Maddy and Finn have gone completely still, like small animals at a watering hole watching as a Komodo dragon slithers toward a water buffalo. It is unusual for them to see their father angry. Peter rarely loses his cool. He much prefers to laugh things off. But he is looking at me now narrow-eyed, as if he can feel the molecules around me vibrating at a different wavelength—as if he has caught me in the act, but doesn’t know the act of what.
“Can you pick up some half-and-half?” Mum calls from the kitchen, where she’s pretending to reheat coffee, listening in. I can hear her voice inside my head saying, Think Botticelli. The sane part of me knows she’s right: I need to back down. I fucked my oldest friend in the bushes last night. All Peter did was laugh when our teenage son disrespected me, which is a daily occurrence. But it’s the tone of warning in Peter’s voice that makes me rise to the bait.
“Don’t make this about you, Pete.”
“About me? Are you sure you want to go there, Eleanor?”
Breakfast rises in my throat. A sudden panic. I glance over at Maddy and Finn on the sofa, their small nervous expressions. Their sweetness. Their worry. What I did last night. A terrible mistake I can never take back.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Then I hold my breath and wait for whatever happens next.
5
1972. August, Connecticut.
Rural Connecticut is an oppressive place in late summer. By eight in the morning the air is already thick with landlocked humidity and the suffocating greenness of everything. After lunch, I like to hide in the shade of my grandfather’s cornfield, run from one end to the other, the lazy husks pattering against me; lie on a dark stripe of plowed earth between the rows, secret and safe, listen to the quiet rustle; watch soldier ants carrying their heavy loads across the ruts and furrows. In the late afternoon, clouds of gnats appear from nowhere and swarm us, forcing us to run inside for cover until they disappear back into the shadows of the sour plum tree.
Every evening at our grandparents’ farm, we wait for the air to cool before taking our after-dinner walk. In the heat of the day, the road’s blacktop oozes and blisters. But later, it is lovely to walk on, the tar still soft but not sticky, like walking on marshmallows, the sweet smell of lava rising. Granddaddy William, my father’s father, carries his hickory walking stick, pipe and packet of tobacco shoved in his trouser pocket. We walk together past the cornfield, past the old cemetery across the street from their farmhouse, past the little white church with its darkened windows, the minister’s small clapboard house, reading lights on, his lace curtains drawn. We walk up the hill, where sheep bells tinkle in the dusky hollows of the neighbor’s farm.
Anna and I carry sugar cubes in our pockets and run ahead to feed the Straights’ piebald horse from the palms of our hands. He waits for us at the edge of the field, waist-high in stinging nettles, his warm, snuffling nostrils picking up our scent. Anna scratches him between the eyes and he harrumphs and stomps his foot. When we get home, Granny Myrtle always has cider and homemade sugar cookies waiting. She says she wishes we could stay here with her all the time—divorce is never good for the children. “I’ve always admired your mother,” she says. “Wallace is a very handsome woman.”
The church has a small playground for Sunday school—swings and a jungle gym—but Anna and I prefer to play in the cemetery, with its big shade trees and clipped green lawns. The rows and rows of gravestones are perfect for hide-and-seek. Our favorite place is the suicide grave. It is all by itself, halfway up the hill. People who kill themselves aren’t allowed near the other graves because they have sinned, Granny Myrtle tells us. The suicide grave has a tall stone marker, much taller than me, with a cyprus tree on either side. His widow planted them, Granny says. “At first they were only shrubs. But that was long ago now. Your grandfather helped her dig the holes. She moved to New Haven after that.” When Anna asks her how the man died, Granny Myrtle replies, “Your grandfather cut him down.”
On the back side of the grave is a wide marble step. It’s meant to be for flowers, Granny tells us, but as far as she knows, no one has ever visited. On very hot days, Anna and I like to sit there, hidden from the road, in the cool shade of the tombstone. We’ve started making paper dolls. We draw them on paper and cut them out. Anna always does the faces and hairstyles: ponytails, Afros, Pippi Longstocking braids, pageboys. We make teensy clothes with square tabs that fold around the dolls—striped purple bell-bottoms and hip-huggers, kitchen aprons, leather jackets, crayon-white go-go boots, maxiskirts, neckties. Bikinis. “Every doll has to have its own wardrobe,” Anna says, carefully cutting out a microscopic handbag.
We are sitting on the grave step when we hear a car turn into our gravel drive across the road.
“He’s here!” Anna says.
Our father is coming for a whole week. We haven’t seen him in ages—he’s been traveling for work. He misses his bunny girls he tells us when Granny lets us speak to him on the phone. He cannot wait to see us. He’s taking us to the Danbury Fair and swimming at Candlewood Lake. He is bringing a surprise. We may not recognize him, he says. He has grown a moustache.
We pack up our paper dolls and race down the hill, calling his name, excited for our surprise. He gets out of his car at the top of the driveway. Then the passenger door opens.
11:00 A.M.
In the wake of my argument with Peter, his car engine gunning away up the driveway, Finn and Maddy have settled back into their books and machines like seabirds after a swell.
“Mind if I squeeze in, chublets?” They make room for me without bothering to look up. “One more squidge.”
“Mom!” Maddy says, annoyed at another disruption.
I lean back between them, close my eyes, grateful for my children’s familiar smell, their eggy breath, a momentary reprieve. Jack is still in his cabin, sulking, single-minded, refusing to come out. Which is typical. Jack was stubborn when he was still in my womb. No matter how many liters of cod-liver oil I drank, he refused to leave his safe watery nest. He finally agreed to emerge two weeks late, after an agonizing and interminable labor. I remember being certain, at one point, that I was going to die in childbirth. By the next morning, I was convinced my baby was dead inside me, though the doctor had seventeen monitors attached to me all pinging Jack’s solid heartbeat. It was the terror of losing the thing I loved most in the world, without ever being allowed to love him. But out he came, pink and squalling, long frog feet, pleated and wrinkled, fish-eyed, blinking. A creature of water. Primordial. Wiped off and swaddled in blue. Handed to me. A softness wrapped in softness wrapped in my arms, inside of me and outside at the same time.
When the nurses took Jack away to let me rest, I sent Peter home. We had both been awake for so many hours. I woke in dimness. I could hear Jack’s snuffling breath, tiny squeaks of dreams, just there, beside my head. The nurses had wheeled him back to me while I slept. I cradled him out of his bassinet, tried to latch him to my breast, no idea what I was doing, feeling like an impostor pretending to be a real mother. Wept as we struggled to connect. Happiest and saddest. Inside and out.
There was a knock on the hospital-room door. The nurse, I thought, relieved. But it was Jonas who came through the door. Jonas, whom I had not seen or spoken to in four years. Who had walked out of my life in anger and hurt when I married Peter. Who was married to Gina now. Jonas, my oldest friend, who stood in the doorway with a massive bunch of white peonies wrapped in brown paper, watching me sob onto my baby.
He came to the edge of the bed, lifted Jack from my arms, gently, not asking permission, knowing he had it. Pulled the blue baby blanket away from Jack’s soft cheek, kissed him on the nose, and said, “Is it me, or does she look a little bit masculine?”
“Fuck off,” I smiled. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.”
“Is it your perineum?” he asked, concerned.
“Oh my god.” And I laughed through the weeping. Hap
piness and loss.
* * *
—
I picture Jack now, lying on his bed, hands crossed behind his head, earphones cutting out the world, trying to decide whether or not he should forgive me—wondering whether I will forgive him. “Yes, and yes,” I want to shout to him, down the path. There is no such thing as unforgivable between people who love each other. But even as I’m thinking it, I know it’s not really true.
A fly has gotten itself trapped inside the porch. It buzzes against the screen, wings and legs rasping the metal filaments. Every so often it stops to rethink and the porch goes silent, only the sound of pages turning, Finn’s spit bubble popping with a faint plip as he concentrates on his game. Across the pond, on the small public-access beach, people are already staking out their patch of sand for the day, unpacking picnics onto cotton tablecloths to prevent anyone else from impinging. I should never have let Peter convince me to meet Jonas and Gina at the beach. The thought of facing Jonas in the stark light of day, eating Gina’s tuna sandwiches and rehashing last night’s dinner party; the lie in my smile. There’s no reason I have to go. Peter made the plan. He can take the kids. No one will care. Except me. Because then they will get to be near Jonas and I won’t. They will get to lay their towels next to his in the hot sand. And the thought of not seeing him fills me with an agonized tangy ache to touch him, brush his hand under the surf, a hunger. An addiction. A siren. A siren with a penis, I think, and laugh out loud.
“What’s so funny?” Maddy asks.
“Nothing.” I catch myself. “Nothing’s funny.”
“That’s kind of weird, Mom,” she says, going back to her book. “Laughing for no reason. It’s like a creepy clown.” She scratches a mosquito bite on her ankle.
“The more you scratch, the more it itches.” The kids are still in their pajamas. A drip of candle wax has hardened on Finn’s sleeve, there from last night, when they came in to say good night to the drunken grown-ups.
* * *
—
“We heard you singing before,” Finn had said, coming in through the screen door with a mischievous “I know I’m supposed to be in bed, but here I am” expression.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You were meant to be asleep hours ago,” I said.
“You people are making too much noise,” Maddy said. “Jack’s asleep. He passed out.”
“Climb on,” I said, pulling Finn onto my lap. “But only five minutes.”
He leaned forward to peel a wax stalactite off the side of a candlestick. A few drops of wax dripped onto his sleeve. “Can I blow out the candles?”
“No, you may not.”
“Will you walk us back to bed? I heard something in the bushes. I think it might be a wolf.”
“There’s no wolves here, dummy,” Maddy said. “I’m getting a glass of milk.”
Finn climbed off my lap and went over to curl up on the sofa next to Peter, who carried on talking to Gina, stroking Finn’s back as if he were a cat. Across the table from me, Anna’s godfather John Dixon and my step-grandmother Pamela were arguing with Jonas’s mother about the nesting shorebirds.
“It’s our beach,” Pamela was saying. “What right does the Park Service have to cordon it off?”
“I couldn’t agree more. It’s for the birds,” Dixon said, laughing too loud at his own pun.
“The beach belongs to Mother Nature,” Jonas’s mother said. “Do you honestly care more about where you put your towel down than the possible extinction of a species?”
“Can someone open the screen door for me?” Maddy came out of the pantry, balancing two glasses of milk.
Peter stood up, a bit unsteady on his feet, opened the porch door, mushed the top of her hair.
“Daddy! I’ll spill.” Maddy laughed, spilling a puddle of milk.
Finn got down on all fours and slurped the milk off the floor. “I’m a cat,” he said.
“Gross.” Maddy blew me a kiss. “Night, Mama. I love you. Night, everyone.”
“Night, sugarplums,” Peter said, lying back down on the sofa. “And not another peep.”
I watched Jonas peel wax dripping off a candle as Finn had just done. He molded the wax between his fingers absent-mindedly. First into a ball, then a swan, then a turtle, a cube, a heart—if his fingers were exposing his thoughts in Claymation. And it occurred to me that the first time I met Jonas he was about Finn’s age. A sweet little boy. Impossible to imagine that my small, tufty child could ever become a hurricane in someone’s life. Jonas glanced up, saw me looking at him.
“You spoil those children,” my mother said after they’d disappeared down the path into the darkness. “In my day, children were supposed to be seen and not heard.”
“If only that rule still applied to you, Wallace,” Peter called over.
“Your husband is terrible,” Mum said, pleased. “I don’t know how you’ve put up with him all these years.”
“Love is blind, thank god. Or at least my wife is.” Peter laughed. “That’s the secret to my happiness.”
“In my day, we simply divorced and remarried,” Mum said. “So much simpler. Refreshing, even. Like buying a new suit of clothes.”
“Huh,” I said. “That’s not quite how I remember it. And if Anna were here, I can guarantee she’d agree.”
“Oh, please,” Mum dismissed me. “You turned out just fine. If your father and I had stayed married, who knows what you might have been. You might have become some happy, namby-pamby twit. You might have become a hotel manager. Divorce is good for children.” She stood up and began clearing away a few lingering dinner forks. “Unhappy people are always more interesting.”
I could feel the familiar fight rising inside me, but Jonas leaned over and whispered, “Ignore her. She says things she doesn’t mean when she drinks. You know that.”
I nodded, poured myself a glass of grappa, handed the bottle to him. Our fingers touched as he took it from me and poured one for himself.
“A toast.” He held up his glass.
“What are we toasting?” I asked, clinking glasses.
“Blind love.” His eyes never left mine.
I waited a few minutes before getting up from the table.
Mum was at the sink, her back to me. “I could use some help with these dishes, Eleanor. The hot water’s refusing to get hot again.”
“In a minute. I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Pee in the bushes. That’s what I always do.”
I slipped out the back door, waited in the shadows wondering if I had read him correctly, wondering how I would feel if I was wrong, left standing here like some pathetic sixteen-year-old. The porch door opened and footsteps came down the sandy path. Jonas stopped, looked around into the darkness, found me. We stood there, a rustle of wind off the pond, bullfrogs lowing.
“Are you waiting here for me, Elle?”
“Shhh.” I put my fingers to his lips. Inside, the dim lull of voices. Something on the record player.
“Turn around,” he whispered, lifting my skirt. “Put your hands against the wall.”
“Are you arresting me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Hurry.”
* * *
—
“Mom!” Tugging at my shirt. “Mom! Are you even listening?” Maddy is saying. “Can we go snorkeling, or not?”
“We found a fish nest yesterday,” Finn says. “There could be eggs.”
“So? Can we go?” Maddy asks. “Mom!”
I shake my head clear, try to rehinge myself. “The masks and flippers are in the first cabin,” I manage to say. I feel filthy, contaminated, desperate to scour my insides. And heartbroken. Because I know the radiation has already gotten through the tear in my body’s hazmat, and I don’t know whether I will survive it.
1973. May, Briarcliff, New York.
A beautiful late spring morning. My father’s wedding day. I’m wearing a lace dress, patent leather shoes, white opaque knee socks. I am six. My father is marrying his girlfriend Joanne. Joanne is a bestselling novelist—“a catch,” our father tells us the first time we meet her. “Nothing more attractive than a strong woman,” he says. Her hair smells of Herbal Essence.
“Your father just likes being bossed around,” Joanne laughs. And they kiss right in front of us.
Joanne is only twenty-five. “We could practically be sisters!” she says to Anna. She is pretty and stocky and has a sheepskin coat. It worries me that the sheep has to live without its skin. They have moved out to the suburbs. My father commutes into the city for work every day, but we rarely see him anymore when he is there.
Joanne drives a new red Mustang. My mother says red is tacky, I tell her, the first time I see the car. You should have gotten blue. And she fakes a laugh. Blue is tasteful, I say. You don’t even know what that means, Anna says, pinching me hard on the arm.
Joanne likes Anna, but she and I “simply aren’t a good fit,” she tells Anna, who repeats it to me. Sometimes Joanne comes into the city and takes Anna for special “girl days”: window-shopping at FAO Schwarz, lunch at Schrafft’s, ice-skating at Wollman Rink. She buys Anna a fuchsia-and-orange bag at Marimekko with shiny silver buttons that look like dimes. She loves Anna’s thick, dark chestnut hair and teaches her how to brush it for ten minutes a day to make it shine.
Every night at exactly six o’clock Joanne has her scotch and soda while my father makes dinner and opens the wine so it can breathe. He likes to cook with shallots, and lets me sit on a tall stool in the kitchen so I can help him peel the carrots. He cooks in a big black cast-iron pan that he has to wipe out with oil instead of soap and water. That would ruin the pan, he says. He says the oil cures it, and I ask him, “Cures it of what?”
Joanne bitterly resents that my father has to pay child support. On Sunday evenings when she drives us back to the train station she hands us a folded piece of paper—a list of things she has deducted from my mother’s “pay”: 8 slices bread, 4 tbsp. peanut butter, six yogurts, two frozen chicken pot pies, Swanson Salisbury Steak. . . .
The Paper Palace Page 5