“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.
Joanne’s younger brother Frank still lives at home. He is fifteen. Frank was a surprise. “A blessing,” Nancy tells us when Anna asks why Frank is so much younger than Joanne. “She means a mistake,” Frank says. He has a blond military crew cut and acne. When he bends over in his chinos, we can see the crack of his behind.
The Burkes live in a three-story white brick house surrounded by delphiniums and banks of sweet pachysandra, overlooking the ribbon of the Hudson River. The house is filled with chocolate Labradors with names like Cora and Blue, and the constant smell of rising yeast. On Sunday mornings, we go to church.
Anna and I have our own room on a little half-story behind the kitchen. A hidden staircase leads from a broom-closet door in the pantry up to our room. “The maid’s,” Nancy calls it. No one else uses this section of the house. Our diamond windowpanes look out on steep gray bedrock that weeps chill water from somewhere deep inside it.
Anna and I are friends again. We play Red Light, Green Light in the garden, sit on the wooden stairs making paper dolls, or read our books curled up in bed. No one bothers us. No one shouts. When it’s time for luncheon, Nancy rings a cowbell and we run downstairs to the dining room, where a fire is always lit, even in early summer. Nancy loves having us here, she tells us. She smothers us in hugs and kisses and unpacks our weekend suitcases into hickory bureau drawers.
Frank has a rec room in the back of the house, where he raises mice, hamsters, and gerbils in fish tanks. They stare across the room at Waldo, the boa constrictor who lives in a larger glass cage in their midst. At night, after dinner, Frank forces us to watch as he feeds teensy baby mice to his snake. Pinkies. I beg to be let out of the room, but he blocks the door. The room smells of cedar sawdust and fear.
“Are you kids having fun in there?” Nancy calls from the kitchen where she is finishing up the dishes.
“We’re feeding Waldo,” Frank yells. “Here. Take this.” He shoves a squirming pinky into Anna’s hand.
“I don’t want to.” She tries to hand the mouse back to him, but he sticks his hands in his pockets.
“If you don’t feed Waldo he’ll be hungry tonight. He might try to escape. Did you know that even a young boa constrictor can strangle a human to death in seconds?”