Vanishing

by Cai Emmons

  No one cared about you and then, on a dime, everyone appeared to. Her mother wanted her to visit Northampton that weekend for a celebration of her brother’s birthday; Tyler was having a housewarming with his new partner Anthony; Whitney Vandermeer, who she’d talked to only briefly at the funeral, wanted her for dinner.

  Esther prevailed. Morna brought with her a bagful of things: two bottles of Esther’s favorite white wine, a sourdough baguette, a round of brie, some silver tapers, and a fat lavender-scented candle for the bedroom or bathroom, all items she was fairly certain Esther would like. She had stretched her budget, but she’d done the reckoning and wanted to feel indispensable.

  Esther’s delight was clear but muted. She peered into the bag and took out the bread and one of the wine bottles then left the bag on the counter like some passed-by hitchhiker. They settled at the table right away, foregoing time in the living room, so Morna wondered if Esther wanted her to leave.

  “Of course not,” Esther said. “I make your favorites.”

  She brought out dish after dish and laid them on the table: a tureen of onion soup, two roast chickens, roasted potatoes, green beans and carrots, a salad. For dessert she’d made un gâteau framboise that she put on the sideboard along with a cheese plate. It was enough food for an entire neighborhood, far more than she’d served Morna before. The sight of so much food sickened Morna a bit. She had gotten used to eating two small meals a day, usually composed of one dish only: eggs, a plate of noodles, a bowl of soup.

  “It soothe me to cook,” Esther said, but she didn’t seem very soothed; she seemed to be sinking far away into a world Morna couldn’t begin to reach.

  “It’s wonderful,” Morna said, setting aside her distaste—these were her favorite dishes apparently, or Isabel’s—tucking into the chicken and the crispy potatoes, using knife and fork European-style, trying to bolster Esther’s mood with her own display of gusto.

  “Really?” Esther said, watching Morna eat, but not picking up her own knife and fork. She sighed. “It is too much. What am I thinking?”

  “You’ll have plenty of leftovers.”

  Morna cut and ate and drank, cut and ate more, cooing and chuckling and praising each dish as she went, trying to get Esther to follow suit, but Esther, immune, sat at the head of the table, fondling her silverware and pondering the windows, the cake on the sideboard, Morna herself. Where was Henry? Why was he never around?

  Morna gulped her wine. “I don’t think I’ve told you about the film I was writing for Isabel. She had so much potential as an actress.”

  “You think so?”

  “She was so pretty—no, not pretty, beautiful. And she had screen presence.”

  “You see her in film?”

  “We did a screen test, and her large features were so expressive. She was an amazing actress.”

  Esther leaned forward, hungry for this knowledge, and Morna could feel the words making pictures in Esther’s mind, images she would fold into her Isabel narrative, the movie in her mind where all her daughter’s dormant, unsung potential came into full bloom.

  “Oh my. It does not surprise me. What is the film about?”

  Morna swallowed an unmasticated piece of chicken and began to choke. Her eyes teared. Esther offered her a water glass. “Drink. Drink.”

  Morna drank the water and the chicken piece moved along the appropriate pathway, but Morna was left feeling sheepish and could feel the color shooting from her stressed vessels to her gullible epidermis. Esther rose and went to the front door where apparently someone was knocking. Morna tried to compose herself.

  “I thought you can’t come,” Esther said.

  “I changed my mind.” Thomas.

  “Wonderful. Come in. I have plenty of food and Morna tells about the film she and Isabel make.”

  Thomas’s arrival energized Esther, and she bustled back and forth locating a plate, glasses, a napkin. Morna, still flushed and flushing anew, turned to greet Thomas, half rising from her seat, then sitting again, then pushing back her chair and standing. She couldn’t hug him, not now, and he wasn’t hugging her.

  “Hey,” she said. “I didn’t expect you.”

  “I didn’t expect myself—or you.”

  Morna nodded, and Thomas sat in the designated place opposite her. Morna felt disgustingly full. It bothered her that the scrim over Esther’s mood had been lifted by Thomas’s arrival. He had cut his hair so it bushed out around his ears. It wasn’t becoming at all and he was still painfully scrawny. Esther laid a full plate in front of him. “We fatten you up,” she said, laughing. She urged more food on Morna, but Morna stood her ground. The vapor of profound exhaustion had descended, and all she wanted to do was sleep.

  Esther resumed her seat, but she’d forgotten the silverware. She started to get up but Thomas stopped her with a tamping palm, turned and reached into the sideboard’s second drawer, helping himself to knife and fork. He ate European-style, looking around the room as he chewed as if to note its changes. After watching him for a moment Esther took up her own fork and knife.

  “So,” she said. “The film. You know this film, Thomas?”

  Thomas’s face was framed by the two white tapers. “A film. Really?” he said.

  “It’s not—” Morna hedged.

  “We’re interested,” Thomas said. He laid his utensils on the side of his plate and picked up his wine glass, his gaze stitched to Morna.

  “She says Isabel has—what is the phrase?”

  “Screen presence.”

  “And—?” Thomas prompted.

  “The kind of face that reads well on film.”

  “Big lips, big eyes, big laugh—that kind of thing?” he said. “Big ass too—would that be photogenic?”

  Morna looked down at her plate, a terrible moment returning to her in painful clarity. She and Thomas coming out of his studio. Isabel, who neither of them knew at the time, was outside talking with another woman, laughing. What a beautiful woman, Thomas remarked. She’s too fat for you, Morna said. And I happen to hate her.

  “Morna begins to tell me what the film is about.”

  “It’s not finished, the script I mean.” Morna stabbed a piece of chicken. “I was working it out.”

  “But the gist?” Thomas prodded.

  “A girl who’s—looking for—there’s a maze in it like the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It’s based on the Neruda poem about the man walking around, sick of being a man, but in this case it’s a girl.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Thomas said.

  “It’s not realistic.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Don’t be mean,” Morna said, forgetting Esther for a moment, the taper flame flickering at the corner of her vision, her voice a quiet hiss, trying to lasso the part of Thomas that had once been devoted to her.

  “Is that what I’m being?”

  “Dessert? I get plates.” Esther rose, knocking the table so the stemware rattled. She went to the kitchen and closed the swinging door behind her.

  “Don’t say anything,” Morna whispered. “Please.”

  He gave her the challenging gaze she remembered him giving his canvasses: I know you’re in there. Give it up. “Don’t fuck with her. She’s precious. Don’t bail when it gets inconvenient, or when it interferes with your personal development.”

  “I’m not mean like that. She’s precious to me too.”

  “Right. You’re not the type to dispose of people.”

  Esther returned to the room with a tray of cake plates and demitasse cups. She maintained her silence while laying down the tray, replenishing the wine glasses with a careless flourish that made Thomas’s glass overflow.

  “Cake here, or in the living room? Gâteau framboise. Isabel’s favorite.” She nodded to Morna.

  “I need some air,�
�� Morna said, rising unsteadily.

  Outside she propelled herself through the quiet neighborhood, houses with blinds pulled, air conditioners purring, the homes of residents who kept their houses painted, their gutters clean, residents who were not cynics or practitioners of sarcasm, people who assumed the best about others. When she and Isabel were last here they had walked this neighborhood with a can of spray paint. Breathe, they scrawled on one stop sign. Laugh, one another. Dance.

  She walked for two hours, emptying herself first of expectation, then of dread, so when she reappeared at the house she was blank and mute. Esther opened the door, as usual, before she knocked. “Thomas is gone. He has fatigue.”

  She had rebuilt the tower of her hairdo, retouched her makeup; her manner was assertive. She cut Morna a piece of cake and made her sit in the living room. “You stay the night,” she said. “Henry is away. I don’t like nights alone.” She sat in the easy chair with her glass of wine and watched Morna eat. Morna was afraid to say a word, afraid of the momentum of even one syllable. She knew the cake was delicious, but her taste buds were dormant.

  Esther put her in Isabel’s room which was still intact, as if Isabel still lived there, had never left for college, never married, certainly not died. Posters of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn. Books of poetry. Purple sheets. A red quilt. It was the room of a person with an appetite for life.

  Esther had given Morna a large white nightgown, eerily bridal, once Isabel’s. It was much too big for Morna, but she wore it anyway, as some kind of penance. It was only eight p.m., still light, and Morna had no idea how to fill the hours until dawn. In the morning there was an eight thirty bus back to the city; she could walk to the stop if necessary. She sat in bed listening to Esther puttering in her room at the end of the hall.

  Sleepless, she ventured downstairs at two forty-five, tripping on the long white gown. She would begin with the first photo album, page through all nine of them, memorize the way families were supposed to behave. She would be able to tell if Adrienne was congenitally angry. If Isabel had always been joyful. What was truly god-given and forever in your DNA.

  Esther reclined on the living room couch in the semi-darkness. She wore a lavender robe over her long pink nightgown, and she clutched a half-full wine glass. Morna thought of retreating, but it was too late, Esther had certainly heard her.

  “Help yourself.” Esther’s voice rose like grit-filled smoke from the depths of the shadows.

  Morna poured herself a fortifying glassful and sat in the easy chair, and they sipped in tense silence, Thomas a phantom between them. After a while Esther rose and disappeared and came back to the living room with her purse, still in nightgown and robe, rattling the car keys in front of Morna. “Drive me to the cemetery, s’il te plaît.”

  It was three fifteen, night and morning both. The streets were deserted, the streetlights casting their lurid light. Morna hiked up her nightgown to negotiate the Cadillac’s pedals, feeling like a criminal. She had never driven in bare feet. The iron gate to the cemetery was locked.

  “Now what?” Morna said.

  Esther got out and began walking. She wedged her body through a narrow space to one side of the gate and continued without looking back, eschewing the roadway. Was she crazy? Furious? Morna killed the engine and hurried after Esther’s vanishing silhouette.

  The grass was dewy, and Morna had to jog to catch up with Esther. She scurried along the shadow-dappled landscape, veering around monuments and headstones, slowed by the gown, twigs and pebbles stabbing her soles. This time Esther’s sense of direction was infallible. Up a short rise, down, a left, another left, and they were there.

  Morna stopped ten feet or so behind Esther. After a few minutes of stillness, Esther turned, “You are the expert,” and she lifted the nightgown over her shoulders, and it billowed with a slight breeze. She dropped it into the grass and stood in the buff, her pale, quasi-lit body both statuesque and sagging. The matronly swoop of hip and belly, the thickly muscled calves and dainty ankles, the breasts loose as testicles. Fleshy and thin, beautiful and despairing. She waited, weight swung into one hip like Venus de Milo, hair adrift.

  “Viens. Show me. Teach me this. We do it together.”

  Morna lifted her own nightgown, Esther, a cool assessing mirror reflecting back Morna’s cape of redhead’s freckles, her mosquito-bite breasts, the scurrilous shape of her shame. She moved closer to Esther and sat in the grass. Esther towered above her, huge and hesitant, calculating how she would lower her own frame. Morna held out her hands. Esther took one of them and, leaning against Morna’s slight shoulder, lowered herself, huffing, first to her knees then rolling onto her buttocks.

  They lay down at the same moment. Side by side, they looked up through the branches of the magnolia at the faintly brightening sky. Light years away stars winked and died and continued to churn out their light.

  HER BOYS

  Talmadge keeps her eyes on the road while watching tiny snowflakes emerge from the pallid sky, trying to situate herself in the moment as a path to forgetting. Now what needs to be forgotten is the entire weekend trip to New Hampshire to visit her mother, Lila, and her much-younger brother, Tim. She doesn’t know why she continues to make these visits, bundling her optimism into the car and transporting it up from Massachusetts where it vaporizes immediately upon her arrival.

  The thing that bothered Talmadge the most on this visit was the smell of the place. It was as if a bunch of Tim’s friends had been sitting around for days burping beer and pizza, farting, never cracking a door or window. They kept the heat too high—Lila claimed she couldn’t adjust it—cooking the air’s smell into something unbreathable. Lila, sixty-three, and Tim, twenty-four, are living together in the same house Tim and Talmadge grew up in, but it no longer resembles the tidy cozy home of her childhood. The roof leaks and some of the beige siding has come off in front and the small side yard has become a cemetery for a collection of Tim’s dead vehicles. Inside there are things everywhere, unnecessary objects in places they have no business being. Why, for example, is there an axe in the foyer? Who has left a waffle iron on the coffee table? Why can’t Tim trash his empty beer cans and rein in his cast-off sweatshirts? Throughout Talmadge’s childhood the place was neat and clean, mostly due to Lila’s efforts. But now even Lila leaves her own trail of sludge. She’s been unemployed for the last two years, and in that time she’s collected unemployment and grown fat. She and Tim have vats of excuses for their sorry state, the difficulty of finding jobs, blah, blah, blah, but Talmadge blames only their overall laziness. It’s unlikely to change. And yet, once every six weeks or so she convinces herself otherwise, and bolsters her hope again and makes the visit with another envelope containing a check that her mother squints at as if it’s not nearly enough.

  It’s Sunday afternoon and while Sunday afternoons are usually the most dismal hours of the week Talmadge now relishes the thought of getting back to work tomorrow, her boys greeting her with their usual verve and jokey sarcasm then scampering off to do what she tells them. She crosses the border into Massachusetts and her entire body goes rubbery with relief, as if the line of demarcation is as significant as an international boundary. The ebbing snow makes driving easier, but still it’s not until she’s back in her Somerville apartment doing the dishes, adjusting the disturbed items on her shelves (she suspects the landlord may have paid a visit while she was gone), fluffing the pillows on her bed, that she finally banishes thoughts of her embarrassing family.

  Before she enters the office each morning she straightens up, brightens her face, then strides in. It’s Wendy, she wants to call out—though she doesn’t as it might offend. They aren’t lost boys, but they aren’t exactly found either. They’re in their mid to late twenties and they work here at Vitruvian—a magazine that explores the liminal space between science and art—for a couple of years before moving on to bigger and better things. When they leave
they mostly stay in touch, and she’s pretty sure they look back on their employment here with some nostalgia. She strolls past their cubicles sprinkling good mornings to the early birds, grabbing a piece of Dan’s bear claw as she passes for a teasing reminder of who’s boss.

  She loves her boys. They make her feel like a queen, not only by doing what she tells them, but by noticing her and complimenting her on her taste in clothing and shoes. Sometimes she finds herself buying something she thinks they’ll like. Recently she’s been eyeing a cropped red leather jacket in one of Harvard Square’s high-end boutiques. She tried it on once and it fit perfectly. Its leather on her neck and bare forearms felt like the touch of a person. Now, each time she passes the window the jacket seems to nod at her, acknowledging a relationship. Someday, when the moment is right, she’ll splurge. Meanwhile, even now, out of reach in the store window, it gives her pleasure.

  Dave, the receptionist, beeps before she has turned on her computer or poured herself coffee. Adrian is here. She forgot—today is his first day. If she’d remembered she would have come in earlier. She and Steve, the magazine’s founder and publisher, hired Adrian after a Skype interview. They gave him a month to move from Chicago.

  She finds him by the front desk with Dave filling out paperwork. He stands to shake her hand. OMG, how little Skype did him justice. He is tall and loose-bodied, devoid of the usual tension of the newly hired. His thick dark brows converge in a ledge, making a secret cave of his face. The English accent, that she remembers, as it may have figured in his hiring. She and Steve speculated after the interview about whether his accent made him appear smarter than the American applicants, giving him an edge. He was coming from a job in a biology lab that had bored him, and he was reevaluating his future, and even if the accent was misleading, with his dual biology and creative writing majors, he was just what they wanted.