She lifts her body and swings it over to straddle him on the bench. Then she reaches down and unzips his pants.
Hey, he says, pulling away from her kisses. Wait. We can’t—you’re—
It’s okay, she says, feeling the wetness from his lips on her neck. I can’t have babies.
She reaches down and takes it in her hand—it’s hot like it’s been cooked all through—and she presses herself down hard on his leg.
But, wait, he says again. It’s not right. I’m twenty-five and you’re—
Hush up, she says. Just do it. I’m done thinkin. Just come on and do it.
She covers his mouth with her own and reaches under the taffeta dress and pulls aside her underwear and lifts up and sets herself down on top of him, and her knees begin to ache on the wooden slats of the bench, but the thing inside her is a living thing and she likes the way her body holds on to it—and she likes to think about what it feels like to him, that part of her that makes her a girl. And the word stutters through her head, girl girl girl girl—and she believes it, she knows it to be true—dang if she doesn’t believe it right in her stomach and her toes and her very teeth.
THE NEXT day she wakes while the sun is still low in the sky. She goes to the window and looks out over the smooth driveway and the canyon, that long cut in the earth, and the flat painted sky beyond.
She opens the connecting door into the next room and sees the bulky shape tangled in the sheets and blankets of the bed. Both pillows are on the floor, and one hand is resting on the nightstand where it has knocked over the alarm clock.
You’re a paragon of helplessness, ain’t you, dummy?
She rights the alarm clock and tries to pull the sheets up over the sleeping figure. But when she does, the blankets come untucked and expose his feet. So she goes to the other side of the bed and tries to cover his feet back up, but she can only find a triangle end of the blanket, and it doesn’t seem long enough to do anything with. Finally she drops the blanket altogether and stands looking down at him with her hands on her hips.
It’s a good thing we found you this place, dummy. One thing’s for sure, a mama I am not.
Coming down the stairs she can hear music in the parlor. Mrs. Grierson is sitting in a chair with a high fan-shaped back, listening to records and knitting something long and baby blue.
You’re up bright and early, Mrs. Grierson says.
I don’t sleep much.
You’re a busybody like me.
Guess I am.
She sits with Mrs. Grierson and changes the records for her when they get to the end. She has never seen a record player before, except in movies, and she likes how delicate the mechanism is. The music is joyful and quick and has a lot of different horns, and it sounds like something that a room full of people wearing skirts and sweaters would be dancing to.
There is a formal breakfast later in the morning, with biscuits and jam and coffee, and all the Griersons sitting around the table, Richard and his mother trying to make pleasant conversation, James looking at Temple only when she is not looking at him. She can see it out of the corner of her eye.
After breakfast, she takes some biscuits on a plate up to the room adjoining hers, and Maisie helps her with the slow bear of a man—getting him up and feeding him and dressing him. Maisie is good with him and talks to him like he’s a 220-pound baby, and he seems to respond to her voice.
Then she finds she has nothing to do. Mrs. Grierson is playing solitaire in the parlor, and Richard is practicing the same song on the piano over and over with no variation that her ear can tell, and James is nowhere to be seen. She wonders how people can live this kind of life—trapped inside a house with windows everywhere showing you where else you could be.
So she goes outside and walks around the house and down the driveway and back and up into the woods overlooking the house, and she finds the electric fence and follows it around the perimeter of the property trying not to get her feet too muddy. It’s a good-sized property, and it takes her half an hour to walk the circumference of it. On the side of the house is a grape arbor with a trellis, and a wooden swing hanging from the branch of a tree. She sits on the swing and kicks herself forward and back a few times.
What are you doing?
James Grierson appears behind her and leans against the tree.
Nothin, she says. Just tryin out this swing. It’s creaky, but it works.
That’s not all you’re doing. You’ve been around this property twice already this morning. You doing reconnaissance?
Nah. I’m just put on a wonder about how the world can all of a sudden get so small you can walk around it twice in one morning.
He nods.
What you doin following me anyway? she says.
Listen, he says. Last night . . . I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to . . . I think it was a mistake.
What do you mean? You mean you ain’t in love with me? You mean you don’t wanna put me in a puffy white dress and marry me?
She laughs.
All right, he says, looking down at his feet. I was just trying to clarify. I was just being—
You mean I sullied my blossomin girlhood on a man who ain’t got noble projections in mind for our future?
She laughs again. He looks miserable.
When you gonna make me curtsy to your father for approval?
That’s enough, he says, and there’s a fierce anger in his eyes.
Okay, okay. I’m just joshin with you. You Griersons are a touchy bunch. One minute it’s biscuits and model ships and the next minute it’s outrage and horror. Your family is livin at the poles when everyone else has gotta make do in the wide middle of things.
I apologize. You talked about meeting my father.
He’s sick, right? How long’s he been sick?
About a year now.
That’s some sick. What’s the matter with him?
The matter with him is that he was born a Grierson. This family is a sickness.
Oh, come on now. They ain’t so bad. Maybe a little kooky, but they got heart.
Heart! He scoffs. You want to see heart? Let me show you heart. Let’s go—I want to introduce you to my father.
Hey now, she says. I was just jokin about that. I ain’t got to meet any more Griersons. I’m about up to my ears in them as it is.
Oh, you’ll like him. He’s different. He’s more relatable.
He takes her by the wrist and leads her back up to the house—except once they’re inside they don’t go up the main staircase but through a door in the kitchen that descends into the basement. It’s musty, and there’s a smell she recognizes, and when he flips a switch the lights go on and she sees a cage made out of bare wood and chicken wire, the concrete floor covered with hooked rugs.
At first it seems like there’s nothing at all in the cage. Then she sees him huddled in the corner.
Meet Randolph Grierson, James announces. The patriarch of the Grierson family, Mrs. Edna Grierson’s prized son, a monument to American aristocracy—and my father.
The head moves slowly, raising itself to expose the desiccated lips and sunken eyes, the gray skin, patches of which are fallen away and blackened at the edges. The gaze itself is muddy, as of a blind man whose eyes follow sound rather than light.
James, how long’s your daddy been dead?
I told you, about a year. See, the Griersons have a hard time letting go of things. Maybe that’s what you were referring to when you were talking about the family having heart.
Randolph Grierson has a look she’s never seen in a meatskin before. He paws at his head with torn fingertips and his skin is coming away in flakes, but his eyes are red and wet—liquid with vitality and pursuit. He looks inquiringly at the two figures studying him through the chicken wire—as though to ask the questions that are both big and simple: What is the shape of the earth and where are we on it?
He drags himself across the floor and puts his fingers through the chicken wire to reach for her. She looks down into those eyes again, weighing that puzzled gaze.
He ain’t ever seen another meatskin, she says.
No, he hasn’t, James confirms.
He doesn’t know what he is, she says.
I guess he doesn’t. Jesus.
He shakes his head.
She reaches out her hand and touches her fingers to those of Randolph Grierson.
He knows somethin’s crooked, she says, but he don’t know what. Like he’s done somethin wrong he don’t know how to pay for.
Hey, be careful. He’ll bite you if you give him a chance. Alive, he was the very picture of honor and noblesse. Dead, he’s just like every other slug.
I guess, she says and crosses her arms. He’s weak. What you been feedin him?
That’s the problem. My brother thinks he can trick him into eating pig meat or cow meat or horse meat. But Big Daddy Randolph Grierson is having none of it.
I seen it happen, them eating animals, but not much. They gotta be desperate and one of em’s gotta be a little crazy and show the others what to do.
He studies her.
You know a lot about them, he says.
I traveled around. They’re a tough job to avoid when you’re on the road.
Well, did you ever see one kept as a pet?
No, I ain’t ever seen that.
So the Griersons still have the power to surprise. In any case, I’m half amazed my grandmother hasn’t tried to feed you to him.
Sure. She loves her son.
That’s not her son.
I guess.
IT’S A grand house, and she learns to call it by its name, Belle Isle, and she likes to explore all its corners because there are things everywhere to discover. Pastel green dollhouses with white gables and miniature lead woodstoves complete with full sets of pans and shelves of old picture books that she can take down and spread open on the rug and peruse to her heart’s content. The hallways upstairs are crowded with doorways and rooms, and no one tells her not to go into them.
Once she opens a door and finds a room like a workshop. Under the far window is a table cluttered with tiny instruments, metal clips, miniature vices, dowels of light wood, splinters and flakes of brass. In the center of the table there’s a model ship held upside down on a stand, its hull half covered with toothpick strips of copper. There’s a thin layer of sawdust over everything, and she draws a smiley face on the tabletop then blows it clear. The walls are covered with world maps, and there are places marked on them with red Xs, and dotted lines, traveling routes, drawn across the wide blue oceans. She uses the tip of her finger to trace one of the dotted lines from X to X across the demarcated seas of the world.