The Excellent Lombards(51)

“You should not admit it,” I instructed.

“What is wrong with you people?” William couldn’t help asking.

My mother glared at her cards. “We’re just old,” my father explained. “That’s all.”

“Well, snap out of it.” Softening, William added, “Do you want me to review the rules again?”

“I think we’ve got it.”

We paused between rounds for the making of cocoa, the milk simmering, the woman of the house busying herself at the stove. She said, with her back to me, “I was talking to Coral at the library today about the drama camp Mr. Dronzek has been recommending. Up in Hayward.”

What was she doing talking to Coral? “I’m not going to camp,” I said.

She came to the table with a tray. “Why not?”

“Because.”

“May I inquire because why?”

“Because I love summer at home. Because I want to do the market with Papa. Because I don’t want to miss hay making and apple picking. And because, for your information, I’m helpful and useful and maybe, just maybe I’m indispensable.”

“No one is indispensable,” she said, on her high horse. She set out our mugs and sat herself down. “Except May Hill. I’ll give her that.”

William was dealing.

“I like this,” my father said, looking at his hand.

“It’s four weeks,” my mother continuing her campaign.

“Good for it,” I said. I tried to appeal to my father. “You need me, Papa.”

“I always miss you when you’re not here,” he said somewhat absently. “But you should have your adventures.”

“I don’t need adventures.”

“You’re a teenager,” my mother observed. “What teenager wants to stay home with her parents? Honestly, Francie, sometimes I wonder if you are a freak of nature.”

“Freak of nature?” I repeated.

“Nellie,” my father said in his warning voice.

“Are you serious, Mother?”

“Forget it,” she said, as if that was an apology or explanation.

When she played her second card William said, “Hmmm. Why—why on earth would you do that?”

She hissed in his face. “Do you want to see my cards?”

“Easy, old girl, easy now.” He’d been talking that way to her, when necessary, for about a year.

She slapped her hand down, destroying the round. “This is what I’ve been dealt. See? Do you see? Or are you just going to pronounce me a stupid idiot?”

“Or freak,” I said. “Let’s say you’re a freak.”

“Simmer down there, Old Betsy,” William said to her. “Simmer down. It’s all right.”

“You did the only thing you could.” My father supporting his wife.

It was as if my mother hadn’t spoken to me in that way, as if her question, her wonderment about my freakishness, now existed only in my ear, everyone else excusing her.

When the dealer was again William, when he was shuffling the cards something untoward occurred. Possibly my mother had been hypnotized without our knowledge. Or she was having a stroke. Whatever the cause, she began to declaim on the most peculiar subject possible. “I remember,” she said slowly, “when we lived with Aunt Florence in the manor house. And we were trying to have a baby.”

“Oh, please,” I said. We all knew that when my mother was very young and first married she’d lived with the ancient aunt and my father, who at that point was also old, sixteen years Nellie’s senior; none of that was news.

“Florence,” she went on, “used to come into the bathroom to wash her teeth, her dentures. Do you remember, Jim?”

“Let’s play the game,” he said.

She went on, “We were in the bedroom that connects to that bathroom, downstairs, you know, the room that’s Sherwood and Dolly’s now.” She was studying her cards as she spoke. “It was so generous of such an old lady to allow me to live in her house with her nephew. Especially when she’d been living with you already for years, Jimmy, the two of you in your way like a married couple. So generous. I don’t know what I can do here, with this hand. Anyway, I used to have the feeling—it’s crazy, I admit it—but I used to think that the noise of her teeth in the glass, the clinking of those dentures as she brushed them next door, right by our headboard? Was the sound that sperm and egg make as they collide, as they become one.”

William was squinting at her, as if she were difficult to see and hear. I had literally just about thrown up in my mouth. If my father was going to say one thing that made them laugh I was going to ax murder the both of them. Fortunately he looked nearly as disgusted as we felt. He’d even closed his eyes against her for a second. “It’s getting late,” he noted.

Nonetheless, we arranged our cards, trump was called, we began to take the tricks. It occurred to me, it hit me that Nellie Lombard, as grotesque as her little story was, had been speaking in a riddle, and that the riddle was for me. When it came my turn to deal I couldn’t help it. I said, “Why did you bring that up?”

“Bring what up?” my father said.

“I’m talking to Nellie.”