by Sara Dillon
Mommy, me come too, me come too.
Mommy needs to work, Madina. You have to sleep, sleep.
No, no, me come too.
The nighttime temperature in Greensboro fell to the 30s. Sometimes I could pick up Vermont’s NPR station and sometimes I couldn’t. I kept thinking that Daddy would be proud; at least he wouldn’t disapprove. It’s beautiful country, honey, he might say in his vague, disinterested way.
I asked him at night, as I smelled the old wood and the apples deep in the wood and sawdust, Is it all right like this?
I would have to do something or other, I knew. But I could do something. If I could manage to lecture on contract prices ex factory or ship’s rail, I could manage to find something near Greensboro; like, work in the IGA, or TrueValue, a mystery figure. GED? they’d ask. Well, actually, PhD, JD, lover of a Japanese rock star, lecturer in obscure points as to risk passage on the high seas. I can do this. Believe me, I can.
The phone
It was a nice little house we rented in Greensboro. The kitchen had stayed untouched for decades, but it hadn’t gone ratty. It reminded me of Aunt Olive’s kitchen in Hyde Park. Tidy white painted cupboards. I enjoyed lying awake at night, listening to the kids’ breathing, and I would accuse myself of every kind of failure in the world.
I didn’t like to sleep away from the kids; I didn’t understand how people could sleep separately, in far-flung bedrooms, leaving it to chance that they would all ever meet again in the morning. Madina slept in a daybed in the corner of my room; Emmet on the floor in a special bed made from quilts and comforters.
Your idiotic clairvoyance, I thought. Less like a talent in the modern sense and more like medieval hysterics—gazing out the window during a faculty meeting, closed up in silence like a tiny Sphinx, and looking for clues that the end of the world was at hand. That the ultimate had arrived.
Madina, be kind to him, he is a so much smaller than you, I heard my repetitious commands. She was wrapped in a beach towel, her bare feet sticking out at the bottom—she was never cold—while Emmet collected rocks.
Now wash the rocks, Emmet, I said, as this was one of his favorite things to do.
In Greensboro, it was odd to be able to decide everything myself—absolutely everything, to go to Willey’s store whenever I liked, and buy what I liked. I knew I would have to phone Una. It was unthinkable what I had done. There were explanations you just couldn’t make to my sister; she was merciless for the most part. Explanations such as, I was being inundated with excessive feeling and I had to follow its lead; or, I could clearly see my long pattern of submission and I knew that this was the only thing left.
I would have to tell her that I’d had a “breakdown;” or that I couldn’t “deal with it” anymore. I feared breakdowns, though, and didn’t like to use the word. It was Gramma’s old word, and using it would leave a residue of contamination or a threat that victory would not, in fact, be mine in the end.
And perhaps I still believed in some corner of my soul, in the back bedroom of our old Galway homestead in Timard, that I would be, in some indefinable way, victorious.
I was afraid to phone Una. But it wasn’t just that—I was also afraid of Una. I could never stand up for myself against her view; whatever she said I should do looked best at that moment. It was never until long after that I realized it was not at all what I wanted, that she had been advising me to be someone else entirely, and perhaps I’d been seeking advice on how to do just that. She sounded so right, so plausible, and every time I tried on my own to figure out where to go or what to do, I just saw pink lilac bushes or long porches in the dusk before my eyes—powerful and memorable, but without any possibility of translating this into a form that others could believe in. I thought in images, and it didn’t hold up with her.
I decided to write her a note instead.
She had always made fun of these notes of mine. You love scribbling these little messages, she said, and she was correct. I hated to witness the reaction of others to myself, that was it. And jotting down a little note made it very unlikely that I would see how they took the contents. I would not have to see other people react to me, I mean. When next I ran into them, they would already have opened the note and read it and got out their raw reaction, had time to regroup and edit.
Una could be scathing.
I would never be forgiven at my law school job, no matter what reason was given. You just don’t leave law classes in the lurch; it is unheard of. Everything is on a litigation model. From that point of view, to drop the ball and disappear has nothing to do with psychology. It’s a professional lapse. I would have blown any chance of return by now. Once they knew I was alive and wandering around Greensboro, their concern would quickly, in a heartbeat, turn to exasperation.
And then within a week, they would be whispering in the hallway about how they should go about finding a replacement. Is subject matter really a consideration, or should we go for a deeper pool of candidates this time? In any event, I had been from the beginning a martian to them; the accidental choice. No matter how large a group of students I might actually have in a class, they continued to think my classes must be small, select, on the fringe. Had they really heard the last of me, they would wonder, or would I make some trouble, accuse them of some mistreatment?
Cooking up allegations, is she, trying to blame it all on being a woman? Or would she just go? This reminded me of standing in the law faculty tea room in Dublin, rain falling outside as it always seemed to be, the television on and Princess Diana speaking in one of her famous interviews, her eyes ringed round with kohl, explaining how the royals wanted to get rid of her. But she won’t go quiatly, that’s the trouble, she won’t go quiatly, she repeated.
It might cross their minds to wonder if I would go quietly.
As the law school must have seen me, I was this shy woman who had spent years in Dublin; she did have those worrying holes in her résumé, the abrupt jumps, the unexplained shift from one subject to another, no clerkships, no demonstrated interest in the profession, hardly any practice, and she never explained it, just stared into space and said, yes, in that vague way.
And she was always complaining about something, but in a way that made it seem that there was really something else on her mind, something unspoken, wrong. Meet her in the law school hallway and she would start right in; how tired she was, the nagging tickle in her throat that made her run from meetings, the exhausting pickups at day care, her hands peeling from the cold outside and dry heat in, her mother’s spine disintegrating. Conference attendance was tapering off, said she was getting phobic about planes.
It was true I could hardly think of getting on planes the way I used to. It had something to do with the kids—I wanted to protect them every minute and didn’t want to risk leaving. I felt danger in the sky and wanted to stay with them, always with them.
At the next catered faculty lunch after my disappearance I would be the talk of the place—You know, I never felt she was the right replacement for Ron to begin with, if only she doesn’t make some diversity thing out of it. Is the Dean inclined to factor it into this year’s hiring or what. It had always been, well, funny, astonishing, incredible that I had shared space with them, that I had conversed with them; it was the anti-fate and I had endured mine.
I waited for Una to write back; I had not included the phone number to the house, though I had managed to locate it. I waited in fear; I was terrified of her, though I was the older one and she insisted up and down that she had grown up in my shadow. I couldn’t decide anything for myself; couldn’t drive properly, in the sense of never doing more than fifty even on the highway. Highway merging I considered a left hand turn. I couldn’t buy furniture on my own; it was bound to be a mistake if I did. I’d always lived out of a suitcase, from apartment to apartment. That was in the days when I never stayed still. Now I didn’t want to go anywhere. To pretend otherwise was too much, too much of a burden.
To do things over Una’s ob
jection was like walking and not leaving footprints.
The line between August and September was abrupt up there in Greensboro. September really meant something, despite the fact that winter was much less of an ordeal than it used to be, even compared to when I was young. There was serious mist on the fields in the morning. We saw deer. The car started hard. The stars at night were sharp as knives. The lights paused when they were turned on in early evening and, poof, lit up everything in strong contrast.
Emmet was confused; he wandered around the new house, looking behind chairs and under the bed. He’d only been with us a year, though, and had hardly had time to get used to anything. Madina and I rocked him to sleep; he would be a mommy’s boy and a big sister’s boy. He would take quickly to pouts and self-pity. Little tufts of pale brown hair had begun to sprout from his almost bald head; he no longer looked so teeny tiny. He tried to climb the stairs after Madina, and she obliged by hauling him up and down.
A mother cat with her kitten, that is what it looked like to me, Madina’s strong little hands grabbing him by the shirt and pulling him forward.
When I’d brought him home the summer before, the doctors had told me to get as many calories into him as I could, and so I did. I would chase him around the kitchen with a spoonful of pudding and heap his high chair tray with a mismatched assortment of foods designed to fatten him up. Though he was nearly two and a half then, I gave him baby formula and snuck canola oil into his milk. At two, he had barely been the size of a small infant, but under the barrage of food, he was beginning to look chunky and it was harder by the day to pick him up. Gramma called him a bag of cement, or a stuffed turkey.
At night when he was asleep, I thought of him with his orphanage group, standing idly inside one of the miniature summer houses on the orphanage grounds, silent in the little dacha, twelve little boys and girls sucking on apples, the Central Asian summer sun beating down on towels spread across the windows.
Emmet and Madina, from the place where it snows every night in winter and swelters in 100 degree heat for a short summer. When they were asleep, I would go and smell the faint perfume from their hair, smile at their earnestness. Where dreamland? Emmet wanted to know.
I was starving, that was it.
I could see the boat leaving the shore—the boat is gone; the boat has left. Le bateau est parti, or would it be s’est parti; the grammar of various languages garbled together.
Teach me French and I’ll teach you German, I remembered Miles Bradford in the hallway of the high school saying that to me. How daring, how unthinkable such a remark seems now. I had no idea at the time.
I was starving, and I would die soon. It was the last chance.
Now at least I could put my feet up and look out at the first twinges of red in the trees. Here I am, I thought.
Una
No one came back. Not one person from any of the many motifs came back.
They all left and never came back. My heart periodically turned to stone, a stone smaller and more useless all the time. In Greensboro, for the very first time, I was glad that no one could guess where I was or find me. Before, over years, I had imagined every day that someone would appear at the door, clothes streaked with mud, having tracked down my whereabouts, followed my trail, my e-mail, my anything.
I walked over to Madina’s bed and watched her peaceful breathing. Her lovely black hair made a broad fan on the pillow; the heavy lines of her eyelids in perfect rest. I touched the coastline of baby hair beneath the more grown up hairline and she stirred in irritation. Emmet was sprawled out unceremoniously, his chubby hands outstretched as if to make sure he wouldn’t miss anything, even in sleep.
The phone rang after nine—it felt very late. The cars had stopped passing and the stars were bright and sharp over the old Grange Hall building. I let it ring twice, three times. It was like being at Park Baun again, the overloud ringing of a phone in the quiet house. No one had the number yet, I was sure of that.
What the hell are you doing? I heard Una’s voice. There was a moment of relief, as if now someone could tell me what to do.
Una, hi.
What the hell are you doing? I don’t care about myself, but what about Gramma, what about your job?
I had a breakdown, I said. It seemed to work, even Una could respond to a breakdown, the old Irish appeal.
Don’t be mad at me, please don’t.
We thought you were dead or something.
No, you didn’t. I left a voice message at Sven’s office.
At first we did.
Una said she was coming up. No, I said, please don’t. Yes, I will, she insisted. I’ll be up tomorrow. Not yet, I pleaded. We’re just settling in.
Settling in? she yelled into the phone. Someone has to save this situation and I’m sorry to say that no one but me ever tries to deal with these things.
We are settling in. I have a plan, I said. My plan was shattering, though, as I spoke. I was weak and Una was terribly strong, frighteningly strong, not beset by my sort of excessive brain waves, what I called the upside of OCD, trying in better times to make her laugh.
It’s a nice house, I said, thinking that might appease her. Una loved real estate, and loved discussing buildings.
But you don’t own it, she said.
She was right, of course. She always accused me, and her husband Sven, of being “risk averse.” We didn’t have the get up and go to leap on an opportunity, everything passed us by. All Sven wants is a long weekend in a rental property, she would jibe at him. You’re right, Sven would reply, I don’t feel like fixing roofs.
She tended to make pronouncements like, I’m taking stock, things are going to change. In the middle of every summer, she would say, It’s happening again, it’s getting away from me, and I won’t let that happen.
Una, Una, my little sister, she was my baby and I would protect her. She always claimed to be an extra, an add on, an also ran, that Gramma hadn’t liked her all that well, she came at the very end of four; as a small child she was strangely quiet, and, according to her, spaced out, everyone talked too much and she had nothing to say. She accused me especially of talking too much; I hogged the floor constantly, drowning her out.
If it was payback she wanted, she had more than accomplished this by now.
Una denied having any happy childhood memories. In fact, she often denied having any memories of herself as a small child. But I loved being a child, I loved our big stucco house in upstate New York, loved the yard, the street, the pond; I loved the Catholic school with its blue jumpers and blue shoes; a school built from old farm buildings. The kindergarten was the old greenhouse, the third grade was created out of the old barn. The twisting road into the school was lovely on rainy days, with rippling puddles and the smell of rain most intense as we went into the cloakroom. Winter was beautiful and early summer was overwhelming. We spent a lot of our time nursing baby birds that had fallen out of trees, and crying over their inevitable deaths.
Una might just have been getting back at me by saying she didn’t remember anything. How could she not recall anything at all? Not even Daddy coming home from a business trip on a summer evening, and all of us running down the backyard walk to meet him? His white shirt was rumpled and wrinkled, but the starch still perfect in the collar and cuffs. He’d been on the road all week; how many hours? we would ask. Una was small then, but how could she say she remembered nothing, zero, none of it?
Daddy was handsome in a certain way; heavy-set in the wonderful manner of Jackie Gleason, solid, a graceful polka dancer for all that he had too much of what people in those days called a paunch.
Una became mine when our older sister Marie died. Marie was the oldest in the family, older than our brother Jack. Marie was the first born, Gramma’s favorite. She had been born with a hole in her heart, that is how they explained it to us, and her lips turned blue when she tried to ride her bike.
I always wanted to chase after her when she went off with her friends, but Gram
ma stopped me. She protected Marie, and let her have secrets. Marie was thirteen when she had her operation. I remembered sitting in the car, looking up at the big bleak hospital; it was an early summer evening and everyone was scared. The doctor was not nice, he was not telling them anything. I had the feeling he was letting Marie die, maybe he even wanted her to die. And when Marie did die, I tried to tell Gramma that we were even now—two girls, even Steven, and she said, But that’s not what we wanted. Gramma disappeared then; she was lying down for days. I knew she loved Marie in some way she would never love anyone else.
Gramma saw everything according to the way she imagined the feelings of others; the doctors who didn’t value us enough, who ran away and hid as Marie lay dying. We were singled out for poor treatment; except by those people, like nuns, who singled us out for lovely treatment. It had to be one or the other, so cruel to us or so good to us. There were no random events or bureaucratic bungles, only the full intention of the universe playing around us like a spotlight at every turn.
And so it was that Una had to be mine, and I had to make sure she would never die.
They sent Una and me to peoples’ houses; I didn’t like people we didn’t know very well giving us baths. Poor Una, she was mine by then. I decided I’d better protect her; she could be lost, gone, and I had to keep her. Being with her was like being with myself. I always held her hand and waited for her and looked for her. Though this did not seem to have registered with her—especially as she insisted much later that she didn’t remember anything of it—not a thing; just nothing.
One hot evening, when everyone was sitting outside the way they used to back then, Una disappeared. She was probably around three years old at the time. She vanished, and for me the world seemed to be coming to an end. Gramma was afraid, too, I could see that. I raced up and down the street, calling her name. Finally I found her on the porch with three elderly unmarried ladies who lived in a house on the top of a little hill. Una was quietly eating cookies and looked unconcerned at my panic. A great relief, like life slowly coming back to me, a reprieve, filled my heart, and I guided Una down the hill and back home; my own little treasure.
