Me and Mr. Stenner

6.

In January, a lot of trouble started.

First of all, my father went to France for two weeks to talk to a company about designing a big industrial complex for them in Marseilles, wherever that was. I missed him dreadfully, even though he sent a postcard each and every day of the week, including Sundays. But I knew what hotel he was staying at in Marseilles, and I also knew the time difference, because I’d asked Mrs. Jovet, who taught French at Hadley-Co. So one fine Friday night, when Mom and Mr. Stenner went to a movie and left me with a sitter, I picked up the telephone and made a collect, transatlantic, person-to-person call to Mr. Frank O’Neill at the Grand Hotel et Noailles in Marseilles. It was eight o’clock at night when I made the call, but like magic it became two o’clock in the morning when Dad picked up the phone. He sounded very sleepy and fuzzy at first, but then we had a nice long chat. I told him I missed him and wished he would hurry back home, and then we said good night to each other, though for him it was already morning, and I went downstairs to tell the sitter I was going to bed.

In the morning, at the breakfast table, I mentioned that I had called Dad in Marseilles.

“You what?” Mom said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I reversed the charges.”

“Who gave you permission to call Marseilles?” my mother asked.

“I didn’t know I needed permission,” I said. “You said I could call Dad whenever I wanted, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but...”

“Well, I felt like calling him, so I called him.”

“What was so urgent that you had to call all the way to...?”

“Nothing was urgent. You said I could call him whenever I wanted to, so I called him. Isn’t that what she said, Mr. Stenner? That I could call Dad whenever...”

“Yes, that’s what she said.”

“See? So I felt like calling, so I...”

“But,” Mr. Stenner said.

I looked at him.

“You’re taking advantage of a technicality,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“It means you know very well what we meant when we...”

“We? Who’s we? It was Mom who made the decision about the phone calls.”

“No, it was Mom and I together.”

“It was Mom who told me I could call Dad whenever...”

“Yes, it was Mom who told you. But it was Mom and I who...”

“What’d you have to do with it?”

“Mom and I make all the decisions together around here.”

“Even decisions about my father?”

“Yes, even decisions about your father.”

“I don’t see why you should have anything to say about calls I make to my father. If I want to call my own father...”

“Abby,” Mr. Stenner said, “we’re not going to get into a contest with your father. We told you it was okay to call him whenever you wanted, but I think you know that didn’t mean calling him in France.”

“You’re not to do that again,” my mother said.

“Well, where can I call him? Can I call him in Germany or Spain or...?”

“Is he going to Germany or Spain?” Mr. Stenner asked.

“I don’t know where he’s going. I’m just saying...”

“Then don’t worry about it.”

“I’m trying to find out what’s okay and what isn’t okay around here. I make a lousy call to France — that you didn’t even have to pay for — and next thing I know...”

“Abby,” Mr. Stenner said, “it is not okay to make any long-distance calls without first asking our permission. Does that clarify it for you?”

“What’s considered long distance? Is it long distance to call...”

“You know what long distance is.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then pick up the phone and ask the operator what the local dialing distance is. Anything outside of that is long distance.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” I said.

“You knew how to call Marseilles,” Mr. Stenner said, and put his napkin on the table, and got up, and went out into the living room.

The Rules List went up the next morning.

I think I already mentioned that when you came into the house the first thing you saw was a staircase going up to where the bedrooms were. The side of the staircase formed a passageway that led to the kitchen, and was paneled with wood. Mr. Stenner had decorated the wood paneling with black-and-white enlargements of pictures he had taken, though he was afraid Mr. Mauley would come in one day and tell him to take the pictures down.

Mr. Mauley had come around on New Year’s Day to wish us a happy new year, and while he was in the house, he’d gone up to my room to check on a storm window that was flapping. He’d noticed that Mr. Stenner had put up a mobile I’d made, and he started fussing and fretting about making holes in the ceiling, and about how difficult it was to repair ceilings when tenants put holes in them. Mr. Stenner very slowly and precisely told Mr. Mauley that the mobile was made of string and cardboard and was light enough to be held to the ceiling with a simple straight pin. Mr. Stenner had, in fact, very carefully and gently hammered the straight pin into the ceiling for me, being careful not to damage anything up there — as if a straight pin could damage anything. He had in fact bent fourteen pins before he got one to go in right.

Mr. Mauley hemmed and hawed and harrumphed a lot, but I think he got Mr. Stenner’s message about not bugging us over a simple little pinhole in the ceiling. But Mr. Stenner was worried now about the photographs he’d put up on the side of the staircase. Anyway, that’s where the Rules List was. Mr. Stenner had taken down one of the photographs, the one I loved of the swan, and had put the Rules List up in its place. The list was hand-lettered. He was pretty good at stuff like that, though not as good as Dad. This is what it looked like:

They called me down for breakfast, and the very first thing I saw on the way to the kitchen was the list. I read it silently, and then I went into the kitchen. Mr. Stenner was at the stove, making pancakes. Mr. Stenner considered pancakes quote a family tradition unquote. All he knew how to cook was pancakes. My father could cook sea bass and quiche and all sorts of things. In fact, before the split, one of the few times my parents didn’t argue was when they were planning and cooking a meal together. Mr. Stenner made pancakes every Sunday morning. That’s because he used to make pancakes for his sons every Sunday morning. The one thing he didn’t realize was that his sons really were his family whereas I was not his family. Mom wasn’t either. So the quote family tradition unquote was wasted on us. Or at least on me.

They were playing it cool, both of them. They knew I’d seen the list, knew I’d read it, and were waiting for me to make the first comment. I didn’t disappoint them.

“What do you mean swear words cost ten cents each?” I asked.

“If you swear,” Mr. Stenner said, “we’ll deduct ten cents from your allowance for each...”

“Why?”

“Because it isn’t nice for little girls to use the kind of language you’ve been using,” Mom said.

“Language like what?”

“You know what,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Give me an example of the words I can’t use,” I said.

Mr. Stenner looked me straight in the eye and said, “Shit.”

“Okay,” I said, and shrugged.

“And I think you know the other words,” he said.

“Can I say them now, just to make sure we re both thinking of the same words? I mean, will it cost me a dime if I say them now?”

“Yes.”

“Then how can I be sure...”

“You can be sure we’re both thinking of the same words,” Mr. Stenner said.

“It didn’t cost you anything,” I said. “When you said...”

“Careful,” he said.

“Can I spell it?”

“No.”

“Well, it didn’t cost you anything.”

“When you get to be forty-three years old, you can say whatever you want, too. Meanwhile, it’ll cost you a dime.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“Who says it has to be fair?”

“Huh?”

“Nowhere is it written that grown-ups have to be fair to children,” he said, and flipped a pancake.

“Boy!” I said.

“Right,” he said, and flipped another pancake. He was smiling, the rat.

“And what’s this about doing my own homework? I do do my own homework.”

“Mommy and I do it,” he said.

“You mean because I ask a simple question every now and then?”

“Always.”

“Only every now and then.”

“Always. There are three things going on every time you do your homework, Abby. The first thing is the television set...”

“I don’t even watch it. I just like to hear the voices. Television helps me concentrate.”

Mr. Stenner rolled his eyes.

“It does.”

“No television,” he said.

“Okay, no damn television.”

“And that’s ten cents,” he said.

“Shit,” I said.

“And that’s another...”

“All right, all right!” I said.

“And no doing your homework in the living room. That’s the second thing that’s going on, all the chatter between Mommy and me, which you re just dying to hear. You’ve got the television on, and you’re listening to our conversation...”

“What’s the third thing?”

“The third thing is constantly asking us what a word means, or how to do an arithmetic problem, or where India is...”

“I know where India is.”

“I think you understand what we’re trying to tell you, Abby,” my mother said.

“All right, I’ll turn off the television, all right? But I’ll do my homework down here.”

“No, you’ll do it upstairs in your bedroom. There’s a desk in your bedroom, that’s what desks are for.”

“I like to spread out.”

“No, you just like to be in the middle of things,” my mother said.

“There’s too much happening down here,” Mr. Stenner said. “You can’t possibly concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing when...”

“I promise I won’t ask any more questions while I’m doing my homework, okay?”

“No,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Well, why not? If I turn off the television, and I keep quiet...”

“We want some time alone,” Mr. Stenner said.

“What?”

“I said...”

“I heard what you said. You’re alone every night after I go to bed, what do you mean you...”

“When I get home from work,” Mr. Stenner said, “there are lots of things I want to discuss with Mom, most of them private. If you’re sitting here in the living room, with your books sprawled all over the floor...”

“Well, if you’ve got something private to tell her, why don’t you go upstairs, instead of me?”

“Because you’re the poor, put-upon little kid,” Mr. Stenner said, smiling, “and I’m your mean old stepfather.”

“You’re not my stepfather yet, thank God.”

“I will be soon.”

“You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to save all my homework and do it at Daddy’s when I go to see him. Because when I ask him questions, he always...”

“That’s rule number ten,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Huh?”

“No contests,” he said. “Would you like another pancake?”

“No,” I said. “I hate pancakes.”

Two days before the end of January, they left me with a woman named Mrs. Cavallo while they went down to Haiti for Mom’s divorce. They were only gone overnight, but I must’ve called Dad at least a dozen times while they were gone. Mrs. Cavallo didn’t know what was going on. They had told her about the Rules List, and showed her where it was tacked up to the side of the staircase, but I took the list down the minute they drove off, and when Mrs. Cavallo looked for it I told her the wind probably blew it off the wall while the door was open and they were carrying their bags out. Miraculously, the wind blew it back onto the wall, pushpins and all, just before they got home the next day. Mrs. Cavallo told them I’d been a good girl while they were gone, and she also told them I’d spent a lot of time on the telephone with my father.

“You’re not her father?” she asked Mr. Stenner, smiling.

“No,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Ah,” Mrs. Cavallo said, and clucked her tongue. “A second marriage, eh?”

“Yes,” my mother said.

“Ah,” Mrs. Cavallo said again, and counted the money twice when Mr. Stenner paid her for her services.

At dinner that night, Mom told me about Haiti, about how hot it had been down there, and about the beggars on the courthouse steps and on the columned verandah facing a public pump from which a pregnant woman kept drawing water. The woman had made six trips to the pump before Mom was called into the judge’s presence, back and forth over the rock-strewn road, her enormous belly thrust out ahead of her, the laden buckets at the ends of her arms serving almost as counterweights to the unborn child inside her. And then Mom had gone into the courthouse while Mr. Stenner waited outside, and the Miami lawyer representing her had secured the divorce in exactly four minutes. That was how long it had taken. Mom was still amazed that all it had taken was four minutes. Signed, sealed, and delivered — sealed yes. There was a great blob of red sealing wax on the divorce decree, over a pair of flowing red ribbons.

“Why’d you go with her?” I asked Mr. Stenner.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“If Mommy went down there to divorce Daddy, why didn’t he go with her? He was the one who married her in the first place, wasn’t he? So he should have been the one to go get the divorce with her.”

My mother’s wineglass hesitated on the way to her lips. She told me later that she’d thought the exact same thing coming home on the plane, and had suddenly buried her head in Mr. Stenner’s shoulder and begun crying. She hadn’t told him why she was crying. She hadn’t said she considered it somehow barbaric to divorce a man without him being there to hear those final words spoken — the way he’d heard the marriage words spoken before an assemblage of witnesses more than thirteen years before.

The wineglass hesitated on the way to her lips, and Mom sipped at the wine thoughtfully, and then turned to me and said, “Daddy signed a power of attorney. He didn’t have to be there.”

“Neither did Mr. Stenner,” I said flatly.