back into a glittering barrette. You’re biting your lip.
“Lovely,” Charles says, and you look pleased. You dressed up for him, after all.
You explain that you’re sorry that your friend Bethenny couldn’t come. She had a dance recital and besides, she was too chicken to sneak out of the house. Not like you.
I bet you met Charles the way he always meets girls. He hangs around the mall just like he used to when he was alive. Back then, he wore skinny ties and listened to new wave. He’s excited that skinny ties are back. See? He’s wearing one tonight.
You look over at me nervously. You probably think I’m too young to drink the bottle of wine you stole from your parents. You think I’m not going to be any fun.
Or maybe you’re just wondering what happened to the rest of the guests.
When I smile at you, you look away uneasily. That just makes me smile wider.
When I was a littler girl than I am now, there was this boy who would always hang around. One day he was over at the house annoying me (he would do this thing where he put his finger on my chin and asked me, “What’s this?” and when I looked down, he would bop me in the nose and laugh), and I realized the cupboard had a package of almond-flavored tea in it.
Since this was back in the eighties, cyanide was in the news a lot. We all knew it tasted like almonds. It was a pretty simple thing to make us mugs of tea — mine, plain, his, the almond-flavored kind.
Then I started telling him how sorry I was that I’d poisoned him. I kept it up until he started crying. Then I kept it up some more.
Our dinner parties always remind me of how much fun that was.
Charles pulls out your chair and that seems to reassure you that things are going just the way you thought they would. You see a pair of teenagers, dressed up in their church clothes, using their parents’ good china to have a dinner party in the middle of the night.
A grown-up party, with candles burning brightly in silver candlesticks and glass stemware and napkins folded into the shape of swans. Charles pours from the bottle of wine he’s already decanted an hour ago.
You take a big sip. That’s the first strike against you. Clearly you have no idea what to do with good wine — how to catch its scent, how to swirl it around the glass to see the color. You glug it like you’re washing down a handful of pills.
You put the glass down with a bang on the table. I jump. “That was great!” you say. There’s lipstick smeared on your teeth.
Charles looks over at me. I frown at him. Disapproving. He could have done better, my look says.
Charles gets up. “I’ll get the first course.”
Silence falls between us as soon as he’s out of the room. I don’t mind. I can be silent for hours. But you’re not used to it. I see you squirm in your chair. Put your hands up to fiddle with your barrettes, unclasp them, close them again. Fiddling. You say, “So you’re Charles’s little sister, huh? How old are you, anyway?”
“Fourteen,” I lie. I try to keep the bitterness out of my voice, because there is nothing worse than a disagreeable hostess, but it’s hard. Charles is nearly grown, old enough to pass for an adult, while I am struggling to pass for fourteen.
With your flat chest and wide eyes, you look fairly young yourself. Another strike against you.
Charles comes back a moment later with bowls of soup. He places yours down first. That’s proper. He’s turning into a real gentleman, Mr. DuChamp would say.
“Are your parents on a trip?” you say. “They must really trust you to leave you here alone.”
“They trust Charles,” I say with a sly smile.
That makes you smile at Charles, too, entrusted to take care of his little sister. And it makes me think of my parents, down in the dirt basement, buried six feet under with pennies in the sockets of their eyes.
Mr. DuChamp said that that was so they could pay the ferryman to take them to the shores of the dead. Mr. DuChamp thought of everything.
You pick up your spoon and dig it into the soup like you’re scooping out a melon. I am fairly sure that when you do start eating, you will make slurping sounds.
You do. Strike three. I look over at Charles with my eyebrows up, but he is ignoring me.
“So,” you say, around your soup, “did Charles tell you where we met?”
I shake my head, although I know. Of course I know. It’s always the same. I can’t imagine why you think I’d be interested. Mr. DuChamp always used to say that guests should never talk about themselves. They should make polite conversation on topics of interest to everyone.
“It was at a concert.” You say the name of a band. A band I’ve never heard of.
“They were okay,” said Charles, “but
Only the fact that it would be a massive breach of etiquette prevents me from making a gagging sound.
You both get into a long, dull conversation weighing the merits of Ladyhawke, Franz Ferdinand, Le Tigre, the Faint, and the Killers. Charles forgets himself so far as to exclaim how happy he is that Devo are making another album. Your blank stare is warning enough for him to clear his throat and suggest that you would like more wine.
You would. In fact, you drink it so fast that he pours yet another glassful. A fine bright color has come into your cheeks. Your eyes shine. I doubt you have ever looked lovelier.
Mr. DuChamp always used to say that appearances weren’t everything. He said that the way a woman carried herself, the way she spoke, and the perfection of her manners were more important than how red her lips and cheeks were, or how shining her eyes. “Looks fade,” he said, “except, of course, in our case.” He would raise a glass to me. “‘Age cannot wither her,’” he would say, “‘nor custom stale her infinite variety.’”
Whatever that meant.
I lift the soup spoon to my mouth, smile, and lower it again. It was Mr. DuChamp who taught me how to pretend that I was eating, how gestures and laughter distracted your guests so that they’d never notice you didn’t take a bite of food.
Mr. DuChamp taught us lots of things. He taught Charles to stand up when a lady entered the room, and how to take a lady’s coat. He told me never to refer to an adult by his or her first name and to sit with my legs uncrossed, always. He didn’t like pants and didn’t approve of girls wearing them. He taught us to be punctual for all social engagements, even though once he moved in with us, the only social engagements we ever had were with him.
When he first came, it was horrible. I woke in the middle of the night because I heard something downstairs. I thought it was my parents fighting — they fought a lot: about the house, which always needed repairs, about her habit of hiding booze and pills, about girls in the office who called him on the weekends. I padded down to the kitchen in my nightgown to see the new Corian countertops splashed with blood.
Mom was on the floor with a strange man hunched over her. All I could see of Dad was his foot sticking out from behind the island.
I must have gasped. Mr. DuChamp looked up. The lower half of his face was red.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”
I made it all the way to the stairs before he caught me.
Charles clears our soup bowls and returns carrying the main course. It’s lasagna, which is the only thing I know how to cook. I know Mr. DuChamp would say I ought to learn more elegant cooking: how to make pate, clear soups, coq au vin, lamb stuffed with raisins and figs, maybe in a sweet plum sauce. But it’s hard to learn when you don’t have much money for ingredients and can’t taste what you’ve made.
The lasagna is a little burned around the edges, but I don’t think you’ll care. You’re too tipsy, and anyway, hardly anyone makes it through the main course.
As you dig into your food, I wonder if you notice that there are heavy curtains across all the windows here and that they are thick with dust. I wonder if you notice the strange scratch marks on the floor. I wonder if you
