BELLE MÈRE page two by Stefan Kiesbye
r.kv.r.y literary journal winter fiction 2007
Sunday evenings I spent watching the X-files with my mother. She had lost weight in the years after the
divorce. Her jaw jutted out, the skin wound tight over her cheekbones and forehead. Her already fine hair
had thinned, and she looked windswept at all times.
She had stayed in the family home in Kenmore and replaced the minivan with a Honda Prelude. Her coats
had grown shorter and shorter, and she wore dresses again. While my father had married again in ’96 – I
could not think of him other than as a husband being cooked and cared for – my mother was in her third
relationship with a married man.
“Convenient,” she once had said, laughing. “You don’t have to drag them around to everything.”
Most Sundays, Mom ordered pizza and we ate and watched TV. She asked about my work, I asked about
her job as a real estate agent, and by eleven, we had nothing left to tell one another. I slept either in my old
room, which she used for painting, or drove back to my apartment on Lexington. Rarely she gave me a hug.
Then her hands grabbed me, and since she was a small woman, I had a hard time avoiding her body coming
too close to mine. She sighed repeatedly and she held me until the silence between us grew awkward.
“Have you heard of your father?” she asked one night just as Moulder was wading through chicken slime in
a food factory.
“No-o,” I said.
“Does he not call?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“So what is it?”
“I’m just never home.”
“Huh,” she said, looking at her next bite of pizza with disgusted eyes. “Is he ever writing you?”
The past year I had not returned any of my dad’s calls, had not answered his two letters, not even opened
them. “He lives in East Aurora.”
“So?”
“He could drive over,” I said.
“I guess.” She sounded pleased with my answers.
I felt loyal to my mother in Kenmore, her fake late-Victorian townhouse, but I admired my father secretly for
leaving her. Or rather, I was glad for him. Mom had chosen Dad back in ’69, I was sure, not the other way
round. Yet the moment he gave in to her, she assumed she could have done better, for which goal we
achieve is worth our efforts?
Dad had struggled for twenty-two years, although he’d been no victim. He’d been happy to be rejected by
his wife, to take a lover, to be greeted back – since Mom only acknowledged his worth if proven by
successful affairs – and to be rejected again out of jealousy and contempt. It had almost been a perpetuum
mobile, a self-powered machine. Only when the fights became violent – I remembered Mom with a
screwdriver in her hand and hurling a crystal vase at Dad – had this engine broken down.
“How’s your stepmom?” Mom’s voice had grown squeaky and energetic over the years. I couldn’t remember
if her voice had ever been fuller, or if she had never spoken loudly enough as a housewife to bring out the
squeaks.
“Okay. I haven’t seen them in a long time.
“Will you tell me why?”
“Another time.”
For the rest of the evening she pouted, keeping quiet or answering my questions with one-liners.
I had always felt strangely older than my parents, more mature even as a teen. Of course they had more
money, better homes and cars, but Mom, angry I didn’t use her as a confidante, reminded me of a small kid
who doesn’t get to stay up late.
That night, when I left, she stood by the entrance in black pants and a black velvet jacket with golden
borders, closing the door, against her custom, before I had gotten into my car.
*
Mike said it couldn’t hurt to visit my father. I had asked him if it would help clear up what those dreams were
about, but he wouldn’t say. “It can’t hurt,” was all he told me.
My Dad was not an imposing man, but had luck with women. At least that’s what he wanted me to believe.
When he divorced Mom, he got married again right away. My stepmother, Nancy, was Mom’s age, but
smaller. She wore a lot of make-up and dark suits; she was the principal of an elementary school in East
Aurora. Her auburn hair she combed every five minutes, as if she had to straighten it out in order to hide a
bald spot, though she wasn’t balding.
My father was an insurance agent, but one who’d made it. He never had to go to his office anymore, but had
hired a manager. He traveled to insurance meetings of the New York State chapter and worked out of his
home. He had taken up hunting, yet I had a hard time imagining him with a gun and clad in orange garb –
there had never been a gun in our house in Kenmore. Dad had also taken up golf, which was easier to
understand, yet equally loathsome in my mind.
He had sounded excited on the phone when I told him I would come to visit. “How do you get here?” he
asked.
“I have a car.”
“What kind?”
“A Chrysler.”
“Good cars.”
“An ’86 Horizon.”
“That’s not so good.”
“I guess.” It might seem strange, but I loved the car and was disappointed by his reaction.
“Will it make the trip?”
“It’s only an hour.”
“Alright. Sorry. We’re looking forward to you coming.”
I never liked arriving, not anywhere. I love going on trips, but even as a kid I wanted to keep on driving,
even beyond our destination. The car was a safe haven for our lives, the confines of the Chevrolets and later
the Lincolns seemed to turn us invulnerable. They turned us into a family. Once we arrived, we’d be
scattered, left to different duties, pleasures and responsibilities.
When I got out of the car in my father’s driveway, I tried to shake off the disappointment. My dad’s house,
the one he’d bought after the divorce, was part of an aging subdivision that now, after ten or fifteen years,
was loosing the stark looks of new developments. The trees had grown respectable, and the lawns, though
still ten notches above Buffalo average, had lost their pedantic hue.
The house was big, but none of the monsters that were going up around Buffalo that year. It tried to look
‘solid brick’ or ‘English country house.’ I didn’t even know if country houses looked like this in England, but
the goal of the architects had been clearly to make people forget that they lived in a subdivision in upstate
New York.
Dad appeared in the entrance in dark leather slippers, his graying hair cropped short, his eyes behind the
glasses beaming. He was almost a foot shorter than me, but held himself erect and was proud of his good
looks. He took short steps toward me, like a woman who has difficulty walking in a tight, long skirt. He put
his arms around me and pressed his head to my chest, hugged me closer and then reached for my face to
plant a kiss on my cheek.
That’s how he was. He’d always done these elaborate greetings. All my friends in high school, especially the
female ones, were hugged and kissed. European style, he told me when I said that other parents didn’t
make such a fuss. His mother, who lived with us until her death when I was a sophomore, had come from
Germany to America. Dad was four at that time, and she refused to speak German with him. She wanted him
to grow up American, and he couldn’t remember any of the words of his childhood.
“Come in,” he said and put his arm under mine, leading me past the three-car garage to the kitchen door. He
was wearing a three-piece suit.
Nancy was cooking in high heels and flower-patterned stockings, which looked strange on a women of fifty-
two cooking in her own kitchen.
“Hi Don.” She smiled and came over to hug me too. “Dinner is almost ready.” She blushed as if she had said
something inappropriate.
“Sit down,” Dad said. “Can I take your jacket?”
“I’m fine,” I said. We’d always sat in the kitchen, it seemed, when I was a kid. The living room had been
something to show to guests or to watch television in, but no place to talk. Whenever there was family
business to take care of – planning of a trip, discussing my grades, discussing my girlfriends’ virtues or lack
thereof – we sat around the kitchen table, sauces and mashed potatoes drying on our plates.
“What are you guys dressed up for?” I asked.
“We have to go to a dinner at the Ferroa Club – business,” my dad said, a frown hiding his pleasure at
feeling important.
“But we wanted to have dinner with you first,” Nancy added. When she was done cooking, she took off her
embroidered apron. She wore a purple blouse, and you could see her black bra shining through just so, and
I blushed. For the rest of our dinner, roast beef and beans and herb potatoes, whenever she addressed me,
I kept my gaze on her eyes and mouth.
Before they left, Nancy led me upstairs. “I’ve prepared our guest room for you. Have a look. Where’s your
bag?” Her fingers combed her hair, her high-heeled feet swayed helplessly on the thick carpet.
“I’ve got some things in the car. I’ll get them later,” I said, having only a brown bag from Wegman’s with
another shirt and socks in the passenger seat.
“Here it is.” She stopped in the doorframe, stretching out her arm in a proud gesture. “We’re so glad you’ve
come,” she said.
Two chocolates sat diligently on my pillow, and the small room smelled fresh and crisp, as if bed, closet, desk
and lamps had been perfumed. “Feel at home,” Nancy said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.” She kissed my cheek
goodbye, then held her own up to me. She did it gingerly, like a woman who knows that her make-up will
have to last an entire evening.
I always liked when people didn’t go out of their way to please me, and she was glad I had come, but didn’t
expect me to make her day. She’d never had kids of her own, and it showed. I was a guest, not a child. I
thought her cheek was beautiful.
Belle mère. Did the French like stepmothers better than Americans did theirs? From the fairy tales I
remembered listening to as a child, stepmothers were evil, harassing children and getting rid of them.
Cinderella was a first wife’s child and was treated with scorn and jealousy. Snow White was assaulted and
nearly killed by her witch stepmother. Yet belle mère? Did the French realize that stepmothers were younger
and more beautiful? Or did they know that mothers were taboo for fantasizing adolescents, stepmothers
however not?
Belle mère. Nancy looked vaguely similar to Mom, short, not slim, yet the sharp lines that sometimes gave my
mother a tortured look were missing. Nancy’s eyes were gentle, quick as a squirrel’s, and her slightly
rounded shoulders and few extra pounds she wore lightly. They exuded a sexy comfortableness, not the
burden of accumulated age. She was spreading, not fading.
*
When Nancy and my dad were gone, I watched television at first, making sure they didn’t come back to pick
up a forgotten gift or pillbox. Then I went through the whole house and stood a long time in their bedroom.
It had a king-size bed, with a mattress and box spring so high, it seemed uncomfortable to get in and out of
the bed.
There was a vanity, and the closet doors were all mirrors. The carpet was a brownish pink, and vanity and
bed were of auburn wood. The room smelled stuffy the way a furniture store smells; no body smells lingered,
only the faint odor of my father’s aftershave.
I went to his office in the basement, and I spent some minutes in what seemed to be Nancy’s room. The
sparse furniture was made of blonde wood, and the giant desk was filled with books on pedagogy and
accounting.
Whenever I came to a family’s house, I got excited. I still felt that way in our old house in Kenmore, and at
friends’ homes, and I felt my skin prickle there in the empty house. Stories I’d read as an adolescent in
borrowed and dog-eared books seemed to materialize. Stories of tender cousins and lonely aunts, of boys
turned into men by longing widows and understanding housewives. Only I didn’t want to be reminded of
them in East Aurora. The excitement opened you and also made you helpless. Pot can do that to you, and
when you’re with the wrong people, it freaks you out.
Yet against better judgment I searched the bookshelves in the living room and found two old acquaintances,
two small volumes entitled Orchid Nights, and More Orchid Nights. I read them again, all of the stories, which
hadn’t left me since I was thirteen and looking for a Playboy calendar I knew my father had been given by a
business associate. It was distressing how little my fantasies had been altered by girlfriends and affairs, and
how strangely intact and satisfying the world of the fantastic encounters of the Orchid Nights still seemed.
Later, I got my bag from the car, then showered. I watched the Mets lose to the Braves, ate some cold roast
beef and went to bed.
I was still lying awake on the unfamiliar, too soft mattress when my dad’s Lincoln pulled into the driveway.
Moments later I heard it knock gently on my door and he came in.
“Are you sleeping?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said and switched on the little lamp on the nightstand, pushing the two books under the bed, but
not quickly enough for my Dad not to notice.
“What are you reading?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and fished for the books. “I like those too.” He
smiled as he leafed through Orchid Nights. “The one with the schoolteacher is my favorite. “Emily” it’s called.
Where the boy does it with his new teacher, in the summer. Yeah, I like that one.”
I didn’t say anything, hoping he would leave. The stories were mine, stolen many years ago for secret
pleasures, and they belonged to the flushed-cheeks boy who filled the empty space on the shelf with
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I didn’t want to hear my dad’s opinion on sex, didn’t want to think that
he was thinking of boys and schoolteachers while sleeping next to Nancy.
“When you were little,” he said, “and we would come home late, we’d always go to your room, you mom and
I.
Sometimes you didn’t wake up, but you would smile at our voices with your eyes closed and answer our
good-nights in your sleep.”
I looked at my father, who put the books on the nightstand. His hand came to lie on my chest. “Good night.”
He pursed his lips in a blown kiss. “See you in the morning.”
*
“So, what are your plans for today?” Dad asked at the breakfast table. There had never been a morning in
my childhood that started past eight o’clock, and neither had this one. He had knocked on my door and
shouted boisterously that the breakfast was ready.
My father’s question meant he didn’t figure in whatever plans I had made. Mornings he kept like a checkbook
to himself, and only in the afternoon was he ever able to dispense some of his time.
Nancy had cooked eggs and bacon and made waffles, and she looked tired and sweet in a black satin robe.
Her brown legs were bare, her feet stuck in black plush slippers.
“You want to help me with the groceries?” she asked.
“If you two are leaving, I’ll put in some time in my den,” my father said, satisfied at how easy he had
escaped.
In the car, a new Toyota Camry, Nancy asked if I would mind going to the mall with her. “Would that be
boring for you?”
“Which one?” I asked.
“The Galleria. In Buffalo.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“Do you mind?”
It was a strange ride. Buffalo was my city, yet in Nancy’s car, I felt like a visitor, a tourist. Nancy’s perfume
was something light, yet spicy, and it lent the Toyota a luxurious ambience. For the first time in years, I saw
the city through someone else’s eyes, and I immediately wished it were nicer. Whatever I was missing in my
life, status, good moods, charms, Buffalo didn’t have either. And although both of us were hoping to get out
of where we were stuck, we didn’t accuse each other of not having reached our goals yet. Yet now I was
glad that we didn’t stop downtown, didn’t have a closer look at the crumpling or boarded-up buildings. I was
glad we went to the mall and its expensive copper light.
divorce. Her jaw jutted out, the skin wound tight over her cheekbones and forehead. Her already fine hair
had thinned, and she looked windswept at all times.
She had stayed in the family home in Kenmore and replaced the minivan with a Honda Prelude. Her coats
had grown shorter and shorter, and she wore dresses again. While my father had married again in ’96 – I
could not think of him other than as a husband being cooked and cared for – my mother was in her third
relationship with a married man.
“Convenient,” she once had said, laughing. “You don’t have to drag them around to everything.”
Most Sundays, Mom ordered pizza and we ate and watched TV. She asked about my work, I asked about
her job as a real estate agent, and by eleven, we had nothing left to tell one another. I slept either in my old
room, which she used for painting, or drove back to my apartment on Lexington. Rarely she gave me a hug.
Then her hands grabbed me, and since she was a small woman, I had a hard time avoiding her body coming
too close to mine. She sighed repeatedly and she held me until the silence between us grew awkward.
“Have you heard of your father?” she asked one night just as Moulder was wading through chicken slime in
a food factory.
“No-o,” I said.
“Does he not call?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“So what is it?”
“I’m just never home.”
“Huh,” she said, looking at her next bite of pizza with disgusted eyes. “Is he ever writing you?”
The past year I had not returned any of my dad’s calls, had not answered his two letters, not even opened
them. “He lives in East Aurora.”
“So?”
“He could drive over,” I said.
“I guess.” She sounded pleased with my answers.
I felt loyal to my mother in Kenmore, her fake late-Victorian townhouse, but I admired my father secretly for
leaving her. Or rather, I was glad for him. Mom had chosen Dad back in ’69, I was sure, not the other way
round. Yet the moment he gave in to her, she assumed she could have done better, for which goal we
achieve is worth our efforts?
Dad had struggled for twenty-two years, although he’d been no victim. He’d been happy to be rejected by
his wife, to take a lover, to be greeted back – since Mom only acknowledged his worth if proven by
successful affairs – and to be rejected again out of jealousy and contempt. It had almost been a perpetuum
mobile, a self-powered machine. Only when the fights became violent – I remembered Mom with a
screwdriver in her hand and hurling a crystal vase at Dad – had this engine broken down.
“How’s your stepmom?” Mom’s voice had grown squeaky and energetic over the years. I couldn’t remember
if her voice had ever been fuller, or if she had never spoken loudly enough as a housewife to bring out the
squeaks.
“Okay. I haven’t seen them in a long time.
“Will you tell me why?”
“Another time.”
For the rest of the evening she pouted, keeping quiet or answering my questions with one-liners.
I had always felt strangely older than my parents, more mature even as a teen. Of course they had more
money, better homes and cars, but Mom, angry I didn’t use her as a confidante, reminded me of a small kid
who doesn’t get to stay up late.
That night, when I left, she stood by the entrance in black pants and a black velvet jacket with golden
borders, closing the door, against her custom, before I had gotten into my car.
*
Mike said it couldn’t hurt to visit my father. I had asked him if it would help clear up what those dreams were
about, but he wouldn’t say. “It can’t hurt,” was all he told me.
My Dad was not an imposing man, but had luck with women. At least that’s what he wanted me to believe.
When he divorced Mom, he got married again right away. My stepmother, Nancy, was Mom’s age, but
smaller. She wore a lot of make-up and dark suits; she was the principal of an elementary school in East
Aurora. Her auburn hair she combed every five minutes, as if she had to straighten it out in order to hide a
bald spot, though she wasn’t balding.
My father was an insurance agent, but one who’d made it. He never had to go to his office anymore, but had
hired a manager. He traveled to insurance meetings of the New York State chapter and worked out of his
home. He had taken up hunting, yet I had a hard time imagining him with a gun and clad in orange garb –
there had never been a gun in our house in Kenmore. Dad had also taken up golf, which was easier to
understand, yet equally loathsome in my mind.
He had sounded excited on the phone when I told him I would come to visit. “How do you get here?” he
asked.
“I have a car.”
“What kind?”
“A Chrysler.”
“Good cars.”
“An ’86 Horizon.”
“That’s not so good.”
“I guess.” It might seem strange, but I loved the car and was disappointed by his reaction.
“Will it make the trip?”
“It’s only an hour.”
“Alright. Sorry. We’re looking forward to you coming.”
I never liked arriving, not anywhere. I love going on trips, but even as a kid I wanted to keep on driving,
even beyond our destination. The car was a safe haven for our lives, the confines of the Chevrolets and later
the Lincolns seemed to turn us invulnerable. They turned us into a family. Once we arrived, we’d be
scattered, left to different duties, pleasures and responsibilities.
When I got out of the car in my father’s driveway, I tried to shake off the disappointment. My dad’s house,
the one he’d bought after the divorce, was part of an aging subdivision that now, after ten or fifteen years,
was loosing the stark looks of new developments. The trees had grown respectable, and the lawns, though
still ten notches above Buffalo average, had lost their pedantic hue.
The house was big, but none of the monsters that were going up around Buffalo that year. It tried to look
‘solid brick’ or ‘English country house.’ I didn’t even know if country houses looked like this in England, but
the goal of the architects had been clearly to make people forget that they lived in a subdivision in upstate
New York.
Dad appeared in the entrance in dark leather slippers, his graying hair cropped short, his eyes behind the
glasses beaming. He was almost a foot shorter than me, but held himself erect and was proud of his good
looks. He took short steps toward me, like a woman who has difficulty walking in a tight, long skirt. He put
his arms around me and pressed his head to my chest, hugged me closer and then reached for my face to
plant a kiss on my cheek.
That’s how he was. He’d always done these elaborate greetings. All my friends in high school, especially the
female ones, were hugged and kissed. European style, he told me when I said that other parents didn’t
make such a fuss. His mother, who lived with us until her death when I was a sophomore, had come from
Germany to America. Dad was four at that time, and she refused to speak German with him. She wanted him
to grow up American, and he couldn’t remember any of the words of his childhood.
“Come in,” he said and put his arm under mine, leading me past the three-car garage to the kitchen door. He
was wearing a three-piece suit.
Nancy was cooking in high heels and flower-patterned stockings, which looked strange on a women of fifty-
two cooking in her own kitchen.
“Hi Don.” She smiled and came over to hug me too. “Dinner is almost ready.” She blushed as if she had said
something inappropriate.
“Sit down,” Dad said. “Can I take your jacket?”
“I’m fine,” I said. We’d always sat in the kitchen, it seemed, when I was a kid. The living room had been
something to show to guests or to watch television in, but no place to talk. Whenever there was family
business to take care of – planning of a trip, discussing my grades, discussing my girlfriends’ virtues or lack
thereof – we sat around the kitchen table, sauces and mashed potatoes drying on our plates.
“What are you guys dressed up for?” I asked.
“We have to go to a dinner at the Ferroa Club – business,” my dad said, a frown hiding his pleasure at
feeling important.
“But we wanted to have dinner with you first,” Nancy added. When she was done cooking, she took off her
embroidered apron. She wore a purple blouse, and you could see her black bra shining through just so, and
I blushed. For the rest of our dinner, roast beef and beans and herb potatoes, whenever she addressed me,
I kept my gaze on her eyes and mouth.
Before they left, Nancy led me upstairs. “I’ve prepared our guest room for you. Have a look. Where’s your
bag?” Her fingers combed her hair, her high-heeled feet swayed helplessly on the thick carpet.
“I’ve got some things in the car. I’ll get them later,” I said, having only a brown bag from Wegman’s with
another shirt and socks in the passenger seat.
“Here it is.” She stopped in the doorframe, stretching out her arm in a proud gesture. “We’re so glad you’ve
come,” she said.
Two chocolates sat diligently on my pillow, and the small room smelled fresh and crisp, as if bed, closet, desk
and lamps had been perfumed. “Feel at home,” Nancy said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.” She kissed my cheek
goodbye, then held her own up to me. She did it gingerly, like a woman who knows that her make-up will
have to last an entire evening.
I always liked when people didn’t go out of their way to please me, and she was glad I had come, but didn’t
expect me to make her day. She’d never had kids of her own, and it showed. I was a guest, not a child. I
thought her cheek was beautiful.
Belle mère. Did the French like stepmothers better than Americans did theirs? From the fairy tales I
remembered listening to as a child, stepmothers were evil, harassing children and getting rid of them.
Cinderella was a first wife’s child and was treated with scorn and jealousy. Snow White was assaulted and
nearly killed by her witch stepmother. Yet belle mère? Did the French realize that stepmothers were younger
and more beautiful? Or did they know that mothers were taboo for fantasizing adolescents, stepmothers
however not?
Belle mère. Nancy looked vaguely similar to Mom, short, not slim, yet the sharp lines that sometimes gave my
mother a tortured look were missing. Nancy’s eyes were gentle, quick as a squirrel’s, and her slightly
rounded shoulders and few extra pounds she wore lightly. They exuded a sexy comfortableness, not the
burden of accumulated age. She was spreading, not fading.
*
When Nancy and my dad were gone, I watched television at first, making sure they didn’t come back to pick
up a forgotten gift or pillbox. Then I went through the whole house and stood a long time in their bedroom.
It had a king-size bed, with a mattress and box spring so high, it seemed uncomfortable to get in and out of
the bed.
There was a vanity, and the closet doors were all mirrors. The carpet was a brownish pink, and vanity and
bed were of auburn wood. The room smelled stuffy the way a furniture store smells; no body smells lingered,
only the faint odor of my father’s aftershave.
I went to his office in the basement, and I spent some minutes in what seemed to be Nancy’s room. The
sparse furniture was made of blonde wood, and the giant desk was filled with books on pedagogy and
accounting.
Whenever I came to a family’s house, I got excited. I still felt that way in our old house in Kenmore, and at
friends’ homes, and I felt my skin prickle there in the empty house. Stories I’d read as an adolescent in
borrowed and dog-eared books seemed to materialize. Stories of tender cousins and lonely aunts, of boys
turned into men by longing widows and understanding housewives. Only I didn’t want to be reminded of
them in East Aurora. The excitement opened you and also made you helpless. Pot can do that to you, and
when you’re with the wrong people, it freaks you out.
Yet against better judgment I searched the bookshelves in the living room and found two old acquaintances,
two small volumes entitled Orchid Nights, and More Orchid Nights. I read them again, all of the stories, which
hadn’t left me since I was thirteen and looking for a Playboy calendar I knew my father had been given by a
business associate. It was distressing how little my fantasies had been altered by girlfriends and affairs, and
how strangely intact and satisfying the world of the fantastic encounters of the Orchid Nights still seemed.
Later, I got my bag from the car, then showered. I watched the Mets lose to the Braves, ate some cold roast
beef and went to bed.
I was still lying awake on the unfamiliar, too soft mattress when my dad’s Lincoln pulled into the driveway.
Moments later I heard it knock gently on my door and he came in.
“Are you sleeping?” he asked.
“Almost,” I said and switched on the little lamp on the nightstand, pushing the two books under the bed, but
not quickly enough for my Dad not to notice.
“What are you reading?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and fished for the books. “I like those too.” He
smiled as he leafed through Orchid Nights. “The one with the schoolteacher is my favorite. “Emily” it’s called.
Where the boy does it with his new teacher, in the summer. Yeah, I like that one.”
I didn’t say anything, hoping he would leave. The stories were mine, stolen many years ago for secret
pleasures, and they belonged to the flushed-cheeks boy who filled the empty space on the shelf with
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I didn’t want to hear my dad’s opinion on sex, didn’t want to think that
he was thinking of boys and schoolteachers while sleeping next to Nancy.
“When you were little,” he said, “and we would come home late, we’d always go to your room, you mom and
I.
Sometimes you didn’t wake up, but you would smile at our voices with your eyes closed and answer our
good-nights in your sleep.”
I looked at my father, who put the books on the nightstand. His hand came to lie on my chest. “Good night.”
He pursed his lips in a blown kiss. “See you in the morning.”
*
“So, what are your plans for today?” Dad asked at the breakfast table. There had never been a morning in
my childhood that started past eight o’clock, and neither had this one. He had knocked on my door and
shouted boisterously that the breakfast was ready.
My father’s question meant he didn’t figure in whatever plans I had made. Mornings he kept like a checkbook
to himself, and only in the afternoon was he ever able to dispense some of his time.
Nancy had cooked eggs and bacon and made waffles, and she looked tired and sweet in a black satin robe.
Her brown legs were bare, her feet stuck in black plush slippers.
“You want to help me with the groceries?” she asked.
“If you two are leaving, I’ll put in some time in my den,” my father said, satisfied at how easy he had
escaped.
In the car, a new Toyota Camry, Nancy asked if I would mind going to the mall with her. “Would that be
boring for you?”
“Which one?” I asked.
“The Galleria. In Buffalo.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“Do you mind?”
It was a strange ride. Buffalo was my city, yet in Nancy’s car, I felt like a visitor, a tourist. Nancy’s perfume
was something light, yet spicy, and it lent the Toyota a luxurious ambience. For the first time in years, I saw
the city through someone else’s eyes, and I immediately wished it were nicer. Whatever I was missing in my
life, status, good moods, charms, Buffalo didn’t have either. And although both of us were hoping to get out
of where we were stuck, we didn’t accuse each other of not having reached our goals yet. Yet now I was
glad that we didn’t stop downtown, didn’t have a closer look at the crumpling or boarded-up buildings. I was
glad we went to the mall and its expensive copper light.
