Waiting to Vanish

by Ann Hood

  Donna had bent her head, as if in shame.

  “I have the midnight blue. With the beaded top.”

  It was her funeral dress, prim, with a high neck and long sleeves. Daisy forced herself not to blurt out something about that being her mother’s funeral dress.

  “Wear that,” Daisy said. “Wear the blue.”

  Iris was well into her purple period when they went to the Porters that first time. She had decided that purple was an extension of herself. Of Iris. Her hair went from light brown to lavender, violet, eggplant. She wore metallic purple nail polish and makeup in all shades of purple, almost like a death mask. To the Porters’, she wore a bright purple jumpsuit and plum boots.

  Years later, after Alexander had left her, Daisy thought of how ridiculous the three of them must have looked. There were the Porters, in corduroys and sweaters, Mackenzie and Cal in plaid wool skirts, each wearing a single strand of pearls. And there were the Blooms. Daisy, in an effort to look sophisticated, looked like a child playing dress-up, her skirt sticking out from under the hem of her coat, her sweater too tight, the jewelry she wore clanking cheaply together. Donna looked overdressed in the midnight blue with the beaded bodice. She chatted away nonstop. “I had the original flower children. Iris and Daisy. Get it?” When Grammie saw Iris she gasped, and grabbed her heart.

  But all Iris could do was stand in awe. The house smelled the way a real home should, a mixture of cinnamon, peppermint, and pine. The table was a deep polished wood draped in lace, with a centerpiece of pine boughs and red berries. She pricked her finger on the needles to see if they were real. Then she picked up a knife, heavy and silver with a curved edge. She put it down quickly, seeing that all the silverware was in some mysterious and repeated order at each place.

  “She’s just trying to find herself, honey,” Donna had told Grammie.

  A huge tree loomed in the living room—the parlor, the Porters called it. Each branch held a shiny treasure, finely striped balls, longer ones with silver stars pressed in their centers, others with fluffs of white, like clouds, poking through gilt. The fireplace was trimmed in pine branches and holly. The logs snapped. There was mistletoe and poinsettias and silver bells, all the things of a fairy tale Christmas. And the Porters moved among the rooms with perfect ease and grace.

  Donna grabbed Daisy’s arm and whispered, “These are real Chinese rugs.”

  Daisy looked down at the carpet where she stood, its bright colors woven into an intricate design of birds and flowers.

  “I’ve seen three so far,” Donna said. “And I haven’t even been upstairs yet.”

  They drank egg nog, Mackenzie pouring it from a silver-handled ladle into tiny silver cups.

  Every few minutes, Mr. Porter cleared his throat and then poked the logs in the fireplace.

  When Mackenzie’s red sweater brushed Donna’s hand, she’d whispered to Iris, “Cashmere, I bet.”

  “We have a goose,” Cal had said. “I hope you like goose.”

  Grammie had laughed.

  “Who doesn’t like goose, Cal? With oyster dressing. A good goose with oyster dressing. I’d like to meet the person who doesn’t like that.”

  Everyone had smiled politely then.

  Cal’s lips kept sticking to her big horse teeth.

  “Not everyone does,” she’d said. “Like goose.”

  Later, back in their own house, the Blooms sat silently amid the litter of dirty dishes and empty bags of food. The wheel sent color across the tree. Already the light had burned through the sliver of yellow, so that every fourth turn left the tree bare and silver.

  “As for me,” Donna said finally, “I could live without ever eating goose again.”

  When no one responded, she said, “They’re a little hoity-toity for my taste. But to each his own.”

  Eventually Donna moved to Mexico. She had never paid taxes on the money she made from her readings, and she moved to a village full of other tax evaders. Daisy got letters from her describing the villa she lived in, the ocean view, the white beaches, and the bushes heavy with large red flowers. “Hibiscus, maybe?” she wrote. “I don’t know. All I know is their perfume is like a rich woman’s.”

  When Alexander left her, and Daisy thought she’d lose her mind from loneliness, she went to visit her mother. There was no ocean view, no white marble villa. She lived instead in a pink stucco apartment complex with bad plumbing. Whenever her neighbor flushed the toilet, her wall dampened. The sinks held old water, sluggish and rusty. The smell was not of a rich woman’s perfume, or of perfume at all. The air was full of chemicals from a nearby factory, which shot dark gray soot into the sky and left ash on rooftops.

  They took a hot, dusty bus to the beach. The beach was littered with beer cans and cigarette butts. The water swirled a milky green around their ankles.

  “Ma,” Daisy said, “are there chemicals in this water?”

  Donna lifted her head toward the sun, looked up, and smiled as if the clouds weren’t tinged with ash.

  “Chemicals?” she said.

  When they got back to shore, their blanket was gone. They walked in circles around the beach, looking for the spot where they had left it. But it was gone, stolen by some village children. They’d also taken a big straw basket, woven with red flowers, that Daisy had bought while they waited for the bus.

  Mackenzie cleared her throat.

  “Sorry,” Daisy said. She smiled weakly. “My mind wandered.”

  She sat on the couch, a sinking feeling in her stomach from remembering. Sometimes, she thought, it’s better to pretend you have no past at all. That your life just started yesterday. Like on Dynasty, the way people were always getting amnesia and starting new lives for themselves. They married different people, became a part of a new family.

  “I guess we should get Sam,” she said, without even looking at Mackenzie. “If he’ll leave his bed. Sometimes he lies there for hours without even moving.”

  When she looked up, there was Mackenzie kneeling on the rug. Sam had come into the room, his koala bear knapsack dangling off one shoulder.

  “Well look who’s come out of hiding,” Daisy said. “Now you two can hit the road.”

  She thought of her house without Sam’s silence. She imagined meeting a man and having him spend the whole night with her. She would go out tonight. To a bar or a party. She would be like Fallon on The Colbys. No memories. No past.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MEMORIES OF CAPE COD kept Cal going through Missouri and Kansas and Nebraska.

  The snow was deep, so white against the road that it blinded her. She wished she had sunglasses with her. The road ahead and behind seemed flat and endless and Cal thought of Cape Cod. She remembered warmth, sunshine and beaches, shells in the sand and the smell of Coppertone. Sounds came to her in a cacophony of wind chimes and waves, children and boats and sea gulls. It was like a symphony. At one point, she rolled down the window and the clean midwestern air shocked her, as if she had really expected to smell Cape Cod.

  Every August for ten years the Porters had rented a beach house. They moved everyone from the house in Rhode Island to a cottage on the Cape—Jams, Cal, Alexander, Mackenzie, Aunt Hope and her son John-Glenn, and Grammie. It was always the same cottage, a small weatherbeaten shingled house with slate blue shutters and trim. It was owned by an old couple, the Sweetlowes. Photographs and portraits of the Sweetlowes’ ancestors hung in dusty silver frames and wooden ovals on the wall, their eyes following the Porters everywhere. One summer, Hope had taken them down and hid them in a drawer. “They give me the creeps,” she’d said. The empty walls had white marks then, in squares and circles where the portraits had hung.

  In the backyard there was a cement slab that the Sweetlowes called the patio. They had hung Japanese lanterns around it on a clothesline, long accordion-pleated ones in off shades of pink and green and yellow. The first summer, Jams had installed a mosquito repeller back there, an electric box that attracted the insects, then electrocute
d them. All through the night they heard the zzzzzzt of mosquitoes against the coils that glowed blue in the dark. At the end of the summer, Jams had left it there for the Sweetlowes, and the next year when they went back to rent, the old man had gazed severely at Jams and Cal. “Mother and I don’t kill insects,” he’d said. He’d had a throat operation and spoke through a box covered by a bright ascot. The children were afraid of him and his wheezing electronic voice. The Porters bringing the mosquito zapper each summer became another ritual of the house, like Hope hiding the portraits.

  The house wasn’t really big enough for everyone, so Alexander slept on a sofa bed on the back porch, and Mackenzie had a cot out there. Hope and Grammie slept in a tiny attic room that was hot and stuffy and smelled, faintly, like cedar. Cal used to believe she could feel the house moving from so many people breathing in it. Jams felt it too, the walls expanding as if to accommodate all those lungs, but he said it was actually the ocean breezes moving the house slightly. Cal used to lie there and listen to the waves and the seagulls and the children whispering together and she’d dream of escapes. It seemed that with so many people, she wouldn’t be missed for a very long time.

  One summer, Cal used to get up early and walk down to the docks to watch the fishermen set their lobster traps. The men never paid attention to her as she sat, huddled against a post in an old black cardigan. She watched them work, mesmerized by their muscles straining and pushing against their T-shirts as they lifted the traps and prepared the boats to go out. The air then, at that time of morning, was so full of salt that it stung her face like a slap. She used to imagine being a stowaway on one of those boats. Although she knew that they didn’t really go anywhere, just out into the ocean for the fish, she still pretended they could carry her somewhere far away and exotic, that they could save her somehow.

  That summer—it was 1968—was the same year all the kids bought bell-bottoms at a surf shop in town, gaudy purple ones and light blue and white pinstriped ones and some just plain white denim. Everyone wore tight bracelets woven out of rope that got dirtier and dirtier as the summer wore on, and no amount of reason could make them take them off. In autumn, a thin bracelet of white flesh slashed their wrists, separating the tanned hand and arms.

  Cal planned elaborate escapes that summer, fanciful ones full of miracles in which she’d go for a swim, start out in the water right near the cottage, and then resurface on a distant shore. Africa, somewhere. Or an island in the Mediterranean. And the air was heavy with spices and hope. Sometimes she’d imagined flying away, rising out of the attic or the chimney of the house and looking down at it, a cloud within arm’s reach. She would watch the walls of the cottage pulsate and swell, watch the cottage until it became a speck below her like the whitecaps on the water.

  Then she discovered the docks and instead of lying in bed daydreaming, Cal went down there with a thermos of sweet Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and watched the men through salt-stung eyes. She came to know the boats, their names captivating her like a magic spell, enchanting her—Halcyon, Byzantine, Eloise.

  One morning, she remembered it as if it had been this very morning, she had sat and watched them work in a dull gray drizzle. A radio somewhere played a countdown of the best one hundred songs since 1960. She listened to “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and tried to remember the group who had sung it.

  A man came up to her. He wore a long yellow slicker and a droopy hat, like the picture of the Gorton’s fisherman on frozen fish boxes.

  She’d thought of that and laughed right out loud.

  “What’s funny?” he said. He had the slightest bit of an accent.

  “You look like a picture on a box of fish sticks,” she said.

  “Fish sticks, huh? You look like someone in a movie, the way you sit here every morning.”

  She thought he might be Italian.

  The radio announcer said, “That was number ninety-one. The Four Seasons.”

  She imagined getting on his boat and sailing to Italy with him. Although she had never been to Italy, her friend Missy had gone during college and told her about the old churches, and the way the Roman wall ran, crumbling, through the city. Missy had gone to Pompeii, and watched them excavate the city. Loaves of bread, whole, covered in ash. And fish. Cal wanted to go with this fisherman and find treasures, too.

  The hat partially hid his face, but Cal could see that he was younger than her. Maybe twenty-five or thirty. He had long sideburns, two big pork chops hugging his cheeks, and a full mustache. Blonde.

  “Which one is yours?” she asked, gesturing toward the boats.

  He stood very close to her and she felt a shiver deep inside. She licked her lips and tasted the ocean, imagined he would taste the same, salty.

  “That one.” He pointed to a small white boat rocking against the rain. “The Santa Maria,” he said.

  “Ah,” Cal said. “So you are Italian.”

  He laughed. The Herman’s Hermits sang “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”

  “You Americans,” he said. “Queen Isabella paid for those boats.”

  “I know,” she said. “Isabella and Ferdinand.”

  “I’m from Portugal,” he said.

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “I see that now.”

  “Or maybe I’m from off the cover of a box of fish sticks. Huh?”

  She was going to go to bed with him, she knew that then. And he knew too. Perhaps that was why he had come over in the first place.

  “If I don’t go out there,” he said, “I’ll lose two, maybe three hundred dollars.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “My partner didn’t show up today. He thinks maybe he’ll melt in the rain. Huh?”

  “Will you melt too?” Cal said. “If you go out there?”

  He’d taken her hand and pulled her away from the post she’d been leaning on.

  “Into you,” she thought he said.

  His accent seemed thicker now, and the sound of it made her light-headed.

  Inside, the boat was small and cramped, and smelled so much like fish that it almost didn’t smell at all. The rain sounded like people marching on the roof. They drank sweet wine his mother had made. He was twenty-four, and full of curly blonde hair, under the hat and all over his chest and stomach and legs. She had forgotten what young men were like.

  When she left him, it was late morning and all the other boats were gone. The rain fell sure and steady. She stopped for breakfast by the water, at the Crab Claw, a place she sometimes took the children for clam rolls. It smelled like mildew inside. Cal sat at the big window and gazed at the dark water. She ached all over. She could smell him on her, a smell not of the earth, but of the ocean. Sand and seaweed and shellfish.

  She sat and ate a full stack of pancakes, drenched in syrup she squirted out of a plastic Mrs. Butterworth, and thought of the other men she had known. Her best friend, Vivvie, years before, had made a list of 108 men she had been with. Cal had read the list, delighted at Vivvie’s adventures.

  “Fourteen Vincents,” Vivvie had said. “Seven Pauls.”

  On some lines, instead of names, there were descriptions. The red-haired guy from Boston College. Gina Ward’s cousin.

  Cal hadn’t needed a list. There were two before Jams, a Harvard divinity student named Matthew and a poet, Isaac. She and Vivvie would go into Boston and she’d meet up with one or the other of them. They would go to foreign movies or coffeehouses to hear poetry read. Isaac had a cold-water flat in the North End. He would read the poems she’d written and criticize them, the meter, the rhyme. They ate tabouli and wheat crackers in bed. Matthew lived in a boarding house on Mt. Auburn Street. He ate raw refrigerator cookie dough and sketched faces in torture, wide eyes and twisted mouths.

  She finished her pancakes and went to call Vivvie. The phone booth had graffiti carved into the wood. FUCK. PEACE. FUCK PEACE. Vivvie had lived in Vermont then, teaching literature at Middlebury.

  “I slept with a Portuguese fisherman,” C
al said as soon as Vivvie answered.

  “What? Is this a joke or something?”

  Cal tried to picture her friend on the other end. She had gained weight over the years. She wore blood-red and violet scarves with fine gold threads running through them that she’d bought when she’d studied Persian poetry in Iran. Her earrings hung, heavy and gold.

  “I did,” Cal said. “Just now.” She started to laugh. “My God,” she said, “he’s twenty-four years old.”

  “Where’s Jams?” Vivvie said. “You left him?”

  Vivvie had never liked Jams. Dull, dull, dull, she’d said. She’d refused to go to the wedding. “I’d jump up when they asked if anyone had a good reason why these two shouldn’t be united. I’d scream, my friend needs excitement. She needs—more. Let’s just call it a boycott of conscience.”

  Cal watched the clock over the bar. It stuck out of the mouth of a stuffed marlin,

  “He’s at the cottage,” Cal said. The face of the clock had a bright green liquid sloshing up and down. Waves.

  “Wait. You’re at the Cape, right?” Vivvie said.

  Cal heard her strike a match, then inhale.

  “He’s entertaining the kids right now. Probably playing Monopoly.”

  “You left him?”

  “No,” Cal said. “Not really.”

  When she got back to the cottage, everyone except Alexander was crowded into the living room. The rug, a black and white knobby tweed, had damp footprints on it. Jams and the children played Monopoly. Grammie was reading a short story from the New Yorker out loud, though not loud enough for anyone to really hear the words clearly. Hope was giving herself a manicure. All the files and polishes lay out on top of the television.