What I Had Before I Had You

by Sarah Cornwell

  I smack my tray down hard on the table next to Courtney. Courtney, who is once again my sister.

  “I’m going to have four kids,” she says.

  “I thought you were at half strength or something,” says Laura to my mother.

  “That’s true. But palm reading doesn’t require any ability. It’s just like reading a book.”

  My mother tells Courtney that her lifeline splits in the middle, which means she will reinvent herself. She will travel a great deal, but her travels will bring her sorrow. I can see the effort of speaking and moving and eating in the lines of my mother’s forehead, the heavy pauses between her words. Every now and again she fixes me with a pleading look, a get me out of here look. Christie eats primly, wiping orange grease from the corners of her thin lips.

  UNDER THE TALL Manhattan streetlights, I stand with my mother by her car. Empty iced-tea bottles litter the backseat, and a paper bag from Wendy’s is balled up in the drink holder.

  “Do you need to gather your things from the house?” she asks me.

  “No,” I mumble.

  My mother’s face collapses as she registers my unwillingness. She buckles against the car and strains there as if against a wind. She cries. Her gulping breaths ring excruciatingly loud and wet in the quiet street. She reaches out to me, and I let her put her arms around me and lay her cheek on my shoulder.

  “Why did you leave here?” I ask her. She breathes on my shoulder. “Why did you say my sisters were dead?”

  “They are dead.”

  “Did you love Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I came home, would it be any different?”

  I wait for a long time, and then she says, “No.”

  She doesn’t loosen her arms when I pull away, and that makes it worse, so I shove backward. As I turn away, I catch a glimpse of my mother that I will never shake: the lines of the car lit yellow by the streetlight, all those horizontals interrupted by the dark bedraggled mass of my mother, her wilted posture, the dandelion earrings oxidizing in the jungle of her hair, greasy to the color of rum. Her look heavy and blank like a sky full of rain, and her hands trembling half-raised, caught somewhere between reaching out for me and dropping slack to her sides.

  15

  WHEN WE GET back to Kandy’s, Carrie goes right to the hall bathroom. I hear the water running and know she is sticking her face under the tap, washing away the mascara tear smear. It’s two o’clock. We find the electrician asleep on the sunroom couch, a long-haired dachshund curled behind his knees. How did I completely fail to notice earlier that Kandy has a dog?

  A television audience stops clapping, and Ricky emerges into the kitchen, up the steps from the sunken den. “No calls,” he says.

  “Thanks for being our man on the ground,” says Kandy.

  Ricky pours a mug of coffee from a half-drunk pot and slugs it black. He gestures at me with the pot.

  “No, thank you,” I say. He is trying so hard to be responsible. Maybe that’s all it takes. Trying.

  Carrie brushes by me. “I’ll have some.” Ricky pours coffee into a tall blue hand-thrown mug for her, and she holds it without drinking just long enough that he understands and starts rooting through the cabinets for sugar.

  Kandy flats her palms on my back and leans forward, tucking her chin over my shoulder. “Are you going to sleep? The kids can stand watch.”

  Carrie follows Ricky back down the three carpeted steps into the den, slow, so as not to spill her coffee. Through the doorway, I can see them sitting side by side on the leather sofa, their backs to me, watching a late-night talk show. Their slender necks and the hoods of their sweatshirts. The dark wispy hair at the nape: baby hair.

  My daughter looks at me over her shoulder. She must expect me to snap out of it any second now, to dump out her coffee and send her to bed. Her lips are bright from wind chap, and her cheeks are flushed, and now that she has washed away her eye makeup, she looks more than ever like my family, like Courtney especially, and like my mother.

  “She’ll be fine,” Kandy says. I don’t know which one of us she is talking to. I think of Jake and of all the boys who came after. I remember them angrily, as if they hurt me, though it was almost always the other way around. I wonder which way it will be for Carrie. I think of my grandmother, who took a bottle of painkillers ten days after my grandfather died. Christie is angry with her—with her ghost—that she didn’t want to go on living for her children and her grandchildren. That she was so singly devoted. I picture my grandparents as I know them from the family photos, always together, always collaborators. I picture them at a table in a restaurant, alone together, though there are other people in the shot. Then I picture him disappearing and her still there, unsure of where to put her hands, unsure of the reason she’s come to dinner or what the point of dinner is anymore, without him, unsure of how to get home and what will be the point of going home, since he will not be there.

  Imagine what that love must have been like. Fifty years of that love. In the end, I am jealous of my heartsick grandmother, because the joining of herself with her lover gave her a joy so large that its absence felt to her like the absence of the world.

  THE LAST PERFECT day I can remember was the day the chicks came in the mail. Carrie was eleven and Daniel seven. She was still my muddy girl, barefoot and earnest, stealing berries from the colander, standing behind the sofa to braid and unbraid my hair. And Daniel was still Daniel. His rages had started, but it would be a year of escalation before his diagnosis. We waited in the cool morning for the P.O. to open its doors, all four of us, and Sam opened the chirping box right there on the counter to make sure I hadn’t been swindled. Our four chicks wobbled together in a squalling fuzzy mass. Carrie reached in and stroked them with the tips of her fingers.

  In the car we listened to Abbey Road. We stopped to pick up breakfast tacos, and I remember Daniel on Sam’s shoulders, jiggling up and down, asking for extra bacon, and the gloss of Sam’s black hair in the sun. We put the chicks in the cat-proof brooder box in the spare bedroom and dipped each of their beaks into the waterer, as we’d seen in online tutorials, and then we all sat Indian-style on the floor and watched them dart and huddle and collide. We spent the whole day together in that room, watching, talking, paging through chicken-keeping books. We had rarely been so quiet together, so unprogrammed. We were stewards of new life. I lay on the floor, resting my head on Sam’s slim thigh, and Carrie read out a list of parasites to watch for. Daniel positioned the chicks face-to-face, each pair in succession, and introduced them to each other. Chicken, this is chicken. We went for a bike ride around Town Lake in the twilight, and then my kids fell asleep together in the hammock. This was back when Daniel could fall asleep anywhere, without fear or fuss.

  It wasn’t that Daniel’s disorder came on suddenly, but that there was an end to the possibility of perfect days. Where before there had been good and bad days, after the chicks arrived, it became good and bad hours. I don’t see how this could have been causal, but the hens suffered for the implication. The pre-chicken years, a golden time. When we woke up on Sunday morning, the black Australorp chick was dead. It might have been that the heat lamp was set too low, or it might have been failure to thrive, which is as inclusive a term as I know. Daniel came into the kitchen with the bird in his sweaty palm.

  “Oh my God,” screeched Carrie, flying toward him. “What did you do?”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” said Daniel, and I was about to tell him gently that the chick might not prove to be okay, when he said, “It’s just dead, it’s okay.”

  See how like my mother.

  TONIGHT, PUTTING ON pajamas seems like giving up. I pull the drawstring too tight around my hips and leave it that way. I lie on the bed in Kandy’s guest room. I have struggled to be good for my kids. I have been secretive, it’s true, and selfish. Sometimes I am Christie, remote and functional,
and sometimes I am my mother, a shower of sparks. I want to live in the space between them. I want to be everything my mother was that was good and none of the bad. I know this is impossible, the yin without the yang.

  If Daniel is delivered to me this night, I swear I will try harder. I will be better. I close my eyes, and there is Daniel in a boat, Daniel with a suitcase at his father’s door, police officers laughing, gullible written on the ceiling. I keep thinking I hear my cell phone ringing, but I surface to silence again and again. At last fatigue takes me over, lets me sink and drift. Daniel broken, Daniel dying, Daniel dead. My mother as James found her, sitting at the kitchen table in her black sundress with the gold buttons and her black high heels, her hair curled with an iron, her head fallen back, her throat arched impossibly. Her mouth wide open, her hands dangling and swollen purple. My thoughts unspool, and I am stolen down into the dark.

  16

  I WAIT UNTIL EVENING, when Tom is still at work and my sisters are out swimming, and I ask Christie for the rest of the story. She gets us tall glasses of iced tea, and we sit on the sofa in the living room. I can almost see the wheels turning in her head as she calculates what she can say and what she can’t.

  “Is there stuff you haven’t told my sisters?” I ask her.

  “You mean your cousins.”

  “My sisters.”

  She looks at me in horror, and for a moment I think I’m wrong about Tom. Then she breathes, “Are you angry?” I shake my head. She takes a long pull on her tea and sets it down firmly, nods once to herself, and starts to talk. She bumbles at first, repeating herself. These are memories rarely summoned. As she relaxes, her diction grows sharper, as she must have talked when she was a younger woman, furious with a sister who couldn’t help but leave a trail of disaster through the years of her growing up.

  I listen closely, putting together images of my mother as Christie describes her and images of the mother I know in order to form a composite Myla. I remember everything Christie told me that evening and on into the night, in low tones, after we moved to retired old armchairs in the sticky attic so as not to be heard. As I have grown older, Christie’s version of events has become part of my own, tempered with my own imaginations and improved by the million small revisions of memory.

  THE SECOND FLOOR hallway of the Seventy-third Street house is a dim interior artery, light escaping the door cracks of the northeast-facing rooms and gleaming, pooled in the grooves in the floorboards. When I imagine my mother’s childhood, this is where I start. I conjure the hallway as it is now, and I think myself back through time until I am standing in the hallway of my mother’s childhood, and it is the same hallway, but now I see posters tacked to two of the doors: Bob Dylan holding up the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” card reading “basement,” and Klimt’s The Kiss. Now there is a white cat shadowing along the baseboards.

  This is the theater of selective memory, where imaginary versions of my mother, my grandparents, Aunt Christie, and Tom play out scenes from the time before me. I blink and the story changes. I blink and the sympathetic version scrolls out before me, where my mother is a persecuted lover, weeping into her pillow as my grandmother stands in the doorway, shaking her grave head. I blink again, and Christie’s version flares up, and my mother is unbearable, breaking plates against the wall, cajoling, deceiving, sliding her toes up Tom’s leg beneath the lace tablecloth as Christie passes a platter of meat to her father.

  Here, I am a glint in my mother’s eye, a ghost from a future she hasn’t begun to imagine. It is 1970, and she is nineteen. She ties her hair back with thick bright ribbons, she smokes on the stoop, paging through Les Fleurs du Mal for her course in the French Romantics at Marymount. She goes to Marymount because it is only blocks from the house; her parents can keep her safe here. Everyone understands safety differently.

  She holds the cigarette with a certain arch to her wrist, a certain absorption in her young face. Her skin is perfect. When she walks down the sidewalk, men turn to watch until she is gone. She pretends she doesn’t notice, but she does. She checks her reflection in the windows of parked cars.

  MYLA ASCENDS INTO the heights of her mania, winging easy on the rush, ideas coming quickly, the poems she read last week opening up and splaying themselves out for her like willing autopsies singing yes yes yes. She asks to be excused from dinner, her red hair loose, her left hand fingering chords on the stem of her wineglass, and my grandparents glance at each other. My grandmother is a small, collected woman. After a glass or two, she will tell stories that knock you out, stories from her days of running clubs for U.S. servicemen in Australia, India, Romania. She is a member of the Junior League; she knows every ballroom dance. She tells her friends that her youngest has a nervous condition, and they nod understandingly, as if it is not 1970 but 1870, and Myla bound for an asylum for hysterics.

  The psychiatrist at Columbia Presbyterian has told them that Myla is manic-depressive, but they are hoping she will grow out of it. It is not the lows that shake my grandmother. Myla lies princess-still in her canopied bed, her flesh a dead weight on her bones, the passage of time a dull march toward nothing. My grandmother brings her strong coffee and strokes her hair and tells her that she is too pure for this world. Depression is something she can understand; after all, the world can be for her, too, a dull and killing place. It is when Myla hits the highest highs that my grandmother frantically rushes her to Columbia, where she sits stiff-necked and prim in the waiting room, as if this posture will signal to passersby that here is a woman of proud stock, here is a mother whose daughter has not just been found sucking off a stranger in a Central Park grotto or trying to borrow a four-hundred-dollar gown from Bergdorf’s or painting all the interior walls of her home different shades of green while everyone was out, drops of paint hardened like mossy coins on the oak veneer of the sideboards, the end tables, the carved Indian chests.

  I OPEN THE Bob Dylan door and I’m in Christie’s room. Christie’s room is orderly. Her intelligence is everywhere. Records in milk crates, framed photographs of friends on the walls, a writing desk pushed flush to the window, where she labors over formulas and proofs. A fish tank.

  Here loop all the stories of the sisters. They age from little silken-haired girls racing pet mice in wooden-block mazes, playing house, pulling hair, to lanky preteens sprawled on the rug reading Jane Austen and sharing school secrets, to teenagers, and here they split. Christie in an army-surplus jacket, her chestnut hair darkening, her face growing long and thoughtful, her time spent already on serious things: chemistry and math, the perfect natural logic of the world. She trusts implicitly that, as she ages, more and more doors will unlock for her, and she will never lose the easy facility of her mind. She trusts the world to make sense. She is right. She is lucky.

  I get carried away in this room.

  My mother, two years younger than Christie and, as a child, easier to love, breaks everyone’s fragile hearts when she starts acting out (as my grandmother calls it). Here she cries her secrets out to Christie late at night. They both test into Hunter; my grandfather believes in the quality of American public schools. Christie, budding genius, listens with concern to the tragic epics of Myla’s school days. Christie quietly wins a national science fair while my mother’s quest for a choir part in Our Town has her parents wrapped up for weeks. Myla shoves a police officer at a peace rally and spends a night in jail. Myla brings home four stray dogs a month. Myla gets ragingly drunk at a college party, Christie rescues her. Myla tells everyone about Christie’s secret crush and then weeps for a week before she can apologize. By then, it’s Christie comforting Myla rather than the other way around. Christie accepts these frequent apologies. This is how her sister is. She only has one sister.

  ON THE RIGHT side of the hallway, my grandparents’ door is always closed. Their bed is navy-sheeted and made with hospital corners. Flowers on a nightstand are freshened twice a week by the part-time maid. Large windows look
out over the patio and the garden, the traffic noise fainter at the back of the house. My grandparents sleep in S shapes, facing each other. My grandmother makes the rules and runs this family, but at night in this room, she is silly with love for her beau. My grandparents read to each other: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. If there is one thing my grandmother is sure of, it is the strength of her marriage. She hopes the same for her girls: husbands of wit and integrity. A deep and certain bond.

  She dislikes Tom from the moment Christie introduces him; my grandmother has some prescience in her, too.

  WHEN CHRISTIE BRINGS Tom home from college, Myla wants him immediately. She feels like she knows him from somewhere, she feels like he’s part of her future. Tom wears a brown corduroy jacket and knows about macroeconomics. He nods as people talk. He rests his hand around Christie’s waist when they walk up the stairs.

  My grandfather approves of him, and Christie is suffused with pleasure. After lunch, she helps my grandmother with the clearing up. Tom mills around the living room, picking up objects and setting them down. He reaches for a book from the top shelf, and his sweater lifts above his weathered belt, his abdomen soft and taut. Myla sits in an armchair by the fireplace and looks. “I can get you a ladder,” she says.

  Tom takes the book down and smiles at her, buoyed by a sense of accomplishment at having wanted something and gotten it. Myla crosses her legs in front of her on the footstool, yawns, arches her long back. Tom loves Christie, but he lives in a city of women—women yawning like cats, women in lipstick and blazers running for cabs, goddesses diving into the city pools with strong thighs and shining hair. In the moment of seeing, he loves them all.