by Wally Lamb
The room filled slowly with old people, Grandma’s lady friends and their husbands. Grandma and I were like royalty—queens for a day. Strangers offered me their limp hands and Mass cards, then sat down to murmur and stare.
A red-haired woman in a tollbooth uniform like Ma’s was on her way home from work. “We’re all just sick about it, sweetheart,” she said. I nodded appreciatively. “It should have been you,” I thought. “Your children should be here, not me.”
An old man kissed my cheek and pressed something into my hand: a twenty-dollar bill folded repeatedly into a tiny, hard square.
I took a cigarette break at the rear of the parlor, silencing the men’s murmured conversations with my presence the same way I silenced people at school, clearing the little wood-paneled room. I ran my fingers along the empty row of coat hangers, making them swing and dance. I wrote my initials in the ashtray sand and buried the twenty-dollar bill. When I got back, Jeanette Nord and her parents were at Ma’s coffin.
Jeanette had frosted her hair and grown hips like her mother’s. Her father wore the same plaid sports jacket I remembered since when I used to sleep over at Jeanette’s on Saturday night and go with them to their Methodist church the following morning. Jack Speight had raped me and Ma was dead and Mr. Nord still wore that coat. I wanted to rest my head against the lapel, but Mrs. Nord kept talking about Jeanette’s life.
Jeanette stretched a smile across her face. She made several tries at looking at me. “I’m really sorry,” she said. Then her mouth bent and she began to choke and laugh.
“I really am sorry,” she said. “Nothing’s funny.” She looked panicked but the laughing continued. “I don’t know what to say. It’s just . . . I mean, what am I supposed to say?” Then she turned and plowed her way toward the metal folding chairs.
“She wanted to come,” Mrs. Nord said. “It was her idea.”
* * *
On the second night of calling hours, Father Duptulski knelt before Ma’s casket and led the rosary. His being there rallied Grandma. “Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,” she repeated after Father, over and over, her voice the loudest in the room.
Daddy was there!
He stood in the foyer, waiting for the rosary to be through. He’d grown a mustache and wide sideburns—muttonchops. His eyes looked out at nothing. His hands kept making and unmaking fists. I thought of the night he’d cupped Ma’s bird, Petey, in those hands—had sent him flying away from her while she begged and cried. “You killed us both, you bastard,” I sat and thought.
Grandma’s praying dropped off and I could tell she saw him, too. If Grandma’s God was real, why wasn’t Daddy my dead parent?
He walked hesitantly toward me, his eyes widening at what I looked like. “What did you expect?” I thought. My anger was as huge as I was.
He squatted before me. “Hi,” he whispered.
“I don’t want to talk to you.”
Grandma reached for my hand. “All right now, Dolores—” she began.
“I don’t want him here, Grandma.” Only I did. I wanted him to hold me, swim with me—wanted him not to have gone away.
The mourners became a row of ghosts.
“Honey, it’s all right,” Daddy said. “I’ll help you through—”
“Don’t talk to me,” I said. “Go fuck yourself. Is Old Lady Masicotte still alive? Go fuck her.”
It wasn’t me. It was the fat girl. The blood drained from his face.
Grandma withdrew her hand. “Oh, please . . .” she said.
Father Duptulski was there, pulling on the sleeve of my dress. “Come on now, missy, let’s you and me take a little walk outside,” he said.
“Why should I take a walk with you? You don’t even know my name. Just tell my so-called ex-father to leave.”
“Now look,” Daddy said. A smile kept blinking on and off his face. “Be fair, okay? This is terrible for everyone and—”
“Just leave!” I shouted.
Grandma’s face was bloodless, too. Father Duptulski’s fingers dug into my fat. “Come on,” he kept nudging. “Come on.”
Daddy wouldn’t leave. He was whispering at my face with sweet liquor breath. “I can understand what you’re going through . . . not the time or the place . . . you don’t know the whole . . .”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
I was out on the sidewalk before I unclapped my hands from my ears and stopped yelling it. Father Duptulski kept patting my shoulder. A new mourner arrived, unaware. “What do you think of those Mets, Father? You praying for those guys or something?” Father Duptulski waved him away.
A car jerked out of the parking lot, Daddy at the wheel. He drove past us, braked, backed up. He was crying. “I’m no saint,” he called out to Father Duptulski. “But I never, ever deserved—” He turned his eyes to me. “You get yourself some help!” he screamed. “Or I’ll get it for you!”
“You stay the fuck away from me!” I screamed back. The car bucked and sped away.
* * *
An hour before the funeral the next day, I decided not to go. Grandma, horrified to silence by my behavior with Daddy, didn’t push it. “People are just hypocrites,” I told myself. From the parlor window, I watched Grandma walk out to the waiting limousine and lower herself in. I would honor my mother in ways that mattered.
The refrigerator was filled with unfamiliar pans and tins from church ladies. Meatballs, baked beans, a turkey, cream puffs. Roberta had sent over a pan of golumpkes. I took a soupspoon and someone’s lemon-meringue pie and headed for my room.
On the stair landing I paused at my favorite picture of Ma. She was seventeen, standing on Grandma’s front porch with her friend Geneva. Both girls wore pageboy hairstyles and white blouses with puffy sleeves, off to some important high school function. They stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing at the camera. Once I asked Ma who’d taken the picture, but she couldn’t remember. Maybe Ma’s death took it, I thought. Maybe it was laughing back at her, knowing everything that would happen, as she posed in happy ignorance. In Ma’s young face there was no trace that Anthony Jr. would strangle himself inside her. That her husband would leave, that her daughter would become me.
For as far back as I could remember, Ma had gotten letters from Geneva. Geneva Sweet, 1515 Bayview Drive, La Jolla, California. You could tell she was rich from their Christmas cards: oversized foil Madonnas on the front, inside her and her husband’s names printed in letters that rose right up off the page, letters you could feel as well as read. Geneva’s husband Irving owned an imported-rug business and treated her like Princess Grace, Ma had once said. “But he’s shorter than Geneva, a little homely man. Not handsome like Daddy.”
The morning before, Grandma had called Geneva to tell her about Ma and she’d asked to speak to me. “Bernice and I have written to each other all our lives,” she said. “It’s as if the bottom’s dropped out of my life. If there’s ever anything . . . anything!”
In the picture, Ma was the prettier of the two, the one laughing the most. Next to Ma, Geneva seemed plain. What was it that had turned her into Cinderella and killed my mother? The picture kept asking me that question.
I’d ironed my funeral dress the night before and hung it from the curtain rod, expecting until that morning to go to the services. Now, at my bedroom door, I mistook the dress for a person and caught my breath.
The flatiron was facedown on the ironing board. I plugged it in and pushed the button, feeling with my fingers the transition from cool to warm to hot. The pain seemed comforting and logical. The woman at the fat-ladies’ dress shop where we’d hurriedly bought the dress had disapproved of my size, had frowned at the way nothing quite fit me. I sat back down on my bed, eating spoonfuls of the lemon pie and marveling at the degree of my exhaustion. . . .
* * *
I awakened to the sound of car doors slamming outside. I shoved the empty pie plate under my bed and checked the lock. P
eople talked in the front hall, quiet at first, then louder. That morning, I’d helped Grandma carry the broken stairway banister out to the yard, walking backward down the steps, sure I’d fall. Plates clinked. High heels scuffed up the stairs to the bathroom. I’d forgotten to turn off the flatiron. The air above it wiggled.
Mrs. Mumphy’s daughter came to my bedroom door and asked if I wanted to go downstairs and visit. I didn’t mind the interruption. Sleep had made me strangely patient.
“Can I make you up a plate then?” she called in.
I smiled. “No, thank you.”
I was involved in a contest befitting a mother killer. I licked my palm and held it to the hot iron.
“It was a beautiful ceremony,” Mrs. Mumphy’s daughter called in.
The skin hissed on contact; the seeping heat made my hand shake. I held it there. My ring became a circle of deeper pain.
“Just beautiful.”
* * *
By the six-thirty news, the last of the lingerers had done the dishes and left. Grandma got into her housecoat and fell asleep in the parlor chair. The astronauts bobbed in the ocean, safe, waving to the cameras on their way into quarantine. I watched Grandma’s slackened jaw, her bobbing head. In her sleep, she was uttering sounds: part speech, part gurgle. “Take it back,” I whispered to Grandma’s sad-eyed, sacred-hearted Jesus. “Make her the one, not Ma.”
I went upstairs to Ma’s room—the first time since she’d died. The clothes she’d worn the week before were laundered and folded in a stack on top of her mother-of-pearl hamper. Outside, rain drummed against the garbage cans. Grandma had stripped the bed.
I sat down at Ma’s desk, not sure of what it was I wanted to write. A suicide letter? Who would I write it to, other than Ma? My hands were blistery and sore from the iron, the pen painful between my fingers.
Dear Kippy,
I can’t wait to meet you. Either my parents or my boyfriend will be driving me down to school. The bedspreads sound fab. How much do I owe you? We seem to have a lot in common!!
This was what my mother had wanted for me: a Tricia Nixon life. I’d create one for her, a gift. Maybe I’d lose weight. Or maybe Kippy was fat, too. I saw us walking to class, two jolly fat girls, sharing a joke—my mother’s death successfully hidden.
I knew I’d lose my nerve if I waited until morning to mail it. I took Ma’s trench coat out of her closet and put it over my shoulders. Smelling her smell. Shaking from love.
I was short of breath by the time I got to the mailbox on Terrace Avenue. It was the farthest I’d walked in months. People drove by, staring. A car of laughing boys slowed down. “Hey, Tiny, I’m a sperm whale, you want to get laid?” one of them called.
I was immune, my head filled with a clarity as sharp as pain, as hot as the face of the flatiron.
“I love you, Ma. This is for you. For you, Ma. I love you.” I chanted it over and over, like a Hail Mary. I dropped the letter in, heard the soft sound of it hitting the bottom.
That night I slept on Ma’s bare mattress, her trench coat over me like a sheet, and woke up smiling from a dream I just missed remembering.
10
By August, Grandma had locked her jaw again, relocated her sense of purpose, and begun the tissuey flipping of yellow pages.
A carpenter came to put up the new banister and, while he was there, replaced a rotting porch step. Two middle-aged women materialized to shampoo the rugs—look-alike sisters in pink rayon uniforms who giggled and called to each other over their whirring machinery.
It was as if Grandma could obliterate pain by scouring it away. As if she could wash and wax sorrow, hire strangers to suck it up a vacuum hose. In this confusion of cleaning, Grandma allowed herself the luxury of forgetting about me. I kept startling her, just by walking into whatever disinfected room she’d placed herself. She was seated at the kitchen table Brillo-ing silverware when I told her.
“I’ve decided to go to that college after all. Like she wanted me to.”
Grandma looked up accusingly, trying to read a joke on my face. Then she left the room.
All that day, she slammed things. She finally spoke at supper. “If you’re going anyway, then what was all that fuss about? Why did you have to plague her?”
Her face looked confused rather than angry. My announcement had genuinely confounded her. For the first time since Ma’s death, I felt as sorry for Grandma’s loss as I did for my own. But when I tried to speak, something locked in my throat. “It was between her and me,” was all I said. “It was personal.”
Her face darkened and she got up to leave the room. “Well, nuts to that,” she said.
I sat paralyzed, staring at the doorway through which she had just walked. I heard again the awful crash of that rented typewriter as it hit the floor, saw Ma’s flushed, warring face after she’d cut the television wire.
I rested my face against the cool tabletop. I deserved this pain—deserved more, even, than what I was feeling. It was me who deserved death, not Ma.
The next morning, Grandma handed me the bankbook in which Ma had been depositing my college money. Two fifty-dollar bills were sticking out of both ends: cash she’d never had time to deposit. The first entry was for $12, made in September of 1962, the month after Daddy had left us. The end ones were for larger amounts—$75, $100—made every fourteen days—every payday—right up through the hell I’d put her through.
I wrote Kippy a long letter, inventing a life for myself: part-time counter girl at McDonald’s, treasurer of my senior class. My mother ran the hospital gift shop; my father was a pediatrician whose office was attached to our house, like Marcus Welby. By our third exchange, I had a boyfriend, Derek. I made him British for practical reasons; he could be sent back quickly to England for those “fab” double dates and “groovy” college weekends Kippy began referring to.
I composed the letters sitting on the stairs, a clipboard resting diagonally against my big belly. The fresh wood smell of the banister was a comfort somehow. “Raw wood” the carpenter had called it. But Grandma was planning on a mahogany stain and varnish; she was eager for it to match. She said it was high time to rewallpaper, too, and took down the stairway photos, even the ones of my mother, especially those. She wrapped the pictures in newspaper and stacked them in a cardboard box, leaving rectangles of vivid pink flamingos amongst the faded ones along the staircase wall. Grandma couldn’t remember how old the wallpaper was, but Grandpa had hung it, so it was before 1948. Why did I ask?
“No reason, really,” I shrugged, doing the private math that placed my mother in her senior year in high school, about the time she’d locked arms with her friend Geneva and posed on the front porch in her white dress.
That afternoon I took the photograph from the upstairs closet, brought it back to my room, and held it against Ma’s painting of the flying leg. What frightened me was the chasm between the two—the distance between Ma’s innocent black-and-white smile and the disembodied winged leg she’d painted during her crazy days. This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going. That was what scared me about college . . . but my fear didn’t matter. I brushed my lips against the cool, flat glass that covered my mother’s face, brushed my fingertips against the dips and rises of the hardened paint. I told Ma that I loved her and missed her and was going to college to make her happy.
Kippy’s letters were confessions on Snoopy stationery. She hated her parents sometimes, her mother in particular. She was still a virgin, technically, though Dante, her boyfriend, was pressuring her. Derek was pressuring me about the same thing, I wrote back, but the last thing I wanted was to end up pregnant and living in England, having to wear old-lady hats like Queen Elizabeth—ha-ha. In my letters, I was someone Ma would have liked, the kind of person she called “a hot ticket.” Maybe I’d somehow manage to slip into this created girl’s life. Or maybe Kippy would love me for my letters, forgive the rest.
Each morning when I woke up, I
knew by heart the number of days left before Freshman Orientation Week; just passing the kitchen calendar created waves of nausea. After I mailed my letters, I’d come home and throw up in the toilet, gagging quietly with the water running so that Grandma wouldn’t hear.
* * *
A month before Ma’s death, Grandma had put down a $25 deposit on a four-day bus trip to Amish Country with her old-lady friends, the St. Anthony’s Travelettes. Now Mrs. Mumphy called Grandma daily to coax her into going, in spite of everything.
“Well, I don’t care if Father Duptulski thinks it’s a good idea for me to go or not, Judy,” Grandma argued back. “That wallpaper hanger is coming that week. What if they serve spicy food? And besides”—here her voice became sober and throaty—“there’s the girl.”
She always referred to me as “the girl” when talking to her friends, always with that drop in her voice, as if I were a monster kept under wraps—Mr. Rochester’s crazy attic wife in Jane Eyre. I’d written on one of Mrs. Bronstein’s essay tests once that I liked that lunatic wife better than I liked boring Jane. Mrs. Bronstein had handed the comment back circled with a string of question marks.
“Grandma, go!” I told her. The thought of three days alone in the Pierce Street house excited me. Free from Grandma’s attempt to clean my mother away, I would instead call up the remaining evidence of her life, poking my way through attic cartons and closets and bureau drawers until I had the whole of who she was, or as much of the whole as possible—until I’d reconstructed the steps that led her from Grandma’s front porch to the highway where her life had ended. “Take some extra Pepto-Bismol with you! And don’t worry one second about me!” I insisted.
Grandma chewed her lip and scowled. “You wouldn’t let the wallpaper man in. You’d pretend no one was home and I’d get back here and find nothing done. After I’ve set my heart on a change.” She nodded toward the cellophane-covered rolls leaning against the telephone table. She’d chosen a pink scallop-shell pattern against a coffee-ice-cream-colored background. “And besides, it wouldn’t be right. People would criticize me for going gallivanting so soon. Or be overly nice to me. It would get too quiet. I wouldn’t be able to sleep and then I’d have to sit there and think.”