She’d toyed with the idea of going at it alone. But every time she imagined the girls coming home from school to a dark house, or sitting at the dinner table, being fed another TV dinner, or walking around the neighborhood with their pant legs hovering three inches above their ankles, every time she imagined them imagining her turning that key in the ignition, which always became tangled up with her own memories of scouring the blood stains off her mother’s tub, every time she pictured her daughters tossing shovelfuls of dirt onto her coffin and saying Kaddish, if Shep would even let them say it, which he probably wouldn’t, she knew she could not leave April and Lily here by themselves. Shep would adapt. He’d find someone to help around the house, to do the laundry and cleaning and grocery shopping. Maybe he’d even get remarried, although she doubted that Mavis would actually leave her husband. But the girls, they would never adapt. First they would suffer. Then they would be pitied. And avoided. And made to feel like lepers. Then, finally, the anger would sink in. After her own mother was wheeled out into the waiting ambulance, its bright lights flashing her family’s shame across the Grand Concourse, the neighbors whispered at her approach. That’s the girl whose mother tried to kill herself . . . the father was schtupping his secretary . . . the mother did it for revenge. Oh, she knew what they were saying! The lies, the truths, all bunched up together in the same suitcase. She knew what they were saying because she saw every word of it in their eyes. Poor kid. Crazy mother. No love. “It’ll be the kind of adventure you’ll remember for the rest of your life, muffin,” she said, choking on the words. She kneeled down until she was at eye level with April, and then she kissed the top of her head. “But first we’re going to visit Aunt Trudy in College Park to eat pizza. She’s taking us to that Italian place you love.”
“Famiglia’s?” April said, pronouncing the word with the g sound intact. Fah-mih-glee-ah. Adele had explained that it had a silent g, the way they say family in Italy, but the girls insisted on pronouncing it the way it was spelled.
“Yes, muffin. That’s right. Famiglia’s,” Adele said, enunciating the g, too. Family was difficult enough to master in English. “Then we’re going to drive out to Gaithersburg to begin our adventure. Dress warmly, okay? Wear a long-sleeved T-shirt and a sweater, and tell your sister to do the same. I’ll pack a suitcase with the rest of our stuff, but if you have any games or toys you want to bring along, just pack them in your school bag.”
“We’re sleeping over on our adventure?”
“Maybe.”
“What about my school books?”
“You won’t need them.”
“Really?”
“Bring a chapter book, if you’d like. We’ll read it if we have time. And maybe some small toys or activities for the ride. Checkers would be good. A deck of cards. Now hurry. Get Lily up and moving.”
“Lily!” April yelled, dashing out of the kitchen. “Wake up! We’re going to eat pizza with Aunt Trudy and go on an adventure!”
And while upstairs her daughters were excitedly putting on their clothes and brushing their teeth, while they were giggling and packing their backpacks full of goodies (Mad Libs, an abacus, a set of magnetic travel checkers, and Harriet the Spy in April’s bag; a Nancy Drew mystery, a sketch pad, a deck of cards, and a tape recorder with a cassette of Top Forty songs in Lily’s bag), downstairs Adele Cassidy was studying the manual for the vacuum cleaner, trying to figure out a way to disengage its plastic hose without destroying the machine. Shep, after everything was said and done, would still need to vacuum.
2.
After lunch, their bellies full of pepperoni pizza and “Famiglia’s famous” garlic bread, April and Lily climbed into the backseat of the family station wagon, which their mother had for some reason decided to wipe down with Lysol and water before leaving the house. They took out the Mad Libs and started working down their list of favorite words—smelly, boogers, poop, farted. Meanwhile, Adele stood on the sidewalk with her sister.
“Oh, Adele,” said Trudy, giving her the kind of bear hug she’d perfected during her brief flirtation with EST. “You’re doing the right thing. You know you are. Enough’s enough. You gave it your best shot.”
Adele was fiddling with a pebble with her big toe, rolling it back and forth between skin and flip-flop. “Remember when we got separated from Mom that day in Coney Island?” she said.
Trudy pursed her lips and turned her eyeballs skyward. “Vaguely. That wasn’t Rye Playland?”
“No. It was Coney Island. I’m positive.” She remembered exactly where they were standing, right under the Ferris wheel. In the line for the sliding cars, not the stationary ones. She was thirteen, which would have made Trudy three. She wrinkled her eyebrows, fiddled with the zipper on her housedress. The possibility of her sister not remembering this most seminal moment in their lives together had never even occurred to her.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Go on.”
Of course it matters, thought Adele. Memory matters! She cleared her throat. “Anyway, so we’d been waiting in line to go on the Ferris wheel . . .” She took a deep breath, cleared her throat again. “We were in line to go on the Ferris wheel. Mom didn’t realize she needed to buy tickets beforehand, so she stepped out of line to go buy them. But she didn’t tell us she was going—she used to do that all the time, remember? just disappeared without explanation—and so we kept moving along in the line, just the two of us by ourselves—”
“— Oh, wait. I do remember. And I started crying.”
“Yes! Exactly!” Victory at last. Someone to share the past, to prove she hadn’t just dreamed it. “You started crying. So we got to the front of the line, but we still didn’t have tickets, so we couldn’t go on the ride, and you wanted to leave to go look for Mom . . .”
“I had to go to the bathroom,” said Trudy.
“I don’t remember that. Anyway, for whatever reason, you wanted to leave, and I kept saying, no, we have to stay here so she can find us again. But the people who were running the ride kept asking us to move out of the way and let the people with tickets through, and I kept saying that our mother would be right back. That she’d definitely come back for us, and then we’d go on the ride, even though I was starting to have my doubts.” I kept picturing her stepping into the surf and floating away, Adele thought. Or diving off the top of the Cyclone into the pavement. “At that point we didn’t even care about going on the ride anymore. Remember? We just wanted to be found. We just wanted our mother to come find us.”
“So what does that have to do with anything?”
“Do you remember what you said—what you made me promise once Mom had come back, and given us our tickets, and we were stuck in that metal cage all by ourselves because she had another migraine and didn’t feel well enough to go on with us?”
“No.”
“You said, ‘If Mommy’s not there when we come back down, will you promise to stay with me forever?’ “
“I did?”
“You did. Right at the top of the ride.” Even at your young age and at that great height, Adele thought (feeling a sudden intensity of tenderness toward her little sister), you could tell we were on shaky ground with our mother. That we’d always be on shaky ground. That it would mostly just be the two of us, rocking back and forth in the ocean breeze, holding hands in our metal cage. “And I said of course. Of course I’ll stay with you forever.” Adele was starting to cry again, clinging to the parking meter for support, realizing she could no longer keep such a promise.
Trudy looked at her sister, perplexed. “Um, Adele? Two things. One, if I actually spoke those words—which I have no memory of having spoken—I’m sure I was just asking if you’d be my sister forever. You know, not understanding that once you’re related, you’re always related. But anyway it doesn’t matter, because the second thing is that I know you’re going through a rough time with Shep right now, and I love that you’re still worried about my well-being, and I’m frankly, well, I’m just . . . touched t
hat you think I still need you, but I’m a twenty-nine-year-old woman.” Her voice was growing restive, hurt. “I’m seven months shy of my PhD! I pay my own rent, and I cook my own food, and I’m perfectly capable of taking care of my—.”
“No, no, I didn’t mean to suggest . . .” Adele was really making a mess of this, she knew. She wanted her parting words to her sister to be meaningful, deep, full of pathos and shared memory; instead she was pissing her off. “I just wanted you to know that I love you.”
“Jesus, Adele, you sound like one of those after-school specials. You’re going to Frederick. We’ll see each other as much as we do now. Maybe even more so now that the . . .”—she peeked inside the car at the girls, who’d moved on to playing checkers, then lowered her voice, just in case—“. . . asshole’s out of the picture.”
“He’s not an asshole, Trude. Please don’t call him that. Don’t even think that.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Adele. He is an asshole! Stop trying to defend him. He’s a drunk and a cheat and a big fat bully, and he’s never been a good father to those—”
“Stop! That’s not true. He’s always been a good father to the girls. He’s always loved them. He may not love me anymore, but who can blame him? I’m the bad person. I’m the monster, Trudy. Me. Look at me.”
And Trudy looked at her sister, thinking, look what he’s done to her, the schmuck.
And Adele looked at her sister, thinking, she’ll never understand.
And the two sisters kissed one another and said good-bye.
Then, as she pulled the station wagon away from the curb, Adele rolled down her window and yelled, “Wait! Trudy!” catching her sister midstride. “Where would I find the nearest hardware store?” And Trudy, assuming her sister needed nails or maybe some lightbulbs or a caulk gun for her new apartment, gave her directions.
3.
“Let’s say I wanted to seal up a room,” Adele was saying to the clerk in the red apron. “Like I was doing work in one room, you know, the kind of work that creates a lot of sawdust and mess, and I wanted to seal it off from the rest of the apartment. Make it so that no air or dust could go in or out. What would you recommend?” There. She’d said it. She’d taken the next step. She was surprised, as she spoke the words, to feel a burst of exhilaration mixed in with her anguish, a lump of sugar tossed in with the tar. She imagined that this is what it must feel like to hold up a store: dread and excitement, in dissonant stereo, a sense of power normally reserved for those who come by it naturally. Her heart was once more beating at twice its normal speed; she felt light-headed and agitated, in equal measure. She looked at her watch. 1:15 PM. She still had a few more hours before Shep would come home from his golf game and find the house empty. Clean, but empty. He’ll think we’re just out at the grocery store, she reasoned. Or shopping at the mall. She wondered how many hours would have to pass between his arrival home and the darkening of the evening sky before her husband would start to wonder where dinner was. The envelope, she knew, would take him at least a week to find. Sorting through the piles of mail, like most of the domestic chores, was her job.
“To seal up a room?” said the clerk. “Follow me.”
She’d left the girls in the car in the parking lot, with the usual admonishment to keep the doors locked and not speak to any strangers. April had wanted to come in—she always wanted to come in—but Adele thought it best for her to stay with Lily. “But I love the smell of hardware stores!” April had said, her voice growing desperate. “Please let me come in.” “No,” said Adele. So she left her daughters there atop the defiled backseat, listening to a scratchy off-the-radio recording of “Crocodile Rock” on Lily’s tape recorder.
“You can’t come in with me, April, or else the surprise will be ruined,” she’d lied, wondering what kind of object she might bring back to them, a question that was answered the minute she saw the bin of flashlights near the cash register. Perfect, she thought. We’ll need a few anyway. She followed the clerk to the next aisle, passing rows of tiny boxes filled with nails and screws, nuts and bolts, now past the garden hoses and household cleansers, breathing it all in deeply. April’s right, she thought. It’s a good smell.
“This here’s plastic sheeting,” said the clerk, a freckle-faced teen with a distinct Southern twang. You never knew what kind of accent you’d get in Maryland. The crossroads between north and south, here and there, its voices ranged from the dropped g’s of warmer climes, to the odd-sounding native o (rendering the three-syllabled Potomac into the nearly four-syllable puh-teh-o-mak), to the New York dialect of transplants like herself, who still pronounced words like god and dog gooawd and dooawg, despite all attempts to soften them. Your origins marked you, thought Adele. In ways you could never escape. “You put a piece of this here up with some duct tape, that should do the trick.”
“Thank you,” said Adele. “That’s exactly what I need.”
Her heart beating even faster now, she carried her purchases up to the register, pulled three flashlights and a couple of packages of C batteries from the bin, and paid for all of it with the cash she’d withdrawn from the drive-through bank window on Friday morning, knowing that if she were to follow through on her plan—which at the moment she’d pulled up to the teller in her car, rolled down her window and said, Three hundred dollars, please,” she still wasn’t sure she would—she’d want to avoid using her credit card. She tried to look normal as she stood there and waited for change, like a woman who just wanted to seal up a room. But her hands were shaking as the bills changed hands, and she made the kind of nervous, eye-contact-avoiding small talk with the cashier about home improvement and sawdust he would have probably described as either suspicious or odd, had he ever been asked.
“I got you some flashlights,” Adele said, as she opened the door of the car.
April breathed a sigh of relief. Her mother was back.
4.
“Where are we going?” April finally said, after they’d been driving in the car, around the Beltway, from Maryland to Virginia and back to Maryland again, until the gas tank was nearly empty.
Adele hadn’t really thought through the where and when of her plan. She knew she needed to find someplace hidden from the road, where a car might sit, idling, without arousing suspicion. And she knew she had a better chance of success with this strategy after dark, when the roads would be emptier, her daughters sleepier. What she hadn’t counted on in her calculations was the rain, which had begun to slam the windshield with the kind of biblical ferocity that rendered visibility close to nil. It would be impossible to make the necessary adjustments to the tailpipe without getting completely soaked. Or even to spot a proper venue for what she’d come to refer to in her head as the big sleep. “Camping,” she said, over the slap of windshield wipers. “We’re going camping. But not tonight. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow night, because of the rain.”
“So where are we going tonight?” said Lily.
A good question. She’d considered driving to New Jersey, where her mother had moved. But this was more of an instinctual impulse, misguided and useless, which she’d learned, by necessity, to repress. She was nearing the Maryland state line again, a GAS FOOD LODGING sign pointing the way. She turned on her signal. “We’ll sleep in a motel tonight,” she said. “That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?”
“Yay!” the girls both shouted.
“Does it have an ice machine?” said April.
“And cups wrapped in plastic?” said her sister.
It took so little to excite a child. The promise of ice. When does that part get lost? Adele wondered. “Yes,” she said. “It’ll have an ice machine and plastic cups. Just like the Sea Esta.”
What a dumb name for a motel. She’d always thought so. “Sea” she understood, and the play on the word “siesta,” but what did “Esta” mean? It didn’t stand by itself. A play on words could only work if each part could stand on its own. Like the OK Coral Shop, just down the road from the Sea Esta
, where the girls bought those puka shell necklaces. That worked. Except, she thought, they were undercutting themselves by calling their merchandise mediocre. You’d never have the OK Burger Stand. Or the OK Crab Shack. No one wants crabs or burgers that are just okay, any more than one would want to have anything that is just okay. Unless, of course, the choice is between okay and miserable. She’d take an OK Life over the one she had now. She’d even settle for a Below-par-but-coping Life. Or a Boring-but-emotionally-steady Life. Anything but this.
The Sea Esta Motel. Esta isn’t a word. Couldn’t they see that? She tried coming up with a better name. Sea Sun, she thought: “season.” No. No one would get it. They’d just say, “We’re going to the Sea Sun Motel for vacation,” without ever considering the elision. She pictured her own name. Adele. A Dell. As in “The farmer in the.” She must have sung that song with the girls at least a thousand times. Two thousand, even. The farmer in the dell, the farmer in the dell, hi ho the derry-o . . . and the farmer fucks the wife and the wife slaps the child and the child scratches the nurse and the nurse kicks the dog and the dog bites the cat and the cat eats the mouse and the mouse shits all over the cheese and the cheese—oh, finally, the cheese, that lucky hunk of mold!—the cheese stands alone. Covered in mouse shit, but all by itself, with no responsibilities, no one asking it questions, no one to bother it or tell it to use old sponges instead of new because he couldn’t stand to see anything wasted. His parents lived through the Depression, he’d said. They taught him the value of thrift. Depression? Fuck their Depression. She had her own, thank you very much.
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