Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“No!” Her head came up and her eyes widened. She clenched her teeth so hard that white ridges stood out in her jaws.

“I won’t talk to Daddy about it! You promised! I won’t! I can’t! I know you’re proud of me, but he’ll have an absolute shit fit about the weight thing! You know how he feels about that; you know he doesn’t like Dr. Flint! You know he thought the whole thing was silly and trivial last time, and that I ought to be doing some really important work rather than all that therapy and stuff about food—”

“Glynnie, where on earth did you get that idea? Daddy was terribly concerned about you! He was willing to do anything in the world to get you better; he will be again—”

“I heard him,” she said softly. “I heard him talking to you about it over and over again! There’s a place in the upstairs laundry room where the vent pipe or something acts like an echo chamber and you can hear whatever anybody is saying down in the den; I’ve known about it since I was little. I used to listen all the time. I heard him say that I was impossibly sheltered and naive, and that he treated eight-year-olds at the clinic who could take better care of themselves than I could, and that I ought to volunteer down there and do some real work and see some real misery and forget about starving myself to death.”

She fell silent and I simply stared at her. My poor, good, frightened child, crouched in the dark beside a clothes dryer, straining to hear how she measured up to Pom and me, to hear how her life was working out, to hear what catastrophe would be coming next, so she could begin to figure how she might control it.

“Daddy wasn’t criticizing you,” I said, not bothering to deny that Pom had said all those things, for he had. “He was just frustrated and frightened because nothing seemed to be working, and he didn’t know what to do next. It was during that time when you and Dr. Flint were trying to get used to each other, you remember, and nothing much was happening, and you were still losing weight.”

“I heard him say once that he hated fat women,” she whispered.

“Oh, honey! He didn’t mean little girls!”

Her silence spun out and then she said, “I’m being a real jerk, aren’t I?”

“Not for a second. You need to talk about what’s bothering you. We’ll get started back with Dr. Flint before you leave for camp, and I promise I won’t mention this to Daddy until you’ve seen her. Glynnie, he adores you. I wish I could convince you of that.”

“I wish he would,” she said in a low voice.

Then she laughed and looked up. “Maybe I should get a pet. A dog. I’d love a big old dog—”

“Well, there’s Samson and Delilah.”

“But they can’t come in the house. I wish I had a dog that would stay with me in my room. I always think about a big dog in my bed with me. But if we got one you’d end up having to take care of it when I went off to camp and then to college, along with everything and everybody else.”

“We could have a cat,” I said. “Maybe even a couple of kittens. They could keep each other company, and they aren’t nearly the trouble dogs are.”

She shook her head.

“Jess brought Muffin over here the last time she came. She’d just picked her up from the vet’s. Mommee screamed so she had to take Muffin home.”

And they hadn’t come back, Jess or Muffin either, Glynn did not say so.

“Well, we can easily keep a cat away from Mommee. It can live in your room, or they can. If you’ll see Dr. Flint and really, really try with the eating I promise we’ll go to the Humane Society and pick you out two wonderful kittens when you get back. And Mommee be blowed.”

She smiled, unwillingly at first, and then genuinely.

“Okay.”

“So. Better now?”

“Yeah.”

“I love you, Glynn.”

“Me too you, Mom,” my child said.

Pom wasn’t home that afternoon after all. When we got home, laden like panoplied elephants with Glynn’s booty, Ina told us that he had been called back to the clinic to see a child running a horrendous fever with what sounded, Pom had said, like meningitis. The young doctor on duty had called him to ascertain the diagnosis. He didn’t know when he would be done.

“Oh, Ina, I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ve stayed two hours past your time already, while we were gobbling our way through Phipps Plaza. Come on, I’ll run you home. I know the bus schedule is awful on weekends.”

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I think you ought to stay here. Miz Fowler’s awfully antsy today. Looks like she got some kind of motor goin’ cain’t nobody turn off. I wanted to give her one of them pills but Doc he say no, she had one last night. I don’t think Glynn ought to stay with her by herself.”

I sighed. “Well, then, Glynn will run you up to the bus stop. Thanks, Ina. I don’t say it enough, but I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“Me neither,” she said, showing her gold tooth in a smile. “And you need two more of me.”

“Where is Mommee now?”

“She up there takin’ all her clothes out of her closet and pilin’ ’em on the floor,” Ina said. “I figure let her, it might take some of the starch out of her, and I can put ’em back Monday. Don’t you go botherin’ with that.”

“I won’t.”

When they had gone I went upstairs and into Mommee’s room. Ina was right; the floor and the chairs and her bed and her chaise and her writing desk were all piled with teetering stacks of clothes. She had even piled clothes in her bathtub. She scuttled busily among the stacks, counting them and petting them and bending over to sniff them as if they were beds of flowers. She hummed to herself and kept up the ceaseless flow of sotto voce conversation she had these days with God knew who.

“What are you doing?” I said, smiling at her from the doorway.

“Getting ready to go to Europe.”

“Really? What fun. Who else is going?”

“Papa and Teddy and Big Pom and Lolly and Jasmine,” she said in a playful singsong. “But not Mama. Mama has to stay home.”

Her adored Papa was, of course, long dead, as were her brother Teddy and her husband, Big Pom. Lolly and Jasmine had been favorite dolls.

“Well, you’re certainly taking a lot of clothes. Are you going to be gone long?”

“Till the end of time,” she said, and turned back to her task.

“You ready for your juice now?”

“No. I wouldn’t say no to an old-fashioned, though.”

She smiled slyly, and looked sideways at me.

“We’ll both have one before supper,” I said. To hell with Pom’s edict that liquor and her pills did not mix. She’d had no pills today, and the drink would make her sleepy.

“Pom too?”

“Pom’s at the clinic,” I said. “But maybe he’ll be home by then.”

“I want Pom.”

“Me, too,” I said, and closed her door softly and stood listening for a moment as the humming and murmuring began again. Then I put my head into Glynn’s room.

She was not there, but all the new clothes were laid carefully about her room, with the accessories that she planned to wear with them. I smiled. I felt somehow safe and soothed when Glynn showed interest in such normal teenage things as pretty new clothes. The careful groupings of clothes and shoes and bags and necklaces spoke of many good times ahead, lighthearted days and nights through which my lovely child would drift like a butterfly, float like a swan. I went downstairs with a lighter heart than I had had the entire day. She was in the kitchen drinking a cola and hanging up the telephone. It was not, I was happy to see, a Diet Coke.

“Is it okay if I go over to Vinings with Marcia and Jess?” she said. “There’s a movie we want to see. I’ll be home way before supper. Marcia’s driving.”