I rapped on the kitchen window, interrupting the Frisbee game. I beckoned them back in.
If I lost my job over all this, it had better fricking well get clean, at least, so I could keep my son while going bankrupt.
We formed a firemen’s brigade of sorts down the hall. Mary and I stuffed clothes into bags—as best I could, anyway, with one screwed-up hand—and then we passed them to Ron and Seth, who ferried them out to a pile in the driveway. Jack, still being one-armed himself at the moment, decided he felt tired and volunteered to take a nap. I tried to hide my delight that he lay down on his own bed, in his own room. True, he didn’t have a choice because we were working in his usual spot. Baby steps, though.
“What’s this?” Mary asked, as she was doubled over, reaching to the floor to snatch up some of the oldest, crummiest clothes. She stood up with a brown book about the size of a record album.
“That’s one of Mom’s albums,” I said, breathless with disbelief. “I didn’t even know I had it.”
Mary sat down slowly, feeling for the edge of the bed, her gaze so focused on the book she seemed hypnotized. “I thought they’d all burned.”
Seth cleared his throat and said he’d go straighten the bags into a neater pile. Ron shuffled out after him, silently.
I joined Mary on the bed, and together we sucked in a breath as she opened the brown cover.
Inside the pages, it was about 1980 or so. A chuckle burst from us both at Dad’s Tom Selleck–style dark mustache. He was puckering up to our mother’s cheek in this picture, taken by one of us kids, based on the low vantage point of the camera.
Mary stroked our mother’s face in the photo. Mom was making an exaggerated face for the camera, her eyes hilariously wide and her mouth in an oval of scandalized surprise. One hand she’d raised lightly to her cheek, as if to say, “Oh my stars, who is this man kissing me?” Her curly hair was barely held at bay by a long, patterned scarf, the ends of which ran over her shoulder and twined around one arm.
Behind our parents’ goofing off was the kitchen, all done in avocado green, burnt orange, and mustard yellow. The white countertops were not only visible but desertlike in how blank they were.
Mary let loose a quick bark of laughter at the next picture. We were sunbathing, she and I, back before anyone imagined the sun could be bad for you, short of crippling sunburn.
I was wearing a two-piece yellow suit, my little preteen boobs just popping up like spring bulbs pushing out of the dirt. I wore smoked sunglasses with lenses big as tennis balls, and I was up on my elbows, trying to look cute. At my side was a magazine, probably Seventeen. I was always trying to rush into adulthood. Idiot, I silently told the thin, smooth, perfect girl in the picture.
Mary was wearing a black tank suit, plain. Her sunglasses were at the top of her head, and she was squinting so much that her pale hazel eyes had disappeared into her long lashes. She had raised a delicate arm to ward off the glare. Instead of my self-consciousness attempt to look adorable—already knowing, as girls do, that how you look in a picture is of critical importance—Mary was slouched and her feet were splayed. A paperback, which looked to be a Sweet Valley High book, was propped on her stomach, and it looked like it was just about to slide off and onto the old bedsheet we were using as our sunning surface.
“I remember this,” Mary said. “No more than one minute after Mom took this picture, Dad came after us with the hose.”
Now it was my turn to laugh. I’d forgotten! We were furious for a few minutes, sputtering and wet, then Mom got this funny look and sauntered over to our laughing dad, who was holding the hose loosely in his fingers.
She snatched it with the reflexes of a ninja and turned it on him, and in an instant it was a girls-against-Dad water brawl. We’d had to buy the library a new Sweet Valley High book, and Dad replaced my magazine for me.
We leafed through a few pages with quiet smiles. Mary exclaimed as jabbed a photo with her finger, “I’d forgotten all about that!”
Mary had worn her hair so long as a girl that it was halfway down her back, and unlike me with Mom’s ragged curls, hers was stick straight. One night I begged her with the tenacity of a barnacle to let me doll her up, and she finally caved, just to shut me up, I think.
The picture we stared at now showed us the results. I’d crimped Mary’s straight hair into these funny waves with one of those crazy irons. Her hair was so long it had taken about six years, but then I moved on to her makeup. Mary’s eyelids fairly glowed with electric blue shadow. Fuchsia splashed across her cheeks, and her long eyelashes were gobbed up with turquoise mascara. On her hands were my fingerless lace gloves, and I’d tied a giant lace bow into her hair. In the picture she was pretending a pencil was a cigarette, dangling it with improbable, unconscious sexiness from her fingers. Bangle bracelets encircled nearly her entire arm.
“You kept telling me how gorgeous I looked,” Mary said, through disbelieving laughter.
“Yeah, well, I also thought shoulder pads were totally rad, so what the hell did I know?”
“It actually made me feel sort of awful.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Because if I was so ‘gorgeous’ with all that stuff on, what did that make me normally?”
“Aww, Mary. I was paying you a compliment.”
“Not me, you weren’t. Not the normal me.”
“Earth to Mary? That was decades ago now. It’s okay to get over it. You take things so seriously.”
“I’m just remembering, Trish. It’s not like I’m carrying open wounds into my adulthood about blue mascara and a lace bow. Anyway”—she tapped her fingernail on the picture—“it was fun.”
I turned to more album pages. “I always thought you were gorgeous with or without that stuff.”
“You never said.”
“Didn’t I?”
Mary shrugged. “Nope. Pretty sure I would have remembered.”
“Huh. Guess it’s not the way sisters talk.”
“Guess not.”
I slowed my page turning as the album crept up in years. I knew without having to ask that Mary was noticing the same thing.
The kitchen countertop, behind this Thanksgiving dinner photo from the late 1980s, was buried under a collection of indistinct things. A few pages later, a shot of the Christmas tree showed—just at the edges of the frame, as if our mother tried to crop it out—piles of boxes, bags, and old bits of junk.
We turned one more page, and the two dozen or so remaining pages were empty.
Mary allowed herself to flop back onto the bed, her eyes up at the ceiling, unfocused, like a TV corpse.
I opened my mouth to speak to her, but light footsteps drew my attention.
“Mama?” Jack rubbed his eyes with his good hand. “Where’s Daddy? Is Aunt Mary OK?”
“We’re fine, pal. Fine and dandy.” I walked him out of the room and tried not to think about how long it had been since I’d taken pictures inside my own house.
Once we reconvened and Mary had shaken out of her stupor, I popped some old-school music into my tape player to speed us along. We’d gotten the room nearly empty in under two hours.
As Bret Michaels crooned about every rose having its thorn, I paused in cramming some stained sweats in a bag, addressed everyone in general, and pronounced, “My God, this song is stupid.”
We all laughed wearily. Mary’s hair was looking stringy and I wanted to brush it. Ron said, “I never could stand that shit.”
“Oh, please, I’ve caught you singing along, you hypocrite.”
“If I did, it was that, watchacallit, ‘Belgium Syndrome.’ ”
“ ‘Stockholm Syndrome,’ ” Seth corrected, smiling in such a way that no one could take offense. “And I’m with you, Ron. Give me Sonic Youth any day.”
Mary interjected, “Listen to you, acting all hard-core, when I happe
n to know that you loved Counting Crows.”
Drew startled the bag right of my hands by appearing behind Seth. “Counting what? Are you kidding me?” He made a face at the music. “And this? Please, Mom, if you want me to stay, you gotta shut that off.”
I punched the Stop button and came up to hug Drew. He permitted it for a moment before stepping back to look around the room. “Wow.”
“Yeah,” I answered, smiling, hands on my hips. “Wow.”
The smile melted from his face. “Wish you coulda done this years ago.”
“I’m doing it now. And you’re welcome.”
“I’m supposed to thank you for just now picking up years’ worth of garbage?”
Seth said, “Drew . . .”
Drew whirled on him. “I don’t even know you, so shut up.”
I opened my mouth, but it was Ron who spoke. “I will not have you talking to people that way, especially people who came here to help, for no personal gain or nothing. You apologize to him, or I’ll knock you to next week.”
Drew scowled at the floor, but grunted out a “sorry.”
I worked my jaw, trying to swallow down my resentment that Ron could ride in here after years of being gone and act like the hero, reining in my son. And for Drew to actually listen to him seemed miraculous, plus unfair. I’d stood up to Drew like that many times only to be blown off completely. And I was here! I hadn’t left the family when it got rough!
I handed Drew a bag. “We’re just bagging up all of it. I’ve already separated out what I’m keeping.”
Without the music, the plasticky crinkling of clothes into bags was enough to drive me mad.
“Somebody say something for the love of Pete,” I muttered.
“Something for the love of Pete,” Mary answered.
This released a group chuckle. Mary had pinpricked the tension, and it seemed to be leaking away. I marveled at my gratitude for her presence and wondered what I’d missed out on all those years by not picking up the phone.
After the bedroom was cleared, we sprawled in the living room, aching with effort. You wouldn’t think clothes would be that heavy. I said, “Oh God, I’ll never go shopping again,” head tipped back on my chair, face addressing the ceiling.
They all had the decency not to correct me. I’m sure I sounded like a hungover lush moaning she’ll never again touch tequila.
Mary had passed out bottled waters and Diet Cokes and was preparing to read another of Mother’s diary entries. Drew had said that sounded boring, so he took Jack for ice cream at the Lickety Split. Seth and Ron made to leave, but Mary told them not to bother, it was just a teenage diary, after all. I was too tired to argue and let her start reading with the men in the room.
May 1, 1961
Well, I just had an interesting night at the Van Linden house.
See, prom is coming up next week and I’m not looking forward to it like the rest of the girls are. I like my dress just fine, and Wally has been nice and all, but it just all seems so silly now that I’ve been helping Mom at the camps. Seeing how the migrant workers live crammed into these tiny huts, working for hours and hours in all kinds of weather with never a break, their injuries and illnesses going ignored until Doc can get there . . . That plus the news about the Freedom Rides, and down South where colored kids can’t go to the same schools with white kids, where they can’t swim in the same pools without causing violent riots, well, I can’t seem to get excited about a corsage. I can’t help but think that the amount spent on my dress would help buy some of these migrant kids some decent shoes.
So I said something like that tonight. Margaret was blabbing on and on about how she wanted some new shoes and Mother was telling her that money was tight right now, and Margaret whined I got to buy a prom dress and I couldn’t take it one more second. I shouted, “You just be glad you have shoes at all. Some of those kids at the camps don’t even have shoes, and they run around with bare feet. Doc had to pull a nail out of one kid’s foot the other day and she screamed fit to die while he was digging it out.”
Father yelled at me, saying I didn’t need to act so high and mighty and if I thought I had better moral values than the rest of the family I could go to my room.
“I think I have better values?” I blurted out before I had a chance to stop and think. “You’re the one always talking about how those people are lawless savages.”
My dad stood up and he lifted his hand like he might smack me one, but Mother stood up and ordered me to my room. Before I’d even pushed my chair back, she was arguing with Father. Margaret stuck her tongue out at me as I left.
Those people are the ones my dad is always muttering about as he watches the news or reads the paper. Usually he’s talking about Negroes, but I know he’d say it about the migrants, too.
Oops, Mother is knocking . . .
Okay, I’m back. Mother said she told Father that I was getting my period so that’s why I was so emotional, but that I had to come out and apologize to him for being sassy.
I wasn’t going to do it. I told Mother I didn’t want to apologize, that I hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true. But without using any words, she begged me. With the look on her face. Then she said quietly, don’t you still want to go to the camps with Doc?
And I figured out that if I didn’t grovel and apologize and take back what I said that Father would make me stop going, and maybe Mother, too. That if he thought his precious girl was being warped by the experience—I’d say expanded, educated—he would put a stop to it.
So I did it. I slunk out there and gave my apology with Margaret smirking at me the whole time. I told Father that I was feeling out of sorts and didn’t know what I was saying. He patted me on the head and offered to let me eat the rest of my dinner, which Mother had kept warm in the oven.
I said no, I wasn’t feeling well. Partly that was to support Mother’s cover story. But it was also because I couldn’t sit there and choke down that food next to him after all that.
Well, the prom dress is already bought, reservations already made, and there’s talk of going out to the lake after the dance to have a bonfire. That sounds nice, to be out under the stars. Maybe I’ll even feel romantic toward Wally, in the right setting. There’s a first time for everything.
Meanwhile, I can change the world in college, out from under my dad’s watchful eye!
Mary closed the notebook. “I can’t believe she never talked about all this. It sounds like quite an awakening for her. And I had no idea she fought like that with her father.”
True. The Grandpa Van Linden of our memory was a sweet-natured, indulgent old man who liked to give us chalky pink candy and taught us pinochle.
I frowned up at the ceiling. I was so tired the air seemed to swim in my vision like it does over hot concrete. “You know? I just remembered something. She told me she never went to prom.”
“She did?”
“Yeah.” I pulled myself up to address her directly. “Remember when Jason reneged on his prom invite to me, junior year? Because he found out the girl he really wanted to take was available? I cried and cried like I thought I’d die. I asked her about her prom, if she had something like this happen, and she said she didn’t go. Said she wasn’t interested.”
“Well, she doesn’t sound very interested in the letters. Maybe something went wrong and she ended up not going.”
Ron coughed, clearing his throat, and I sat up to look at him, wondering what he was nervous about.
“Not to change the subject, but . . . You know, it seems to be there’s just one major room up here we ain’t done yet.”
I gripped the arms of my chair. “No, not yet. We haven’t done the bathroom. Or Drew’s room, either. We need to do Drew’s room.”
Ron said, “The bathroom just has some old shampoo bottles and some random papers. We can take care of that in no time. Drew’s
room won’t be that bad, neither.”
I shook my head, hard. “No. We can leave that one alone. We don’t use that room.”
I felt them watching me. Their stares had a physical weight, and I wanted to wipe them off like crawling bugs.
Ron said more gently, “No, we can’t. It’s high time we dealt with it.”
“It’s a spare room. Just close the door and leave it.”
“You’ve been leaving it all these years and look where it’s got you.”
My heart started throbbing in my chest. I felt its pulse in my hands, my ears, my stomach.
I heard Seth suggest, “You guys aren’t just talking about a room, are you?” Mary asked if I was OK. Ron said, “Trish?”
Their voices sounded distant and echoed, like I’d fallen down a well and they were all at the top, calling down to me.
Chapter 38
Seth stood before me in the yellow light over Trish’s garage. I had my purse in my hands and was preparing to disappear inside my little trailer. Ron had just left for his bachelor apartment, and Trish was inside trying to bribe Jack into his own neatly made twin bed for a change.
I shifted from foot to foot, feeling weirdly like we’d been on a date. Only his shirt had sweat stains in the pits, and my hair was a rat’s nest, and I smelled weird from embracing Trish’s musty old clothes by the armful.
I had already decided to throw these clothes in the garbage.
“Sounds like that one room is going to be hard,” Seth said finally.
“Yeah. I wish I understood why, exactly.”
Trish had quashed any further attempt to raise the issue of That Room, but I sensed from Ron’s glowering silence that we hadn’t heard the end of it.
I told Seth, “I think you should know what might be coming. If anyone touches that room.”
“What do you mean?”
I told him how she slammed me against the wall when I dared open that door. Seth’s eyes widened, and he reached out his arm, as if the injury had only just happened. I stepped back before I knew what I was doing.
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