The Missing Person Read Online Free Page A

given her mother’s whole name, like a boy gets with junior tacked on to his father’s whole name. She became Fanny Marker, the daughter of Fanny Marker the mother. Mary Maguire liked this fact and put it into her book. She asked Franny if she missed not having a father. Franny said she didn’t: “Hell, who is a father? Someone like Jerryboy but older, maybe?”
    Franny told Mary Maguire that her mother always reminded her that she was both mother and father to her. Once, in the year before Fanny left home, her mother told her that again: “I am your mother and your father and you’d better not forget it.” Fanny laughed and said, “Sure, Pop,” and her mother, her eyes cold with fury, had slapped her face hard.
    â€œCall me Daddy, Bubbles,” Jerryboy said to her once, and laughed.
    â€œAre you a daddy, Jerryboy?”
    â€œSomebody’s, I’ll bet,” her mother said in her low man’s voice, almost like a growl.
    â€œYou can be damn sure,” he said and laughed again.
    Jerryboy didn’t like two Fannys in one flat, he said, so he called her Bubbles after a stripper he once knew. She hated the name, she hated him.
    Arnie once told Franny he could remember every place he had ever lived growing up in Brooklyn, the beach at Far Rockaway he went to in the summer, even all the movie theaters he had gone to with his sister Saturday afternoons before the prices changed. He said that growing up had only one thing wrong with it. It had a way of dimming all those good memories, weakening all the happy rituals of going away and coming back and moving, all the relationships to places and neighborhoods of one’s childhood.
    Fanny could not remember one of the places she had lived in. They were all the same. She always had to sleep in the front room that had some kind of orangey or green wallpaper or flowers or something, and rotogravure photos of the Grand Canyon or New York at sunset thumbtacked up over the chesterfield. Once she had slept in the hall when the front room was too small for a daybed. For her, summers were no different from any other season, only hotter. But she did remember the men who had lived with them, a man named Fry who her mother called Frenchy, and someone called Benjamin something or other who her mother called Benjyboy. She seemed to like that kind of nickname, as though she were a mother to them all. She was older than most of them. After a while they’d leave, like sons do when they grow up. One she threw out when she heard the cops were after him for something he’d done in Syracuse.
    But Jerryboy. He was the one Fanny remembered best. He picked on her whenever her mother stopped doing it, especially when she was daydreaming and not answering him. While she dreamed, she sucked on the ends of her hair. Jerryboy would sweep his hand across Fanny’s face and pull the hair out of her mouth.
    â€œStop that, damn it.”
    She would look at him and say nothing.
    â€œWhy do you do that, for chrissake?”
    â€œDo what?” She moved away, thinking he was going to hit her, not knowing she was doing it.
    â€œEating your hair like that.”
    â€œOh that. I dunno. Do I do that?”
    Then he’d laugh and suddenly come toward her and poke at her cheek with his thick black nail. Her mother was changing her uniform in the bedroom and putting on her pink wrapper, sighing as she unhooked her all-in-one. As she performed this ritual she had a habit of singing in a low monotone, especially when she was annoyed or angry, the song that was her favorite: “It cost me a lot, but there’s one thing I’ve got / It’s my ma-a-an .” Fanny could hear her in the bedroom singing it aloud to herself, and sometimes, with a stagy smile and her hands holding her breasts, she’d sing the lines to Jerryboy.
    She looked out the door, the weighing look on her unsmiling fat face. Jerryboy stopped laughing and went