Fugue State: stories

Girls in Tents

In the late afternoons, after school, in the days just after their father had left their mother, the two girls would strip all the blankets off their beds. Gathering them up as best they could, they carried them out of their rooms and down the narrow hall to drop them in a heap in the living room. They tucked blanket edges under couch cushions or put them on furniture with encyclopedias piled on them, and then stretched the blankets from couch to chair or from chair to window ledge. When done, they had a series of tents, all overlapping, the living room become a series of billows and dips under which they could crouch.

For several months they lived each afternoon under these tents, light coming mottled through the fabric. They felt good there. Sometimes they read or drew or talked there, other times just sat. When their mother came home from work, she often knelt down and asked how they were doing, and what. The youngest girl mostly half-shrugged and said fine, they were doing fine. The oldest girl never answered unless she had to, unless the mother addressed her directly and more than once. It was not that she disliked her mother, only that she thought it was none of the mother’s business. The tents had been the oldest girl’s idea; she had made them so as to have a substitute house within the larger house, for now that the father was gone the house no longer felt like it was her house. It was only in the tents that she began to feel at home again. In the tents it was the two of them, the two girls, alone but together, and nothing changing unless they wanted it to. So when the mother knelt down to ask what they were doing in the tents, the oldest girl didn’t feel she should have to answer: the tents were not about the mother.

When the father had left, it was as if he had taken part of the house with him. It no longer felt like the oldest girl’s house, but neither did it feel like her house at the apartment the father rented across town. Every other week the girls’ father showed up, looking somewhat disoriented, to take them away to his apartment, where they stayed for almost two full days, the father trying to keep them entertained until the mother arrived on Sunday afternoon to take them to church. At the father’s house, in his apartment, the girls slept on the front-room floor in sleeping bags. This practice the father sometimes referred to as camping, which made the oldest girl try to imagine she was out in the open, under the stars. But still she never felt at home in a sleeping bag like she did in the tents.

One problem with the father’s new house was that there were not enough blankets to make a good tent. The father was what the mother called a cold sleeper; he had only one blanket in his apartment and usually slept (so the oldest girl had found sometimes late at night when she couldn’t sleep and went to the father’s bedroom to see if the father was asleep himself) on the edge of the bed, half his body uncovered, the blanket splitting him in two. During the day, the girls were allowed to take this single blanket from the bed and stretch it from the back of the couch to the bookshelves behind, then tuck it in tightly between the books, but one blanket was not enough; it made a tunnel but hardly a tent. They had tried, the two girls, unzipping the sleeping bags to use them as blankets to make tents, but the sleeping-bag fabric was heavy and thick — light didn’t come through in the way it did with a good blanket. And in any case, the father didn’t have enough furniture to make good tents. All he had was a couch and a chair. Now that he was out of the house, the father didn’t have much of anything. In the kitchen, all he had of utensils were three of each: three knives, three forks, three spoons, all taken from the larger collection of wedding flatware that still resided with the mother. If he and the girls ate anything, the father would have to wash utensils before they could eat again.

The father, when he was feeling exuberant, when he was at his best, would claim that they were lucky girls, that most little girls did not have two houses like they did. But the oldest girl felt that no, they did not now have two houses: they were between houses and thus in a way had no house. And it was clear to the oldest girl that their father did not feel at home in his new house, that in a way he had no home of his own either. Unlike the father, the oldest girl at least had the tents to go to, and after school, each day, she and her sister would make the tents and lie beneath in the warm space, watching the mottled light filter through.

Near the end of his fourth month out of the house, the father began to let them down. He still showed up on Friday to take them to his house, to his apartment, but they never could count on when. Before, he had always been sitting on the porch when they came home from school, but now it was hard to say. Sometimes he was there, waiting, but most days he would not show up until the mother was long home from work and it had begun to grow dark outside. A few times the mother got tired of waiting and called him, and when he showed up ten minutes later he was shamefaced and apologetic.

The oldest girl knew something was going wrong with the father, but could not say what exactly. She knew he was distracted but could not say why. In a way, what or why did not matter. The youngest girl, too, felt something going wrong with the father, and the youngest girl was nervous about him. The youngest girl was, so the mother always said, high-strung, and thus needed from time to time to be soothed and calmed down. The oldest girl always tried to calm her down. She did not always notice things as quickly as the oldest girl did, but when she did notice them she seemed to feel them more, and since the father had left, it had somehow become the oldest girl’s job to help calm her down. Because of that, the oldest girl had learned not to show when she knew something or felt it, so that sometimes she felt like she was just watching things happening but nothing really was ever happening to her. The oldest girl thus had learned to cope with everything alone and quickly, so that by the time the youngest girl began to catch wind of things she could be there, as calm and placid as glass, to comfort her.

So while it was true that the oldest girl knew something was wrong with the father well before the youngest girl, by the time the youngest girl began to notice and feel it the oldest girl had stopped worrying and already saw this wrongness now instead as a condition of life to be adapted to. The youngest girl worried about what was happening with the father, but the oldest girl, while calming the youngest girl and distracting her and making up games in the tent for her, was not so much worried as only curious about where it would all lead.

The father kept coming to get them, mostly late but occasionally on time. Sometimes he seemed so distracted that he could not even be talked to. They would ride back with him to his apartment in silence. Once there, he would sometimes notice them and smile, and sometimes they would even walk a few blocks together for ice cream and then figure out something else to do, but mostly they would just sit around the apartment in their inadequate blanket tunnel while the father lay on the blanketless bed reading a book or just staring up at the ceiling. Sometimes he would come out of the bedroom and sit at one end of the blanket tunnel and give them choices about what they could do. They could order a pizza or they could have pasta. They could go to a movie or they could go to the zoo. Which did they want to do? The oldest girl had developed a system of not putting any demands on the father, figuring that putting demands on him would make him even less dependable than he already was, so mostly she shrugged and said she didn’t care. The youngest girl usually followed her lead. But somehow not caring put another sort of demand on the father, so that he just shook his head and often went back into the bedroom without deciding on any particular thing, and nothing was done. Something was happening to the father so that he was slowly disengaging himself from them, even when they were actually present and there. The oldest girl could guess where it was going, that they would see the father less and less and one day see him not at all. But all she could do while she comforted the youngest girl and kept her from the truth was steel herself for what would happen next.

On the day the father failed to arrive, the mother had made other arrangements. She would not be home after work, had an engagement, would not be back until the next day. She had in fact called the father the night before to let him know this, to stress that he must come on time. This, the youngest girl thought later, once night had fallen and she and her sister were alone in the tents, had been a mistake on the mother’s part. The mother did not understand how the father worked, since she herself, the mother, worked so differently. She did not see that saying such things to the father made him not more dependable but less so.

So, when they left in the morning, the mother gave them their lunches and reminded them that she would not be home, that when they got back from school the father would be there waiting for them. She kissed them and drove them to school and left them there like she always did, and they went to their classes and ate lunch and went to their classes again. When school was over, the oldest girl went to the youngest girl’s classroom and got her and together they walked home.

At the house, the father wasn’t there yet. They took the key from under the doormat and cleaned it off and let themselves in. Hello, the youngest girl called out hopefully as they entered the house, but there was no answer.

They put their schoolbooks down on the couch and then went to get their already packed overnight bags out of their rooms and put them next to the front door, up against the wall right beside the door, so that when the father arrived they would be all ready to go. They sat on the couch, waiting. Usually, the oldest girl thought, the mother was there and would have them do something while she herself called the father, but they were alone, the oldest girl thought, that was fine, the oldest girl thought, they would manage. Or at least she would. The youngest girl, she could see, was beginning to fidget and get anxious. She was sitting on the couch and trying to figure out what was happening, or rather not happening, and soon she was going to start to panic.

“Let’s go get a snack,” said the oldest girl to her, poker-faced, as if getting a snack and their father’s absence weren’t actually connected. They went into the kitchen and the oldest girl boosted the youngest girl up onto the counter so that she could stand there and open the cabinet and get the snacks out. Getting up on the counter was a special treat for the youngest girl, the oldest girl knew. The youngest girl got down the sandwich cookies and sat on the edge of the counter while the oldest girl opened the packages and divided the cookies out. The way the girls liked to eat sandwich cookies was to break them open and scrape the cream out with their teeth and then eat the cookie part later, dipped in milk. But even when they were done, cream and cookie halves and milk gone, the father still hadn’t arrived.

The sun was getting low in the sky outside, the oldest girl noticed. She wondered how long it would be before the youngest girl noticed. The oldest girl helped her sister off the counter and they went back into the living room and the oldest girl, trying to be casual about it, turned on the light.

“When is he coming?” asked the youngest girl.

“He’s on his way,” said the oldest girl. And then she said, “Time for tents.”

They did it the way they always did. The oldest girl went into her room and pulled her blankets into a pile and carried them out all at once, then dumped them on the living room floor. The youngest girl carried out just one of her blankets and then waited for the oldest girl to come get the other one. Together, they pushed the armchair closer to the couch and brought in the kitchen chairs as well. They got the encyclopedias down from the shelf and then set about spreading the blankets out, tucking them into the couch cushions and anchoring them down with books.

When they were done, the tents overlapped and stretched from couch to fireplace, in some places as high as the girls sitting and in others almost touching the floor. The girls crawled under an edge and got in and moved into the middle, where, near the armchair, they could sit upright without the tents touching them, the overhead light coming differently through the different blankets around them, shining oddly on their flesh.

“I’m hungry,” said the youngest girl.

“We had a snack,” said her sister.

“When is he coming?”

“Soon.”

“Did you call him?”

The oldest girl did not answer. She did not want to call the father, though she knew that was what the mother would do. She wanted him to come on his own. Instead, she crawled out of the tents and got some bread and a knife and a mostly empty jar of peanut butter and crawled with it back into the tents.

“We’re not supposed to eat in the living room,” said the youngest girl.

“We’re not in the living room,” said the oldest girl, “we’re in the tents. Besides, mother isn’t here.”

When the bread was gone and they had scraped the rest of the peanut butter out of the jar, they sat and waited. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s pale and anxious face, and wondered how her own face looked. And while she was sitting there, looking at her sister’s face and wondering about her own, she saw the face begin to change and her sister begin to cry. The oldest girl reached out across the tent and put her hand on her sister’s back and began to move her hand. It was like she was petting an animal — or rather, since she herself, concentrating on staying as calm as glass for the sake of her sister, felt distant not only from her sister’s back but from her own hand, as if she were watching someone else pet an animal.

The youngest girl, she realized, was asking about the father. Where was he? Wasn’t he coming? Where was he? Why wasn’t he here? The oldest girl just kept patting her back. And where was the mother? the youngest girl wanted to know. Not only where was the father but where was the mother?

“She’s not here,” said the oldest girl.

The youngest girl kept crying and asking questions, which made the oldest girl think that she didn’t really want an answer, or at least didn’t want the real answer. The oldest girl kept patting her sister on the back and waiting for it to be over, waiting for her to calm down. When she finally did, her face was blotched red and her eyes were puffy. She sat in the tents looking drained and not looking at anything at all.

“What do we do?” the youngest girl asked.

“We wait for him to come,” said the oldest girl.

“But what if he doesn’t come?”

“He’ll come,” said the oldest girl.

“But what if he doesn’t?”

“He will,” said the oldest girl firmly.

She crawled out of the tents and got some pillows from their bedrooms. She brought them back into the tents and coaxed her sister into lying down. We’ll just wait, she told her. We’ll just lie down and relax and wait for him to come.

Later, the oldest girl was not sure how long they had stayed there together, waiting, the oldest girl sitting, the youngest girl lying down. The oldest girl watched the youngest girl’s eyes narrow and finally close. Then she kept sitting and watching, the blanket fabric brushing her head lightly. She waited.

When her own head began to nod, she shook it and got up, crawled out of the tents. In the kitchen she checked the clock; it was after eleven, much later than she was allowed to stay up. She looked out the window; there was no moon, the night thick and dark. She could see the dim shape of the porch supports, the ghost of the garage a dozen feet past them, but little more. It was as if the world had dissolved.

She locked the back door, left the front door unlocked so the father could get in. She went around the house, turning lights on. When she was done, she went back into the living room, sat just outside the tents.

She could hear her sister inside the tents, breathing softly. Otherwise the house was quiet. Why not telephone the father? she wondered. But that was the sort of thing the mother would do, the sort of thing, the oldest girl thought, that made the father less dependable. The father, she felt, had to come on his own.

She sat there cross-legged, just outside the tents, guarding her sister, waiting for the father to come. Eventually, he would come, she was sure of it. He would remember them. He would remember her.

And, she thought as her eyes grew heavy, when the father did burst through the door, wild-eyed and unshaven, wearing only his pajama bottoms, she would still be there, she was certain, sitting cross-legged just outside the tents. He would look at her and she would look back, and then she would turn and crawl back into the tents and lay her head down next to her sister’s on the pillow, and sleep. If the father wanted to follow her in, that was fine — there was plenty of room in the tents, and for the mother, too, if she wanted to come. But they would have to understand that in the tents it was the two girls who made the rules. It would be up to the girls now to be in charge, she thought, yawning. It was up to them, not the parents, which meant it was mostly up to the oldest girl. The father would have to understand that.

But if he didn’t come, she finally thought hours later, her legs tingling from being crossed so long, the sky beginning to grow light outside, if he didn’t come, she could learn to live with that too.