“Oh, he’s just showing off. So. You think this neighborhood is great, eh? Let me see. You’ve got the old Jews and the young Israelis north of the park. You’ve got your mafia fledglings along Lefferts. And you’ve got your Puerto Ricans, Colombians, and Indians down on Jamaica. You’ve got some taste, kid.”
Claire didn’t say anything then, because she couldn’t describe what she felt when she saw an Indian woman in a shocking-pink sari gliding past an el train covered with graffiti. She’d have to shoot the scene and show it to her. Claire’s heart swelled when she thought of all the ideas she had for portraying the neighborhood. She’d show the standing-stillness in all the flurry of transition. She’d achieve something true. And then maybe Zinnie wouldn’t look at her with that suspicious, worried face. “Look, Zinnie,” she said, “I want to get one thing straight. No, listen to me. Don’t look off as if you weren’t listening. I just want to tell you that I’m not running off again. Not anywhere. And I won’t have you and Mom and the rest of them *-footing around me as if I were a ghost. When I said I was over Michael’s death, I meant it. Will you tell them that? Will you help me try and make them understand?”
Zinnie pried a perfectly good cuticle up with her teeth and bit it off. “Sure,” she said. She would have said more, but then Stan came back into the kitchen, lilly-legged in his bermuda shorts, and announced that he was heading on up to the woods to see what all the commotion was about.
“Wanna come?” he asked.
Claire shook her head no.
“I was looking out the bathroom window. They’ve got the brass up there,” he tempted Zinnie.
“Okey-doke,” Zinnie agreed.
I’ll not be left out of this, the Mayor thought, and he hoisted his broad beam up on all fours.
Claire wandered around the old house while they were gone, sipping her bowl of coffee, enjoying the dark rooms and the full sun blasting against the screens. She sat up in the dining room, window seat, always her favorite place, and felt the house—just her and the house. This was where she’d curled up as a child and pored through each new issue of National Geographic, struck with wonder at the glossy, important-looking pages alive with color and exotic cultures. This was where it had all begun for her. The tall-ceilinged rooms were littered with dusty books and her father’s homemade cannons. All of these things, she thought, so long in their same old spots that you forgot they were there. She bet nobody in the family ever saw the stained glass window over the pantry anymore. Well, maybe Michaelaen did.
Michaelaen saw a lot of things the others didn’t. He was an intense child, very involved in his four-year-old world of animals and mechanics. Michaelaen seemed to have inherited his grandpa’s love of junkyards. That’s what the two of them would do for fun: visit junkyards and collect “treasure,” odd bits of copper and brass and all sorts of rubble that could only attract little boys and old men. It was a good education for the boy, Stan swore. He was learning the value of real resources, he said. There was some question as to who enjoyed these jaunts to the junkies more, Stan or Michaelaen.
The cellar was so full of their accumulations that a ragged path was all you got when you had to make your way through. Stan and Michaelaen found enough place to do things down there. They would hammer and fiddle and come up the stairs all covered with dirt. Stan would dust his knees off proudly and say, “He’s all boy, that kid.” The only trouble was, he’d say it over and over again, as if he were trying to reassure himself.
“Shut up, Pop, willya?” Zinnie would finally look up from the TV and snap at him. And Michaelaen would busy himself with some toy car, pretending not to understand for fear their feelings would be hurt.
Claire smiled to herself. Six days home and already she knew their ways. Any minute now they’d all be back and full of the news from the park, bubbling and scandalized, each with his or her own private theory, clattering in and out and filling up the now-still rooms.