages gathered against her waist. She turned over our hands and showed us the black smudges of newsprint coating our skin. All that mess: where had we touched? Where had we left marks? She turned off the television for good. Not just that afternoon, but for years.
The man says $35 is all he can pay.
Our mother replies, “Fifty is firm.”
Our mother is not a U.S. citizen, so she is not eligible to vote. If we were one person, we would equal our father’s vote. That would be one more vote for Dukakis!
The pregnant lady comes out of the bathroom looking clammy. Still, our mother won’t budge. The man tugs on the drawers. “OK,” he says.
The man goes out to his van, gets the cash and two thick blankets. One blanket is yellow wool. One is a sleeping bag unzipped the whole way around. We are relieved when he hands over the cash. Our mother was right to hold out for her price.
Bush. Dukakis. Bush. Dukakis.
It has to be the woman, in the exercise of her own conscience and religious beliefs, that makes that decision.
Back in our bedroom, the man tilts the dresser, measuring the weight for the first time. He’s going to do it, we think: He’s going to take these pieces away. But the man tilts his chin toward the sound of the candidates.
“Could your husband give me a hand?”
We are caught. We will all burst into the den now.
“No,” our mother snaps.
The buyers have an accent that we cannot place. We all do. We all have terrible accents.
The man raises his palms at hip height, a low surrender. The pregnant lady and the man rock the dresser on to one of the blankets and they begin to bring the dresser down the hallway as if on a sled. Our mother does not help; the pregnant lady is pushing from the back, guiding the piece with force. We do not watch as the lady squats to lift the dresser out the door, to carry it down the walkway. The crib goes next.
Our mother puts the $50 away, turns the debate off, butchers the pineapple. Chopped yellow pieces cover the board like collapsed bricks. We eat ferociously until what’s left is a small amount that we absolutely cannot eat.
Later, the telephone rings: “Sorry, it has been sold.”
Another ring: they’ve come and gone.
In the night, there is a soft sound in our room. Like we are trying to make something.
In the morning, I see the wood I have worn away with my teeth, as if I tried to whittle from the top bunk down to where my sister sleeps separately. My jaw aches, but I don’t have splinters in my tongue or cheeks. The damage done I have swallowed. I wonder if I have weakened the structure, if it is necessary to sleep now in fear of collapse.
Megan Tucker is the associate fiction editor of The Common, and a graduate of Wellesley College and the University of Michigan.