“I was thinking of lovely little girl names,” she said, “for my lovely little girls.”
We told her our names were horrid, ugly, everywhere.
“Should I have named you Tallulah?” she asked us. “Hermione? What?”
“Something fancy,” we said sadly. “Something like Joelle.”
WHEN EXACTLY THE phone calls began, we could never pinpoint. It seemed that one summer they were suddenly there, the tinny ring of our black telephone, then the hushed voices, the tears, the slam of Joelle’s bedroom door, my father placating, pleading. Sometimes we huddled in the hallway, trying to hear what was being said, but the words always sounded vague and muddled behind the closed doors. Sometimes we came upon Joelle whispering into the telephone. She would glare at us and stop talking until we left the room. Then, our ears pressed against the door, we would try to make out what exactly she was saying.
Our mother grew silent and edgy. Whenever the phone rang she jumped as if she’d been shot, then answered it softly, turning her head away from us. More than once we stumbled inside from the blazing Baltimore heat for more Popsicles or to complain about how bored and hot we’d grown, to find her sitting at our big wooden kitchen table, crying.
All summer, this went on, until we stopped thinking about it and accepted it as part of the grown-up world our parents inhabited. Instead we focused on other things: stringing long strands of beads to hang in our doorway, monitoring the growth of a litter of newborn kittens who resided in our neighbor’s garage, begging our mother for one of those kittens, counting the days until we finally left the city and went to our rented cottage in Rehoboth Beach. We traded 45s with our friends. We made up dances—the Frog and the Cobra. We pretended our backyard was The Club, and threw out anyone who yelled there. We begged our mother for some of the little white socks Joelle always wore, ankle length with pastel pom-poms on the backs, and when she finally relented, we wore them day after day, with the sticks and the musty balls, practicing our golf and tennis.
The weekend we were finally leaving for the beach, Joelle arrived at our house with our father. She had her lovely suntanned arms folded tightly across her chest and whenever we spoke to her she turned her head, lifting it upward so her nose pointed at the ceiling. We all begged her to talk to us. But she wouldn’t, not to us or our father or our mother, who walked around looking as tight as the blue metal top we liked to spin across the kitchen floor.
At a sullen dinner on the screened in porch, we tried to entice her with plans for the beach. Last year, we reminded her, we had found a jellyfish. We talked about the french fries available there, salty and greasy and hot. We told her that Hurricane Margaret was headed north from Puerto Rico. We might have to get masking tape and make X’s for our windows. The waves, we said, would be tall. Maybe even a hundred feet high.
“Shut up,” Joelle told us. They were the first words she’d spoken all day, and they flew out of her mouth like gunfire. “Just shut up. All of you.”
In a flash our mother was out of her seat and leaning right into Joelle’s face. “Don’t you ever say that to my children again. Ever. Do you understand? I have had enough of you. Of this. Do you hear me?”
We stared at the two of them, silent and unsure of who to hate—Joelle for telling us to shut up, or our mother for offending Joelle. We did not know what to do or what might happen next. It seemed like right then a car screeched up to our house, but maybe that was some time later. A car did screech up that night, its door flying open and banging shut. We heard the unfamiliar sound of high heels pounding up our front walk.
Then just one word, spoken into the hot summer air: “Joelle.”
We looked through the screen, where moths clung, batting their gossamer wings, and saw Joelle’s mother standing on the steps that led to our house, her arms folded in such a way that she appeared to be hugging herself. In the glare of the single bulb that hung over the front stairs, we could make out every detail. She was the tallest woman we had ever seen, or so she seemed standing there like that. Her hair, no longer golden, was pulled into a tight chignon, and everything she wore matched: pale yellow pants and tunic top, large wooden earrings painted red and yellow, with matching large wooden beads around her neck. She had on nylons under the wide legs of her pants, and high heels in a color we would later call taupe, but then thought of as the color of flesh. Her lips and cheeks were pink.