Me and Mr. Stenner

9.

Mr. Stenner began growing a beard shortly after the wedding, at about the same time Chiquita Banana came into my life. I was the one who nicknamed her Chiquita Banana. Her real name was Maria Victoria Valdez. Mr. Stenner had taught me the Chiquita Banana song, and I used to sing it around the house all the time. But I never thought I’d meet someone who was actually from South America, and who was my father’s girlfriend besides. Well, not actually his girlfriend. I mean, they weren’t too serious. I guess. But they were going out together. And maybe sleeping together, I’m not sure. Anyway, by the time I met her, they’d been seeing each other for quite some time. Maybe ever since Christmas. Or at least since Mom got the divorce in January. Come to think of it, that probably was when Dad started dating Chiquita Banana. Because in January he probably realized the marriage was really and truly over, red blob of wax on two red ribbons.

So one Saturday morning in June, Dad drove up to the house, everything in bloom, the forsythia bursting with yellow, the magnolia dripping pink petals on the lawn, the crocuses and day lilies and, oh, just everything in bloom, it was absolutely magnificent — and there was Chiquita Banana.

How to describe her?

Black hair.

Very white skin.

Eyes so brown they looked black.

Very curvaceous.

Yoke neck on her dress, rah-ther protuberant boobs.

Simpering smile on her face.

(Or was it fear?)

“Abby, I want you to meet Maria Victoria Valdez. Maria, this is my daughter.”

“How do you do?”

(Should I curtsy?)

“How do you do, Abby?”

(She says it so that it sounds like “Ah-bee.”)

“Well, get in, get in,” my father says.

“What about my bag?”

“Oh, your bag. Right, right, your bag.”

“I’ll get it, Frank,” Mr. Stenner says.

“That’s okay, I’ve got it, Peter.”

I hated her on sight.

I couldn’t tell which I hated most — Mr. Stenner’s beard or Chiquita Banana. To begin with, the beard wasn’t a beard. Not like Jeff’s beard. Not a real beard, not hair, not a full bushy beard on a person’s face. It was just a scraggly collection of bristles that felt as if you’d walked into a porcupine whenever he gave you a hug.

“Please, Mr. Stenner,” I begged him day and night, “please shave off the beard.”

“I like the beard,” he’d say, rubbing his hand over it. “Don’t you like the beard, Lillith?”

“No,” Mom would say.

“Gee, I like it,” he’d say. “Give it a chance. It’s only a few weeks old.”

I guess he intended going through with it because when he went down to renew his passport, he didn’t shave the beard, even though he knew they’d be taking a new picture of him. I went with him that day. The reason I went with him was because school had already ended at Hadley-Co, and I had nothing to do before we left for Europe.

We went for his passport on a Friday. Dad was supposed to pick me up at five-thirty, after work, and it was about eleven in the morning when Mr. Stenner asked if I’d like to join him for lunch and for getting his new passport. I said I guessed it would be better than sitting around the house. The place we went to for his passport was the courthouse in White Plains. He filled out the application for renewal there, an then we went around the corner to have his picture taken. The photographer told us to come back for it in an hour, and that’s when we went to lunch.

We had an interesting conversation during lunch.

I told him all about the time I’d been to Paris.

He said Mommy had told him a lot about that, too, about me going down the Champs Elysees doing a little dance with an umbrella. He told me that when Luke had been my age, he’d taken him and Jeff to London and the only thing Luke had wanted to buy was a bowler hat. He’d worn it all through England. He told me that every time he thought of me dancing down the Champs Elysees with my umbrella, he automatically thought of Luke wearing his bowler hat all through England. I didn’t know what a bowler hat was. Mr. Stenner said it was a derby. Then he asked me how I liked my new stepbrothers.

“Well,” I said, “no offense, Mr. Stenner, but I don’t think they’re really my stepbrothers yet.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well, I guess what it is... well, I don’t think they like me very much.”

“They’re not used to having a sister,” Mr. Stenner said.

“That may be part of it,” I said, “but the other part is they just don’t like me.” I paused, and looked him straight in the eye, and then I said, “They don’t like Mommy either.”

He thought about this for what seemed like a long time. Then he nodded and said, “I guess you’re right, Abby,” and sighed.

“But I guess they’ll begin to like us after a while,” I said.

“I hope so,” he said.

When we went back for the photograph, it was the laugh riot of the century. Even the photographer laughed. I begged Mr. Stenner to have another picture taken, but he thought this one was priceless and insisted that he would use it in his passport. The picture made him look like a punch-drunk fighter. He had this scraggly beard on his face, and the photographer snapped the picture just as he was blinking his eyes, so that he looked as if he was coming out of his corner for the tenth round. On the way back to the courthouse, I asked him why he hadn’t taken his own picture for the passport, and Mr. Stenner said, “Bad subject.”

“What do you mean?”

“I blink a lot.”

Then he did something that embarrassed me to death.

“Bong!” he said, and immediately put up his fists like a fighter and came out of his corner bobbing and weaving and ducking his head and jabbing at an imaginary opponent, except that he wasn’t in a prizefight ring — he was on the main street of White Plains with people walking everywhere around us and thinking he had gone totally bananas. When he gave the picture to the clerk in the passport office, she looked up at him and said, “That’s a winner, all right.”

Driving back home from White Plains, I asked him something that had been bothering me for a while. “Mr. Stenner,” I said, “what’s the difference between a stepbrother and a halfbrother?”

“Well, if Mommy and I were to have a baby, a little boy, he’d be your half brother. Because you’d both have had the same mother but different fathers.”

“Are you going to have a baby?” I asked immediately.

“We haven’t really discussed it,” Mr. Stenner said.

“But when you discuss it. Then will you have a baby?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want you to have a baby,” I said.

“It’s not something we vote on,” Mr. Stenner said.

It was a good joke. I laughed at it.

If you encouraged him, he did outrageous things. In a restaurant, for example, he would order wine, and when the wine steward came and pulled the cork and poured a little of the wine into his glass to taste, Mr. Stenner would lift the glass to his lips, and take a sip of the wine, and roll it around on his tongue, and then pretend he’d been poisoned, clutching his throat and gasping for breath. Then he’d suddenly look up at the startled waiter, and smile, and say, “That’s very nice, thank you.”

Maria Victoria Valdez, on the other hand, had no sense of humor whatever. I told her a riddle I’d made up. The riddle was this: What did one fish say to the other fish after there’d been a long drought?

Maria looked at me and said, “What?”

“Long time no sea,” I said.

Maria kept looking at me.

“Long time no sea,” I said again.

She was still looking at me.

“Sea,” I said. “S-E-A.”

“Oh, it’s a play on words, eh?” Maria said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s very funny, Ah-bee,” she said, but she didn’t crack a smile.

“I guess it loses something in the translation,” I said. That was one of Mr. Stenner’s favorite lines. He’d say something he thought was hilariously funny, and if I didn’t laugh he’d say, “I guess it loses something in the translation.” Sometimes, just to tease him, I tried not to laugh at something that was really funny. Once, I almost wet my pants holding back the laughter. But Maria Victoria Valdez wasn’t wetting her pants holding back any laughter. She just didn’t find anything funny about “Long time no sea.”

“Where will you be going on your trip, Ah-bee?” she asked.

She was making conversation. She didn’t really care where I was going on my trip. All she cared about was the fact that I was going. Four weeks in Europe. Four weeks alone with Frank O’Neill. No bratty little daughter around telling incomprehensible riddles.

“We’re going to Italy,” I said.

“For four weeks?”

“Yes.”

“All four weeks in Italy?”

“Yes. Mr. Stenner says there’s lots to see in Italy. He says four weeks isn’t enough time to see it all.”

“This is a honeymoon?” Maria asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“They are taking you on their honeymoon?”

“Well, they were living together for a long time before they got married, you know, it isn’t as if this is such a big deal,” I said.

My father looked up from where he was mixing Maria a drink. Maria tried a weak smile.

“Well, it’s the truth,” I said. “And anyway, they’re married now. So what difference does it make?”

“Abby,” my father said, “let’s talk about something else, okay?”

“It was Maria who asked me about the trip.”

“Yes, but not about the living arrangements of the past God knows how many months,” my father said.

“What’s wrong with the living arrangements?” I said. “The living arrangements are fine. I’ve got two rooms. I’ll only have one room in the new house.”

“When will you be moving into the new house?” Maria asked.

“When we get back from the honeymoon.”

“In the fall?”

“Yeah, in September.”

“What’s the new house like?” my father asked.

“It’s nice,” I said. He was always doing that. First he would tell me not to talk about things, and then he would ask me questions about the very thing he had asked me not to talk about. Like our living arrangements.

“How many rooms are there?” he asked.

“Well, what difference does it make?” I said.

“Well, I’m an architect, I’m interested in houses,” he said, and smiled at Maria. I was sure the smile meant something, but I didn’t know what. I felt suddenly left out of things. Why was my father smiling at this strange person, this Chiquita Banana from Brazil, as if he was sharing the secrets of the world with her, when I was his daughter? Me! Abigail O’Neill! I was the one he should have been sharing the secrets with, whatever those secrets were.

“Are you going to sell this house or something?” I asked suddenly.

“No, no,” my father said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Well, why’d you just smile at Maria?”

“That had nothing to do with houses.”

“What did it have to do with?”

“A private joke,” my father said.

“What’s the joke?” I said.

“You wouldn’t understand it,” my father said.

“Try me,” I said, quoting Mr. Stenner.

“I’d rather not,” my father said.

“Where in Italy will you be going?” Maria asked.

“I don’t know where. Venice, I know, but the other cities... Rome, I think, is one of them.”

“Venice is beautiful,” Maria said. “Have you been to Venice, Frank?”

“Never,” my father said.

“Perhaps we will go one day,” Maria said.

“Will you take me?” I said.

“Ah, but you are going now,” Maria said. “No?”

I hated her.

I have to admit there were a lot of changes after the wedding. I mean, in addition to Mr. Stenner’s dumb beard.

“Hey, look at this, will you?” he’d say. “It’s got red hairs in it, will you look at it?”

“Those are blond.”

“Red! Look at them, Abby!”

“Mr. Stenner... shave it off, okay?”

The changes took place in all of us. They were subtle changes, maybe, but they were also very important ones. For example, Mom seeing her name on her own stationery made a difference: Lillith Stenner, and under it, the address of the new house we’d bought. It wasn’t just that the house we were moving into had been bought rather than rented, it was that we had bought it. Not just Mr. Stenner. Us. All of us. We all had a stake in it. In the same way that we all knew the house we’d been living in was not ours — the cavalry officer on the wall never allowed us to forget that simple fact — we also knew that the house we’d be moving to in the fall was ours. Mom and Mr. Stenner had shown me the deed, it had both their names on it: “Peter and Lillith Stenner, husband and wife.” Seeing the deed made me sort of wish my name was Abigail Stenner instead of Abigail O’Neill.

I know that sounds like I was being a traitor to my real father, and actually, whenever I had a thought like that, I did feel as if I were betraying him. But at the same time, I felt that now that Mom and Mr. Stenner were married, and we were sort of a family, with Mom being Lillith Stenner and all — well, it just sometimes seemed to me that it would be more natural if I were Abigail Stenner. If only for the sake of avoiding confusion.

Father’s Day was a real hassle.

Father’s Day came in June, and this particular Father’s Day fell on a Sunday two weeks before we were supposed to leave for Europe. This was the first time I’d ever had two fathers to worry about, a real father and a stepfather. The main problem was where to spend Father’s Day. Should I spend it at home (Mr. Mauley’s house), or should I spend it away from home (Dad’s house)? The choice seemed obvious to me. Of course I would spend Father’s Day at Dad’s house. He was my father, right? My real father. My natural father. But at the same time, I didn’t want to hurt Mr. Stenner’s feelings. Because I was beginning to think of him as a good man. Which is what Mom had told me he was.

So here was Father’s Day, and Mom had taken me out on the Tuesday before, mainly to shop for clothes I would need in Italy because I seemed to be suddenly outgrowing things in leaps and bounds, but also to buy presents for the real father over there and the fake father over here. For the real one — Frank O’Neill himself, world’s greatest architect — I bought a striped silk tie that cost four dollars and thirty-six cents with the tax, and I made up a poem that I typed on Mom’s typewriter. This is what the poem looked like:

For the fake one — Peter Stenner, world’s greatest fashion photographer, punch-drunk fighter, and punster — I bought a metal statue of the Empire State Building, and I cut out a picture of a gorilla from a magazine, and I Scotch-taped it to the top of the Empire State Building, and on a little piece of white paper, I hand-lettered:

I knew he’d get the joke because we’d watched King Kong on television together only a few weeks before. Mom told me it was appropriate for me to visit my father on Father’s Day, even though it wasn’t one of the weekends I was supposed to be visiting him. The calendar in our house was marked with “Abigail here” or “Abigail Frank’s” on alternating weekends. It got confusing around holiday time, when all the rules were canceled. Speaking of rules, Mr. Stenner had taken down the Rules List the day after the wedding. When I asked him how come, he just shrugged and said, “We don’t need them anymore, do we?” Anyway, on Father’s Day, at about twelve noon, my father’s car came driving up to the front of the house, but my father wasn’t driving it. Instead, Chiquita Banana was behind the wheel.

“Where’s Dad?” I said.

“He’s sick,” she said.

“Sick?” Mom said. I could see the look of alarm in her eyes. What did the poor man have? Something communicable? Would Abigail O Neill come back from a visit to her father with some incurable Asian disease?

“Just a head cold,” Chiquita Banana said. “But he didn’t think he should leave the house.”

“I don’t want Abby catching a cold,” Mom said. “We’re leaving for Europe in two weeks...”

“It makes no difference to me,” Chiquita said flatly, “whether she visits her father or not. He asked me to come for her.”

“I see,” Mom said.

“Well,” Mr. Stenner said, “if it makes no difference to you, it makes a lot of difference to us. We can’t afford to have Abby catch whatever it is Frank has.”

“Gee,” I said, “I won’t catch it.”

“I’d better call your father,” Mom said.

This was another subtle difference, by the way. After the wedding, Mom never referred to my father as “Dad” anymore. In the old days, she would have said, “I’d better call Dad.” Now she said, “I’d better call your father.”

Which she went to do while we all waited in the driveway.

“What part of Brazil are you from?” Mr. Stenner asked our Latin American neighbor.

“Rio,” she said.

“I shot some stuff for Vogue down there once,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Vogue?” she said.

“The magazine,” he said.

“Ah, Vogue,” she said. “The magazine.”

Mom came out of the house.

“Well?” I said.

“Your father and I think it might be best for you to stay home today,” she said.

“But it’s Father’s Day!” I said.

“You can see him next week, Abby,” Mom said.

“Next week isn’t Father’s Day!” I said.

“Abby, we don’t want you catching cold,” Mom said.

“You just don’t want me to spend Father’s Day with Dad!” I said.

“Abby, that isn’t...”

“Forget it!” I said, and stormed into the house.

It wasn’t the same spending Father’s Day with him a week after Father’s Day. His cold was gone by then, but so was the holiday. I gave him the tie, and he said he liked it very much. Before I left him, he made me promise to write him every day from Italy, if only a postcard.

Two days before we left, Mr. Stenner shaved off the beard.