by Diana Welch
Once the gray house was finally empty, I made another trip by myself. The only sounds were the crickets and the wind rustling through the still-full September trees. As I drove through the small thicket separating my old life from my new, I had no idea that I wouldn’t set foot in that house again for more than twenty years.
Yet I would walk past it every day on my way down to the bus, at times turning my head away from it, sitting there, up on top of that hill, taunting me. Those mornings, I’d wake up after Mom left for work. Diana would already be dressed—in her OshKosh overalls and her favorite rainbow sweatshirt or in her purple corduroys and a hot pink unicorn T-shirt—watching morning cartoons with a bowl of Cheerios balanced on her lap. Mom would leave notes, “I’ll be home by 7 p.m.,” sometimes a grocery list, and always “Love, Mom,” in her loopy cursive. I’d make Diana lunch—peanut butter and jelly on Branola bread, a box of apple juice, and a granola bar—and tell her when it was time to make the trek down the driveway to wait for the bus.
Dan and I took the bus together—he was only in seventh grade but his middle school was on the same campus as my high school. I always showered and washed my hair the night before because there was only one bathroom in the cottage. My morning ritual took time: I desperately wanted a perm, but Mom said I was too young, so I used her hot curlers instead and applied my makeup as they cooled. Mom thought only blush and lip-gloss were appropriate for a high school sophomore, but since she was gone most mornings, I raided her makeup. She kept it in a red leather suitcase that looked like a fancy fishing tackle box, embossed with her initials, AWW, in gold. It was filled with tools of her trade: pots of foundation, compacts of blush, brushes from tiny to large, and dozens of pencils for both eyes and lips. Her Ultima eye-shadow kit, which looked like a painter’s palette with twenty-four different colors, was my favorite. I experimented with gold and peach one day, pale blues and grays the next. Face done, I unwrapped the curlers and placed one hand on my dresser and the other on my bed before whipping my head back and forth several times, unleashing the tight coils into loose lassoes. I’d read somewhere that this was what Farrah Fawcett did. Pleased with the results, I used a can of Aqua Net to spray my frothy locks into place and headed off to school.
Hardly anyone at school knew I was living in the cottage because I never invited anyone over. Ever. It was small and cramped and uncomfortable for my family, let alone friends. We were living on top of one another. If everyone wanted to watch TV, someone had to sit on the floor. It was embarrassing. I hadn’t told anyone Mom had cancer, either. I kept that a secret, too. She never even seemed sick, just sad. I wanted to protect her and my siblings from people passing judgment on us as a family. To lose our dad was painful enough. To lose our way of life added a layer of humiliation—for me, at least. So I only told my closest friends that we had even moved. No one else needed to know.
I spent lots of time at friends’ houses or babysitting. No one seemed to notice how drastically my life had changed. I still wore the same preppy clothes from the year before. Mom still drove the same cars, and we even used the same turnoff on West Patent Road to get to our driveway, as the new one didn’t split off from the old one until just below the pasture. For months, it was simply a rough line dug into the earth where the bulldozer tire had carved a herringbone pattern into the red-gold dirt that would eventually fade with use. But no one could see the new driveway from West Patent Road. The only good thing about the cottage was that it was hidden.
When Amanda came home, she slept on the couch. Sharing a twin bed was uncomfortable, and if we pulled out the trundle, there was no room to walk. To help Mom out, we’d do the grocery shopping or run other errands together. Mom still left a check made out to ShopRite, but she had stopped leaving lists because by now I knew what we needed.
One weekday afternoon, I wanted to make meatloaf for dinner and realized we didn’t have any ground beef. Amanda wasn’t due home for two days, Mom was at work, and we were running low on milk and eggs. I went through the cupboards and the refrigerator and made a list—we needed tuna fish and mayonnaise and graham crackers, too. As always, Mom had left a check on the counter. Dan was probably at Curtis’s house; he was never home anyway. Diana was busy coloring in Mom’s room, so I shouted, “I’ll be right back, Di,” grabbed the check, and walked out the door.
The Mercedes was parked out front. I got in the driver’s seat, started the engine, and caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. I was only fourteen but I could pass for older. I had begged Mom for braces to fix one errant tooth that popped out of line, but she insisted it gave my smile personality, explaining, “Perfect is boring, darling.” I knew she just didn’t want to pay for them, and on this particular day, her stinginess worked in my favor. Girls with braces were generally too young to drive cars. I was almost five-foot-six and my feet were size eight. One more size up and I’d be able to wear Mom’s shoes. I put the car in reverse.
Driving down the driveway was easy, as was taking the left onto West Patent Road. Then I saw a car speeding toward me. My chest expanded—I thought I might explode. But the car passed, and I was still alive and not smeared on the street or smashed against the windshield. My fear dissipated until another car appeared ahead, barreling toward me. I remembered Dad’s words, “Steady and straight, toots, steady and straight,” and I kept on, clutching the wheel, my knuckles almost popping through my skin.
I made it down our road and another before I came to the one that poured into Mount Kisco’s busiest intersection. The road was steep and narrow and had such sharp, blind corners that I honked as I rounded each and stayed so far to the right I heard branches scrape against the passenger’s side. Thankfully, the light at the bottom of the serpentine hill was red, giving me a moment to breathe and strategize. ShopRite was just across the four-lane road.
The light turned green and a stream of cars started moving toward me, some turning in front, others whizzing past. I imagined Dad guiding me, “Okay, kiddo, make it through this intersection and you’re golden.” A horn hollered from behind, jolting me into action. I lifted my foot off the brake and began to cross. As I maneuvered the Mercedes through the labyrinth of metal and wheels and horns, I held my breath and fought the urge to close my eyes. Once safely in the lot, I parked far away from the shopping carts and people and cars and got out shaking. I kept waiting for someone to bust me, to ask, “Where’s your mom?” or “How did you get here?” I was slightly disappointed when nobody did. I did the grocery shopping and added an extra twenty-five dollars, the limit, to the total of the bill, pocketed the cash, and then drove home. Dan was sitting in front of the TV, watching One Day at a Time.
“Hey,” he said, barely turning his head.
“Hey,” I answered back and started unpacking groceries, giddy. If no one noticed I was gone, then I wouldn’t get caught. But then vague disappointment set in: No one was there to pat me on the back and say, “Nice job, toots.”
I started driving all the time. To grocery-shop, to buy candy at D’s variety store, to Mount Kisco to drop Dan off at Curtis’s house, and to go try on dresses at the Bazaar Mall with my friends.
One evening, Mom called me to her bedroom. She was just home from work, and I was in my room, doing homework. “Elizabeth,” she said, concern coloring her voice.
I froze for a moment before going into her room, only a couple steps from my own. “I just got off the phone with Mrs. Vucovick,” she continued.
I was standing in her bedroom doorway, and Mom was sitting on the corner of her bed, unzipping her knee-high burgundy boots. Her hair was set and sprayed into a puffy bob, and she still had a thick coat of makeup from her day on the set, but she looked tired beneath the foundation and eyeliner and blush. She looked worn-out and a bit deflated beneath her stiff hair. Her eyes caught and held mine.
“She called to say she thought she saw you driving the Mercedes by yourself down Springhurst Road.”
The panic I felt during my first drive starte
d to uncoil once again. How could I talk my way out of this?
Mom was now bent over and massaging her left foot, which looked puffy and swollen beneath the beige pantyhose. It was bigger than her right foot, I could see.
I stood in silence for a moment, thinking hard. Mom always said she could forgive anything except a lie. So I said, “How else are we supposed to get groceries, Mom?”
She stopped rubbing her foot and looked up at me. Her face, which was taut yet weary, suddenly shifted. She crinkled her nose as if she were about to sneeze and thought for a moment before she said, “Good point, darling.” She said it again and smiled. “Good point.” I saw a fleeting spark in her eye and her lips soften. I saw the mom who sang lines from Broadway show tunes in the midst of conversations, who insisted on playing levitation with my friends at slumber parties, and who used to take me and Dan to school in a horse-drawn carriage until the police stopped her on West Patent Road and said she needed a special license. I saw a glimpse of the mom who used to embarrass me and whom I now missed terribly. And so I kept driving.
DIANA
THE WALK UP the driveway was even longer now, since I had to pass by the gray house and walk between my old swing set and pool before I got to the cottage. The people who lived in our old house were called the Chisolms, and they were English. They had an Auntie Eve they called “Nanny,” and they called mud “muck.” They also put sugar on their grapefruit. Hugh and Laura were around my age, and they went to Rippowam Cisqua, my old school. Their little brother Mark looked like a tiny old man, and he tried to follow us everywhere. It was fun to not be the youngest, and they were nice about sharing the swing set that I still considered mine although Mom had explained to me that it wasn’t any longer, even though it was closer to our new house than it was to theirs.
Nobody was playing in the yard that afternoon, so I kept walking until the cottage appeared from behind the pine trees. Since we had moved, Mom had very little time to do the things she used to. Everything seemed harder, a chore. Even my birthday. Mom didn’t want to have a party for me because things were “so up in the air.” That’s what she said. I heard her arguing with Liz about it in the kitchen. I was lying in the new bedroom I shared with Mom, making purple spirals with my Spirograph set. My pen kept cracking through the paper because the carpet was too soft, so I used a Pay Day board game box as a table.
“We have to do it, Mom,” I could hear Liz say, and then Mom’s low murmur. “Every little girl deserves a birthday,” Liz answered back, fast and hard.
My sixth birthday fell on a Friday, and Liz surprised me at school with cupcakes for my whole class. That afternoon, Amanda took me to the music store and let me pick out three tapes: I chose Huey Lewis and the News’ Sports, Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell, and Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s. Then Liz took me to the Denim Mine and told me to go and get anything I wanted and to meet her at the cash register in ten minutes. I don’t remember what I chose. And they did throw me a party, at the cottage, in the garage, and nearly everybody in my grade came, even boys. We danced in pointy hats and ate a Mickey Mouse cake.
DAN
I HATED THE cottage. I had to sleep in a closet, on an army cot shoved in the back corner, leaving only six inches between me and Dad’s suits and Mom’s old furs. It reminded me of this summer school I went to for my dyslexia a few years before, when I was nine. I got the worst migraine ever. It was so bad that drugs couldn’t help. I couldn’t be touched. Light was excruciating. I just hid in the coat racks, lying down until the pain washed over me and was gone. The closet was like that; I could just lie there and disappear. It was my little cocoon, my musty incubator. And it was freezing in there, so I made this elaborate pulley system out of string so I wouldn’t have to get out of bed at night to turn off the light. I stacked boxes so that I couldn’t see the door from my cot, so I could hide. The only thing that kept me from feeling totally alone was Ralph. Ralph was a German shepherd–beagle mutt, born six months after Dad died. Mom said that he was a good omen, because she believed that animals were good energy.
One night, lying on my cot with Ralph, I wrote FUCK LIFE on the wall in pencil. When Mom found it, she freaked out. I felt so bad—the last thing I wanted to do was make her worry. She had enough to worry about. Ever since Dad died, she told me I was the man of the house. I wanted to pull my own weight, not add to her load. Like at the tag sale when we were moving out of the gray house, I ran around putting little colored stickers on things, pricing them. I wanted to chip in, so I sold my baseball card collection. I had the entire 1976 lineup, every single person in the league, 1,127 cards. I sold them for, like, forty bucks. I sold everything I owned and gave the money to Mom. I can’t remember bringing anything to the cottage. Where would I have put it, anyway?
Mom sent me to a shrink after she found what I wrote. He had a beard and longish hair, the kind of guy who would put the Muppet on his hand to ask, “Where did he touch you?” I liked him, though. We talked for, like, twenty minutes and then played tiddlywinks for the rest. I talked about missing Dad and how hard it was being the only boy. That was the big thing for me, being the only boy.
DIANA
DANNY GOT GROUNDED because he wrote FUCK on the wall in his closet. Mom made him erase it when she found it. I know because I snuck in there when no one was home, parted the plastic-covered jackets, and saw its ghost on the white wall. Mom was mad, so was he. Everyone was grumpy since we moved to the cottage, even Liz.
I liked the cottage. Every afternoon after school, I came home to an empty house. Once inside, I’d drop my knapsack on the floor and drag a chair from the dining-room table up to the counter. Then I’d climb onto the creaking straw seat that was woven in the same pattern as the God’s eyes we made in arts and crafts. With one knee on the yellow counter, I could reach the cupboard that held the graham crackers and the one that held the cups. My favorite was a tall glass with the purple Grimace on it that I got with a McDonald’s Happy Meal.
It was nice to sit in front of the TV, right up in it so I could feel the hairs on my face talk to the electricity coming off the screen. I watched Scooby-Doo and ate graham crackers until my stomach hurt, generally half a package, soaking each rectangle in the milk past my fingertips, waving it back and forth until the cracker was soft enough to fall apart on my tongue.
One afternoon, Liz came home and broke the spell by telling me I’d ruin my eyesight sitting so close to the TV. Wiping my milky fingers on my pants, I backed up a little bit and rested my chin in my hands, splaying my legs out one on each side like a frog. Liz started talking on the phone as she unpacked the groceries, slamming cabinet doors with her shoulder and drawers with her hips. She was making so much noise I couldn’t even hear the show, so I retreated into my and Mom’s room, leaving my cup and cookies on the floor.
I didn’t come out of the bedroom until much later, once the windows had gone dark and I had completely filled in my Barbie coloring book. I only came out because I wanted to go to Carvel, one of my and Mom’s favorite places. In the commercials, an old guy named Tom Carvel always talked about his whale-shaped ice cream cake that said “Have a Whale of a Day!” on it in blue icing. I ate it once, at a friend’s birthday party, and it was gross, all mushy and cold on my fork. I liked a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles, and Mom liked a vanilla cone dipped in a hard chocolate shell. We’d start licking before we were out of the shop, and by the time we got to the car, my face would be covered in ice cream and so would her hand. Mom would flip down my visor so I could see my reflection in the mirror, and we’d giggle about my ice cream lipstick while she licked her hand and mewed like a cat. Then she’d poke me in the side, making me twist in my seat. I’d laugh so hard I’d get a double chin and kick the dashboard, my cone held high in the air.
So I walked into the main room where Amanda and Liz and Dan were all hanging out. Mom wasn’t there. “Can we go to Carvel?” I asked. Nobody answered. Dan was scrunched on the couch watching TV, his chin resting against his k
nees, his dirty white-socked feet sinking into the down cushion. Liz and Amanda were to my left in the kitchen, talking to each other. “Can we go to Carvel?” I asked them, a little louder this time. But nobody answered, not even Liz. She and Amanda just kept talking, and Amanda threw her head back and laughed loudly, baring her fanglike incisors to the harsh yellow track lights on the kitchen ceiling.
Being ignored was new, but I was getting used to it. Even gross old Mimsy, Mom’s hundred-year-old cat, was ignoring me, sitting on the couch next to Dan with her eyes closed, purring. So I went back into my and Mom’s bedroom and felt sorry for myself, really sorry. Like wondering why everyone hated me so much, why they all acted like I wasn’t even alive, or like if they pretended that I wasn’t there, I would go away. But I had nowhere to go besides this stupid bedroom, and I wanted to go to Carvel!
The tears came gushing out with so much wind behind them that my lungs couldn’t keep up. I was heaving, my tongue flapping against my throat. I wanted Mom, but she wasn’t there; and when she was, she was always tired or busy; and my sisters didn’t have time for me; and my brother felt far away. Suddenly, Liz was at the door.
“What’s wrong?” she asked me, weary. She had a dish towel hanging from her hand, which was on her hip. In my despair, I had flung myself on the bed and grabbed onto my right knee, and a perfect cover-up came to mind.
