The ARSENIC HOUR

JORDAN!” MY AUNT NAN SCREAMS. “You knock that off ! I want you to stop acting as if you’ve been invaded! And you !” She whips around to glare at me. “Annalee, you are to stop provoking him with your pronouncements!”

My cousin and I stopped fighting when we heard her coming, but we’re still breathing hard, sweating. My aunt’s smart--she was in medical school when my uncle made her quit to marry him. She’s smart plus she’s shrewd, so there’s no real way to hide a thing from her. I’m 15, Jordy’s one year younger. My aunt had five children of her own, then got my brothers and me. Jordy is--I know--her favorite child, and I’m the one she likes the least.

The skin of my aunt’s face and neck and arms is deeply tanned all year-round and so thoroughly freckled that, looking down into it, you can see the flecks of colors in all the layers. My father, her brother, had skin like that. He’s been dead now five years. My own brothers and I haven’t been in this family long enough to know what is really meant by the things they say. I am not certain, for instance, what a pronouncement is.

My Aunt Nan and her mother, our San Marino grandmother, address children formally, as if they are trying to appeal to what’s civilized in our natures. Grandmother Nell likes to say that children are the limbs of Satan. She says this, then she and my aunt both laugh. My own parents, who themselves made it a habit not to act very civilized, usually called me Annie.

My aunt’s furious at Jordy and me. She’s mad, but I am madder still. I’ve just discovered it, this mute ability: that of watching her longer, harder than she could ever watch me. I watch her until her eyes glitter and she has to look away. She knows something, I see. Whatever she knows is purpling the depths of the skin of her neck and face. Under my gaze, her tan is turning gaudy.

Aunt Nan’s dark hair is sticking up from the way she combs it back to dry after swimming. She has a cowlick at the hairline that makes her bangs pop up. They come up and stay, swaying like a wave on the verge of crashing. My father’s hair was dark like hers; his, though, like mine, was curly. My aunt’s hair is stick straight--I can hardly get it to bend around the rollers when she has me set it for her cocktail parties. She’s rich but hates for people to know it. She won’t waste money on going to a beauty parlor. Instead, she goes to a regular barber who, for $2.25, whacks it off in this sleek, dark cap.

Jordy and I fight all the time, but this one’s bad. My scalp still aches from how he yanked me up, holding on to two great fistfuls of hair. We’re the same size, but he’s stronger. Still I’m faster, smarter, know more words. I aim these at him and make him weep with fury.

These are performances , my aunt is saying, in which we demonstrate our lack of gratitude and grace. It is 4:30 in the afternoon, the time right before dinner, what she calls the Arsenic Hour. We’re fighting and my uncle has just phoned to say he won’t be home, that Visiting Firemen are in town so he’s taking them out to dinner. He’s with Lockheed and often does this, or he travels out of town.

These performances , she says again, are demonstrations of the depths of our discontent . I don’t know what she’s talking about.

Jordy and I fight for a simpler reason: We hate each other.

IT’S DURING the Arsenic Hour that my aunt and her friends sit in the shade by the side of the pool with their long brown Coppertoned legs stretched out into the still-hot sun of the late afternoon. They smoke and drink their tinkling drinks and talk about their husbands who are usually traveling out of town. This is in 1963 in the San Fernando Valley, where the kids stay in the water until their eyes are red and squinty, swimming until their lungs ache. My blond hair has turned mint green from the chlorine.

The mothers wear tennis dresses or terry-cloth turbans and caftans. They talk about their husbands as “him,” as if they were all somehow married to the exact same man. My aunt, I notice, doesn’t gossip about my uncle. This is because she is religious. It may have been my father’s death that did that to her--it had the opposite effect on me. I can tell, though, that she does enjoy listening to the husband stories. I lie flat out, wet, my front pressed to the hot cement. Arms down by my sides, my eyes mostly closed--they don’t know I am listening.

Aunt Nan takes a deep drag from her cigarette, makes some low, wry comment. Then her tilted face, in the shade of her hat brim, suddenly lights up with the white of her smile. She makes another sharp comment and the others laugh. She keeps her face in the shadow.

She is tall, thin, as handsome as a model, but she keeps her face bowed down over her embroidery. She’s working on vestments for the Altar Guild of St. Nicholas Parish in Encino. My Aunt Nan is very High Church, my mother likes to say. The threads she is using are wound with filaments of real gold, real silver. My aunt and uncle, I know, are too High Church to divorce, too High Church to kill themselves or to get themselves committed, as my own father and mother have done. Still, there is something wrong.

There is something wrong. My aunt and uncle never argue, being too High Church to disagree. Instead, they have discussions, the ironic tone of which I can hear through the wall of the living room. This wall has been made so the living room “communicates” with the family room. The things in the wall--fireplace, hi-fi, bar, television--all work from both sides. The TV’s on a track that lets it slide through and swivel. My aunt designed this wall when she was redoing the kitchen one of the times she was adding on. My aunt has one slide-out cupboard in her kitchen that is made to hold nothing but the empty drum and rattle of the hung-up lids of pans.

I hear them, then lean over to look through the hearth of the open fireplace. My aunt’s head is down. She’s smiling hard at her bright embroidery. The silver of the needle leads the shining gold she’s jabbing in. “Oh, you talk a good fight,” she says. My uncle’s done something but won’t act sorry. He’s teasing, playful, very good-looking. She takes a deep breath, smokes, presses her lips together. He made her quit med school, and now she has all these kids. He’s always out with the Visiting Firemen. Try as she might, she still can’t forgive him. She can’t forgive him though she positions herself each Sunday in her pew on the red leather of the kneeler, with her long tan fingers covering the dark of her face, and she prays fervently for the ability to do so.

THOUGH LACKING in the virtue of forgiveness, my aunt is still the most sainted woman of our neighborhood. She’s sainted because, with her own five, she still took in her dead brother’s three. She is so good that at first she even took our dog. She took Zippy because she thought the dog might help John Daniel adjust. My little brother’s in the fourth grade. He’s been held back twice, still can’t read or write. He tested as intelligent. (We’re all three much too intelligent,” my Grandmother Nell has told me. That is at least hawwlf our problem.) Now John Daniel’s getting so big he doesn’t even look like he belongs in elementary school.

Aunt Nan got rid of Zippy because he fought with my cousins’ Dalmatian. Murphy is valuable, a very High Church sort of dog, while Zippy was just a mutt. Anyway, as my uncle told me at the time, Murphy was here first. Murphy’s named after the cartoon in Surfer Magazine. This is a dog bred dumb, bred for looks, for nose length--bred without remembering that there needs to be room left behind the eyes for brains. This is a dog so dumb we all watched him once as he ran across the lawn full-speed-ahead and smacked right into a splurting Rain Bird. From that he got 10 black and spidery Frankenstein stitches across his forehead, making it look like they finally broke down and bought him a brain.

“That’s not funny,” my aunt tells me.

Murphy was show quality, until the stitches. Zippy was short, black, fattish. He and Murphy fought, my aunt says, because they both were males. Also, like my brothers and me, Zippy had been poorly trained. Aunt Nan took him to the pound, where he was “put to sleep.” Then, to be fair, she had Murphy castrated. My aunt says “castrated” instead of “altered,” “fixed” or “neutered.” I say “killed” instead of “put to sleep.”

Our dog was killed, then Will, my big brother, was sent off to a military academy in San Rafael. William’s roommate there is the son of a psychiatrist, who is, Will says, at least as screwed up as we three are. “Or maybe worse,” Will says. Will tells me stuff like this when he calls from Union Station. He calls at least once a month when he runs away from the military academy and comes down to L.A. by train. Last time, he just walked away from drills, still wearing his dress uniform. He’s so tall now that people on the train think he’s in the real Army.

“Do you remember the time Mom forgot us at the nursery school?” he asks me this month when he phones. “When she was so late they had to leave, so they locked the school and left us on the porch outside in the rain?”

I have no recollection of this event, cannot even find the air with which to breathe out a reply.

“Well, they could have been arrested,” Will tells me. “What they did was against the law.”

“Who?” I yell. “Our mother and father ?” I’m yelling at him because I’m so startled. The memory of our parents is fragile, like smoke on a windy day. Never do Will or I ever say a bad word against them. Never, really, do we ever really think it. John Daniel, usually, doesn’t say a word at all.

“Not them ,” Will says. “The ones who had the nursery school. Put John Daniel on and let me see if he remembers it.” John Daniel holds the receiver to his ear, staring at the floor. His nose is huge and extravagantly freckled, shiny red where it has peeled and peeled. The nose itself is big but the nostrils are absolutely tiny. Through these small holes, he has the enormous task of first breathing in, then breathing out. Sometimes when I sneak out of the house at night through my bedroom window, I go around to the boys’ wing and stand at the window next to my brother’s bed. He always sleeps with the light on. He sleeps flat on his back without ever moving, breathing noisily in, then noisily out. I am 15 years old but I do know this: His is not the sleep of a child.

WHEN WILL RUNS AWAY and comes down to L.A. by train he gets to spend one night with Grandmother Nell in San Marino before they put him back on the train going up to San Rafael. He has shown me a picture of a bird he says our grandmother resembles. This is a brightly plumed bird of prey called the harpy eagle. “Chchaaachchch,” Will breathes from the back of his throat. I can see him on the phone, mouth drawn wide, wagging his tongue in his wide-open mouth, just as she does when drunk and bumping down the hall.

Grandmother Nell drinks too much. When we sleep at her house she stays up late to play the piano. She has two grand pianos in her living room, and an antique organ you pump with your feet. As she plays, she drinks vermouth from a tall crystal water goblet. After a while, she starts weeping on the keys. She drinks, weeps, then comes upstairs into the pitch-black dark to tuck us in again, though we are already deep in sleep. In this way, breathing her rasping breath, she came to John Daniel’s bed once, to where he too was laboriously breathing, bent over and woke him. She scared him so much he threw up apple juice and cashews all over her French-laundered sheets.

MY AUNT AND UNCLE’S is a tract house in a part of the Valley that was recently walnut groves. They bought it new, then started putting wings on it. In redoing the house, my aunt is copying my father the same way I want to copy Will. My father was an architect--it was his firm that designed the first shopping center at Del Amo. “Del Amo,” in Spanish, means either “of the heart” or “of the soul.”

I lie in bed at night in my aunt and uncle’s house and try to see it from above as an architect might, its wings reaching out around the patio and pool. I can’t really imagine our father in heaven, spying on the things I do. Will says he killed himself over things like Del Amo, over having to design the same ugly house over and over again and place it six or eight times per block.

I want to believe our father died of the ugliness of buildings. Instead, I remember the look on his face one night, once when the three of us tricked him.

It was when were staying at our grandmother’s house in Manhattan Beach. There was something wrong--we were living there in winter. When my father came in from work, his face felt freezing to the touch of my lips. He’d pick me up to dance with him, waltz me on his shoes.

“Daddy!” we chanted. We’d planned this together. “Can we get you something? Your paper? Slippers? Can we bring you a beer?”

Our father’s face, which was gray with cold and weariness, opened like the quick shutter of a working camera. We brought him the afternoon paper, his beer. We watched him drink, sputter, then gasp and gag. He spit it out and looked up at us, hurt, astonished. “April Fools,” we all three cried. We’d splurted the beer open with the point of a can opener, funneled a cup of salt in it.

“Very funny,” I think now. I lie in the dark in my aunt’s house. I think it over and over--could die of thinking it.

OUR PARENTS WERE THE way they were, Will says, because they were bohemian. They were bohemian, while the other ones in our family--by which he means the rich ones--were all bourgeois. This word is so funny to Will he says it like this: ber-goys , the way our parents did. His calling our aunt’s household furnishings “pathetically bergoys” is one of the things that landed him in the military academy.

Aunt Nan’s color scheme is marine, all sea blues, sea greens, plus a beige that she calls “sand.” Her furniture is all Danish modern. With seven children still at home, she does all her own housework with the help of only a once-a-week cleaning lady. She still line-dries her sheets. She swims a mile of laps every morning, then gets out, dries off and chain-smokes cigarettes. My Uncle Jack says smoking is a filthy habit. She says cigarettes are cheaper than tranquilizers. She and my Grandmother Nell both own stock in R. J. Reynolds, so each smokes meaningfully, as if every puff were a small patriotic act.

My aunt swims laps and makes us kids swim them, too. The biggest boys, Graham and Jordy, swim competitively; the middle boys, Wesley and John Daniel, soon will, too. The twins, Eliza and M Thomas, who are only 6, still have such gasping, lopsided strokes that it takes them five minutes to swim the length of the pool. My aunt tells people she got me too late to do anything about. She supposedly means the swimming, but there are the other things as well.

My aunt and I sew our own clothes from Simplicity patterns. We sew or we shop at Samples ‘n Seconds in a corner shopping center in Reseda, where the dresses come already ripped in the underarms from being tried on by girls much bigger than the sample Size 4. She takes me to her barber for a haircut. My minty hair is wild, always badly tangled. It reminds my aunt of my mother, I know, in the mental hospital. My aunt asks her barber to do something to it to keep me from looking so . . . ? She says “unkempt,” but she means “deranged.”

She saves money on the boys’ haircuts by doing them herself. She does them on the screened-in porch, one right after the other, making each sit on newspapers on the picnic table. Seeing the mean way her face concentrates, shrinking down into itself in her determination, I know what my mother means when she says Aunt Nan should have been a surgeon. My mother says she would have been the kind who breaks bones.

At first the boys laugh at one another, at the freckled noses, the reddened, peeling ears that stick right out from the sides of their new pink scalps--only Jordy and Eliza have my aunt’s dark hair. Someone always cries--it’s one job at which she never becomes expert. She scalps them, leaving each boy with only the slightest fringe in front to be combed up with Dixie Peach pomade. Once a month it happens, the ritualistic shearing. I am spared it because I am a girl and because I am 15.

Because I’m a girl, I’m prohibited from ever setting foot in the boys’ wing. I go there anyway, thrilled by the way it makes me feel to be where I am not allowed. Aunt Nan designed this, too: It’s one long room divided by built-in bunk beds and closets, one desk per alcove, one alcove per boy. The ceiling is papered with the eerie see-through blue of heaven. The color comes from sunlight breaking through the cresting waves of surfer posters. I lie on a top bunk, right up next to a closet wall. I lie there breathing like John Daniel, slowly in then slowly out. I dream of being dead, drowned. I dream of feeling the weight of various boys lying on top of me. My aunt is calling from the family room, but I cannot be found.

She’s calling me in to help look for Eliza’s kitten, which has been gone all day. Aunt Nan calls one last time, then takes the little kids out the side gate through the yard where the laundry’s hung.

With them gone, I go into the boys’ bathroom to smell their things. In their medicine cabinet, they have powder for athlete’s foot, a tube of Clearasil, and acid for Graham’s plantar wart. I put Graham’s gunked-up safety razor to the sides of my own face. He’s a year ahead of me in school. Once, I remember, he did seem to like me. Now, Graham ignores me when we pass in the hall.

I go out through the still-damp sheets in the laundry yard, climbing up onto the roof of the bike shed and then onto the roof of the garage. My aunt is taking the kids door-to-door: Sainted Nan, with her entourage. I’m lying in a way that keeps me hidden beneath the leaves of the overhanging walnut tree. I observe them: my aunt, my large and silent younger brother, my goofy cousin Wesley and the twins. It’s Eliza’s face I am most closely watching. It is thinning now in the cheeks, hollowing out, growing pinched with desperation. She’s 6 years old--nothing really bad has happened to her yet. I can still remember when this was true of me.

MY UNCLE LIKES TO JOKE that I’m his favorite niece. The joke is this: I’m his only niece. Boys run in our family. My uncle had Eliza’s name picked out for Graham and had to wait through all four boys to get the girl to stick it on. I think she’s named after “My Fair Lady.”

Her twin, M Thomas, prefers not to be called Tommy or anything else for short. He is trying, I understand, to distinguish himself from the crowd that is his family. This is something that my brothers and I no longer have to worry about, having already been distinguished by the actions of our parents.

I am lying on my bed watching M Thomas out my window. He is attempting to talk seriously to grown-ups at my aunt and uncle’s cocktail party. He is pushing his glasses back up his sunburned nose, informing some half-drunk lady that the M in his name is an initial only, and therefore doesn’t “deserve” a period. “That’s nice, honey,” she’s telling him, giving his crew cut a pat. Then she reaches over him to get at the pineapple that stands on the buffet table.

This is a pineapple bristling with chunks of orange cheese, with giant pink shrimp, with fat-riddled cubes of ham, all of which are stuck onto it with bright and frilly toothpicks. “At least seven Americans,” I have informed my aunt this day, “die each year of toothpick wounds.” I told her that as the two of us stood in her showplace kitchen, assembling the buffet. Her slide-out pot-and-pan lid drawer has been featured in Sunset magazine.

“That, Annalee, is simply not true,” my aunt informed me. “I don’t know why you always find it necessary to embellish the truth.” It was by her annoyance that I guessed my saying this about toothpick death is what a “pronouncement” is. But it happens to be true, people do die of toothpicks, of graphite pencils, of falling from cars that are standing stock still at intersections. Children aspirate hot dogs and chunks of baloney. Children die from blowing up party balloons.

Now, it’s later that same night. I’m not talking to my aunt and I’m no longer helping. Instead, I’m watching the cocktail party from the window of my darkened bedroom. These windows once opened to the outside, but they now look out over the added-on screened-in porch. It’s hot--the sliding glass doors to the living room and family room are all standing open. This is to allow the guests to circulate.

Eliza’s kitten, which I keep in the record cabinet of my mother’s hi-fi, is awake now--I hear it meowing. I go and get it out. There are clots of shit on my mother’s record albums. She has “South Pacific,” “Oklahoma!” “Annie Get Your Gun.” The kitten’s fluffy and purring. It hasn’t eaten in days. It weighs so little that the hand of mine that’s holding it seems to be raising up into the air itself, carrying nothing more than the fluff and the vibration. I cradle the purring, then tip open the top of the console, where the record changer is. I breathe deeply of the air: I believe, by keeping the lid down, I save my mother’s smell.

I open the door and push the kitten out. It’s too dumb to even want to go, but then moves off at a diagonal into the silence of the sand-colored hall. I go back to my window, waiting to see the modern-day miracle transpire. Father Robert Gerhardt of St. Nicholas Parish is one of my aunt and uncle’s party guests.

My aunt is wearing a short black-beaded evening dress with a chiffon skirt and spaghetti straps. She has a red flower in her dark hair--this party has a hula theme. The dress arrived unbidden this very day, sent by Grandmother Nell. My grandmother likes to shop by phone, vindictively. She uses the unexpected delivery as a form of wordless criticism. She buys things for you, then sends them c.o.d. She’s recently had a vanity table delivered to me. It has a delicate little wrought-iron chair covered with a pink plush seat. The table is glass-topped, has a little mirror. Her card read: “Smile! Stand Up Straight. Get Your Clothes On Right!”

The three shiny bumps of hair lying along the top of my aunt’s head all show the crimp of the pins that recently held the rollers. Father Gerhardt is watching her. He sits on a dark green and blue plaid chair, the arms of which are teak. He holds his drink in one hand. He has set a toothpicked shrimp on a fancy napkin balanced on his knee; it is covered by the tented fingers of the other hand. He keeps the shrimp so caged while he listens to an angry lady--she’s mad at him for making a speech in church in favor of the Rumford Fair Housing Act. When he spoke out in church in favor of the act, half the congregation got up, walked out and never did come back.

Now, he’s keeping the shrimp, listening well but not eating. He doesn’t eat, I see, to not mix up the two things: his food with his capacity for deep understanding. He puts his drink down, moves his palm down the length of one thigh, than changes the balancing hand. Then he lifts his drink, drinks, picks up the shrimp and the napkin. He is a man, I see, who is nearly overwhelmed by the lady, her anger and the party things he’s holding. He puts them all down, then recrosses his legs the wide way to show he is not a fairy. That’s when Eliza comes out holding the purring, shouting out to her mom about the kitty’s resurrection.

I’ve just learned, this day, that in the San Fernando Valley the added-on screened-in porch goes by the name lanai .

I AM LYING FLAT out on the shake roof of the garage, hidden by the bending branches of the walnut tree. I can hear Jordy climbing up the bike shed behind me. He’s mad at me over something. I’m eating a bag of Cornnuts while I watch for Father Gerhardt’s Karmann Ghia to come pulling into the drive. He comes now two or three times a week, usually during the Arsenic Hour. If it’s fourish, he and my aunt have tea. If it’s more like 5, then they have drinks made at the two-way bar.

“Cornnuts give you horse breath,” my cousin says. He has, evidently, climbed all the way up two steep roofs in order to tell me this.

“Oh, go to hell,” I say. I say it mildly. I am watching my aunt as she opens the front door and peers out expectantly. The floor of the brand-new entryway is paved in a greenish-black polished slate. She works hard, I notice, to keep that floor shiny. Her perfume, a fragrance called Replique, seems to pool right there. You can smell it best at knee height, as if she spends hours all dressed up and buffing.

“You can’t swear at me,” Jordy says. “This isn’t your house.”

“Oh, go to f---ing hell,” I say. My voice sounds bored. Jordy’s straddling my body now, holding on to one of the branches of the walnut tree. He has on moccasins but no socks. There are calcified knots on the tops of his feet from kneeling on his surfboard. The skin along the top of his feet and well up his ankles is deeply brown, as perfectly hairless as a girl’s.

With one set of the toes gripping through the mocs, he lifts the other and takes a little kick at my side. “I said you may not swear at me.”

“Oh, up yours,” I say. I’m watching the car turn in and come bumping up the drive. “Up yours, actually, with a 10-foot pole.” I’m watching so completely that it’s a surprise when Jordy starts his huffing, kicking, weeping. It is shocking to me that he gets so violently angry, that he accomplishes a rage so easily.

“Your mother’s crazy !” he’s screaming. “You don’t really live here! We’re just letting you stay until you go away to college.” I look up and watch him mildly. Jordy’s eyes don’t match. One’s brown, the other a deep, true blue, with a rock-shaped chunk of the brown color in it, like a meteor in the iris that’s the sky. Graham likes to tell him there’s a breed of dogs with eyes like this. “Your father threw himself off a roof, just like you’re going to.” He’s prying at the places my fingers clutch the shakes.

“Well,” I sniff. I sniff not from pain and suffering but from moral superiority, like our Grandmother Nell. “My mother may be insane,” I grant him. “Still, she’d never do a thing as crazy as fall in love with the parish priest.”

Jordy’s one of Father Gerhardt’s acolytes. Though deeply devout, he’d still like to be a sheriff one day. This is the sort of little-boy wish even M Thomas has outgrown at the age of 6. Jordy wants to be a sheriff, I know, so he can kill people legally.

He slams his fist into the center of my back as his tears rain down on me. He does this a few times, then tries to shove me from the slope. Then, quite abruptly, he stops and slides on the slick soles of his mocs down the walnut-stained incline. He hops off the bike shed, then runs across the side yard with the Dalmatian rocking along next to him like a hobby horse. Murphy’s so dumb he thinks Jordy’s having fun. Jordy’s sobbing loudly, his fists still tightly clenched.

I’m silent, dry-eyed, still holding my bag of Cornnuts. Jordy is weeping from sheer frustration, I know, that I am nothing but a girl , but he can never make me cry. He never got it: He thought he had a cousin who would not cry, when it was only that she once had, and now didn’t.

JORDY’S SO MEAN to John Daniel and his own brothers that my aunt and uncle move him out of his alcove in the boys’ wing and into the guest room on the same hall as Eliza and me, so now the three of us share a bathroom. Every night he waits behind his closed door to listen for when I start tiptoeing down the dark and deeply carpeted hallway. Sometimes I almost get there before he hears me. He hears me, opens his door, gets into the bathroom by taking two short steps. Then he slams the door and locks it.

This has been been going on for days, now weeks. Jordy doesn’t get tired of doing it, but now he’s getting lazy. I never win, but then suddenly one night I do. I’m wearing the shoes Graham and Jordy tease me about: dark brown, clunky oxfords--not another girl in our high school would be caught dead wearing shoes like these. My cousins call them my Little Man Shoes. They’re similar to the ones my father wore when we used to dance, with me poised on his toes. He was nearly 6-foot-3. His big shoes were beautiful. He always had them shined professionally.

This night, the night I win, I get one shoe in before he can slam the door and lock it. “My turn,” I tell him. “I’m going first this time.” My voice, I hear, is sweet.

“Go away, Nikita,” Jordy whispers. “You don’t live here, Fidel.”

My cousin believes my parents were communists because they once voted for Adlai Stevenson. This is what supposedly caused our San Marino grandfather’s fatal heart attack.

“Can’t win,” I whisper, through the crack. “The heart’s going out of you--you can’t do it, Jordy. You’re just a stupid surfer acolyte. You can’t beat me.” He’s crying, I hear. The effort defeats him. He’s stronger, but I have on hard leather shoes and I am more determined. I shove the door back so it rides up over his toes. He yelps, but he does so quietly. We can fight now almost entirely without sound.

He is moaning, hopping around, holding his toes while I start my bath. I turn the water on, then begin to unbutton my blouse. Tears stand in his mismatched eyes. Jordy goes absolutely crazy. He jumps me, we roll around on the floor. “Get out!” he screams right down at me so I can feel his breath against my face. He’s on my chest, his knees pinning down my minty hair.

“Why, I ‘d love to, Adolf,” I tell him. “Just as soon as I finish my bath.” Though he’s trying his best to hold them, my hands get free. Now I’m unzipping my jeans. Now I’m tipping my hips up, and I’m sliding out of them.

Then, suddenly, my aunt is there pounding on the door. “Annalee!” she’s yelling. “Turn that water off this instant! You’re using enough water for all the tea in China.”

The door isn’t locked, not even tightly closed. All she needs to do is push it open. Still, since she isn’t my own mother, she is shy of seeing my body. “Annalee!” she shouts again. “I mean it. I don’t want this dawdling and defiance.” Jordy is up now, his weight gone from me. He’s at the tub in perfect silence, turning off the water. First, he listens for her to leave. Then he goes to lock the door.

He’s her favorite child, my father’s sister’s son. I wait while he’s gone, wait while he comes back to me.