How Will I Know You?

by Jessica Treadway

“Do what,” Gil said without interest, his voice muffled from under the sink.

  When she reached to pull the doorknob toward her to shut it again, she thought for a moment that she was imagining what she saw: the rumpled comforter and, on the wall along the bed and extending to the closet, the hooks that had secured Joy’s artwork in her private gallery—the gallery she’d invited Martin into on the day of the barbecue. Susanne recalled coming upon them when she’d been looking for Joy, recalled worrying that she’d shown too much surprised pleasure when she realized that Martin was also in the room. She remembered the flash of confusion in Joy’s face when she saw her mother’s expression, and the detachment that replaced it a moment later.

  The memory took only an instant, and to shake it off she entered the room slowly, perceiving only dimly that in the face of the intrusion she witnessed, she should be afraid. At the same time, she sensed within her a bizarre excitement: She’s here! She’s here! even as she knew that of course the room’s disruption could not be attributed to Joy. Six hooks hung empty of the charcoal pieces Joy had considered her best, including children competing over a toy and the reproduction of a van Gogh modeled on Susanne’s hands.

  She called for Gil again, his name catching in her throat. “What,” he said from the doorway, a wrench hanging from his hands.

  When he saw what she did, he rushed in to grab her and pulled her out to the hall. Raising the wrench now as a weapon, he went into the room, first bending to peer under the bed and then approaching the closet to yank the door open, his breath as he did so coming out in a cry she was sure he hadn’t intended. She watched him step back with anticipation of being run at, attacked, but no such thing happened. The closet’s interior was just as Joy had left it: her sweaters and corduroys hanging tidily, summer clothes folded in vacuum-sealed bags on the top shelf. Her shoes and boots—except for the fake UGGs she’d been wearing the day she left—sat on a two-tiered floor rack, next to the hamper containing the worn clothes Susanne had not been able to bring herself to wash.

  Her whole life, she would never stop regretting her decision to hold off until Christmas to give her daughter the boots she’d bought her. Or the fact that Joy died wearing the fake ones.

  “Son of a bitch,” Gil said. He darted out to check the rest of the house, then returned to sit on the defiled bed. Salsa had come to watch from the doorway, slinking around Susanne’s ankles in fascinated fear. “Somebody came in here. While we were at her funeral.” He laid the wrench across his lap, and Susanne recognized his impulse to avoid soiling his daughter’s comforter with the tool.

  “We don’t know that, do we?” she asked. “When it happened? I haven’t been in here since—in a long time.”

  “I have.” He could have said it as an accusation, but instead his voice was a spike of loneliness that lanced her. “I come in here every day.”

  “But who would—who would—”

  “That’s what they do. People. They read the funeral announcements, they know nobody will be home.” He sounded more sad than disgusted.

  “How did they get in?”

  “I don’t think I locked the door.” He blinked, as if he had just recovered the concept of trying to protect against intruders. “I don’t think I’ve been doing that.”

  She knew he expected her to criticize him for it. But she could not. “And why would they take the—why would they take her—” She waved at the wall that had been stripped of their daughter’s art, understanding for the first time why people who had not been assaulted physically often felt, when robbed of valuables, that they had. “Do you think they thought they were worth something?”

  Gil stood and laid the wrench gently on Joy’s bureau, next to the Derek Jeter Bobblehead. “It was probably just some crime junkie, looking for a souvenir. Listen, help me with this.”

  Through a daze, she joined him in straightening the comforter across the bed. “Should we take the hooks out?” she asked, gesturing again at the wall, and he told her no, maybe they would get the drawings back someday. Immediately she recognized this as wishful thinking, as she knew he must, too. But neither of them would name it for what it was.

  Once the comforter had been smoothed out, Salsa jumped up on it, assuming her favorite spot near the wall. Susanne and Gil left the door open and returned to the hall.

  “Thanks for trying to save me,” she told him, remembering his rushing to remove her from what might have been harm’s way.

  “What?” He had forgotten. “Oh, that.” His face was vacant, and his arm went slack as if the wrench he’d carried out suddenly became too much for him to handle. “Don’t thank me—I didn’t even think.”

  Before

  Colossal Joy

  Two weeks into November—Friday the 13th—Susanne was on the verge of a nap, her head still pulsing despite the aspirins she took after dragging herself home from sculpture studio, when she heard Joy come in from school. A few minutes later there was a meek tap at her door and her daughter said, “Mom. You awake?” Her voice was much softer than the one she’d used to eject her parents from her bedroom after her release from the police station the week before.

  Susanne considered not answering, then raised herself on an elbow and told Joy to come in. She’d barely slept since Joy’s arrest, but she knew it would be wrong to ignore an opportunity to hear whatever her daughter might have to say.

  Joy went over to her mother’s dresser, where Susanne kept one of her earliest hand sculptures: the tiny set of baby hands, fingers curled in fists so that only the barest sliver of nail on each was exposed to the viewer’s eye. The hands were miniatures, smaller than any real baby’s could ever be. She’d named the piece Colossal Joy.

  Joy lifted it carefully, with both of her now-woman-sized hands, the way she was taught as a child to handle all of her mother’s work. Susanne said, “Your first modeling gig,” and they both smiled.

  “First and only.” Joy replaced the piece as tenderly as she’d picked it up. “I don’t think I ever told you how much I love your stuff. Have I?”

  Had she? Susanne didn’t know. She couldn’t remember Joy ever mentioning her work before, except for the day in seventh grade when she came home from school to say that her art teacher had asked if Joy’s mother might be willing to come in as a guest speaker sometime, to show them what she did. The teacher passed around photos from the Rochester newspaper of Susanne’s exhibit, and Keith Nance asked Joy if her mother liked doing “hand jobs.”

  Susanne blushed and felt a pang remembering Joy’s struggle to tell her this story, which she saved until Gil had left the supper table. When Joy confessed that she didn’t know what a hand job was—that she could only tell because of the way Keith said it, and the giggles he’d gotten, that it was something dirty—she had to explain it to her daughter.

  “I appreciate that,” she said, hoping Joy was not recalling the same event.

  “Why did you stop?” Joy asked.

  The question caught Susanne up short. It had been a few years since she’d sculpted anything, or wanted to, but neither Joy nor Gil had commented on this before now. Martin had been the last person to ask about her work. They’d been lying in bed one Thursday at the beginning of October when he said, “Why hands?” pulling one of hers toward him and kissing it.

  Because of Rodin, she told him. It was from Rodin that she learned she did not need to sculpt anything other than hands, if she didn’t want to—his own figures of disparate body parts (fingers, legs, heads, torsos) had taught her this. A piece of something could be as beautiful as its whole, he maintained. She’d quoted him in her Artist’s Statement: “Where can one find more perfect harmony than in this fragment?”

  Then she told Martin about the months she spent hosteling through Europe with her boyfriend from college, and how moved she’d felt when she saw The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “At first I thought their hands were touching. But then Danny said to look closer—the hands don’t actually meet. They
just miss, he said. For some reason I couldn’t get over that image, them wanting to reach each other and almost making it, but not quite. Danny and I broke up right after that.” She paused, returning Martin’s sympathetic squeeze. “It makes me sad every time I see it.”

  He tightened his grasp. “We reach each other,” he’d told her, and this lifted her sadness for a moment.

  It was shortly after this conversation that she knew she had to put a stop to it, whatever they were doing. Only on that Thursday did she understand what it meant to him—their affair, their communion; between themselves, they had not given it a name. And though it did not mean any less to her, she knew as she always had that it was temporary, whereas (she saw in his eyes that day, and heard in his voice) Martin seemed to be thinking it might lead to more.

  In the bedroom now, when Joy asked her why she’d stopped sculpting, Susanne thought about telling her the truth: that it didn’t feel necessary anymore. There’d been a period of years when she would not have known what to do with herself, or who she was, if she hadn’t been thinking about art, or planning it, or doing her best to make it. She didn’t know why that feeling of urgency had left her—only that it had.

  But she hesitated, not wanting her answer to suggest to Joy that she herself might lose interest in her own artwork someday. Joy seemed to sense she shouldn’t press the question. Instead, as Suzanne stood up from the bed, she told her mother, “I’m glad I’ll have this.”

  “You’ll have it?” It took Susanne another beat to understand what Joy was saying. “You mean after I die?”

  Now it was Joy who blushed. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to wait until then.” An impulse she couldn’t tell right away if she regretted. “You can take that to Brockport with you.” She gestured at Colossal Joy, only realizing, as she did so, her mistake. She did not want the piece sitting on a desk in some dorm room. Was that wrong of her? Selfish?

  She was saved from having to dwell on it when Joy said, “What if I don’t go?”

  “Go where? You mean to college?”

  “No. Brockport.”

  “Joy, we talked about this. Even with a scholarship, Decker’s too—”

  “Never mind. Got it.” Joy waved as if to say Don’t waste your breath.

  Not wanting to get into a fight, Susanne picked up the piece on the dresser and said, “I’m glad you asked about this.” Glad you think you’ll want to remember me, she might have added, especially after the week we’ve just been through.

  How could she bring it up now—the questions that persisted, between her and Gil, about why Joy had allowed herself to become involved with Jason and his criminal enterprise? (Which was how Susanne preferred to think of it—didn’t that at least sound better than “drug ring”?) It could wait, couldn’t it? The last thing she wanted was to spoil what she felt, unexpectedly and with a blind rush of gratitude, between herself and her daughter—a closeness she’d been missing for months. She hadn’t allowed herself to realize the loss she’d been living with until this moment, when that acute absence was replaced with the particular surge of love she’d only ever felt for this particular person in the world, the one who had made her a mother.

  She went into the kitchen and Joy trailed, declining her mother’s offer of tea.

  Susanne could always tell when her daughter fretted; her two top teeth bit into her lower lip. “Listen, I know I’m grounded,” Joy said, and Susanne waited for whatever request was sure to follow. “But can I borrow your car just this once, just for like an hour, to drive out to the pond?”

  “Why?” A moot question—Susanne and Gil had forbidden her to go anywhere without one or both of them.

  “I want to go skating.” Joy appeared to be stifling her excitement; didn’t her mother’s question imply that Susanne was considering giving permission? “Like the old days.”

  Like the old days. A phrase intended, no doubt, to appeal to Susanne’s memories of that time—to her nostalgia not only for the summer afternoons they spent together on that lazy, sunny shore, sharing the big scratchy blanket held down at the corners by their flip-flops and bottles of sunscreen and the cooler Susanne packed with sandwiches and juice boxes and chips, but also for the winter afternoons when parents, mostly mothers, brought their kids to the same shore to skate while they ducked in and out of the Elbow Room to stay warm, some surreptitiously (or not so surreptitiously) lacing cups of the shack’s hot chocolate with Baileys or Kahlúa or even red wine (Lynette Stowell introduced this one into the mix, cheerfully referring to the concoction as “Couch Coma”). The shore’s hard ground led onto a long rectangle of silver ice, which turned a corner about three hundred yards out as it bent into the “elbow” bordering the woods. Sometimes kids raced each other on their skates as far out as the elbow, but mostly their parents prohibited them from going farther because they couldn’t be seen beyond the turn.

  Bringing up “the old days” was a miscalculation on Joy’s part. If Susanne had been inclined to waver in the ban she and Gil had placed on their daughter, her resolve reasserted itself when she realized Joy was trying to manipulate her. Feeling a psychic nudge from Gil, she told her daughter, “You know I can’t let you do that.”

  “Even though the charges were dropped?”

  “Yes. You’re still grounded. You had those drugs on you.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Joy muttered the words as if she’d been doing so all her life, although Susanne had never heard the oath from her daughter before.

  “Joy. I know you’re upset, but please, let’s be civil.” Though she hadn’t thought of it in years, she remembered suddenly the tenets of a book someone (Rachel Feinbloom?) had lent her when their kids were in preschool together. PET—Parent Effectiveness Training. The idea was that you didn’t punish your kid, you didn’t reward her, and you didn’t pull any version of the “Because I said so” authority that would lead her to rebel. Instead, when she did something you wished she hadn’t, you were supposed to tell her how her behavior affected you.

  “I feel like you’re pushing me away,” Susanne said, flailing, not knowing whether she was doing it right. This was probably a line she’d heard once on TV. “When all I’m trying to do is get closer.”

  “Oh, that is such bullshit!” Joy raised her voice to a level she’d never used inside the house before. She was edging toward the back door and the garage, though only later would Susanne register that her daughter had already decided to take the car whether Susanne gave permission or not. They’d been wrong, she thought grimly. She and Gil had automatically given Joy her own set of keys when she got her license; it wouldn’t have occurred to them that they couldn’t trust her.

  “What did you just say?” Susanne didn’t really need to have the words repeated; her question followed the blow of hearing them all too clearly.

  “You are such a hypocrite! You expect me to ‘behave myself’”—Joy drew elaborate air quotes around the words—“when what you did was so much worse.”

  “What I did?” Later, Susanne would recognize that she had hurried to accuse in an effort to avoid the more precarious position of having to defend. “I haven’t broken any laws. I haven’t been arrested.”

  “Well, guess what. Adultery is, too, a crime—I looked it up. A misdemeanor, but it’s still illegal in this state.”

  Standing in the doorway, Susanne felt her arms wrapping themselves around her torso more from shock at her daughter’s words than from the cold outside. Adultery. For a moment, she thought she might have heard Joy wrong. A moment later she thought, Of course she knows. How did I think we could keep it from her? “Be quiet, Joy. People will hear you. And come inside—it’s freezing out here.”

  “You just had to relive your hippie-dippie college days, shake up your boring suburban life. You think you’re cool because you slept with some black guy?” Joy yanked open the Mazda’s door. “I can’t believe you would do that to Daddy. I’m going to tell him, when he gets home t
onight.”

  “Joy.” How had she let her life come to this? Though Susanne was quite sure her next words should be some kind of reprimand, instead she said, “He already knows.”

  For a moment, Joy appeared stricken. Then her defiance reasserted itself. “Like hell he does. He wouldn’t stay with someone who cuckolded him.”

  Cuckolded—was that one of the vocabulary words she’d learned for the SAT? In another circumstance, Susanne might have smiled. But now Joy was getting into the car, and although Susanne called after her that if she did this she’d be sorry, they both knew there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop what was happening.

  She waited and watched, thinking (though she knew better) that Joy might come to her senses before she reached the corner, reverse direction, and slink toward home. When she didn’t, Susanne turned back toward the house, trying to figure out what to do when she got inside. Call Gil? But if she did, she’d feel compelled to tell him what their daughter had said. He’d have to know about it sometime, but she didn’t feel ready to report to him, yet, how wrong they’d both been—how deluded they were (she saw now) to allow themselves to believe they’d managed to keep Susanne’s affair a secret.

  Behind her came the sound of her own name, in a voice so soft that at first she wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. When it repeated, she hadn’t even turned yet to see Martin before he added, “I don’t want to scare you” as he held a hand up in apology.

  She was both surprised and not; she hadn’t spoken to him outside of class since that last lunchtime they’d slept together, several weeks before. And even in class, their exchanges were perfunctory, formal. Yet it felt right that he should be the next person she saw after the quarrel with Joy, not only because he was the subject of Joy’s accusation but because he was precisely who she needed at that moment. How could he have known?

  Later, she realized that of course he had not known; he could only have intuited, or come to her house for some reason of his own. She pitched forward, but he misinterpreted, or perhaps it was she who did: was she approaching him for a hug? At the last second she stopped herself short, understanding with chagrin that it was not because she didn’t want to touch him, but because she worried that Betsy Hahnemann might be watching through the window.