Julie Esther Fisher

"Why don't you kids make yourself useful. Go inside and get some scissors. Cut that lawn over there. This place needs some sprucing up—"

 

There are two pairs of scissors, one sharp, one woefully dull, and though my sister Lily offers to make a go of it with the dull ones, I agree to give her the good ones if she stops crying.

 

Our father comments from the veranda.

 

"To the left, Lily. No, not my left—yours—"

 

And individual blades of grass draw comment from his intermittent tours of inspection.

 

"Clip them all to the same height, Eliza. Your sections are uneven."

 

These I return to and summarily snip. All I have to do is think of my mother, and nothing living escapes deliverance from these scissors.

 

We are vacationing in the South of France. The sun-drenched villa perches on cliffs overlooking the sea. There are pear orchards. That is where I hid last night to see it happening, the strange arithmetic of marriage—the subtraction—how, by candlelight, with graceful dancing limbs, dusky murmurings ending in a slap, four became three. I alone saw this; my sister slept. Now that slap is everywhere. It inhabits the flesh of the growing pears. If we stay here for long enough, we'll be eating it.

 

We woke up this morning to find our father on the veranda. His face was sallow; his fat body slumped.

 

"There's something I have to tell you," he said.

 

I stepped in front of my sister to soften the slap that survived the night to end up here.

 

"Your Grandmother's sick. Your mother's gone back to the States."

 

"When will she be back?" Lily asked.

 

My father peered vaguely in the direction of the orchard. "I don't know. We've got this place now. We'll have to make the best of it."

 

I stared stonily at the veranda's columns.  Dry paint was peeling from them. My own eyes felt just as dry. I kicked at the marble stoop until my toes stung.

 

"What will we do without Mommy?" Lily sniffled. A few tears leaked from her eyes.

 

He stared down at us. That was when he ordered us inside to get the scissors.

 

Now we crouch and snip. The sun beats down on our backs.

 

 

At twelve-thirty, when the sun is at its hottest, he retires to the shady verandah out back. Hunkered in the grass, Lily and I wait. It's so quiet we can hear his footsteps trudging across the villa's marble floors, a door swinging on its hinges, and then the creaks and groans of the hammock announcing its burden. A moment later come the snores: thick and regular.

We lie down side by side in the narrow swath it has taken us hours to cut. It's a green grave from which I squint up at the sun through the branches of a pear tree at the edge of the orchard. The heat settles on top of us, as if the sun has gotten snarled in the branches and can't go down.

 

I say, "She's not visiting Grandma, you know. She's leaving Daddy. She may have someone else."

 

Lily props up on an elbow.

 

"You think Mommy's a bigatist?"

 

Under that French sun the whole world seems a dry dazzling white. Even the young pears loading up the branches look bleached and artificial.

 

"Bigamist. But do you even know what that word means?"

 

"Maybe we're not really his?"

 

I turn to her.

 

"We're his. If anyone's the bigamist, it's him. Probably that's why Mommy left." I wave a fly out of my face. "She probably isn't our real mother anyway."

 

Lily looks shocked. "Don't say that! Of course she is."

 

"I bet the strain of it got too much."

 

She sits up. "What strain?"

 

"The strain of raising us, someone else's kids, naturally. Besides, we're not easy, you know… Well, you're never any trouble..."

 

She takes my hand, looks me in the eye.

 

"Elzie James, are you telling me the truth?"

 

"Of course," I say, shaking her off. "What, are you calling me a liar?"

 

A moment passes. Lily takes the measure of me.

 

"Well, if Mommy isn't our real mother, then who is? It isn't Alexandra, is it?" she asks with dread of the housekeeper. "But she doesn't even like him."

 

"Dummy, who says you have to like someone to marry them?"

 

 

We creep away to spy on that housekeeper through the kitchen window. I can feel Lily examining Alexandra with new eyes. A sharp-featured older woman, she holds knitting on equally sharp-looking needles and looks like someone to steer clear of. Suddenly our father appears in the kitchen doorway. We crouch lower. Alexandra mumbles a swift "Bon jour", to which he replies, "What the heck's so good about it?"

 

He walks toward the fridge.

 

"Ah, Monsieur James," she chides, "s'il vous plait—nous pouvons manger en une heure......"

 

"That may be," our father says. "But on ne mange pas real food."

 

From outside, we see his big hand on the unopened package of hamburger meat. Cutting it open, he sinks his knife into the red and white worms of meat and spreads it raw on to an oval slice of Jewish rye, bringing it to his mouth before the spreading is even complete. Four, maybe five slices before trudging off to his chamber to collapse on the bed. We peep in. There he lies in his underwear, snoring, a great spill of a birthmark half exposed on his gut: a deep, strawberry red anchor.

 

 

I begin to believe my own lie that our mother isn't ours. It explains how easily I can act like my father.

 

Now, crouched at the villa's kitchen window, "Here are the scissors," I say to Lily. "Get going."

 

She looks at me without surprise, with that expression of inevitability and premature forgiveness which only makes me more contrary.

 

 

There is a whistle. I've heard it before, but only in France does it seem to be summoning me too. I follow the lazy purr of a saxophone floating from an old radio and it leads me to a clearing in the orchard. My father lights candles. The flames brighten the whites of their eyes. Scuffing the dust, they dance. Their bodies cradle each other. My mother's head is on his shoulder. I hide behind a tree. Their words float, stirring the air, the leaves. My ears are hungry for such murmurings.

 

"The agent wasn't kidding," my father says. "This place is a palace. And for four blissful weeks, it's ours. What do you think, Rosie? Will it suit?"

 

"What are we going to do here for four weeks?" she says, lifting her head. Her lips are a bright balloon red.

 

"Do? There's plenty to do," he says. "And there's stuff nearby. Monte Carlo isn't far."

 

She turns toward him. "As if coming here wasn't enough of a gamble…"

 

"You were gambling that in five, ten years he'd still be around to worship you."

 

My mother has a parasol beauty that looks particularly good under the French sky. She prepared for this trip, bought a little string bikini. There's a sheer cover-up too through which the bikini will show. They are as proud of her body as they are of my rare sorties into school work.

 

Her remoteness holds a kind of majesty. Even from a distance, the weight of it bears down on me.

 

"You're happy now," my father says.

 

I wonder what's paler, her face or the moths.

 

"How much did you spend on this place?" she asks. "Will you win it back?"

 

"I did you, didn't I?"

 

"The children will be happy here," she says duskily.

 

A clumsy moth bumps her face, lost perhaps on its way to the flame. She brushes it gently along.

 

"Wipe that stuff off your lips. Kiss me."

 

I blush at the thought that they won't be able to help themselves, they'll get swept up in some icky passion. But the kiss, when it comes, is scarcely a graze, light enough to allay my fear that he'd end up with her mark on him.

 

 

My father unravels as surely as the mysterious garment Alexandra undoes each night, to begin anew the next morning with the same kinked yarn. Tonight I'm wakened from a fitful dream. I leave Lily sleeping and walk toward the strange sounds which I deduce must be my father weeping. They aren't loud sounds, but they're deep and penetrating, and they travel the long hallways and twisting corridors with determined desolation. I descend to the kitchen, open the ice box, and snag the last slice of Jalousie. I put it on a tray with a tall glass of Cassis and follow the doleful sounds out on to the veranda. Handing it to my father, I wrap my arms around his belly. In this moment I forget what he might have said before she slapped him. He has to hold the tray out to avoid my burrowing head.

 

 

In its sprawling opulence, the villa mocks our shrinking numbers. The textured magnificence of the furnishings contrasts with the monotony of the motherless, wifeless lives we now live.

 

Our father mopes over his French cuisine at his solitary station, the verandah. Lily and I eat at the banquet table in the dining room, an immense slab of mahogany so polished that, looking into it, it's as if we're feeding our reflections. We're waited on by a handsome boy, Philippe Pierre, whose father, we guess, must be a mortician. Philippe wears a black jacket we're sure serves a gruesome double duty. When he draws close to me with the silver service of petit pois or fillets de rouget aux herbettes, a pungent smell wafts up from the outstretched sleeve. This morning he whispers, "You are preety," which cause my cheeks to flame and Alexandra to look up over the rims of her specs.

 

 

We have our choice of a dozen different bedrooms. The windows in these are all sealed shut, screened by stiff savagely pleated draperies. No breeze blows through. You can't hear the sea. Everything is dark and shut up; the silence is deep and aspidistral. Phantoms lurk beneath this crust of neglect. My mother's, however, is nowhere amongst them.

 

"Do you really think Mommy's never coming back?" Lily whimpers from inside cool mimosa sheets. "Then why aren't you sad? Who's going to take care of us?"

 

It's nine o'clock, the light is declining. The balcony doors pried open, the wild sea is just a blur over the treetops.

 

"I am sad," I say touchily, batting the festoon that loops between the four posters of our bed. "I'll have to take care of you. I'm older. You don't know the ropes."

 

"What about Daddy?"

 

The deep sigh that escapes me stirs some extravagant feathers sprouting from a vase.

 

"He's a gambler. He doesn't know what to do with kids."

 

Lily huddles closer.

 

"Mommy's probably out interviewing orphanages," I say authoritatively.

 

"Orphanages?"

 

"Yeah. She'll pick the best one and then she'll give us up. Officially. The most we can hope for is that we won't be split up… I wouldn't want to be. I like you, kiddo."

 

I plant a small kiss on her forehead.

 

"I like you too, Elzie. A lot. But you lie."

 

"Do not—"

 

"Yes, you do. All the time. I never know whether to believe you."

 

 

Every day, driven by a bungling desire to please my father, I wield my blades. I excel at grooming the lawn. Yet day by day his interest in the childish diversion wanes. I begin to feel guilty for appropriating what was originally his, begin to make blunders and glaring omissions with the scissors I think will revive him. But these do nothing to allay the dismal moods that chase him back to the verandah, where he broods in a rocking chair. I hear the rails right now grinding into the marble floor.

 

Days stretch to weeks. The pears grow. We hear nothing from our mother. Every day I run down the driveway to check the mailbox for a letter. I never wonder what she'd write to me, only what I'd say to her if she did. Our father never wavers in his story about our sick grandmother and I never let on that I know it's a lie. As time wears on, my yarns become more fantastical. Our mother was a travel agent before she got married. Maybe she bought herself a one-way ticket somewhere. Or maybe she really does have a lover, he already has kids, and they don't want more. Feeling more French by the day, I seem to lie even better in this new language.