Pete suddenly remembered something. “Vicky,” he said, “tell Lucy about Lila. How she’s going to go to college.”
“Oh.” Vicky scratched at her neck again; a red streak appeared across it. Then she looked carefully at her fingers. “Yeah. My baby girl is probably going to college next year.” She looked up at Lucy. “Her grades are good and her guidance counselor says she can get her into college with expenses paid. Just like you did, Lucy.”
“Are you serious?” Lucy sat forward. “Vicky, that’s so exciting.”
“I guess so,” Vicky said. She pushed on her bottom lip with her fingers, biting it.
“But it is,” Lucy said.
Vicky took her hand away from her mouth, rubbed it on her pants. “Sure. And then she’ll just go away like you did.”
Pete saw Lucy’s face change, as though she’d been slapped. Then Lucy said, “No, she won’t.”
“Why won’t she?” Vicky tried to rearrange herself on the couch. When Lucy didn’t answer, Vicky said, in a slightly mincing voice, “Because she has a different mother, Vicky. That’s why she won’t. Thank you, Lucy.”
Lucy closed her eyes briefly.
“You know who her guidance counselor is?” Vicky looked back around at Pete. “Patty Nicely. She was the youngest of the Pretty Nicely Girls, remember them?”
Lucy said, “That’s who’s helping get her to college?”
“Yup. ‘Fatty Patty,’ the kids call her. Or they used to, she’s lost some weight,” Vicky said.
“They call Patty Nicely ‘Fatty Patty’?” Lucy frowned at Vicky.
“Oh yeah, sure. You know, they’re kids.” Vicky waited and then she said, “They call me ‘Icky Vicky’ at work.”
“No, they don’t,” Lucy said.
“Yes, they do.”
Pete said, “You never told me that, Vicky. Well, they’re old and they’ve gone dopey-dope in their heads.”
“It’s not the patients. It’s the others who work there. I heard this woman say, two days ago she said this, Here comes Icky Vicky.” And Vicky took her glasses off; tears began to roll down her face.
“Oh, honey,” said Lucy. She moved closer to her sister, she rubbed her knee. “Oh, that’s disgusting. You are not icky, Vicky, you’re—”
“I am so icky, Lucy. Just look at me.” Tears kept coming from Vicky’s eyes. They rolled down over her mouth, with its lipstick.
“You know what?” Lucy said. She stopped rubbing Vicky’s knee and started patting it instead. “Cry away. Honey, just cry your eyes out, it’s okay. My God, do you remember how we were never supposed to cry?”
Pete leaned forward; he said, “Lucy’s right. You just go ahead and cry. No one’s going to cut your clothes up this time.”
Vicky looked over at him. “What did you say?” She wiped at her nose with her bare hand. Lucy brought a tissue from her jacket pocket and handed it to Vicky.
Pete said, “I said, No one is going to cut your clothes up. Never again.”
Vicky said, “What are you talking about?”
Pete said, “Don’t you remember how one day you were here crying and Mommy came home and cut up your clothes?”
“She did?” Lucy said.
“She did?” Vicky was patting the tissue over her face; she patted it lightly on her mouth. “Oh, wait. Oh my God, she did. I’d forgotten about that.” Vicky looked at Lucy, then at Pete; her face without its glasses seemed younger, and bloated. “Why would she do that?” Vicky asked this with wonder.
“Wait,” Lucy said. “Mom cut up your clothes?”
“Yeah.” Vicky nodded slowly. “I’d been crying, I can’t remember why. It had to do with something that had happened at school, and I was just crying and crying—you’re right, Lucy, they just hated for us to cry, but they weren’t home, so I was sitting here crying, and, Pete, you were here—and I was crying so hard I didn’t hear her come in. Oh, I do remember this now.” Vicky waved the tissue in her hand; there were reddish spots on it from her lipstick. “And she came through that door and she said, ‘Stop that noise right now, Vicky,’ but you know, I couldn’t—quite. And she said, ‘I said stop that noise right now,’ and then she went and got her shears from the sewing area and she went in our room—and I just remember hearing the hangers moving, and then it was you, Pete”—Vicky touched the tissue to her face again, turning slightly in Pete’s direction—“who figured out what she was doing, and you went and stood by the door of the room, and then I got up and stood behind you and I screamed, Mommy, don’t, oh, don’t, Mommy! And she just kept cutting up my clothes and tossing the pieces on the floor and on the bed. Then she walked out and went upstairs.” Vicky just sat now, staring at the floor. “Oh my God,” Vicky said. “She hated me—so—much.”
“But she sewed,” Lucy said. “Why in the world would she cut up your clothes?”
“Oh, she sewed them back together the next day. On her machine.” Vicky lifted a hand listlessly. “She just stuck the pieces together and sewed them, so I looked like, I don’t know, I looked like even more of a moron.” Vicky said this, gazing in front of her.
After a long moment, Pete said, still leaning forward in his chair, “Look, you guys, I’ve been thinking about her a lot recently, and here’s what I think: I think she just wasn’t made right.”
His siblings said nothing for a long while. Then Lucy said, “Well, maybe. And then she had Daddy to contend with.” Lucy added, “She was gritty, though.”
“What do you mean?” asked Vicky.
“She had grit. She hung in there.”
“What was she supposed to do? She didn’t have anywhere to go.” Vicky looked at the bottom of her blouse, and tried to tug it down again.
“She could have left us. She’d have made money with her sewing. Just for herself. But she didn’t.” Lucy said this, then pressed her lips together.
“You know what I hated the most?” Vicky glanced at Lucy and Pete, and said almost serenely, “The sex sounds. When Daddy wasn’t walking around twanging his wang, they’d be doing it right up there—” She pointed to the ceiling. “And it made me sick to hear it, the bed shaking, and the sounds he made. I never heard any man make the sounds he made during sex.” She blew her nose. “Boy, try having a normal sex life after all that crap for years.”
Pete said, “I never did. Try, I mean.” His face became hot quickly; oh, he was embarrassed. But Vicky smiled back at him, and he added, “I know what you mean, though. My bedroom was right next to theirs, and jeepers—” He shook his head quickly, more like a shiver. “It was like I was in there with them.”
Vicky said, “Wait. You know what? He made all the sounds; there was never a sound from her.”
Pete had never thought about this before. “Hey, you’re right,” he said. “You’re right. She never did make any sounds.”
“Oh God,” Vicky said, and she sighed. “Oh, the poor—”
“Stop,” Lucy said. “Let’s just stop this. It doesn’t do any good.”
“But it’s true,” said Vicky. “It’s all true, who else are we supposed to talk to about this? Lucy, why don’t you write a story about a mother who cuts up her daughter’s clothes? You want truthful sentences? I mean it. Write about that.”
Lucy was putting her shoes back on. “I don’t want to write that story.” Her voice sounded angry.
Pete said, “And who’d want to read it?”
“I would,” Vicky said.
“I still like to read about the family on the prairie,” Pete said. “Remember that series of books? I have them upstairs.”
“I can’t,” Lucy said. “I can’t.”
“So don’t write it,” Vicky said, with a shrug, “I was just saying— Oh my God, I remember now—”
Lucy stood up. “Stop it,” she said. Her face had two red splotches high on her cheeks. “Stop it,” she repeated. “Just stop it.” She looked at Vicky, then she looked at Pete. She said—and her voice was loud and wobbly—“It was not that bad.” Her voice rose. “No, I mean it.”
Silence hung in the room.
In a few moments, Vicky said calmly, “It was exactly that bad, Lucy.”