Comfort

by Ann Hood

  I hid from everything.

  But it is difficult to hide from the Beatles. After all these years they are still regularly in the news. Their songs play on oldies stations, countdowns, and best-ofs. There is always some Beatles anniversary: the first No. 1 song, the first time in the United States, a birthday, an anniversary, a milestone, a Broadway show. Just today I opened a newspaper to a review of a new movie about John Lennon.

  But hide from the Beatles I must. Or, in some cases, escape. One day in the grocery store, when “Eight Days a Week” came on, I had to leave my cartful of food and run out. Stepping into an elevator that’s blasting a peppy Muzak version of “Hey Jude” is enough to send me home to bed.

  Of course it wasn’t always this way. I used to love everything about the Beatles. As a child I memorized their birthdays, their tragic life stories, the words to all of their songs. I collected Beatles trading cards in bubble gum packs and wore a charm bracelet of dangling Beatles’ heads and guitars.

  For days my cousin Debbie and I argued over whether “Penny Lane” and its flip side, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” had been worth waiting for. I struggled to understand “Sgt. Pepper”; I marveled over the brilliance of the White Album.

  My cousins and I used to play Beatle wives. We all wanted to be married to Paul, but John was okay too. None of us wanted Ringo. Or even worse, George.

  It was too easy to love Paul. Those bedroom eyes. That mop of hair. Classically cute. When I was eight, I asked my mother if she thought I might someday marry Paul McCartney.

  “Well, honey,” she said, taking a long drag on her Pall Mall, “somebody will. Maybe it’ll be you.”

  In fifth grade, in a diary in which I mostly wrote, It is so boring here, or simply, Bored, only one entry stands out: I just heard on the radio that Paul got married. Oh, please, God, don’t let it be true.

  It was true, and I mourned for far too long.

  Of course by the time I was in high school, I understood my folly. John was the best Beatle: sarcastic, funny, interesting-looking. That long thin nose. Those round wire-rimmed glasses. By then I didn’t want to be anybody’s wife. But I did want a boy like John, someone who spoke his mind, got into trouble, swore a lot, and wrote poetry.

  When I did get married and then had children, it was Beatles songs I sang to them at night. As one of the youngest of twenty-four cousins, I had never held an infant or babysat. I didn’t know any lullabies, so I sang Sam and Grace to sleep with “I Will” and “P.S. I Love You.” Eventually Sam fell in love with Broadway musicals and abandoned the Beatles.

  But not Grace. She embraced them with all the fervor that I had. Her taste was quirky, mature.

  “What’s the song where the man is standing, holding his head?” she asked, frowning, and before long I had unearthed my old “Help!” album, and the two of us were singing “You’ve got to Hide Your Love Away” together.

  For Grace’s fourth Christmas, Santa brought her all of the Beatles’ movies on video, a photo book of their career, and the Beatles 1 tape. Before long, playing “Eight Days a Week” as loud as possible became our anthem. Even Sam sang along and admitted that it was arguably the greatest song ever written.

  Best of all about my daughter the Beatles fan was that by the time she was five she had already fallen for John. Paul’s traditional good looks did not win her over. Instead she liked John’s nasally voice, his dark side. After watching the biopic Downbeat, she said Stu was her favorite. But since he was dead, she would settle for John.

  Once I overheard her arguing with a first-grade boy who didn’t believe that there had been another Beatle.

  “There were two other Beatles,” Grace told him, disgusted. “Stu and Pete Best.” She rolled her eyes and stomped off in her glittery shoes.

  Sometimes, before she fell asleep, she would make me tell her stories about John’s mother dying, how the band met in Liverpool, and how when Paul wrote the tune for “Yesterday,” he sang the words “scrambled eggs” to it.

  After I would drop Sam off at school and continue with Grace to her kindergarten, she’d have me play one of her Beatles tapes. She would sing along the whole way there, replacing the word “yesterday” with “scrambled eggs.”

  On the day George Harrison died, Grace acted as if she had lost a friend, walking sad and teary-eyed around the house, shaking her head in disbelief. She asked if we could play just Beatles music all day, and we did. That night we watched a retrospective on George. Feeling guilty, I confessed that he was the one none of us wanted to marry.

  “George?” Grace said, stunned. “But he’s great.”

  Five months later, on a beautiful April morning, Grace and I took Sam to school, then got in the car and sang along with “I Want to Hold Your Hand” while we drove. Before she left, she asked me to cue the tape so that as soon as she got back in the car that afternoon, she could hear “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” right from the beginning. That was the last time we listened to our Beatles together.

  The next day Grace spiked that fever. Briefly, as she lay in the ICU, the nurses told us to bring in some of her favorite music. My husband ran out to the car and grabbed 1 from the tape deck. Then he put it in the hospital’s tape deck, and we climbed on the bed with our daughter and sang her “Love Me Do.” Despite the tubes and machines struggling to keep her alive, Grace smiled at us as we sang to her.

  At her memorial service, eight-year-old Sam, wearing a bright red bow tie, stood in front of the hundreds of people there and sang “Eight Days a Week” loud enough for his sister, wherever she had gone, to hear him.

  That evening I gathered all of my Beatles music—the dusty albums, the tapes that littered the floor of my car, the CDs that filled our stereo—and put them in a box with Grace’s copies of the Beatles’ movies. I could not pause over any of them.

  Instead I threw them in carelessly and fast, knowing that the sight of those black-and-white faces on Revolver, or the dizzying colors of Sgt. Pepper, or even the cartoon drawings from Yellow Submarine, the very things that had made me so happy a week earlier, were now too painful even to glimpse.

  As parents do, I had shared my passions with my children. And when it came to the Beatles, Grace had seized my passion and made it her own. But with her death, that passion was turned upside down, and rather than bring joy, the Beatles haunted me.

  I couldn’t bear to hear even the opening chords of “Yesterday” or a cover of “Michelle.” In the car I started listening only to talk radio to avoid a Beatles song catching me by surprise and touching off another round of sobbing.

  I tried to shield myself from the Beatles altogether—their music, images, conversations about them—but it’s hard, if not impossible. How, for example, am I supposed to ask Sam not to pick out their music slowly during his guitar lessons?

  Back in the sixties, in my aunt’s family room with the knotty-pine walls and Zenith TV, with my female cousins all around me, our hair straight and long, our bangs in our eyes, the air thick with our parents’ cigarette smoke and the harmonies of the Beatles, I believed there was no love greater than mine for Paul McCartney.

  Sometimes now, alone, I find myself singing “I Will” softly. I sing to Grace, imagining her blue eyes shining behind her own little wire-rimmed glasses, her feet tapping in time. It was once my favorite love song, silent now in its White Album cover in my basement.

  How foolish I was to have fallen so easily for Paul while overlooking John and George, to have believed that everything I could ever want was right there in that family room of my childhood: cousins, TV, my favorite music. But mostly I feel foolish for believing that my time with my daughter would never end.

  Or perhaps that is love: a leap of faith, a belief in the impossible, the ability to believe that a little girl in a small town in Rhode Island would grow up to marry Paul McCartney. Or for a grieving woman to believe that a mother’s love is so strong that the child she lost can still hear her singing a lullaby.

  CHAPT
ER FIVE

  Wildfires

  WHEN I TRY to find order in the chaos of grief, those are the things that occur to me. The darkness of the tattoo parlor. How the tattoo bled while I sat with my cousins in my backyard on that first birthday of Grace’s after she died. I was hiding then too. Inside sat her friend Adrian’s parents, invited by my husband, who didn’t realize how painful it was for me to see them again. I see myself singing a Beatles song with such desperation that it hurts for me to remember it. Sometimes now I run my fingers over all the yarn I bought to prevent myself from running out. What if one night I knit my way through all I had and then had to sit without being able to knit anything? So I bought more than anyone could ever use. I bought so much yarn that we converted a small room in our house to a knitting room, one wall filled with shelves to hold all the yarn.

  We took that road trip that summer, driving the rented VW van from San Francisco to Seattle and back. Hillary had just gotten engaged, I think. Her wedding was the following summer, 2003. This time we could manage to organize a cross-country trip in our own VW van. We drove from Providence to Oregon and then from Oregon home.

  Wildfires surrounded the Black Butte Ranch the weekend of Hillary’s wedding. Evacuation routes hung from trees, bright orange, pointing the way to safety. An AM radio station gave updates as the fires moved in on us, growing closer and closer.

  Afraid to unpack, we left our luggage by the door of the condo we’d rented on the property. Without the haze of smoke and the bitter taste it brought with it, we would have a beautiful view of the Cascade Mountains, towering Ponderosa pines, the silvery leaves of aspens. But when we stood on the deck, we only saw smoke growing denser as the fires moved toward us.

  As a distraction, my husband and I took Sam to the swimming pool. The nervous wedding party and other guests lounged poolside under the thick gray skies. I jumped into the water beside Sam. When my head popped out, I saw ash floating on the surface. Ash showered down on us. There was ash in people’s hair and dusting their tanned shoulders. I thought of Pompeii, of the world coming to an end.

  Hillary, the bride, our former nanny, appeared, giggling and golden blonde, dreamy-eyed and hopeful even as fire threatened. She was not thinking that plans could go awry, that catastrophe loomed around every corner. She was optimistic, her new life about to unfold amid this ash and these mountains. Why shouldn’t she be optimistic? Why shouldn’t she believe the fires would change direction and spare her?

  I bent my head so that no one would see me cry. I was at a wedding, I reminded myself. I was surrounded by happiness, by happy people, even if that part of me, the happy part, had disappeared. It was on hold in the year since Grace had died.

  Hillary had been Grace’s first nanny, living with us for three years. She had been there the day I went into labor with Grace, and the day that I brought her home from the hospital. She had carried Grace all around Providence in a backpack, the two of them chattering to each other as they went out for adventures. And Hillary had flown to my side when she learned that Grace had died. Without hesitation, she had traveled from her home in Portland and stayed with us, her pockets full of pictures she had of Grace.

  My crying grew stronger. For me, Grace and Hillary were linked in a special way. But now here was Hillary about to be married, and we had lost Grace. Time was moving forward, taking us even farther away from the days when my family was happy and complete. I caught sight of Hillary, her head tossed back in laughter, and the ache of my loss overcame me. I dunked myself back under the water. My eyes open, the blue shimmered around me. Above, the bits of ash floated like confetti.

  HILLARY CAME INTO my life on a bright summer afternoon in 1996. She was tall and skinny with a tattoo on her ankle. She had hair dyed bright red and cut real short. If Princess Diana were an art student, she would have been Hillary: they shared the same nose, the same posture, the same awkward smile. Hillary came that day to talk to us about the position of a live-in nanny that we had posted on the jobs board at the Rhode Island School of Design.

  Lorne posted our ad. Before he even left the employment office, he had met a twenty-eight-year-old returning student, an apparel design major from Portland, Oregon. She was only here for the summer, she explained. Then she was leaving for an internship in Paris. They made a time for her to come over to our house to talk.

  As Lorne walked out the door, another woman ran toward him. She was also twenty-eight years old, also a returning student, also an apparel design major, and also from Portland, Oregon. But she was going home for the summer, and was interested in beginning in September. Her name, she told him, was Hillary.

  WHEN I WAS a little girl, I had a fantasy. It was not to be a ballerina or a movie star, or even a writer. My fantasy was to live in a big house like the one on the TV show Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and to have a lot of children and a big dog and a messy office where I would try to write novels. I liked the happy noise in that fantasy. I liked the chaotic household, the wry, witty mother, the mischievous children.

  At the time Hillary came into my life, I thought I was on my way to that fantasy. After many happy years living in New York City, I was lured to Providence by Lorne. Handsome as a television sitcom star, he also had an amused attitude and appreciation of me, the slightly distracted, head-in-the-clouds writer. To complete the picture, when Sam was three and I was pregnant with our daughter Grace, we rented a huge, slightly run-down Victorian house.

  The house had thirteen rooms, three floors, and several staircases. Its poor insulation caused the curtains to blow about on windy days, even with the windows shut. The walls were painted pink or blue or purple with colorful scrolling trim. It had fireplaces that didn’t work, soaring ceilings, and a bookcase that slid forward to reveal a secret door in Sam’s room. In short, it was the house of my dreams.

  The day Hillary knocked on the heavy bright green front door of my dream house, I was thirty-nine years old and seven months pregnant. I loved my husband. I had found happiness in motherhood and adored my son Sam. We had learned that this new baby was a girl, a girl who we would call Grace. Like Hillary on her wedding day seven years later, I saw only possibility ahead of me. I was hopeful and optimistic. I opened the door of my house, and Hillary walked in.

  ON HER SECOND DAY with us, Sam told Hillary: “Hillary, I’m going to suck your toe.”

  Then he bent and did just that. He sucked her big toe.

  Later, Hillary would tell us everything going through her mind in that instant: I don’t even know these people and I don’t know what to do right now. She confessed to us that she had been wearing her clogs all day, and her feet were sweaty.

  “Hillary,” Sam said, “you need to wash your feet.”

  But then he said, “Even so, I’d suck your toes again.”

  The night before her wedding, the fires still raging, the barbecue they’d planned was moved to an area considered safer than the original site. People were asked to come forward and give toasts. Sam was one of the first to do it. He told the story about sucking Hillary’s toe. Everyone laughed at the audacity of his three-year-old self and the confidence in him still.

  Sam turned to Hillary and said, “You get married tomorrow. I still have time before then.” Then he said to her husband-to-be, “Watch out!”

  I wanted to speak, to put into words what Hillary meant to me. Many words ran through my mind, but I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t just the smoke that caused the back of my throat to ache; it was the tears that I kept forcing back. At one point that night, I literally lost my voice. I could not speak.

  From somewhere in the crowd, I heard a woman calling. “Grace! Gracie?” And then the delighted giggles of a little girl. Foolishly I ran toward that voice, that laughter. Everyone was wearing name tags, and I stumbled into a woman holding the hand of a little girl whose name tag said GRACE in big loopy letters.

  The woman looked up at me, but I turned and walked away before she could say anything. In a tumble of memory, I remembered ho
w Hillary’s aunt had had a baby shortly after we’d had Grace, and that she had named that baby Grace. Here they were, mother and daughter. Grace. Gracie.

  Quietly, I slipped away from the party, and back to our rented condo, the orange evacuation signs leading the way.

  A WEEK AFTER Hillary moved in with us, I went into labor. She found me in our foyer, doubled over mid-contraction, waiting for Lorne to get the car. We hardly knew each other.

  “Wow,” she said, wide-eyed.

  Two days later, I was home with Grace. Hillary’s presence became immediately important. She had a soothing calm about her, a way of knowing what I needed before I even knew it.

  That night, I awoke in horrible pain. Funny, I remember thinking, I’m having an appendicitis attack right after having a baby. But I soon realized that this was something else. At dawn I was in the emergency room where the doctor discovered a piece of placenta still left behind. He removed it and I was sent home, but by that afternoon my fever began to soar. Only Hillary was home with me, and she found me on the bathroom floor, wild with fever, scrawling my will on the back of a grocery receipt.

  She called the doctor and got me antibiotics, then put me to bed, where I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up, Hillary was sitting there with a toasted bagel topped with melted cheese. She brought Grace to me so I could breast-feed her. “I’m right here,” she said. The last words I heard before falling back to sleep.