Pretend We Are Lovely Read online

  We’re not talking too much. Daddy swigs his beer and I can smell it on him. Vivvy nibbles at her second piece of her pizza. I’m on my last, picking off the little meaty balls with my fingers and setting them on my tongue one by one.

  “Slide out,” says Vivvy. “I have to pee.”

  I do. Daddy and I smile at each other. We don’t look at Vivvy’s pizza, the two pieces left, the barely touched slice on her plate, the slicks of orange oil puddling in her pepperoni slices, the blobs of cheese stretching over the edge of the crust turning to sublime, crisp-edged goo.

  He moves first. Takes the third piece. I take the fourth. We both scarf these down, not wanting her to catch us—as if she won’t notice the second half of her pizza is gone, double gone. We finish our bites at the same time. I’ve got a sore place in my throat now from too big a hunk of crust going down. Daddy hiccups. I smile-laugh. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the window, or through it. He pushes the table out of the way to slide himself from the booth and goes to the front to pay.

  “Round up your sister,” he calls back. “I’ll be at the car.”

  I turn away from him and the door. I take Vivvy’s nibbled-on slice and jam it into my mouth, keep chewing chewing chewing until my cheeks ache.

  Vivvy comes out of the bathroom.

  I look away and gulp, feel my eyes watering.

  She rubs circles into both cheeks and she looks pinker, more awake. She didn’t see.

  I push the table back over to Daddy’s side so I can get up. “Come on,” I say, trying to shoo her out, away from the table. “Let’s go,” I tell her. “He’s waiting, we have to go.”

  But she stands at the booth. She reaches for her cup and takes another drink of Pepsi. She stands here sipping so slow on the straw and looking at our three empty pizza pans. And now, even her plate is clean. She turns around with her hands on her hips just like Ma. “Revolting,” she says.

  •

  We get into the car and Daddy yawns once, then again. “You girls tired? Enid, you look tired.”

  “Unh-uh, Daddy.”

  “I’m good,” says Vivvy, bright-eyed.

  “I’m gonna dip my hands in the stripy candle wax,” I tell Vivvy. “Remember how it stripes? And the petting zoo. I’m doing the petting zoo.”

  “All those yaks and goats jumped all over me,” she says. “They’re stupid.”

  “You weren’t feeding them fast enough.”

  She puffs out her front. “You may not expect manners at the dinner table, but Mom and I do.”

  She’s mad at me. About the pizza.

  I put my hand on Daddy’s shorts cuff and sort of tug it. He keeps on driving. Staring ahead.

  Later on, Vivvy and I have climbed over the seats to lie down in back. When she’s asleep, I snitch a saltine from my knapsack and let it turn to mush on my tongue. I take a second one. Vivvy sighs. I hold still, my mouth too dry now to melt the cracker.

  “Maybe,” says Daddy, starting up again. He has us in the far right lane and we are slowing down. “I’m not sure, but maybe this isn’t the smartest thing . . . Francie, well . . . Francie will worry.” His fingers drum the wheel. It’s getting dark.

  “This is so stupid,” says Vivvy, her eyes still shut. “This is the stupidest thing ever.”

  •

  Ma stands in the driveway shaking her finger at us when we pull up. Daddy jumps out of the car.

  “Completely unacceptable!” she says to him.

  “I wanted to surprise them,” he says.

  “You certainly surprised me.”

  Before we’re out of the car she turns her back and goes into the house, letting the screen door slap shut on Floey, who wants to follow her in for supper. Daddy gets there next and Floey sneaks in before him.

  I don’t feel like going in, I don’t feel like sitting here. Neither one is good but here is where I am, so I fold my arms below the window and stare at nothing and no one on the porch.

  Vivvy comes to sit close beside me.

  “Raaaaahr!” she screams into my ear and yanks both of my braids.

  I grab at her. We’re turned together now and shrieking. I throw my bag over the front seat and then I throw myself over the front seat. But Vivvy has my leg and is pulling and digging her nails into my skin so I have to hold on to the seat belt buckle and tug myself over. I’m sweating and hot. My sandal pops off in Vivvy’s hands when I drop down into the seat. I turn to see her. So she can’t sneak up on me again. My knees scrape on the buckle but I swing the door open and she can’t grab me anymore.

  I stand on the gravel in one shoe, shouting, “What is wrong with you!” back into the car.

  “What is wrong with you?” she mimics, shaking her head and grinning at me. She pulls two sections of her ponytail to either side to tighten the band.

  I slam the car door shut and run, nearly dumping out all my stuff again from the knapsack, which I guess is upside down and wide open. So I turn it around, pull the ties, and hold on tightly. I have to limp, too, going fast but jumping faster onto my sandal foot when little rocks poke up in between my toes. From out here, the house looks empty.

  I wipe my hands on my shirt, wipe at the sweat stinging my eyes and soaking my bangs. I try to feel where my hair is weird, before Ma sees. Two skinny french braids still hang down my back but all my little too-short hairs have popped out. I poke at a big loop standing right at the top of my head, where the braids begin. I tug at the next crossing of the braid, and feel for whether the loop is smaller or gone.

  Once on the porch, I see the kitchen light on, so I go through the other door, the one into the eating room. Ma tries to call it the family room but it’s where we eat, nothing more. I sit now, leaning up against the inside of this door. When my breathing starts to settle, though, I lean forward on my elbows to see.

  Ma gets a glass down and runs the faucet, moving the handle to cold and testing the water with two fingers.

  “Sit down with me, please,” he says. “Come on—you waited on the dishes until we got back just so you could give me the silent treatment?”

  She turns toward the eating room to drink the water, and I wonder if she knows I’m here. If maybe she’s glad for the company. She drinks her water. All of it. Letting the faucet run in a way she never would allow us to do. Her face is tight, her lips small. She’s back at the water, running her fingers through back and forth, now filling the glass to the very rim and drinking again without spilling. She leans against the counter with her eyes shut, gulping quietly. She finishes the glass and sets it down.

  Daddy goes to stand with her or the plates stacked in the sink. “That looks good,” he says. “Can I get one?”

  “You could have been home by now.”

  He picks up her glass, says, “I don’t want you to have to wash one more thing—especially tonight.” He runs his other hand over the edge of each dish in the tallest stack, his lips moving like maybe to count.

  Ma swats at his hand. “It’s fine,” she says. She takes her glass from him, sets it down, and gets down a fresh one. She moves the faucet handle to the middle and fills his glass.

  “Can I just say something? I’m not trying to go against your wishes, but I need to tell you—”

  “There,” she says, “now you’re all set.” She places the glass on the counter and he picks it right up.

  He takes a sip. He sets it back down.

  She picks up the glass, runs a sponge over that spot of the counter. She pours out the glass, watching the water go down the drain.

  “Francie.”

  “Tate.”

  He touches her on the arm and says her name again. She gets to the other doorway, her toes on the dining room carpet.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m fucking sorry!” His hands come down bang, bang on the counter. Bang, and the plates jump.

  “Go right ahead.” She smiles. “Feel better? Go again?”

  She does not move.

  He looks at her
.

  Something touches me from behind and I scream and almost fall on the floor. Vivvy covers my mouth and dangles my sandal in front of me. I don’t take it so she puts it in my hand.

  She goes right in the kitchen and I reach out to yank her back—Ma will kill us for listening this long!—so now I’m in the kitchen right along with her. Ma just goes back to the sink and the dirty dishes, slips on her rubber gloves, and doesn’t even turn around.

  Vivvy hugs Ma’s side, twirls a finger in the dishwater. Even as small as she is, she looks too old to do such a thing.

  “I wanted to give them something nice. Make a family. It’s summer, for god’s sake,” he says. “I should have told you but, Francie, you make that difficult . . . never being around . . . never saying yes.” He looks only at Ma. “Francie,” he says and puts his chin out.

  “Girls, upstairs!” she says and we go.

  I’m on my bunk and Vivvy’s over my head on hers. She leans down to see me, her hair one long horse’s tail hanging smooth and shiny.

  “She’s not being fair to him,” I say.

  “Is she ever?”

  •

  I creep downstairs when I see the glow of his headlights finally light our ceiling, hear the gravel popping out from his tires. That sound sets me on edge.

  Ma still stands at the sink. She sweeps shattered glass from the counter down into the sink, the palm of her rubber glove stuttering across the counter. Pieces clatter and chink as they touch and hit one another falling to the water. She pulls out the stopper and shakes her arms twice over the draining sink. The yellow gloves are still on.

  “Where’s your sister?” Her voice startles me.

  “Sleeping?” I say, like I’m asking her.

  There is a plate of lemon bars on the counter. Ma looks at it. I can smell the XXX sugar she sprinkles overtop and it tickles my nose. I’ve been smelling it all night, even upstairs, my mouth so wet it feels pickled.

  “One,” she tells me.

  I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, making a slick of crumbly crust, lemon goop, and sugar there, melting.

  I go hug her back, wrap my arms around her and press like she’s the cookie and I’m the tongue. She turns to look at me, her face long but peachy, bits of hair come out of the hair combs hang down over her ears.

  •

  I had a brother once. Older than me. Older than Vivvy. He was six when I was middle-two. Always, just six. With lots of yellow hair like me and fat cheeks like if Daddy’s eating a handful of peanuts. He used to carry me around, drag me sort of. He ate rocks out front in the driveway when he was a baby, and sometimes after; there are pictures from when they still thought it was funny—now Ma won’t show them to you.

  There was something wrong with him. The older he got, the more was wrong. He lived in the hospital for a whole year. Ma’s milk was bad or he didn’t know he needed it. Daddy says I can ask him anything but all he can say is it wasn’t her fault. Shelly just never wanted to eat at first.

  That’s what makes none of the rest of him make any sense, because even I remember that all he ever wanted was food.

  When he came home, he wanted to eat more than anyone. Ma baked cookies and muffins and cakes, Daddy said, until he was big, with a belly, and his wrists creased and his thighs bubbled like a baby’s. And the doctors said they had to tell him no.

  So one day, Ma said, “Go outside,” because Shelly wanted cereal and she said no, and he had to have cereal and so he put his face in Floey’s dish and ate the canned stew balls the dog was leaving for later and even the little stewy peas she always nudges into a pile in the corner of her dish, and Ma said, “I hate you,” and that’s when we went outside.

  That day, lots of days, Shelly whined at the back door like a cat but then we went to the driveway. He plopped me down and put chunks of gravel in our hands.

  I don’t remember this. I only know because of Vivvy who had flu and was looking out the window on that day. She saw everything.

  Me in a blue plaid bubble suit so my thighs are mashing right into the rocks. But he is here, wants me here with him. There’s a look that comes over his face: some big idea, he’ll put the rocks in my hands and just see if he can get me to do anything he wants. And he can. Sun is behind me and lights him up. All goldy. I picture it as almost fall—oak leaf clumps nibbled off the trees down in the yard for all the squirrels out hunting. But I know truly it was March.

  “Smell that?” Shelly asks, putting his nose up in the air like a cartoon after some great wafty cloud. He wants it. Doesn’t come out with saying so, but says he smells Ma’s brownies starting to cool on the countertop. “Uh uh uh uh uh uh uh,” he goes and I say no but he starts rocking and he says, “You go,” and picks at his knotted shoelaces but they won’t come undone so he bends in half and the gray frazzled laces are in his teeth and he’s chewing. They don’t come back out.

  Vivvy’s still watching, still watching. I’ll have flu next week and Daddy will take me from my crib in the middle of the night to Dr. Gibson.

  “Uh uh uh uh uh uh uh,” he says, so I wander back inside to load as many brownies as will fit into the gathered sides of my bubble suit. Vivvy says there's no way I can remember but I do.

  I go for the brownies and they’re here on the metal rack cooling. But I’m too little and spend some time hoisting myself on the stool and grabbing hold of them with my little hands. The door shuts. I feel it in my belly. I turn around to see who is here, who has caught me. But it was someone going not coming.

  The rest I know from Vivvy before we stopped talking about it. I do have the memory of sitting on the stool eating two brownies. That I was a piggy and wasn’t even there.

  Ma was only moving the car down to the street. Not even going somewhere, though she had a satchel and her racket, Vivvy said. Daddy was reading downstairs and ran past me when the sound—which wasn’t much of a sound at all—made it into the house. But it wasn’t him. Vivvy fell out of the bunk. That was it. There wasn’t any screaming. There was no smashing of the car. No crying out. Nothing. Just the dull thwunk upstairs of Vivvy dropping to the floor.

  Daddy carried him in, I think, because I do know Ma stayed in her car all morning. All afternoon. Until Dr. Gibson came and put her into bed. Daddy had Shelly wrapped in his sports coat, the sleeves crossed over his front, keeping him warm or maybe just covered. But everyone knew he was gone, and that meant dead. Everyone knew, though the only change was a slim trickle of blood out his left ear. Daddy sat on the living room sofa with Shelly in his arms, and Floey and the cat we had back then came to put their noses in his lap and then lay at his feet. Vivvy rubbed at the purple swelling on her forehead and I rubbed at the nicks and grooves from the gravel where it had pressed into the backs of my legs.

  And then Shelly was gone from our house. There was Daddy and Floey and the cat, and Vivvy and me, and even Ma upstairs. And he was gone just like that, like the cat curled on your lap and you don’t notice the moment she jumps down but only come to look and see your own legs instead of her fluffy fur. The day blurred.

  Ma slept for a couple of days. I remember that. Daddy made sloppy Bisquick pancakes for lunch and supper. We smiled even though it didn’t seem right. Vivvy told elephant toenail jokes:

  “Why did the elephant hide in the strawberry patch? Because she painted her toenails red today.”

  I told my one and only joke: “Why was the hippopotamus on the ceiling? Because there was popcorn in the chandelier.”

  Vivvy’s came from a book. Mine came from my head. Daddy laughed hard for hers; on mine, he laughed until there was water coming out of his eyes and he had to blow his nose in his handkerchief.

  Once she came out of her bedroom, Ma spent the next few days tearing apart the house and putting it back together. She said it was time for spring-cleaning. When I told her my joke she didn’t laugh. Vivvy didn’t bother. We pulled all the canned beans and tomatoes off the pantry shelves and Ma decided we’d give away nearly all of them.
I begged to keep the mashed potato flakes and butter rice and she said, “Choose.”

  I put the flakes back on the shelf but that night snuck the butter rice out of the trash sack and slid the box deep down between my bunk and the wall. For years, whenever Vivvy was out and Ma’d been stern with me, I lay in bed and fingered the grains of rice in the box, listening to their rummaging as I tipped it end to end and took out one grain after another to suck on.

  Once she finished cleaning, she went through our clothing, sorting for size and wear. She took my favorite blue T-shirt and wouldn’t give it back. When I found it in her closet in the sack on its way to the thrift store, I hid it away inside my pillowcase but it was gone again the next day. And so was the sack.

  Ma wouldn’t look at us. Not at me and Vivvy. Not at Daddy. Not even at the cat or Floey, whom she’d shoo if one or the other came near her lap for a pat.

  Then Daddy made her stew recipe in the Crock-Pot along with buttermilk biscuits from mix. She cleared the table after dinner and set the dishes in the sink to get started washing them. He came up behind her. He set his chin on her right shoulder and had his cheek to hers, his hands around her front, his thick fingers moving over her hip bones.

  She screamed. Just like the cat some nights chasing neighbor cats through the trees and fences.

  So he let go.

  Francie

  This was my boy. These are my girls. He, that man, is my something.

  These are my earlobes. This is my nose. Here are my shoulders. This is my elbow, my ulna, my basilic vein, my round thumb knuckle, my spinning gold ring.

  These are my toes, my ankles, my shins. Flip me around for my calves like Thoroughbreds after the derby—I am granite. My knees with their dimples: bone-sucking skin. Here is my waist. My hand. My fingers nearly touch, if I wrap both around my middle. And I do.

  Sternum, little-girl breasts with spring pinecone nipples. Here are my hip bones, two fists beneath the covers. When I stand, my thighs leave a triangle, rectangle of light, of air.

  Put me in my kitchen. My cupboards. My fridge shelves lined full. Labels straightened, boxes squared. The milk always in half gallons. The eggs always brown. Red-needled scale set back from the counter’s edge so little fingers, little careless people, grabby and insatiable, won’t disturb its tare. A silver dish atop, removable, washable. Notepad and pen. Pocket calculator, blue keys.