After five years, it felt as though all we had in common was the desire not to hurt each other’s feelings. Late one Sunday morning, when I had the manuscript pages I was reading strewn all over our bed, the guitar music coming from the entryway stopped. Dean walked into the bedroom and said softly, “I don’t know, it’s like a house of cards and the cards are just, well, tumbling down.” As he said it, his hands fluttered in the air and fell to his sides. I thought of dance class as a child, when the teacher would say, “Think of your hands as the leaves, girls, leaves in the autumn, tumbling to the ground.” And I thought, That’s it. Dead leaves.
After the leaf gesture, Dean took off his wedding ring and it lay in the palm of his hand, a little lost craft. We both looked at it, for a moment; then he shoved it deep in the pocket of his jeans. Good-bye, I thought. The gesture was so simple, brief, and yet final. He left a few weeks later, a duffle bag slung over one arm and a mountaineering pack on his back, like a kid catching the next bus back to college. The next day I called my mother in Paris. I told her about the whole thing. The tank and the KitchenAid mixer, the dead-leaf gesture and the ring. I told her about how I kept leaving paper clips from manuscripts in the bed by mistake. I told her about how the guitar music stopped one morning suddenly out of the blue. I told her that none of the things that were supposed to happen were going to happen anymore.
“I am completely undone by this,” she told me over the phone. Then she added, “I am the only woman I know who isn’t a grandmother.” She paused, then put in, “I’m going to be in a wheelchair before one of the three of you gives me a grandchild.”
To my unmarried sisters she confided, “Now I’m back to square one with you girls. Jesus Christ.”
The next day, she called back and announced her arrival the following weekend. “I think I better come on,” she said. “This is, after all, an emergency.” I could hear the dramatic exhale, as if her cigarette smoke were drifting lazily through the phone wires, obscuring all my determined boundaries. It was brooding smoking. “You know I like to give you your space. Your ‘space,’ as you kids call it, but I’ve been brooding.”
“Ma, I’m fine here,” I said. “I’m doing just fine.” But the voice was not my own; it was a thin eggshell of a voice saying, “No, I mean yes, I mean no.”
“I don’t want my baby girl alone,” she continued. “My tiny baby girl.”
In truth, I was probably ready for her. In a dream I kept having, I was walking a street in New York. The streets were filled with men wearing gold wedding bands, men who kept coming up to me and telling me they never loved me. Then the bands disappeared. “But you don’t even look like my husband,” I told one of them.
In March in New York City, you can sometimes smell the dirt thaw. If it’s an early spring, the streets give off a tang at once filthy and fresh, the sour along with the sweet promise of new bloom. The year Dean left, spring came early. My mother came soon after that.
“You know, I can’t really help you with this,” she warned as we drove down the LIE to the house. “If you had asked me a few years ago, well, I might have said a few things. But did anyone ask me?”
She appeared to be addressing herself in the small mirror of the sun visor, looking at her eyes in the mirror as she spoke. “I could have said a few long things back then,” she repeated, telling the visor, “before it was too late. About marrying a boy like Dean. Who, let’s face it, is a solid citizen in the world, handsome, polite, but is simply not yet grown-up. And yet. I quite liked him. John adored him.” All this she told the sun visor. “But here we are. It’s a mother’s role, at a time like this, coming on.”
In the years since my father had died, my mother had become something of a traveling road show. She lived in Paris much of the time, and took long cruises and safaris and stayed at châteaux and estates with people with impossibly exotic names and often with titles. She told me about it over the phone, lists and lists of foreign cities, elegant restaurants, all the new best friends she’d made god knows where, one more amusing than the last. Though she was alone now in the world, my mother liked to keep herself surrounded. And now she’d rolled the road show back into town, all the colored lights and clowns and jaunty music, the sideshow acts of bravery and daring, to my doorstep, for a few brief lessons in showmanship.
“Well, I’m here now,” she declared. “Aren’t I.” Not a question. A statement of fact. An achievement.
She looked down and pulled a pile of glossy magazines from her carry bag and scattered them on her lap. “Here, dearie, get a load of this.” She tapped a long red fingernail at a page of young women in poufy skirts. “Bubble skirts. Everyone in Paris is wearing them. I got one for each of you girls, to cheer you up.” She sat back. Satisfied. She had brought back presents. “It’s important to be chic. In times like this. To show the world you still know how to put yourself together. Baby girl.” She patted my hand. “Look. A heart breaks sometimes. That’s all there is to it. But you mark my words. We’re going to get through this thing with grace and style and while we’re at it with dignity, even if it kills us.” She paused for a moment, watching silently as we drove along the LIE, passing a few exits. Then she spoke again. “The bottom line is, the show must go on. Trust your mother, that’s all there is to that.”
The morning that Dean left, I made him scrambled eggs, as if it were just another Saturday. I scrambled them with cheese and a dollop of mustard, which makes the eggs frothy. While I beat the mustard into the eggs, I thought, All these years, I’ve never told him that I put mustard in the eggs. And now he’ll never know why for the rest of his life his eggs are never again this frothy. At that moment in the kitchen, beating eggs in a copper pot I held nestled in the crook of my arm, this was the biggest thought I’d had about the longevity of the rest of our lives, and that they would be lived separately. It was all I could manage. Eggs. Mustard. Froth. Kitchen tips.
When I returned home from work one night the following week, the blanket box in the foyer, where Dean sat to play his guitar, was gone. In its place, there was a note set on a folding chair.
“I know,” it began, “it looks bare to me too. Give it a few weeks and if it still feels odd, I’ll bring it back.” There was some more talk of details: the car, forwarding mail, instructions about the fuse box in the back hall. Details of the quotidian. Then there was a lot of talk about paths and souls. How our souls had touched each other, but we were on different paths.
I lay on the floor in the empty foyer and looked up at the light fixture above me. It was a paper lantern we’d put over a bulb when we first moved in. The rest of the apartment was dark and quiet. Just one light above. No sound.
I bet birds talk like this, in the night sky, and we just don’t understand them. “I love you, I love you, I love you. How come you never tell me that?” “I’m telling you now. I love you.”
It was very quiet in the foyer and nothing moved.
* * *
The morning by the sea, it rained. Heavy winds frothed the waves, the water steely as it crashed along the shoreline.
We were up in the attic. When I was a child, the attic was where my sisters and I would go in a storm. The reverberations up there were theatrical and spooky, and as children we loved being spooked, loved it the way one loves something loud, something forceful, something one can never control. The very drama of it put us in a world of our own: the rain falling in mad sparks of sound against the roof, the echo of the surf, thunder like a rip through the sky. It was a ghostly theater in the attic when it rained. One summer we had erected a shelter out of swaths of material, bright orange with white polka dots, in a series of swoops, which we thought reminiscent of Moroccan tents, pinning the bright cotton up with thumbtacks into the wooden beams along the eaves of the roof. It was our clubhouse, where we stored our collection of Tiger Beat, the teen fan magazine. We taped pictures of the Beatles, the Stones, and the Monkees on the walls of our orange tent. It was still there, the tent, the magazines, an
d the small portable record player that played our collection of 45s: “Mony Mony,” “Hey Jude,” “I’m a Believer.”
Our mother had stored all the old childhood furniture under another eave in the attic, in preparation for grandchildren. In one corner was a high chair, white wood, with a pink elephant painted on the seat back. I reached out to touch it, and my finger made a long white line in the dust.
After Dean and I were married, all our wedding presents were stowed in the attic as we prepared for my father’s funeral. With the occasion so quickly shifting modes, it seemed wrong to do otherwise. “We,” the newlyweds, were suddenly “we,” members of the family of the deceased, and our presents almost indecently irreverent. My mother had printed Tiffany cards for me to send out, saying I’d received their gift and would reply promptly. “That’s what you do,” she told me then, “so they don’t think you forgot about them. Then you’ll write later. Soon, mind you, but not now.” Sympathy notes came in before I could send out any cards. And now the wedding presents waited. Blue Tiffany boxes, silver bags, colorful tissue paper, streamers and ribbons. We had never gone through them. So they remained where they’d been left, undisturbed, a huddled reminder of that weekend back in August 1983. Suddenly, unused and unopened, they were the only things between Dean and me to separate, and without my having to say it, my mother realized I couldn’t do it alone.
She seated herself in an old orange beanbag chair that we’d had in the living room in the ’60s. It was faded and collapsed, the Styrofoam balls flattened from use.
She blinked into the dim light at all the boxes, trunks, and discarded furniture. Cobwebs formed between the wood beams of the ceiling.
“Let’s get this done before the weather clears,” she said. She wriggled herself further into the beanbag. “Then we can take a nice walk on the beach.”
The wind was howling. “Ma, it’s dreadful out there.”
“Oh,” she said. “Trust your mother. It will clear. Your mother knows a few things.”
The boxes were carefully marked. “TWO SALT AND PEPPER SHAKERS, BRASS CANDLESTICKS, SOUP TUREEN, CERAMIC COOKIE JAR (REALLY UGLY),” one box was labeled. “BRANDY SNIFTERS ($$$),” another said. I brought over a box marked “SILVER CHAFING DISH.”
My mother eyed the boxes. “Jesus. I hope to god you wrote thank-you notes for all of this eventually,” she said.
“Ma, it was five years ago.”
“Your mother just wants to make sure. There’s some pretty good loot here, it looks like.”
She looked out over the presents. “Those Tiffany note cards I gave you to send out were not to take the place of actual thank-you notes, let me remind you.”
In fact, I never sent out the Tiffany note cards she had given me. Instead of thank-you notes going out, condolence notes came pouring in. “It was a beautiful wedding,” read one. “I am so sorry for your loss.”
“People remember these things, dearie,” my mother said. “The rule is, you have one year to write a thank-you note for a wedding present. Not a day more. So it’s important. I told you that umpteen times.”
“Ma, don’t stew.”
“Your mother is just checking,” she said, “is all.”
“Okay, you checked.” I held up the silver chafing dish. “What the hell is a chafing dish, anyway? How’d it get that name?”
“That one happens to be very expensive. Who gave you that?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It’s very good sterling silver.” She took off the ornate top and held it up. I could see her red lips reflected in the shine. “Take it home. It came from our side of the family.”
“How can you be sure.”
“Peh, c’mon. It’s shows real taste.” She wrote it on the list on the column under my name. “Let’s give him things he can really use. That life preserver, for example. Who gave you a life preserver?”
“It goes with the canoe.”
The canoe, our beautiful pea green boat, had spent the past five years accumulating dust in my mother’s garage.
“A canoe. Who gives such presents?” my mother asked. “A canoe in New York City. What the hell were you planning to do with it?”
“I don’t know. Circumnavigate the island? Hang it out the window on upper Broadway and use it as a planter with a row of geraniums?”
“Please,” my mother said, shaking her head. “Don’t get me started.” She added the life preserver and the canoe to the column on Dean’s side of the list. “Bring on the next item,” she said, waving her pen in the air.
The next box was china dinner plates. A dozen of them, pearly gray, almost pinkish, opaque, with the luster of the inside of a conch shell. I remembered picking them out. I remembered standing in the store, afraid to touch one, as if it would slip through my fingers, shatter right there, and everyone would know the marriage was a joke. A facade. That we were not ready for adult things like marriage and fine china.
“You never used these? You never thought to come and get them?”
“We never had cause to.”
“You eat. God knows he ate.”
“I don’t know. It was safer to use the old stuff.”
She held up her pen. “Look. China breaks sometimes. You have to be careful, but it doesn’t mean you don’t use it.”
Look, a heart breaks sometimes. You have to be careful, but it doesn’t mean you don’t use it.
Patch as much as you need; it doesn’t hurt.
“I don’t know, I guess I was scared,” I admitted.
She laughed. “You little thing? What do you have to be so afraid of?”
She went on. “Let him have the goddamn china then.” She wrote down, “TIFFANY DINNER PLATES, ONE DOZEN.” “Fine, done. Done and done. Life goes on. You don’t dwell, dearie. You don’t wallow and brood.”
I closed the box. Good-bye, I was thinking. They looked so serene, lying there. I’d lost them, and they didn’t even break. Something more inept than just slipping through fingers. Or maybe just that inept. Just that dumb and tragic.
I thought then of my father’s note on the envelope of the last Franklin story he gave me: “JJ dear, here is an installment of Franklin. I finally managed it.
“You’re getting too old for my stories, but as you keep asking for them, your wish is my command. But this is the last one I believe. With love and pride, Daddy.”
That was how he left us: “This is the last one I believe.”
“Look, you don’t want these things sitting around haunting you forever, trust me. Sometimes,” my mother said, making points with the pen on her pad for emphasis, “you just have to accept that you lose things. They go. That doesn’t mean you don’t use them.”
Loss. After the episode of the man who drowned in front of our eyes when I was a child, I had come to imagine “loss” as a stuff, a substance that I could hold in my hand. It would be the grainy consistency of sand or cremated ashes, and if someone came along and offered me more I would say, “Loss? Thanks. No. I don’t need any more. I’ve got all I can ever use right here.” As if to prove it, I’d hold out my hand. I thought that might protect me from more loss on the perilous dune, a handful of grain in the palm of my hand.
She drew a double line at the bottom of the list. Then she looked up. “You know,” she said, “I wish I could have been a better mother to you then, at the wedding. But I was just . . . numb.”
I felt I needed to say something to reassure her then. She was a mother after all. Only a mother. Nothing superhuman. “I know, Ma, we all were. Numb. We were zombies. I was the zombie bride of the apocalypse.”
She smiled then. “Tee,” she said. “Dearie, you do amuse me. You make your mother laugh.”
I thought then of what the minister had told me the morning of my wedding: “You’re laughing, but I know you don’t think this is funny.” The joke reflex was my family’s way of glossing over things. Our way of trying not to feel. I didn’t know at the time that it was dangerous to gloss over things, to
not speak up, to try not to feel. At the time, it felt safe.
We’re going to get through this thing with grace and style even if it kills us.
I wish I could have been a better mother to you then, but I was numb.
In one quiet corner of the attic, a series of large wardrobe boxes huddled under the slanted wooden beams. The name of a local moving company, Home Sweet Home, was stamped in black lettering on each tall dusty box. One box was labeled, “MRS. MCCULLOCH: FORMALWEAR 1960–1975.” Inside, her feathered ball gowns were encased in thick plastic bags, the feathers flat, matted down over the years. The boxes smelled of mothballs.
“Whew, Ma, look at this,” I said. “Your dresses.” Things forgotten came back. The black velvet with white ostrich around the neck was her favorite. Another was navy blue organdy with dyed-blue feathers ringed at the wrists like muffs.
In another box was her Lilly Pulitzer collection.
When we were young, all the summer mothers used to stand at the rail station on Friday evening waiting for the train from Penn Station, the weekly Cannonball, as it was called, to deliver the fathers from the city. I remember the mothers in their brightly colored flowery shifts, hair frosted silvery in the manner of the model Jean Shrimpton and freshly done in neat arrangements behind matching headbands. The mothers wore pastel sandals, pale pink frosted Slicker lipstick, and gold earrings. Though my sisters and I had no father working in the city during the week, sometimes we would go along with friends—it was always a special occasion. We’d lay pennies on the track long before arrival, when the first whistle blew in the distance to the left, announcing the train had just left the station at the Water Mill stop and was heading our way. Then, when the train rushed by, all the fathers would wave from the windows. Children on the platform would jump up and down and laugh; the mothers in their Lillys would talk to one another, and as they spotted each other’s husbands, they would point them out: “Molly, there’s Jerry, looks like he got a haircut during the week.” “Janet, Henry’s right there.” “Jake is on the last car, Mary, the caboose, see, there he is, honey.” When the train came to a stop, the fathers would amble off in an even file, jumping down the last few steps onto the platform, hair mussed, in shirtsleeves, ties off and collars unbuttoned, carrying jackets and briefcases in their hands. Spotting their families, the fathers would open their arms, mouths in broad smiles, ready to be enveloped in the hugs of their clan. After the train passed, my sisters and I would make our way back down to the tracks to collect the flattened pennies, while the children whose fathers had been delivered to them stood on the platform, wrapped in grateful embraces, before heading out to the parking lot filled with wood-sided station wagons.
All Happy Families Page 17
