Freaky Green Eyes by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

been dragging along with Bs and incompletes all semester. Samantha did okay, too. Finished fifth grade with all As and a single B (gym). I was proud of her, and I hoped that Mom and Dad were, too.
    â€œWhen can we come with you, Mom?” Samantha kept asking. And Mom would say, “When your school is out.” But when school was out, and Samantha asked, Mom said evasively, with a nervous flutter of her eyelids, “When I’m finished painting the cabin. When your father thinks it’s appropriate.”
    Samantha said, jabbing her thumb at her mouth, “Franky and I can help you paint, Mom. You let us last time. You said we painted your studio really well.”
    â€œYes, honey. You certainly did. But . . .” Mom paused. For a moment she seemed confused, as if she couldn’t remember what she was supposed to be saying. “. . . it’s another time now, honey.”
    I wanted to ask her what painting her cabin had to do with Dad’s opinion. And how long was it taking to paint her cabin, which was the size of a single room? But resentment for this woman was like a big clump of hot dough in my throat.
    Go away then. Stay away .
    You don’t love us. You love the “zone” you’re in .
    As soon as the station wagon pulled out of the driveway, know what I did? I made certain my cell phone was turned off.
    For hours each day, except when Maria was here (Maria was the Filipino woman Mom had hired to oversee the household in her absence), I kept the family phone off the hook, too. Mom called home at least twice a day; she could leave a message in our voice mail.
    So I wouldn’t be waiting for the phones to ring every minute I was home.
    I stopped bringing my friends home. With Mom away, the house was deadly quiet like a museum nobody ever visits. Even Maria banging around vacuuming the big rooms overhead (that didn’t need vacuuming, but Maria had to do something to earn her salary) was a kind of dead absence of sound. Rabbit’s nervous high-pitched yipping, which Dad disliked, I kept imagining I heard, but at a distance, as if Rabbit was somewhere in theneighborhood, lost. Samantha and I kept thinking we saw him in the kitchen by his food and water dishes. We heard his toenails clicking on the tile floor, and his eager panting breath.
    Samantha said, “It isn’t fair, Franky, is it? Rabbit is our dog, too.”
    â€œI guess Mom isn’t thinking of us right now. ‘She’s in her own zone.’” I spoke lightly, not sarcastically.
    Samantha asked, “What’s a ‘zone,’ Franky? Daddy didn’t say.”
    â€œHer own space, like. In her own head. Doing what she wants to do, not what other people want her to do. I guess.”
    In fact, I didn’t know. But I knew I hated that zone.
    Pretty soon we figured out the schedule: Mom was gone two or three days a week, and most of this time Dad was home. (When he wasn’t traveling, he worked in downtown Seattle. He covered local sportsevents when they “impacted” on the national scene.) The day after Mom returned, Dad would leave. There was always some overlap. A family meal together, an evening. Samantha was nervous a lot, not knowing what was going on, exactly; I tried to be neutral. I guess I was stiff with Mom, feeling she was betraying us. With Dad, when all he wanted was his “good girls” laughing at his jokes, it wasn’t so hard.
    I wondered: did Mom and Dad sleep together any longer? In the same bed?
    It was weird—some nights at dinner they got along really well. Called each other “honey” and “darling” and were extra nice. Then, next day, Dad would be flying out to Miami, Chicago, Austin. And when he returned, it would be time for Mom to pack up her things, kiss us good-bye, call, “Rabbit! C’mon, boy,” and drive off in the station wagon to Skagit Harbor. Once Samantha stood in the driveway yelling after Mom,