by Celeste Ng
Somewhere in this room, she is sure, is the answer to what happened. And there, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, she sees the neat row of diaries lined up by year. Marilyn had given Lydia her first diary the Christmas she was five, a flowered one with gilt edges and a key lighter than a paper clip. Her daughter had unwrapped it and turned it over and over in her hands, touching the tiny keyhole, as if she didn’t know what it was for. “For writing down your secrets,” Marilyn had said with a smile, and Lydia had smiled back up at her and said, “But Mom, I don’t have any secrets.”
At the time, Marilyn had laughed. What secrets could a daughter keep from her mother, anyway? Still, every year, she gave Lydia another diary. Now she thinks of all those crossed-out phone numbers, that long list of girls who said they barely knew Lydia at all. Of boys from school. Of strange men who might lurch out of the shadows. With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake.
The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter’s life unmarked. Nothing to explain anything.
Across town, James wakes in a blurry haze. It’s almost evening, and Louisa’s apartment has grown dim. “I have to go,” he says, dizzy with the thought of what he has done, and Louisa wraps herself in the sheet and watches him dress. Under her gaze, his fingers grow clumsy: he misbuttons his shirt not once but twice, and even when he gets it on properly it doesn’t feel right. It hangs strangely, pinching him under the arms, bulging at his belly. How did you say good-bye, after something like this?
“Goodnight,” he says finally, lifting his bag, and Louisa says simply, “Goodnight.” As if they’re leaving the office, as if nothing has happened. Only in the car, when his stomach begins to rumble, does he realize there’d been no lunch at Louisa’s apartment, that he had never actually expected there to be.
And while James clicks on his headlights and eases the car into motion, stunned at how much has happened in one day, his son peers through his bedroom window in the growing dimness, staring out at Jack’s house, where the porch light has just turned on, where the police car has long since pulled away. Up in the attic, Hannah curls up in her bed, sifting through each detail of the day: the white spot on each of her father’s knuckles as he grasped the steering wheel; the tiny beads of sweat that clung to the minister’s upper lip, like dew; the soft thump the coffin made as it touched the bottom of the grave. The small figure of her brother—spied through the west-facing window of her room—rising slowly from Jack’s front steps and trudging home, head bowed. And the faint questioning creak of her mother’s bedroom door opening, answered by the quiet click of Lydia’s door latching shut. She has been in there for hours. Hannah wraps her arms around herself and squeezes, imagines comforting her mother, her mother’s arms comforting her in return.
Marilyn, unaware that her youngest is listening so closely, so longingly, blots her eyes and replaces the diaries on the shelf and makes herself a promise. She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.
four
Just before Marilyn had given Lydia that first diary, the university had held its annual Christmas party. Marilyn had not wanted to go. All fall she’d been wrestling a vague discontentment. Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she’d been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she’d planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn’t remember how to write a paper, how to take notes; it seemed as vague and hazy as something she had done in a dream. How could she study when dinner needed cooking, when Nath needed to be tucked in, when Lydia wanted to play? She leafed through the Help Wanted ads in the paper, but they were all for waitresses, accountants, copywriters. Nothing she knew how to do. She thought of her mother, the life her mother had wanted for her, the life her mother had hoped to lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order. Without meaning to, she’d acquired it. There was nothing more her mother could have wished her. The thought did not put her in a festive mood.
James, however, had insisted that they put in an appearance at the Christmas party; he was up for tenure in the spring, and appearances mattered. So they had asked Vivian Allen from across the street to babysit Nath and Lydia, and Marilyn put on a peach cocktail dress and her pearls and they headed to the crepe-papered gymnasium, where a Christmas tree had been erected on the midcourt line. Then, after the obligatory round of hellos and how-are-yous, she retreated to the corner, nursing a cup of rum punch. That was where she ran into Tom Lawson.
Tom brought her a slice of fruitcake and introduced himself—he was a professor in the chemistry department; he and James had worked together on the thesis committee of a double-majoring student who’d written about chemical warfare in World War I. Marilyn tensed against the inevitable questions—And what do you do, Marilyn?—but instead they exchanged the usual benign civilities: how old the children were, how nice this year’s Christmas tree looked. And when he began to tell her about the research he was doing—something to do with the pancreas and artificial insulin—she interrupted to ask if he needed a research assistant, and he stared at her over his plate of pigs in blankets. Marilyn, afraid of seeming unqualified, offered a flood of explanations: she had been a chemistry major at Radcliffe and she’d been planning on medical school and she hadn’t quite finished her degree—yet—but now that the children were a bit older—
In fact, Tom Lawson had been surprised at the tone of her request: it had the murmured, breathless quality of a proposition. Marilyn looked up at him and smiled, and her deep dimples gave her the earnestness of a little girl.
“Please,” she said, putting her hand on his elbow. “I’d really enjoy doing some more academic work again.”
Tom Lawson grinned. “I guess I could use some help,” he said. “If your husband doesn’t mind, that is. Maybe we could meet and talk about it after New Year’s, when term starts.” And Marilyn said yes, yes, that would be wonderful.
James was less enthusiastic. He knew what people would say: He couldn’t make enough—his wife had to hire herself out. Years had passed, but he still remembered his mother rising early each morning and donning her uniform, how one winter, when she’d been home from work with the flu for two weeks, they’d had to turn off the heat and bundle in double blankets. He remembered how at night, his mother would massage oil into her calloused hands, trying to soften them, and his father would leave the room, ashamed. “No,” he told Marilyn. “When I get tenure, we’ll have all the money we need.” He took her hand, uncurled her fingers, kissed her soft palm. “Tell me you won’t worry about working anymore,” he said, and at last she had agreed. But she kept Tom Lawson’s phone number.
Then, in the spring, while James—newly tenured—was at work and the children were at school and Marilyn, at home, folded her second load of laundry, the phone rang. A nurse from St. Catherine’s Hospital, in Virginia, telling her that her mother had died. A stroke. It was April 1, 1966, and the first thing Marilyn thought was: what a terrible, tasteless joke.
By then she had not spoken to her mother in almost eight years, since her wedding day. In all that time, her mother had not written once. When Nath had been born, then Lydia, Marilyn had not informed her mother, had not even sent a photograph. What was ther
e to say? She and James had never discussed what her mother had said about their marriage that last day: it’s not right. She had not ever wanted to think of it again. So when James came home that night, she said simply, “My mother died.” Then she turned back to the stove and added, “And the lawn needs mowing,” and he understood: they would not talk about it. At dinner, when she told the children that their grandmother had died, Lydia cocked her head and asked, “Are you sad?”
Marilyn glanced at her husband. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”
There were things to be taken care of: papers to be signed, burial arrangements to be made. So Marilyn left the children with James and drove to Virginia—she’d long since stopped thinking of it as home—to sort out her mother’s things. As mile after mile of Ohio, then West Virginia, streamed past, her daughter’s question echoed in her mind. She could not answer for sure.
Was she sad? She was more surprised than anything: surprised at how familiar her mother’s house still felt. Even after eight years, she still remembered exactly how to wiggle the key—down and to the left—to get the lock to open; she still remembered the screen door that slowly closed itself with a hiss. The light in the foyer had burned out and the heavy curtains in the living room were closed, but her feet moved by instinct despite the dark: years of rehearsal had taught her the dance step around the armchair and the ottoman to the table beside the sofa. Her fingers caught the ribbed switch of the lamp on the first try. It could have been her house.
When the light came on, she saw the same shabby furniture she’d grown up with, the same pale lilac wallpaper with a grain, like silk. The same china cabinet full of her mother’s dolls, whose unblinking eyes gave her the same cold tingle on the back of her neck. On the mantel, the same photographs of her as a child. All the things that she needed to clear away. Was she sad? No, after the daylong drive, only tired. “Many people find this job overwhelming,” the undertaker told her the next morning. He gave her the number of a cleaning company that specialized in making houses ready to sell. Ghouls, Marilyn thought. What a job, clearing the homes of the dead, piling whole lives into garbage bins and lugging them to the curb.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’d rather take care of it myself.”
But when she tried to sort her mother’s things, she could find nothing she wanted to keep. Her mother’s gold ring, her twelve settings of china, the pearl bracelet from Marilyn’s father: mementos of an ill-fated wedding day. Her demure sweater sets and pencil skirts, the gloves and hat-boxed hats: relics of a corseted existence that Marilyn had always pitied. Her mother had loved her doll collection, but their faces were blank as chalk, white china masks under horsehair wigs. Little strangers with cold stares. Marilyn leafed through photo albums for a picture of herself with her mother and couldn’t find one. Only Marilyn in kindergarten pigtails; Marilyn in third grade with a missing front tooth; Marilyn at a school party, a paper crown on her head. Marilyn in high school in front of the Christmas tree in a precious Kodachrome. Three photo albums of Marilyn and not a single shot of her mother. As if her mother had never been there.
Was she sad? How could she miss her mother when her mother was nowhere to be found?
And then, in the kitchen, she discovered her mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook, the spine cracking and mended, twice, with Scotch tape. On the first page of the cookie section, a deliberate line in the margin of the introduction, the kind she herself had made in college to mark an important passage. It was no recipe. Always cookies in the cookie jar! the paragraph read. Is there a happier symbol of a friendly house? That was all. Her mother had felt the need to highlight this. Marilyn glanced at the cow-shaped cookie jar on the counter and tried to picture the bottom. The more she thought about it, the less sure she was that she had ever seen it.
She flipped through the other chapters, looking for more pencil lines. In “Pies,” she found another: If you care about pleasing a man—bake a pie. But make sure it’s a perfect pie. Pity the man who has never come home to a pumpkin or custard pie. Under “Basic Eggs”: The man you marry will know the way he likes his eggs. And chances are he’ll be fussy about them. So it behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways. She imagined her mother touching the pencil tip to her tongue, then drawing a careful dark mark down the margin so that she would remember.
You’ll find your skill with a salad makes its own contribution to the quality of life in your house.
Does anything make you feel so pleased with yourself as baking bread?
Betty’s pickles! Aunt Alice’s peach conserve! Mary’s mint relish! Is there anything that gives you a deeper sense of satisfaction than a row of shining jars and glasses standing on your shelf?
Marilyn looked at Betty Crocker’s portrait on the back cover of the cookbook, the faint streaks of gray at her temples, the hair that curled back from her forehead, as if pushed back by the arch of her eyebrow. For a second, it resembled her mother. Is there anything that gives you a deeper sense of satisfaction? Certainly her mother would have said no, no, no. She thought with sharp and painful pity of her mother, who had planned on a golden, vanilla-scented life but ended up alone, trapped like a fly in this small and sad and empty house, this small and sad and empty life, her daughter gone, no trace of herself left except these pencil-marked dreams. Was she sad? She was angry. Furious at the smallness of her mother’s life. This, she thought fiercely, touching the cookbook’s cover. This is all I need to remember about her. This is all I want to keep.
The next morning, she called the housecleaning company the undertaker had recommended. The two men who arrived at her door wore blue uniforms, like janitors. They were clean-shaven and courteous; they looked at her with sympathy but said nothing about “your loss.” With the efficiency of movers they packed dolls and dishes and clothes into cartons. They swaddled furniture in quilted pads and trundled it to the truck. Where did it go, Marilyn wondered, cradling the cookbook—the mattresses, the photographs, the emptied-out bookshelves? The same place people went when they died, where everything went: on, away, out of your life.
By dinnertime, the men had emptied the entire house. One of them tipped his hat to Marilyn; the other gave her a polite little nod. Then they stepped out onto the stoop, and the truck’s engine started outside. She moved from room to room, the cookbook tucked under her arm, checking that nothing had been left behind, but the men had been thorough. Her old room was hardly recognizable with the pictures peeled from its walls. The only signs of her time there were the thumbtack holes in the wallpaper, invisible unless you knew where to look. It could have been a stranger’s house. Through the open curtains she could see nothing, only panes of dusk and her face faintly reflected back to her in the glow of the ceiling light. On her way out, she paused in the living room, where the carpet was pockmarked with the ghosts of chair feet, and studied the mantel, now a clean line under a stretch of bare wall.
As she pulled onto the highway, heading toward Ohio and home, those empty rooms kept rising in her mind. She swallowed uneasily, pushing the thought aside, and pressed the gas pedal harder.
Outside Charlottesville, flecks of rain appeared on the windows. Halfway across West Virginia the rain grew heavy, sheeting the windshield. Marilyn pulled to the roadside and turned off the car, and the wipers stopped midsweep, two slashes across the glass. It was past one o’clock in the morning and no one else was on the road: no taillights on the horizon, no headlights in the rearview, only farmland stretching out on either side. She snapped off her own lights and leaned back against the headrest. How good the rain would feel, like crying all over her body.
She thought again of the empty house, a lifetime of possessions now bound for the thrift shop, or the garbage dump. Her mother’s clothes on some stranger’s body, her ring circling some stranger’s finger. Only the cookbook, beside her at the other end of the front seat, had survived. That was the only thing worth keeping, Marilyn reminded herself, the only place in th
e house there was any trace of her.
It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags. How was it possible to spend so many hours spreading peanut butter across bread? How was it possible to spend so many hours cooking eggs? Sunny-side up for James. Hard-boiled for Nath. Scrambled for Lydia. It behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways. Was she sad? Yes. She was sad. About the eggs. About everything.
She unlocked the door and stepped out onto the asphalt.
The noise outside the car was deafening: a million marbles hitting a million tin roofs, a million radios all crackling on the same non-station. By the time she shut the door she was drenched. She lifted her hair and bowed her head and let the rain soak the curls beneath. The drops smarted against her bare skin. She leaned back on the cooling hood of the car and spread her arms wide, letting the rain needle her all over.
Never, she promised herself. I will never end up like that.
Under her head she could hear water thrumming on the steel. Now it sounded like tiny patters of applause, a million hands clapping. She opened her mouth and let rain drip into it, opened her eyes and tried to look straight up into the falling rain.
Back in the car, she peeled off her blouse and skirt and stockings and shoes. At the far end of the passenger seat they made a sad little heap beside the cookbook, like a melting scoop of ice cream. The rain slowed, and the gas pedal was stiff under her bare foot as she coaxed the car into motion. In the rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of her reflection, and instead of being embarrassed to see herself stripped so naked and vulnerable, she admired the pale gleam of her own skin against the white of her bra.
