Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“I left something in the trunk,” he told Emily Klein. He fled down the front steps with his squirming burden, looking for all the world like a man who was stealing a child. He stepped back out into the afternoon. The light of a Washington summer, of his earliest childhood, spilled over the dilapidated lawns and trees of the Kleins’ neighborhood, rippling and golden and rank as a pool of gasoline. Green hurried toward his car.

“Put me down!” Jocelyn cried. “You’re mooshing my new dress.”

“Sorry,” said Green, as if he had bumped a passerby. He was not listening to his daughter’s protests.

“Daddy!” It was a cry of fury — choked, deeply offended — such as Jocelyn rarely expressed to Green. The heel of her shoe glanced sharply off his cheekbone. That was when he realized that she had been kicking him the whole way out to the street. No doubt he had made a spectacle of them both.

They reached Green’s car, a new black German sedan with a turbocharged engine. Green stopped, his cheek stinging. He turned the little girl over and set her on her feet. Her cheeks were bright red, her breathing frantic. Green realized that in his haste to flee the woman in the Kleins’ living room he had been constricting the very wind out of his daughter's lungs.

“I’ll fix your dress,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the house. “I’m sorry.”

The dress was a gray-and-white seersucker dirndl, appliquéd on the bib with a basket of blue asters, worn over a stiff white blouse trimmed at the collar with crocheted lace. The shoes, also new, were patent T-straps, liquid and black as the pupil of an eye. Jocelyn’s legs, their pudgy thighs the only trace that now remained of a rather corpulent babyhood, Green had stuffed carefully into a pair of white tights. When Green exercised his rights of visitation — one weekend a month, three weeks during the summer — he dressed her with surprising care and according to outmoded notions of proper feminine attire that horrified his former wife but that, for reasons he chose not to examine, Green found he could not suppress.

Green knelt in front of Jocelyn and tugged down on the hem of her skirt, smoothing it with one hand. He hiked the waistband of the tights, lifting his daughter a full half inch off the ground, and held her suspended until her skinny little bottom — she was just out of diapers — sank back snugly into place. He straightened her lacy collar, setting it to lie flat on her heaving chest. Jocelyn observed these attentions with an air of approval and of being very conscious of her decision to forgive her father for his bad behavior.

“I can feel my heart,” she told him. She pressed a dimpled hand against the basket of blue asters. The presence of her heart in her chest had come to her attention only within the last week. Its activities, when they became palpable, were still an accidental enchantment that startled and delighted her, like the metallic blur of a hummingbird at the window or the sound of her mother’s voice emerging from Green’s answering machine.

“What’s it doing?”

“It’s beading.” She had mangled his explanation of the circulatory system and must, he thought, see the production of her blood as an amusing inward pastime of her body in moments of exertion, an endless stringing of bright red beads. “Where are we going?”

“Daddy has to get something out of the trunk.”

“What?”

“Something.”

“Is it a surprise?”

“I don’t know. It might be.”

“A surprise for me? Is it a toy?”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t a toy.”

“What is it, then?”

“Jocelyn, please. It isn’t anything.”

In the trunk of his car, when he opened it, along with his overnight bag, Jocelyn’s pink plastic suitcase, and a zippered case of compact discs, was an implausible crate of grapefruit he had bought five weeks ago, on a briefer than fleeting impulse, at a roadside stand near his home in Fort Lauderdale, then forgotten until two days earlier as he loaded up for the drive north. Green ran a hand through his hair; there was enough sweat on his forehead to slick back and hold the thinning strands in place. He tried to decide just how idiotic he would look struggling into the Kleins’ house with a crate full of shriveled Indian River grapefruit. Now that they were safely out on the street again, he considered the possible consequences of their simply splitting. Caryn, his ex-wife, who lived in Philadelphia, was not expecting Jocelyn for another two days. Green had accepted an invitation to stay with the Kleins, but now that seemed impossible. He had always wanted to go out to Chincoteague and take a look at those half-feral ponies from the Marguerite Henry books; maybe Jocelyn would like that. At any rate, he was certain his absence from Seth Klein’s graduation party could not possibly make a great deal of difference to Seth, who hadn’t seen Green since he was a very little boy and even then had not evinced any great interest in Green. Green burned his forehead for an instant on the black roof of his car. Go, he told himself.

“Marty?”

They were supposed to be the descendants of horses that survived the sinking of a Spanish galleon in the age of plunder, those ponies, but Green had read recently that natural historians now doubted this. It was much more likely that the ponies had been deliberately driven onto their island by local farmers looking for convenient pastureland. Green wondered if by the end of his life, or perhaps sooner, every single beautiful lie he had been told during the course of his childhood, great or small, would have been exposed.

“Marty? It’s Ruby. Klein.”

Green turned. Ruby came scraping and clattering down the drive in her witch boots, trailing cigarette smoke, holding a can of Pabst, looking amazed. She had a long, handsome, heavy-chinned face, flawless skin tinged faintly blue like skimmed milk, with the plump purple-jellybean mouth. Evidently her natural endowments were insufficient — or perhaps superfluous — for her purposes. Not only were her lips heavily painted but her eyelashes were rimed like a chimney sweep’s bristles with thick black flakes of mascara, and she had pierced the ridge of her left eyebrow, both nostrils, and every available centimeter of both earlobes. Several ounces of sterling were involved, and there was an unmistakable promise, not just in this but in something halting and surreptitious in her walk, of hidden posts, clasps, and metal rings concealed elsewhere on her body. Her machete-cut hair scraped against his cheek as she lurched wholeheartedly into his arms. Green held her for as long as he could bear, then let go. His heart seemed to shrink in his chest, to collapse itself into a tight, tiny black fist of shame. Her brilliant loose smile was a reproach, her beauty a reminder of all that was ugly inside him.

“Look at you,” he said. The last time he had seen her, she was seven, dressed for an ice-skating class, wearing a pair of mittens strung through the sleeves of a pink coat trimmed with white fake fur. “Ruby. My.”

“I’m kind of drunk; you probably noticed.”

Green had schooled himself never to tell lies. It was a constant battle with his natural impulses.

“I did,” he said.

“I’m so pissed. My father is coming.” She pronounced the word father by deepening her voice to a Mister Ed baritone and nickering it, rolling her eyes. “I haven’t seen the bastard in five years. Last time I saw him, I scratched his bastard face. There was skin under my fingernails.”

“My goodness,” said Green. He had never met Emily Klein’s ex-husband, though tucked away in some inner closet drawer he found a small shoe box in which scorn for Dr. Harvey Klein, who had left his pregnant wife and daughter and fled to Texas with his receptionist, lay wrapped in yellowing tissue paper. Still, the expression of naked parricidal impulses within the hearing of his own loving daughter made him uneasy. He cleared his throat and pushed Jocelyn forward, a bit like Van Helsing brandishing a cross, both as a reproach to Ruby and as a form of protection against her.