Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim Page A

plate and put them two at a time in a paper bag which already held salt-and-peppered flour. She shook them hard in the bag, then dipped each one in a bowl of beaten egg, before laying them carefully in a roasting tin which she then put in the oven. She was wearing a sleeveless sweater and a black skirt; unlike Gladys, she didn’t like to wear an apron, and she refused to wear a uniform.
    When Lily came home (Mike had basketball practice and came home later), Bobby would go back to the bedroom to watch TV or play with his marbles, or use his father’s old putter, stroking a golf ball across the bare brown carpet into a speckled plastic cup that served as the hole. He didn’t mind being alone there, even before Lily got home, as long as he knew Vanetta was in the apartment.
    When he went to the back of the apartment, the door to his father’s bedroom was always open. He kept it that way, ever since Bobby’s mother had died two years before. Even at night his father didn’t close it, so he could hear his children if they needed him. Bobby didn’t want it closed again – it would mean someone else had taken his mother’s place.
    He wondered why Lily acted as if she liked this woman Merrill, unless it was because she really did. Mike loathed her, though in front of their father his antipathy was only evident because he never talked about the woman at all. Oh, Merrill was polite enough and pleasant looking and, according to Vanetta, she dressed nicely, but she made you feel you had to be on your best behaviour, and you couldn’t ever be yourself. His mother had been pretty, girlish and had liked to dance; Merrill was handsome and acted lady-like. She called his father Jonathan, for example, when everybody knew his name was Johnny, and he was different when he was with her – there were not so many jokes. His dad had always been naturally funny, but there was nothing natural to Merrill, and her increasing presence worried Bobby.
    She also tried to tell Vanetta what to do, which wasn’t right at all. Vanetta took it in her stride, he supposed, but he couldn’t believe she liked it. And Lily didn’t help – she was arguing with Vanetta these days, being downright rude, about when she would go out and when she’d see her friends and how much time she could spend on the phone even though she hadn’t done her homework.
    ‘She’s just being a teenager,’ Vanetta had explained to his father, when Lily was giving him a hard time too, but Bobby was apprehensive nonetheless and didn’t like the arguments.
    When Vanetta asked her to do something, Lily would say, ‘Don’t boss me.’
    ‘Child, I’m not asking you anything your father don’t want you to do. If you wants to make a fuss, make it with him.’
    And Lily would roll her eyes and sigh.
    He figured as long as Merrill didn’t actually live there he was safe. He wished instead that Vanetta could live with them. Or at the very least be there more of the time – especially weekends, when there were just the four Danzigers stuck in this dark apartment, especially during winter. They seemed never to go out; the only expedition was on Saturday morning when his father took him (Mike and Lily always turning down the privilege) along for the weekly shop. He said he needed help, but Bobby knew he needed company.
    Yet how could his father be lonely? There didn’t seem any need for his father to see Merrill. He had his children, didn’t he? – and his friends, and Uncle Larry and Aunt ZZ. And Vanetta as the lynchpin for life in this apartment. Yet there was his father finding company with Merrill, some lady who lived in the Cloisters, a vast armoury-shaped apartment building, which Bobby passed each morning with his father on the way to school.
    His father, bizarrely, seemed concerned that Bobby was lonely too. One day Bobby heard him and Vanetta talking in the kitchen while he stood in the doorway to the long hall; they must have thought he was back watching Superman