“It’s four weeks,” my mother continuing her campaign.
“Good for it,” I said. I tried to appeal to my father. “You need me, Papa.”
“I always miss you when you’re not here,” he said somewhat absently. “But you should have your adventures.”
“I don’t need adventures.”
“You’re a teenager,” my mother observed. “What teenager wants to stay home with her parents? Honestly, Francie, sometimes I wonder if you are a freak of nature.”
“Freak of nature?” I repeated.
“Nellie,” my father said in his warning voice.
“Are you serious, Mother?”
“Forget it,” she said, as if that was an apology or explanation.
When she played her second card William said, “Hmmm. Why—why on earth would you do that?”
She hissed in his face. “Do you want to see my cards?”
“Easy, old girl, easy now.” He’d been talking that way to her, when necessary, for about a year.
She slapped her hand down, destroying the round. “This is what I’ve been dealt. See? Do you see? Or are you just going to pronounce me a stupid idiot?”
“Or freak,” I said. “Let’s say you’re a freak.”
“Simmer down there, Old Betsy,” William said to her. “Simmer down. It’s all right.”
“You did the only thing you could.” My father supporting his wife.
It was as if my mother hadn’t spoken to me in that way, as if her question, her wonderment about my freakishness, now existed only in my ear, everyone else excusing her.
When the dealer was again William, when he was shuffling the cards something untoward occurred. Possibly my mother had been hypnotized without our knowledge. Or she was having a stroke. Whatever the cause, she began to declaim on the most peculiar subject possible. “I remember,” she said slowly, “when we lived with Aunt Florence in the manor house. And we were trying to have a baby.”
“Oh, please,” I said. We all knew that when my mother was very young and first married she’d lived with the ancient aunt and my father, who at that point was also old, sixteen years Nellie’s senior; none of that was news.
“Florence,” she went on, “used to come into the bathroom to wash her teeth, her dentures. Do you remember, Jim?”
“Let’s play the game,” he said.
She went on, “We were in the bedroom that connects to that bathroom, downstairs, you know, the room that’s Sherwood and Dolly’s now.” She was studying her cards as she spoke. “It was so generous of such an old lady to allow me to live in her house with her nephew. Especially when she’d been living with you already for years, Jimmy, the two of you in your way like a married couple. So generous. I don’t know what I can do here, with this hand. Anyway, I used to have the feeling—it’s crazy, I admit it—but I used to think that the noise of her teeth in the glass, the clinking of those dentures as she brushed them next door, right by our headboard? Was the sound that sperm and egg make as they collide, as they become one.”
William was squinting at her, as if she were difficult to see and hear. I had literally just about thrown up in my mouth. If my father was going to say one thing that made them laugh I was going to ax murder the both of them. Fortunately he looked nearly as disgusted as we felt. He’d even closed his eyes against her for a second. “It’s getting late,” he noted.
Nonetheless, we arranged our cards, trump was called, we began to take the tricks. It occurred to me, it hit me that Nellie Lombard, as grotesque as her little story was, had been speaking in a riddle, and that the riddle was for me. When it came my turn to deal I couldn’t help it. I said, “Why did you bring that up?”
“Bring what up?” my father said.
“I’m talking to Nellie.”
“What?” she said.
“Are you trying to say that our birth was the result of the immaculate conception? Teeth plus egg, the clinking becomes William? Is that it? The big reveal? You were not adopted, kids, but there’s something we need to tell you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said breezily. “I just remember feeling like I was having a baby by all the Lombards and for all the Lombards.”
“Hearts,” William called out, staring at me—this isn’t happening! “Hearts is trump.”
“I…don’t know…what! You are doing,” I said elocutionarily to my mother. I was going to remain at home all summer long to be the good, kind, strong daughter to my father, to be indispensable to him. I was going to do so even if I had been conceived to be a worker bee, a Lombard slave. I said, “I’m not going to Camp Four Rivers, in case you did not understand my earlier comment. I have no interest in the rustic cabins, the bonding, the stupid girls, the stupider boys, the competition for parts, and whatever else. I don’t care if Coral is signed up. Get it through your head that I am not going to Hayward.”