Perle constantly giving in to him, all he had to do was insist and he could have anything he wanted, just to shut him up. Still red-faced and crying really, only more subtly.
And so he let him have the hammer: let him, knowing that he was weak-wristed and the hammer too heavy; let him, knowing that it was dangerous; let him, knowing he might well hurt himself. Let him. It would be good for him. He was prone to crying over scratches and poison ivy, stubbed toes, bumps, bruises, frightened of wasps and jellyfish and sounds in the night. His fingers were covered with Band-Aids, his scuffed knees yellow from application of Mercurochrome – he was frightened of iodine. Ow! It hurts! No, it would do him no harm if harm it was to be.
It was. The hammer came up, not very far up, and down, not very hard, but it was high enough and hard enough to give the boy’s thumb such a whack that, if it couldn’t have been heard in the kitchen, the resulting screams certainly were.
Ten years old, making a fuss.
Perle came rushing across the lawn in her apron, waving her hands in her ‘It’s a disaster’ motion, like a marionette operated by a spastic. Jake was lying on the floor holding his hand, screaming, face soaked, snot-ridden. Making a meal of it, Maurice thought unsympathetically.
‘Maurice! What have you done? How many times have I told you!’
She leant down and lifted the crying boy, who was too big now to carry back to the house but seemed incapable of standing up. Unwilling, really.
‘Let me see, let me see!’ she said, unwrapping the one hand from the other to reveal the red swelling thumb.
‘Don’t touch it!’
‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ she said. ‘Come with me, we’ll put it in cold water and then put a lovely ice pack on it. That’ll make it all better.’
She glared at Maurice, who was sheepishly putting his tools away, and propelled the boy gently back to the house, brushing past Becca, lurking to the side, making herself simultaneously invisible and available.
‘I’ll turn the cold water on!’ she said, running back to the house. ‘And wake Addie!’
Perle loved to be needed, to make sure the children had everything they wanted, and then to worry after they had it. She spoiled them, and then worried they’d spoil, or worse. Being alive was dangerous. In the meantime die kinder needed to be watched over and protected. They’d eat too much fruit and get a stomach ache, go into the water just after eating a hotdog and drown of cramps, fall out of the tree, get stung by a bee or bitten by a dog, get a poison ivy rash, prick themselves on the blackberry bushes. Or get sucked into the septic tank. This was a fiction of Jake’s that Perle, who knew nothing of such tanks save what they were full of, curiously colluded in. If you got too close to the septic tank area, behind the garage, the ground would give way and you could fall in! Jake said so, it was like quicksand. Perle never went near it, and Becca wouldn’t go into the garage at all – which was, of course, Jake’s aim – for fear that the quicksand would reach out and grab her by the ankles, and in she’d go to the most horrible death she could imagine, drowned in poo-poo. Worse than being eaten by the Great Danes up the hill, who howled all night and ate children. At least they were in their cage!
Becca slept for almost an hour, and woke up irritable and thirsty, rubbing her eyes.
‘Are we almost there?’
Jake knew she would say that – she was always asking, never satisfied.
‘No! It’s a long way still. You’ve got to learn to be patient!’
It was what Addie kept telling her, but Becca had no need to defer to her brother.
‘You be patient! I’m hungry and I feel sick!’
It was her trump card. Last year she’d been nauseous on the way to Huntington, vomited copiously in the car, almost missing Jake. Addie had insisted, before they set off, on making bacon and scrambled eggs for the children. Both resisted, but lots of ketchup and extra bacon had solved the immediate problem, and exacerbated the resulting one.
The copious ejaculate, which emerged in a muddy rainbow arc, made the rear of the car uninhabitable, ready for an emergency United Nations task force. Rotten half-digested eggs and red slush with brown bits covered much of the surfaces, and some of Jake’s. Fallout was nothing compared to this, just some dusty powder, nothing to it, whatever the consequences . . .
Ben had opened the window, put on the fan for fresh air and, gagging continuously, exited the highway five minutes later in search of a store where he could buy some cleaning materials, and a pharmacy to get something to settle Becca’s stomach, all of their stomachs. It took twenty minutes to find one, during which they had to pull over twice for Becca to empty her stomach, and for the rest of them to fill their lungs.
They filled buckets with water, scrubbed and brushed and installed air fresheners, the result of which was that the car smelled like a hospital on a humid day, the air falsified by cleaning odours, underlain by the stench of decay.
Becca knew that none of them wanted that again.
‘I ate too many jellybeans. I think I might . . .’ She made a retching sound from the back of her throat and repeated it while clutching her stomach.
Jake glared at her. He’d heard that sound before, not when she had actually vomited, which she’d done quickly and without any fuss, but some time afterwards, when she was ostensibly playing in the yard. The first time he’d rushed over to her, to ask if she was sick. She looked sheepish, cleared her throat, walked away. She’d been practising.
Addie had brought a vomit bag from their plane trip to Bermuda the previous Easter and had it ready.
‘Here, darling, try to hold on, and if you need to vomit do it in this. It’s a special bag. You remember, from the plane?’
‘I’m not doing it in a bag! I’ll miss and get it all over me!’
‘Better than getting it on me!’ said Jake.
‘I need the bathroom! Hurry!’
It was impossible not to stop, though Addie and Ben suspected, and Jake knew, that there was no danger of a barf.
He looked at his sister suspiciously.
‘Becky,’ he said, ‘is drecky!’
She glared right back.
‘Jakie,’ she hissed, ‘is snakey!’
‘Shut up! Now!’ said Addie.
*
Everything was a potential source of harm. Particularly Maurice. One day he threw a baseball when the boy had his head turned and hit him on the cheek, the next day he pushed Becca too high on the swing and she began to cry. He let them stay up too late, and the next day they’d be cranky and hurt themselves.
He had no sense of having done wrong, the only wrong was in being there at all, or too often. He should have gone to the city for the day, though he supposedly had the month off. But there were always deals to be done, orders supervised: the rag trade was like that, quiet one moment, frantic the next. Even in the dog days. The sales force – grand name for the eight of them, five of them useless schleppers, God knows why Sol and Molly kept them on – all took a break in August, so if there was anything to be done, Sol would get on the phone, knowing Maurice wanted to say yes.
Perle objected each time. But some opportunities were too good to miss, and when he returned from his occasional triumphs, pockets full of cash, she’d be mollified. Sometimes even more than that. Talk about blessings!
She’d watch him drive off, suit jacket folded on the seat next to him, his shirtsleeves rolled up, arm resting outside the window. By now he had more hair on his arms and chest than on his head, but he looked good going bald, not like the rest of the shrivelled alter kockers. Even at sixty-one he was a fine figure of a man, noble-browed, browned, still with that body that had once given her such pleasure. In his twenties he’d played