by Lisa Gornick
Tonight, the memory is of a painting her brother, Alan, made some twenty years ago of the family as a table setting. It was the one year they had all been in high school together, spaced like stepping-stones across the grades: David and Alan, with nearly two years between them but due to quirks of the district’s age rules only one grade, then Sam, fourteen months younger than Alan, and finally Marnie, who’d tagged along by skipping a grade so she’d landed a year behind Sam. In Alan’s painting, her mother had been the plate, her eyes and nose rising from the white expanse like the woman in the moon, her hair still thick and black. Her father, dressed in a brown suit, jagged on one side to form the serrated edge of the blade, was the knife. David, then a senior, brainy and always brooding, either about his college applications or an argument with Nancy, his girlfriend who was already planning their wedding for four years hence, was the fork, set off far to the left of the canvas. Sam, whom everyone still called Sama, had been a long-legged soup spoon with a haze of marijuana smoke billowing around her hair and an arm draped over Marnie, cast as a plump cross-legged teaspoon with her nose in a book. Alan had painted himself as a goblet with a hollowed-out, oversized head filled with milk. Without a word about its implications, her mother framed the painting and hung it in the dining room, where Marnie had felt compelled each dinner to examine it anew.
Now Marnie can’t recall when the picture disappeared. Perhaps the year after Alan’s suicide, when Marnie was the only kid left in the house (David by then a junior at Princeton, Sam in her first year at Berkeley) and her mother threw herself into redecorating: tearing down the original fireplace mantel, ripping up the kitchen linoleum, turning the three empty bedrooms into a library, guest room, and ironing room, and then painting all the walls a brutal white that she left bare of photographs and pictures.
Ben moves onto his stomach, his head turned toward Marnie. He blinks his eyes, shuts them, and then opens them wide. “What’s the matter?”
“I can’t sleep.”
He reaches a hand onto Marnie’s hip, rubs little circles with his thumb.
“I’m taking the nine o’clock bus to Rapahu and Sam’s flying down from Boston so we can have a meeting about what to do with my mother.”
“What to do?”
“David says we’re going to have to move her to a nursing home—that the hospital won’t keep her more than a hundred and twenty days. Sam wants to talk about how long we’ll keep her alive on the tubes.”
Ben turns onto his back, props a pillow under his neck, and switches on the light. Marnie feels a surge of love for him; even Decembers when Ben would work until midnight for weeks on end printing holiday cards, he’d always welcomed her words, always made her feel that nothing was more important.
“It’s going to be a mess. David sees this through his doctor eyes: we have to use all measures to keep our mother alive. And you know Sam. She defends radical ideas like they’re starving children. When she was at Berkeley, she was a research assistant for this feminist political science professor, Hildie Something-or-other, who wrote an article about a feminist interpretation of the politics of dying. She keeps quoting this professor about the medical-slash-patriarchal oppression of women.”
“This is why people write living wills.”
“She’d been trying to get my mother to write one, but it obviously didn’t happen in time.” Marnie shifts onto her side. “Sam thinks this professor’s son is some sort of legal expert on the subject and might be able to advise us on what to do when there isn’t anything in writing, but she’s been dragging her feet contacting him.”
“Why’s that?”
“God knows. Maybe he’s one of her spurned lovers or maybe she’s delaying the fight with David.”
“Did your mother ever talk about what she’d want?”
Marnie feels irritated: Is she imagining this or is Ben interrogating her? She leans back, presses her eyes with the flats of her fingers. Her mother’s face floats into her mind. She’s dangling a plastic rain bonnet like the ones sold in restroom vending machines. The rain bonnet is not a mystery. With David handling Raya’s doctors, Marnie has taken over the indomitable paperwork for the insurance claim. This week, a second police report arrived in a mustard envelope. In the report, a boy described Raya as wearing a plastic scarf over her hair.
Marnie thinks about telling Ben about the report and what the boy wrote but Ben is stroking her arm and saying, “Shhh, try to go back to sleep,” and her limbs are growing heavy and her thoughts drift like clouds past Ellie with her beach-ball belly, past her father in his jagged brown suit, past her mother and the dangling bonnet.
*
Marnie scans the waiting room of the Rapahu station half expecting to see someone she knows, but only the blind man who runs the newsstand looks familiar. Yesterday, on the phone, she’d tussled with David about wanting to take a cab to his house rather than having him pick her up—this being a classic interaction with David, who snatches at any opportunity to give something tangible to his sisters while avoiding knowing too much about either of them. Now, with the sun breaking through the white winter sky, Marnie decides to walk the mile and a half to David and Nancy’s house.
In the eighteen years since Marnie graduated from high school and moved away, Rapahu has changed very little. Main Street still sports the florist shop owned by her now-sister-in-law Nancy’s parents and run these days with the help of Nancy’s younger sister; the pharmacy owned by the Stephens family, whose son had for a while been one of Sam’s many boyfriends (at sixteen, he’d been renowned for his Milk Duds box filled with Seconals, Darvocets, and Valium, but is now, Nancy has hinted, “very into his recovery”); the appliance store where Marnie’s parents and Nancy’s parents and, more recently, David and Nancy bought their dishwashers, refrigerators, and stoves.
Despite its familiarity, Marnie has always experienced the town as alien: the expectation of enthusiasm for Masonic raffles and Girl Scout cookie drives, the tinsel and spray-painted pine-cone wreaths wrapped around the lampposts and the town’s two stoplights the Monday that follows Thanksgiving, the low buildings dwarfed by the expanse of the sky. Not until the summer after she turned eleven—a lonely stretch when Sam had a boyfriend from David’s class with whom she spent her waking hours learning to smoke cigarettes and roll joints, and David started a lawn-mowing business with Alan as his assistant and the goal of buying his own stereo by the fall—had Marnie understood that her feeling of being a foreigner accidentally laid-over in Rapahu was connected to her mother.
At the beginning of the summer, Marnie had fallen into a routine, sleeping each day until noon, spending the afternoons stretched out on a beach blanket in the backyard listening to the radio and tanning her legs, reading late into the night. This dreamy pattern broke midsummer when Raya announced that she and Marnie were going to paint the upstairs bedrooms. Each morning at six thirty, Raya would shake Marnie awake so they could work in the early cool: laying tarps, sanding woodwork, rolling and rerolling walls, painting trim with an array of small slanted brushes.
While they painted, Raya talked—first in snatches as she had always done when any of her children would ask about her past, but then, as the days went on and the paint seeped into their skin and the heat rose in August and Marnie mastered painting even window frames, in longer and longer stretches. Each episode of her mother’s life attached itself to the place they were working. In Alan’s room, there was the story of how Marnie’s parents had made the move from the Upper West Side to Rapahu on her father’s insistence shortly after his promotion to director of sales at Little Falls Paper, where he’d clawed his way from a salesman in the Bronx to the top of his heap.
“How come Daddy didn’t like the city?” It was late morning and Raya was standing on a stepladder to reach the strip of wall over Alan’s closet while Marnie sat on the floor painting the radiator.
“It goes way back. When your father was a boy, he and Grandma Mary lived in a tiny apartment over what’s n
ow the pharmacy. Grandma Mary would cry and cry about no longer having a house. Ever since, your father has felt that apartment living is only for poor people.”
While rolling the walls in Sam’s room, Marnie learned how Grandma Mary had to sell her house after her husband, Marnie’s father’s father, angry that Grandma Mary’s claims about her family’s wealth had been vastly exaggerated, took off with the three hundred dollars they had in their checking account to make a life by himself in Florida, leaving Grandma Mary with a one-year-old and a household of expensive wedding presents but no income except what she was able to earn as a switchboard operator for the telephone company.
The most spectacular story had come when they reached Marnie’s room and her mother had told Marnie that she’d been married before: to Harvey Miller, a painter and a Communist who three months after their wedding left Raya in their Manhattan railroad flat while he headed with a friend to Mexico, Party business, he hinted, a possible meeting with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but, Raya knew, really an opportunity for a lot of drinking and whoring (would her mother have said whoring?—no, probably, not, Marnie thinks), where he died of a spider bite. A twenty-year-old widow, Raya turned a deaf ear to her parents’ pleas that she move back to St. Louis. Instead, she found a job as an assistant to one of the curators of Meso-American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and began attending City College at night.
Raya had been almost thirty and at work on a catalogue of Kahlo’s paintings when she first met Thomas. How does Marnie know that her mother hadn’t loved her father at the time of his proposal but correctly surmised that she would grow to love him for his devotion to her, his hardworking nature, and his appreciation of beauty, acquired from his own mother? Did her mother talk about it that summer while they painted the bedrooms? Probably what she said was that she had wanted children. Indeed, two months after her marriage to Thomas, Raya was pregnant with David, and within five years Alan, Sam, and Marnie followed.
“If we’d stayed in the city,” her mother said with a sigh (they were painting the trim in David’s room), “I would have gone back to work. Old Mr. Klopfer was still the head curator and he told me when I left, right before David was born, that as long as he was there, I’d always have a job.”
Marnie turns at the brick ramparts that mark Grant Street, formerly the drive to an estate where Ulysses S. Grant is said to have summered during his presidency, and now a residential street canopied with elms and lined with three-story center-hall Colonial houses. Neither she nor Sam was surprised when, after his residency, David bought the practice of Rapahu’s retiring gastroenterologist, making him the third generation of their family to live in the town. She hasn’t been to her brother’s house since the first week after Raya’s accident, when she and Sam shared the guest room. The stay ended badly after Sam, whose temper was even shorter than usual, exploded following Nancy’s insistence that they all—Nancy, David, their five-year-old Kyle, Marnie, and Sam—join hands before dinner to say the Serenity Prayer, which Nancy had recently learned as part of what she referred to as her recovery with Adult Children of Alcoholics. “What kind of voodoo crock of shit is this?” Sam yelled—alone with Marnie but loudly enough, Marnie was certain, for David and Nancy to hear. “Neither of Nancy’s parents is an alcoholic. They didn’t drink any more than Mom and Dad or anyone else’s parents.”
“She thinks that they interacted with her like alcoholics and that the meetings are helping her to stop enabling those behaviors.”
Sam tapped a cigarette out of her pack and put it under her nose. She inhaled deeply. “She probably thinks it was the plan of Señor Higher Power for a bread truck to hit Mom.”
As she approaches the house, Marnie can see Kyle sitting in the circular driveway poking with a stick at a patch of gravel a few feet behind David’s BMW. He’s a silent child who rarely cries or whines or asks for things and spends most of his time digging holes in the ground. It has taken Marnie a long time to understand that unlike her own visits to an imaginary world, her nephew, bored by his parents’ patter (brush your teeth, eat more chicken, get your backpack), resides full-time in this alternate reality. Of late, Kyle has taken to feigning intermittent deafness; now he ignores the crunch of Marnie’s feet on the drive.
Stopping a few steps away, Marnie quietly watches her nephew. After a minute or two, he glances at her boots.
“Could I take a look?”
Kyle makes a tiny nod. Marnie moves closer and lowers herself onto her haunches. She examines the hole in the frozen ground. Around the edges, Kyle has placed a circle of stones.
“It’s a secret tunnel.”
Marnie remains squatting. Kyle has rubbed dirt into the thighs of his pants. In the weak light, his thin hair looks electric. “A secret tunnel,” she repeats.
“It goes under the house and then down a million billion miles to the middle of the earth.”
“That’s far. What’s down there?”
“Lots and lots of people,” Kyle says, his eyes fixed on the hole.
“Anyone I know?”
“That’s where all the people who die go.” Kyle keeps digging. Marnie wonders if this is where he thinks his grandmother is now. For Kyle’s fifth birthday, only a week before her mother’s accident, Marnie had written a rhyming book that Raya illustrated with watercolors. There were ten pages: Once in a while, you meet a Kyle. Kyle walks a mile. There’s Kyle, in the aisle. Kyle is on trial. Kyle knows how to dial. Kyle has a file. Kyle makes a pile. Kyle dresses in style. Kyle meets a crocodile. Kyle likes to smile. For the last page, her mother had wanted to paste in a photograph of Kyle. To no avail, she searched her packets of photographs and even called Nancy’s mother to see if she had a picture of Kyle with a smile. “Just like Alan,” Raya said, surprising Marnie, since her mother rarely mentioned Alan’s name. “Your father could never get a picture of him when he wasn’t lost in thought.”
Marnie hears the front door open, and looks up to see David standing at the top of the stairs. He scowls. “What? You couldn’t get a cab?”
“No, I wanted to walk.”
“You should have called. Sam took the early shuttle so she could visit Mom. We’ve been back already half an hour.”
Marnie hugs David. In the past year, his hair has turned from bluish black to salt-and-pepper. “I wanted to walk.”
“Go in, go in. Nancy and Sam are in the kitchen making lunch.” On the front door, a yellow bow that signals support for the troops in Iraq hangs next to a NO SMOKING PLEASE sign. Marnie wipes her feet, wondering which will have irritated Sam more: the yellow ribbon or the sign. Outside she can hear David telling Kyle to come in for lunch, and then his annoyance when he receives no reply. “Kyle, answer me. I’ve told you a hundred times that you’re to answer when people talk to you.”
In the kitchen, Nancy is laying out cold cuts wrapped in wax paper and spooning deli salads into serving bowls. Sam sits at the counter, tapping her fingers in the way that she does when she’s dying for a cigarette. As usual, Nancy is dressed in overly coordinated clothes: baby blue for her corduroy pants and headband, brown suede for her flats and belt. She looks prissy next to Sam, who with Raya’s height but their father’s delicate bone structure has for twenty years been wrecking men with her look of careless semi-dishabille—collarbone sticking out from a T-shirt, delicate ankles perched over work boots, long neck exposed by the short crop of her hair. Now Sam sports jeans and an oversized flannel shirt that probably belongs to her most recent boyfriend, Matt, a professor of sociology at MIT who, Sam confided in Marnie, first captured her interest due to rumors of his IRA connections and who writes on rhetoric and culture—dense, theoretical stuff with words like autochthonous and de-realizing that Sam refuses to read and that even David, the most intellectual of the three of them, has proclaimed impenetrable.
Marnie blows Sam a kiss and gives Nancy a hug. “What can I do to help?”
“Nothing, nothing. Just sit down, everything’s organized.” Sam winks.
She and Nancy had been in the same grade in the Rapahu schools; by sixth grade, Nancy had color-coded notebooks for each subject and a plaid address book with each of her friends’ phone numbers, birth dates, and clothing sizes written inside. “I bet she even poops on schedule,” Sam used to joke.
“How was Mom?” Marnie asks.
“She got up, did a tango, and then just lay back down, eyes closed, in the same position.” Sam grins her toothy Joni Mitchell smile. Nancy looks up from slicing a tomato. She purses her lips. The joking’s good, Marnie wants to say, it keeps Raya alive for us, it’s what she would want, and then, for the first time today, it hits her, why they’re all here: to figure out what her mother would want.
*
They eat on lavender paper plates in the Queen Anne dining room. In the middle of the table there’s a centerpiece from Nancy’s parents’ florist shop: red, white, and blue carnations with miniature American flags interspersed and a yellow ribbon wrapped around the container.
“Looks like your folks have quite a business in war propaganda,” Sam says.
Marnie pinches Sam’s leg under the table, but Nancy is deaf to derision. “Oh, yes,” Nancy says between delicate bites of her sandwich. “They’ve used a thousand yards of yellow ribbon since the war began. My father says you can’t get a flag anywhere in the county.”
Nancy goes on to tell them who from Rapahu is in the Gulf and about the letter-writing campaign at the middle school. David eats quickly and a lot, as if tranquilizing himself with the macaroni salad. Kyle nibbles at the crust of his sandwich, peels back the top slice of bread to inspect what’s underneath, turns the bread upside down so that the mayonnaise is on the outside, and then pokes a hole with his forefinger through the center.
Looking across the table, Marnie can see that Sam has also abandoned her sandwich, her tapping resumed. Before they sat down, David had whispered that Nancy would take Kyle to visit her parents after lunch and that they’d be able to talk freely about Raya then. Sam looks at her watch. Damn, Marnie thinks about her sister, she’s literally counting the minutes until Nancy and Kyle will leave and she can head out the back door to smoke.