Politesse

wBliss

She fights unfairly, painting pictures of herself as a 10-year old girl running alongside foreign cargo trucks bound for Anatolia.

'Gumi! Gumi!'

The drivers, gypsy dark, wearing fezes covered in woolen clots, throw tiny packets of bubble gum through the windows. One of the girls inherits a used bicycle, and she shares with each of the others in the flat. They run through cornfields, stealing unripened pumpkins. You can't stay angry at a girl who paints for you pictures like this, of childhood. She might run away to those fields, in packs of castaway nymphs.

* * *

'Wheeere's your father?' the overpainted woman asks coyly.

Alex's sister, the older girl, answers defiantly, in forced politesse. 'We don't know.'

The woman flips her skirt, flowing like the tapestries of a neglected harem, and comes into the hotel room anyway. She inspects their father's personal items, putting her long fingers on intimate items, on his razor, his comb. She opens the top drawer and pulls out an undershirt, and both girls tense angrily, lines more tightly drawn around their lips, but hold firm to hard-learned lessons of respect, reserved for adults and dignitaries. The woman pulls a miniature bottle from her purse, and sprays the front of the shirt with a mist that smells sweetly to the girls, like lavender, and their eyes water, as if burned by gasoline. The woman sprays her own neck with the perfume before recapping the bottle.

'Byyyye, girls.'

* * *

They write a postcard to their mother, who works through these summers, and tell her they miss her. She has grown shorter with them as they've gotten older, and rough, pulling hair and slapping; frustrations manifested in midday rants and midnight regrets. At home they pretend to sleep when their father stumbles home drunk, looking for a conversation, to speak loudly over the jealous sobs of their mother. Sometimes they cannot help but give in to bathroom urgings, and steal quietly so as not to rouse his attention. He usually hears and calls them into the kitchen, where he asks them about their day, running through cornfields, and reminds them that summer camp looms, like the promise of an impossible gift. His eyes light up like the child, his shirt stained, as by perfume; the alcohol burns their eyes. Their mother cries louder and screams at the girls to go back to bed if they do not want lashings with their breakfast. But he doesn't release them, and talks with them even louder, slurring the joys of his life, and they stand next to him at the table, knowing they will get those lashings, and bear the welts meant for him. Summer camp looms.

* * *

He stumbles home late, and they hear laughter at the door; keys dropped time and time and time; at first by accident, but not subsequently. The door is unlocked. When he finally commits to coming inside, he actually locks the door with the key, and the laughter outside sounds like ridicule launched their way. The lines draw tightly around their lips.

The girls smell like salt water, and they breathe each other in, in voluminous comfort, to drown out the gasoline. He is exhausted on these nights, so they don't fear midnight conversations. Their mother is back home, 7 hours and a week away, so they don't fear the sting of vicarious abuse. It was always meant for him. Their sweet father who taught them to swim and carried them across mountains and through valleys on his back. It was meant for him. Their dear father who never grew tired of their whimsical tales, when sober; who never touched them in anger. Always meant for him. Who had forgotten the pictures of childhood that his own wife once painted.