And Give You Peace

by Jessica Treadway

  I heard John Shea say, “Yeah, right,” but when I turned my head to look from the side of my eye, he was staring at the piece of paper in front of him. He took a quick glance around to see if anyone was watching, and then he began to scribble. The fact that John Shea seemed to be doing the assignment made everybody sit up a little straighter and bend forward over their desks. John Shea doing the assignment meant something serious was going on. I began to panic, because although I recognized the sensation Mr. Martino had just described to us, I couldn’t attach it to any specific experience of my own. I closed my eyes, and tried to squeeze a memory into my head. I opened them and read, “the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, / and the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, / The surface glittered out of heart of light.” Then I had it.

  Christmas Day, the year I turned ten. We always celebrated at my grandparents’ house, and it started to snow in the morning. By the middle of the afternoon, after dinner, enough fresh powder had fallen on the field behind the house for my grandfather to pull the old toboggan out of the shed and announce that it was time to christen winter with the season’s first ride down Hangman’s Hill.

  “Too dangerous,” our father said. He was already nervous because the radio was warning people to stay off the roads, and he believed we needed to start for home. When he felt my grandfather giving him a look, he added, “I mean, people have accidents on those things. Look at Ethan Frome and his girlfriend, whatever-her-name-was.” He was trying to make a joke, but I didn’t get it until eight years later, when I read Edith Wharton’s novel in Freshman Lit.

  “There won’t be any accidents,” Grandma Ott said. “The point is to have fun. Are you going to keep them away from everything that might ever hurt them, Tom? You may as well build a bomb shelter in your backyard.”

  “Well, I’ll go with them, then.” My father picked his gloves up from the radiator, where he had set them to dry.

  “I’ll go, too,” my grandfather said. Justine and I looked at each other. We sensed in the men’s tones something more than the mere desire to have a good time, and we weren’t sure we wanted to go out and play anymore.

  “Let’s all go,” our grandmother said, suddenly seeming to have a fresh burst of energy. She was already untying her apron and reaching to turn off the stove. “Come on, Margaret. The fresh air will do us good.”

  “What are you talking about?” My father was holding Meggy on his lap. “What about the baby?”

  “Bundle her up,” our grandfather said. “Besides, she’s not a baby anymore, Tom. You’d better wise up to that.”

  “Margaret,” my father said, pleading with that one word for my mother to do something. But my mother went over to take Meggy from him and started packing her into her snowsuit.

  “Look how much padding there is,” she told my father. “She’ll be fine.”

  “You people are all crazy.” But my father seemed to realize it wouldn’t do any good for him to object. We all put on boots and jackets, mittens and hats, laughing at how we looked—Grandma wore a stocking cap she’d knitted herself, in the Mets’ colors, and she wrapped the tail around her neck—and trooped outside to the toboggan, where my mother sat on it holding Meggy while we all took up the rope and pulled her across the ground.

  It was one of those crystal winter days, the air cold but sunny so that you squinted up at the light even as the frozen hairs crackled inside your nose. Outside, our grandparents looked like whole different people. You wouldn’t have guessed they were old from the way they looked—all bundled up and laughing, leading the way across Wildwood Lane.

  The adults had come on the sledding trip to protect us children, as much from one another’s influences as from the momentum down the hill. My grandfather worried that my father would make us afraid of too many things, so he came along to remind us we were having a good time. Our father came to make sure Meggy wouldn’t die from exposure or a crash. Grandma probably wanted to save us from any argument the two men might have, and our mother, besides not wanting to be left in the house alone, no doubt felt like the fulcrum at the center of this family; without her, somebody might fall off.

  But within a few yards of leaving the house behind, all these invisible reasons disappeared, and we were seven people on our way to the top of a hill on a December day and anticipating the rush of flying, for a few moments, faster than the things we were afraid of. There were three other people at Hangman’s Hill when we arrived, a father and his two boys. But all they had were saucers and those plastic mats that kept turning sideways a few feet into their run. They hadn’t even been able to pack a very good path down the hill, so my grandfather pulled the toboggan over to a fresh patch of snow and said to us, loud enough that the father and the boys might have heard him, “Let’s show ’em how it’s done.”

  Or maybe it was just the look of our toboggan—its obvious experience and history, the sleek and powerful design—that made them stop to watch us as we prepared for our descent. “Meggy stays with her mother,” our grandfather said, motioning for our mother to stay where she was, in the center of the seat. “Grace, you get behind Margaret, and the girls get in front of her. That’s it. Now, Tom, you get on behind Grace.”

  “Carl,” my grandmother said, even as she was obeying his instructions, “you can’t possibly be thinking of us all going down at once?”

  “Why the hell not? Just because we believe in God doesn’t mean we can’t have a good time!” My grandfather never swore, and his suddenly raucous mood made Justine and me, and even our mother, laugh. “Hold on, everybody!” he shouted, and the next thing we knew, he had given the toboggan a push before jumping into the last space on the cushion, sending us on our way. I heard my father say, “Oh, my God,” and I knew he would be clutching my mother and Meggy, holding them as close as he could as we hurtled down. I felt myself laughing and gasping as we closed our eyes and let the wind carry us toward the bottom. I felt lighter than I ever had, and it was okay to scream because the grown-ups were doing it, but screaming in a good way as we pressed into one another and the toboggan slithered and leaned.

  When we finally stopped because the ground leveled out, I felt the toboggan tip over at a slow speed, trapping us all underneath. I expected Meggy to cry, but instead I saw that she was staring straight ahead, sideways, still tight in my mother’s arms. I saw her smile. The wood made a cover over our heads, blocking the sun, but around us we saw the bright snow, and we were warm lying on it, heated by nestled bodies and the exhilaration of the trip down.

  Everything was completely still, the only sounds our hard breathing and, in the distance, the call of a single bird. I sensed all seven of our hearts beating in the same row. I closed my eyes thinking that this would make the sensation stronger, but instead it made me feel alone. I opened my eyes and saw my grandfather’s hand flung over my father’s shoulder, his other arm under my mother’s back. On the other side of me, strands of Justine’s brown hair and my grandmother’s gray were packed with each other into the snow.

  But after a few seconds we all began shifting, untangling our limbs and pulling away into separate spaces, claiming again what was ours. My father took Meggy from my mother to convince himself that the baby was all right. My grandfather righted the toboggan and began pulling it up the hill, but we all knew we wouldn’t be going down again. Grandma touched my father’s shoulder, and I saw him look up at the tender pressure, but then she changed it into a gesture of brushing snow from his sleeve.

  At Meggy’s baptism, Mr. Corson’s voice had been strong and sure as he declared, “Whoso receiveth one such little child in my name, receiveth me.” But nearly sixteen years later, conducting the funeral, he faltered over the words from Ecclesiastes, and by accident he repeated the line, “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning.” This time it was me who tried to bite back tears with the tissue my mother offered.

  On the day of my mother and Paul’s wedding, Mr. Corson looked nothing like the vigorous man of faith who had lift
ed the infant Meggy above his head to present her for a blessing. He had grown hunched with age, and I couldn’t tell whether he recognized Justine and me, even after our mother reminded him who we were. The guests gathered among the chairs set up in modest rows at the front of the reception room, where the ceremony would take place. Altogether there were about twenty-five people, including my grandparents, who sat in the front row; most of the others were coworkers of my mother’s and Paul’s from the newspaper. Deirdre, the child from next door, was carried in by her mother at the last minute, and they took seats in the rear. No one from Ashmont had been invited. When the guests filed in they were handed computer-generated programs, on the cover of which was a rose.

  The Hyperion Club provided an organ, and shortly before two o’clock a woman with crooked hair and a corsage pinned to her chest sat at the bench and began playing Bach. When it was time for my mother to walk down the “aisle,” Justine and I preceded her, clutching bouquets of lilies and baby’s breath. Paul had combed his hair into two wet sheets at the side of his head. His brown suit didn’t fit right, but at least he looked like himself. Our mother moved toward her new husband by herself—no one would give her away—and joined him at the makeshift altar, where Paul reached to take her hand. I had to look down and take a breath to compose myself as Mr. Corson stepped forward and the ceremony began.

  “We are gathered here today to join in the celebration of matrimony between Margaret Ott and Paul Richter,” the minister said, referring to notes he had scribbled on an index card. Justine and I looked at each other. We had not been told that our mother would use her maiden name, rather than the one we shared with her, in these vows. “Let us pray.”

  I stole a look around the room and was surprised to see so many heads bowed. “Heavenly Father, we ask that you look down on us today in a spirit of welcome and thanksgiving,” Mr. Corson said, and I felt reassured to hear in his voice some of the reverent authority I remembered. “Be with us as we ask for Your guidance in sanctifying the marriage of Margaret and Paul, keeping in mind Your teachings of infinite love and the almighty power of forgiveness.” When he said “forgiveness,” my mother looked up in surprise, but the minister didn’t seem to notice. “What God has joined, let no one put asunder.” Through his prayer, we heard the noise of dishes clattering in the kitchen next door as the chefs prepared the buffet. Something heavy fell to the floor, and a few of the waitresses standing by the door covered laughter with their hands.

  The ceremony was short and my knees shook all the way through it. At one point, I felt Justine reach out to steady me. My mother and Paul pledged their promises to each other, leaving out until death do us part. Next came the benediction. “The peace that passes all understanding,” Mr. Corson pronounced. I waited for him to explain what this meant, until I realized he couldn’t, and, further, that this was the point. Then my mother and Paul kissed each other to the sound of uncertain applause.

  8. All our best love

  Q. Why can’t you tickle yourself?

  — B.R., Esperance

  A. No one knows the answer for sure, but neuroanatomist Richard N. Grote speculates that your brain sends out inhibitory messages when you tickle yourself, and that these supersede the messages sent from the nerve endings in—for example—your belly or the soles of your feet. Grote says that the sensations of itch, tickle, and pain are probably linked. The brain can send messages to the spinal cord to modulate pain transmissions, which can inhibit how painful you perceive a given stimulus to be. (This is the way narcotics work.) The same may be true of a tickle.

  If you move your hand in space, many receptors in your skin are activated, but you don’t feel much sensation unless the hand touches something. Similarly, Dr. Grote says, if your brain knows you’re trying to tickle yourself, it can send an inhibitory signal to the spinal cord that will block neurons in the tickled area from responding.

  “Basically,” Dr. Grote concludes, “whether or not you feel the tickle may depend on whether or not you see it coming.”

  After five months of not bleeding, I got my period back during my mother’s wedding reception (I had to leave the Hyperion Club to find a drugstore) and Justine’s returned shortly after New Year’s. My mother and Paul spent their honeymoon in Florida and ended up buying a house in Madeira Beach, where they’ve lived ever since. Paul opened a little shop in a strip mall, where he takes passport photos and develops one-hour film. My mother got her real estate license and has done very well. She wanted everything to change when she moved south, she told us, including her career. She had her pick of agencies, based on tryouts, and she chose Century 21. Every time somebody buys a house from her, she brings them a Tiffany key ring as a housewarming gift.

  For months after the wedding, Justine remained in the condo in Delphi, until it was clear that our mother wasn’t going to come back. Our mother sold her unit to Deirdre’s parents, who moved Deirdre’s grandmother into my mother’s side. Justine came to live in Boston with me and Ruthie for a while, but the way she ate made Ruthie nervous—little Clark bars, Mallomars hidden all over the house—and Justine realized this and left before I had to say anything. She drove around the country for a while, sending me postcards and leaving phone messages on my machine (she seemed to call when she knew she wouldn’t get me in person). She settled in Tucson, where she did the opposite of what, in all the jokes, a woman is expected to do: she got married and then lost the weight. Not all of it, but she’d been too thin to begin with, so she ended up just about right.

  To keep herself in shape she runs every day, no matter what the weather or how she feels. In this way she reminds me of our father. His compulsion—the thing that ultimately killed Meggy and him—shows up in both my sister and me from time to time, but it doesn’t scare me the way it did at first, as on the day we set out to visit the graves, when I couldn’t let the car move without checking to make sure Deirdre wasn’t underneath. Although it may sound strange, when I sense my father in one of my own behaviors (for example, if I skip every other step on the stairway, it will be a good day), I find it an odd comfort, like an unexpected but familiar hand on my shoulder, an old friend waving from the bus. It’s as if he’s still around somehow, as if we didn’t lose all of him when he died.

  The last time I visited Justine in Arizona and she went out for her regular six-point-two-mile run during a thunderstorm, I asked her if she remembered the day they called us from the YMCA because our father wouldn’t get out of the pool at closing time. He told them he’d only swum fifty-four laps and couldn’t stop until he reached one hundred. My mother went down to try to talk him out, but even when the lifeguard tried to drag him physically from the water, my father pulled away, and with his legs pushed himself mightily off the wall. Later, he told us that if he hadn’t swum exactly one hundred laps, something bad would have happened. We didn’t ask him what. The lifeguard let him finish, but they revoked his membership after that.

  Justine said she didn’t remember this story. Only half-teasing, she accused me of making it up.

  Her husband is a psychiatrist, and because of my old resentments toward his profession, I had a chip on my shoulder the first time I met him. But it fell off as soon as I saw the way he kept looking at my sister: with gratitude, as if she were a gift he never dared ask for and couldn’t believe he’d received. They have two sons, Jake and Robbie, and are expecting a daughter (Justine will finally get to use all the baby clothes we rescued, including the christening dress). I see them about three times a year.

  Now that there are new children in the family, we all come together occasionally. When it was just grown-ups, it didn’t work. Justine and I could talk to each other, and she and my mother were in touch.

  But I didn’t see my mother and Paul for two years after the first time we tried to have a family Christmas in Florida, which was a disaster. Nobody had anything to say to one another; or there was too much to say, but nobody dared. After that, we just sent cards (always the so-called humorou
s kind) and talked on the phone some Sundays. There was a tacit acknowledgment that this was the easiest way.

  But Jake and Robbie changed things. They give us something to focus on, beyond what we have suffered together in the past. Instead of screaming at one another, we change diapers. Instead of asking questions nobody can answer, we read aloud from Green Eggs and Ham.

  Distractions, yes. But that’s what life comes down to, I’m beginning to understand.

  The boys know one grandfather and aren’t old enough to ask about the other one yet, and Justine says she’s not sure what she will tell them when they do. In the meantime, we take pictures and put them in albums dating back only as far as the day of Jake’s birth. My nephews call me Ana Banana. I send them each a new book every month, and I look forward to their being old enough to read Alice.

  For a while after we moved from Ashmont, I kept a subscription to the Star because I liked following the news of people I knew. Two years after my father and Meggy died, an item under Unions announced the marriage of Heather Shufelt—whom I had once smacked in the ear with an errant cross-fire ball—to Officer Frank Garhart of the Ashmont Police Department. I stared at the announcement for a long time. For a moment I considered cutting it out, but instead I picked up the phone to call the Star and cancel my subscription.

  My grandfather died a few years ago, of a heart attack, and my grandmother moved into a place that advertised “assisted living.” When I helped her move in, I smiled at the sign and said I wouldn’t mind some assistance with living, but she was beyond getting the joke.

  If anyone had told me in high school that I would end up becoming a scientist, I would have said they’d been reading the wrong report card, not to mention the wrong heart. I had never paid much attention, or energy, to science and math. It was literature I loved—from the first book I ever memorized and feigned reading aloud to my kindergarten class, a long verse about manners called The Goops (“The Goops they lick their fingers, the Goops they lick their knives; they spill their broth on the tablecloth—oh, they lead disgusting lives!”), and later, Jane Eyre and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (which was my favorite because it was so delicious to know Tess’s secret, and wait for it finally to come out), I would have said I preferred spending my time with made-up people in pages than with just about any live human being I knew.