Father’s smile looked more like an ache. I hated the weak look in his eyes telling me, please, Sarah. I don’t have the strength.
I turned and left the room, oddly triumphant in my desire to hurt her, not thinking of him. But her — I didn’t want her here. She was not welcome. She would have to try harder, that I promised, and with this resolution, I became a notch lighter, useful, a woman of purpose.
At dinner, Dora circled the dining room table. We didn’t wait for Peter. He rarely ate dinner with us anymore.
“Robert, sit up. Put the book down. Not at dinner. Sarah, help Elliot with his chicken. Cut it into smaller pieces. What would you like to drink, Miss Delgarno?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. Call me Sherry, please.”
Dora tightened her lips and looked at me. The flash of disapproval galvanized us. She too did not like what she saw sitting in Mother’s chair. I had grown so used to Dora’s sharp eyes confiscating the flaws she inevitably saw in me that I reveled in her new focus of reprimand. Dora was circumspect and that made Dora my accomplice. I felt a quick thrill, a rare sense of unity.
Father said, “Sherry, you ought to ask Robert about his time series.”
“I’d love to hear about it.”
“Nothing to tell. You can read it,” Robert said.
Father grimaced. He would have shouted a few months ago but the shouting had turned into lugubrious expressions, his eyes liquid as the vodka glasses filled to the brim; his cheeks sodden, still chapped from crying. Father took another long swallow of his drink, then resumed eating his chicken.
“Your father asked me to join you,” Miss Delgarno said. “I hope you don’t mind. I’d like to help out any way I can.”
I did mind, obviously. Who was she to take on this task? Why, of all the people I knew, from teachers and friends, should she be the one to finally speak up? Dora left the room, shoving through the swinging doors so that the hinges squeaked and the doors clattered.
Elliot decided to tell us about rattlesnakes.
“Did you know that some rattlesnakes lay eggs and others have live babies?”
“That’s weird,” Robert said. “They’re caught between evolutionary cycles.”
“I had no idea,” Miss Delgarno said, looking at Elliot and Robert. She put her fork down. “I’m going to have to think about that one. What do you think about it?”
Elliot shrugged. “I like snakes,” he said, twiddling with his peas. A few popped off his fork and spun off the table. He smiled and I might have laughed but not today.
Dora reentered.
“I’m done,” I declared, handing her my plate.
“Can we be excused?” Robert asked.
“What about dessert?” Father said, looking at Dora.
I stood up. “I don’t want any.”
I didn’t want to spend another moment with Miss Sherry.
Robert pushed back his chair. “Me either.”
“If you want, I’ll show you my animals,” Elliot said to her.
Sherry looked over at Father who nodded.
“He’s quite the collector.”
Then she looked at Dora. “Can I help?”
“I’ve got it all taken care of here.”
I went to my room to finish homework but heard every footstep Delgarno planted in our house. From her jaunt upstairs to Elliot’s room, because Elliot who didn’t judge, who accepted you if you were kind, was willing to listen. I heard her go back downstairs to Father’s office. For a long time she stayed in the office. I heard records playing somber, melodic Frank Sinatra tunes, then the brighter voice of Ella Fitzgerald. I waited and waited for her to leave.
While I was in the shower, Dora knocked on the bathroom door to tell me to save some hot water for my brothers. I could tell she was connecting with me by her softer tone. I grunted, “Okay!” because I was so accustomed to sequestering my feelings from her, not wanting her to have an edge, but I felt lifted up by our alignment and doused my eyes and head under the water spray, lost myself in warm liquid, and forced myself to turn off the water before the heat ran out simply because she requested it.
Delgarno wouldn’t leave. She stayed after I tucked in Elliot, and after he fell asleep; after Robert’s light clicked off; after the dishwasher cycle had stopped. The buzzing of Dora’s television remained and streams of Glenn Miller’s band seeped under Father’s office door.
She stayed after Peter came home. I smelled beer on his breath. His army jacket exhumed a pungent dose of cigarette smoke laced with a planty, sweet smell of hashish. I sat on my bed with the night light shining.
“She’s still down there,” I said of Delgarno.
“What do you expect?” Peter said.
He left to go upstairs. I lay in the dark listening to pop 40 hits until I fell asleep. I didn’t hear Father come upstairs. But I heard her car roll down the street.
The next afternoon I came home, intent on checking a few things. I went immediately to Father’s office and dumped an ashtray full of Delgarno’s lipstick-covered cigarette butts into the kitchen wastebasket. It surprised me that Dora had not done so but it looked as if Dora had decided not to go into the office at all. The room smelled of stale perfume and carbon paper. Father left open his sleeper couch, blankets tousled like seaweed washed ashore. He slept there every night now. A cadre of clean shirts and two sports jackets hung on the office closet door. His shaving bag lay open on the desktop. I checked the downstairs bathroom and there it was: his toothbrush still moist from morning use, stored in the medicine cabinet.
Upstairs, the master bedroom door stayed shut. When I opened it the room smelled and felt like a cabin that had been vacated for the winter season. The windows had been vacuum-sealed, stale air devoid of dust and microorganisms. I edged open a window. Mother would not want her room cut off from her beloved outdoors. The grass was greening and that smell of new growth was everywhere: in the bark of the trees, the buds on thorny bushes. You couldn’t avoid it.
Her clothes hung in her closet, still wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic. I stood in front of the dresses and waited for something, I didn’t know what, pressing my face into the pink dress she wore to a New Year’s Eve party at the club, inhaling her. I started to reach for the violin case on the shelf but changed my mind. I took her makeup case from her dressing room drawer instead.
The next day I wore her eyeliner and mascara to school, and a light layer of lipstick. Dora noticed. She started to say something as I walked out the door but I was ready. I was ready to tell her that I was wearing Mother’s and she couldn’t do a thing to stop me. No. So Dora hesitated, like people do when they sense something different and are surprised by it and powerless. I had never talked sharply with her, usually meeting her directives with stares and grimaces, but instead of berating me this time, she reached her hand out and touched my shoulder.
“Looks better on you than that Sherry woman,” she said, affirming our partnership. I think I could have embraced her, lifted her up in my arms had I not spent the entire year learning not to.
I also discovered several unopened packages of real silk stockings and a garter belt in Mother’s dresser. I didn’t wear these; I wanted to save them for a special occasion. So, I stored them in the back of my underwear drawer wrapped in a paper bag. I stole another, cheaper pair of pantyhose from the Five & Dime later that week.
Chapter Fourteen
Moon in the House
To prepare for the high school spring concert, “Springtime on Broadway,” as Mr. Edwards called it, I stood on the raised stands surrounded by a chorus that was finally knitting together. Mr. Edwards pointed to me and blithely asked me to sing the solo verses in “Aquarius,” from the musical Hair.
I adored this song.
Harmony and understanding,
no more falsehoods or derisions.
The song skipped and hopped, mixing colors and jewels with bigger ideas about revelation and freedom, about the zodiac and the universe. Words about dreams and v
isions spun around me, clothed me in feathers and silk.
After practice, Mr. Edwards gestured for me to wait. I waved to Sophie and watched the choir file out of the large room, some in pairs, until the last person, a girl in a plaid skirt and red sweater, left. Mr. Edwards sat down at the piano bench.
“Let’s play this once through together. Do you have time for it?”
I nodded.
He shuffled the sheets of music, penciling in notations above the lines, then placed his thin fingers on the keys.
“Start softly now and let it build. Imagine a cone widening — the beginning of the song is at the narrow tip of the megaphone. As you sing through the verses, think of the sound filling the widest part of the mouth.” He played past the introduction and dipped his head to indicate where I should begin.
“When the moon is in the seventh house —”
“Good. Keep it going to the stars. Next two lines, please.”
I sang about peace and planets. I sang about Jupiter aligning with Mars. I saw myself soaring through space, sailing across rings of stardust.
He stopped playing and swiveled around to face me. The room without music felt cavernous. I became small, tiny all of a sudden.
He straightened the music sheets again. “This is good. Very good. What do you think, Sarah? How’s everything going with you right now?”
“Fine.” I nodded quickly, too quickly, and looked at the stage as if something important needed watching over there.
He smiled and glanced at the stage. “I was thinking that singing’s not just about the music, it’s about your life. The whole package. Your mom, your family. That’s why I’m here. Not just to play these notes.” He trilled a few keys. “Make sense?”
“Sure. Okay.”
I might have spoken sarcastically as I had to my uncle and those people who came after the funeral, but he was different. I had not expected this. I could tell it wasn’t about how sorry he was, he was sorry about the situation. I could hear the sincerity in his voice — not urgent, not cloying.
“My father died when I was a little bit older than you — your brother, Peter’s age. So, you and I know about losing the most important person in our lives.”
I nodded again but I didn’t feel like escaping, as I usually did.
“He died of cancer. Big family secret. Not good to have those kinds of secrets.” He tapped his chest with two fingers.
The far door flung open and the girl in a plaid skirt ran back in. “Forgot something,” she said, huffing.
“Red notebook?” he said, pointing to it on a chair.
She ran out again and he turned back to me. “So if you want to get anything off your chest, come see me. Anytime is a good time. Just knock on my piano.” He smiled. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You sound terrific. Now memorize those words and you’re there.”
I collected my books and headed out more or less dazed. First, that he had spoken personally to me, and second, because of what he said about his father. I walked home in a dream that lasted all the way past the stores and trees, our driveway — a feeling that I was not alone. He had been on the same train of this unwanted trip, taking in similar views.
After my private talk with Mr. Edwards, I hummed the song everyday between classes, in the shower, walking home. I became it.
~~~~~
On the night of the choral performance, I wore a long black skirt and white blouse, but underneath I carefully hooked Mother’s garter belt to a pair of her sand dune-colored nylons. These had a sumptuous feel, entirely different than the coarser pantyhose sold at the Five & Dime.
Everyone at the school came, including Anthony, who sat in the far back. He caught my eye and nodded. I smiled and quickly looked at the crowd that was growing boisterous, a funnel of hysteria as the semester wrapped up, capped by this evening. Giselle sat on the opposite end of the room with friends. Margaret told me she was no longer with him. She didn’t tell me why he stayed away from me, only that he was dating lots of girls and was stupid for not asking me out. Boys were idiots sometimes, she said. The blond-haired girl who had harassed me sat next to Anthony. She was his sister and this is why, since the day he walked me home, she left me alone.
All the parents showed up. The auditorium was packed, echoing with the voices of the entire high school, grades 10-12; nearly three thousand people warming the room. The lights dimmed twice.
When they blinked on again, I spotted Father in the middle center with Elliot and Robert on either side. Robert, of course, plunged in his book series on time travel. He was on book eleven now. According to the series, eleven was a mystical number with vibrations that opened the soul to yet another dimension, a parallel universe where people like us lived, only differently, without the noise and disturbances. Imagining myself in this alter world, I saw our house in a perennial springtime with Mother’s roses blooming, the coriander smell of the Korean spice bush filling my bedroom. Daylight would be lush as a field of dandelion flowers. The sun, never hurried, would drift across the horizon in early summer. Of all the books that Robert had read in this super fiction collection, this one intrigued me the most. The idea that something abstract as a number could transport you to another world was something I wanted to believe in. I saw the power of sound, the physical way a note vibrated and made the brain shimmer with joy. Music took me someplace else. Perhaps numbers worked in a similar way for Robert.
Elliot waved to me. I nodded from my spot on the second row in the soprano section. Sophie stood behind me. Peter was also performing: a guitar solo of Bob Dylan songs near the end of the program. Mr. Bingham would open the program singing three art songs. The lights dimmed and the auditorium grew dark and quiet. Time to begin. All eyes of the chorus focused on Mr. Edwards, who smiled and lifted his baton. A flap of his elbow and we were off with a lively “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from the musical Gypsy.
We sang through our medley of songs. The nerves in my stomach settled down and focused. When “Aquarius” started with its quiet beginning, Mr. Edwards turned to me and raised his eyebrows: ready, Sarah? The orchestra launched into its intro, repeating the main melodic line, adding a series of harmonies, then slowing down to meet my part. I inhaled and sang.
“When the moon is in the seventh house,” at first softly, cleanly, exhuming the ache and promise of the phrase as it filled the empty tank that had become my chest. Everything in me rose to the crescendo in the music, like a plant to sun. I tilted my head higher, looking first over the heads of the school body to the red exit signs all the way in back. The chorus joined in, adding layers of notes, a rippling of sails responding. I sang again, leading the fleet, always lighter than the chorus, able to float above the room. By the time I reached the last lines of the first stanza, and love — will steer the stars — I had left the auditorium on a solo ride, as if I were in a hot-air balloon drifting over high branches and the chorus like leaves rustling below. Together, we sang: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”
I stood taller, turning my palm out, offering up my heart. It was here, in this moment of singing, that I shed my shadows and ghosts. I forgot about Anthony and Giselle. Father’s face cringed in another bout of tears but it didn’t register in me except as purity of emotion, his lost desires embodied in the song. As I reached the final stanza and the chorus joined in again in a celebratory shout “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” we brought the melody to its exuberant end. Mr. Edwards swept his arms up in a final punch to the ceiling and the people in the first rows stood up in a paroxysm of applause, followed by the rows behind them and more rows again, hooting and shouting their approval, a room shaking with illusions of joy.
I rubbed my thighs to feel her against my skin and remembered how proudly she talked about Mrs.Janson’s daughter, Justine. I didn’t know if I measured up to Mother’s standards. This wasn’t opera I was singing. As the program went into intermission, and the second half came and went, Father squeez
ed my hand and refused to let me free. I was his prize for the evening and Peter too, for he had sung Dylan’s “Times They Are A-Changin’.” In this short evening, Peter and I became known to the entire school. I became visible again.
Students whom I knew only from sight came over to congratulate me. “You’re really talented. I didn’t know you sang. You sound professional. When are you singing again? What grade are you in?”
In bed that night, relief and exhilaration splashed against another layer that stayed ever the same inside. Alone, the music that had filled me, that had temporarily patched up the cracks and holes, drained away, like streams after a flash flood. I was left with darkness again.
I lay awake listening to the heat in the radiator as it sent off cryptic messages of pings and pangs knocking against metal. The house rattled like a broken toy. Downstairs Father shuffled down the hall from his office to brush his teeth. He had been proud. For that short time, he too had risen above himself and glowed. But Mother’s absence dimmed that too.
I turned over but repositioning my body didn’t help at all. I turned back over. Mother’s death became my life sentence, a different kind of imprisonment, and I realized that Elliot might be right about ghosts. This one had slipped inside me, pacing for public recognition, seeking that salve of music, a restless, circular longing for condolence and release.
Chapter Fifteen
Stonehill
Peter planned to stay at our cousin Kenneth’s apartment for the summer but he didn’t tell Father about this and he didn’t tell me until the night of his leaving. It was what Peter dreamed of: getting away. Far, far away. Kenneth lived in Los Angeles.
As I sat on Peter’s bedroom floor, my back against the wall, I watched my brother roll an extra pair of jeans and flannel shirt and wedge them into his backpack; his toiletry bag and notebook for songwriting, he tamped down on top. The magic of his cross-country trip flamed inside me. I wanted to go, too. His bus was heading west at midnight, passing through cities sparkling in the dark.
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