by Tanen Jones
“What did you do with it?” she asked that night, when we were again in bed.
“With what?” I said.
She closed her mouth. I never caught her under the bed again.
18
Mary
The crazy thing is that I woke up with a big smile on my face. I couldn’t help it. I’d slept so good in Leslie’s ginormous memory-foam bed, and there were wooden hangers for my five articles of clothing in the closet, and rose-scented tissues on the nightstand…and I was free. I didn’t have work in the morning. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t even have to answer to my own name.
Leslie’s voice filtered into my consciousness as I squirmed around in the bed, testing how it was possible that I could be comfortable in literally every position. She was on the landing, talking to someone. Dave’s voice, low. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Go on, go to work.” A kiss, then his shoes on the stairs. Her voice again: “Hi, Diego. Just calling to say I’m not feeling well today. I’m going to stay home for now.” A beat. “Yeah. I’m going to try to work on it this afternoon if the medicine kicks in…Okay. See you.”
I frowned. The front door had shut halfway through her conversation, and she’d still faked the whole thing, like Dave might be able to hear her through the wall.
In the other room, the baby began to cry. I rolled over, giving up on going back to sleep. Also, I hadn’t bothered to take a shower last night and I was sort of grossing myself out.
I got up and padded over to my duffel bag to get my cigarettes. I thought Leslie probably wouldn’t appreciate me smoking in the room, but I didn’t want to negate the air-conditioning by opening the window, so I went into the closet and hotboxed myself for a couple minutes until my body assured me it had been satisfactorily saturated in nicotine.
After that I went into the adjoining bathroom and sat down on the toilet. Leslie had mini cruelty-free toiletries lined up on the sink. There was a basket behind them, containing folded hand towels and what looked like inflated macaron cookies.
BOMB, the middle one read.
Oh. Perfect. I ran a bath (built-in, with its own set of wooden stairs leading up to the edge) and dropped the macaron into it. It fizzed happily, turning the water into a dense purple mirror flecked with blue and pink stars.
I climbed into the galaxy and stared down.
There was a faint banging. “Mary?”
Don’t you mean Robin? I thought. What if your husband hears from all the way at the firehouse?
“Mary?”
“Come in,” I called.
The bedroom door clicked open, then the door to the bathroom. “Oh!” Leslie backed into the doorframe, as if she had entered the bathroom expecting to see me filing my taxes.
“It’s okay.” I smiled. “Could you hand me the conditioner? Actually, don’t worry about it, I’ll get it.”
I stood up, dripping stars and glitter, and descended the little wooden stairs while Leslie covered her eyes and turned her back.
“Are you—decent?”
I sloshed back into the tub and slouched low enough to cover my chest with stars. “I love your bath products.”
Leslie stared at the glittery puddle on the hardwood floor, then made a visible effort to refocus. Was she angry? “I made an appointment with Albert. The trustee, I mean. He couldn’t get us in today, though.”
More time for me to spend in Leslie’s luxury bathtub. “That’s too bad,” I said.
“I thought you could come with me to my dad’s place. I’m packing up his stuff.” She waited, adding, when I didn’t respond, “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to hang out there for the day.”
“You don’t want me to be here alone,” I said, half questioning.
There was a silence. “Be downstairs in half an hour,” Leslie said.
“I’m not going to run away or anything,” I said, sliding lower in the water and squeezing my eyes shut. “Is that what you’re worried about?”
But I was talking to nobody. Past the open doorway, I could hear Leslie’s steps echoing on the stairs.
19
Leslie
“How come you don’t want to take him with us?” Mary asked through a bite of egg-and-cheese biscuit. She had insisted we stop at McDonald’s on the way.
I was unbuckling Eli from his car seat. “Ah. Ah. Ah!” he insisted. I stuck his pacifier in his mouth and hefted him onto my hip.
“I need to focus on getting my dad’s things put away,” I said.
“I could babysit him.” Mary took another bite. “He’s cute,” she said after swallowing, eyes following Eli’s attempt to grab my earring.
“Have you ever taken care of a baby before?” I slammed the car door and lifted the bag of baby items onto my other shoulder.
She leaned over into the driver’s seat, cooing at Eli from the rolled-down window. “Aunt Robin. Come on, baby. Say ‘Aunt Robin.’ ”
“That’s not funny.” I tried to control the tremor in my voice.
She was instantly remorseful. “Sorry, Leslie. I was just joking.”
I stared at her, then turned and took Eli into the daycare.
When I came back out, she was licking her fingers, crumpling the tinfoil in her other hand. “I’m really sorry,” she said.
“It’s fine.” I put the car into drive and turned onto Comanche, heading west.
Mary stared out the window as we pulled into the driveway on Riviera a few minutes later. “This it?” she asked, chewing on her lip.
“Yeah.” It was a single-story adobe in the style popular in the 1920s, with exposed vigas striping the wall over the garage and a painted teal gate standing slightly open. The latch was broken and I hadn’t bothered to fix it yet. There were a few succulents lining the front walk among the multicolored stones that took the place of a lawn, and the neighbor’s desert willow cast rippling shadows over them. I thought, as I always did, how much Albuquerque yards looked like aquariums waiting to be filled with water. I remembered being twelve, lying on the ground outside, covering my ears while above, an airplane passed through the clouds like a far-off nurse shark. I’d watched it, listening to the tidal noise of my own breath passing through my nose.
Mary kept quiet as we passed through the gate and into the front hallway. It smelled musty inside, like all dark houses in the desert, cut with a chemical lemon scent from when I’d scrubbed the tiles a month ago. No one had been here; it hadn’t faded.
I dropped the boxes next to my dad’s La-Z-Boy in the sunken living room and went to hang my purse on the hook by the door. I remembered my mother hanging her purse on this hook years ago, and how elegant I’d thought she looked, lifting it with two fingers just as she left the house. “I thought we’d go through his records and books and give them away,” I said. “There’s a used bookstore not too far down the road.”
“You’re not going to keep any of them?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t even know what’s in here,” I said. “He never played any of it, just collected.”
“You know, there’s, like, a vinyl resurgence,” she said, sitting on the carpet in front of the pinewood bookcases and running her hands along the faded album spines. “You could probably sell some of these on the Internet or something.”
“I mean, feel free to take one if you like it,” I said, crouching next to her. I tilted my head. These books were so familiar to me, and yet I’d never read them the entire time they’d been here—some of them longer than I’d been alive. The tattered red-and-green capitals of The Recognitions; the pale blue of Red Sky at Morning; the ugly off-white of Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories. I took out Myra Breckinridge and paged through it.
“Your dad sure liked to read, huh?”
I glanced at her. “I don’t know. I think he liked to have them there for pe
ople to see more than he liked to read them. I never saw him open most of these.”
“Did you read any of them?” She was picking through the records too carefully, dropping them in the box one by one.
“No,” I said. “I never did. I don’t read that much.” Dave bought me audiobooks for the car. Otherwise I read mostly magazine articles and the news and Facebook. Opening a real book—holding it up in bed—felt farcically virtuous. I could never tell if I liked it or if I only liked the picture I made. I remembered my manners and cleared my throat. “Do you? Read much?”
She smiled, her eyes locked on the album in her hands. “Sure. I read sometimes.”
“What kind of stuff do you like?”
Mary pursed her lips. “I like to challenge myself to read five important books a year. For self-improvement. Last year I read Middlesex. And I was reading a book this month by a woman named Mary Carson. No. Mary Karr. But I left it behind.”
“You can take whatever you want from here.” I grabbed a handful of books and fitted them into one of the cardboard boxes. “I’m dropping them all off at Menaul otherwise.”
“I don’t think they’ll fit in my duffel,” she said, running her fingers over the spines. “I’m gonna have one of these someday. A big old shelf to show I’m not just looks.” She grinned at me and went back to adding records to her own box, one at a time. After a minute she said, “What was your daddy like?”
“Um,” I said. “He was a decent guy.” One of the books clipped my fingernail and I winced and stuck it in my mouth, continuing, muffled, “It was hard to be really close to him, you know, because he was already pushing sixty when I was a teenager, and he got sick right after that. I spent a lot of time taking care of him.” I went back to adding books, heaviest at the bottom, more carefully this time.
“What did he look like?”
“Hang on.” I unfolded my legs and stood up, going over to my dad’s study opposite the living room. On top of the old secretary was a photograph of him and my mom on their wedding day. He had an enormous blond mustache and no hair on top. Her hair was a feathered, backcombed pageboy in the Princess Diana style, and she wore a high-necked powder-blue nightgown of a wedding dress. She looked so young next to him, like it was her first dance.
I brought the photo to Mary. She laughed as I put it in her hands. “He looks like Ron Burgundy.”
“Who’s that?”
She shook her head at me. “It’s from a movie. Never mind. Your mom was cute. How old was she here?”
“Twenty-six.” Something about her silence made me keep talking. “She was pregnant with me in this picture.”
Mary looked up in surprise. “Really? Wow. Shotgun wedding?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, telling the truth. “She was only one or two months along, so maybe she didn’t know until after.”
“You look like her,” Mary said, setting the photograph on the carpet.
“My dad used to say that.” After his first surgery, he was on pain medication almost all the time. It helped give him some respite from the open wound in his neck and the persistent, wracking cough that made it hard for him to swallow food, but it also sent him swimming out into a kaleidoscopic half reality. He called me Chrissy a lot. It made me sad, and then a little angry; he spoke to me-as-Christine in the absent imperative: Get me my chair, Chrissy. Leave me with my nurse, if you please, Chrissy. I hadn’t even remembered he’d talked to my mother that way until he got sick and mixed us up. Then it came creeping back: what a tight ship he’d run then, how silent we all were.
I looked around at the room. The long thin bars of light coming through the blinds had slid toward the wall, signaling noon’s approach.
“We should get back to work,” I said. “I’m almost done with this shelf. I’ll go through his study next. You can help me when you’re done with the albums.” I dropped the last few books into the box haphazardly, bending a few of the pages.
“ ’Kay,” Mary said, still looking at the photo on the floor. I snatched it up and went into the study to unfold another box.
The study was cramped and dark, full of floating dust motes that flurried every time I picked up one of Daddy’s clothbound 1960s textbooks and heaved it into the box. I was wondering what to do with the cigar box that held his class ring when there was a rustling sound from the other room and then music began to filter into the hallway.
“Mary?” I called.
I went back into the living room. Mary wasn’t there. I followed the music down the hall, feeling sicker and sicker the closer I got to the open doorway.
She was standing in the middle of Robin’s old bedroom, facing away from me toward the record player propped up on a chair. When she heard me push the door farther open, she turned around and grinned. “Look what I found!” she said over the noise, holding up the record sleeve with both arms like Vanna White. “He’s got so much ancient stuff here. I love it. Have you ever heard of Laura Nyro?”
“No.” The photo on the cover of the album was of a long-faced, heavy-browed woman pulling on her own dark hair. She looked like my mother the way I remembered her, with the thin, round bangs. “Come back out to the living room.”
“You barely got to this room at all,” Mary said. “Wow, I feel like I’m being stared at.”
She didn’t mean me. She meant the posters.
Robin’s room was covered in faces. Photographs lined the walls and ceiling. Iggy Pop approximating Munch’s scream, Grace Jones snarling, Britney Spears ducking her head, Kate Hudson as Penny Lane, Ava Gardner as herself, Lincoln, Kahlo, Courbet’s desperate man. From behind, bits of the pale blue wallpaper peeked out, the prim white wainscoting. Two mirrors faced each other at either end of the room. In between, an enormous bureau and a third, smaller mirror, garlanded with dusty plastic hibiscus flowers. The comforter was a dull black, incongruous, strewn with clothes, which were scattered over the rug and hung from the open drawers of the bureau. The mess was a teenage girl’s, in medias; she might have returned at any moment. Daddy had never touched it.
Now Mary was standing in her room, wearing her face.
“You don’t want me to be in here, huh?” she asked with Robin’s mouth, wrinkling Robin’s forehead.
I felt dizzy. “We need to pack.”
“Okay, but you gotta listen to the song first. I’ll start it again.” Mary gathered up the record player and carried it out into the hallway. I shut Robin’s door firmly behind her.
“You look stressed out, Leslie,” Mary said, setting the needle and lying down in the middle of the sunken living room, closing her eyes, spreading her arms and legs like a snow angel. “Come rest with me. I’m sorry I went in Robin’s room. I didn’t know it was hers.”
I sat down next to her. “It’s all right.” After a second I said, “Oh. I do know this song. I recognize this song.”
“Lie down,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“Why?”
She didn’t answer. After a moment I lay down next to her.
Laura Nyro sang fuzzily, “In your voice I hear a choir of carousels. Oh, but am I ever gonna hear my wedding bells?”
The carpet smelled like the rest of the house used to. No antiseptic lemon, just cigarettes and Brut and old lasagna.
“Bill! I love you so, I always will…”
20
Robin
That photograph was the only one he displayed of her. Do you see those earrings? Leslie asked me once when we were children, pointing to the little bride, my mother. He gave them to her as a wedding present. Five pearls in each, five-pointed stars. He used to refuse to kiss her if she didn’t have them on. It was a romantic joke between them, full of affection, To the moon, Alice! She kept them in a bowl on the night table, but sometimes she forgot and slept in them. The next morning her earlobes would look red and sore, and he would pinch them
, telling her he was giving her a massage as she winced. Leslie used to watch with that curled-lip look on her face, an expression like she’d been caught in a sneeze, the disgust trying to disguise the satisfaction.
I was never angry with my mother like Leslie was, maybe because I had never expected anything of her. It seemed natural to me that Leslie should be responsible for the day-to-day ablutions while Christine came and went. Three times during our childhood she disappeared for months at a time, which meant she had gone on a trip, according to my father. He always gave her yellow roses when she came back, so we knew he had missed her. I assumed these vacations were much like Daddy’s business trips; it was only later that I realized she had no job, so they couldn’t be business trips at all. At the time I viewed them just as I did her occasional all-day errands—it was as if she exited the house directly into a void, and I didn’t think about her again until she returned.
I think it was this attitude that earned me, not Leslie, the prize of accompanying her into the void one day. I was six, halfway through first grade, Christine freshly returned home after months away. I was called to the office to meet my mother just before school ended, but when I got there I hardly knew her. She had curled her hair so tightly it resembled a perm, and wore hot streaks of blush across the tops of her cheeks. Instead of her loose, soft cardigan, she wore a light blue skirt suit with matching vest and white chiffon blouse that tied at her neck and wrists. The makeup gave her face that blurry Vaseline-lens effect that I recognized from television. “It’s you!” I said.
She smiled, revealing the same crooked canine that Leslie had only recently inherited with her adult teeth. “It’s me. Do you want to come with me to a party?”
Had her errands been parties all along? I was electrified by being entrusted with such a worthy secret. I imagined her sneaking off to dozens and dozens of formal affairs, like the twelve dancing princesses. “Does Daddy know?” I asked her in the car, trying to get a look at her shoes.