by Maria Semple
It was one in the morning before I remembered. “The book!”
“You may not know this yet,” Joyce said, masterfully switching into editor mode. “But you’re a writer. You think like a writer. Yes, I want those Flood Girls illustrations. But I want your words too. Is the book mostly words? Mostly pictures? I don’t know. Every book has to invent itself. I’m giving you complete freedom. Use those illustrations. Just put what’s in there…” She pointed to my head and said, “On the page.”
I don’t know if I got Joyce Primmed or if she got Eleanor Flooded. But I skipped out of there with a book deal.
“I did meet your sister,” Spencer was saying, utterly flummoxed. “She was willowy. She always came by.”
“Must have been someone else,” I pronounced and sealed it with a smile.
Spencer looked like the guy in Alien before he started blurping up that white stuff. He checked his watch.
“Hi,” he said to a passing waiter. “Would you mind terribly bringing us the check?”
“Now?” Timby said, having hardly made a dent in the heap of fries.
“We’ll get a box for those,” I said.
I don’t have a sister.
I don’t have a sister.
“French fries aren’t good to go,” said Timby.
“You two stay,” Spencer said. “I have to find my way to the sculpture park for a meeting with my curator.”
Thank God Spencer had no way of knowing we lived three blocks from the sculpture park, that it was where I brought Yo-Yo for his midday walk—
“We’re going there too!” Timby erupted. “We can give you a ride.”
I saw panic in Spencer’s eyes.
“No, darling,” I said to Timby. “Spencer’s a busy man. He’s not going to want to come home with us first and get the dog, and you know.”
“I can show you my art!” Timby said to Spencer. “And then you can show me your art!”
Timby’s voice had a plaintive little squeak to it.
Spencer = trapped animal.
Lying in bed this morning, I had set the bar laughably low: look people in the eye, get dressed, smile! It should have been a Sunday drive. Then that prankster Reality appeared in the pickup truck ahead of me and started tossing watermelons out the back. And it wasn’t even one o’clock!
Today, at the very least, I’d fulfill my promise to Timby. I’d make it his day.
I looked at Spencer with what must have been desperation.
“Sure,” he said. “I guess we could all go.”
“Yay!” cried Timby
“I owe you one,” I whispered to Spencer as we left the restaurant.
“It all evens out,” he said tightly.
I flung open the front door with a flourish that said the hills were alive with the sound of music, when really I wanted a head start to make sure the toilets were flushed. On the off chance Spencer still admired me, I didn’t want to queer it by him seeing our toilets full of pee.
Guess who didn’t greet me at the door? Yo-Yo. He didn’t even raise his chin off the rim of his bed. The most he could muster was to follow me around with watery, put-upon eyes.
“Would you look at this view?” I said, momentarily confused that I was Spencer seeing my apartment for the first time.
Spencer couldn’t help but be pulled toward the floor-to-ceiling windows and our cartoonish panorama of Seattle: snowy Mount Rainier, Space Needle, Pacific Science Center arches, container ships of Elliott Bay.
“We were so nervous about the infamous Seattle weather that Joe said, ‘Let’s give ourselves half a chance of avoiding a murder-suicide and get a place with lots of light.’” I had to stop talking!
I popped into the bathroom, flushed (nice save!), and emerged babbling.
“This is where the magic happens!” I said, presenting Spencer the walk-in pantry I’d converted to my studio. “Or doesn’t, depending on the day.”
Spencer poked his head in. The space was barely big enough for my drawing table; the walls pinned floor to ceiling with a mad jam of photos, images torn from magazines, notes to myself, random trinkets. On the floor, waist-high stacks of the photography books I use for reference, and a glass jug that held the stubs of all the colored pencils I’d ever burned through.
“Thank God you’re an artist,” I said to Spencer. “Most people who sneak a peek think I’m batshit.”
Spencer couldn’t resist a closer look at my current project. I was working on a commission for the Telluride Film Festival, fiddling around with the idea of the knots in aspen trees looking like eyes. Or something. Scattered on the desk were strips of film, glass eyes I’d found at a curio shop, and an out-of-print book flagged for Herbert Bayer photographs.
“Imagine being you!” I said. “Seeing the inside of my car, apartment, and studio in the same day. It must feel like skipping first and second base and going straight to third!”
“If I’m making you nervous,” Spencer said, “I can just go.”
“Don’t go!” I screeched, scaring even myself.
Joe’s and Timby’s breakfast dishes were still on the table, a diorama of half-eaten toast and half-finished orange juice.
“It’s like the final day of Pompeii around here!”
“You and your sister,” Spencer said quietly. “It’s none of my business what happened. I’m not judging. You can stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Why are you guys fighting?” Timby asked.
“How about you show me that art,” Spencer said.
I hustled into Joe’s office. For the first time since the shock of The Flood Girls, it was just me and me. My body knew it and involuntarily dropped into Joe’s leather chair.
This. Shit!
The lethargy pressed down on me. My breathing slowed. I lowered my face into my spiderweb fingers.
Ivy. Whenever I think of her, the first image I always have, she’s in profile, in her twenties, smiling, curious. She was born trusting and stayed that way, believed in people, saw the good in their stories, in their intentions, played along with how they wanted to be perceived. Her skin was so delicate you could see a blue vein running along her strong jaw. Her physical beauty was the first thing people noticed. She spoke quietly, drawing them into where they wanted to be, closer to her.
I wonder if she learned that from our mother, who could only whisper toward the end. Mom’s friend Gigi would pick Ivy and me up every day after school and take us to the hospital. Each day, Mom’s voice grew weaker.
Then one day, it was Daddy standing at the school gate.
I was nine. Ivy was five.
My memories of our mother’s death (not the dying itself, but the days after) are a numb jumble dominated by my father’s cluelessness and the flamboyant grief of show people.
Forty years later, though, the memories that cause my chest to curl in and ache are those of Ivy.
Within a week of her death, Mom’s friends threw a celebration of her life. Broadway was dark on Mondays, so they borrowed the Minskoff, where Bette Midler was doing a one-woman show.
Daddy, Ivy, and I arrived at the theater and found ourselves receiving condolences in a random huddle in the center aisle. At the back of the stage, in the shadows, was the huge mechanical ape hand in which Bette Midler made her entrance.
The lights flickered. Father Kidney started up the steps to the mic. But the theater wasn’t a quarter full.
“Shouldn’t we wait for everyone?” I asked Daddy.
“It’s a big theater,” he said, and we took our seats.
I began to tremble. This was how her “tribe,” as my mother called her theater friends, wanted her remembered? A priest speaking on a borrowed stage in front of another woman’s props to an empty house?
My mother wasn’t theirs to humiliate. She belonged to me. She was elegant and precise. She’d gone to boarding school in Switzerland and made us cheese soufflés in little ramekins and posed nude for a German photographer and filled our house with fr
esh flowers.
I turned to Ivy. “We’re leaving.”
“I want to see the show.”
I yanked her away. We sat on velvet chairs in the lobby and fell asleep, awaking to the wail of bagpipes.
Daddy couldn’t face sleeping in their bed so he’d been spending the nights on the couch. But it was the cat’s couch. The morning after the memorial, the three of us were silently eating the food people had brought. (Weird stuff in unfamiliar casseroles: shepherd’s pie with ground beef, not lamb; lasagna that tasted of cinnamon; macaroni and cheese with peas: all of it only compounding our dread of what the world would be like without Mom in it.) The cat hopped up on the couch, squatted over the spot where Daddy’s head had been, and, staring straight at us, peed. It was completely evil and felt personal, as if Pumpkin were saying, You think you have it bad now? Try this.
I guess Daddy had to take his bottled fury and fear out on something, and better the cat than us. But still, I should have hurried Ivy out of there.
That afternoon, Gigi and another friend of Mom’s, Alan, came over, and Daddy took Ivy and me to the park.
When we returned, Gigi and Alan were gone. The couch was gone. Pumpkin was gone. Everything of Mom’s had been removed: the dresses in her closet, the sweaters and silk scarves folded in her drawers, the hats on the shelves, her jewelry, her makeup. Even her lingering smell had vanished.
In the hallway sat two boxes. One marked ELEANOR. One marked IVY.
The only thing Daddy kept were Tyler family heirlooms: a pair of antique derringers.
That night, while Daddy snored in his bed, I stared at those two boxes for hours. I finally picked them up, walked them to the incinerator chute, and tossed them in. (The scratch of sequins and beads against cardboard still haunts me.)
A week later, Daddy drove us to Colorado. He didn’t tell us it would be one way. He’d met a woman from Dallas who had a second house in Aspen. We could live in the guesthouse in exchange for Daddy doing maintenance and small repairs. (In the ’70s, Aspen was a funky former mining town with the best powder in the world, attracting mostly Texans. It was more cowboy hats and Wranglers than Mariah Carey and Gulfstream 550s.)
In New York, Daddy had installed sound systems for a living. His hope was to do that in Aspen, but something must have happened. I’ve since learned that many bookies started as gamblers who got in too deep and had to work off their debts.
The first time he left us alone was our first winter there. “You can take care of your sister?” Daddy had asked me. It was an odd question. He said we could sign for what we needed at Carl’s Pharmacy. (Everything with Daddy is still a puzzle with missing pieces. My best guess is that he drove to Vegas to lay off Super Bowl bets.)
He was gone nine days. Ivy and I lived by ourselves in the guesthouse. (“Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.” That was the Lear speech Mom used to recite before bed.) It was January. When the school bus dropped us off, we’d hit Carl’s, then slip into the little gingerbread house like thieves, the sun already behind Shadow Mountain. We’d turn on all the lights, start a fire, watch TV, and eat our haul of pharmacy Jolly Ranchers, Pringles, and whatever random piece of fruit sometimes appeared on top of a barrel by the back register.
A few days in, Ivy got sick and sicker. A 102 fever, wet cough, and earache that had her moaning. We didn’t even have a pediatrician. If I called 911, the police would know we’d been left alone. We’d be taken away, most likely separated. I forged Daddy’s signature on notes to school and nursed Ivy with whatever beckoned from the shelves at Carl’s. Aspirin, VapoRub, Sucrets, throat spray, Benadryl, cough syrup—the what-might-have-beens still send shivers. I’d return home every day praying Ivy was alive.
She always was, and wanting to hear stories about what had happened at school. (Six she was. Being raised by a fourth-grader.) I didn’t dare tell her the truth. I was a fat kid with red hair and freckles. New to town, having moved midyear from New York, I was tempting prey for the tough kids. As I walked on the path between classes, they’d push me into the pond. I wouldn’t fight as they filled my backpack with heaps of fresh powder. Snowbaths, these wintry interludes were called.
But at home, in my afternoon reports to Ivy, I’d have the last word, mocking the bullies’ appearances, ridiculing their names, belittling their intellects. “You’re awful!” Ivy would say through her laughter, my audience of one.
But she knew I wasn’t awful.
Once, years later, when we were in our twenties and walking up Madison Avenue, Ivy took my hand, just to hold. Such was our ease.
Despite everything that’s happened between us, when I’m taken by surprise, the feeling I have of Ivy is one of tenderness: that day, taking my hand.
Now, with Ivy erased, I’ve become The Trick. I’m a grotesquerie going out into the world fetching observations and encounters to perform for someone who long ago left the building.
As I sat there at home, in Joe’s office, a toxic, roiling mass bloomed in my stomach. Guilt, longing, regret: name it, it was in me, black, corroding me from within.
I couldn’t help that being coldcocked with a reminder of Ivy triggered this wave of nausea and weakness. What I was feeling? It wasn’t me. It was an isolated sensation that appeared in my stomach. It had edges. My job was to recognize it as an entity separate from myself.
Smell the soup. Cool the soup.
I’d rather be me right now. Ivy was off living a life of idiotic facades, laughable values—
I stopped myself.
I wasn’t doing that. My business was my life. My life was an honorable one of self-generating abundance. I was healthy. Timby was healthy. Joe was healthy. I was loved. I’d made an impact as an artist. I had a graphic memoir to write. So what if I didn’t get along with my sister?
I stood up, still a bit trembly, and started to leave, then stopped.
On Joe’s desk. A telescope of some kind. Gray, the size of a demi-baguette, on crouching insect legs. It was aimed out the window.
How bizarre.
“I want to see!” It was Timby, followed by Spencer, his face covered in tiny flower stickers.
“Get away.” I hip-checked Timby before he could get his hand on it.
“You’re mean.”
“Out, out.” I herded them into the living room.
“Mom, can we use your computer to watch walking-stick videos?”
“I have to get going,” Spencer said.
“One second.” I shut the door.
I stepped behind Joe’s desk, tucked my hands behind my back in reverse prayer, and lowered my face to the eyepiece.
Between the putty blur of foreground condos, a distant yacht leaped brightly into view. Black-hulled and sleek, just the prow peeked through in sharp focus.
I walked to the window. There it was, at a random dock at an industrial waterfront I never thought about but did pass on my way to Costco.
Hmm. A ship.
I stepped back, knocking over a date-tree stalk that was propped against the wall. Waist-high and edged with triangular spikes, sharp like shark teeth, a hundred twiny fronds dangled from the top like a prehistoric pom-pom.
Joe had brought it back from Turkey where he’d gone to do contracture-release surgeries. While there, he’d met a man who’d crossed the desert from Iraq with his cloudy-eyed father; they’d heard American doctors could make the blind see. As payment, they’d sawn off a branch from the family’s date tree, heavy with fruit. Joe explained he wasn’t that kind of doctor. They insisted Joe try a date anyway. The sweetness of the fruit might change his mind.
Joe lugged that stalk on four planes so he’d never forget those men. “I want to forget them!” I cried when Joe told me the wretched tale. “Get that thing out of here!” He’d brought the stalk to work only to have Ruthie chase it out too. It ended up here in the corner.
I returned to the big room and sat down at Joe’s place at the table. I pushed aside the dishes.
“I can see why that would make you feel bad.” Spencer’s voice.
Click-click-click. Yo-Yo, standing there, dim and hopeful.
“Everything I say.” Timby’s little voice. “Piper acts like she knows more. I was telling her how I hate the Disney princesses—”
“You love the Disney princesses!” I shouted.
“I never liked them!” he shouted back.
“Halloween you went as Gaston, and Gaston loves Belle, so—”
Slam went Timby’s door.
I lowered my forehead onto the table. It was much harder and colder than you’d think. I spread my arms out and up, just as Joe had done this morning. Not comfortable. Definitely not a position you’d find yourself in naturally. But what did it say? I’m depressed. I’m alone. I’m hurting. I need help.
I sat up. Yo-Yo cocked his head. His tail dared to wag.
“Go away.”
“I know, right?” Timby said from his room. “I know, right?” Spencer answered. “I know, right?” Timby jumped in. “I know, right?” Spencer said on top of him. And on and on, until it was staccato and rapid-fire and I half expected a disco song to erupt, but instead it was giggles. God bless the gay and the young. Or the gay and the gay.
“Let’s do this thang,” I said, looking at Yo-Yo. “Who wants a walk?”
Having heard the magic word, Yo-Yo started barking.
“It’s all true!” I said in my high-pitched Yo-Yo voice. “Let’s go, Charlie Trotter. Let’s go, Biscuit. Let’s go, Yo-Yo-san. Let’s go, Yoozy Von Boozy.”
“His name is Yo-Yo,” said Timby coldly, now standing there with Spencer.
“It’s my tell,” I said. “When I’m anxious, I make up nicknames for the dog.”
“What do you have to be anxious about?” Timby asked.
“Things,” I said.
