It’s different when you talk about a parent. It’s not so shocking to say your father’s dead. Hardly anyone ever wants to know the details; the fact alone is enough, that branch of your tree has fallen, you’re held up now by other things. It doesn’t leave you swinging in the air like the loss of a sister. I don’t think anything does.
This is the way they died: our father went into Meggy’s bedroom on a humid Wednesday morning at the end of June, four months before Meggy’s sixteenth birthday, and shot her through the head with a gun none of us had ever seen before. Then Dad walked around inside the house for a while. Through the kitchen window screen the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Waxman, saw his shadow, running a glass of water and drinking it. She saw and heard the TV in the family room being turned on—the sounds of a musical, children singing— and almost immediately it went off again, the picture collapsing like a star in the center of the screen. Our father went outside to trim the rosebushes. But after he trimmed them, he cut the blooms off, too.
Then he went back inside the house, to his own bedroom, and shot himself by putting the gun in his mouth.
By that time Mrs. Waxman had gone downstairs to start her laundry, so nobody heard anything—no shot, no body falling. Justine found our father when she came home to change clothes for a party that afternoon, and the police found Meggy when they arrived a few minutes later. Our dog, Bill Buckner, had been locked out of the house, and by the time police arrived he was going nuts. At first they thought he might have witnessed what happened, through the windows, but then they figured out that he was just hungry. After they fed him he settled down in the place where the roses had fallen.
All of this was documented in the police report, after they interviewed Mrs. Waxman. “In his mouth?” I remember my mother asking. “He put something as dirty as a gun in his mouth?” She seemed almost more surprised by this detail than by the suicide itself. But then the police told us that he’d done it on top of the Sunday newspaper, spreading sections over the place he assumed his body would hit. “Well, that makes more sense,” my mother said, as if this made her feel better.
If I am grateful for anything about that day and what happened in it, it’s that Justine did not see Meggy, did not look into the corner bedroom, before she ran out of the house and over to the Waxmans’, where she whispered “ambulance” and then threw up until she fainted.
She played dead but she really wasn’t.
But yes. She really was.
They used the ambulance for Justine; our father and Meggy were not carried out until the police had gone through the house. They took fingerprints from the water glass my father had left in the sink.
Even Meggy’s diary, from which the most recent pages were missing, became part of the case.
They put things in plastic bags, the way police do on TV: rug fragments, threads, the piece of Meggy’s rubbing blanket—she called it her “rubbie”—that lay tucked under her good cheek. Meggy would have been embarrassed to know she had been found with her rubbie. And she was wearing a nightshirt spotted with old stains from her period. When I learned these details, I couldn’t help realizing that this is where the expression comes from: I wouldn’t be caught dead.
But when she went to bed with her secrets the night before, she had no reason to believe she would not be alone with them, under the covers, until she got up in the morning.
At first, my mother insisted that there had been a mistake. The deaths could not have been the result of murder and suicide, she told the police. It had to be foul play.
But the police showed her a letter our father had written for our mother and Justine and me. That night, our mother told us she’d burned the note without reading it. Hearing this, Justine laughed because she thought our mother was making a bad joke.
“No, I mean it,” our mother said.
“Yeah, right. You burned Dad’s suicide note.” My sister actually snorted; it was a vulgar, piglike noise she would have mocked in another girl.
“I thought it was best.” My mother squeezed her own fingers inside each other until both hands turned white. “I didn’t want the last thing we remembered about him to be a bunch of rambling that didn’t make any sense.”
“How do you know that’s what it was, if you didn’t read it?” I asked. For an astonishing moment I thought I might strangle her.
My mother coughed. “I’m just assuming,” she said, but something was still caught in her throat and she coughed again. Justine and I waited. “Based on his state of mind.” Then she told us she thought it would be simpler, if anyone asked, to just say there had been no note.
But the media had already gotten hold of it—not the note itself, but the fact that one existed. The woman on the TV news called it “blood-spattered,” but at this our mother made a sound of disgust and muttered something about sensationalism. She said that the note had actually been very clean, considering. There was only a trace of red in the top corner. It might have been a smear of Justine’s nail polish, excess blotted from the edge of a finger against whatever scrap of paper happened to be around.
But it was not nail polish. We know, because they did tests. The note was folded neatly when they found it on Dad’s dresser, next to loose change and his keys and the plastic photograph cube that contained pictures in only three of the six squares.
I keep the photograph cube on my own dresser now; neither my mother nor Justine wanted it. The first picture is the one my mother took on the boat that day in Boston Harbor. Then there’s a snapshot of our whole family taken by Mr. Waxman at a barbecue in our backyard two summers before the deaths. Justine and Meggy and I sit with our legs crossed, at our parents’ feet. On one end, my dark hair tilts toward my sisters’ fairer heads. Nobody quite knows why I was born with this complexion, with brown eyes and skin that might have been blessed by the Mediterranean. My sisters and my mother have blue eyes, my father hazel, and according to the laws I learned in tenth-grade genetics, I shouldn’t belong to this group.
My father’s sister, Aunt Rosemary, insists that she remembers an uncle with my same coloring, but he never came up in any other conversation, and I’m pretty sure she invented him to make me feel better. When she got to the tenth grade herself, Justine took to calling me a mutation until my father made her stop.
And I remember once, when we were little, someone commenting on how different I looked from Justine and Meggy, and my mother saying that they hadn’t quite gotten the recipe right the first time around. I must have seemed upset because my father told her, “I can’t believe you just said that, Margaret.”
“Oh, she knows I don’t mean anything,” my mother said. “Right, Ana? Daddy’s too sensitive.”
In our family photograph, my father’s eyes appear dark and slitted above his smile. Here he looks sinister, although he was not. Between Meggy and me, Justine hugs her legs, her chin resting on a bare kneecap, her watchband slid all the way down to the base of her bony wrist. Meggy’s braces flash in the sun.
My father is the only one touching some part of everyone else in the family. He has to stretch himself to do it—to lay one palm on Meggy’s shoulder and the other on mine, while his shin supports Justine’s back. Next to him, her hand on his arm, my mother looks as if she is about to say something. I have heard photographs referred to as frozen time, but whenever I look at this one, I think of it as a moment in motion. My mother—her white neck looking fragile in the noon light, her short hair waving away from her head—still waits to utter whatever it was.
The third picture is cut from the cover of a theater program. When she was nine years old, Meggy played the title role in the Ashmont Repertory’s production of Annie. She didn’t even have to audition for the part. The repertory’s director, Mr. Spelich, was also the elementary-school music teacher, and he took my mother aside one day and asked how she’d feel about Meggy being in the play. “It’s a lot of work, and some late nights, but I think you’ll be glad you let her do it, in the long run,” he advised. “She has perfect pitch
, and she’s a remarkable actress. I don’t know if you realize.”
“We had some idea,” my mother told him, although in truth I don’t think any of us had ever really noticed that Meggy could sing. Because she was the youngest, her voice was often crowded out. She liked to stand in front of her mirror and perform, using a hairbrush as a microphone, but Justine’s stereo was always on at the same time, and her music was all any of us could hear.
In our town’s Annie, Meggy was a star. With her long hair tucked up under the curly orange wig and her features accentuated by shadow and rouge, her expression of hopeful innocence reached all the way to the auditorium’s last row. When she finished her solo as the abandoned daughter imagining the parents who will return for her someday, there was a moment of stunned silence in the audience before it exploded in applause. On opening night I sat between my parents (Justine was watching from a dark rear corner with the first in a series of junior-high boyfriends; I’m not sure she saw or heard much of anything that happened on the stage), and while everyone around us clapped and whistled for Meggy, my father sat motionless in his seat, unable to hide or remove the tears shining on his face. Across my chest, my mother passed him a tissue, but he wouldn’t take it. His eyes were fixed on the stage, as if he had been hypnotized by his own daughter. Although I was fifteen then and thought myself too old to care about such things, I felt a chill of jealousy at the effect Meggy had on him—she had made him feel awe—which I knew I never could.
After the cast took its bows, we went back to find Meggy. Along the way we accepted congratulations from our neighbors and friends, and from people we’d never been introduced to but who, because of the size of our town, knew us anyway. I’d expected that Meggy would be flushed with pride and excitement, but instead she was sobbing in the arms of Haley Goldberg, our dental hygienist, who’d played Miss Hannigan. When Meggy saw my parents, she broke away from Haley and went to my father, who folded her into his arms. “I kept thinking about what if I didn’t have you,” she mumbled, barely getting the words out between shuddery breaths. She took care to address both of our parents, but we could all tell it was Dad she grieved most in her fantasy. I looked at my mother and saw her lips go tight as she understood this, too. Our father picked Meggy up and carried her out the back door, past clusters of admiring coos. When we got home, he was the one who tucked her into bed. In the morning he was ready to call Mr. Spelich and withdraw Meggy from the play, but my mother convinced him not to. And Meggy herself seemed fine after a good sleep, as if she didn’t even remember her sorrow of the night before. My mother and I went to all of the other performances, but my father, saying he couldn’t stand it, stayed home.
The show had been videotaped, though, and often he would watch it, late at night when everyone else was in bed. When I came home after graduating from college that summer, just before the deaths, I kept finding the worn-out Ashmont Rep tape in the VCR. By then, Meggy was spending a lot of time with her friends, trying on makeup and trading clothes, and she only clucked whenever our father called her “Annie,” in an effort to win her back.
“Get over it, Dad,” she’d say, in the sarcastic, world-weary tone she and her friend Gail inspired in each other. “I’m not your little orphan-girl anymore.” Then she and Gail would giggle and go off to call some boy, leaving my father with the ghost of his foolish hopes still fading from his face.
The videotape was one of the things the police took from the house when they searched it for evidence. They watched the first half hour before deciding it wasn’t relevant. Later, when I lay in bed next to the investigating officer, he told me that the cops had not even recognized Meggy in the starring role. I was glad my father wasn’t alive to hear him say it.
The final photograph in the cube on my father’s dresser shows my sisters and me laughing as we fall out of a human pyramid. Justine and I are kneeling next to each other on all fours in a pile of leaves while Meggy loses her balance on top of us, one knee wobbling on each of our denim backs. Her hair, long and loose that day, falls in front of her forehead and across one eye above her laughter, making her look like a giddy pirate. The camera caught us on our way down into the leaves, all three of our mouths opened in the same pleasurable surprise.
We learned how to make the human pyramid from Justine, who was a cheerleader. When she was in her uniform I was a little afraid of her, even though I was older. Something about the confidence she put on along with the flared skirt made me shrink before her. I knew, of course, that the orange A sprawled across the chest of her sweater stood for Ashmont, but there was a part of me that also suspected it was a code for some secret language I would never be allowed to understand. Justine knew this and didn’t use it against me the way she might have with a non-sister, a girl she could afford to offend or threaten, whose worship she would welcome and perhaps even invite. Between us, my rank in the family—my firstness, which all oldest children cherish, no matter how much we complain—gave me a power each of us knew would belong to me as long as we both should live.
Meggy, when she was little, begged Justine to teach her the cheers. Sometimes as I practiced with the two of them, I imagined I belonged to that species of girl you could identify purely by posture from far away. We pushed the sofa to one side of the living room and jumped and clapped and shouted until we were out of breath or until our parents made us stop.
But they—our parents—were also infected by the cheers, especially the old standard that our school’s teams raised in the locker room or on the bus to away games, and which Justine took to singing around the house:
We are the Eagles, mighty mighty Eagles!
Everywhere we go-oh, people want to know-oh
Who we are. So we tell them:
We are the Eagles, mighty mighty Eagles!
Everywhere we go-oh, people want to know…
And you kept repeating the words until you got sick of them, or you grew hoarse, or somebody told you to shut up.
One Sunday, when we were driving down to our grandparents’ house for dinner and somebody in a Cadillac cut us off at a light, my father hit the steering wheel with the palms of both hands and yelled “Goddammit!” at the windshield. It was his favorite and, as far as I can remember, his only epithet. He was usually able to expel all his rage in the space of these three syllables, after which he was calm.
On the day the Cadillac cut us off, he aimed the aftershock smile at our mother, who sat next to him in the front seat. “Doesn’t he know who we are?” he said, referring to the Cadillac’s driver. Mom just looked at him for a moment, and then she caught on and smiled, too. Together they began to sing, and from the backseat the three of us joined in—
We are the Dolans, mighty mighty Dolans!
Everywhere we go, people want to know
Who we are. So we tell them:
We are the Dolans, mighty mighty Dolans!
Of course, if anybody I knew had been within hearing distance, I would have slumped way down in the seat and rolled up the window. Even remembering it now makes me blush at how corny it was. But privately, among the five of us, it became a family refrain, especially when our parents were arguing. Say Dad was making a fuss about raw chicken in the refrigerator not being wrapped tight enough, or about somebody leaving a drop of egg white on the sponge. Next to the poison from lead paint on windowsills, diseases from eggs and chickens were among the potential invasions he dreaded most.
When his anxiety was highest, we couldn’t have chicken in the house; when we did, he was the only one who could touch it before it was cooked. He buried the plastic wrapping in newspaper, which he then put into its own garbage bag and rolled into a tight twist. He brought the whole package outside to stash in his car trunk, so he could dispose of it far from the house.
And once, when he’d bought a week’s worth of groceries but the cashier sneezed while packing them, my father wheeled the bags out of the store and directly to the Dumpster, where he tossed the entire purchase, canned sauces and a
ll. If we had pancakes for breakfast, only he could crack the eggs into the batter, and the eggshells went the same way as the blood juice of the meat. (Years later, I would miss my father whenever I saw Phil Hartman playing the Anal-Retentive Chef on Saturday Night Live, while around me everybody laughed.)
Sometimes our mother just watched, without saying anything, when our father went through these elaborate sanitary routines. But other times she grew impatient and couldn’t help showing it. She’d watch our father scouring the spot where an egg had leaked, and she’d say, “For God’s sake, Tom, it’s an egg, not a body fluid.”
My father seemed to understand that his behavior was difficult to put up with, but he couldn’t help it. He would ask her not to be so sarcastic, and she would say she couldn’t help that. If the mood wasn’t already ruined beyond repair, Meggy could start up the mighty mighty Dolan cheer and make everyone smile. It had to be the right moment, but when it worked it was one of those magic formulas every family has, a silly set of words reminding us of what’s really important, that we belong to each other and this is how we know.
Justine was in junior high when she made her first cheerleading squad. Meggy was eight then, and I had just turned fifteen. Dancing alone in front of my mirror, I could move my body in a way I didn’t mind watching, but when it came to gym or intramurals, I was the spastic sister. This was not a name I invented for my own masochistic torment; I heard somebody giggle it once as I passed the playing field with Justine. I was one of those girls who hates every minute of gym class except when the teacher blows the whistle to signal the end. On the soccer or hockey field I just tried to stay out of the way when the ball came to me, and let my teammates knock me down, if they needed to, in taking over the play.
The worst was cross fire, which we played on rainy days, the boys’ and girls’ classes combined. It was one thing to play the version we all learned in elementary school, where, if you got hit with the ball from the other side of the center line, you were out of the game. Many times, I would put myself in the direct line of these shots, so I could go sit on the side until there was only one person left and it was time to start over. Once, I was darting out when a ball bounced off my shoulder and hit Heather Shufelt in the ear. Even after I apologized and said that it wasn’t my fault, Heather started a rumor that I wore boys’ underwear.
And Give You Peace Page 2
