“I’m sorry,” Lily says. “Let’s try not to fight.”
Noelle doesn’t respond.
Soon it starts to rain again, and there’s nothing but the beat of water against the windshield and the sound of the boys sleeping quietly in back, nothing in Lily’s head but her own voice reminding her what she told Malcolm before she left, what she said to Clarissa on the phone last night, what she’s been resolving to herself for weeks now, that she won’t fight with Noelle on this trip, for her own sake, for her parents’ sake, for the sake of Leo’s memory. So she stays quiet as she drives, taking occasional sips from her Coke, focused only on the goal of navigating them through the traffic, everyone pressed like boats stern to prow as she drives along the road to her parents’ house.
4
Thisbe’s breath catches as she walks up the path; her heart throbs in her forehead. It’s just Marilyn and David, she reminds herself, but to no avail. Calder, blond, long-lashed, is asleep in her arms. It’s six in the evening, an hour before his bedtime, but his clock has been thrown off by the day’s travel. His head thumps against her shoulder to the beat of her walking, but he remains undisturbed.
The front door looks different. Have they painted it? she wonders. It’s green now; she could have sworn it used to be white. Above the knocker is a note that says “Welcome Home!” with three stick figures beside it. Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle, their arms touching. Marilyn and David have always been this way, the welcome home signs greeting the adult children, the happy birthday notes appended to bedroom doors, but when Thisbe poked fun at this (“What are you guys, seven?” she used to say to Leo), he would turn defensive. Though now she wonders if it’s envy she feels and, as always, that undercurrent of exclusion: was she, despite everything, hoping for a fourth stick figure?
She rings the bell, and when no one answers, she finds the door unlocked. “Hello? Is anybody home?” She’s in the foyer, next to the coat rack and umbrella stand; beside them sits the shoe cubby with David’s running sneakers spilling out of it. “We’re here!” she shouts. “It’s Thisbe and Calder! Marilyn! David! Your grandson has arrived!” She’s going for animation, engaged, she realizes, in willed histrionics, hoping to lose herself in the hubbub of the reunion. Calder turned three in February. He hasn’t seen Marilyn and David in months, and to compensate for this, Thisbe has placed their photograph beside his bed. Her own parents live in Santa Cruz, a mere hour and a half away, so they see Calder all the time. They’re simply Grandma and Grandpa to him, but in anticipation of this trip, she has started to refer to them as Grandma Natalie and Grandpa Ivan, as if to prove she’s not playing favorites.
In the car ride from the airport, she brought out her treasure trove of memories, recounting to Calder the times he’d spent with her in-laws, the elevator in Marilyn and David’s building in Manhattan that catapulted them to the seventeenth floor. (Calder insisted on pushing all the buttons; Marilyn and David even allowed him to press the alarm.) Do you remember this? Thisbe asked. Do you remember that? It’s possible Calder does, though it’s hard to know: you get him on a roll and he’ll confirm anything. (“Did you play with Jacob?” she asks when he returns from preschool. “Yes,” Calder says. “Did you play with Sophia?” “Yes.” “Did you play with Donald Rumsfeld?” “Yes.”) Still, she’s hoping that the promptings on the plane going east will carry the weight she wants them to—she brought an entire photo album to show Calder, filled with photos of Marilyn and David, and of Clarissa, Lily, and Noelle. “Those are Daddy’s sisters,” she said. “Don’t they look like him?” She fears Calder won’t recognize his grandparents or, if he does, that he’ll hide his face—he can be shy when he first sees someone, even someone he knows—and that this will reflect badly on her, will confirm whatever suspicions her in-laws have been harboring.
“Marilyn and David? Clarissa? Lily? Noelle?” For an instant she wonders, does she have the wrong date? But no: of course it’s the Fourth. She sets Calder on the couch and goes to remove some stray items from the car, and as she heads back inside she sees two figures coming up the road, carrying groceries. She can’t make out their faces yet, but their carriage is unmistakable. “Hello!” she calls out.
Simultaneously they wave, each holding one hand overhead, like two traffic cops. As they approach, a shyness overtakes them; no one seems sure what to do next.
Marilyn takes her in a hug, and Thisbe feels the anxiety leak out of her, though her pulse still flutters in her forehead like a sail.
“Where’s Calder?” David asks.
“Inside,” she says. “Asleep.”
“Did the girls get here?”
“Not yet.”
Marilyn looks at her watch. “They promised they’d be here for dinner. “Marilyn’s hair is red, the family trademark, though hers is shot through with long stripes of gray. She wears it back in a ponytail; not many sixty-nine-year-olds could keep their hair that long without looking like a hippie or a fading ingénue, but Marilyn is neither of those things, certainly. She’s tall and thin, a wearer of shawls and long dresses, and with her sharp chin and rapidly descending nose, she has the look of an especially handsome bird. One of Thisbe’s most distinct memories is of Marilyn shooing off some pharmaceutical representative (Marilyn believes there’s a special place in hell for the drug reps, and she makes a point of not prescribing any medication that’s been pressed too forcefully on her), chasing after him, her doctor’s coat flying behind her. David is thicker-set and fleshier-faced; he has Clarissa’s green eyes, though he’s the only non-redhead in the family. His hair has turned silvery, and he has let it grow longer, though mostly it’s grown out instead of down.
“How’s retirement treating you?” Thisbe asks.
“He’s keeping busy,” Marilyn says. “David’s the most unretiring person I know.”
“Second to you,” David says.
In the living room, Marilyn stands above the sleeping Calder. “He’s darling,” she says. “I can’t believe how much he’s grown.” She leans so close to him their noses almost touch.
“I bought him new shoes in February,” Thisbe says, “and already he’s too big for them.”
“It was the same way with Leo,” Marilyn says. “You got him home from the shoe store, and you had to go right back.”
Thisbe doesn’t blame Marilyn: whom else should Calder remind her of if not Leo? But it makes her uncomfortable nonetheless. The last time she saw him, Marilyn slipped a few times and called Calder Leo, and Thisbe wondered whether it was really a slip or whether Marilyn was staking a claim. Thisbe and Leo gave Calder a hyphenated combination of their last names, a fact Marilyn seems to have forgotten, or has chosen simply to ignore. On Calder’s birthday, on holidays, whenever Marilyn sends Calder a card, it’s always to “Calder Frankel” that she addresses it.
It’s that name, in fact, that stares up at Calder now, on a gift Marilyn and David have gotten him. It’s a jigsaw puzzle. There must be a thousand pieces in it; Thisbe has no idea how she’ll pack it for the trip home. Long ago she learned that the weight of your baggage is inversely proportionate to the weight of your traveling companion. “Marilyn,” she says gently, “that’s not his name.”
“What?”
“It’s Godsoe-Frankel.”
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn says. “I forgot.”
Now, though, Thisbe feels bad, because what difference does it make what her mother-in-law calls him? This is how it always is with Marilyn, the swinging from resentment to self-blame. Although Thisbe misses Leo for countless reasons, one of them is that he was a buffer between her and Marilyn. He was her perspective, her ballast, and now that he’s gone, she feels the recriminations bloom once more.
“How’s grad school going?” Marilyn asks. “Was it a good year?”
“It was,” Thisbe says. It was as good a year as it could be under the circumstances, certainly the grad school part.
“And now?”
“Now it’s summer. Like they say, the thre
e best reasons to go to grad school are June, July, and August.”
“So what comes next?” Marilyn says. “More classes?”
“One year down, ten to go. Or twenty. Or forty.” Thisbe knows the stories about humanities PhDs, those perpetual graduate students marooned in college towns, working in bars, bookstores, and cafés long past an age when it’s seemly to do so. Marilyn knows those stories, too. Years ago, David himself was an English PhD, student before he dropped out to teach high school.
“Come, come,” Marilyn says. “You’re not like that.”
And she isn’t, Thisbe knows. She’s likely to finish sooner rather than later. She’s never been one to tarry, when it comes to school or anything else.
“Leo would have loved Berkeley,” Marilyn says, and Thisbe understands that this is a peace offering. Because when Thisbe applied to anthropology programs, when she was deciding among good graduate schools on the east and west coasts, Marilyn implied without ever directly saying so that she thought Thisbe was taking Leo away from them, back to where she’d grown up. Marilyn was right—Thisbe was taking Leo away from them—but Leo had been the one who wanted to move to Berkeley. He had his own fantasies about shorts in November, had fantasies, too, about U.C. Berkeley itself. Born in the 1970s, raised just blocks from Columbia, he’d missed out on the student protests. “I wouldn’t have minded occupying a building,” he told Thisbe once, and Thisbe just laughed. “What you wouldn’t have minded was free love.”
“Sure,” Leo said. “That would have been good, too.”
When she decided to go to Berkeley, Leo gave notice at Newsday. He had landed a job at the San Francisco Chronicle, on the foreign desk. They would be moving in August. The day he was killed, they had already booked their flights.
“I look at you and it just kills me,” Marilyn says. “You’re thirty-three years old, and you’ve already been through so much.”
“I’ll be all right,” Thisbe says.
“Will you be?”
“I hope so.” Thisbe looks down at Calder, who remains asleep, flat as a flounder on the living room couch, his arms flung to the sides. “What about you, Marilyn. How are you doing?”
“Terrible,” Marilyn says. “Just dreadful.”
“I’m so sorry.” It’s been the hardest year of Thisbe’s life, yet it’s different for her. Marilyn and David were Leo’s parents. Whereas she … she can barely say the words, even to herself. She has come east for many reasons. For Leo’s sake, of course, and to pay respects to his family, but also because she needs to tell Marilyn and David about Wyeth. I have a new boyfriend. It makes her heart palpitate just to think this. Lily is the only one who knows about Wyeth, and even she doesn’t know how serious it has become.
Thisbe goes into the kitchen, passing through the swinging door where Leo, when he was three, caught his finger and had to go to the emergency room to have it reattached. It was the first of a series of injuries he suffered (several years later he almost lost a toe, cutting it on a Pringles can during a water fight), victim of his own heedlessness and bad luck. Thisbe was twenty-one when she met him, waitressing at a bar in town, and it was the first thing she noticed about him, that misshapen forefinger, how he held his beer so it looked like he was pointing across the room.
Now, in the kitchen, she finds food warming on the stove. She has half a mind to try something. If Leo were here, he’d be breaking into the food, serving himself a pre-dinner (an amuse-bouche, he’d have called it, though the way he’d have heaped his plate, it would have been hard to describe it as mere amusement), all too happy to join in the second seating when everyone else arrived. Once, at a Japanese restaurant, he shambled over to another table and returned with a plate of abandoned fish. “It’s all-you-can-eat sushi,” he said. “Why let it go to waste?” He’d done this to shock her, though she was long past being shocked. He’s been gone a year, and she still envies him his impropriety.
It’s an old wood house with a mansard roof, two stories plus a basement that, when Leo was a teenager, held the family’s air hockey table and pinball machine and was witness to epic games of Ping-Pong between Leo and his father (when the girls came home from college they got in on the fun, too), and late at night when his parents were asleep served as the pot-smoking venue for Leo and his friends. (It was the same way for Thisbe growing up; the American family basement, she has long believed, was invented with marijuana in mind.) Even after Leo moved out, there remained an upstairs-downstairs divide, with the basement serving as rec room, while the rest of the house was consecrated to more high-minded pleasures, to the piano—Marilyn and David still play—and to a slew of board games, which were packed into the cabinets beneath the bookshelves. When Thisbe met Leo, the summer after her junior year at Bowdoin, she would come over to find various Frankels spread across the rug playing Scrabble, Pictionary, Boggle, Taboo. Most of the time she refused join in; the competition was so explicit it unsettled her. Though she’s competitive herself. Those times when she agreed to play, she was as resolved to win as anyone else.
In the dining room, a couple of booster seats are perched on the table, and next to them stands a high chair. Marilyn and David had it made after Noelle’s first son was born. “We wanted it to be an actual piece of furniture,” Marilyn said, and Thisbe, back when procreating seemed at best a theoretical enterprise, said to Leo, “What does she mean, she wants to it to be an actual piece of furniture? It’s a high chair!” Later, she took to surveying the other baby accoutrements, purchased for a grandson who lived six thousand miles away. “I think the diaper disposal should be a real piece of furniture. And the training potty, too.”
In the living room she finds a deck of playing cards, a set of keys, and a flyer from the local policemen’s benevolent association advertising the upcoming auction. An antique reading lamp sits next to the couch, and beside it lie Marilyn’s glasses on top of an open copy of the Times. (The image Thisbe retains is of Marilyn and David up late reading, the smell of wood in the fireplace and of Marilyn’s mulled apple cider, Thisbe and Leo coming home from the bar to find Marilyn and David asleep with their books toppled on their laps, Leo saying, “Come on, kids, time for bed.”) Magazines are strewn across the top of the grand piano—The New Yorker, Harper’s, the TLS—along with some medical journals and, stuck between them, an errant copy of Blueberries for Sal. Thisbe sits down to read, but then, distracted, she wanders across the living room and around the bend, through this house filled with alcoves. One Christmas, she and Leo house-sat for her college professor, and half the fun was seeing what they could find snooping through the closets. She’s suspicious of people who don’t snoop; she thinks it suggests a lack of curiosity. Besides, she has a proprietary regard for this house. It’s here, in Lenox, where she and Leo met, where they spent their first months together.
On the rafters are the siblings’ names and the names of old boyfriends and girlfriends etched into the wood. After she and Leo started to go out, he climbed up a beam and, in a ritual of mock seriousness, crossed out the name of his old girlfriend, Nora, and carved in Thisbe’s name instead. Her gallant boyfriend. It’s been twelve years since then, but she can still make out her name on the rafters; it flusters her to see herself here, living on in this house after he’s gone. A shudder runs through her, though it could be from the cold as much as from anything else. The house feels damp, as it always did, perhaps because it wasn’t winterized when it was first built and because, once it was, the process was done haphazardly and on the cheap. You’d think going to Bowdoin would have acclimated her to the cold, but it hasn’t; even San Francisco feels chilly to her. Berkeley is warmer, which is one reason she’s staying there, though she’s a city person and if Calder weren’t so happy at preschool, she might move across the Bay.
In the closet are arrayed sandals, flip-flops, and tennis sneakers—shoes of languor, Thisbe thinks, meant for traipsing through town, and for hitting a shuttlecock behind the house. There’s even a pair of snow boots amid
st everything else, though the family is in Lenox mostly during the summer. In the off-season they rent out the house for weeks at a time, though no one can remember when it’s being rented; more than once somebody drove up, only to find the house occupied. It was Leo one time, and he so startled the renter that she pointed a hunting rifle at him. After that, Leo told Thisbe always to ring the doorbell when she arrived unless she wanted his parents to shoot her. A laughable notion: Thisbe can think of no one less likely to shoot a gun than Marilyn or David. Apparently, when Marilyn was growing up she refused on moral grounds to touch a weapon—she even opted out of archery practice at summer camp—and when she became a parent, she didn’t allow her children to play with toy guns. “Good liberals,” Leo said of them, only half derisively; they’d turned him into a good liberal, too.
Upstairs in the hallway everything is as she remembers it—the Kathe Kollwitz etchings on the wall, the faded portraits of Leo’s great-grandparents, the old charcoal street map of Paris. On a glass table sit the family photos, where Thisbe finds a younger version of herself standing next to Leo at his Wesleyan graduation, and another photo, from their wedding, at the New York Aquarium, she in her wedding gown holding a glass of champagne, and behind her, in his tank, the walrus pressed against the glass, making his walrus noises. That walrus alone, Leo used to say, was worth the cost of the wedding; he kept referring to the walrus as his best man. In another photograph, this one taken after Leo’s death, she’s holding Calder, just two years old. In all these photos she plays a supporting role—the girlfriend, the wife, the mother—though there’s also one of her alone, in a yellow sundress, a look of perplexity across her face, taken when, she isn’t sure. This photo, in particular, makes her feel obscurely violated, which is strange because for years there were no photos of her in the house, and she took this as evidence that she wasn’t welcomed by Leo’s parents, at least not by Marilyn, who from the start was suspicious of her, why, she doesn’t know. The only reason she can come up with is that she wasn’t Nora, Leo’s high school girlfriend, who lingered on haphazardly into college, showing up in Middletown when she and Leo weren’t with someone else to perpetrate another act of high drama. The girl with the extra toe, Thisbe called Nora, which, she understood, was mean-spirited (though Nora did, in fact, have an extra toe, at the base of where her first two toes met), and was, besides, the least remarkable thing about her. More remarkable was her capacity for self-destruction, for putting things into her body that didn’t belong and failing to put in things that did. Leo’s mother helped Nora get treatment (for drugs, for anorexia), and because of this, and because Leo knew Nora as long as he did (they were in the same nursery-school class in Morningside Heights), Marilyn saw Nora as a surrogate daughter and was almost as protective of her as Leo was.
World Without You Page 8
