True to Form

  He looks up at me and I see a blue vein running up his neck that reminds me that he is a human being and it is a miracle how blood keeps us alive and how all our organs are always working without us paying any attention. “It is already a symbol,” I say again. I am sorry to disappoint him, but I think he should know.

  “A symbol for what?” he asks.

  “It’s an asterisk,” I say, “and—” Henry starts laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask, and he says, “Asterisk. It’s a dirty word.”

  He acts like this is pure hysterical, but I know it’s because he’s tired; when kids get tired they can start acting like nothing at all is the funniest thing in the world.

  “It is not dirty,” I say, “it is an asterisk, and it signifies ‘something missing.’ ”

  “Not tonight,” Henry says. “Tonight it means the last number.” “Okay,” I say, and look at my watch again. Hallelujah, I have made it. It is time for them to go to sleep and me to take off my shoes and rest my feet on the coffee table while I decide: magazine or television. If I lived in my own house, it would be luxury time like that all the time. Magazine, I might decide, and then I would go and get some good potato chips to eat while I read it.

  I tuck them all in, David and Mark in the bunk beds in one room, which smells like socks, and Henry in his bed in the real little room that he has alone that smells like apples, I don’t know why. Model airplanes hang from his ceiling, and he has an old brown bear with no eyes that he sleeps with but he won’t pick it up in front of me. I like to tuck Henry in, because he isn’t embarrassed; he likes when I pull the sheet up under his chin. Tonight he gets the bonus that I sit on the bed beside him like a real mother. “Good night,” I say, and he rubs his eyes and yawns and it makes for this little hurt of pleasure inside me like when you see baby kittens sitting there blinking in the sun, they just have no idea.

  SUNDAY NIGHT, WE ARE EATING dinner, when I all of a sudden take in a deep breath and bring it up. “Dad? I entered this contest on the radio, and guess what, I won!”

  “You won what?” he says, and then gestures with his chin toward the bread, which means Ginger should pass it to him.

  “I won a trip.”

  He stops buttering his bread. “To where?”

  “To Texas. On an airplane. Well, I could have gone anywhere I wanted, but I picked Fort Hood. Now I can go back and visit Cherylanne!”

  He looks at Ginger, whose blank and innocent face is like her shrugging her shoulders and saying, Don’t ask me.

  “You’re not going on any trip,” he says.

  I look at Ginger, who is looking into her plate. Not my business. He is not angry, but he could get that way if I push.

  But I have to. Very quietly, I say, “Why not?”

  He looks up and I sit still.

  “You don’t need to be taking a trip that far away by yourself.” Forkful of meat loaf, chew, chew. Shakes his head. “No.”

  “Would this all have been free?” Ginger asks. It’s like under the table, we are holding hands.

  “What did I say?” he yells, and that’s it, game over, no winner.

  “May I be excused?” I say, and I don’t wait for an answer before I go to my room and close the door. I sit at the edge of my bed and start crying. I should have known that he would never go for this. Cynthia knew, and she’s not even his daughter. I hold a pillow to my middle, rock back and forth. What if this is the only time I ever win anything, and now I can’t even go. I think of how I would have been high in the sky looking out the little round window. How I would have come to Cherylanne’s house like a celebrity. How we would have gone to her room like old times and talked and gone to the swimming pool again. And then I stop thinking about it, because this dream has been ground out like one of his cigarettes in his beanbag ashtray. I don’t think it’s right for a parent to have so much control over another person’s whole life, even if they are a kid. Some things you could at least talk about. Other families do that. On Father Knows Best, he would let Princess go. Probably not Kitten, but I am much older than she is. Now I will have to call Fab Freddy and say I can’t go: Hello, this is Katie Nash, and I am still a baby who can’t do anything. Just give the prize to someone else, thank you.

  I start to look at a Seventeen that I’ve already read three hundred times when I hear him calling me. I crack open my door, yell, “Yes, sir?”

  “Dishes,” he says.

  You would think when you have had your dream smashed you at least could forget about dishes. But no. I start down the hall and I hear Ginger say, “Never mind, Katie, I’ll do them.”

  I hear the deep voice of my father start to say something, and then the fast, light words of Ginger. She will take care of him; I am free. I go back to my bedroom and close my door again and get the faint hope that maybe she can talk him into letting me go. I think of Diane, wonder what she’s doing right this minute out there in California. It is five o’clock. Maybe she is on the bus, on her way home from the office where she is a typist, and men are looking at her; they always look at her, because she’s so beautiful. If they are, I know what she might do. Sometimes when some guy was staring at her, she would say, “Take a picture, it lasts longer.” Another thing she used to say is, “Take a good look while you’ve got a chance; prices go up tomorrow.” Men would laugh then, but it was an unsure laugh, and in their eyes would be some hatred.

  It is such a strange and dark secret that Diane is hardly ever in touch with us. We have only been to see her once, my father and I, and we all slept in the living room because she has what they call a studio apartment. She had so few dishes in the cupboard, two or three plates, two glasses, only one cup. A set of silverware for four, so thin and light it bent in your hand if you pressed down too hard. Weeds grew out in the front yard of the corner apartment building where she lives, but, it being California, they were pretty weeds. We didn’t do much there—took a walk around the city of Sacramento, went out to a little restaurant where nobody talked much, we just ate some Mexican food, cheese enchiladas. When we left, my father tried to give Diane some money, but she wouldn’t take it. “I don’t need it, I’m fine,” she kept saying, but then at the end, she did take it. My father tried to hug her good-bye, which he learned from Ginger, but Diane only stiffened like he was hurting her. I guess he was.

  Diane is like a sword in my father’s side, Ginger told me. Maybe that could help in getting him to change his mind about my trip. I might go out and just mention Diane. I stand up, thinking of what I might say, then sit back down. I don’t need to mention her if she is a sword in his side. He feels it all the time. And yet, look.

  AT NINE O’CLOCK, I call Cynthia and tell her the grim news. “Oh, I knew it,” she says. “I knew he wouldn’t let you go.”

  I say nothing, stare at the little round paper circle on the phone that tells the number, TWinbrook 3-6409. I wonder who gets to make up the names for telephone numbers. Here would be mine: UNfair 3-6409.

  “Did you call the radio station?” Cynthia asks.

  “No.”

  “You have to call them, so they can give it to someone else.”

  “I know that, Cynthia.” I fill up my cheeks with air, then blow it all out.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I would help you if I could. You want me to call him? Or my mom? Want her to call him?”

  “Your mom!”

  “Yeah. She could say she would let me go, if I won.”

  “She wouldn’t let you go! She hardly lets you go out without a sweater when it’s five hundred degrees outside!”

  “I know. But one thing she likes is travel. She thinks it’s ‘broadening.’ She actually might let me go. You want me to ask her to call your father?”

  I think about this for a minute, imagine Mrs. O’Connell calling him. But then, “No thanks,” I say. “It would only make him mad.”

  “I can tell you something that is even worse than you can’t go to Texas,” Cynthia says.

&nbsp
; “What?”

  “My mother is planning a camping experience for her Girl Scout troop.”

  “When?”

  “In three weeks.”

  “Do you have to go?”

  “Of course. But here’s the queer part: It’s going to be inside! It’s going to be in our living room!”

  “What?”

  “Yes! Because my mother doesn’t like the woods because it’s all dirty there.”

  I can just see Mrs. O’Connell out in the middle of the woods, beautiful bird sounds all around, the sun shining through the trees like rays from heaven, and her with her cleaning kerchief on, sweeping violently and spraying Country Fresh deodorizer all over the place. But how in the world do you pitch a tent in the middle of a living room?

  “You can’t go camping inside!” I say.

  “That’s what I said. And she said she is the leader and what she says, goes. She says we will sleep in sleeping bags and make our hobo dinners in tinfoil packets and cook them in the fireplace, and we’ll tell ghost stories and have s’mores and look at some books on nature, so what’s the difference? Plus we have to make ‘eyes of god’ with Popsicle sticks and yarn.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “I know.”

  “We are both of us losers,” I say. It just slips out, and even though I’m sorry to say it, it kind of makes me feel better.

  “We are not,” Cynthia says.

  Right.

  IAM IN THAT PLACE JUST before sleep where even though things are real they could also be a dream. I see my door open and in comes my father. It’s real: I smell Old Spice. I sit up.

  “You awake?” he says.

  “Yes, sir.” And don’t think I’m not still mad at you, because I am still mad at you.

  He pulls out my desk chair and turns on my desk light.

  I hold my hands up over my eyes, and he moves the lamp so it’s behind his back and not so bright.

  “I have changed my mind about your going to Texas,” he says.

  I don’t move one muscle.

  “All right?”

  I nod. “Yes, sir.” Very, very quietly, I clear my throat.

  “You go ahead and go back to sleep; tomorrow we’ll make all the arrangements. You can stay for two days, and two days only.”

  “Okay.”

  “All right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right.”

  He snaps off the light, comes over to stand beside me. He is so tall. “Good night,” he says.

  He goes out the door and closes the door behind him. I squeeze my pillow really tight, but that is not enough so I happy-punch it a few times. I think of myself getting on the airplane and waving good-bye and I have to leap up and do the quietest happiness dance, just a few steps like the Pony, and inside me there is an open mouth shouting yahoo! Then I lie back down, but I am way too excited to sleep. I get up and go to my desk and start my list of things to bring. “Present for Belle” is the first thing I write, because she is the main hostess. Hankies or bubble bath. I know why I can only stay two days. Benjamin Franklin said, “Fish and visitors smell in three days.” We had that in junior high English. I was having a bad day that day because when the teacher called on me to explain what it meant, I thought it meant they didn’t wash. Although I didn’t say that. I just said, “Well, I think it’s sort of self-explanatory.” But then another girl raised her hand and said, all smug, “Don’t overstay your welcome.” The idea is you might be really happy to see someone, but then they get on your nerves because you’re sick of them and you just want your normal life back. But if they leave before three days, you might even kind of miss them.

  “Underwear,” I write next, which is pretty obvious, but you might as well write it down because what if you did forget. There you would be the next day, staring at your open suitcase and thinking, Uh oh. “Bathing suit,” I write. “Nice dress for going out,” because we might. I start thinking of going out with Cherylanne and a funny thing happens: I think of Cynthia instead. How I will miss her. How I might send her a postcard.

  I guess it has become home here, now. There are reasons for coming back. I have the responsibility of my jobs, and there is the interesting dilemma of how to save Cynthia from a mother gone berserk. It’s so amazing how that happens, place after place. When your dad is in the army, it’s like you’re always saying, “Okay, this is home.” And then, “No. This is home.” And so on and so on forever. But the joke is that you are never home except inside yourself. That is where you have to make the place with the light always on, a chair always waiting, sit down. It is always the same light, and it is always the same chair, turned just so and never moving one inch.

  MONDAY EVENING AFTER DINNER, I am allowed to call Cherylanne. My father has spoken with the radio station, and TWA will send me tickets for whenever I want. The kitchen timer is set for Cherylanne and me to talk three minutes; then my father will take over and talk to Belle. I go into the hall and dial her number, then slide down onto the floor, my back against the wall, get ready. The phone rings and right away a boy answers. “Bubba?” I say. I can feel my heart beating so fast in my chest.

  A pause. A burp. Then, “Yeah?”

  Well, Bubba has not changed. “This is Katie!”

  Nothing.

  “I used to live next door to you?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello?” I say.

  “Oh yeah,” he says, his voice lazy like he just woke up. “I remember you. You had that sister, Diane, she was always getting in trouble. And y’all got a puppy just before y’all left.”

  I really do not need for Bubba to tell me my life history, since I am more aware than he is of how the story goes.

  “How you doing?” he asks.

  Well, here I have the problem that I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t want to use my three minutes talking to Bubba. It turns out that I don’t have to say a thing, though, because in the background I hear Cherylanne’s familiar voice saying, “Is that Katie Nash?” And there is her voice in my ear, saying, “Katie? Is that you?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I am smiling so hard I can hardly talk. “I’m calling to say I’m coming to visit you, if it’s okay! For two days. On an airplane!”

  “You are?”

  “Yes, if it’s okay. I won a trip from a radio contest. I could pick anywhere, and I picked to come and see you!”

  A moment, and then, “You could have gone anywhere?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. I would have picked Hollywood.”

  “Well,” I say.

  “But I’m glad you’re coming! When?”

  “I can come almost anytime.”

  “Mom!” Cherylanne calls. “Katie’s coming to visit! Can she come next weekend?”

  Another pause, and then Belle is on the phone. “Well, sweetheart, how are you?”

  “Fine, thank you,” I say, and I see my three minutes going down the drain.

  “We would be delighted to have you; when are you coming?”

  “My dad will talk to you about that,” I say. “I was just going to talk to Cherylanne first. I have three minutes, and then my dad will talk to you.”

  “Oh!” she says. “Well, let me put her back on.”

  And there Cherylanne is again, her breathy “Hi!”

  “Hi,” I say, and all of a sudden I am shy. My hand goes into a fist, like it always does when I feel like this.

  “Did you get my letter about Darren?” Her voice is low and a bit muffled, as though she has her hand over the phone.

  “Yes.” Now I relax a bit and lower my voice too. I love this. Me and another person, boxed off from the world.

  “Believe me, I have plenty more to tell you. And now you can meet him, too! I never thought that would happen. I swear, it just goes to show you.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can do a lot of things,” Cherylanne says. “What do you want to do first?”

  I think about this. We are not exactly the same as we us
ed to be.

  “Katie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t worry. It will all be delirious surprises, okay?”

  And ding! Our talk time is over. I say good-bye to Cherylanne and hand the phone to my father. “Flight arrangements,” he is saying. “Arrival.” “Departure.” About me. Queen of Sheba. Flying through the sky on my own visit to my own friend because of something I did, by myself.

  IN THE MORNING, I head over to Cynthia’s house. I have a few hours before I have to go to the Randolphs’, and Cynthia had an excellent idea. I used my baby-sitting money on a bottle of QT and we are both going to use it and then enjoy the miracle of tanning in her bedroom while we plan how to get her out of Girl Scouts. Cynthia’s mother needs to understand that when you’re a teenager you make your own kind of Girl Scout troop, because you and your friends do the stuff you care about automatically. You don’t need somebody’s mom making you do things on a checklist to earn a badge that you sew on a sash and then go around wearing like an idiot.

  When I get to Cynthia’s house, I see her leaning out her bedroom window, waving me over. “Come here!” she whispers urgently, and looks all around to see if anyone is watching. I point to the door, and she hisses, “No! Come over here!”

  I go to her window and she says, “Climb in.”

  I stare at her. “Why?”

  “I need to know if it can be done.”

  “Well, why don’t you try it, then?” I stand back so she can jump out. It actually looks pretty easy to get back in; the window is fairly low to the ground.

  “I can’t do it,” she says. “If somebody sees, I could get in trouble.”

  “Why won’t I get in trouble?”

  “Because,” Cynthia says, “it’s not your house. It’s not your mother. Just do it, okay? See if you can.”

  I don’t understand this, but I hoist myself up on the windowsill, then slide in to her room. It scrapes my stomach a bit, but it’s not that hard. “Ta da,” I say.

  “Oh, good,” she says. “Now I know I have an escape route.”