It took me another week to finally call my mother. Or, to be more precise, it took me three days to finally dial her number and another four days of dialing for her to pick up. When she finally did, she sounded awful—croaky and weak.
“Mom, you okay?”
“Lo siento, me hagarras en un mal momento.”
“Mom, can we please speak English here?”
“Realmene no me siento bien. Tu crees que podemos hablar en otro momento?”
“Mom? English?”
“English?” She said this like she had never heard the term.
“English. Please, Mom. My Spanish is pretty much gone.”
“Okay. You okay?”
“I hope you remember more than the word ‘okay.’ Yeah, Mom, I’m basically fine. How about you?”
“I told you I’m not feeling well.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, who said anything was wrong?”
“Well, you did. In two languages.”
“Oh, you know, it’s the usual stuff. Your dad drives the taxi all of the time, so I have no one to help me.”
“So how is Dad? How are his kneecaps?”
“His kneecaps are fine, as far as I know. Why would you ask this?”
“Oh, he was drunk and said they were shot off, and then he said they were going to be shot off, you know Dad.”
“I know better than I would wish to. Yes, my dear, I know. He’s had some trouble with some money he owes, but so far there’s no shooting.”
“Good. So what’re you doing with your time?”
“Oh, this and that.”
“Specifically which this and that?”
“Hah, hah, don’t be so smart with me. How’s your job?”
“My job is fine. I just don’t happen to personally occupy it anymore.”
“I’m not sure I understand what this means.”
“Never mind. Listen, Mom, do you mind if I ask you something?”
“I mind. I mean, I don’t mind, that kind of a saying always made me confused in English. So? What?”
“You and Dad, when we moved from Chicago to Buenos Aires for a few years, remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“So why? Why did we move there?”
“Why are you asking me this question now? I couldn’t possibly remember this if you paid me a million dollars, why we moved back. Anyway, is this really a thing you want to talk about at this time in your life?”
“Not really, no. But I sort of feel like I need to know anyway.”
“Well, I don’t know what this means, this difference between you-don’t-want-to but you-need-to business.”
“Just trust me on this, okay?”
“Okay. Well, your father missed Argentina, that’s all.”
“What about what happened with Elizabeth?”
“Who?”
“The little girl down the street that I was supposedly babysitting.”
“What about her?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Honestly, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Babysitting? So you were a babysitter, all the kids in the neighborhood did that, even the boys back then.”
“Yes, but this was a special kind of babysitting. I wasn’t old enough to do it, for one thing. And for another, the girl we’re talking about, Elizabeth, fell behind the bed.”
“Oh, her. I don’t think I ever would’ve remembered that name. That was a sad thing.”
“And her mom blamed me. Did you know that Elizabeth never actually died?”
“Of course, sweetheart. Who said she did?”
“A lot of people implied it.”
“Silly, if she had died, there would have been a funeral. She was taken to a hospital, that’s the last your father and I heard.”
“But you never actually told me that she didn’t die.”
“Didn’t I? Then your father must have.”
“No, and if he were on the phone now, he’d probably say that you must’ve.”
“Well, I’m not sure what difference it makes.”
“The fucking difference is that I spent my entire adult life thinking that I’d been responsible for the death of a baby! And it turns out she didn’t die, and it wasn’t even my responsibility anyway!”
“I never said it was your responsibility.”
“And why wasn’t it? Did you tell me why it wasn’t my responsibility? Did you tell me that Elizabeth and Willa had an older sister who was supposed to be watching Elizabeth?”
“I don’t remember. It’s possible I told you, and it’s possible I didn’t. Anyway, I repeat this to you, what difference does it make?”
“The difference it makes is that we moved away to Argentina, the place where old Nazi war criminals go to die, we slunk away, out of shame for what I supposedly did but in fact did not do. How do you think that’s affected me growing up?”
“We most certainly didn’t slunk away.”
“Slink. The word is slink.”
“Sorry, it sounds funny. I don’t speak much English these days. We didn’t shlink.”
“You’re slurring, Mother. But let’s accept that this is true. That leaves the other possibility, which is that Willa and Elizabeth’s father, whatever his name was, paid you with one-way tickets to Buenos Aires to get you out of the neighborhood.”
“I think his name was Herbert. And why would he have”—she searched for the right word—“supposedly done this?”
“To get the neighborhood to think it was me and not Beatrice who was responsible for Elizabeth’s accident.”
“Be-a-trish?”
“That’s the older sister of Willa and Elizabeth. She was the one who was supposed to be watching Elizabeth.”
“Darling, it’s true that Herbert bought us tickets back to Buenos Aires. And it’s also true that we left right after the accident with their baby. But back in those days, before, what do you call those computer travel agencies?”
“You mean like Orbitz or Travelocity?”
“Yeah, back then it took a while to buy airline tickets, and it took weeks of planning to travel internationally. We were still Argentine citizens, yes, but do you think we could have just packed up and moved in a day or two? The incident with the baby was just the final straw after the camel’s back.”
“What were the other straws? Mom? What else are you referring to?”
“Let me get a glass of water first.” I knew she meant another glass of wine. There was a bit of clattering on the line, and then she returned.
“Okay, so what were we talking about?”
“Oh, come on, Mother. You know. Why did we move? If it wasn’t Elizabeth, why did we move?”
“He broke a window.”
“Who broke what window?”
“Your father. He threw one of his sculptures through the kitchen window of the Dunleavys and it landed right in the sink that was full of dirty dishes and broke some dishes, too.”
“Why did he do that?”
“And the funny thing was, the sculpture broke, too. At least I thought it was funny. Enough with his goddamn sculptures, naturally with those stupid holes they’re fragile, of course they’ll break, though there’s more of them than ever now. It’s like they breed while I’m not looking, though how they do that with no ‘thingies’ I don’t get.”
“Okay. Mother. So why did he throw one of his sculptures through Isabelle Dunleavy’s kitchen window? He was drunk, I assume?”
“Well, of course he was drunk. Herbert said some things to him he didn’t appreciate.”
“Hah, you mean criticizing his artistic talent?”
“You’re joking, but that was part of it, too. He b
asically told your father that he sculpted ‘lumps.’ That was the word he used, lumps.”
“Okay, so that was part of it. What was the other part?”
My mother sighed. “Oh, you know, just the jealousy.”
“Which jealousy? What?” I suddenly was seized with a terrifying thought—that my father had had an affair with Isabelle Dunleavy, that he had gotten her pregnant, and that Elizabeth was my sister. That would explain so much—Beatrice’s inattention, the sudden flight to Buenos Aires. I said, shakily, “Do you mean Father and Isabelle?”
My mother laughed. “No, your father had no interest in such matters. You’re too young to remember, but he’d retire every evening to the backroom to work on his lumps with the holes and drink. Women? Hah. He also had a hole where that was. And with me? Hah!”
“So you mean…”
“Look, sweetie, all I mean is that Herbert was lonely and maybe doing without a lot of affection because the pregnance, the pregnancy, of Elizabeth was unplanned. And maybe Isabelle didn’t have a lot of time for him. So he made a little, I forget the expression…an attempt, you know?”
“He made a play for you?”
“Yes, he went after me so to speak. He kissed me a couple of times.”
“And you kissed him back?”
”Yes. You’re an adult now, I can be honest with you. I was very, very interested in Herbert, he was a handsome man if you remember.”
“How would I remember that? I can’t even picture what he looked like.”
“And he was an insurance executive.” She slurred and etiolated the word “insurance” so alarmingly that I was afraid she was about to drop the phone and pass out. “I felt he was doing something with his life. He was very, very attractive, and he dressed beautifully, not like most American men. So we kissed a few times, and your father found out and he broke the window.”
“So why would this lead to Herbert paying for a flight back to Argentina? Wouldn’t he have wanted you around?”
“Well, the problem was that when your father smashed the window with the sculpture, Isabelle asked, ‘Well, why is this man’s broken sculpture in my sink?’ ” And one thing led to another, and she found out about the affair…”
“Affair? What affair? I thought you said it was just kissing.”
“It was, I swear. That’s all it ever was. But you kiss another woman’s husband and that’s an affair, don’t you think? So she threatened to leave Herbert and take the girls with her, and he loved those little girls, and he couldn’t bear the, you know, the humiliation, so he begged with her and said he’d never see me again, and she insisted that they move out of the neighborhood, and that’s when he came up with the idea of moving us out instead. It was easy, your father was unhappy and had wanted for a long time anyway to move, and so for the price of a few plane tickets, I was out of his hair, the expression is, and then when the accident happened with the baby, well, the timing couldn’t have been better, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I know what you mean. Better for everyone, except for me. So it all came down to something I supposedly did and that covered up the affair and everything else.”
“I wish I could put a better way of saying on it, but that’s what happened.”
I remembered very little about Buenos Aires. I remembered my father, back when he looked more like a matador than a bull, taking me for walks along an endless avenue of antiques and glassware and beaded purses and little brass Buddhas and bric-a-brac where, on weekends, he would sometimes set up a table to sell his sculptures. I used to stoop low in front of the table and peek at him through the holes in the sexless reclining figures, and he’d wink wearily back. And I remember an outdoor café—really just a raised concrete platform with a rough metal grill and a dozen or so metal tables—where my father bought us a couple of steak sandwiches, soaked with a green-flecked spicy sauce that I didn’t like, and a beer for him and a Coke for me. He tore off hunks of bread and meat from both sandwiches, focusing on the parts that hadn’t been befouled by the spicy sauce, and fed them to me one at a time, as if I were four years old and not eight. I loved him a little bit, I think, but it all is very hazy.
And I remember the Catholic elementary school for English speakers I’d attended. All of my classmates, like me, were the children of expatriates, but none, as far as my eight-year-old brain could comprehend it, were the children of exiles nor exiles themselves. The nuns weren’t too bad, and in fact this particular order had a real fondness for animals, so I remembered with pleasure the guinea pigs in our classroom and the small flock of peafowl in the concrete play yard that was fenced in by an elaborate black ironwork gate. For reasons I can’t remember, I would fight my male classmates constantly, stalking them into the corners and throwing punches from every angle or wrestling them to the ground. The peacocks would scuttle around self-consciously and act a little nervous, but my classmates, even the ones who were bigger than me, seemed at once terrified and impressed. I broke one boy’s collarbone when I threw him to the ground, and never heard a word about it from him or his parents. I broke my own collarbone twice, both times in bicycling accidents when I was much older, and never regarded either break as a form of retribution. I wasn’t the least bit ashamed of being the skinny little bully that I was.
If I had told all this to Alisa, especially after she’d punched me out in Hawaii, she would have simply snorted in disbelief.
And I remember most of all a miniature city of crumbling concrete tombs that I wandered around in one sunny early-autumn day, and I must have been there with either my mother or my father, but I remember neither one, only how immense this above-ground cemetery complex was, and how rectilinear and claustrophobic were the narrow, indistinguishable avenues. Most of the tombs were fashioned like miniature churches, chapels, and homes, and at one time had been extravagant, a way for the wealthy to compete even after death. The one- or two-story tombs were far too tall for an eight-year-old, and in fact were more confusing than an actual skyline filled with skyscrapers, because they were all pretty much the same height so there were no reference points on the horizon, and the grid never varied, so there were no reference points on the ground either, except for the feral cats that sunned themselves in the middle of one walk or another.
It was impossible not to get lost.
Once I did lose my bearings, I discovered that while the avenues were identical, each tomb was as idiosyncratic as the souls that resided within, though this was something I only felt and was far too young to actually understand. The tiny cathedrals and stage-set homes, which looked like narrow slices of real rooms, had been decorated as the reliquaries they were, with elaborate iron grilles that reminded me of the black iron fence that protected the peacocks, and behind the grilles, cracked glass windows and double doors that were padlocked but sometimes swung partway open anyway, and behind the windows small altars and empty candlesticks and artificial flowers in green glass vases and elaborate filigreed crosses and terrifying crucifixes and ornately framed, hand-colored photographs of the doomed individuals within, and, in the center of each display, an elaborate coffin with lion’s head handles and the like, splashed with orange and yellow light from the small panels of stained glass on the sides and back of the tombs. And over all of this original decoration in memory of the dead was a second layer of decoration that replicated the process of dying itself, crumbled leaves from that autumn and the one before, and concrete dust and flaking rust from the tombs themselves, and shattered glass where the windows had been broken by stones or gusts of wind, and bits of dried paint, all of it connected in random fashion by trembling bits of cobweb, and then a third layer that replicated the resurrection, ivy and blue-green moss that carpeted the concrete and skinny weeds that sprouted out of the cracked and crumbling mausoleums, around the iron globes, through the glass, and into the coffins themselves.
After what seemed like an
hour of wandering and worrying among the dusty avenues, but probably was no more than fifteen minutes, I finally figured out where I was. I’d realized that, by looking at the decorations on top of many of the tombs, the Pietàs and the saints in the stone robes, I could triangulate my way, through trial and error, back to one particular tomb near the entrance that had a thick, rusted iron spigot on the side and, underneath the spigot, a particular striped tabby I remembered from when I first arrived.
I probably would have found my way out long before if I hadn’t kept my eyes nervously averted for much of the time from the mausoleums, having discovered that some of them had lower levels that could be glimpsed through the shattered glass and half-open iron doors. These levels were incomplete ur-basements and cellars that ended in darkness after a single half-turn of a spiral staircase, at the end of which rested a casket that had been placed there on purpose or slid down over the years from its original ground-level resting place. One of these lower-level tombs, I’d fleetingly thought, must have held the bones of Elizabeth.
And that was why, I concluded as I’d stroked the warm fur of the striped tabby, I’d been left there to find my own way out.
6
“So, did you call your mother?” Dr. Nemerov asked at my next visit.
“Yeah, I did. Just the other day. She claimed we left for Argentina because she was having some kind of half-assed affair with Willa’s father, not because of Elizabeth.”
“And what about MariAngela? Have you seen her?”
“Yes, but don’t you want to talk about my mother and Elizabeth?”
“I want to talk about what you want to talk about. But the dreams you keep on having are about this MariAngela, so I think we should stay on that. Have you had any new ones?”
“No.”
“So what else have you been up to?”
“Not much. Went to a sports bar and watched some guys rolling around punching each other in the face.”
“Ha, sounds like something I’d enjoy if that was something I’d enjoy.”
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 24