by Alice Sebold
By giving up my life to her on a global basis, I bought small moments away. I could read the books I liked. I could grow the flowers I wished. I could drive to Westmore and stand nude on a platform. Only by thinking I had freedom had I come to understand how imprisoned I was.
"Change!" Haku barked. I could hear in his tone an admonition to work harder on my pose.
A godsend, this one, after the awkwardness of the last. I sat down sideways on the chair, knowing that the students would have to imagine the edge of the tub beneath me. How my ass would be rounder instead of squared off by the seat of the chair. Again, I reached for the hospital gown and used it as a towel. After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck always allowed for a quick massaging squeeze or two to my shoulders before I grew still.
I heard a few students grumble about a lack of time. How they wanted the poses to be longer. There was one boy I particularly disliked, even if I knew myself to be uncharitable. When I was introducing myself in the first week and telling them about myself, describing my daughters--where they lived and what they did--the boy had said, "So you're, like, as old as my mother." I had answered, because my pride knew no danger, that I was forty-nine. His two-word response, I told my mother, laughing, was "Vomit city."
"I tried to seduce Alistair Castle once," she had said to me. I stopped and stared. Early in her eighties, she'd begun to tell me things I'd never known. How she was touched inappropriately by a friend of her father's. How she had stopped having what she called "relations" with my father after his accident. How she didn't care much for Emily, though she enjoyed Sarah's failed audition stories. "Imagine having to audition to be a waitress," she'd said, loving that in New York a restaurant job could be so competitive it involved callbacks.
With each of these unexpected revelations, I grew numb, an art I had perfected over time in order to extract the truth behind the flashes.
"And how did your seduction go?" I had asked my mother, my head spinning with the pain this must have caused my father if he'd known.
"Vomit city!" my mother responded, looking into the empty fireplace, whose bricks were painted black. "Marlene Dietrich had it right," she said. "For about ten years, you can glue rubber bands to your head and pull your skin tight, but after that, it's about hiding out. At least then you have mystique."
I wanted to tell her that in terms of mystique, she'd won the lottery. From Billy Murdoch to her blanketed escapades, her mystique was bulletproof, even if it was more about being creepy and strange than unattainable.
She looked from the fireplace to me. She assessed. "You should get plastic surgery. I would if I were your age."
"No, thanks."
"Faye Dunaway," she said.
"Tits, Mom," I said. "If I get anything done, I'm going to get huge monster tits. I'll serve dinner on them, and you can eat off the right tit and I'll eat off the left."
"Helen," she said, "that's disgusting." But I had made her laugh.
I stood to draw the blinds before turning on her PBS shows for the evening. As I lowered the blinds all the way and then went to the television in the opposite corner, my mother landed her spear: "Besides, Manny and I were talking, and we both think it's your face that needs work. Your body is still fine."
What I wanted to say was "I'm glad to know Manny wants to fuck my headless body." Instead I said, "It looks like Wall $treet Week has been preempted by Live at the Boston Pops."
Days later, the rest of her story came out.
"Hilda Castle was in the hospital, having a hysterectomy," my mother said. "I offered myself."
The phrase repelled me.
"You what?"
"I tried to seduce him."
I was holding the large bath towels I used to mask her way to the car, and she was delaying us as she always did when we had to go to the doctor.
I stood just inside the front door and unfolded the first towel, draping it across her shoulders like a shawl. This was the backup. If, for some reason, the towel that was protecting her head and face should fall, she could quickly grab the shawl towel and replace it.
She peered into my eyes, the algae green of the towel darkening her papery skin.
"Does Sarah fuck?"
I knew enough to ignore her.
"We are late for your date with the machine," I said. My mother was scheduled for an MRI and was deathly afraid. For weeks beforehand, I had arrived to find her lying on the floor of the living room with a ticking alarm clock by her head. "What are you doing?" I'd ask her. "Practicing," she'd say.
Going to the doctor was one thing I could not do by proxy for my mother. It was her body they needed to poke and prod, not mine. Twice the man my mother still called "the new doctor," though he had taken over the office of my parents' original physician in the 1980s, had encouraged her to try a sedative. It was an attempt to make leaving the house not so excruciating for her. She had nodded her head as if she found this sage advice. I watched her as she creased the dutifully written prescription once down the middle and then continued folding it over and over again. By the time we reached the car to head home again, the prescription would be the size of her thumbnail, even smaller than the notes I remembered finding in Sarah's room when she was a teenager. "Mindy screwed Owen under the bleachers," Sarah's notes said. "Xanax 10 mgs. As needed," my mother's said.
As her daughter, I could fill her prescriptions, and though she would not medicate herself, I often popped a pill before I had to wrestle her into the car. I was sanguine about it--if, by taking a sedative, I crashed the car and killed one or both of us, life would be easier as a result.
"Emily must fuck because she's married," my mother said, but by the end of the sentence I'd put the towel over her head and muffled the sound. It was actually better if she got onto a topic like this. Her aggression was strength and therefore preferable to the alternative, which was her moaning in fear as I guided her down the front steps and toward the car.
I had done this too many times to worry about what the neighbors thought. I learned from Manny that many of the newer neighbors assumed my mother was a burn victim and that the blankets and towels were meant to hide her scars.
"But she's a really nice old lady," he'd said. "I was surprised."
"Right," I'd said, and then Manny went down to the basement for some unidentified chore for which I'd have to figure out what to pay him.
"Alistair Castle just stared at me," my mother said as she sat next to me, under her towels. "He stopped coming around."
"And Hilda started," I said.
"He rejected her after the operation. We had that in common."
"A hysterectomy?"
"No, sexual rejection," my mother said. She had lifted the towel up just enough to make sure she was heard.
"Got it," I said.
"Change!" Tanner barked.
I heard the students growing restless. Three poses was usually the max of their attention spans. The adjustment for Woman Washing in Her Bath was minimal. I had to lean farther over and replace the hospital-gown towel with the sea sponge, which I would hold at the back of my neck. My shoulders ached now but in ways I was long familiar with. Quickly, I glanced up to find Dorothy at her easel. She stared intently back at me.
Jake had come from a family that prayed. Emily had taken up the call by covering all bases: New Age spiritualism, Christian revivalism, and an ecumenical inclusiveness that bordered on the sublime.
I thought of my father tending the sheep in a graveyard for a church he had never been in. Churches spooked him, he said. "I prefer it out here, with the dead."
In the weeks following his suicide, I had freighted that sentence with more meaning than it had most likely deserved. I did this with everything. I remembered the particularly sweet kisses he had laid on the heads of Emily and Sarah in the days before. I was struck by how all his suits were hung perfectly in the closet, with one Jake had complimented freshly dry-cleaned and ready to wear. And I went searching in his workshop for a photo I had found there as
a girl.
It was still in his tool drawer. I stared at the boy who would become my father and who would kill himself in the end. How far back did it go?
I had held on to the picture as I dialed Jake's number in Wisconsin. His work was just beginning to garner attention. He was in the midst of applying for a Guggenheim to travel abroad. He had only recently left the temporary faculty housing we'd shared and was renting a house outside Madison--the carriage house of a mansion on a lake.
"Tell me everything," he said.
"I can't."
I had managed to blurt out the words, not yet able to use the more exact word of "suicide." So Jake described the water on the lake. How the back door of his house opened onto a short flight of concrete stairs that led directly to the water; how, depending on the season, the water came to within inches of his door.
"Where are the girls?" he asked.
"With Natalie," I said. "I'm in the kitchen. Mom's upstairs."
I clutched the cord of the phone so tightly that my nails turned white.
"Say anything," Jake said. "Just talk."
I moved over to stand in front of the window. I could see my father's workshop and the Levertons' backyard.
"Mrs. Leverton's grandson was outside, weeding the flagstones," I said. "It was Mrs. Leverton who called the police."
I felt the clutch in my throat but strangled the sob. I was blindingly angry and confused. I hated everyone.
"I thought of him this morning, once, just a half thought really. I was driving the girls to the Y. Emily got her Flying Fish Badge yesterday, and I heard music coming from the car behind me when I stopped at the light. It was Vivaldi, the sort of overdramatic stuff that could make my father smile. Mr. Forrest would know the exact piece."
I dragged the red step stool away from the wall and put it in the middle of the kitchen. I could sit there and look out through the dining room and across the street.
"He used my grandfather's old pistol," I said.
I could hear, if I let myself, a momentary crackle on the line or the hum of Jake's breath--the baffled noise of the distance between us. I told him everything I knew, how my father had looked when I'd come in the door; how my mother had seemed almost erased, I had such difficulty focusing on her; how the police and the neighbors had been so decorous, so kind, and all I'd wanted to do was rip off each face and throw it, fleshy and wet, onto the floor where my father lay.
Finally, when I had talked for a very long time, Jake spoke. "I know he loved you."
My mouth hung open. I thought of the vodka in my freezer at home. I wondered what medications--sedatives and pain-killers--might lurk upstairs in the bathroom cabinets and the dresser drawers.
"How is this proof of love?" I asked.
Jake had no answer for me.
I thought of the Catholic minister. My father told me that the minister had never gotten his name right. "He called my father David instead of Daniel when he saw him tending the sheep."
"Helen?" It was Tanner. He was close to me.
I heard commotion at the back of the classroom. Painfully, I sat up from my bending position on the chair.
"Here," he said, "put this on."
He draped the papery hospital gown over me. "There are men here to see you," he said.
"Men?"
"Police, Helen."
Over Tanner's shoulder, I saw into the back of the room. Standing just inside the door, and trying not to look in any one direction for all the drawings of my nude body they might see, were two men in uniform. Beside them, just as ramrod straight but in a sport coat and slacks, was another man. He had thick white hair and a mustache. He looked once around the room, his eyes coming to rest on me.
"Class," Tanner announced, "we'll end early and pick up next time."
The easels jostled while sketch pads were collected and charcoal was put down. Knapsacks were opened and cell phones were turned on, emitting songs and beeps and whistles to let the students know that yes, just as they'd thought, something more exciting had been going on while they'd been locked inside the classroom.
I thought of a handmade felt Christmas ornament my mother had sent me in Wisconsin one year in the middle of July. It was meticulous in every detail, from the sewn-on beads in the shapes of ornaments, no two alike, to the loop at the top, which had been braided from silk floss. The card, tucked inside the box, had said, "I made this. Don't waste your life."
As the students filtered out, the man in the sport jacket came up to the platform. "Helen Knightly," he said, extending his hand. "I'm Robert Broumas, Phoenixville police." His hand hung in the air, and I motioned toward my own hands, which were clasping the gown in front of me.
"Yes?" I said.
"I'm afraid we have some disturbing news."
"Yes?" I thought about how to prepare for it, what to say. The surprise party without the surprise was coming, and I had no idea how to behave.
"A neighbor of your mother's found her this morning," he said.
I stared at him and then at Tanner.
"I don't understand."
"She's dead, Mrs. Knightly. We have a few questions to ask."
I could not form an expression of any kind. He watched me intently, and I could do nothing but look back at him. To rise or leave the platform felt cowardly to me, an admission of my guilt.
If I could only have willed myself to faint, that small slice of oblivion would have been welcome, but I could not. I had wanted to faint upon seeing my father, but instead I had heard my mother's voice. "She'll help me clean up," she'd said to the police officer nearest her, and not knowing what else to do, I had gone straight to the kitchen, filled his old hospital sick bowl with water, and returned to the hallway to find my mother standing barefoot in my father's blood.
"He finally did it," she said. "I never thought he would."
I had wanted to hit her, but I was aware of the officers watching us, and in my hands I held the bowl.
TWELVE
When I was twelve, I found a photograph of my father in the small metal drawer beneath his workbench. He was a young man in the picture and stood outside an old brick row house. He was posed on the stairs, which were imposing and made from poured cement. On either side were brick-and-mortar pilasters. He wore a crumpled white shirt and pleated trousers, a thin brown belt holding them up. Next to the stairs where my father stood was the corner of a large square Dumpster in the scrappy patch of yard. Table legs and what looked like a chair poked up above the rim.
By twelve I had already begun to listen for when my father spoke about the place he came from. It was called Lambeth, and on the new maps, it no longer existed except as the name of a dam along the Delaware.
My mother called it the Dirty City because after they'd closed down the town and evicted the people--"relocated," a nice word for what they'd done--they had built a dam that redirected the river and was supposed to result in the obsolescence of the town.
Instead, despite the careful calculations of the engineers and draftsmen, what roared through town was a wall of mud that grew chunky with floating mowers and brittle with the skeletons of animals from backyard graves. After six months, it receded and left the upper parts of the town merely drenched in mud and ruined by water.
The official flood had happened shortly before he met my mother at the John Wanamaker shoot. "It's why I went into water," he would explain to people. The flooding had coincided with the buildup of surrounding towns, including Phoenixville. "Lambeth paid for the Holy Ghost Social Center," my father would point out when we drove by the squat brick-and-silver building.
On my thirteenth birthday, he had decided I was old enough to go with him to the drowned town where he'd grown up. He packed a picnic basket for the two of us and kissed my mother lightly on the forehead. "Be well, beautiful," he said.
Forty minutes later, I could sense the atmosphere palpably change inside the Oldsmobile as we approached the town, where low one-story cottages and five-house rows of brick home
s still shared peaceable blocks until the streets dipped underwater and reappeared in the distance, a few miles on.
His house, when I finally saw it, was a ruin of the building in the photograph. It stood in a row of condemned homes that, though slated for demolition, had been left in place year after year. The only remaining access was by a patched asphalt road that fell off on either side into culverts eroded by water. Trying to avoid the yawning potholes meant that he wove the car in and out of lanes like a drunk might. To me it was a sickening carnival ride.
At last we stood outside the front door, and he took my hand as we picked our way up the rotting stairs.
"This is where you stood in the photo," I said.
"Nature takes things back," my father said. "Watch your step on the porch."
And sure enough, the planks, stripped over time of their protective paint, were all but rotten. Someone--my father, I realized--had placed a new sheet of plywood down so you could make it to the front door without falling. I saw the sawed edges of a faulty arabesque and recognized it as what remained after he had carved out the arching back of a rocking horse.
We walked into the front hall, and I spotted a propane lamp sitting on an old mule-ear chair. It was from his workshop.
"There'll be things in here," he said, "that we don't need to tell your mother about."
I had begun to vary my reading at school with squirreled-away paperbacks that did not appear on our reading lists, and I knew, I thought, what comprised "men's needs." I pictured what Natalie and I loved the sound of: a den of iniquity. There would be velvet drapes and throw pillows and some sort of women smoking things out of pipes that looked like vases but weren't. That's as far as my imagination went, but I thought I was prepared.
I wasn't.
I didn't even know what to make of them at first.
