I didn’t feel scared, at first—she could not have moved very far in such a short time; I just wasn’t seeing her, wherever she was. On the other side of the water fountain, I heard cars spitting up gravel as they pulled out or parked. “Meggy,” I called, in the direction of the pigeons, “where are you?” The birds made their gulpy noises and flew aside when I walked near them. I did not see my sister anywhere, not by the snack bar or the toilets or the path that led up to the animals and their pens, where now I saw my mother and Justine holding hands as they walked toward me.
I knew I should move, but I couldn’t; I just waited and watched as they approached, and I saw my mother’s smile collapse as she realized that I was alone, and she dropped Justine’s hand and ran the rest of the way to where I stood.
“Where’s Meggy?” she yelled, and behind her, trying to catch up, Justine began crying.
“I don’t know. I just went over there to get a drink, and when I came back, she was gone.”
“Gone where?” My mother grabbed my shoulders.
“Mommy, I don’t know.” Then I cried, too, and a woman passing us with a stroller lifted her sunglasses and looked over.
“Have you seen a baby?” my mother asked the woman. “A little girl?”
The woman, confused, looked down into the stroller she was pushing, but my mother said, “No, I mean my baby,” and the woman said, “You mean she’s lost?” and when my mother made an impatient sound, the woman said, “No, I’m sorry,” and pushed her sunglasses back down on her face.
“She’s here, Mommy, she’s somewhere,” Justine said. Her face and voice were desperate. “Just please don’t worry, just please don’t look like that.”
When my mother concentrated—on a book, a piecrust, or a crisis like this one—her eyebrows dove in toward each other and made her look mad. The expression on her face at these times was especially upsetting to Justine, even though my mother had explained to her that it wasn’t anger, it was just how she looked when she was trying to figure something out.
But right now I saw—along with Justine, who took a step backward to join me—that my mother was mad, and I felt a chill in my stomach when I realized she was mad at me.
“You were supposed to take care of her!” she yelled, and the woman with the sunglasses, who had walked on ahead, paused to look back at us. “You’re the oldest,” my mother went on, and even though I sensed that she was out of control and would hate herself later for the things she was saying now, I felt a tremble begin so deep inside that I knew it would not dare show itself anywhere close to the surface. “All you had to do was hold onto her for five minutes. Goddammit, Ana, where did she go?”
But all I could say was, “I don’t know,” in a whisper, and my mother almost pushed Justine and me down on the picnic-table bench, telling us to wait, don’t move, and she went off in the direction of the swings and slide.
It was then, after watching the hem of our mother’s culottes flap against her thighs as she moved away from us, that Justine and I together saw Meggy in the shade thrown by the awning of the hot-dog stand, the other direction from where Mom was headed. Our sister squatted in the circle of shadow to look at something on the ground.
“Meggy,” we said, together, and forgetting what our mother had told us, we both jumped up from the bench.
“Stay here,” I said to Justine. “No, go get Mommy. Bring her back.” She started running the short distance to the playground, her chubby legs still tan in September.
As I approached, Meggy looked up, and I saw that it was a stiff pigeon she crouched over. “Yuck,” I said. “Don’t touch that.” Of course, this made her put out her hand toward the pigeon; all she’d heard was the word touch.
“No,” I said, reaching to pick her up. “It’s dead. It’s yucky.”
“Ana mean,” she said, squirming, and as I carried her back to the picnic table, she threw kisses over my shoulder at the dead bird.
When my mother had Meggy back on her lap, she apologized to me. “Sometimes people yell when they’re worried, honey,” she told me. “It was just that she could have been anywhere. She could have been kidnapped or hit by one of the cars.”
“I know.”
“You just can’t imagine how a mother feels.”
“It was my fault,” I said. “I was supposed to take care of her.” I wanted my mother to smile and tell me it was all right, I had only made a mistake, but she didn’t; she just kept putting her mouth next to Meggy’s hair.
“Don’t ever go away like that again,” she said to Meggy, and I waited for her to add, “That goes for all of you,” and when she didn’t, I thought, Well, Justine and I are old enough to know that without being told. Still, walking back to the car, I felt as if the wind had been knocked out of me. I was aware of my breath—how much I needed it—and how it is really only our breath and blood and heartbeat, and not love, that keeps us alive.
The feeling of something bad having almost happened stayed with us all the way to our grandparents’ house, and we did not sing. Meggy was the only one who behaved as she normally did, chattering and offering us animal crackers from the box my mother had bought her. She didn’t seem to notice that the rest of us weren’t responding in the way she was accustomed to. Mom kept her eyes on the road more intently than usual, and Justine and I knew enough to keep quiet even when we saw things to be excited about, like cows or a Ferris wheel.
They were both outside when we arrived. Our grandfather was sitting on the porch reading Rabbit, Run. (I remember because it seemed to me the title of a children’s book, not one of the novels he always had open during our visits.) Our grandmother walked toward him from the backyard, where she had been sweeping pieces of loose tar left by the men who had refinished the driveway. She wore white knee socks and sneakers under her gardening dress, a green cotton shift faded by sun and detergent and time. When she saw our car turning in, she raised a hand above her eyes, trying to make out whose it was. A minute later, when she lifted her face to kiss us, I saw that her fingers against her forehead had left dark marks on the fair white skin.
“What are you doing here?” she asked my mother. “Don’t the girls have school?” I was old enough to sense that although she was glad to see us, she was also preparing to disapprove. Next to me, I could feel Mom react to this tone in her own mother’s voice.
“There was teacher training today,” she told my grandmother, and it sounded so true from her lips that I almost said, There was? But right before I would have spoken, I caught sight of my mother’s eyes, and I saw that she needed me.
“It’s a day off,” I said. “Like a holiday. We wanted to give you a surprise.”
My mother sent me a grateful look, which made me feel as high as the sun. She sat down on the porch with her parents while Justine and I took Meggy inside to find the toys my grandmother kept in the sewing-room closet. We wanted the marble farm. This was a coffee can containing marbles of every size and color and condition, each labeled with a dot of cloth adhesive tape that carried a number. The names corresponding to the numbers—Chestnut, Black Beauty, Thunder, Blaze—had been kept in a notebook that was destroyed ten years earlier in the fire my mother’s brother set in the attic when he was home during a college break and fell asleep sneaking a cigarette.
But the marbles themselves, the horses in their Chock full o’ Nuts stable, survived. My grandmother asked my mother if she wanted them for us to play with, but my mother said no, she wanted to keep them in this house, they would be a treat when we visited. Although I was angry at her then because I wanted the marbles—they weren’t just any marbles, but ones my mother had played with, held, and loved when she was a child—I also recognized that it was the fact that I could not have them, whenever I wanted, that made them precious.
We took the marble farm back outside and put down the pasture, a big plank of cardboard with glued-on Easter-basket grass. Meggy wasn’t old enough yet to appreciate the various events of the horse show, but Justine a
nd I were teaching them to her, as our mother had taught them to us. First was the high jump: you picked out ten marbles to compete and, one at a time, made them bounce on the cardboard over the high-jump bar, which was a Popsicle stick you kept raising. The victorious marble was placed in the winner’s circle (one of my grandmother’s old bracelets) and covered with a dandelion crown.
Next was the steeplechase, the elaborate course of which we never tired of setting up. It consisted of the cardboard tubes from wax-paper and toilet-paper rolls, taped together in a labyrinth, beginning where it was propped on the high end of a shoe box, ending in a soft cotton pile. You sent the marbles through the chute and listened to them wind their way through the tunnels, while you counted one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred, three. The marble reaching the end in the shortest amount of time won.
Justine and I took turns starting the horses off in the gate, but by then Meggy wanted to try, so we let her. She loved dropping the marbles into the open end of the cardboard, and each time she would put her eye up to the hole to follow where it had gone.
As we set up the farm, our mother was saying, “But I don’t think that’s really the point, Pop.” If I tilted my head a little, pretending to move my eyes out of the sun, I could see her sitting on the top step, looking up with the weight of a favor on her face.
“Well, whatever the point is, Margaret, you’re asking for money. And that gives whoever you’re asking a certain right.” My grandfather had turned the Rabbit book facedown on his lap. He often spoke quietly, so that you had to lean in when you listened; but when you heard what it was he was saying, you sometimes sat back again from its force.
“It’s just till he gets his license,” my mother said. “We’ll pay it back when he sells his first house.” I knew they were talking about my father and his most recent change of career. (When he was between jobs, my father liked to borrow another line of Susan Hayward’s from the movie I Want to Live! When somebody asked her, “What’s your occupation? What do you do?” she answered without missing a beat, “The best I can.”)
“How much do you need?” my grandmother asked. My mother mumbled something, which I didn’t hear, and a few seconds later my grandmother got up to go inside. When she came out, she took a check from her cotton pocket and gave it to my mother, who kissed her and tucked it carefully into her purse.
“You know how much I appreciate this,” my mother said. “Listen, I’m not going to tell him where this came from, so could you please not bring it up?”
“Where’s he going to think you got it?” My grandfather seemed agitated. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of my grandmother’s having acted without consulting him, or just the tacit but tangible doubts he’d accumulated over the years of my father’s spotty job record and his need to act on compulsions that had no ground.
“I’ll think of something,” my mother said. As if saving her from having to elaborate, Meggy made a noise that caused us all to look at her in alarm. She was bending forward from her hips, her mouth open and her face turning dark.
Justine said, “She just swallowed a marble.”
My grandmother murmured, “Oh, dear God,” and my mother was with Meggy in an instant, turning her over so that the hem of Meggy’s dress fell above her head. The sound my mother made while she was hitting Meggy on the back was similar to the sound I had heard at the game farm when Meggy was lost, but this one was worse—higher-pitched, more panicked—and Justine and I sat there watching as Meggy sputtered and gasped and finally gave up the marble. Then she began to scream.
“That’s the second scary thing that’s happened to her today,” Justine said. Moving closer to put her berry-stained hand on the baby’s head, my grandmother asked, “You mean Meggy or your mother?”
Once Meggy was in kindergarten, my mother gave up freelancing and looked for part-time journalism work. When she couldn’t find a regular reporting job, she established the “Ask Us” column at the Ashmont Star. The column appeared in each weekly issue on the same page as the Stork Market, which listed all the new births in town.
As the Ask Us editor, my mother researched answers to questions that bothered or intrigued the people who wrote or called in. Then she composed a little narrative history about each one. Some questions were easy (“When were golf balls invented?”) if you knew, as she did, the right sources to consult. My mother always tried to alternate these with the more specialized queries, such as, “Is there a club for people who collect license plates?” (The answer, in case you’re interested, is yes.)
The idea for Ask Us came from a phrase we traded often in our family: Tell me something I don’t know. Kids used to say it when they wanted to ridicule you by showing that whatever you had to say was too old or too obvious for words, like that the gym teacher was a lesbo or that it was going to snow.
But one day a long time ago, when Meggy heard me say to Justine, Tell me something I don’t know, our little sister missed the sarcasm in my voice and came over to listen for Justine’s answer. Meggy must have been four or five then, and in her sharp, sweet face, I could see that she was waiting; that she thought I was genuinely asking Justine to teach me something new. So, feeling ashamed of myself, and loving Meggy’s trustfulness more than I thought I could bear, I altered my tone and the look on my face and I said to Justine, “No, I mean it. Tell me something I really don’t know.”
Justine was suspicious, as of course she should have been. But then she saw that I was serious, and her expression changed to one of concentration as she tried to come up with an interesting fact. It had to be a good one, she knew—something that would impress both Meggy and me. She twirled her long hair around a finger (even then, she was practicing the gestures that would lay her foundation as a flirt) and bit at a fingernail. Finally, she took a breath and said, “A worm has a bunch of hearts all through his body, and if you cut him in half, you get two new whole worms out of one. And if you cut those worms, you get two more out of each one, and it keeps on going.”
Well, I did know this; I had learned it, as she had, from the Let’s Look at Animals book our father bought for us as a consolation prize, the day we had to cancel a trip to Cooperstown because there was a garbage spill on the Thruway and he didn’t want us exposed.
But I wasn’t about to let on to Justine that the worm fact wasn’t new to me. “That’s neat,” I said.
“But how can it?” Meggy pulled herself up on the couch between us and leaned her head against my shoulder. “Have so many hearts?” So Justine went and got the book from their bedroom. The next day, when there was a lull during dinner, Meggy said to all of us, “Tell me something I don’t know,” and it became a game, instead of the insult it started out to be.
Ask Us was one of the most popular parts of the newspaper, because you found that people were asking things you also wondered about. “How did they get the horse’s mouth to move on the old Mr. Ed show?” K.V. from Ravena would write, and my mother investigated until she learned that it was a simple case of applying a peanut butter-like substance to the horse’s lips, prompting the animal to attempt to lick it off.
My mother wrote the Ask Us column for ten years. During that time, she answered more than a thousand questions. She always made fun of her job; for instance, on the day every spring that the Pulitzer prizes were scheduled to be announced, she pretended she was waiting for their call.
When she finally stopped writing Ask Us, it had less to do with the job itself than with my father and what was happening at home. I remember the day in February, four months before the deaths, that my mother decided to move out. It was a Friday, and I was visiting from college for the long Presidents’ Day weekend. My mother came home from work and stood in front of the TV, where Meggy and our father and I were watching People’s Court. Meggy was laying out a game of Solitaire on the rug, Bill Buckner’s nose resting on her knee. Mom stood in front of the screen and said, “Listen to this,” as she shook a piece of paper to get our attention. My brother and I are c
urious about popcorn. How and why does it pop? What kind of corn is it? Who first discovered what it could do? Then she crunched up the paper into a ball.
“Well?” our father said, after a moment. “Who did discover popcorn?”
“The Indians,” she told him, her voice dripping exasperation, “but that’s not the point.” My father asked her what the point was, and she said, “The point is that I spend most of my time tracking down useless information for people who have nothing better to do than sit around and wonder about popcorn, for God’s sake.”
“But popcorn’s important,” Meggy said, without looking up from her game. She and her friend Gail had made their Black Pact at New Year’s—a contest to see who could go the longest wearing only black clothes—and the jeans she put on every day were flecked with Bill Buckner’s white hair. She tried to pretend she was smiling but it was more of a smirk, and I could see that she was going to say something she would regret, considering our mother’s mood, even before the words were out. “It’s excellent roughage. We learned that in health.”
“Oh, very funny.” My mother whipped the ball of paper over Bill Buckner’s head and into the fireplace, where blue flames consumed it. “I guess this is all just hilarious to you guys. Nobody remembers that I covered Malcolm X and once interviewed Richard Nixon. I had Secret Service credentials. Now I’m just a big joke.”
“Margaret?” From his reclining position on the sofa, our father raised himself up on an elbow. I felt my mother turning toward him hopefully; I could tell that she thought he might say something to comfort or contradict her. But he looked beyond her to the fireplace, where fragments of the singed paper had floated out onto the hearth. “Could you sweep those ashes up?”
My mother looked at him as if she couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Meggy, who was between games, stopped shuffling and froze, because it was clear that something big was about to happen. We watched as my mother went to the kitchen for the hand broom and returned to brush the bits of charred paper into the dustpan. Then she went over to the sofa and turned the soot onto my father’s head.
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