Chapter 37
“I don’t like Ida spending so much time with her.” It was the last Friday in November. Tom and Henry and I were finishing comida, Louise having picked Ida up from school.
I smiled equably. “What do you mean, ‘so much’?”—making quotes with my fingers. I hadn’t told him about many of the times they’d been together.
He made an impatient gesture, a glance to Henry that told me he felt constrained by his presence from giving full vent to his criticisms of Louise.
The day of the egg, when the kids came home full of excited stories of their triumph, he had played along with them, but that night with me, he had reiterated his mistrust of her, his concern, me countering that she was giving them experiences they never could have had at home.
“I’m just saying, we should be encouraging Ida to make friends her own age, maybe setting up playdates with other kids in her class.”
“She doesn’t like the kids at school. With Louise, she can be herself; she can have Louise’s undivided attention.”
“But don’t you think it’s weird for her to spend time with someone so much older?”
“I think it’s good for her,” I said, and began to reiterate things I’d said before, that children benefited from knowing different kinds of people; that loving them meant preparing them to separate from you.
I believed that, but I was invoking it fatuously.
It was mostly complacency that had led me to permit Ida to spend time with her, while I wiled away the hours with Henry, walking the botanical gardens or huddling together under blankets in the feeble late-autumn sun, telling him stories.
“I’m going to get her,” Tom said. “What’s there for her to do over there? I want to see her. I have the afternoon off.”
“No, I’ll get her,” I said decisively. “Just relax, read a magazine or whatever, you’ve already worked. I’ll be home soon.”
As I approached Louise’s, reflexively I began looking for her and Ida in the field, imagining they might be out hunting for bugs, maybe sketching.
The construction had stalled again; there was no one.
The neighbor boy was sitting on the stoop.
Beside him sat another boy I didn’t recognize, paler and more finely made.
The two appeared to be “drawing” on the concrete slab with sticks, or maybe they were ancient crayons.
As I rose out of the parked car, suddenly, in that way that things transform before your eyes—the man becomes a coat hung on a stand, the stooping child in a red jacket a fire hydrant—the unfamiliar boy became Ida.
Ida, who now turned to me, smiling, her neck paler than the rest of her, impossibly slender.
She was beautiful and handsome, herself and not herself. I was stunned.
“Hello,” she said without addressing me, as though we were meeting for the first time. She didn’t stand, didn’t run up to kiss me or embrace me.
“Ida, oh my God,” I said. “You cut your hair.”
“Louise did it.”
“Oh? Did she?” I was struggling to modulate my voice, my heart thrashing in my chest. “How did that happen, my love?”
“What do you mean?” she said, her tone faintly mocking, as though I were an idiot. It happened with scissors—what did I think?
“I mean, how did it come about?” I said, fighting myself back, trembling slightly.
“In the field.”
“But when? Whose idea was this?”
A little satisfied smile. “We both wanted to.”
I got into the car and turned it on. “We need to go,” I called shortly through the window, a rigid smile pasted on my face.
“Why?” she said, still mocking me. But she walked over to the front passenger seat, springing from her toes, her head very erect.
I pulled back over the gravel without saying anything to Louise, who must have been inside the house now that the deed was accomplished—doing what, exactly?
Smoking, paging through some outdated communist tome, I thought furiously.
A surge of panic: What would Tom do when he saw Ida?
When it came out that Louise had done it?
I imagined him seething with rage, ranting that she had altered our daughter without our consent, violated our trust. Certainly that was how he would see it: We’d been violated, he and I.
Meanwhile, Ida maintained a defiant silence.
As we came to the top of the hill, unable to contain myself and against my better judgment—Ida always leapt at any opening like a hunter—I said, “Ida, you’re so quiet; is everything all right? ”
“Why wouldn’t it be? I finally got my hair cut, and it’s exactly how I wanted it.”
Meaning: I hadn’t done it for her; I had failed to please her.
Impetuously I nearly struck back, Daddy and Henry will certainly be surprised.
I don’t think they’ll like it. But I managed to check myself.
We had rounded the final curve and were descending the steep driveway, Ida staring ahead through the window, her face set in a particular way.
Catching sight of her from the corner of my eye—the way her mouth lifted, her eyes narrowed over her private thoughts—an unpleasant sensation passed through me.
Her expression was so eerily like Louise’s.
Tom was on the patio relaxing when we stepped up into the main living area. Without greeting him, Ida ran to play in the lower courtyard. In the kitchen, I filled two glasses with ice and then lime, tequila, a little grapefruit soda.
“Drink?” I said, handing him one as I stepped outside.
“Where’s Ida?” he asked in surprise.
I told him she was downstairs, and let a minute or so pass before saying, “I forgot to mention, I took Ida earlier to get her hair cut.” I hadn’t planned to lie, not fully anyway.
Something in his face when he’d asked for Ida made me understand in a different way the finality of what had happened. What it might mean for Louise and me.
“When was this?” he said, as always stuck on the details, the logistical facts.
“Right after school, just before I dropped her at Louise’s.
” I’d added a second lie on top of the first; Louise had been the one to pick her up.
He made a questioning sound in response, and I went on, “I just want you to prepare yourself, it’s a big change.
It’s a lot shorter. But she really loves it.
She’s very proud of it,” I added, conveying with my tone a warning to let it be her thing, preserve her happiness.
“All right,” he said with a small sigh, like he was resigning himself, being the bigger man. “So, let’s see this haircut.” Lifting his voice, “Ida! Come up, I want to see you!”
“Can’t we just enjoy our moment alone?” I said, smiling, reaching a hand to his shoulder and bending forward to kiss him.
He acquiesced, and for a while, we drank, speaking only a little and superficially about the weather and the beauty of the view as I tried to tamp down my worry.
After ten minutes or so, hearing Ida speaking below, Tom went to the edge of the balcony and called down to her.
When she called back, presumably stepping into view for the first time, his face went dark.
It was unbearable. I stood and began toward the glass doors, saying over my shoulder, “Should I refresh our drinks?” I glanced back inquiringly.
He was staring at me, his face contorted.
“Be nice,” I whispered to him. “She likes it.” Then I went dashing off into the house, busying myself with this and that, like a naughty child attempting to hide.
I had anticipated Tom’s anger with Louise, and also with me. What I hadn’t fully anticipated was the force of his anger at the haircut itself.
“It’s so ugly,” he pronounced as soon as we were alone that night, sitting stiffly on the edge of our bed. Climbing beside him, I tried to temper his reaction: Ida had such a beautiful face, now you could really see it, lots of beautiful girls and women had pixie cuts.
“She looks like a fucking dyke.”
“Jesus Christ, Tom! Do you hear yourself?”
We’d always allowed each other to vent about our children, to be coarse if we needed to blow off steam: Henry’s being such an asshole.
But there was something so brutal in his reaction that I was unable to let it go, furiously telling him that I had only facilitated what Ida herself wanted, she loved it, she was happy; wasn’t that the point, not whether we liked it? “Anyway, I think it’s pretty.”
“It’s not. It’s hideous.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“What, I can’t be upset about my child, my little girl—”
“Don’t call her that.”
“Why?” He had contorted his face into a mask of obliviousness. “Please, enlighten me: Why can’t I call our daughter my little girl?”
“Because she doesn’t belong to us like that.
” My voice had risen. “She’s not some doll for us to tote around and show off—look what we own, look how pretty she is, look how clever.
” As I gave that last attribute, I could already hear him protesting in his fastidious way, What does cleverness have to do with it?
But he didn’t comment. It was as though he hadn’t even heard me.
“You know what it really is?” he finally said out of the silence. “It’s that she looks like her now. That fucking woman. That liar.”