I See You
Other than worrying I’d never need to open the box of Tampax in the bottom of my top drawer, life felt less stressful than I could ever remember.
I felt no pang of homesickness for my parents or my life back home.
I didn’t miss the sound of the vodka bottle hitting the trash bin in the night, or my mother’s silent death-ray looks when she found it there in the morning.
In the days since I’d been at Wonderland, my parents hadn’t called. This was good news.
When I woke up in my little bed under the skylight to the sound of Forrest down in the kitchen mixing the batter for pancakes, or the smell of French toast on the griddle, I couldn’t believe how lucky I was just being in this place.
Every night, after I did my sit-ups and practiced my pretend tennis serve in the mirror with the stolen Wilson Number Three ball, I said it all over again in my journal.
June was going by fast. Eighty-one days remained in my Wonderland summer. Eighty-one more days I got to spend in the company of Forrest Emerson.
“Earth to Frances,” Forrest said. We had finished our breakfast. The two of us had gone over our typewritten instructions for the day from Regina.
We were just sitting there—Forrest filling the day-of-the-week compartments of Regina’s pillbox, me off in that other world I went to sometimes, the one in my head.
It was an odd thing, but at random moments, I’d find myself thinking about tennis, picturing myself out on the court, with Forrest on the other side of the net.
I could hear the sound of Jilly’s Teddy Ruxpin upstairs, reciting the line that emanated from his furry stomach if you pushed the button and the batteries hadn’t given out yet: “Can you be my special friend?”
Forrest snapped the pillbox shut. Mission accomplished. Soon enough Regina would have more jobs for him. “Where are you?” Forrest said to me.
“I was thinking about something,” I said. I didn’t add, thinking about him.
Of the two of them, Regina and Forrest, the one who mattered to me was always Forrest—he, the one who saw me for the girl I was; he, the one who offered attention, affection, tenderness, and what felt to me like the first real love anyone had ever shown me.
In my nighttime life, it was Forrest who occupied my brain.
But in the daylight hours, with the exception of those breakfasts Forrest and I shared, it was Regina who kept an eye out for me.
Forrest would promise a waterskiing lesson. Had done so a number of times, in fact. And no doubt he meant to make good on his promise. He just wasn’t all that reliable.
Cool and detached as she invariably seemed, Regina was the one who made sure I put on sunscreen.
It was Regina who asked me—in one of her notes—whether I’d had a tetanus shot and made an appointment for me to get one.
Last summer I found a nail sticking out at the dock, she had typed, on one of her notes, early on.
We don’t want you ending up with lockjaw.
It was Regina, not Forrest, who had remembered my birthday every September for as long as I could remember—even the year my own parents forgot.
Though the date fell just after Labor Day—the week following my family’s annual visit to Maine and her own children’s return to school in Boston—Regina never failed to put a package in the mail for me.
She sent the strangest, most random-seeming gifts, but they had a certain unexpected magic to them.
One year my present was a hand-carved owl and a book of poems by Emily Dickinson.
She sent an amaryllis bulb, a book about dolphins, a pair of fishnet stockings.
I was ten years old, and my mother called the gift ridiculous and inappropriate, but I loved them.
One time—I doubt I was older than six—an extremely heavy box arrived at our apartment, containing a block of clay and a card with just two words: Make something.
Last year, she’d sent a vinyl recording of a singer I’d never heard of, named Maria Callas. This, at an age when I and every girl I knew was listening to Madonna.
You seem like someone who would understand what makes Maria Callas so different from everyone else, Regina had written in the note that accompanied the record. I had no idea how she came to this conclusion. Those times we visited, Regina and I barely spoke.
And if you don’t understand yet, you will, she’d written. Once you get a little more life under your belt.
It was Regina who, on one of my family’s visits a few summers earlier, had rented a VCR tape of a French movie about a young boy growing up in Paris, who was misunderstood by his parents and then his teachers, accused of crimes he did not commit, and sent to juvenile detention.
What other adult would show The 400 Blows to a nine-year-old, just barely old enough to read the subtitles?
“Frances will like this one,” she’d said to the others, who decided they’d rather sit outside on the patio with their gin and tonics than watch with the two of us.
She was right, of course. I knew what it was like to be that boy in the movie.
Here was an odd thing about Regina and her gifts to me. As much time and thought as she appeared to give to considering what I might like and what it was I might want or need that I didn’t have, she never seemed that interested in her own children.
One night when I was in the living room, reading my Stephen King book—Regina on the opposite couch with her knitting—Jilly came bouncing into the room with a medal around her neck. She’d won a prize at sailing camp that day. She wanted to show it to her mother.
The way Regina looked at her, it was almost as if she were watching through one-way glass. She took in the sight of her daughter, twirling her plastic medal, but said nothing. When Jilly landed in her lap, I saw her wince.
A person might have thought that Forrest would have appeared irritated or resentful, witnessing his wife’s strange, distant, and downright cold behavior toward just about everyone around her.
It wouldn’t have seemed surprising if he’d grown distant himself.
What amazed me, as a person accustomed to seeing married people exchanging hostile remarks, if they even spoke to each other, was how amiably he accepted everything Regina did, and more so, everything she didn’t do—the hours she spent on the chaise lounge, the way she brushed their children aside, not to mention him, when he’d lean in to stroke her hair, as he did now.
But Forrest held steady. He never seemed hurt by the bored look in Regina’s eyes.
Jilly did. Jilly worshipped her father, of course.
On this particular occasion, she deposited herself firmly in Forrest’s lap, confident of the affection and enthusiasm she’d find there.
He picked her up and spun her around, pulled up her Care Bears T-shirt, and pressed his mouth against her stomach, making fart sounds and tickling her.
“Da-ddy!” She always pretended she was annoyed, but I knew she loved it.
“Your daughter just had a root beer float,” Regina said, sounding wearier than ever. “If you aren’t careful, you’ll make her throw up.”
But Jilly was already asking him to do it again. “I’m worn out,” Forrest said, feigning the kind of exhaustion Regina conveyed twenty-four seven. “Can’t you see I’m an old man?”
Not even close.
I sat there watching as if this were a movie. Only I got to be in it, as an extra, anyway. Unlike Jilly, I kept my adoration for Forrest hidden. It was a secret little flame burning hot in my heart.
Then what do you know, he turned to me.
“Our Frances,” he said, reaching my spot on the couch and shaking his head with a look of wonderment, as if he could hardly believe it that I was actually there. I felt the same thing, but more so. How was it possible that this god of a man shared my opinion?
“Our Frances!” he said again. “I don’t know how we ever got along without you,” he said. “You know you’re part of the family now.”
I tried not to show how thrilled I was, hearing the words. I looked down at my lap.
My cheeks burned. In that place I could not name, the one I’d begun touching in my bed at night, a warm feeling coursed through me.
I looked over at Regina then. Her face didn’t look mad or jealous in the way girls’ faces got when somebody got asked to the dance by a boy they hoped might ask them instead.
The look on her face was just sad, that was all.
The saddest look I’d ever seen on her maybe—like she was a dead person, back on earth just long enough to pay a quick visit to the living before heading back to wherever it was dead people went once their hearts stopped beating.
In my journal that night, I didn’t write about Regina’s coldness to Jilly, or Jilly’s disappointment. I wrote down Forrest’s words to me: Part of the family.