The Paper Palace(16)

“Are you waiting here for me, Elle?”

“Shhh.” I put my fingers to his lips. Inside, the dim lull of voices. Something on the record player.

“Turn around,” he whispered, lifting my skirt. “Put your hands against the wall.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Hurry.”



* * *



—

“Mom!” Tugging at my shirt. “Mom! Are you even listening?” Maddy is saying. “Can we go snorkeling, or not?”

“We found a fish nest yesterday,” Finn says. “There could be eggs.”

“So? Can we go?” Maddy asks. “Mom!”

I shake my head clear, try to rehinge myself. “The masks and flippers are in the first cabin,” I manage to say. I feel filthy, contaminated, desperate to scour my insides. And heartbroken. Because I know the radiation has already gotten through the tear in my body’s hazmat, and I don’t know whether I will survive it.





1973. May, Briarcliff, New York.


A beautiful late spring morning. My father’s wedding day. I’m wearing a lace dress, patent leather shoes, white opaque knee socks. I am six. My father is marrying his girlfriend Joanne. Joanne is a bestselling novelist—“a catch,” our father tells us the first time we meet her. “Nothing more attractive than a strong woman,” he says. Her hair smells of Herbal Essence.

“Your father just likes being bossed around,” Joanne laughs. And they kiss right in front of us.

Joanne is only twenty-five. “We could practically be sisters!” she says to Anna. She is pretty and stocky and has a sheepskin coat. It worries me that the sheep has to live without its skin. They have moved out to the suburbs. My father commutes into the city for work every day, but we rarely see him anymore when he is there.

Joanne drives a new red Mustang. My mother says red is tacky, I tell her, the first time I see the car. You should have gotten blue. And she fakes a laugh. Blue is tasteful, I say. You don’t even know what that means, Anna says, pinching me hard on the arm.

Joanne likes Anna, but she and I “simply aren’t a good fit,” she tells Anna, who repeats it to me. Sometimes Joanne comes into the city and takes Anna for special “girl days”: window-shopping at FAO Schwarz, lunch at Schrafft’s, ice-skating at Wollman Rink. She buys Anna a fuchsia-and-orange bag at Marimekko with shiny silver buttons that look like dimes. She loves Anna’s thick, dark chestnut hair and teaches her how to brush it for ten minutes a day to make it shine.

Every night at exactly six o’clock Joanne has her scotch and soda while my father makes dinner and opens the wine so it can breathe. He likes to cook with shallots, and lets me sit on a tall stool in the kitchen so I can help him peel the carrots. He cooks in a big black cast-iron pan that he has to wipe out with oil instead of soap and water. That would ruin the pan, he says. He says the oil cures it, and I ask him, “Cures it of what?”

Joanne bitterly resents that my father has to pay child support. On Sunday evenings when she drives us back to the train station she hands us a folded piece of paper—a list of things she has deducted from my mother’s “pay”: 8 slices bread, 4 tbsp. peanut butter, six yogurts, two frozen chicken pot pies, Swanson Salisbury Steak. . . .



* * *



—

Now I watch my father walk down the aisle. Next to me, in the pew, Granny Myrtle sits up straight, her pillbox hat askew, lips tight. She doesn’t like Joanne, either. The last time Joanne and my father dropped us off at our grandparents’ house, our suitcases were filled with dirty laundry. “The woman is a slob,” my grandmother had said. “And lazy as a cat in the sun. Your father may have graduated summa cum laude from Yale, but he doesn’t have a brain below the waist. How he could have chosen her. I’ll have to check you for bird mites.”

I look down at the folds of white lace in my lap, pick at a scab on my knee. My legs are covered in impetigo scars and scabs from falling onto the rough concrete under the jungle gym in the playground. Granny Myrtle reaches over and takes my hand, gives me a reassuring squeeze. I like the way her worn silver wedding band feels against my knuckles. She rests our hands together on my lap. I trace the thin blue veins on the back of her hand. I love her so much.

Anna is wearing navy. She has gotten chunky and Joanne thought the color would be becoming. I tap the floor nervously with my shoe. Anna kicks me in the shin. I have been told not to fidget. A beam of red light crosses the altar in front of the church. I trace it back to a high stained-glass window. It is the blood of Christ, trailing from his open wounds. My father walks past me now, toward the priest. I run into the aisle and throw myself at his feet, grab his pant leg and hold on. He tries to get free of me, still smiling at the wedding guests, but I won’t let go. I am a fury of white lace, snot, and tears. He inches forward, pretending to ignore the small child latched onto his ankles. I am a suckerfish.

My father and I have reached the altar. The organist begins the “Wedding March.” The guests get to their feet, a bit unsure. Now Joanne is steaming toward us down the aisle, a big pouffy veil hiding her rage. She has chosen a satin minidress, and her thick legs poke out from under it. They look like sausages stuffed into tiny shoes. She steps over me, takes my father’s hands, nods at the priest. I am lying on the ground, curled around his ankles as they take their vows. Why isn’t she wearing underpants? I’m thinking when they say the words “I do.”