She mailed the letter, walked around for a while looking at the shops, and bought a copy of House and Garden at the AM/PM store. Then she went into Eagle’s Deli and ordered a cup of coffee. For her Daily Suffering she would walk home in the downpour.
Q: Is that good enough?
A: Probably not. We’ll see.
She opened House and Garden and read an article about an English family with a hyphenated name who lived in a renovated Victorian horse barn. Their children were James, Charlotte, Alexander, Emma, and Tony. Charlotte was fourteen and had her own studio to paint in. Little Tony had his own playhouse, a hundred years old, with a thatched roof. The stables were like a palace. It would all be jolly good fun for the homeless: fifteen rooms, sixty acres, Hepple-white beds, Chippendale chairs, antlers on the wall to hang hats on, everything dusted by servants, and, through the silk-curtained windows, views of the lime walk, the dovecote, the bell tower.
Margaret loved House and Garden. For years, she had given her mother a subscription every Christmas, until her mother refused to read it anymore. She claimed it was a frivolous and decadent magazine. Margaret had asked her if it wasn’t more frivolous and decadent to live that way yourself than to read about other people living that way. Her mother had said what nonsense, they didn’t live that way, and Margaret had said that they would if they could, wasn’t that what this house was all about? Antiques and china and expensive tea and those five-dollar cans of oatmeal imported from Scotland. Admit it, she said—you’d love it if I called you Mummy. And her mother had said you are an absurd, ridiculous girl, you are truly pathetic, you have lost contact with reality.
The rain started when she was halfway through her second cup of coffee, and she left without finishing it in case the rain stopped prematurely. It was a tentative rain, but she was glad to see that it increased as she walked. She put the magazine under her sweater and lifted her face to the clouds, which were now a solid gray mass over her head. In the west there was a window of blue. California, she thought. Water dripped down her neck. She wondered if her earrings would rust. Too bad: part of D.S.
She thought about Roddie, the only person who knew about Daily Suffering. He had said he would do it too, and he probably did for a while, but she was sure he wasn’t doing it any more. Not that he didn’t feel bad about it—he agreed with her that abortion was an important right for poor black teenagers, etc., but wrong for healthy young spoiled white women who had gotten pregnant through carelessness and a feeling of invincibility. They both knew they should have gone through with it, let the baby live, gotten married or at least had it adopted.
But Roddie didn’t feel bad about it quite the way she did. If she knew he felt bad enough, she might want to see him. But he hadn’t had the nausea and the swollen breasts, he hadn’t had a little thing with arms and legs and a brain scraped out of him, he hadn’t bled buckets, he hadn’t been told he was a disgrace.
This particular Daily Suffering hadn’t seemed like much when she decided on it, but by the time she got home she was soaked through, her teeth were chattering, her feet were frozen. When she looked in the mirror her ears and her nose were bright red, the rest of her face dead white, her hair plastered down to her head like molasses. She thought with satisfaction that she had never seen anything so ugly. Oh you lovely young thing.
She ran a hot bath and took off her clothes, shivering. No heat until November first, that was her father’s inflexible rule. She threw everything down the laundry chute, even though her mother had made her promise never to throw clothes down wet because of mildew. She stepped into the tub and submerged everything but her head. She had forgotten to take off her earrings, and they were cold against her neck. Even under the hot water, her feet and her knobby knees stayed bluish. She would never warm up. This would be the Ultimate Daily Suffering, to stay cold forever until she froze to death like her mother’s aunt Peggy had: until her blood froze in her veins, her brain hardened like a flower after an ice storm, her eyeballs became marble eggs, her heart a Popsicle, her toes and fingers deader than wax.…
She ended up in bed for a week with a major cold. Her mother had been in Vermont taking photographs, but she got home just in time to keep Margaret supplied with vegetarian broth and fruit juice. She put the antique cowbell next to Margaret’s bed for her to ring when she wanted anything—an old Neal family tradition. Her mother loved it when she was sick, Margaret could tell; it made her a dependent again, a mother’s dream: a daughter whose biggest disgrace was her runny nose.
When her father was home, he answered the cowbell. He stood in the doorway and said, “Your wish is my command.” To prove, contrary to all appearances, that he really did love her, he would go out and get her anything. Mocha lace ice cream, Soho black cherry soda, spinach croissants: nothing was too much trouble except normal conversation. He would bring her what she wanted, ask her how she was feeling, tell her to keep drinking liquids, and return to the basement where he spent his evenings caning chairs and refinishing furniture. He went to bed at 9:30 every night because he had to leave at 6:30 in the morning to avoid rush hour. He was a research physicist at a lab in Watertown. Her mother stayed up half the night and slept the mornings away. For a long time Margaret had wondered how they managed their sex life until it finally occurred to her that they didn’t have one.
She and her mother looked at the Vermont photographs together—the usual product, just right for the annual calendar that was her mother’s one claim to fame. This would be its eighth year: Lucy Neal’s New England Visions, A Portfolio for All Seasons, it was officially called—a small but steady seller. Tourists loved it: arty black-and-white views of churches and birches, kittens curled up in baskets made by Native Americans, wheelbarrows, picket fences, village greens with harmless old cannons, hay wagons piled high with pumpkins.
“Pick two,” her mother said. “We’re looking for October and November.” She sat at the foot of Margaret’s bed, curled up like a kid. Margaret shuffled through the photographs and picked out one of smiling children in Halloween costumes and one of a broken-down fence and leafless trees twisted against the sky. Her mother frowned over them, her light curly hair falling in her face. She tapped her top teeth with one fingernail. Her fingernail was ragged, her cuticles bitten. Her lips were chapped, so she had smeared Vaseline over them. She wore a baggy blue sweater and faded jeans and a necklace made of moldy-looking greenish chunks of something. In contrast to the house, she always looked like a slob.
Her mother said, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m not sure about the trees. They’re so depressing.” She sighed, but Margaret could tell she was really in a good mood. There were times when her mother’s unhappiness was massive and scary, a force that appeared out of the blue and permeated the whole house like poison gas. Margaret sometimes thought her mother must have a secret life that preoccupied her, that dictated her mysterious ups and downs—a lover in Maine or Vermont, where she took her photographs, or in New York, where she was always going to see her art director. When Margaret was feeling generous, she hoped this was true, though it was hard to imagine. Roddie, whose tastes were bizarre to say the least, thought her mother was good-looking.
Her mother asked, “What about the basket of acorns?”
“You did a basket of pinecones two years ago.” Margaret had had the calendar in her room at Adams House. That November—the pinecone November—she had met Roddie. She had circled November twenty-ninth in red because that was the first time they had slept together. Big deal. She had thought it would lead to better things, but it had only led to a blob of blood and tissue thrown out with the trash at Cambridge Hospital. She counted back in her mind: Roddie hadn’t called her in two and a half weeks. Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Her mother finally decided on the trees and the broken-down fence, and she praised Margaret’s taste. For years, she had paid compliments meant to encourage Margaret’s artistic talent. She thought Margaret should be a painter. Margaret hadn’t painted in year
s, not since high school. She hated to think of the paintings she had produced, the lame attempts at drama and shock (a dead squirrel she found in the backyard that she painted in various stages of decomposition, a sequence of dead flowers in expensive cut-glass vases) and the cheap symbolism she sometimes attempted as a commentary on current events—like Reagan grinning on a television screen that was really a coffin. She knew she couldn’t paint, even if her mother didn’t have the sense to realize it. Or maybe her mother did, and encouraged her anyway because she was perverse, or because she wanted Margaret to be mediocre, or because she wanted Margaret to get off her butt and back in touch with reality.
Except that now she was exempt from getting off her butt because she had a cold. She wondered how long she could hang on to her precious germs. She thought about writing a poem, “To a Virus,” the way poets used to write poems to mice and fleas. Hail thou microscopic beastie. On my blood thou hast thy feastie. It was pleasant to be sick. Her father ran errands for her. Her mother made hot toddies, lentil soup, custards. She framed a print of the trees and gave it to Margaret to cheer her up, propping it on the top shelf of her bookcase between the pottery vase full of chrysanthemums and the old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock.
Her mother’s passionate quest for domestic perfection usually seemed to Margaret a form of insanity—everything relentlessly clean, tidy, and aesthetically pleasing, the whole house a monument to anal retentiveness. Or to her parents’ empty marriage. Or her mother’s vague but stifled creativity. Whatever. But when she was ill she liked it. Sunlight, flowers, neat bare surfaces—they made her feel pampered, like a movie heroine with a wasting disease, someone beloved who would be missed when she was gone. Everything was ready: the camera crew could move right in, wouldn’t have to touch a thing. Just dab some makeup on her red nose.
She liked the tree photograph. It would be one of the things she would take to California, as a souvenir. It was perfect: dead-looking trees, photographed by her mother.
“It looks nice on the shelf,” Margaret said.
“It’s pretty bleak,” her mother said dubiously.
“It’s supposed to be bleak, Ma. November is the bleakest month.”
Her mother smiled at her, as she always did at the hint of a literary allusion, any evidence that nearly three years at Harvard plus a home life rich in culture had done its work. “Are you reading anything good?” she asked. “Besides House and Garden?”
Margaret held it up, open to the stables people. “James goes to Oxford, Alexander’s at Eton, and Charlotte’s won the watercolor prize three years in a row at her school. And look—that’s Tony’s little playhouse.”
“Please, Margaret,” her mother said. “Let’s not have our House and Garden argument again.”
“I’m also reading Middlemarch.”
“God—what’s that? The fifth time?” Her mother used to be proud of her for reading it so many times. Lately it was worrying her. It was like when Margaret was eleven and used to read about keeping bees. She wrote to the Department of Agriculture and the National Beekeepers’ League for pamphlets, and subscribed to an English publication called The Apiarist. Her Bible had been The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture. At first her mother thought it was cute, an eleven-year-old who knew, and would tell you, that bees won’t fly unless the temperature is at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit, that drones have 37,800 olfactory centers in each antenna. Then she started thinking it was weird, and kept trying to distract Margaret by buying her things: a boom box, a fish tank, a set of wooden chickens that nested one inside the other like Russian dolls, an Alice in Wonderland pop-up book from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was much too young for her. Also, that was the summer they went to England. When the beekeeping craze was safely over, she heard her mother say to her father, “I suppose she gets something out of these obsessions,” and for years afterward she wondered what she had gotten out of her love for bees besides a love for bees.
“Or the sixth?” her mother asked, picking up Middlemarch and squinting at the painting on the cover: a woman in a fussy Victorian dress, languishing in an uncomfortable-looking chair.
It was only the fifth time, but Margaret said, “Seventh.”
At the end of the week, when she was beginning to feel better, a postcard came from Heather. Fast work: hard to believe, from a cousin whose busiest moments used to involve putting three coats of polish on each nail and drying each coat separately in a nail-drying machine she had conned Uncle Teddy into buying her. Margaret was glad she was home alone when the mail came; her plans were private, as Heather should have known. Margaret assumed she did know, and that was why she’d chosen to expose them on the back of a postcard.
She took the card up to her room to read it. In her tiny cramped printing, Heather said that if Margaret was serious about coming to San Francisco, she should get in touch with Rob at his bank, where they always needed teller trainees, though the pay was lousy. Heather and Rob were in the process of breaking up. Heather was living in a tiny studio apartment, but she might be able to put Margaret up for a night or two if she didn’t mind sleeping on the floor. There was a PS.:
As for the weather, you’ve probably heard Mark Twain’s famous line that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco, so don’t expect much.
Margaret turned the postcard over: a tinted photograph of a 1957 Chevy in front of a hot dog stand with carhops. She tried to visualize someone going into a shop and actually buying this card. Then she read Heather’s tiny cramped printing again and decided the message was hostile. But it told her one thing she needed to know: avoid Heather like the plague. She ripped the card into four pieces and tucked them in her sweatshirt pocket.
Her mother was out at the supermarket, so she couldn’t ring the cowbell. She blew her nose and went down to the kitchen to make tea. She hadn’t had a cup of tea since she got the cold: tea with milk tasted terrible when you had a cold, like drinking mucus, and she hated tea plain. She put Heather’s postcard down the garbage disposal and put on water for a pot of Jackson’s Queen Mary, her favorite. While she waited for the kettle to boil, she stared at a photograph hanging over the sink: herself at fourteen—one of her more awkward ages—wearing a denim jacket and trying to look tough, but looking, in fact, harmless to the point of geekiness—which was why her mother had framed the thing and hung it on the wall. God forbid she should just thumbtack it up. That photograph was one of the million things Margaret wanted to escape. If she made a list of them, it would stretch from Brookline to San Francisco.
She carried the tea and a tin of shortbread cookies upstairs on a tray. She had planned to pig out on cookies washed down with tea and make a leisurely list of her options, but before she took three bites it was clear to her that her only hope was Aunt Nell—her mother’s aunt, actually, a no-nonsense ex-schoolteacher who wore sandals with colored cotton socks and was probably a lesbian. Aunt Nell was the only one of her generation left, and she had all the money.
But Margaret hesitated to ask her, not because she thought her aunt would refuse but because she was pretty sure she’d agree. It made her feel guilty. What did the old lady have in her life? A cat. A big old house full of stuff nobody wanted. Bran cereal and prunes. Relatives who coveted her dough.
When Margaret was little she used to like going to Aunt Nell’s every year for the big family Thanksgiving dinner. She and her parents always stayed overnight. There was always a cat, that Aunt Nell always named Dinah. There was an antique bed with pineapple posts. There was the dusty attic where she could take the cat and hide from her cousins. There was Aunt Nell’s friend Thea, who kept chocolate kisses in the pocket of her apron. There was Aunt Nell herself, who at some point always used to tuck a folded ten-dollar bill into Margaret’s palm and say, “This is for you to spend, don’t tell your parents about it.”
As Margaret got older she dreaded those reunions. Her cousins always seemed to be going through unpleasant stages. After Thea died, Aunt Nell became crabby,
and the food wasn’t as good. And it was boring there—nothing to do but pet the cat or sneak away with a book or be snubbed by Heather or watch Uncle Teddy get drunk. She was still fond of Aunt Nell, and sometimes thought of going up to Syracuse to visit her, but she never did. She couldn’t believe she would be anything but a burden, an awkward young niece who didn’t have a lot to say. After Thea’s funeral, when they were all up at her aunt’s house eating lunch, Margaret had tried to tell her aunt how much she had liked Thea, how sorry she was, and Nell had been mean to her for the first time in her life—brushed her aside, said it didn’t matter, what good did anyone’s sympathy do.
She sat on her bed and finished the tea and cookies. She tried to empty her mind by staring at the alarm clock. The tick was so loud she couldn’t actually use the clock, and when she was eight years old she had permanently stopped it at 8:13, which someone told her was the time Lincoln was shot. She used to stare at the Roman-numeraled face until she got double vision and began to feel dizzy, and then she would close her eyes, open them, and something significant would come into her mind. She tried it, but the only thing that came into her mind was the doctor who had scraped her clean, Dr. O’Something, she could never remember, trying to hide his disapproval behind an unconvincingly brisk manner, calling her “Ms. Neal,” scribbling on her chart and refusing to look her in the eye.
Q: Should I or shouldn’t I?
A: Go ahead. See if you can take advantage of an old lady on top of everything else you’ve done.
She went to the desk for more stationery and wrote:
Souvenir of Cold Springs Page 2
