by Hilary Sloin
On the other hand, she knew, as did Alfonse, about the morning Evelyn had walked in on Francesca and the Chinese girl, and this, Vivian told herself—and Alfonse told himself as well—was the real reason Francesca had fled. She’d always seemed a strange child, what with her penchant for things wild and natural, her lack of interest in anything feminine (I want a purple room!), her finger painting. And on the day when Evelyn related the story, through a filter of disgust and rage, Vivian and Alfonse could no longer hide from themselves what Francesca was. This, they decided then, was why she’d gone, so she could live among other people like her. Evelyn had been happy to accept this explanation, since it took the onus off of her and made Francesca’s disappearance inevitable.
Alfonse piled spaghetti, three meatballs, and a heaping tablespoon of freshly grated Reggiano Parmesan onto a plate.
“That Joycie. What a mensch,” said Vivian, referring to Joycie Newman, who had dropped the food off in Tupperwares that afternoon.
Alfonse held the plate out to Francesca. “Our guest of honor,” he said.
Isabella put one hand in the air. “Ask her if she eats meat,” she demanded.
“Oh—” Abashedly, he retracted the plate.
“I do eat meat. Thank you.” Francesca took it from him.
Alfonse glared at Isabella.
“What,” Isabella said firmly. “A lot of lesbians don’t eat meat.”
He ladled a large heap of pasta and sauce onto another plate and held it out to Isabella.
“What? I can’t eat that!” She blocked it with outstretched hands. “Didn’t she bring any salad?”
“Joycie brought spaghetti. That’s how it is. People bring the food and we eat it. It’s not a time to be difficult,” said Vivian.
“I’ll just have an apple,” said Isabella.
“Viv, tell her to eat the spaghetti.” Alfonse spoke quietly.
“It’s okay,” said Vivian. “Just don’t eat too much.”
Isabella looked at the plate, panicked, as if upon it sat an unpredictable wild animal she didn’t want to rouse. She swallowed hard and shook her head. “Just sauce,” she said, handing the plate back to Alfonse. “Please.”
“What do you mean, just sauce?”
“It’s fine, Alfonse,” said Vivian. She turned to Isabella. “I know for a fact that Joycie uses very little oil in the sauce. And lean meat. You know Joycie—she’s always on a diet.” She patted Isabella’s hand.
“That’s ridiculous. She’s too skinny as it is,” said Alfonse, disgusted.
“It’s the white flour. It metabolizes into sugar and forms a layer of flab right here.” Isabella patted her belly.
Alfonse pushed the spaghetti back into the saucepan, mixing it in with the mound of clean noodles, staining everything a weak orange. He slapped the pot down and presented Isabella with her abridged plate, now smattered with sauce and pimply bumps of meat. “Happy?” he said, his voice tight.
Gingerly, Isabella moved two laggard strands of spaghetti to the side, then took the plate from her father. Sauce is depression; spaghetti, mania. She should have chosen spaghetti, some meatballs, a big glass of Coke. Tears filled her eyes, silent and unstoppable, clouding her vision. She felt around her plate for her spoon, trying to focus on the sad puddle of sauce before her, struggling not to resent her sister’s monopoly on approval. She shook her head, grimacing. She was trying so hard. Oh, how she was trying. She reassured herself that although Francesca was visiting, and so was being fussed over and lavished with gobs of attention, her parents were and always would be hers. Utterly. Exclusively. This fact, while unspoken and, of course, unspeakable, was still a fact. Already they were so ill at ease with each other, her mother and her fly-by-night sister, that it was only a matter of time until they ran fresh out of patience, or whatever resource they were rapidly depleting. There was nothing to draw them together except perhaps the tiniest physical resemblance—the posture, the leanness, the sharp features. And the big hands. Vivian had smaller hands but they were big for her size, for her carriage—long fingered and thick palmed. Francesca’s were just plain big. Anyhow, this was a superficial likeness, so subtle as to go unnoticed, and Isabella knew that very soon they would revert to a state of mutual loathing. How sad. Sad, sad, sad. It was all she could do not to “tsk tsk” aloud. She wished everyone well, somewhere deep down and hard to get a hold of. Like a tiny gold ring at the bottom of the ocean. “All done!” She placed her tablespoon diagonally across her plate, took the salt-shaker from the middle of the table, and dumped a long spray over the stain of sauce that remained. She sprung to her feet.
“Good for you.” Vivian said.
“Good? Why are you telling her that’s good?” asked Alfonse, his voice cracking.
“That’s why she’s so slim.”
“Yes, she is. Thank you,” said Isabella. “If you’ll excuse her . . .” She walked into the living room and flung herself on the couch.
“Tell her to get back in here,” Alfonse demanded.
“You should have seen your sister,” Vivian told Francesca. She puffed out her cheeks and hung her hands at her side.
“I saw that, Mom,” called Isabella.
“No, you didn’t,” Vivian replied smartly, as if this were a game.
“Viv, tell her to come back in here.”
Why, Francesca wondered, had Lisa ended her life when lives like these continued on and on with no apparent purpose?
Isabella’s needs were tapping, tapping, demanding attention. She’d tried to allow the focus to stagnate on her sister. But Francesca didn’t need their attention; that was obvious. And oh, how Isabella did. She needed it more with each passing moment. She appeared in the doorway. “Here I am.” She sat down at the table and, to please Alfonse, took her napkin and smoothed it over her lap. “I’ll have some spaghetti, Papa.”
“No point now. We’re nearly finished.”
“But I’m hungry.”
He took her plate, rather roughly, and spooned a small amount of pasta, maybe a quarter cup, over the heap of salt, then used the ladle to cover it with sauce. But as soon as Isabella had taken the plate from him, she knew she couldn’t eat. Quickly, she searched for a distraction.
“My new book is going very well,” she said. “It’s a memoir.”
“We know,” Alfonse said.
“How do you know?”
“You told us.” He picked up his fork.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Recently.”
Isabella thought hard. “Oh. I guess I’ve been so busy working on it, I forgot.” She paused, heard only the sounds of silverware tapping dishes. “Uh oh. Did I give away the ending?”
“I’m sure you didn’t,” said Vivian.
“Good, because it’s the best part. The ending. But they say you’re never supposed to tell. Because once you tell, once you say the story out loud, which, of course, is so much easier than writing the whole thing down, page after page after page—then you needn’t write it.”
“Oh, go ahead,” Francesca pushed her plate away, relieved to have her sister back in the room. Isabella, at least, had vim. Inside that pale, frayed exterior, one could feel the life trying to get out. “Tell us, Bella.”
“Alright. If Francesca wants to hear it. Since she’s the guest of honor.” She leaned closer to her sister until their faces were inches apart, and spoke intimately, in a low, spooky voice. “It’s all about the mental ward. And the narrator—is . . .” she whispered, “a pedophile.”
“Jesus Christ.” Alfonse dropped his fork, put his hand to his heart. “Vivian!”
Vivian turned to Isabella. “Either you sit down and act like a regular person, or you can stay in the other room.”
“I’m telling Francesca.” She cupped Francesca’s ear but spoke loudly enough that the others would hear. “He managed to work a deal with the prosecutor where he’s in the loony bin to beat a jail rap,” she whispered. “This actually happened.”
�
��Isabella, stop fibbing,” said Vivian.
“Why does she always want to write about perverts?” asked Alfonse.
“First of all, I never write about perverts.” She wasn’t sure whether this was true. “Second, it’s a classic theme, Papa. The antiprotagonist. The main character who does horrible things and yet we are made to identify with him. Dostoyevsky did it. Nabokov did it.” Finally, thought Isabella, the spotlight was rightfully hers. “Even Shakespeare was obsessed with it.”
“Nabokov always wrote about pedophiles,” offered Francesca.
“Well, he was a very strange fellow. He had that thing about butterflies,” Alfonse added, trying to participate.
“Papa, I doubt you’ve ever read Nabokov,” said Isabella.
“I’ve read plenty. I’ve certainly read Italo Calvino. He’s a very fine writer. And he writes about beauty and his country and love, of course.”
“But Nabokov turned the whole genre upside down. No one since Chaucer had written such defiantly literary dirty books! Unless you consider Henry Miller literary.” Isabella shuddered with distaste.
“Could we please talk about something else?” Alfonse dropped his silverware and let his chin hover inches from his plate. He looked at Vivian, then Isabella. “There must be other things to discuss. I haven’t seen Francesca in seven years.”
“Eight,” added Isabella.
“Why is it always lunatics and suicide and holocaust victims and pedophiles? What about something nice? Love, maybe?” He looked at Isabella. “Why don’t you write about love?”
Isabella shrugged. “Because I don’t know about love,” she said in a flat voice.
“That’s not true, Bella,” said Vivian. “Now just stop it.”
Isabella looked at her mother, thinking about her words: “That’s not true.” Were they correct? Was it not true? Was she just being melodramatic?
“I don’t mean parental love,” she clarified. “I know about parental love.”
“Just let the rest of us eat,” said Vivian.
Francesca felt impotent, and this feeling was unpleasant and familiar. She wanted to intervene, to defend her sister, at least to prod Isabella into defending herself. Tell them to shut the fuck up, she wanted to say. Tell them you’re 28 years old. Instead, she did nothing. She began to imagine the drive back to Cape Cod, stopping at Wendy’s for a chicken sandwich (instead of McDonalds), returning to her cabin and unloading all the paintings from the car, unadulterated, having never subjected them to the scrutiny of these fatuous people.
Isabella began to cry quietly. She wiped tears with her sleeve and sniffled, then pulled her chair back from the table, preparing to stand. “Papa? Do you want me at the table?” she looked at him.
“Of course he does,” said Vivian. “We all do.”
“Does Francesca want me?” asked Isabella.
“I really do,” said Francesca.
And so, Isabella sat quietly, close to her sister, feeling, for the first time in her life, that she had a sister. Francesca patted Isabella’s knee, then left her large hand there, heavy and reassuring.
That night Alfonse slept fitfully, dreaming of Vivian and his daughters sitting on the neighbor’s porch. In the dream, they were all lesbians. From next door he smelled Evelyn’s cooking instead of old Mrs. Weinstein’s garbage rotting in the garage. He seemed to be going blind. He tried to look at his younger daughter and the lesbian neighbor, but he could not see them anymore.
He awoke in the middle of the night, his throat dry and filled with the taste of copper and garlic. The clock said 3:12. He walked down the dark hallway, the floorboards creaking beneath his bare feet, and stood at the kitchen sink, drinking glass after glass of tepid, sulfur-stained water, gazing out at the silent yard. How, he wondered, could he have tolerated so many years of not knowing whether his youngest daughter was even alive? How had it happened that he and Vivian had returned from a marriage encounter weekend to find one daughter nearly dead, the other gone? The song they’d chosen, for every couple had been required to choose a song, was “For All We Know.” The title took on an unpleasant, ironic sting: It seemed they didn’t know much. He’d driven around the neighborhood, stopped by the school, talked with some teachers. He’d even called Mr. Sinsong, who claimed not to remember ever visiting 312 Riverview Street and had suggested, accusingly, that perhaps Alfonse had the wrong Chinese family.
By the time he and Vivian had extracted details from Evelyn—how she’d found Lisa in Francesca’s bed, the clothes on the floor—days had passed. “That one from Chapel Street,” Evelyn kept saying, as if Lisa’s neighborhood and all it symbolized were to blame.
At the police station, the detective had explained there was nothing to be done about an 18-year-old who chooses to leave home. Unless they suspected foul play. Did they feel she’d been abducted? the policeman had asked. Vivian nodded with certitude, but Alfonse said nothing. He’d wanted to suspect wrongdoing, something to make fade the glaring, throbbing truth that there was nothing criminal about her disappearance: no one had abducted her, forced her to leave; in fact, she’d fled her miserable life. He thought of Francesca’s face—lined now with age and sadness. But youthful. It was the face of an honest life. He thought of her deep voice, the way she sat, shoulders straight, head slightly forward, and wondered what sort of thoughts occupied her mind. He wanted to believe she’d escaped unscathed. But he knew that was a lie. Anyone with eyes could see that hers were sad as a war-torn country.
In a sense, they’d forgotten her. The panic had faded to pain, first acute, then unremarkable. In the same way the acuity of any loss lessens, things filling up its gaping hole, the absence of Francesca came to be routine. She was a name rarely mentioned—the daughter they’d once had, the one they’d lost. People in the town stopped including Francesca’s name in the general inquiries. Of course, some years later, when it became clear that Isabella would never fulfill her promise, when Evelyn’s mind hit the dirt like compost, people no longer inquired, just smiled and said hello. That was the sort of town it was—everyone knew but pretended to know nothing. He supposed all towns were like that, and it seemed sad to him, how little comfort people spared for each other, how separate and safe from each other’s tragedies they all chose to remain.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The basement, disguised as a guest room, more closely resembled a friendly prison cell, with hard linoleum tile and plastic paneled walls, one secret window tucked just beneath the ceiling, its pane cracked and cloudy from cobwebs. The air was heavy and mildewed. The seat of a metal folding chair was tucked under the surface of a bridge table, and in the far corner of the room Francesca’s old record player balanced precariously on a column of albums, her headphones poised on top. A sheath of moonlight managed entry as she lay on the daybed, her body covered in brick-red wool blankets, topped off by the lavender bedspread of her childhood. She should have stayed in a hotel; she knew this as she dipped her feet under the cold sheets and felt the springs give under her weight. But there was something here that she needed. She felt herself easing into the heaviness of the house, like stepping into a pair of old slippers that are soft and unstable. She chose the basement over her mother’s office, the room that had once been Isabella’s bedroom. (She had categorically declined her sister’s offer to share the attic room.) The basement had the fewest memories, afforded the greatest privacy. And it was tomblike, somewhere safe and dark to which she could retreat.
She dreamt of Lisa—discombobulated, incomprehensible dreams—images violent as the ocean during a storm: pieces of Lisa’s face, Lisa’s fragmented fingers, Lisa’s black shoes stepping in and out of the rusty tracks, moving across the dusty floor of her cabin. Wasn’t it strange, Francesca wondered upon waking, that Lisa had gone to the train tracks to die? Or was it pure coincidence? By even thinking it, was Francesca trying to bolster her own significance in Lisa’s life?
It wasn’t uncommon for her to dream of Lisa; Lisa nearly always stood about
in Francesca’s dreams, even the innocuous, everyday anxiety ones where she tried desperately, in vain, to buy socks or cigarettes. Always Lisa lurked—picking up cigs at the liquor store, driving past in the VW—the embodiment of everything Francesca longed for and lost. But to dream of her in this house, while she lay swaddled in the dreaded bedspread, a few feet away from her Beatles collection, across from the oil burner (making a strange knocking, as if a pebble were bouncing against its steel sides), amplified the loss of Lisa, banged on the bruise in her heart.
She reminded herself that she hadn’t stepped back in time. She was Francesca deSilva with a lower case “d,” just as she’d been yesterday, still a renowned artist who had long ago fled this suffocating structure and its damaged inhabitants. Still . . . she seemed to have invited all of it inside her again, allowed it to penetrate a cavity that had heretofore been sealed off.
She sat up and lit a cigarette, suddenly overcome with the desire to hear music on her old phonograph, a side of some album absurdly time-worn and dated. She crossed the cold, lacquered floor and lifted her record player—it was surprisingly light and cheaply constructed—into the center of the room and rested it on an unfolded bridge chair. She plugged in the appliance, chose Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (worse still: “She’s Leaving Home”), and laid the needle gently down, then inserted the headphones jack and reclined on the daybed, her back to the wall, her large feet protruding in front of her.
For a moment, she was soothed, distracted, even transported to the attic room, the early evening hours before dinner when she’d be blissfully alone with music amid the slow capping off of light; before she’d have to join the others for a strained, brief meeting at the dinner table. They weren’t all terrible memories. Life had, ultimately, turned in her favor. Art had wrought new possibilities. Lisa had loved her, briefly.
But then, as if she’d been struck from behind, a steep blow to the head by the point of a rock or the edge of a brick—she remembered, afresh, that Lisa was dead. That she’d failed to pick up on the clues that were surely being dropped like a thin trail of breadcrumbs behind Lisa’s feet. That she’d failed Lisa in every respect, and this failure on her part seemed inherent, even destined. Growing up in this colorless, ailing house had made certain that she would never be attuned to the finer dips and curves of life. Nor the joys. Though she experienced little skits of pleasure, life was, had always been, an ongoing, concerted effort to keep pain at bay, to get through this day and onto the next. And all of this mitigating had caused her to miss Lisa’s agony altogether; she was too consumed by her own. Now she would spend the rest of her life knowing she hadn’t helped the person who mattered most to her in the world.