The view was familiar. During the war she’d opened this window for Henry, out prowling around with his friends after a dance at the casino, getting into mischief. Their parents had a curfew but slept through it, and Henry would show up at two in the morning, smelling yeasty, and she’d have to help him in the window. It was never easy, since he was big and frequently laughed at his own unaccustomed clumsiness. Some nights he’d bug her to come out—Come on, Ar, don’t be a stick—and she’d relent, pulling on her sweatshirt and stealing across the lawn, the two of them paddling out into the awesome calm, the stars mirrored in the water.
She had the urge to sneak out now, climb through and come in the front, just to see if anyone would notice—possibly Margaret, sitting in the big chair again, replaying their conversation. She wished she could explain that her father hadn’t always been like that, that he’d had his wild times too. They’d all been young once, and made mistakes. Margaret shouldn’t blame him for forgetting what it was like.
She should do it, she thought, sit on the sill and swivel her legs out, twist and duck her head under. She’d walk around the house like a burglar, tiptoe in the porch door and peek through the window at them, give the children a thrill.
Silly. It was wet out, and she didn’t see well in the dark, never had.
She smoked her cigarette down to the Lucky crest, then held it out for the rain to extinguish, and when that didn’t work, spit on the end. She pitched it onto the lawn, then pushed herself up and closed and locked the window, all softly, as if she might get caught, but when she was done, the room oppressively bright around her, she didn’t feel as if she’d gotten away with something. No, she thought, it was the exact opposite.
22
1952. The day came back with the date embossed on the matchbooks, her dress, the cake that leaned because the base wasn’t strong enough, the ride away from the drunken reception in her uncle Carl’s Packard when they were finally alone, both of them reclining in the plush backseat with champagne headaches, eyes closed, while her uncle the teetotaler chauffered, and Henry took her hand. She had been twenty-three, an eager bride. Nearly forty-nine years, Emily thought, and steeled herself for the twinge of missing fifty. She wondered how much she would remember, how much she had already mixed with the trips they took in the sixties, the jerky home movies of the children waving by the inadequate railing, behind them Goat Island and the river swirling blue before it poured broken and foamy over the long drop. There was no thunder, just the whirring of the projector, the image flickering on the screen Henry set up by the fireplace on Pearl Street, popcorn dotting the green carpet she hated and couldn’t afford to replace. The children always wanted him to run everything backward.
Beside her Sarah laughed, and the movie drew her attention again, a toy cowboy riding a toy dinosaur like a bronco. For all its technical wizardry it was dull as mush, or maybe it was supposed to elude her. Half the things they laughed at were a mystery, in-jokes from TV shows far beyond her. As simple as the action was, she had lost the story line. The toys seemed to jump from one big production number to another, frantic as a bad musical. She wanted to go to bed, wake up and find it was tomorrow, the rain hanging over the lake. She and Arlene could go to the falls by themselves if no one else was interested.
She was hoping for rain now. She couldn’t ask them to give up a sunny day. Arlene would give her a hard time and eventually relent, but the falls would be wall-to-wall tourists, and she had no desire to subject herself to that brand of indignity. She’d lived on memories this far. There would be other summers.
Margaret disappeared upstairs to check on Justin again. The movie had to be over soon. It was past the children’s bedtime, fast coming up on her own. Rufus had long since retired to the throw rug in front of her dresser. The soundtrack drowned out the reassuring sprinkle of rain, so perfect for sleeping. She turned to check the window behind her, drops holding the coppery glow of the streetlight by the Wisemans’. It was too bright inside to see farther, only the dark reflection of the drapes, her face, mercifully softened, surprisingly unlined.
Forty-eight years, and even at twenty-three she hadn’t been a girl but a young woman accustomed to city living, knocking around that ratty apartment with crazy, leggy Jocelyn as if Pittsburgh were New York, the two of them destined for Broadway, Radio City at the very least. She had pictures from before that, snaps her father had taken of her on their back steps or at her grade school commencement, her peachy cheeks giving her a baby face, her body already blossoming under her gown. “Who’s that hot little number?” Henry would say, making fun, and sometimes Emily was jealous, since that Kersey girl was gone, not her anymore. How hard she’d worked to get rid of her, and then she missed her, wished she could return to that quiet life, her mother’s house a blur of steam on wash day, the bleached sheets on the clothesline belling like sails, tossing off their pins so she had to hunt for them in the cold grass.
Margaret reappeared and laid her head sideways on her clasped hands—Justin was asleep. This obnoxious cartoon, it was endless. The truly galling thing was that it had been a hit. Emily remembered the commercials playing incessantly those last weeks, the bizarre stereo of several TVs on Henry’s floor tuned to the same channel so that the clamor followed her as she walked down the hall and waited at the elevators, meaning the only peace she had was in the cafeteria, taking the corner farthest from the line and eating straight from her tray, the words of the newspaper running through her brain like ticker tape, meaningless figures.
The first time they saw the falls it had been sunny. The spray sent up its perpetual rainbow, as if blessing them. She’d been amazed, though she knew the science behind it as well as he did—the mist a prism bending light into its visible spectrum. How little it was made of.
Henry had been tempted to say something, to compare their love to it, and she kissed him, held her lips to his until she could shush him with a finger. He knew not to ruin it, and they stood there in Canada, married, with money to spend, knowing the motel waited for them at the end of the day.
The children crowed and cackled with laughter, Sam pointing at a toy spaceman sailing through the air, headed for an open window, his eyes bugged wide. The plot was creaking to its slapdash finale, which somehow involved a dog.
She checked her watch surreptitiously, lifting the blanket. It was late, but she was too tired to stay up for the news, and in truth she didn’t hold out much hope for the girl, not after three days. Kenneth could fill her in tomorrow. All she wanted to know was what it was going to be like.
She still had a pack of matches from the Bridal Veil Motel secreted in her dresser with the browning report cards and jagged baby teeth, the cardboard cover nicked and discolored, the match heads crumbling like a roll of Henry’s Tums she’d run through the dryer. She’d lost the cherished washcloth somehow, gone to spring cleaning or a move, used as a rag in Henry’s shop or sent to camp or college with the children. Careless of her, but she’d been so busy then. She had dreamed of sitting like this, no chore that desperately needed her attention.
Finally, the credits arrived. Kenneth and Margaret marshaled the children, making each of them give her a good-night kiss before heading up. Sam squeezed too tight, as if he were wrestling her. The girls were so different from each other, and from their mothers, Sarah affectionate, Ella shy and polite. And then they were gone, the downstairs empty, the ceiling above her thumping.
The bathroom was free. Arlene was hibernating again. Kenneth could close up. She’d have to turn on the radio by her bed and try not to fall asleep. It wouldn’t be long, she thought. At ten they’d have the weather.
23
It was too late for pie and way too late to start another movie, but Ken wasn’t tired. He’d done nothing today—the convenience store and the casino, but he’d sneaked those rolls in, maybe an hour’s worth of work. What he’d done with the rest of the day he wasn’t sure. Tomorrow would be lost as well. He’d shoot a roll of his mother in front of t
he falls, some of the kids, Lise. He’d have to catch up Thursday and Friday, and he worried that he’d run out of time and light. And still he wasn’t convinced any of them would come out, the Holga was so prone to leaks. He’d already gone through a whole roll of gaffer’s tape trying to black out the cracks.
Meg came down first, and went to check the dishwasher. It needed another run. Without the TV, the machine seemed louder, filling the dim kitchen behind her.
“How’s he doing?” Ken asked.
“He’s out, the poor kid. I don’t think he’s having much fun.”
“He had a good time at the arcade today.”
“I worry about him. He’s not like Sarah.”
“You mean he’s not like you.”
“You know who he’s like?” she asked.
“Who?”
“I think he’s a lot like you. He never says anything.”
“That’s like Dad, not like me.”
“It’s the same thing,” she said. “Very male, keeping everything secret.”
He laughed at this. She was the biggest secret keeper of them all.
“Okay,” she said, “I deserved that, but it’s true, he does keep everything inside.”
“Everyone does, to some extent. Imagine what it would be like if we didn’t.”
“I don’t have to imagine, not after the last year. It’s like I’ve been turned inside out.”
“You’re all right now though,” he asked.
“It’s easy here. It’s when I’m by myself that it’s a problem.”
He let it rest there. He wished they had had a fire tonight, but it was too late.
“What about you?” she asked. “You ever have times like that, or is it just me?”
“Of course,” he said, “all the time.”
He was glad to reassure her. Because it was the truth. He knew Lise considered him oversensitive, but he’d seen her own low moments, nights when, instead of crying, she patiently waited for the TV to reach the news so she could go to bed without him commenting on how early it was, and then when he followed her in she would be asleep, or pretending to be, cut off from him but her turned back sending a message, one he was helpless to translate beyond the fact that she was angry at him for not understanding her (which he didn’t). It was normal to have those moments, especially at this time of life, when one was tempted to look back and regret all that had gone wrong, all that was left undone. At times it could be paralyzing, but then there was work to get up for, and the children to get off to school. It seemed almost no help that the only solution was to keep busy, to avoid the question, really, since it never went away. But he couldn’t tell Meg that.
“They pass,” he said.
“That’s good. I’m hoping mine will. It’s just been a bad year, with Dad and everything.”
Bad years, he wanted to say. She’d been like this even before their father, before she and Jeff had fallen apart, before she’d done rehab.
“They will,” Ken said.
They heard Lise coming down the stairs and for an instant stopped talking, as if they’d been caught.
“Niagara Falls,” Ken filled in, as if he’d thought about it at all.
“Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch.” Meg’s fingers were claws in front of her face. They’d played this game since they were little, a legacy of their father’s love of the Three Stooges (their mother had no tolerance for them).
Lise dropped onto the couch beside him with her book. “The girls are still yakking away, but the boys are down.”
Out of habit, Ken thanked her.
“So, what time do you want to get going tomorrow?” Lise asked.
“Nine, I think,” Meg guessed.
The tone of the room had changed, and he knew that he and Meg could not talk seriously now. Lise laid a hand on his thigh while she read, and he wanted to apologize to Meg. It felt like a kind of contest he was trapped in, and while they were both there, a stalemate. They sat on either side of him like bodyguards, reading. He turned the TV on low, though the news wasn’t for another twenty minutes. In the kitchen, the dishwasher rolled on.
24
She got stoned in the garage before putting away the dishes. She liked to go to bed high, to slingshot herself into wild dreams, sleeping as if bludgeoned. It made waking up harder, but all spring she’d forced herself downstairs to get breakfast for Sarah before the early bus, the two of them silently occupying the kitchen—like now, only the clatter of the dishes to keep her company.
She liked this time of night, and being the last one up, beyond the grasp of everyone she’d disappointed, as if the world were fresh again, all things possible in her heart. If it were a clear night, she would go out on the dock and watch the stars, maybe sit on the screenporch in her mother’s coat and listen to the locusts drone, no one to interrupt her swerving thoughts, the way they rushed and coupled and then circled back again. To Jeff and the apartment she’d lived in in San Francisco, the night sky there, people stalking the streets at three A.M., the time she’d pitched a brick through the window of a parked car for no reason except she was hammered. And then rehab, the dented steel mirrors in the bathroom and how her face seemed to swell and shrink like a balloon and she thought she would not survive it, that she’d smash the hard plastic cup for her toothbrush and they’d find her bleeding out in a locked stall.
But she’d made it, here she was, living fucking proof. The fact made her laugh, made the simplest motions—reaching up and fitting these bowls into each other—solid and remarkable. She was even taking care of things, being responsible, though the thought sent her plunging again into how she’d fucked up everything with the kids and with Jeff, how it wasn’t completely his fault, the men she’d gotten involved with, and the crash, the grit of safety glass under her stockinged feet, the trooper half lifting her into his cruiser, and the defense she clung to, that, ironically, she hadn’t been drunk, which later she herself would find beside the point, an easy excuse, leading back to rehab, as if her whole life had landed her there, like a murderer marked from birth for prison.
She was not one of those holy-roller juicers who saw everything as destiny, God’s face in a cup of weak meeting coffee. It wasn’t like she was a poster child for sobriety. But she was here, and that in itself was astonishing. Sometimes she wondered where she’d been all these years.
She emptied the top rack of glasses and loaded the few new ones from the sink. Hanging the damp dishcloth from the handle of the oven, she noticed the silly salt and pepper shakers her mother bought at the flea market, the pink pigs dressed like waiters. She picked them up, one in each hand, examining their happy faces, their black vests, the towels draped over their arms. They seemed to be rushing to fill someone’s order, but gamely, rosy-cheeked.
She tried to recall a morning thirty years ago, maybe in winter, because she could picture snow falling on the Mitchells’ pear tree across the driveway. Her father wore a pressed shirt, his tie thrown over his shoulder so he wouldn’t spill on it, and orange juice, he always had a glass. He ate first because he had to catch the bus, taking the same chair every morning, his back to the refrigerator. Then when he was gone she and Ken and their mother sat down together and had their eggs or oatmeal. These shakers would be on the table, but she couldn’t see them. There were plates, but what they looked like she had no idea, as if her brain had been scrubbed clean of the memory. Glasses, silverware, the table itself—nothing. All she could recall was her father sitting there alone, reading the business section as he ate, and then the three of them sitting down without him.
She was going to put the shakers down again—foreign now, things she might have handled in a dream—but noticed a film of grease on the stove top. She soaped and wetted a sponge and wiped between the burners, then set them back where they were supposed to go.
She did the counters and the chopping block, pensive, in slow strokes, her eyes going unfocused. While it was still dark, her father would walk down Grafton Stree
t with his briefcase to the corner of Farragut and wait for the bus by the sign. In winter he wore galoshes over his good shoes and a black watch cap. There were three or four other fathers who waited with him, discussing money or sports, whatever it was fathers discussed. When the bus came they filed on and it rolled off, blowing diesel exhaust, the silhouettes of their heads in the lit windows.
She rinsed the sponge, filled Rufus’s water dish from the teapot and refilled the teapot from the tap. Finally, she turned the lights off in order: the outside light and then the kitchen, leaving only the brow of the stove to guide her, the yellow porch overhead, the lamp above the puzzle, and lastly the brass one by the gateleg table. At the door to the stairs she paused, appreciating the dark, then went up, her father following her, cruising through the cold city, lost in his newspaper.
25
Emily woke in the vast, blank middle of the night, as if the Lerners’ alarm had gone off. It hadn’t, but she sat up, head cocked, listening for what it might have been. The rain had slackened, and as the room divulged itself—the bright clock, the shadow-box mirror on the dresser, the drapes, the closet door—she was certain she heard someone prowling through the downstairs. At the foot of the bed, invisible, Rufus exhaled indignantly, and the burglar evaporated.
She tipped her head, her mouth open yet holding her breath, until all she heard was a tiny whine, a piercing set of empty frequencies like a skewer through her head—an absence of sound that she understood was manufactured deep within her skull, one she knew from afternoons when she skipped lunch, precursor of a debilitating headache.
The window flashed, a lunging shadow painted on the drapes, making her clutch the covers, unconsciously reach beside her as if to wake Henry. Just then a wall of thunder banged and broke open, uncomfortably close, echoing over the hills, slowly dispersing in crunches like distant fireworks.
Wish You Were Here Page 32
