by T. Greenwood
“You’ll be Liesl,” she said to me. “Unless … Mr. Hammer, have you found a Maria?”
“Yes,” he said. “Charlene Applebee will be playing Maria. We’ll also be casting some children from the elementary school to play the younger Von Trapp children.”
Charlene Applebee was Lucy Applebee’s mother. Lucy was a senior, a Quimby girl. Her parents owned the big brick house with the columns on the park in town. Lucy smiled knowingly at Melissa Ball, whose family also lived on the park, and nodded. Mrs. Jasper clapped her hands together and said, “Good, good. Then rehearsals will start tomorrow after last period. On the dot. Don’t be late, because the doors will be locked at two-thirty.”
At Boo’s, Becca tried on a pair of silver stilettos and wobbled across the driveway, turning her ankles and laughing. I watched her through the window and wondered if it was really this easy, becoming someone else.
Boo was sorting through men’s suits, donated by a woman whose husband had just died. The cardboard box was tearing with the weight of wool.
“Liesl.” Boo nodded. “That’s a big part. You’ll have to sing that duet … what is it? ‘I am sixteen, going on seventeen.’ I just love that movie.”
“I’m just doing it to keep Becca company.” I sighed and leaned over to pull out one of the jackets. I slipped the jacket on and buttoned it up. It smelled like a nursing home.
Boo handed me the matching pants. I took off the coat and hung them both on a hanger.
Boo said, “Your mum would be proud of you.”
I blinked hard and stared out the window. Becca was sitting on Boo’s steps, unwinding herself from the silver straps.
Boo knew where my mother was. The hurt of that had been sharp at first, but now it felt like a fading slap. No matter how many times I asked her, she wouldn’t tell, couldn’t tell, because she would never betray my mother. Boo kept her promises. She was the only one I knew who did, and though it made me ache inside, made my stomach turn and my eyes burn, I had to respect that.
I am grown now. I have to remind myself sometimes that all of this is inevitable, that if it hadn’t been cancer, it would have been something else. Everyone has to leave sometime, everyone dies. But at thirty, this feels like an injustice. I read the obituaries every day, looking for others like me. But almost everyone who dies here is already old. Their numbers glare at me, mocking, from the smudged pages: 93, 76, 81.
This morning Becca brings bagels and the Sunday Burlington Free Press, dividing it according to our now familiar routine. While she reads the “Living” section, I scour the lists of the newly deceased.
“I’m buying you a juicer,” she says, her finger pointing to a glossy Kmart insert. “You like carrot juice?”
“Yuck.”
“Tomato juice?” Her finger presses into the advertisement.
I shake my head, returning to the former Navy officer, 75. The grandmother of twenty-seven, 98. The retired surgeon, 81.
“You can use fruit, too. Oranges, kiwi even.” She sounds exasperated.
I look up from the obituaries. She is tapping the ad now, insistent.
“We’ll go next weekend,” I say.
“The sale ends today,” she says. “Then it goes right back to the normal price.”
“Fine,” I say. “This afternoon.”
Satisfied, she smiles and folds the advertisement carefully. “I bet you can even use pineapples. Mangoes.”
Never mind I know she hasn’t once seen a mango at the Shop-N-Save. I nod and smile anyway.
My instinct in the beginning was to fight. I laced up my gloves, stood in the ring, and imagined cancer cloaked in a tacky satin robe in the other corner. For three years, my hands have been curled into fists. But I’m tired now. I am tired and bloodied and my blows are soft. It’s because of Becca, my relentless coach, that I continue. I dream the white towel floating down into the center of the ring, but she clings to it. She is holding on to it with every bit of her strength, and her fists are stronger than mine.
But it is autumn here now, and I know I am no different than the precarious leaves, holding on to the branches of the trees outside my window. I dream myself red and gold and purple. I dream the flight from branch to sky to ground. But every time I begin to fall, Becca is there, demanding to know exactly what I think I am doing.
She believes the underdog can win the fight, that winning is as simple as persistence and faith. In my corner, she rinses my bloodied face with cool water and urges me back into the cold ring. She knows how tired I am, knows that without rest there is no way I will be able to win. She thinks that I am only taking a break, only gathering strength.
Daddy almost never came home anymore. Every night that he worked, he spent at Roxanne’s house. That was fine with me. When he was home, he just stared at the things my mother left behind. I found him once in the bathroom, holding one of her razors, the bathtub steaming with hot water and the lilac bubble soap she always used.
Before she left, my mother’s baths had been intricate rituals. I actually believed that something magical occurred each time she went into the small bathroom off the kitchen and closed the door behind her. She would leave us after dinner, while we were still cleaning our plates. My father would open another beer, Quinn would scrape whatever was left from the blue-and-white casserole dish onto his plate, and I would wonder what she was doing in there. After the dishes were done and Daddy and Quinn had retired to their respective corners of our small house, my mother would emerge in her giant red bathrobe, turbaned like a woman in a commercial.
I thought I might figure out her secrets by studying the artifacts, but there was little to go on. After she was done, I would lock myself in the bathroom as the water drained. The smell was of lilacs, even in winter. Sometimes I would close my eyes and reach into the steam; I swear I could feel the purple petals in my fingers. Along the edge of the cracked porcelain tub lay mysterious instruments, like the tools of a magician. Silver razor, clippers, tweezers. Once, I took the razor and ran it across the length of my arm. When I looked at the blade, it was full of downy hairs. I blew them off and hoped she wouldn’t know what I’d done. I was obsessed with my mother’s rituals of hand cream and pumice and perfume, because when she came out of the steamy bathroom each night, she looked like a different person. Even if Daddy had spent the whole day lying on the couch with the cool washcloth pressed against his head and a beer in his hand, after her bath, her skin glowed pink and her face looked calm. I imagined her worries swirling down the drain, like bubble soap or the sawdust that always covered our clothes.
What I loved most, though, were the bottles, the plastic containers shaped like champagne bottles, gold foil at the top, plastic corks. Inside, liquid lilacs. Every now and then I would peel a little piece of the foil off, fold it into a tiny square, and put it in my mouth. It hurt when it touched my fillings, but it was a thrilling kind of pain. I wanted my own magic ritual to take away my worries. I wanted instruments that would rid me of all of my fears. I wanted to make my world smell of lilacs, even in winter.
I would stand on the furry bath mat, still soggy from her wet feet, and look at my reflection in the mirror over the sink. I’d turn from side to side, looking for my mother’s features in my face. But I could never find them: not eyes, not nose, not throat. I looked like my father. He was me. He was my birth and my death, rendered simply in his hands and in his eyes. I could see my future in his face and hear my past in his words. Watching him staring at the empty places where my mother used to be was like staring at both the self I’d already lost and the person I would become. I was grateful, in a strange way, for Roxanne. When Daddy was away, I didn’t have to stare my own sadness in the face.
By the time winter descended, touching us at the Pond with its frigid white fingers before moving south toward the lake and on into Quimby, Daddy had stopped sleeping in their old bed. Stopped coming by except to drop off a check and, every now and then, something he thought we needed.
“Le
t’s take a walk,” Becca says when she finds me buried under covers on my lumpy couch watching the fourth soap opera in a row.
I grumble and burrow deeper into my nest.
“Come on,” she says, gently tugging my hand.
Bog, who has been napping on the rug next to me, stands up and stretches his front legs. He is always ready for a walk. But when I don’t budge, he looks at me and then lies back down, covering his long snout with his paw.
“It’s sunny out,” she says. “It smells like fall.”
Reluctantly, I pull myself away from the beautiful couple on TV and stand up. I am dizzy and weak and everything aches today. On days like this I wish it were over with already. On days like this it’s hard to think I was ever well.
I groan a little with the pain that accompanies the first few movements after hours of stillness. “I don’t think I’m up for it today, Beck. My back is hurting.”
“You need fresh air,” she says, exasperated.
What she doesn’t understand is how little I really do need.
At first, I listened intently to the doctors as they prescribed everything that would be required to wage this war. It’s funny how they always use the language of soldiers. They said that first I would need surgery, but that I did not need to worry. The tumor was large, but did not appear to have spread. It was in situ. Contained. But they were wrong. They would need to extract my lymph nodes. I needed radiation, I needed chemotherapy. Every week, Becca drove me from Quimby to Burlington, where I received the treatment I needed to survive. I needed to keep my appetite up, I needed rest, I needed to fight. But even with every necessity fulfilled, I was losing. New growths blossomed like flowers on soldiers’ graves.
Now, I only need something sweet to eat after dinner. Warm pajamas. Music. Becca makes sure I have all these things.
It felt strange at first, when she reappeared. Shortly after my surgery, she moved home from New York, where she’d been since college, trying to make a career as an actress. She had been offered a job at the high school, teaching social studies and coaching drama. When she found out I was sick, she knocked on my door and said, “What can I do?”
I hadn’t seen her in so long, she was almost a stranger. So I shrugged and said, “I don’t really need much.”
Now, she brings me the eclairs I love, and big bags of Snickers bars that the doctors say I definitely do not need. Sometimes, she stays with me all night, just the way she did when we were kids, and we’ll listen to music until one of us falls asleep. Sometimes, I think the only thing I really need now is Becca.
“Fine,” I say, and take the wool sweater she is holding out to me. “Let’s go for a walk.”
She knows I’ve been thinking about my mother lately. And I think she knows I’ve been thinking about him, too.
“I wouldn’t want to be Maria, anyway,” Becca said.
We were sitting on a small sawdust mountain near the Pond, chucking rocks into the half-frozen water. We’d taken the bus home after the tryouts instead of waiting for Quinn, but I’d forgotten my key.
“Liesl is so much prettier,” she said, pulling one long strand of red hair under her nose and sniffing it.
“Maybe my mom went to Austria,” I said absently. We’d been playing this game since she disappeared.
“Paris!”
“Italy,” I said, halfheartedly. I picked up a heavy rock and threw it toward the center of the Pond. It landed on a frozen patch and sat there.
“Africa?”
I laughed, but my stomach turned a little.
Becca nodded her head and stared at her feet. She’d had the same pair of boots since sixth grade. That was when she’d stopped growing. While the seams of my clothes strained, and the hems of my skirts and pants kept rising, Becca remained small. Sometimes she said she was afraid that she’d never grow another inch. I was afraid I’d never stop.
“Do you think you’ll have to kiss Rolf?” she asked.
“What?”
“In the play, does Liesl kiss Rolf? In the movie, they kiss. In the gazebo, remember?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”
At this point, neither one of us had really kissed anyone. I’d come close once, at an eighth-grade party when I was forced into a closet with Melissa Ball’s younger brother, Frank. He’d smelled like sour milk when he got close to me, and I’d dodged his lips. The one I’d wanted to be in the closet with was Blue Henderson. He smelled like autumn apples, and once when he tackled me playing keep-away, we’d been pressed together long enough for me to imagine what it might feel like to be older. To be in love. But Blue got chickenpox before Melissa’s party, and Frank kept lunging at me all night with his hands and hips and tongue.
“You think Quinn’s home yet?” Becca asked, shivering a little in her sweater. She didn’t wear a coat until after it started snowing, because the only one she had was bright purple with fur around the hood and she’d had it since fourth grade.
“I dunno. Let’s go check,” I said. “If not, we could go to your house.”
“Nah, my mom’s got the kitchen tore up. Remodeling. She says no company.”
I’d known Becca since kindergarten, and I knew what her house looked like. Her mother was always coming up with reasons for me not to come over. She didn’t like Becca spending time with me. It hurt in the same way the glances and whispers from the Quimby girls did. As if I were dirty. Stained.
Back at the house, my father had been by to visit. Sleep was riled up the way he got only when Daddy came by. He was circling the house, bumping into furniture and walls. I think even he felt betrayed. Quinn was locked in his room, and there was a bag of groceries on the table. Generic macaroni and cheese, motor oil, detergent, and bread. Fifteen dollars and change at the bottom of the bag. A note scribbled on the receipt, “Missed you at home. Working tonight. See you at the game tomorrow? Love, Dad.”
I dumped everything onto the kitchen table and scooped the money into my hand. I’d almost forgotten the homecoming game scheduled for that weekend. Even Becca seemed to have forgotten about it with all the excitement of the auditions.
“You still wanna go to the game tomorrow?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “It’s homecoming.”
The next day at the football game, I looked everywhere for my father, but I only found Roxanne, sitting high on the bleachers wearing one of Jake’s jerseys with a scarf and mittens.
“You seen my dad?” I asked her as I climbed up the steps.
“He’s workin’,” she said. Her voice crackled like flames. Then she smiled sweetly, looking at her friend, who was busy adjusting her bra strap underneath layers and layers of clothes. “This is Eddie’s girl, Piper.”
“Hi, honey,” the woman said, holding out her hand. It was cold and clammy.
“I’ll tell him you were lookin’ for him,” she said.
“Tell him we need wood, we’re almost down to a half-cord and it isn’t even December yet,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, frowning.
I yanked on Becca’s hand and pulled her away from the bleachers, where she had started to make herself comfortable. “Let’s go.”
I walked briskly away from the football field, up the hill past the school, and through the gate into the cemetery. I could hear Becca behind me, struggling to keep up. I kicked the first headstone I saw. It hurt my foot but I kept walking.
“Hey,” Becca said. “Wait up.”
I got to another headstone and kicked it, hard. It was ancient. Gray and crumbling. And instead of resisting, I felt it give with the force of my kick, watched as it fell slowly backward, pulling up bits of frozen ground with it.
“Shit,” I whispered.
“Shit’s right,” Becca said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
We stopped running when we got to the parking lot behind the school. I collapsed on the grass, breathing cold autumn air into my lungs like smoke.
“I hate that bitch,” I said
. I lay on my back, staring up at the sky. It was strangely cloudless. The sun was bright and made my eyes ache.
“We’ve got extra wood at home. I can get my dad to bring some over in his truck,” Becca offered, even though she knew it wasn’t wood that I needed.
I almost didn’t go to the first rehearsal that Monday afternoon. Over the weekend I’d come to believe that it was ridiculous, my pretending to be anyone other than who I was. I was about as far from Liesl as anyone could be. The only similarity was that neither of us had a mother. And the women who had stepped in, Maria and Roxanne, were about as far removed as day from night.
On Sunday I stayed in bed all day, reading the script Mrs. Jasper had given me after the auditions. Quinn had the day off, too, but had decided to hike up Franklin to see if he could find snow. He left at five o’clock in the morning with his skis sticking out of the rear window of my mother’s car. Becca called three times to make sure I was still going to do the play with her. By the fourth time, I let the phone ring and ring. The fifth time, I picked up the receiver angrily. “Becca, I told you I’m thinking about it. Let me read the damn thing—”
“Piper?”
My hands started to shake.
“Honey?”
My mother’s voice was so far away it could have been coming from someone else’s dream.
“Mum?” I said, my throat thick with tears and disbelief.
“It’s me, honey. Are you okay? I just was taking a nap and I had a terrible dream, and I … I just needed to hear your voice. … You’re okay, though, right?” Her voice sounded the way it always did in the middle of the night when she woke up from a nightmare and needed me to make everything okay.
“Mum,” I said, all of my words gone except for the only one that mattered.
“It was the worst dream. I’m so sorry.” As she woke up I could hear her realizing what she had done. The mistake she’d made. “Now, honey, let’s not tell anybody I called, okay? Not Daddy. Not even Quinn. I’m so sorry. I was just so worried about you. …”
