You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  “Um hmm.” He nods: he has already finished with this. “You didn’t, though, so it doesn’t matter.”

  She feels sweat on her skin and such an awful feeling in her stomach that she has to sit.

  “Only by luck.”

  “Everything’s luck.”

  Now she looks up. There is defeat in his voice. Slowly, her awareness of him pushes away her awareness of herself. This suffering man. And he is not, in fact, leaving. Unshaven and small at the kitchen table, smelling of smoke and sweat. Later, she tells herself, she can do full penance for what she had nearly done. Now, she stands and rounds the kitchen table to where he is and puts her arms around his head, her stomach against his cheek, stroking his scalp. For a time she stands like this. Then he pushes her away gently, a hand on her stomach, and looks up at her.

  “You slept all night.”

  By way of response, she pulls his face back against her stomach. Then she steps away again.

  “I’m so sorry, J.”

  He puts his hand, or rather his fingertips, back on her stomach. “For missing the failsafe?”

  She hesitates. “That too.”

  “You got me out before the worst of the rain.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  He hesitates too, now. He doesn’t really want to formulate this thought. He’s too superstitious to admit that when Molly had missed the failsafe, he had felt confident nothing was wrong.

  “That you had slept through midnight.”

  Molly shifts her weight now, and crosses the kitchen to the coffee pot. The sight of a pack of Marlboro Lights on the counter draws her up short. She’d bought it the day before, on the way home from running the Dutcher Notch trail. Stopped to buy gas in Catskill, and the pump credit-card machine had been broken, so she went in to pay. On the counter was a cigarette display and she thought fuck it. But she’d never have left them out, she’d known J. was coming. She’d have hid them. For the second time she thinks: fuck it, and lights one.

  “Is there any news?”

  He shrugs, then wakes the computer up to show an article from the Times. “Times says the memorial’s next week at the Spanish Embassy. The obit notice asks for donations to the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in lieu of flowers. Rockland County News has an op-ed. Predictably.”

  Molly smokes, watching him. His tone is dull, his face drawn and tired. She thinks of him, watching the world without color, all night in the rain. She says:

  “I think I know how you feel.”

  “How?”

  “Like all the color’s drained out of the world.”

  “No. I mean, how do you know?”

  That makes her hesitate. He knows how. She said: “Because I’ve felt it too.”

  “Have you?” He stands now like a horse in a stall, moves to the window. “I don’t think so.”

  “J.” She hadn’t expected him to be angry.

  “No, I don’t think so.” And now she sees that he’s not angry at her, but at himself. “Your folks didn’t die alone. Donny didn’t die alone. Donny didn’t die abandoned by his youngest son. Donny didn’t die having seen everything he believed in his life turn to shit.”

  That surprises her. Because Donny died exactly like that, exactly. But she is still not planning to tell him that—or more exactly, she still doesn’t know that she is planning to tell him that. What she says is: “Neither did your father.”

  “Yes he did. He died seeing everything he believed in fail. And I was one of the people who made it so. Donny—you told me yourself. He went to Vietnam to fight Communism. He believed in what he was doing, and died, just like he was prepared to, while doing it. And everything he believed turned out to be right.”

  Really, there is no point in this. He is lecturing, not discussing. He is recounting what he had been thinking about, sitting out at Huckleberry Point, when the vista drained of all color. She listens carefully, an ear cocked toward the interstices between words, where she might find what he had experienced. Then she answers.

  “J., Jesus. They lost the fucking war.”

  “Right, and won everything else. The White House, the national agenda, the future. Don’t talk to me about Clinton. Clinton’s about as left-wing as you are, and you know it. You know there’s not one serious issue you disagree with his administration on, and you’ve never voted but Republican since ’68. My father? From the day Stalin came to power he saw everything he believed in fail. One after the other after the other.”

  “Fathers die. It isn’t a defeat.”

  “His death was.” He moves from the window again and to her utter shock takes the cigarette from her fingers and hit it. J., who once ate a non-organic stringbean, sometime in the ’70s. But when he speaks, it is not exactly to her. “You think I don’t know? You think I’m a fucking idiot. He loved us. My dad? He lived for us. There was a hole in the middle of his life exactly my shape. The color drain out of the world? I made the color drain out of his world.”

  Ah. A little puff of satisfaction in her belly. The incredible power of listening. So this is J. without hope. She never would have guessed.

  For a moment, she watches with nearly clinical curiosity. And then she realizes that she would never have guessed, either, how much it hurt her. Never would have guessed how much she depended on his hope. His optimism. His mad optimism in the face of such steep odds.

  He has carried her cigarette away. She lights another, and tries to think what to do next. See, you don’t comfort Little J. Little J. comforts you, or me, or his clients, or his friends, or the fucking counterwoman who serves him coffee at a fucking highway diner he’ll never be back to in his life. Little J. has a heart for everyone. But you don’t comfort Little J. So she says, with trepidation:

  “Little J. Fathers die.”

  But it is too much, even this, and for a moment she recognizes him again in the coldness of his response. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Okay.” She approaches him again now, takes the cigarette butt from his hand and, with hers, tosses them into the sink. Then she puts her arms around his shoulders. “Enough.”

  And then Izzy is there, having woken with the first light, and come downstairs, and because she couldn’t even know that she had a grandfather, never mind that he died, they say no more.

  Lies, lies, and lies. All happening so fast you cannot even comprehend them.

  8.

  But it stays with her. All that day. A Saturday under November rain, with Izzy to take care of. J starts a fire in the living-room fireplace. They play a round of cards. Maybe Izzy has that rarest of treats, and one she only had at Molly’s: a half hour in front of the TV—but if so, it’s just Bill Moyers, or Amy Goodman, a barrel of laughs. Molly feeds everyone, twice: breakfast, then lunch. After lunch, when the rain stops and the sky begins to rise, aided by winds from the south, they take a walk, tramping on the wet dirt of the nameless street outside the house, up past the only other resident, the sculptor who rented Molly’s barn, and then up some more to where it peters out and becomes a trail, winding up to the meadows that were all that remained from the Bentley Farm.

  Does the normalcy of this activity emphasize, for Jason, the bizarreness of what he is doing, playing with his daughter and hiding from her the death of a grandfather she didn’t know she had? Not sitting shiva, not mourning, just carrying on, as if the worst thing in his life, the thing he had feared the most, has not just happened?

  That night they have dinner in front of a W. C. Fields movie. Then, without any discussion, Jason sends Izzy to bed there, in Molly’s house.

  As if they live here now.

  Jason comes in to kiss his daughter goodnight. Then he falls asleep on her bed with me for a time. When he wakes, it is well into the night. Downstairs, Molly is smoking in front of the living-room window, lights off, watching the moon rise, real light now falling on her face. She turns quickly, putting the cigarette out in a potted plant.

  “Are you all righ
t?”

  He nods, by way of reply, and sits in an armchair by the fire. “You?”

  She shrugs, and there’s a pause. Then he says: “What’s up, Mol?”

  This time, she shakes her head. “I don’t know. I feel awful for you.”

  Now he shrugs, and watches the fire. “Don’t. I was waiting for this for years.”

  “Doesn’t help.”

  “I know that.”

  He turns to the fire now, this time for such a long time that at last she speaks again.

  “Are you going to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “J.”

  “You’ve already been a casualty of Vietnam. You don’t need to be one again.”

  She speaks in a neutral voice, as if making a contribution to an only slightly relevant symposium. “In what way is this about Vietnam?”

  “Everything is about Vietnam. Without fucking Vietnam I’d have been with my father on the day he died. Maybe the moment he died.”

  “Your brother was there.” She speaks neutrally again, watching him closely, nearly clinically. And when he goes on, again, she gets a glimpse at what he is thinking.

  “I made his life meaningless. Without me he’d have been a great American jurist. I made him marginal. The father of a criminal. Then I left him to die.”

  “Bullshit, J.” Now she has said it, for the record. She doesn’t expect him to listen. Did he? For a long time he looks into the fire, and she thinks: I’m sorry. She looks up now to find him looking up, and she nods.

  “J. You stay here tonight.”

  He considers this. “Izzy’ll know.”

  “I know.”

  There is a long silence now. Then he says: “Okay.”

  She nodded again. “Okay.”

  “Should we go on up now?”

  This time she turns around, to face him. “We should.”

  9.

  It is midnight again.

  You can tell by Molly Sackler’s kitchen window, across the way, alight.

  Or can you? Really, the moon is so bright and silvery that it’s hard to tell if you’re watching a bright electric light within or the very moon’s reflection on black windows without.

  Funny how in the presence of the absolute, all certainty is lost.

  Wish my father and his fucking friends had known that.

  This fucking light. This fucking window.

  In fact, it’s the moon you see. Last night’s clouds are gone and the moon, forty-eight hours older than when Molly woke at midnight to the news of Jack Sinai’s death, is full. So perfectly full you know it the second you see it. And so bright that you really could not—really not—a moment ago, tell whether it is the moon you see, on Molly’s window, or a brash light within.

  But that window, it was not a literary device. It is the moon you see. The interior light is off and the moon’s absolute silver lies on the window like water. Molly Sackler is still asleep, lying in the absolute black that, during the huge November moon, is the only alternative to the absolute silver that lights the lawn and trees and the street with no name, outside, this little edge of the village of Saugerties under moonlight falling softly, softly falling, on the house and on the grounds.

  What’s more, this fall night, this moon declines so steeply to the south that, by 12:30, from down the steep fall of the lawn toward the woods to the south, it actually peers up under the eaves of Molly’s house into her bedroom window, its bright silver light suddenly appearing in the far corner by the bureau, then beginning its slow creep across the room, throwing a deranged trapezoid over the bureau, the rug, the rocking chair and, before it leaves altogether, the bed where Molly sleeps.

  Who knows? Without this moon, this could be the third night in thirty years that Molly sleeps till dawn. Everything has changed, so suddenly, so enormously, why not that also? She’s exhausted enough—drained really. Ran two days in a row. Took care of Izzy. Dealt with J. That was not the exhausting part. What drained her was the realization that her life, as she was leading it, was no longer tenable. Maybe that is what her sleeping self has recognized: that everything might as well change, including the thirty years of waking at midnight, because of a lie she told thirty years before.

  During the day, she could say to herself, as she had said to herself for years: we all have our secrets. J., if nothing else, had taught her that. She didn’t even think of it as a secret. She thought of it as something she shared with no one simply because it was within her own legitimate zone of privacy. But sleeping, her lie weighed upon her now as it had not in years. Sleeping, it was no longer legitimate, or private. Sleeping, it was no longer even hers. My grandfather’s death had changed all that. Or maybe it had never been hers.

  So now, drained, she sleeps, the old argument falling apart in dreams. J. and Izzy, Leo, all of her students. The dirt intersection of the unnamed roads on what had once been the Bentley Farm. The cracks in the rubber expansion joints behind Mount Marion Elementary. Old Mr. S. in his mourning suit on the lawn outside All Souls, birds flying over him out of the south. A young woman cresting a grassy hill under the Catskill sky and waving her goodbye. You stay. But across the open countryside the grass is waving its goodbye to you. A line in a poem by Frank Stewart. Then the supermarket dream, the one she had dreamt when Kennedy was shot where a girl died in the supermarket aisle she’d been in when she heard the news, the cold aisle in the Grand Union up the mountain, and in a catch of her breath while she sleeps the understanding that it is that one, the girl who lost her husband, the one in the supermarket aisle when Kennedy died, the one Molly cherished so, that is dreaming and that girl’s dream is the thirty years since of her life.

  If only she could remember it when she awakes.

  So she sleeps, on her back, arms around her head, hair spread between her arms.

  The moon has crossed the Wakefield bureau, with its framed pictures of Leo, and her parents, and, in a tiny silver frame, Donny, just his face.

  It has crept across the rug, throwing its big-headed shape across the pattern of, in this light, blacks and silvers.

  It has crossed the rocking chair and done so, carved spindle to carved spindle of its complicated back, with such a fuss that to the side, over the carpet, the rocking chair has nearly knocked over the dresser with its distorted shadow.

  And Molly sleeps.

  There is a pause while the moon peers under the bed, for an instant, before it jumps onto the covers, like a kitten. Now it is too slow for our eyes to see it move. But at one moment it is on the border of the quilt’s first interior border—duotoned black and silver—then our attention wanders, despite ourselves, and when we look back, the entire half of the bed is alit and on it Jason is lying face down, his bare shoulders visible, the moon creeping over muscles of his back.

  Molly herself, as the light advances, is as if preparing to wake. The quilt shifts slowly with her breath, evenly. But is she still dreaming? I don’t think so. I think she is returning, slowly surfacing, as the moon lights her face on the pillow, the dreams already forgotten.

  In a moment they’ll have gone, leaving only the disturbance of their passage, like the flicker of a fish’s tail passing as a wave along the algae beneath, or a disturbance of the light.

  The moon touches her eyes. She wakes directly and in a smooth movement, as if she had been waiting, sits up on her bed. Fully in the present, vertical in the silver, framed perfectly and casting, on the corner of the bed and the wall, an absolute black moonshadow.

  For a long time she sits there, her hands, silver skinned, on the mattress as if she is steadying herself on a boat. Her hair, as if a living thing, has fallen, sleek and heavy, into place. Her face is utterly unarmed. Her eyes, stupid, are focused on nothing.

  Molly knows she is on thin ice. She is on thin ice because her plan for J. is done. It was a victory and as so often in victory it had drained her, drained her. Now she is reamed with hollowness, reamed through and through, her chest, her belly, her guts.
In this trapezoid of colorless light, a light that eradicates color, everything has been eradicated. It is not like the day at Old Mr. Sackler’s house up the mountain in Onteora. This is different. This she had never felt before, but she is not surprised. It had been promised, this, though she had never fully believed it to be true.

  Nor, she knew, would she ever experience this again. What she saw that day at the Sacklers’, that was just a fact about life and death, non-negotiable, a knowledge of grief. This was different. This was something that, after you have experienced it, something had to change radically in your life, so radically that you have never to experience it again, and because one choice for that change was of course non-negotiable, it made anything, as an alternative, possible.

  Even, in Molly’s case, telling the truth.

  Before the silvery light has moved from her body, Molly has risen and stepped out of its cell. She’s naked, and it’s cold, but she stops only to step into Jason’s camping shirt, lying where he had left it on the floor, smelling of sweat and woodsmoke.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, she does not even bother turning on the light, but opens the blind on the kitchen window, letting another of those moon-made trapezoids, like a crazed Noguchi design, into the room. By its light—better, luminescence—she wakes the computer screen which, in turn, lights her face. Nothing is in the news about Somalia: no firefight, no bombardment, no kidnapping or beheading or public parading of corpses. For a time she absorbs that, and when she stands, now, you think it is to go to the counter for one of those cigarettes she bought that afternoon in Catskill, to light one at the stove and then, watching out the window, exhale. But in fact, she doesn’t. In fact, she leaves the cigarettes, turns on her heel, goes back upstairs, and then upstairs again to the third floor, the never-used floor that contains her parents’ bedroom and the formal parlor, that looks over the black shadows cast by the maple trees over the duotone garden.

  It is an orderly room, cleaned monthly by the maid, never used, smelling more than slightly of mothballs from the closet, where her mother’s and father’s clothes are stored. She has not been back here in six months, or more, and before that it was six months before, or more. So long that the sweep of her bare foot on the wood floor surprises her, both with its strangeness and with its familiarity: recent strangeness, long ago familiarity.