I’m not sorry I missed Christmas. I couldn’t have sat through it, a whole day of him being there, across the table, next to Daddy, clinking glasses of Dewar’s. I think my ears would have bled to hear the sound of their goddam ice cubes rattling and the two of them talking about who bought what goddam piece of land and how much it was worth and how quickly they were going to be able to turn it over. I couldn’t stand the idea of him asking me about my sociology class when all he cares about is money.
How was Mom? I called her after I got Daddy’s letter when I knew he’d be at work and Jacqueline answered and said that Mom was having a nap and she wasn’t able to come to the phone. She said that the next day too and the day after, so I stopped calling. I might call her again or write to her. Who knows, maybe I’ll go round there one day and burst into the room where she’s lying in bed and make her talk to me. Only we both know you can’t make Mom talk to you if she doesn’t want to, can you?
So what else is new? Are you going home for Spring Break? What about the summer?
I’m thinking about going fruit picking in Florida this summer. Tawny’s grandparents live there, they have some huge farm and they always need people to pick oranges and grapefruits. I like the idea, you know? Getting up with the sun, the earth under my feet, the sky blue and clean every day, the simplicity of it, just picking fruit over and over and over. Not having to think about anything or figure anything out, just letting my hands do the work for me. Chuck says fruit picking would bore him rigid. He wants to go to the Hamptons, he can’t get why I don’t want to go there, especially when we could stay in the Bridgehampton house, so I’ve stopped explaining it to him. I mean, really—how can he not get it? I think I’m going to have to break up with him, I don’t think I can be with someone who can’t even get that. Did you like him that night you met him? I know he was playing pool with Paul most of the time so you didn’t get to talk to him much. He has nice eyes and a great smile and he cracks me up—that’s what I like about him, but it’s not enough, is it? Do you think it’s enough? I liked Paul, you guys seem so happy together. He’s totally your type—that cute and preppy thing. He reminded me of Jason Morton—and don’t pretend you didn’t like him, I always knew you did!
You know what it was I wanted to ask you—do you ever think about our grandmother? Not Nana Brooks, the other one, Daddy’s mom. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately—what kind of person pretends that their mom is dead, especially when she lives in the same city? Do you remember how scared we were when she came to stay? How we didn’t even know who she was that first night? You were terrified when she took her teeth out! I never knew that Daddy spoke another language before I heard him yelling that night, the two of them at the top of the stairs shouting at each other. I didn’t even know what language it was except it sounded like the way Mr. Stepanov talked to his son when they came to tune the piano. Do you remember that night? You were standing behind me in the doorway of the playroom—I remember that, because when Daddy saw us listening he yelled at us both in English to get into bed.
It probably seems weird, wondering about her now—our grandmother—but I kind of missed her after she left. It wasn’t her fault that she scared us, with her teeth and her smell of smoke and her scary language. She did speak a bit of English—remember? She spoke a little bit. She showed me how to sew one day, remember those little round embroidery things she was always sewing? She threaded the needle for me and made me my own one, so I could follow her stitches back and forth and over and under. She went slow, so I could follow her, pointing if I made a mistake and smiling and saying “good girl” when I got it right and “little, little” when I got it wrong.
I was trying to remember why I ran into her room that morning and I think it was because of that—the sewing. I think I ran in to finish sewing one of those things, or maybe start a new one, and the bed was all made up and fresh and the window was open but you could still kind of smell her a little bit, if you breathed hard enough. Daddy was gone to work already and Mom said she’d had to go to the hospital because she was sick and when I asked her when she’d be better she said she didn’t know. I waited up for Daddy that night, made myself sit by the door with the light coming in from the landing so I’d hear his key and even though I fell asleep, I woke up when I heard the front door opening and I ran to the top of the stairs and I asked him when she’d be back. He looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was talking about at first and then he said he didn’t know. It was Sunday at breakfast when he told us she’d died and I thought maybe I’d heard him wrong, because he didn’t cry or anything, just kept reading his New York Times and then he asked Wendy to get him a glass of water and then he drank it all back and kept reading the paper.
You know what I’ve been wondering lately? When was her funeral? Did they even have one? Did Daddy go? I know I’ve asked you before and you said you don’t remember any of this stuff, but I thought maybe Mom might have said something about it to you. Maybe she’d tell you if you asked. She’d never say anything to me.
Write me back, Ruth. I miss you, you know? Maybe you don’t know, but I do. If you’re there for Spring Break maybe I’ll come up again? Or over, or wherever it is. I think that old joke about New Yorkers not knowing where anywhere else is is totally true. Chuck showed me this joke map in some magazine the other day, of the United States, and New York is huge and in the center, and all the other states are fucked up and tiny and weird shapes and some of them don’t even have proper names and over West Virginia, which is only a tiny speck, there was a line that said: “Is there really a state called West Virginia?” You’d probably have to see it to find it funny but it cracked me up, it really did. I think you’d think it was funny too, if you saw it.
So let me know anyway, write me back. I hope school is good. I hope you’re not too cold and you’re not working too hard—there’s plenty of time for that, you know, after. Enjoy school, Ruth, don’t forget to enjoy it, will you?
Love,
Alli xx
P.S. They have this student exchange program here where I can go spend a semester in Europe!! I’m thinking about it … I’ll let you know … you’d have to come visit!
P.P.S. Sorry about all the stuff I dumped on you that night Chuck and I drove up to visit. It was too heavy and you’re right, it was mostly just the drink talking. Forget I ever said anything.
Dear Mum,
I can hear your voice! I know that might sound fifty kinds of crazy but I really can hear you, like you’re talking to me! I want to say “it’s wild” like you do, maybe I’ll start saying that!
I love what you said about the stars, driving up into the universe. I can picture it too, the way you described it. I’d love to do a trip like that, drive across the country like that. Maybe I will, one day at the end of the summer.
I wonder if you made up with your dad. And what happened with Chuck? You were thinking about dropping out of Columbia even then, it sounds like, maybe it wasn’t just because you had me at all.
Oh, and at first I was confused about who you meant at the table at Christmas but it was your dad’s boss, I bet it was him, because you don’t want to come out here either, to his house. And I bet I was right that he was having an affair with Nana Davis, I bet that’s why you hated him.
Maybe you’ll tell me in the next letter!!
Rhea
March 2, 1981
Dear Ruth,
Thanks for your letter! I loved getting it, it was such a surprise! I didn’t know you had my address—I guess you got it from Mom because I gave it to her a while ago. She hasn’t written yet, but, you know, she’s not much of a letter writer, and I guess I’m not either. That’s why I’m writing you today, because I know if I don’t do it today, I might not ever do it!
You asked a lot of questions and I want to be sure to answer them all because I hate when I ask people questions and they don’t answer them.
We’ve no phone, by the way, so I can’t give you my number. I’m surprised Daddy didn’t tell you that. It drives him crazy and he’s always making snide remarks about Dublin being so backward. I like it though, talking to him from the phone booth by the harbor, especially when he starts on about Mom and how badly she’s taking everything and how if I don’t come home it might even kill her! He said that the other night—can you believe it? I bet you can. When he says things like that it’s nice to be able to close the door of the phone booth and leave his words there, trapped inside the glass.
The place where I’m living is in Dublin but it’s not the city exactly, it’s sixteen miles outside, so it’s kind of like living in Long Island or Jersey or something, but it’s still Dublin. They call Dublin a city but it’s not really. It’s small, you know, the center of it is tiny, like a few streets and a river and that’s it. Where we live is a village, smaller than Bridgehampton. Dermot’s store is part of this little strip of stores on the main drag and there’s a market and a bar and a library and another bar and that’s about it! In the summer, the market sells other stuff too—like beach chairs and towels and this soft whipped ice cream with a piece of chocolate in it that they call a “99.” (I’ve no idea why it’s called that by the way, but you have to have one when you come.)
It’s wild being so close to the sea. I love it, it’s my favorite thing about living here. I read your letter on the beach this morning—I swim there every day. The beach is really big and kind of stretched out, some days you have to walk miles to get to the water and other days it’s right there. It’s different from the beaches out in the Hamptons or anywhere else I’ve been. It’s not the ocean though, it’s the sea that separates Ireland from England, and Dermot says he’s going to take me to the west coast someday soon so I can see the Atlantic from the other side!
There’s no need to worry, by the way, the bombs and stuff you see on TV are all in the northern part, not where we are. It’s not that far away, I guess, but it’s so quiet here and really safe. It’s like being in another world. I couldn’t imagine a place more different from New York.
I’m sorry you’re mad at me about the wedding, but there wasn’t really time, everything just happened so fast! You know how people say you know when you meet the right person? From that first night I saw Dermot playing in the bar, I knew. I just knew, I can’t explain it. I never used to believe in love at first sight until then, but there was something about him—I don’t know, Ruth, it’s like I was mesmerized by him or something. He has this kind of calm about him. He plays this kind of hand-held Irish drum—they call it a bow-rawn—and his hand was moving so fast and he wasn’t even looking at it and he was smiling and his eyes are gorgeous, and it was like his drum was the heartbeat of all the music, the heartbeat of the whole night, like it was kind of channeling into my heart or something, you know? And I just knew, then. Before we’d even spoken, I knew. Did you feel like that when you met Paul?
We look funny together—he makes me look tiny, he’s so tall. When he puts his arm around me it feels so heavy on my shoulder. Once, when we were riding in a taxi cab, he cupped my waist with his arm and it felt like I was locked in so tight—like the way it feels on a roller coaster when they lock the safety bar. It felt so safe. He makes me feel safe.
You’d love him, you have to meet him. Mom and Daddy don’t want to and that’s fine. They can’t see beyond his age but age is only a number, it’s what’s inside that counts. And no, he doesn’t tour or anything—they play in bars in Dublin mainly, usually on the weekends. The rest of them play midweek too, but he doesn’t anymore because he wants to come home after being in the store all day. You know that, don’t you? He owns a store—a butchers. It used to be his father’s. I offered to help him out in the store but he doesn’t want me to. He’s so sweet he says he just wants to take care of me and I shouldn’t have to do anything, that especially since I’m “expecting” I should be a “lady of leisure”! He has all these cute expressions like that and it’s so funny, all these other words he uses for regular stuff and a lot of the time we have to stop and figure out what we’re talking about or we wouldn’t know what each other was saying at all!
What else did you want to know? Oh, yes, the baby! You’re going to be an aunt—Aunt Ruth! Wow, doesn’t that sound stern or something? We have plenty of room in Dermot’s house—it’s where he grew up with his mom and dad but they’re both dead now so it’s all his. There are three bedrooms and we haven’t cleared his mom’s stuff out of her old room yet, so we’re going to make the other one into a room for the baby. I want to say for “her”—I keep thinking it’s a girl already, I have a feeling it is, but don’t say it to Mom and Daddy though, just in case I’m wrong. I asked Daddy the other day if they might come over when the baby’s born but he didn’t answer, just went on about it being so busy at work. When I asked him why Mom wouldn’t come over on her own, he wrapped up the conversation real fast.
Being pregnant is wild, this thing growing inside you so you can never forget it’s there, but in a weird way I can’t really get my head around the fact that it is a baby—an actual baby—that I have a human growing inside me, a human I’m going to have to push out of my body! It’s wild, isn’t it, the whole thing, when you think about it?
I just put my hand on my bump and I was hoping to feel it moving around so I could tell you it sends a kick to you but it’s stubborn, like its Mom, and it stayed still. Maybe it’s sleeping. I hope it’s OK. I get worried sometimes. I hope I’m a good mother. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, thinking about Mom and it’s weird I’ve been trying to remember things—like what she did with us growing up and this is going to sound crazy but I don’t remember her doing anything with us at all, do you? I mean, I guess she must have done a lot of things with us, but I can’t remember a single thing.
Instead of Mom, I remember Wendy. Remember how she used to let us hang out in the kitchen with her for hours and how it was always so warm there? She used to love jigsaws, remember? I’m sure they were in her way on that table, but I don’t remember her ever making us move one of them. The first time I ever remember using the playroom was after she left and Jacqueline came and she put her foot down about having us hang out down in the kitchen where she was trying to work.
I want to be like Wendy was, with this baby. I’m going to be a fun mom. I’m going to play with her all the time and take her to the beach and make sandcastles and teach her how to draw and dance and sing. Or him. I don’t know if it’s my hormones or something but lately I’ve been missing Wendy, I know that sounds crazy but it’s true. I don’t think I even ever knew where she went when she left, or why we couldn’t see her anymore.
The only time I ever saw her cry was that morning she was taking us to school and we passed by the apartment building on the corner of 77th, do you remember, the building just a block up from us? Wendy saw what was happening before we did and she was trying to get us across the street before we noticed, but I saw the cop cars and the whole block blocked off and the white sheet on the sidewalk that everyone gathered around. When I asked her what it was, she didn’t answer and then you asked her why she was crying—I remember that, because I hadn’t even noticed she was crying—and she dabbed at the corner of her eyes with her lacy hanky and said that we should say a prayer because some poor person had fallen from the window. Even though she told us not to look, I couldn’t help it and I kept twisting my head to see while we were waiting for the lights to change. And that’s when I heard the man with a microphone ask a woman pushing a baby carriage if she’d seen the jumper and she was crying too and she had her hand over her mouth so I couldn’t hear her answer.
The whole way to school I thought about that and every time I got it, I’d kind of forget it, until I finally got it when Miss Everett was doing the spelling bee. A jumper was someone who jumped, not someone who fell. The person under the sheet jumped—they decided to do that, you
could decide to do that. You could jump out of a window and then you’d be dead, the same way Mom’s Aunt Mary died, except she died in the hospital, not jumping out a window. I don’t know if you ever thought about it after that, but I did, all the time. Walking home after school, there was blue plastic over one of the windows, the third one down, second in from the corner, and that was where he’d done it. The next day, the plastic was gone, the window was glass, reflecting back the clouds just like all the other windows, but it wasn’t just like all the other windows. I always looked up at it, the third one down, second one in, and I used to imagine it, the feeling just after the jump, so free, the wind lifting you, holding you, puffing out your sleeves, the legs of your trousers—you’d want to be wearing trousers.
In my imagination, it went slowly, like you’d be floating in the air, like music, lifting nearly, not falling at all until then the block of ground would rush up, quick, sweet, sudden, over.
I never knew what happened after that.
In my head, it was always a man who jumped that day, only years later I was walking by with Susan Sharp and she said her mother’s tennis partner had killed herself jumping from that building, and I realized I’d been wrong all along.
How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? Page 33
