Breadcrumbs and parsley were scattered all over the counter, the food processor, plugged in and full of chopped onion. Miniature statues were placed on the stove, the way people stuck them on dashboards to ensure safe journeys.
Margo was searching in the fridge for a Diet Pepsi, when she noticed Richard behind her. He took the bottle from her hands and set it on the table. Then, he took her right hand and turned her engagement ring around to the outside, just as he had done the last few times she’d visited.
“You’ll cut yourself that way.”
“Well, what do you expect?”
“I expect you to tell him about Matthew. Today.”
“You can call him ‘Matt.’ He wouldn’t mind.”
Margo searched the cabinet for a glass, while Richard stood behind her like a cop. Of course, she understood he was trying to get the news over and done with, but, he seemed annoyed that she was skipping out on them, running away with a normal plan that had fallen into her lap, and moving toward a normal life. She was grateful that Paul had Richard. He was able to lift the six-foot-three Paul in and out of the bathtub, in and out of the van, and onto the toilet bowl.
Margo worried that Richard might tell Paul about Matt before she did. They both knew it would upset him; he would assume that Margo would not visit so often. After the wedding, she would move into Matt’s place in Manhattan and planned on being promoted to a new position, which would surely be more demanding of her time.
She tried to scan Richard’s face without him noticing and expected another scolding, but before he left the black-lacquered kitchen, all he said was, “Don’t leave your shoes in the dining room. One of the girls might take them.”
Margo felt like a traitor, alone in the kitchen with her guilt and an old picture of Paul tacked to the bulletin board, wearing a tuxedo and a confident smile.
Forgetting her shoes, Margo helped herself to a piece of dark chocolate from an open box of candy in the dining room. A stone elephant, as big as a toy poodle, watched her from under the glass table. She glanced over the ripped-out magazine pages, a sloppy collage taped on the mirror; the models looked absent-minded and lucky. Margo recognized the pages. They had been torn from Vogue, whose offices were located in the same building as Teen Idol, where she was currently paying her dues as a research assistant for the “Fashion-Junkie” column. She envied the Vogue editors, who exuded the magazine’s style—even when running through the lobby with their coffees and briefcases—and hoped to make her way onto their staff.
Margo walked back through the hallway in her bare feet, into the bedroom, ignoring Richard, who was again buried in his newspaper. She held her glass of Pepsi under Paul’s chin as he bobbed for the straw. Her mouth close to his ear, she whispered, “Your friend was in there giving me some elephant lore.” Settling back in her chair, she said, “OK, boss, I’m ready.”
Margo saw, in the space between Paul’s lips, a letter.
“U.”
And then a “P” popping out. “P” was always a cinch. “Up. The word is up.”
Richard was making plenty of noise with the newspaper, his head hidden behind the theater section. He went to see everything on Broadway. Margo stuck her tongue out at him, and Paul laughed. Now it was Margo and Paul against Richard.
Paul kept eyeing the tissue box. This was the other ritual, getting all sweaty in the game like athletes. Margo was perspiring, and he wanted her to take a tissue and wipe her forehead, the bridge of her nose, her mouth, which she did. She then took the damp tissue and kneeled on the floor next to him. She pulled his fingers back and wiped the moisture collected in his lifelines, his sweat mixing with hers. Sometimes, when she pulled Paul’s fingers away from his palm, there would be a slight yeast odor, but she could only smell it if she got close. She didn’t care if she was annoying Richard, who kept Paul’s body as immaculate as he kept his own.
Margot returned to her chair. “Next letter,” she said weakly. She knew it would be a difficult one. It always happened like that. She’d be on a streak then get dead stuck. She sat still, a good student, observing Paul’s mouth. His lips were full and never dry like her own were at the moment. Sometimes, she groped hard for a letter, as if the alphabet were strung between them. She felt, too, that if she concentrated hard enough, she would be able to read his mind.
He was still performing letters with the only movable part of his body.
“Y—Y?”
He was getting anxious and had already moved on to the next clue.
“O?”
“U?”
“R?”
Richard folded his newspaper into his lap. He thought only he could understand his patient.
The doorbell rang again and again.
“Must be one of the girls,” Richard said. “Now I’m going to miss the best part of the show.”
One of the cha-chas was there to pick up her order, so Richard pitched in. He didn’t seem to mind. Gabriella wouldn’t be back for hours. The only thing she ever did was go grocery shopping, or to the beauty parlor, and to the bank. Today, however, she had gone to Seventh Avenue in New York to the houses she ordered from. Most of the clothes came to her U.P.S.
Margo heard the lavish talk and jingles going on between Richard and Gabriella’s customer. Whoever was at the door was delighted to see Richard.
Relieved to be alone, not that Richard ever presided over them, they were happy for the moment. Margo felt her diamond ring against her bare leg.
Paul hissed.
“S.”
Paul exhaled.
“H.”
Paul winked.
“I.”
Paul chewed.
“R.”
The old reliable “T” sound came from Paul’s mouth in a hurry. He was perspiring.
Shirt, Margo said to herself. Lift up your shirt. She let it sink in, while she focused on a small plastic hose attached to a box on the night table. She had seen Paul blow into the hose, making the ball inside the box flutter up and down. Two years of religiously visiting him, each visit now stuck in her chest, swelling, so that she was forced to examine what had really happened. Now, she couldn’t deliver, and he would feel punished for it. Margo, afraid to look, felt Paul waiting. Perhaps she misunderstood the letters.
She managed, “Lift up my shirt?”
The words rose around them.
Richard rushed in, peach lipstick on each cheek. He was carrying a ceramic elephant one of Gabriella’s customers brought home from Florence. She could tell by the way he looked at them, he knew the game was over. He put the elephant down on the rug near the bed and maneuvered Paul’s body by pulling the sheets and pillows under him so that he was again straight and comfortable.
Margo tried not to watch this ritual—it had to be embarrassing—and stared down at the new elephant in bright Florentine colors. His trunk, resting over a tusk, looked bloated and heavy.
Richard appeared to be getting Paul ready for something, and now, Margo felt like the one left out. Richard propped Paul upright, combed his hair, and placed a little towel roll behind his neck so his head wouldn’t flop. Deftly, with a lemony swab, he cleaned out Paul’s mouth so fast that Margo wasn’t even sure he had done it.
During all this, the sentence—Lift up your shirt—played in Margo’s head. She felt the urge to say it aloud, to see the expression on Richard’s face, but she also felt ashamed. It might upset Paul, and Richard didn’t deserve that either.
Richard folded Paul’s hands together over his shapeless stomach, finished his duties, and stood straight, his head almost to the ceiling, a good giant finished with his deeds, leaving the fairies to play. He gave Margo one of his famous looks, glared down at her ring finger as a reminder, and left the room, closing the door firmly to make his point.
“Lipstick,” Margo whispered. “All over him.” She dotted her face wit
h her finger. “The one with the bracelets did it. Big Boy didn’t stand a chance.”
Paul didn’t laugh. He was fresh, combed, and ready.
Margo played out the words she would say in her mind. Paul—if you knew Matt, you’d like him. If you don’t like him, he’s history. She’d make a joke of it.
Margo saw letters all over Paul’s face, jumbled up, desperate. He was starting again with the L, the I, the F, the T. She thought of the game she had played in secret the night before, at a dinner with Matt and his law partners. Pretending she was deaf, she had studied Matt’s mouth as he chatted to a lawyer. She couldn’t pick up a signal there, so she searched the rest of Matt’s face for clues, his gesturing hands, and his body, hunched into the conversation. Finally, she gave up. She hadn’t given it a second thought. Until now.
Margo got out of her chair, the back of her knees wet, her hands so moist her engagement ring slipped. She opened her mouth and thought about the place inside her where her voice began. She imagined a hollow black box deep within her throat, the top lid propped open. Nothing emerged; she could not form a single word.
Her sudden paralysis made everything in the room come to life. She felt the presence of Jesus Christ in the portrait above Paul’s head, staring past them, uninvolved. The Padre Pio statue held his hand up like a crossing guard. There was a pile of untouched magazines—Forbes, Fortune, Business Week—the covers alive with functioning executives in suits. The humidifier hissed, the smell of menthol coated her with another layer.
On that too-warm day in mid-October, no one watched Margo from the backyard, through the picture window, and she looked out on the scene that would be her audience—Gabriella’s ghosts and scarecrows, which she must have pulled from the shed and were now huddled together, as dead leaves accumulated in the pool.
Margot thought of all of Paul’s friends who stopped visiting because they couldn’t handle it. She could hear her father’s demanding voice, forbidding her to see a sick man, and she could see the warning expression in Richard’s eyes.
And, Paul’s wife. She left him when he could no longer tie his shoes.
Margo lifted her sweater up and over her head. She put her hands behind her back, pulled off her ring, letting it drop into the rug, and unfastened the hooks of her bra. She slipped off her skirt, and then her underwear, with one finger, down to the floor.
She looked down at herself, at the sweat on her breasts, at her toes half-hidden in the thick, soft rug. Paul’s breathing was labored, and Margo looked around the room for the contraption Richard used when Paul got like this. But he never got like this exactly.
Paul’s mouth began to form letters, but he stopped. His eyes softened. It seemed as though this was what he had wanted. It wasn’t too much to ask. Margo saw Paul’s beautiful white teeth and remembered the photo of him in his tuxedo, and the one where he wore his bathing suit with the turquoise ocean behind him.
Paul pushed his chin out with all his might, moisture gathering in the corners of his mouth. As Margo moved closer, she almost knocked down the cold ceramic elephant. She continued on, feeling the weight of Paul’s need on her, moving through this secretive, shameful game. She got on the tight sheets of the bed, carefully positioning herself so that she was face to face with Paul, her legs on each side of him.
She pulled back his fingers and opened his hands.
IN THE BEACH CHAIR
The crowd at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery had no order or shape, just pockets of space here and there as if the sun were burning holes through the mass, completely missing two tall targets, Stef and her mother, Constance. Stef noticed the heat made her mother’s unworldly pink lipstick seep upwards and outwards into the lines around her mouth, a frame of sorts for the word “dirt,” the word her mother kept whispering to her all through the service. And wouldn’t it be hilarious if it was plain old dirt that would make her mother forget all the shit that had gone back and forth between her and her sister Linnie before she’d died?
“Look at the dirt,” Constance said again, her face crunched up like she had a sour ball under her tongue.
Stef looked around, creeped out by the fresh mounds nearby.
“There’s a seam.” And in the palm of her hand, her mother drew the seam that went down the center of the coffin, her thick gold ring with the diamond strip all around distracting Stef. She adored the ring and her mother waved it in front of her as often as she could.
Constance was on a soft-spoken tirade. “Must be made of goddamn fiberglass,” she said, looking over the heads in front of them. “That’s what the bastard bought,” referring to Aunt Linnie’s born-again Christian husband.
The pall bearers threw fistfuls of dirt over the coffin while Father Boyle stood over to the side, reading from his prayer book like he knew anything about love, human love. The dirt, Constance insisted, was getting stuck in the seam, and surely the dirt was falling in through the crack and onto her sister (who’d died like a rabbit under the porch) over her deflated stomach, over the only decent dress she ever had, one that Constance had bought for this occasion.
Stef figured her mother would have sprung for the coffin, too, to spread some butter over her guilt, but Uncle Jeff wanted to buy it himself with his own five hundred bucks, so everyone would feel sorry for him.
Constance reached for the candies in her purse, a sign that meant she was turning over an irritating situation in her mind.
“You know what that bastard said to me this morning with my poor dead sister in the same room?” Constance pulled the skin above her daughter’s elbow. “Steffie has become a woman. She could rival my wife—before the boys, before the lymphoma.”
“Since when do you give a shit what he says,” Stef said in her usual under-the-breath response, trying to recover from how her mother referred to Aunt Linnie—my poor dead sister—like she was all heart.
It was clear to Stef that her mother wasn’t passing on a compliment. This was a warning. Stef couldn’t see any similarity between herself—tall and broad with straight black hair—and the Northern Italian colors of her mother’s family. It was nice to feel her mother studying her at that moment, affectionately rearranging her hair behind her shoulders, gazing at her slender nose, her full cheeks, even if she was only searching for the reference Uncle Jeff had made.
Stef had had no contact with the Olsens for five years now, because of the various silent treatments inflicted by both sides. But as she imagined Aunt Linnie lying in the fiberglass box, her rust-colored curls still plump because hair, they say, doesn’t die, Stef knew she should be there.
Constance shoved her purse into her daughter’s hands, her breath full of butterscotch. “My baby sister,” she said and moved toward the coffin.
Stef felt ridiculous, holding two purses, one of them clearly old ladyish, so fat with used tissues and mess inside, all smelling of Madam Rochas perfume, even the candy. Stef found one of the gooey Lifesavers in her mother’s purse, and watched as her mother twisted her large body from one side to the other, squeezing through the crowd, putting a hand gently on a shoulder or an arm as she passed. Stef saw the guilt, all ribbony and flowing down her back like the tails of an Easter hat.
Constance wore a classic black suit with white piping and Stef tried to picture her mother at her own father’s funeral, when Stef was only five like her cousin Tommy was now. Had Constance carried on about something then? Had she truly been thin, the way she’d described herself? When she used to put Stef to bed as a child, Constance had often told her the story of her dad’s funeral, how the pallbearers could hardly carry a man of his size on their shoulders. Constance had worried they’d drop the hand-finished oak casket, with the creamy taffeta interior, pop the seal, and her husband would roll out onto the hardened soil like the trunk of an oak tree, his eyes unglued and staring straight ahead.
She’d told her daughter it was the what-ifs in life that would kill her.<
br />
Stef couldn’t remember a thing about that day, so she inserted the image of her father falling and rolling on the ground.
Stef had been away at boarding school when she got the news about Aunt Linnie, but from what she’d gathered through her mother’s too-busy-to-talk phone calls, her mother had been by Linnie’s side over the past year. Constance had temporarily closed her shop—not that she’d ever had normal business hours anyway—and gone back to her sister because of the cancer, the cancer she had fully expected. Aunt Linnie, the beautiful one, had just turned forty, and she was the first to go, summoned up, no doubt, by their dead mother. Aunt Linnie had been Grandma Dottie’s favorite. She was everybody’s favorite, except, maybe, Uncle Jeff’s.
Four bright blonde heads kept turning back in Stef’s direction, even Tommy, with shocking colors around their necks—pinks, neon greens, oranges—like surfer boys, their clothes bagging on them.
Stef had never gotten this kind of attention from the Olsen boys before. She felt like a giant in her black sheath dress, kitten heels, and two purses, overlooking the townspeople, her eye on one troublemaker in particular. Away at school, she had never had this feeling, that creeping sense that something could go wrong any minute.
She watched as her mother moved closer to the coffin, and Father Boyle looked up from his prayer book. Was it her mother that distracted him, or, did the clouds remind him of the whipped cream that would soon be floating on top of his Irish coffee? That must be how priests got off, Stef thought, if they weren’t helping themselves to young boys.
Stef noticed her mother’s hair, fried from all the bleach, was becoming undone from her usual chignon as she made it up to the coffin and stood in front of it like a soldier too tired to salute.
Father Boyle continued talking about Linnie’s disposition throughout her illness; her dedication to education in the town of Pelham where Jeff Olson was now teaching eighth grade math over at the high school. Of course, Father never mentioned why everyone just wanted to shake her sometimes.
This Side of Water Page 4