He remained motionless for a few seconds, though his eyes widened and panic swallowed the pupils. Then he began having trouble breathing. By the time he got up from the sofa, he was taking big gasps and still not getting enough air. My mother did not go after him; it was Meggy who, having thrown down her cards, ran to get him a glass of water. “It’s okay, Dad. Dad, it’s not really dirt, it’s just paper. You can take a shower. We’ll get you clean.” She said the last four words more loudly and distinctly than the others, as if she thought they might get through.
“I’m okay,” he said, though it was clear he wasn’t. He gagged and choked. Meggy followed him upstairs, and we heard the shutting of the bathroom door. I turned up the TV to hear Judge Wapner’s verdict. Without a word, my mother left the house, and through the window I saw her go across the street to the neighbors’, where I knew she would sit down to a glass of wine with Kay Lonergan. At the kitchen table, they would take turns complaining about their husbands—one who scrubbed himself raw and still couldn’t get clean enough, the other an elected town official with a tab at the Shamrock rivaling some people’s VISA bills.
Meggy came back downstairs and told me, as if trying to convince both of us, “He’ll be okay.” The shower in my parents’ bathroom ran through the entire six o’clock news. It was still running when Justine came home from a basketball game at 7:15.
“We lost,” she said, flopping into my father’s place and reaching for the box of Ritz crackers, which was all Meggy and I had managed to dig up for dinner. When none of us responded, she added, “Does anybody care?”
“Not really,” Meggy said. “Could we talk about something besides cheerleading for a change?” Above us the shower faucets went off; Meggy and I looked at each other with relief, and Justine bounced, her ponytail bobbing, up to her room. When my mother came back from the Lonergans’ she made up the cot in the basement and spent the night there. Within a week she was sending out resumes, and two weeks later an old friend from her early newspaper days offered her the job at the Delphi Oracle.
I had a list of questions I imagined, in my fantasies after the deaths, submitting to my mother in care of Ask Us. “Why did you leave? Why did Dad kill Meggy? Why did he kill himself?” And then the big one: “What did the note say?”—Your daughter, Anastasia, At Large.
But by then it was too late. She had already quit the job.
4. God’s eyes
Q. I recently heard of a measurement know as the “jnd.” To what does this refer?
— G.H., West Saugerties
A. The initials stand for the “just noticeable difference” between sensations. Researchers ask an experimental subject to judge between two stimuli—two sounds of nearly identical intensity, two lights of similar brightness or color, two weights that are nearly the same. By repeated tests, an effort is made to establish the exact difference between the stimuli that is needed to produce a single jnd of sensation.
The people who’d signed a purchase-and-sale agreement on our house in Ashmont wanted to back out of the deal after my father and Meggy died. The closing wasn’t scheduled until the end of July, and in the meantime, word of what had happened made it down to the Crowells in Atlanta. When they heard, the wife contacted our real estate office to say that she’d changed her mind. The realtor, Gwen Schiff, called us in a panic to deliver the news. Justine and I were the only ones home; our mother was in Oneida covering a water-main break. I spoke to Gwen on the phone while gesturing for Justine to turn down the television, where she was watching a rerun of Bewitched.
“So what can we do?” I asked. Gwen was the top salesperson at Zenith Realty, where my father had worked for six months, nearly fifteen years ago, before they let him go because he hadn’t sold a single property. I was surprised he had called them when it came time to sell the house, but he said there were no hard feelings, and besides, Zenith was the best.
“Well,” Gwen said, and in the background I could hear her punching numbers. “I got the impression they might still be interested, if we came down on the price.”
“Then do it,” I told her.
“I mean substantially.”
“I don’t care. Just get rid of it.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to put it back on the market?” Gwen stopped her fingers from flying. I heard the flick of a cigarette being lit. “Although I’ll be honest with you, it’ll be hard to sell to anyone, at least anytime soon, because of—the history. If the Crowells are willing to renegotiate, we should probably grab it.”
“Fine. Do.” I didn’t even discuss it with Justine, because I knew what my sister would say. The house had remained in our father’s name when my mother moved out, and he’d left everything to any children who survived him.
“All right. I just wanted to check with you.” Gwen took a long drag, then lowered her voice. I imagined her cupping a hand over the phone. “Listen, we had the place cleaned. We brought in a company to do the whole thing—rugs, curtains, everything. You’d never be able to tell—well, you know.”
“Good,” I said, closing my eyes and trying not to think about what it must have looked like when the workers went in.
“I know you told the movers to take everything,” she added, “but the last time I was over there, I saw some stuff in the basement.”
“What stuff?”
“Just a few boxes. I didn’t look inside. Do you want me to have them removed?”
I looked across the room at Justine sprawled motionless on the couch, watching the TV as intently as if God himself were addressing her from the screen.
“No,” I said to Gwen.
“Well, then, you’ll have to get rid of them yourselves. If the Crowells take us up on a lower price and they have to come up here for the closing, they’ll want to move in as soon as they can.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. Every time I talked to her, I felt like punching Gwen Schiff through the phone. She had come to the funeral, sat in a pew near the front, and cried, but I knew from overhearing my parents, all those years ago, that she’d been the one to suggest firing my father when he didn’t produce. “I’ll take care of it.” I hung up without saying good-bye and then sat at the kitchen counter, tapping a pencil on the pad where I’d taken down figures without even seeing them.
When Justine’s show was over, she sat up and looked at me. “Who was that?”
“We have to go back there.”
“Where?”
“The house.”
“When? Why?”
“That was Gwen. She says there’s some boxes down in the basement the movers forgot to take.” I decided there was no point in mentioning anything about the change in the sale price. “We have to go get them.”
“Boxes of what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe junk. But I don’t want to take a chance; it might be something we’d end up wanting.”
“What about Mom?”
“What about her?”
“Don’t you think she’d want to go with us?”
“Yeah, right.” In my sarcasm, I tried not to snort. Our mother had made it clear, when she moved out, that she was leaving Pearl Street for good. After the deaths and the funeral reception at the Waxmans’ house, her resolve grew even stronger. “It won’t take us long. If we go now, we can miss rush hour.”
Justine said, “I don’t exactly want to go back there.”
“You think I do?”
“Why does it have to be today?”
“It doesn’t. But why not get it over with? What else are we doing?”
“I don’t know.” She lay sideways again on the sofa. Sitting required more effort than she could spare.
I said, “There might be some things we forgot to save.”
She stared at the TV for a long moment, then shrugged in an imitation of someone who didn’t care one way or the other. “Why not?” she said, and the question seemed so absurd—there were so many possible answers—that I almost laughed.
We started the road
trip singing along with Carly Simon, but the closer we moved to familiar territory, the quieter we became in the car. As we turned off the Thruway exit toward Ashmont, I felt us both hold our breath.
Do I have to tell you what it is like to go back home? You know by instinct the exact distance between every street sign, and just about every house has a name or a memory attached. This is where you took piano lessons from Mrs. Delmonte, who had an Italian accent and always made you crack up when she instructed you to use your “turd” finger instead of your third. If you go by the corner where the man in the lawn chair is always sitting with the schnauzer in his lap—making the dog wave its paws at the cars going by—but they are not there today, then their absence is as remarkable to you as the sight of the man and the dog would be to a stranger first passing through.
You know how long the lights take to change, the route of all the parades, what stood in that lot—the Cut’n’Curl, where you once lost a contact lens in a hair magazine—before the new bank was built. That the library used to be a funeral parlor, that Jimmy Garcia got killed playing chicken behind the old dump. You know this place—home—too intimately for your own good. Nothing should ever be this familiar, or have such a sure hold upon your heart.
“This is so weird,” Justine whispered as I took the back way, a shortcut, to Pearl Street. It was the first time we had been on our old block since the day of the funerals. As we drove toward our house, I thought I could feel a thousand eyes staring out at us. Too late, it occurred to me that we should have waited for dark.
We went around to the back of the house, where the grass, which was too high, tickled our ankles. Our father had always been conscientious about the grass, as he was about the garden; he mowed the lawn on Saturday afternoons, and liked it most when the day was hot and he finished sweaty and satisfied, ready for the reward of a shower and an iced tea. I remember how he threw his head back as he drank, closing his eyes as if nothing he’d ever tasted had been so good.
Gwen had left the basement door unlocked. Ashmont was the kind of town where you could do this—safe, its citizens trustworthy, if only because they had reputations to protect. Justine and I sat in the car, in front of the house, for a good ten minutes. I had not parked in the driveway because we were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. But if anyone wanted to see us, it was too late to avoid notice now. We shut the car doors quietly, like kids sneaking in past curfew, and moved quickly around the house to the bulkhead that led to the basement.
I went down the steps first, though Justine stayed close enough behind me that I could feel her breath on my back. “This gives me the creeps,” she said, and I heard her shivering, even though the air was warm. “How come, out of all the time we lived here, all we can think about is that day?” It wasn’t precisely true, but I knew what she meant. The deaths gave everything else we remembered a sinister sheen. Like the swing set in the middle of the backyard, and the picnic table in the corner: they reminded us of birthday parties, cake and ice cream that melted before we could eat it, the paper toot-horns we’d use to tickle one another’s ears.
Yet we could not think of that laughter, the shouts and the singing, the dresses and hats and favor bags of Hershey’s kisses, as anything but ghosts.
Same with the basement, once we stepped inside. All three of us had spent hours of our childhood down here with our mother, playing jacks and Spit on the other end of the rickety table as she folded the clothes. We came to associate the scent of warm laundry with the sensation of comfort, the rhythmic whish of the washer with the routine of carrying a dirty jumble downstairs and emerging later with a soap-smelling pile. I was very young when I realized that a basket of dirty clothes was heavier than a basket of clean. But back then I didn’t understand why; in my childish conception, it had to do with good and bad, and God giving the reward of lightness to the pure, laundered load. To me it was a magical transformation that had nothing to do with the laws of nature, the density of soil and sweat, or the wringing motion of the spin. All I knew was that my mother seemed happier when the laundry was finished, and we could go upstairs again to the light of the kitchen and the feeling that all was fresh.
But now the washer and dryer had been moved out, and only one of the lights still worked, a single bulb trailing a length of sturdy green string my mother had borrowed a long time ago from my God’s-eye kit. God’s eyes—those designs you made by wrapping string around nails hammered into wood; stars and geometric figures and crossover patterns in bright colors of thick thread, which you pulled taut across a skeleton of nails. I had to stop making them when my father got it into his head that Meggy could pull one of the nails out of a board and swallow it. Not only did I have to stop making new God’s eyes, he told me; I had to get rid of the ones I already had.
We used the many colors of string in that kit for years, to tie up newspapers, to wrap birthday presents when we ran out of real ribbon, even to extricate one of Justine’s baby teeth when it was just hanging in its socket. Our mother attached one end of a length of red string to the tooth and another to the bathroom doorknob, but then she couldn’t bring herself to slam the door to yank the tooth out, so I volunteered. It worked, but the force hurt Justine and made her mouth bleed, and though she didn’t yell at me, I felt guilty. In the morning, we both found quarters under our pillows.
And we used the string to make the chain on this basement light switch longer, so that even Meggy could turn it on if she came down first. Now Justine and I looked at each other through the dimness, and when I didn’t make a move (as the oldest, I always had the right of first refusal in such decisions), she reached up and yanked the bulb into brightness. We both blinked and started, suddenly able—before we were really ready for it—to see what was in front of us.
“Jesus,” Justine said. “What did we do this for?”
Instead of answering, I went over to the hot-water tank, next to which the realtor had stacked the three boxes we were supposed to take. In the first box, we found piles of our old baby clothes—everything from stained T-shirts and sleepers to the antique christening dress that had been handed down through the Ott family for four generations. Here was the dress with the strawberry pockets, the plaid poncho, the jumper of calico wool. “Oh, God,” Justine said, when we saw what the box contained, and though she quickly added, “If we came all the way here just for some stupid baby things, I’m going to be pissed,” I knew that her exclamation came from shocked pleasure at recovering what we had loved once and had not now expected to find. If we went back to Delphi with only these little remnants, her tone said, it will be worth the trip.
We put them aside to open the other two boxes. One was nearly empty, except for several newspapers, which at first we took to be cushioning for something else. But when we looked more closely, we saw that they were the front sections of the Knickerbocker News from significant dates in contemporary history: the day Nixon resigned, the day of the Kent State riots, the day Kennedy was shot. There was also a framed “dummy” front page that had been made up by the other reporters to send my mother off when she left the newspaper. Ott Opts for Motherhood, the top headline said, and, underneath it: Knick Loses Ace Reporter to So-Called Normal Life.
“I guess she was saving these once,” Justine said, blowing dust from a yellowing photo of Patricia Hearst in her Symbionese Liberation Army uniform. “Should we take them back for her?”
“Let’s not,” I told her. “She went through all this stuff when she moved out. She must have left them here on purpose.” I didn’t add what I was thinking: If she did want them, too bad. She had her chance.
We put that box aside and pulled out the third and heaviest one, which had been layered with strips of thick packaging tape. The other two boxes had been labeled in our mother’s slight, sloppy hand; this one carried my father’s heavy deliberate letters, spelling IMPORTANT—SAVE.
We couldn’t figure out how to get it open until Justine stood on her toes and found a wrench on top of the wat
er tank. She ripped a slit down the center of the seal. “And now, Vanna, let’s take a look at our prize,” Justine said, holding the wrench up in front of her like a microphone. It took both of us to drag the box away from the tank and rip back the cardboard flaps.
What we saw made us smile first, then laugh to each other with our eyes, although there seems nothing funny in retrospect about a cartonful of keys, all loose and piled on top of one another like so many random coins. No two keys were on chains or connected by tape or twine; none was labeled or tagged; and there was no indication anywhere of what locks the keys fitted, how old they were, whether they had been discarded in this box or were being saved for the day when our father might need to open something and would try every key he had ever encountered, until one of them finally worked.
“Jesus,” Justine said. She tried to whistle but it came out spit. “Did you ever see these before?”
“Of course not. What do you think?” I heard indignation in my voice without even knowing where it came from, but in the next moment I realized it was because I felt accused, and because I was instinctively defending my father, who was the guilty one. When had he begun collecting these keys, and why did he hide them, and what comfort did he derive from knowing they were here? He had always been a hoarder, but as far as we knew it was never in secret—he’d stick the most unlikely things (the cardboard of a paper-towel roll, an empty soap-bubble jar) on top of his current pile in the pantry, and our mother would take care of getting rid of them later, when he was out of sight. He couldn’t bring himself to discard even a burnt match, at the exact moment it passed from utility into worthlessness.
And Give You Peace Page 10
