I love these long walks. They started out as necessity. A way to clear my head of all the grating sadness, anger, and confusion. Now, being alone on the streets is pleasant. I know the people and businesses on my path. I stop for a café con leche at the little Spanish coffee shop, where the cashier with red lipstick watches Mexican soaps on the TV above the counter. Sometimes I pop into the ancient Ferdinando’s Focacceira, still in the same tiny space since my grandparents were born, for a rice ball or scungilli salad. I browse the newer shops on Smith and Court for handmade tote bags, funky pottery, and vintage coats. I almost never buy anything, but I love to look.
Today, with my pie tucked against my hip, I stop in front of an empty store on Smith and Second. The door is open, and the lights are on. A realtor stands in the center of the main room, gesturing to the light spilling in from the large front window. A couple stands, faces sour, shaking their heads at the old exposed brick on the walls and the wide-plank floorboards.
“It would need a lot of work,” the guy says. He’s wearing sunglasses and Prada shoes. I can’t stand him already.
“We’d have to do something about these floors,” the woman says. She scuffs her pointy-toed boot against the mellow oak. I want to step on her dainty foot.
“But the light!” the realtor exclaims, desperately.
“It’s an exclusive champagne bar,” the guy says. “We’d have to cover the window anyway.”
Oh, Christ, I think and try to imagine my aunts and uncles sipping overpriced bubbly while some obnoxious twenty-two-year-old deejay named G-Lover Flash spins a Cocteau Twins remix. I step aside when the couple walks out. They look up and down the street and shake their heads, clearly unimpressed. The realtor runs doggedly behind them. “I have a gorgeous urban space in DUMBO,” she says. “Very industrial. Exposed ductwork. You’d love it!” When they are around the corner, I peek in the window again. As soon as my mind starts conjuring up a floor plan and a menu, I jump away and walk quickly toward my grandmother’s. This is not what I need right now.
My grandmother isn’t home, so I leave the pie on the kitchen table. From downstairs I hear a man’s voice say, “I’m sensing a child. A small child. Blond or strawberry blond or reddish hair.”
It’s coming from Livinia’s living room. I walk downstairs to see what she’s watching and see a teary-eyed woman nodding her head on the TV screen. “My son,” she says. “Joseph. He had the most beautiful red highlights in his hair during the summer.”
The camera cuts to James Van Praagh. “Joseph is here,” Van Praagh says. “And he’s okay. He says to tell you it wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could. And he loves you.”
Livinia sits with rapt attention, her hands paused from her constant crocheting. I shake my head at the poor gullible woman on TV, so desperate for the spirit of her dead son to reveal himself to the studio audience. Maybe old James could conjure up my dead baby and my long-gone parents from the great hereafter so they could have a panel discussion about what kind of mother I would’ve been. Now that would be a show worth watching.
A commercial for floor wax comes on, and I step into the room. “Hey, Aunt Livinia,” I say softly. She looks at me uncertainly for a few seconds. “It’s me, Lemon,” I say as I drop onto the couch.
“I know who you are,” she says and turns back to her crocheting. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
My half a doily and abandoned hook lie on the arm of the couch where I left them a week ago. The tension is all wrong, one side tight, the other loose and sloppy. “I don’t really have a job right now,” I tell her.
“That’s good.” She draws a long length of baby blue yarn from her basket and begins working it into a tulip pattern. “It’s better to stay at home. Let your husband work so you can raise the baby.”
“I’m not going to have a baby,” I say. “Remember? I lost it.” I’m surprised by how easily I admit this to Livinia. Then again, this is the woman who surrounds herself with photos of dead children. She continues to work the yarn as if I’ve said nothing.
I pick up one of the photos from the end table and look at it carefully. It’s a baby in a long christening gown with tatted lace edges extending far below where its feet would be. Its little cheeks are sunken, and its closed eyes look like dark hollows. Poor tiny creature looks more like an old man than an infant. What could have ravaged a baby that way? Some old wasting disease, dysentery, cholera? How did mothers stand it? So many babies died.
As I study the picture, I think of the water baby Makiko gave me. I still haven’t figured out what to do with it. I’ve kept it in the living room for the past few days, on the mantel, next to pictures of my parents. This feels a little weird. Slightly creepy. Only I love to see it. Every time I pass by, I watch it watching me with those stone dead eyes. I find it oddly reassuring. Sometimes I touch it. Trace the outline of its face. Cup my hands around its head. Or hold it close to my body. And I talk to it. In my head. Like I talked to my baby when she was inside me. I tell her how much I miss her.
Now Livinia’s photos don’t seem quite so weird to me. I can understand the appeal of having a picture of a deceased child. Some tangible reminder of the soul that so quickly left. Even the poor woman duped by James Van Praagh doesn’t seem so pathetic when I think about my own ways of hanging on to what I’ve lost. I show Livinia the picture I’m holding. “Do you know who this was?” I ask her.
She peers at it. Her lips work in and out as she studies it. “That was my son,” she says.
I know this can’t be true. The picture is way too old.
I pick up another one of a little girl, maybe two years old, with soft brown curls around her face. She wears a dark wool dress with a wide sailor collar and sits stiffly upright in a high chair. “How about this one?” I ask. “Do you know who this was?”
Livinia narrows her eyes and concentrates. “That was my daughter,” she says.
I set the picture down and take Livinia’s hands in mine. “Why do you have these pictures?” I ask. She looks away from me. I have no idea what Livinia’s been through in her life or if she’ll even remember, but I figure there has to be some explanation for her fascination with the photographs and claiming the children as her own.
“Did you ever lose a baby?” It’s a bold question, but I can’t stand the thought of her carrying around that kind of sadness and having no one to talk to about it. “I did,” I tell her. “I had a miscarriage.”
She nods. I’m not sure if this means she knows about my loss, or if she’s acknowledging her own. Either way, it feels good to talk about it.
“Most people don’t understand how much it hurts,” I say. “To lose a baby when you’re pregnant. They think it’s not really a baby, and they move on so fast. They think you should, too. But they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t want to hear about how sad you feel or how much you miss that baby. But I’ll listen, Livinia. I’ll listen if you want to tell me.”
She stares at the photos with tears quivering on the bottom lids of her rheumy eyes, but she says nothing. I wait. I’ll be patient. I know how hard it is to find the words. I watch her face, and nothing changes. No teardrops fall, no hint of recognition glimmers in her face. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Livinia and I have nothing in common, and she is simply an odd old bird.
Just as I’m ready to give up, to accept once and for all that Livinia is far too strange for me to understand, just as I’m letting go of her hand and straightening to a stand, she grips my fingers and says, “I lost five of them.”
“Five?” I whisper with horror. I lower myself in front of her again. “Five?” I repeat and shudder.
“I buried them behind the house,” she tells me in her dry raspy voice. “Beneath the rosebushes. I named them after saints. Catherine, Jerome, Philip, Anne, and Christopher.” She pauses. Twists the unraveling doily in her fingers. “Then Tony left me for that whore. He was so stupid.” She spits the words. “It wasn’t his baby. I told him that. They didn�
�t deserve to have a baby.”
I’m startled to hear my words in hers. I’ve said that exact same thing about my cousin Trina. And although I understand Livinia’s anger, hearing it from someone else’s mouth, I’m struck by how horrible it sounds. How does she know if that woman deserved a child or not? How does she know what kind of life that child had?
“Did you tell your sisters?” I ask. “My grandmother? Did they help you?”
Livinia looks at me, dead on and serious, as clear as I’ve ever seen her. “They wouldn’t have cared,” she says coldly. Then she puts her face close to mine. “They were all whores!” she spews. “All of them and their daughters. You, too. With your loose morals. Not saving yourself for marriage. I’m the one who waited. I’m the one who should’ve had a baby. None of you deserved it!” she screeches.
Her words startle me backward. I stumble to catch myself against the chair. My cheeks are hot, as if she’s smacked me. “Yes, I do!” I yell at her. “I deserve to have a kid as much as anybody else!”
“You’re going to hell!” she screams. “All of you!”
I don’t need to listen to this. Senile or not, she’s a wretched old woman. I turn and run up the stairs. Slam the door behind me. Tear through the hall and rip open the front door to find my grandmother standing on the steps next to her red shopping cart full of groceries. She has her keys in one hand and jumps when I explode out onto the porch.
“What the hell happened to you?” she asks me.
“Livinia!” I sputter.
“What about her?”
“She’s such a horrible, awful, mean old bat!”
Grandma shrugs as she pushes past me through the door. “You’re just now figuring that out?”
“She called me a whore and said I didn’t deserve to have a baby.”
“Aw, don’t listen to her nonsense.” My grandmother pats me on the shoulder. “She’s just an unhappy old woman.”
I wipe my sleeve across my sweaty face and shake my head. “I was trying to be nice and talk to her about those baby photos.”
Grandma pulls the cart down the hall. I follow her. “Why would you want to talk to her about that?” she asks me.
“Because I thought maybe she’d had a miscarriage, too.” In the kitchen, I drop into a chair and watch my grandmother unload her groceries.
“Were you right?” she asks. “Did she have a miscarriage?”
“She had five,” I say.
This stops my grandmother. She stands with a jar of olives in her hands and looks at me with her eyebrows raised. “She never told me that.”
“Apparently she didn’t tell anyone. Not even Tony. She thought no one would care.”
“Well, that’s her own damn fault,” says my grandmother. “We would’ve helped her, but she never asked.”
“It’s not that easy,” I protest.
“I didn’t say it was easy, Lemon.” Grandma pulls two industrial-sized cans of crushed tomatoes out of her cart and sets them on the table. She leans over and stares at me. “Your whole family loves you and cares about you. You know that, don’t you? They might not always understand you or say the exact right thing, but their hearts are in the right place, and they want to help.”
“We’re talking about Livinia,” I say snottily.
“And if you don’t watch out, you’ll end up like her. Sad, old, bitter, and alone.”
I snort a little disbelieving laugh at my grandmother’s straight talk. “I don’t suggest you write a self-help book or volunteer at a suicide hotline any time soon,” I say, but of course I know she’s right.
She just shrugs. Hauls her cans of tomatoes off the table and stows them in the pantry, already fully stocked with soup, canned vegetables, spices, boxes of pasta. I remember my parents coming home from the road and raiding these cupboards for something good to eat. My father would make us grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, or my mother would scramble eggs with diced onions. These shelves were never empty, nor was a meal missed. My grandmother never slowed down for a moment after my parents died. “How did you get over my mother’s death so easily?” I ask her.
She turns to look at me. “I had you to take care of, and I had the rest of the family to deal with.” She dumps a head of lettuce and several zucchini into the crisper drawers of the refrigerator. “Sometime you just have to keep moving. It’s not such a bad thing to distract yourself so you don’t get mired in sadness and end up in a chair in front of the TV.” She looks at me pointedly.
I’m quiet for a moment, seething a little at the sharpness of her criticism. But again, I know she’s right. “I made you a pie,” I say sheepishly and nudge the pan in the center of the table.
My grandmother smiles at me. “I love your pies. What kind is it?”
“Lemon meringue,” I say begrudgingly.
Her face brightens as she uncovers it. “You haven’t made me a lemon meringue pie for years. It’s one of my favorites. Did you have this on the menu at your restaurant?”
I shake my head as she sets it on the table between us. The meringue has held up nicely. No slumping or weeping. I could take advice from the pie as easily as from my grandmother.
“Well, you should have.” She takes two small plates from the cabinet and hands me a knife.
“It didn’t seem fancy enough.” I score the meringue to make the pieces even, then cut deeply across the middle. “Everything at Lemon had to have sixty-five different ingredients. Tahitian ginger bosc pear crème brûlée with sugared violets and Thai vanilla bean ice cream over a puddle of pomegranate quince coulis blah blah blah blah. Jesus.” I lift a large firm piece of pie out of the pan and slide it onto a blue dessert plate for my grandmother. “Our menu read more like a Dean & DeLuca shopping list. No wonder the whole thing collapsed under its own pretense.”
“Do you miss it?” my grandmother asks me as she digs her fork down through the fluffy peaks of the pie.
I cut a piece for myself and shake my head. “Honestly, no. I miss cooking, but I don’t miss the constant chaos and headaches of trying to keep that place going. I made everything so complicated for myself there. Between Franny and me fighting and trying to compete with every other Manhattan restaurant to be the best at everything and get all the attention for us, I nearly drove myself insane.” I point my fork at her and say, “I’ll tell you this, the next time I have a restaurant—” Then I stop myself.
Grandma laughs at me and puts a large bite of pie in her mouth. I do the same. The crust crumbles, the lemon filling is velvet across my tongue, the meringue dissolves into silk.
Grandma closes her eyes as she chews. “Perfect,” she says. “The next time you have a restaurant, put this on the menu.”
Chapter
Thirty
I ’ve decided what to do with the water baby statue. Having it stare at me from the mantel seems a bit too Aunt Livinia-ish, and after her last outburst, I want to disassociate myself from her as much as possible. Plus I don’t want to explain to visitors that it represents a baby I lost once when I was pregnant, as if it’s some curious totem to be revered. Yet it’s too intimate a part of my life to put away in a shoebox at the top of a dark closet. Since we don’t have special graveyards in this country for the souls of lost children, I need to find my own sacred space to rest this part of my past, and suddenly I know the perfect place.
Eddie agrees to come with me. He’s been shy about the water baby. I’ve caught him a few times standing several feet away from the mantel with his hands in his pockets, staring at it. I wonder if he’s silently talking to it, like I do. Or if he’s trying to comprehend what this object means to me. I think his mother’s right; despite all his effort to comfort me, he’ll never quite understand what I’ve gone through. I realize now that he has his own version of sadness and anger over this, and ours don’t have to be the same for us to get through it together.
I wrap the water baby in a soft silky scarf, the same sunny yellow as my mother’s wedding dress. I’m tempt
ed to swaddle it like an infant, but I don’t. Eddie and I take turns carrying the water baby as we walk the Brooklyn streets that have become so familiar to me. It’s a gorgeous fall day, warm except for the blustery breezes that stir up orange and gold leaves around our feet. We hold hands, and neither of us says much, but the silence between us is comforting just now. I don’t need any more words.
My grandmother pops her head out of the kitchen when we come in the front door. “You need anything?” she asks us.
“No,” I tell her. “We’re fine.”
She nods, then leaves us alone as we make our way into the garden. The mock orange is long faded—the brown shells of its buds now litter the ground—but my mother’s old pear tree is in full glory. Vibrant green, yellow, and red leaves form a mosaic on the branches and a soft bed underneath. I crouch down and brush the leaves away from the base of the tree, looking for the perfect spot where my water baby will be safe. On the left side of the tree, near the corner of the fence, two rocks sit together at an angle, leaving enough space between them for the statue to fit comfortably.
Eddie unwraps the water baby. He holds her for a moment in the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves before he hands her to me. I cradle her briefly against my body one last time, then set her down. She fits snugly in the crook between the rocks. She is lovely beneath my mother’s favorite hiding place, and I hope that they know one another like they’ve known me, intimately, from the inside.
Eddie and I stand together, our arms wrapped around one another as we look down on her. We’ve both said good-bye to the thought of this child many times over the past few weeks. Since she was never here with us, we have no smile to forget, no smell to linger over, no memory of her soft skin against ours. What we have is the lost potential of this life. Something taken from us before we had a chance to know it. There is no finality of a burial for our child, just the slow drifting away of what we thought we’d have.
Luscious Lemon Page 26
