by Maile Meloy
“Honey,” I said, picking her up. “It’s okay. She’s just come to visit.”
“Didn’t she die?” Marcus asked me.
“They made a mistake,” I said. “She’s fine.”
Marcus turned his level gaze on the ancient blonde in the living room. “Where are the doggies?” he asked. They had seen a picture of her by a blue swimming pool with three little white Papillons, with oversized ears, and it had made a big impression.
Liliana waved a hand in disgust at the memory. “Oh,” she said. “The caretaker drowned them in a sack.”
Now it was Marcus’s turn to tremble into tears.
“Darling!” Liliana cried, reaching for him. “I’ll get new doggies! As soon as I get my money back from the horrible RSPCA!”
Marcus backed away from her, and I gathered my frightened children into my arms on the couch. I told them it was all right. I told Liliana they were still half asleep. We were all sitting that way when Mina came home from work. Her voice in the hallway said, “Babe, I’m too tired to get dinner—” and then she saw us all and stopped. “You’re alive,” she said to Liliana.
“Of course I am.”
“I guess we’re not having pizza, then,” Mina said.
“Pizza!” the children cried.
“Mina dear,” Liliana said, standing to take my wife’s hand. “I haven’t seen you with this Sapphic haircut. Your children are lovely.”
Mina’s hair was cut short because she had no time to deal with it, and I thought of it as gamine-like and sexy. “Thank you,” Mina said. “You look great. Especially under the circumstances.”
“It was all a mistake,” Liliana said.
“I see.”
“We could go out to dinner, to celebrate,” I offered, avoiding my wife’s eye. While I was out of work, we had established what we called the New Austerity, and its cardinal prohibition was restaurants.
“Pizza!” the children cried again.
“Pizza would be very nice,” my grandmother said.
Forty-five minutes later we were eating on the couch, in front of the TV. Mina had changed into sweatpants and graded papers while she ate. Liliana still wore her black dress. She wanted to watch the news, to see if there was anything about her. She had always, when I knew her, employed a butler, a waiter, a chef, and a couple of housemaids, but she handled the plate on her lap with perfect ease. The children gave her instructions on eating the pizza.
The sight of my children and my grandmother eating together was oddly thrilling. My parents and I had moved abruptly and often, kept late hours, and lived beyond our means. Liliana was only a fraught rumor, and a source of unpredictable gifts. Once I went to a friend’s grandmother’s house after school and she made buttered saltine crackers, baked in the oven on a metal tray. We sat on a worn green carpet with the hot crackers, careful not to let butter drip through the little holes onto our laps, and we watched The Brady Bunch with the grandmother, who told me to call her Nana. The house seemed like a bastion of stability and normality, and I was completely happy there. I had fantasies of my only grandmother inviting me to Spain, to eat buttered saltines.
When I finally did visit Liliana, on a Eurail pass in college, in defiance of my father, we sat in straight-backed chairs at a formal table. Silent servants brought our food, and a candle centerpiece made it difficult to see her across the table. I had arrived in a lull between more interesting guests, just missing an exiled prince, a gossip columnist, and a banker from Zurich who brought his own helicopter. Liliana was tired, and sated with flattery. She treated me like a lover she took for granted. When I asked about her German movies, she grew alert and looked at me shrewdly.
“Let me guess,” she said. “Your virtuous father has been calling me a Nazi whore.”
I mumbled a vague protest.
“One of the movies was a love story,” she said. “The other was a silly musical. I would have done more, if I could. It was such fun. There was a part in a comedy that I very much wanted, but they had a Bavarian girl with splendid breasts.” She mimed the breasts in front of her own. “She would have gone to fat, but at the time she made me look like a little English mouse. So I went back to singing. Then the war came. The Bavarian girl died in the bombing, I heard.”
She offered me a chocolate from a plate, and the silent waiter brought tiny cups of espresso. She said, “I was so happy your father was going to be an American. I always envied Americans. Their lives seemed so simple. But that was foolish. I don’t mean to put you in the middle, but it’s very tiresome, your father’s virtue.”
I mumbled something again, this time a kind of apology.
“Somewhere I have the musical,” she said. “A friend found it for me. You can see it if you like. I’m not terribly good. Now, sweetheart, I’m off to bed.”
She kissed me carelessly on the lips and we each went to our bedrooms in the vast silent house. Outside was darkness: dark trees, dark sea in the distance. The next day, Liliana gave me a Betamax tape, and after dinner I watched the movie alone, on a television deep in the house. It was a banal musical about a convent girl in the big city, except that it was in German and therefore ominous and scary. At one point the girl was threatened by a Gypsy. My father had made it sound like Triumph of the Will, and maybe it was, if you could understand what they were saying. Liliana had a sweet, clear voice and a fetching smile. I could see why men left their fortunes at her feet.
Years later, when my father died, Liliana—who had by then buried four husbands and divorced two—sent me a thick, cream-colored, black-bordered note of consolation. She gave her regrets for the funeral, and ended with the hope that I had not learned very much either from my father or from her.
Now my own small family, which I had built on the model of buttered saltines in front of the TV, was piled on our secondhand couch with that same distant grandmother. There was nothing about Liliana on the news, of course, but she seemed inclined to watch the sitcom that followed. Marcus and Bethie drew nearer to her as she giggled at the screen. Mina brought out praline ice cream, and soon the children were leaning sticky-fingered against their great-grandmother, one on each side.
“That’s what I wanted!” I told Mina in the kitchen. “A normal childhood, a granny to eat ice cream and watch TV with. I wanted it so much.”
“Why isn’t she dead?”
“It was the caretaker’s wife in her clothes.”
Mina rinsed a plate. “You have to explain it to me when I’m not so tired,” she said.
I made up our queen-sized bed with the clean sheets, and Mina loaned Liliana a nightgown. When everyone was packed off to sleep—Mina in the children’s room, to their delight—I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling, thinking about my grandmother giggling on this couch and holding contests with the children to see who could stretch the mozzarella the longest.
In the morning, after Mina went to work, Liliana announced that she had a car coming and she was taking Marcus and Bethie shopping in Beverly Hills.
“Everything costs a fortune there,” I said.
“It’s where I used to go.”
“The kids don’t last long, shopping,” I said. “They start to melt down.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s time for them to learn.”
I watched the three of them climb into another shiny black town car, and wondered if my grandmother knew about taxis.
“Don’t lose my kids,” I said. She patted my cheek.
I WENT BACK in the house and shaved close, to get rid of the gray in my beard, for my own morale. It was exhilarating to have a kid-free morning, and I pulled up my résumé on the computer and changed the font. It looked much better. I started moving my accomplishments around.
At noon, though, I started to worry, and thought I should have told my grandmother to call and check in. At one, I made a sandwich and imagined telling Mina that I’d let the kids go off alone with a woman who had never been known for her judgment. At one-thirty, I tried to distract
myself by raking leaves in the backyard, and at two, I came inside to find my children in a screaming tussle with a white yapping dog, while my grandmother looked on, beaming.
“What is this?” I asked.
Marcus and Bethie, with their finely tuned receptors for parental opinion, froze. The dog kept whirling and barking, then stopped, confused.
”It’s a new doggie!” Liliana said, still beaming.
“Is it yours?” I asked.
“No, darling, it’s theirs.”
Marcus and Bethie were on the verge of tears now, full of the misgivings they’d ignored at the pet store.
“We can’t have a dog, Liliana,” I said. “I have to go back to work. There’s no one to take care of it.”
“We’ll take care of it!” Marcus said.
“You’ll be in school,” I reminded him.
My grandmother looked around the living room, as if for the dog-loving servants who might be hiding behind the furniture. She looked back at me, wide-eyed. “Every child should have a dog,” she said.
“I’m sure that’s true,” I said. “We just can’t right now.”
“But the children are so happy!”
The children did not look happy at all. Here was their great-grandmother, returned from the grave, just to give them an animal they couldn’t keep.
“Have they had lunch?” I asked.
“Yes, of course!” Liliana said, then she looked at the children, considering. “No,” she said. “Perhaps not. I think someone at the pet store gave them a cookie.”
“Let’s get lunch,” I said. “We’ll talk about the dog when Mina gets home.”
While I fed the kids, the dog chewed a hole in the seat of the big yellow chair.
“We can just flip it over,” I said, trying to be magnanimous, but when I turned over the cushion, there was a hole chewed in the other side. I looked at Liliana, who shrugged.
“I had the same idea,” she said.
By the time Mina came home, it had been decided: Bethie was allergic, with angry red welts on her throat and chin and wrists. She was noble and brave, willing to suffer all manner of torture for the still-unnamed dog, but the hives were spreading.
Mina had brought Chinese takeout from the good place, in violation of the New Austerity, and we ate at the kitchen table. Liliana sat archly beside me, her hair tied back with a pale blue ribbon of Bethie’s. When I met her eye, she raised her painted eyebrows, as if catching a stranger staring.
Bethie, her neck ringed with hives, was still working the angles. “Is there,” she said, “a different doggie I can have?”
“One that won’t make her sick?” Marcus asked.
“No, babe,” Mina said. “No dog.”
They knew that was it: Mina’s word was the law. Bethie frowned mournfully at her plum sauce–smeared plate, and her brother shot her a resentful look.
IN THE MORNING, Liliana waited in her black coat, with her handbag packed, for the car service. The children were in the backyard, saying goodbye to the dog: Bethie with socks over her hands and a bandanna tied over her nose and throat.
“I hoped you might stay,” I said to Liliana. “The kids are just getting to know you.”
“We have your daughter’s health to consider,” she said primly.
“The pet store might take the dog back.”
She looked astonished. “That would be cruel,” she said. “He has a home, with me.”
“Where will you go?”
“My lawyer found me an apartment in Paris,” she said. “He’s very contrite. And the RSPCA is beginning to be reasonable. I’ll be fine.”
I nodded. I had no doubt of that. Even when she was dead she had been fine. Another black car pulled up to the curb, and Liliana stood and clapped her hands. The dog came running through the back door to her heels, as if it had always been hers.
“Come, darling,” she said to it. “We’re on our way.”
The children and I trailed her out and watched as she eased into the car after the dog, swinging her high heels gracefully in.
“Can we come visit the doggie in Spain?” Marcus asked.
She laughed. “I don’t even have a house yet,” she said. “I’m going to France now. Come give me a kiss.”
The children did, and then I did, too, leaning into the car. I smelled her perfume and her wool coat, and the faint staleness of the dress worn three days in a row. The dog climbed into her lap, and she rubbed its ears and cooed at it. Then she smiled her film-star smile at me, squeezed my arm with her elegant, twisted hand, and pointedly let go. I was blocking the car door, holding her up.
“Why did you come here?” I asked, risking annoying her.
She looked startled, and blinked once. “I wanted to see you,” she said. “To see how you had grown up.”
“And?”
She tilted her head as if to see me better. “Well, you aren’t very much like your father, thankfully,” she said. “But you aren’t very much like me, either. Maybe there’s something your mother isn’t telling us.”
I could feel my face doing something unattractive. “You think she was cheating on my father?”
“Oh, don’t be such a bore,” she said. “It was a joke!”
I wanted to be light and flippant, as she was, but I felt cold pass through me. It was like people described the presence of ghosts. Disillusioned with the effect of her gift to the animals, she had come to check out her biological legacy, and decide if I was a worthy heir. I tried to keep the neediness out of my voice, but it wasn’t neediness, it was need.
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m not dying.” She waved to the children, behind me. “Goodbye, darlings.”
“Liliana,” I said.
“My flight, darling,” she said. “I’ll write to you soon.”
Then she pulled the door closed, and the car slid away from the curb. With my children at my side, I stood watching it cruise toward the end of our block. She wouldn’t send for us when she had a new house. She wouldn’t be calling for my Social Security number when she wrote her new will. She had appeared on my doorstep only to dismiss me a second time, more decisively now that she had made a careful inspection, and recognized nothing of herself in me. I tried to say, like Mina, Good riddance, but I was not as sensible as my wife. I felt a rising anguish in my chest. We hadn’t made ourselves as vivid to Liliana as the fate of some unneutered cats. We had failed, even in overtime, and she was gone.
WHEN VALENTINE WAS NINE, her mother’s new lover took them one night to a bonfire the college kids had at the lake. He carried her in her nightgown from the house to his faded red convertible, and put her in the back seat with his son. They parked between two pickup trucks and walked toward the blaze in the dark. The air smelled like woodsmoke, and the students stood in a circle, lit up by the fire, drinking beers and talking. Carlo was the Italian teacher at the college, and some of the students said “Ciao” and laughed and shook his hand, or gave him five. His son, Jake, who was ten, wandered to the other side of the fire. Valentine sat on a patch of grass in her nightgown, still sleepy.
“College was the best time,” Carlo said, hugging her mother around the waist. “It never gets any better.”
He hadn’t yet spent a night at their house. Valentine’s mother said he was the dangerous kind of handsome, and that his name was really just Charles. He would look hard at the person he was talking to, as if what they were saying was supremely important, then lose interest and drop the conversation. His son, Jake, was beautiful, everyone said so.
Across the fire, Jake was talking to a ponytailed college girl, both of them sitting cross-legged on the ground. Their faces were rosy orange in the firelight, with the dark water of the lake behind them. Jake made the older girl laugh, and she put a hand on his cheek. Valentine watched them. Her mother’s last boyfriend had a daughter, who asked if Valentine really liked her mother, and why her bedroom was so small. The girl asked what
she called her unit—what word she used—and laughed when Valentine didn’t know what she meant.
“Are you bored, honey?” her mother asked.
Valentine shook her head, stretching her nightgown tight over her knees.
Carlo drove them home, and in the back seat Valentine fell asleep. In the morning she came out of her room to find Jake awake under blankets on the couch. She opened her mother’s door, and Carlo was in her mother’s bed. He lifted his head from the pillow.
“There’s money in my jeans,” he said. “Two maple bars and a newspaper for me. Gwen?”
“I’ll make breakfast,” her mother said, but she didn’t get up. Her hair spilled out on the pillow, and her shoulder was bare. She usually wore her hair up and a nightgown.
“The kids are going for breakfast,” Carlo said. “And how about knocking next time.”
On the walk to the store, Valentine had to run in skipping steps to keep up with Jake. He knew how to order at the pastry counter, and he added an apple fritter for himself. He knew which newspaper to buy. Valentine watched him pay, and thought of the girl touching his face.
Back at the house, they knocked on the bedroom door. Valentine’s mother came out in a robe and went to make coffee. Jake and Valentine climbed over the bedcovers with the bag of maple bars and the newspaper. Carlo pulled Valentine close, squeezed her shoulders and spoke into her hair.
“Sorry I said that about knocking,” he said. “Your mom just needs her privacy. I want us all to be friends.”
Jake didn’t look in their direction, but ate his apple fritter, inspecting the inside between bites.
When they had gone, Valentine’s mother pulled the covers off the bed. She looked dreamy and happy; she wore lace underwear under her untied bathrobe and her hair was brushed.
“He said I have wonderful cleavage,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s the space between your breasts.”
Valentine thought about this information, and about the word. Her mother’s breasts were small, compared to other women’s, and separated by several inches of breastbone that might have been Valentine’s own.