by Lisa Gornick
Sam smashes out her cigarette, winks at Marnie, and raps David on the forehead. “Come on, partner,” she says. The older couple smiles as Sam leads David onto the dance floor. Like their father, David keeps his back and shoulders perfectly still, leading Sam, it seems, from the pit of his stomach.
Laura twists her neck to watch David and Sam. “They’re terrific.”
Marnie feels annoyed with Sam for having left her alone with Laura. Laura sips her drink. “Terrific,” she repeats, her eyes focused now on the bottom of her glass.
That last Thanksgiving, Alan had talked about taking classes over the summer so he could graduate a semester early so when Laura did the study-abroad program she hoped to do at the Leakey Foundation, he could go with her. Now Marnie wonders if Laura ever finished high school.
“I saw your mother,” Laura says.
“In the hospital?”
“No, before.”
Marnie is surprised and vaguely hurt. Her mother had never mentioned seeing Laura.
“It was a year ago. Almost exactly.”
From the look on Laura face, Marnie is certain that she means on the anniversary of Alan’s suicide. For a long time, they had always telephoned each other on that day. Then, during the past decade, they stopped. It had begun to seem morbid to mark the date of a suicide. Last year, though, the first time Raya would have faced the day without Thomas, Marnie did call her mother. It was evening and they talked for a good while, and although neither of them mentioned Alan, Marnie had been certain that her mother knew why she had called.
“I hadn’t seen her since before…” Laura pauses.
“Before Alan killed himself,” Marnie says. She hadn’t intended the sharp note in her voice.
Laura peeks up at Marnie. “Except for those first few weeks before I left school when I used to see you and Sama, I … I guess I haven’t seen any of you since then. Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve seen David a couple of times around town but I always turned my face and he never recognized me.”
“Why did you go see my mother?”
“I wanted to tell her something about Alan.” Laura puts a hand on her chest, which moves up and down as she breathes.
Marnie feels her jaw clench and a surge of anger welling up inside. She imagines rolling up a newspaper and whacking Laura on the side of her head. “What did you tell her?”
Laura leaks. A tear slides down her cheek. She reaches into a pocket and pulls out a wad of tissues. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just that it’s been such a weight on me and I was so grateful to your mother for letting me talk with her.”
She dabs at her eyes with the tissues. “It was about that last time, when Alan was home. We were intimate—I mean, we tried to be.”
She hesitates, unsure, it seems, if it’s okay to go on. Marnie feels her stomach turn. She really does not want to hear any more.
“We’d planned it for a long time. Alan didn’t want me to take any risks, about getting pregnant, so we’d decided I’d get something first. I went to Planned Parenthood and they had me do all of these counseling sessions because I was under eighteen, and then they gave me…”
Laura glances over at her husband, then turns back to Marnie. “I told Alan on the phone and he worked out this plan that we could be alone the Saturday after Thanksgiving because David would have left already to go back to Princeton and you and Sama would go with your parents to visit your grandmother.”
Like everything about Alan’s last trip home, Marnie has gone over that Saturday so many times in her mind that the events are permanently logged in her memory: her father sniping at both David and Alan about their not coming along to visit Grandma Mary, David storming out without saying goodbye to any of them, Alan insisting that he had to use the afternoon to study.
The friends of the red-bouffanted woman and her husband have joined them on the dance floor. The other man, broad as he is tall, laughs as he spins his wife into a series of double turns. Laura finishes her sea breeze. “We tried, but Alan couldn’t.” Her eyes well. “I told him it didn’t matter—there’d be lots of other times. That I’d read in one of the books I saw at Planned Parenthood that this happens to lots of guys the first time, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”
Laura gives up trying to hold back from crying. Her shoulders heave, tiny dots of black mascara speckle her cheeks and then gather into black streaks that avalanche toward her chin. “He put the pillow over his head and refused to look at me. He just kept telling me to go away. All he’d say was, Go away, I just want you to go away.”
Marnie sees Alan’s face when Thomas would yell, “Goddammit, count”: Alan’s eyes cast downward, his teeth ground into his lower lip. She knows that she should reach out and touch Laura’s hand or arm, but she can’t.
After a bit, Laura’s shoulders still. She blows her nose loudly like a foghorn. “Your mother was wonderful. She held my hand and made me tea and said that I mustn’t blame myself, that she’d felt that way after her first husband died in Mexico and that she was sure Alan hadn’t killed himself because of what happened that Saturday—and that even if it was in some way connected, I wasn’t to blame, because that would mean something was wrong long before then. I told her how afterwards I’d wanted to kill myself too, and how my parents ended up calling a psychiatrist, who had them call the police to take me to the Carrier Clinic.” Laura runs a finger under her nose. “They kept me there almost a year.”
Marnie feels stunned. Stunned that she’d never wondered what happened to Laura. Stunned that her mother had talked with Laura so openly.
All of these years, none of them had ever talked with Raya about Alan. At first it had seemed impossible: her mother so brusque and businesslike about everything to be done. Then, at night, she would disappear early, usually by eight, into her bedroom. In the fall Sam moved to Berkeley, and only Marnie and her parents were left in the house. Evenings, Marnie would sit in the den with her father—Marnie doing her homework, her father reading the paper or reports from work between trips to the kitchen to top off his gin and tonic.
“What else did my mother say?”
“Just that she understood about my having not wanted to go on. That she’d felt that way since your father’s death—not that she would ever do anything, just that she wouldn’t be unhappy if her end came sooner rather than later.”
Marnie shudders.
Laura gasps. She grabs Marnie’s arm. “Oh my God. I’m such an asshole.” She squeezes so hard it hurts.
Marnie can see Laura’s husband scowling in their direction and pointing in an exaggerated way at his wristwatch. “Your husband. I think he’s trying to get your attention.”
Laura looks at the bar, and then back at Marnie.
“It’s all right. You can go.”
“I guess I better. Jimmie’s diabetic and can’t eat too late.”
Laura opens her purse and Marnie holds up her hand to stop Laura from pulling out her wallet.
Laura stands. “I’m such a jerk.” She points toward the dance floor. “Tell them goodbye for me, okay?” she says and then heads to the door, where her husband is standing with his windbreaker already on.
On the dance floor, David and Sam have switched partners. David is guiding the woman with the red bouffant into a demi-turn and Sam is doing a three-step with the woman’s husband.
Marnie drinks the rest of David’s scotch. She knows she should be letting what Laura told her about Alan, a pillow over his head, about herself, a year in the Carrier Clinic, sink in, but all she can focus on is how could her mother have said she wouldn’t be unhappy if her end came sooner rather than later? What about David, Sam, and her? Didn’t her mother want to be with them? Didn’t her mother want to see if she and Sam have children, how Kyle turns out?
She wonders if what Laura told her constitutes evidence of Raya’s wishes. Or was it nothing more than Raya trying to be nice to Laura—one woman comforting another with half-truths?
As she had with Ala
n, Raya had handled Thomas’s funeral arrangements by herself. She’d refused both David and Nancy’s and Marnie’s offer to come stay with them for a couple of weeks instead of being alone in the house. Except for neglecting the flowers and tomatoes that Thomas had planted (according to Nancy, Raya let the tomatoes rot on the vine), she’d seemed to be adjusting to living alone just fine.
It was like she didn’t even look.
Marnie wishes she could talk with Ben, ask him what she should do. Ben relishes these kinds of questions: “The interpretive decision,” he’d once explained, “is at the heart of Jewish thought.”
Maybe she would get Sam’s friend’s phone number and call him herself. At least then they would have a legal opinion.
The music stops. David shakes his dance partner’s hand. Sam gives the husband a peck on the cheek.
Marnie tracks David and Sam as they approach her from opposite corners of the dance floor—Sam waving and smiling from all the spinning and twirling; David dabbing the beads of perspiration on his forehead, glancing at his watch, already, it seems, thinking of Nancy and her opprobrium. For a moment she can see it from above: the three of them as the end points of a triangle etched into the floor of the tavern, Nancy and Kyle and Ben hovering moons, Alan and Thomas and Raya distant stars.
1992
Parachute
She called him on the eighty-ninth day her mother was in a coma. Her sister, Sam, thought he knew something about the legality of dying—living wills, how families could make these kinds of decisions without documents—but aside from a summer when he was in law school working with his mother, whom he called by her first name, Hildie, on a paper on the topic, a paper more grounded in Hildie’s feminist politics of death than in actual case law, he knew no more about the subject than the rest of the Boston secondary markets team, mostly MBAs, not lawyers, that he’d recently joined or, for that matter, than her ex-husband, a guy who ran a printing shop. The mistake embarrassed her, and she found herself flushed and damp at the armpits on the other end of the line, a response that returned when, four months later, after he’d moved back to New York, he called wondering if they might have coffee, a beer … his voice dropped off. A few days later, sitting across from her in an Afghani restaurant at a table covered with an oilcloth laid over a miniature rug, he talked mostly about Guatemala: a blue lake, Atitlán, a quarter-mile deep with three ancient volcanoes looming overhead like an extra-titted animal, an Indian village nestled at each of the inlets, the villages like abandoned eggs with only a mail boat that left the largest of the hamlets, Panajachel, each morning at dawn to connect them.
The children had gawked, he told her, at his then-long blond hair, at his height (a foot taller than their stooped, dark fathers), at his skin the color of the mountain clouds that blew in each dusk. They’d called him Jesus con un camión, Jesus with a truck, and would gather around because he gave them oranges. Watching this big man debone a chicken breast in three deft cuts, a banker’s suit draped over the filled-out chest of what she could imagine had once been a lean California boy, the fingers that had grazed her shoulder as they moved to the table, his stories like an intoxicant rising between them, she felt what she’d long thought of as her tiny dried-up heart erupt, tumbling like lava down one of those three ashen slopes.
She (her name is Marnie Klein) was thirty-six, a children’s book writer who had buried half her family—her brother two decades ago after he’d looped a rope around his neck, her father nineteen months ago after his heart turned into a backed-up drain, her mother a week after she’d called this Jesus con un camión with her misguided questions—as well as a marriage to a man she’d adored but whose Orthodox Judaism she’d been unable to abide.
He (his name is Andrew Stackhouse) was thirty-nine, divorced too—a brief marriage that seemed to have left him largely untouched. After an aborted beginning as a community organizer, the trip to Guatemala having been in part to put together a collective of weavers, he’d wandered east with greater deliberation than his demeanor suggested to law school at NYU, where he’d had an affair with a moody girl named Louisa that ended badly when a vamp named Cat-Sue put her panties inside his contracts course textbook.
Now, a year and a half after they met, they are married, with Marnie nearly three months pregnant, seated thigh to thigh thirty-five thousand feet above land en route to Berkeley for what will be Marnie’s first visit with Andrew’s parents.
Through the window, Marnie can see a blanket of clouds shimmering and opalescent beneath the belly of the plane, so near that one of her storybook characters could jump from the tip of the wing and somersault to a gentle stop. Andrew is asleep, his fingers still curled on the edges of his newspaper. In Guatemala, he told her, he had gone to villages so high in the mountains, he’d driven through clouds to get there. The children would grab on to the door handles and the side mirrors, damp with the condensation of the thin air, to beg for the oranges he’d pass out the window.
They didn’t even know how to peel them, he told her. They’d bite right through the skin.
*
“Andrew Stackhouse,” her sister, Sam, had said with a laugh when Marnie called to say that he’d moved back to New York and wanted to meet her.
“He didn’t know a damn thing about living wills. How well, exactly, do you know him?”
“He’s one of those people you’ve known forever but you never really get to know and as the years pass you keep thinking you must know them better than in fact you do. I told you, he’s the son of that professor I worked for when I was at Berkeley, Hildie Willis.”
Sam laughed again, her nervous laugh, and suddenly Marnie could imagine it: her sister, with her beautiful teeth and her gorgeous boy’s hips that no man Marnie has known has not wanted to grab.
“He’s a year or two older than me, Alan’s age.” Sam stopped, caught in one of the culs-de-sac that halt so many of their conversations.
“I know what you mean. The age Alan would be.”
“When we met, he was taking a year off from college, hanging out at his parents’ house while he looked for a job. We went to a concert together.”
“You mean you slept together.”
“I can’t remember. I know that’s disgusting, but I honestly can’t. It was a couple of months after I met him and he’d moved into the city and someone had given him tickets for one of those mega-concerts at the Fillmore West—I think it was Grace Slick with the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service. All I clearly remember is that we smoked so much pot, I never made it back over the bridge to Berkeley.”
Marnie could hear foil crinkling as her sister pulled out a cigarette.
“Thank God there wasn’t AIDS in those years,” Sam continued. “I bumped into him a couple of times after that, while I was still living out west. I think it was at a meeting for groups sending medical supplies to Nicaragua. Something like that. He’d just come back from Guatemala. Then, last year, when I was working with the Boston Clean Air Coalition, we decided to try to get some money from the local business community.”
The hilarity was draining from her sister’s story, Marnie thought, in the way it does as people move from their twenties into their thirties.
“I was having a hell of a time, since conservatives like to make their charitable donations for genetic diseases—cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy—ailments where it’s hard to see capitalism as the culprit. Those hideous telethons where they drag out a poor kid with braces on his arms and legs and everyone can feel good about giving for research to discover the defective gene because no one’s going to turn around and say, like they can about a kid who falls down an elevator shaft, who’s responsible for this?”
Marnie pictured her sister closing her eyes for the first long inhale.
“When I called him, it was awkward, awkward, awkward. He was embarrassed about having become this financial guy with all of these rationalizations about how he’d realized with the Guatemalan cooperative that he’d
never be able to help them if he didn’t understand how to work within the existing legal system and how he’d gone to law school with the idea of learning the law applying to cooperatives and private support of third world development, but after he got his degree there hadn’t been any NGO jobs and then he’d had his student loans to pay, blah blah blah, all the time not getting it that I was psyched that he’d done what he had because I could hit him up for a whopper corporate donation.”
Not until Marnie had hung up with Sam and run a bath and put on a recording of Ella Fitzgerald her ex-husband had given her and then poured a glass of sparkling water to bring into the tub with a book she never opened did she admit to herself her curiosity about her sister’s long-ago discarded lover.
*
Marnie is quite sure that Andrew’s mother won’t remember that they met years ago at the Berkeley Co-op. (Marnie hadn’t recalled herself until after the dinner at the Afghan restaurant when Andrew had delivered his irony-inflected portrait of Hildie and George.) It was the summer before Marnie’s junior year of college and Sam’s last year at Berkeley (ahhh, Marnie thinks, Sam was with her old boyfriend Peter then, so she’d probably already slept with and discarded Andrew) when Marnie made her first trip to California to visit Sam. Sam and Peter had been at the apex of their harmony-with-the-earth phase. They’d given their leather shoes and belts to Goodwill, brushed their teeth with baking soda, and taken up a method of natural birth control that involved an instructor named Mahiana Devi who offered counseling sessions at the co-op and sold Sam a year’s worth of charts for recording her basal body temperature, her dreams, the consistency of her vaginal mucus, and the cycles of the moon.
On the second day of Marnie’s visit, she and Sam walked the half mile to the co-op with Sam’s chart rolled in a tube. Mahiana sat behind a card table with an ashtray of burning frankincense in front of her. Despite her Arabian pants and embroidered Mexican blouse, Mahiana looked to Marnie like a girl from Short Hills who could have used some electrolysis. For half an hour she talked to Sam about the Karezza method of Tantric sex practiced by a nineteenth-century Oneida community and a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist’s research on cosmic fertility.