* * *
—
Now I watch my father walk down the aisle. Next to me, in the pew, Granny Myrtle sits up straight, her pillbox hat askew, lips tight. She doesn’t like Joanne, either. The last time Joanne and my father dropped us off at our grandparents’ house, our suitcases were filled with dirty laundry. “The woman is a slob,” my grandmother had said. “And lazy as a cat in the sun. Your father may have graduated summa cum laude from Yale, but he doesn’t have a brain below the waist. How he could have chosen her. I’ll have to check you for bird mites.”
I look down at the folds of white lace in my lap, pick at a scab on my knee. My legs are covered in impetigo scars and scabs from falling onto the rough concrete under the jungle gym in the playground. Granny Myrtle reaches over and takes my hand, gives me a reassuring squeeze. I like the way her worn silver wedding band feels against my knuckles. She rests our hands together on my lap. I trace the thin blue veins on the back of her hand. I love her so much.
Anna is wearing navy. She has gotten chunky and Joanne thought the color would be becoming. I tap the floor nervously with my shoe. Anna kicks me in the shin. I have been told not to fidget. A beam of red light crosses the altar in front of the church. I trace it back to a high stained-glass window. It is the blood of Christ, trailing from his open wounds. My father walks past me now, toward the priest. I run into the aisle and throw myself at his feet, grab his pant leg and hold on. He tries to get free of me, still smiling at the wedding guests, but I won’t let go. I am a fury of white lace, snot, and tears. He inches forward, pretending to ignore the small child latched onto his ankles. I am a suckerfish.
My father and I have reached the altar. The organist begins the “Wedding March.” The guests get to their feet, a bit unsure. Now Joanne is steaming toward us down the aisle, a big pouffy veil hiding her rage. She has chosen a satin minidress, and her thick legs poke out from under it. They look like sausages stuffed into tiny shoes. She steps over me, takes my father’s hands, nods at the priest. I am lying on the ground, curled around his ankles as they take their vows. Why isn’t she wearing underpants? I’m thinking when they say the words “I do.”
1973. November, Tarrytown, New York.
One of our father’s “weekends.” He’s meant to have us every other weekend, but this is the first time we’ve seen him in over a month. They’ve had endless engagements. Joanne has too many friends and they all want to meet her old man, he tells us. “Who is the old man?” I ask. “Have we met him?”
The house is brown. In the yard, ropes hang from a bare tree where a swing used to be. Beyond it, a rocky ridge leads down to a small, muddy pond. Not swimmable, my father says, but in winter it will freeze and we can ice-skate. The living room is long and narrow with a huge plate-glass window overlooking “the lake,” as Joanne calls it. “Waterfront property is impossible to find,” she says. The only room in the house without wall-to-wall shag carpeting is the kitchen.
Saturday afternoon. Anna and I are sitting on the kitchen floor playing jacks. Outside, rain slashes the windows, a relentless gloom. I’ve gotten to tensies and I’m about to flip when Joanne comes in brandishing her hairbrush. She pulls a few strands of hair out of it, waves them at me.
“You used my hairbrush, Eleanor. After I specifically told you not to.”
“I didn’t,” I say, though I did.
“There was an outbreak of lice at your fancy new school. I’ll have to boil it.” She is furious. “If this brush gets ruined, I’m sending the bill to your mother. These are boar bristles.”
“It wasn’t me!”
“The hairs are blond. I will not stand for lying in this house.” She reaches down and sweeps our jacks up off the floor.
“Give them back!” I shout.
My father wanders in from the garage. “C’mon, you two. No fighting, no biting.”
“Don’t speak to me as though I’m a child, Henry,” Joanne says.
“She took our jacks for no reason, and she won’t give them back,” I say.
“Elle used Joanne’s hairbrush without asking,” Anna says.
“That’s not true!” I say.
“It’s just a hairbrush,” Dad says. “I’m sure Joanne doesn’t mind. Did I ever tell you your grandmother was jacks champion of her school?” He opens the freezer and looks inside. “How does chicken pot pie sound for dinner? Jo and I are out tonight.”
“I don’t want you to go out,” I say. “You always go out.”
“We’ll be right next door. And we found a great local girl to babysit.”
“Can we watch TV?” Anna says.
“Anything you want.”
“I don’t like it here,” I say. “This house is ugly. I want to go home.”
“Shut up,” Anna says. “Stop ruining everything.”
I run from the room in tears.
Behind me I hear Joanne say, through her own angry tears, “I can’t take this anymore, Henry. I didn’t sign up to be a mother.”
I throw myself on my bed, bury my face in my pillow. “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her,” I chant, like a prayer. When my father comes to comfort me, I turn away, curl myself into a pill bug.
He lifts me onto his lap and strokes my hair until my sobs subside. “I won’t go anywhere tonight, rabbit. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“She’s mean.”
“She doesn’t mean to be. This is hard for both of you. Joanne is a good woman. Please give her a chance. For me.”
I snuggle deeper into his arms and nod, knowing it’s a lie.
“Good girl.”
* * *
—
“For god’s sake, Henry,” Joanne says when he tells her he’s staying home with us. “We made this plan with the Streeps weeks ago.”
“You’ll be fine. The Streeps are more your friends, anyway. And Sheila will have cooked something delicious. I haven’t seen my girls in weeks.”
“It’s Saturday night. I’m not going out on my own.”
“Even better. Stay home with me and the girls. We’ll watch a movie, make popcorn.”
“The babysitter is already on her way. We can’t cancel her now.” She turns her back to him and looks in the hall mirror, putting in her large gold-hoop earrings. She smooths her eyebrows and gives each of her cheeks a hard pinch.
“We’ll pay her for her travel time. She’ll understand.”
I stare at Joanne’s reflection in the mirror, watching, fascinated, as her nostrils get bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller. Her mouth is a furious slash. When she catches me watching her, I smile in triumph.
* * *
—
But in the end, she wins. Every weekend after that, when our father meets us at the train station, he loads us into his car and drops us with Joanne’s parents, half an hour away. There is always some new excuse: Joanne has the curse and is feeling sick; the house is being treated for wood rot; they’ve been invited to a house party in Roxbury and Joanne thinks we’ll be bored, but next weekend we will stay with him, he promises. When he waves goodbye to us from the car he always looks sad, and I know it’s my fault.
Joanne’s father, Dwight Burke, is a famous poet. He has a lovely scratchy voice and wears a three-piece suit to breakfast. He carries a glass of bourbon with him when he goes up to his study in the morning. His wife Nancy is a big, warm woman. A Catholic. She carries a rosary in her apron pocket and asks me if I believe in God. She bakes round loaves of buttery bread, and calls lunch “luncheon.” Her hair is always done. They are the sorts of parents I have only ever read about in books. Tweedy and kind. I can’t understand how they raised such a horrible cow.
Joanne’s younger brother Frank still lives at home. He is fifteen. Frank was a surprise. “A blessing,” Nancy tells us when Anna asks why Frank is so much younger than Joanne. “She means a mistake,” Frank says. He has a blo
nd military crew cut and acne. When he bends over in his chinos, we can see the crack of his behind.
The Burkes live in a three-story white brick house surrounded by delphiniums and banks of sweet pachysandra, overlooking the ribbon of the Hudson River. The house is filled with chocolate Labradors with names like Cora and Blue, and the constant smell of rising yeast. On Sunday mornings, we go to church.
Anna and I have our own room on a little half-story behind the kitchen. A hidden staircase leads from a broom-closet door in the pantry up to our room. “The maid’s,” Nancy calls it. No one else uses this section of the house. Our diamond windowpanes look out on steep gray bedrock that weeps chill water from somewhere deep inside it.
Anna and I are friends again. We play Red Light, Green Light in the garden, sit on the wooden stairs making paper dolls, or read our books curled up in bed. No one bothers us. No one shouts. When it’s time for luncheon, Nancy rings a cowbell and we run downstairs to the dining room, where a fire is always lit, even in early summer. Nancy loves having us here, she tells us. She smothers us in hugs and kisses and unpacks our weekend suitcases into hickory bureau drawers.
Frank has a rec room in the back of the house, where he raises mice, hamsters, and gerbils in fish tanks. They stare across the room at Waldo, the boa constrictor who lives in a larger glass cage in their midst. At night, after dinner, Frank forces us to watch as he feeds teensy baby mice to his snake. Pinkies. I beg to be let out of the room, but he blocks the door. The room smells of cedar sawdust and fear.
“Are you kids having fun in there?” Nancy calls from the kitchen where she is finishing up the dishes.
“We’re feeding Waldo,” Frank yells. “Here. Take this.” He shoves a squirming pinky into Anna’s hand.
“I don’t want to.” She tries to hand the mouse back to him, but he sticks his hands in his pockets.
“If you don’t feed Waldo he’ll be hungry tonight. He might try to escape. Did you know that even a young boa constrictor can strangle a human to death in seconds?”
Anna opens the top of the snake cage, closes her eyes, and releases the baby mouse. I watch it fall into a soft pile of aspen shavings. For five long seconds, it blinks and looks around, relieved to be alive. Waldo slithers forward, then strikes. The mouse is gone. All that is left is a small bump the size of a marble in Waldo’s throat. We watch as the muscles move it down toward his stomach—a gagging, sinuous movement.
Frank loves his snake, but he loves his hamsters even more. He breeds them and sells them for pocket money. They are his most prized possessions. One weekend Goldie, his favorite hamster, escapes. Frank is frantic. He races up and down stairs, looking under sofas, pulling books off the shelves calling for her. He is certain one of the dogs has eaten her and kicks the oldest Lab, Mabel, in the shin. Mabel yelps and limps away.
“Is everything okay?” Nancy calls out from the kitchen, where beef stew is cooking.
Frank turns on me now. Accuses me of having fed Goldie to Waldo. “I know you think I’m ugly,” he says. “I heard you say it.” He pins me against the staircase wall. His breath smells of Chee-tos and milk. I stare at the neon-orange dust that has built up around his lips as I swear to him that I did not.
That night, when Nancy pulls up Anna’s blanket to tuck her in, Goldie’s limp body shakes out onto the bed. She has been squashed flat between the bed and the wall. Nancy fetches a broom and dustpan, opens the window, and tosses Goldie into the hydrangea bushes.
Frank is watching from the doorway. A high-pitched gurgling sound comes from his throat. His face twists and pinches, his acne bulges dark red. I’m certain that he is choking. I watch, transfixed, wondering if he will die. Instead, he lets out a strangled sob. Anna and I look at each other, horrified, and then burst out laughing. Frank runs away, shamefaced. I listen to the thump of his feet on our wooden staircase, hear the faraway slam of a door. Nancy stares out into the darkness, her back to us.
The next weekend, when we arrive at the train station, our father tells us we will be spending the weekend with him and Joanne. Dwight and Nancy feel it would be best.
6
11:30 A.M.
In my mother’s family, divorce is just a seven-letter word. Letters that could easily be replaced with I’m bored or bad luck. Both of her parents married three times. My grandfather Amory, who built the Paper Palace, lived in his house on the pond until the day he died, chopping wood in his hiking boots, fishing, canoeing, watching the changing ecosystem of the pond. He tracked the water lilies, the great blue herons, counted painted turtles basking on the tree trunks that rotted and grayed in the shallows. Wives moved in and out, but the pond remained his. He had found it, stumbled out of the deep woods with his hunting rifle at the age of eighteen, found the pure fresh water, its white sandy bottom, and drunk from it. When he died, Grandfather Amory left his house to Pamela, his third and final wife. She alone had proved herself worthy of it, understood its powerful hold, its soul—the religion of the Pond. The Paper Palace he left to Mum. Her brother Austin, who had never left Guatemala, wanted nothing to do with it. But to Mum, it was everything.
On the wall of my office at NYU there’s a black-and-white photograph of my mother as a young girl in Guatemala. My office is a hoarder’s paradise—books falling off the shelves, desk piled high with graduate theses, pencil stubs, Comp Lit papers to be graded, a depressing, old-womanish avocado plant I am forced to keep because Maddy “made” it for my birthday when she was six. The only clean spaces are the white walls, entirely bare except for that single photograph. In the photo, my mother is sitting astride a palomino horse. She has long braids and wears an embroidered peasant blouse, blue jeans rolled up at the cuff, leather huaraches. She is fifteen. Behind her, a young boy dressed in white walks down the dusty road pushing a wooden wheelbarrow; open fields stretch toward lava cliffs in the rugged foothills of a shrouded volcano. In one hand, my mother holds the burnished horn of her Western saddle. In the other, a single ear of corn. She is smiling at the camera, relaxed, happy—a looseness and freedom I have never seen on her face. Her teeth are white and straight.
She told me the photo was taken by the handsome gardener, that the little boy was his son; that seconds after the picture was taken, the boy nicked the horse with his cart and the horse bolted, galloped across the field and threw her, breaking her arm and two ribs. She never got back on a horse. The following fall, my mother left Guatemala for a posh New England boarding school, where she played in tennis whites and had chapel every morning. She never looked back.
I have always loved that photo. It reminds me of Michelangelo’s David: a split second carved in eternal time, the instant before the throw—right before everything changes; the randomness of the things that lead us to turn left, or right, or simply sit down on a dusty road and never move forward again. That boy, that cart, that horse, that fall, my mother’s choice to leave Guatemala, come back to the woods—gave me the pond.
* * *
—
From the porch, I watch Finn and Maddy flopping about in the shallows. Maddy points to something moving near the lily pads. Finn takes a step backward, but Maddy takes his hand, maternal. “It’s okay. Water snakes are harmless,” I hear her say. They watch its little black head making its ticktack S curves through the reeds. “Look! Minnows,” Finn says, and they disappear under the water together. The bright yellow tips of their snorkels plow figure eights on the surface.
“Has anyone seen my dark glasses?” My mother wanders out to the porch from the kitchen. “I know I left them on the bookshelf. Someone must have moved them.”
“They’re right here. On the table,” I say. “Exactly where you left them.”
“I’m going next door. I promised Pamela I’d bring over a jar of milk and two eggs.”
“You should have asked Peter to pick up groceries for her.”
“Hardly. Anyone with sense knows to avoid
your husband like the plague when smoke starts coming out of his ears. But you, Eleanor, insist on wading in with a match and setting everyone’s hair on fire. I am removing myself, with my jar of milk and my parcel of eggs. I’ll be back when you and your husband have stopped acting like infants in front of your children. You should try not to be so impossible, dear. He’s a good man. A reasonable man. You’re lucky to have him.”
“I know.”
“And take something for that hangover,” Mum says. “You’re positively green around the gills. There’s ginger ale in the icebox.”
My mother has always had a mini-crush on Peter. She’s not wrong. He’s a wonderful man. A towering hickory. Gentle but never weak. The strength of rivers. Opinionated, thoughtful, thought-provoking. A sexy English accent. He makes us laugh. He adores me. He adores his children. And I adore him right back, with a love as deep and strong as tree roots. There are times when I want to tear him limb from limb, but that’s probably the definition of marriage. Toilet paper can lead to World War III.
My mother disappears into the trees at the far end of our beach, egg basket in one hand, jar of milk in the other. Three minutes later, I can hear her calling “Yoo-hoo!” as she emerges from the woods onto my grandfather’s property. He has been dead for many years, but it will always be his house. A screen door opens, shuts, a garbled laugh, Pamela saying, “Oh my!” Although Pamela is a decade older, she and my mother are close friends. “She’s practically the only person I can bear in these woods anymore,” Mum says. “Though it would be restful if she ever wore a color other than purple. And you’d think she invented botulism, the way she cooks. I found a piece of blue cheese in her icebox that turned out to be butter. Everyone says Daddy died from old age, but I suspect she may have poisoned him by mistake.”
The Paper Palace Page 6
