“Well, of course you’re not, sweetheart. This is a learning experience, that’s all. Next time, you’ll know better.”
“But I knew this time! I lined up all my ingredients…And now look. I wanted to surprise you!”
“Honey. It doesn’t matter. Believe me.”
“Doesn’t matter?”
She raised her eyes and stared at him. She didn’t care now if he saw that she was crying. She hoped he did see. “How can you say it doesn’t matter,” she asked him, “when I went to all this trouble?”
“No, I just meant—”
“Oh, forget it,” she said, and she spun on her heel and left the kitchen. She went back out to the dining room and sat down in her chair and picked up her pencil.
Her father followed, with Elaine a shadow behind him. “Willa, honey,” he said.
“I’m studying.”
“Willa, don’t be this way.”
“Will you let me do my homework, please?” she asked him.
He waited a while, but she kept her head lowered, frowning steadily at her notebook, and finally he went back to the kitchen. Elaine stayed there a moment longer, watching her, but then she turned and left too.
Willa drew a fierce black line through her last history answer.
* * *
—
For supper they had grilled cheese sandwiches with peas. Willa ate silently, keeping her eyes on her plate, but Elaine and their father talked all through the meal in way-too-bright voices. Elaine told their father about the rabbit that Dommie Marconi had brought in for show-and-tell, and their father said, “Speaking of which, eat your peas, little rabbit,” and Elaine popped a single pea in her mouth and tried to wriggle her nose up and down as she chewed, which made their father laugh. It was disgusting.
Willa said, “May I please be excused?”
“You didn’t like your sandwich, honey?” her father asked, because she’d left half of it on her plate.
She said, “I’m not hungry,” and stood up and pushed her chair back.
Her father and Elaine were the ones who cleared the table. Willa heard the chinking and scraping from where she sat in the dining room, and then she heard water running. So they must be washing the dishes, too.
Her father had not said one word of thanks for how she’d washed the dishes from earlier.
By now she had finished her homework, but she went on sitting over her books because they were her excuse for not helping out in the kitchen. Then her father came to the doorway and said, “Care for a game of Parcheesi?”
“It’s my bath night,” she said stiffly.
“What, so early?”
She didn’t answer. Keeping her face turned away from him, she stood up and left the dining room and climbed the stairs to her room.
In the mirror on the closet door she looked streaky-faced and rumpled. Her frizzes were sticking out crazily all over her head, and her eyelashes were spiky from tears.
She yanked the closet door open and her reflection vanished. She took her pajamas from their hook and went to the bathroom to run a bath.
Sitting up to her armpits in hot water, watching her fingers turn smocked-looking, she started wondering if something terrible had happened to her mother. Maybe she had left intending to come right back but then had wrecked the car. Would anyone know to call them? She might be lying in the hospital unconscious.
Or dead.
Why hadn’t that thought occurred to her father? Oh, there was just something wrong with this family! Willa was the only one who was normal.
When she’d finished her bath she went straight to bed, although it wasn’t even eight o’clock and she didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. She lay in the dark with her arms straight by her sides and stared up at the ceiling. Downstairs she heard her father talking and her sister giggling. A bit later she heard her sister climbing the stairs and she closed her eyes. Elaine hesitated in the doorway and then crossed to her bed and undressed by the light from the hall. Willa could make out the shape of her through her squinched eyelids; she saw Elaine hopping about as she put one foot and then the other into her pajama bottoms. When she was done she picked up her Little House book from the nightstand and went back downstairs, and then Willa heard their father’s voice rumbling indistinctly as he read aloud.
He came upstairs with Elaine when they’d finished their chapter. Willa had just enough time to turn on her side with her face to the wall before he walked in, and she listened to him tuck Elaine into bed and wish her a good night. Then he came over to Willa’s side of the room and whispered, “Willie? Wills? You awake?” But she didn’t answer, and finally he went away.
His footsteps thudding down the stairs sounded so humble and disappointed that Willa had the feeling something was tearing apart in her chest.
* * *
—
When she woke, the morning sun was slanting across her quilt, and the house smelled of bacon and toast, and she heard quick, light footsteps tripping up the stairs. “Rise and shine, duckies!” their mother said as she arrived in the doorway.
“Duckies” was what she called them when she was in a good mood, and to Willa it always seemed that she said it in a ducklike voice—fat-sounding and happy, like the voice women used on the radio when they wanted to show they were smiling. Willa couldn’t help feeling cheered any time she heard it, but this morning she stayed flat on her back even so.
Elaine, though, sat up and cried, “Mommy!”
This was really annoying, because ordinarily she said “Mom.” But “I’ve missed you so much, Mommy!” she cried, and she jumped out of bed, and when Willa sat up herself Elaine was wrapping her arms around their mother’s waist and beaming up at her, and their mother was smiling and hugging her. She was wearing her rosebud housecoat, so she must have come home at some point during the night. “Where were you, Mommy? Where’d you go?” Elaine asked, but their mother just said, “Oh, hither and yon,” in an airy tone, and then she flashed a smile at Willa and said, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
“Morning,” Willa said in a low voice.
“I can fry your eggs, or scramble them, or poach them. What’s Your Highness’s preference?”
Which was how she often did after flare-ups—pretending nothing had happened. Never mind that she’d walked out on them without a thought; it didn’t mean anything, she seemed to be saying. Heavens, just get over it! She could come back to find them dead in their beds, Willa thought, and all she’d say would be “Goodness! What’s all this about?”