by T. Greenwood
Frank, like me, loved books. But while my collection consisted of piles of dime-store novels and thrift-store paperbacks stacked up in teetering towers beside my reading chair or at the side of my bed, Frank had assembled a virtual library in their home. Every room had at least two bookcases, each of them stuffed with books. Every seat had a proper lamp to read by. And most evenings, rather than retiring in front of the TV, like our family was bound to do, Frank settled in front of the fire with a book while Gussy helped the girls with their schoolwork or taught them to sew or knit or do needlepoint.
Frank had exactly one glass of bourbon each night, with plenty of ice. He never raised his voice in anger, and he certainly never pounded his fists against that dining room table. He didn’t disappear into the basement of the house to drink wine by the jugful or work on whatever salvaged piece of junk he’d dragged home. Instead he was there. Present. Reading passages aloud when he found something interesting. Offering up tidbits of knowledge like little treasures, thrilled by each discovery. He was a gentleman. A truly gentle man. And he adored and appreciated every single thing Gussy did for him and their family. After nearly eighteen years of marriage, Gussy still blushed when he complimented her. They still held hands. And he still kissed her and said “Love you, Gus,” whenever he got a chance.
Did I envy Gussy? Of course I did. Gussy’s life was everything a life was supposed to be. She had found happiness in that kitchen, inside the walls of that home. She was a good mother, a patient mother, and a good wife whose husband honored and respected her. Our lives, though seemingly similar, were like two opposite sides of the same coin. She never wished her husband dead. She never fantasized about running off with the lady who lived across the street. But despite any envy I felt for the happiness Gussy had found, it was impossible to begrudge her any of her contentment. She had earned it. She deserved all of this simple joy.
She was my sister. And she was one of the only people in the world whom I knew would not judge me. Her kindness and openness of heart was not for show. It was exactly who she was inside. And it was with absolute certainty of this that I finally told her. That I shared the secret I’d been keeping almost my whole life.
The older girls had taken Chessy and Mouse to see a matinee of The Pink Panther. My girls adored Gussy’s daughters, looking up to them like older sisters but without any of the rivalry of siblings. Cousins are like this, I’ve found. Cousins are to be adored and admired.
It was the Saturday before Easter, and the girls and I were going to catch the three o’clock train back to Hollyville. I had somehow managed to make it through an entire week without doing what I’d come to do. I’d lost myself a little in Gussy’s world, enjoying the peace of it, the normalcy and comfort of it. But I also knew that I was only a train ride away from my own world, and that I could not go back to Hollyville, back to Frankie, without some sort of concrete plan rather than the hazy one I’d dreamed up and shared only in my letters to Eva.
Gussy was at the counter chopping vegetables for beef stew. Gussy almost never stopped moving; no idle hands in this house. There was a certain rhythm, a pleasing cadence to the chopping of carrots and celery. A pitter patter of purpose. But I needed her to stop if I was ever going to get it out.
“Gussy,” I said, feeling my entire world rocking, shaking beneath me.
“Uh-huh?” she asked. Chop. Chop. Choppity chop.
“Come here a minute?” I said.
She turned to me, and, seeing my face, she set the knife down and wiped her hands on her apron. She came to the table and sat down next to me. She reached for my hands, which were shaking like something electrified. “Oh, Gingersnap,” she said. “You’re trembling something terrible. What’s the matter?”
I lifted my head, and it felt as though I were trying to support a bowling ball on a needle. I frowned and shook my head. “You know, I’ve never been like you,” I said.
“Of course not,” she said, shaking her head. “That would be silly. You’re you.”
“No, Gus, just listen.”
She nodded, always obedient, and looked me right in the eyes.
“It’s Eva. Eva and I . . .” Saying our names together felt dangerous and wonderful, terrifying in the way that a simple sentence could link us, grammar bringing us together. But I didn’t know how to get the words out, the ones I’d rehearsed. The technical term for what I was, for what we were doing. Suddenly, it felt all wrong. Impossible to articulate. Those words just that, nothing but words. Labels on a spice jar, having nothing to do with what was inside.
“I know,” Gussy said. Her voice was firm. And I knew, suddenly, that she was not simply saying this to reassure me of whatever silly problem I was having. She knew.
I felt my eyes widen.
“Frankie wrote me a letter, after he found out. He wrote Mother a letter too.”
“What?” I said, feeling as though a cartoon anvil had fallen across my chest.
“Here,” she said, rushing to the faucet with my empty water glass.
“He wrote you a letter?” I said, feeling my voice gaining volume as my incredulity grew. “He told you?”
She nodded. “Listen, he was angry. He was hurt. He was scared. Is scared.”
I stood up, feeling like I needed to escape. I had to get out of this perfect little house.
“He shouldn’t have, but he did.”
“He wrote to Mama?” I asked.
She nodded. I thought about the last few times I had spoken to my mother, the clipped way she had talked to me. Had I been so distracted, so consumed, that I didn’t realize what had happened? “What did she say?” I asked, hitting that table, that perfect table with its cheery, cherry-littered cloth.
Gussy shook her head. “You know Mama.”
I thought of our mother then, our austere mother with her cold hands and stern face. I tried to imagine that stone shattering, that composure crushed.
“Did she tell Daddy?”
She shook her head again. “She insists Frankie is a liar. You know she’s never liked him. She says he’s made it all up. That it’s just delusions, from the drinking.”
“Well, it’s not!” I screamed. And for a moment I feared that raising my voice in this way was certain to shatter all of those polished glasses in Gussy’s cupboards, that the walls themselves might come down at my beckoning. “It’s the truth. I love Eva. I love her.”
I felt my insides suddenly unraveling from the knots they’d been twisted into for the last week, for the last four years. Saying it aloud like this, in Gussy’s kitchen no less, suddenly cut all those tangled cords that had been like a noose around my neck. And the sudden liberation, like someone pulled out of the water after nearly drowning, was exhilarating. I felt my body becoming light, filling with air like a balloon. It felt almost ticklish, and I started to laugh. Even as tears ran down my cheeks, as tears ran down Gussy’s cheeks, I was laughing. And she came to me, enclosed me in her arms, as though she were relieved to find me alive. She cupped my face in her hands, looked hard into my eyes. “It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
But as much as I wanted to believe her, I knew that this was simply another area of Gussy’s expertise. Gussy, the homemaker, the caretaker, the soother. I’d watched her for years bring comfort to others around her. She was always the one ready with a Band-Aid, a hot pot of soup, kindness that could undo any cruelties that had been inflicted upon those she loved. But her consolation, while a heartfelt panacea, came from her compulsion to make me feel better, not from the very real truth that what Eva and I shared would never be okay, not in most people’s eyes. Not in Mama’s eyes, not in Frankie’s, maybe not even in my own children’s.
I almost didn’t go back home to Hollyville. The thought of facing Frankie knowing what he had done, after he had betrayed me in such an insidious way—I didn’t know how I could look at him again. He had taken the most private thing in the world and offered it up like any other piece of gossip. He was no better than Hannah. As far as I was conce
rned, he had betrayed me as much as I had betrayed him, and I couldn’t help but wonder who else he had told. Because while his pride was enormous, clearly his rage and need for revenge were bigger. He’d told my own mother. But I also knew that if I was going to go through with my plan, if everything I’d talked through with Gussy that afternoon was going to come to fruition, I needed to pretend as though nothing were wrong. I needed to make Frankie believe that my indiscretion with Eva was just that, a momentary slide, and that it was over, that I had made a mistake and was atoning for it.
The girls were looking forward to Easter, despite the matching pink dresses. Every year, on the night before Easter, we dyed eggs, which, after the girls had gone to sleep, and barring any snow, Frankie and I would hide in the backyard. In the morning, each of the girls was given a basket with a solid milk chocolate rabbit nestled inside. They hunted for the eggs, and then we cracked them all open, and I used them to make French toast for breakfast. Frankie would take the girls to Mass while I prepared Easter dinner: usually a ham that Frank was given at work along with maple-soaked carrots and cabbage. We had one of the neighbors take a photo of us in front of the house. I kept these pictures, practically the only family portraits we had, in one album so we could track the girls’ growth. In the earliest pictures, Frankie and I looked so young. Just kids: bright eyed and hopeful. What was I thinking back then? I tried to recollect what was going through my mind in those early years, those years before Eva. Had I really believed that I could live like this my whole life? That I could carry this lie in my heart, that I could go through the motions for ten, twenty, thirty years? I felt sorry for my twenty-two-year-old self. I looked at her standing in front of the house, clutching the bundle with Francesca inside. I studied her flushed cheeks and misty eyes. Was it the cold weather that first Easter morning that made my eyes water and cheeks burn? Or was it something else? Why couldn’t I remember what it was like to be her anymore? Who was she? And where did she go?
That night the girls and I sat at the kitchen table, the cups of colorful dyes spread out before us. Frankie had retired to his workshop basement earlier than usual, coming up only to check the score on the basketball game. I could tell he was getting really drunk, and earlier than usual. He would abstain all day on Easter, the one holiday he remained sober, and I suspected he was making up for it that night.
I imagine now he was worried that either Gussy or my mother had said something about the letter. He couldn’t have thought that they would keep it a secret from me. He had to have known that it would come out eventually, that you can’t just light the fuse on that kind of news without expecting an explosion.
“I miss Sally,” Mouse said as she dipped her egg into a cup of bright yellow dye. “I wonder if she gets to go to Girl Scouts in Boston.”
“I don’t know,” I said, though I did know. Ted didn’t allow the children to participate in any after-school activities. They came straight home after school so that they could report back to him on their mother’s activities. He had made them into tiny wardens and Eva their charge.
Chessy was quiet, dipping her egg carefully into the cups. I watched her, this little girl whose face had lost that childlike quality, whose body was also becoming softer, more like a young woman’s than a girl’s.
“What about you, Chess? You must miss Donna,” I said.
Chessy shrugged without looking at me. This sullenness was new as well, this quiet brooding. Gussy assured me that both her girls had gone through a similar transformation at about this age as well. That hormones were to blame. But I still feared it had nothing to do with estrogen and everything to do with me.
“Can we go visit them?” Mouse asked.
“That would be nice,” I said. “Maybe this summer.”
My heart pounded with the knowledge of what I had planned for the summer. That Mouse’s wish would, in fact, come true. That if all went as planned, our two families, minus Ted and Frankie, would be together again.
“Except Johnny. I don’t care if I ever see him again,” Mouse said.
Eva had written that Johnny was still having troubles at school. Getting into fights with boys who were a lot bigger and stronger than he was. I knew that Johnny would be a problem we’d have to deal with.
“When is the new baby coming?” Mouse asked, scratching her name on an egg with a waxy crayon.
“Next month,” I said.
“Will it be another boy?” Mouse asked, grimacing.
“We won’t know until it comes,” I said.“Babies are surprising like that.”
When I dreamed of the baby, of our baby, it was always a boy. A sweet, pudgy-cheeked boy. And in my dreams, I could smell the baby scent of his hair, feel the way his fingers tightened over mine. Eva had said she felt like she did when she was pregnant with Johnny. Always sick, never hungry. She carried all of the weight in front, like a basketball. From behind you couldn’t even tell she was pregnant.
The baby was due in a few weeks. And afterward, it would be time.
The girls and I finished the eggs, and we laid out their new dresses at the foot of their beds. I polished their old white shoes with toothpaste to get the scuffs out. Mouse, who still believed in the Easter Bunny, left a carrot out, and then I tucked them in.
As I was leaning down to kiss Mouse, she whispered, “What’s a homosexual, Mommy?”
I caught my breath. The word stung; I physically felt a sharp pang somewhere deep in my rib cage.
“Chessy says that you’re a homosexual. I looked it up in my dictionary, and it said that it means you love other ladies. Chessy says it’s a sin. But I love other girls. I love you and Chessy and Eva and Sally. Am I going to go to hell?”
I could feel all of the blood draining from my face, pooling in my shoulders, in my hands. Had they heard us fighting? Had this word, this horrible word, crept up the stairs and under their door, skipped across their pillows and into their ears? Goddamn Frankie and goddamn that church and goddamn that word. I could practically hear Frankie hissing it at me, muttering it under his breath, shouting it, the alcohol making it softer, mushier in his mouth. The same word that had found its way to my ears as I slept at night, whispered between my mother and father. The questioning, the fear. The word that came from the therapist’s lips after the episode with Miss Mars, the diagnosis with the cure being to simply deny or reject my feelings.
Hot tears welled up in my eyes, and I blinked, sending them shooting down my cheeks. “I love Eva too,” I said. “And some people think that’s a terrible thing. A sinful thing.”
“Is that why she moved away?”
I was so sick of lying, so sick of rejecting and denying. And here was my chance to make all of this okay. I was Mouse’s mother. I was the one whom she trusted and listened to more than anyone else in the entire world. I could change the way she saw things. I had this power, if nothing else.
“It is. It’s scary to Daddy and to Mr. Wilson. But it’s not bad. Love is never bad.”
Mouse touched her finger to my tear and said,“You’re crying.”
I nodded.
“I love you, Mommy.”
I closed my eyes tightly and allowed her to embrace me. It was the first time since she was an infant that I had held her so close. I realized, as I felt the unfamiliar angles of her shoulders and arms, I’d been so afraid of harming her, of passing on everything that scared me, that I had denied her my affections. The overwhelming enormity of this hit me hard, turning that sharp prick in my chest into a turning corkscrew.
When I released her and looked toward the door, I could see Chessy standing in the doorway, her head hung low. I didn’t know how much she had heard, though it was clearly enough. But as I stood up from the bed to go to her, she turned and ran, all the way down the stairs and then down the basement stairs to Frankie.
Alcohol and Frankie were like gasoline and a rag; it only took the smallest spark to set the whole thing on fire. The spark that night was Chessy, and while I could have killed her t
hen, I realize now that she was only scared and confused and when forced to choose, she’d chosen her father. If she’d had any idea what he was going to do that night, and everything that would happen after, she probably would have slipped quietly back into her room. But she didn’t know, couldn’t know; none of us could. And by then it was too late.
Frankie came barreling up the stairs, two at a time. He had a pair of plastic goggles on his forehead, which I remember made him look a little silly. In my panic, I almost laughed.
“What are you telling our children?” he screamed at me, lunging toward me.
“What are you telling our children?” I asked.
“The truth,” he screamed. For a small man, he still had the power to terrify me. He seemed to grow in his rage, his shoulders informed by his anger. His muscles swelling with his fury. “That you’re sick. That you’re a whore. A dirty, cheating whore.”
Mouse stood at the top of the stairs, trembling. I motioned for her to go to her room and she ran quickly down the hall. The beam of light coming from her room disappeared as the door slammed shut.
“Go upstairs, Francesca,” I said.
She shook her head.
“I said go upstairs!” My own voice startled me. It seemed to startle her as well, and she ran up the stairs, slamming her own door shut.
“I can’t do this anymore, Frankie. You can’t punish me forever. You can’t just pretend everything is okay and still hate me. Hate what I did. Who I am.”
“You’re ruining their lives!” he bellowed. “Their innocence. You’re selfish and sick. You should go away and never come back.”
I took a deep breath and steadied myself by gripping the edge of the counter. Funny, I remember now seeing the calendar, a calendar from the post office, and remembering that it was Easter the next day. A day of atonement. When Gussy and I were little, at Easter dinner everyone at the table was asked to make an apology for something they had done. And then whoever had been wronged would grant forgiveness. It helped clear the air, though the wrongs were usually small and inconsequential.
