When we grew tired of hearing the story, we played a game where we bought three horses and had to name them. Sugar was a good one; Henry, Midnight, Star, Strawberry, Red Stallion, and Chester were some of the favorites. Ruthie liked Grand Canyon. We said the names until one fell asleep, then the other. Then the last one.
In the morning after Lilly’s date we heard the shrill ring of the telephone. I wasn’t sure my mother was home yet, but after two rings, Lilly picked up. I went downstairs. Lilly was still dressed in the navy blue dress she had worn on her date with Kent the night before.
I went back upstairs. “Something’s the matter,” I told my sisters.
We trailed downstairs and lingered in our mother’s shadow.
“Who was it, Mom?” Ruthie finally said.
Lilly sat up and wiped wisps of hair off her face with her sleeve. Snow had come in the night and was building faster in the yard, scratching out the last sliver of sky. There would be no school that day.
“Oh, it was no one you know, darling. It was nothing. I’m just tired. I was up all night.” Lilly was edgy. She had canceled her next date with Kent. When the phone rang again, Kent no doubt pestering Lilly to change her mind, she asked Ruthie to answer and say she wasn’t home. She stared out the window, biting the cuticle skin around one thumb. Her makeup from the night before was smeared under her eyes.
“Why do I have to lie for you?” Ruthie barked. But when she looked into our mother’s tired eyes, she gave in.
Lilly tied her hair back off her face in a ponytail. She began to move about the house, washing dishes, doing laundry, still in her tight-fitting evening dress, as if she were following a routine she’d carried out for years.
The doorbell rang. Lilly moved the curtain and peered out the window. It was Mr. Hopkins from down the street with the immaculate lawn that looked smooth as carpet or golf-course grass.
Lilly opened the door.
“Mrs. Crane, the block association has signed a petition,” he began, clearing his throat. He shoved a piece of paper into Lilly’s hand. “You’ve got to do something about your house. It’s affecting the value of the neighborhood.”
Lilly looked at him the way sad widows do.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings,” Mr. Hopkins stuttered. “But we’ve got to consider our children. I wish we could do something to help.”
Lilly took the petition, crumpled it in a ball, threw it back at him, and shut the door.
“You’ll be hearing from our attorneys,” Mr. Hopkins called.
Lilly went to the kitchen and swallowed down three aspirin. “No one understands,” she sighed.
Around three o’clock she shoved us outdoors. “I need peace and quiet,” she explained. “My head’s throbbing.”
I looked down the block. The front lawns of the houses on our street were covered with snow. Our neighbor was shoveling his driveway. I looked at our own yard. The old snow was covered three or four inches high.
The paint on our house had begun to peel, and the wood was buckling. One of the shutters on the upstairs windows hung crooked. The gutters sagged with packed, frozen snow. The broken attic window was held together with masking tape. The hedges surrounding our house had long become overgrown and uneven. The other houses on the block were freshly painted. An acorn wreath with a red ribbon hung on the door across the street. It dawned on me then, though I had walked our block hundreds of times, that next to the other houses on our street, our house, the one my father had built for us, looked neglected and old.
My sisters and I took out the rusted shovels and began to shovel a path along the front walkway. Down the street the Magilicuttys must have lit a fire in the fireplace. The burnt smell hovered over our roof. I watched as the smoke created patterns in the sky. It began to turn from afternoon to dusk. The winter storm enveloped us in a frozen cocoon.
A shiny black Mercedes pulled up by the side of the street to our house. “Hello, girls,” Kent called out through his rolled-down passenger window. “Is your mother home?”
We pointed inside.
“I think your mother is really special,” he said. “And I’m looking forward to getting to know you. Which one of you is Anna?”
We had been introduced to him more than a handful of times.
“I am,” I said.
“I understand you and my son Mark are in the same class.”
I just stared at him. I couldn’t help but wonder if Mark Montgomery, who looked a little bit like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, knew his father was obsessed with my mother. Sometimes, before school, Kent came to our house dressed in his business suit to see my mother before heading downtown to work. She’d make coffee for him in our narrow kitchen. He sometimes showed up again, unannounced, in the middle of the afternoon. I once saw Mark with his mother at the grocery store. She was overweight and had the look of a divorcee who knew she was no longer desired. Mark flipped through a comic book he tore off the rack near the cashier counter so as not to catch my eye.
When Kent emerged from his car we smelled a blast of liquor on his breath. He waltzed into our house, as he always did, without ringing the bell or knocking. Once Lilly had begun seeing Kent regularly, he became possessive and forbade her to see other men.
“How can she go out with that greaser?” Ruthie said.
I wandered up to the front door and opened it. Kent had Lilly in a tight hold. His beard was pressed against her neck.
“Why don’t you and your sisters go to the corner and buy yourself an ice-cream sundae?” Kent said, thrusting a crisp twenty-dollar bill into my hand, and closed the front door.
When we got home, our snow jackets soaked through, our hands and feet frozen, Lilly was still in the kitchen with Kent. Our hands and faces were burning from the cold. Kent was drinking a glass of whiskey from a bottle Lilly kept under the kitchen sink.
“It’s time for you to go home now, Kent,” Lilly said. She looked frightened. “I need to give the girls their supper.”
“No one tells me what to do,” Kent said. He wobbled and almost fell off the stool he was sitting on. “I don’t care how big her tits are.”
“Leave now,” Lilly demanded. She began to reach for the phone.
“You bet your pretty ass I will,” Kent said. “And you can forget about that loan I promised you. You’re nothing but a goddamn tease.”
Kent began to pour himself another glass of whiskey. Lilly took the bottle out of his hand. “Just get out!” she screamed.
After Kent stormed out of the house, Lilly burst into tears. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said.
We pulled off our wet coats and boots and sat around the table. Lilly confessed that the phone call she had received that morning was from the bank. We were months past due on the mortgage on our house. She stared at the letter from the bank that she held in her hand. Then she opened the drawer where she kept her bills. There were unopened envelopes from the gas company, the grocery store where Lilly paid for everything on credit, the telephone company, Higbees department store, where she charged our school clothes and the wardrobe she updated each season to keep up with the competition from the slew of rich divorcees that had begun to plague our neighborhood.
“I can’t let your father down,” she said. “We have to find a way to pay down this mortgage. This house is all we have left. When we dated your father used to pick me up every Sunday, and we’d drive to Chagrin Falls to eat caramel corn or get an ice-cream cone and watch the falls. It always seemed to us that we were in some little New England town far away and not barely twenty minutes from where our families lived. When your father and I got married, we decided we wanted to live in Chagrin Falls. This house was our secret paradise.”
Louise, in an attempt to cheer up our mother, dragged Lilly to the window to show her that we had shoveled the snow from the driveway. Lilly gazed out into the yard in a stupor. Lazily she picked the frozen ice from my sister’s hair.
But new snow had furiously filled
the driveway. In less than an hour, all our hard work had gone to waste.
Later that night I came downstairs and found my mother sitting on the couch thumbing through her old scrapbooks. Her eyes rested on a crinkled carnation ironed between sheets of wax paper. It was the corsage my father had given Lilly on their first date. I pictured my mother coming home that night, taking the corsage and the roll of wax paper, setting up the ironing board, heating the iron, oblivious to her fate.
My mother was slipping into her memories. When she did that, day after day would pass with my mother so deeply into her thoughts it was as if she were almost invisible, like the bushes in front of our house huddled under a casing of snow.
“When was that picture taken?” I pointed to a photograph of my father and mother standing in front of Nonie and Papa’s house.
“This was the first time I met Nonie and Papa.” Lilly’s eyes lit up as she spoke. “Your Papa was a shrewd businessman. He owned a pawn shop on 113th Street. I stayed up so many nights worrying that Nonie and Papa wouldn’t approve of me because I was only a bank teller’s daughter. But your father could have cared less.”
Aunt Adrienne and my father’s brother, Uncle Ben, lived just a few blocks from Nonie and Papa’s house. When we visited my sisters and I dressed in our hand-me-downs, while our cousins were cloaked in the fashions of the moment. On their block the driveways were freshly tarred, and basketball nets hung above shiny white garages. By contrast, the houses on the block where Lilly had grown up were decades old. At Aunt Rose’s house in Cleveland, before she moved to California, family photographs in sepia tones decorated the plaster-cracked walls. The plumbing and fixtures were creaky and rusted. Rugs from the old country covered the splintered wood floors.
After my father’s death we visited his family once or twice a year. Around the modern glass coffee table, I listened to Aunt Adrienne and Nonie chitchat about upcoming parties, hairstyles, the color of someone’s nail polish, events at the country club, the opening of a new restaurant downtown. The death of a family member, a mixed-up child, someone’s unhappiness—these things weren’t spoken about. They were like dark wounds, not to be touched, cared for, or reopened. The memories of my father, the war that claimed my mother’s relatives, people I never knew, were whited out. Most people keep their pasts secret. Even I find myself doing it: inventing a future for myself separate from what I’ve lost. But I didn’t understand then why everything had to be a secret, when at home it was obvious our lives were hanging by a thread. In the trapped air at Nonie’s and Papa’s, the unspoken truth felt impossible not to notice: If my father hadn’t died, my mother and sisters and I would be living the same carefree existence as Aunt Adrienne and Uncle Ben’s family.
The furniture in Nonie and Papa’s house was sleek and contemporary. Wall-to-wall carpet covered the floors instead of throw rugs hiding scratches in the wood. With all their money they tried to cover up the suffering they had endured in the old country, but its shadows were stubborn.
“When your father proposed,” Lilly continued, still looking at the photo of the two of them together, “there was so little money, my family had to rent an extra bedroom in Aunt Rose’s house for a boarder. I couldn’t imagine not having to think twice about spending money on a new dress or a pair of stockings. When I married your father, it was a step up, a key to all my family never had. My family was so proud.
“Come sit next to me, angel.”
I begrudgingly snuggled up against my mother. I knew she needed the feel of a body against hers, so she could forget, at least for a few moments, that she now belonged to no one. I let her squeeze me, as if her life depended on it, before I went up to bed.
Later that night I awoke to what I knew as the sound of suffering coming from my mothers bedroom door. I took off the covers, crawled out of bed, and tiptoed into the hallway. Lilly was sitting in a chair by her window with a Kleenex balled in her hand. The heat was down so low that the air in the house felt damp and cold, like the inside of an old shed. “I can’t take this anymore,” Lilly whispered softly to no one, only to the long, slender branches of the oak that stroked her window.
“Mom, are you crying because of Kent?”
“That creep,” she said. “I don’t care ten cents for him. Go back to bed, darling.”
Why couldn’t my mother meet a nice man? Not the kind who looked at her too long and made her crazy, but a man like Nancy and Scott’s father, who always walked them to school before he went to work and made sure their jackets were zipped, their heads covered. I thought that if my mother met the right man, she would return to us whole again, and have room to love us the way children ought to be loved.
The next morning was Saturday, and the three of us, like the dips, hues, and shadows of the same self, went out to play. We rode our bikes over the wet pavement on the snowplowed streets to the Chagrin River and skated with our shoes on the frozen patches of ice. Across from the river stood the old brick homes with colorful garden beds and black iron lawn furniture.
Once, when we had driven past one of those houses, Lilly said, “Can you imagine, angels? Isn’t that garden exquisite? It’s a palace, a home for a queen. If your father were still alive, that’s how we’d be living.” Now Ruthie had a plan to kill more time. She wanted to get inside and see how the rich people lived. We hid our bikes in the bushes and walked through the snow-packed grass till we came to one of Lilly’s favorites.
I liked being with Ruthie when she was on a mission. She could tuck her own anger and feelings away, and with her in charge, I could step back and be a child again. Sometimes when Ruthie, Louise, and me were away from our house we could forget about our mother. I felt the still place in the center of my being when I was cut off from her frequency.
Ruthie rang the doorbell. The house Ruthie decided we’d try was the one Lilly adored most. My heart began to beat so loud I could hear it.
When the door opened everything in that house was lush and spotless. Red Oriental carpets, antique furniture, goldframed paintings on the walls. But it wasn’t the expensive furniture and huge house that impressed me. It was the sense of order and care. Not a glass or a pillow was out of place. The books lined in the bookshelf were arranged perfectly according to size.
“What can I do for you girls?”
The man who stood before us was different from the men who hung around my mother. An aura of contentment radiated from his being.
“I was wondering if my sister could use your bathroom,” Ruthie said. She pushed Louise forward. “We’re a long way from home.”
Louise’s mouth fell open.
“Charlie Dodd,” the man said, holding out his hand.
“I’m Ruthie Crane, and these are my sisters,” Ruthie said, like a grown-up.
“Lilly Crane’s daughters. Well, I’ll be goddamned. I knew your father. We played football together in high school. He knew how to make everyone feel important.” He shook his head sadly, the way everyone did when they talked about our father.
After Louise came back from the bathroom, we said goodbye, and mounted our bikes. As we pedaled away beside the road that followed the banks of the river, none of us said a word. Across the water a school of baby ducks followed in their mother’s uneven wake.
That night Lilly went out and didn’t come home until after midnight. When we told our mother we’d met Charlie Dodd, Lilly said: “Oh my stars. Your father and I used to double-date with him and Sally Wasserman.” She thought for a moment. “Is he single?”
“I don’t think so,” Louise said.
“Need I even ask,” Lilly responded. “All the good ones are taken.”
Frost had begun to form along the edges of the windows in the den.
“Why aren’t you two in bed?”
Louise and I turned from the TV, where we were watching The Twilight Zone. Our mother’s eye makeup was smeared, and her lipstick had melted off.
“I’m going to bed now,” she said. “Don’t stay up too late.”
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br /> Almost another two years passed, marked by the long, languishing days we spent at school and the evenings at home watching episodes of Patty Duke or Father Knows Best while our mother went through the eligible bachelors of our community, picking and choosing as if she were checking out books from the library. It began to feel impossible to us that our mother would find the man she was waiting for. Ruthie took the defeat the hardest. By the time she was in sixth grade, she began hanging out with a fast crowd at school, sometimes not coming home when she was supposed to, instigating fights with my mother, bringing boys home she’d sequester in her bedroom. Her recklessness was like a quick high that for a brief instant took her away from us. I couldn’t blame her. Over the years, it would grow more difficult to pull her back.
“Where’s Ruthie?” Lilly said one night when she had come home after midnight. I was in fifth grade.
We shrugged.
“Well, where is she?”
Lilly walked briskly up the stairs and pushed open Ruthie’s door. I don’t know what my mother thought we did all those nights she went out. She must have assumed we’d be there frozen like statues exactly how she left us.
“She went out,” Louise called from our room.
“At this time of night? Girls, get your coats on this instant.”
As we drove around the neighborhood, Lilly nibbled at the sides of her fingers. “How could she do this to me?”
I tried to think of something to console her. “I’ll never leave you,” I said.
“Of course you will, Anna,” Lilly paused. “One day you’ll all leave me.” She looked ahead at the dark, slushy street.
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