Francie's Got a Gun, page 4
“I like it,” said David, “but I think that I might not have heard all the words correctly.”
“Francie makes up her own words sometimes,” Alice explained.
“I see, I see.”
“For the concert, I’ll sing the real words,” said Francie.
“Do you know the real words?” Kate wondered, but Francie didn’t answer. There was no way she knew the real words.
“I have to go home.” Francie sounded breathless.
Kate didn’t say what she could have said then, that they’d sounded pretty good, that they’d gotten it together, that the kid had an interesting voice. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t even exactly in tune, but it was different. It was unlikely. You’d remember its weirdness. “You’re supposed to practise your own songs, actually,” Kate told Alice.
“Who left my mixing bowl on the sidewalk?” Here came Sally, bursting through the front door. “Someone come give me a hand with these groceries!”
Francie ran to help. Weird kid.
Kate’s dad wandered toward the front hall, but turned instead to go into the bedroom. The door shut quietly, so he was thinking about that, about making his escape. Kate gave Diego a quick shove off the good couch, and he looked at her with sad eyes. Betrayal. “Life’s hard, dumbo.”
Francie staggered by carrying a couple of grocery bags that looked like they might snap her arms off, and Kate said to Alice again: “You’re supposed to practise your own songs.”
Somehow, Alice managed to ignore Kate and follow her instructions. She started with scales, which made her sound dutiful and obedient. And got her off the hook for whatever Sally had planned for them.
“Kate!” Too late. “Help Francie put things away. She doesn’t know what she’s doing!”
“The bags are too heavy,” said Francie, standing in the kitchen.
“Well, you made it this far,” Sally told her.
Kate didn’t think her mother knew that Francie wanted to cry just then. But how did Kate know? Kate knew, she just knew. Feelings swirled in the air and Kate caught them, whether she wanted to or not, and she had to decide: hold on or let go?
Could she use them for something powerful? Was this a thought on the cusp of becoming big?
“Move!” Sally waved her arms at Max and his friends, who were sitting on the wide windowsill at the end of the table, finishing the bag of pretzels. “You can’t stay for supper,” Sally announced in a general way. “We’re having guests. They’re very strange, the husband works with David and the wife writes poetry.” Sally clapped her hands. “They’re vegetarians, so I’m making fish!”
“Ummmm, Mom…” But Kate didn’t bother finishing.
She slid her journal into the pages of the biology textbook and picked up the textbook, her pencil case, the other things, and zipped them into her backpack, which she’d tripped over when standing up.
Diego was nosing inside the bags Francie had dropped on the floor, while Francie waved a bunch of kale at him, weakly; and Kate decided she liked the kid alright. Little weirdo.
Diego had found the fish.
“Get out of here!” Sally grabbed for the bag and shouted, probably at Diego, but if Kate were a kid, like Francie, would she know Sally’s shouts weren’t meant for her? It seemed like a long time since Kate had been a kid.
This could have been Kate’s moment to drift away, but Sally sensed the silent gliding. “You, wash the kale.”
Francie held it out to her, its leaves thick, black-green, ribbed and veined like the leaves of a tropical tree. It looked inedible. Kate was surprised when Francie met her eyes. The kid’s feelings came rushing at her, an ambush of feelings.
Did this kid hate her? That wasn’t fair. What did this kid want?
“Got it.” Kate grabbed the kale. The kid was still looking at her.
“There are fairies that lay eggs,” said the kid.
“There are?” Kate was caught off balance.
“Yeah,” said the kid, “there are fairies that lay tiny little blue eggs.”
“Right. Okay.”
The problem with feelings was that sometimes they ran the other way. Sometimes they poured from you into someone else, and you couldn’t stop it from happening. It was like the kid was daring Kate to hurt her, to be cruel, to tell her not to believe whatever it was she wanted to believe. This wasn’t about fairies laying eggs. It was about who got to tell you what you were allowed to believe, to feel, to do, to be. Now that was a big thought.
The kid was leaving now, and Kate let herself feel what she was feeling, her own feelings bouncing back at her, off the kid, pouring into her bloodstream like a torrent of confusion and vigour and caring.
Dammit!
Kate felt the heat of everything she was feeling rush through her. It rushed through like a storm, possessed her. The kid was tying her shoes in the front hall, and Kate held the kale like a sword and pointed it at her mother. “You, on guard!”
* * *
Luce was on the couch. Marietta couldn’t see him, but she knew he was there.
“Hello?” she called, pushing through the side door. She was lugging a cloth bag of groceries, fresh off the bus, pulling Sam in the umbrella stroller up over the threshold. “Hey, I could really use a hand here!”
Her uniform reeked of spilled chicken noodle soup slopped down its front. “We don’t pay for laundering,” the daytime supervisor told her, as if Marietta had requested a special favour. “It’s in your contract.”
Marietta couldn’t remember signing any contract. She was fairly certain, however, that she didn’t have a clean uniform waiting for her at home, it was trickier to get to the laundromat with these random night shifts at the new place. The landlord had promised them a washer and dryer when they’d moved in, years ago. Marietta would settle for a washer, forget the dryer, she already hauled home the wet clothes to hang on the line. Hell, she thought, I’d settle for an old-fashioned hand-operated wringer. She remembered, all in a useless flash, that those machines were called mangles. A mangle. Why did she have to keep every last detail? Empty it, empty it, empty it out.
Mangle reminded her of the front door. Another meaning of the word. Mangled. Broken, wrecked, fucked. She’d found it like that yesterday morning when she got home from her night shift: the door hanging oddly on its hinges when she’d pushed it open, and no matter how she’d rattled the handle and muscled against it, it wouldn’t close. While she was standing there in the front room, trying to make sense of it, Luce had come in the side door carrying a cup of takeout coffee, promising he’d fix it.
“But what happened? What happened to the door? Why were you out? Did you leave the kids here alone?”
“Just for a minute,” Luce promised.
Luce promised.
“Should’ve picked up a coffee for you too,” he said, and he poured half into a cup for her, and they sat at the table and he told her again about this project he was working on with Mikey, it was going to be big, and Marietta couldn’t believe it, she couldn’t believe him!
“This has to stop, Luce, this needs to end, you have to be real with me.”
Luce hadn’t said he was in any kind of trouble, but he never would. As long as his car was running, he thought the world would keep spinning in whatever direction he pleased.
She knew he was home now.
“Luce!” Marietta hated hollering, hated how it hurt her throat and her head. How it vibrated through every nerve in her body, rattling her to the core.
Sam began to cry. “It’s not you,” she told him, thinking, Breathe, just breathe.
She moved her foot and the side door swung shut, bumping her hip as she bent to unstrap Sam. He didn’t nurse anymore. She had to quit breastfeeding when she took the night job, lining her bra with cabbage leaves to dry up the milk: a waft reminiscent of cabbage rolls pouring forth when she removed her bra after a long shift. She had to stop herself telling the old men what she had in there as she tended to their nighttime needs. Like a dirty joke, maybe they would have appreciated it; did she really want to know?
Sam was almost a year; still, Marietta felt she’d cheated him, or, perversely, he’d cheated her by letting go so easily. By not seeming to mind. By forgetting how he’d needed her. Francie was two and a half when she’d weaned, not that it made a difference, Marietta thought, sitting on the bottom step of the abbreviated staircase that led to the kitchen. She pushed off the flimsy canvas tennis shoes, her feet hurt—
Everything you are saying to yourself right now is negative! Stop complaining! Attitude of gratitude! She hated that phrase, superficial, fake…But she tried, she spoke out loud, quietly, gritting her teeth: “I’m thankful for…all of this…” She thought she heard a stirring from the front room, maybe Luce could hear her whispers louder than her shouts.
She knew he was here.
His car was parked in the driveway, and he never walked any distance anymore, not since the accident. They were coming up on a year now. What changed him wasn’t the physical injury so much as how it all messed with his head. Early on, she’d tried to help him bathe. He was in pain, naked on a stool in the shower, pretending nothing hurt. “I’m practically a nurse, this is nothing to be ashamed of,” she told him. Just saying the word, ashamed, naming it, she shouldn’t have.
“Too late,” she whispered now.
She pulled Sam into her lap and unbuttoned his jacket—the babysitter had put it on wrong, skipping a button, he looked lopsided. He looked neglected. His cheeks and chin were dirty. The babysitter had several new kids today, crowding around underfoot, older than Sam; she wasn’t licensed. But she had her first aid, Marietta asked to see the certificate. Marietta wasn’t a thoughtless mother.
If you have to tell yourself that, it means you probably are!
Luce came into the kitchen and silently moved the cloth bag of groceries from the floor to the table.
“Where’s Francie?” said Marietta.
He didn’t know. He didn’t even know what time of day it was, she could see it in his eyes.
“What happened to the door?” She couldn’t help herself, repeating all the wrong questions.
He wasn’t going to answer her.
“Did you fix it? Did you call the landlord?”
“I’m not calling the landlord, okay.”
This was home, this one-storey postwar cottage built on a little rise of a hill above a busy four-lane street. It had probably been a quaint two-lane road when the house was first built, but now the street hummed with the steady flow of traffic, worst at commuting hours. The number seven bus stopped directly in front of their house. Strangers waited there on the sidewalk, all day long and into the night, dropping their glowing cigarettes, rocking their strollers, talking on their phones.
They’d moved into the house a few years ago. It was their first home that was a house. That spring, Luce dug up a sapling from his mother’s property, wrapped its roots in burlap, and drove it here in the trunk of his car. He planted it in the front yard, didn’t ask the landlord for permission.
The tree didn’t make it.
The next spring, Luce tried again. Again, the little scrap of branches and twigs and fragile green leaves withered and yellowed and died.
Luce had been waiting on these two dead trees to grow suckers off their roots ever since. A dead tree wasn’t really dead, he said. Sometime this spring, like every spring, Luce would grab Marietta and drag her out there to show her the sprouts of tender green growing out of those two dead trunks. What was she supposed to say?
“Change Sam’s diaper, he’s soaked.”
Marietta handed Luce the baby, began unpacking items from the cloth bag, started sweeping the linoleum. She was thinking how Luce used to be able to pick her up, lift her right off the ground, not just when they were wanting each other but those other times when she was weeping and needing him to hold her—
Stop it, already. Don’t make it worse.
In high school, Luce was a runner, eating up the miles in cross-country, his long legs loping, looking for all the world like this was easy for him. It was never easy for Marietta. She ran after him, after him, after him.
You can’t tell another person how to be. But what about yourself?
“Changed,” said Luce, coming back into the kitchen holding Sam, who was dressed in a different t-shirt. Luce leaned down to kiss Marietta’s neck and Marietta sighed and turned toward him, not away.
“You smell funny,” he said.
Marietta remembered the spoiled uniform and the other one that might not be clean, and that she had a shift tomorrow morning.
She pushed him away. “I have to make dinner. Take Sam outside. I don’t think he gets enough fresh air at the sitter’s.”
She didn’t ask: What did you do all day? She had her own secrets—or just the one, and not what you’d think, Luce, not what you’d guess, if you noticed and thought and guessed anything about me at all. She hadn’t been to the bathroom since her break at two o’clock, yet she’d made time for a stop between work and picking up groceries; she’d let Sam stew in his juices at the babysitter’s, just so she, Marietta, could hunt for a breath of calm in a room at the library full of other women with their eyes closed, chanting words in a language none of them understood, all of them hunting for themselves, for a scrap of themselves that still belonged to them alone. Could it be innocent when it felt so illicit?
Now, catching herself in the bathroom mirror, Marietta laughed. You’ve been out in public like this! Don’t look! Don’t look at the fright queen! She wanted to close her eyes and stay here, feeling the water warm against her hands, her forehead resting on the mirror, leaving a greasy print, she saw, when she drew away. That would never do.
Marietta spritzed the glass with a homemade solution of vinegar and water that she kept under the sink, and she wiped the mirror clean.
The clock on the stove read 6:07. Francie should be home by now. Marietta could call over to ask Sally if Francie was there, where Marietta knew she would be, she always was, but something in her resisted. She didn’t need the judgment, thanks very much.
It’s not like they were friends, she and Sally. It’s not like Marietta told Sally things, and the things Sally told Marietta were the things she told everybody.
Marietta used to tell Mikey things. He listened, she missed him in their lives. She could have told Mikey about the door, for example. But not Sally. Definitely not her mother, who’d escaped with her third husband to Florida. Maybe Luce’s mother. No. Better not.
Marietta scrubbed potatoes in the sink, leaving the peels on.
She was drying her hands when she heard Francie’s raucous voice coming from the backyard. That girl had a pair of lungs on her. A good feeling, a lightness came into the day: everyone home!
Marietta turned the burner on high and walked to Francie and Sam’s room. She pulled the slatted blind by its string, latching it open, so she could watch them play in the tidy backyard. There were things Marietta had that Sally did not: a tidy yard, a clean house. Marietta was certain that Sally had never gotten on her hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, let alone washed the walls, the baseboards, the handles of cupboards, cupboard doors, pulled everything out and repapered the shelves.
Marietta watched her children play.
Francie trotted a loop around the grass with Sam on her back, while Luce pretended to time them. Really, he was just staring at his phone. He sat on the top of the picnic table, scavenged from a neighbour’s trash and carried home between the two of them, Luce and Marietta. After Francie was born. Long before the accident. Between pregnancies. She’d been pregnant a few times, two live births, plus the other times (Luce lifting her off the ground, holding her; strong).
I’m done, the words came into her head. She was thirty-two. Old enough to be done.
I need to get rid of that picnic table before Luce breaks it, she thought, picturing herself dragging it down the driveway and leaving it on the curb where some other pair, even less lucky than the two of them, might spot value in the rotten wood and carry it off.
What would she put in its place?
What did the yard require?
No, the question was bigger and more desperate: What did her family require, what could she, Marietta, give to her family that would save them from this spiral into which they were being pulled, in slow motion, day by day drawn deeper into its centre, which she sensed was an abyss? They would be swallowed whole. Unless she, Marietta, could stop their descent.
She needed to make something. Do something. Fill the void where the rotten picnic table, once sturdy, no longer belonged, it was sending out all the wrong messages.
Whatever replaced it, Marietta would need to make it from scratch.
She needed to think.
She stood in her children’s room feeling stern and determined. Anything was possible! The feeling was familiar, it had been visiting her since childhood, always with hope that dwindled by invisible degrees only to be kindled anew like a little match being struck behind her eyes.
She felt it now, the spark of a tiny flame.
Marietta stepped out of her pants, pulled her top over her head, and with her uniform held lightly between her fingers stood in the quiet little house, looking at her family framed in the window outside. No picture could be sweeter, or more deceptive.
Did everyone feel like this? This powerful, this alone?
She heard a splash from the kitchen and a hissing that didn’t stop. Oh shit, the potatoes!
The potatoes were boiling over.
* * *
Sam could hear Mom’s music, her voice chanting, when Francie carried him into the warm house on her back. Sam went quiet, listening for Mom. The kitchen was darker than outside. Francie’s fingers were cool on his ankles as she tried to yank off his slippers, little leather booties with holes worn in them by another baby’s toes. Sam squirmed away from his sister. Dad came in behind them, smelling like fresh spring air.
