A Face in Every Window (10 page)

I stood up, backing toward my bookcases, brushing the wild strands of hair out of my eyes. "And your mother can't, so she's weak?"

"Never defends me or protects me. Teaches me how to lie. Says for me to tell the teachers I fell, or a dog bit me. What kind of mother is that?"

"I—I—"

Bobbi pointed at me. "I'll never be like her."

I looked straight at her. "So who are you like, then? Your father?"

"Go to hell, O'Brien!" Bobbi strode out again, slamming the door, and a few seconds later the door opened about a foot and my Einstein shirt went flying across the room. It hit one of the bookshelves, slapping the spot where my microscope used to be, and then dropped to the floor.

"And give me back my microscope!" I yelled, grabbing up my shirt The shirt felt warm in my hands and smelled sweet and powdery. I tossed it on my bed, sat back down at my desk, and tried to concentrate on my schoolwork. I had exams in both history and French the next day. I wasn't worried about them; I knew I'd do well. I had no problems making As at the new high school, but I did have problems making friends, at home and at school. Keeping my face buried in books took my mind off of this fact and kept me from examining the problem too closely. I knew I wouldn't like what I found. Until the move, I had never realized how much I had depended on Tim Seeley, for his friendship, for the way he could tease me out of my moods, and for the way he'd let me know when I said or did something stupid.

His friends became my friends, and I'd never noticed until we moved that it had never been the other way around, it never could have been, because I had never made a friend that wasn't Tim's first Without him I had no one to talk to here, and I found myself spending more and more time hanging out in the computer lab, talking to the teachers more than to any of my classmates, and when the lab teacher offered me a job as his assistant in the lab during my two free periods and the assistant principal offered me one in the office after school, I jumped at both offers. It meant less time
sitting by myself, and the office paid me for my work. It wasn't much, but I wanted it so I could contribute to our house fund.

The house fund was my idea. We had money now. Mam had her job; we had Grandma Mary's insurance money and money from the sale of the house. But with Mam getting to work late half the time, I worried she'd get fired and we'd lose her good income. Mam had set aside the rest of Grandma Mary's insurance for Pap's future, in case anything should happen to her, she said, and the money from the house wouldn't last forever. Besides, I resented Bobbi and Larry's freeloading and taking everything for granted. Larry had even taken to bossing me out of the cabin anytime he found me in there, as if it were his property.

I held a meeting in the upstairs hall bathroom. It was a narrow room with a bathtub on legs, a large washbasin that took up most of the space, and your basic toilet in the corner. Larry and Bobbi grumbled and shuffled into the room, where Mam had already found her spot on the floor, sitting cross-legged with a slice of zucchini bread on a napkin in her lap. Larry and Bobbi sat down on the edge of the bathtub, stretched their legs out in front of them, and passed a cigarette back and forth.

I stood leaning against the wall, wedged between the sink and the entrance, and Pap sat on the closed toilet bowl. He thought sitting on the toilet in front of everyone was funny enough to mention every few minutes, and he giggled over it until Mam set her hand on his lap and he stopped.

"I called you into the bathroom," I said, once we were all settled, "because it's in need of the most work." I pointed at the ceiling.

"Plaster is falling everywhere, and this floor"—I pushed my weight forward into the floor and the wood gave under me, groaning and threatening to give way completely—"this floor's pretty much rotted out, and the toilet overflows."

"Like this!" Pap imitated flushing noises and tossed his arms up as if demonstrating an eruption.

I cleared my throat and continued, speaking over Pap's giggles. "We also have a couple of bedroom ceilings that look as if they're about to come crashing to the floor, a leaky roof around my chimney, some floors that need refinishing, and others, especially the parlor, that need shoring up from the basement before that piano we've got in there falls through. Also, several of the rooms could stand fresh paint. All of this costs money and, folks, the money's getting tight."

"But not too tight," Mam interjected.

"True," I said. "And if you're willing to shop at the grocery store instead of the health food store, we could really save a bundle."

"No way." Mam shook her head and Larry stubbed out his cigarette on the edge of the tub and stood up with his arms crossed in front of him.

"Well, then," I said, "we all need to pitch in. Get jobs, those of you who don't have one, and put a portion of your earnings into a house fund for repairs and groceries and stuff like that."

I waited for everyone to groan and grumble. Instead Larry suggested that we do the work ourselves.

"I know we don't have any experience, but there's this
Reader's Digest
do-it-yourself manual I saw at the bookstore we could use. I'll pay for the book. I get a discount," Larry
said, glaring at me as if to say,
I already have a job, you stiff.

He had gotten a job at Farley's Bookstore in town, but so far the store had profited more than he had, because he came home just about every day with a small stack of books, and always with one for Mam.

Mam and Bobbi thought Larry's idea was a good one and that maybe we could do half the work ourselves but leave some of the more difficult tasks to a professional.

"Either way," I said, interrupting their enthusiasm for the do-it-yourself idea, "it's going to cost us, and I think that each of us needs to contribute monthly to the house fund."

Everyone agreed and Pap said, "You know what this toilet does is just like the creek overflowing. Remember the creek all over our house, and Mrs. Jerico, she got snakes in her house and she rode away on her bike in the water with her cat on her shoulders? Remember funny Mrs. Jerico?"

Even I had to laugh at that memory, and instead of laughing to ourselves with our heads turned down the way we all usually did, we laughed looking at one another, nodding at the shared memory of the time the creek overflowed and we moved from house to house helping one another salvage furniture and bail out basements, making runs to the McDonald's and eating together at picnic tables set out in the street, then talking late into the night. Then this feeling ran through each of us. I felt it, and I could see it on the others' faces, in a look of recognition: We all came from the same place. It was almost as if another person had entered the room and passed his hand over each of us, baptizing us, five people, one memory, one household, one family.

I
SAW OUR
new family as a ship. At first it had been a sinking ship, with a hole in its side so large that the best thing any of us could do was abandon it and swim to safety. Then as we tried to adjust to one another, it became a ship that needed constant bailing, first from one side, then from the other. It stayed afloat, but only as long as we kept bailing. Then after the meeting in the bathroom, the ship ran aground, and the five of us, stuck on our small island, could put down our bailing buckets and take a long deep breath. We could walk the length of the ship, and the ship, though tilted, wouldn't move. We could step outside the ship, explore the island, and know that when we turned back, there it would still be—until the tide came in, or a wave, or a storm, or some other turbulence came along to dislodge us and send our ship back into the cold dark waters.

Everyone acted as if running aground was the way it should be, as if this were the most stable condition, but I
knew nothing had been fixed. We still had the hole in the side, we'd still have to bail like crazy when the tide came in, and I knew it would. I knew the only really safe place for us to be was anchored back in homeport, no holes and no added weight. I just didn't know how to steer us there, not when everyone was happy where they were and Mam was captain of the ship.

Larry had discovered that we had run aground in a town filled with artists—actors, potters, painters, musicians, and writers. This discovery changed Larry. He started seeing himself as a poet, and he invited other wannabe poets to the house at night to read and critique one another's work. When Larry read his poems to the group, his voice took on a haunted, moaning tone, and since he loved the English poets, he read with an English accent. After a while he started using the accent in his everyday speech, until, at last, it became his usual way of speaking. He began to use the word
bloody
a lot. He'd say, "It's bloody hot in here," or "I bloody well have a right to be in here, you swag." He started calling our meals
repasts,
and flashlights
torches,
the hood of the van a
bonnet,
and gas
petrol
all words he'd picked up from the poetry and the Agatha Christie mystery novels Bobbi had been taking out of the library and Larry had been snitching from her.

Then I noticed Larry was wearing black turtlenecks all the time. He took out all his earrings except one, grew a goatee, and wore Mam's red plaid scarf around his neck, even indoors. He said the scarf was his signature. Every poet in the group had his or her own signature and own pose. Harold, the angry poet, wore his hair in a tangle of dreads and dressed in colorful African robes that came down to his ankles; Jerusha, a cellist and the most talented of the group, wore ties and men's suit pants; Leon, more interested in Jerusha than in poetry, wore tall L. L. Bean hunting boots with the laces wrapped around the boots like a ballerina's toe shoe; and Melanie, the nature poet, wore thin cashmere sweaters over long and lacy dresses she bought at the vintage clothing store in town.

The poetry sessions at our house became so successful that Larry and his friends gathered there every night. They'd talk all night long, drinking cheap gallons of wine or sipping herbal teas, and Mam didn't mind a bit. She loved all the comings and goings of Larry's friends. She loved the crowd they made in the kitchen, squeezing in with the rest of us for dinner at a table built for four.

"Now, isn't this cozy," she'd say, looking around the table at us and reaching out to squeeze someone's hand.

She loved their poetry. She loved their moody, over-emotional existence, and the group sought her advice on everything from poetry to love, and a lot of that love went on right under our own roof. Larry and his friends passed themselves around, hooking up with one person one week, then moving on to another the next. I never saw the same coupling two weeks in a row, which meant there were a lot of lovers' quarrels and hurt feelings and making up going on all over the house.

They argued about everything and Mam loved it. "I just love a fun fight," she'd say, after what she thought was an exhilarating argument over the looting of Egyptian pyramids, or euthanasia and living wills. Of course, most of the time they argued over poetry and poets, discussing the false lives and improper desires in'T. S. Eliot's
Waste Land
for hours on end, the air thick with cigarette smoke.

Sometimes the discussions lasted so long the group would all stay the night, and I'd come down in the morning and find bodies scattered about the house, asleep in chairs, on the couch, on the floor, anywhere they happened to be when sleep overtook them. Sometimes I'd even find Mam asleep right alongside the others, covered in someone's old ratty coat I'd stand and watch her and wonder who she had become. I didn't know her anymore, and I didn't know the others, either, Larry or Bobbi or even Pap. All of them had become different people from who they were back home.

Bobbi got a job at the veterinary clinic after school and became a foster parent to the stray cats, dogs, and ferrets she picked up at the SPCA once in a while. She and Pap loved the animals. They'd feed them, cuddle them, talk baby talk to them, and laugh together over the silly things the creatures did. Bobbi and Pap became close through the animals, and it changed both of them. Bobbi stopped yelling at everyone and even left me alone, for the most part. She made friends in school who didn't know about her past reputation, and she sang in the school chorus.

Pap didn't wander around the house looking for something or someone to entertain him. He didn't wander outside anymore, either. He had Bobbi now, and they did everything together. They would climb through the second-floor hall window out onto the porch roof and sit with the Nativity set. I could see their still, dark forms among all the lit bodies. They sat together, arms around each other, rarely speaking, as if they were waiting for something.

Mam looked at them through the window one evening
and said, nodding to herself, "Bobbi needs Pap. He's a good father to her."

I didn't say anything, but I looked out at the two of them and wondered. Could Pap ever be a father to someone?

Every morning, the two of them got up at five-thirty and slipped out to go to six o'clock mass. As far as I could tell, most of their conversations were about Jesus, and sometimes I'd see Bobbi reading to Pap from the Bible the same way Larry would read Tennyson's poetry to Mam, as if they were sharing something deep about themselves.

Pap still went to the Center every day with Mam, and he loved this. He took a gym class, an art class, a reading class, and then Mam's horticulture class, where he learned how to propagate, grow, and maintain flowers and vegetables and other plants. He worked in the greenhouse with his classmates, and Mam said he was a natural at digging dirt. He loved his new job, as he called it. He'd come home with egg cartons filled with dirt and seeds, and he'd set them near the windows in the kitchen and talk to them. Sometimes he'd take the poor things into the parlor with him and play the piano and sing to them. We were amazed when the seeds started growing and he had to transfer the plants into pots, but no one was more amazed than Pap.