by Karen Brown
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Fay took Sylvie with her to her mother’s on the weekends with a packed bag so Fay and her husband could go out. Lately, though, Fay had been going out with her girlfriends, and her husband stayed home, happy enough to eat leftovers, or grab takeout and watch television. He thought Fay and her friends went to movies and out for coffee afterward. Instead, Fay went to downtown clubs housed in old three-story brick buildings, with expensive sound systems and crowds of men and women brushing hips and shoulders, spilling drinks on each other’s shoes. Fay would choose a man to smile at, or bum a cigarette from. He would lean his face into her hair to say things to her, and maybe, she might lead him into a dark corner to let him kiss her. She would go home with her friends and slip into her own bed beside her husband, her body tight and singing with the memory of someone else.
Tonight, Fay dropped off Sylvie early, at five o’clock. Sylvie was two and clung to her and did not want her to go. Her face contorted, and Fay felt a pang of alarm.
“Nana wants you to play,” Fay said.
Fay’s mother had on her floor-length caftan. She clapped her hands at Sylvie and sang part of a Halloween song. “Stir it in my witches brew, I’ve got magic, Alacazamacazoo!” Fay’s mother owned a nursery school, which Sylvie attended part-time during the week. Spread out on the surface of the satin bedcover were orange pumpkin cutouts and black triangles the children would paste on for eyes and a nose. Fay’s mother reached out and put a hand on Sylvie’s arm. Her hair had been done that day, styled up stiff with spray. She wore her half-glasses on a chain. In the bedroom was the old, familiar smell of clean bedsheets and cigarettes and the unique mix of Beefeaters and White Shoulders. Did Fay notice her mother’s swaying a bit more than usual? She hesitated and allowed Sylvie to cling to her.
“Maybe I’ll just take her home,” Fay said.
Her mother gave her a look. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I’ve made her dinner.” She put her hands on her hips. Fay did hear a slur in her speech.
A scene was coming. Fay could leave as quickly as possible with Sylvie, but that would not be the end of it. Her mother was used to Sylvie spending every weekend with her. She had come to depend on it, and Fay saw that she would not let her forget. The calls would start as soon as she got home. She would threaten to tell Fay’s husband where Fay really went. She would hang up and call back, over and over with new threats and accusations. She would curse Fay and say that she had always chosen her grandmother over her. Fay never realized, before her mother’s drunken calls, that her mother had expected her to stay with her on the night of her grandmother’s death, that all along a rivalry had been going on for rights to Fay’s love.
The October light fell across the carpet and wavered there. Beyond the glass doors was the cement patio covered with an aluminum awning, the square of backyard grass, and the swing where Fay’s mother would rock Sylvie to sleep as an infant. This house was not the one where Fay grew up. It was a smaller, cement-block place that her mother bought when she divorced Fay’s father. Her mother slammed her hand down on the bedside table. “Why would you do this?” she said. Her face was red, her voice shrill. Sylvie began to cry. Fay breathed in slowly. She had planned to meet her friends early, at six, for dinner, and she was tempted to just go, to leave Sylvie and let her mother pacify her. Hadn’t she left her every other weekend with only slight reservations? She wanted her mother to be happy. Fay sighed and gave Sylvie a little push in her mother’s direction. She went out the front door and stood on the front walk, waiting for the crying to stop. Her chest tightened. She felt her heart beat at the base of her throat. Sylvie’s crying continued, anguished and unceasing. Fay imagined her daughter’s mottled face, her little hands in fists, rubbing her eyes.
When Fay was small her grandmother would watch her in the afternoons after school. She would pick her up in her car filled with cigarette smoke. She would have her drink glass in the cup holder and her cigarettes in a lamé case. She had her hair done twice a week, and the style was full and formal, like a girl’s on prom night. She always wore her rings and her makeup, applied in a specially lighted mirror in her bedroom. Her grandmother drove erratically, with fierce turns that slid Fay into the passenger door. Fay would realize that her grandmother’s drinking impaired her driving ability when she drove drunk herself and experienced the same buoyant fearlessness. As a child, Fay did not know to be afraid. Fay’s grandmother would say “Ooops!” and “Whoa!” and Fay would laugh and grab onto the back of the seat. They would get to her house, the one she lived in with her grandfather, the Bermuda ranch with the plantation shutters and the freshly cut lawn, and Fay’s grandmother would make them both a snack, which they would eat out by the pool. Fay’s grandmother called it “the lagoon.” Sometimes, her grandmother would fall asleep on the chaise, and Fay would sit with her pile of books and puzzles or her dolls and play quietly, waiting for her grandmother to wake up. Once, her grandmother slept until it grew dark, and the landscape lights came on and shivered on the pool’s surface. Fay had reached out and touched her grandmother’s bare foot and given it a little shake. The foot had been slightly swollen and threaded with thin veins. Her grandmother sat up, suddenly, and looked around blinking like one of Fay’s dolls. It was chilly. Fay’s grandfather came out from the house in his suit, his shoe soles tapping on the patio tiles. “What are my two girls doing out here?” He grinned. Fay’s grandmother looked up at him in dismay, and later Fay would wonder if her grandmother knew that his geniality came from having just left his girlfriend’s bed.
Fay listened to Sylvie cry. She did not know how to be a mother, she thought. She went back into the house. Sylvie sat in her little time-out chair in the corner of Fay’s mother’s bedroom.
“What are you doing, Fay?” her mother said. She came out of the bathroom with her glass. Fay knew then that her mother kept her liquor bottle there, hidden in a cupboard. She had looked for it many times while her mother was busy with Sylvie, searching behind bags of potting soil on dim garage shelves, beneath the stacked place mats in the dining room buffet.
“I don’t feel like going out,” Fay said.
Fay’s mother glared at her. “You will teach her that she can get away with anything,” she said.
Fay looked over at Sylvie. She sat quietly now, watching, her chest heaving with little sighs. She did not dare leave the time-out chair. She was a good girl, and the bow in her hair tonight was grosgrain, patterned with ladybugs, and Fay loved her. She held her arms out to her, and Sylvie ran into them gratefully. Her dress, which Fay had pressed that morning, smelled of spray sizing. Her skin was damp from the exertion of crying. Fay hefted her daughter up into her arms and left the room. Behind her, she knew her mother had probably begun to cry. While she put Sylvie into the car her mother stood at the front door and called to her.
“Don’t do this, Fay,” she called. “Please.”
Fay ignored her. A neighbor who passed with his dog looked away. Fay’s mother kept on from the doorway, her voice plaintive and awful. Fay got quickly into the car and drove home. She would unplug the phone from the wall. Or, better, she would convince her husband to take them somewhere—a nice hotel at the beach, a family vacation. As she drove she made these plans, deciding what to pack, her heart soft and fluttering in her chest. Sylvie fell asleep in her car seat, her legs with their chubby knees lax and dangling. Fay hated to see her sleep in her clothes. She wanted to take off her shoes and the little ruffled socks. She wanted to lie down and pull her daughter’s body close to hers.
At her house, Fay fumbled with the keys to the door. Inside, the lights were off, and Fay was surprised to see her husband was not there in front of the television. She wondered now how she might convince him of her plans when she did not know where he’d gone and she was annoyed. She carried Sylvie, still asleep, upstairs to the master bedroom. She would not tell him what really happened. She would lie and say that her mother was sick. She planned to put Sylvie down on he
r bed, and then retrieve her nightgown from her own room, but in the hallway to the bedroom Fay stopped. She sensed a slight disruption in the dimness, a sound of movement and breath. She heard two people, a man and a woman on the bed. Their sighs grew, and Fay listened to her own husband’s moans with a sudden, wrenching embarrassment. She stood in the hallway shadows. She felt Sylvie’s weight. Her arms began to ache. Yet, even when they were through, and the woman slid from the bed and came to the doorway, Fay could not move. The woman paused there on the threshold, nude, stunned to stillness. Fay saw the white shine of her skin, her luminous thighs and breasts, a slender arm upraised, holding a glass. Fay did not look at her face, into her eyes. The woman made a small noise, one of protest and surprise. Fay turned away quickly and retreated down the stairs. Outside, she hurried to the car and put Sylvie in and slid behind the wheel. She did not know where she would go.
The night her grandmother died Fay and her aunt watched the ambulance attendants bring her home and lay her down on her bed. It was very late. In the hospital, there had been no need for her wig. She wore a nightgown that Fay’s aunt had picked out, cotton, trellised with roses. They pulled up the covers, and the hospice worker, who would depart until morning, told them all would be fine now, that this was what Fay’s grandmother wanted. Fay remembered that she had been in awe of her grandmother’s will not to die until she got her way. Her father and her uncle had been annoyed, inconvenienced. Fay’s aunt had been up for two days, waiting and crying.
“I need to sleep,” her aunt said.
Her aunt lay down alongside Fay’s grandmother, and Fay stretched out, too, on the other side. The air in the little house was close. It smelled of dirt and leaves traipsed in on the bottoms of their shoes and milk spoiled in saucers in the next room. Sitting behind the wheel of her car, Fay remembered that the night her grandmother died she had been thinking about her routine for cheerleading, the boy in homeroom who wrote his name on the palm of her hand. His eyes had been brown and thickly lashed. He held her hand in his and pressed lightly with the tip of the pen. Her grandmother gasped, agonizing breaths with long stretches of silent space between them. Fay and her aunt each took one of her grandmother’s hands. Fay thought, Give up give up give up. Around them the little house was still and fragile. The window curtains came in and out like her grandmother’s breathing. Fay felt the air and heard the leaves on the mango trees, imagined the sound like shimmering.
Fay could suddenly see the moments to which she would always return. They revealed themselves, a tableau of selfish horrors. She remembered baby Claude’s accident, not the way it happened, but the way she imagined it might have, with herself and Sylvie in the path of Mrs. Culligan’s car. It could easily have been them. Sylvie would be the baby thrown from the stroller. There was her little pacifier in the grass by the curb. And then Fay skipped ahead, through the grief of that moment and on into the years beyond, when the grief would have dulled and dimmed to something precious, like a talisman. She would not have had any more children. She and her husband would have separated, not from sorrow, but from a lack of any reason to remain together. She would enter into the future alone—years unfolding shining and strange, full of people she would never meet, lovers and friends, places she would never live.
She saw her grandmother’s head, round and bare on the pillow, her mouth open like a baby bird’s. Her body was a husk, ready to be abandoned, but Fay knew now that as she had lain beside her planning her own life out beyond the inexorable, lengthening breathing, her grandmother never wanted to go. Fay rolled down the car window. She smelled the vine flowering in her courtyard. The lights in her house came on. She would wait for her husband to emerge and confess. She imagined his face, the sorrowful eyes, his pale lips mouthing a plea for forgiveness, like a moment she had been expecting all her life.
dead boyfriends
In the lot behind Junior’s garage, buried in tall summer grass, are the hulls of cars in which Nan once had sex. Above her the elms wave and whine with insects. She treads the grass down in her sandals. Her hair sticks to her forehead, the back of her neck. Junior saunters along ahead of her with his same slanting shoulders and slouch, his black stringy hair threaded with gray now. They aren’t looking for anything in particular yet. She had gone to the garage and knocked on the scarred wooden door in back, and he had opened it and stood there, nodding at her, his large dark eyes blank.
“You don’t really remember me, do you?” she asks him now.
He stops and looks back over his shoulder. He holds a cigarette in his blackened fingers and points. “That,” he says. “That was Matt Olander’s classic Buick.”
Nan feels a little saddened lurch. The car seems hunched over in the grass. Nan sees that the front end is crushed, shoved in up to the dashboard. The paint still holds its glimmer of metal flake. Queen Anne’s lace grows up around the back bumper.
“What happened to it?” she asks.
Junior says nothing for a long moment. He has always been quiet. He brings his cigarette to his mouth and takes a drag. His hair still falls over his eyes, Nan notices, so you can’t read his face. “Run into a tree,” he says.
Not Matt, she thinks. Matt Olander worked on cars in the Mobil station’s bay. Later, they surmised it was the asbestos in the brakes that gave him the lung cancer that killed him. She used to ride with him in the ’56 Buick convertible to the Berlin Turnpike motel. The red vinyl seats smelled of years of men’s hair pomade. Matt’s hands smelled of the soap he used to take off the grease. Nan doesn’t feel anything about his death. It happened years after she knew him, when he had married and even had children. These things, even more than his death, surprise her. As if once she left him, he should have persisted in the same manner, like Junior, found easily this afternoon in the same place she last saw him.
She had come home to visit her old high school friend, Betty Barnard, who, like Nan, had recently divorced. Betty had moved back into her mother’s house, a place Nan spent a lot of time in as a teenager. On an impulse, without calling first, Nan packed a bag for herself and one for Clemmy, while he watched, quiet and wide-eyed from the center of the unmade king-size bed. She told him, as she packed, all about her friend Betty from school, making her seem like one of his own friends from preschool class, friends he missed with a perceptible sorrow since the initiation of summer. She realized the words tumbled from her mouth, that her movements had become frantic, but too late. As she closed the flap of the small suitcase, Clemmy flinched.
“Oh, stop it,” she said, riddled with guilt. She held out her arms and he climbed into them. He smelled of buttered breakfast toast. The traffic was thick from Boston, and the drive to Connecticut took nearly three hours. Clemmy sat, as he always did, a perfect child in his car seat, his little books spread out within reach. After only an hour of driving, he fell asleep. Nan had heard horrors from other mothers of children throwing things, or shrieking, or twisting out from under their straps, and she had not understood any of it. She drove into town and went to Betty’s mother’s house, a split-level ranch in a subdivision off Terry Plains Road. The neighborhood seemed shadowy and deteriorated, the trash cans rolling on the sidewalks, the lawns full of crabgrass. She realized then that the trees had grown. The maples and elms, once new saplings braced with wires, were lofty, canopying the street. Nan remembered the times she ran away and went to see Betty, whose divorced mother smoked long Benson & Hedges menthols and went out ballroom dancing. Nan would hear her keys fumbling in the lock at night, her giddy laughter. She would kick off her pumps, one at a time, into the closet of the next bedroom. Sometimes she would come into Betty’s room and flip on the light and look at them on the twin beds. She’d pause there, as if she wanted to say something but thought better of it, her earrings dangling a kind of music. Nan feigned sleep, feeling the bright overhead light against her lids, wondering when she might be loved enough. Betty had a rec room and a stereo, and Betty and Nan began having boys over, Betty upstairs in her own bedro
om, and Nan downstairs on the rec room couch. Nan’s father would eventually search her out, pulling into the driveway on a day she had not shown up at school. He would come to the door, his gaunt face masklike. Nan remembered hiding up in Betty’s pink painted room, peering at him from the upstairs window.
“I know you’re up there,” he would say, stepping back and looking up at the window.
Nan would feel a certain sadness, staring at his shoes planted on the cement porch. They were his dress shoes, the ones he buffed with a soft cloth on Sundays before church. She would think of her own room at home, its dormer window looking out over the apple orchard in spring, the blossoms white and pink on the uneven ground, the smell of her mother’s clothes left hanging in her parents’ bedroom closet. Yet she would not relent. She watched him and let him leave, the part of her that had torn healed over in the boys’ clumsy arms, a hastily seamed scar.
This afternoon, when she arrived back in town, neither Betty nor her mother was home. Nan sat in her car in their driveway and did not know what to do. Clemmy still slept, his little hands in fists on his lap. She left a note on the screen door and considered driving to a motel rather than facing her father just yet. Nan did not often come home to visit. She was the youngest, the one everyone considered the most selfish. Her two sisters lived within proximity and cooked and cleaned and cared for their father as if he were infirm. Nan had moved far enough away, first to college in Rhode Island, then to Boston, so that she did not have to participate in any of the daily tending. Her father, when she saw him on holidays, always seemed perfectly capable and robust. She sat in Betty’s mother’s driveway a while longer. It was noon, and neither she nor Clemmy had eaten since early that morning. The air was still and heavy with humidity. She smelled the stink of the trash cans mixed with the scent of cut grass and gasoline. And then she had the feeling that Betty was up in her old pink bedroom, peeking out at her, waiting for her to leave. It was an odd feeling of reversal. Nan saw herself as the one with nothing to offer.
