My mother and Mr. Dancy are still in bed when I get home. Their cabin has a plate-glass window overlooking the pond. I run into their room without knocking, jump up and down on their bouncy mattress with my wet, sandy feet. My nightgown rises into the air every time I come back to earth.
“Out,” Mr. Dancy growls in a half sleep. “Wallace, Jesus Christ.”
Through the window I see Anna and her best summer-friend Peggy in the water, splashing each other. Peggy has orange hair and freckles.
“What are those?” My mother points at my belly. “Hold still!”
I stop jumping, pull up my nightgown, and let her examine my stomach. It is covered in red spots.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” she says. “Chicken pox. How did this happen? I’d better go check Anna.”
“They itch,” I say and flip off the bed.
“Stay here,” my mother orders. “I’ll get the calamine lotion.”
“I want to go swimming.”
“Stay in this room. I don’t need you infecting Peggy.”
I push past her and make a run for the door.
Mr. Dancy snatches my arm, hard. “You heard your mother.”
I try to pull away, but his grip tightens.
“Carl, stop. You’re hurting her,” my mother says.
“She needs to be controlled.”
“Please,” Mum says. “She’s five.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
“Of course not,” Mum says, placating.
He throws off the covers and starts pulling on his clothes. “If I want to deal with spoiled brats, I’ll go spend time with my own kids.”
“What are you doing?” My mother’s voice sounds tight, high-pitched.
“I’ll see you back in the city. This place makes me antsy.”
“Please, Carl.”
The door slams behind him.
“Do. Not. Move,” Mum says. “If I find you out of this room there will be hell to pay.” And races out to stop him.
I sit down on the bed, watch Anna putting on a mask and snorkel. She squats down at the water’s edge, her back to the pond, dips her mask in the pond, empties it, spits in it. Behind her, Peggy wades out into deeper water. With every step, a few more inches of her disappear. A car engine starts up. I hear my mother shouting, her voice getting fainter and fainter as she runs up the driveway, chasing Mr. Dancy’s car. I watch as the bottom of Peggy’s red pigtail disappears. Now only her head is above water, floating, disembodied. Now only the top of her head, like a turtle’s back. Now Peggy is a trail of bubbles. I imagine the suckerfish, giving her their soft kisses. The bubbles stop. I wait for her to reappear. I bang on the glass, trying to get Anna’s attention. I know she can hear me, but she doesn’t bother to look up. I bang again, harder now. Anna sticks her tongue out at me, sits down on the beach to pull on her yellow flippers.
4
10:00 A.M.
There are already five cigarette butts in the ashtray next to Peter. A Camel Light dangles from his mouth. He drinks his coffee through it, unaware. No hands. Like a carny trick. A thin trail of smoke drifts from his lower lip as he swallows. He reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out an orange Bic lighter, worries it over and over in his hand like a string of prayer beads, turns the newspaper page, gropes blindly for a piece of bacon. If it were possible to smoke in his sleep, he would. When we were first together, I hounded him, begged him to stop. But it was like asking a chicken to fly. I want to save his life, God knows, but he’s the only one who can do that.
The kids have sprawled themselves over the couch, glued to their screens, white chargers in every outlet, their dirty plates still on the table, my mother’s tattered novel kicked to the floor. All of the bacon and most of the eggs have been eaten. I watch my mother wade out of the pond, shake the water off. Bright droplets arc through the sky. She lets her hair down out of its chignon, squeezes it, then quickly twists it right back up again, clips it into place with a barrette. She reaches for an old mint-green towel she’s hung on the branch of a tree and wraps it around herself. I take a bite of my toast. At seventy-three, she is still beautiful.
The morning Peggy drowned, I stood almost where I am now, watching her evaporate into the water. And then my mother was there, still in her negligee, screaming at Anna, splashing into the pond, diving under. When she came up, she had Peggy by the hair. Peggy was pale blue. My mother dragged her back to shore by her pigtail, banged on her chest, and kissed air into her mouth until Peggy gulped and gasped and vomited back to life. Mum had been a lifeguard when she was a girl and she knew a secret: that some drowning victims can come back from the dead. I watched. While my mother played God. While Mr. Dancy drove out of our lives forever. While Anna poked a branch at Peggy’s feet, trying to wake her.
Now I watch my mother lift her face into the warm breeze. The backs of her arms have age spots. Spider veins break the surface of the skin behind her knees and thighs. She looks around blankly, then gives a little shrug that I recognize as “Aha!” and picks up her prescription sunglasses from the end of the canoe where she left them. I’ve seen all this a hundred times before, but this morning she seems different. Older. And it makes me sad. There is something eternal about my mother. She’s a pain in the ass, but she has great dignity. She reminds me of Margaret Dumont from the Marx Brothers movies. She doesn’t take on airs, she has them naturally. We should have waited for her for breakfast.
* * *
—
“Can you pass the toast, or have the locusts finished that as well?” Mum says, coming onto the porch and pulling up a chair.
Peter peers over his newspaper. “Good swim, Wallace?”
“Hardly. The bladderwort is back. It’s those damned fishermen. They drag it in on the bottoms of their boats from God knows where.”
“Nevertheless, you’re looking radiant this morning.”
“Pish,” Mum says, reaching for a piece of toast. “Flattery will get you nowhere. And it certainly won’t bring the bacon back.”
“Then I shall get up and make you some.”
“Your husband’s in an unusually good mood today,” Mum says to me.
“I am indeed,” Peter says.
“You must be the only person in the world who’s ever been improved by a trip to Memphis.”
“I do so adore you, Wallace.” Peter laughs.
I get up from the table. “I’ll make more bacon. And eggs. Those are cold.”
“God, no!” Mum says. “And create an even bigger pile of dishes? Is there a single pot you didn’t use?”
“Scrambled or soft-boiled?” I’m hating her again already. “Jack, clear those plates off the table and bring your grandmother the marmalade.”
“Maddy, go get Wallace the marmalade,” Jack says to his sister without looking up. My mother has always insisted that the kids call her by her first name. “I’m not ready to be a grandmother,” she said before Jack had even started to talk. “And I certainly hope you aren’t expecting me to babysit.”
Maddy ignores Jack.
“Guys? Hello?” I actually put my hands on my hips.
“You’re already up,” Jack says to me. “You get it.”
I hold my breath for ten seconds, trying not to explode. I am underwater, watching the fish through murky green. I close my eyes. I am Peggy. I choose the quiet of the reeds.
Peter lights another cigarette. “Jack, do what your mother says. Stop acting the fool.”
“Yes, Jack,” Mum agrees. “You’re behaving like an asshole. That sort of behavior is unbecoming.”
1956. Guatemala.
My grandmother Nanette moved to Central America after her third husband left her. She had divorced the monstrous Jim at last, but she had no way of surviving in the world without a man to support her. Vince Corcoran was her way out—a millionaire, which in th
ose days meant something. Vince had made his fortune in import/export—fruit and coffee. He wasn’t handsome, but he was a genuinely good man—bighearted, kind to the children, madly in love with their mother. She had married him for his money. She couldn’t stand the way his breath smelled, and when they had sex, big drops of sweat would fall on her face from his brow. It disgusted her. She was mortified that she had stooped to marrying a banana salesman, but she had a townhouse in Gramercy Park and a cabernet Rolls-Royce. Vince divorced her after reading this in her journal, or so the story goes. All Granny Nanette got in the settlement was the car, a small monthly stipend, and a massive villa in Guatemala she had never even seen. Vince had won it from a colleague several years back in a poker game. So Nanette, a single woman, barely thirty-three years old, three times divorced, left her New York socialite life behind: sold her furs, packed up her leather trunks, piled Wallace and Austin, aged twelve and ten, into the Rolls-Royce, and drove all the way to a remote valley on the outskirts of Antigua, a small and beautiful Spanish colonial city that sat in the shade of volcanoes.
Casa Naranjal was a crumbling, iguana-infested estate. Its lands were filled with orange, lime, and avocado orchards. Jacarandas burst into lavender fireworks in the spring. Clusters of bananas hung heavy under rattling fronds. In the rainy season the river swelled, then broke its banks. The estate was walled off from the prying eyes of the local villagers. Don Ezequiel, a toothless old man, guarded its massive wooden gates. Most days, he sat in the shade of an adobe hut eating frijoles on the blade of a knife. My mother loved to sit beside him on the hard earthen floor and watch him eating.
Along with the estate, Granny Nanette had inherited a small staff of servants, a private cook, and three horses that roamed the property untethered. A handsome dark-haired gardener, dressed only in white, picked mangosteens for their breakfast, chased armadillos off the lawns, and fished large worms out of the black-bottomed pool. My grandmother spent her days locked away in her bedroom, terrified of the strange world that had saved her, unable to communicate with anyone but her two children. Her bedroom was on the upper floor of an octagonal tower covered in purple bougainvillea. Directly underneath was a grand living room with soaring ceilings and massive doors that opened onto the landscape. The closest the kids ever got to their mother during the day was the sound of her pacing back and forth above them on the Saltillo floor.
A colonnaded terrace connected the living room to the kitchen, where every morning the cook prepared the masa for tortillas and crushed green tomatoes into salsa verde. Gilded birdcages filled with brilliant-colored parrots and cockatiels were strung between the terraced arches. Wallace and Austin would eat alone at the long dining table, feeding the birds bits of their fried plantains while the parrots chattered to them in Spanish. Mum has always claimed this was how she learned to speak Spanish. Her first words were “Huevos revueltos? Huevos revueltos?”
For three months, the children never went to school. Granny Nanette had no idea how to arrange it. (My mother loves to tell me this any time I express worry over my children’s education. “Don’t be so ordinary, Elle,” she says. “It doesn’t become you. Slide rules are for the meager.” An attitude largely informed by the fact that she can barely add, as I like to point out.)
Austin was afraid to leave the grounds, so Mum wandered around on her own with an old Leica her father had given her, taking photographs of white bulls in the empty fields; wild horses in dry riverbeds, their rib cages swollen from hunger; scorpions hiding in the shade of the woodpile; her brother drinking Limonada by the pool. Her favorite place was the graveyard outside the village. She loved the caged madonnas, the spicy marigolds brought in armfuls by the villagers, the pink-stucco tombstones that looked like dollhouse cathedrals, the paper flowers draped over painted crypts—turquoise, tangerine, lemon-yellow—whatever was the favorite color of the deceased. She would go to the cemetery to read, curled up in the shade of a tomb, comforted by the souls of the dead.
Most afternoons, my mother rode her favorite horse across the valley and over a steep hill into Antigua. She would tie her horse to a post and wander the cobbled streets, explore the ruins of the ancient churches and monasteries, long ago destroyed by earthquakes, still scattered throughout the city. She loved the milagros that the old women sold in the main square to hang on silver chains—tiny charms: amputated legs and arms, eyes, a pair of lungs, a bird, a heart. Afterward, she would go into the cathedral and burn incense, praying for nothing.
One evening, as she was riding home to the valley down a steep trail that narrowed between two boulders, a man stepped out from behind the rocks, blocking her way. He took the reins of her horse and told her to get down. He put his hand on his machete, stroked his crotch. She sat there, cowlike, mute. Enough of this, she thought. She kicked her horse hard in the gut and ran straight over the man. She says she still remembers hearing the crack of his leg bone, the squelch of the horse’s hooves in his stomach. That night at dinner, over a bowl of turkey soup, she told her mother what she had done.
“I hope you killed him,” Granny Nanette said, dipping a tortilla into her soup. “But Wallace, dear,” she added, “that sort of behavior is unbecoming in a girl.”
10:15 A.M.
The shock of being called an asshole by his grandmother has gotten Jack up off the sofa. I should try it, but it would only devolve into a hideous shouting match that would leave me in tears and Jack in adolescent triumph. I don’t have my mother’s haughty gravitas.
My cell phone buzzes. Peter reaches across the table and picks it up before I can get to it. “Jonas is texting you.” He clicks on the message.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. My heart stops beating.
“They want to meet us at Higgins Hollow. They’re saying eleven. They’ll bring sandwiches.”
Thank you, God.
“I have a horrible feeling I made a plan with Gina last night before I passed out,” Peter says.
“Do we really want to spend hours on the beach? I’d rather lie in the hammock in a heap.”
“I don’t want to be rude. Gina can get a bit chippy.”
“She won’t care. We’re all nursing hangovers.” But I sound disingenuous even to myself.
Peter drains his coffee. “It has forever amazed me. Jonas is a brilliant painter. Successful. Looks like a bloody screen idol. He could have married Sophia-fucking-Loren. I think he hooked up with Gina just to irritate his mother.”
“Well, that was a worthy cause, anyway,” my mother says.
Peter laughs. He loves it when my mother is bitchy.
“The two of you,” I say. “Enough.”
“So, chickadees? You up for the beach?” Peter says.
“When’s low tide?” Maddy asks.
Peter turns the local paper over and runs his finger down the tide chart. “1:23.”
“Can we bring the boogie boards?” Finn asks.
“May we,” my mother corrects him.
“I’m not coming,” Jack says. “I’m meeting Sam at the Racing Club.”
“How are you planning to get there?” I ask.
“I’ll take your car.”
“Not happening. You’ll have to take your bike.”
“Are you kidding me? It’s, like, fifteen miles.”
“Last time you drove my car you forgot to fill it and I almost ran out of gas. I limped to the Texaco station.”
“We already made the plan. He’ll be waiting.”
“Text him. Tell him the plan’s changed.”
“Mom.”
“End of subject.” My cell phone buzzes again. This time I get there first. “Yes to beach?” Jonas is asking. I can feel him there at the other end holding his phone, touching me through it, feel his fingers typing, each word a hidden message to me. “I need to text Jonas back, Pete. What time should I say?”
“Tell them eleven thirty.”
/> Jack walks into the living room and picks my purse up from the table. I watch as he digs around, pulls out my car keys.
“What exactly are you doing?” I ask.
“I’ll bring it back with a full tank. I promise.”
“Give me those,” I hold out my hand for the keys. “Either you come to the beach with us or you bike to the Racing Club. Basta.”
“Why are you doing this? You are literally going out of your way to make problems for me.” Jack throws my car keys on the floor and slams out the porch door. “How can you stand being married to such a bitch,” he shouts over his shoulder as he storms off to his cabin.
“You make a great point,” Peter calls back, laughing.
“Are you kidding me, Pete?”
“Relax. He’s a teenager. He’s supposed to be rude to his mother. It’s all part of the separation process.”
My entire being bristles. There is nothing that makes me more tense than being told to relax. “Rude? He called me a bitch. And your laughing only encourages him.”
“So, this is my fault?” Peter raises an eyebrow.
“Of course not,” I say, exasperated. “But he takes his cues from you.”
Peter stands up. “I’m going into town to get cigarettes.”
“We’re in the middle of a conversation.”
“Is there anything else we need?” His voice is cold as stones.
“For fuck’s sake, Pete.”
The Paper Palace Page 4
