Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [17]
“Athletic cup,” he said, putting it in front to show me how it worked. “My dad used to wear it for rugby.”
I started looking around on my own. If I waited for Benjie, we’d never get to any good stuff. I stuck my hand under the bed, and then I got down on my knees. Under the bed and back of the closet had been the best places so far. I didn’t like going into basements, certainly not for the split garden hoses, rusty skates, and used tires that everyone kept.
There was nothing under the bed, but in the back of the closet there were shoe boxes half filled with curling photographs. I let Benjie rummage in the underwear drawers. The pictures were of Mrs. Stone.
She was naked, kneeling in one, on her hands and knees in the others, looking back at the camera with a stupid smile. Her long hair hung over one shoulder, and her rear end was dark with pimples and little creases and hairs. The whole thing was worse than her paintings. I put the photos back in the box and the box back behind Mr. Stone’s winter boots.
“Let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”
“Look at this. It’s Greta.”
I hated it when kids called their parents by their first names, like they were other kids.
She is skinny and tall in the photo, taller than she looks now. Maybe it’s because her skirt is so short and her hair is short too, with bangs sticking out in three directions. She’s wearing shoes with no socks, but it doesn’t look like summer; she’s wearing a boy’s jacket, her hands stuck in the pockets.
“Where is that?” It’s obviously not America.
“Prague. That’s in Czechoslovakia. They speak Czech. My mother speaks Czech.”
“Do you?”
“A little. Not really. She looks weird.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the picture again. I knew what she was thinking as if I were standing there myself, my hands in her pockets, our fingers wedged together in the torn lining. She is trying not to cry. Everyone wants her to be happy now, and she’s trying.
“It’s late, Benj. You’re supposed to be in bed.”
“You’re invisible.”
“I am not fucking invisible and it’s ten-thirty. Come on, put the picture back.”
He jumped on the bed, bouncing like a trampoline expert, knees bent, arms parallel to the mat, thing flapping up and down in a blur.
“Come and get me, milacku.”
“What’s that?” I began circling the bed. I wanted to grab him, but I didn’t want to smush my face against his thing or his butt.
“Milacku, sweetie pie. Milacku, sweetie pie. Mam te rad. I love you. Mam te rad. Dobrounots. Good night. Dobrounots. Good night, good doughnuts.”
He kept singing the words and repeating them until the English and Czech ran together and I couldn’t understand anything. The bed was creaking loudly, rocking on the short wooden legs.
“Benjie, get off the bed.”
“Say the f-word again.”
“Get off the bed. I’m sorry I used bad language.”
He started screaming. “Say it. Say the f-word.”
“Okay, stop it. Jesus. Get off the fucking bed. Okay? Get off the fucking bed and give me the fucking picture. Your parents will never fucking hire me again if they come home at eleven and find you wandering around the fucking house butt-naked. Okay?”
By the third “fucking” he stopped bouncing, and then he just sat on the end of the bed, waving the photo at me like a little grey flag. I took it out of his hand and put it back in the black leather wallet he’d found it in.
“Where’d you get the wallet?”
He shrugged.
“Come on. You can’t go looking through people’s stuff and leave it all over the place.” Lessons in Rudimentary Snooping.
“In the thing there.” He pointed to the nightstand.
I wasn’t a genius, but at nine I knew the word for “nightstand.” Of course, because of my mother, I also knew “escritoire,” “armoire,” and more about Chippendale Chinese than most people.
I slid the picture out, looking again at her face, skinny little scared face with a big fake smile. I put the wallet back in the drawer, laying a pencil