“I need some comfortable shoes,” Nancy said. “Sensible ones. And a coat for the fall. My old one looks
shabby and your dad doesn’t like when I look shabby. I won’t take a long time.”
Nancy’s figure displayed a laziness that comes with age and desk jobs and responsibilities. They wear at
your flesh, soften it. Yet her position as a principal caught her soft body like a safety net. Nancy looked
assured and fond of herself.
“What do you think of those?” she asked, putting a mauve-stockinged foot into a brown patent leather
shoe. Her feet looked tired, like pudgy kids, angry and pouting.
“They’re nice.”
“Should I get them in black?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think?”
“Brown, black – why don’t you try the red ones there, maybe?”
Nancy really went to the rack I pointed to and asked the clerk to bring a pair her size.
“You like them?” She wiggled her foot for me to see.
“Sure. How are they?” I was embarrassed that she wanted my opinion. I’d never advised anyone on
their clothes, and Nancy was my father’s wife.
“I’ll take them.”
We left the store, and she took my arm as if I were dear to her and she proud to be seen with me. We
went to Banana Republic and she insisted on buying me a beige sweater that was real soft. “You look so
nice in it,” she said.
“I don’t know. I don’t wear turtlenecks, not really.”
“You don’t like them?”
“No, it’s just...”
“I like you in it. You chose my shoes, and I’ll choose a sweater.” In that moment she looked old, a bit
more like Mom, and I couldn’t help but feel like a kid, and for a moment I wished I hadn’t come. She also
bought boots for me, yellow ones, which she insisted everyone had these days, and when we sat down
for lunch at the Pizzeria Uno, I had lost my appetite.
She ordered wine, and in the green, red and brown darkness of our booth, her eyes sparkled. She had
small hands, nicely padded hands and fingers, and her nails were done in dark red. She told me about
her work, the children’s sicknesses, angry parents and the East Aurora mafia, who let no one from
outside town use their parks and golf courses. Our pizza came, and Nancy drank more wine. Her cheeks
flushed and she took off her thin cardigan and was wearing a sleeveless shirt. I saw where her bra cut
into her flesh and stared at her bare arms.
“It’s nice to have you with us,” she said.
“Umh,” I mumbled.
“We’re old enough to get around this stepmother-stepson thing, aren’t we? It’s nice to see Helmut’s
son.”
We had met at the wedding of course, and two or three other times, but never alone.
“Are you seeing someone?” she asked. “You should bring her over. Helmut was very upset when you
hung up on him and didn’t answer his letters.”
“I’m not seeing anyone.”
“We don’t have to talk about that.”
“Did he send you to the mall with me?”
“No, that was my idea.”
“The pizza is pretty bad.”
“Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“You mean, not eat this?” I pointed to my plate.
“Yeah.”
I laughed. I wouldn’t have had the money to pay for wine and pizza, and now she suggested dumping
our food and pay again somewhere else. “Okay,” I said.
She paid and walked ahead of me out of the restaurant. Without touching me, she went to the car, and I
got in next to her.
“So, where do you want us to go?”
I laughed again. This freedom shocked me, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I knew places like the
Great Wall, Pano’s, and Mykonos, but I couldn’t imagine Nancy in those places.
“You like hot-dogs?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“At LaSalle Park, there’s a Ted’s. Near the Peace Bridge.”
Nancy put the car in gear – it wasn’t an automatic – and she turned onto the 33 and drove downtown.
Maybe it was the wine, maybe the fact that I started to feel more comfortable next to her, but Buffalo
didn’t look as shabby as it had on our arrival. It was still the same decrepit steel-town, yet sitting in the
Camry, I saw the Peace Bridge and the run-down Westside through more benign eyes.
Seagulls greeted us in front of Ted’s. The benches outside were spotted white and black, and the air
smelled of garbage, late summer warmth, and echoed with the birds’ angry voices. In the stark dining-
room, I poured vinegar over Nancy’s fries, and she said she liked it.
“This is fun,” she said. “I’ve never been here.”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you call? Were you angry at him for marrying me?”
It would have been convenient for me to say yes, see her face cloud and lighten up again, to turn this
into a pancake of a movie-scene, warm and fluffy. Yet I shook my head.
“What’s wrong?”
How can you tell your father’s wife that you’re having a dream about him, a dream in which he rapes
you, and that you hate the way he touches you? She likes to be touched by him, lives with him every
day, and you don’t even know whether your dream is memory or a mirage.
What I did remember was my mother sleeping naked and myself crawling into bed every morning after
Dad had left for work. I remembered weekend mornings when they were both naked and laughing at my
curiosity. That is what I remember: my mother laughing at my small hands that seek out her dark
nipples, my father watching and laughing too. My mother lifting me over her belly with its soft skin and
deep navel over to my father, who received me and stuffed me under the covers next to him. I remember
having to massage his back and legs, and his obvious pleasure, his groans and moans, his hairiness. I
hated having to touch him so I could stay with them in bed.
Back in the car, Nancy looked at me concerned because I hadn’t answered her question and maybe
because I looked older now and like the bust that I was. I gazed at her mauve legs, and her auburn hair
might as well have been dyed. I looked into her brown, quick eyes which seemed to understand, if only
because I wanted them to.
I put my head in her lap, and she put her fingers in my hair and was quiet. God, she was quiet and didn’t
move, held me without a word, held still as long as I had my head next to her small belly, until I grew
self-conscious and sat back up. “Thanks,” I said.
*
My father sat at a desk at the far end of the living room, college football muted on the screen.
“I thought you had gone off into the sunset and left me.” He laughed and embraced me like I’d seen
coaches embrace their prize-fighters after a victory. We had a whiskey, the manly afternoon drink, and I
told him about the fairy-tale I remembered from my childhood. By that time I was asking myself why I
had come and how I had ever expected to find out if my dreams were just that, dreams, or if they were
memories. I wanted to talk about the past and didn’t know how to bring it up.
“Do you know “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs?”
“Where did you and Nancy go?”
“Do you?”
“What is it? A story?”
“A fairy-tale. Grimms’ tales.”
“Why? Was it fun to go shopping? Nancy is a great shopper.”
“Dad. The tale. Grandma read it to me.”
He looked at me, he suppressed a laugh, waited for me to say more, to explain myself.
“She told it again and again.”
He didn’t remember the fairy-tale, but he wanted to understand, although he didn’t. We heard Nancy’s
busy feet in the kitchen. She was baking Pillsbury cookies we had picked up on our way home.
“We’re – don’t take offense – we’re worried about you. No, no, please, we know you can fend for
yourself, but not hearing from you was hard.” He came over to where I sat in a green overstuffed
armchair and put a hand on my arm, a hand that looked like mine with its long fingers and slightly
crooked nails.
“I don’t like the way you touch me,” I said.
He stepped back, his face drawn, shocked. He was hurt, but didn’t attack. He sat back down and stared
at the carpet in front of him.
“The fairy-tale,” he said, cautiously, as if he expected me to jump him.
“It’s about a boy born in a lucky skin, and to marry the King’s daughter, he has to go to hell and get the
Devil’s three golden hairs.”
“I’m not sure we have that book.”
I groaned, feeling more and more stupid with every word I said. How could I talk about fairy-tales no one
in my family remembered anyway?
“Is that the reason?”
“The reason for what?” I asked.
“I talked with Nancy about you. Often. She really likes you.”
“What reason?”
“That story?”
“For what?”
He sighed. “We’re just old and worry about you.”
“The reason for what?” I shouted.
“You have to...I mean everyone needs a job, a place to live...”
“The fairy-tale.”
“I want to understand, but...what is this story about?”
“You freak me out,” I said. “You give me the creeps.” And then I became too afraid of what he might
have to say or what he would ask and that in the end I would be laughed at again, and I ran up the
stairs, got my things and rushed to the entrance.
He stood there, small, a slight man with graying, impeccably cut hair, trim, wealthy and hurt.
“I don’t comprehend. What did I do?” he asked. Nancy stood in the kitchen door looking at me, my
stepmother the principal, looking out into the school corridor with professionally concerned eyes.
I needed my silent exit, I felt I needed my stoic silence to be able to walk to my car, but on my way home
to Buffalo, I knew that I was left with an empty feeling, that of a fighter who didn’t try. I had everything
going for me, but how can a child talk to his daddy when the child is twenty-eight and the father fifty-four
and no one remembers? It was this: I couldn’t talk to someone who did not exist anymore. The six-year
old did not exist and the thirty-five year old was gone. He didn’t know what tale I was talking about, for
him it had never existed.
I had been afraid to stay one moment longer in my father’s house, for if I had uttered one more word in
my dad’s presence, I would have believed in his ignorance, believed that what had been important to me
only existed in my crooked mind.
*
“It didn’t work,” I said to Mike and told him about the weekend.
“What didn’t work?” he asked.
“It. The weekend. I couldn’t speak. I’m talking about kid’s tales and ferrymen and my dad thinks I’m nuts.
I couldn’t say another word. I didn’t have a voice.”
Mike went to a corner of the room, picked up two pairs of boxing gloves from behind a few Raggedy Ann
dolls, and threw one of them at me. He carefully took of his gold-rimmed glasses. Without them, his eyes
looked big and helpless. Mike looked like a mole, pudgy, furry and soft and blind.
I punched him, he punched back. I hit him, he hit me back. I got angry; I was taller than him and threw
punches that I thought should make him wince, but he punched me, and it was me who cringed. He
seemed to enjoy this, his smile was carved into his face. He hit me harder until I stood against one wall,
only blocking his punches.
My voice was a squeak when I said, “Leave me alone.” I thought of the ferryman when he put the oars
into the greedy king’s hands. What had he said? What had broken the spell?
Mike stopped and looked at me intently. Then he asked, “Who said that?”
shabby and your dad doesn’t like when I look shabby. I won’t take a long time.”
Nancy’s figure displayed a laziness that comes with age and desk jobs and responsibilities. They wear at
your flesh, soften it. Yet her position as a principal caught her soft body like a safety net. Nancy looked
assured and fond of herself.
“What do you think of those?” she asked, putting a mauve-stockinged foot into a brown patent leather
shoe. Her feet looked tired, like pudgy kids, angry and pouting.
“They’re nice.”
“Should I get them in black?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think?”
“Brown, black – why don’t you try the red ones there, maybe?”
Nancy really went to the rack I pointed to and asked the clerk to bring a pair her size.
“You like them?” She wiggled her foot for me to see.
“Sure. How are they?” I was embarrassed that she wanted my opinion. I’d never advised anyone on
their clothes, and Nancy was my father’s wife.
“I’ll take them.”
We left the store, and she took my arm as if I were dear to her and she proud to be seen with me. We
went to Banana Republic and she insisted on buying me a beige sweater that was real soft. “You look so
nice in it,” she said.
“I don’t know. I don’t wear turtlenecks, not really.”
“You don’t like them?”
“No, it’s just...”
“I like you in it. You chose my shoes, and I’ll choose a sweater.” In that moment she looked old, a bit
more like Mom, and I couldn’t help but feel like a kid, and for a moment I wished I hadn’t come. She also
bought boots for me, yellow ones, which she insisted everyone had these days, and when we sat down
for lunch at the Pizzeria Uno, I had lost my appetite.
She ordered wine, and in the green, red and brown darkness of our booth, her eyes sparkled. She had
small hands, nicely padded hands and fingers, and her nails were done in dark red. She told me about
her work, the children’s sicknesses, angry parents and the East Aurora mafia, who let no one from
outside town use their parks and golf courses. Our pizza came, and Nancy drank more wine. Her cheeks
flushed and she took off her thin cardigan and was wearing a sleeveless shirt. I saw where her bra cut
into her flesh and stared at her bare arms.
“It’s nice to have you with us,” she said.
“Umh,” I mumbled.
“We’re old enough to get around this stepmother-stepson thing, aren’t we? It’s nice to see Helmut’s
son.”
We had met at the wedding of course, and two or three other times, but never alone.
“Are you seeing someone?” she asked. “You should bring her over. Helmut was very upset when you
hung up on him and didn’t answer his letters.”
“I’m not seeing anyone.”
“We don’t have to talk about that.”
“Did he send you to the mall with me?”
“No, that was my idea.”
“The pizza is pretty bad.”
“Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“You mean, not eat this?” I pointed to my plate.
“Yeah.”
I laughed. I wouldn’t have had the money to pay for wine and pizza, and now she suggested dumping
our food and pay again somewhere else. “Okay,” I said.
She paid and walked ahead of me out of the restaurant. Without touching me, she went to the car, and I
got in next to her.
“So, where do you want us to go?”
I laughed again. This freedom shocked me, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I knew places like the
Great Wall, Pano’s, and Mykonos, but I couldn’t imagine Nancy in those places.
“You like hot-dogs?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“At LaSalle Park, there’s a Ted’s. Near the Peace Bridge.”
Nancy put the car in gear – it wasn’t an automatic – and she turned onto the 33 and drove downtown.
Maybe it was the wine, maybe the fact that I started to feel more comfortable next to her, but Buffalo
didn’t look as shabby as it had on our arrival. It was still the same decrepit steel-town, yet sitting in the
Camry, I saw the Peace Bridge and the run-down Westside through more benign eyes.
Seagulls greeted us in front of Ted’s. The benches outside were spotted white and black, and the air
smelled of garbage, late summer warmth, and echoed with the birds’ angry voices. In the stark dining-
room, I poured vinegar over Nancy’s fries, and she said she liked it.
“This is fun,” she said. “I’ve never been here.”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you call? Were you angry at him for marrying me?”
It would have been convenient for me to say yes, see her face cloud and lighten up again, to turn this
into a pancake of a movie-scene, warm and fluffy. Yet I shook my head.
“What’s wrong?”
How can you tell your father’s wife that you’re having a dream about him, a dream in which he rapes
you, and that you hate the way he touches you? She likes to be touched by him, lives with him every
day, and you don’t even know whether your dream is memory or a mirage.
What I did remember was my mother sleeping naked and myself crawling into bed every morning after
Dad had left for work. I remembered weekend mornings when they were both naked and laughing at my
curiosity. That is what I remember: my mother laughing at my small hands that seek out her dark
nipples, my father watching and laughing too. My mother lifting me over her belly with its soft skin and
deep navel over to my father, who received me and stuffed me under the covers next to him. I remember
having to massage his back and legs, and his obvious pleasure, his groans and moans, his hairiness. I
hated having to touch him so I could stay with them in bed.
Back in the car, Nancy looked at me concerned because I hadn’t answered her question and maybe
because I looked older now and like the bust that I was. I gazed at her mauve legs, and her auburn hair
might as well have been dyed. I looked into her brown, quick eyes which seemed to understand, if only
because I wanted them to.
I put my head in her lap, and she put her fingers in my hair and was quiet. God, she was quiet and didn’t
move, held me without a word, held still as long as I had my head next to her small belly, until I grew
self-conscious and sat back up. “Thanks,” I said.
*
My father sat at a desk at the far end of the living room, college football muted on the screen.
“I thought you had gone off into the sunset and left me.” He laughed and embraced me like I’d seen
coaches embrace their prize-fighters after a victory. We had a whiskey, the manly afternoon drink, and I
told him about the fairy-tale I remembered from my childhood. By that time I was asking myself why I
had come and how I had ever expected to find out if my dreams were just that, dreams, or if they were
memories. I wanted to talk about the past and didn’t know how to bring it up.
“Do you know “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs?”
“Where did you and Nancy go?”
“Do you?”
“What is it? A story?”
“A fairy-tale. Grimms’ tales.”
“Why? Was it fun to go shopping? Nancy is a great shopper.”
“Dad. The tale. Grandma read it to me.”
He looked at me, he suppressed a laugh, waited for me to say more, to explain myself.
“She told it again and again.”
He didn’t remember the fairy-tale, but he wanted to understand, although he didn’t. We heard Nancy’s
busy feet in the kitchen. She was baking Pillsbury cookies we had picked up on our way home.
“We’re – don’t take offense – we’re worried about you. No, no, please, we know you can fend for
yourself, but not hearing from you was hard.” He came over to where I sat in a green overstuffed
armchair and put a hand on my arm, a hand that looked like mine with its long fingers and slightly
crooked nails.
“I don’t like the way you touch me,” I said.
He stepped back, his face drawn, shocked. He was hurt, but didn’t attack. He sat back down and stared
at the carpet in front of him.
“The fairy-tale,” he said, cautiously, as if he expected me to jump him.
“It’s about a boy born in a lucky skin, and to marry the King’s daughter, he has to go to hell and get the
Devil’s three golden hairs.”
“I’m not sure we have that book.”
I groaned, feeling more and more stupid with every word I said. How could I talk about fairy-tales no one
in my family remembered anyway?
“Is that the reason?”
“The reason for what?” I asked.
“I talked with Nancy about you. Often. She really likes you.”
“What reason?”
“That story?”
“For what?”
He sighed. “We’re just old and worry about you.”
“The reason for what?” I shouted.
“You have to...I mean everyone needs a job, a place to live...”
“The fairy-tale.”
“I want to understand, but...what is this story about?”
“You freak me out,” I said. “You give me the creeps.” And then I became too afraid of what he might
have to say or what he would ask and that in the end I would be laughed at again, and I ran up the
stairs, got my things and rushed to the entrance.
He stood there, small, a slight man with graying, impeccably cut hair, trim, wealthy and hurt.
“I don’t comprehend. What did I do?” he asked. Nancy stood in the kitchen door looking at me, my
stepmother the principal, looking out into the school corridor with professionally concerned eyes.
I needed my silent exit, I felt I needed my stoic silence to be able to walk to my car, but on my way home
to Buffalo, I knew that I was left with an empty feeling, that of a fighter who didn’t try. I had everything
going for me, but how can a child talk to his daddy when the child is twenty-eight and the father fifty-four
and no one remembers? It was this: I couldn’t talk to someone who did not exist anymore. The six-year
old did not exist and the thirty-five year old was gone. He didn’t know what tale I was talking about, for
him it had never existed.
I had been afraid to stay one moment longer in my father’s house, for if I had uttered one more word in
my dad’s presence, I would have believed in his ignorance, believed that what had been important to me
only existed in my crooked mind.
*
“It didn’t work,” I said to Mike and told him about the weekend.
“What didn’t work?” he asked.
“It. The weekend. I couldn’t speak. I’m talking about kid’s tales and ferrymen and my dad thinks I’m nuts.
I couldn’t say another word. I didn’t have a voice.”
Mike went to a corner of the room, picked up two pairs of boxing gloves from behind a few Raggedy Ann
dolls, and threw one of them at me. He carefully took of his gold-rimmed glasses. Without them, his eyes
looked big and helpless. Mike looked like a mole, pudgy, furry and soft and blind.
I punched him, he punched back. I hit him, he hit me back. I got angry; I was taller than him and threw
punches that I thought should make him wince, but he punched me, and it was me who cringed. He
seemed to enjoy this, his smile was carved into his face. He hit me harder until I stood against one wall,
only blocking his punches.
My voice was a squeak when I said, “Leave me alone.” I thought of the ferryman when he put the oars
into the greedy king’s hands. What had he said? What had broken the spell?
Mike stopped and looked at me intently. Then he asked, “Who said that?”
BELLE MÈRE by Stefan Kiesbye page 3