Me and Mr. Stenner

1.

Mr. Stenner didn’t know what a Shirley Temple was.

I thought a grown man had to be pretty dumb not to know what a Shirley Temple was, but I didn’t say anything about it. Mom smiled at him and said he certainly had a lot to learn about eleven-year-old girls, and then she told him what it was, and ordered one for me. I’ll tell you the truth, I felt somewhat betrayed. It was my father who’d introduced me to Shirley Temples, which I used to ask him to order for me whenever we went out to eat. I didn’t plan on sharing with Mr. Stenner anything Daddy and I had shared, and was in fact going to order a Coke. But Mom said, “Would you like a Shirley Temple, honey?” and that was when Mr. Stenner asked what a Shirley Temple was, and that started the whole dumb thing.

I sipped at the drink like a lady spy I’d seen on television, watching Mr. Stenner over the rim of the glass, ready to do something if he pulled a Luger pistol from his belt. Mr. Stenner seemed very nervous. Mom seemed nervous, too. I could tell; she was smiling a lot.

“Well, what do you feel like eating, Abby?” Mr. Stenner said. “They’ve got some very good steaks here, and if you care for seafood...”

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“They’ve got children’s portions, if you...”

“No, thank you, I’m really not hungry.”

“Maybe you’ll change your mind,” he said. “Maybe,” I said, and then picked up my straw and blew some bubbles into the Shirley Temple.

“Abby, please don’t do that,” my mother said.

Everyone was always telling me I looked just like my mother, with the same blue eyes and blond hair. My mother’s hair was clipped short, though, and my own hair fell almost to the middle of my back, just like my Aunt Harriet’s. Aunt Harriet was my father’s sister. She lived in New Mexico. She had blond hair and blue eyes, too, and frankly I thought I resembled her more than I did Mom. Mom wore eyeglasses, for example. Aunt Harriet didn’t. Nobody on my father’s side of the family wore glasses, for that matter, and neither did I. At the table that night, I was the only one not wearing glasses. Mom was wearing glasses, and Mr. Stenner was also wearing glasses, and I remembered him having said they were aviator glasses, so I asked him if he was an aviator.

“Me?” he said, and laughed. “No, I’m not an aviator.”

“What are you then?”

“You know what he is,” my mother said, and smiled and looked at him across the table.

“No, I don’t.”

“He’s a photographer.”

“You mean you take pictures?”

“Yes,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Movies?”

“No, stills.”

“What’s stills?” I asked.

“How would you define stills, Lillith?” Mr. Stenner said. “Let me see...”

I once looked up the name Lillith in my book of four thousand baby names. That was when I was hoping my mother would have another baby, and was looking up baby names all the time. In the baby-name book, it said that Lillith meant “evil woman” or “bad wife.” I couldn’t imagine why anybody in her right mind would give her daughter a name like that, so I asked Grandmother Lu if she knew what Lillith meant. Grandmother Lu said she didn’t, and when I told her, she said, “Well, well.” Grandmother’s full name was Lucille, which in the baby-name book said “See Lucy,” and Lucy was from the Latin for “light.” Abigail was “a source of joy” — which wasn’t bad.

“... or newspapers or magazines, or even the family album. Those are all stills,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Do you take pictures for magazines?” I asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“Fashion, mostly.”

“Do you ever take pictures of animals?”

“I’ve taken pictures of animals, yes. But mostly I take pictures of people.”

“What kind of animals?”

“Well, all kinds.”

“Tigers?”

“No, I don’t think I’ve ever...”

“You said all kinds. Do you take pictures of people playing tennis or swimming or...?”

“No, most of my work is posed. Studio work, do you know what I mean?”

“Daddy has a studio, you know. He’s an architect.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He designs industrial complexes,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Not houses. Industrial complexes.”

“Mm,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Maybe he’ll let you take a picture of something he designed.”

“Maybe he will.”

“Though I guess if Daddy wanted a picture taken, he’d take it himself,” I said, and knew by the look my mother shot me that I’d made my point; what I was saying was that I didn’t think much of Mr. Stenner’s job. Mr. Stenner got the point, too. He suddenly looked very embarrassed and picked up his menu and began studying it.

I’m not really a brat, please understand that. But, you know, you come home from school one day, and you plunk your books down and go into the living room, and there’s your mother wearing her Long Grave Face and sipping tea which she never brews except in times of national emergencies and certain disasters or calamities, and she tells you she’s leaving your father, tells you in fact that your father has already taken a room at a hotel as a temporary measure, that you and she will soon be making other plans...

“Mr. Stenner,” I said, “when Mommy and I move into the new house, will we own it?”

“No,” he said, and put down the menu. “It’ll be rented.”

“Who’ll be paying the rent? Daddy?”

“No,” Mr. Stenner said, and glanced at my mother. “I’ll be paying the rent.”

“When will you and Mommy get married?”

“As soon as I can reach an agreement with Mrs. Stenner.”

“When will that be?”

“I don’t know. We’re negotiating now.”

“When will Mommy divorce Daddy?”

“As soon as possible.”

“It’s all very complicated,” my mother said.

I loved the new house and not only because I had two rooms all to myself. The house was located closer to school, which meant I didn’t have to spend my entire childhood on a bus. I was going to a private school named Hadley-Coburn, which most of the kids called Hadley-Co, and which some of the kids called Hadley-Co, Inc. You had to wear a uniform at Hadley-Co — plaid skirt, white blouse, blue blazer — and you had to get up at the crack of dawn to catch a bus that took you all over the countryside for six and a half hours picking up other kids who went to Hadley-Co. Before we moved into the new house, I used to leave for school at seven-thirty in the morning and get home at a quarter past five, and that was a long hard day.

The new house had a huge lawn that sloped up from the main road to the front door. And it had a pine forest, sort of set back. The pine forest didn’t belong to the people who were renting us the house, but that didn’t stop me from walking in it. On the ground floor of the house, there was an entrance hall, and then a library to the left of it, and if you walked straight ahead you came into the kitchen and a combination dining room-living room that was connected to the library via a small room that served as a bar. I really mean a small room. It probably had been a closet once upon a time, before the owner of the house changed it to a bar by putting in a counter top and a wine rack. Upstairs from the entrance hall, if you went straight ahead, you came to the bedroom I was sleeping in, and a bathroom between that bedroom and the one I was spilling over into. Then, if you went down the hall, you came to my mother’s bedroom, and across from that the room Mr. Stenner slept in whenever he stayed over.

One of the things I didn’t like was Mr. Stenner staying over so often. He came to dinner every single night, and then instead of going home to his own apartment, he usually hung around talking to Mom, and finally she’d say, “Why don’t you stay the night, Peter, instead of driving all that distance?”

All that distance was maybe three or four miles.

Frankly, I suspected they were sleeping together.

Because otherwise, how come the door at the end of the hall was always locked when Mr. Stenner stayed over, but never locked when there was just Mom and me alone in the house? I was, in fact, positive they were sleeping together. So one morning, I asked my mother if she and Mr. Stenner were sleeping together.

“Yes,” my mother said.

“Why?” I said.

“Because we love each other.”

“But what about Daddy? Don’t you love him?”

“No,” my mother said.

“Do you like him?”

“At the moment, no, I don’t like him very much either.”

“Did you ever like him?”

“Yes, I liked him,” my mother said. “And I loved him, too.”

“But not anymore.”

“No, darling. Not anymore.”

“Well... I love him,” I said. “And I like him, too.”

“Fine.”

“Do you love Mr. Stenner?”

“Yes, Abby. I love him a lot.”

“I hate him.”

“You told me you liked him. You said you liked him very much.”

“That was before he started coming here all the time and acting as if he lived here,” I said, and paused, and frowned, and then looked up into my mother’s face, and asked the question I should have asked right from the beginning. “Mom,” I said, “does he live here?”

“Yes,” my mother said. “He lives here.”

“Shit,” I said.