Becoming the Butlers Read online

  “Sick?” my father would guess as Mrs. Vasquez swayed back and forth holding her stomach.

  “Maybe she’s pregnant,” I suggested.

  “Then why wouldn’t she stick a cushion under her robe?”

  Mrs. Vasquez moaned.

  “I think she’s hungry, Dad.”

  “Hungry? Hmmm, you may be right, Rachel.”

  Of course Mrs. Vasquez couldn’t tell us if our guess was correct or not, and I was sure my father learned a whole category of words which, if he ever returned to Madrid, would cause him great embarrassment. As for me, I couldn’t watch Johnny Carson again without half expecting a stethoscope to slip out from beneath his tie.

  I wouldn’t have minded my father’s Spanish lessons so much if he hadn’t tried to repair things too. James bought himself a mammoth kit from Sears, with tools that looked more useful for a sixteen-wheeler, a high-grade flashlight that could blind a raccoon, and a thick paperback titled Big Jim’s Fix-It-Yourself Handbook. I didn’t know if he was trying to be George or didn’t trust the new super, a recent Russian immigrant who, according to Mrs. Rosen, was such an idiot that he had nearly electrocuted himself when he tried to plug her broken iron into the wrong socket. My father made the blades of Mrs. Vasquez’s blender whirl again, installed an illegal cable television unscrambler for George Jr., fixed the tire on Luisa’s tricycle, and built a small bookcase out of pine boards for Pilar. His last project, thankfully, was our leaky shower-head, which had come to resemble Niagara Falls. Luckily the apartment had two bathrooms, or we would have burst waiting for my father to finish. He promised he’d only be an hour, but by midnight was drenched by the shower, which was beginning to make painful whining noises as if the pipes were being slowly strangled to death. James decided to call it a night and continue working the next day, but the shower committed suicide in the early morning hours. We woke up to a loud crash—and saw the bathtub porcelain shattered in pieces like a dried lakebed, the broken shower-head surrounded by rusting metal coils. In the end my father paid eight hundred dollars to The Elegant John, Inc. and Big Jim wound up in the trash, which pleased me immensely.

  He was also trying to learn to draw. This was a secret which I accidentally discovered. One night, when I couldn’t bear another one of Mrs. Vasquez’s Spanish specialties, I decided to order-in Chinese. My father usually kept the take-out menus crammed with other junk in his deep desk drawer. I couldn’t find the menu but I did discover a roll of papers bound together with a heavy cord. I quickly untied it, expecting to find legal documents with the Vasquezes as exclusive beneficiaries. At first I thought the sketches were George’s. Although they didn’t resemble his expressionistic style, I couldn’t believe my father, in addition to Spanish and his handyman activities, would also attempt to be an artist. He wasn’t very good, but I could tell he had spent a lot of time erasing and redrawing every line. All this revision made my mother look watery, blurred, like a reflection in a rippling pond. She stood in profile in every scene, her long hair blowing about her shoulders, her arms outstretched as if ready for an embrace. She also wore the same outfit, a long cape with billowing sleeves and, I suppose because my father had trouble drawing feet, her legs stopped abruptly at her ankles. I traced my forefinger over my father’s lines the same way Roja studied her coloring books. The paper felt warm and rough, almost like flesh. On the top of every page was the title: “Elizabeth in the Park,” which confused me because I didn’t see any trees or grass. In the lower corner my father had signed his full name, James Campbell Harris, in large sloping letters: a proud declaration of love.

  “That’s not a take-out menu,” I heard my father say behind me.

  I whirled around, trying to hide the sketches behind my back. My father had been helping Mrs. Vasquez with dinner and brought in with him an odor of smoke and onions. His face was still red from the oven heat and the white apron loosely tied over his hips was splattered with gravy stains. As he lunged for his charcoals he dropped a pan he had been carrying in his right hand.

  “Don’t!” I cried as he wrestled the sketches from my grasp. “They’re good.”

  “No they’re not,” James muttered, tearing the pages in two. “Not good enough. Anyway, what’s the point of saving them? She’ll never come back.”

  I reached out and grabbed my father’s arm, hoping to save at least one drawing. James pulled back so suddenly that I slipped and banged my head against the wall. My left eye throbbed in pain and I suddenly imagined a violet scar blossoming over my brow, exactly the same as my father’s old bruise.

  “I’m sorry, Rachel,” my father gasped. “Are you all right?”

  I swayed unsteadily as the room swirled about in colored streaks like my mother’s spin art. Why couldn’t everything for once be still? My world would never stop revolving. Even the sketches, which my father dropped, seemed to whirl in midair before they drifted downward.

  “Mrs. Rosen was wrong,” James said quietly. “I don’t really want to be George. I don’t want to be anyone. Do you know what Limbo is?”

  I shook my head.

  “Now I don’t mean a low stick you shimmy under on a crowded Caribbean beach. I’m talking about the place for souls barred from heaven, a state of oblivion, according to my dictionary. Well, this is the place where I thought the Vasquezes would bring me. What I strove for was not happiness or unhappiness, but just being. A kind of constant anesthesia, which had to be better than Finlandia. A well-mixed martini can bring Limbo for a couple of hours, but you’ll always be in hell the next morning.”

  “Did you get to Limbo?” I asked.

  “No, I’m still in hell, even without the hangover,” he answered gravely. “Do you know that every time I draw a diagram in class I see Elizabeth’s face? My students must think I’m mad the way I keep gaping at the blackboard. Once, when bisecting an angle, I saw George’s face instead, and started stabbing my notebook with my compass. Those two haunt me everywhere. The token clerk at Seventy-ninth Street has George’s squinty eyes. Suzie Winchester who sits in front row in my ten A.M. Geometry class has Elizabeth’s profile. The Vasquezes all look like George, even Isabel. What did I think I was doing? They’ll have to leave one day. Or maybe I’ll be the one to leave.”

  There was one last sketch my father didn’t destroy. As he turned around I crouched down and grabbed the page to my chest.

  “Put that under your pillow,” my father instructed, “and make a wish. Maybe fairy tales do come true.”

  I gazed down at the sketch I saved. It was barely finished: mostly smudges. My mother looked like a shadow, an impression burned upon a blank wall.

  That Friday I stayed in the library after school, and slipped into the stairway when the librarian began to lock up. When I was convinced there was no one left inside the Winfield Academy, I stole pliers and a hammer from the shop room, and a trash bag from the school’s supply cabinet. The only light in the hallway was a red exit light, and I had trouble making out the numbers on Olivia’s lock. The cleaning woman, a drunk the students called Jenny Gin and Tonic, had broken a glass vial in the Bio lab and the strong chemical odor stung my eyes. Upstairs, on the rooftop gym, a sole basketball player shuffled about with a lumpy-sounding ball. I hammered on Olivia’s lock several times, until the metal latch finally came loose.

  Of course I had been inspired by Nicole’s story about Cecily and the theft of the Cartier watch. But my real motivation was James. No one could help him, and I realized I had better start helping myself. I didn’t really believe that Olivia would be my best friend because I robbed her locker. I wasn’t even sure how I would hide everything and then pretend to discover it and be hero for a day. As my father once said, “Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures.” The theft was an extreme act that would have extreme results. I couldn’t stand floating about in my current state of limbo. Something had to give, and I didn’t mind being the first one to go.

  Olivia’s locker door swung open a few inches and the contents came t
umbling out like a bouquet released from its bow. And what flowers! At least six silk scarves made by Italian designers, one hundred dollars each, were carelessly tossed at the bottom of the locker. On a hook a damp green bathing suit that smelled of chlorine dangled like an African vine next to a baby blue cashmere scarf. In the locker slats were black-and-white postcards of Manhattan, old movie stills: the Woolworth Building at night, the Brooklyn Bridge in a silvery mist. No messages marked these postcards, the address box empty of words and stamps. A warped forty-five of a song called “Dazzled!!!” by Malcolm G. was stored on the top shelf, along with a Plaza Hotel towel and a tube of pearly shampoo, a drop of which I poured in my hand and rubbed between my fingers. On to Olivia’s notebooks, the pages crammed with exams and compositions. One teacher’s remark read: “Excellent, you truly comprehend Conrad’s dualism,” and on a midterm, “A, as always, but were you really trying?” I examined Olivia’s handwriting, delicate and spindly, the letters at times resembling elegant spiders. “Sundays are absolute doom,” she wrote on one notebook page, “because Father can’t smile and lie at the same time.” Crumpled on the floor was a melancholy poem I picked up, unfolded and still can quote:

  Domes of Cathedrals on Riverside Drive.

  The city weeps, the sun never sets

  On alleys slick with blood and sweat,

  dewy with morning.

  Sherman crawls into the East

  Only to be conquered by indifference.

  Still more secrets. Back issues of Tiger Beat magazine hidden inside The History of World Art. This, I suspected, was Olivia’s Achilles’ heel: an utter fascination with Michael J. Fox. The pages that contained his photos looked bleary, as if Olivia’s adoring looks had worn down his features, and there were even penciled-in check marks next to “Michael’s Pet Peeves” to demonstrate Olivia’s concordance. She was so ashamed of these teen magazines that the covers were torn off, the tables of contents crossed out, and hastily filled subscription forms ripped and then stuck back in the binding.

  I reminded myself of my mission, and began to throw the contents of Olivia’s locker into the garbage bag. But I certainly couldn’t just throw them in like refuse, and took too much time planning where to put everything. What I really wanted to do was slip into the dark space of the locker and be enveloped in all that was Olivia: feel the coolness of the silk scarves and hear the sighs of her poem and breathe the almost edible scent that I imagined belonged exclusively to the Butlers—something like chocolate and oranges and cognac, which my father had always described as liquid velvet. Instead I took Olivia’s navy blue pea jacket and slipped the sleeves over my arms, snapping the buttons and turning up the collar. The jacket fit perfectly: not a stitch out of place. I stood straight, cocked my head, and placed my right hand on my hip. In light that dim, someone might even mistake me for Olivia Butler. Someone, perhaps, but not Olivia’s brother.

  When I heard the noise I thought Jenny Gin and Tonic had returned. To his credit, my unexpected visitor tried his utmost to be polite.

  “Hello, that’s not your locker. Excuse me, but what’s going on?”

  Then he saw me in his sister’s coat, and his anger erupted so fast I fell back as if slapped.

  “That’s Olivia’s! How dare you!” He took a deep breath. “I should call the police. They know what to do with people like you.”

  Had it been anyone except Edwin Butler, I would have laughed at his theatrics and ask what the police would do with people like me? But because he was Edwin Butler, I remained silent. He stood before me in a white T-shirt and striped shorts, still panting from his exertions. He smelled, remarkably, like any other boy who had been playing basketball. Although I was amazed to see him, I was also amazed to see him flushed and breathless. He was wet and glowing with sweat. I was so relieved that he was real that I almost wept.

  Why was Edwin Butler playing basketball on the roof at the very hour I decided to burglarize his sister’s locker?

  The coincidence was enough of an answer for me. Not only was I meant to be caught, but caught only by Edwin Butler. No longer the usual anonymous face he scorned, I now had a name and a meaning. Edwin had stared at me not with the usual indifference he allotted to everyone, but with real emotion that practically burned like steam from his eyes.

  Although the evidence was overwhelming (my Hefty bag bulging with Olivia’s possessions, the pliers from the school shop room, Edwin’s eyewitness account), I would never confess to being a thief. Maybe at first my intentions were larcenous. But the moment I opened Olivia Butler’s locker I didn’t so much want to steal, but somehow coalesce with her things. For a few moments I was that damp bathing suit, the beads of pearly shampoo, the cashmere scarf. I felt as whole as I’ve ever been. But try explaining that to your school principal.

  Mr. Gregory was also still at the Winfield Academy, and Edwin marched me downstairs, carefully guarding me as if we were in the middle of a basketball game. “Don’t worry, I’m not wearing my Reeboks,” I joked. His face remained grim, but Edwin didn’t intimidate me anymore. I was a Butler. I knew all of Olivia’s secrets: her Michael J. Fox crush, her subscription to Tiger Beat, her hatred of Sundays, her distrust of her father, and how Sherman was finally conquered by indifference. Even her coat had fit me as if custom-made.

  Edwin went into Mr. Gregory’s office first and I heard the murmuring of low voices. Then Edwin stepped out, and fixed his eyes, as if for inspiration, on a sepia-tinted photograph of Eugene Smith Winfield, the academy’s founder.

  “Mr. Gregory will see you now,” Edwin told me, his voice as punctilious as Miss Layton’s, the school’s secretary.

  I remembered my father describing how during staff meetings he always had the uncomfortable feeling of being stuck in the middle of a giant walnut. As I walked inside the principal’s office I understood exactly what he meant. The wall paneling, desk, bookcase, and chairs were all walnut wood. Even the brown carpet was speckled so as to resemble walnut. At first I didn’t see Mr. Gregory, and looked over my shoulder expecting some sort of practical joke. Then I could have sworn the floor sneezed, and I spotted our school’s principal two feet away, crouched on his knees, examining the corded tassels of the room’s thick brown curtain. He too was dressed in a brown suit with a brown tie and a weathered shirt that once might have been brown but now was faded or bleached to beige. Maybe I couldn’t get my father’s words out of my head, for suddenly Mr. Gregory struck me as looking like some sort of overgrown squirrel.

  “Oh, Rachel, good afternoon!” he exclaimed, still hunched over. My father claimed that Mr. Gregory’s pseudo-British accent was fake and that everyone knew the headmaster hailed from Hoboken, New Jersey.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gregory.” I was still lugging around my Hefty bag crammed with Olivia’s things. Mr. Gregory’s eyes flickered briefly toward my left shoulder, and then, as if horrified at the obvious evidence, concentrated again on that worn curtain tassel.

  “I suppose it’s true then?” he murmured, picking at something that looked like lint.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Why?” He sounded more curious than condemning, and I suppose it was a curious situation. It wasn’t like I had stolen Olivia’s wallet, or mugged her personally in the ladies room. I had rummaged through a school locker, which, for ninety-nine percent of most students, contained junk that even Senegalese merchants wouldn’t sell on Broadway.

  “I thought it would help me,” I told him, deciding to be honest. Why bother to make up a story? I only lied when I needed to protect my father, and this time I was the only one in trouble.

  “You thought stealing another student’s possessions would help you?” Still crouched down, he kind of hopped in a semicircle until he faced me. My school principal now resembled a guinea pig.

  “And it did help me,” I protested.

  Mr. Gregory finally stood up, his knees creaking beneath him. He was well over six feet, and like Jack in the Beanstalk he kept rising and rising. “W
ell you missed your mark if you were hoping to impress them.”

  “But I was hoping to impress them.”

  “Rachel, please be serious! This is a serious matter. I see you have your father’s sarcastic sense of humor.” He walked over and pulled out a chair. “Sit down.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  “You’re not facing a firing squad. I just want to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Why you did this.”

  “I want to become a Butler.”

  “Well…” My answer didn’t seem to faze him. “I suppose that makes sense. But only if you examine it on a superficial level. Did it ever occur to you that being a Butler might not be a field of daisies?”

  “Anyone’s better than me,” I said miserably.

  “I suppose you find your own family lacking.”

  “You could say that.”

  “It’s been a rough year for you and Jim. But you shouldn’t give up. Although your mother’s absent, you two still constitute a whole. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  I shook my head and traced a pattern across the carpet with the tip of my shoe.

  “I really should expel you,” he said, studying me with his fist cupping his chin. “But since your father’s a teacher here, and I understand your home situation, I’ll only give you suspension, let’s say for three weeks. You’ll be allowed to come in and collect your homework and, if necessary, attend class for any exams. I’ll probably get a lot of flack for being so lenient.”