“Where the hell were you?” my grandfather asked one day when I got home from helping Annie in the garden. He was drinking a mug of tea.
“Working in the garden.” It was getting late in the summer, mid-August. There’d only be a few more weeks of helping, maybe a month, before school started again.
“Bloody waste of time. I’m your father, you should be helping me.”
I moved Stormcloud from a chair and sat down.
“Don’t move the cat! She was sleeping!” my grandfather growled.
“Sorry,” I said.
Stormcloud toddled off to find some food.
“There’s plenty of stuff that needs doing around here, instead of wasting your time in a fucking garden.”
“Like what?” I couldn’t think of anything that really needed to be done at home. Roger did the sanding and varnishing and painting; Pete repaired anything that needed repairing. Although my parents talked about firing our cleaning lady to save money, they hadn’t done so. Once a year, I helped Marilyn enter data into an aging computer for the business’s taxes, for which she paid me. I cleaned the kitchen most nights and usually once during the day. I did laundry sometimes. Between visits from the cleaning lady, I swept up the cat litter and animal hair. I was lazy, though, so it wasn’t as if I did these chores eagerly or with gusto. Sometimes I took on projects like scouring and shining the ship’s brass bell, work that I actually enjoyed. But usually there was nothing that needed doing except schoolwork. In the summers, I made up my own homework to keep busy—doing grammar exercises in an old grammar text of Marilyn’s, giving myself vocabulary quizzes, reading Discover or National Geographic and novels from various schools’ summer reading lists, memorizing definitions out of the dictionary, drawing, once in a while trying to write a story.
“Well, why the hell am I paying Roger to do the brightwork around here?” my grandfather huffed. “I’ll get him to teach you how to sand first thing in the morning.”
The thing was, I actually wanted to learn how to do that. I wanted to learn something practical, to work with my body, to feel the way I did after a morning of gardening. And I wanted my parents to think I was worth my keep.
Once when I was little, maybe nine or ten, my grandfather had screamed at me for not cleaning up my room and for not helping enough around the house. “You’re nothing but a parasite!” he’d shouted at me, his face red with the exertion, his hand holding my arm so I couldn’t move. “Do you know what a parasite is?” I did. I’d learned about tapeworms at school; I’d seen the leeches in The African Queen. When he said that, I felt as small as a parasite, as vile as something that sucked a nobler animal dry. Years later, part of me still felt that way. I was fourteen, and I felt completely useless.
But my grandfather’s threats always fell through. The next morning when I reminded him about learning to sand, he said, with genuine surprise, “Why would you want to do that?”
What my grandfather really wanted me to do was sit by him in the dining room while he watched TV or read or, at the very least, to be within earshot in case he wanted a cup of tea. I couldn’t really blame him. He needed us to help him dress. Marilyn or I needed to help him test his blood sugar and shoot him with insulin. We needed to trim his nails and get him in or out of a bath. If he wanted to go somewhere, he needed someone to drive him. Sometimes he needed help dialing the phone. When he counted quarters for the store, he needed me to haul the heavy sacks to his desk and dump them into the counting machine, which we’d bought after his accident. He needed me to carry away the wrapped bags of counted quarters. He needed me to bend over and pick up the things he dropped, to find his glasses, his slippers, his books, his watch, his billfold. As much as he pretended not to need Marilyn and me, summoning or dismissing us with a gruff command, I knew that he knew he was helpless without us. Somehow I understood that it terrified him.
Marilyn, too, needed me, although helping her was not as easy as helping my grandfather. Now that my grandfather was incapacitated, she did almost everything for the business. She ran errands all afternoon, then came home, rolling groceries and tape boxes along the long dock with her hand truck, then made dinner, then worked on accounts or tapes until two or three in the morning. She’d sleep in late, and when she woke, she’d wake up angry, slamming shampoo bottles and trash cans, kitchen pots and pans, screaming “shit” and “fuck” to no one in particular, although I knew the noise was directed at all of us. My grandfather, the cats, the dogs, Pete, the boat, and I—we were all burdens on her, things that just created more work. Anyone could see that. And even when we tried to help—doing the cat boxes or cleaning the kitchen or having Pete run errands—nothing we did met her standards. Five minutes after I started the dishwasher, she’d open it and completely reload it, slamming plates between the metal prongs of the rack. She’d sweep the floor again after I’d just swept and mopped it, muttering under her breath about dirt I could not see. She’d refold her laundry before she put it away in her drawers. Helping around the house seemed pointless when it simply created more work for her.
Nothing helped Marilyn, unless you counted coffee—which she drank all day, toting it around with her in thermoses, premixed with NutraSweet and cream—and wine, of which, I realized that summer, she’d been drinking a lot.
Since finding the two bottles stashed among the groceries, I’d begun to pay attention. I’d found where she’d hidden the bottles: they were under the kitchen sink, tucked way in the back. She used them to refill the small bottle she kept in the fridge, so it looked like she’d been working on the same bottle for weeks, when she’d really been drinking something like a bottle a day. It was hard to keep track, though, because she mixed her wine with sugar-free cran-apple juice, which she also kept in the fridge. She’d buy three bottles of juice at a time. But I’d only ever seen her bring home the wine that one time.
She drank the mixture out of red Solo cups instead of wine glasses and called them “fruity cocktails.” They’d taken the place of Engineer’s Specials, and instead of just drinking them before dinner, she drank them all evening once she got home. She rarely got obviously drunk. Instead I started to notice how she just got slower in speech and movement, happier—unnaturally chipper—and then sleepy. But if she fell asleep at the dining room table or later on at her desk, it was easy to credit it to her long days working, the late hours she kept.
It would be easy to miss what was happening if you didn’t notice how the cork in the wine bottle in the fridge was dried out and stained red on both ends. Or if you never looked under the sink for scouring pads and saw the wine bottles gleam faintly in the shadows. My grandfather couldn’t bend down that low and wouldn’t have seen well enough anyway. As for me, I saw it all, but it still took me a few years to understand what I was seeing and longer to say something and even longer to try to do something about it. I’d like to think it was because I was young or because she hid it so well, and perhaps that was part of it. But even then, part of me knew that she needed her fruity cocktails to function. And we—my grandfather and I—desperately needed her to function, so much so that we both turned a blind eye. And in some way I could not fully fathom, I knew that she needed us to need her just that much.
They both needed me to keep them safe: him from tripping, falling, illness, stroke, heart attack; her from him, from herself.
In the face of so much need, nothing I could do seemed adequate.
• • •
“You see, you have to make skirts either very short, so you can see lots of leg,” Josette said, “or just below the knee, to hide the knee. The knee is so ugly, don’t you think?”
I didn’t. But I didn’t want the skirt she was making—a beautiful straight one out of camel-colored wool—to be too short, and so I’d chosen the longer option. A couple of weeks before school started again, Josette decided I needed new school clothes, clothes for a young lady. I was standing on her trampoline—a small, black-and-metal device meant for exercise, not fun—while she squatted beneath me, her silver head bobbing up and down while she worked to pin the hem. Sometimes she dropped a pin, and they’d tinkle-bounce beneath the couch or into the sewing room’s dim corners. When I’d been little, my favorite thing to do at her house was take the yardstick that she’d attached a magnet to and sweep for pins.
“Tiens, c’est fini,” she said. “You can take it off now. I’ll sew the hem, and it will be all done. You can wear it the first day.”
I knew already that the skirt would not be a “cool” thing to wear at school; but I loved it, and I loved Josette, so I’d wear it anyway. Maybe not the first day, though.
I changed in front of her, pulling my jeans under the skirt, then wiggling the skirt off, careful not to jar the hem.
She talked to me as she sewed by hand. I sat cross-legged on the trampoline and answered her questions. I liked spending time at Josette’s, how absolutely quiet it was, except for the ticking of her grandfather clock, the hyperdrive purr of her cat. I liked browsing the endless shelves of books, classics of literature in English and French, cookbooks, and tomes on gardening.
I don’t remember how we got to it, but I said, “My grandfather doesn’t like it when women wear pants. He says it makes our bottoms look too big.”
“Well, your grandfather is from another time and place,” she replied.
I figured she knew what she was talking about. After all, she’d been a child in France during the war; she understood his time and place more than I did—only she wore pants all the time.
“I guess that explains the shouting,” I said lightly, realizing as I said it that it must have seemed to come out of the blue. But in my head, it made sense. The shouting had something to do with his having been of another generation, of having been born in 1917—almost a Victorian. Or perhaps the shouting came from his having been a naval officer in the war. I meant it as a joke.
Josette raised her gray eyes to look up at me over her sewing, as if she were deciding whether or not to tell me something, and then looked down again.
“Do you remember Nancy?” she asked. “She worked for your grandfather and Marilyn a few years ago. Right before you moved on to the boat.”
I did remember Nancy. She’d had short, blond hair and was always cheerful. Josette had gotten her a job with us, helping Marilyn do the bookkeeping at the video store. I’d been under the impression that Nancy needed the job as much as Marilyn needed the help. But she hadn’t lasted long—maybe a few months—and then Marilyn was back to doing everything on her own.
“She told me about the way Richard shouts.” Josette kept sewing, her eyes securely locked on the needle and camel-colored thread, and I watched, too, the glint of the thimble as it bobbed and darted. “How he screams at Marilyn, especially. She said, ‘Josette, it’s verbal abuse.’ That’s one of the reasons she quit.”
I’d never heard the term “verbal abuse,” or at least never in the context of a family, of my family. The way Josette said it, it sounded like a husband beating a wife or child, someone out of control, someone drunk or violent.
“Do you think she’s right?” she asked. The thimble kept moving.
I looked up from her lap. “I don’t know.” I wanted to say, “But what about me? He shouts at me too,” but I didn’t. I felt guilty thinking it. He shouted at Marilyn a lot more than he shouted at me.
My grandfather shouted at everyone, though; it was just how he was. He shouted at people on the phone, the dog, Roger, even the traveling freelance porn salesman who brought tapes to the boat for us to buy. I thought of the way he used to shout at Guillermo—the way it made Guillermo physically sick—how Roger sometimes shook after my grandfather was done screaming. How I sometimes shook. I thought of the way Marilyn often sat before him while he shouted, her head bowed like that of a child being scolded, waiting for it to be over.
So very many things could upset him: not being enthusiastic enough about a gift from him, forgetting to make him a cup of tea or to get a roast out from the freezer, preparing dinner too late, being too excited about anything, seeming to favor Marilyn over him. But I thought, too, of the times he was loving and funny and generous and silly, and how very few things felt better than being with him at those times.
I thought of the knot in my stomach when there was a chance he might be upset: the suspense of getting home late with Marilyn and opening the door to the boat, sliding it slowly, waiting to discover the first signs of his mood, whether it might be anger or forgiveness. And if the former, the tension-filled, careful dance of anticipating his desires in order to prevent an explosion.
But he’d never hit us, not once. He’d even stopped Marilyn from spanking me after I’d moved in with them. Spence had spanked me when I lived with her, and I still remembered the relief I felt knowing I’d never be hit again. Verbal abuse wasn’t as bad as physical abuse, was it? Surely what he did couldn’t be that bad.
I thought again of Marilyn sitting at the table, her head bent like a little child, the way she sometimes agreed with whatever he said, even if it was something bad about herself. “Okay, okay, okay,” she’d say. “You’re right. Okay.”
I thought of how helpless I felt watching her, that painful knot in my stomach. I thought of the glasses of wine. I looked up at Josette, who sat with her soft hands folded loosely in her lap.
“It’s okay,” I told her. She nodded and waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. It was okay. It wasn’t a big deal, not a big enough deal to have a name like that. After a moment, she smiled.
“Your skirt is ready, dear,” she said and held it up to me with her strong hands.