He knocked on the door.
“I’m still not feeling well.”
He opened it and stood in the hallway looking in. My shades were drawn giving the room a sick brownish pallor.
“Women stuff.”
This set him back. He started to close the door again.
“I’ll tell Dora to call the school. See you tonight. Call me if you need me. All right?”
He raised his eyebrows, waiting.
I nodded, sliding further under the covers. “Shut the door all the way, please.”
Downstairs, I heard him talking to Dora. The back door shut and he headed down the steps to the driveway. I looked at the clock. He had reverted to his old precise schedule: 7:45 a.m. out the door in the morning as if precision about time could put order back into our lives. The arc of Time prevailed over his mood swings, Robert’s diatribes, Peter’s absconding to the West Coast, Elliot’s gentle emotional probing, and his daughter’s insouciance. Sherry had something to do with it. She was there nudging him back to life.
I waited to see if he took the car, but this morning his shoes scraped along the pebble-crusted driveway, down our short street, a right turn down the longer hill, another right to a flatter stretch, then left onto the main road to town and finally the train station, not far from the pet store. His overloaded briefcase filled with the day’s literary rantings, some ancient author’s forging.
Elliot and Robert went next. Robert chattered beneath my window while Elliot whistled. Something about early October made the sound of their voices clean and light. Maybe it was the thinning trees. Less leaves to absorb the vibrations. Robert told Elliot to shut up and listen. It was the usual morning fare. Elliot didn’t hesitate to respond in an even tone. I admired Elliot for his ability to ignore Robert’s prickliness and I think that Robert, despite himself, appreciated this. On some level, and he rarely occupied himself with what others thought, Robert suspected, he knew his diatribes and mental chomping harassed people and wore them down. It was why he had few friends. At the same time, Elliot toughened under the influence of Robert’s insistent, repetitive talk. He grew stronger. He opened himself to the world and endured.
Once the house stopped rippling with sounds and the breakfast smells subsided, Dora came upstairs and knocked on my door. She set a warm mug of tea with milk and sugar on my night table. I didn’t expect this. She put a small plate of buttered toast next to it, lingering until she saw me sipping and nibbling. She raised the shades to modulate the morning sun coming in and when she came back up to retrieve the empty plates, she lowered them so the afternoon sun wouldn’t pierce my eyes. She felt my head for fever and took my temperature. I was normal.
“What kind of bug is this?”
“It’s my, you know, my stomach. Period stuff,” I said, hoping that would say enough, but say nothing as well. She pinched her lips, assessing something in the middle of the room looking for what to put in order, sensing something because I rarely stayed home. I much preferred to be out. But my room, as usual, was clean and neat, so she left.
Blood soaked my sanitary pads. I got up to change. The clinic in New York said to expect this. I had a sheet of warning signs and tips and ten days' worth of antibiotics. The nurse told me to take it easy the first week. Increased activity could increase the bleeding. She gave me a prescription for birth control pills. One pill a day. I had a tip sheet about this too. The essentialness of remembering, the danger of forgetting. I had a good head on my shoulders. I used to. I thought I did.
All these things I kept in my night table drawer, tucked in a box. I had another tip sheet listing numbers to call, including a follow-up appointment with the clinic psychologist on Beacon Hill. I had a handful of aspirins laced with codeine — to still the mild cramping, the uterine spasms. The pills quieted my head. I eased into a warm safe feeling. I lay on my back gazing at nothing, the tiny yellow birch leaves flickering outside my window, a squirrel skipping up a branch, then curling itself into a prayer’s stance. I listened to my body whirring smoothly, thoughtless as a child, simple as days when the slant of sun or a color in the cloud was enough knowledge, more than enough to take me through the day.
I slept.
I wrapped the sanitary pads in wads of toilet paper. The tiny trash can in the bathroom filled up with a sour smell of old blood and dried body fluids. The same smell saturated my nightgown. I got up and took a shower to clean it away, push the New York trip further back in the drawer. I smoked two cigarettes leaning out the bathroom window. Long sucking smoke.
I didn’t have these warning signs: excessive blood, clots bigger than fifty cents.
When the aspirin lost traction and the tugging in my lower abdomen started up again; a grinding twist in my stomach, I took a few more. The tip sheet said to expect this. Nauseous fingers played with the back of my throat. I breathed. I turned over in bed. I flipped the pillow to its cool side. I turned the radio on.
The trip might have been yesterday or it might have been last year. The way to New York where Gregory lived might have been across the ocean, Europe, a nightmare crossing a current of disbelief. And Gregory. He seemed like a stick figure now. An idea that hadn’t worked out.
This wasn’t me.
Except it was.
I struggled against this. I wanted to fold myself up, put me in a drawer neat as my room, vacuumed, dust free — life free. I was an intelligent girl, talented, the one who made the right decisions. I had made a terrible mistake.
But then, I had a mother once.
“Oooh,” she said, her voice girlish and pleased. “Shall we sit up close?” She placed the popcorn container between us. Our fingers collided happily as we dug in and scooped handfuls. I followed her to the middle section of the theater, about twenty rows back from the screen and settled in beside her. On a rare outing together, she and I went to see a James Bond movie. Alone. Together. Not long after Grandpa’s funeral. Not long after the first accident.
Diamonds Are Forever was playing at Soquaset’s movie theater. Mother ordered a large buttered popcorn and two Cokes. The theater was half-full. We didn’t see anyone we knew.
Up front, the red curtain opened and the movie trailers began. Wearing navy pants and matching jersey, Mother melded into the darkened theater, except when the lights from the movie brightened her exposed arms and face. Midway into the feature, she put her hand on my arm. We laughed, giggled, and gasped as our hero, James Bond, burst through a paper wall, threw darts into the chest of the British enemy and fist-fought his way out of an elevator. We traveled to prairies in South Africa and posh Las Vegas casinos. I inhaled the aroma of butter on her breath while James Bond hung dangerously from the roof of a skyscraper hotel. For a short time, mother and I were action-loving companions riding an invisible roller coaster together, leaning into our seats, not wanting the ride to end.
~~~~~
I tried to touch her absence. I lifted my arm and waved it across the undisturbed bedroom air. I opened and shut my fingers. She was palpable. She was out of reach. I wanted her now, here in my room, at the window, at night, looking out at my dark hunger, this vacuous wedge between my ribs. The farther she went from me, someplace out my window, past the birch tree and the Fineburgs’ roof, to the plain vaulted room in the sky, her absence funneled deeper. I saw her sitting there. She was there. I got up and stood at the windowsill and tried to fit myself into the invisible envelope of her body. Time made things worse not better. Her leaving dug in, scratched and ached. I went back to bed. I saw her shoveling out the garden bed, clawing the dirt to make room for winter bulbs. Her fingers curled below the roots into the cold. Her pink fingernails protected by heavy, suede gardening gloves. The cherry tree had lost most of its leaves. The bulbous limbs reached across the patch of browning grass, saving its place for spring.
I wouldn’t be here to watch the blossoms return. That angered me. It reignited grief. I wanted to scream. Get a hold of myself. My brain lobes vibrated. I turned the radio up. The 5th Dim
ension.
Up, up and away
My beautiful,
My beautiful balloon!
Shaky thoughts. On the way home from New York, the car, the plane, Benny picking us up. Dear God. Mother. Where are you? I held the little bear in my lap, sleeping as the plane shifted levels before making its descent. And then it was over in some way. All over. But beginning again. The carving was done. I was sore. I had come to the end of something. I had come to nothing. I lay in the backseat of Benny’s car and we agreed that Sophie would come in to divert attention. Sophie had called Peter from the clinic pay phone. I was asleep, my head laden with medication and the frightening slice of regret that divided my life to before and after.
Life was full of before and afters. Before Mother died and after. Before Sherry came to the party and after. Before Peter left and after. Before Gregory slipped his penis between my legs and after. Before Anthony lifted me onto his lap and after. Before this abortion and after.
Except for music. Singing didn’t have a before or after. It stayed and stayed.
~~~~~
I stepped into the kitchen and heard the television in the den. Robert and Elliot watching a Walt Disney movie as they did every week, and Father there with them. I smelled his cigarette smoke. Not hers. Sherry’s coat was not in the hall closet. She went home on Saturday nights. The kitchen lights had been dimmed to night watch; the counters so clean a visitor would never suspect the confusion that prevailed, our spotted life. I heard Dora in her room watching TV.
“I’m home,” I shouted to stave off suspicion.
This worked better than sneaking upstairs. My elusiveness would only tug at Father, who would want to know if I had something to hide, a list of details to prove where I had been.
I headed up to my room and changed into a nightgown and robe then eased into bed. I planned to say I wasn’t feeling well. I planned to skip school. I planned to be alone, to change, to fix this mistake.
Sophie left, calling out to Father as she went out the back door.
“Good-bye, Mr. Kunitz. See you soon,” she yelled cheerfully.
I listened to Benny back his car down the driveway. Sophie had made a good choice, a better way of loving.
The night drifted quiet as a merry-go-round when the music has been turned off and the carousel is coasting to a stop. Gravity slips its hold on you as you ride the merry-go-round horse, up and down, until the people around you are no longer a colorful blur but individual faces waiting for you to step down, come back to their world, but you don’t want to let go of the pole or the height because up here on the merry-go-round horse, life looks better. I hugged my pillow and heard Robert and Elliot coming upstairs to bed, passing by my closed door. I had planned to take over Peter’s room and have Elliot take over mine but with the house sale, it didn’t matter anymore. I started to cry, tears spidering down my cheek. I squashed the drops into my pillow. I cried. I coughed the last drops out.
~~~~~
Tuesday, I lay in bed listening to the top 40 count-down on the radio. Emptiness flattened me as if I were lying under a mattress and another part of me lying on top of myself. In the early afternoon, Dora cleaned the second floor bathroom and emptied out trash cans. I smelled Clorox bleach. I listened to the shushing sprays of the window cleaner. Familiar smells wiping away history, wiping away this house.
I slept some but I heard her come in again and leave a cup of chicken soup. Later in the afternoon, before my brothers returned from school, she came in and sat on the end of the bed.
“Bad cramps?”
I nodded. I did my best to look calm but felt my face tighten. She would see the sanitary pads, the excessive number of them.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said, looking at me in that way that penetrated my thoughts. “My middle daughter went through this.”
I turned my head to the pillow. I didn’t want her to see my tears but they dripped to the side, icicles melting.
“The most important thing you can do is get on with your life,” she said putting her hand on my blanket-covered foot. “You’re too young for this.”
“I feel old,” I admitted. I saw that she wasn’t going to judge me. It was too late for that.
“Sophie’s a good friend,” she said. “Now you be a better friend to yourself.”
That started me crying again and when she squeezed my ankle in sympathy, I shook with all that I gave up. Ashamed.
“It’s a woman’s burden, this business. Did you start the pill?”
I nodded.
She tapped my ankle again and went out.
I sat up slowly. The soreness between my legs complained. I remembered when I was eight, swooshing down an aluminum slide in the school playground, ramming into a boy’s foot caught at the bottom of the slide because he had stopped abruptly, a joke to catch me on the way down. I ran around the yard clutching my pelvis unable to locate the specific point of intrusion. Streams of pain radiated into my hips and stomach. Muscle and skin throbbed an imprint of that boy’s hard-bottomed shoe. It was the first time my vagina protested, the first time I was forced to think about a tunnel running inside me, a cavity of unknown life, a vessel filled with a universe too grand and dark, abstract and unreachable for my mind.
I turned the radio dial, spun it away from advertisements about cars and laundry soap. Dora returned with a warm facecloth, which she tamped lightly on my forehead. She placed a hot water bottle near my stomach.
“This will soothe you. I’ll keep your father away when he comes home. He’ll be no help to you right now.”
“Keep her away too. It’s uncomfortable.”
She nodded, her stern face a measure of something tangible, a ruler of concern.
“I couldn’t have told Mother.”
“Tell her what you need her to know, now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Talk to her now. She’ll listen.”
After she left, I thought about what Dora said, but it scared me. I felt confused. I moved out of bed and went to my closet to find Mother’s picture I had hidden there. It was a framed, professional photo of her playing the violin. I rubbed the glass with my nightgown. She didn’t dye her hair then. Shoulder length, her hair shone like lemon polish on wood. She was young, still in college. And there was that expression — a dreamy, happy look on her lips, and a dip of the head the way it perched on the chin rest of the violin, as if she were doing the sidestroke in a warm pool.
I couldn’t talk to a photo. It was hard. What did it matter who she was then? That youthful part of her had left so long ago. Here, without her, it hurt. Maybe she did hear me. Mother, are you listening? The radio announcer chattered on, oblivious to me. I put the photo back in the closet and returned to bed.
~~~~~
For three days I stayed at home, sleeping for hours during the day, working on homework at night: algebra problems, biology chapter on the cell, a report due on Hawthorne for American history. Sophie came each afternoon with daily assignments and graded papers, then headed off to dance class. Benny drove up to the same spot on the driveway and waited in the car until my best friend returned to him, skipped back down the kitchen steps. Benny liked the rock station on FM. I could hear his car radio spilling out a low, sophisticated voice of a deejay, a torrent of words sounding sexy and angry; fermented in sleeplessness and drugs.
I piled my textbooks on the floor near the end of the bed. In the afternoon, Sophie knocked on my door, a few light taps, before entering. She brought the freshness of a school day, the way it might have been before Mother died, before Father fell apart, before Sherry attached herself to my life like a strip of bed sheets knotted and tossed over the side of a building, as if she were waiting for me to climb over the side or leap over imaginary flames, to her lifesaving arms.
I didn’t despise Sherry anymore. She meant well but Dora meant better. And Mother wouldn’t have approved. I remember how she noticed Sherry at the party, sidling up to Father in the backyard — She
rry, trying hard not to appear disheveled in her party dress and wrap. Her slathered lipstick. Her nipples. But Father and Shell, they liked something about her. She wasn’t untouchable. Sherry ate potato chips from a greasy well in her hand. She wasn’t prickly. She laughed at their stupid jokes.
Mother held back. She traveled inside an arcane orbit, spinning too quickly for any of us. Mother went out to the backyard that night of the party striving for something better, higher, so high she couldn’t touch it and neither could Father. He couldn’t grasp her core.
Where was she? Why couldn’t I feel her? Why couldn’t I remember who she was? Yet I saw her dresses, her chiffon pleated couture, her silk pointed shoes, the gold buttons on her coat. Please, Mother.
If this was growing up, I didn’t want to go this way but I couldn’t see any alternative but to move forward, to find something better. I reached for the sheet music under the night table. Mr. Edwards wanted me to sing. I held the papers in my hand; I held them tightly. I needed these notes, this music.
~~~~~
Dora finished vacuuming. She had stacked clean towels in the upstairs linen closet. After this, she went into Mother’s room. Now that the house was under contract Mother’s room became a packing room.
I felt well enough and got up to watch her unloading Mother’s closet. She carefully folded chiffon dresses, wool suits, linen pants, shoes of different colors. She pressed them into boxes and labeled them. The violin case had been taken down, set aside with things that were going with us.
“You should be resting,” she said, eying me severely.
“I’m feeling better today. What are we going to do with these?” I said, touching the cardboard flap of an open box full of sweaters.
“Take them to the new place.”
Father found a two-family on a street just outside the center of town. The walk to school would be closer. We would live upstairs without Dora. An older couple that had rented there for twenty-two years would remain. Maybe they would be nice. Dora would commute four days a week from her daughter’s house in Roxbury.
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