“I’m heading back to the house,” I tell my father.
He cracks open an eye that might have been sleeping. “Oh? Okay. Do you want to take the tractor? I could stand to walk some of this off,” he says, patting his belly good-naturedly.
“You rode the tractor down?” I ask, amused. We loved to take the tractor down to the lake when we were little, perched above the axle, on either side of the driver’s seat. Nadine used to roll her eyes, but after Marlon left us, she would sometimes drive down herself. She had taught us how to use it when we were fourteen.
“Thought I’d see if she’s still running. You know how to start her up?” he says.
“No, the tractor has just been sitting here waiting for your return. None of us know how to operate it without your masculine expertise.”
He doesn’t say anything, just shuts his eyes again. I think he might be quite drunk. I wonder if he’ll be able to make it back up to the house. The walk will help sober him up, I reason, and he’ll be less likely to drive the tractor into the lake or flip it over and kill himself. That would really be Zelda’s crowning glory; maybe she could dispose of both of our parents in a single weekend.
17
Quietly, I slide open the door to the living room, not wanting anyone to know I’m back. I plan to sneak around silently before hiding in my room for the rest of the night. I’ve resolved that yesterday’s excesses have determined that I can eat only apples for dinner. This is something I feel has been objectively decided, as though it’s a mathematical equation: yesterday, falafel AND wine? Today, only apples. I’m thinking this logic through when Opal interrupts me.
“Ava, sweetie, is that you?”
I consider scuttling away but sigh in resignation. There’s no help for it. “Yeah, it’s me.”
Opal reaches for my hand, enclosing it in her own damp palm. “Ava, how are you doing?”
“Just fine,” I answer brusquely.
“Because your father and I…we’re worried about you, sweetie. We’re not sure you’re processing everything that’s happened.”
“Everyone grieves in different ways.”
“You just seem so distant. And sort of, well, as though you’re in denial. We were thinking maybe you wanted to talk. About your feelings, that is,” she adds, as though there were some ambiguity, as though maybe she had been suggesting that we talk about the economy or fashion. She wants me to feel that she is available. She is reinforcing the message that her wrinkled fingertips are insisting on as they go to work on my wrist, on the back of my hand: I’m here, I’m not dead, I’m alive, I’m here. I can sense her frantic unwillingness to disappear. She squeezes me tightly around my shoulders, kneading my deltoids with her searching, hungry hands. I wonder if her desire for physical proximity has always been so obviously linked to her desire to escape eradication. Zelda and I are her living iterations, her small sip of immortality, and she has covetously massaged and fondled our bodies since our birth, taking tactile comfort in the knowledge that her flesh has been extended. I dislike being deployed this way. I dislike her desperation.
“Listen, Grandma, I’m beat, and I have to get Nadine something to eat, get her ready for dinner, you know,” I say, and move away, not waiting for her to release me. Her hands paw at the space where my body was.
“Of course, of course, I’ll be fine down here. Don’t worry about me. I don’t mind being alone.” She waves me off.
“I’ll be back down in a bit.”
Upstairs, Nadine is in her bed, mumbling something. Her palsied hands are shaking, and her head is bobbling more than usual.
“When I was little, I used to go crabbing, you know,” she informs me absently, tapping on her knee as though making an important point.
“Oh, yeah?” This conversation seems encouraging. My mother has never talked much about her life.
“With my mother. I used to go crabbing. There was a marsh, near our house. We would go out at low tide.”
“What was she like, Grandma Maureen?” I ask. She died before we were born, and I know virtually nothing about her, except that she didn’t drink.
“Oh, she was uptight. She could be a real cunty tight-ass.” My eyes widen at my mother’s language, and I almost burst out laughing. “She grew up poor, outside Boston, and both her parents were drunks. Momma was desperate to get away from all that. She married rich, though maybe stupidly.”
“Why is that? Was Grandpa Patrick…not a good guy?” I ask hungrily.
She snorts. “He was a controlling, raging drunk, exactly like her father. He sang beautifully, but he was just filled with anger. It didn’t take her long to figure out she’d made a mistake, but Irish Catholics don’t get divorces.” She laughs bitterly, acknowledging her own marital status. “You missed out on the worst years, though. Once you left, they were just miserable.”
“What—I never met them, Mom.”
“Nonsense. After you died, Daddy just disappeared. He was drunk every night, almost never came home anymore, and Momma just…turned off. She did the laundry and cooked meals, but she was just empty.” Oh, Christ. Mom thinks I’m her dead sister. Maybe that’s what she meant in the car, when she called me dead—she thought I was Nina, not Zelda. Nadine was eight when it happened, and Nina was ten, I think. She almost never spoke of her, but Marlon had explained this to me and Zelda one night when Mom had wept on the couch for close to an hour, drunkenly moaning “Nina” the whole while. He said that she had always felt like her life, and her parents’ lives, would never have turned into what they had if Nina had lived. “You were just the light of the family. Precocious, chatty. Fun, above all. Mother and I were always a bit serious. But you. You.” She gazes at me fondly. “Everyone loved you.”
“And then I died?”
“And then you died. And I knew whenever Momma took me down to the beach in the evenings, she was thinking about you. You’d think they would both have wanted to get away from that spot….” From what I understood, Mom’s childhood home had been spacious if not quite opulent, close to the water on the tip of Cape Cod. Grandpa Patrick was a successful real estate broker, Maureen the diligent, red-knuckled housewife. Grandpa was a gambler, not unlike my father. There was a photograph of the house, a sweet bungalow facing the ocean. As a child, it had seemed positively idyllic to me. But Nadine had sold it the second her mother died, clearly desperate to get rid of it.
“Is that why you sold the house?” I ask.
“Of course,” she answers. “It was haunted, you know. Once someone has died, they stay put.” I can’t help thinking of the barn, of the bones in the wreckage. “There are spiders, all over the walls,” Nadine adds conversationally, and I leap up, nearly upsetting the tray of leftovers I brought from downstairs and have set down on the nightstand. I look around in a panic, but of course there is nothing.
“Jesus, Mom.” She seems not so much upset by the hallucinated spiders as intrigued, and she waves her hands around as though counting them. “Okay,” I say, “time for meds and dinner.”
“I’m not hungry,” she replies, dismissing me. As usual. Has she ever admitted to being hungry, to needing something?
“You still have to eat something. You’re not supposed to take the meds on an empty stomach.”
“Oh, fuck my meds,” she snaps. “I’m not sick. I won’t take them.”
“Then no wine.”
“I don’t see any wine,” she says with a raised eyebrow.
Puffing in annoyance, I trundle back downstairs and bring her up a bottle.
“Meds first.” We go through the tedious process of swallowing the pills from the dispenser that lives by her bed. When she is done, I pour her a measure of Chablis and try to convince her to eat. I’m exhausted with this routine already, with its dull repetition. Again and again, day after day. And I’ve been home for only a few days—what must Zelda have learned of boredom? When she’s done, I help her get undressed for bed, though she changes her mind halfway through and decides she should be getting dressed, and s
he tries to do her hair and put on makeup. Eventually, the promise of more wine convinces her to submit to her bedtime routine. When I finally get her tucked in, the sun has long since set. I’m planning to leave her to her fussing for the rest of the night, but the way she looks at me as I’m walking toward the door is so full of pure need that I pause.
“Do you want some company, Mom?”
“What? No, I don’t need anything,” she says casually, even shrugging. “I was just going to watch something on TV.” My mother has never really sought out my attention or time, so I’m confused about whether or not this is an overture.
“Um, do you…mind if I join you?”
“It’s entirely up to you.”
I consider, then decide, meh, fuck it. I crawl onto the other side of the bed and reach for the laptop there, which is synced to the big-screen TV across from us. But when I go to open Netflix in the browser, Nadine seems to be logged out of her account.
“Any chance you know the password to this, Mom?” I ask, already pessimistic.
She looks stricken, but to my surprise, she answers me. “Zinfandel three eight one five,” she says confidently, and my eyebrows shoot up. All right. Though when I type that password in, it doesn’t work.
“Try again, Mom.”
She doesn’t answer this time, just stares straight ahead. I sigh. The Netflix account is registered to Zelda, so I request a new password and log in to her email from the laptop. Her password has been “ZeeN0tZed” for as long as I can remember, and it still is. My fingers fumble on the unfamiliar keyboard—I’ve grown so accustomed to AZERTY.
When I log in for the link, there’s a fresh email from Zelda waiting in her inbox. I glance at Mom, but I’m really not concerned about her seeing it, even though the computer screen is mirrored on the big screen across the room. I open the email.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Quack Quack
June 25, 2016 @ 8:45 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-V1aCjgzlg
That’s it. Just the link. With another quick look at my mother, I click on it. It takes me to a YouTube video of Sesame Street’s “Letter Q.” I push play and watch as a bunch of cheery, racially diverse kids toss out words that start with Q. Ernie plays a joke on Bert. Kermit and Grover draw the letter in orange across the screen. Nadine watches alertly, her eyes wide.
“This mean anything to you, Mom?”
She shakes her head.
I’m not surprised. Even if she wasn’t deteriorating from the inside out, it’s unlikely that she’d remember an incident from when we were in kindergarten. The letter would mean nothing to her, because she never came to see us there. Our kindergarten class was a pretty laid-back public school experience. A big chunk of the year was to be dedicated to the alphabet and mastering this crucial sequence. We soon learned that our kindergarten teacher had a very special, secret relationship to someone really, really important.
—
“Okay, everybody,” said Ms. Prescott, a pretty young blonde, during the second week of school. “This is a really big secret, and it’s super important that you don’t tell kids in other classrooms about this, because it would make them feel bad. But. Guess who I know?” A chorus of hushed and reverent “Who?”s greeted this question, and a couple of hands even went up, as though there might actually be a right answer to this ridiculous query. “One of my close friends is someone named…” She walked over to a closet in the corner of the classroom, ducked inside, and then bounced back out, exclaiming, “Elmo!”
This piece of information was greeted with near hysteria in our classroom, where it was obvious that everyone watched Sesame Street. Elmo was as close to a celebrity as it got for rural five-year-olds, and excited whispers circulated around the oval of squirmy kids when this announcement came. We could not believe our good luck.
In retrospect, I wonder at the injunction to secrecy. It didn’t strike us as weird, at the time, but maybe that’s because childhood is filled with so many of these strange entreaties against transparency. “Don’t tell your mother.” “Promise you won’t show Mom and Dad.” “Becky definitely can’t find out, okay?”
We soon learned that Elmo’s role in our classroom was to appear every Monday morning with the “weekly letter.” Apparently, he would spend all week chasing around the next week’s letter, and late on Sunday night, he would finally catch it and trap it in the closet at our classroom, waiting to be liberated by Ms. Prescott on Monday morning.
But. There was a catch. She needed help to bring out the letters, drag them out into the sunny space of our classroom. The implication was that the letters didn’t want to be seen, known, unveiled. It took the conjoined efforts of at least three people to midwife them into the class: Elmo, Ms. Prescott, and a classroom parent. This meant that every week, one of our parents would show up to help Ms. Prescott introduce that Monday’s letter. Meaning that one of our parents would eventually come to our classroom! Our circle was abuzz with excitement.
Letters were assigned randomly, so that no one became jealous or possessive. For example, it would have made sense to assign me A, for Ava. But our class also had an Adam and an Anthony, and they could just as plausibly have laid claim to that primary chunk of our alphabet. Zelda and I were assigned one letter because there were twenty-seven students in the class. Any guesses what letter that was?
Marlon, of course, was the one who brought us to school early one Monday morning in spring, as our kindergarten year was winding down. He wore a wild Hawaiian shirt and mismatched plaid trousers and a bizarre hat with earflaps, exactly the sort of clothes that appeal to five-year-olds. Marlon always knows his audience, and he arrived fully prepared to charm.
“Okay, kids. It’s Monday. Everybody know what that means?” Ms. Prescott said.
“Letter day!” we all hollered in frenzied anticipation. There is no explaining why this whole process was so much fun, but it was extremely titillating. The puzzle of that closed door, the jelly-kneed expectation of having some foreign body appear behind it, dragged there against its own volition, even if you knew what came next in that limited queue of letters. We could scarcely contain ourselves.
“That’s right!” Ms. Prescott cooed, rabble-rousing. “So, what letters have we done so far?” My hand shot into the air. “Ava?”
“Aybeeceedeeeeeffgeeaitchayejaykayellemenohpeekewaressteeyouveedubbleyouexwyezee!” I expelled in a single breath.
“Almost! You’re getting ahead of yourself there a bit, though. That’s all the letters. What was the last letter we did?” A few hands poked up, Zelda’s included.
“Zelda?” Ms. Prescott pointed. I can only assume that she was giving us both a chance to perform in front of our parent, rather than intentionally fomenting sibling rivalry. But Zelda smiled slyly, with barely a glance at me.
“P. And before that O. And before that N.”
“That’s right!” Ms. Prescott congratulated her. Marlon beamed.
“So what’s next, guys?”
“Q!” someone shouted from the back.
“Hey, what are our rules? We raise our hands, right?” Our teacher sternly arched her eyebrows. “Let’s all say it together. What letter are we doing today?”
“Keewww!” we all responded.
“And today, we have a very special visitor.” Ms. Prescott looked fondly at my father with an expression that suggested he was indeed very special. “Ava and Zelda’s dad. And what’s your name?” she asked him, in the same tone she used to address us, then immediately blushed because she realized how ridiculous she sounded.
“My name is Marlon!” my father announced, batting not one eyelid. “And I’m here to get the letter Q on the hook!” He produced a collapsible fishing pole from his pocket, and we all squealed. This was new! Normally the parents just made a show of pulling the letters out of the closet while a profoundly unhelpful Elmo cheered them on. Fishing! We’d
never fished for letters! Ms. Prescott looked amused and concerned; she must have been wondering if there was a hook on that line, and whether she was legally liable if Marlon accidentally snagged somebody’s lip or cheek.
“Well. Goodness. Let’s go to the closet, then,” she said, unwilling to be disagreeable in front of Marlon. We knew the drill, so we remained glued to the carpet while Ms. Prescott walked over to the door. She knocked once, then twice. “Elmo?” she called.
“Is that you, Ms. Prescott?” she answered herself in a decent ventriloquist version of Elmo. This may have been her single most important skill as a teacher.
“Yes! Do you have a letter for us today?”
“Why, yes, yes, I do!”
“I have a friend here to help us get it out. His name is Marlon, and he has a fishing pole!” Normally parents were introduced by their last names, a “Mr.” or “Mrs.” But my father had easily bypassed those formalities.
“Wow, a fishing pole! That sounds great.”
“Are you ready for us to open the door, Elmo?”
“You bet!”
Ms. Prescott theatrically flung the door open and leaned in, scooping up the Elmo puppet in a practiced move.
“He’s in the back of the closet, Ms. Prescott,” Elmo informed her. “He doesn’t want to come out!” (The letters were always masculine.)
“Well, that’s why I brought my friend Marlon!” she answered herself, eyes blazing in excitement. We could tell that something about this ritual thrilled her too.
“Okay, Elmo, you ready for me to go fishing?” my father asked Elmo, with a big, slow wink at Ms. Prescott. She blushed again.
“You bet, Marlon!”
“Okay, here I go!” He made an elaborate gesture of casting his line into the closet. For a moment it looked like he hooked something, and he frowned in exaggerated concentration. But then he reeled in the line again. “That’s one slippery letter!” he informed us. He cast again. Again, it looked like a sure thing, and he even strained dramatically, pretending to pull on something. But no. “Got away again!” Marlon wiped his brow. “Jeez, maybe I should just give up. What do you guys think—should I call it a day?”
Dead Letters Page 22
