When We Were Animals(60)

“Do you think…” Miss Simons began. But she didn’t seem to know how to phrase the next part.

I wanted to put her out of her misery. It made me anxious to see adults flounder like that.

“The thing is,” I said, “he’s still in love with my mother. I’ve told him he should try to move on, but he just thinks about her all the time.”

“No one could ever replace your mother, and that’s not what I’m trying to do here.”

“I know.”

Now I was beginning to be confused by the conversation. But we were pulling up in front of my house, and it seemed important to finish things.

“Anyway,” I said. “You’re very nice, but I don’t think he’d be interested in dating right now.”

She looked at me, and she seemed confused. Then something occurred to her.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ve messed this all up. I just wanted to do right by you.”

Just then the door of the house opened, and my father emerged. It was a strange thing, because he was not usually home at this time of the afternoon. Also, he did not seem surprised to see me sitting in my physics teacher’s car, nor did he come down the path to meet me.

“I asked him,” Miss Simons said, “your father. I asked him if I could be the one to talk to you about it.”

I felt sick to my stomach in the way that you sometimes do at those moments when you realize the world has been playing tricks on you.

Miss Simons had not been asking my permission to see my father—she was telling me that they had already been seeing each other behind my back. She was not the petitioner but the executioner.

I opened the car door and pushed myself up and out.

As I passed him on the way into the house, my father called after me in a voice that expected no response:

“Lumen. Lumen.”

I walked out of his voice. That’s what it felt like. I opened the door in the room of my father’s voice, stepped outside, and shut the door behind me.

*



They had been seeing each other since the fall—but I was only told about it after the fact, perhaps as a punishment for my having succumbed to the corruptions of adulthood. Everyone was dirty now. We might as well bare it all. It soon became a habit for Margot Simons to spend evenings with my father and me at our house.

She was maybe ten years younger than my father and very pretty in an angular way. Her lipstick always looked like it had been recently applied, and her brunette hair was trimmed perfectly along her jawline. Her purse rattled with tubes of mascara and clamshells of powder and tortoiseshell combs and an assortment of clips and fasteners to hold her comeliness in place. She wore jeans when she came to our house, and the first thing she did when she arrived was take off her shoes to expose whatever playful color her toenails were painted that day. Her feet were bony, and she folded them up under her when she joined my father and me on the couch for our regular Saturday evening viewings of black-and-white movies.

She would yawn and rest her head on my father’s shoulder, and I hated her.

Her attempts at befriending me did not help. She promised she would take me shopping at the mall the next county over. When she said it, my father chuckled uncomfortably and shook his head. He knew I was not a typical teenage girl, one who gets giddy about shopping for dresses at the mall. I glared at him.

One night, after she had left, I confronted him in the kitchen.

“Do you love her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think I could.”

“Will you marry her?”

“Lumen.” He leaned forward and touched my hair with his hand, as though trying to incant some long-lost version of himself and me. “I used to hold you on a pillow in my lap. Look at you now.”

But when I gave him nothing but a cold look in return, he drew back his hand as though it had been bitten. He looked poisoned, miserable.

“Look,” he said, and now there was nothing delicate about his voice. He had rarely in his life used this tone with me, and it had always made me feel criminal. He was explaining something, for better or worse, and whether I liked it or not was beside the point. I shrank back. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to hurt you. No one can replace your mother.”

“No one’s talking about her. Who brought her up?” I was irritated at the way everyone was forecasting the damage I would suffer as a result of my loyalty to my mother. I didn’t like being second-guessed.

“I’m just saying I was being careful. But now, now that you’re…growing up…”

And that was it. It was his euphemism for breaching. We are always told that honesty and truth are the shining ideals. But sometimes the truth could be used as a punishment. That’s what I learned on that day.

“Go away,” I told him.

I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to hurt them all. My father and Margot Simons. Blackhat Roy and Rose Lincoln. Boring, bland Polly. Peter Meechum, who seemed ennobled by hurt. Even my mother, who left me early on rather than staying by my father’s side and being the one single love of his life—even my mother, the imaginary doll whose enfabulation seemed to grow more and more childish with each passing day. I wanted to hurt her, too, for not being real.

*



The kind of geologist my father was was an engineering geologist—which meant that he studied how characteristics of the natural landscape might affect the man-made structures that are built on top of it. He was a person who knew how to harmonize man and nature. He created elaborate three-dimensional simulations on his computer that spun freely in space. When I was a young girl, I admired them, wishing to be able to create such pretty artifacts of my own. He also had a whole set of magnifying lenses that I liked to observe the world through.