The Paper Palace(17)

1973. November, Tarrytown, New York.


One of our father’s “weekends.” He’s meant to have us every other weekend, but this is the first time we’ve seen him in over a month. They’ve had endless engagements. Joanne has too many friends and they all want to meet her old man, he tells us. “Who is the old man?” I ask. “Have we met him?”

The house is brown. In the yard, ropes hang from a bare tree where a swing used to be. Beyond it, a rocky ridge leads down to a small, muddy pond. Not swimmable, my father says, but in winter it will freeze and we can ice-skate. The living room is long and narrow with a huge plate-glass window overlooking “the lake,” as Joanne calls it. “Waterfront property is impossible to find,” she says. The only room in the house without wall-to-wall shag carpeting is the kitchen.

Saturday afternoon. Anna and I are sitting on the kitchen floor playing jacks. Outside, rain slashes the windows, a relentless gloom. I’ve gotten to tensies and I’m about to flip when Joanne comes in brandishing her hairbrush. She pulls a few strands of hair out of it, waves them at me.

“You used my hairbrush, Eleanor. After I specifically told you not to.”

“I didn’t,” I say, though I did.

“There was an outbreak of lice at your fancy new school. I’ll have to boil it.” She is furious. “If this brush gets ruined, I’m sending the bill to your mother. These are boar bristles.”

“It wasn’t me!”

“The hairs are blond. I will not stand for lying in this house.” She reaches down and sweeps our jacks up off the floor.

“Give them back!” I shout.

My father wanders in from the garage. “C’mon, you two. No fighting, no biting.”

“Don’t speak to me as though I’m a child, Henry,” Joanne says.

“She took our jacks for no reason, and she won’t give them back,” I say.

“Elle used Joanne’s hairbrush without asking,” Anna says.

“That’s not true!” I say.

“It’s just a hairbrush,” Dad says. “I’m sure Joanne doesn’t mind. Did I ever tell you your grandmother was jacks champion of her school?” He opens the freezer and looks inside. “How does chicken pot pie sound for dinner? Jo and I are out tonight.”

“I don’t want you to go out,” I say. “You always go out.”

“We’ll be right next door. And we found a great local girl to babysit.”

“Can we watch TV?” Anna says.

“Anything you want.”

“I don’t like it here,” I say. “This house is ugly. I want to go home.”

“Shut up,” Anna says. “Stop ruining everything.”

I run from the room in tears.

Behind me I hear Joanne say, through her own angry tears, “I can’t take this anymore, Henry. I didn’t sign up to be a mother.”

I throw myself on my bed, bury my face in my pillow. “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her,” I chant, like a prayer. When my father comes to comfort me, I turn away, curl myself into a pill bug.

He lifts me onto his lap and strokes my hair until my sobs subside. “I won’t go anywhere tonight, rabbit. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“She’s mean.”

“She doesn’t mean to be. This is hard for both of you. Joanne is a good woman. Please give her a chance. For me.”

I snuggle deeper into his arms and nod, knowing it’s a lie.

“Good girl.”



* * *



—

“For god’s sake, Henry,” Joanne says when he tells her he’s staying home with us. “We made this plan with the Streeps weeks ago.”

“You’ll be fine. The Streeps are more your friends, anyway. And Sheila will have cooked something delicious. I haven’t seen my girls in weeks.”

“It’s Saturday night. I’m not going out on my own.”

“Even better. Stay home with me and the girls. We’ll watch a movie, make popcorn.”

“The babysitter is already on her way. We can’t cancel her now.” She turns her back to him and looks in the hall mirror, putting in her large gold-hoop earrings. She smooths her eyebrows and gives each of her cheeks a hard pinch.

“We’ll pay her for her travel time. She’ll understand.”

I stare at Joanne’s reflection in the mirror, watching, fascinated, as her nostrils get bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller. Her mouth is a furious slash. When she catches me watching her, I smile in triumph.



* * *



—

But in the end, she wins. Every weekend after that, when our father meets us at the train station, he loads us into his car and drops us with Joanne’s parents, half an hour away. There is always some new excuse: Joanne has the curse and is feeling sick; the house is being treated for wood rot; they’ve been invited to a house party in Roxbury and Joanne thinks we’ll be bored, but next weekend we will stay with him, he promises. When he waves goodbye to us from the car he always looks sad, and I know it’s my fault.

Joanne’s father, Dwight Burke, is a famous poet. He has a lovely scratchy voice and wears a three-piece suit to breakfast. He carries a glass of bourbon with him when he goes up to his study in the morning. His wife Nancy is a big, warm woman. A Catholic. She carries a rosary in her apron pocket and asks me if I believe in God. She bakes round loaves of buttery bread, and calls lunch “luncheon.” Her hair is always done. They are the sorts of parents I have only ever read about in books. Tweedy and kind. I can’t understand how they raised such a horrible cow.