Out of Peel Tree

Who’s in the Kitchen with Dinah?: Billie

43 Who’s in the Kitchen with Dinah? Billie In the early morning, when the roses on the wallpaper were gray splotches and the floor a long shadow, I woke. The house was drowned in a depth of stillness possible only when no one has made a sound for hours. I knew my mother and little brother, Hector, were dreaming in the rooms next to mine. Hardly breathing, I tiptoed down the dozen stairs and into the kitchen. While listening intently, I gazed at the silver stroke of the faucet, coiled burners, racked dishes piled over with bowls and glasses, and two o-mouthed tea cups in the sink. The refrigerator hummed but all else seemed petrified in sleep, even the plant cuttings in jars on the windowsill, a tiny jungle of leaves with tangled roots afloat. Finally , from the top of the basement stairs, I heard the blurred hum of the shower. My father, who slept in the deep quiet underneath the house, was up for work. I knew it was finally happening. “Your father and I might get divorced,” Mother sometimes warned Hector and me, her voice low with outrage and shame. One time she added, “We might have to go who’s in the kitchen with dinah 44 to court.” After that, during the days when the house brewed with silent anger, the days when Hector and I spoke to each other quietly , waiting for voices to erupt downstairs, I sometimes pictured a hushed courtroom. The air tinged brown as in an old photograph, I sat in a wooden box and a judge, with a face as impassive as those on dollars, asked me who I wanted to live with. I replied, “My father,” even though my mother then stared so darkly I was nearly blinded, and even though that meant living in a hotel room, which was, according to Mother, “where your father will end up.” I supposed that such a room would be similar to the school sickroom, with two cots, a sink with exposed pipes, and on the cinderblock wall a pencilpocked picture of Jesus surrounded by insipid children. I wouldn’t tell the judge I wanted to live with my mother because to her the way my hair curled, and the way I held my fork and talked and smiled, everything about me was wrong. But not to my father, whose cheek bristled mine when he kissed it. He called me Billie Josephine instead of just Billie, and sometimes laid a cool and heavy half dollar in my palm. This morning, before he went to work, I had to tell my father I would live with him, he mustn’t leave without me. Maybe he would live on the caboose, where he went to work every day—I had to tell him I’ll live there, too. Hector wouldn’t come, of course. I would make sure of that. He was seven and a crybaby, and anyway he wouldn’t leave Mother. But he could come visit us. Last month, the day after my birthday, Dad took Hector and me for a ride on the caboose. Hector and I had seen trains only from the outside, usually when Dad drove us to a crossing point and we counted the coal cars rumbling by, our eyes mesmerized by the repetition of mustard-yellow cats silhouetted across the ribbed black cars. “Eight-three, eighty-four,” I would count under my breath. who’s in the kitchen with dinah 45 There was a space of silence after the caboose with its little windows wheeled gaily by and the disappearance of the moving black wall amazed us. “One hundred sixty-nine,” Hector would guess. “One hundred and two,” I would guess. Every time, my father chose one of us and said, “That’s right.” Then we clattered across the tracks, made a U-turn, clattered back across, and went home. This time, to our surprise, Dad lifted us to the steps of the caboose ’s porch and we went into its shadowy interior. There was a bunk bed on one side and a deep wooden bench on the other. By the door was a cooler with a sliding silver lid. Dad reached his whole arm inside and lifted out bottles of Coke beaded with chill. I stretched on the top bunk and pressed my nose to the window. The train wound deep into steep, close...