David just could not make himself do it. He put down his brush. “Primrose, are you
sure
?”
She looked down from the roof. “If you ask me that one more time.”
“But it feels so weird.”
“You’re going to
look
weird with a white face in about two seconds.”
“But who ever heard of a bedroom without windows? You have to have at least one.”
“Why? So the egg throwers can look in at me?”
“So you can look out.”
“There’s nothing to look out
at.
Paint.”
It had been hard enough to paint the side windows. But the last remaining window? The most important window of all?
Primrose thumped across the roof on her knees and with an angry swat left a three-foot track of Buten’s white primer across the front windshield. “There go your excuses,” she growled. “Now finish it.”
Reluctantly, David took up his brush and, standing on a chair, began painting the windshield. The last thing he saw inside before the last brushstroke was the propped-up picture on Primrose’s dresser. He had wanted to ask his father about it, but he would not be home for days, and David did not have the patience to wait. So he had resorted to his grandmother.
First he asked her if she knew that picture frames were sold with people’s pictures already in them. His grandmother, who was snipping the stems of flowers from the backyard, simply stared at him for a moment, shocked — and overjoyed — that he would ask her a question. She quickly recovered and said yes, she knew that. David walked away. If he had to speak to her, at least he would do it in pieces, and if possible at her inconvenience.
Later he caught her as she was talking on the phone. “Why do they do it?” he said.
“Just a second,” she said into the phone, not at all irritably, and cupped her hand over the receiver. “Do what, David?”
“Put pictures in the frames.”
“So they can give the customer an idea how their own picture would look in the frame.”
She was heading out the door for her evening walk when he asked what kind of people they used for those pictures. “Oh, usually models or movie stars,” she said. She waited at the door, her expression saying,
I like you talking to me.
Please ask me more
.
As she watched her favorite TV show that night, he thrust the picture at her. “Know who this is?”
She hesitated, then dared to take it from his hand. She lowered the volume with the remote control. She nodded, smiling. “This is Clark Gable. He was a movie star many years ago.”
He took the picture back. It bugged him that he could not annoy her. “How old is he?”
“Oh, he died some time ago. If he were living, I guess he’d be in his nineties, maybe older.”
“His name’s not Bob?
“Bob?” She stared at the picture. “No, I’m sure it’s Clark Gable. He was known as the ‘King of the Movies.’ ”
And not Primrose’s father,
David had fully realized in bed that night.
Primrose thinks he’s her father — but he’s not. She’s wrong.
It took them most of the day to lay a primer and final coat. Nothing on the outside showed that wasn’t white: wheel stumps, windows, fenders, everything.
“Looks dumb,” said David.
“It won’t,” said Primrose. “It’s nowhere near . . . uh-oh.” She was looking toward the street. A long, chromey car was pulling up to the house. A lady in black skintight pants got out, followed by a small, yipping, long-haired brown-and-yellow dog. The lady pointed to the front yard, which was indistinguishable from the dirt and gravel driveway. “Poop here, Mimi,” she said. Mimi pooped, and the two of them went to the front door. The dog looked at Primrose and David, the lady did not. The dog yipped. They entered the house.
Primrose picked up a paint stirrer, walked over to Mimi’s warm sculpture, lifted it carefully from the dirt, and deposited it on the backseat floor of the long car. “C’mon,” she said. “Wait’ll you see this.”
She led him (by the hand, to David’s surprise) around the house — “Shhh . . . tiptoe” — and in the back door. At the drapery wall to the reading room, she knelt and pulled him down. She drew the drape aside an inch or two.
Madame Dufee, Mimi the dog, and the black-legged lady were sitting on the rug. Madame Dufee had one of Mimi’s paws in her hand. She appeared to be intently studying the paw. She began to nod. “Yes . . . yes . . . I see wonderful things. A long and happy life.” The dog yipped.
Primrose got up, no longer trying to be quiet, said aloud, “You believe it?” and went out the back door.
They sat in the van, the doors left open as they had been all during the painting. “I don’t know who’s worse,” said Primrose, “my mother or that weasel lady.”
“She came before?” said David.
“Yeah. She comes a couple times a year. First time she came she had a different dog. Guess it didn’t have such a long and happy life after all.” Primrose lay back and stared at the ceiling. She balled her fists and pounded the floor. “Damn!” She jumped up. She swatted her
House Beautiful
s and sent them flying like paper ducks. “Why can’t I just have a nice, normal mother like everybody else?” She stared at David, yet seemed unaware of the irony of her question. “A mother that cooks dinner. That takes me places. That buys me stuff. Hah!” Her laugh was cold.
“Those rings on her feet you saw? Know where she got them? From
me
. I found them. I was going to sell them at the flea market. It’s everything. Clothes. Combs. Hah — the stupid
teddy
bear?” She rammed her thumb into her chest. “Mine!” She flung herself outside, ranting. “
She
takes
my
stuff. My mother. Who’s the
daughter
around here anyway?
I’m
supposed to take
her
stuff!”
She stomped twice around the van, then came back in. “You know what’s funny? You know what’s
really
funny?”
David, wide-eyed, shook his head. “I’ll tell you what’s really funny. She” — she pointed out the door — “she tells everybody the same thing. ‘I see a long and happy life.’ Doesn’t matter who. You could be ready to croak any minute. ‘A long and happy life.’ A lobster heading for the pot. ‘A long and happy life.’ ”
She kept saying it in a funny way, her head wobbling like a puppet’s, and David could not keep a laugh gob from popping out. Primrose didn’t seem to notice. “Well, while she’s telling everybody else what a long and happy life they’re gonna have, what kind of a life am
I
having? Huh? What about
my
future? Huh? I’ll tell you what.”
She held out her hand. She pretended to trace lines on the palm. “Ah, yes, here we are. I see . . . I see . . . a short and crappy life.” She gurgled up some spit, reared back, and sent a hocker flying out the door. “Ptoo!
That’s
what
I
get!”
She left the car again. She was pacing, flinging her arms, kicking stones. “She’s nutso. A crackpot. Like that nutcake waving at cars all day.” She bent over and flapped her arm goofily at the horizon. As she stomped around the van, David tracked her passing one door, then the other. “I want —” She came back in. “You saw me at the library, remember?”
David nodded.
“You know why I was there? Huh?”
David shook his head.
“I was there because I never went to sleep with my mother reading to me.” She flopped onto the beanbag chair. “Did you?”
David nodded.
“Right. So did everybody else — except me. I try it a couple times every summer. I go to Summer Story Time. I close my eyes. I try to pretend the voice is my mother’s. But it never works. I just keep hearing the story and hearing the story and I never get to sleep.” She snapped her face away from him. She slumped in the beanbag chair.
In his mind David heard the old familiar words: “Mike Mulligan had a steam shovel, a beautiful red steam shovel. Her name was Mary Anne. . . .” How those words used to spin the drowsies about him night after night when he was little. Even now it tickled him that a steam shovel had a girl’s name. He felt guilty for having such a warm memory in the presence of Primrose’s pain. He wished he could make her feel better, but he could not think of anything to say.
She was subdued now, dreamy. She reached for the framed portrait. She stared for a long time at the picture in her lap, and David understood that a great and terrible secret had fallen to him. He had been given custody of Primrose’s dream, her heart. He understood that he could not tell her that he knew the truth. Not ever.
For two full weeks Margaret Limpert wrestled with the question: Should she or should she not ask David to go with her to Midsummer Night’s Scream?
Though she knew that grandmothers were welcome, it annoyed her that the annual scary story night at the library was billed as a parent and child event. For that matter, life itself was billed as a parent-child event: grandparents were not exactly banned, but neither were they invited. They were allowed. Grandparents were substitutes, stand-ins, expected to step in and play a role to perfection when the star was ill.
But what happened when the star was more than ill?
When her son’s wife had died, Margaret Limpert had grieved as long and deeply as anyone. She had loved Carolyn as her own flesh and blood, and when David and his father came to live in her house, David became her new son in her mind and heart.
It didn’t take him long to set her straight.
From the minute he arrived, he had been grumpy and silent and even mean with her. She was not even allowed to call him Davey. She thought she understood. He had lost his mother. He resented another person taking her place. Margaret backed off. Gave him his space, as the saying went.
But how much space can you give to some one you live with? Someone you love? Was she supposed to let him go out in the cold without his gloves? Was she supposed to send him off to school without pointing out that his fly was open? She gave him what space she could, but matters only got worse.
Their relationship came to be symbolized by a carrot. She left a fresh one, washed and peeled, next to his peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch each day. She was careful not to hound him about it. Only once did she mention that carrots were good for him, they supply vitamin A, and, as her own mother had told her time and again, they help one to see in the dark. The daily carrot became her last stand — one small, pitiful, final attempt to bond with her grandson. He never took a bite.
Frustrated, she worked up her nerve for a showdown. She said to him at lunch one day, “We used to have such good times together.”
He went on munching his peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The carrot, as usual, lay untouched on the table.
“David?”
Munching. As if she weren’t there.
She went away in tears.
Two days later, out of the blue during lunch, an answer arrived: “You were Nana then.”
She stiffened. She stood in front of him, looking down on the top of his head, the brown hair she once loved to muss. “
Then?
I still
am
Nana.”
“No.”
“No?” Something delicate inside her fell from an edge and shattered. She could not keep the tremble from her voice. “What am I now?”
He did not reply. He got up and left the kitchen. A half-eaten sandwich lay on his plate. Sticking up out of the bread, like an orange dagger, was the uneaten carrot.
Unwilling to add to her son’s burden, she kept these things to herself. She bit her lip and counted to ten and reminded herself, he’s only a little boy, only a little boy.
So it went for months, and she thought it pointless to even think about going to Midsummer Night’s Scream. But then, that one night, she had heard him laughing in his room. “Something funny on TV,” he had said, quite pleasantly. And now more recently: all these questions about the Clark Gable picture. Little signs that he was thawing, inching back to his old self. She took courage. She dared to hope it could change.
She chose the same setting as before: the kitchen, lunch. Again he was having peanut butter and jelly. Her nerves were quaking like a girl’s. She asked if he would like to go with her to Midsummer Night’s Scream.
He said no.
Primrose would have swallowed spiders before admitting it, but there was at least one way in which she was like her mother: she enjoyed pretending. Specifically, she enjoyed pretending to be somebody she really wasn’t.
She had not done so since Easter morning, when she imitated a dead body in the leaves. Now another chance had come her way. It had begun with a poster she and David had seen at the 7-Eleven checkout counter. It told about the library’s Midsummer Night’s Scream.
Their first reaction was: “Let’s go!” Then Primrose noticed it said “Parent-Child,” and David said, “Oh.”
Days later David told her his grandmother had asked him to go with her, and he had said no.
“You’re not the only one,” said Primrose. “It’s a problem for me too.”
“What do you mean?” said David.
“I mean I’m a kid too. How am I s’pposed get in without
my
mother?”
“So ask her to go with you.”
“Yeah, right.”
Primrose was silent. As she stared at him, a faint smile appeared.
“What?” he said.
“So who says I have to go as the
kid
?”
David stared at her. She could see her meaning sink in. He said nothing. She didn’t press it.
Next day she said, “So, what do you think? Me going as a mother?”
He shrugged.
She thought about it. He wasn’t saying yes, but he wasn’t saying no either. That put Primrose ahead of his grandmother. She knew deep down he wanted to go. She also knew that out of respect for his mother she shouldn’t get too pushy about it.
And then she found herself in a thrift shop, flipping through ladies’ clothes, picturing herself. Asking herself: Could I really pull it off?
She could not resist. She bought the clothes. That night she put them on, along with jewelry, makeup, and the final touch: her mother’s blonde Madame Dufee wig. She practiced lowering her voice, standing, walking, sitting, waving (“Hi, Mabel!”), laughing, sipping tea. She dressed herself up and tried a test run to 7-Eleven. The girl behind the counter didn’t say anything, didn’t look at her funny. She thought about trying it on Refrigerator John, but chickened out.
The plan was to keep it out of David’s hands. Spring it on him. Let him see her in her mommy outfit, get used to it, see it was no big deal.
So that’s what she did the following day. When he came over, she met him at the doorway with the outfit on. She posed. “What do you think?”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
She kept the outfit on while they finished the paint job on the van — white with blue trim on the outside, bright green inside.
A couple of times, stirring paint, she mentioned nonchalantly that as long as she had the outfit, well heck, she might as well use it and go to Midsummer Night’s Scream. By herself if need be. What were they going to do, kick her out because she — a mother — showed up without a kid?
“I know you’re not going,” she said nonchalantly, stirring paint, “but just to let you know, I’ll prob’ly have to walk past your house Wednesday night on my way to the library. Prob’ly about eight o’clock.” She watched him out of the corner of her eye. He went on painting. He said nothing. He did not seem to have heard.
On Wednesday night, at quarter till eight, he was waiting in front of his house.