And so when at last I returned to the living room, I murmured to Ben that I had a headache and was going to bed early. The dismay on his face confirmed to me that he had planned to propose that night. Maybe we’d have taken a walk down the cold, dark street of brick houses, or it would have been by the fireplace, after the cousins had left and his sisters and parents had gone to sleep. I felt a churning in my stomach as I brushed my teeth and climbed into the double bed that Ben’s parents didn’t care if we shared. (In contrast to the mother of my high school boyfriend Tom Mueller, Ben’s mother adored me—she would send fruit-scented soaps and packets of fancy powdered hot chocolate to our apartment in Chicago and sign the cards “Mom Sylvia.” I think she had never quite gotten over the fact that my parents hadn’t attended my college graduation.)
I would still have to stave off a proposal for the two days before Ben and I returned to Chicago, I thought, and then I’d have to stave off whatever new plan he came up with after proposing at his parents’ house hadn’t worked, and it all made me feel tired. It wasn’t that I wanted to break up with him, just that I wanted to halt further progress—I wanted to enter a holding pattern. These were the thoughts I went to sleep thinking the night after my mother died. Then I dreamed not of her but of Vi yelling my name from across a grassy field; in the dream, I pretended I couldn’t hear her.
I didn’t have a cellphone then, and because Ben’s last name was Murphy and neither Vi nor my father knew the first name of Ben’s father, it was useless for them to call information in Indianapolis; they had no way of reaching me. Vi sent an email—Call me ASAP—which I got while sitting in front of a computer at the desk in Ben’s father’s home office on the evening of December 26. Immediately, my pulse began to race. Normally, I’d have gone to find Ben’s mother and asked if I could make a long-distance call, but instead I simply lifted the receiver of the office phone and dialed Vi’s apartment. Patrick answered on the fifth ring, and when he realized it was me, he said, “I’m so sorry, Daze.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Oh, shit, I thought Vi reached you,” he said. “Your mom died.” I almost thought he was kidding, but then he began to sob.
I swallowed and said, “But how?”
“The EMT told your dad he thought it was a reaction to her medications. It was in her sleep.”
I had known my mother took several prescription medicines, I’d seen the forest of bottles on her nightstand, but I couldn’t have said exactly what they were for.
“Vi’s at your parents’ house now,” Patrick said.
Ben drove me to St. Louis that night; it took us four hours, and there was the threat of a snowstorm, but the flakes didn’t start to fall until we’d arrived. My father greeted us at the door and said, “I’m glad you’ve come home,” and his voice cracked. Behind him, I caught sight of Vi in an old University of Nebraska sweatshirt with the hood up, her eyes puffy and rimmed with red.
My mother’s was the first funeral I’d ever attended. There was a service at the funeral home, a large white house on Manchester Road that I’d passed many times without taking note of it, then the burial at Oak Hill Cemetery. My Mizzou friend Lauren had wanted to come, but she was a paralegal in her hometown of Tampa and had to work over the holidays. My father’s brother and his wife flew in from Omaha, and Patrick and his mother were there, along with a handful of Vi’s restaurant co-workers, some of my father’s colleagues, a few of our neighbors, and all four members of the Spriggs family. I didn’t realize I’d been waiting for Pete Spriggs, who’d become a rotund man in his late twenties, to announce to Vi and me, “You’re twins because there’s two of you” until the burial was finished, everyone had dispersed, and he hadn’t said it.
During the service, I’d had trouble remembering what my mother had looked like. I could remember certain photos of her but not her moving around, talking to me. What came to mind instead was something Vi had once said when we’d studied the civil rights movement in high school, which was that if our mother had lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, during desegregation, she was the kind of person who’d have spit at the black students as they tried to get inside the high school. I attempted to chase the comment from my brain.
Patrick, his mother, and our aunt and uncle came back to our house for lunch, which was a tray of cold cuts Ben had picked up that morning from Schnucks. From the moment Patrick had told me my mother had died, I’d felt both clingy and jumpy around Ben—glad that he hadn’t given me the opportunity to turn down his proposal, that I hadn’t made things officially bad between us and he was willing to drive with me to St. Louis and stand next to me at the funeral, but aware that I still couldn’t marry him, even though my mother had died. I just couldn’t.
There had been, as Ben and I had talked increasingly seriously about marriage, two points of tension between us, and we’d looked at engagement rings without resolving either one. The first was that he didn’t want to adopt Chinese girls. After several conversations about it, he’d finally said, “I know how this sounds, but I can’t picture having squinty-eyed kids.”
If the statement was shocking, it would have been disingenuous for me to act shocked by it. I said, “What if we adopted from another country, like in South America?”
“It’s all kind of the same.” Then he said, “I like my family. I think the Murphy genes are worth passing on.”
The second point of tension between Ben and me, which we never discussed, was Vi. He at least had the wisdom not to say so, and maybe I shouldn’t have held it against him, given the way they’d met, but he didn’t like her. And Vi either could tell, and amped up her Vi-ishness with him, or else I was just more aware of her Vi-ishness when Ben was around to disapprove of it: She’d bring up the old story of Patrick’s cousin and the Naughty Biscotti, or she’d talk about how her friend Nancy had bought a huge purple dildo with lifelike veins in it, or she’d fart loudly, look at Ben, and say, “Pardon my French.”
The afternoon of my mother’s funeral, my father drove his brother and sister-in-law to the hotel where they were staying and returned home for a nap; he took it, I noticed, in the guest room. In the living room, Vi lit a joint and passed it to Patrick, who passed it to Ben, who shook his head. I had seen Ben smoke pot countless times in college, if not much since, and his demurral irritated me. It was mostly for this reason that I took a hit myself.
When the joint reached her again, Vi inhaled before saying, “The EMTs took Mom’s body to the medical examiner’s office to do an autopsy.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. Ben sat in an armchair watching bowling on TV, and though neither his head nor his eyes moved, I could tell his attention had shifted to Vi.
“Because of how young she was,” Vi said. “I had a sense before she died, you know. Jocelyn was doing my tarot cards, and the Ten of Swords kept coming up.”
In the last five years, I had never mentioned senses to Ben. Whatever it was that Vi had divulged during the ride in his car from Mizzou—I hadn’t expanded on or tried to explain that.
“Now I think, well, why didn’t I just ask Guardian who the card was for?” Vi said. Guardian was how she’d begun referring to the entity who had spoken to her in the library at Reed, whom she’d continued to communicate with. “But maybe it was her time.”
“She was forty-six,” I said. If I didn’t acknowledge Vi’s reference to Guardian, perhaps Ben wouldn’t notice it, I thought; it didn’t seem to occur to Vi that Ben wouldn’t be well-acquainted with our senses.
“What a tragedy,” Patrick said. “Poor Rita.” He and Vi were both on the couch, her feet on his lap.
As Vi passed the joint to him again, she said, “I wonder if Mom will contact us from the other side.”
“Ben.” I stood. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Six weeks later, on a Sunday evening after he returned to our apartment from playing touch football, I told Ben that I was moving back to St. Louis. “Is this because of what I said about squinty e
yes?” he asked.
For a few seconds, I was genuinely confused, and then I said, “It has nothing to do with that.”
“I’m not an asshole,” he said.
“I didn’t say you are.” After my mother’s death, I’d been unable to reenter the once-enchanted-seeming life Ben and I led together in Chicago, shopping at the farmers’ market on weekends and seeing independent movies at the Music Box. (The truth was, because we were only twenty-three, neither of us was in a hurry to have or adopt children anyway, and even in our disagreements, there was a self-congratulatory note about how responsible we were to discuss these important issues in advance.) It had been the acceptance letter I’d received from the social work school at the University of Illinois at Chicago that had made me decide for certain: I wasn’t enrolling. And not only that, I was leaving Chicago. I’d been working for a year and a half as the activities director at a nursing home, and I’d given notice there before I told Ben, partly so that I couldn’t back out.
He said then, “And I’m supposed to just be cool with a long-distance relationship?”
I said nothing, and an expression of dawning comprehension formed on his face. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “This is how you tell me you want to break up?” I wondered if he was wishing he could undo all our time together, starting with that game of ping-pong in the basement of the Delta Upsilon house in 1993, if he thought I’d turned out to be someone other than the person I’d presented myself as. He said, “I’m sorry your mom committed suicide. I really am. But that’s no reason to destroy your own life.”
In a small, tight voice, I said, “My mother didn’t commit suicide.”
He blinked in surprise, and his lips parted, as if he was about to speak. But he was quiet for more than thirty seconds before saying, “Wow. Okay. Okay then, Kate.”
I rented a car to drive myself home; there wasn’t much I wanted to take from the apartment in Lincoln Park, but there was more than I could carry on the bus. Because I wasn’t yet twenty-five, the rental company imposed a surcharge, in addition to the exorbitant fee for dropping off the car in a different city from the one where I’d picked it up, but I wasn’t going to ask my father or Vi to come get me. And so on February 12, 1999—it seemed like a good idea to leave town before Valentine’s Day—in a maroon Chevy Malibu, I drove south on Interstate 55, through Bloomington and Springfield, and as I crossed the Pine Street Bridge, the Arch on my right, I thought how strange it was that my belief that I’d never again live in St. Louis had not only been wrong but had been wrong so quickly.
I hadn’t told my father to expect me, but he didn’t appear particularly surprised. In fact, I was the one in for a surprise: As I pulled up in front of the house on Gilbert Street, I saw a for sale sign in the yard and, beneath the name and number of the real estate agency, a rectangular metal attachment that read under contract. I knew right away, with a gasping kind of fury, that my father had already gotten rid of the only things I’d have wanted from the house, which were my mother’s Christmas records. And though I quickly confirmed this suspicion, there was no point in confronting my father; the records would still be gone. He’d be moving into a rental apartment in Des Peres, my father told me, then said, “Ben’s not with you?”
I shook my head. “But I’m here for good.”
I suppose I’d expected him to express pleasure or even gratitude, but he looked stern as he said, “Are you? I hope that’s what you want.”
My father was sixty-three then, and what I had thought in the days after my mother’s death was that if he—or, for that matter, she—had lived in the nursing home where I worked in Chicago, I would have been attentive to them in a way I’d never been as their own daughter. I wasn’t under the illusion that I could solve all the problems of the nursing home residents, or even any of their problems, but I could lead them through chair exercises and bingo, I could hold spa sessions in which I painted the women’s toenails and applied face masks. The previous summer, we’d planted a vegetable garden and had succeeded in deterring squirrels from the tomato plants with a mixture of hot pepper juice and water that two of the men and I made in the kitchen. I liked these old people, even when they were disagreeable—to cajole them into participating in activities was a satisfying challenge—yet it hadn’t occurred to me to demonstrate to my mother or father the patience I reserved for my job. Now it was too late to do so for my mother.
As it happened, however, it wasn’t clear that my father wanted me around. He was cordial in those early days following my return home, but in the way of one tenant of a boardinghouse to another; he didn’t change his habits on my behalf. He read the newspaper as he ate toast in the morning, though I was at the table, and he watched television at night. When the weather rose to fifty degrees, he declined my invitation to go for a walk, and he didn’t want to see a movie or try a tapas restaurant. After a week, I was unable to suppress the suspicion that I’d made a huge mistake.
But having returned the rental car, I was trapped in the house with no way of getting anywhere other than downtown Kirkwood when my father was at work; I had to wait until after dinner to go to Kinko’s to print résumés and cover letters. One morning, I tried to go running, but it had gotten cold again, and my chest hurt. I took to reading the Post-Dispatch cover to cover, which made me paranoid about all the crime occurring in the city and county; besides that, I mostly watched TV.
Another two weeks passed before I called Ben. It was late at night, around the time he’d be going to bed, and after we’d exchanged greetings, his none too warm, he said, “Why are you calling?”
I was startled. “I guess because I miss you.”
“I should probably tell you that Lauren and I are seeing each other.”
“Lauren who?”
“Lauren Lauren. Lauren Mitchell.”
“But she’s in Florida.” Though I had never consciously thought that Ben and my friend Lauren might be attracted to each other—wasn’t this shockingly disloyal on both their parts?—I immediately remembered the very first night he and I had hooked up, when he’d ejaculated all over me. He hadn’t said, Are you going to tell your friends? He’d said, “Are you going to tell Lauren?” On the phone, I said, “I thought you were opposed to long-distance relationships.”
“There’s such a thing as airplanes,” Ben said. “Kate, you broke up with me. Unless I’m mistaken.”
“What would happen if I wanted to get back together?” I said.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then quit fucking with me,” he said.
They were going to get married. Not right away, but eventually, Ben would become Lauren’s husband, not mine, and I sensed this. Nevertheless, the next day, I called him at work and said, “What if I take the bus up there this weekend?”
After a pause, he said, “Lauren’s coming here on Friday.” Lauren, who hadn’t been able to get away from her paralegal job to attend my mother’s funeral? I had last seen her when she’d visited Ben and me in the late summer, when we’d gotten along the way we always had, but now it was impossible not to second-guess our entire friendship.
“You could tell her not to come,” I said.
“I could.” Ben was quiet, and I heard some of his co-workers talking in the background. “But I don’t think I want to.”
I’d been in St. Louis for five weeks when I got hired, through an agency, as a home health aide for a rich old woman who lived in a huge house in Clayton. As soon as I shared the news with my father, he managed to convey his preference that I not move into his apartment by saying, “I bet you’ll be glad to live on your own again.”
By chance, Patrick was moving in then with his boyfriend, a lawyer who was ten years older than us and owned a condo in the Central West End, and Vi suggested that I take Patrick’s room.
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and she looked at me with amusement.
“You have a better plan?”
Twen
ty-four hours later, I told her, “I’ll live with you if you don’t communicate with Guardian in the apartment.” I had no idea if she talked to him out loud, but I didn’t want to ask.
Vi seemed more baffled than offended. “It bothers you that much?”
“Even when I’m not there, you can’t,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Guardian is a totally peaceful entity,” Vi said, and I said, “Maybe we shouldn’t live together. We’ll probably just fight.”
Vi held up one hand. “No, no, I can meditate at the bookstore.” She meant at the New Age one in Maplewood where she went a few nights a week, when she wasn’t working. “And we can do a sage cleansing in the apartment if you’re worried about spiritual detritus.” Then she said, “You know what? Let’s find a different place. It’s not like this one is that great.”
The day that Vi and I were to take occupancy of the second floor of a duplex in Richmond Heights, I ate toast for breakfast at the kitchen table while my father read the Post-Dispatch. All my things were packed—repacked—into suitcases and boxes waiting by the front door, and Vi and her friend Seth, who owned a van, were coming over to help me move them. The closing for the house on Gilbert Street would happen in less than a week. This breakfast was, presumably, the last meal I’d eat in the house where I’d grown up, but it didn’t feel momentous. My father set down the business section of the paper and said, “I wonder if you might show me sometime how you do your grocery shopping.”
While home, I hadn’t reverted to making my mother’s old recipes, but, not wanting to live on frozen dinners, I did borrow my father’s credit card and drive to Schnucks a few nights a week. That purchasing bananas and cottage cheese and deli ham was a skill had never occurred to me, nor had it occurred to me that it was one my father didn’t possess. I even wondered if he might be humoring me, trying to make me feel useful in the way I’d persuaded myself I would be before I’d left Chicago, but it appeared his request was sincere. This was how it happened that I began taking him grocery shopping. Certainly after a time or two, he knew what he was doing—a little ridiculously, I’d drawn a chart on a sheet of paper with each day of the week and a space beside it, so he could plan his dinners in advance—but we kept going to the store together. Back then, we did it on Sundays, after I moved in with Jeremy we went on Thursday nights, and when my father was retired and I had children, we switched to weekdays.
Sisterland Page 17
