Deel got home around six. “Shit,” she said.
“What?”
“I hate math! I hate it. I hate it so much I wish I knew the person who invented it and I’d go out and kill him.” Deel’s glasses were fogged over. She has dark frizzy hair and a big nose, like Daddy, and when she’s mad, she gets this really fierce expression that used to scare me when I was little.
“Gee.” It’s funny. I really kind of like math. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be a mathematician or anything like that, but I like math. “Isn’t he helping any?”
“Dodson? Not really . . . we never do any math. He just tells me stories.”
“But what’ll you do? What if you fail again?”
Deel shrugged. “Where’s Mom?”
“Out having a drink with Simon.”
“So, did Daddy shoot anyone yet?”
I sighed. “Mom said he was going to call Joshua’s father from the office.” I started biting my nails, something I made myself stop doing six months ago.
“God, Rust, you are dumb! How come you let him stay so late?”
“We fell asleep.”
“So, what happened? What were you doing in the bathroom?”
“Just kind of fooling around.”
Deel looked at me suspiciously. “At three in the morning?”
“I remembered I hadn’t washed my hair so . . .”
Deel sniffed; she has a cold. “What happened with Daddy, though?”
“He began hammering on the door.”
“While you were washing your hair?”
I felt sheepish. “No, we’d finished with my hair.”
“What do you mean we?”
“Well, Joshua said he’d help me.”
Deel’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow! You mean you were—”
“Yeah.”
She whistled. “And Daddy—You were, like, doing it, when—”
“Yeah.”
“Oh boy, you have got problems.”
“It was dumb,” I agreed.
I feel kind of funny talking about sex with Deel, just for this reason: she’s never fucked with anyone, even though she’s a year and a half older than me. It isn’t on moral grounds or anything. It’s just no one has asked her. She says if no one does by February, when she’s sixteen, she’s just going to go out and find someone, in cold blood, sort of, and do it to get it over with. I guess she feels a little humiliated that I did it first. Deel has this theory, though, that younger sisters usually do things first in terms of marriage and sex. She says older sisters tend to do better academically and become doctors and lawyers. The trouble is, I do pretty well in school and it’s Deel who’s failing Math. It seems like all our lives people have said to Deel, “Well, are you still reading a mile a minute?” and to me, “Look at that hair! Look at those eyes! Aren’t you as cute as a button?”
By the way, the reason we have such weird names is Daddy. He used to teach at the Yale Drama School—that’s were he met Mom, who was in his class—and he wanted to name us after literary heroines. Deel’s real name is Cordelia after someone in a play by Shakespeare called King Lear. It’s worse for her because she hates “Cordy” and doesn’t much like “Deel,” but she doesn’t want people to go around calling her “Cordelia” either. She says at school her teachers always call her “Deelyer” which she hates most of all. I’m named after this person in a Russian opera, Eugene Onegin. It’s about this girl who falls in love with somebody who doesn’t love her back, but then she gets married to somebody else and he changes his mind, only then it’s too late. My friends call me Rusty because of my hair so that’s not such a problem. Mom calls me Tat or Tati, but Daddy likes to call me Tatiana if he’s feeling affectionate. He likes graceful, romantic names for women.
“Listen, Deel?” I followed her into her room.
“What?” Deel was sneezing and changing into another sweatshirt.
“Mom was saying—well, you know Daddy’ll be fifty next month? And she’s giving him a surprise party and she thought we might, like, do something special for it, like bake something?”
“Sure,” Deel said.
“Do you want to do the Dobos Torte?”
“Yeah, that’s yummy.”
Deel and I make regular things like brownies and pound cake, but our specialty is Dobos Torte. It’s this wonderful chocolate cake with around eight layers. It takes a long, long time to make, but it always tastes wonderful.
“Mom says Daddy’s feeling sad and we should try to cheer him up.”
“It’s like in Passages,” Deel said. She’s reading that just for pleasure. Deel does a lot of reading, not for school, just because she feels like it. Passages is this book that tells about all the problems adults have. It sounds like a kind of depressing book. “He’s a classic case.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll read it to you later. I think—” Just then the door opened. We looked at each other.
“Daddy?” Deel called out.
“Hi,” Daddy called from the hall. He came down with his coat still on. “Where’s Amanda?”
“She’s having a drink with Simon,” I said. “She said she’d be back at six thirty.”
“It is six thirty,” Daddy said. He likes things to happen when they’re supposed to.
“Maybe I’ll set the table,” I said, scurrying in there.
Daddy followed me. “Well, I called Mr. Lasker,” he said. “We’re having a drink with him and his wife at nine.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
I put the silverware out. Daddy stood there, watching me. “He said he appreciated my concern,” he said dryly.
I folded the napkins. I didn’t know what to say.
“Tat, there are two issues here.”
“Uh huh?”
“One is the simple matter of rules. Now, you know, we are very, very, I would even say inordinately, flexible about rules. So the few we have are just set up for your benefit. Having a curfew of eleven on a night before school is hardly Draconian by any standards, even the most liberal.”
“We fell asleep,” I said, looking at him pleadingly.
“Yes,” he said.