Wilde Lake(12)

We invited Noel inside, hoping he would pick up on the fact that he must ingratiate himself with Teensy if he wished to have any traction in our household. He started off very smartly by not asking, as so many did, why a six-foot-tall woman was called Teensy. Her nickname was derived, in fact, from her first name, Hortensia. Noel, who had the most finely attuned social antenna I was ever to know, sidestepped that minefield, first apologizing for scaring her, then offering to finish the sink of dishes she had been washing.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Teensy said. “Would you like an ice cream sandwich?”

An ice cream sandwich! Teensy had told us only minutes earlier that we were not entitled to dessert, given our refusal to eat much of the lunch she had “cooked.” (Another rule of life with Teensy is that we were not to challenge the lackluster lunches she made, so different from the meals she served in the evening, when our father was present. He came home to pot roasts, lamb chops, whipped potatoes. We got canned soup, bolo gna sandwiches, carrot sticks. Every day. The only variations were turkey instead of bologna, celery instead of carrots.) Now she opened a box of Eskimo Pies and passed them out to all of us.

And just like that, Noel had the run of our house. When we had finished eating our ice cream on the back porch, he asked for a tour, during which he made approving and knowing comments about the furniture, chosen by our mother and never changed. He liked old things and was appalled that his mother had brought him someplace where everything was new. He told us that his father was old friends with someone in the Rouse Company, Columbia’s developer, and that there had been concern, early on, when black home buyers had clustered in certain neighborhoods. The suspicion was that real estate agents were circumventing the explicit plan to make Columbia a heterogeneous utopia, where race and class mingled. But the truth was prosaic and without agenda. Black home buyers, many of them first-time home buyers, wanted brick homes, not wooden-frame ones.

“Like the Three Little Pigs!” I said, pleased to have anything to offer to this fast-talking, fast-moving beautiful boy.

Noel laughed and kept going, not even bothering to ask permission as he opened doors to closets and bathrooms. He sailed into the enormous second-floor bedroom that belonged to my father, picked up the silver frame on his bureau.

“Who’s this?”

“My mother,” AJ said.

“Our mother,” I clarified. It was an odd linguistic habit of AJ’s, to use “I” and “my” in situations where “we” and “ours” were more accurate.

“She looks like Norma Talmadge.”

Ah, there was Noel’s inner drummer again, beating wildly, eager to tell everyone who he was.

Anyway, he was right: our mother did bear a striking resemblance to the actress, with her shortish, curly hair, Cupid’s bow lips, and enormous brown eyes. AJ, lucky rat, was a masculine version of her, while I was a petite knockoff of our father, rawboned and sandy-haired. Worse, I was covered with freckles, something my father had been spared. People said I looked like Laura from Little House on the Prairie. I disliked the show and did not consider the comparison a compliment.

“She died when Lu was born,” AJ said.

“The week after,” I said.

“Do you visit her grave?”

Her grave. Her grave. Where was my mother’s grave? The question captured my imagination. Why had I never thought about her resting place? I had been death obsessed, as children tend to be, and certainly I had specific reasons to think about mortality. My mother’s parents had been killed in a car accident within a year of her death. Yet it had never occurred to me that my dead mother was contained somewhere, that I could visit her if I wanted.

“She was cremated,” AJ said, dashing my hopes as quickly as they had been raised. “Her ashes are—I don’t know where they are, come to think of it. I just know that my dad says she wouldn’t have wanted to be kept cooped up anywhere. She was a restless soul. That’s what he says.”

Noel looked around the room, his eyes catching on a Chinese vase high up on the bookshelves. The vase was out of his reach. He opened my father’s desk, an antique planter’s desk, one of the few things he had from his own family. I could sense AJ wanted to tell him no, but they were courting each other in the way that new friends do, trying to impress. Girls are more likely to do this, but boys do it, too.

Noel climbed up on the desk and tilted the vase toward him. “No, nothing in here.” He was hoisting it back to its place when the desk lid, which had supports that Noel had failed to pull out, gave way under his weight and cracked at its hinges.

Although she was a flight of stairs away, Teensy was in my father’s bedroom within seconds.

“What are you doing in Mr. Brant’s room?” she asked, huffing and puffing, angry at being forced to rush.

“We’re allowed,” AJ said. “He’s never said we couldn’t be.”

“But you’re not supposed to be around his desk,” Teensy said. “You know that. He keeps confidential things in there, work things. And it was closed this morning. You opened it up and climbed on it.”

“To be fair,” Noel said, scrambling to his feet, still holding the vase. “I did that.”

But he was already beloved in Teensy’s eyes. He could do no wrong.

“You’re a guest,” Teensy said. “It was up to them to explain the rules of our house.” She surveyed the damage. “It’s a clean break. My husband can fix it.” Teensy’s husband was a mysterious, seldom-seen person, responsible for many edicts that could not be challenged. My husband likes me home early on Fridays. My husband says you’ve got to have a little bread at every meal.