“Why?”
“Because they get dirty, Belle. All that spray. It may look faraway, but it finds its way here, trust me.” I look at Tad. His beautiful face so earnest, so shadowless. He reminds me of a golden retriever. I picture my mother patting his golden head. Tad barking happily.
“I see.”
I walk over to the breakfast table by the window but I don’t look out, won’t look out. I sit with my back to the glass, staring down at the table. I can feel Tad staring at me, and heat floods my cheeks like I’m a child again. As a child, I’d always find men in the kitchen in the morning. Making her coffee. Breakfast in bed. Well, hello there, kiddo, they’d say when they saw me staring up at them from the kitchen doorway. Mirabelle, am I right? I remember I said nothing. Neither confirmed nor denied this. Just stood there in my dumb little nightgown patterned with pink bunnies, clutching my stuffed white rabbit by its foot.
Sometimes the men were wearing just boxers, which embarrassed me. All that visible, sculpted flesh. All that hair on their legs, sometimes chests and backs. Some of them were ugly. Little hedgehog men. Some were old and withered, reminding me of toads. Their liver-spotted skin lifting ghoulishly upward whenever they smiled. Mostly, though, they looked like men from the soap operas Grand-Maman watched in her rocking chair in the dark while eating religieuse. The men had those kinds of chiseled bones, those penetrating eyes. I would watch the soaps on Grand-Maman’s beige bed, lying on my back and hanging off the bed’s edge, looking at the television screen upside down, my head filling with blood. That looks like Jake, I might say, pointing at the screen.
Jake, c’est qui? Grand-Maman would ask. Speaking to me in French like Mother never did.
Un ami de Maman, I’d say, staring at the screen.
And Grand-Maman would snort. Wolf down another pastry. Un ami, she said. Shaking her head of undyed white hair. She’d disapproved of my father, too, of course. But at least my father had manners, Grand-Maman said. Even if he hadn’t been a Catholic. Always so very polite, respectful. Brought her what she called those oriental pastries and gold trinkets whenever he visited. The pastries were far too sweet for her taste and the trinkets were tawdry, of course, but the gesture was something. Whenever Grand-Maman talked about my father, I’d have a dim flash of a tall, dark man with an afro standing in her front doorway, sweating and smiling and bowing his head. A hairy hand engulfing mine, the cave of it hot and dry. How our skins, side by side, looked like different gradients on a single scale, his fingers ringed with the same gold that encircled my wrist in a slim chain. A soft male voice speaking a broken, heavily accented French to an unsmiling woman dressed head to toe in crackling black lace. No, Grand-Maman always conceded, my father, god rest his soul, was nothing like Mother’s gentleman friends.
Sometimes the men I met in Mother’s kitchen were fully dressed in suits or polo shirts and jeans. Wearing whatever they’d worn the night before when they knocked on our front door. One morning I found one of them wearing her red silk robe as he made her espresso, the robe I’m wearing now, in fact.
My father bought her that, I screamed at him from the doorway of the kitchen. You can’t wear that. And I burst into tears.
What’s going on here? Mother said, coming into the kitchen. Clip-clopping into my nightmare like she was walking on air. Looking lazy and oblivious. So beautiful, she hurt my eyes. Everything seemed like it belonged to her. The morning light, the blue sky. Everything okay, Sunshine? Why the long face?
Oh, we’re fine, the man said, winking at me like we were in on something together. We were just getting acquainted, weren’t we, my dear?
And he smiled at me like he hated me. I didn’t know what to do. I nodded yes though I hated him, whoever he was. I was rewarded with a flash of his white teeth. And Mother smiled like how lovely it had all worked itself out in her favor. Oh good. Chin up, then, Sunshine. Patting my cheek. No more long face. What do we always say? And she did an impression of me. Folded her arms tightly in front of her chest. Stuck out her lower lip in a pout. My face will freeze that way, I said. That’s ri-ight, she’d sing, lighting a cigarette and winking at the man. I remember I hated her, too, in that moment. I recall the hate coursing through my little body. And then? Black after that. I’ve reached the edge of this memory. Can’t go any further into its dark wood.
“How about some coffee?” Tad says softly now.
Though I don’t nod, Tad pours some from a French press. Tears threaten to fill my eyes as I sip. At what? The kindness of Tad? The richness of the coffee? The absurdity of being a grown woman tended to by my mother’s lover? Or perhaps just the remnants of the Revitalizing Eye Formula that can cause watering long after applied, and no matter how carefully applied. It happens, Marva says, even with the most sophisticated formulas. It is their nature to run.
I watch Tad pad into the kitchen and start to make what I presume is breakfast. “You really don’t—”
“Happy to,” Tad says. “You’re exhausted, I’m sure. After a long night of packing.”
I look at the opened basement box from the shop sitting in the middle of the living room, which is as far as I got yesterday before I put on those red shoes. Now Anjelica is sitting on top of the mound of dolls, yawning.
“And you’ve got another big day today, I’m sure. Need your protein.”
I watch his back for a while, stupefied. He pulls a frying pan from the cupboard. Spatula from a drawer. Eggs, berries, and greens from the fridge. He tips the fruits and greens into Mother’s Vitamix like he’s done it a thousand times before. It roars to life with the push of a button.
“You really know your way around,” I say to his back, over the roar.
He goes still. Then he turns and grins. “Yup,” he shouts at me. Winks. I drink the coffee. It’s in a bowl that says café au lait on it in five hundred different fonts. I remember Mother’s look of hurt the last time I visited, when I refused the café au lait she’d made for me in this very bowl. Since when did you switch to black coffee?
Since now, I said. And she gaped at me like I’d slapped her.
I don’t understand why you’re freaking out, I said. It’s just coffee. I looked at her over the untouched bowl. She’d given it a mountain of foam, shaved chocolate curls into it just like I’d loved as a teenager.
Just tell me it isn’t some SKIN thing, she muttered at last, clearing the bowl away.
It’s not, I lied.
Never mind, she said, holding a hand up. What else should I expect, right?
Now Tad sets a plate proudly before me. Two sunny-side up eggs that regard me like eyes. A vegan bacon strip for a mouth. Strawberry nose. Beside it, a smoothie so blue-green it looks radioactive.
“That’s the spirulina and blueberries,” Tad says. It’s the exact smoothie I made for myself when I was here, the one Mother mocked and called my skin sludge.
“Where did you learn to make this?” I say, pointing to the smoothie.
“Oh, your mother taught me a while ago. This was her favorite.”
“Her favorite?”
“She had it every morning when she remembered. With two scoops of this stuff too.” And he holds out the blue tub of collagen powder that I left here, that she wrinkled her nose at. You’re drinking BONE gelatin now?
“What’s wrong?” Tad asks me.
“Nothing,” I murmur at the eggs. He pats me on the back gently like he’s my father. This shirtless man who is at least five years younger than I am. I stare at the eggy eyes, the leering bacon mouth. One of the yolks is oozing now like it’s weeping.
“Tad? What would you say my mother’s mental state was?”
“That’s a good question,” Tad says. He thinks for a while, scratches his neck. “Overall, I’d say it was… great.”
“Great. Really?”
“Sure. I mean, she was really upbeat. Sunny-side up,” he says, looking at my weeping eggs. “Always.”