Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

them from a distance; we admired them as we admired the sun and moon, adoring their beauty and constancy, their infinite power. They were gods; we worshipped them. But we loved Emily in a different way.

Emily started working for us as a relief nurse and ended up staying full time. On her days off she went home to her husband, Ed Buck, and once or twice, giving in to our entreaties, she took us with her to their little house with hibiscus bushes growing up either side of the front walk. Emily had no children of her own, and considered us hers, which suited us perfectly. Mother and Father used to say fondly that Emily was the homeliest person they’d ever seen, but the kindest. We, however, thought she was the most beautiful, and said so. She had stringy mouse-colored hair, which hung limply in one stage or another of a bad permanent. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were sparse and did less to define her eyes than the discolored hollows under them. Two deep furrows ran from her rather bulbous nose to the corners of her mouth, where they were intersected by a great system of other lines. Her skin was pitted in some places like old tarmac and in others dislodged by moles or wens; it seemed to be permanently redolent of coffee and as nicotine-stained as her teeth. Emily, like Father, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, preferably Camels, and when they became scarce during the war, she took to rolling her own. On special occasions she wore lipstick, a dark purplish color. She’d apply it carefully to her angular lips, then smack them together and blot most of it off with tissues.

“Poor Em,” we’d sigh, inspecting the varicose veins in her calves, which gave her trouble when she stood too long. “Someday we’ll take care of you.” Then Father would interject while she poured him a cup of her coffee, which he preferred to Elsa’s, “I hope to Christ the three of you children take care of both of us when you get to be twenty-one years old and I’m doddering around in a state of financial ruin.” Emily would guffaw, and say, “Oh, good Lord, Mr. Hayward, don’t start that again,” and we’d giggle and chorus, “But, Father, we’ll never make enough money to take care of you.” Father would lower his teaspoon into the coffee, carefully submerging three lumps of sugar, one for each of us to suck, and shake his head. “God knows, children, it won’t be easy. But that’s what children are for, to take care of their poor old senile parents. You’re all smart as hell; you’ll get good grades at school—you’d better, by God—I’m counting on you to keep me from the poorhouse.…”

“But, Father, we’re not allowed to go to school.”

“Oh, yes, that’s right. Well, someday—now, let’s see—let’s get right down to business. Brooke, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

This was a game we loved, although the answers never changed. “A painter and a writer.”

“No money in that. Bridget?”

“I want to grow up to be a housewife with ten children.”

“No hope there whatsoever. Disaster. My last chance—Bill?”

“When I grow up, I’m going to be either a fireman or the President of the United States.”

“Well, couldn’t you marry a very rich girl while you’re at it? This is just awful. Promise me that one of you at least will be considerate enough to marry somebody with a lot of dough for the sake of your beloved old father. After all, I think I deserve to be supported in some kind of style.…”

Father’s mother, Sarah Tappin—Grandsarah—moved to Los Angeles in 1943. She had raised champion cairn terriers with her third husband, Lindsley Tappin, at their country house in Wilton, Connecticut. After he died, she decided to come out to California to see her only son and three grandchildren, so she sold the house, packed her station wagon with one poodle, twenty-six of her favorite cairns, and Archie, her black caretaker, and drove all the way across the country herself (since Archie had never learned how), stopping twice a day to take the dogs out of their individual wicker baskets to feed and exercise them.

Father had bought her a house on Magnolia Boulevard in Van Nuys. Every Sunday we would drive over to the Valley, holding our breaths and making wishes as we came to the entrance of the tunnel through the mountains; then, as Sepulveda Boulevard began its serpentine descent to the lovely clear expanse below, Father would take his foot off the gas as a gesture toward rationing, and the car would careen around the curves, speeding up and slowing down under its own momentum.

My grandmother’s house was dark and cool and filled with beautiful dusty mysteries. Beyond the verandah that ran all around it, softening its borders with six feet of shade, lay the gardens, several acres of them, bounded by high walls and fruit trees gleaming in the sun. Pomegranates overlapped persimmons, peaches and cherries intertwined, a lacy forest of citrus—tangerines, lemons, grapefruits, and oranges—gradually gave way to thick meandering shrubbery, dappled with sweet-skinned kumquats and guavas that Grandsarah made into jelly each fall. We squinted through the shadowy living room toward the blinding green sunlight, bewitched by the contrast between inside and out. Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s house was the most compelling adventure, the most seductive paradise we knew. We were overcome by desires; we wanted to possess everything that we saw or smelled or tasted, to touch it, hold it, take it away with us so that we could have it forever. In her house we became pirates.

First we headed for the cupboards where she kept her three-odd sets of wineglasses, each with a goblet or two missing, just to make sure none had been broken or rearranged since the previous Sunday. We had, after interminable bickering, staked out our individual territories, and for some reason the wineglasses from which we