by Diana Welch
Then, suddenly, as everybody sang “Amazing Grace,” one of Mom’s favorite songs, I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I saw her thin, fluffy hair that liked to hide under her silk scarf, and I saw her big worried eyes that closed when I kissed her on her soft warm lips that would smile just for me. My tears were hot and steamed up my glasses, which were smashed crooked between my nose and my sister’s body. Liz was shaking slightly; I could feel it against my head as she ran her hand up and down my arm, steadily, over and over again.
LIZ
THE FUNERAL TOOK place at Saint Luke’s church in Katonah, the same place we had Dad’s funeral. I still get the two confused. I do know that Mom’s coffin was pine because I went with Daisy Stewart to pick it out while Mom was still alive. But this time, when the funeral director tried to get me to look at fancier wooden boxes, I was prepared. I said, “No, she wants something simple.”
Other than that, I don’t remember the service or where I sat in the church. I don’t remember people coming back to our house afterward for cold cuts and coffee, although I’m certain they did. I do remember Daisy Stewart and Nancy Chamberlain telling me to take Dan to the movies. We went to see Weird Science. It felt good to be in the dark, distracted. I think we may have even laughed.
AMANDA
ON THE WAY out of Saint Luke’s, I was a sobbing mess, all puffy from crying. The Chamberlains had just put me in the back of their car to drive me home when the fucking funeral director came running out of the church waving the bill. He actually tried to shove the bill through the window. Ted Chamberlain confronted the guy and said, “This will get taken care of, but not now.” He and Nancy stood up for me; I really appreciated that.
And it wasn’t the first time. The day before the funeral, Uncle Buzz came back to our house with a U-Haul truck. He wanted to take all his family furniture back to Texas with him. Everyone was furious, including Nancy. She greeted him at the door, saying, “What do you think you are doing?” In the end, he took a Victorian settee, two paintings that our great-aunt did, and a brass throne that our cat Mimsy used to sleep on. Nancy stood watching him, her arms crossed, giving him the evil eye as he skulked out the door.
DAN
BACK HOME, AFTER the funeral, Topher Scott walked up to me with a tennis racket. There, in the living room in front of all these people, he told me that he couldn’t be my guardian and handed me the racket. There was a note on it that said “To a good game!”
Like I said, I had no idea who this guy was. I don’t even remember his face; all I saw was a headless suit handing me a tennis racket. Liz and I went to the movies that afternoon, and when we got back to the house, Karen Kayser said she would take me in. She lived in Manhattan and used to come visit on the weekends and make me garden at the gray house. I never really liked her. She’d bark orders at me even when my parents were around. My parents never barked at me. But at least I knew her.
LIZ
AMANDA, DAN, AND I drove six hours south to Falls Church, Virginia, to bury Mom next to her father. It was more than four hundred miles away from Quincy, Massachusetts, where we had buried Dad, three and a half-years before, next to his mother. He and Mom had never talked about where they wanted to be buried, just as they had not talked about who would take care of us kids after they were dead.
We drove through the wrought-iron cemetery gates and parked. As soon as we stepped out of the car, I saw Uncle Buzz rushing toward us, his silver pageboy bobbing with each step. For a moment, I was glad to see him, a familiar human face floating above the field of cold marble slabs. Then I noticed the frantic look in his eyes.
“Did you bring your checkbook?” he asked Amanda sternly as he approached.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Your checkbook?” he repeated. “People are gathered around the gravesite, and we need to pay for the burial before they start digging.” Amanda said nothing as Dan and I each took a step closer, flanking her.
“Well, who did you expect to pay for it?” he snapped. “Me?” He sounded angry, but not more so than I. My fury at that moment scared me more than my own grief. I put my hand on Amanda’s lower back and looked hard at Buzz, funneling all of my rage into a beam that I hoped would zap him.
“I’ll pay you back,” Amanda said, coolly.
“Fucking asshole,” I added, under my breath so only my siblings could hear.
He hurried off and we followed him slowly, a united front, toward Mom’s gravesite. As we approached, the small backhoe parked nearby began to move, gnawing at the cold December earth.
AMANDA
THE DAY MOM died, her lawyer gave me a checkbook with “The Estate of Ann Williams” written on it and then started sending me all these bills. As executor of Mom’s will and trust, it was my responsibility to pay for her funeral, her burial, everything. I also had to deal with the rest of Dad’s debt, the sale of the house, the lawyers, all that. It was like I had no time to just miss Mom.
I wound up spending that Christmas at a riding school in Ireland with Dr. Tudor, one of Mom’s good friends. He was a teacher at West Patent Elementary School who spoke as if he were reading lines from a play. They used to ride together, before Mom got sick. After she was bedridden, he’d visit often and they’d spend afternoons together in her bedroom talking about theater and horses.
It was Mom’s idea that I go with him to Ireland; she set the whole thing up because she knew how much I loved to ride. Under any other circumstances, I would have enjoyed the experience, but not the week after Mom died. I should have been with my family. I don’t even know why I went.
DIANA
DOWNSTAIRS, A WOMAN’S voice was shouting, “Come on, lazybones!”
I opened my eye to the rumpled sheets of an empty twin bed, the white cotton blankets thrown off in a hurry. I was in an identical bed, same sheets, same blankets, separated by a small night table with a lamp on it and a clock that read 7 a.m. I had no idea where I was. Then it came to me slowly, the panic in my stomach fading but not disappearing: I was at my new house, where I’d been living for four months or so, having moved in shortly before my eighth birthday. I was in my new little sister’s room, where I’d spent the night. Her name was Margaret and she was five. She had a younger brother, William, who was two. They were downstairs with their mom and their dad. Their mom was calling me “lazybones.” My mom was dead. I didn’t know where my sisters were, or my brother. I had just seen them ten days ago, at the funeral, but I had no idea where they were now. I figured they were all off together somewhere, sleeping in. I closed my eyes and scooted my body down the mattress, pulling the blanket up over my head to block out the noise. I could have stayed there all day. “Come on, lazybones!” the lady called from the bottom of the stairs. “What’s wrong with you? It’s Christmas!”
The night before, I got to stay up late planting evidence in the living room after Margaret and William had gone to sleep. It had taken them a while to drift off because they were listening for the sounds of hooves on the roof. Their mom told me to take a bite out of the chocolate chip cookies and to drink a big swig from the glass of milk as proof to the younger ones that Santa had shoved his chubby body down the chimney. It felt special to be in on the grown-up side of things for a change. Afterward, instead of having to walk all the way to the other side of the house where I usually slept near the maid, Rhonda, I walked upstairs to Margaret’s room with Mrs. Chamberlain and she tucked me in. She stood at the bottom of the bed and flapped the covers over me, letting the cool air puff up my nightgown before the heaviness of the sheets and blankets settled around me. It was nice.
“What are you waiting for?” She was still shouting from the bottom of the stairs. Margaret and William echoed their mother, tired of waiting for me to come down so they could open their gifts. I got out of bed and put a strange bathrobe on over a strange nightgown and walked downstairs. They were all hopping and waving and clapping in the living room in front of a Christmas tree propped up by piles of presents wrapped
with bows and ribbons. Rhonda wasn’t there; she was in the Bronx celebrating with her family, I guessed. Mrs. Chamberlain waved her hands in the air like an over eager cheerleader twirling invisible batons as Alvin, Simon, and Theodore screeched “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth” in their high-pitched Chipmunk voices. Her kids hopped around and around in circles, one diapered, one pigtailed. Their dad stood in the corner of the blue living room, smiling and bending his knees, up, down, up, down, clapping slowly, in a trance. They looked happy, all of them.
Earlier that week, Mrs. Chamberlain had taken me home for the last time. There was no one there in the big sunny living room. Last Christmas, there had been a big tree covered in silver tinsel. Amanda and Liz had rolled their eyes and said that tinsel was cheesy, but I liked how it floated around, making our living room a sparkly mess while we all played Trivial Pursuit and listened to Placido Domingo, Mom’s favorite. But there was nothing Christmas-y in the living room this year, just our saggy couches and stained Oriental rug. As I stood there, in that big, cavernous room, someone gave me an unwrapped rag doll Mom had bought me for Christmas before she died. The doll had frizzy silvery blond hair framing its pale, painted-on face, and it wore a blue Laura Ingalls Wilder dress. It was ugly and I hated it. But in my room at the Chamberlains’, I kept it hidden in my closet, underneath my clothes, next to my shoes and a picture of Mom squinting in the sunlight.
“She’s finally awake!” Mr. Chamberlain said when he saw me hovering in the living-room doorway. Still smiling and clapping, he looked like Lady Elaine Fairchilde from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, crescent-moon-faced and red-nosed. I sat down on the couch, looked at my lap for a while, and noticed that my hands matched the tiny pink flowers on my white flannel nightgown almost perfectly. The lace collar itched. I could hear Margaret ripping through presents and squealing—Pound Puppies and My Little Ponies to add to her collection—but I couldn’t watch. All of my toys back home were drawn on or broken or gone. I never really cared for my toys, though I did have one bunny named Shoe that I loved enough to put a Band-Aid on his ear, pretending to fix a wound. I had no idea where he was now. I wished he were like Corduroy, that teddy bear from the books who found his way back into his little girl’s arms after she left him at the mall. But I knew Shoe wasn’t crawling out of a moving box and getting lost on West Patent Road trying to find me. How could he? I didn’t even know where I was.
A red-wrapped present appeared on my lap. I was stuck. I couldn’t move my arms, and my feet were bare and cold. I looked behind me, out the window at the stone walls and the bare trees.
Days ago, William, Margaret, and I were at the breakfast-room table writing letters to Santa, colored pencils and construction paper scattered before us on the tabletop. Mrs. Chamberlain was helping Margaret form letters and words, pointing to the paper. I was supposed to write a letter to Santa along with them, but I didn’t know what to ask for. I didn’t want any stupid toys. I wanted to go home. But after drawing some hearts on my piece of paper, I wrote “Brown leather pants,” handed the paper to Mrs. Chamberlain, and left the table to go up to my room.
I was sitting on one of the twin beds when Mrs. Chamberlain appeared in my doorway, wearing a white button-down shirt large enough to cover her hips, which were wide, with black pants and black flats. She described her look as French chic. She had a habit of scooping her unpainted fingers behind her ears, expertly tucking the hair so that it curled around the lobe just so, keeping her blond, chin-length hair out of her pale face. She wore small diamond earrings and no makeup. The natural position of her lips was a slight frown. She was pretty but plain. Not beautiful like Mom. She held my letter to Santa by her hip.
“You’ll have to ask for something else,” she said. “Eight-year-old girls do not wear leather pants.” I rolled over on the bed, away from her, and slid down into the crack between my bed and the wall. From there, in a funny, compressed voice that I wasn’t sure she could even hear, I told this lady that Amanda had leather pants and that so did Jim Morrison. I told her they were what I wanted. I told her that I needed them for school. I couldn’t see or hear her; my shoulders covered my ears, and the bed protected me from the room.
I wasn’t expecting to find any leather pants in the shiny red box on my lap that Christmas morning. “Come on, come on!” the mom shouted in her living room, waving her arms in the air.
“Yay, yay!” the kids shouted, and the father clapped.
So I unwrapped the present, and thanked them, and smiled, I think, I hope. Everyone was happy, and Margaret’s face was reddening from all the yelling, turning almost purple as she ran around in circles, while William stood in a pile of shiny paper and ribbons, bending his knees like his father, his diaper crinkling with each awkward squat. I’m not sure what they gave me, but I seem to remember more wool nightgowns that crawled up to strangle me in the night.
LIZ
I WOKE UP on Christmas morning in the Stewarts’ former guest room, my new room. It was painted pale orange that picked up on the peach in the Laura Ashley floral linens covering two twin beds. There was a small closet into which I had crammed all of my clothes. I kept my records in a red milk crate in one corner. My posters stayed rolled up; the English Beat and the Psychedelic Furs didn’t mix well with Laura Ashley.
Jonah was four and slept in the room across the hallway from me in a bunk bed that looked like an English double-decker bus, and Addison, only two, was in the room adjacent to mine, still in a crib but one he could climb out of as he pleased. The bathroom I shared with the boys had a naval theme, dark blue boats embroidered on the towels and a big anchor on the bathmat. A framed letter on White House stationery hung above the toilet: Montgomery’s parents were big Republican donors, so Ronald Reagan sent a letter to Jonah, congratulating him for being born. Daisy and Montgomery’s room was on the other side of the house.
Daisy had invited Karen and Dan to spend the holiday with us at Daisy’s mother’s house in Westport, Connecticut. En route, we stopped by the Chamberlains’. Diana was already dressed when we arrived, around ten, and though she looked adorable in her taffeta dress and tights, I couldn’t help but think that it was wrong. This was not how we did Christmas. Everyone was supposed to stay in their pajamas and sit around the tree opening one present at a time, dragging the process out as long as possible, until it was time for turkey at two. Yet there we were, dropping by with Christmas presents well before noon and Diana was already dressed for church. We never went to church. And then Nancy Chamberlain offered us bagels, cream cheese, and lox, and my heart sank further. Mom made homemade pumpkin bread, dense with molasses, raisins, and walnuts. I’d eat four slices over the present-opening period, which lasted hours. That, to me, was Christmas. Not bagels, cream cheese, and lox.
Dan, Karen, and I sat stiffly in the living room and gave Diana and her new siblings their presents. I cannot remember what gift I had brought for Diana, only that she looked at me and said thank you in a rather formal way, not anything like the Diana I knew. It’s not that she didn’t like my present; it’s that she knew this was all wrong, too. She looked back at me, and her brown eyes got wide beneath her pink-framed glasses as if she were trying to say something via ESP. She didn’t say it out loud, because she could not voice it there on Christmas morning in front of these strange people posing as her new parents, but her expression said, “Don’t leave me here.” So to soothe the gash that her look tore in my heart, I convinced myself, right then and there, that these strangers sitting on their silk couches in their church clothes were benevolent people who would take good care of Diana.
DAN
THAT CHRISTMAS SUCKED. After visiting Diana, we went to some house in Westport, Connecticut, filled with people I had never seen or even heard of before. Liz and I sat on the couch in the corner while Karen spent the entire day flirting with Daisy Stewart’s father. She was literally etching circles on his thigh with her nail and giggling. It was embarrassing.
I kept thinking, �
��I’m going to live with this crazy woman with her leg up on some stranger?” But I knew she loved Mom. So at least we had that in common.
AMANDA
LOOK, KAREN WASN’T an ideal guardian. She was an old acting friend of Mom’s, who would come up for weekends to garden and brush our dogs and skinny-dip in our pool. Auntie Eve would purse her lips and mutter about Karen flirting with Dad, but Mom didn’t seem to mind. She took in people like Karen all the time. She took them in like she took in the owl with the broken wing or a stray dog.
To be honest, Karen could be cruel. I remember being eight years old and asking her to pass the potatoes because I wanted seconds. And she said to me, “You do not need more potatoes.”
I just gave her a look like, “Bitch, pass the potatoes!” I never took any shit from her. Anyway, what’s important is that she really stood up when we needed her.
DIANA
WHEN CHRISTMAS WAS over and we were done opening presents, Mrs. Chamberlain told me to make a list of each gift I’d been given and who gave it to me. I didn’t know who many of the people were, and, like the letter to Santa, thank-you notes were something I had never done before. But, Mrs. Chamberlain explained, you had to write thank-you notes; otherwise, people wouldn’t give you any more presents. Anyway, I didn’t have a choice. I sat at the red Formica table in the breakfast room with a pile of white unlined paper. After folding one piece in half, I drew a sprig of holly with green and red colored pencils on the front flap. Inside, I wrote, “Dear (whoever they were), Thanks for the (whatever they gave me). Have a Happy New Year! From, Diana.” After the eighth or ninth card, my hollies started to get sloppy, the spiky green leaves less filled in, the trio of red berries less bunched, trailing up like thought bubbles. But I finished them, left the stack on the table, and sat on the nearby couch to read.
