“She’s lost her mind!” Isabel said.
“Maybe,” Alice said. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s in shock. I can understand wanting so badly not to believe something that you find a way of convincing yourself it doesn’t matter.”
“Alice,” Isabel said, “your situation and Tina’s are not the same. It’s one thing to hope a person’s nature may have changed, and another to pretend the laws of the country simply do not exist!” When her sister didn’t say anything, Isabel went on, “Even when she was little, Tina liked to change the rules of a game if she thought she was going to lose.”
“Every child does that,” Alice said. “You used to do it yourself.”
That night the sisters slept again in their old beds in the Devon house. Isabel could hear Alice turning over restlessly in the next room. She couldn’t sleep, either. She listened to the wind moving in the trees outside the window, the same wind in the same trees as when they were children. A few crickets chirped in the bushes, but otherwise the night was silent. She lay awake a long time, wondering if her mother was managing to get any rest. She thought of all the things she had criticized her mother for over the years. For working too much, for being too emotional, for not understanding who Isabel was or what she needed. For interfering in her grown daughters’ lives and feeling responsible for everything that happened to them. For purveying the myth of love at first sight, which Isabel had rejected and then bought into and now rejected again.
Why had she married Theo? Why hadn’t she waited, like all her friends—lived with him for a couple of years first? Was it stubbornness? A determination to be different from everyone else? It was so hard to remember now. Had she chosen Theo for the ways he was like her father—or for the ways he wasn’t like her father—or because he was in the right place at the right time? The questions roiled in her mind like water in a clothes washer. Turbulent, dirty. Going around and around without getting anywhere.
Well, she thought. Was it so strange that Doc felt responsible for her daughters when Isabel herself, at thirty-five, was still blaming her for things? What had she done, after all, that was so terrible? Become a doctor? Chosen to do what she loved, to treat the sick, to share the financial burden of the household? Was this what Isabel was holding against her? Isabel, who had all the freedoms of her generation. It was true that Doc was irritating, tactless, interfering, sentimental. But wasn’t Doc just trying to live her life, as her daughters were trying to live theirs? Wasn’t she doing her best?
Isabel turned the pillow over and tried to get comfortable. The crickets sang and the smell of honeysuckle drifted into the room. Around three she heard the ghostly hooting of a great horned owl, and she sat up in the dark and looked out the window.
The moon had risen above the tops of the trees, faintly illuminating their feathery shapes. The owl hooted again: one hoot, and then two, and then another two. Once the owl had been considered an omen of evil, but it was just what it was. A wild creature—gorgeous, swift, and hungry. A great bird soaring over the August woods on silent wings.
In the morning their father made phone calls, and Alice visited Tina and Soren at their hotel, but nothing changed. Soren refused to take steps to finalize his divorce, and Tina made calls to the caterers and florists and musicians from the bedside telephone, determined that every detail of her “wedding” be as she had imagined it since she was six years old.
Isabel took care of their mother, who seemed to have literally made herself ill with worry. Whatever her faults, Dr. Rubin had never been a hypochondriac or a malingerer, but now she lay between the monogrammed sheets, her forehead hot and the tips of her fingers cold, tears occasionally leaking down the sides of her face. “Oh, Isabel,” she said whenever Isabel came into the room.
“What?” Isabel would ask. But Dr. Rubin shook her head and wouldn’t say.
On the third afternoon, when Isabel came in to bring her a cup of tea, Dr. Rubin put a hand on her daughter’s wrist. “Thank you,” she said.
Startled, Isabel spilled some of the tea. “You’re welcome.”
“I’ve been thinking. Lying here. Thinking about the three of you. At your age, I was a resident and had three children. I lived here, in this house. My life was all sorted out.”
Isabel found a towel and mopped up the spill. She sat on the edge of the bed. “It was a different time,” she said. “People lived differently.”
“Not so differently,” Dr. Rubin said.
“I don’t know,” Isabel said. She waited for her mother to bring up her friends and their children, most of them settled now, with children of their own.
Instead Doc said, “I always worried about what it would mean for you, me having the kind of job I did. Everyone told me I couldn’t do it. My parents, my friends. My medical school class-mates. You can’t answer to two masters, they said!” She took a drink of the sweet tea, her hand trembling, then set the cup down clumsily on the bedside table. “I tried to make sure you girls knew that the family came first. And I was so happy when I found Cicily! I thought you were in such good hands with her. She was patient, and you could see how much she enjoyed being with you. I remember when she came for an interview. I must have interviewed a dozen women before her, and they were all terrible. Alice was three and you were seven months old and screaming, and Cicily just took you and held you on her knee and smiled at you, and I was so impressed that she could do that. Just be calm with you, when you were crying.
“I was such a mess when Alice was a baby. I loved her to death, but at the same time I thought I would die of boredom! The endless days. The weeks stretching out like years. My God! It was partly postpartum depression, I suppose, though we didn’t have that term then. The baby blues. She was hungry all the time, but the doctors told us babies had to be on a schedule. Don’t feed them more than every four hours, they said. She would cry, and I would cry, and your father would come home and want dinner.”
Dr. Rubin stopped. Isabel held her breath. She had never heard her mother talk like this before. After a long silence, she prompted, “He should have helped you out. It shouldn’t all have been your responsibility.”
Dr. Rubin shook her head. “No,” she said in a tired voice. Her hands lay on top of the sheets, and she twisted the thick wedding band around and around her finger. “That was how things were.” Her lined face looked gray and her hair was gray and her large, expressive eyes looked faded and shadowed. “I was never the right kind of mother,” she said.
Isabel watched the gold ring twisting and glinting. She wanted to reach out and touch her mother’s hand, but it was so unlike the kind of thing she did that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “You were a good mother,” she said. “And you did do both, didn’t you? Had your work and your family, too. Despite what anybody said.”
Dr. Rubin’s eyes swam. “Yes,” she said dully. “I suppose.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
On Saturday Isabel called Beth Kaplan. “Your owl’s better,” Beth said. “Why don’t you come and get it?”
“It’s not mine,” Isabel said. But she borrowed Alice’s car and headed out.
It was early and there wasn’t much traffic on the roads. Isabel sped down Route 30, feeling free and happy. It was good to be out of the Devon house, to be alone and on her way into the city. The sun beat down through the windshield, and the car was hot even with the air-conditioning on high, but Isabel didn’t care. She remembered how she had felt at seventeen, driving down this road to college in her parents’ car, boxes piled high in the backseat—so eager to be on her own in the world that she thought she might explode with anticipation.
Who would have guessed how little ways away she’d get? Here she was, almost twenty years later, still spinning in her family’s orbit. All three of them were: she and Alice and Tina. Why was that? Was there something backward, stunted, unfinished, about their family life? Overgrown children, unable to separate, a therapist might say. Or was there a better light in which to look at it? Was it
love that held them? Did maturity mean, of necessity, moving away—or not? Once the answer had seemed obvious, but nothing seemed obvious anymore.
It was a beautiful morning. The sun sparkled, reflecting silver off the towers of Liberty Place. Cars honked and radios blared. The air was rich with the smells of hot tar and car exhaust and the river. Isabel found a parking spot only a couple of blocks from the animal hospital, dug out quarters for the meter. On the corner, a vendor was doing a brisk business in snow cones. Across the street, a woman walked three greyhounds on leashes. The dogs wagged their tails, sniffing and straining in Isabel’s direction. Each familiar intersection, the sight of each store she’d shopped in—Vera’s Shoes, Park Lunch, the L&M Carpet Emporium—made her heart lift.
The little saw-whet owl was transformed. It tilted its head to get a better look at Isabel and flapped its wings energetically, its feathers sleek and glossy.
“It’s eating fine,” Beth said. “It made a great recovery.”
“You did a great job,” Isabel said. “It looks ready to go get a mouse.”
Beth smiled. “We’ll give it a week or two with a rehabber first. I know a good place up in Buck’s County you could take it to.”
“Actually,” Isabel said, “I have someone in mind.”
Alapocas, Delaware, lay in the flatlands of Kent County, not far from the Maryland line. A small town in a landscape of chicken farms and truck farms, the suburban sprawl of Philadelphia, Wilmington, and even of Dover had barely touched it. A couple of fast-food chains and convenience stores had sprung up on the edge of town, but along Oak Street the diner, the junk shop, the hardware store, the hairdresser, and the Alapocas Bar and Grill looked as though they had been unchanged for thirty years.
Isabel took the box with the owl out of the backseat and tucked it under her arm. It was too hot to leave it in the car. Heat shimmered off the sidewalk. A man in a baseball cap hurried by with a package under his arm. A teenager in thick mascara jiggled her bracelets, and a young mother, not much older than the teenager, dragged a toddler along by the arm. Each one glanced at Isabel as they went by, and she tried to work up the courage to ask them if they knew the Bird Lady of Alapocas. They had to, didn’t they? In a town this size. But something held her back. Cicily must have been a chameleon to fit in so well in Devon and Philadelphia and then to come home every weekend to a town like this. Again she wondered whether Cicily had really loved them or whether she had just been doing her job. How would she feel to see Isabel at her door now, wanting something, so many years after she had stopped being paid to give anything at all?
Isabel went into the diner, sat at the counter with the box beside her, and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich.
“How about this heat?” the waitress said, bringing over the plate. “Every day that guy on the radio says it’s going to break. Been saying it nine days now by my count.”
“It’s not so bad in here with the fans going,” Isabel said.
“I brought those fans in myself,” the waitress said. “The owner, he don’t do nothing. Sits in his air-cooled office all day with his feet up. Want some ice cream? We’ve got pie, but ice cream will cool you off but good.”
She was a black woman, about twenty-five, in a turquoise uniform with her hair done in braids that swung when she walked and two-inch frosted white fingernails. In her voice Isabel could hear a trace of the accent she associated with Cicily, a soft, twangy way of speaking, as though Delaware were in the foothills of Appalachia. Was a job like this what Cicily had escaped by taking the Greyhound bus to Philadelphia every week and sleeping more than half her nights in someone else’s house? Was taking care of other people’s children better than pouring coffee and making change, or not?
“Ice cream sounds good,” Isabel said.
“Vanilla or peach?” the waitress asked, wiping the counter.
Isabel asked for peach. She listened to the chatter of the other customers—about a daughter starting community college, a sick dog, and the best place to buy children’s clothes. It was soothing, sitting on the stool with the fans whirring in the open windows, eating ice cream with a long-handled spoon, and listening to other people talk.
“What you got in that box?” the waitress asked when she brought Isabel her check.
“An owl,” Isabel said.
The waitress laughed. “You looking for Cicily Lamont? Why didn’t you say so? You see her on that TV program? Who’d have thought being a, what you call, eccentric, could make you famous!”
Ten minutes later, Isabel was standing in front of a small white house at the end of a rutted driveway. In the back, behind some bushes, she could make out the long, board-and-chicken-wire flight she had seen on the television news. There was an old car in the driveway and red curtains in the windows. She rang the bell, and the next moment Cicily opened the door.
“Yes?” she said.
A handsome woman in a sleeveless yellow dress, she looked younger than Isabel had expected—younger, certainly, than Dr. Rubin. Her hair was not wrapped in a scarf as Isabel remembered it, but shaped close to her head. Instead of wrinkles, a few deep grooves ran along her face, from nose to mouth and across her forehead, as though they were symbols rather than consequences of age. She looked at Isabel’s box. “Is there someone in there for me?” she said, and her voice went straight to Isabel’s heart, opening it like a key.
Isabel said, “Cicily, do you remember me?”
The older woman looked at her and clapped her hand over her mouth. “Isabel Rubin! My Lord!” she said, and then she took Isabel’s face in her hands and kissed her on both cheeks.
The house was filled with birds. Canaries, budgies, lovebirds, and chickadees looked out from cages or perched on the furniture. They spread their wings and darted from room to room. There was a macaw as well, and a large gray African parrot that turned up its beak and looked down at them haughtily as they passed. “I had to pull up the carpets,” Cicily said, leading Isabel through the house into the kitchen at the back. “It’s all linoleum now. Sit down and let me look at you. So big! Well, you were almost all grown-up the last time I saw you. Too big for a babysitter, according to you! And it was true, too. You could practically take care of yourself when you were eight years old, and your sister Alice the same way. Only that little one was a handful of trouble. Lord, how she could scream when she didn’t get her way! Pretty little Tina. How is she? How is everyone?”
Isabel felt so odd, she could hardly answer. She felt as though she were dreaming, or as though she had stepped into an old photograph that had come to life. It had been twenty years since she had seen Cicily, yet here she was, her back straight and her head held high on her elegant neck, only somewhat thinner and older, and her voice more gravelly than it had been. Here she was, living all these years in this house as Isabel went about her life in Philadelphia as though it were the only place in the world, as though towns like Alapocas did not really exist. She sat at the kitchen table and accepted a glass of iced tea. “We’re all right. Alice is a lawyer now.”
“That’s no surprise, with that mind of hers! She always took after your father. Looks, everything. The way you and Tina took after your mother.”
“I never took after Doc,” Isabel said in surprise.
“My God, what a likeness! And so emotional, both of you. I always thought you had the most open face in the world, with those big brown eyes. So full of whatever you were feeling. Of course, when you got to be eleven or so you learned to hide it pretty good. And both of you stubborn as bulls when you wanted something.” Cicily shooed a pigeon off a chair and sat down.
“And how are you, Cicily?” asked Isabel, who had come precisely to hear about herself and her family but suddenly wanted only to change the subject.
“Well, my Paul passed fifteen years ago. It doesn’t seem so long. I still miss him. But my feathered friends are good company. I’ve got a place here, and something I like to do that’s useful in its way. I’ve even earned myself a little f
ame.” She laughed. “I bet you saw me on that TV show. Everyone did!”
Isabel laughed, too. “Alice and I were watching the news, and there you were. Alice tried to get your number from information, but they didn’t have it.”
“What do I need a phone for?” Cicily said, and Isabel could hear a trace of the old scornfulness, the old way Cicily might once have said, “What do you need a new bike for?”
“In case people want to get in touch with you.”
“They just have to come to my door, like you did.”
Isabel looked around the little kitchen with its yellow Formica counters, its crooked cabinets, its worn dishcloths and pot holders, its newspaper clippings and pictures of birds stuck to the walls with bits of tape, its water dishes and hanging perches and saucers of seed, and its birds. The pauses in conversation were filled with twittering and squawking. “I remember when you used to take us to the zoo,” Isabel said. “You loved the bird house. Who would have thought you would have ended up with one of your own!”
“There’s no telling how any of us will end up, is there?” Cicily said. “You used to like the reptile house, if I remember. Did you end up in a house full of snakes?”
Isabel told Cicily about studying zoology, and being a vet, and about her work at the zoo. “I think I took after you,” Isabel said, leaning across the table. “Not Doc. Not Dad. You’re the one who brought us up, after all.”
“I did not!” Cicily was indignant. “Your mother and your dad raised you. I just took care of the details.”
“Oh yes, the details! Like feeding us, bathing us, looking after us when we were sick. Advising us when we had problems. Teaching us how to look at the world. If I had children, I would take care of them myself!”
“That’s the Isabel I remember,” Cicily said. “Always sure you could do things better than everybody else.”
“We were lucky they found you,” Isabel said. “Suppose they had hired somebody stupid?”
This Side of Married Page 20
