Six Going on Seven, Chapter 4 ~ Six Going on Seven, part 2

Liseli scrubbed the bathroom within an inch of its life, that morning.  She used all the tools and cleaners at her disposal, even attacking grout with the mini scrub brush.  It felt good to hack and slash away at the gunk in the bathroom; scrubbing was good for the temper.  She’d like to use those heavy duty bristles on Russ.

He’d sat at the table just like Muttface hiding in a corner after trudging mud in on the carpeting.  Him being insensitive enough to know when he was being bad but doing it anyway made her more angry than when he was just totally clueless.  But she had kept herself together.  Yelling at him just made him angry and defiant and out the door.  Liseli shook her head as she mopped the floor with gusto.  Russ understood one language; sex.  Well fine.  She could speak that language.

One day, when you’re old and ugly and the children are gone, nothing will keep him around . . . .

“Shut up,” she muttered, splashing the mop into the bucket.  She blew hair out of her face and looked into the mirror.  At thirty she hadn’t changed much from when he’d first started drooling after her back at the Burger House.  She’d put on a little weight, but was remarkably lucky for a mother of three.  Russ had even assured her that he liked her better with a little more padding on the bones.  She’d have brushed that off as him trying to earn brownie points, but he was the one who was always telling her to eat more.  Fattening her up for groping.  Tch.

But just wait.  You’re still only thirty, give it a few more years.  When you start to sag and wrinkle and your hair becomes gray and brittle he won’t be coming back for more.  And in about twenty years the kids will be moving away, and he’ll be bored out of mind and want to gag every time he looks at you . . . .

“Stop it!”  She swung the mop up and struck the mirror, splashing herself, the walls, and the sinktop with gray soapy water.  She cringed, ducking away, then shook her head in disgust as she lowered the mop back to the floor.  In twenty years Russ won’t look so hot, either, she reminded herself.  We’ll just get old and saggy together.

Sure you will.  Together.

“He can’t leave me,” she muttered to the soap suds in the bucket.  “I won’t let him.”

When she was done with the bathroom she went outside for some fresh air, to clear the ammonia from her head.  She walked down to the mailbox and brought the mail back to the kitchen, where she found Russ half under the sink, mumbling to himself.  He’d cleared out the contents of the cupboard, haphazardly scattering things around him, and parts of the faucet lay in the sink and on the counter.  The boys were still looking glazed in front of the television out in the living room.  At least it’s PBS, she thought guiltily, glancing through the doorway at them.

“How’s it going?”  She walked over to the sink and looked through the drain at Russ.

“Fine,” he snapped.

She smiled.  “That’s good.  Will I be able to use the sink for lunch?”

After a moment’s hesitation he said, “Yes,” not very convincingly.

Liseli turned away, shuffling through the mail.  There wasn’t much that was interesting, but . . . she paused when she came to an envelope from a catalogue company.  She had ordered a birthday present for Elly from that catalogue two months ago, and had been getting a little impatient for it to come.

“Oh great.”  She dropped the rest of the mail on the table and started to tear at the envelope.  “Five days before her birthday they had better not be telling me it’s unavailable.”

They were, and it was.  She skimmed over the form telling her that Elly’s present would not arrive for at least another month, then tossed it onto the table.  “Great.  Just great.  Now what am I going to do?”

Russ was silent under the sink.  There wasn’t even clinking or anything to show he was doing something with the pipes down there.

“You know, if it was going to be out of stock, they should have told me when I ordered, not a ‘Surprise!’ five days before I need it.  Tch.”  She picked up the mail just to throw it down again.  This was the last thing she needed to happen this week!

Russ eased out from under the sink and looked at her for a moment, fiddling with a wrench.  “What did you order?”

“This—” Liseli grabbed the magazine from where it had been sitting on the counter for months.  She paged through and shoved it toward him.  “That.”  She tapped the picture of a little red-headed doll in a white dress.  The doll had a porcelain white, serious face, and dark eyes.  Liseli thought it was a little creepy, but Elly had liked it.  “She asked for it.”

“Elly Ann never asks for anything.”

“Yeah.  I know.  But she asked for that.  In particular.”  Liseli turned the catalogue around, studying it.  “The girl asks for one thing in her life, and they’re out of stock.”

“It looks like something you could get anywhere.”  Russ shrugged.

“But she asked for this.  She’d know if I got something that was just similar.”

“Uh-huh.”  He leaned his head back and surveyed her from half lidded eyes.

“And I looked around at some stores, didn’t see anything quite right.”  She looked down, sniffing once as she fiddled with the edges of the mail on the table.  The doll in the catalogue was a bit more than she felt comfortable paying, so she had looked for a cheaper substitution online and in stores.  But Elly had wanted the one she saw in the glossy pages of the catalogue, and everything else felt like a gyp.

“Elly will like anything she gets,” said Russ, cocking his head to the side with that silly girl look.  “I mean, she was thrilled to death with Furball, and I got the cat from a box on the sidewalk.”  He shrugged.

“Russ—” she made her tone flat “—she likes anything you give her.  Not everything she gets.  Remember that game I bought her for Christmas?  Yeah, of course not, she never plays with it.  I don’t have the advantage of being her most favorite person in the world.”

He leaned his head against the cupboard door and rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling.  “Do you have to make our daughter’s happiness into a competition?”

“It’s not a competition.”  Liseli almost laughed out loud.  She allowed herself a little snort.  “It’s a rout.  We both know she’s always been Daddy’s girl and always will be.  But that wasn’t my point.  I just . . . I want to get her something she’ll like.”  She unfolded her arms and turned around.  “I don’t know.  Now I don’t know what to get her.”

“Liseli — she’s only seven.  Just turning seven.”

She spun back around.  “I’m not going to just throw a Barbie doll at her, or anything else most seven-year-olds like.  Elly isn’t most seven-year-olds.”

“I think you’re assuming a lot just because she hasn’t played with one game you got her.”  Russ sat up straighter, then leaned forward.  “I still say, she’s only seven, she’s not as hard to please as you’ve got yourself all worked up to think.”

“Don’t lecture me, Russell.”  She held out her hand, steaming inside.  “You can go ahead and pick up whatever junk you want for her, and she’ll think it’s just the greatest thing ever because you’re the one giving it to her.  In the meantime, I’m going to look for something she’ll actually enjoy on its own merits.”

Russ snorted.  “You’re trying to make it a competition again.  I’m not gonna fight over whose present Elly Ann will like more.”

“Do you even have a present for her yet?”

He slid his eyes to the side as a smirk inched onto his face.  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

Liseli almost made the observation that since he’d been without a job for a couple years, any money he spent on a gift would be money she had earned.  But she stopped, getting only as far as the intake of breath.  It wouldn’t matter to Elly where the money came from, so it didn’t matter at all.  “Just don’t get her any more animals.  I’m the one who cleans that cat’s litterbox.”

His smirk widened.  “Don’t worry.”

“I won’t.”  Then she switched gears abruptly, frustrated; “I’m taking the boys outside for a little while before lunch.”

She turned to go, hesitating in the doorway.  But he said nothing, so she left.  Why did he always have to poo-poo how she felt about things?  He couldn’t even begin to understand what it was like to want to get someone the perfect present.  It was too easy for him.  Elly lit up at anything he did for her, anything he said to her, anything.  That was fine, just fine, but why couldn’t he see how different it was with her?  Elly was only six going on seven, but she’d already mastered the weak, polite smile.  All the things Liseli had bought for her since she was five had been met with that weak, polite smile, and never used, never worn, never appreciated, never wanted.

---

When Russ finally got the faucet back together, it was dripping worse than before.  He stood at the sink for a few moments, watching it.  He had been very proud, for a split second there, just because he’d been able to put it back together at all.  Now he wanted to beat the faucet with his wrench.

Liseli had taken the boys somewhere in the car.  He looked at the clock and wondered how long she’d be out, and how much new faucets went for, and if he had to go to the store and get a new one could he bring it back and take out the old one and install the new one before the guys got there and wanted to practice?

He turned the TV on and fell asleep in front of the twelve o’clock news.  He drifted away from the headlines and dreamed that he was in Alisiya, walking through the hilly fields and woodland patches.  He was alone and he did not think about anything, but he was happy.

It wasn’t the first time he had dreamed of Alisiya.  He had the dream often; it was unlike other dreams where things happened.  In this dream, things just were.  The sun, the grass, the pathways he made with his feet.  Maybe birds sang.  Maybe not.  Maybe the wind blew and maybe it was still.  But the sun and the grass and the shade under the trees was unchangeable.

He’d been to lots of different worlds in that three year period after Alisiya and Adayzjia before Elly was born, before he was married and settled down.  But he rarely dreamed about those places.  They’d been interesting to him while he was there, when he was discovering them.  But it was the wilderness of Alisiya he returned to still, now that he’d been settled for seven years and didn’t look to be unsettling anytime soon.  Perhaps never.

He woke up in the middle of a soap opera.  It was after twelve thirty and Liseli wasn’t home to make lunch, so he stayed in front of the TV and watched the soap.  It wasn’t that he couldn’t make lunch.  He usually made lunch for himself and the boys.  But he didn’t see the point in starting in on lunch when Liseli had promised to make it.

When he was awake he could think about that dream.  In the dream he didn’t have to think, but he liked to remember it.  There was a quietness and peace to it that he didn’t usually feel, even in dreams.  A rightness.

He wondered if he could ever go there again.  An idea had worked its way into his mind that week and even though he shook it away, no, beat it away, it stayed there insistently.  He couldn’t.  He shouldn’t.  There was no way to go without Liseli knowing, but she couldn’t know.  He’d promised.  It had practically been the unofficial, private version of their wedding vows.  I will never leave this world again.  I will stay with you.  I will not go where you won’t follow.

Still the idea crouched.  Still.  He wondered if he could live this life of leaky faucets, twelve o’clock news, catalogue companies, and Sesame Street till he died.  Liseli wanted her normal life with her 40 hours a week job and church on Sundays with a trip to the zoo or park wedged in between on Saturday.  He’d never thought about that being the future called settling down when he promised to never follow the Gates again.

I want to be twenty again, he thought bleakly, watching but not seeing the melodrama on the television play out before him.  It wasn’t that he felt that old, at thirty, but he could see his whole life ahead of him, stretching out like a depressingly straight line.  He’d find another job, because it wasn’t like the band was going to grow past a hobby, and he’d watch his kids get older until they left for lives of their own, and he’d take up golfing or something like that to pass the years of retirement before he died.  Out of the corners of his eyes he could still see all the paths he could be taking, as instead he trudged on toward death of heart failure at sixty-five or a stroke at seventy or Alzheimer’s in his eighties.  And that would be the good, normal, life.

At twenty he hadn’t known what came next.  That was a feeling he hadn’t appreciated fully.  But every time he’d walked through the Gates to a new world, not knowing what to expect, he’d loved what he called adventure and discovery.

Liseli came home a little after one o’clock, bearing fast food.  “I was going to come home and make lunch,” she said, pulling burgers and fries out of the bag, “but the boys were having such fun at the park I thought I’d let them play till they wore themselves out.  So.  I got you a chicken sandwich.”

She paused, balancing his sandwich on her palm, looking at him for the first time since walking in the door.  “I see the faucet’s back together.”

Looking into the green of her eyes, he knew with that same straightline feeling that they’d be having sex before sleep that night.  That was, unless he did something to mess it up.  She wasn’t altogether happy with him, but it wouldn’t hamper the sex any.  She had that look.

“Yeah.  But it still drips.  I think I’ll have to get a new one.”

“Oh.”  She sighed a little.  “Are you going to do that today?”

“I suppose.  Um . . . .”  He paused, scratched the back of his head, took his sandwich from her.

“What?”  She still held her hand palm up toward the ceiling.

“The guys are coming over in a couple hours.”

“I see.”  She pursed her lips slightly, but then shrugged out of the expression.  “I suppose they want to be over every day this week.”

“Noah was hoping . . . .”

“Well just get to it when you can,” she brushed Noah’s name aside, sitting down to her French fries with the merest twitch of one shoulder.

“I will.”

She looked up, not saying anything, but the look said it was still going to happen.  He hadn’t messed it up, yet.

When he was twenty, he’d wondered if he would ever get laid, and even when it had happened he’d wondered what the chances were of it happening again.  He hadn’t known what would happen next.  Now he felt he had it pretty well figured out.  If she was not too tired or overly upset with him and he had been a good boy, taking care of the kids, fixing faucets, being on time for dinner, brushing his teeth, sex was only a reach away in bed next to him.  That was the sort of thing he’d wished for at twenty, but now to know the formula for getting lucky made it not so . . . lucky.

He thought about it, eating his chicken sandwich and watching her with her French fries and ketchup.  But then Marcus and Eric, badly in need of a nap, started fighting bitterly over the chintzy toys they’d gotten in their meals, and he shook himself from his brooding.  Most days the boys kept him from thinking too much about things like otherworlds and other things the way they’d been ten years ago.  Elly Ann and the boys.  His past didn’t matter to them because their worlds had begun after the fact.  They were all about the present and the future, and they had no idea what was going to happen to them next.

Neither did he, come to think of it.

---

When Elly got home from school, finally, she felt as if she’d missed something very important.  Her parents were talking to each other again, in the normal way, even though Dad’s band was over again for a little while making noise in the garage.  But Mom made taco salad for dinner and smiled at Dad and he stayed home that night, and they never talked about last night.

Maybe everything was going to be okay, after all.  Maybe Maisie really was just wrong.

She breathed easier and went to bed relieved enough to sleep, and sleep deeply, making up for a long night and a hard day, and the burden of not knowing why sometimes life was good and sometimes it was bad.