A Taxonomy of Barnacles, page 17
Rising tension reached fever pitch as all six girls simultaneously converged on the bathroom. They took the opportunity to compare notes on the events of Thursday evening.
Bell offered the first and most radical perspective on their father’s behavior. “Ignore him,” she said. “It’s obvious what he’s trying to do. He has one goal and one alone, to get me and Bridget married.”
Bridget, however, had more faith in her father and a slightly paranoid streak. “I wonder if something’s wrong,” she said, “and this is some sort of cover-up. I really hope he’s not in trouble with the IRS.”
Beth, however, was blessed with the authority of a scientist. “Don’t be hysterical,” she cautioned. “After all these years, haven’t you learned to ignore Dad’s little outbursts? He’s having a midlife crisis. Soon they’ll have drugs for these things like they do for menopause and PMS.”
Belinda paused to consider Beth’s assessment but promptly ruled it out. She knew better than to place her trust in Beth. Most likely, Beth was simply trying to throw her sisters off the scent. “Ignore Beth, everybody,” she announced. “There’s nothing odd about this at all. It’s the latest in a long history of grotesque behavior from a man so obsessed with winning that he rates his own you-know-what.”
Conversation halted as the others paused to consider Belinda’s cryptic and likely crass comment.
“Nope,” said Beryl, “you’re all wrong.”
“Tell us what you see,” Beth mocked.
“Yeah,” said Benita, “considering your predictions have zero percent accuracy.”
“I’ll tell you this,” Beryl said. “Neither one of you is going to win.”
“How can you know that?” Benita demanded.
“Because you,” she said, turning to Benita, “are too competitive for your own good and you,” she said, turning Beth, “well, just look at your losing record.”
“Go to hell,” said Benita.
“Up and die,” said Beth.
“Gladly,” snapped Beryl. “It would be a relief. Death would spare me the torture of looking at the two of you.”
Inspired by a literal interpretation, Beth took the fight to the next level. She hurried to the kitchen, anxious to realize Beryl’s bold claim. She located the phone book above the fridge and found the number for the New York Times, then asked a very helpful operator to connect her to the obituary section. As it turned out, next-day announcements cost more than she was willing to spend. Luckily, the standard notice, guaranteed to run within three days, could be ordered free of charge. Beth devoted the next hour to penning the perfect tribute, anxious to find the right balance between praise and honesty. She wrote and rewrote the text several times before submitting a final draft. Ultimately, she was pleased with her effort. She kept it short and sweet.
Beryl Barnacle died at the age of fifteen in her childhood home. She is survived by five sisters, one father, one mother, and various and sundry pets. Though she was, by most accounts, the most eccentric of the Barnacle sisters, Beryl will be missed sorely, if only due to the peace and quiet afforded by her absence. Luckily, she is only dead to her older and much more intelligent sister, Beth.
Wholly unaware of the metaphorical murder being perpetrated in the next room, Belinda returned to her bedroom and dropped to the floor, unable to bring herself to the task of packing for school. Instead, she simply sat and sulked, listening to dirgelike French music and occasionally shifting her position on the floor. On sound of her mother calling out her twenty-, ten-, then five-minute warnings, she assumed the universal pose of teenage angst, lying flat on her stomach with her heels kicking the backs of her knees as though these kicks might enact some minor amount of violence on those who oppressed her. She only deigned to move when the record reached its final, wailing note at which point she lifted herself from the ground, replaced the needle at the beginning of the record, then resumed her prostrate position and the task of tuning her family out.
Despite her well-publicized love of school, Belinda had no interest in going back. Her claim that anything was better than home had always been uttered mostly for effect and now failed to convince even her. During her freshman and sophomore years, she’d been pacified by the change of scenery. The sturdy brick buildings and pristine hedges of the manicured campus had worked its magic on her restlessness, providing a legible and satisfying symbol of captivity and freedom both. Any urge to break free found its ideal opponent in so much impenetrable brick. Any urge to be sheltered found its fulfillment in the form of ubiquitous patrolling guards. So many soccer fields and their store of smiling, sun-kissed, sometimes shirtless boys did their part to ease Belinda’s transition from grittier urban landscapes. It was hard to miss the city in the presence of so much well-trimmed grass. It was hard to miss her family in the presence of so many boys.
Nor had she missed the girls she’d left behind at the Chapin School. Even Belinda felt her classmates wore their skirts promiscuously short, permitting other students and utter strangers an effortless glimpse at their thighs. She’d long ago tired of the nightly romp her friends excused for a social life, meeting in clumps at the awnings of their Upper East Side palaces, tramping up and down Park Avenue like a band of well-heeled vagrants. Besides which, she found their hallowed destinations equally laughable; in the winter, the fountain at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the spring, Sheep Meadow in Central Park. They trekked to both spots illogically enough so as to imbibe in public the same substances they smuggled into their homes. What was the point of all this traipsing? Belinda often wondered. Why go to such great lengths to find privacy when busy parents offered the same neglect in the comfort of one’s own home? She could only conclude the following: It was somehow essential to simulate the act of breaking rules to have fun.
But now, three years later, Belinda had tired of this, too. Just thinking about it exhausted her. She lacked the energy to live up to her ignominious rep. Despite her wise and worldly demeanor, her indisputably impressive wardrobe, and her formidable command of the New York City phone book, she was not, for all her pretense, quite as worldly as she seemed. Truth be told, Belinda had not yet lost her virginity; a confession she would never make in public but of which she was actually quite proud considering the amount of willpower and physical force required to maintain the claim. No, the semblance of wizened cool, her endless supply of drug lore, her mastery of East Village bars were all part of a well-tuned act, all necessary accoutrements of a persona she donned as she might her favorite pair of jeans. This pair incidentally caused further contention, since Bella wished Belinda would throw them away and Bridget wished Belinda would give them back. The perfectly symmetrical rip in the crotch had taken Belinda years to perfect and, Bridget argued, could not have occurred naturally as Belinda claimed.
Indeed, Belinda was locked into a life that wasn’t hers. Her friends and family gave her no choice, demanding she uphold her wild-child identity, much like a lawyer forced to defend a dubious witness. Still, Belinda had grown accustomed to living with the burden. She saw it as a duty of sorts. She provided a valuable service to her friends and family. Her alleged rebellion allowed them to find contentment in their uneventful lives. Her contrary behavior offered them a rallying call of sorts, giving them something to oppose, securing their comfortable stasis in lives they would otherwise find too boring to inhabit. It permitted her sisters to deflect their bad behavior, her mother to vent her dissatisfaction, and her father to consolidate the pent-up fury of failing to produce a single male heir. Of course, it was not always easy to play the tortured, sullen teen. Belinda dreaded the screaming matches, the seething looks, the slammed door, as much as everyone else. But she felt she had no choice but play the role in which she’d been cast.
And so it was with no remorse that Belinda prepared for her routine flight, cementing her conviction with the reminder that her rebellion was the fault of those who had typecast her in the first place. With expert speed, she hurried through the ritual’s sacred rites, first opening the window a sliver to check the weather outside, tying an extra sweater around her waist so as to be prepared for a change in temperature, firmly closing her bedroom door and locking it from the inside. And despite the fact that she had made this flight at least a hundred times, she was filled with a sudden swell of fear. But, refusing to be slowed, Belinda thrust the window all the way open as though the force with which she shoved might hurry the flight of her conscience.
The thrill of escape came over her as she prepared for descent. First, she wet her index fingers to muffle the squeaks of the window frame. Next, a quick backward glance at the room to make sure she’d remembered everything. Finally, as a last reluctant nod to obligation, she paused in the window’s hutch, halfway between freedom and captivity, to consider her mother’s feelings on discovering another missing child. But this notion only presented the most fleeting of second thoughts before she continued with the delicate procedure of hurtling herself into space. By the time Bella broke into the room, Belinda was well on her way, already nearing the corner of Sixtieth and Fifth. Heading west, she booked it past the Pierre Hotel just as the evening rush of taxis commenced its daily congestion of Fifth Avenue. She sprinted past the Plaza and its lines of waiting carriages up Central Park South. She slowed down only once she’d reached Eighth Avenue, peering south quickly for a glimpse of Times Square’s shimmering red and blue lights. Finally, at Columbus Circle, she ducked into the subway station and hopped the 9 train with no particular plan or itinerary.
All this forward motion should have been liberating. But as Belinda rode downtown, she was plagued by thoughts of her father. Barry provided Belinda an endless source of angry rumination; he was, in her opinion, both the cause and solution to her every single problem. His latest announcement epitomized his deep-seated disorder, revealing with naked transparence his vulgar and, Belinda felt, embarrassingly Jewish obsession with winning and competition. Why could he not be more like the parents of her boarding school friends, discreet in their goals for their children, even charmingly disinterested? Why must his every hope bear the weight of generations of immigrants, as though his daughters, despite their freedom from such concerns, could not live happy, fruitful lives unless they, too, were transported to the squalid streets of the turn-of-the-century shtetl. Of course, Belinda saw the merits of a healthy work ethic. She could agree with her father that the blasé entitlement of the Finches was equally reprehensible. But she still begrudged her father his aching need to win. His overt effort was embarrassing; it reeked of desperation.
Still, she found herself fixating on her father’s proposed contest, obsessing over potential strategies with the same vigor as Benita. Nothing would please her more than to mock her father’s warped value system by surpassing her crowd-pleasing sisters. Now, as she rode the subway, she recalled the verbiage of Barry’s pompous speech and made a concerted and thorough search for possible loopholes and technicalities, scouring his semantics for shortcuts by which she could vault herself to fame and recognition. Luckily, the culture in which she lived was similarly infected by Barry’s obsessions and provided a glittering, if questionable, abundance of schemes that enabled one to get rich or at least marginally famous in thirty days or less. She contemplated the alternatives at the exclusion of her surroundings.
A young homeless boy sat across the aisle, gazing intently out the window, his eyes betraying a certain deep and irresistible rage. His hair was dyed blond and dreadlocked, bisected by a bald stripe. His feet were filthy. It seemed two weeks, at the least, since they’d last been washed. His age was hard to determine from his face. He looked at once old and young, blessed with the same translucent skin of spoiled neighborhood boys, but he boasted an attractive weathered quality Belinda had rarely seen, his face revealing the wrinkles and worry of life on the road. She could tell, even from her distance, that he was deeply distracted, surely by a recent criminal offense or the end to a tortured romance.
As she examined this wayward boy, Belinda became increasingly convinced that, after years of bogus leads, she had finally found her soul mate. This boy was twice the man of her fair-faced prep school friends. Even their hairdos proved their kinship. This boy was her long-lost twin. Best of all, this boy would shock and horrify her father. Surely the very sight of him would be the death knell of their relationship. As though propelled by this very thought from her seat into the boy’s arms, Belinda crossed the train and seated herself next to him.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Yes,” said the boy.
“Will you marry me?” she asked.
The boy said nothing, looked right, then left, then shrugged and said, “Why not?”
“Cool,” said Belinda. “Do you promise?”
“Sure,” he said, shrugging as though Belinda had only inquired if the seat next to him was free.
“There’s one small thing,” Belinda added. “You’ll have to take my last name.”
“That works,” he said amiably. “I’ve never liked mine all that much.”
Belinda smiled at the boy. Then, as an afterthought, she asked, “Why, what’s wrong with it?”
The boy shook his head and sealed his mouth.
“Come on. It can’t be that bad.”
“Trust me,” he said.
“Come on,” said Belinda.
The boy offered a tentative wince. Then, barely in a whisper, he answered, “Goldfarb. What’s yours?”
In a moment, Belinda realized the enormity of her mistake. This boy was hardly a ruffian. He was merely a confused teen, a boy bewildered by his privilege, set on the run by the pressure of all that explosive guilt. She knew a hundred just like him. He probably grew up only blocks away. For all she knew, they lived on the very same street. Cringing, she met the boy’s eyes and answered his question. “Barnacle,” she replied.
“Cool,” said the boy.
Belinda mustered a paltry smile, then turned away from the boy. But, determined not to let her father ruin her life even in his absence, she forced herself to wrangle her negative thoughts. Regardless of her error in judgment, she had accomplished one miraculous thing: In all of ten seconds, she had lapped her sisters and taken the lead in her father’s contest. Comforted, she imagined her father’s face on sight of the new member of the family. She smiled as she pictured her sisters’ reactions to the blatant upset. Blessed with the foreclosed possibility of going back to school, she decided to make the most of her vacation. She had only to find somewhere to sleep that night and a way to stomach this boy until they made it official.
Belinda did her best to squelch her conscience as they rode downtown. But against her will, responsible thoughts invaded her head. Finally, based on a mutual consensus made by eye contact alone, the two alighted at Astor Place with the vague intention of killing time in the East Village. Belinda found the first pay phone on the platform and made two strategic calls. First, she called her family to inform them that she had caught an earlier train to school. Then, she called the main number at school and, doing her best impersonation of Bunny, dispensed with any remaining possibility of turning back.
“Due to a family emergency,” Belinda said, “Belinda will not be returning to school.” And then, as an extra precaution, she added, “Things are tense at the Barnacle apartment, so please do not call them at home.”
* * *
Very early on Saturday morning or very late on Friday night, Barry was awakened by a faint squeaking sound coming from Bell and Bridget’s bedroom. Lately, he had fallen back into the clutches of insomnia, and slept most nights for intervals of less than ten or twenty minutes, often for a total of one or two hours. After several such nights, his investigative powers were less acute than usual and, as a result, caused him incorrectly to attribute the noise in the house to Latrell. Perhaps, he had finally tired of his sojourn and come back of his own volition. But the noise was not Latrell sneaking back in his window; it was the sound of Belinda’s shutters, moved by the evening breeze.
Despite his apparent neglect, Barry was very conscious of Bella’s adopted son; his apathy, in fact, a conscious rebellion against loving Latrell. In Barry’s opinion, the women in the house had coddled Latrell so consistently that they had softened the sharpness of his talents and deprived him the hunger and aspiration a boy needed to become a great man. At the heart of this sentiment was Barry’s conviction that Latrell was naturally gifted and that squandering talent was a more flagrant insult than having none in the first place. Still, despite his stated surrender to Bella’s policy of indulgence, Barry watched over Latrell from a distance, preferring to keep his affection a secret from the family.
In truth, Barry was fascinated with Latrell, obsessed with the object of his distracted gaze like a mechanic with a machine. He was inherently suspicious of the amount of time Latrell spent staring into space, assuming it meant Latrell was disinterested in him or, worse, disapproving of his transgressions. But rather than acknowledge his own shortcomings, Barry focused on Latrell’s, arguing that Bella had spoiled him with liberal administration of television, pizza, and cookies, causing him to swell into a soft mama’s boy as opposed to a lean athlete. Latrell is what happens, Barry liked to say, when children play too many video games. Latrell is what happens when children watch too much MTV.
