It was a family custom to have pancakes on Sunday nights; this was Friday noontime.
“I don’t want to make pancakes,” said Julie. She had started to cry, soundlessly, and was wiping her face with her hands.
“Well, I’m afraid that’s too bad,” said their mother. “Julie, sweet-heart. If you keep on with this crying, I’m going right through the roof.” Anita tossed the sponge into the sink. “Right through the roof, understand?”
“Mom, my God.”
“And stop with the swearing, sweetheart. God has his hands full without you calling upon him in vain. Routine, Julie. Routine is what makes prisons and armies work.”
Winnie said, “I’ll make the pancakes.” She wanted her mother to stop talking about prisons and armies. Her mother had been talking about prisons and armies ever since those pictures had come out with the hooded prisoners overseas, and American soldiers leading them around on leashes like dogs.
“We deserve everything we get,” her mother had said a few months ago in the grocery store, talking loudly to Marlene Bonney. And Cliff Mott, who had a big yellow ribbon decal on his truck because of his grandson, had come around from behind the cereal aisle and said, “Be careful with your crazy talk, Anita.”
“All right, Winnie,” said her mother. “You make the pancakes.”
“Want some help?” asked her father. He had taken some eggs from the grocery bag, and leaned to switch on the radio.
“No,” Winnie said. “I’ll do it.”
“Yes,” said her mother. “Jim, get the bowl out.”
He got the mixing bowl from the cupboard while Frank Sinatra’s voice rose, fell, then rose again, “Myyyy waaayy.”
“Oh, please,” Julie said. “Please, please, please turn that off.”
“Jim,” Anita said. “Turn the radio off.”
Winnie was the one to lean over and turn the radio off. She wanted Julie to see that she was the one who had done it, but Julie wasn’t looking.
“Julie, sweetheart,” said their mother, “this can’t go on forever. The family has the right to listen to the radio. You know, eventually.”
“It’s been four days,” Julie said. She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “Come on.”
“Six,” said her mother. “Today is day six.”
“Mom, please. Just give me a break.”
Winnie thought someone should give her a tranquilizer. Uncle Kyle had brought some over, but their mother only doled them out at night now, breaking them in half. Winnie woke up sometimes and could tell Julie was awake. Last night the moon had been full and their bedroom had had white all through it. “Julie,” Winnie had whispered. “Are you awake?”
Julie hadn’t answered.
Winnie had turned over and looked through the window at the moon. It had been huge, hanging over the water like something swollen. If there’d been a curtain, Winnie would have closed it, but they didn’t have curtains in their house. They lived on the end of a long dirt road and their mother had said there was no need for curtains, although a year ago she had hung fishnet up around the edges of the windows in the living room for decoration. She’d sent Winnie and Julie down to the shore to get starfish, all different sizes, so she could dry them out and stick them on the fishnet curtains. Julie and Winnie had walked over the seaweed, flipping back rocks, stacking up a pile of bumpy-skinned starfish.
“This has to do with her father—and mine,” Julie had said. Julie was the only person who told Winnie stuff like that. “She misses both of them. Her father used to bring her starfish at the end of the day when she was a kid. And then she wanted Ted to do that, too, and he did for a while.”
“That was a long time ago,” Winnie had said, peeling a starfish off a rock, a little one; its leg ripped as she pulled. She put the starfish back onto the rock. They grew new legs if they lost them.
“Doesn’t matter,” Julie had said. “Missing someone doesn’t stop.”
Their grandfather had been a fisherman whose boat had gotten stuck on a ledge out at sea. The newspaper clipping was in the same scrapbook showing the picture of Anita as Miss Potato Queen. “People used to call her Tater Tits,” Julie told Winnie. “Don’t tell her I told you she told me.” Anita had married Ted, a carpenter, because she was pregnant with Julie, but Ted had never wanted to stay with anyone for long. Julie said he had made that clear from the beginning. “So she lost both of them in just a couple of years.” Julie peered into the pail of starfish. “We have enough. Let’s go.” Walking back over the rocks, Julie added, “Bruce told me most fishermen can’t swim. It’s funny I didn’t know that.”
Winnie was surprised Bruce knew that; he wasn’t from around here. He’d come up from Boston and rented a cottage for a month with his brothers, and Winnie didn’t know how he would know if fishermen could swim.
“Could he swim?” Winnie asked Julie. She meant their grandfather, but she didn’t have a name to call him, since he was never mentioned.
“Nope. He had to just sit on that boat with the other guy, watching the tide come in. He’d have known he was going to drown. That’s the part that makes Mom nuts, I think.”
After their mother put the starfish in the fishnet curtains, they began to smell because they hadn’t been dried out enough first, and Anita threw them out. Winnie watched while her mother stood on the porch leaning over the rail, throwing the starfish back into the ocean one by one. She wore a pale green dress that the wind moved so it showed her figure, her breasts, her tiny waist, her long bare legs, her feet arched as she lifted up onto her toes to throw the starfish out. Winnie heard a sound, like a little scream, come from her mother as she threw the last one.
“Honey,” Anita said to Julie now, “take a shower, you’ll feel a whole lot better.”
“I don’t want to take a shower,” said Julie, still leaning in the doorway, wiping her sleeve across her mouth.
“Now, why not?” asked her mother. “What’s the difference between crying in the kitchen and crying in the shower?” She put a hand on her hip, and Winnie saw the pink fingernail polish, perfectly done on her mother’s fingertips.
“Because I don’t want to take my clothes off. I don’t want to see my body.”
Anita’s jaw got hard, and she nodded her head in tiny nods. “Winnifred, watch your sleeve near that flame. Another catastrophe right now and I’m liable to kill someone.”
Their house didn’t have a shower and a bathroom the way most houses did. There was a shower stall off the hallway, and across from that was a closet with a chemical toilet, a barrel-shaped plastic thing that made a whirring sound when you pushed a button to flush it. There wasn’t any door for this closet, just a curtain to pull. Sometimes if Anita walked by, she’d say, “Whew! Who just had a movement?” If you wanted to take a shower, you told people to stay out of the hallway, otherwise you had to get undressed inside the metal shower stall and toss your clothes out into the hall, then wait for the water to warm up, as you pressed against the stall’s metal side.
Julie left the kitchen and soon there was the sound of the shower spraying. “I’m taking a shower,” Julie called loudly. “So please stay out.”
“No intention of bothering you,” Anita called back. Winnie set the table and poured some juice. When the shower turned off, they could all hear the sound of Julie’s crying.
“I don’t know if I can stand this another minute,” said Anita, drumming her nails against the counter.
“Give it time,” said Jim. He poured pancake batter into the frying pan.
“Time?” said Anita, pointing toward the hall. “Jimmy, I have given that girl half my life.”
“Well,” said Jim, winking at Winnie.
“Well? Well, hell. I’m really, really getting tired of this.”
“Your hair looks good, Mom,” Winnie said.
“It should,” said Anita. “It cost two months of groceries.”
Julie came back into the kitchen, her wet hair stuck to her head, the ends drip
ping onto her red sweatshirt, making it dark on the shoulders. Winnie saw her father flip a pancake made in the wobbly shape of a J. “A J for my jewel,” he said to Julie, and that made Winnie wonder what had happened to the wedding rings.
The limousine had caused some tension. At first the driver refused to come to the house; he said they should have mentioned the dirt road, that the branches would scratch the paint. “Julie’s not walking down a dirt road in her damn wedding dress,” Anita said to her husband. “You make that driver drive the foolish car up here.” The limousine had been Anita’s idea.
Jim, looking all scrubbed and pink in his rented tuxedo, stepped outside and talked to the driver. In a few minutes, he went into the cellar and came back up with some hedge clippers. Then he and the driver disappeared down the driveway, and a few minutes later the limousine drove up, Jim waving from the front seat.
Bruce arrived at the house looking sick.
“You can’t see the bride before the wedding,” Anita called through the window. “Bruce, dear God!” She started to run to the door, but Bruce had already stepped inside, and when Anita saw his face, she stopped what she was saying. Julie, coming right up behind her, didn’t say anything either.
Julie and Bruce went out onto the back lawn, which wasn’t so much a lawn as a kind of clearing of roots and pine needles. Winnie watched through the window with her mother. Jim got out of the limousine and came inside and watched with them. Julie looked like an ad from a magazine, standing there next to a bayberry bush in her gown, the white train folded on itself, but still flowing behind her, six feet long.
“Jimmy,” Anita said, “people are at the church.”
But he didn’t answer. The three of them kept standing there watching through the window. Julie and Bruce hardly moved. They didn’t touch each other, or even move their arms, and then Bruce stepped through the bayberry bushes and headed to the road.
Julie came back to the house like a walking Barbie doll, and the three of them were at the screen door when she came in. “Mommy,” said Julie, quietly. Her eyes weren’t quite right. “This isn’t happening, is it?”
Uncle Kyle showed up with pills. Jim spoke to the limousine driver and then went off to the church. The limousine drove away, catching the leaves of a poplar tree in its back fender above the tire, and Winnie sat on the steps in her bridesmaid dress. After a while her father came back. “Guess you can take that off, Winnie-doodle,” he said, but Winnie just kept sitting there. Her father went inside, and when he came back out, he said, “Julie’s resting on our bed along with your mother.” Winnie figured that meant Uncle Kyle had drugged them both.
She sat on the steps until she had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t like going to the bathroom in the house anymore, behind the curtain like that, when everyone was home. But no one was around when she went inside. She could hear her father downstairs in the cellar, and her parents’ bedroom door was closed. In a few minutes, though, the door opened and her mother walked out. She had on her old blue skirt, with a pink sweater, and she didn’t look the least bit drugged.
Jim Harwood had been building a boat for years. It was going to be a big boat—the frame took up a lot of the cellar. For almost a year he hadn’t done anything more than spread the blueprints out onto the living room floor and look at them each night. But finally he went into the cellar and set up two sawhorses. Every night the family could hear the electric saw buzzing, and sometimes the sound of hammering, and very slowly the curved-out skeleton of a boat began to appear. The boat stayed in its skeleton shape for a long time. Jim kept going down there night after night to work on it. “It’s at the slow point now, Winnie-doodle,” he said. He had to press pieces of wood in clamps to get them to arch the right way, and then he’d varnish the wood carefully and put over each nail gummy cement that took four days to dry.
“How’re you going to get it out of here when it’s done?” Winnie asked him one night, as she sat watching on the cellar stairs.
“Good question, isn’t it?” he said. He explained how he’d figured it out beforehand, mathematically, measuring the cellar door, and the circumference of the hull, and that theoretically if he turned it at a certain angle, it should be able to get through the door when the time came. “But I’m beginning to wonder,” he said.
Winnie wondered, too. The boat was looking awfully big. “Well, then it will be like a ship in a bottle,” she said, “like the ones at Moody’s store.”
“That’s right,” said her father. “It’ll be kind of like that, I guess.”
When Winnie was smaller, she used to play in the cellar with Julie. Sometimes Julie would play store with her, with the canned food their mother bought, pushing it across a table pretending to ring it up. Now the cellar was pretty much taken over by the boat and her father’s tools. He had built shelves along the wall; up on top was an old rifle that had been around for years, and on the shelves below were wooden boxes filled with cords and nails and bolts, separated according to size.
Sun streamed through the window over the kitchen sink. Winnie could see dust particles floating through the air. “Now,” said her mother, putting down her coffee cup, “let’s get the day figured out. Daddy’s going back to the school for a bit, I’m going to feed my roses, and what are you girls up to?” She raised her eyebrows and tapped her painted fingernails on the table.
Julie and Winnie didn’t say anything. Winnie put her finger on the top of the syrup and then into her mouth.
“Winnie, please, don’t be a pig,” her mother said, standing up, putting her coffee cup into the sink. “Julie, you’ll be a lot better off when you figure out what to do.”
One thing Anita had found to do the day there wasn’t a wedding was write Bruce a letter. She told him she would shoot him if she ever saw him again, if he ever came close to her daughter. “That’s a federal crime, I think,” Jim had told her quietly. “Putting a threat in the mail.”
“Federal crime be damned,” Anita said. “He’s the one who did a federal crime.”
Winnie remembered Cliff Mott telling her mother in the grocery store to stop her crazy talk. It was a strange feeling—to go from being proud of your pretty mother to wondering what people said about her, if maybe she was nuts; and Winnie suddenly thought how her mother didn’t have close friends the way other mothers did. She didn’t talk on the phone or go shopping with anyone.
Now Winnie sat with Julie at the kitchen table, and saw through the window her mother walking around to the rosebushes, a trowel in her hand. “You know what this is all about, don’t you?” Julie said quietly. “Sex.”
Winnie nodded, but she didn’t know, exactly. The sun, bright in the kitchen, was giving her a headache.
“She can’t stand that I had sex with him.”
Winnie got up and dried a plate and put it away. Julie was staring straight in front of her, blankly, like she wasn’t really looking at anything. Winnie had seen her mother looking that way sometimes. “Winnie,” Julie said, still staring, “always lie to Mom. Remember I said that to you. Just lie. Lie your head off.”
Winnie dried another plate.
The gist of it was that Bruce had gotten scared. He didn’t want to break up with Julie, he just didn’t want to marry her. He wanted to live with her instead. Anita had told Julie that if she wanted to live like a common slut with a man who had left her so publicly at the altar, she could expect to never come home again.
“She doesn’t mean it,” Winnie had said to Julie. “People live with each other all over the place.”
“You want to bet? You want to bet she doesn’t mean it?” Julie had said. And Winnie had felt something almost like car sickness; she guessed she didn’t want to bet on anything where their mother was concerned.
“Paint a picture. Read a book. Hook a rug.” Anita’s hand slapped the table with each suggestion. Julie wasn’t answering. She sat nibbling a cracker while Anita and Winnie had soup; they had made it through another day—it was Saturday lunch. ??
?Clean the windows,” Anita said. “Winnie, don’t drink from the bowl like a pig.” Anita wiped her mouth with a paper towel, which is what they used for napkins. “What you should do is call Beth Marden and see about having your job back at the nursery school this fall.” Anita stood and put her bowl into the sink.
“No,” said Julie.
“Say, I know.” Her mother was pleased about this one, Winnie could tell. When her mother’s eyes got shiny like that, it made Winnie want to hug her, the way you’d want to hug some child who’d gotten confused about something.
“Oatmeal cookie dough,” Anita said. She nodded at Julie, then at Winnie. “We’ll make a batch and we won’t bake any. We’ll just eat it all as dough.”
Julie didn’t say anything. She started picking at her nail.
“So, what do you say?” Anita asked.
“I don’t think so,” Julie said, glancing up at her. “I mean, thank you, though—it was a nice idea.”
Anita’s face got blank, like she couldn’t find the expression to put on it. “Julie,” Winnie said. “Come on, it’ll be fun.” She got up and brought out a bowl and a spoon and the measuring cups.
Anita walked out of the kitchen and they heard the front door open and close. Anita was supposed to be working today at her job as a cashier at the hospital’s coffee shop. She had called in sick. Through the window Winnie saw their mother move past the bayberry bushes and head down the road to where her goldfish pool was. The first year Anita made the goldfish pool, she let the fish freeze in the ice for the winter; she said she’d heard you could do that, that they’d thaw out in the spring. Winnie used to scrape the snow off sometimes to look at the blurry orange spots in the ice.
“I guess I blew that, huh,” Julie said. She sat with her chin in her hands.
Winnie didn’t know if she should start the cookie dough or not. She took some butter out of the refrigerator and the telephone began to ring. “Get that,” Julie said, sitting up straight. “Quick.” She was in the chair by the corner, and she started pushing at the other chairs that were in her way. The phone rang another ring.