The High Season(54)

Without Penny, she was a boat unmoored. A woman without a best friend.

She left the playhouse for the lawn. She needed plenty of pacing room. Earbuds in, she dialed her father’s number in Tampa. He would be surprised to hear from her. They had a regularly scheduled phone call on the first of the month, as if she were a bill on automatic payment.

    “Ruthie! We just spoke! Anything wrong?”

“No, I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Great! It’s just that we’re going out to dinner. New place in Hyde Park. Berte already put on her earrings, that means two minutes and we’re out the door. That woman is a clock,” he said fondly. “How’s my little girl?”

“Fine.”

“And my beautiful granddaughter?”

“She’s good. She’s been working hard at the farm stand. She likes it.”

“Good. Never too soon to be responsible. Hang on.” She heard him speak to Berte. “Go ahead out, cool down the car for us, darling.” Of course his darling should cool down the car; Ruthie had been to Tampa in July, it was hellfire. Of course Berte was anxious to make their reservation, of course he would call her darling, of course the easy affection of their marriage would cut her to the heart every time. She pictured Berte in a tropical-print full skirt, red lipstick, dangling pretty sea-glass earrings, swishing out into the warm night to cool down the Buick.

Conversation with her father was always bumpy. On the mornings of their scheduled calls she drew up a mental list of items to talk about. She could sense his impatience now. His cocktail was waiting.

“How’s that museum of yours?”

She hesitated. That was what she was calling for, to tell him what had happened, to ask for a loan, to ask for something for the first time in her life since she’d left for college. She had already planned it out, how she would structure the payments to pay him back, the amount she would ask for, the amount she would offer to Mike to buy him out. Her father, she was sure, had the money.

“One of these days we’ll get up there to see it. Such a long drive, though.”

    “You could fly.”

“Right. Berte is going to take that course, you know the one where they cure you of phobias? They use meditation now.”

“Great idea.”

Usually a variant of this sparkling dialogue continued for ten excruciating minutes, until they were allowed to hang up. There was so little in common between them. Love, of course. Love was a given, but if she wanted a place in his heart she had to get in line. That was just the way it was. She didn’t need to go to therapy about it. She got it. He was a man who had been overtaken by an overwhelming force. True love. Berte had given him all the warmth he’d been missing, and she was all he needed and wanted.

Her father had always been called “such a sad sack” by her mother. He had been a creature of routine, and that didn’t include smiling. By the time Ruthie woke up in the mornings he was gone, heading out to buy fish for his shop in Bayside, Queens. When he got home he walked to the cabinet, took a slug of Scotch, and went immediately to the shower to wash off the smell. Sometimes on weekends when Ruthie got in the car she could see blood on the floor. She never asked her father to drive her and her friends to the movies, for fear the car would smell like bluefish.

When she was nine he started leaving on Wednesday evenings to take lessons in Portuguese, so he could communicate with the fishermen, he said. He’d listen to tapes in the car. Um dois três, they would chant together. Domingo, Segunda-feira, Ter?a-feira. He fell in love with Brazil and spoke of its beaches and jungles to Ruthie as if it were a place in a book, something enchanted. He nagged her mother to make moqueca on Fridays instead of broiled swordfish. Finally he himself tied on an apron and made feijoada, pronouncing it correctly with a flourish. Her mother worried about a nervous breakdown and was on the phone with her friend Marie for hours, but Ruthie liked this new perky version of her dad. Until the day he moved out to live with Berte, a Brazilian widow. Apparently his fishermen didn’t speak Portuguese after all. Berte had come into the fish store every Friday. They’d fallen in love over the fluke.

    In less than a year they’d moved to Tampa. Ruthie was not allowed to speak his name in the house. She used to whisper Lou Lou Lou with her mouth smashed in her pillow. His calls were sporadic. A card on her birthday, urging her to visit. “Your father is louco,” her mother said, proud of her pun. She waited for Lou to realize his mistake, to come back and reclaim the fish store and his family, but he sent pictures of himself tarpon fishing instead.

All through her adolescence, Ruthie’s yearly visits were painful, her Julys excruciating, when she arrived for four weeks. Berte had three teenage daughters, girls from a fairy tale, each more beautiful than the next. They all ran in and out of the sunny house with the terrazzo floor, dressed in tennis whites or bikinis, grabbing fruit from enormous colorful bowls. Lou now dressed in baggy short-sleeved shirts and shorts that showed his tanned knees, sandals that revealed his toes, the toes Ruthie had never seen, and a variety of caps that covered his bald spot. He had gone into real estate at the right time in the market. He laughed and smiled, he kissed Berte every morning, he owned a juicer. Full of citrus and mangoes, Ruthie would arrive back on the plane in a state of fruit-drugged anguish. Her mother would meet her at the baggage claim at LaGuardia and ask through tight lips (what an effort that must have been, to seem disinterested) how the trip was. Ruthie knew, even at twelve, even at thirteen, that a one-word answer was required.