When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.
“That’s a lot to know by heart,” I mumbled. So Eli was a memorizer. Now I knew why I’d scored thirty dollars from poetry. My mother beamed again like a moron. He’s not your kid, I felt like saying.
“Are you from the Midwest?” Hector asked him.
“Yes, the flyover,” he said. “I lived in Ohio until I was nine.”
“Where in Ohio?”
“Where am I from in Ohio, Reen?” Eli asked. The Mims looked down and swung her foot. Oh no! She didn’t know the answer! My heart dropped, but I was also happy. “And when is my birthday?” He elbowed her side. He was smiling, but there was pain in it. Poor guy.
“I have it in my book,” she said, halting.
“Mom!” She knew our birthdays! What was the deal?
“I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland called Lakewood,” Eli said, looking at Hector, specifically avoiding her. “And my birthday is November tenth.”
I pushed Hector out the back door so we were alone and said, “I’m beginning to think she’s the bad guy. He remembers everything about us. What’s up with her?”
“Maybe she’s got the ’tism,” Hector said. That was our new thing. The ’tism.
“See those sweatshirts?” I pointed to my sisters, one of whom was cartwheeling on the grass. “Eighty dollars each. I’m broke. Eli got the Mims a dress. We’re sleeping in a cabin, and yesterday we went skiing on Pine Mountain.”
“You went to Mount Pinos?” For years, in elementary school, his dad drove him to Mount Pinos to look at stars. It never occurred to me it was the same mountain.
“What have you guys been doing?”
“Just helping here. We’re going home tonight.”
“Us tomorrow.” It was almost time to leave for Boston with our dad. In the car, driving back to our cabin, we heard a train again.
“I love that,” my mom said.
Eli had those sticks you break to make light. We drew on the dark with those wands, leaving brief trails as we trucked down. Right before we went inside, Eli pulled my head back so I’d look up. Millions of sharp, small stars; it was dizzying how far the sky went back. The smell of the pine pressed close to us. This was a different kind of vacation than we’d taken before. I asked my mom if I could recite my poem for ten dollars. I was cleaned out. She told me sure, then had me turn around while the Boops pulled pajama tops over their heads.
I tripped through “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”
“Tea and Waffle Maid?” Boop Two said, from inside her top. The Boops lived on frozen waffles.
I’d made two tiny errors. My mom told me to practice more.
“Oh, honey, I think articles are fungible,” Eli said. “May I pay him?” He gave me a twenty and said, “I have another Yeats for you.”
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
He was sad, I thought, because she didn’t remember his hometown. She loved him, though; I could see that. I used to count on being able to enchant her: with chess, the suspenders I snapped against my shirt when I was small, the night of paper airplanes. But now, Eli could. More. Even with his twenty in my pocket, I didn’t like that.
My sister whispered to me in the dark, “If Mom married Eli, would he still bring presents or would he get like Dad, not wanting to spoil me?”
“Like Dad,” I said.
The next day, on our way home, we stopped and wandered through the grounds of Caltech. On the highway, Eli said to the Mims, “After you drop them at Cary’s, I’ll take you somewhere you can wear that dress. To a place where we’ll hear trains at night.”
“What are you doing, Mom, while we’re gone?” Boop Two asked. She never liked being away from the Mims.
“Eli’s staying.”
They were playing some game in the front seat, handing back and forth my mom’s small graph-paper notebook. She wrote something, and then he did.
Keep your hand on the steering wheel, I felt like saying.
“Thank you, sweetie,” he said after he read her move. “I won’t hold you to it.”
31 • A Graph-Paper Contract
Then we flew to Boston. On my dad’s side, we had traditions, too. Each year we met in a new city and shopped. We all loved the great American malls. We ate in restaurants my aunts and uncles had read about; though they didn’t cook, the Harts appreciated food. My sisters and I talked about the cabin among ourselves, but we liked this, too. For Hanukkah we each got eight presents. We didn’t light the candles and receive one every night the way Simon’s family did. We skipped the candles altogether and got the presents all at once. I missed Hector. But he wasn’t home either; they’d gone on another epic road trip.
By the time we returned to LA on Christmas Eve, Eli had vanished. He was working in the DC shelter again, my mom told us; he’d fly to Wisconsin in the morning. What about his brother? I remembered all of a sudden. Was Hugo just alone? Why didn’t Eli go there, instead of to the shelter? For that matter, couldn’t he have brought Hugo here? I hoped the Mims had invited him. Maybe she hadn’t. She should have. But then she’d forgotten Eli’s birthday.
The doorbell rang, and Charlie stood there, buttoned into a dress shirt, holding a ridged glass canister filled with roses, holly, and pine. Every year, Sare gave presents with one flea-market component and something else she made. Last year, she delivered alcoholic eggnog in antique jugs. I preferred that. For the obvious reason.
I set my alarm for a predawn hour and pushed myself out of bed to make sure stockings were stuffed. I walked through the house, the only one up. Croissants the Mims had sent away for had risen under a white towel. On the mantel, our stockings bulged. I could have gone back to bed, but I liked waiting alone at the kitchen table. I wanted to hear people wake up. My sisters talked among themselves in their room, then they went to the porch and brought back the plate where we’d left cookies. They still believed! They really did. I tried to make them let the Mims sleep, but she came from her room, tying a long robe around her waist.
“Kind of old Hollywood,” I said, fingering it. “A gift?”
But she shook her head.
After the riot of tearing, we sat around the tree. There seemed to be too few of us again. Our dad would come but still not for hours. My head hurt behind my eyes. The Mims stumbled around in that robe stuffing crumpled wrapping paper into a garbage bag. She was always moving. I wanted her to sit still. She set up the Boops squeezing oranges, each with her own old glass juicer from her stocking. (Just what every eleven-year-old girl dreams of: a citrus juicer!) I opened a drawer in the kitchen for no reason: matches, pencils, a small notebook.
On the last page I found:
CONTRACT:
I, Irene E. Adler promise to move to Pasadena.
&n
bsp; I, Eli J. Lee promise to love the above forever.
They’d both signed their names. Move to Pasadena! I wanted to ask, but I knew I shouldn’t have snooped, so instead I held up a rectangular thing from the drawer, a stack made of squares of cloth. “What’s this?”
“Oh. Eli bought a suit. Or had one made—but I guess they didn’t do it right. So they’re giving him another. He wants me to help pick the fabric.”
“Does he get to keep the first one?”
“I think so,” she said.
“Two for the price of one. Like Dad’s hats.” The first present the Mims ever bought my dad was a hat, a Borsalino, the brand Humphrey Bogart wore. But it didn’t fit his head. My dad took it back and came home with two different hats.
I remembered the card with names of London tailors. What was it with Eli and suits? Suits and animal shelters clashed, didn’t they? I tried to picture him in a suit, holding a dying cat.
“Can I have a cookie?” Boop One called from the other room.
“Have you had any yet?”
“I had a star but it had two arms broken off.”
A car stopped outside. Our dad walked up in jeans, smoking one of his little cigars, stopping for a last drag, then dropping it and smashing it out with his shoe. In front was an old dark blue convertible with a wreath tied on the grille. I ran outside to see. “A guy at the studio garage let me borrow it.” He turned on the radio: Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon.”
“Get your mom and sisters.”
We drove on the Pacific Coast Highway beside the beach, wind batting our faces, riling our hair. The sky was clear, the ocean dark blue, and palm fronds were going totally wild. Air came so fast into your eyes they ached on the edges. We jammed our hands in our pockets. It was a quiet thrill to be in this car, with our handsome dad driving! At times like this, I thought of Simon’s mom saying we had the best everything. The whole feeling was what people in LA know when they eat in a restaurant with a movie star but don’t indicate by any word or movement that they recognize him because they understand that actors and actresses live among them and have to have real lives, too. We ended up at the Getty. “I booked a corner table,” our dad said, standing in the open-air train. He carried two bags of shiny store-wrapped presents. The restaurant on top of the hill looked over miles of our city. The air felt thin, prosperous, with a stable, old sacred-day light. It was a museum, after all. We laughed without stopping all through lunch.
It felt like the first good Christmas since I’d been old enough to understand there could be any other kind. My father bent down to kiss my mother’s forehead when he dropped us back, brushing a piece of her hair behind her ear, the jewel earring he’d given her hanging next to her cheek. That’s how I remember it, anyhow. I realize, it probably couldn’t have been that jolly. These were people going through a divorce. From what I know now, they must have been almost done.
The Mims made a fire inside, threw on a log, saying, “Another Christmas.”
It was only afternoon, but we each went to our rooms. I pulled my shades down; I liked the lush, dark privacy, like a movie theater, with the scrabble of Gal.
32 • The Sex Diary
I’d been watching for the UPS truck. Eli had sent the box before he knew he was going to buy me binoculars. I knew it was greedy, but I hoped he’d put in something for me. The day after Christmas a truck parked in front of the house; it turned out to be a moving van. Men carried chairs, tables, sofas, and—in a moment of poetry—a pool table into the house next door. On New Year’s Eve day the people came. They had kids, my sisters reported. Four maybe. Or five. Hector and I climbed to the Rabbits’ Pad with my German binoculars. We saw only an empty backyard. Even so, it was peaceful there. Hector read a thick book. I flipped through my dad’s old Richie Rich comics. After an hour, Hector sprang up. On the balcony of the house next door was a perfect girl: blonde, wearing white short shorts, with tan legs. “She’s a fox. Wait. There’s more. Binoculars!”
I’d adjusted them before to look at a bug. People were a different setting. Once we had her in focus, we spied. There seemed to be three of them, different sizes, all blonde. A wooden fence separated our yards. We could make a trapdoor.
“You have the best house,” Hector said.
We traded the binoculars until the girls retreated deep inside the house. Then we went down to ask about renting a movie.
My mom and Marge Cottle sat at the kitchen table, with papers spread out and a tin of almond brittle open. The widow and the soon-to-be divorcée. Neither looked that great. Hector’s mom, Kat, was definitely the poster single woman. The Mims had her hair in a bun held together with a pencil. Marge said she was starting a diet, which seemed like a good idea, but then again, she’d brought the almond brittle. “I think it’s really fitting that Eli’s willing to forfeit the big job and come out here. Stanley moved four times to follow me.” They paused. Stanley was dead. You couldn’t just put him in a conversation and gallop on.
“Eli’s grateful for the teaching,” my mom said. “He said we’ll use the money to take the kids away somewhere every month.”
“He’s thinking about it all,” Marge said. “I like that.”
I figured I’d have to write down his birthday and remind her next November. I tried to remember again where it was that he grew up. I’d have to write that down, too.
AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE BUT NOT MORE SO—Uncle Albert was on the blackboard again.
Boop One slid in on her socks. “What are we doing tonight?”
“Eli’s coming. Maybe we’ll make resolutions.”
“We’re not doing anything? What’s Dad doing?”
“You’re probably going to bed,” Marge said. “New Year’s Eve is not a classic eleven-year-old’s holiday.” Marge believed our mother spoiled us, although she fed her dog hormone-free sirloin from Whole Foods.
“I’m going to call Daddy to pick me up,” Boop One said. We heard her side of the conversation. “But you’re always going out with your friends. You’d rather go out with your friends than be with your very own daughter.” She kicked the floor.
“Chillax,” I said. “Most parents go out New Year’s Eve.”
The Mims told us we had to walk to Blockbuster, but Marge offered us a ride in the small back of her car. The dog perched on its own plaid cushion in the passenger seat.
She parked in front of Blockbuster and said, “I can swing you on back.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. But she waited. She had a sweetness that got lost in the volume of her face.
“She’s really nice,” Hector said as we bounded back up our steps. “I’m glad she has that dog.”
I hoped my mom had invited her for tonight; I had the feeling Marge was just going to be home with her mutt.
Hector and I put on a movie until we heard fireworks booming outside. Then we strayed down to watch. The foxes from next door stood with their parents on their new front lawn. Boop One had fallen asleep, but Boop Two crawled onto my mom’s lap. During the finale, Eli stepped out of a taxi, carrying a suit by its hanger.
“He looks like a spy,” Hector whispered. “And he travels all the time.”
“I don’t think the National Science Foundation has spies.”
The Mims tried to lift Boop Two over her shoulder, but my sister was too big now. It looked like the Mims was dancing with a rag doll. Boop Two was sucking her third finger; she’d done that ever since she was born.
“Where’s he gonna sleep?” I asked our mom.
“The futon-sofa. Or, if you guys want to go upstairs, we can give him your room.”
We called upstairs. He could have the bunks. Like my dad did that once.
Eli opened a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator. They offered us each an inch. It tasted like pee.
He clunked around the kitchen barefoot, with adult knobby feet, opening oysters in our sink with a small knife. They seemed to work together without talking, like married parents, a
s boring as anybody else’s. The oysters quivered like eye gel.
Hector and I finished About a Boy. After that, we watched Annie Hall for the third time, the plaid comforters from my bunks pulled up to our faces. I got up once to piss and heard them.
“You know what I want from you? Your memory. Will you keep a diary? Can you even remember all the times?”
“I think I could reconstruct them.” His memory again—to her it was this great pile of coins. Some beautiful empty library.
“That would be my perfect gift,” she said. I remembered the box that hadn’t come yet. Had I just not seen it? Four books I hadn’t noticed before were stacked on her desk. James Newman’s The World of Mathematics.
I fell back onto the couch and repeated the conversation to Hector. He looked like he felt sorry for me. Diane Keaton flickered in front of us, our same LA but with everyone in outdated clothes. Then I bolted up. Sex was what Hector thought my mom was asking him to remember. A sex diary. I shook him awake. “That’s not what she’s talking about. She means like when we went to the cabin. And cross-country skiing.”
“How do you know?” Hector mumbled.
I ventured out to the top of the stairs, but it was quiet now. I crept down and looked into my bedroom; sure enough, there was Eli, tucked in alone. Comforterless.
Unlike my dad, Eli had taken the top bunk.
In the morning, I heard water in the pipes. I sat on the landing again.
“Rosenfeld says he could get three days,” my mom said, from the kitchen.
“Even though he has Malc drive them to school and comes home late?”
It took me a minute to understand: they were talking about custody. My parents must have been fighting over us! That started a feeling in my chest; our dad wanted me. I’d suggested a million times that I stay with him while the Boops were with my mom. Then we could switch. I’d never have to live with the Boops again.