Sometimes, when he'd speak of her, something would happen in his throat, some sheen would come across his eyes, as though she were an unearthly presence he'd managed to persuade to come down and live with him on the planet, and he was still marveling at his good fortune. His job was to make her life comfortable so that she could simply be who she was meant to be.
He and I never spoke of it, but I understood somehow that we, he and I, took care of everyone else. That was who we were: the caretakers. We were the strong, capable ones. We lived in the real world, and Dana and Momma—well, we loved them, but they maybe needed a little help sometimes. They swooned and fell, they drank too much, they wept. We picked them up, we loved them until they were right again—and we got our strength just from the trust they had in us to keep on keeping on.
But now all of them were gone. That's what I had to get used to. I wished I could call out to my father, ask him what I was supposed to do now, now that there was nobody to take care of. "Avery Brown," I said up to the sky, "you didn't tell me that everybody was going to go off and leave me here. What is all this about? What the hell do I do next?"
I went back to digging holes and waiting for Dana to come back. I was going to be ready this time, to do things right for her, try to be her soul mate and best friend, to replace my mother for her. That was what I needed to do. No wonder I hadn't been any good at surrogate parenting. My sister had lost her best friend. I had forgotten that part.
Maggie tried to get me to let her come live in my spare room and look after me, but I said no. And Leon, bless him, used to come over and tell me stories about my parents, and talk to me about weather patterns. He'd been a meteorologist before he retired. He liked clouds and big thunderstorms.
It was Leon who sorted the mail, deposited my checks, and paid the electric bill before the power could get turned off. Mavis brought over blueberry pies and bagels with cream cheese and left them out on the counter, the way you might do for a feral animal.
Finally, one day, Gracie, my mother's radical lesbian-feminist best friend, arrived home from Florence, where she'd been on a fellowship for the whole two terrible years, teaching poetry to Italian undergrads. She'd missed my parents' deaths, missed my flailing around trying to raise Dana, missed the whole disintegration of everything. And now she was back. She came out to the beach, and I told her right up front that I wasn't up for talking about anything, and that the kindest thing she could do would be just to leave me alone, because as anyone could see, I was toxic and poison and good only for digging holes in the sand. She said matter-of-factly, "You've just been through too much, that's all. You're exhausted. We'll fix you up."
"I'm fine," I said.
One day she came out of her house next door and eased herself down next to me on the sand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that she was wearing sparkly artist-type clothing like my mother had worn. I thought of her then as a carbon copy of my mother, sort of useless and self-centered, not really helpful. She just sat there silently and watched me digging. It turned out she'd brought a book of poetry with her, and after a while she read me a poem by Thomas Hardy.
It was a long poem, about sadness over a death. I couldn't make myself pay attention to it. Poetry isn't my thing. Her voice was gruff while she read, but then when she got near the end, she got all choked up. I looked up at her and watched her read the end.
" 'I seem but a dead man held on end, To sink down soon... O you could not know, That such swift fleeting, No soul foreseeing—not even I—would undo me so!' "
In the heavy silence after she finished, a chorus of cicadas started buzzing.
"I miss her, too," she said when she had finished. "But life doesn't have to stop."
I sat in the hot noon sun and listened in the roar of the afternoon. Later she said, "I've got to say, I like what you've done with the place," gesturing at the dozens of deep holes I had going. I don't remember when she went away that day, but that night, I noticed that she had left the poetry book on the kitchen table for me, along with a lobster roll from Lenny and Joe's Fish Tale restaurant, which I gobbled up in about two and a half bites. I had forgotten about lobsters and lobster rolls, how buttery they tasted, how they melted in your mouth.
The next day she came over with plant food and fed my mother's roses. Later, she talked me into going out in my father's boat near dusk, and we paddled around the bay. She leaned across the boat and told me that she was so very sorry she hadn't come home when my parents died. Her short gray hair lifted in the breeze, and her green eyes were kind and serious. I couldn't look away. She said it was the grief that had made her stay in Italy; she couldn't bear the loss. "I should have been here with you, though," she said. "Your grief was what I should have helped with. This is where I needed to be. You needed me, and I'm sorry."
That's when I first got an inkling that Gracie and I might belong to each other, in the way that people who have nobody else grope their way toward creating a family.
A week later, I picked up the phone and made an appointment to see a grief counselor. If I was going to have a family, I wanted to get better.
***
The counselor was helpful, and she loved my grief so much that it became part of who we were together. She said I'd had something of a little nervous breakdown, or at least that's what they called it in the old days. Now I don't know what they call it: an emotional collapse, maybe, a chemical imbalance, a spiritual crisis.
In our little show—the counseling show the two of us were privately putting on—I was Lily, fucked up and grieving, and she was Marianna, who was healing me. Only I noticed that every time I started to feel better, Marianna said we maybe weren't truly facing everything that needed to be faced. Perhaps we should wade in once again and drag out some other dead, lost thing to grieve over.
As she got to know me better, she would sometimes indulge herself in making fun of a guy who had a practice in the same building, a New Agey sort named Teddy Kingsley, who used crystals and did energy work and drove an old, beat-up VW Bug. This was wicked of her, she said, to ridicule another therapist—but surely no one could take his methods seriously. "Really," she said, and something about the mean look in her eye reminded me of my mother and drilled a hole right through the center of me, "who could believe in any of that stuff that involves rocks and things that smell funny? You'd come out crazier than when you went in."
So on the day I told her that I didn't want to drag out any more griefs, and she said I was once again in denial of its power over me, I stopped in Teddy's office to make an appointment with him. He was soft-spoken and disheveled, and I liked him immediately—the kind look in his eyes, the way his curly hair had a life of its own, how the long lines around his mouth seemed to have been carved out by emotions he'd honestly felt.
He was about to write down the time on a little card, but he kept writing down dates and times and then scratching them out, and then writing in new dates that were closer to the present. And then, suddenly, he looked up at me with such a naked, flustered look on his face that it almost stopped my heart, and he said, "But if I see you professionally, then I can't see you socially, so would you mind if we did that instead?" I said no, and he tore up the card right in front of me.
We were married a year later. By then, I had Gracie for a substitute mother and now I was going to have a husband, too.
6
Simon comes padding into my bedroom early the next morning, carefully carrying in his pudgy little hands the little screened jar containing his firefly. He climbs up on the bed, and I make room for him under the covers, and for a while, the three of us—two humans and one insect, in an example of interspecies accord—snuggle under the blankets. Then he whispers, "Why is your hair like that?"
"What is it like?" I say.
"I don't know," he says. "It has orange spots in it."
"I had a run-in with a bottle of hair coloring," I tell him. "Don't worry. It'll get fixed up later today."
"I like it," he says. He re
aches over with a plump finger and touches it gently. "I think you look like a firefly."
"Great. That was exactly the look I was going for." I tackle him in a bear hug and roll him back and forth, and when I stop, he wiggles down close to me. And fidgets.
"What if we all had fireflies in our hair all the time and we couldn't sleep at night because our room kept flashing off and on and off and on?" he says. This is the first what-if question of the day, and I know from experience we can get up to one hundred by breakfast.
I say, "Did Lily the firefly keep flashing all night in your room?"
"Yeah," he says. "That's how fireflies talk."
Then he remembers his very favorite activity when he's in my room, which is making a quick burrow to the bottom of the bed, churning up the covers as he goes and making motorboat-in-distress noise. I have to hang on to the sheet for dear life or it will be caught in his vortex. Then, from the bottom of the bed, he says in his automatic robot voice, "Now. I. Am. Going. To. Be. A. Radio. Man. And. Talk. To. You. Are. You. Ready?"
"Ready, Radio Man."
"Okay. Lily Brown. Question. Why. Isn't. Daddy. Your. Husband. Anymore?"
"Well, Mr. Radio Man," I say, "we got a divorce. That's why."
"Lily Brown. Why. Did. You. Get. A. Bevorce?"
"Because, Mr. Radio Man, we made a mistake when we got married in the first place. We thought we could stick it out for fifty or sixty years, but, alas, we could not. Let's go get some pancakes, shall we?"
"Why?"
"Why, what?"
"Why, alas, you could not?" He pokes his head out, speaking now in his regular voice.
I just look at him. Um . . . how to explain it? Innocence, grief, unrealistic plans for the future, the O.J. verdict, the RSVP thing? Maybe the fact that Teddy is always expecting the very worst and needs daily—no, minute-by-minute—pep talks? Maybe because he isn't at all like the men I am normally attracted to? Maybe because he isn't like my father?
"It's hard to explain. Sometimes mommies and daddies just can't stay loving each other even when they wish they could."
Simon sits cross-legged on the bed and looks at me from underneath his long bangs. He has the most delectable chubby cheeks, and brown hair that reminds me of milk chocolate with butterscotch swirled in. "Maybe," he says nonchalantly, "if you don't want to marry Daddy again, you and I could maybe get married sometime. If you want to."
I smile at him. "Thank you. That's a very nice offer, but they don't let mothers and sons get married. Causes problems with the genetic codes, I think."
He laughs and scrambles to his feet and starts jumping on the bed. He's wearing his red railroad pajamas, and his hair flies up in the air with each jump. He's grinning from ear to ear. "Come on! Jump with me!"
So I do. I put Lily the firefly carefully on the floor, and then I get up on the bed, too, and take both of Simon's hands, and we jump as high as we can—up and down, up and down, until we are nearly breathless.
***
Simon and I always go to the diner for banana pancakes on Saturday mornings, so once we've discussed our marriage options and jumped on the bed to the point of exhaustion, we get ourselves dressed and walk into town. Even though it's a warm, humid morning, I'm wearing my dad's old watch cap because, frankly, when I looked at my hair in the mirror this morning, I nearly passed out from the shock of what I'd done. I actually got a little queasy standing there—queasy enough that I called Jillian, my hairdresser, and confessed everything. She was not all that sympathetic, I've got to say. Wanted to know if I'd lost my mind buying a home kit instead of going to her, a Certified Professional, to have her put highlights in my hair—and then she told me she couldn't help me fix it; she's heading off on a two-week vacation and she's all booked, even when she gets back. She ended the conversation with "So you'll have a month or two of looking kind of punkish. It'll give you a chance to express your wild side."
It's possible she's still mad at me for setting her up with Teddy.
After I talked to her, I called five other hair salons—but it's Saturday, as one woman acidly reminded me. Nobody has an extra two hours in their schedule to fix a hair disaster. And in fact, no one has any time all week, when it comes right down to it.
"You know what this means? You are forcing me to go and buy yet another kit," I said to her, but she'd already hung up. I continued on with the dial tone: "When I have to go around looking like a complete freak, it's going to be because of people like you. I hope you can live with yourself."
Naturally, Simon and I run into everybody we know at the diner—Joe Wiznowski is grouchily out running errands, which he has to do all by himself since his wife, Paulette, died last summer; Anginetta Franzoni is on her way to the post office; Leon and Krystal are lollygagging and grinning over strawberry waffles with piles of whipped cream—and they all say I'm insane to be wearing a winter cap on such a warm morning. I tell them my hair has been sent out for repair and I didn't want to sunburn my scalp by going around bald-headed, and they all laugh and say, "Oh, you!" and "Simon, your mom is such a riot, isn't she?" Then Simon and I finish eating and go to the drugstore, and after I study all the possibilities in the hair-care aisle, I buy another hair-painting kit just like the first one. Perhaps, with one more try, I really can even out the blobs and make them into nice delicate highlights. Hair coloring, I think, might be just another one of those things in life—like motherhood and marriage—that you have to practice until you get it right.
***
I love Saturday. For me, it's house-cleaning day, which I have to confess I'm a little addicted to. I know, I know. This smacks of the 1950s and Donna Reed running around in heels and a ruffly little apron, pushing a carpet sweeper and smiling. Believe me, I'm the last person who ever thought this would happen to me. But it's while I'm getting out all my special cleaning products—the beeswax furniture polish, the fragrant sandalwood oil, the non-streak glass cleaner, the ostrich-feather duster, and my apron with all the pockets—that I feel most connected to this house, and to myself. There's something therapeutic about shining and polishing everything, especially when there's no one around to point out that you've missed a spot, or that perhaps this isn't a worthwhile use of time, that it's something losers do, people who have no life.
Today, with Simon gone to his friend Christopher's house for a playdate, I put on Bonnie Raitt full-blast and dance around the rooms, waving my feather duster in the air and singing at the top of my lungs. I shimmy past the windows, dusting the sills. I love getting at all the little crevices and grooves in the old wood. Outside, I see that the Sound is calm and flat, a silver coin against a sky almost deep purple with wispy fluffs of clouds. A breeze stirs my mother's old lace curtains. I watch the dust motes float down through a sunbeam, and, just as I did when I was a child, I try to catch them with my hands before they land.
I love this house. It was once just a drafty turn-of-the-century summer cottage, with beamed ceilings, wainscoting, and plank floors, until my parents winterized it and tried to make it civilized. They may have made their mark on it, but nothing they did ever changed its damp, salty character. I know every board, every knothole in the floors, and all the places where the glass in the upstairs window gets so wavery that the outdoors looks like an optical illusion.
There are, of course, at least a million things wrong with the house: the stairs creak and groan under our footsteps, the closet under the stairs has a family of mice I can't seem to get rid of, and the porch railing needs painting from blistering in the sun. The bookshelves in the living room are starting to sag. One year I had to put in all new storm windows because the old windows were leaking and ruining the siding. And three years ago, I replaced the roof when my bed kept getting wet. The trees need trimming, and an evil woodpecker has drilled a hole in the side of the house.
But it's all mine. My favorite room is the kitchen, which is large now and light, with Italian tile floors, a central island, a stone fireplace, a large picture window that looks
out over the Sound and the garden, and a sliding door leading out onto the porch. Big copper pots hang on hooks from the ceiling beams, and the sideboard is filled with my mother's colorful Fiestaware and mixing bowls. The round oak table is the same one I used to sit at in my highchair, and when Dana was born, she sat there, too, and then Simon. I had my first kiss in the mudroom off the kitchen, and I both conceived and then went into labor with Simon in the upstairs bedroom.
There are three bedrooms upstairs—the master bedroom overlooking the back of the house and the Sound, and two smaller bedrooms. Simon sleeps in the room that Dana had, and my old bedroom is now the place where I've put my mother's paintings—the secondary ones, the ones that aren't displayed on the walls—and her old, cracked watercolor sets and canvases. The closet, I think, even has some of hers and Daddy's clothes, things I've never been able to bring myself to part with.
I'm upstairs dusting the carved mahogany pineapples on the bedposts of my parents' old bed when I look over and see that the answering machine light is blinking twice. The first message is from Teddy, who whines that he wants me to let him know immediately if Kendall calls. I laugh and shake my head.
But I stop laughing when I hear the second message. It's from that Southern guy again, the one who left a message for Dana last night. In a teasing, lazy voice, he says, "Hey, chick, this is Randy. I need to talk to you. Call." Then he clears his throat, like he's waiting for her to pick up the phone, and then he says, in a voice that sounds much more ominous, "Oh, Daaaaana? Ever heard of a little thang called grand theft auto? I'd hate to have to lay that on you, sweetheart. You better call me. I'm waaaaiting..."
7
As soon as I'm finished cleaning the house, I get out the new hair-coloring kit and stare for a very long time at the beautiful, sun-streaked blonde on the front of the box, a woman who probably did not use a do-it-yourself product to get that look—or if she did, it's clear that she didn't get interrupted by her ex-husband and have to wrap a towel around her head. I take ten very deep, cleansing breaths for courage, and then, when that doesn't make me feel better, I do a few rounds of calisthenics, some abdominal crunches, and some muscle flexes for strength. Then back to cleansing breaths. I will flood my body with oxygen . . .
A Piece Of Normal Page 6