When She Came Home (17 page)

Frankie slapped her face.

F
rom her kitchen across the street Maryanne watched the cars parked in front of Frankie and Rick’s house pull away and thought it strange that everyone was leaving at the same time.

Upstairs the General was watching the football game with the volume muted. In recent years he had lost most of his interest in football and preferred to take a long nap on Sunday afternoons; but as ever in his life, he was afraid of missing something so he kept the picture on. Deep under the covers and curled on his side like an old tomcat, the General slept more soundly in the afternoon than he ever did at night.

Maryanne was at the sink scouring the copper bottoms of her favorite pans with salt and lemon juice when Frankie rushed into the house, tears streaming down her face.

Maryanne started toward her. “Is it Glory?” It was a fear never far from a grandmother’s heart.

In the living room Frankie fell on the couch, facedown
in a pile of rough wool pillows. For a moment Maryanne watched, letting the vision register. How odd, how unlikely, and how deeply disorienting it was to see her daughter break down in this way. She laid her hand between Frankie’s shoulder blades.

“Stop this now and tell me what happened.”

Frankie turned onto her back. Her round and even-featured face was the antonym of exotic, too homespun and prairie ever to be considered more than pretty. But at that moment Maryanne thought she was almost beautiful, an angel of misery with her fair hair half out of its braid, her cheeks flushed as roses and the tears still shining in the light of her frantic eyes.

Maryanne pulled a dark blue lap rug off the back of the couch and covered her shivering body. The kindness seemed to be too much. Covering her face with her hands, Frankie blurted out the story. The epic went on and on and Maryanne stopped trying to follow the chain of crises.

“And then I slapped her, I slapped her face.”

This was the crux of it.

“I’ll make us some tea.”

Maryanne had been expecting trouble since Frankie came home from Iraq. At family meals and drop-ins, the many planned and unplanned interactions that occurred almost every day because they lived across the street from each other, she had observed her daughter and knew that she was unhappy. But, in spite of all she had gone through with the General, she had hoped that Frankie’s problems
would resolve themselves without catastrophe. The worst of it was, Maryanne had no better idea how to help her daughter than she’d had thirty years before when Harlan was chasing the dog around the house in the middle of the night, waving a loaded Beretta.

Frankie came into the kitchen.

“I want to sleep. I want to go under and never come up.”

“Have some tea first.” Maryanne pointed at one of the ladder-back chairs arranged at the round oak breakfast table.

Somewhere in the dark ages of childhood, even before Harry’s accident had put him out of the running as successor to the General’s glory, Frankie had set her heart on the impossible goal of pleasing her father, and she had never faltered in pursuit of it. It was like being the mother of Sisyphus, watching Frankie struggle and fail again and again.

Her efforts to balance the General’s importance in Frankie’s life had been clumsy failures. She and her daughter were just too different. Frankie had no enthusiasm for shopping or gardening or cooking, and, during the two days they’d spent at a spa in Ojai, Frankie’s boredom had been embarrassingly apparent. For her part Maryanne never cared for sports though she faithfully attended all Frankie’s matches and cheered appropriately. One year they had sung together in the choir at All Souls, but Maryanne was a soprano, Frankie an alto, and half the time they practiced on different nights of the week.

It was Harry whom she understood. Maybe that was
because they’d spent so much time on their own together in the years the General was deployed. In those days she had the patience for Tinkertoys and games of twenty questions and go fish. They’d gone to museums and aquariums, on road trips; and while she put in a vegetable garden, he excavated highways for his fleet of tiny cars and trucks. Even now, when Harry was almost forty, a husband and a doctor, they could sit at this table and talk all afternoon about not much of anything, laughing like friends. She had been the first to realize that his accident had been a disguised blessing, allowing him to find his true expression through medicine.

“Where did she bite you?”

Just above the small Semper Fi tattoo she and her Marine Corps friends had gotten after they finished Basic, the inside of Frankie’s arm was fair and silken, faintly blued by the veins beneath the skin. Glory’s teeth had left an ovoid imprint.

“Well, for goodness sake, of course you slapped her,” Maryanne said, disgusted. “I would have done the same thing myself. My God, what’s come over that child?”

“There’s never any excuse for slapping a child, not on the face.”

Apart from the shock and pain of it, a face slap was an insult intended to stomp out confidence and dignity and always a gross demonstration of power. Unlike Frankie, Maryanne didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing.

“Don’t be so melodramatic.” Maryanne held out a plate
of sugar cookies. “Have one of these. I made them yesterday. Children are adaptable creatures. If they weren’t, the human race would have died off long ago. They can forgive far worse things than one slap.” Maryanne did not romanticize childhood or believe it was meant to be one long romp in the park. “Think about it. She put her teeth in you. Like a dog. Your slap taught her a lesson she won’t forget.”

“If she’s bratty it’s my fault. I should have stayed home and done my job.”

“Would a man ever say that? Stop blaming yourself.”

“I was selfish—”

“Enough! You became a Marine Corps officer because you love this country and you went to Iraq because you believed it was the right thing to do. I never wanted you to go but once you made up your mind, I supported you. Feelings of patriotism and honor aren’t restricted to men, you know.”

“But I hurt her, Mom.”

“I won’t get on the pity pot with you, Francine.” Maryanne could not take much more of this conversation. “It’s called action and consequence and it’s the way we learn what we can do in this world and what we can’t.”

The kitchen was hot and the fresh cookies smelled too sweet. Maryanne leaned across the sink and shoved up the window, letting in a gust of salt-smelling westerly wind.

She told Frankie to go into the room off the kitchen where there was a bed. Originally intended for a maid—though the Byrnes family had never had live-in help—it
had been converted to a catch-all room for laundry, mending, and sometimes a quick nap.

“Whatever’s on the bed, just push it off and lie down. When do you want me to wake you?”

“Rick’ll worry. I should call him.”

“Oh, I’m sure he can figure out where you are.”

Maryanne returned to the living room where she folded the lap rug and fluffed the couch cushions. She remembered Harlan telling her when they were first married that she should keep the house in such order that if the base commander were to walk in without notice, she would have nothing to be ashamed of. Maryanne had taken his words to heart and, in retrospect, she knew that by such efforts—plus all the officers’ wives’ meetings she had attended, the committees she chaired and all the dinner parties she gave—she had contributed to her husband’s success.

But she had failed Frankie by letting her believe that the General’s impossible standards were the only ones that mattered. The truth was that the base commander was never going to drop in unannounced and perfection was overrated unless you were a sniper. Ease of mind and personal satisfaction counted much more, and Frankie had never had much of either.

Maryanne was standing at the kitchen counter thumbing through a cookbook trying to summon some interest in food when the clock at the top of the stairs struck six and Rick and Glory walked in.

“Is she here?” He looked haggard.

“Sit down, Rick. You too, Glory.” Without asking if he wanted tea, she refilled the electric kettle. “Glory, get me two cups out of the dishwasher. They’re clean.”

Glory handed them to her. One second of eye contact with her grandmother and she began to cry an eight-year-old’s galloping, gulping sobs, and Maryanne heard all over again the story of the vegetables, the stink, the bite, and the slap.

I’m too old for this.

She put tea bags and a teaspoon of sugar in the cups and poured boiling water over.

“Is she here?” Glory asked. “Where is she?”

Maryanne put a finger to her lips and then pointed at the closed door to the maid’s room.

“I don’t know what to do.” Rick took his tea without looking at Maryanne. “I don’t think there’s anything I
can
do. She’s been crazy all day.”

Maryanne wanted to counter this statement with a few hard words, but now wasn’t the time.

“What does her therapist say?”

He didn’t know.

“Well, I think you’d better call her, Rick. Maybe she could suggest someone for
you
to see while this is going on.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not the problem here, Maryanne.”

“She’s your wife, Rick. I’m her mother and that man upstairs is her father. We’re all part of this and it’s no good
pretending we’re not. And I don’t want to hear you say she’s acting crazy. She’s been through things you can’t begin to imagine.”

The little speech left her quite breathless.

“I never told her to go.”

“Her conscience did. And you should be grateful you have a wife who’s not afraid to do the right thing.” She wanted to add
stop feeling sorry for yourself,
but that would be pushing too hard. She loved her son-in-law and did not wish to be unkind.

“What about me?” Glory asked. “She slapped me. That’s child abuse.”

“From what I hear you deserved what you got, young lady. You’re not a German shepherd. You do not bite unless your life depends on it.”

Glory shoved a sugar cookie into her mouth and sulked.

Rick said, “I want to take her home, but I’ll leave her hear if she’s sleeping—”

“She belongs at home. With you.” Maryanne pointed to the closed maid’s room door. “Go wake your mother.”

Glory sucked in her lips and shook her head.

“Now.”

She walked with her back straight, her shoulders squared like a T. It took only a slight blurring of Maryanne’s vision to see Frankie at the same age, trudging off to do something she didn’t want to do.

“Close the door behind you,” Maryanne said. “Give yourselves some privacy.”

It was warm in the maid’s room, but Frankie had slept.

The door opened and the air freshened a little. Glory stood at the foot of the bed and details of the party came back to Frankie and there was nothing she could say that would change the stubborn and miserable look on her daughter’s face. She sat up and opened her arms. She saw Glory flinch and her shoulders round in reflexive self-protection. And then she seemed to have a second thought. Water shimmered in her eyes and she dropped onto the bed and into Frankie’s arms.

“I’m sorry, baby. So sorry.”

T
hey sat at the table and picked at leftovers. To Maryanne the moping and misery had begun to reek of self-indulgence and she wanted everyone out of the house. Admittedly it had been a bad day, a bad series of days, of weeks even. But she could tell Frankie and Rick about bad times.

The decades had vanished behind Maryanne, taking with them more than forty anniversaries and hundreds of orchestrated birthday parties, New Year’s celebrations, and galas in aid of causes that had seemed worthy at the time. She had forgotten them all but the night when the General loaded his Beretta and threatened to shoot the dog for waking him out of his first sound sleep in a month, that she remembered in three dimensions and Technicolor. After she stood between him and the dog, crying
shoot me! shoot me!
he fled the house and was gone three days; and when he came home he never talked about where he went or
what he did, and she was too angry and scared and relieved to ask him.

As if her thoughts had woken him from his nap, the General called to her as he came downstairs. At the sound of his voice the air in the kitchen stiffened and everyone around the table sat up straighter. He shambled into the room barefoot, wearing sweatpants and an ancient Marine Corps T-shirt. “… damn dream about that Belasco woman. General MacArthur was there. I haven’t thought of that son of a bitch in at least ten years. Belasco had him in one of those old-fashioned witness boxes….” He stopped talking when he saw Frankie and her family around the table.

“I didn’t know you were coming to dinner.”

No one answered. He poked Frankie’s shoulder with his index finger.

“I asked you a question.”

“It’s not important, Harlan. Go back upstairs.” Maryanne ran scalding water into the sink and began noisily washing teacups by hand. If the hair on her head had stood up and sparked, she would not have been surprised. With her hands in the water, she could be electrocuted.

“I’ll bring you some dinner on a tray.”

“Am I sick? What’s going on around here?”

“Mommy has PTSD,” Glory said.

The General narrowed his eyes. “PMS?”

Glory giggled. She thought he was teasing, pretending not to hear correctly. Maryanne didn’t know if he was
playing or not. The General had never been a good listener and nowadays he was half deaf when he wanted to be.

“P. T. S. D,” Glory said again, enunciating carefully. “She got it from Iraq.”

The General appeared to think about this, turned, and left the room. Over his shoulder he told Maryanne, “You can bring me scrambled eggs. And some of those sugar cookies.”

He was back on the bed watching
60 Minutes
when she came in thirty minutes later.

She turned off the set and stood in front of it.

“Hey! Mike Wallace is going to talk about G4S. I want to see that.”