Happiness

Eve and Adam, 1963

Eve and Adam, 1963 The real reason they sent me to stay with Clesta that summer was sex. "How can we7 With three pubescent girls in the house7" my mother would yell at my father sooner or later during every one of their battles. "That's why we fight all the time. It's the goddamn sexual tension!" The bedroom door would slam, and then the door to my mother's workroom, and we'd hear her loom scrape across the floor as she pushed it into a comer to unfold the rollaway bed. So they parceled us out-my older sister, Rhoda, to be an artsand -crafts counselor in the Poconos, my younger sister, Althea (Praise God, as Doc would say), to my grandparents down in El Pas~d went on a two-week package to Aruba for what my mother called a 11 second honeymoon. But I heard her tell her friend Diana from Bryn Mawr that they were going there to work on the marriage, an activity that sounded drawn-out and dull, like two people bent over a dismantled car with its parts strewn all around it. I could help my greataunt , they said; Doc, who'd kept house for Clesta from the day she married, was getting too old to do everything. I was glad to be the only one going to no Wesley Street, to have Clesta and Doc and Chinky and the whole glOwing cave of a house all to myself, even though it meant there'd be nobody to hang out with. My only cousin in Bethlehem was a boy. The Greyhound from Philadelphia was late; it was almost dinnertime when Chinky met me in the little foyer, gargling threats. He was a black Chinese chow with a seamed face and reddish popeyes. Doc and I hauled my duffel bag and my two suitcases up the winding stairs. Clesta's apartment took up the two upper floors of the house she'd inherited from her mean dead husband, huge and old, with a lot of dark wood. Doc's black face was shiny with sweat and his tongue kept flicking out to moisten his lips, like a minnow flashing back and forth. Clesta hugged me, smelling of Ben-Gay. "Lilly," she said. "LillyLil . You're bigger than last year." My father's family runs to strange names for its women. RoseAlthea , my great-grandmother, named her daughters Clesta, Maude, and Eulalie; then, running out of steam, she named the boys Bob and John. Who's named Lillian these days? Still, I preferred my name to Rhoda's. I could insist on Lil, which sounded like a heroine of the Old West but was at least kind of rakish. There wasn't any nickname for Rhoda. "Two and a quarter inches," I said. "Five-eight." Behind me, Doc said, "She'll never be a beauty. Not like you were." He fingered his grey fringe of beard and sighed. "Well, time flies, is what it is. You get old, every fifteen minutes it's time for breakfast." He went back down the steps to the kitchen. In the living room, late sun straight-armed its way through the half-drawn drapes. Two grandfather docks, Big Gramp and Little Gramp, ticked unevenly, like two old men's voices going tsk, tsk. It was a room full of images. Family photographs stood on every table top, a century's worth of them: still, round-eyed sepia faces next to full-color children wheeling across summer grass. Chair legs carved 12 Eve and Adam in the shape of curved animal paws; blue-and-white tiles around the fireplace depicting Bible scenes; even the spoons at dinner would have handles twisted into cherubs. The dead husband's furniture, dark and looming, made the room feel cool even in summer. When I was small I liked to lay my tongue against the knobs on the wooden ladder-back chairs; they tasted dark and faintly bitter. Clesta lowered herself onto the brocade sofa and patted the seat beside her. "So, Lilly. Tell me." I talked about my new contact lenses and finally making the swim team and Rhoda's new boyfriend's hunter-green Camaro. Clesta's head quivered from side to side in little half-circles as she listened. When she laughed, her eyes had the mottled shine of old china, and there was lavender in the...