by Ann Hood
“Auntie Cal,” John-Glenn said as soon as she walked in, “Alexander never came home until just now.” He pressed a Monopoly token, the top hat, between his fingers. “He’s in big trouble, right?”
Cal felt as if she filled the small room with the smell of fish.
Mackenzie looked up.
“I own Boardwalk and Park Place,” she said. She held up the two deeds, the blue stripes across the top of each.
“So what? So what?” John-Glenn said. A fine spray of spit streamed through the gap in his front teeth. The teeth didn’t grow in until years later, when he was already in junior high. “I have all the light light blues. All of them.”
Grammie stopped reading.
“They’re not worth peanuts,” she said.
She and Mackenzie giggled together.
Jams cleared his throat.
Cal looked around her. She felt as if she had walked into someone else’s life. She sucked in her bottom lip, tasting still the sweet wine.
Grammie sniffed loudly. “You smell,” she said.
Jams led Cal by the elbow to the porch where Alexander was sprawled on the glider, wrapped in one of Mrs. Sweetlowe’s afghans. As Mrs. Sweetlowe lost her eyesight, the gaps in the crochet and the edges had grown more and more erratic.
Jams cleared his throat again.
Alexander opened his eyes.
“Tell your mother.”
“I’m too embarrassed.”
“That’s all right,” Cal said. “As long as you’re okay.”
“Emma Matlock’s parents don’t think it’s all right,” Jams said.
Cal pictured the girl. She was a year younger than Alexander, her parents August people too. She was small and skinny, frail-looking, with round wire-rimmed glasses and pale hair. She went to Hunter High School in Manhattan and always told Cal the things she had done in school the year before. Just last week she had seen Emma on the beach. “I did a paper on the old Jack Benny radio show,” she’d said. “For my communications class. I went to the Museum of Broadcasting and just sat there for hours listening to them.”
“I’m in love,” Alexander said.
Emma’s voice was so soft that people tended to tilt their heads toward her, even when she wasn’t speaking, in case she started. She wore an old black one-piece bathing suit and a smear of zinc oxide across her nose.
“They spent the night up at Truro,” Jams said. “Slept there. In the dunes.”
“She’s like an angel,” Alexander said. “And to think I ignored her all these years.” He sat up. “I mean, last year she started to tell me about African tribal masks and I walked away.”
“Well,” Cal said. “That’s fine.”
She went into the bathroom and stood under a hot shower until the water turned icy.
She never went back to the docks.
Once, before they left that summer, she saw the fisherman at a crafts fair in Hyannis. He held delicate silver earrings in the palm of his hand. There was mother-of-pearl inlaid at the bottom of the tear shape, and it glistened in the sunlight. Mackenzie tried on rings, interlocked silver hearts. Cal had looked right into his eyes across the table of silver, shocked by their color, a velvety violet. It was a cool day and he wore a white cable knit sweater. She saw that his front tooth was chipped, and wondered if it had always been that way. He held the earrings like an offering.
Cal turned away abruptly.
She thought he said, “I waited for you.”
Her impulse when she’d left Rhode Island last Labor Day had been to run away from home, like a child. She used to threaten this sometimes when her own children were young. Jams would be at one of the liquor stores he owned, Grammie would be demanding dinner or a card game or her attention, Hope would be crying because her husband, Ricardo Havana, had left her, and John-Glenn would be in trouble somehow—popping all the fuses in the fuse box or trying to shave the cat with an electric razor—and Cal would state calmly, “I’m going to run away.” She would get in the car and drive around and around the block until she was ready to go back in the house.
Grammie used to have a large map of the United States hanging in her bedroom. She would stick pushpins into the cities she’d visited. New England was a mass of red and yellow pins. A solitary green one jutted out from Atlantic City. One blue one pointed into Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That memory of her mother’s map had led Cal to keeping the one in the car. She marked off city after city as she drove, cluttering it with X’s.
Last September, Cal had stood in her kitchen and watched, unmoving, as a pan of water boiled over on the stove. Jams had come in moments before, looking sheepish. Cal had known immediately what he had done.
“What did you take?” she had demanded.
Jams didn’t answer. He kept his eyes focused on the big green and yellow squares of the floor.
She had hit his pockets lightly with her hands, like a policeman frisking a criminal. His jeans hung too low off his hips, the belt the only thing holding them up at all. Cal’s fingers found something in the pocket of his blue cardigan, the alligator on its chest grinning at her.
“Why are you doing this?” she’d said, her hands frozen on the outside of the pocket. He had earned the nickname Jams as a child because he was always getting into trouble. No one ever called him Jared, even though as an adult he had become quieter and less likely to make waves. Yet, in the past three months he’d stolen corkscrews, packs of gum, even tubes of lipstick.
Slowly Jams shook his head. The blondeness there was turning, rapidly, to silver.
Cal reached into the pocket and pulled out a small tangerine.
“We have a refrigerator full of food,” she shouted. She wanted to hit him.
Mackenzie, her skin so tanned she looked foreign, stood in the doorway.
“We have to stop this,” Mackenzie said.
“A refrigerator full!”
Jams remained silent. He took the tangerine from her, held the tiny orange fruit to his nose, and inhaled.
“Dad,” Mackenzie said.
From downstairs, Cal could hear John-Glenn’s high-pitched laughter.
Jams pressed his thumb into the fruit and began to peel it, dropping the torn skin into his pocket. Cal walked over to the refrigerator and yanked the door open. She pulled food off the shelves and threw it, hard, at him. Strawberries. A small block of cheddar cheese. An egg that hit his leg and then rolled onto the floor without breaking. Then another egg, this one cracking open immediately, its yolk bleeding on the green and yellow squares. Mackenzie was yelling “Stop” over and over but Cal kept throwing food. The milk carton oozed milk as it flew out. A jar of mustard cracked into two perfect halves. Jams stood there, peeling the tangerine until all the skin was off. Then he pulled a canoe-shaped section off and ate it.
The water on the stove began to boil, tiny bubbles erupting into bigger ones. Cal had stopped to watch it boil over, the water hissing as it splashed onto the flame below the pan. Mackenzie, crying, had turned the stove off and then started to clean up the food on the floor. The egg slid off the paper towel like a tear.
Jams didn’t move at all. He just kept eating the stolen fruit, piece by piece.
“I’m going to run away,” Cal had said quietly, watching the bubbles die in the pan. “I can’t stay here anymore.”
Then she’d really left. She had gotten in Alexander’s car and had driven away. She wanted to contact them somehow but could only bring herself to send postcards without any messages written on them. She had no message for anyone yet. But this way they’d know she was all right.
The sign ahead of her now said: WELCOME TO COLORADO, THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN STATE.
Cal sighed.
In front of her, a car with a full ski rack on top had broken down. Teenagers in brightly colored ski outfits stood beside it. They blazed color against the white snow—turquoise, orange, fuchsia. One girl held a handwritten sign, HELP!!!
Cal drove past.
The girl, she thought, ha
d looked a little like Emma Matlock. That same hair, so pale it really had no color. Even the same glasses, and they’d been long out of style now. Maybe it was just that she’d been remembering Emma.
Alexander and Emma had gone out through most of college. She came home with him every Christmas and brought chestnuts and tiny pine trees decorated with miniature ornaments, doves and balls with angel’s hair. Her father was in advertising and not long after she and Alexander started dating, her father grew a mustache like a walrus and long hair. He wore paisley shirts and left her mother for a model named Coco who had starred in one of his soft drink ads. Emma always had stories to tell them, about ski trips he took with Coco, rock concerts they went to, and the gifts he gave her.
Emma majored in French at Smith. When she went to study in Paris her junior year she met a man there, Armand, and never came home. He was a diplomat now, and they lived all over the world. Postcards still came to Alexander written in her backward left-handed slant, from Hong Kong, Venezuela, New Zealand. The day Alexander got the letter from Emma telling him about Armand, he’d collected all the things she’d ever given him, and burned them. He had stood over the flames crying. “Armand,” he’d said. “What kind of stupid name is that?”
For a long time, Cal had a fantasy in which Emma left Armand and came back to Alexander. She imagined them in a high-ceilinged room together, with bookshelves and Oriental vases and a piano playing Chopin. His life, in contrast, since Daisy had been noisy and out of sync. Their apartments had been a series of rooms filled with unpacked boxes and makeshift shelves. After Sam was born, the smell of spilled milk lingered beneath Daisy’s perfume. It had seemed to Cal that Alexander spent his life with Daisy running from something.
Cal laughed. Who was she to talk about running away? It’s what she was doing now, what she had imagined doing for a very long time.
She had even tried it once, a half-hearted effort their last year at the Cape. Alexander drove down on weekends with Daisy, who greased herself in cocoa butter and lay in the sun until someone went to get her to come inside. John-Glenn got hepatitis halfway through August and Hope and Grammie took him home to recuperate. Jams’s niece, Jodi, was visiting from Pennsylvania, overweight and sullen. She tried a different fad diet every week, gorging herself on grapefruits until she broke out in hives, then eating only leafy green vegetables. Finally, she settled on something called BARF. A day of bananas, a day of apples, a day of raisins, a day of frankfurters. Then repeat. The hot dog days made Cal ill; the smell of boiling frankfurters clung to the sticky air.
That year the temperature stayed above ninety-five degrees for almost two weeks, and the fans did nothing more than blow hot air back at them. Mackenzie had met a boy in Falmouth, and worried that her boyfriend, Felix, from back home would show up. She kept saying to Cal, “What should I say? What should I do?” and retelling how she felt and what her options were until Cal had said to her, “You are not the only person here, you know. Everyone has problems this year.” And she had screamed at Jodi, “Can’t you grill those hot dogs? Or fry them? Do they have to boil like that?”
Cal found a trunk in the attic full of Mrs. Sweetlowe’s old clothes and letters. She started going up there that summer and sorting through them. There was something oddly comforting about the feel of the worn lace, the faint smell of floral sachet, and the world the letters spoke of. Cal sat in front of a small fan and pretended this life was hers—parties on the veranda where the girls snuck away for a cigarette, boyfriends away at war, and one exciting Saturday spent watching an airplane fly by.
She could not imagine that the Patsy Sweetlowe whose things were in this old steamer trunk was Mrs. Sweetlowe, who she’d seen in the car, blind, with thinly curled bluish hair. The one whose letters Cal read was funny and smart and independent. She turned down three marriage proposals, then ran away with an inventor who took her across the country, trying to peddle his inventions. When Cal went up to the attic, she entered a different world.
Then one day, their last week there, Mr. Sweetlowe called and told them his wife had died. Cal thought not of the eighty-six-year-old woman, but of the young girl in the letters. That day, Cal had found a hard peppermint candy in one of the dress pockets in the attic, and it was as if the young Patsy were still alive.
“She was old,” Jams told Cal when she’d cried. “We didn’t even know her.”
But the loss seemed real and near to her. She felt that it was a sign of sorts, a message that she had to do something before it was too late, before she lost the young girl in herself. Cal had thought of going to Vivvie’s, but it seemed too far. And she wasn’t really sure what she would say when she got there. She needed to sort things out. So she drove up to Provincetown and checked into a small inn on a curving road that overlooked the beach.
The room was too expensive, but the heat wave broke that night and a cool breeze came in right from the sea. Cal lay under the sheet and listened to two men in the room next to hers making love all night. One said, “Aaaaargh” over and over, in a guttural voice, like a wild animal. In the morning, they ate breakfast beside her at the inn’s outdoor patio. She had tried to guess which one had made that sound, but they were each polite and soft-spoken and she wondered if it had been a wild animal. Or just her imagination. When she stood to leave, one of the men smiled at her and said, “Good day,” like a country gentleman.
She’d had no money, certainly not enough to spend another night there. After she’d walked around the town, through galleries and shops, she’d headed back to the cottage and her family. The house was noisy and cool when she got there, and the smell of barbecue sauce drifted in from the grill on the patio. Daisy and Alexander were there, and had brought Grammie with them. Felix had driven down to see Mackenzie, and everyone talked about Nixon, and what would happen to him, whether he’d be impeached or not, whether he’d resign.
Cal waited for Jams to ask her where she’d been. But he didn’t.
That night in bed, with the fan off and the window opened to bring in cool air, she’d said, “I went to Provincetown yesterday.”
He was quiet.
“I almost didn’t come back,” she said finally.
In the distance she heard a foghorn.
“Well,” Jams said, “I guess it’s a good place to go and think.”
A good place to go and think.
Cal said the words silently, then out loud. Around her now the Rocky Mountains rose like outstretched arms. Colorado blended into Utah. She’d reach her destination soon. San Francisco. She could start a new life there. Be a poet, just like she started out to be long ago. The hills and fog and gingerbread houses would be a constant inspiration. Already, she’d submitted the poems she’d written on this trip to a journal there, using, of all people, Iris Bloom’s address on the return envelope. It was the only address Cal knew out there and it made her feel good to think of San Francisco as her new home. The roads were winding and icy. She watched a jeep in front of her fishtail. Once. Twice. Cat held her breath. The jeep regained control, vanished around the bend.
Sometimes, when she turned a corner, the view was so spectacular she gasped. She wished they had had Alexander cremated and had thrown his ashes here, over these mountains. It seemed more right than putting him in the ground off a highway in Warwick, Rhode Island. But it had all happened so quickly—hadn’t she spoken to him that very afternoon?—that things came to her too late. She would think of songs they should have had played at the service, poems that the family could have read.
One night shortly after the funeral she had woken up trying to remember a particular Beatles song he had liked. She’d known that the words, if she could only remember them, were beautiful and appropriate.
Mackenzie was asleep down the hall, in her old bedroom, and Cal had run to her. The room was lit by a plastic nightlight, the type that sat flush into an outlet. Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty.
Cal shook her awake.
“There’s a song,” she’d
said when Mackenzie opened her eyes.
Cal tried to hum it.
“What song?” Mackenzie said.
“Something about places I remember,” she said. She hummed again softly. “But of all these friends and lovers, something …”
“I don’t know it,” Mackenzie said.
Cal turned on the overhead light.
The furniture was the color of eggshells, with tiny yellow and pink flowers stenciled on it. The sheets on the bed were a soft yellow, like melted butter, and Mackenzie’s hair, bleached from the sun, seemed white against them.
“You have the record,” Cal said. “I know you have it. You used to play it all the time.”
She opened the closet and rummaged deep inside, to the back. She pulled out an old album case, orange with black kaleidoscope swirls.
“Sing it again,” Mackenzie said. “Maybe I can think of it.”
“There’s something in it about places I remember that have changed,” Cal said, pulling albums out of the case and sliding them across the floor as she discarded them. “And how you never forget people and things that came before.”
Meet the Beatles. Jan and Dean’s Deadman’s Curve. The Herman’s Hermits.
Mackenzie smoothed each cover down as her mother tossed it aside.
Until finally Cal said, “This is it. ‘My Life.’”
Mackenzie nodded.
“Now I know it,” she said.
“We should have played it at the funeral,” Cal said.
There were other things she thought of later. But here, in the mountains of Utah, she saw that all those things were wrong too. Cal pulled over at a lookout. She stood, staring down at clouds and mountaintops. She could make out the S shapes of ski trails. She had read once that if a person was cremated, he or she didn’t just dissolve into fine ash. Rather, there were chunks of bone like rock candy and ash thick with crystals, and more ash grainy like sand. Cal imagined having that now, Alexander’s body crushed in her hands like seashells, and she opened her hand over the railing, stretched it into the cold blue air, as if she really were scattering his ashes here.