I began word processing for the lawyer who had handled our parents’ separation. I spent a whole lunch hour looking through the file marked Dolan, T. v. Dolan, M., and at first, nothing in it surprised me. Irreconcilable differences, it said. The last papers in the file were the unsigned divorce documents. Across my father’s name the word DECEASED had been stamped in red.
Then, just before I closed the file, the word “Psychiatric” caught my eye, and I saw that my father had been referred to a specific doctor for evaluation. There were no notes to indicate whether he had followed up on the referral, but several dates—during the month before the deaths—were listed next to the doctor’s name. I scribbled the name at the top of the bookmark holding my place in Revolutionary Road and, though I wasn’t sure what I would do with it, I made sure not to lose the slip.
During other lunch hours I went to the library and read the psychology journals. I thought, again, about graduate school. Slowly, the days regained a shape and texture I remembered from before the deaths: they had a beginning, middle, and end, instead of the amorphous stretch of consciousness during which I yearned only to be asleep. Whole minutes could go by, now, without the electronic marquee in my head flashing the continuous message, They’re dead. Although I did not admit it to Justine, I was glad our mother had made us leave the house. I was pretty sure my sister felt the same way, even though she always came home smelling like doughnuts and complaining of sore feet.
In the middle of October, our mother suggested taking a trip back to Ashmont to visit the graves over Meggy’s birthday at the end of the month. By coincidence, the man at the memorial shop had just called to say that the headstones—he called them monuments—were ready, and would be installed within the week. Although our mother made the trip sound like her own idea, I suspect it actually originated with Paul, the staff photographer at the Oracle, whom our mother had started dating around the time of the Toothpaste Burglar pool. He was a short man who always seemed to wear the same hooded navy sweatshirt, brown corduroys, and sneakers, and although he didn’t have much hair—he was completely bald on top, but still had tufts at the sides, around the ears—it always managed to look uncombed. Justine and I, to each other, called him Curly, after the Stooge. He was the complete opposite of our father, who kept his body tight and lean by running in the summer and swimming in the winter, and who had a regular appointment at the barber’s every three weeks. Paul could make Mom laugh, which was something our father hadn’t been able to do for a long time before she left.
At first Justine and I didn’t see Paul all that much, because our mother felt awkward having him at the condo while we were still there. But when it became clear to her that we weren’t planning to move out anytime soon, she invited him over for dinner. He came a few times in September, and Justine tried to repel him out by eating three or four helpings of everything on the table, but he didn’t seem to notice; then one day when he didn’t know I was looking I saw him sprinkling parmesan cheese into his throat, followed by a chaser of Reddi-wip squeezed straight from the can, and I understood why Justine’s habits didn’t bother him. He kept to himself, mostly, and if he had to speak to one of us he did it shyly, mumbling into his plate. We never talked about my father or Meggy, and if the subject ever threatened to come up—like a finger pressing gently, testing an exposed wound—one of us always managed, at the last minute, to snatch the conversation back to the Mets or the merits of Mom’s Hungarian goulash.
The reason I believe it was Paul’s suggestion that we go to the cemetery on Meggy’s birthday is that during one of these dinners, seemingly out of the blue, he made a point of telling us he had to work that whole particular weekend, shooting the Bills in Buffalo and then a freelance job in Niagara Falls. My mother didn’t seem to understand why he was bringing up his schedule, but when she got home later that night after they’d gone out to a movie, she sat watching Justine and me without speaking. Sneaking looks back at her, we saw that she was considering something. When a commercial came on she raised a finger to get our attention and said, “Do you think we should go visit Birch Street on the twenty-sixth?” as if she knew it were an absurd proposition but was willing to solicit other opinions. (She always referred to it as “Birch Street” because she seemed unable to bring herself to say the word “cemetery.” Our father and Meggy were buried in the graveyard on a corner near the center of Ashmont, where the two main roads, Birch and Euclid, crossed each other at a light. Growing up, we always held our breath when we drove by it, so our bodies wouldn’t be invaded by the souls of the dead.)
When Justine and I looked at each other and realized simultaneously what “the twenty-sixth” was, then both answered “Yeah” without qualification, my mother seemed surprised and a little nervous. “Are you sure?” she said.
“I wanted to see the headstones, anyway,” I told her, and Justine nodded.
“Well. All right, then.” Our mother stood up and put her hands together with the air of one who wants to get busy on a new project. As if to convince herself of her commitment, she went over to the calendar and drew a bold circle around Saturday, October 26.
“I think we should invite Rosemary, too,” I said, flipping through my address book to find my aunt’s number in New York. My mother hesitated a moment, though she tried not to show it, then handed me the phone.
As the date approached, she kept asking us if we really wanted to make the trip, if we didn’t think we might be rushing things, if maybe we shouldn’t wait until Christmas or even the spring.
“You don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to, Mom,” Justine told her the last time she brought it up. Our mother replied, Don’t be silly, of course I want to go.
She didn’t get home until late every night of the first three weeks in October. She said she had evening assignments, but we knew she was spending that time with Paul. Justine and I didn’t mind, as long as we had each other for company.
The night before the trip, Justine and I stayed up late watching a Star Trek movie while we waited for our mother to come home. When we finally turned off the TV and shut the light out, it was three o’clock and she still wasn’t there. “Should we call over to Paul’s house?” Justine asked. “Just to make sure? I mean, what if she got in an accident?”
“She’s not in an accident,” I told her. “She’s in bed.”
“You didn’t have to say that.” Justine turned over, and I had to keep myself from rolling toward the depression her body had carved into the mattress.
Within minutes I felt my sister’s even breath heating the ridge between our pillows. Then, before I even realized I was sleeping, I dropped deep into a dream: Meggy was hiding under her bed in the house on Pearl Street as a rainbow of bullets sang through her room. They were out to get her, but nobody thought to look beneath the bed. The shooting stopped after a while and Meggy began to crawl out. I passed by her room at that moment and saw one gun still aiming, waiting and cocked, to pick off my little sister. I tried to scream her name, but I had forgotten it.
Panicked, I woke to the sound of The Jetsons wafting through the living-room wall. Next to me Justine was silent, but the three-year-old girl on the other side of my mother’s duplex was watching cartoons. Her name was Deirdre, and my mother baby-sat for her sometimes. She was cute, but—as silly as it might sound—Deirdre’s friendship with our mother had felt threatening to Justine and me ever since we found out that our mother gave her one of Meggy’s old dolls.
It’s not as if it was Meggy’s favorite doll; in fact, we didn’t even know if it ever had a name. But Justine and I didn’t like the idea of letting go of anything that once belonged to Meggy, anything she ever touched. The only other time it had come up was when we considered and then approved giving Meggy’s bike to Sibyl McGuin. The bike was a blue three-speed Schwinn with accessories. Our parents had given it to Meggy for her twelfth birthday, and we let it go to Sibyl on the condition that she agree not to roll the odometer back to zero, but save the m
iles Meggy had left there.
I must have fallen back asleep, listening to The Jetsons, because the next thing I was aware of was the sound of my sister taking a shower. My mother entered the house and tried tiptoeing into her bedroom.
“Good morning,” I said, and she drew her breath in and dropped her keys.
“Goddammit,” she answered. “You scared me.” Instead of the work clothes she had left the house in the day before, she was wearing the Mets shirt and sweatpants she generally used as pajamas.
I lifted my head to see what time it was: 7:15. From the other side of the wall I heard Deirdre eating cereal, her spoon banging the bowl. “You scared us, too,” I told my mother, even though this was true only of Justine. “We called the hospitals.”
“Oh, God. You didn’t.”
She looked so stricken that I said, “Well, no, we didn’t. But we thought about it.”
“I just assumed you’d know I was at Paul’s.”
“Well, that’s what we figured. But you could have called.”
My mother sank into the loveseat, laughing a little as she shook her head. “Something’s backwards here,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m the one who’s supposed to worry about you guys staying out too late. You should be the ones having to sneak into the house.” She leaned forward, and I could tell she was ready to pick a fight. “Really, Ana. Don’t you think it’s time you went back to Boston and Justine got a place of her own? We can’t put our lives on hold, just sitting around here moping and getting fat.”
“We’re not moping,” I told her. Anger made me sit up. “And I’m not getting fat.”
“Well, you know what I mean.” She crossed to the windows, stepped over the dog, and opened the blinds before I saw what she was doing. The sun went straight to my eyes.
“Jeez, Mom,” I said, making my hand a shade, “do you mind?”
“What?” She looked puzzled.
“It’s too bright.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She turned the slats back down, but only halfway. “Don’t you want to be getting up soon, anyway?”
“It’s not even eight-thirty,” I said, reminded that these were the two circumstances—in my mother’s presence, and too early in the morning—that caused me to speak in italics.
“Well,” my mother murmured, “I know.” She added, as if she had not already told us this several times, “Rosemary said she’d be here by eleven,” as Justine emerged from the bathroom wrapped in two towels.
“Mommy,” Justine said, the word escaping her tongue before she could check it. “I mean, Mom. You’re back.” I saw in her the same instinct I’d felt, to accuse, but she refrained as I had.
“Yes, I’m back,” our mother said lightly. “I didn’t know I’d be the subject of an APB.”
Justine looked at me, and I shook my head. “Well,” our mother said, with a let’s-change-the-subject raise of her eyebrows, “I guess I’ll make breakfast.” She went over to the kitchen and started taking things out of the cupboards. Justine got dressed, and she and I set the table as our mother took down the fancy champagne glasses from the sideboard. She poured orange juice into the glasses and we sat in our usual places. She picked hers up and looked into it, then set it down again without drinking when she realized that Justine and I were trying to forget what it was we had agreed to celebrate.
“It’s Meggy’s sixteenth birthday,” she said, as if we might not know.
When Rosemary arrived, the three of us were in the front yard waiting for her and raking leaves with Deirdre’s mother. It was more of an excuse to be outside than it was real work; Deirdre kept jumping in the pile we made, scattering the leaves for us to rake up again. Although it wasn’t sunny, the air was warm, and we wore light clothing with our sleeves rolled up. Most of the other people who lived in the complex had also been lured out by the temperature and were sitting in lawn chairs or on their front steps. My mother didn’t know any of them officially except Deirdre’s family, but she waved or nodded or said, “Beautiful day,” and they did the same back, so it felt like a neighborhood even though none of them knew one another’s names. Through a screen window, somebody had a radio on, playing baroque music that made it feel as if we were all part of a medieval dream. When we heard a car slowing as it approached the cul-de-sac, Deirdre looked over and then yelled to us, “Is that who you’re waiting for? She’s wearing big sunglasses and her hair kind of looks like a witch.”
“Ssh, Dee Dee,” her mother said, though it was an accurate description. When our aunt stepped out of her car, a maroon Mercedes, she appeared mysterious and—especially to a child, I’m sure—scary. Her eyes were hidden and her hair, which was longer now than I’d ever seen it, stuck out in wild strands across her forehead. She took the glasses off as we came toward her, and her eyes looked dazed and puzzled, exposed to sunlight without a shield.
“Oh, Margaret,” she said, putting her arms around our mother, who stood closest to the curb. “Ana. Justine.” She said each of our names as she kissed our cheeks, as if she were christening us.
“Mommy,” Deirdre said, watching from her side of the lawn, “they’re all hugging the lady.”
“Are you hungry?” my mother asked Rosemary, after we’d stepped back from one another and stood blinking at the day.
“Oh, God, no.” Rosemary slid the sunglasses on top of her head and put a hand against the stomach of her sweater, which was made of lace eyelet in a pale green. Whenever I think of Rosemary, I picture her in this color, an American Irishwoman who inherited her father’s vivid eyes and bushy hair—which Rosemary kept auburn even after it wanted to go gray—and his appetite for alcohol. “I had a milkshake from Burger King on the way up.” She spoke with a thickened tongue, and Justine and my mother and I sent glances at each other, because from the kisses and the way her words came out, we could tell that she poured a little something extra into that milkshake before she drank it down.
Our aunt Rosemary was two years older than our father, which made her nearly fifty, but she looked at least ten years younger. All the time we were growing up, she lived in Woodstock, near the town where the famous concert was held. We used to visit her in the little house-shack where she supported herself by preparing taxes and reading Tarot cards. There was always a man there when we went to visit, but it was hardly ever the same man as the time before. A few years before our father and Meggy died, she moved down to New York City with the one who had accompanied her to the funeral, Harold Webb. A former priest, he now managed the careers of recording artists. Harold Webb had plenty of money (and the Mercedes), and we believed that Rosemary lived with him for this reason, more than for love.
When it was time to start out for Ashmont, we all got into my mother’s car, and she started it and shifted into reverse. “Wait,” I said, putting my hand out to keep her from moving. She braked. “Where’s Deirdre?”
“She went into the house with her mother,” Justine said.
“Are you sure?”
“The little girl?” Rosemary says. “I saw her go in, too.”
My mother was looking at me with an expression I had seen before only when she sensed that something was starting to take hold of my father. “Honey, she’s in the house,” she said to me gently.
“Can you wait a second? I just have to see.” I opened my door and stepped out and went around to the rear of the car, where I bent down to look under the wheels. Of course, Deirdre wasn’t there. I got in the car again, feeling foolish. “I just had a feeling. You know how that happens? I had to check.”
“It’s okay, honey,” my mother murmured. She looked away, but I saw her bite her lip.
We decided to take a secondary road, Route 20, because although it would make the trip slightly longer, it was less boring than our usual route along the Thruway. More scenic, my mother said. It was true: the trees had turned, and when the sun broke over the hills, it lit up the blond fields like every painting of heaven I’d ever se
en. Hay bales left over from summer stood in stagnant, luxurious scrolls. The mountains, set back in the sky behind treetops, stretched dark blue and deep. Cows gathered in sluggish bunches; chickens circled themselves at the side of the road. We went by signs that said Honey & Nite Crawlers, Grampa’s Collectables, Firewood 4 Sale. A long, low-ceilinged house turned out to be the Petrified Creatures Museum of Natural History. “What do they have to be petrified about,” Rosemary quipped, and the three of us said, ha, ha.
It was so beautiful it made our hearts twist. I knew we were all thinking about Meggy; this had been her favorite season of the year. She loved having her birthday so close to Halloween, and until she was twelve, she always had costume parties with her friends. Our father dressed up in the same pirate clothes to host the party every year, until my mother told him that Meggy was embarrassed by it; she was getting too old.
“Of course she isn’t,” my father said, blowing dust off the eye patch. “She hasn’t said a thing.”
“She asked me to,” my mother told him.
“Oh.” The next day he put the pirate suit in a grocery bag and dropped it off at Goodwill.
On our way to Ashmont, my mother noticed a sign for a garage sale in Voorheesville and decided to stop. She bought a set of canisters, two paperbacks, a welcome mat, and a beach chair she said reminded her of the summers her own family used to spend at Lake Independence in Minnesota.
“I’d say that’s a pretty good deal,” she told us as we pulled back onto the road. “All that stuff for under ten bucks.” I was sitting next to her in the front seat; in the back, Justine started reading Presumed Innocent, one of our mother’s new books. “Honey, you’ll get sick,” our mother warned her, speaking to the rearview mirror. In the old days, Justine would have made a face and kept on reading. But now she closed the book with an obedience that made me roll down my window and whisper “Jesus Christ” into the wind.
And Give You Peace Page 13
