Life Sentences by Laura Lippman Page B

alcohol content.”
    He had used his own gin and made his drink to his exacting specifications, but never mind.
    â€œCome on, Dad,” Cassandra said. “We’ll climb the hill together.”
    He smiled, pleased by the allusion to one of his favorite poems. “But I’ll beat you down.”
    TOTTERING DOWN
    DICKEY HILL ELEMENTARY, SCHOOL NUMBER 201, new in the fall of 1966, opened in utter chaos. I stood in the hallway near the principal’s office, willing myself not to reach for my father’s hand. Just five minutes ago, I had shaken his hand off as he walked me to school, a rare treat. We had been climbing the hill past the Wakefield Apartments, prompting, inevitably, a recitation of “John Anderson, My Jo.” In a Scottish accent, no less.
    John Anderson, my jo, John,
    We clamb the hill thegither;
    And monie a canty day, John,
    We’ve had wi’ ane anither:
    Now we maun totter down, John,
    But hand in hand we’ll go,
    And sleep thegither at the foot,
    John Anderson, my jo.
    It was the first time I felt a twinge of embarrassment at my father’s behavior. Fleeting, to be sure—I was still years away from the moment when everything about one’s parents becomes unbearable, when the simple act of my mother speaking, in the car, with no one else there to hear,could make me cringe—but I remember speeding up a little so the students arriving by car and bus might not associate me with this odd man.
    â€œDo you know what brent means, Cassandra?” my father quizzed me, referring to another line in the poem: His bonny brow was brent.
    I pretended great interest in the Wakefield Apartments, and the pretense quickly became authentic. Apartments were glamorous to me, in general, and although these did not conform to my penthouse fantasies, the terraced units had that kind of compactness that often appeals to small children. I wanted to make friends with people who lived in those apartments, see what was behind their doors and windows. It was a frequent impulse, one that would later lead to my dismal attempt to support myself as a freelance journalist for shelter magazines. Wherever I went—the sidewalks of the Wakefield Apartments, the long avenues of rowhouses that led to various downtown destinations—I wanted to know the interiors of people’s homes, their lives, their minds.
    Because I was encouraged to tell my parents whatever passed through my quicksilver little brain, I told my father what I was thinking.
    â€œI hope there are kids who live in those apartments and they’re in my class and they become my friends and I get to go to their houses after school and play there.” It was lonely on Hillhouse Road, where I was the only child in the five houses. There were teenagers, but they had no use for me. We had so little in common that they might as well have been bears or Martians or salamanders.
    â€œYour mother won’t like that,” my father said.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause your mother’s a snob.”
    I pondered that. A snob considered herself better than other people. This did not fit my sense of my mother, who seemed forever… sorry about things. She was always apologizing, mainly to my father. For dinner—its arrival time, its contents. For letting me sneak television shows like Peyton Place and, a few years hence, Love, American Style, which my father found so appalling that he couldn’t stop watching it. Television,which my father despised, would become a regular feature of my weekend visits with him, a reliable way of “entertaining” me. On Friday nights, I would sit rapt in front of the television, tuned unerringly to ABC, where I progressed from fantasy to fantasy—the blended world of The Brady Bunch, the domestic magic of Nanny and the Professor, the harmonious life of The Partridge Family. That Girl (my personal idol), Love, American Style. It was fun, or would have been if not for my