1
 
 
 

I’d Know You Anywhere

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive
down to his place and see what might be in it for us.
She tapped my nose with her grapefruit spoon. “It’s like this,”
she said. “Your father loves us more, but he’s got another family, a
wife, and a girl a little older than you. Her family had all the money.
Wipe your face.”
There was no one like my mother, for straight talk. She washed
my neck and ears until they shone. We helped each other dress: her
lilac dress, with the underarm zipper, my pink one with the tricky
buttons. My mother did my braids so tight, my eyes pulled up. She
took her violet cloche and her best gloves and she ran across the
road to borrow Mr. Portman’s car. I was glad to be going and I
thought I could get to be glad about having a sister. I wasn’t sorry
my father’s other wife was dead.
 
• • •

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4 Amy Bloom
 
We’d waited for him for weeks. My mother sat by the window in
the morning and smoked through supper every night. When she
came home from work at Hobson’s, she was in a bad mood, even
after I rubbed her feet. I hung around the house all July, playing
with Mr. Portman’s poodle, waiting for my father to drive up. When
he came, he usually came by two o’clock, in case there was a Fire-
side Chat that day. We listened to all the Fireside Chats together.
We loved President Roosevelt. On Sundays, when my father came,
he brought a pack of Lucky Strikes for my mother and a Hershey
bar for me. After supper, my mother sat in my father’s lap and I sat
right on his slippers and if there was a Fireside Chat, my father did
his FDR imitation. Good evening, friends, he said, and he stuck a
straw in his mouth like a cigarette holder. Good evening, ladies and
gentlemen. He bowed to my mother and said, Eleanor, my dear,
how ’bout a waltz? They danced to the radio for a while and then it
was my bedtime. My mother put a few bobby pins in my hair for
curls and my father carried me to bed, singing, “I wish I could
shimmy like my sister Kate.” Then he tucked me in and shimmied
out the door. Monday mornings, he was gone and I waited until
Thursday, and sometimes, until next Sunday.
 
 
 
My mother parked the car and redid her lipstick. My father’s
house was two stories of red stone and tall windows, with fringed
lace curtains behind and wide brown steps stacked like boxes in
front of the shining wood door. Your father does like to have things
nice, while he’s away, she said. It sure is nice, I said. We ought to live
here.
My mother smiled at me and ran her tongue over her teeth.
Could be, she said—you never know. She’d already told me she was
tired of Abingdon, where we’d been since I was born. It was no kind
of real town and she was fed up to here hostessing at Hobson’s. We
talked a lot about finding ourselves a better life in Chicago. Chicago,
Chicago, that toddlin’ town . . . I saw a man, he danced with his wife. I

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Lucky Us 5
 
sang as we got out of the car and I did a few dance steps like in the
movies. My mother said, You are the bee’s knees, kiddo, and she
grabbed the back of my dress. She licked her palm and pressed it to
my bangs, so they wouldn’t fly up. She straightened her skirt and
told me to check her seams. Straight as arrows, I said, and we went
up the stairs hand in hand.
My mother knocked and my father answered the door in the
blue vest he wore at our house during the president’s speeches. My
father hugged me and my parents whispered to each other while I
stood there, trying to see more of the parlor, which was as big as our
whole apartment and filled with flowers. (Maybe my father said,
What the hell are you doing here? Maybe my mother cursed him
for staying away, but I doubt it. My father had played the gentle-
man his whole life and my mother must have said to me a hundred
times that men needed to be handled right and a woman who
couldn’t handle her man had only herself to blame. “When I say
men are dogs,” she’d say, “I’m not being insulting. I like dogs.”) Be-
hind my father, I saw a tall girl.
“My daughter Iris,” my father said. I could hear my mother
breathe in.
“Iris,” he said, “this is my friend Mrs. Logan and her daughter,
her lovely daughter, Eva.”
I knew, standing in their foyer, that this girl had a ton of things
I didn’t have. Flowers in crystal vases the size of buckets. Pretty,
light-brown curls. My father’s hand on her shoulder. She wore a
baby-blue sweater and a white blouse with a bluebird pin on the
collar. I think she wore stockings. Iris was sixteen and she looked
like a grown woman to me. She looked like a movie star. My father
pushed us to the stairs and told Iris to entertain me in her room
while he and my mother had a chat.
 
 
 
“Picture this,” Iris said. She lay on her bed and I sat on the
braided rug next to it. She gave me a couple of gumdrops and I was

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6 Amy Bloom
 
happy to sit there. She was a great talker and a perfect mimic. “The
whole college came to my mother’s funeral. My grandfather used to
be president of the college, but he had a stroke last year, so he’s dif-
ferent now. There was this one girl, red hair, really awful. Redheads.
Like they didn’t cook long enough or something.”
“I think Paulette Goddard’s a redhead,” I said. I’d read this in
Photoplay last week.
“How old are you, ten? Who the hell wants to be Paulette God-
dard? Anyway, this redheaded girl comes back to our house. She’s
just bawling to beat the band. So this lady, our neighbor, Mrs. Drys-
dale, says to her, ‘Were you very close to dear Mrs. Acton?’”
The way Iris said this, I could just see Mrs. Drysdale, sticking
her nose in, keeping her spotted veil out of her mouth while she ate,
her wet hankie stuffed into her big bosom, which my mother told
me was a disgusting thing to do.
“I’m twelve,” I said.
Iris said, “My mother was like a saint—everybody says so. She
was nice to everyone, but I don’t want people thinking my mother
wasted her time on this stupid girl, so I turn around and say that
none of us even know who she is and she runs into the powder
room downstairs—this is the funny part—the door gets stuck, and
she can’t get out. She’s banging on the door and two professors have
to jimmy it open. It was funny.”
Iris told me that the whole college (I didn’t know my father
taught at a college; if you had asked me, I would have said that he
read books for a living) came to the chapel to grieve for her mother,
to offer sympathy to her and her father. She said that all of their
family friends were there, which was her way of telling me that my
mother could not really be a friend of her father’s.
 
 
 
We heard the voices downstairs and then a door shutting and
then the piano, playing “My Angel Put the Devil in Me.” I didn’t
know my father played the piano. Iris and I stood at her bedroom

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Lucky Us 7
 
door, leaning into the hall. We heard the toilet flush, which was
embarrassing but reassuring and then my father started playing the
“Moonlight Sonata” and then we heard a car’s engine. Iris and I ran
downstairs. My mother’d left the front door open and just slipped
into Mr. Portman’s car. She’d set a brown tweed suitcase on the front
porch. I stood on the porch holding the suitcase, looking at the
road. My father sat down in the rocker and pulled me onto his lap,
which he’d stopped doing last year. He asked me if I thought my
mother was coming back and I asked him, Do you think my mother
is coming back? My father asked me if I had any other family on
my mother’s side, and I lay my head on his shoulder. I’d seen my
father most Sundays and some Thursdays since I was a baby, and
the whole rest of my family was my mother. I was friendly with Mr.
Portman and his poodle and all of my teachers had taken an inter-
est in me, and that was the sum of what you could call my family.
Iris opened the screen door and looked at me the way a cat
looks at a dog.
We sat down to meat loaf and mashed potatoes and the third
time Iris told me to get my elbows off the table, this isn’t a board-
inghouse, my father said, Behave yourself, Iris. She’s your sister. Iris
left the room and my father told me to improve my manners. You’re
not living in that dreadful town anymore and you’re not Eva Logan
anymore, he said. You’re Eva Acton. We’ll say you’re my niece.
I was thirteen before I understood that my mother wasn’t com-
ing back to get me.

From  the  Book,  LUCKY  US  by  Amy  Bloom.  Copyright  ©  2014  by  Amy  Bloom.      
Reprinted  by  arrangement  with  Random  House,  an  imprint  of  Random  House  ,    
a  division  of  Random  House,  Inc.    All  rights  reserved.  

 
 
 

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