I hadn’t planned on asking Paul what he’d been doing to her, but he brought it up. On the bike ride home, he was quiet for a long time. Then after a while he started saying, “That girl, that girl …”
So I craned my neck around and said, “What?”
“That girl …”
“Paul, you hurt her.” I felt obliged to say that.
“She fell!”
“You held her.”
“I healed her.”
“Gimme a break.”
By their nature, it came to me, children were freaks. They believed impossible things to suit themselves, thought their fantasies were the center of the world. They were the best kinds of quacks, if that’s what you wanted—pretenders who didn’t know they were pretending at all. That’s what I was thinking as I pedaled Paul home. Rain made the breaks squeal beneath us, made the bike tires drone.
“Gimme a break!” Paul said.
By their nature, kids were also parrots.
6
IN FACT, PAUL AND I DID NOT ALWAYS GET ALONG. We respected each other most of the time, and in general we were pretty good at setting up compromises. I gave Paul an afternoon at the diner eating pie, and in return he gave me an hour on the lake in the canoe. We sat in the back booth of the diner, and I paid from my slowly growing savings, smoothing one of Patra’s ten-dollar bills on the table when we were done. No oily quarters and dimes, no waiting around for change, no small talk with Santa Anna, the slightly bearded waitress.
“What makes pie so good?” Paul asked as we walked out. The sugar had wound him up. He was doing a little jig of ecstasy, hopping from foot to foot, flapping his fingertips.
“It’s in the name,” I said.
“Chocolate?”
“Mousse.” I raised my eyebrows.
Paul looked up at the moose head mounted over the door, antlers wide as a man’s flung-open arms, nostrils big as bowls.
The canoe ride was a tougher sell. He was fussy about it from the beginning. He didn’t want to get his shoes wet getting in, so I waded through the water in my boots, Paul in my arms, and set him down on the hull near the prow. This seemed more stable than getting him to perch on the seat. Then I gave him his pretzels and a mildewed life vest to sit on, sultan-style. I told him to stay still as I paddled: don’t rock back and forth, just look straight ahead. That day the water was calm and black, absorbing each dip of the paddle. Paul got so bored he fell asleep. Head down, arms crossed over the portage pads, water clunk-clunking beneath us. I had to carry him back to the house with his legs wrapped around my waist like a baby. I had to leave the canoe half-beached in the rocks, where it could have been carried away if the wind picked up. I didn’t have a free hand to drag it.
And even then, he was whiny in my arms. Fighting me and refusing to be put down. Going, “Stop it, stop it, Linda.” As if I had been tormenting him with the pleasure of a canoe ride. With the gift of a perfect day.
I’m not saying he was especially difficult to manage. But he did have a ferocious streak; somewhere in him there was a sharp line drawn between order and chaos. He did not tolerate, for instance, any break in his routine. If occasionally I lingered after I brought him back—if Patra laid out an extra plate and showed me how to whisk oil and lemon for a dressing—Paul would grow increasingly clingy. Possessive. All through dinner, he’d beg to sit in Patra’s lap, and by the end he’d work his way up and nuzzle her neck. She’d fork lettuce into her mouth with one hand, pet his blond hair with the other.
There was one night in particular. Paul was whiny, and Patra was casting about for something other than trains and bath time to talk about. I remember how she pushed back her bowl, set her chin in her palm and pointed herself at me.
“O-kay, Linda,” she said. There was something unsettled about her that night, a frenzy of tiny movements in the skin around her eyes. “Tell me. You’re one of those girls who wants to raise horses or something, be a vet, when she grows up. I can tell. I’m right, aren’t I? That’s what you want to be.”
I wasn’t one of those girls, actually. I didn’t think much about the future, but when I did, all I could come up with was the weird image of a semitruck, white and floating down the highway. Of course I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t say truck driver, so to stall I looked across the table at Paul, who was inching from his chair to the floor.
Singing: “I want to be a phy-sic-ist. I want to be a phy-sic-ist.”
Patra was just teasing, though, I could tell. She didn’t really care what I said, as long as I played along. She wanted something to do before clearing the table, before coaxing Paul toward bed. A distraction before the husband called.
“I could be a vet,” I said, offering myself up. “Sure.”