“You’re incredibly stubborn.”
“So I’ve been told.”
He started pulling the meat away from the hard shell. He’d drained the milk into a glass jar. “You coming out? Or are you going to hide from me?”
“I’m not hiding from you.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I went out and sat on the step. He handed me a piece of coconut, then sat with his back to the railing, stretched out his legs and looked at me like he planned to stay awhile.
“I can’t stand that we were…” I said.
I stopped. I didn’t want to say making love; it hadn’t been that for him. I didn’t want to say having sex, it seemed like more than that, even for him. I didn’t know what we’d been doing.
“That we were what?” he asked.
“Whatever. That it was waiting under the surface.”
“I don’t like it either. Is this someone you’re going back to?”
“Do you want the truth?”
“Probably not, but I don’t want anything else either.”
I told him the story. He glanced away over the night Steve had pinned my face to the bed, it had probably been that night, and again over the last night of slurs. I didn’t go into any real detail, but he seemed to understand the story. I’d traded a few nights of chemistry for what might have been a long-term relationship. The long-term relationship didn’t take it well.
It was interesting to tell the truth. It moved the focus from a frittering brain trying to paint a prettier picture, to the shame and pain stored in the gut. Unlike the frittering, it was a relief when it was over. The sound of waves washed in and out over our silence. He handed me the jar of milk and I drank some; he drank the rest. I felt completely drained.
“I’m sorry, Jon. I had no idea. I would never have done that.”
He wiped his hammer on the paper bag he’d been using as a cleaning board, then folded the coconut up in the bag and handed it to me.
“Eat this,” he said. “I need to head out this afternoon. Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
He picked up the empty jar and walked away. I didn’t go to bed right away. I thought about calling Karin, but I was back to that place where my throat had closed up and the back of my tongue felt so fat I was sure I couldn’t speak. I finally gave in and went back to sleep.
I woke up in the middle of the night; the cottage was dark and empty. I remembered. I was hungry but nothing sounded like food. Jon was gone and I needed to be home where the familiar walls could hold me together. I turned on all the lights, packed, and then got on-line and found a flight at noon. I left a note for the cleaners to take the food and left them a tip under the dead ikebana arrangement on the table.
New Year’s Eve travel should be easy. I drove in before dawn, dropped the car, and sat around in the airport watching smiling couples come and go in matching all-terrain sandals. It would never occur to me to wear matching shoes, but I guessed that was what happy people did.
TEN
New Year’s Day in Los Angeles and it was colder inside the house than out. I started a fire and opened windows. It’s hard to make the transition from hot to cold. I made tea and walked around my two worktables, reacquainting myself with work. I still had a month before we left for India. I decided to pack all the material and move it down to our workshop at the studio on Monday.
I’d turned off my phone so I could get some uninterrupted sleep. I turned it back on and it rang almost immediately; it was Eric.
“Happy New Year,” I said. “I tried calling, but you weren’t home.”
“We got the message,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Home,” I said. “I got in last night.”
“You need to come down here,” he said.
“Now? I just got back, I’m fried.”
“There was an accident last night.”
“What accident?”
“Binky was killed in a car accident.” His voice was catching. “Amber too.”
I sat down in a chair. I was having a hard time understanding English.
“Amber?”
He handed the phone to Anna.
“Hannah, I’m so sorry.”
“How’s Ted? The kids?”
“Mom and Arthur are there. It’s not real yet, for any of us.”
Binky had been at an afternoon New Year’s Eve party with some girlfriends. She was drunk. She’d picked up Amber from a little program that her jump rope team, The Skippers, had put on at a convalescent hospital. It struck me as so odd that Amber would be doing anything that generous. Binky had pulled on to the freeway going the wrong way on an off-ramp. It was dusk, that confusing time of day. She’d always had a hard time with the light that time of day; her eyes were damaged after our childhood of long days playing in the sun. She’d driven down the freeway going the wrong direction. A semi-truck had slammed into them. As far as anyone knew they were both killed instantly.
Ted had been at work at the hospital when the bodies were brought in. He didn’t know who they were until he recognized Binky’s wedding ring. I had a vision of Binky driving in a stupor, blinking the way she did, while Amber screamed at her. I could almost hear Binky saying, “Oh shut up, Amber.” Amber must have died terrified.
“I’m having a hard time understanding this,” I said. “Was anyone else hurt?”
“No, just them. Can you come down?” asked Anna.
“I’ll be down this afternoon.”
“Do you want me to send a car?”
“No, I can do it.”
“Be careful. It’s a shock.”
I had to move, get on the road. I dumped my suitcase out on the unmade bed and threw Hawaii in a pile on the floor. I started packing again. I didn’t know what I would need. I packed the suit I’d worn to my grandmother’s burial. I added my book of Emily and my pearls. Bettina and I had been given pearls for our eighteenth birthdays. I damped down the fire, stirred the ashes, and even went so far as to sprinkle water on it to be sure it was completely out before leaving. I never did that. I wasn’t sure what mattered to do and what didn’t.
I emailed Margaret to let her know what had happened. I blind-copied Karin. It was a crude way to deliver the news, but I didn’t have a phone call in me and I knew she’d understand. I was on the road by noon.
I drove for miles and miles without awareness. I needed to pay attention. I tried to force my mind to focus, but it wanted to run the Bettina movie. Not the Binky crash movie, but the vivacious young Bettina movie. The smart big sister who told me I must be growing up after I told her I had a hankering for butterscotch pudding. She said knowing what I wanted was the first sign of growing up. I felt so proud of myself over the taste of butterscotch that had spontaneously bloomed on my tongue.
We used to have a monkey tree with needle leaves in the backyard. Binky used to say she was the doctor and poke me with them. She kept saying she wouldn’t really poke me this time, but then she did. I always fell for it. I wanted her to like me.
One day she decided to fry donuts while our parents were gone. The grease caught fire. Instead of putting the lid on the pan, she ran screaming through the house with the flaming pot of oil, through the garage, and then poured it in the street. My parents weren’t as upset about the fire and burned up kitchen, as they were about the fact that she’d drunk two shots of whiskey before they got home. She’d seen Mom do it.
Her drinking years had been a nightmare. She was so unhappy. She’d wanted to go to college and be a doctor, to poke people for real. But she’d been trapped in Mother’s dream catcher of how life should be.
Eric opened the door. His eyes were red-rimmed with crying and fatigue. His shoulders sagged under the burden of being a responsible man. Anna’s nostrils were chapped; she looked plain and worn out. Their kids, Adam and Grace, were quiet and sticking to themselves in their rooms. They were good friends with their cousins Sam and Sam; they were close in age. They had taken their cou
sins to the beach where they just sat around. They’d picked bits of dry seaweed out of the sand until it was clean, and then let the warm grains run through their fingers, over and over, like an hourglass. Anna said the kids hadn’t said much.
Eric was on the phone with the funeral home, but nothing could be done New Years Day. It’s a busy night for the coroner. No one in the family had buried a child since our grandmothers, two generations before. We needed to learn how to do that. Would there be two services? Two burials? Could we even stand that? There would be no viewing; the damage was too great. I wondered if that was better, to not have that last image of a stranger called by your sister or niece’s name stuck in your memory.
Anna and I went over to Binky’s where Mom was passing time cleaning out the refrigerator and making homemade soup. It smelled like a hundred Sunday afternoons growing up. Arthur was playing a video game with Sam. Samantha was in her room with the door closed. Ted was wandering around. Samantha came out of her room and then went back in a few minutes later, carrying her mother’s jewelry box. I smiled at her; she didn’t smile back. She closed the door. I’d have to tell her I still had my father’s.
No one was watching football or reruns of the Rose Parade. I knew what they were doing; they were living in a shocked ground fog, suspended between then and the unknown of what would come when the sun burned through the haze. I thought of a sky sandwich, of Jon saying we can’t go to those other worlds without some help. But they would, they would somehow get to the next place like we all do, with or without help.
I hugged Ted, he was stiff; he thanked me for coming. He was going to need to do a lot more than wander in the years ahead. I hugged my mother and she started to cry. The fabric on my shoulder was completely soaked before she ran down. I was crying on her shoulder. It felt like we were literally steaming with grief.
Anna and I didn’t stay long. There would be days and days of it to get through. We started home. I told her about the miscarriage. She reached over and held my hand and started crying. I felt cried out. I said she needed to pay attention to her driving or she’d get us killed too. Black humor was creeping in. We drove down to the beach, parked and just sat together. Eric called to check on us. We went home. He needed us too; we sometimes forget that about him.
None of us were hungry. I said I thought being hungry confused the issue so Anna defrosted homemade lasagna and heated rosemary rolls. We devoured it. I wondered if they felt the same twinge of guilt I did, for enjoying food when Binky and Amber never would again.
Friends and neighbors would start arriving with food at Binky’s tomorrow, as soon as the word spread and their New Year’s hangovers were behind them. We would stop calling it Binky’s soon, and start calling it Ted and the kids’ house. I wondered if Ted would remarry. I thought so. I hoped he had better luck.
I checked my email. Margaret and Karin had both responded with concern. Margaret said not to worry; we would be fine no matter how much we got done before we left. Karin was shocked and said to call when I got a chance. Jon hadn’t called. I tried him, but it went to voicemail. I hung up. I knew I couldn’t get through leaving him a message. I didn’t even know why I was calling him.
I took a long hot shower and put on my nightgown. I felt like a little girl in a red and yellow flannel nightgown in my brother’s house. My mother had given it to me for Christmas with the note, “red and yellow, catch a fellow.” She hadn’t met Steve yet. But when I was only fifteen she’d given me sets of red and black lace underpants and bras. I didn’t know what to make of it at that age. She can be so out of synch.
The next days were a blur of arrangements. We picked out caskets and shopped for funeral clothes with the kids. We talked to the minister and listened to music for the service. We picked prayers. We picked photographs to have enlarged.
We took turns being the hostess at Bettina’s. Food, flowers, strained conversations. I made a point of being the one who ferried food back and forth from neighborhood freezers so the kids didn’t have to do it. They’d find out soon enough that they were aliens in a changed land.
Ted and the kids wanted one service, one burial. After Grandma’s burial Bettina had announced that she wanted to be buried in Altadena too. Ted was torn between burying them close so the kids could visit, and honoring Bettina’s last request. He opted to buy new plots, side-by-side. No one got on their high horse about Binky’s last wish. We knew it didn’t matter. As far as I knew no one in my family had ever visited my father’s grave. I decided to ask Eric to do that with me. I emailed Margaret and Karin progress reports. I knew they were sitting out there loving me.
Eric and I went to our father’s grave. We wondered why people do that. We had Filipino friends who set up a whole Christmas tree, and Hispanic friends who took picnics. Presbyterians are called the frozen Christians; we don’t go in for graveside partying.
“Anna told me what happened, I’m sorry. We hoped you’d have a good time over there,” he said. “Get a fresh start.”
“It’s the most fun I can ever remember having, but it wasn’t meant to be, none of it. I guess it was a fresh start in a way. The alternative would have been a nightmare. The boys next door were sleeping in a hut they built. Do you remember the forts Binky built for me?”
“Yeah, especially the pink sheet tent. Then she served you graham crackers and mandarin orange slices for two days until you threw up and Dad put a stop to it.”
“Warm mandarin slices. I still can’t even think the word mandarin. She saved me from the boy up the street when I was nine, did you know about that?”
“What boy?”
“The Taylor boy, not boy really, he was probably eighteen. I was over playing with his sister. I didn’t even know she had a brother; he just appeared one day. He took me in the den and stuck his hand down my pants and rubbed me. He told me to wear something silky next time. I didn’t know what he meant. I was still wearing cotton underpants with smiley faces.”
What I didn’t tell Eric was how it had felt good; his voice in the dark room was hypnotic. I felt guilty at age nine without having any idea why.
“That guy was never a boy, he was a fucking freak.” Eric was looking off in memory. “He was always being hauled off somewhere for reprogramming.”
“I told Binky about it at a swim meet. I can still see her in her shiny blue bathing suit and one of those horrible caps that tear your hair out. I swore her to secrecy.”
“Binky never kept a secret in her life,” he said. “God, could she blab.”
“She must have blabbed to Mom and Dad. The guy disappeared. No one ever mentioned him again. I still played with his sister.”
“Dad probably took him half a tank off the coast and shoved him out of the plane.”
“That’s kind of mafia for a Presbyterian.”
“That was a no-fly zone for him.”
“That’s comforting to know. I was wondering about it the other day. I’ve never known what would be okay with him.”
“He was no Puritan, obviously. But he was dug in about people confining their activities to the appropriate age group.”
“Yeah. Mom too. She hired a painter once when I was in high school. He said something funky to me and I told her. She got in the car to go to the office, then drove around the block, came in and kicked him out of the house.”
“Mom. Took her a trip around the block to decide to fire him before the work was done. It’s hard to find a painter.”
We ended up on the ground laughing. It’s good to laugh when you’re burying your sister and niece. I asked him why Aunt Asp wasn’t around. I couldn’t believe she’d miss a chance to be cruel to her sister over the death of her daughter. They were traveling in China; it was too much to come home. Nice sister, but better for Mom that way. We were lying on the grass looking at the sky, taking a break from adulthood.
“What kind of truck was it?” I asked.
“Mack.”
“A John Deere would have been too weird, would
n’t it?”
“Yeah, but as Anna said, stranger things have happened.”
“What did Binky keep of Dad’s?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh come on, Eric. She told you everything. She had to blab.”
“She wouldn’t tell me that. I can’t even guess.”
“Does his watch work?”
“No. The crystal was broken, it could probably be fixed.”
“What time is it?”
He was quiet; he knew what I meant. “Eighteen-thirty-one. You were right. I looked it up. It was sunset.”
“It’s hard to see that time of day,” I said.
“For this family at least,” he said.
The world turned and the day of the service finally got around to us. Ted and the kids looked like a set of papier-mâché death effigies on sticks. Their clothes hung off them. Samantha was wearing Binky’s pearls. I was wearing mine. Mom was in a black suit with some room in it; she’d lost weight. Her skin looked pale and flakey through a hole that was starting in the back of her black pantyhose. Adam and Grace sat with Sam and Sam, next to Ted. Arthur and Eric flanked Mom, who looked out of focus. Anna and I found space to fit in.
We got through the service. Eric did the eulogy; he had borrowed part of our graveside conversation. Not the hands down the pants guy, but he talked about swim meets, and pink tents, and how Binky never could keep a secret. Everyone smiled a remembering smile. Amber’s Skipper team came; they wore their team tee shirts with the rainbow jump rope logo. They sang “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and we all sobbed. Ted could probably have told stories about his wife and child, but that was too much to ask.
The burial was private. Two shiny black limousines followed a black hearse with Binky, and a white hearse with Amber. Their caskets didn’t match either. Binky’s was a soft metallic grey with silver trim. Amber’s was smaller. It was white with little girl trim edging the lid. It looked like multi-colored pastel jump rope. The sweet pastel colors flashed soft flares of rainbow color across Binky’s metallic grey as they carried them across the lawn to be lowered into the ground. The plots were under shade trees. It would be a nice spot for them on hot summer days. The minister said a few words. Then I read Emily’s poem “Hope.”
Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights Page 18