After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  They stepped outside into the frigid air. As the glass doors closed behind them with a little suction sound, shutting out the Christmas music and leaving them in the quiet dusk, Dennis held the mistletoe aloft. “Can I have that kiss now?” he said.

  And he leaned down and kissed her. And she kissed back, and back, and back.

  The next day, Dennis celebrated Christmas at home with Janet and her kids, and Tim came to our house for Christmas after spending the night at his parents’. Gwen and Dave came, and we all opened presents and ate ham and laughed in the glow of the tree. Mom had fun; she was proud to host her sister in her home, happy that her boyfriend and her family were together. But there was a cold undercurrent beneath the warmth of the day. If she and Tim didn’t last, she thought, next year would be ruined by the pain of missing him, of remembering him here amid the tinsel and the holiday music.

  The glow from that drugstore evening carried Dennis all through the holidays. In the meantime, he and Crystal continued their dance at work. They didn’t repeat the impulsive kiss, but they did go to the Black Horse Tavern on Friday afternoons when they got out early. They’d drink coffee for a couple of hours, until it was time for Mom to pick me up from school, just across the street.

  Soon Dennis started coming around to our house with Mom’s friend Richard once a week to watch Seinfeld with us. Richard—a jokey man I called Hairball because of his wild mane and full beard—had always been very kind to Mom, and it was clear that he liked Dennis better than Tim. I took this endorsement seriously, and Dennis was smart about making his case to me. He talked to me, asked me about my interests. He seemed intelligent and didn’t patronize me like some adults did. I also thought he was very good-looking, with those long dimples and cute teeth. He was more striking than Tim, it’s true, but he was also only eight years older than me. I called him Denny.

  Following some depressing natural law, Mom’s car had been giving her trouble since the moment she’d paid it off months earlier, and Denny was good with cars. What’s more, he was around—she couldn’t always afford a garage, and when the Tempo wouldn’t start, she had little choice but to call Denny, who always came and could always get it running again. In my diary at the time, I wrote, “Tim just comes and has sex with Mom and then goes back to college. But Denny does things for her, he fixes her car. He fixed everything he found broken around the house. Why won’t she date Denny?”

  Denny seemed to enliven my mother from the start. I knew, the moment I met him, that first night when he came over with Richard, that my mother was lying when she said they were “just friends.” Of course, she may not have been honest with herself about her feelings, either. Denny was full of barely contained energy, and he poured that energy into my mother just by looking at her. I knew he could tempt her away from Tim and his constant disappointments. I was tired of her overwhelming sadness when things with Tim weren’t going well, sadness that came upon her like a wave I was powerless to block, a force that drowned us both.

  Finally, Dennis walked out on a fight with his wife and never went back. They filed for divorce, and the proceedings moved along swiftly. He went to the courthouse downtown to finalize the divorce during a lunch break from work. When he returned and parked, Crystal had just gotten back from lunch, too, and they walked into the Shop together. As they approached their stations, he was walking ahead of her, and she said, “Hey!”

  He turned around, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Yeah?”

  And she stepped forward, grabbed his shirt collar, and planted a huge kiss on him, right in front of everybody. People stopped what they were doing to stare.

  “There,” she said. “Now you can go back to work.”

  Later, Dennis said of that moment, “It wasn’t the day I put a tack through my finger, but it could’ve been. She just blew me away. All the time, really.”

  22

  * * *

  after

  Not long after I arrived in Texas, Tootsie took the whole family on a trip to the Six Flags park just outside San Antonio, about three hours away. We stayed at a Motel 6 that night rather than drive home. When she announced that it was time to change for bed, the boys started stripping off their clothes, flinging their tiny shirts to the floor and hop-wiggling out of their pants. I gathered my pajamas from my bag and then stood there, hesitating. “It’s okay,” Tootsie said. “We’re all family.” But I hardly knew these people, did not feel like one of them. My uncle Jimmy was right there, and though of course he wasn’t looking at me, I wasn’t about to change with him in the room. I think Tootsie simply forgot what it was like to be twelve years old, considered me too young to have developed a sense of modesty. I mumbled something about having to go to the bathroom anyway and changed in there, behind the shut and locked door. That moment was when I realized that I was wary of all men, not just those on the official suspect list.

  I had a deep conviction that anyone could do anything—knowing that people can kill is far different from seeing the proof. I had learned that humanity itself did not have limits. I knew the killer was a man because of the grunt I’d heard that night; so I knew that men, especially, were capable of anything. That night in the hotel, it wasn’t so much that I thought my uncle might hurt me. It was that I didn’t want to be vulnerable near that violent energy, however deeply buried it might be, however well checked. I thought it was possible that his shyness was a product of shame, or a subconscious disguise. I was sure there was no such thing as an entirely benevolent man.

  In pictures from those first months in Texas, I am a specter: too thin, with bland, utilitarian clothes and haunted eyes. I got thinner and thinner, a project that was as much about denying myself as it was about looking prettier. The blue of my irises had darkened, nearly merging with my pupils, as though the blackness that threatened to fill my head had started showing itself to others, too. The dull clothes were my choice: grays and pale blues, loose-fitting jeans. I had one simple black shirt, my most striking piece. I remember a Walmart shopping trip with Tootsie, shuffling along next to the plastic cart while she pushed, gently touching the soft cotton clothing and occasionally adding a piece to the small pile I would take into the dressing room. As I dropped in a pale blue T-shirt, she suddenly barked at me: “Why don’t you ever wear anything that’s a real color?” I stammered something; I don’t remember what. What I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell her was that I was looking for ways to disappear.

  Although I feared Maine and did not want to return, I still considered it home, and would sometimes think wistfully of the tall pines that I’d left, forgetting that they cast thick, dark shadows that evoked my fear. So I did keep in touch with a few friends. Marie was faithful for years. She sent long letters adorned with beautiful drawings, and cards she picked out from the pharmacy where we used to roam the aisles wasting time, surreptitiously trying on funky nail polish while giving the tourists our best dirty looks. She sent me gossip about our classmates, clearly trying to keep her letters light and cheerful. She asked when I could visit, and we talked on the phone as often as we were allowed. Sifting through her cards and letters now, I see that many of them have disclaimers: “Warning: This note may be mushy or embarrassing!” I am saddened that she felt the need to temper her love for me, the best friend who would never come back to stay. But I was, in a way, put off by Marie’s friendship. As soon as I perceived need, I became less likely to write back. Connection to Bridgton had to be on my terms. It was risky. My former home had become a place I could barely look at on a map.

  * * *

  As strict as she could be, Tootsie didn’t impose a bedtime in the summer, at least not for me. I passed endless hours of insomnia in the same tight grip of panic I’d felt at Carol’s, telling myself over and over how far away I was from Maine, trying to believe that meant I was safe. I had a TV in my room—the first time I’d ever had cable—and I watched late into the night, Letterman followed by black-and-white sitcoms followed by hypnotic hours of infomercials, perfectly manicur
ed hands turning and turning sparkly stones against the light, confident men selling gadgets to fix every conceivable problem. I did my best to reach a kind of flatlined numbness. But when I slept, I kept the lights on. And my white Keds.

  I always thought about Dennis on those long nights, although I wouldn’t have been able to say whether I thought he had killed Mom. I had no proof, I had no specific reason to think so, but his image kept stepping into the blank space in my head where the killer would have resided. I kept an eye out for him, sure that there was no legitimate reason for him to visit Texas—therefore, if I saw him, he was probably coming after me. His face would appear suddenly in a crowd, then clarify into the bland face of a stranger. The world is full of tallish, long-limbed young men with light brown hair. I shook in the grocery store, in the mall, turned away from my friends to hide my suddenly pale face.

  * * *

  For reasons neither could remember, Glenice hadn’t spoken to Tootsie in twenty years—not one word. Now that I was in Texas, she made sure to call the house every few weeks, and sometimes, before she talked to me, she would ask her sister how I was doing. These years later, Glenice says that early on in my time there, Tootsie complained that I was acting strangely. “She always keeps her blinds closed,” Tootsie said. “And I’ll get up in the middle of the night and go to her room, and find her in the closet. Sitting in her closet, in the dark! She’s acting really weird. Creepy.”

  Glenice says she shot back: “What do you expect? She probably feels safe in there. You’re the psychologist; you went to school. You should be able to handle someone in distress.”

  Those long nights of brightly lit anxiety still live within me: I remember flipping the blinds up and down and then up again, debating which way made me less visible to the outside. But I don’t remember sitting alone in the dark in the closet. The idea is terrifying. And it’s disheartening to think that of all the fear I remember from those days, there were apparently hours of panic that were even worse, moments beyond my control or comprehension. I think about Tootsie roaming the house at night, unable to sleep. About her quietly opening my door to check on me and finding my bed empty. I think about cowering in the closet, in the grip of an unthinking animal fear, only to have the door suddenly pulled open to more darkness. And a woman who felt more contempt for me than compassion.

  Of course, Tootsie could have lied, or said something that Glenice later embellished without meaning to. It’s more likely that I was sitting in the closet with the light on, hiding from Tootsie the fact that I hadn’t yet gone to bed. But still it makes sense that Glenice remembers a story of me alone, isolated, trapped in the dark.

  * * *

  The night before I started seventh grade in San Angelo, Tootsie came into my room about twenty minutes before bedtime. I was sitting and watching television, or reading—I can’t remember. But I do remember how she loomed over me, or seemed to, how she took up all the space even in that large white room. I had laid out everything for the next morning on a blue trunk I used as a bedside table. It was all very neat, very controlled: jeans and T-shirt folded, underwear and bra tucked out of sight underneath. Socks balled up in the shoes I planned to wear, which were at perfect right angles to the trunk. I also had accessories arranged and ready: my watch and the thin silver chain necklace I’d found among Mom’s things. I was nervous about the next day, particularly about waking up early and getting ready in time to catch the bus. I hadn’t slept a full night in weeks. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

  I was also twelve, and starting junior high, so I wanted to look as pretty as possible the next day. If I attracted a boyfriend, I thought, maybe he would distract me from everything else, the way Angela was distracted by the very idea of dating. My little grid of accessories thus included purple eye shadow. It was a pale, frosty shade that my mother had given me after I’d begged, and then taught me to dust almost invisibly on my lids.

  As Tootsie’s sharp eyes surveyed the items on the trunk, I saw my compulsive precision through her eyes and immediately flushed with embarrassment. I was still awash in this feeling when she reached down, picked up the eye shadow, and said in a low, derisive voice, “You don’t want to look like a whore, do you?”

  My response was nothing worth remembering, a passive, shocked mumble. Tootsie put the eye shadow back down, but the message was clear: I was not to wear it. It was useless now, a shameful, secret thing. I remembered then how strange Tootsie had seemed to me that night she visited me and Mom in Maine, strong and direct and plain. She’d worn red cotton sweatpants, tapered at the ankles above chunky white sneakers, topped by a gray T-shirt that said ARMY in block print across the chest. The shirt was tucked into the waistband of her pants, and the bright white drawstring was tamed in a tight knot near the fabric. It was hard to believe that she and my mother were sisters, and I watched carefully when they laughed together, Mom’s melodic giggles dancing over Tootsie’s masculine rumble. That night in Texas, I sensed that Tootsie’s comment was a condemnation of the kind of woman my mother had been, someone foolish enough to care about looking pretty, someone girly. But I couldn’t stand to think about this, to face that living in a house where Mom’s form of beauty wasn’t valued was to begin the process of her erasure.

  But that night Tootsie insisted I sleep with the light off, leaving no room for argument. And so I gradually relearned that darkness could be a comfort, too.

  * * *

  Tootsie’s moods were volatile, her desires a moving target I could rarely hit. She had very rigid ideas about how a person should behave, ideas she usually shared with me only after I had done something to displease her. It is hard, now, to recall examples of what could make her angry; the system of rules was constantly changing, the triggers unpredictable and confusing. I was a relatively good preteen and teenager: I dressed neatly, studied, did not smoke or drink or stay out late. But the smallest infraction could make her explode, yelling until her face turned red, shaking and waving her finger inches from my eyes. I wasn’t used to this; this was the sort of fighting I’d only observed, or heard through my bedroom wall. Worse than the yelling, though, was the way she could coldly intone just one sentence and convince me that I wasn’t just misbehaving, but inherently bad—silly and ungrateful and weak.

  Above all else, Tootsie despised weakness. As the family story goes, she was always hardest on Gwen, her infuriatingly sensitive, quiet, slow little sister. She often repeated her mantra that those who couldn’t run a mile, regardless of the reason, were useless. She believed only the strong deserved to live. I wanted to be one of the strong.

  Tootsie would go on two-mile runs, timing herself to ensure that she made it in twenty minutes or less, ever mindful, at nearly forty, of keeping up with her eighteen-year-old recruits. She would return red and sweaty from the ninety-degree heat, startlingly soon after her departure, and I was always struck by the idea that if it took that much exertion for her, such a run would be impossible for me. My thinness was from not eating, not from exercise. I had knobby elbows and indented temples; I got winded easily. It occurs to me now that Tootsie could have taken me with her on slower runs, shared training tips and built me up. She could have taught me that strength can be earned and quietly built, not just summoned with a desperate, all-or-nothing force of will.

  Tootsie’s training as an Army recruiter had taught her to identify weakness and manipulate it, a skill I too often fell prey to. Sometimes when I really did break the rules, she would be shockingly lenient. This disturbed me more than anything else; after enough explosions and judgments, those calm and reasonable responses started to feel like a ploy. I felt real physical fear at the idea of displeasing her. Each time I came home from seeing Angela next door, I scanned the atmosphere of the house, tasted the air to see if Tootsie was wound up, my body tense, my heart speeding until I reached the safety of my room.

  Homework was my best excuse to hole up, since the only thing Tootsie and I really agreed on was that I could always
work harder. I’d bring home report cards filled with 97s and 98s and Tootsie would ask why, if it was all so easy for me, those grades weren’t 100s. If this comment was meant to be a joke, it was impossible at the time to differentiate it from her often outlandish criticism. I did not allow myself to think about how my mother would never have said such a thing, and tried not to dwell on my conviction that Tootsie wouldn’t speak to her sons that way. I told myself that I needed a place to live, period. And I was not interested in replacing my mother.

  * * *

  About four months into my life in Texas, I came home from school on a Wednesday afternoon, exhausted from sleep deprivation and the effort of speaking and moving and smiling like a normal teenager, from answering questions in class and listening to my classmates talk endlessly about crushes and movies and unfair parents and skateboards and their hair. I set my heavy backpack down in my room and noticed the silence in the carpeted house. I walked the length of it to the garage, which I found blissfully empty.

  I walked back through the house toward the bathroom, pausing for a moment to stare out the glass doors. My eyes traced the flat line of the canal along the horizon, just above the shallow-pitched roofs of the neighbors’ houses. The sky was white with heat, even this late in the year.

  Tootsie and Jimmy timed my showers to keep me from running the water bill up too high. I had gotten up late that morning, too late to shower, and I was now hoping for one that was unmonitored. It was there in the soothing water that I could actually relax. I could cry and not worry about Tootsie appearing and seeing my contorted face—she had made it clear that “we don’t lock our bedroom doors around here,” so I often felt self-conscious falling apart even in the supposed privacy of my bedroom. Of course, it was hard to enjoy the refuge of the shower when any moment could bring her hard knuckles rapping on the door, gruffly declaring, “Time’s up!”