“Allison?” the man said. “But Allison isn’t—”
“Are you okay?” Anna Page asked, letting go of my hand and moving toward him. “Do you need help?”
The dog seemed to surge forward without coming any closer, his tail lowered and still.
“I … Forgive me, I …” He turned abruptly to leave, then turned back to me, blinking as if I were just coming into focus. “You’ll have the desk, of course, Asha. And the pictures. Yes, you must have the pictures,” he said, and he stepped out the door, latching it behind him, leaving us alone again in the glow of the single bulb.
Aunt Ally had a lover, too? Anna Page almost blurted the words out as the blue door closed, or that’s the way she tells it now, anyway. As with much of this story, what I know of the rest of that evening—what happened after I was asleep, for example—I know from the rehashing afterward. We Wednesday Daughters, like our mothers, love to tell stories on ourselves. Aunt Kath tells her own version of that evening, by the way, in which we arrive at the cottage “looking like something the pooch found under the porch”—never mind that she didn’t join us until six days later and has no idea what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know Julie’s part of this story, for example; we’ve never told Julie’s part of this story to any of the Wednesday Sisters, and I’m sure we never will.
Anna Page opened a gray-blue metal chest beside the fireplace: newspapers, an ash brush, a scoop of some sort, a box of Cook’s matches. I examined a photo of the grandparents I’d never met, and another of Sammy and me the morning I started kindergarten, my chubby hand grasping a Snow White lunch box that had been Anna Page’s. Julie found a small watercolor inside the glass-fronted bookcase, which she declared must be “that Beatrix Potter duck.” She handed me the little painting as Anna Page began piling large and irregular-shaped coals from a bin beside the fireplace onto the grate.
“Don’t start that thing, Anna Page!” Julie warned. “We’ll die of carbon monoxide poisoning.” Then to me, “What is it, Hope?”
Anna Page, too, was studying me then, their faces as expectant as when they’d stood at either end of a twirling rope, urging me to jump in.
“ ‘Where do you go every afternoon by yourself, Jemima Puddle-duck?’ ” I said, although the purple-velvet-vested character in the painting—one I knew so well without ever having seen her—wasn’t Jemima. I gathered the best I could of a smile. “It’s a goose.”
“You silly goose, Jules!” Anna Page said. “Don’t you know a duck from a goose?”
Julie gave her a look. “One quacks and the other honks,” she said. “But painted ones don’t do either.”
“Dang, she’s getting sassy,” Anna Page said.
The long matches I found wouldn’t stay lit, and the shorter ones succeeded only in searing the edges of the paper. I pulled some fire starters from the metal bin—the slimy white slabs filling the room with eau de gasoline when freed from the plastic wrap—and broke off three perforated rectangles; if I wanted to burn down my mother’s cottage, I would damn well do it. Four more blackened-but-not-burning-edge attempts later, Anna Page grabbed the matches and tossed a lit one directly onto a starter. It burst into flames that shot up the chimney, surely threatening the trees outside.
“Shit!” Julie shouted, and she began to laugh unabashedly, and we were all laughing then, as the ash from the burning paper fell through the grate and smoke poured everywhere, the kindling popping sparks to the edge of the hearth as the fire made a whipping sound, like a strong wind. Even with the screen replaced, sparks and ashes splashed forward from the grate and slipped out under the screen.
“It’s a scene from one of Mom’s books,” I said, staring into the mess of ash and singed paper bits. “The watercolor. It’s Gabriella Goose from ‘The Tale of Gabby Goose.’ ”
Julie brushed a few fallen coal bits back behind the screen with the metal scoop.
“I didn’t know your mom painted,” Anna Page said, her low voice almost lost in the sound of the fire.
I stared at the funny way the coal burned—not evenly on the surface the way barbecue charcoal does, but becoming craggy, riddled with holes. I wanted to put Anna Page out the way Mom put out the spiders. I wanted to tell her she didn’t know anything about my mother, and her mother didn’t, either, Aunt Kath who went off to an office every day, leaving Mom to help Anna Page with term-paper footnotes and sanitary pads and boyfriends, to give her love-life advice that I, years later, would remember rather than hear firsthand.
“I should have saved her,” Anna Page said. “If only …”
If only Dad had been alive to call for help. If only I’d stopped by for coffee on the way to work, as I had so many mornings after he’d died. If only Mom had been Anna Page’s patient or even mentioned to her the “bit of toothache” she mentioned to me. Toothache. Indigestion. The little flip-flop of her heart that sometimes made her stop and touch her chest. All signs Anna Page would have recognized as a heart going bad. How hard had Mom’s heart tried to keep going before she died?
I was in my pajamas and drifting off to sleep under my mother’s batik bedspread, the lights on and Anna Page whispering to Julie that she was going outside in search of cellphone reception, when Julie backed up against the book cabinet and something clicked. “Oh!” she said as the face of the center drawer opened forward.
“It’s a desk?” she whispered uncertainly, pulling on the edge of wood and sliding it out. “It is. A hidden little drawer-desk.”
I fought against the drowsiness of the pill Anna Page had given me. The drawer face was lying flat, on hinges, revealing wood-divided cubbies holding pens and paper clips, a stapler, a tidy stack of black moleskine notebooks like the ones in which I used to write. Julie was about to open the top journal, but Anna Page took it from her and set it in my hands. I opened it and blinked against the jumble of letters and numbers on the first page:
7.0.1999, ehqrs mhfgs zs sgd bnsszfd.
Gibberish. My mind going, or my mother’s having gone, or both.
“I didn’t, either, Anna Page,” I mumbled, pressing my mouth to the journal, inhaling the scent of leather and ink and paper as I gave in to the sleeping-pill heaviness. “I didn’t know Mom could paint.”
From the Journals of Ally Tantry
19.8.2008, Keswick, in the English Lake District. Beatrix and I have arrived at a shabby little bed & breakfast which has to commend it not much more than location: from here we can take the Keswick Launch across Derwentwater and walk to Lingholm and Fawe Park—which Bea assures me still looks the way it did when she painted it for Mr. McGregor’s garden. We’re having tea on the patio under an umbrella, in plastic chairs at the lake’s edge. I’ve slipped my shoes and socks off and stuck a quick toe in the water. Bea has untied the old-fashioned lace-up-forever things she wears (she refuses to trade them in for today’s practical flats, much less sneakers, which they call trainers here), but she’s quite shocked at my suggestion that she roll down her stockings in public. No amount of trying to persuade her to trade her full-length skirts for slacks works, either.
—But you’re dead, Bea, I remind her. How can it possibly matter? You’ve been dead for years.
—Would you have me give up my cane, too, Allison? she insists. And what about my sheep?
Beatrix is mad for sheep, I’m afraid. Really, you will want to avoid the topic. “Our Water Lily was quite famous,” she’ll tell you without a hint of modesty, the beginning of a monologue about the salvers and teapots and tankards her ewes won. There will be photographs: Bea so stooped over a cane that you can’t imagine she could get anywhere at all, but there she is in the middle of a pasture with a motley-looking sheep. And she sketches them. Do not—I warn you, do not!—express any interest in seeing her drawings of the sheep.
She chooses a second scone and stares across the lake to mountains that belong on a child’s model train set, or a grown man’s one.
—Most people, after one success, she says, are so cringingly af
raid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.
She looks like Kath as she says this—her expression like Kath’s when I’d mentioned to the Wednesday sisters that I might come here to research a Beatrix Potter biography I might write. “Isn’t your mama from those parts?” Kath had asked, and the others had been suspicious, too, Frankie and Linda pointing out that I’d have to stick to the truth, and Brett saying, “No telling it slant,” quoting Emily Dickinson the way she is forever quoting people more clever than us. “I’m ‘potty for Potter,’ ” I’d insisted, echoing the improbable pitch I came upon in a tourist brochure at the Manchester train station on my first trip to England, with Jim on a business trip. The brochure (offering three days and two nights at a house that once belonged to Potter and was now an inn) beckoned improbably: “Are you potty for Potter?”
Bea offers me the last scone before taking it herself.
—Yes, Allison, she says. Potty for Potter. So it does seem you are. But if we can’t be a little crazy when we’re writing in our journals, where can we be?
And she’s off on a tear about “Mr. Warne” (as she calls him) agreeing to publish Peter Rabbit the summer she stayed here, in 1901. The book started as the most charming picture-letter written to her former governess’s five-year-old son when Bea herself was twenty-five, the strong forward slant of her cursive intermixed with sketches of an expressive black-ink bunny face. She’d given up on finding a commercial publisher and self-published the book with black-and-white sketches before Warne became interested. He was the one who insisted on the watercolors—Peter’s blue coat.
I suppose I like to imagine Bea wrote her stories the way I wrote mine: for children she longed to have but couldn’t, with the superstition that writing the stories might somehow break the curse of childlessness. It was different for her, of course. I married young but miscarried so many times that I’d begun to despair of ever bringing a child to term. Bea was forty-seven before she married, too late for children, the way I worry it will be too late for Hope.
“A minnow! a minnow! I have him by the nose!”
—FROM The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher BY BEATRIX POTTER
ANNA PAGE NUDGED JULIE’S THIN SHOULDER AND WHISPERED THAT she was going down to sit by the lake. Julie, fast asleep on the love seat in Mom’s cottage, didn’t stir.
Anna Page nudged her again. “I wanted to let you know where I was, just in case.”
“In the lake,” Julie mumbled.
“By the lake,” Anna Page said.
Julie opened her eyes and peered at Anna Page from under eyebrows that are straight across and not insubstantial, not overthinned or overarched or over-anythinged, and yet with the slightest narrowing can bring even the most ardent teenagers flirting in the library stacks to a hush. She’s all long straight arms and nose and neck, long straight fingers abundant with rings that ought to be too much but aren’t, with only an occasional earring tangled in the sheet of her impeccably highlighted hair out of place. Always silver earrings, which she wears in such abundance that it stops people, as if they can accept a librarian who doesn’t wear glasses, but one with multiple ear piercings is more than they can take.
“Fine, I’m awake now,” she whispered to Anna Page. “I’ll come with you.”
“You were sleeping. Stay here with Hope and sleep.”
“You can’t go out by yourself, Ape.” Julie hauled herself up, the jet lag creasing her face. “What if that creepy neighbor with the dog is out there somewhere? What if the murderer-husband that Robbie the boat rower described is on the loose?”
Anna Page said Julie had read Jane Eyre too many times, and Julie countered that Anna Page hadn’t read it enough. “Rochester didn’t kill his wife. She jumped from the roof.”
“You’d jump, too, if someone kept you locked up,” Anna Page responded, knowing Rochester’s wife was crazy but ignoring the inconvenient detail. Vexing Julie has always been the easiest way to get her to insist on doing what she thinks you don’t want her to do. And even Julie will tell you she was plenty vexed with Anna Page as she followed her out the door, as Anna Page meant her to all along.
Outside, the darkness under the tree canopy was almost total, the frightening thrum of insects making Julie’s skin creepy with the thought of being swarmed with disgusting flying things. If she wanted to kill someone, this was where she would come, she said—not that she expected Anna Page to admit this was a stupid idea; Anna Page isn’t much for admitting stupidity.
Anna Page, without breaking stride or turning, asked, “Did you ever imagine Aunt Ally might have a lover?” And when Julie didn’t answer, “And why does it make me feel better that my daddy wasn’t the only one?”
Julie had felt odd enough being out at night with Anna Page even before the conversation turned to the other Kath—a heart surgeon at Stanford like Anna Page and her dad, with whom Anna Page’s father had lived for decades without ever divorcing her mom. It was as if Anna Page were on a midnight walk not with her but with her sister, with Jamie arisen from the dead. God knew the three of them had been out at night together often enough as kids, Anna Page tossing rocks at their bedroom window and Julie and Jamie climbing out into the night to go wherever she wanted to go. But that was decades past, and Jamie was dead. Jamie had been dead a few days short of a year, leaving Isaac without a wife and Oliver without a mother, Anna Page without a best friend, Julie without a sister and with all her guilt.
“I’m pretty sure Aunt Ally and that guy with the dog were just friends,” Julie answered finally, as if friendship were something less than love, as if Jamie must have cared more for Julie than for Anna Page just because they’d shared the same bedroom, the same faces and hair and hands, thigh muscles, elbows. The same tastes for Brussels sprouts. Red shoes. Men who told goofy jokes, or at least appreciated theirs.
“You’d look great as a D-cup.” That was the way her twin sister, Jamie, had received Julie’s declaration that she was going to have a prophylactic mastectomy—with no more fanfare than if she were changing her hair color or deciding on a pair of boots. It was a Tuesday. They were sitting at a table at Osteria, waiting for their mother. Outside the window, a clump of bicyclers stopped for a red light, Palo Alto sweat-for-lunch types.
“Remember when we used to stuff Kleenex in our bras?” Jamie had said. “The first time Isaac saw me topless, he said, ‘Wait, where’s the beef?’ ”
“He did not!”
“ ‘I ordered the Quarter Pounder, not the kid’s burger!’ That’s what he said, I swear.”
Jamie was already dying by then. You couldn’t take anything she said seriously. She was already dying and she had accepted that, and she was doing her best to help the rest of us accept it, for the sake of her husband, Isaac, and their five-year-old son, Oliver.
“If you’re going to do it, you may as well get something out of it. At least a C.” That’s what Jamie said.
What Julie’s husband, Noah, had said was, “But you tested negative for the gene.” As if there were only one BRCA entry into the breast cancer world, as if the fact that her genes were identical to her sister’s and Jamie was Stage IV, metastatic at presentation, meant nothing. It was in Jamie’s brain before they knew it was anywhere. In her brain that was exactly the same as Julie’s brain, except not.
“I’d have to buy a whole new bra wardrobe if I went to a D,” Julie said. “Underwire? Don’t you need underwire if you’re a D?”
“So you’ve scheduled it.” Jamie slid a finger under the edge of her wig and scratched. She’d have gone bald if it wouldn’t have been too scary for Oliver, all that naked skull. “If you’re telling me about it, then you’ve scheduled it. You won’t let me talk you out of it.”
“Would you try?”
“Pffft. I’m not exactly the poster child for keeping them, Jules.”
Outside, the light changed, and the pack of bicyclists pushed on again.
“Thursday,” Julie said. This was Tuesday.
“Recover quickly,” Jamie said. “I need you on deck for Isaac and Oliver.” And before Julie could object that Jamie wasn’t going anywhere, Jamie said, “Don’t get them set too high, Jules. They always look fake when they’re set too high. Remember when Rachel had hers done, how ridiculous she looked? If you show up Friday with your breasts on your shoulders, I’m sending you back for a redo.”
The three of them—Julie, Jamie, and their mother—had lunch together at Osteria twice each year, on Aunt Linda’s birthday and on Julie and Jamie’s “shared” birthday, although in fact they didn’t share a birthday, they were identical twins born in different years, Jamie a few minutes before midnight, on December 31, 1963, and Julie a half hour later, on January 1, 1964. They’d always had birthday celebrations together, though, because if you had two different parties with all the same friends (and they always shared friends), the second party would be a letdown, Julie’s would be a dull echo of Jamie’s, which would always come first.
These celebrations were supposed to be festive, but Julie never felt festive eating at restaurants; she couldn’t shake the memory of that breakfast at the Plaza Hotel when she was a kid. “Mommy has to go to the hospital early tomorrow morning for an operation,” their mother had told them after they’d finished their strawberries and whipped cream, if not their waffles. She might look kind of weird after the surgery if she needed a mastectomy, she’d told them. Then she’d begun telling them how they made her the happiest mommy in the world. “No matter what happens, I want you to remember that,” she’d said, “even when you’re a hundred and two.” They’d all giggled, and Julie had said even when she was a hundred and ninety-two, and Jamie, not to be outdone, had said, “When I’m two thousand!”
Julie fingered the row of silver earrings on her left lobe. “Remember the two-headed snake we saw that afternoon in New York, James, after the strawberry waffles?” she asked. “If I could have, I would have set it loose on you.”
The Wednesday Daughters Page 2
