by Ann Hood
When they got back to the Porters’, the house was dark.
“My mother always used to leave a light on for us when we were out,” Mackenzie said.
“I have to have you in my life,” he said.
He thought this sounded dramatic, and inappropriate beside her grief.
But she smiled, and nodded.
“I’ve thought of you,” she said, “but it’s been as if time has disappeared.”
A month later she moved to New York.
Jason knew that somehow Mackenzie had to give in to her grief. She kept holding back, keeping it at arm’s length. This mission she was on, taking Sam to Rhode Island for Christmas, was an effort to retrieve what had been lost. But the old structure could not be revived. Wasn’t that, after all, the very nature of death?
He told her they could get married and build a home together.
“Your image of home,” he’d told her, “is precious and beautiful. But it’s gone.”
“No,” she’d said.
He knew that for her to admit that was to accept Alexander’s death. To marry him and start a life together was to turn her back on her brother.
Jason ordered another beer.
Kyle O’Day walked through the door.
She was over an hour late for their meeting. As she moved toward him, Jason’s gut ached for Mackenzie.
“Dance class,” Kyle said as she sat down.
Her red hair hung loose and fell around her in gentle ripples. She had a pouty mouth that she painted in a clear gloss that smelled like bubble gum.
He wanted her to disappear. Or to metamorphose into Mackenzie. Mackenzie opening her bag and laying out photographs of doorways. He imagined them there before him—brick against wood, or a bright green one decked in flowers.
“God,” Kyle said, and rolled her eyes. “Dance. Voice. Scene study. I hardly have time to breathe. Really.”
She lit up a clove cigarette.
“Want one?” She held the crumpled red packet toward him.
Jason shook his head.
“The thing I wanted to focus on,” he said, “is that the role you’re playing—”
“Tracy.”
“Yes. The role of Tracy is someone older, but still childlike. That’s why she can really hold Paul McCartney as some idol. Ideal.”
She nodded.
“I’m not sure you have a grasp,” he said, “of who Tracy is. Or rather, where she’s coming from.”
“Well,” Kyle said, “personally I would fall for George. I mean, me, Kyle O’Day. I would like George. He was all dark and mysterious, right?”
Her voice was breathless and quick.
“Since Tracy’s crush on Paul, that is to say, since she was a child, a lot has happened,” Jason said. His nose tickled from all the sweet smells. Clove. Bubble gum. “She was thrown into a world of questioning. Rebellion. The Vietnam War. Drugs. Free sex.”
“Blah, blah, blah.”
He frowned.
“Listen,” Kyle said, “I know.”
She puffed on her clove cigarette for effect.
“I was at Woodstock,”, she said.
“Kyle.”
“I was.”
“In 1969 you were, what? Five years old?”
“Three.” She smiled. “I was one of those naked little kids playing in the mud. I’m even in a magazine picture. All dirty, holding a flower.”
His frown deepened as he listened.
“I’ll show you the picture sometime,” she said. “My parents were into all that. God, my brother may have even been conceived there. That just blows my mother away. They even named him Arlo, for some—”
“I know,” Jason said.
“Right. Now my father works for Donald Trump. My mother thinks it’s disgusting, that my dad’s this big real estate mogul. He says he laughs all the way to the bank.”
“What do you say?”
Kyle shrugged. “It sure beats fucking in a pile of mud while Jimi Hendrix blows his mind on stage.”
They stared at each other.
He wished she’d disappear.
“No offense,” she said.
Jason finished his beer.
He closed his eyes while Kyle talked about the character. He imagined Mackenzie, driving south toward Maryland and Sam, and tried to will her back to him.
CHAPTER THREE
SOMETIMES SAM LIKED TO lie in bed with all the lights off. Even the clown lamp, with its soft-colored balloons. He lay there and tried to erase every thought from his head. He pretended his mind was a blackboard, and imagined a hand wiping it clean. Swoosh. Swoosh. Then nothing.
His mother hated when he went in there and did that.
She’d open the door and right away turn on the lights. Every one of them.
“Sam,” she’d say, “what exactly are you doing? Sit up. Sit up, right now.”
Before his father had died, Sam would never have done anything like that, like lying in bed in the dark. He would draw instead. Big pictures with lots of yellow and blue in them. Pictures full of smiling fish, and a big round happy sun. His father had had one of them framed and he’d hung it in his living room in Boston, like it was real art. That picture had a rainbow, and tall flowers that looked like lollipops, and green green grass.
He knew that his mother was afraid he was crazy. He had heard her telling her best friend, Allison. She had said, “Can little boys lose their minds?” Allison had said, “Yes. Look at Sybil. She went crazy when she was just a little girl.” Sam didn’t know Sybil, or any crazy children. He wasn’t worried anyway, because he knew that he was sad, not crazy.
His mother called him Mr. Turtle. She tried to laugh when she said it but her voice sounded nervous, the way it sounded when she talked to Grandma Cal when she used to call. Another time, he’d heard his mother say to Allison, “He’s like a shell.” Even though she’d said it like it was a bad thing to be, it had made Sam think of the ocean and seashells and the tiny animals who lived in them and he liked the idea of it. He was a shell. His father had told him stories about seashells. They were like marble palaces to the sea animals, he’d said. So when Sam had heard his mother say that, he’d smiled, and curled himself into a tight ball, like a sea scallop in its fan-shaped palace.
Sometimes, after his mother came in and turned on all the lights, she’d say, “Let’s read.”
The truth was, he didn’t like books so much anymore. Instead, he liked to try to remember the stories that his father had told him. Looking at books just mixed him up.
She’d pull out a Curious George book from the shelf. The one about the hats. The pictures used to make him laugh. All those funny hats piled on that little monkey’s head.
“Look how funny Curious George looks with all those hats,” she’d say.
Sam would look, just to make her happy. But it didn’t seem funny to him anymore. Instead, he’d try to remember. Had his father ever told him a story about a monkey? Or was it just a book? When he couldn’t remember exactly, he’d slam the Curious George book closed and bang it with his fist.
Once, after he did that, his mother shouted, “You are impossible and I am tired of you. Do you hear me?”
Sam had rolled himself up tight. He thought of a story his father used to tell about an island that disappeared and he pretended to be there, a sea scallop in a purple shell on the island of Atlantis.
Daisy stood in the doorway of Sam’s room, gritting her teeth so hard they almost hurt. Looking at her little boy curled up like this, in the dark, should make her feel sympathy, she thought. Or sadness. But all it did was make her angry.
“All right, Mr. Turtle,” she said, not even trying to make her voice sound cheerful. “Mackenzie will be here any minute and I want you ready to go. Got it?”
Sam didn’t budge.
“Good,” she said, as if he had answered.
She turned on the overhead light, then waited for a reaction from him. When she got none, she left.
In the living r
oom, she piled magazines, shoes, toys—whatever was laying around—and threw it all into the closet. She wanted order. She wanted Mackenzie to see that Daisy’s life was going swell. When Alexander had moved out on her a couple of years ago, Daisy had thought she’d fall apart. She’d imagined the Porters in their big house, nodding at each other, feeling self-righteous, thinking Daisy Bloom had lost after all. She was going to show Mackenzie that she hadn’t lost. She had made money as a cosmetics company sales rep. She’d bought this condo. She’d even won a pale pink Cadillac for being the top saleswoman in her district last year. All without being Mrs. Alexander Porter.
Daisy was only seventeen when she’d first met Alexander. She had just graduated from high school, despite all the teachers’ threats that she’d never make it. Even though everyone around her was going to college, or into the Navy, or getting married, Daisy felt that she was going to leave them all behind. She had big plans. She was tall enough and skinny enough to be a model. When she looked in the mirror, she didn’t see that her hair was too brassy or her teeth too crooked on the bottom. Instead, she’d imagine herself taking the train to New York and marching into the Eileen Ford Agency where Eileen Ford herself would gasp. People were always telling Daisy that she resembled Goldie Hawn. Same shaggy hair and blue eyes as round as Frisbees.
She used to always talk about becoming a model. Before school ended, she used to cut classes and take off to the beach with whatever boy she liked at the time. Maybe someone with a new Camaro, or an old boyfriend home on leave. They would drink a bottle of Riunite Lambrusco and smoke dope and Daisy would talk about being a model. “You need to be tall and skinny and beautiful,” she’d say. Then she’d undress for them. “Am I beautiful?” she’d ask. Even now she sometimes thought about those days at the beach, about all those boys who believed in her, who believed that Eileen Ford would hire her as a model, that she’d make five hundred dollars a day and be on the cover of Glamour magazine. She still could remember the hairless chests and faded jeans they all seemed to have, and the taste of the too-sweet wine mixed with smoke, their eager hands and tongues on her. Their names had all faded in her mind. Instead, she recalled a sea horse tattoo, an appendectomy scar, a gold stud earring. “Beats algebra,” she always said afterward. It was her standard line, rehearsed like her Goldie Hawn giggle and the particular way she rolled her eyes. At home she practiced walking with a book on her head. But nobody ever saw that.
All that summer after graduation she worked at Jordan Marsh and saved her money to pay a photographer for her portfolio pictures. She wrote to Eileen Ford, and got a form letter that said she needed a picture in formal wear, one in jeans, and one in a bathing suit. The photographer posed her in front of a screen with a sunset painted on it. He was short and fat with a goatee. He smelled like garlic. For almost an hour she posed in her bright orange bikini in front of that fake sunset. Finally she’d said, “Can I change now?” His beard had grown damp and there were big circles of sweat under his arms and on his back. “Why don’t you touch yourself?” he’d said. He reached over and slipped his moist hand into her bikini bottom. “Touch yourself here,” he said. She didn’t move. He had three hundred dollars of hers. He whispered, “I know Eileen Ford. I’ve sent girls to her. Mona Grant. You know Mona Grant?” He reached over and unsnapped her bikini bra. Her breasts fell out and the top dangled around her neck by its thin straps. “Do you really know Eileen Ford?” she’d said. “Really?” Later, he’d laughed. “Kid,” he told her, “you need to see a dentist. And your nose is too long. But your body’s pretty good.” He gave her his card. “I do movies too. You want to work for me, give me a call.” “Fuck you,” she’d said, and left.
When she met Alexander, she told him that she had been to New York and that the Eileen Ford Agency had sent her to a photographer who told her modeling was a terrible business. “He thought I’d be a good actress,” she’d said, “but I wanted to do more with my life.” Alexander had been impressed. He used to introduce her as a former model sometimes. He was the first guy to take her on real dates. To open the car door for her and pay for her dinner. The first time she walked into the Porter house, she had felt like a princess entering a castle. And then Mackenzie had come in, and Daisy had known that here was the real princess.
“Not anymore,” Daisy said out loud.
She looked around her living room, pleased.
But a few minutes later when Mackenzie arrived, Daisy felt embarrassed by the room. The gray suede couch that she’d paid a fortune for looked tacky. The two glossy prints of large pink flowers seemed cheap, tasteless. And the balloon curtains on the window seemed funereal suddenly, like the satin interior of a coffin.
“Nice,” Mackenzie said politely.
Daisy shrugged. She thought about how long it had taken her to pick those prints out, how unsure she’d been about the curtains.
“How’s Sam doing?” Mackenzie asked.
“Fine, considering he still refuses to talk. It’s enough to drive you crazy. You’ll see.”
“Well, Daisy,” Mackenzie said, “he’s had a terrible trauma. We all have.”
Daisy noticed that Mackenzie’s eyes were a murky green instead of their usual bright turquoise.
The room seemed to grow more and more shabby the longer Mackenzie stood there in her brightly striped sweater and shiny blonde hair. Daisy had an impulse to move things around, rearrange everything so that it might look better. She thought of the house she’d grown up in.
The Bloom house was square and brick. Every house on the street was identical, and people added shutters or awnings or porches to make theirs stand out. But the Bloom house remained untouched, until its plainness was what made it, finally, different from the others. The night their father left, Daisy and her sister, Iris, were eating potato chips, dipping them into a mixture of Lipton’s dried onion soup and sour cream, and watching Petticoat junction in the kitchen on a nine-inch-screen TV. Their mother, Donna, watched Peyton Place on the big television in the living room.
“Oops,” their father said, and he patted his shirt pocket. “I’m out of cigs. You need anything, Donna?”
“You can pick up some soda,” she said, “if you’re going to Cumberland Farms.”
She didn’t look at him, just stared at the television. The room, as Daisy remembered it, had been cast in a smoky blue light.
He had walked out without anyone looking up. Iris and Daisy stared at the tiny screen, watched Billie-Jo, Bobbie-Jo, and Betty-Jo, as their father walked out forever. “One woman’s garbage is another’s dessert,” Donna had said in explanation. Their mother had dozens of sayings, one for any occasion that could pop up. “To each his own.” “If you spit in the air, it comes back in your face.”
After their father left, Donna stopped cooking. Sometimes, late at night, she’d make a pot of spaghetti or a pot roast and they’d eat it whenever the mood struck them. Most of the time, they each threw their own meal together and ate it wherever they happened to be. Unwashed dishes could be found anywhere, as they were left beside the bathtub or on top of a bureau or chair. Every couple of months, when there were no more clean dishes, the three of them would go on a search mission to unearth all the used plates. They would wash them in the bathtub and then start over. “If you’re hungry,” Donna used to say, “make a little something.”
When Daisy first started to date Alexander, she’d come home and scream, “They eat real meals there. They all sit together and eat. Roast beef. Mashed potatoes. String beans.” She redecorated her room then, painted her half a soft yellow with floral decals along the borders of the walls. “This isn’t right,” she’d said when she was done. Iris’s half stayed the same dingy off-white with posters of the Monkees taped to the wall.
Daisy started to eat sitting at the kitchen table. She would move away the Reader’s Digests and unopened bills that covered it, set a place for herself with a plate and napkin and a glass of water, and eat. “This,” she would say, “is how a normal per
son eats.”
Donna read cards for a living. Never at home, always for groups of six or more. She did parties mostly and was booked for months in advance. She used a regular deck of playing cards and gave the same advice she gave to her daughters. “There’s a dark haired man. Am I right? What are you doing with him? One woman’s garbage, honey, is another’s dessert.” She told Mrs. Porter that she was a counselor. “The problems I see,” she told her, shaking her head. “What kind of counselor are you exactly?” Cal had asked, pronouncing each word, each syllable, with disbelief. “Psychic counselor, honey,” Donna said.
That first year that Daisy dated Alexander, she came home a few weeks before Christmas, mad again, screaming.
“Can’t we even have a Christmas tree? Like normal people? A little tree, that’s all.”
As children, Iris and Daisy had done any holiday decorating for the house, using things they’d made in school. Red paper hearts pasted to doilies stayed up all year, hung beside turkeys traced from their hands and rough silhouettes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Construction paper chains, meant to hang on Christmas trees, draped instead over the kitchen cupboards until the links tore and sent them to the floor. One year they made pine cone trees, stuck with plaster of paris into empty tunafish cans painted white and green. Those sat among the papers on the table until the pine cones dried up and the paint flaked off and no one could remember why they were even there.
“I’ve had it up to here with the Porters,” Donna had said. “What with their roast beef and their Cape Cod vacations.”
But she bought a tree.
It was silver. The branches stuck out from a center post and came to a pom-pom-tipped end. It had no decorations. Instead, a multicolored light rotated in front of it, changing the tree to shiny blue, then red, then green, and finally yellow. The tree stayed up until March, gathering dust, the pom-poms drooping until they looked like silver streams of tinfoil.
That same year, just before Christmas, the Porters invited the Blooms to their house for dinner. Daisy panicked. She went through Donna’s closets, pulling out clothes. “Don’t you have anything understated?” she said. She sat on Donna’s bed, surrounded by flowered chiffon blouses with ruffled cuffs and tight black dresses with slit skirts and drop backs and screamed. Daisy’s back was pressed against her mother’s satin headboard like a cornered cat, the mascara running down her cheeks and her hair long and straight and yellow. She had tiny feet for such a tall girl, and she was wearing small brown suede moccasins with eagles beaded on the fronts. “Can’t you just look normal?”