“Why didn’t you stay married to her?” we asked. Unspoken between us was our fantasy—then she would be our mother too.
“If I had, then none of you monkeys would be born,” our father said, leveling his gaze at us, the one he used in his lectures at Johns Hopkins; he was a professor of English literature. “You are one part me and one part your mother.”
Guiltily, we left him to his blue books for grading.
But he called to us, and we turned back to face him.
“It’s about love, you know,” he said. “I thought I loved her, but I didn’t. Your mother,” he added, “your mother I adore. For always.”
Of course, we asked Joelle. Did our father live with you and your mother? Did he make up stories for you at night? Did he hold your mother’s hand? Kiss her on the back of the neck while she stood stirring soup on the stove?
Joelle was stingy with details. Sometimes she would bark at us. “No, he never did any of those things. He left us, you know!” We would sulk out of her room and whisper about what that meant. Could he leave us too someday? Then we would study our father for signs of his possible departure. But he remained the same, slightly goofy and distracted, circling our mother with nervous attention. Other times Joelle would cry and blame our mother for ruining their life. We thought our mother capable of ruining lives, with her strong opinions and the certainty with which she did everything. But Joelle and her mother’s life hardly seemed ruined. Still, when we raised this point to Joelle she would only shake her head and refuse to elaborate.
Once in a while Joelle would tell us something that we wanted to know, how our father and her mother had honeymooned in Bermuda in a big hotel with a pink sand beach. We could not, of course, imagine it: our father at a resort, lounging on the beach, sipping rum swizzles and slathering Joelle’s mother’s back with coconut oil. But she told us it was true; she had seen pictures. When we begged Joelle to bring the pictures to us she grew quiet, sullen. “My mother,” she told us, “would kill me if I did that.”
Our mother, we knew, would never go to Bermuda. We looked it up in the atlas and stared at the tiny island with the pink sand beaches where everyone spoke in British accents and stopped midafternoon for teatime. One night we asked her, feigning innocence, if we could take a vacation to Bermuda. We waited, breaths held, for her reply. “Why in the world would we ever go there?” she said, wrinkling her nose as if she smelled something very very bad.
JOELLE IN SUMMER was best. She arrived in cool tennis whites, tanned from days spent at The Club swimming or taking lessons of one kind or another. We made her tell us details of The Club. Our summer days were spent sitting on the sidewalk trying to finish our Popsicles before they melted. Or running under someone’s sprinkler. Or taking turns standing in front of the fan in the kitchen. For two weeks every year our parents rented a cottage at Rehoboth Beach. Then we rode waves, collected fireflies in empty mayonnaise jars, ate watermelon on the screened in porch. We waited all summer for those two weeks. Until then, we had Joelle’s descriptions of The Club.
“No one can yell there,” she told us. “Suppose your mother wants you to come out of the pool. Maybe it’s time to go home. Or maybe she wants you to go with her to The Grill for a hamburger. She has to walk to the edge of the pool and get you. No yelling from the chaise lounge.”
She pronounced chaise, chezz. We imitated her, taking turns being Joelle’s mother. Sit on the chezz, we’d say. Now walk to the very edge of the pool and ask us politely to come out for lunch. This game always ended in a fight: everyone wanted to be Joelle’s mother all the time.
We made her tell us more. What kind of bathing suits did people wear at The Club?
“One piece,” Joelle said. “Or a two piece that doesn’t show your belly button.”
She explained that intermittent belly buttons were okay. That was when a woman walked and her belly button showed sometimes. But full out belly buttons were prohibited. The rule applied to kids as well. Embarrassed, we did not mention the way our mother sunbathed topless in our backyard, the way she said chase lounge, the way she stood on the front porch of our row house and yelled above the noisy crickets for us to come inside. Instead of nightly games of kick the can, we forced our neighbors to play our version of tennis or golf, using branches of trees and old musty balls from someone’s basement. Joelle only watched, sitting on our stoop, high above us, her sneakers so white they glowed.
OUR NAMES—Molly, Sarah, Hannah—were common and dull. Not at all like Joelle, which sounded exotic, practically French. In every class or every house for one square block, there resided another Molly, another Sarah, another Hannah. But we never met another Joelle. We took this naming of us as still one more betrayal.
“What were you thinking?” we asked our mother.