At twelve years old, my anger is already taking root. Angry girls are not good girls—this much I have been taught—which makes me certain that I am to blame for what happens.
It is midmorning on Saturday when the telephone rings. I am in the kitchen stirring ice cubes into my lemonade when you scurry from the living room to snatch it up. Our home is a one-story bungalow with a living room you step down into from the kitchen. An open doorway separates the two spaces, which means anything said in one room is heard in the other.
You cradle the lime-green receiver against your shoulder as you squirt lotion from a Jergens bottle that sits on the counter and rub it vigorously up your forearms. You are still wearing your pink silk bathrobe and feathered slippers which you stay in until noon on your days off. “Oh, you’re a doll. Of course we’ll be there,” you say, and I feel a flurry of excitement. You promised we’d spend the evening watching Maverick and eating orange sherbet, but I’d easily give up both for a night out. The last time you took me out we went to a charity ball at the Palladium, and I got to meet Lucille Ball.
I am picturing what glittering event you are taking me to when you hang up. “That was Uncle Duke inviting Alfonso and me to a cocktail party. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I simply couldn’t turn him down.”
Under my palm, the perspiring glass feels slick and wet, the ice cubes already melted to slivers. The slightest motion would send it sailing off the counter, drown our feet in shattered glass and sweet lemonade. I look at you, meet your eyes. “Why do you still call him Uncle Duke? He’s not my uncle,” I say, hoping this will sting more than broken glass.
John Wayne became my uncle after you married his best friend, Grant. Now that you are married to Alfonso, a gorgeous, dark-haired juggler—gorgeous being your word, not mine—you have no right calling John my uncle or dining at his house with your new husband, for that matter.
Unfazed by my comment, you smile and wrap an arm around my shoulder. “He’ll always be your uncle, dearest. Now, don’t be glum. I promise to make it up to you tomorrow. We’ll stay up until midnight watching television and eating buckets of sherbet, just the two of us.”
I sink against you, melting under the scent of the orange-blossom skin cream you slathered over your arms. For the briefest moment, I let my head rest on the bridge of your shoulder before pushing you away. It isn’t fair that you can soften my anger when you are the cause of it. “Turn Mr. Wayne down. Tell him you already have plans.”
You cross your arms, looking sorry but unwavering. No one tells you what to do, other than Grandmother Maria. “That would be rude, now wouldn’t it, Nina?”
Catching hold of the tassel on the tie of your robe, I give it a childish tug, “He’d understand, and besides, he wouldn’t want you leaving me all alone.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re old enough to stay home alone, and even if you weren’t, your abuela is here.”
“She doesn’t count!”
From the next room Grandmother Maria shouts back, “Oh, I don’t, do I?”
“Nina,” you scold, “don’t hurt your abuela’s feelings.”
“She doesn’t have any!” I cry, my anger finding a target with my grandmother. Grandmother Maria is the ruler of the house and the cause of many bad things, namely boarding school, which she enforces. I know you’d never send me away to school if it wasn’t for her.
“Stop it, Nina. You’re being childish. Sometimes things come up that can’t be helped.”
“Why do you want to see Uncle Duke, anyway? He was Grant’s best friend, not Alfonso’s. He doesn’t even like Alfonso. He hasn’t come to see us once since you married him.”
Grant’s name strikes where I want. Your eyes slide away from mine, your smooth cheeks twitching as you press your lips together in an effort to keep whatever you’d like to say to yourself.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it,” I say quickly, but you just shake your head and leave the kitchen, looking disappointed in me.
I would have felt genuinely sorry about bringing up Grant if it had changed your mind, but it doesn’t.
By the time dusk arrives, the sinking sun making everything glow hotter, I am waiting on the sofa for you to emerge in your shimmering evening attire and forgive me. The ceiling fan sends little hairs tickling across my forehead, and the mohair cushion prickles the backs of my bare calves. I should be wearing stockings with my skirt, but they’re too sweaty. I stare at the enormous painting over the stone fireplace—colorful geometric shapes floating on a white canvas—and imagine myself boxed up, a girl configured of precise angles and neat points. Fixed. Perfectly contained.
I think of Grant. The orange chair he died in is still here, pushed up to the floor-length window that looks out onto our teardrop swimming pool. The last time I saw him he was slumped in that chair with a bottle of alcohol between his knees, his eyes red and swollen. Grant was handsome once, in films and photographs, but by the time he married you he was old and puffy.
I should have known something was wrong that day. Despite the drinking, he always noticed me, even when I felt invisible, which made me love him. No matter how drunk he was, he always managed a smile or a wink, never failing to ask how I was faring with the wretched nuns at boarding school. “If I had my way,” he’d say, “you’d go to school down the street and be home for dinner. Between Grandmother Maria and that mother of yours—” an elbow nudge to my side “—don’t try and change those gals’ minds about anything. You know what I mean, darling?”
The day he died, he had no words for me. When I walked into the living room, he glanced up, but there was a flat, vacant look in his eyes, their clear blue turned watery as if he was fading from the inside. “Hi, Grant,” I said, but he didn’t answer, just dropped his gaze back into his lap. I remember how the light from the window poured over him, uncomfortably bright as I walked past him to my room, waiting for you to return with Christmas packages. Eventually, I heard your car pull up, the front door open and then a scream. I flew into the hallway only to be met by Grandmother Maria who was rushing toward me with her hands raised in the air. She pushed me back into my room crying, “Do not come out,” and slammed the door behind her. Terrified, I dropped to my stomach and pressed my face to the crack under the door. There was sobbing and hurrying feet, and then after what felt like a lifetime, a distant police siren that grew louder, roaring to a halt in front of our house. I ran to the window. People spilled from their doorways and gathered in the street, our quiet, Sherman Oaks neighborhood coming to life.
Not until two white-coated men appeared carrying a stretcher with a lumpy body covered in a sheet did I understand that someone was dead. I went sick with dread until I saw you walking down the path, Grandmother’s arm tight around your waist. I banged the glass. I wanted you to look up, to tell me what was going on. But you only clung to the side of the stretcher and climbed into the back of the ambulance without a backward glance.