A Study in Sherlock

for having Chinese food brought right to the door with everybody already in pajamas. There was nothing cozier than eating Chinese food with her parents with everyone already in pajamas. But because someone had to go downstairs to fetch it, they never ended up doing it that way. Besides, they seldom ate dinner as a family because her father worked late. He said he couldn’t help being a night owl. Sometimes her mother ate with Sheila; sometimes she drank a glass of wine while Sheila ate dinner by herself. They had a formal dining room, but it was rare for them to eat in there because it was so formal. They were not formal people, her father said. They all preferred the little breakfast bar in the kitchen, which was bright and cheerful.

But everyone else, guests and strangers, loved the dining room with its scary crimson walls and the chandelier that looked like something that might become a monster at night. It’s a beautiful apartment. That’s what everyone said, upon entering. What a beautiful apartment. They praised her parents’ taste. They expressed envy for the bookshelves, for the tiny study that her parents shared, for the floors, which were parquet, which Sheila eventually figured out was not a type of margarine. But whenever her mother led someone down the hall with the bedrooms, she would say apologetically: “The bedrooms are kind of mean.” Sheila felt this made their bedrooms sound much more exciting than they were. They were small and square with such limited closet space that the smallest one, in the middle, had been transformed into a walk-in closet/dressing room. Her father got one side, her mother got the other. Sheila remained stuck with the little stinky one in her room.

The summer she turned eleven, she began to spend a lot of time in the walk-in closet and that was how she found her mother’s deerstalker cap.

“Were you popular?” she asked her mother, twirling the cap on her index finger. “When you were my age?”

“I was kind of in the middle. Not popular, but I had lots of friends.”

“Were you pretty?” Her mother was one of the old mothers at her school and although there were quite a few old mothers, she was one of the old-old mothers.

“I didn’t think so, but I was, actually. I had shiny hair and such a nice smile. When I see photographs of myself from that time, I could kick myself for not realizing how pretty I was. Don’t make the same mistake, Sheila. Whatever age you are, you’ll look back ten years and you would kill to look like that again.”

“I don’t want to look like I’m one years old. I was fat and I had no hair.”

Her mother laughed. “Later, I mean. At thirty, a woman wants to look as she did at twenty, so on and so forth.”

Sheila had shiny hair and she supposed her smile was nice, but that was not enough, not at her school. Things must have been simpler in her mother’s times. Then again, she grew up in Ohio.

Sheila spent entire days in the closet and her babysitter didn’t care. The summer babysitter was old, a woman who didn’t want to go anywhere and had to visit the doctor a lot, which is why there was so much child- care chaos. Sheila found she could hear whatever her parents said in their bedroom, if she crept into the closet late at night after a bathroom run. They talked about her at times. It was neither good nor bad, so her father wasn’t exactly right about eavesdroppers. Her parents were worried about school. They talked about bullies and clicks. Trista’s name came up. Trista was a bully, for sure. She was the worst kind of bully, the kind that had other people do her bullying for her. Her hair was shiny, too. So shiny hair was part of being popular, but it wasn’t the only thing that would make a person popular. In her composition book, Sheila began working on a list of things required for popularity and came up with:

    1) Shiny hair

    2) Nice smile (no braces. lip gloss?)

    3) Good clothes

    4) Being nice to most people but maybe mean to one person

    5) To be continued

She continued to search the walk-in closet. Her father saved everything. Everything! Single cufflinks, keys to forgotten places and key rings with no keys, coasters, old business cards. He had a box of Sheila’s baby clothes, nothing special, yet he kept them. It was embarrassing to see those stupid clothes, especially the Yankees onesie. Girls shouldn’t wear baseball onesies.

But it was in her mother’s jewelry box, the one that Sheila was never, ever supposed to touch, that Sheila found the heavy engraved card with her father’s name and a woman’s name and an address downtown, on Chambers Street. She did not know her father had been in business with a woman named Chloe Beezer. Sheila had never met Chloe Beezer, or heard her father speak of her. The card was pretty, cream-colored and on heavy paper, with a thin green line around their names. Beezer—what an ugly name. A person would have to be very pretty to survive such a name.

There was a photograph clipped to the back. Her father, with a mustache and longer hair, tilted his head toward a woman with blond hair. They were somewhere with palm trees, bright orange drinks in front of them, an orange sky behind them.

“Dad, who was Chloe Beezer?” she asked him on the 1 train, coming back from his office. It was the final week of her summer vacation and the train was hot and smelly.

“How do you know that name?” he asked her.

“I found a card, with her name on it and yours.”

“Where?”

Why did she lie? It was instinctive. Instinctive lying was part of the reason that Sheila was in trouble at school. She took things. She lied about it. But how could one tell the truth about taking things? How could she explain to anyone that Trista’s billfold, which had a pattern of gold swirls and caramel whorls that reminded Sheila of a blond brownie, had seemed magical to her. A talisman, a word she had found in books by E. Nesbit and Edward Eager, writers her father insisted were superior to J. K. Rowling. If she had a billfold like that, she would be powerful. And she was very considerate, which is probably why she got caught: she removed the money and the credit card and the other personal items and put them back in Trista’s purse, taking only the billfold. Trista’s family was rich-rich. A billfold meant nothing to her. She would have a new one in a month or two. Whereas Sheila’s family was comfortable, according to her parents. Except in their dining room, which made them all uncomfortable.

She was not supposed to snoop. But she also was not supposed to go into her mother’s jewelry box, which sat on the vanity that separated her father’s cluttered side of the closet from her mother’s neat, orderly side.

She decided to admit to a smaller crime.

“I found it in a box you had with cufflinks and other old stuff.”

“You shouldn’t be poking around in other people’s things, Sheila.”

“Why? Do you have secrets?”

“I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Do you want me to go in your room and search through your things?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I’ve hidden my composition book. You’ll never find it.” If there was a lesson to be learned from Harriet the Spy, it was to maintain control over one’s diary, not that Sheila’s had anything juicy in it. “Who was Chloe Beezer?”

Her father sighed. “You know, I think, that I was married once before. Before your mother.”

She did know that, in some vague way. It had just never been real to her.

“The card was something she made when we got married and moved in together. We sent it out to our friends. We didn’t have a wedding, so we wanted our friends to know where we had set up house.”

“Was she Beezer-Weiner?”

He laughed, as if this were a ridiculous question. “Chloe? No. No. She wanted no part of Weiner.” He laughed again, but it was a different kind of laugh.

“Did she die?”

“No! What made you think that?”

“I don’t know. Did you get divorced?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It’s an odd thing, Sheila, but I don’t really remember. We married quickly. Perhaps we didn’t think it through. Are you ready for school next week? Don’t we need to make a trip for school supplies?”