by Aimee Bender
After the pie, I carried the poison bottle around with me for the rest of the day. Aunt Minn and Uncle Stan did all the dishes, and Mom and I strolled the backyard and toured those plants she had loved, and we presented gifts to Grandma, which she accepted with curt nods, and even a half-apology for yelling at the table; “You’re a tough one, Francie,” she said, barking out a laugh. I gave her a nod back. The adults kept sharp eyes on me, but no one seemed concerned that I might drink from the poison myself—more that I might empty it onto the flower beds, or slip a drop into somebody’s teacup. Only when we piled back in our car, and Uncle Stan and Aunt Minn had waved goodbye, heading south to spend a few days in San Francisco visiting the buffalo in Golden Gate Park and eating mounds of sourdough as happy, dutiful tourists, only then did I hand the bottle back through the open car window after asking my grandmother to promise that she wouldn’t send it to the doctor anymore. She didn’t answer me, but stood on the lawn with the bottle in her hand like she was holding a crackling fire. “She’s not a mistake,” I said out the window. “Drive safely,” Grandma said, “thank you for coming.” “He did not ruin her,” I said. “Sorry, Ma,” said my mother, leaning over me to wave out the passenger side, “happy birthday.” She put the car into drive, fir trees springing up in pointy clusters at the sides of the road, as we turned the corner to head to the 5 North.
35
“But he did,” she said quietly, smoking out the driver’s-side window, an hour or so later, when she thought I was asleep.
36
When Esther finally brought my blanket back to elementary school, after I’d called and asked her for it under my mother’s watch that morning, “Please bring it to school, it has little sheep on it, thank you,” it was after I’d already left town. She brought it on the Monday after the hammer smash, and by then I was deep in my window seat on the train, halfway down the western edge of the country, looking out at the Shakespeare billboards fronting even more clusters of trees advertising the upcoming summer theater bill in Ashland, Oregon: Hamlet. Twelfth Night. Death of a Salesman. I retained no love for the blanket, but it showed up in Burbank a few weeks later anyway, in a yellow puffy package on the counter mailed from Portland with my name on it and the neatly folded graying cloth inside. A colorful card from one of the volunteer mothers said, We’re thinking of you, Francie. Here’s someone who might help a little bit. Aunt Minn was in the other room trying to tend to a fussy Vicky in the rocking chair with her breast, and I stood there at the counter with the sound of a car radio blaring commercials from outside picking at that word. Someone. Obviously, it was a well-meaning volunteer mother who had searched my cubby and figured the blanket was important and had taken the time to find my address and fold it so carefully, but as I dumped the fabric out of the envelope, the world split into the two parts it had become so many times before: into those who could adorably call a blanket a someone, and those of us who, just weeks earlier, had listened to her mother racked with sobs over the decimated bodies of cotton-stuffed lions. Who, just months before, had watched her aunt drink a new glass of water just in case there was any invented chance of passing the illness along to her fetus via spit. I slid the card into the paper shredder.
Even the sight of the blanket bothered me, but I didn’t know how to dispose of it; I walked around the house, but any trash can felt conspicuous, scissors wouldn’t cut it well, burning would be too messy. More than anything, I wanted to slip it into the invisible. Vicky had started to cry again; she had exited the womb a healthy baby with an intact head, a baby with everything just where it was supposed to be, who had passed all her tests, and was growing in all the ways hoped, but who still had a lot of trouble burping, and while Aunt Minn patted her back over and over in the baby room, singing clips of songs, saying sshh, sshh, please baby, please, with a catch in her voice, some kind of lullaby rotation cube spinning light patterns on the floor, I went to the doorway of the nursery and told my aunt I had just received an old baby blanket in the mail; would it please be okay if I gave it to the baby? Aunt Minn, her face hazy with exhaustion, living right at the rim of overwhelm, said that was very generous of me, absolutely, please, and we both twitched a little in amazement when the moment I draped the blanket on my aunt’s shoulder, the baby burped, rested her head right on it, and within seconds had fallen asleep.
Years later, when I came home from the visit to the neurologist holding on to the dead roses that had emerged from the damask curtains at Deena’s house, something similar occurred. Vicky was older then, but everything of mine still had a pull on her, and as soon as we drove up, she ran out of the house in her bare feet and followed me to the side yard, bombarding me with questions: how was it? did the doctor say anything new? are you all right? and I told her the doctor had been fine, nothing new, all was okay, nothing to worry about, but she stood by my shoulder and raised up on her toes to look in as I laid the roses in the green garbage can in the side yard among grass cuttings and crackling strands of dead bougainvillea as gathered by the gardener on Tuesdays. I had told her earlier where the roses had come from. I had told her I did not plan to keep them. So, it was not a huge surprise when later, after I let the lid of the bin drop without ceremony, out my window, when night had fallen on the garden and she thought I was doing homework, I saw as Vicky sneaked through the side door, tiptoed to the bins, and carefully lifted one of the roses from the pile. “Vick, that you out there?” called Aunt Minn from the living room, where she was flipping through channels. “Just checking something for homework!” Vicky called back, side door locking. By then, I had locked myself in my room for the night, which I still did despite the fact that her skull had knit together years earlier without interference, which I still did even though Deena had invited me out with her and another friend that night, to the movie-plex, to see a thriller; no, I preferred the sanctity and simplicity of this enclosed chamber, and I could hear the faint sounds of Vicky entering the living room, the two of them laughing at a show, Uncle Stan making a bowl of popcorn, Vicky likely tucked into the bone of her mother’s shoulder, cozy, the rose somewhere nearby, on a shelf, maybe, or a table. When I asked her about it the next day, both of us home from school, the trash trucks come and gone, her sitting cross-legged on her maroon quilt doing math drills, she knelt down and opened the drawer on her nightstand with the brass key she wore around her neck, and there it was, nestled on a scrap of fabric, petals dry and cracking. All her most precious things were in there: the azure marble she’d found once in Aunt Minn’s coat pocket, a skillful drawing of a Siamese cat by her friend Lola, a whittled spoon from Grandpa. “Why do you want it?” I asked. Outside, the tall sycamore pressed its leaves against her window. “I just want it.” “It won’t become anything else.” “That’s fine.” She glared at me with force in her eyes, but as we sat there the force began falling in on itself, turning inside out until it became, in an instant, begging. “Please don’t take it away,” she said, starting to cry. “It’s so special to me.” She held it to her cheek, and then lowered it back to the drawer to settle on its remnant of dun-colored satin. “The only flower in the world that didn’t come from a seed,” she said. “Except the other two.” “Stop, Francie! Don’t you see? I’ll have this when I’m an old lady. I will pass it along to my children. If there was a fire, I would get it first—” “First?” “Of the things, please. You gave it up, Francie. It belongs to me now.”
37
It all mattered to Vicky. Vicky’s personal essay about me. Vicky’s monologue for her theater class playwriting unit about my mother’s excessive blanket delivery on the Fourth of July. Vicky’s drawer of memorabilia. Vicky’s idea of stickiness that turned into the memory tent.
On that first day of the tent’s use, after she’d come over and built it with me, she called as soon as she got home from school. “Tell me, tell me!” she said, “how was it?” and I could hear her moving things around in the kitchen, undoing the dishwasher, stacking bow
ls. “Fine,” I said, slowly. “Kind of random. All I remembered today was how the babysitter had this fringy scarf on her television.” “Cool.” “And her cat.” “You mean Hattie?” I laughed. “I should just interview you,” I said. She jangled some silverware. “I told Mom about what we made, and she thought it was really interesting, but she’s a tiny bit worried about it. I mean, I think it’s amazing, but she thinks you might be isolating yourself.” I moved over to the balcony glass window to look out at the new protruding orange tent shape. It had only been a day by that point, but I thought I could already feel it gaining something inside, vapor steeping, waiting for me. “Will you tell her it’s a way to un-isolate myself?” I said, stepping forward, pressing my nose to the glass of the balcony door; “It’s like the freeze tag.” “Where you were more connected to the kids at school while you were frozen than when you were talking to them at a table?” “Exactly.” “That still seems really crazy to me.” “But it is true.” Vicky paused. I could hear her gently dropping spoons into a drawer. Like it had been with the freeze tag, if I concentrated and listened, I could feel now, for a second, the presence of the world buzzing outside me, the cars on the street, the people stepping into the stores, the children on the playgrounds, my existence inside it. How I might, over time, form some kind of outline in this way. “Aren’t you lonely, Francie?” Vicky asked. “Sure,” I said. “I mean, sitting there in a tent all day and mailing packages?” “It won’t be all day.” “Do you feel distant from me now? Like are you secretly playing freeze tag in your mind or something?” She waited. Plates clinked into piles. “You have your own mother, you know,” I said, breathing a smudge onto the glass. “With her own stuff,” I said. Vicky laughed. “You think?” I breathed out until the smudge was as large as my face. “Make your own tent,” I said.
38
By their adolescences, Elaine and Minnie looked so different that strangers in lines at the grocery store or doctors’ offices laughed out loud when they found out they were siblings. At that point, it was like the sisters had been born in different dimensions, like Grandma Bea had, during labor, wandered out of her hospital room into a space-time warp where she delivered two children from varying proportional systems, who would look almost identical for the first few years of life, until one shrank and the other expanded, not in terms of weight, but of something more elemental. Aunt Minn appears more sleek and efficient than my mother: smaller eyes, bones, gestures, words, more porcelain in style, and delicacy of movement. My mother, woman of enthusiasms, has that roiling bountiful hair, generous features and gestures, and when well an appreciation of jazz piano and vibrators, full moons, gold-plated oyster forks. The man she is currently dating, Edward, the pianist, says when they make a plan to go out, “the lights of the city brighten.” His own eyes glow as he grabs her hand, as we leave her room at Hawthorne House to walk over together to the living room area, where she will soon be singing as part of the post-lunch show. I’m here for my annual fall visit, a few months into the memory tent, the visit timed to coincide with this performance of selections from Pal Joey as accompanied by Edward and his friend the percussionist, and we stroll the main hall together and step into the living room, and when we do, to my complete shock, the whole area, my usual favorite part of the visit, the place in which I have spent so many updating afternoons, reveals itself to be entirely redecorated. Chrome-armed sofas and new plastic coffee tables. Solid-color rugs. Enlarged photographs of birds and flowers. Particleboard desks. Wicker trash cans. My mother sees my face, tells me someone discovered a month or so ago that those beautiful raw silk lime green parlor chairs in which we sat, side by side, over so many years, had all been absolutely seething with termites. “You wouldn’t believe how fast they fixed it!” she says, laughing. “It took two days? Was it two, Edward?” “It seemed like a minute,” he says, smiling into her eyes. They head to their spots, her greeting everyone like the star of a show, which she is, him settling at the piano, which is the same, and before I take my seat, and the show begins, I stop and ask a staff member in the hall if she happens to know where the seascapes that used to hang on the walls in those golden frames went: the ones with the crashing waves? The wild storm-clouded skies? The pail? Maybe there’s one in a closet somewhere I could take home? I’d found, I tell her, so much solace in them over the years. My voice surprises me, shaking with urgency, and the tall woman in scrubs hears it, nods at me—we’ve had many short conversations over the years—and pulls me aside, away from the remaining trickle of residents heading in to get their seats. In the corner, she tells me in a hushed, almost conspiratorial voice that she’s very sorry, and she loved those pictures too, but by the time they dragged the furniture and paintings outside to get picked up by sanitation services, everything was literally disintegrating in their hands. “It was actually kind of incredible,” she says, widening her eyes. “Watching them dissolve. It was almost like they had never existed in the first place.” She flutters her fingers in the air. “Like they returned to dust.”
My mother sings wonderfully, and gets a standing ovation from the residents, and Edward hugs her in a way that seems kind, and she introduces me to everyone as her greatest accomplishment, but I think only about the disintegrating paintings during the flight home. They are significant to me in a way I can’t quite pinpoint. It’s evening by then, and the sun is setting, and the dust motes floating in the body of the plane are lit into a goldenness. Outside the windows, the landscape moves below us, farmlands again, mountain peaks, my own thinking, and by the time the wheels bump to landing, I think it might be because it means that any speck of dust in the world may have once been part of a beautiful painting. My mother looked happy in her bronze eye shadow, happier than I’ve ever seen her. My baggage is the last to arrive on the baggage claim.
39
The babysitter was finishing in the bathroom, running the faucet, humming a song. I had only a minute. I could not leave the butterfly in the water glass in her apartment, but I did not have a book handy in which to press it, or a baggie, or anything to preserve it in a proper way, so I picked up the glass, and when I swallowed it down, the wings scratched like a finely leafed lettuce down my throat, with only the faintest prickings from legs and antennae.
The faucet turned off, and the babysitter opened the door to return to the living room. She had clipped a festive pink rhinestone barrette into her hair for wherever she would go after dropping me off.
“Thirsty girl!” she said, smiling at the empty glass. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
PART FOUR
Beetle
40
On a Saturday afternoon later in the fall, Vicky asks if she can come over to my apartment to work on the final final draft of her essay. We’re at the end of October now, and she tells me, sprawled on the carpet, that Aunt Minn has been checking on her weekend plans again in this pretend-casual way that Vicky hates, and she really appreciates how empty my apartment is, how quiet, with the balcony door open and an occasional breeze floating in even though it’s been such a hot fall, so bright in the direct sunlight that I can feel burn rising to the surface of my skin in minutes. She says she likes how I have such little furniture, even though she also thinks it’s creepy. “Both,” she says, stretching out her legs, “definitely both.”
We are leaning against one of the walls, as usual, looking at some of her final sentence changes, while also sorting through a surplus I found over the weekend from a woman moving to a much smaller apartment in Chicago due to a hopeful new romance. The woman had taken me on a tour of her ceramic and blown glass vases, set on card tables of varying heights, vases she’d collected for thirty years, plus some great wooden bracelets, and a scarf I set aside for my mother of the vibrant reds and purples she loves the most. I circle a line in Vicky’s essay about the lock. “This could still be sharper,” I say. “I mean, to say it was an honor is a little much.” She’s flat on the floor now, leaning on a pillow
, and tries to scribble on the draft in the air with a red pen, but the ink just bends on the folded paper. “But it was an honor,” she says after a minute, reaching her eyes to mine. “I want to say honor.” “It’s just a little over-the-top, don’t you think?” “Not if it’s true, Francie.” There’s a knock at the door. We look at each other. “Did you order anything?” she asks, hopeful. In the peephole is the warped and intent face of that building manager, who lives those few doors down. She has never knocked on my door before. “Can I speak with you for a moment?” she asks when I open up.
41
The train to Los Angeles was set to leave at two p.m., but the babysitter told me it was good to get there early so we could meet the steward and make sure everything was settled for the trip. Together, we gathered my bags, and I glanced around the loft until we headed downstairs to the #9 covered bus stop at the end of the block. Outside, the day was beautiful, a vibrant demonstration of spring, the city sparkling with a green and varied aliveness, and on the bus, commuters sat in chairs, reading, looking out windows, two friends talking with excitement about a party they’d attended the night before. The babysitter and I were both quiet; she was thinking of other things, or trying to be respectful of my transition, and I was in a daze about my body and what was in it. The new queasiness and hint of elation I felt while holding on to the greasy silver pole of the bus and watching the squat brown buildings and stores pass by.