All the Finest Girls Read online

  Her voice seemed to come from somewhere inside the car — the vents, the speakers — then just as quickly disappeared, fluttering out the window into the warm air. I was tired, surely. Not myself. I fixed my eyes back on the road and we rode along, the three of us in our separateness, northward through the lush hills.

  2

  MY MOTHER AND I stand on the stairs outside the Rubinsteins’ big brick house and listen to the doorbell’s tinkling chime. We have driven down from Coldbrook to New Haven in the old green station wagon, running out of gas halfway there. Before we were rescued, Mom poked gingerly with one finger under the car’s hood, looking for engine trouble. Now her blouse is stained, the collar turned up on one side. She pushes at her hair and dabs at the corner of her mouth, puckering her lips hopelessly.

  For a moment her hand hovers over my head. She wants to do something about my hair. I haven’t allowed her to brush it since last winter, when the electricity from the brush stood my hair on end and shocked me so that I tasted metal on my tongue. The broken strands are thick and matted and won’t now, I’ve discovered, yield to even the most gentle grooming.

  My clothes, too, are long overdue for cleaning. I’ve taken to wearing outfits again and again, dressing myself in the half-light of morning from a pile on my desk chair. Sometimes my mother notices. Sometimes not. When she does Snooks, I think you might want to go up and change that blouse I explode with all my gathered strength. I howl and bare my claws.

  I screech just like Cat. Cat, who shows himself only to me, circling my room at night. Howling like a dying witch when my father shouts at my mother. Plucking his way around the carpet until darkness gives into morning. I watch him all night long.

  I scream until I’ve spent myself, till my voice is nothing but scratchy air and my head feels like a new bruise. There is no end to it, my screaming. My mother begs me to stop, in tones both gentle and harsh. She offers me things, ignores me, shouts back. Why? Why are you like this?! she implores, fist to her forehead, hot tears running down her cheeks to match my own. I don’t know! I shout, each scream feeling as though I were shredding myself, piece by flaming piece.

  That is it. I don’t know why I am like this. I don’t know why Cat torments me, why I torment my mother. I don’t know at all.

  “So, my lamb,” she says, “you’re not going to … are you? Remember what I said?”

  I run my toe along the plastic bristles of the doormat.

  “Anyway,” she says, straightening up at the sound of approaching footsteps, “June is making lunch for us. Yum yum. And Max and the boys aren’t home.”

  Finally the door opens, turning out the scent of pine and something in the oven. June, the Rubinsteins’ housekeeper, stands to the side in her crisp white uniform.

  June cares for the Rubinstein boys — Teddy, Ben, and Maxie — who are older than I, roughhouse boys who always smell mossy from outdoor adventures. They seem to be one unit of rapidly spinning dust and noise, like characters fighting on Saturday morning cartoons. Teasers and practical jokers, the boys give everyone a stupid name and a hard time. When June tells them what to do, they sass her, voices pitched high, imitating her accent. All right, you buggah! they cry, chasing her through the kitchen, breaking things as they go. But me tellin yah, yah nutting but a tief! June, yah been smokin’ dat reefah again. They call me Sadelaide, when they call me anything at all. Hey, Sadelaide, why are you so sadelaide? Is it because you look so badelaide?

  We haven’t seen much of the Rubinsteins since last April, when Mrs. Rubinstein died. Thin and wobbly as a baby deer, the boys’ mother was the only person they didn’t harass. Crashing into a room, they hushed the instant they saw her. Usually, Mrs. Rubinstein was perched on the window seat or being swallowed by the living-room couch. How are you feeling today, Mommy? Do you need anything, Mommy? they’d say, one on top of the other. The boys fought, as they did with everything, to be the first to prop a pillow or get their mother her tea. When her heart finally gave out, Big Max, a colleague of my father’s at the university, came to our house and cried in my mother’s arms. Now it’s just him, the boys, and June, and nobody makes jokes anymore.

  “Hi, June, I’m so sorry we’re late, the car just went kerflooey!”

  My mother’s hand darts out, nudging me along into the Rubinsteins’ foyer, newly polished and still. I envy the uninterrupted quiet of this motherless house.

  As my eyes adjust to the darkness, a sickening fizz rises again in my stomach. It has been sloshing inside me most of the morning.

  “She’s up in back. Why don’t you go on and say hello?” says June to me, splitting the quiet with her brassy voice. She shouts at children, I think, out of habit.

  I walk slowly through the kitchen toward the back staircase to June’s room. During dinner parties, I sometimes crouch there on one of the spiral steps, hoping no one will find me until it’s time to go home.

  Upstairs, a woman is sitting on the edge of June’s single bed. She watches a soap opera on a tiny black and white, her hands cradling a glass of water. A white cardigan sweater is buttoned around her shoulders like a cape. She turns slowly toward me. She is the darkest person I’ve ever seen.

  Standing dumbly in the doorway, I suddenly have no idea what to do. The woman is a friend of June’s from St. Clair, and Mom says we have to see whether we like each other well enough for her to come live with us. Her eyes, enormous behind their thick lenses, fall on me and hold me in their gaze. She doesn’t look a bit like June, who moves about quickly, all angles and ironed edges. Instead, this woman is curved and upholstered, her lap like a love seat. She doesn’t speak to me. I think to turn and run back down the stairs, but I don’t. Can’t. With her huge brown eyes, she’s making a picture that I can see, as though her eyes are my own. I’m where she is, and across the room stands a bony girl, smudgy and colorless as cigarette smoke, done out in dusty corduroys and a crown of fermented hair. The rims of my ears go hot with shame.

  We stay that way, waiting for each other, and when I think I won’t stand it any longer, the woman turns back to the television. I sit down on the threshold and stare hard at the tips of my sneakers until my vision blurs.

  “Louise,” June calls from below. The woman walks toward the stairs, stopping for a moment in the doorway. I squint up at her, this time wearing my most terrible face. She looks back at me, soft and bottomless. Something is pulling at me, dragging me down. Afraid of crying, I turn away. The seconds tick. She moves past me to the stairs. When I hear the back door open, I stand and look out the window onto the porch below.

  My mother is extending her hand to Louise, drawing her into the crazy light that seems to attract most people to her. The two of them sit down in a square of sun at the outdoor table and Mom begins making sweeping movements with her hands, talking excitedly. Louise nods. Around her I see a bright space, a reflection from her sweater, perhaps, where, in spite of myself, I want to be. June appears with a platter of sandwiches, and I drift downstairs. Taking a little triangle of peanut butter and jelly, I make a seat for myself and dangle my legs over the edge of the porch.

  My mother talks and talks A good winter coat makes all the difference. We’ll take care of that lickety-split. We go away to my mother’s house at the beach in the summer if I’m not working. Of course our produce is never any good up here, but we can order lots of things as though to stop would be to die. She skitters from subject to subject, describing Coldbrook and asking about life on St. Clair. Every now and then, she offers up bits of information about me, wildly inflating my talents. Oh, the water in the Caribbean is so lovely. Addy’s a terrific swimmer, just terrific. She’s like a water bug.

  I don’t turn around when my mother says my name but instead count the seconds of silence before she goes off on another tangent. Louise says almost nothing, and the quiet she leaves begins, little by little, to soothe me like a language all its own. I have begun to feel drowsy and follow the progress of a slug along the weathered porch railing.
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br />   Then I hear, “… June says you have children?”

  “Mmhmm, yes I do,” replies Louise.

  “Girls or boys?”

  “Two boys. The oldest is Philip. Then Derek, he’s the baby. Coming on seven next week.”

  I stop moving my legs. A black circle grows around me like spilled ink. Like an inner tube. I am set adrift. There is at once the faintest sound I must strain to hear. I pray I am mistaken. My skin prickles. Yes, it’s there. Hoosh goes Cat’s tail, snaking through the reeds beyond the lawn, trampling the pacific afternoon. Climbing over the lip of the sun and into the dark, empty space around me. Getting ever closer.

  I stand and drop my plate, turn around in my dark circle, searching for him. The yard, with its budding cherry tree and neglected vegetable garden, vanishes. My mother calls my name, a thousand miles away. Cat hangs above, his teeth like white needles, and now I’m screaming, to scare him away. He draws closer and I look away. That’s when I see Louise, motionless, across the empty space, her magnified eyes drinking me in. Her hand is over her heart. The black circle lifts as harmless as steam from a kettle, leaving me inside the palette of peanut butter and jelly I’ve splattered on the porch floor.

  A chapel bell, a tree full of crows, the sounds of the neighborhood clutter the air again. Mom has turned away from me, but I can see the slightest tremble around her mouth and the whiteness of her knuckles.

  “I’m sorry, that’s, um, something, that doesn’t …”

  She’s looking down at the blue stones in her ring. For the first time all afternoon, Mom has nothing to say.

  To my amazement, Louise smiles, revealing a little gold band between her front teeth.

  “Don’t trouble wit it, Mrs. Abraham,” she says. “She’ll be good if I be minding she.”

  After a moment of silence, my mother raises her head and pushes a stray lock of yellow hair from her face. “Anyway,” she says, smiling again, “you were speaking of your children. I’m sure they’re lovely. You must miss them a lot.”

  Louise nods, and the conversation moves on to vacation time and the school calendar. I run inside and settle on the bottom step of June’s stairway.

  By the coatrack when it’s time to leave, I watch the three women. Kissing June on the cheek Again, I’m so sorry. Remind Mr. Rubinstein about Friday my mother turns to Louise and takes her hand in both of hers. Louise looks shyly down at the floor.

  “So anyway, thank you,” Mom says. “It would be great. I think. Marvelous.” Turning to me, she raises her eyebrows up near her hairline.

  “Addy? Can you thank June and tell Louise how nice it was to meet her?”

  I do as I’m told, but I can’t lift my chin from the buttons on my shirt. I don’t want Louise to look at my face. I don’t want her, whom I might never meet again, to see what I know only she can see.

  “Nice,” I whisper, and run out the door.

  3

  IWOKE WITH A start, drool across my cheek, when Derek pulled up on the emergency brake. Before the driveway dust settled, he and Cyril had disappeared inside the single-level, tin-roofed house in front of which we were parked. Groggy, I sat up and tried to pull myself together.

  This was the second time I’d blanked out in the space of a month. It was something I used to do a lot, passing out or falling asleep at inopportune moments. People around me didn’t care much for my behavior or for my lame excuses. I’d tried hard to lick the problem, and for a long time I had actually succeeded. But now I’d succumbed twice in the space of a month. It was unnerving and, I knew, totally unacceptable. As my grandmother Edith would say, this was neither the time nor the place.

  The house, at the top of a steep drive, overlooked a village on St. Clair’s northern coast. I could see a church steeple just below and a series of dirt roads running east and west of town. Jutting out from the cove, which was not sandy but studded with rock and coral, three docks tethered a jumble of wooden fishing boats. It was a world away from the unblemished beachfronts on the island’s other side. I unstuck myself from my seat and, stepping out, got a lungful of salt air, jasmine, and the rich, fatty currents of something cooking. Across the street a man with a cane watched me as if sizing up an unusual but not particularly glamorous plant.

  Just as I felt the sun might bore a hole in my head, a woman came out of the house, wiping her hands on an apron. Her hair, a milk white halo, was combed back from her dark face into a tiny knot at the back of her head. This time, I had no doubts. She was unmistakably Lou’s sister, Marva.

  “Well,” she said, walking up to me and putting her hands on her hips, “lemme see yah.”

  She looked me up and down, ran her tongue under her lip, sucked a tooth. But for a large mole like a cough drop on her cheek, and a different, sadder curve of the brow, I was looking into Lou’s face. Images, fragments of thought, clattered and snapped in my head I’m dreaming dem babies still, like when I left. The sound of my own body, rhythmic fluid and machinery, was suddenly audible. Without ceremony, Marva broke away and turned briskly back toward the house.

  “Derek,” she shouted, “come get dis frighty ting’s bags now!”

  I’d been to the Caribbean a couple of times, with my parents when I was small. We would travel directly from the airport to our hotel, where we remained for most of our stay. I remember one dinner in town, at a restaurant on a long veranda. A calypso band had played throughout the meal, irritating my father, and I heard a parrot speak for the first time. It was that same trip, Barbados, I think, that a taxi driver taking us back to the airport pulled over and used a pocketknife to cut me a stalk of sugarcane. I sucked on the sweet, fibrous flesh until it was confiscated by a man at customs. Never before, though, had I visited someone’s home.

  The cool of the entranceway was an immediate relief. I followed Marva as she moved through a little parlor at the front of the house, its dusty spareness giving the impression of a place from which life had traveled long ago. A sofa and armchair were squarely arranged on either side of a coffee table, their bowed seats just clearing the floor. At the table’s center lay a Bible and a book titled Redemption Songs. The bindings of both were held together with tape. Nothing but a crucifix adorned the walls, the blood of Jesus’ wounds pink from age. I found it difficult to imagine the room ever accommodating children, a family.

  The back of the house was a different story. Continuing on, I found myself at the kitchen’s threshold, where sunlight and a breeze came through the open windows. An old radio played softly from its perch above the rusty refrigerator. Long and narrow, the room seemed barely wide enough for anyone to navigate between the counters and the linoleum-topped table, but Marva, her back still to me, moved about it effortlessly. She opened cabinets, reached without looking, found work space on the jammed counters. This was her kitchen.

  “Gwan and sit down,” she said finally over her shoulder, and as I did so, I realized what was in store for me.

  Platters and casserole dishes lined every flat surface. Boiled vegetables, fish and curried chicken, stews and compotes, all bumped up against one another. Cakes with icing running down their sides and glass bowls of carefully cut fruit. Serving plates in neat towers. It was, of course, a house to which death had come. And so neighbors had come as well, hoping to ease the burden. The smells that hung in the air were unfamiliar, intense. Marva ladled food onto a plate, and I began to feel distinctly nauseous. To my left, down a darkened passageway, I could hear Cyril talking loudly and a woman responding in a hushed voice.

  “Please don’t. I had lunch on the plane,” I lied, hoping that would be enough to save me from the dish, brown and glutinous, over which Marva was now pouring a piping-hot red sauce. “It wasn’t very good. I’m sorry if I’m not hungry.”

  Marva forced a disapproving burst of air through her nostrils. From the refrigerator she drew a green glass bottle and placed it, with the steaming plate, before me. Then she sat down across the table, quiet descending about her suddenly, and folded her arms. There
was little question I’d have to eat, unappealing though the idea was. I wasn’t used to being a guest and remembered quickly why I didn’t accept, or receive, many invitations.

  I looked down at a little dune of speckly rice. Marva jutted her chin out and poured me a glass of tea from the bottle. I drank and felt the tea travel down in a cool stream, slaking my suddenly astounding thirst. While she refilled my glass, I tried the simplest meat dish on my plate. It looked like chicken, firm and unadorned, topped with a yellow sauce that I suspected was curry. I chewed but didn’t breathe. Finally, little by little, my tastebuds connected to my brain. The food was better than anything I could remember having eaten. A long time seemed to pass before I thought to look up and say something. Marva was studying a fray in the trim of her apron.

  “My condolences. For your loss,” I offered, remembering the phrase from some long-ago exchange I’d witnessed, or a movie I’d seen. The words spooled out as weightless as thread and lay there for an instant before blowing away. I wished immediately I could take them back in favor of something better, more my own. But nothing appropriate came to mind. If Marva found my sentiment wanting, she showed no sign in her reply. Neither did she look at me.

  “When I told Papa, him sit up in bed all night calling Mumma’s name. She been gone nearly twenty years.”

  “You still have your father with you?”

  “Whatever yah want to call it,” Marva answered with a sigh, pushing herself up from the table. I could see the years of work in the backs of her sculptured, masculine hands.

  Marva turned her back, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe Lou’s sister didn’t like me any better than Derek did. Perhaps she was just being polite. I began to imagine the worst was yet to come and felt the sudden deadweight of the situation into which I’d maneuvered myself.

  After I ate, we walked out back where the roof extended over bare earth and a few rattan chairs were placed in the shade. Marva bent to pick up a piece of trash from the dirt floor. I felt compelled to say something.