The door slides open. “Come inside right now,” her mother says, the words a hiss. She takes Prima’s arm and guides her over the threshold into the muffled quiet of the house and to the steady barstool of the kitchen island. The stool is high. Her legs dangle like a girl’s. Her view is of the big, open living room, the back staircase, the fireplace. She has picked out every single piece of furniture, every plate and vase and candle and coaster, and the music they make together brings her calm.
“I don’t like this one bit,” her father says. He watches the games on the porch through the window above the sink. “You let those kids drink too much.”
“They’re teenagers,” Prima says. “That’s what they do. It’ll wear off. Better they do it here than under some bridge like I used to.”
“And you’re proud of that?” he says.
“I thought you had more common sense now,” says her mother, shaking her head. “How much did you drink, anyway?”
“Is Mary Walsh still here?”
“I been talking to her in the driveway,” her mother says. “Good thing. Then I come inside and see what I see?”
“If you don’t like it, you can leave,” Prima says. “It’s not your party. Not everything’s designed for your comfort and joy.”
“Watch it, girl,” says her father. He gives Prima the stern look that still makes her stomach fall. “Show some respect.”
She turns the other way and rolls her eyes.
“You’re lucky your husband’s in bed.”
“Welcome to my world,” Prima says, throwing her hands up in the air. “Ten o’clock on a Saturday night, Tom dead asleep, me in the kitchen by myself. It’s a wonder I’m not a drunk.”
She doesn’t know why she says this. Compared to every other husband in her circle of moms, Tom’s a good egg. He doesn’t make many gestures, but when he does, he makes them big, like she does: surprise weekends in New York City, a BMW with a red bow on the hood, the diamond-studded watch on her wrist. So what if he doesn’t smother her with kisses every time she walks through the door? Who has time for that stuff anymore? The last thing Prima wants is to be one of those ’merican wives who complains that her husband doesn’t talk enough, doesn’t romance her, doesn’t appreciate her. But she falls into that trap without even trying. Maybe she watches too much TV. That’s all you see: husbands snoring away in the hammock while their wives drool over the gardener. One thing Prima can’t bear is a bored housewife who wants to be her husband’s best friend. A man, more than a woman, needs his own life. Don’t nag him too much, and he’ll always come back to you.
“Poor you,” her mother is saying. Her arms are opened dramatically wide. “In this big house like a princess.”
“I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t.”
“My life is perfect,” says Prima.
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“You don’t understand.”
Maddalena shakes her head. “I understand you have too much. Your problem is you have no problems. You make them up so you have something to do.” She walks to the sink and starts washing the dishes.
“Use the dishwasher, for Christ’s sake,” Prima says. “That’s what it’s for.”
Ryan and Patrick and a pack of boys stumble into the living room from the porch. Doubled over laughing, holding their beers steady, they fall onto the couches. They switch on the TV and turn on the baseball game full volume. Ryan’s a Yankees fan now that he’s at Syracuse, but he’s the only one pulling for them over the Indians.
“The Indians’ll skin you if you let them,” Prima shouts from her perch. “Their pitching’s been lights out.”
Just then, like magic, Paul O’Neill hits a grand slam. Ryan jumps on the arm of the couch and raises his arms above his head like it’s a touchdown. “Real lights out, Ma,” he says. “You should be a commentator.”
It hurts her, O’Neill’s grand slam. It feels, in this particular moment, personal. “Cut me some slack, will you?” she says. Again her voice comes out louder, more anguished, than she intends. A screech. The boys look over at her, narrow their eyes. Ryan drops his arms.
“Are you crying?”
“Am I crying?” She covers her face. “Yes, Ryan. Maybe I am! Maybe I’m crying!” The darkness spins. The tears are hot on her palms. “I can’t be right all the time, you know.”
“Jeez, Ma,” he says. “It’s just a baseball game.”
“Get your feet off the couch!” she shouts, though her eyes are still covered.
He hops down and says something to one of his buddies. The two erupt in laughter.
“Don’t make fun of your mother,” says Maddalena.
It’s the first good point she’s made all night. And then it’s her unmistakable arm around Prima’s shoulders, her warm, perfumed chest upon which Prima lays her head.
“If you ask me, she needs to grow up and not be such a wacko,” Ryan says, and with that he and his buddies are gone.
“Come with me,” says Maddalena. She guides Prima off the stool. Her father takes her other arm. Her body feels both unexpectedly light and familiarly sludge-heavy at the same time. The stairs are wobbly.
“Open your eyes,” Maddalena says. “Move your feet!”
“Not my room!” says Prima. She goes limp. “Tom’ll wake up!”
“So?”
“He’ll think something’s wrong. Nothing’s wrong. I can’t fall asleep. I have work to do.” She tries to break free. “The party—”
“The party’s over,” says her father.
“Take her to the living room,” says her mother.
And then she sits between her parents on the sofa for what feels like hours. Her drunkenness fades to a buzz, then to a dull throb behind her left ear. The cloud of negativity over her mother, which first descended early in the night when the subject of Italy was mentioned, lifts for a while as they discuss Mary Walsh’s obvious eye job, new colors to paint the living room walls, and the upcoming season of Christmas shopping. Slowly the throb fades, too, and the night clicks back into place. At exactly eleven o’clock, Frankie calls, and mother and son gab like sorority sisters while Prima and her father flip through magazines.
When Maddalena finally hangs up, she’s got a smile on her face like she’s forgotten there’s been any fighting or drunkenness at all. “How’d he know to call here?” Prima asks her.
“I told him last night. He pays attention.”
And I don’t? Prima almost says, but she lets it go. Still, she can’t resist taking a shot: “So how is the little vampire, anyway?” And just like that, as Prima suspected, the cloud descends again, and mother and daughter look at each other through the fog.
“You don’t take anything serious,” Maddalena says. “No, that’s not true. You take the wrong things serious and the other things—the right things—you don’t pay attention to.”
“Give me an example.”
Maddalena shakes her head. “We fight enough for one night.”
Prima can’t admit to her mother that she, too, is worried about Frankie. His walks remind her of Tony, the weeks before, when he’d come home hours late from school with no explanation and clean his room top to bottom without doing his homework and get quiet and far away in the eyes. So she changes the subject to something safe, and soon it’s time for her parents to go.
She stands in the headlights of her father’s Cadillac, waving as he backs out onto the street. He doesn’t see so well anymore, and the road from here to Graylyn Ridge is dark and windy and narrow. At least once a week somebody hits a deer or drives into a ditch. He’ll call her in thirty-five minutes to let her know they made it home safe. In the meantime, the last remaining clouds in Prima’s head evaporate. She paces around the yard, sandals in hand, cooling her bare feet on the grass. (Lately the soles have been burning in flashes, day and night. She knows what this means, that it’s the end of one era and the beginning of another.) She stares at the oakleaf hydrangea, p
ulls some weeds, breaks off a sprig of the red chokeberry. Even in the shadowy light they are beautiful against the brick. One day she wants a moonlight garden, all white flowers. Daisies and honeysuckle and birch. She wants to step down from the back deck at night into a field of ghosts. On recommendation from her landscaper, she is also considering an English garden—“controlled wildness,” he calls it. Violets, peonies, primroses, asters. Something to shake up the yards of box hedges and boulders of Fox Chase Estates. It’s a pretty neighborhood and costs a fortune in civic-association dues and property taxes, but the front lawns and flower beds are a yawn.
Three thousand three hundred and eighty-five square feet. There’s your answer, Allison Grey. Market value: four hundred thousand dollars. She didn’t want to brag. Maybe the girl isn’t from money. She could be at Padua on scholarship. She and her mother might walk through Ethan Allen just to daydream.
After twenty-five minutes, Prima heads back inside, takes two aspirin, and sits with a big glass of water on the main stairs next to the hall phone. Yanks-Indians is long over, but the games on the porch continue. The basement door opens and closes. There are separate sets of footsteps on the back stairs and moving slowly across the second-floor hallway. She has lost supervisory control. She needs to set up the sleeping bags in the family room and put out towels for morning showers and prep some of the breakfast so she’s not overwhelmed by all the hungry mouths in the morning. She wonders if the keg is done. In her mind the whole time is the image of a deer and a ditch and her father’s car flipped over. She imagines her life without them, the emptiness of it, how you are never too old to be an orphan. Her friends who’ve gone through it have started on medication and gained weight; their grief hangs on them like an odor. When the first parent goes, Prima wonders, will the other move in with her, or will Frankie move back, or will they insist on living alone in Graylyn Ridge? Neither will want to give up the house, and she won’t be able to win that argument, either. A house is an impossible thing to give up. It is a display of your insides, whether you mean it to be or not. And when you surrender your house, half your self goes with it. Meanwhile ten minutes go by and the phone doesn’t ring and doesn’t ring, and then it does, and her mother and father are home safe, and Prima says she’s sorry for how she behaved tonight, because she is, because she’s a good daughter and has a good life, and they say to make sure to wish the twins a happy birthday and tell them to save the money they put in their cards, and she says, “I will.”
When Prima looks out onto the porch, she sees that not only does the beer pong tournament rage on, but a group of kids are now on the lawn running some sort of race? With a tree branch? Whatever it is, Ryan’s directing it, shirtless, and she resists the urge to pull open the door and shout, You’ll catch cold! like some sitcom mom. There’s no sign of the twins, though that might be Matt who’s just been tackled by a guy in an Eagles jersey. It’s hard to see. She climbs the stairs again to check on Patrick, who’s invited some of his own friends over, younger boys. They’ve spent the entire night locked in his upstairs bedroom watching horror movies in the dark with family-size bags of chips and a cooler of soda (and probably, if she knows Patrick, some beers stashed under the Cokes). It’s a full house, for sure, a peaceful one, with all her beloveds, awake or asleep, safe and happy, and for Prima, nothing could be sweeter.
She heads down to the basement for the sleeping bags. A few years ago, they converted one side of it to a guest suite and put in a treadmill and a small office and a bathroom so it would feel like a hotel. Nobody’s ever slept there, though, because it’s warmer and plenty spacious upstairs, especially with the twins and Ryan gone. Prima looks forward to the guests. She has a leather-bound guest book with “Hotel Buckley” embossed on the front, ready to be filled.
She finds the camping equipment right away, Tom having organized the other side by season. As she’s reaching to pull down one of the plastic bins, she hears a noise. She looks across the room but sees nothing. The hotel side of the basement is dark, and the Chinese divider stands where it stood when she came down. She reaches up again for the bin, and for sure this time, there’s someone or something moving just a few feet away from her, on the other side of the divider.
“Hello?”
She walks slowly across the basement and peers around the corner of the divider into the blackness of the hotel. She hears laughter, muffled laughter, a boy’s laughter, but sees nothing. She takes a few steps toward it. She rests her hand on the seat of the stationary bike. She should turn around. It’s not her business if two kids want to sneak off and neck. Did she not do as much at their age? She might have expected this to happen but is surprised that she feels charmed by it—yes, charmed is the word—thinking that her house will be the site of such memories, that years later a woman like her, a wife and mother pushing fifty, might drive by this house and suddenly remember, That’s where I had my first kiss, in that basement there. I think his name was Buckley . . .
She steps closer. Her eyes adjust. She can make out the desk, the printer, the treadmill, the door to the bedroom suite half-open. Still barefoot, she makes no noise as she maneuvers toward the door. The sounds on the other side are clearer now. Furniture moving, the creak of the bed, breath. More laughter. Voices. The slap of skin.
“Your turn . . .”
“No, you—get it—”
There are three of them. She can see that now, for sure. Maybe? A boy standing. Two on the bed. Are there four? They’re laughing. No clothes at all. Moonlight. Their skin glows. A girl’s on the bed. Her long hair covers her face. The standing boy jumps onto the mattress, lands on his knees. The other boy, in profile, lifts his arm. The girl is giggling.
Prima can see them, but they can’t see her. The moonlight stops at her feet. There are three.
“Shh,” one of the boys says, “you’re not so wasted.” Matt says. One of the boys is Matt.
More giggling from the girl. “No, not me!” She keeps giggling. Allison Grey keeps giggling. Then she stops.
“That’s the way to shut her up,” the other boy says. The other boy is Zach.
Prima closes her eyes, opens them, closes them again. The girl says something she can’t quite make out—“Sure” or “Here”—and sits up. Maybe it’s not Allison? The girls all look alike. The boys stay on either side of her. Maybe those aren’t her boys? But they are. She’d know them in complete darkness. Then the girl starts to sing. I’ll be gone till November, I’ll be gone till November . . .
“I gotta piss,” Zach says. He goes into the bathroom. She hears his stream, the running water of the sink. While he’s doing this, his brother climbs on top of the girl.
“Off—” Zach says when he returns. He takes Matt’s place.
I’ll be gone till November, gone till November . . .
Prima backs away and, as silently as she came, crosses the basement and rushes up the stairs, leaving the light on, the sleeping bags in their bins.
Ryan’s a blur in the kitchen, guzzling Gatorade. “Good night to you, too, Ma,” he says as she charges up to the second floor.
In her bedroom, the TV’s on low and Tom’s still asleep and the walls are loud with blue light flashing. She locks herself in the bathroom and sits on the edge of the tub in the dark, her palms pressed to her eyes. This is the woman she’s become: a mother who spies on her sons from behind a door. She’s not proud of the spying or what she saw or thinks she saw, but she’s not ashamed, either, not of herself and not of her sons. The girl is beautiful. They are, the three of them, young. They should have everything and keep taking and taking until they get it. If not now, when? They just need to be careful. Controlled wildness. And she is the boys’ mother, their best friend. She won’t be surprised if they tell her the story in the morning.
If Prima were braver, she’d change the rhythm, unlock the bathroom door, pull the covers off Tom, and wake him with a kiss on his mouth and her hand between his legs. But she’s not brave in this way. She used to be, ba
ck when she was the twins’ age, in the years after Tony, when nothing mattered, which is maybe why she feels no shame for her boys now. The reason is of no importance. They just need to be careful. How can she make sure they’re careful?
“YOU HAVE TO understand,” says Professor Rhonda Birch, from the other side of the kitchen table. “This puts me in a very awkward position.”
Frankie’s Rice Krispies have gone soggy. And now, while she explains why he should not count on the dissertation fellowship that could change the trajectory of his career, possibly not even apply for the award at all, the bananas rot in their little pools of milk, the cabinet doors fly open, the wallpaper peels off in sheets, and the ceiling begins to buckle. His own little House of Usher. And for not having said, Let’s just be clear: no one deserves this award more than you, my darling Frankie, but—as a preamble, before her litany of practical reasons, he’d like to strangle her and hide her under the floorboards.
“We can’t risk even the illusion of impropriety,” she continues. “This is my livelihood we’re talking about.”
“What about my livelihood?”
“You have a thousand more chances ahead of you. This is the beginning of your career. Mine’s in its twilight, at best. If I lose this position, where do I go? How do I compete with the rising stars? Plus, Amos has a lot of influential friends.”
“Twilight is pushing it.”
“These days, the lifespan of an academic—a woman’s at least, a vital woman’s—is short as a supermodel’s,” she says. “And these ankles are weak, baby. My wrinkles are showing.”
“You’re not serious,” Frankie says, because it occurs to him she might be teasing, or if not, that she can easily be swayed. The Professor’s pattern—in the classroom, in her scholarship, in bed—is to rant and bluster and overreact and get all soap-operatic at the beginning, then step back, consider broader contexts, give the other side its due, and finally stake out the middle ground in a kind of shared understanding, the end result of which is mutual pleasure. It distinguishes her among the ideologues in her field, but it also makes her extremely defensive if someone questions the strength of her convictions, which they frequently do. Empathy is not a virtue in their social and academic circles. Exhibit it too often or at too intense a degree, and sooner or later someone will hurl at you the most damaging accusation of all: “You’re not serious.” That label immediately casts you in the subintellectual league of humanists, Comp and Rhet instructors, and contemporary novelists. But Frankie has always believed—and will continue to believe, no matter what—in Professor Birch’s intellectual integrity and academic prowess. Her chapter on Ngugi, from her second book, nearly brought him to weeping. He believes that empathy and literary theory are not only compatible but can enrich each other and possibly even change the world.
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