Read Haywire for Free Online Page B

exhilarating to lie side by side and talk to each other before going to sleep. One night, Mother stuck her head in the door and told us to stop the racket, it was bedtime; but after a safe interlude we went right on singing and giggling. The house was built around a brick patio, which she crossed again in ten minutes to say that we were being not only extremely disobedient but foolish as well, since we could be clearly heard in the living room across the courtyard where all the grownups were sitting, and if she heard one more sound, she was warning us, we would have to be spanked. Heady and reckless with excitement, we sang a chorus of “Frère Jacques” loudly in unison. Mother stormed back, yanked the Dutch door open, and switched on the light. “Leland!” she called across the darkened patio. “Come here this
instant!
” We had never seen her so angry; it was thrilling. Father came and stood sheepishly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. “All right, Leland, you take Brooke and I’ll take Bridget,” she announced, marching over to Bridget’s bed. “Maggie,” Father murmured, “couldn’t we give them one more chance?” Mother was pulling down Bridget’s pajamas. “Nope,” she said firmly, and started to spank Bridget. I began to giggle; by the time Father had me across his lap, I was laughing uproariously. It was my first spanking. As his hand smacked my behind for the third or fourth time, inflicting actual pain, I felt first a sensation of surprise, then of fury, both of which turned my laughter into uncontrollable sobs. I was vaguely aware of Bridget crying in the bed next to me, and then Father picking me up and carrying me outside where he leaned against a post entwined with bougainvillaea. He held me tightly against his chest, so tightly I could hardly breathe. “Brooke,” he whispered to me, beginning to cry himself; unable to see his face clearly in the filtered light, I reached up and touched his eyes in wonder—his tears soaked my hair and mine his polo shirt. “Brooke,” he said, weeping, “I promise you something—do you know what a promise is?—I shall never spank you again as long as I live.” He kept his word.
    The next time I saw him cry he was in his old maroon silk bathrobe, and it was the evening of the day Bridget died. There were other people in the study—Josh and Nedda, George and Joan Axelrod, Bill Francisco, and Pamela—whom I had to walk past rather self-consciously in order to reach him. He was sitting in his favorite armchair, heavily, as if he never wanted to rise again. His eyes were fixed absently on the seven-o’clock news; when I came and stood between the television set and him, they glimmered like milky blue stones under shallow water. I reached down and lifted the large cut-glass tumbler of Jack Daniels from his lap, where it had sunk with both his hands clasped rigidly around it, and took a sip because my mouth was so dry.
    “Come here, Brooke,” was all he said, so I sat on his lap and put my head against his, and his tears streamed down my cheeks. “Poor Bridget, poor little kid,” he murmured over and over against my face; I kept licking his tears away as they reached my lips because both my arms were tight around his neck and I didn’t want to let go. Oh, God, I thought, we used to want so badly to be grown up—all the endless games we played to evoke that miraculous state of power, Bridget and I sauntering past the hall mirror in lipstick and high heels, Bill sitting for hours in the driveway behind the steering wheel of the old Cadillac, maniacally spinning it—but given a choice of which condition was really worse, that of parent or that of child, didn’t we know, even then, that parents lost hands-down? All the time we were growing up and hating the fact that it took so long, didn’t we instinctively sense the agony that waited for us on the other side of the fence?
    Monsen came in unobtrusively and announced dinner. Pamela moved