girl in the hat

(image courtesy Sarah R. Bloom)

*

It was the quietest part of the night, when even the insects had succumbed to silence. The long black silk robe Eleanor wore brushed each step as she descended the grand curving staircase toward the front door. Robin watched her through the stained glass window, swimming toward him like a wavery mermaid.

She pulled the door open and looked up at him grinning down at her with one arm propped jauntily against the jamb.

“Thanks again for coming,” she said. “I just couldn’t sleep when I realized I was all alone in the house. I started thinking about vampires and ghosts, you know? Boo Radley and Huck’s dad and ghosts in white nighties. I shouldn’t read before I go to sleep but then I swear I heard noises in the attic. It was probably just a mouse or a squirrel or something, right? But I kept thinking, what if someone’s up there? What if that’s where the owners keep uncle Phil, who was never quite right in the head if you know what I mean?” Saying the words out loud took the fear out of them. She ran her fingers through her hair self-consciously. Rosemary’s kimono was embroidered with delicate pastel butterflies and several sizes too large; it kept slipping off one shoulder. “I swear to god I almost called 911.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Elle. Glad to be of service.” Robin was carefully combed and neatly pressed in skinny pants and a faded blue gingham shirt with pearl snaps and brown leather boots.

She took his knapsack and put it on the little table next to the door. “You look fancy and you smell like beer. You must have been awake when I called?”

“Yeah. I was out with a friend.”

“Hot date?”

He sighed. “A set-up. She wasn’t my type. I guess I was glad for an excuse to leave.” He looked past Elle into the parlor where the little lamp with the red satin shade shed its scarlet light across the ornate drapery, the watercolor flowers in gilt frames, the curvy sofa and the fat little chairs. “Nice house.”

“Oh, all this stuff came with the place.” She pulled him through the parlor and the darkened library toward the brightly lit kitchen doorway. “My mothers’ tastes tend to be much more mid-century and eclectic. Danish or modern Italian, sometimes antique Japanese.” She said this as if she knew what she was talking about. She showed him to a chair at the kitchen table because she did know how to play hostess. “Can I offer you a drink?”

He hesitated for a moment, wondered if she knew how to mix a cocktail. It had always been his job to pour his mother a glass of sherry before bed even though she would swear on the family bible that she never touched a drop, and he figured that maybe a drink poured by a child is innocent, it probably doesn’t count as a sin if it’s offered by a child or a priest, and he nodded yes.

“How about some warm milk? I make it with honey and vanilla.”

He laughed. “Sounds good.”

She lit the gas on the old stove with a wooden match and pushed a little stool over to reach the vanilla in the cupboard. She moved like someone who knew her way around the kitchen.

He said, “I wonder where they are, anyway. Your parents.”

She answered without turning around. “One is back in Los Angeles overseeing construction. The other’s at work.”

“Didn’t you call them? What did they say?”

She pulled the robe back up her shoulder. “Lang must have her cell turned off but I left a message. She doesn’t like to be interrupted when she’s working. It’s too late to call Rosemary and besides, she couldn’t do anything from California. She’d just get freaked out.” She poured the steaming liquid into two cups and sat down. She wonders what they’d think. No one ever said she wasn’t allowed to call him, they’re the ones who hired him, but sitting with him here in a fluorescent cocoon, sitting with him and not with Rosemary or Lang, felt like a betrayal, but she didn’t know why. “Someone is supposed to be here at night, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not too much to ask. In the day it’s alright but at night it’s creepy.”

“I’m glad to oblige.”

Elle got up again and went to the sink, filled the saucepan with water to soak, and looked out the window at darkness so total it revealed only a reflection of the kitchen: white wainscoting framed by the floral window treatment and a lone man hunched over his cup in the center of the room, like an American gothic portrait, and at the edge of the frame in the foreground, a solemn dark-eyed ghost stared back at her. Elle wanted to ask him if he ever had that feeling when you open your eyes and realize that there’s nothing familiar around you—not your bed, not your furniture, not your window, not your house, not your family, you don’t recognize anything and nothing recognizes you and suddenly you’re gone, sucked into another reality, reincarnated on the spot into an alien world, but instead, she told him, “Anyway, I thought, what if you were alone, too? Maybe we could be alone together.”

“Alone together. That’s an oxymoron. A contradiction in terms. Shakespeare liked to use them.” He spoke in falsetto: “Oh heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.”

“I read Romeo and Juliet when I was a kid.”

“When you were a kid. Ha. Jumbo shrimp!”

“Ha, ha. But that’s not really an oxymoron.”

“I can’t teach you anything, can I?”

“That’s not true. You’ve taught me lots of stuff.”

“Like what?”

She took a sip of milk. “I don’t know. Lots of things.”

For a moment, the woman she will become swam briefly to the surface of her eyes. He looked down at his cup.

She asked, “So she wasn’t your type? Your date, I mean?”

“Oh, yeah, well she’s a perfectly nice girl. Clean and sincere and perfectly nice. Nice hair and nails, nice clothes. Very well groomed.”

“Is that all you have to say about her?” She liked to keep him talking. When he’s talking, she remembered who she is.

“Well I must say she had perfect teeth, at least from what I could see from across the table. Actually, she was such a good talker and I saw quite a bit of teeth. She’s from Shreveport, here for nursing school. Do you know that in the first half hour of our date she managed to tell me her entire wish list for life?”

She sipped and watched. He could fill the whole house with his noise.

“First, she wants a big house like this one. Second, she wants three kids. Third, I guess not necessarily in this order, she wants a good man. She spent several minutes clarifying what she meant by ‘good’. I could hardly keep my eyes open. Don’t get me wrong, I like kids and all, but I’d like to do something different with my life. Travel to India or Africa, you know, the proverbial trip to find myself. I’m still young.” He stretched and yawned. “Except compared to you, I’m old and tired.”

“If you’re so grown up then how come you still live at home?” She asked, but he just laughed and took his cup to the sink. “Well, I want to go to Mexico. My parents could send us and you could teach me about the Mayans. We could surf and learn to speak Spanish.”

“I’m sure they’d miss you.” He looked at his watch. “That milk made me sleepy. When do you think your mom will be home?”

“I’m not going to have kids, myself.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“They just get in the way.”

He laughed. “Mamselle, sometimes you say the funniest things.”

“Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious. I know what I’m talking about. “

“Of course you do. But you’re seriously funny. You’re an oxymoron.”

“Well that’s better than being a plain old moron like you.” She punched his shoulder but she wasn’t smiling. “Please don’t go. I’m scared.”

So they played hide-and-seek. She counted to twenty and found him quickly behind the pantry door, then he counted in a booming voice while she scurried into the library and hid under the desk, then he hid under the sofa pillows and when she found him, he was fast asleep. She took him upstairs to her room crowded with the queensize canopy bed. There was nowhere else for him but the bed. She read until he slumped down the headboard, until the birds began to chirp and call outside her window.

When the oak tree detached itself from the darkness, she put the book down. When he slept, his face looked rounder and younger-eyes closed, slack lips pressed against the pillow. He looked like a big baby. She pulled off his shoes and alined them at the foot of the bed. She threw a quilt over and tucked it carefully under his chin. She climbed into bed and inched closer, as close as she could without waking him. His breath on her cheek was warm and faintly yeasty. She gave him the softest kiss, like a butterfly landing, and pressed her back into his warmth.

In the morning they can play some more. She will make buttermilk pancakes.