“To show us what?” My mother wasn’t even blinking.
“Well,” Lois said, “I guess maybe I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’ll just get out of your way, then. The thing is, I need my quiche dish back.”
The silence that came after her request, among those of us sitting around the coffee table, felt like slow motion. We all looked at where the broccoli-and-mushroom quiche sat among the other offerings; there was only one piece gone from the fluted plate. Justine, who brought raw cauliflower and carrots to school for lunch, snacked on heads of lettuce and, candy-wise, had not let so much as an M&M pass her lips since the day her gym teacher called her Tubster when she was ten, picked up a fork and ate the rest of the entire quiche as Lois Phelps stood there watching with an expression of discomfort that melted into disgust. Our mother also watched, though I don’t think she understood what she was seeing. “Oh, dear,” Lois said at one point, as Justine scraped up a huge forkful of crust, but no one seemed to hear her. When Justine had finished, she went into the kitchen to wash the dish, and she brought it back out to Lois wrapped in a plastic shopping bag from the Gap. Then she sat back down and ate what was left on the table.
Later, in the night, Justine was sick; but the next day she fell to eating again with the same desperate energy, her teeth grinding through each bite. When my mother finally came to and asked her what she was doing, Justine said “Nothing,” and my mother didn’t pursue it. After that, Justine started eating in secret.
The first day our mother was scheduled to go back to work after the deaths, my sister slipped out of the sofa bed early. I knew she was trying not to wake me up by the way she walked on the balls of her feet, and even when she stubbed her toe on the bed frame, she stifled a curse. She took my mother’s car without asking permission. Half an hour later she came back carrying a bag of groceries, a globe of broccoli sticking pointedly out of the top.
“Where’d you go?” I asked her. I hadn’t gotten out of the sofa bed yet because I saw through the blinds that the day was going to be beautiful, and I wanted to put off the sunlight as long as I could. “Well, where does it look like I went?” Justine began unpacking the food—tomatoes, sprouts, cantaloupe—and Bill Buckner trotted over to see if there was anything for him.
I wanted to say, I know you snuck away to eat something. You can’t fool me. I know you were sitting in the car behind the Price Chopper, stuffing Devil Dogs into your face. But I didn’t say any of these things. Instead I went to sit up in the sofa bed, and as I tried to step out of it, the mattress folded, clapping me inside.
“Goddammit!” I was more shocked than anything else, though in that first moment when my face was pressed against foam rubber I had to move my head to breathe. Then I heard my mother come out of the bathroom and start laughing, and I knew from the sound that she was bent over with how funny she found it. Didn’t this happen to That Girl once? Didn’t an old commercial for the show go, What other girl could get her head/Caught inside a folding bed? Around me the mattress started shaking as I let my own laughter go. “Hey,” I said, hearing my words from far away, as if underwater. “Help.”
My mother said, “What’s that, honey?” as she moved toward where I was trapped. Her words contained mischief and a little bit of mirth. “Could you speak up?”
“Mom, come on.” Justine’s tone indicated that she saw nothing amusing about it at all. “Let’s get her out.” I felt the edges of the mattress being pulled away from each other, and my mother and Justine opened the bed wide enough for me to roll out onto the floor.
My mother said, “Look, it’s a girl!”
“This bed isn’t safe,” Justine declared. She crossed her arms over her chest and added, “No beds in this family are.”
I felt as if somebody had punched me quick, the surprise going deeper than the blow. I knew Justine was referring to the fact that Meggy died in her bed, but if anyone had overheard her, it would have sounded like something else. In the days after the funeral we got wind of the rumors being passed around town, and one of them was that my father had been molesting Meggy, and that he killed himself and her either out of guilt or because she had threatened to tell on him. Of course, nobody ever said anything to us directly, so we couldn’t very well go around announcing, out of the blue, that our father was not a child abuser.
When Justine made the crack about beds, my mother took in a slow breath and put a palm across her stomach.
“I can’t believe you said that,” I told Justine.
“I can’t either,” my sister said. She sounded the way she did when she came back from the dentist and her mouth was still numb. “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know that was going to come out.”
“I know.” My mother nodded. “Never mind.” She tried to smile, but her lips were twitching. She started for the kitchen, and I saw in her face the decision to forget what had just been said.
One day at the beginning of August, a few weeks after our mother had gone back to work, I snapped off the TV abruptly and said, “There’s no way she didn’t read that note.”
“What note?” Justine asked automatically, though of course she already knew.
I didn’t bother answering. Justine pulled herself up from the couch. She wasn’t used to carrying the new weight she’d gained in only six weeks; I’d never seen anyone put on pounds so fast, and it made me think that her cells had been screaming More! More! for years since she’d started depriving them, and now were hoarding all they had missed. The rapid change made her movements awkward, though behind them still lay the cheerleader’s grace.
She followed me into our mother’s bedroom, where I began going through the drawers. “You shouldn’t,” she told me, not because she thought it was wrong in a moral sense, but because she knew how our mother would react if she found out we’d gone through her things. I ignored her and began rummaging through underwear, sweaters, jewelry, and even—on the top shelf of the closet, in a cardboard filing chest—the divorce papers, which had never been signed.
“Nothing,” I said, shoving the file back up. “Goddammit.”
Justine’s hesitation gave way to curiosity and she said, “What about with her souvenirs?” Like a character in a movie, I snapped my fingers and said, “Of course.” But when we went to the desk in the living room, took out the old Thom McAn box and lifted the lid, we saw immediately that nothing had been added to the contents we expected to find.
“I guess, in a way, that’s good,” Justine said, her mouth twisting a little as she replaced the box in its drawer. “It would be kind of fucked if she kept her husband’s suicide note in the same place as her swizzle stick from the Governor’s Ball.” I knew she was disappointed and also relieved, because I felt the same way. I picked up my book again and Justine turned on the TV, and when our mother came home that night she didn’t notice anything out of place.
We did have Meggy’s diary—that, my mother didn’t burn. Meggy started keeping it only that New Year’s, having received the journal from Aunt Rosemary for Christmas. It was a beautiful date book, with a fauxmarble cover and thinly ruled, gilt-edged pages. You could fit a lot on those pages, although Meggy usually only filled the first line for each day. When the police gave it back to us after determining there was nothing they needed inside, each of us took our time before reading it; the idea that we were invading her privacy was still too fresh.
But finally, we needed to read it. At first I thought it was funny, the way Meggy had kept track of the weather each day (at the top of each page was a chart with check boxes for Clear, Cloudy, Rain, or Snow), along with her homework assignments and the first days of her period. As if, in the future, she would have cared about accounting for any of these things.
But as I began flipping through the book, looking for anything personal, I grew more and more frustrated with each page. These were the months leading up to the murder and suicide—the months leading up to, and following, the day our mother moved out. Yet Meggy made only the slightest mention of this event, and nothing els
e that could help us to understand what was going on with her—inside her—in the last year of her life. She kept notes like a reporter: March 7: Mom gone. May 21: Ana graduated. May 23: Ana home. After this last entry, she’d drawn a smiley face, and when I saw it, my heart gave such a heave that I understood why people speak of hearts breaking. I could only look at that page once. Every other time I read the diary, after the first time, I skipped over that day.
The last entry we had was the one dated June 27, two days before she died. Meggy had written, “Fight with Gail, its not really her fault.” The next two pages had been ripped out of the book.
“Maybe she just got mad and tore out blank pages,” Justine suggested, but I knew we both believed that the missing entry contained some kind of clue.
A few days after Justine and I searched without success for our father’s suicide note, our mother came home waving an envelope that turned out to be filled with dollar bills. I was reading Beloved and Justine was watching Oprah, who had just returned from a commercial break to say, “We’re talking about how coming out of a coma changes your life.” Mom shouted, “Hey, I won!” as she stepped through the door. “Hey, you guys, I won the pool at work.” She hoisted the money like a trophy above her head.
“What pool?” Justine said. She was lying on the floor with an arm across her forehead, and I knew she felt sick from having just consumed an entire sleeve of chocolate pinwheels on the other side of the bathroom door.
“We all put money down on when and where the Toothpaste Burglar would finally be caught.” My mother opened the refrigerator door, considered what was inside, then closed it again without choosing anything. “I had him down for the twenty-fifth, two in the afternoon, over in Westwood, and guess what? They got him that exact day at one-thirty, in one of those new houses on Westwood Ridge.” She slapped the envelope on the counter to punctuate her achievement.
The Toothpaste Burglar had been on the loose in central New York since the spring. He stole the things burglars usually do—stereos, TVs, jewelry—but when he left the houses, he always wrote a message in his victim’s own toothpaste on the bathroom mirror. Sometimes the messages themselves were disappointing and unoriginal—Fuck you or Ha! or Eat shit (of course, the newspaper didn’t print the actual obscenities; our mother gave us those details).
But the more recent break-ins seemed to have taken a spiritual turn. The last few messages had been the same: God weeps with us, scrawled in Crest or Gleem across the glass. He was becoming careless, letting his handwriting become more identifiable than at the beginning of his reign. Psychologists interviewed for the newspaper suggested that he wanted to be caught. Police Sink Teeth in Burglary Probe, the headlines of the Oracle winked.
“He’s just this little man, it turns out, who wasn’t even selling the things he stole.” Our mother was still looking for something to eat, and she finally settled on a dish of cold creamed corn left over from who knew when. “They found it all piled up in a corner of this little room. When the police got there, he answered the door naked and held his hands out for the cuffs.”
Justine and I looked at each other, and I knew that it was not the specific information about the Toothpaste Burglar we were responding to, but the smile on our mother’s face. It was an odd sight, at once foreign and familiar, and it made us wince. The few times I’d felt a laugh rise in me that summer—when we watched reruns of I Love Lucy, for instance—I always wanted to say “Sorry” or “I couldn’t help it” to Justine.
On the day my mother won the Toothpaste Burglar pool, Justine and I searched for evidence of that same shame in her. But we didn’t find it, and though we said nothing to each other about it then, I knew we both realized we’d lost something that could never be retrieved.
Now, I believe that we would have been better off to follow the therapist’s advice, and do what our mother did: find something to take us out into the world each day and pass the hours in the presence of other people who might have known and understood our situation, but who weren’t submerged in grief themselves. At the time, I didn’t understand how my mother managed. “You’ll probably think this sounds silly,” she said, the day I finally worked up the courage to ask her, “but I just pretend Meggy’s away at camp.” She was watching herself in the mirror, tying a scarf around her neck. “And Daddy I was used to living without.” Since the deaths, she had started calling him “Daddy” again, to Justine and me. For months before that, while the legal papers were in the works, he had been “your father.” Now we noticed that when she met someone new, she told them she was a widow. When she saw the looks we gave her, she reminded us, “Well, the divorce never was final.”
When my friends tried to reach me that summer, I let the machine answer and made myself forget to return the calls. I continued reading novels—Sophie’s Choice, The Color Purple, Of Mice and Men. I didn’t know that I chose them for a reason, but when I look back, I realize I was seeking a common theme. See what we can survive, if we have to. Look how much human beings can bear.
Over the summer, Justine went up two sizes. I went through twenty-three novels, but don’t ask me what they all were.
The only one I couldn’t finish was Jude the Obscure. When I got to the part where the oldest brother hangs himself and his siblings by nooses from coat hooks and leaves the note, “Done because we are too menny,” I put the book away. Not because it was so sad, but because I didn’t believe it. Children don’t commit suicide, I remember thinking. Children get killed.
My mother had been working the general assignment beat at the Delphi Oracle, covering everything from county politics to the Central Tier’s annual tree-sitting contest, for four months when my father and Meggy died. She had been a journalist since just after college when she was hired by the Knickerbocker News, which came out every afternoon except Sunday. This was in Albany, where many things—streets, restaurants—are named after the Dutch.
It was on the newspaper’s bowling team that my parents met. This is the most unromantic way I’ve ever heard, at least among the stories of my friends, whose fathers first approached their mothers across dark rooms at dances, or caught their eyes over the head of other straphangers on the bus.
My friend Ruthie swears her parents met like this: her mother was on a college choir trip to San Francisco and had arranged to meet a male cousin, twice removed, in front of a certain coffee shop at a particular hour. When the time came and a man walked up, she said the cousin’s name like a question, and the man smiled and said yes. They went inside and sat down and ordered, and by the time their pastries arrived she caught on that he wasn’t the cousin she had arranged to meet, and the man confessed but said he couldn’t help it, her voice was so charming and her face so sweet, he had run the risk to see where it would take him, and he was glad he had.
So by then she was flattered and couldn’t hate him, and she forgot about the cousin who might be waiting out in the darkness, searching for a face that would look familiar to him though he had never seen it before. By the time they left the coffee shop, it was late and cooler. The man and the woman who eventually became Ruthie’s parents went walking, arm in arm. They were both visitors to California, and on their honeymoon they returned. Ruthie herself had never been there. I’m saving it, she said.
But my parents met on the bowling team of the Knick News. My father, who sold advertising space, was the captain of the team. Bowling was a sport he was accustomed to, as he had grown up in Albany near the Lucky Strike Lanes. My mother was a novice at bowling when she joined the newspaper, but she picked it up quickly and within weeks she had the highest average of all the women in the league. At the end of the season, Tom Dolan and Margaret Ott won the Golden Bowl award for the Cutest Couple, and the Knick ran a picture of them, their cheeks touching behind the trophy. The headline over the photo said, Bowled Over, and the ring on my mother’s finger caught the camera’s flash as the diamond appeared to explode.
At first my mother’s parents disapproved of my f
ather because he’d started working straight out of high school and had no college plans. But one Sunday, when my parents took them out for dinner after my grandparents came up to Albany for a church meeting, the conversation turned to Hemingway, and my father said he was the most overrated writer of all time. By accident, he’d voiced an opinion with which my grandfather thoroughly agreed. Beyond that, they both believed that most people knew this truth about Hemingway, but were afraid to say so. So my father got points for the courage of his convictions and for the fact that he read so much on his own.
My parents’ first official date was to see the movie I Want to Live! It wasn’t until we got a VCR that I watched the movie myself. My father rented it one night soon after our mother had left, when I was home on spring break and both of my sisters were sleeping over at friends’ houses. When he popped the movie in I felt vaguely guilty, as if I were stealing something from my mother.
But then I became engrossed by Susan Hayward’s portrayal of Barbara Graham, the condemned woman who remains blithe and irreverent even in the face of her own execution. For the first time I recognized, in Hayward’s saucy performance, the source of a gesture my father always made whenever we asked him for something—the pantomime blow on a pair of pretend dice for good luck, followed by their roll against an invisible wall. Like Hayward’s character, he would pretend to read how they came up and then tell us, “No dice” or “It’s a deal!”
And there was the dialogue between Barbara and her lover, which echoed a refrain from my childhood. “Life’s a funny thing,” the man muses. Barbara quips back: “Compared to what?” My parents exchanged these lines often, and though the context always seemed to change— sometimes they’d have just finished a fight, other times it was after kissing—my sisters and I took comfort in the familiar tune of the words.
In less specific ways, the movie reminded me of my mother. She was no criminal, but in her personality she resembled Barbara Graham. I could imagine my mother ordering a hot-fudge sundae as her last meal and insisting that she be allowed to wear her shoes into the gas chamber, because she looked better in them than she did barefoot.
And Give You Peace Page 7
