But Pamela’s smart. She’ll figure out one day that she missed being young because of you. She won’t ever forgive that.
Knowing exactly what you did (and what you keep doing) makes it so much easier to write this next part. I am marrying Lawrence. I love him like no one could ever love you. He says it’s awfully tenderhearted of me to keep writing to you for so long. I’m a nice person. You wouldn’t know anything about that. I planned on writing till the end. But I can’t do it anymore. I don’t even feel bad telling you that you’re the last person on earth I would ever care for.
You see how good I am at learning what I want to. Your daughter will give up on you one of these days and I will know all about it. I’ll cheer. You’re going to die one day soon, horribly and puffed full of poisons. I’m going to know all about it when it happens. I’ll cheer when you’re dead, Clarence, and I can hardly wait.
32.
First thing Monday morning I walked the letter to the corner mailbox. Pickup times at 10:30 and 2:30. I dropped it in and it was gone. I waited to make sure they carted it off. Commuters chugged along, busy cogwork of the world. Hot out already, and it was going to be humid, the day sticky as Kath’s cake. No one noticed me standing on the corner. No one spoke. Another kind of body would be questioned for loitering. A frailer kind of body would be asked if it needed help. Pickup at 10:30 just as promised. I walked home. My reflection cast in shop windows, frizzled like a fancy garnish, the kind that gets oohs and ahhs then more often than not is left on the plate. Kath was waiting in front of the townhouse. She spied me from two blocks away. She stood. She raised a large disposable cup. “So. You walked without me.”
“Kath.”
“Better that than hiding in there.” She jerked the cup toward the townhouse. A clatter of ice. My joints felt three times their usual size and never in my life had my throat been so raw. Kath said, “If you’d done that, I’d have judged you like hell for a chicken.”
“I guessed you weren’t coming.”
“Well, guess again. And let me in. I drank this whole thing waiting on you. You owe me the necessary at least.”
I unlocked the door, glad that I am one of those women who tidies when agitated. Washrooms especially. There’s something about the tang of bleach. Kath zipped off toward the powder room. I’d been walking a while and it was gummy outside. I downed a fast glass of water and poured myself a second. “Want one?” I offered when she joined me in the kitchen.
“Lord no. Are you fit for human company?”
“Based on recent events?”
“So that’s a no then.” Kath went to the living room and sat. The squashy cloud of a love seat where Pam had liked to study, the one I’d had to have reupholstered when her pen burst and leaked all over.
“Are you sure I can’t get you anything?”
“I’m lovely, thanks.” She said lovely in a formal way that put me decidedly outside the word and its warm meaning.
It needed saying: “I was awful yesterday.”
“A harridan.”
“Good word.”
“I had time to think of it. I was waiting on your steps a long while.”
I checked my watch. After noon. Your letter nearly two hours irrevocably gone. “Kath. I honestly didn’t think you were coming.”
“We’re family.”
I said nothing.
“Have you talked to Pam?”
I shook my head.
“You should. You can’t let these things—Pam deserves a chance to yell at you a bit.”
“I’ve been visiting her grandmother. She doesn’t know.”
Kath absorbed the weirdness of it. Too easily. I had said it because I wanted to shock her. I wanted Kath angry with me. I wanted her gone as forever as your letter. Gone as forever as the rest of it. But she only asked, “Did you tell her? It’s good news once you let yourself get used to it.”
“Tell Marjorie about the baby or Pam about Marjorie?”
“Either. Both. It’s all family.”
“Our family doesn’t work like your family.”
A beat. “I’m sorry. I know.” Another beat. “You scared the pants off me when the kids first got together.”
“Our family?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not fair. Just because her father—”
“Not him. That’s—I don’t know.” An indistinct motion with her hands, an attempt, I supposed, to indicate very far away. “I meant you. You and Pam. You’re like—” Inarticulate hands again, a cupped palmed pat-a-cake. “Imagine trying to find a place in that.”
“Is that why all the linners?” Because it occurred to me: the other in-laws were not as regularly featured. I was mirroring the gesture she’d made for me and Pam. Hands worked that way making snowballs, shaping basic forms from clay.
“At first. But I like you. And I like that you like us.” She tapped her temple. “Ego. You don’t put up with much.”
I couldn’t stand the kindness. “Pam doesn’t put up with much either.”
“What’s good for the sauce—” The cupping motion, pat-a-caked.
“I wish I was the way you think I am. I wish we were.”
“You know what Patrice calls you?” Patrice was our hairdresser-in-common and had been for years before we met. “Good Queen Hedgehog. Imperious and prickly but—”
“You know what Patrice calls you?”
“—there’s a soft underbelly beneath.”
“Kath. He calls you Kath. Because everything in your world gets to be exactly what it seems.”
“It’s a compliment, Lida. We like the underbelly. And the prickles are something to live up to. Lida, I—” she unclasped her purse. Her ID was somewhere in it. My passport back to Marjorie. My thoughts sharpened to a single how. Kath rifled. A baby picture emerged. Striped hat and the face of a wizened old man. “Coleen. My first grandbaby.”
I took the picture. Coleen was eleven now, maybe twelve. Acne and elbows. On the springboard of her awkward age, about to dive headlong.
“It’s a lot to take in,” Kath said. “When Genevieve first told me, I booked a consult with a plastic surgeon. It was unbecoming. I told her and Alec there was meat in my freezer older than the both of them.”
“That scene at the linner—it wasn’t vanity,” I said. If only it could be so simple. Good Queen Hedgehog. I felt all belly then, or worse than belly. I felt inverted, a thousand Patrice prickers turned in.
“You’ll fix it,” Kath said, and it was shocking. Shocking, her faith in me. Shocking, her cheery can-doism. Shocking that she’d got this age without knowing when a thing is broken for good.
33.
I shut off the AC. Soon the air would be hot enough to peel paint. I got out my tape measure. I tested a length and released it. The tape snapped across my fingers and I drew them to my mouth.
Pam slammed her fingers once in her bedroom door. Frank and I had sent her to her room for sassing so she was crying to begin with. It took me longer than it should have to discover something new was wrong.
And she pinched those fingers in the hinges of her dollhouse. Four separate occasions. The thing was a menace.
She burnt a finger on that ridiculous crimping iron.
Mashed a thumbnail attempting to hammer.
And the paper cuts. Even I couldn’t number those.
My kitchen chair measured sixteen inches in width. I dragged it to the living room. Its feet roughed furrows in the rug. The couch was scaled for the old house. Precisely ten and a half feet. I shoved the chair up against it, making a neat corner. Barbra would have loved this. When she was a kid she’d cobbled together houses out of chairs and old bedsheets, her face small and lovely in the cotton-filtered light. I suppose you knew that about her, in your own way, back when you had her, had sheets. A tender sheen where light met her skin. How you must have hated her to do what you did.
Your cell was eight feet by ten.
You must hate her to this day.
The si
xteen-inch chair belonged to a set of four. Lined up they’d be five feet and change. Close enough, if I added a pair of wide lamps. I went to gather what I needed. By the time the L was done I was sweating hard. My hair snarled sticky at the scalp. No rest though. I had two more walls to build. A long one—four-foot coffee table, sixty-inch (with extra leaf) card table, a narrow lamp—and a short one—a pair of twenty-inch end tables, a two-foot wicker hamper, a wheeled file cabinet—completed the box. Just as well I lived alone. Building it I couldn’t help a few unladylike grunts. I stepped into the box. I lay smack in its center. I was panting. I shut my eyes and rolled onto my stomach. Let my own steady weight still the heaving. In breath out breath. The temperature rose and rose. Any time I wanted I could leave. Your cell was smaller than this, eight by ten exactly, but then my crimes were nowhere near as large. My lungs quieted. I could almost breathe now without sound. I must stink to high heaven. I turned onto my back and mopped my wet skin. If only these rivers could pull more from me than salt.
34.
I didn’t call Kath and I didn’t call Pam and I didn’t go to Marjorie though they knew me now at Riverview and I could likely sweet-talk my way past the front desk. I spent my nights in the couch box. I passed a fair chunk of my days there too. They slipped by one after another after another with the light across my ceiling. One morning it rained, or threatened to. I couldn’t tell from the floor. The townhouse ceiling was all bumps. The townhouse floor was all bumps. Whenever I stretched, cracks snaked down my back. When a knock came at the door I assumed it was something new in me breaking.
Pam wore a Cardinals cap that did little to rein in her hair, gone electric in the damp. “I want to come in.” Something clicked against her teeth. Hard candy. Likely for nausea. My mouth swam at the thought of sweetness. My own meals had grown increasingly salty. Ramen twice daily. Buttered toast. I let Pamela pass. Green apple on her breath, the same scent companies had begun to add to dish soap.
She pulled the door closed. She looked wan by indoor light. She locked the door. She slid the bolt across. She clicked the top chain into place. Overkill, but I didn’t argue. All those locks would slow her if it came to storming out.
“You must be roasting alive.” She passed her hand across the brim of her cap, a catcher signaling I had no idea what.
“Thermostat’s shot. I’ve got a boy coming to look it over.”
“You’ve got it turned off.” She flicked the AC back on. “You’ve got to pay better attention.” She sounded like a mother already, exasperated. She pushed past me to the living room. She took in its state.
“Spring cleaning,” I lied.
“You’re always spring cleaning.”
“The time’s always right to put the tick in your tock.” Another Ma saying.
“I always hated that one.” Pamela edged into the box.
I shoved at an end table. “Just let me get a few things back into place.”
“It’s nine-hundred eighty degrees. Seriously. Leave it.”
Pam took the couch. I went for the neighboring chair. Our knees almost touched. I hadn’t paid such close attention to the gaps between knees since my first sneak-around dates with Frank. Pamela unsnapped her purse. The good hand-stitched one Frank and I had brought her from the Scuola del Cuoio. Preposterous with her grubby clothes. “Okay, Lida. Here’s me, officially concerned.”
“It’s only cleaning. I wasn’t expecting company.”
Pam sighed. Cellophane crinkled.
“Got another?”
She tossed me an orange candy, shot through with a creamy swirl. She unwrapped a second for herself.
“Crystallized ginger helps with nausea,” I said. I’d heard Meifen telling another customer once.
“It’s not the baby. I just like the taste.”
“I don’t exactly know how these things work, Pamela.” I never once lasted three months. We hadn’t told Pam about any of it. Imagine if she thought we wanted her to be not herself but some lost one of them. The same reason I tried to nix when-Barbra-was-your-age stories. Pammie was Pam; we didn’t want her thinking in terms of one-for-one substitutions.
The AC grumbled on. Pam’s fingers curled up in a quick white-knuckled fist. She shifted her legs. The gap between her knee and mine could be plugged with a nickel. “Okay, Lida. Here’s the thing.” She was sweating, pale with it. Usually it made her seem hearty and athletic. Baby was to blame, sure as if it reached a milky hand up her throat and yanked down on her uvula. “I’m going to talk now,” she said. “I want you to listen, even though I’m going to say some things that you don’t like. I’m going to talk and then when my turn is done, you can have your say.”
Silence.
“Lida?”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to be talking.”
“Starting now.” She drew her knees to her chest. Another few weeks and she’d be done with that for the duration. She wrapped a hand around each ankle and settled her chin into the notch where her knees met. “Okay. So I need you to keep that thing of Granna’s in mind. You know? Everybody’s just people.”
“It was Frank who said that.”
“Lida, I’m talking.”
“Okay. Yes. Sorry. But it was Frank. Ma’s sayings were always more ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, dah-dee-dee-dee-dee-dum-dum-dum.”
“Lida.” Pam took off her cap. Until she ran her hands through her hair, I thought it was a gesture of respect. “I don’t care who said the thing. I just need you to remember the thing. Everybody’s just people.”
A beat. Another. She seemed to want me to repeat it. I obliged. “Everybody’s just people.”
“Okay then. Good. Here goes. I’ve been in touch with my father. Don’t be mad.”
Silence. A fat bolt of it unspooling.
“You know what? I think I want you to talk. It’s loads worse just waiting.”
I said, “You probably thought he should know about the baby.” Imagine if I hadn’t created Maisie. Imagine hearing it with no warning at all. Even knowing it beforehand, I felt veiny and defenseless, a shrimp all unshelled.
“No,” said Pam. “Well, yes. But—before that.”
“Do you have another candy?” While it dissolved I could be quiet and think of what to say. I knew better this time than to tell her I already knew; I was stubborn, yes, but I was capable of learning. The candy this time was bright yellow, banana-flavored where I expected lemon.
“I needed to know him,” Pam said. “You and Frank acted like I invented the sky. My own personal pep squad with, I don’t know, gold-plated megaphones. Every swim meet or report card or time I cleared the dishes—”
“You were a good kid. You were such a good kid.” Beneath my tongue, saliva welled, banana-sweet and sludgy.
“I was his kid. I knew what that meant. I knew that every single yay rah was code for thank god the Clarence isn’t showing yet. You’d never know it—here I was this kid who couldn’t even swear—but I’d get so angry. Every time I tricked people into thinking I was just some sweet girl I wanted to, I don’t know, scream, or light matches, or bite their stupid fingers off. So I started writing. I had to, Lida. If I was going to have a shot at turning out different.”
“You were never a thing like him, Pam.” We kept everything. Doily and paste Valentines. B+ essays on cellular mitosis. But Pam got it all wrong. We never—not for half a second—needed proof that she was good. We needed evidence for us. A shoebox of seashells and another of chestnuts. A cassette player in the shape of a bear. Proof we tried for the childhood she deserved. “You shouldn’t have worried about that. You weren’t like either of them. I shouldn’t have said—at linner. You’re not a bit like her.”
“Everybody’s just people.” She rubbed her eyes. “That’s the terrible part.”
If my furniture was laid out properly there’d be tissues within reach.
Pam sniffed. “Before I got the guts to write him I used to wish it would turn out I was really Georg Ring’s.”
“The policeman’s?”
“The teacher’s. Oh, God. What kind of person can’t even keep her father’s murder victims straight?” Her laugh was an eerie, unconnected thread of sound. I hoped the baby hadn’t yet grown ears.
“How long?” I asked. “How long have you been writing him?” It shouldn’t matter but it did. Not under my roof, I thought. Not under my roof.
“You’re not going to like this.”
Pammie at sixteen, waiting that extra beat before letting me into her room. Pammie at seventeen, schoolwork colonizing the kitchen table, a protective arm shielding her notebook. Little privacy, Li? It’s just SAT words. Then eighteen and off to the dorms. “Honestly, Pamela,” I said, “there’s not a whole lot about this conversation I do like.”
“Sophomore year, Trish got her hands on some edibles.”
My confusion must have shown.
“Pot, Lida. The marijuana. But in, like, brownies, so it wasn’t carcinogenic or whatever you’re about to melt down about. We wound up sitting with this Psych TA who’d been after Trish all semester—”
“I’m starting to regret all those tuition checks.”
“Very funny. And nothing happened. We were sitting at this construction site over by the law school and having this weird, pretentious conversation about recurring dreams and somehow I wound up telling them how I used to wake up screaming from all those horrible huge birds. So the TA goes, ‘what do you think the birds are?’ and Trish is all, ‘who do you think you are, Sigmund Freud?’ and he makes some crack about zee fazzer in this fake German accent and I just—”
“You just what?”
“I knew, Lida. I figured it out. The big dark nightmare bird was the cop we hit. Bam!” She drove a fist into her palm, then let it fly. “Off the hood.”
“Pamela, I—”
“Let’s have it be my turn. I was nineteen and still having this dream every few weeks. I figured it was stupid to pretend I was normal. It was time to write him. And so I looked up the address. I’m sorry.”
The Done Thing Page 15
