Recent History

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“Yesterday,” I announced, in apology.

That was all. Her eyes went from me to Andrew, who rose halfway and moved his hair away from his face. She took him in, then stared at me again briefly, as if now she knew something about me. Still, the mask of absence remained on her.

“You’ll all be great friends,” Bob Painter said.

The plan was to ride in two cabs to a large wooded park on the Belmont line. We stopped at a grocery to get cold cuts and rolls. My father sat with Andrew and me in one cab. Bob Painter and his daughters were in the other.

I sensed a stiffness in my father that day. There had been no birthday present, but that was understandable, I knew he was experiencing financial troubles, and I thought I knew something else as well. His distracted state felt familiar to me, the state he went into when he was close to action. It was the way he had been in the days before his departure from home—wearing a faraway look, clearly no longer with us. Now that same state might lead to the opposite action. At least, that was what I hoped. We rode, and he had his hand on my knee, massaging gently, as though maybe he wasn’t even aware he was doing that, and I remember feeling happy, certain about what was about to happen. I didn’t know the rules of houses, but I suspected even after you sold one you could get it back if you changed your mind. Andrew was on the other side of my body, like a thing that had attached to me, so that when my father looked at me now, I knew he had to see two things, and I knew, also, that this made it difficult for him, a goad to return to a place from which he could guide me away from the undesirable.

We met up on the curb and Bob led us into the woods. Somewhere there were picnic tables, he thought he knew where. “I remember a beautiful spot in here,” Bob said, but he seemed uncertain, and kept checking on my father, as if he, too, had picked up on the detachment I had noticed in the cab.

“I guess this’ll have to do,” Bob said finally, giving up when we were in the middle of the woods, in a sunny clearing, with no picnic tables in sight. “We can spread ourselves out on the ground. Otherwise we’d have to go back. I guess I’m lost. You girls mind that?”

Of course the little ones didn’t, and of course Maureen did. She stood at a distance from us and accepted nothing from her father.

“You have to eat, Maureen,” Bob called.

“I’m not hungry,” she said finally. Her voice was low, deeper than that of any twelve-year-old I knew.

Bob went on eating then, with his gaze turned inward, rising out of this every once in a while only to look at my father, and then at Maureen, like two polarities he could not, for the life of him, bring together.

We dispersed after lunch. Andrew and I were sent to push the little ones on a set of swings we’d passed on the way there. Maureen followed, walking ten or so feet behind us. While we pushed the little girls, Maureen sat on a bench, staring at the ground, playing with her hair.

“Miss Superior,” Andrew had begun to call her, under his breath.

I stared at her a long time.

“Miss Superior won’t speak to us.”

In the afternoon it got warm, and it was hot for us, pushing the little girls.

“Don’t you girls want to spend some time with your father?” Andrew asked.

They stared at us like we were curiosities.

“Give us a higher push,” the smaller one, Jane, said.

Finally, though, even they got tired and went and sat with Maureen. When they were all huddled together, I could see maybe how things were in Woburn, in Bob Painter’s absence, a little world closing in on itself, female and long-cheeked and with its own rules and intonations, complete enough so that I wondered how Bob Painter had ever fit in at all.