by Louisa Hall
After a week of camping in the bedroom, reading children’s books and eating melted peanut butter sandwiches that William carried up to her, Isabelle came downstairs. She’d lost weight and somehow looked younger since her accident. The first thing she asked for when she came downstairs was a new tennis racket, and as soon as the cast came off, she and William spent their mornings at the public courts. This became the peak moment of activity in the Adair family schedule, which faded into stillness toward the end of the afternoon. During the Adair family dinner, which Louise attended through a crack in her door, Elizabeth spouted the narrative of her illustrious day. The eminent architect pulled out weeds and his Hollywood-actress daughter performed at the community center, while his teenager read children’s books and toyed with her food. William didn’t seem unduly perturbed. He wasn’t leaping around for joy, that was for sure, but he wasn’t beating his fists on the walls. For the sake of her book, Louise wanted to remind him that these were not lofty occupations. She could not write a novel about a mildly content puller of weeds.
Louise worried about this for several days, until she came to the conclusion that all ambitions—no matter how grand—are incomprehensible to people who don’t have them. You have to be caught up in the dream of something to believe in its importance. As soon as you take one step out of your dream, you suddenly know that it was only an excuse to avoid the fact that you’re just another sad old tosser living out your boring life before you die. It takes guts to face life without any ambitions, facing reality each and every ambitionless day. Knowing all this, Louise began to feel that she should give up on the goal of writing a book, until she decided that her book would be about a family whose ambitions had dried out, and therefore it would still be a real contribution.
If she didn’t let the Adair family dinner get her down, Louise could stay in, microwave herself a bowl of rice with melted cheese and ketchup, and read Margaux’s diaries all night. She’d pillaged the entire stack from Margaux’s desk when the family moved down to the shore, and she kept them in a plastic crate under her bed. She perused them religiously. After reading about Dr. Worthington’s original suggestion that Margaux might merely be depressed, Louise started to wonder whether Margaux had suspected her illness before she was diagnosed. Maybe she’d been waiting to inherit her mother’s disease and had found it in herself before it could be medically confirmed. Her decline had been monumentally slow, even for an early-onset patient. She failed several comprehension tests, but in the beginning Dr. Worthington wasn’t convinced her condition was Alzheimer’s. It would have been impossible to know for sure. Unless you bored a hole in her skull and captured her brain on X-ray film, you couldn’t know which parts of Margaux’s tissue had faded to white.
Later, the voids in her memory became increasingly obvious. In her diaries, she took to occasionally asserting that Isabelle hadn’t been born yet. Before Louise was hired, Margaux got seriously lost twice while taking a walk. Once they found her stuck in the middle of Kennedy Drive, cars screeching around her. And after Izzy’s accident, with the anxious packing of bags and waiting by the door, Margaux acted more and more like a traditional patient lost in the middle stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Still, there was an odd degree of watchfulness involved in the forgetting of the early diaries. Louise suspected that the seeds of the disease had lurked for some time in her mind before they took root. Pre-Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s. Who knew how many of us had it? This idea also depressed Louise, so that between Margaux’s anticipation of decline and William’s blank acceptance of his family’s fallen position, Louise sometimes had the urge to go out for a drink.
There was a tiny local bar called the Grubby Tub where Louise gravitated in these instances, to sit in a dark corner with one of Margaux’s journals and a Guinness, trying to revive herself. Sometimes an Aussie tennis pro with a peeling nose and a yellow Jeep Wrangler arrived, each night with a different girl who always looked about seventeen. When he sat down, he winked at Louise, recognizing a fellow citizen, and once or twice he bought her a drink, but Louise was absorbed in the journals and didn’t have time to run around in search of diasporic Aussies to shag. The second weekend that Adelia did not stay at the beach, however, the novel hit a wall and Louise fell into a new depth of malaise. That night at the Tub, she felt compelled to replace her Guinness with whiskey, at which point the tennis pro showed up on his own.
It was a tired old drunken story. Somehow Louise found herself back at his apartment, drinking crap red wine, smoking weed, reading him passages out of Margaux’s journals, drinking more wine, waiting patiently while he pawed around. At some point a glass of wine was spilled. There was excessive laughter of the kind that hurts your distorted face after it dies down. Then there was more weed, more pawing, more wine, until Louise finally fell asleep in his asymmetrical arms.
In the morning, she woke up and took stock of the situation. She hadn’t brushed her teeth, and her mouth tasted like an old sponge. She sat up: explosions in her cerebellum. On the floor there were two wineglasses, one broken, an empty bottle, and Margaux’s journal, ruined by a wine stain the size of a tennis ball. Louise groaned. She struggled to swallow, then picked up the journal and inspected it more closely. Oddly, the wine stain on its pages made her want to cry, and if she weren’t so dehydrated she might have. She felt literally homesick, as if her distance from home had translated directly into cottonmouth and the throbbing in her temples. Oddly, she had the distinct feeling that she had betrayed her own mother by having read Margaux’s journals to a stranger and then allowing him to douse them with wine. The bottom right corner of the page was unreadable:
November 1993
Today I asked William to send me to a home for the final time. I would like to remember that. I asked him over and over again, as if I didn’t remember asking him only yesterday. Today I finally stopped. It was for their good that I wanted to go. I am aware that it is hurtful every day to be reminded that your mother can’t remember the logic of your bond. It would be better for them to be with Adelia; she has a memory as loyal as an elephant’s. But I can’t insist anymore. He hasn’t wrapped his head around the reality. He feels that nothing dramatic has changed. I want to explain to him that it’s because there was never an enormous change. It was in me from the start. I’ve adjusted to it well. They say people with a strong sense of identity make the worst Alzheimer’s patients. It’s lucky, then, I suppose, that I was always a little apart from myself. It’s only a surprise that William didn’t notice from the start; I was not a woman with whom he should have had children. It was my fault, too; I thought maybe I’d become more real. Tod
went to the kitchen and there was a cake that said “Happy Twelfth Birthd
that Isabelle was born twelve years ago. It was a startling recollec
strange, but I sometimes think that Izzy hasn’t been bor
Margaux hasn’t yet been born. When are we born in
rather not stay here and fill her with doubt. I c
me stay. If it were not for him I could just disap
whether or not to remember me, but in any case they’d
• • •
Louise’s chest ached. Forever, the bottom quadrant of Margaux in November 1993 was lost because Louise had taken it upon herself to shag a tennis pro. Because yet again Louise had forgotten the importance of her task. Because Louise was drunk and stupid and never could keep hold of any motivation, and this was why even a person as pathetic as Bradley didn’t want to marry her. Because she was careless. She couldn’t hold on to ambitions. Even her ambition to let go of ambitions got ruined. She was the kind of person who could discover a secret journal of forgotten things and decide to write a novel about it, then get drunk and spill wine on its pages, ruining the one thing she’d discovered and wanted to keep.
Chapter 20
For Elizabeth’s experimental performance, William selected a pair of white khaki pants and a royal blue polo
shirt. The belt he chose was embroidered with yellow whales. He had never thought of himself as a beach man, and he felt no different even after over a month in Rock Harbor. He did not like to sit on the sand. He did not like the endless leisure or how often people commented on the precise stage of their relaxation. He did not like how the only tennis courts in town were a set of eight old concrete courts, cracked by the sun and surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence as though they were basketball courts in an underprivileged neighborhood. At the beach, William was a man living in exile. He was born on Little Lane. He was a boy on Little Lane, he grew up on Little Lane, and he raised his children on Little Lane. When they packed him up in the rental car and shipped him off to the beach, there had been no other option but to leave his history there, on Little Lane, with the ruins of the carriage house.
Regardless, life continued. He was still a good-looking man. Outwardly, there was no visible sign that part of him was missing. There was no reason for him to give up entirely just because an important element of himself had been amputated and left behind. His resolve in this regard had been fortified by the recent improvements in his family’s appearance. Since taking up with her performance art group, Elizabeth had started wearing simpler clothes. The flailing scarves had made him nervous, as if she were Amelia Earhart getting ready for a misguided flight. Now she wore sporty tank tops and jeans, and she had developed a healthy tan. Comforted by the thought of Elizabeth’s improvements, William pulled a pair of yellow sport socks onto his feet, then slipped them into his Docksiders. He would not go to Elizabeth’s performance sockless, though so many of the men in Rock Harbor had dispensed with socks for the summer. Even if it was an experimental art performance, William would not sink so low.
He examined himself again in the mirror. He was ready to go. No one could say that he had attended his daughter’s performance in anything less than a dignified outfit. He carried himself down the stairs as an optimistic man carries himself, then joined his family in the Acura with a cheerful salute. He was pleased that they were going together, despite the fact that, in general, he did not like experimental things. His attitude toward them was this: experiment when no one is watching. Once your experiment was proved, he was ready to admire it. And yet there was a definite glow to Elizabeth, and less of those scarves, and William was determined to applaud the development. When he climbed into the car, which Diana was driving, he noted that the rest of his family had also improved since coming to the beach. This alone was enough to make William resolve to continue at the cottage. Their looks, earlier this summer on Little Lane, had caused him to question everything from his genes to the state of his country. Because his children had always represented life in America to William, and they had always been hopeful-looking and fresh. In their mature years, it began to look as if they didn’t care about anything at all. Having taken their looks for granted, they had allowed them to fade away. Isabelle, for instance, might have emerged from her hospital bed deformed, because she simply hadn’t cared. Thankfully, she did not, except that she was missing a spleen and part of her collarbone was now a shard of titanium.
William glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She was gazing out the window. Something about her had settled since the accident. She bristled less. She wore sundresses and spent whole days at the beach, reading her books. Nearly every morning, she asked him to play tennis with her, and this was certainly a positive development. He started playing against her in his Docksiders, but recently, she had gotten good enough that he asked Diana to pick up his tennis shoes on her next trip back to Breacon.
For that matter, something had changed about Diana also. In the recent past, looking at Diana had given him a stomachache. Arthur Schmidt was right when he said she had changed beyond recognition from the girl who was student body president. She was still different—quieter and less athletic—but she had improved. He wished she would stay more often, without running back to Breacon to dredge up the carriage house, lugging tote bags of architecture textbooks. She indulged in excessive studiousness, and Little Lane was a depressingly hopeless cause for her to take on, but at least she had found her determination. She looked less perpetually limp. In recent weeks she had even developed a tan. He would have liked to have asked Arthur whether she was still changed beyond all recognition; for his part, William couldn’t tell.
When they pulled into the parking lot of the Lee W. Greenfield Rock Harbor Arts Center, Adelia and Margaux were waiting on the sidewalk. Adelia was wearing sunglasses. Margaux had on a large straw hat that suited her well, particularly at the beach. A straw hat and a fluttery dress. When William first met her, she was sitting in the back row in art history class, spreading out a lunch for herself that was old-fashioned in its intricate presentation. She was a woman from another time in history. A more delicate time, or so he had imagined. He was twenty-one years old; what had he known about anything? She was, at any rate, exactly opposite Adelia, which at that point was enough to satisfy William. Adelia’s refusal had stung him; in the aftermath, it was pleasant to impress a woman such as Margaux, with her nervous fingers and artistic eye for impractical details.
After all these years, it was strange to see her standing beside Adelia. Adelia watched the Acura pull up as though it were an incoming volley, as though she were ready to take it early, facing it down. Margaux gazed off into the wind. They were like two birds from entirely incompatible ecosystems, nestled on one branch. It was for his sake that they had both flown here. William knew this, and although he did not like the beach, he was not ungrateful for the unlikely migration they had made on his account.
When they walked into the arts center lobby, William appreciated that no one who saw them would think they were an unattractive flock. One might go so far as to say that they were handsome in their way. It wasn’t the same surge of pride he’d felt when the girls were younger, when he took them out in a gleaming troupe and knew that everyone who saw them would be dazzled. But still. In the arching, spare lobby of the arts center, surrounded by glass and circulating strangers, they were a striking little tribe. William knew, of course, that it was considered vain to care so much about looks. In his case, it wasn’t mere vanity. He believed that looks were representative of deeper qualities. He trusted—and he was not sure how others could bear to live without such belief—that a person’s deepest self must be represented in his outward appearance. If not, then the world was a deceitful place. The fact that his family was attractive again settled him as he had not felt settled in weeks.
He chose a seat with Margaux on his left and Isabelle on his right. It appeared, from the program on his chair, that Elizabeth would perform second, in an experimental piece entitled “The Divorce.” The first piece was entitled “A Diary of My Life in Sensation.” The third and final piece was called “Birth.” William did not look forward to either the first or the third. He did not like when people forced their diaries upon you, and he did not like the vaginal aggressiveness that defined much of the theater to which his daughter had exposed him. He allowed himself a moment to wish that his daughter had joined a Shakespearean troupe rather than an experimental gang. He had once seen her play Goneril in a production of King Lear and had been deeply moved by her regal carriage. He liked to imagine each of his three daughters in Shakespearean roles. Diana once could have played Portia, doling out mercy and punishment in the Venetian court. Isabelle could have been any beautiful heroine she desired to play. They tried to deny it, but they had presence, all of them.
And yet this piece—“The Divorce”—meant something to Elizabeth, and it was part of the improvement that he had seen in all his daughters since coming to the beach, so he settled into his yellow plastic chair and focused his eyes on the empty center, which soon would be occupied by the Diarist of Sensations. She arrived in a lab coat. Her face was unremarkable, and her body was shaped like an egg. “Please reach under your seat,” she said, and William grudgingly did as he was told. There he found a glas
s jar, which he pulled out and held in his lap. “Please smell the contents of your jar, then pass it to the left.” William opened his jar and smelled: nothing. From its viscous cherry-colored wash, he could see that it was cough syrup, and yet even this knowledge did not produce the illusion of scent. The next jar that Isabelle passed him was full of lotion. Again, nothing. The next contained a pile of grass cuttings. The smell of grass once reminded him—while walking across the golf course—of tennis and possibility. And now nothing: a nothing he would have to live with.
When the smelling exercise was over, the diarist placed empty watercooler bottles, their necks sawed off and their outer plastic smeared with Vaseline, over each audience member’s head. Sealed inside his helmet, William could hear his own breathing. He looked around. Isabelle’s face was blurred, but he could tell that she was smiling at him, so he smiled back. On his left, Margaux’s face was distant, disappearing slowly while he watched. He reached out for her hand and found it on her lap. She let him take it. Her head was a watercooler bottle. They were both strange beings, headless and blurred. He squeezed her hand. It was like seeing her through tears, like seeing her when she had faded further than she already had. He wanted to hold her close. When the Diarist arrived to remove his helmet, Margaux’s sudden clarity took his breath away. And then she released his hand, and the group was subjected to more sensory abrasions that William was able to withstand because he understood that if he waited long enough, Elizabeth would arrive, and the world would resolve itself into the intensity of focusing on one of his girls.