The 10 P.M. Question (24 page)

“They like everything out,” said Sydney. “We shifted it all when Freya left. She hates it, but too bad. If they have everything out, they’ll play for hours and they won’t bother us, except for food.”

“We can bribe them with chocolate cake,” said Frankie.

“Geznady propotkin!” said Sydney, which meant “Damn fine.” Sydney was making good progress with Chilun, though she said it lacked logic, unlike German or Dutch, so it was much harder to remember.

“It’s not regular,” she said. “It doesn’t have enough patterns. It’s unpredictable.”

“Just like life, then,” Frankie had said, and they had smiled weakly at each other.

There had been many such exchanges during camp week, while the rest of room 11 had been away. While the rest of room 11 had been scaling rock walls and trekking across rivers, Frankie and Sydney had talked themselves ragged. They talked while they worked in class. They talked while they ate lunch on the bench outside room 11. While they walked to the bus. On the bus. On the phone. At Frankie’s house . . .

Sydney’s abrupt tearful confession in the driveway of Washington Crescent had changed something, Frankie knew. Sydney herself had bounced back, more or less. She was still full of restless energy and inquiry. She still rolled on her feet and cartwheeled and made Frankie laugh a lot. But there was something different about her, too, something at once careless
and
resigned.

As for Frankie, the change seemed seismic. It was as if the very coordinates of his life had been reorganized. Sydney’s revelation had had the magical effect of unplugging his own banked-up secrets. It seemed as if from that moment, his dread of her pesky questions had evaporated; now he practically
invited
them.

He had pondered this change to and from the village shops one afternoon, all the way down the hill with the empty burlap bag, then back up again, tilting to the right under the weight of the groceries. On his return, he had leaned on the bench in the kitchen, watching Ma make the preparations for a batch of Russian kulich. As she worked, a new understanding had seemed slowly to suffuse him; it had spread like a warm bath,
inside
him.

He watched Ma measure the yeast into the warm water and he thought about the way Sydney’s presence had worked on him over the last few months. He watched Ma blend the yeast, dried fruit, and spices into the flour, and then knead the mixture, pushing and folding and turning, until the dough was smooth and elastic. His voice was telling Ma about Mr. and Mrs. Owen at the dry cleaner’s, but all the time he was thinking, too, how Sydney had prodded and probed him, knocked him out of shape sometimes, given him sleepless nights for heaven’s sake, with her incessant inquiries. And now he was like a proved dough, he thought, extremely pleased with this fancy and wishing he could hand it to Mr. A for a big fat A+ in literary arts.

He was like the Russian kulich loaves when they came out of the warming cupboard. He had bloomed; he had risen up and started talking; he had leaked out his worst rodent fears.

But here the promising metaphor had run dry and his moment of glorious insight faded a little. Later, he had looked at the row of round kulich loaves, golden brown and sticky with icing, lined up on the bench with the pots of pashka, and he had thought sadly that, for all that, talking still wasn’t enough. His leaked-out secrets had not — would not — actually
change
his life. Telling Sydney everything had not magically eliminated, or even quieted, the rodent voice. It had not relieved him of any of the domestic tasks he longed to hand over, or his great feeling of responsibility for Ma. Nor had it stopped his vigils in Ma’s bedroom, his never-ending inventory of gnawing worries, brooded over and confessed haltingly during the nightly visits. It certainly hadn’t suddenly enabled him to go to camp.

It hadn’t changed Ma one bit.

Frankie had tried to express some of this to Sydney during camp week. They’d been sharing cake one lunchtime and inventing a perfect cricket team. Sydney had stared out at the junior girls swarming and squealing on the hopscotch ground. She ate Granny Warren Cake with noisy fervor.

“Isn’t it perfect?” she said. “
My
mother never stays in one place and
your
mother never moves.”

This tidy but depressing notion had already occurred to Frankie. He waited for Sydney to say something else, something helpful. He waited for her to endorse his new insight and offer a solution. He had begun to think she could, somehow, do this — that she might somehow, someday soon, come out with
the
answer. Something simple and obvious and blindingly right.

But Sydney had just carried on eating cake and staring at the hopscotch girls. And Frankie had put his thumbs between his first two fingers, which was his new charm against the possibility of Sydney ever leaving.

Now, in the dining room of Sydney’s house, Frankie pulled the Mistake Cake from his backpack and handed it over. He took out his sketches and put them on the circular table, which stood in the big bay window recess. He looked around the room.

Like the exterior of the house and the front garden, the room was rather formal and furnished in a way that made Sydney seem quite out of place. The room did not at all match Sydney’s purple vest and patched jeans. It certainly did not match her dreads. It was a room for stiff-necked people, people who ate meals with extremely good manners and talked in considered tones, not a girl with a nose piercing and a chaotic home life.

There was a glass-fronted cabinet with teacups and crystal bowls and china figurines. There was a large fireplace with old-fashioned fire irons and a beaten copper fireguard. Above the mantel hung a heavy gilt-framed portrait of some distinguished gentleman in a wig, St. Paul’s Cathedral looming behind him.

Frankie knew it was St. Paul’s because he had seen pictures of the building often enough — the Aunties were mad cathedral buffs. They had toured all the great English cathedrals in their time; he had heard them discuss the various merits of Salisbury and Norwich, of Ely and St. Paul’s. Along with all the other useless old-lady knowledge lodged in his brain was a bunch of random facts about cathedral history and architecture.

“Who’s he?” said Frankie, not really caring.

“Some bishop,” said Sydney. “This isn’t our house, you know.”

It was true. He knew that Freya rented the house from some rich family living overseas — no, no, correction, Freya’s
boyfriend
rented the house from the rich family because Freya needed
looking after
. . .

This happened quite a lot, Sydney had told him. As well as living in caravans, inner-city apartments, leaky bungalows, shacks by the sea, communes, and refurbished warehouses, they had also quite often lived in swanky houses. Freya liked to try out suburban living every now and then, Sydney said. She liked to do the soccer-mom thing. Sydney had actually called it that.

Freya had a lot of acts, Sydney went on, counting them off on her fingers: dreamy artist, soccer mom, caring charity worker, solo mother with a tragic past, worldly nomad, hot blonde, exhausted highflier having time out. Her whole life was like a series of stage plays, Sydney said, with Freya in the starring roles. Even reading to the blind was acting; she got to do different voices and accents. She was actually very good at it.

They had been walking in the village after school when Sydney had told him this, and Frankie had flung himself facedown on the grass in exaggerated horror. It was too much for him. He couldn’t believe it. It was bananas.

“She is so
crazy
!” he said, banging the grass with his fists.
“Craaaazeee.”
He made a big thing of rolling back and forth with his hands either side of his head.

But when he stood up again, laughing, brushing himself down, Sydney had been looking at him in a distinctly wintry way.

“Well, she
is,
” he said defensively.

“Maybe,” Sydney said, drawing out the word. “But maybe she’s no crazier than a person who never leaves the house for nine years.”

Frankie was shocked. He had gone as still as stone, but his heart had leaped up inside him and begun thundering. He felt both foolish after his grass antics and astounded that Sydney should say such a thing about Ma.

“Shut up,” he said. It came out like a whip crack. “Shut
up
.” He had turned and walked away from Sydney, down the main street toward the Green, but not really knowing where he was going. He passed Owens’, Wysockis’, the Post Office, the dairy, Cut Above, and the Unitarian Church without seeing any of them, and walked the perimeter of the Green until he reached the Centenary Clubhouse. He sat down heavily on the bottom step and stared into the distance, waiting for the storm in his chest to subside.

In a while his heart returned to normal and his face cooled, but he still felt very upset. Freya
was
crazy, he told himself stubbornly. She did
not
behave like a mother. She behaved, she behaved — he searched for the word . . .
outrageously
. He looked out over the Green, at the band of pin oaks on the other side, at the orange leaves floating slowly to the ground, cradled by the breeze.

Ma was a good mother, a
great
mother. And she wasn’t crazy, not the tiniest bit. She was fragile; that was how the Aunties put it. There was a difference. A big difference. Frankie kept sitting and staring and turning over these thoughts, these
facts,
until Sydney plunked herself on the bottom step beside him.

“Thorry,” said Sydney.

Frankie counted the pin oaks. Two, four, six, eight —

“Really. I am.”

— fourteen, sixteen, seventeen.

“But you should be, too,” she said.

Huh,
thought Frankie, and kept looking ahead, counting the pin oaks again, to make sure.

Sydney began pulling grass out in clumps, a quick tearing sound.

“I guess we can’t say those things about each other’s mother,” she said. There was a rhythm to her plucking. Pull, pause, pull, pause . . . Frankie counted the trees singly, in time to her beat.

“Other people should never say those things,” said Sydney. “Even the O’s not allowed.”

Seventeen again.

“But you were so
upset,
” Frankie said at last. “About camp, and the money. And the . . .” He trailed off, not wanting to say boyfriends.

“Boyfriends,” said Sydney. Frankie looked at her, but her head was down, she was concentrating on her outspread hand. She lined up blades of grass very carefully on her palm. One, two, three, four . . .

“You get upset,” said Sydney.

Yes,
thought Frankie.
But it’s quite different.

“So?”

“So.” Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

“So, we’d better go,” said Frankie.

“S’pose,” said Sydney. She looked at her watch. “Thirty-two past four.” But neither of them had moved.

“Sorry,” Frankie said after a long pause. Then Sydney had thrown her grass blades to the wind and they had gone to the dairy for chocolate raisins.

Later, lying on his bed, Frankie had gone over and over the afternoon episode, worrying away at it, bothered by the quick fury that had sprung up between them. It was quite different from a fight with Gigs. He didn’t really fight with Gigs. They just occasionally went quiet, almost by mutual consent. But Sydney didn’t do quiet. He saw them both, on the footpath, their
punch, punch, counterpunch,
their springing apart like surprised boxers.

“First fight,” he said aloud to Morrie and Robert Plant, and then he’d covered his face with his pillow, needing quickly to smother his blush.

Frankie had been warier since then. He had saved his anti-Freya comments for Gigs and his own perpetual interior conversations with himself. When Sydney and he were together, he listened to her moan about her mother, he sympathized, sometimes he made kindly suggestions, but he did
not
lie down waving his legs in the air like a cast spider and shout, as he longed to,
Nozdoreeshna! Your mother is a wack-job. Someone has to
do
something!

Looking up now at Bishop Whoever and the dome of St. Paul’s in Sydney’s latest dining room, Frankie said, “Tow shilly factium primo?” (What shall we do first?)

“Eat the cake,” said Sydney. She was already scooping out a fingerful from the container. “Let’s not give the kids any of this. They can have cereal. They like it dry, in bowls. They pretend they’re kittens having Whiskas. This is good, so
moist
.”

So they ate some cake and then settled to work. Frankie showed Sydney his latest batch of drawings, and she said once again how lifelike Microsoft was, how she almost expected him to bark at her and lick her hand. Sydney was in love with Microsoft. She wanted a real dog exactly like him. Frankie found it very gratifying.

“I’ve just got a bit more,” she said, “and then you can read it all.”

She put her head down and wrote quickly and busily, in her usual way. Frankie tried to solve a picture he’d been having trouble with. He wanted to show Hank driving at great speed in his truck, Microsoft’s head out the passenger window, ears pinned back, tongue hanging, his dappled coat ruffled by the wind. Microsoft was easy, but Frankie was no good at vehicles. He didn’t know why; they ought to have been a whole lot simpler than birds and four-legged creatures, all straightforward shapes and predictable bits. But he wasn’t that interested in vehicles. They just didn’t spin his wheels, ha, ha.

He looked up at the big oil painting and found the bishop staring directly at him. That was interesting. He got up and went over to the other side of the room and stood in front of a big wooden dresser. It had a dinner set displayed like one in the Victorian Life section of the museum. He turned quickly, as if catching the bishop out, and once again found him looking steadily back. He walked from the dresser to the door, all the while holding the bishop’s gaze, and all the while the bishop held his right back. It was a kindly gaze, on the whole. The old guy wasn’t smiling, but the set of his face seemed somehow benevolent. Frankie closed his eyes and opened them again. Yup. Still looking at him.