by Ann Hood
Aunt Hope and Ricardo eloped on a Sunday night in the spring of 1960. The family was watching Ed Sullivan when the phone rang. Grammie was sitting in her rocking chair, and Alexander and Mackenzie were squeezed into the big overstuffed chair, the color of butterscotch candy. Their mother and father sat together on the pale red sofa. Grammie answered the telephone.
“Hello,” she said, her voice, as always, demanding. She listened, her grip on the receiver tightening every second. Her face grew pale. She picked up her paper fan with the ornate Japanese scene of bridges and blossoms and birds painted on it and began to move it jerkily up and down, a signal for everyone to jump up and go over to her.
“What, Mom? What?” Mackenzie’s mother, Cal, shouted, as if to wake her from a daze.
Behind them, on the screen, of the old Zenith, Czechoslovakian gymnasts formed a fuzzy pyramid of bodies. Alexander crouched in front of the set and counted them quickly, his finger pushing against the screen, touching each person for an instant, climbing up the pyramid until it reached the top. Then he said in awe, “Twenty-one. Holy cow.”
“Mom,” Cal said again. “What?”
Grammie closed her eyes and shoved the receiver into Cal’s hand.
“Hello, hello, hello,” Cal said. “Who is this?”
Mackenzie heard tinny laughter from the caller. She inched closer, trying to make out words.
“Are you drunk?” Cal demanded.
“For God’s sake,” Jams said. “What is going on here?”
Cal pressed the heavy black receiver into her shoulder.
“Hope married Ricardo Havana. They’re in Seekonk now.”
“Tell her,” Grammie whispered from under her fan, “to get home now.”
“Jams,” Cal said to her husband, “tell her.”
Mackenzie watched as her father took the receiver from her mother.
“Why didn’t we get invited?” she asked. “Mom?”
“Not now,” Cal said.
“Does she have a bride gown?” Mackenzie said.
“Hope,” Jams said into the phone, “we think you should come home and talk this over.”
“Or else,” Grammie said.
“Tell her or else,” Cal said.
“Well, now,” Jams said. He put a finger in his free ear to block out the voices in the living room. “That sounds reasonable to me. We’ll see you Wednesday then.”
“Wednesday!” Grammie shrieked. “It will be too late by then.”
The Czechoslovakians leaped backwards out of the pyramid.
“Yikes!” Alexander said.
“They want a little honeymoon,” Jams said. He never raised his voice or spoke quickly. It was always the same even pace. Grammie said that was because he was a Pennsylvania Quaker. “They’re in Seekonk and they thought they’d just keep on going. To Boston, maybe. Or New Hampshire. Ricardo has to sing Wednesday night so they’ll be back sometime before that.”
“Ricardo Havana,” Cal said.
“That man,” Grammie moaned. “I don’t trust anybody with a skinny mustache. And that fake accent.”
“He talks like Ricky Ricardo,” Mackenzie said.
“Yeah,” Alexander said. “Babaloo-oo-oo.”
Jams laughed along with his children.
“Don’t encourage them,” Cal said.
Later, up in Alexander’s room, Mackenzie asked him where Seekonk was. “Right over the state line,” he told her. “Aunt Hope had to go there to get married because the legal age in Massachusetts is younger than in Rhode
Island. To get married here, Grammie would have had to sign a permission slip and she would never do that. Not in a million years.” “Why not?” Mackenzie asked him. “He seems like a nice man. He brings me those little bananas.” Alexander held up his hand and counted the reasons. “Ricardo Havana is foreign, number one. Number two, he doesn’t have a real job. And number three, he drinks too much.”
Mackenzie went into the kitchen. The clock above the sink said three o’clock. When she looked out the window, the sky was daytime bright, illuminated by the lights at the mall across the highway. They stayed lit all night, to keep people out. A patrol car with silent red flashing lights drove by slowly. Mackenzie picked up the telephone and dialed, pushing at the tiny squares quickly, listening to the familiar tune the numbers played.
“Hi,” a mechanical taped voice said, “this is Jason Fine. I can’t come to the phone right now …”
She wanted to hang up. But instead she waited for the beep at the end of the message, then said, “Jason, it’s me.”
“Whoa,” the real Jason cut in. “Wait a minute.”
His voice was thick with sleep. She heard the machine whir, then click off.
“Mackenzie?” he said.
“Hi.”
She could picture him in his railroad flat in the East Village, each room gaping open into the next, the red bathtub in the middle of the kitchen like a strange centerpiece. Mackenzie imagined him sitting on his bed, two doors topped with a thin piece of foam. Above it he had hung two old posters from the Avalon Ballroom period. They had psychedelic swirls and fat elongated letters advertising concerts by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Creem. Jason had tacked them up over a water spot shaped like the state of Florida. She saw him there, his thick brown hair curling in every direction, flat where it had lain on the pillow, wildly poking out everyplace else.
“Are you naked?” she asked, seeing him so.
“Yes,” he said. “I was sleeping.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m in Rhode Island,” she said. “I made it.”
Mackenzie sat on one of the stools at the kitchen counter. The overly bright mall lights washed the rooms in a fluorescent glow and she could see, clearly, Sam asleep on the couch. The ghosts on the mantel stood watch over him from across the living room. A blanket was twisted around his legs, the sheet, covered with a design of violets, was tangled around him like a snake. A violent sleeper, Mackenzie thought. She heard Jason’s voice, a question.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What?”
“How is Sam?”
Mackenzie put her fingers through the curly loops of the telephone cord.
“This is so hard,” she said.
“I know,” Jason said softly.
“Somehow, I knew that if I didn’t show Sam, or tell him, that all those things would disappear.”
“I know,” Jason said again.
“Now I woke up with this crazy idea that maybe I can find my mother and bring her back. I mean, even though Alexander died, we can still be a family, can’t we? Aren’t we stronger than that?”
“What can I do?” Jason said.
Mackenzie reached out in the air, the way she did sometimes at night when they were together and she needed to touch him, his shoulder or leg.
“Feed the cats for me,” she said.
“Of course. Anything else?”
She tried to think. “Those pictures are done. They’re in the bathroom, hanging on the clothesline. You can drop them off at the magazine.”
“Okay. What else?”
“I can’t think.”
“Call me when you can. Okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Mackenzie?”
“Me too,” she said, knowing what he was going to say. “I love you too.”
She hung up and went over to the couch where Sam slept. John-Glenn had bunk beds in his room, but he was afraid to sleep on the top bed and Mackenzie was afraid to put Sam up there. So he had been put down, half-asleep, here.
Mackenzie thought of Jason, probably already back to sleep. He could wake up and answer ringing phones or doorbells and then fall immediately asleep again.
Sam’s legs moved in his sleep, kicked against the blanket. Mackenzie tried to straighten the bedding, to untwist it. She pulled the blanket away, and shook it out gently. Then she began to disentangle the sheet. She had to lift him up slightly to free him from its grip. Sam’s mouth moved, noisele
ssly. Across the wall, the patrol car’s red beam flashed, bathing the room and Mackenzie and Sam in its light, then passed by.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AFTER MACKENZIE LEFT, DAISY poured herself a big glass of white wine and paced the living room floor. Goddam that Mackenzie, she said out loud. Goddam the entire Porter family. They hadn’t liked her from the first day she walked in that house, a gangly seventeen-year-old with blonde hair full of brassy highlights from too much Sun-In and a hot pink miniskirt that allowed flashes of white silk panties when she sat down. She remembered how she had chewed gum nervously, popping it loudly and wrapping it around her tongue as Alexander’s family surveyed her.
Even back then Mackenzie had been bold and arrogant, all full of herself and the books she was reading, dropping names of poets and painters like she knew them personally. She was only a few years younger than Daisy, but that first night, as she talked on and on about some incredible book and this amazing artist she’d just found out about, Daisy had felt like a child beside her. And then Mackenzie had run out to take some photographs while the light was just right, and Daisy had watched her, a camera hanging down her chest and a tripod in her hand, and she had known that forever this girl would be her enemy, like all girls like that were to all the girls like Daisy.
Mrs. Porter and Grammie had shot disappointed looks at Alexander as they served iced tea with fresh mint leaves crushed into it and butterscotch brownies they called blondies. The tea, she thought now, had been too strong and bitter and she recalled the look of horror on their faces as she kept adding more and more sugar to her glass. “They’re just not used to you yet,” Alexander had told her when they left. But in the ten years that she was involved with the Porter family, right up until Alexander died, she had never felt a part of it.
Daisy stopped pacing and dug her bare toes into the carpet. Every time she thought about the Porters she got angry. All the years she had struggled to understand their conversations, to get in on their little family jokes, had made her dislike them even more. Once, during an argument Alexander had with his mother while Daisy sat in the car, she had heard Mrs. Porter say, “She dresses like a streetwalker, Alexander. What will she wear to faculty parties with you?”
She looked at the little Christmas tree she had put up for Sam. It was sitting on top of the coffee table, covered in tinsel and blinking red and green lights. She thought, for an instant, of the tree the Porters always had, a tall, perfectly shaped one that Alexander and his father cut down. It used to be full of ornaments that had been in the family for years—red porcelain apples with Cal’s and Hope’s names painted on in white scroll, construction-paper angels that Alexander had made in school, glass and silver and angel’s hair shaped into bulbs. Daisy used to sit near that tree and wish she had grown up in a family like that. “Don’t worry,” Alexander had told her, “our kids will have traditions just like these.” She looked back at the little dime store tree on the table, its skinny plastic branches almost blue. She fought back an impulse to take the tree apart and throw it out.
Here I go again, Daisy said to herself. All I’ve got to do is think of the Porters and I start doubting myself. She had gotten farther since Alexander left her than she did in all the years they were together, shuffling from school to school so he could get all his degrees, and then shuffling even more so he could teach. When he moved to Boston without her, his whole family acted like she was the one who deserted him. She could imagine them shouting “I told you so” in unison.
She refilled her wineglass and walked into the kitchen. Sam’s See-and-Say toy was on the table. Daisy picked it up and turned it on. A picture of an apple lit up on the screen and a robotlike voice said, “Apple.”
“Jesus,” Daisy said.
Sam’s speech therapist had given the toy to him, hoping that alone with it he would talk, follow the mechanical voice and recite words after it. He never did, although he listened over and over as the different objects were identified. Cat. Dog. Car.
“Ball,” the toy said now.
“Fuck you,” Daisy said, and turned it off.
She needed to talk to someone. She brought the bottle of wine into the kitchen and sat at the table with it in front of her.
“Iris,” she said. Then she flipped through her address book until she found her sister’s number in San Francisco.
Iris was a good person to talk to when she felt this awful. She was always going through a crisis herself and into some new way to relieve her pain—EST, TM, Pyramid Power.
Daisy and Iris looked as different as sisters could look. Daisy had always been too tall and too skinny. She still wore her hair in the same shag she’d had since junior high, and she still dyed it an off-yellow. The last time Daisy saw her sister, Iris had platinum blonde hair and dark black eyebrows. “My therapist says my purple phase and purple hair were just a reaction to being named Iris,” she’d explained. “I act out my fears and desires through my personal appearance rather than passive or aggressive acts.”
Daisy counted the times the telephone rang. On the tenth one she started to hang up when she heard Iris answer.
“Hello,” she said. “Iris Bloom here.”
“Daisy Bloom here.”
“Porter.”
“I switched back,” Daisy said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Who said anything was wrong?”
“You never call when things are right,” Iris said. “When Alexander left you, you called a thousand times a day.”
“He didn’t leave me.”
“Oh. My mistake. I thought moving to Boston without you indicated leaving you.”
Daisy didn’t respond.
“How’s business?” Iris asked.
“Great. I told you I earned a car, right? A pink Cimarron.” Daisy’s voice sounded flat, even though earning that car had been one of her biggest triumphs. Every Saturday she and Sam took it to the drive-through car wash. She paid the extra two dollars to have it waxed as well. Then the two of them cleaned the interior, vacuumed and buffed every inch. “It’s a gorgeous car,” she added.
“So what then?”
“Mackenzie took Sam to Rhode Island for the holidays.”
Daisy felt like she was going to cry. I should not feel guilty, she told herself. She bit down on her bottom lip, hard, until she felt a little pain there. Alexander used to say it was better to cry than bite your lip off. Thinking of that, she bit down harder. She tasted the faint rusty taste of blood.
“Listen,” Iris said, “did you know that Iris was like a goddess? A goddess of rainbows? My therapist told me. I feel so liberated now. I mean, that is really a beautiful thing. Goddess of rainbows. You should see what I’ve done with my hair.”
“What?” Daisy pictured Iris with a multicolored afro, the top arcing like a rainbow, the colors in the exact order of the spectrum.
“It’s brown,” Iris said. “How about that? Number 22, Clairol brown.”
“Oh, God,” Daisy said. Her tongue ran over her bottom lip. She could feel a tiny ridge where she’d bitten down.
“There probably aren’t any name therapists in Maryland, but you should check it out. You’d feel so much better if you explored your identity through your name.”
Daisy thought of the time Alexander had given her books with characters named Daisy in them for her birthday. The Great Gatsby. Daisy Miller. “For my own heroine, Daisy” he’d written.
“Maybe,” Daisy said, “I should have gone to Boston with Alexander.”
“What? Listen here, you blossomed after he left. You’ve made something of yourself. When you were with him all you did was live in his shadow. Period. Now you earned that car. And you bought that condominium. Do you hear me?”
Daisy nodded.
“You and Alexander were wrong for each other. All wrong. You were always saying that.”
“I don’t know,” Daisy said.
“Well I’m reminding you.”
“One time,” Daisy said, po
uring more wine in her glass, “he brought me one hundred daisies. He did. He covered me completely with daisies.”
“He could have taken a job in Washington,” Iris said. “In the Washington area, anyway. You moved plenty of times for him. Plenty.”
“I fell in love with him the minute I saw him.”
“You did not, Daisy. You say that now because he’s dead. People always speak fondly of the dead, no matter how they really feel. Alexander was so stodgy. So stiff.”
“He wasn’t. You hardly knew him. When I met him, my heart fell,” Daisy said. “It did.”
“Fine,” Iris said.
Daisy closed her eyes and remembered that day. It was summer and she was working at the candy counter in Jordan Marsh, kneeling behind it and sneaking Godiva chocolates into her mouth.
“I saw that,” Alexander had said.
She could remember looking up at him. He was so tall, much taller than her. His hair was somewhere between blonde and brown, and fell over his forehead. There was a slight cowlick in the back, and short sideburns. Daisy remembered thinking it was funny to see such short ones. Later, she convinced him to grow long, thick ones. He would itch and pull at them like they had no business on his face. The first time she saw him, he had on madras shorts, the magenta and green bleeding together in such a way that it made her blink to look at them, as if blinking would clear the blurry plaid.
“Nice shorts,” she’d said, standing up, pushing the candy in her mouth to the side, against her teeth, so she could talk better.
He’d looked down, confused. It was as if he really didn’t know that no one wore shorts like that or big tortoiseshell glasses.
Daisy had laughed. He was holding a bag from Waldenbooks, tightly, as if it were precious cargo.
“What’s in the bag?” she’d asked. “Gold?”