‘Put Your Hat On, Pick Up a Walking Stick, and Go’

One shouldn’t get married, indeed one shouldn’t. It’s a bore.—andrei prozorov

Someone knocked on the condo door at seven-ten the next morning. I put down my bowl of (Marianne’s) honey-oat clusters, pulled on a coat from the hall closet, and peered out the door.

My father stood on the concrete steps, wearing an old blue sweatsuit and a grey trench coat. He carried a battered aqua-colored leather suitcase. “Oh, Pai!” I opened the door wide and let him in with a hug.

“Good morning, Beki,” he answered.

A slight noise from the basement caught my attention—if Pai saw that a man lived in our condo, he’d flip. He was already settling down in the living room, and he looked like he wanted to talk. “Hold that thought,” I told him, running to the basement door and descending into Chris’s cave.

I hadn’t been down there since Chris’s first night at the condo. The basement had gotten chillier, if that were possible. I whispered his name while I sent him telepathic messages, Please have clothes on, please have clothes on! But Chris was nowhere to be found—the noise I’d heard must have been the basement-to-backyard door closing behind him as he left. I found a Smith’s receipt on his nightstand and wrote him a note on the back longwise with a pencil stub:

Chris—Surprise! My dad’s here! Please, please, please don’t come upstairs if he’s still here when you come home. I know the bathroom and kitchen are upstairs, and I’m really sorry, but I don’t know what else to do. Thank you! I owe you bigtime.—Bekah

This arranged visibly on his neatly made bed, I rushed back upstairs. Pai was staring at our white carpet, his head in his hands. “What happened to your face?” I asked. A long, raw scab ran from his left temple to his chin.

He looked up at me with the same dark blue eyes I see every morning in the mirror, except his were surrounded by browned, scaly wrinkles. At the moment, his eyes were staring off to the right as he thought furiously.

“You’re about to lie, I can tell.” I crossed my arms and frowned at him.

He sighed and relaxed his brain, “Your mother trow a dish at me.”

“Again! Why?”

“We sell—sold—her car yesterday to make te payment of te mortgage. She say it is my fault, and I am a lazy, fat, . . . good-for-nussing.”

I walked halfway across the living room, then stopped, my arms loose at my sides. “Oh. But I thought you had that interview a couple weeks ago.”

“Tey did not want me. Why do anybody want a fifty-eight-years-old man tat cannot speak English?”

I crossed the remainder of the carpet and sat next to my father on the couch. “You speak English fine,” I rubbed his hunched shoulders.

“Your mother does not want me anymore.”

“Oh, Pai, that can’t be true. Mom’s crazy about you.”

He patted the suitcase at his feet. “Tis bag was everyting I have when I come to tis country—Estados Unidos da América, I called it—and zere at te customs was your mother. She was te most beautiful woman I ever seen. Her hair—it was long, and the color was like ouro, like gold—like your hair.” My father stood and tested the weight of his luggage. “I leave her wis what I come wis.”

My eyes were dry, with heavy rubber lids. “She still loves you, Pai. I know she does. If you just hadn’t quit the factory, and still . . .”

Pai squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “Rebekah Inês, do not talk to me about dat.”

I pounded the wall in my best impression of Marianne. I heard a dull thud and felt a sharp pain. “Why won’t anyone explain anything to me?! Why is everyone I want to be close to such a freaking enigma?!”

My father stood up, brushed invisible dust off his sweatpants, and moved towards the door with his suitcase.

“Where will you go?” I asked.

“I go to visit Roque in Salt Lake City; ten, I do not know. You do not want your old Pai around here when you have so much fun.”

He was right. I smiled and hugged him. He took one of Marianne’s onion bagels—she probably wouldn’t eat it now that she was with Derek, I supposed—and left in the old maroon Corolla.

I slipped back downstairs, erased my note until not a hint of it remained, and left the receipt on Chris’s nightstand exactly as I had found it.

* * * *

I thought about how Chris described love as Masha stared at Vershinin the next day during dress rehearsal. An invisible string I attached between my heart and his hand. When he moved too far away, my heart was in pain. My body sighed when Vershinin kissed Masha’s hand and looked up into Masha’s shining violet eyes to whisper what she wanted to hear: “I love you, love you, love you. I love your eyes, I love the way you move, I dream about you. You’re a wonderful, marvelous woman.”

A shudder thrilled through me. I laughed nervously, yet I clung tighter to Vershinin’s hand. “When you talk like this, it somehow makes me laugh, though it frightens me as well. Please,” I shut my eyes and breathed, and I dedicated the breath to Vershinin, “don’t talk that way again.”

Vershinin took back his hand and stood straight. I grabbed at the hand and held it to my heart, stroking the smooth dark skin, “No, it’s all right, go on. I don’t mind.” I pressed his palm over my face. “I don’t mind,” I whispered again. We heard movement offstage. “There’s someone coming,” I dropped Vershinin’s hand again and wiped my eyes with my thumb. “You’d better talk about something else,” I shrugged.

Tuzenbakh wandered in, chest out, with Irina on his arm. He was boasting for her benefit, though she hardly noticed: “I have a triple-barreled name, Baron Tuzenbakh-Krone-Altschauer, but I’m just as Russian as you are. There’s not much trace of my German ancestry about me, except perhaps that I’m so persistent and stubborn about inflicting myself on you. I’ll walk home with you every evening.”

Irina barely managed a thin smile. She stared at the opposite wall, “I’m so tired.”

Professor Allred was pleased with the last two dress rehearsals. The next morning, we were to perform at Timpview High School in front of high-schoolers and scouts from summer theater programs, and the butterflies were already fluttering in my stomach.

Chris looked at me with a worried brow. I smiled back—I didn’t want him to think that I was mad about his rejecting me. I wasn’t. I didn’t move to talk to him, however, and he didn’t come to me.

* * * *

On Wednesday night I tossed and turned until gentle Graça gave me a grumpy look through the gloom. I took a blanket into the living room and pulled a beat-up copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s gothic stories (from a literature class last year) from the bookcase. I flipped to “The Crooked Branch” and read about a beautiful, beguiling boy who was rotten through and through until I dozed into a dream about farms and robbers and denial. I woke to a glorious rosy dawn and more knocking at the door.

“So who was it last night, Bekah?” My mother stood on the doorstep, short yellow hair mussed, arms crossed, toe tapping.

“Huh?” I rubbed my eyes.

She pushed past me into the hallway. I looked outside before shutting the door—a creamy newish Mercedes was double-parked in front of Marianne’s jeep. “I heard about you in bed with a guy—I have connections.” She pulled a bottle of Frappuccino out of her purse and drank deep.

“So is that . . . is that why you’re here?”

“Of course not—you’re an adult. I’m here to collect my husband. Has he been here?”

“Yes, almost,” I looked at the clock, “exactly twenty-three hours ago.”

“Damn!”

“Mom!”

“I’m worried, Bekah. Henrique’s never run across state lines before.”

I brushed her plump arm with my hand, “It’ll—you’ll find him. I think he’s at Rock’s.”

She turned away and started poking around the kitchen. “No, he’s not—I called Rock last night to come down and help me look. If your father were with your brother, he’d have said.”

“Well, you kicked him out.”

Mom slammed a cupboard closed, “Where is your food, Bekah? I was hoping we could do breakfast, but I only see gtf and mma on things . . . is yours this cjm?.”

“No. I don’t have any food right now.”

She picked her purse and walked me to the door, “Let’s go get you some, then.” We slid into Dr. Freidman’s second Mercedes and visited Smith’s at six-thirty in the morning.