Joan folded the letter and placed it inside an envelope. She took the envelope to the star-studded cupboard and slid it in between the boxes of unsorted photos. There. She was one step closer to something. She had gone and created the exit button.
*
All the Christmas leftovers in Tara’s fridge were cling-filmed. There even seemed to be a dedicated shelf – jars with fuzzy green crowns, or on other containers of even older leftovers. William could see the chaos house lit up through the bamboo hedge – too many yellow glows, too many rooms empty but burning up energy. He could smell the warmth and mess from here. The only lights that were on in Tara’s house were the kitchen lights and the bedside lamp in her bedroom.
Wim pulled at a tag that was scratching inside his new Christmas sweater. Tara was zapping plates of thinly sliced boeuf-en-croûte and roasted potatoes in the microwave.
‘Do you want something to drink?’ she asked.
‘Do you have Orangina?’
There had always been Orangina in Tara’s house. Also, the sideboard was never messy, and the opened bills were filed there in a manageable and not unattractive pile. The maelstrom in his parents’ house was never far away. It was expertly hidden by Joan, but it was there. Like the dresser in the dining room. On top of it sat the two pine-green, hand-painted candelabra that had been Joan’s first real adult purchase. But if you opened the top three drawers, you found unopened bills going back ten years. And three bottom rows of drawers were full of VHS tapes – many of them in the wrong boxes. There wasn’t even a VCR in the house, just hundreds of VHS tapes.
The microwave pinged, and Tara took out the reheated leftovers using a pot holder she’d made in Year Eight. Wim remembered making a pot holder too, that year. Watching Tara scrape the bottom of the mustard jar with a knife, he was overcome with the desire to kiss her. The kiss made Tara drop the knife, which left a grainy yellow streak on the brown tiles. He tried to kiss Tara again as she bent down to pick it up.
‘Get off,’ she yelled, pushing him away. ‘What’s your fucking problem?’
It made no sense to be in this kitchen, at this table, in this too-blue sweater, so close to Tara and about to eat roast beef.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What is your fucking problem?’ she repeated, appearing to want an answer.
Wim took the sponge from the sink and cleaned the mustard off the floor.
‘Shall I get out of here?’ asked Wim.
‘Can’t we just fucking sit down and eat? Can you just sit down?’
Wim grabbed the Orangina that Tara had put on the table and poured himself a glass.
‘You’re all over the place,’ said Tara, who clearly wasn’t.
He cut into the meat, which seeped pale blood onto the plate. If they could still be friends, eating leftovers, if he didn’t fuck it up, again, maybe they could be like divorced adults. He wondered if it was too late for Joan and Frank to become divorced adults. If they had missed the boat on that one.
‘When do you have to go back?’ asked Tara.
‘I have to be back by the third.’
The next few days were for turning the page.
‘You wanna drive to Italy?’ she asked. ‘I have the car, and my parents are at my aunt’s for the next few days anyway.’
Yes, he did want to drive to Italy. He hadn’t seen Lois in months, and he knew Joan would be upset. But they would understand. Maya and the kids were leaving tomorrow anyway. Frank had given him 300 euros this morning. They could stay in a cheap hotel. Eat osso buco and bring back cans of vongole for Joan. He could pay for everything. Tara could take charge of where to go and what to do.
‘All right,’ he said, bringing his plate to the sink.
‘Go get your stuff, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s just go.’
He didn’t need anything. In that moment, it felt like he had everything he needed right there.
*
Gitsy was busy applying the new cherry-scented nail polish to her toes when Lois walked into the room with the phone. Maya was filling a see-through plastic box with the clothes that Finn and Gitsy had almost outgrown. She tore off a piece of masking tape and labelled the box. ‘Kids’ clothes/Maya’. Even though she was the only one with kids.
‘It’s Liz for you,’ said Lois, handing the phone to Maya.
‘Very funny,’ said Maya.
‘She says that’s very funny,’ Lois said into the receiver.
‘Who’s Liz?’ asked Gitsy.
She put the nail polish wand down onto the green carpet, which was already spattered with little flecks of fuchsia.
Maya snatched the phone from Lois’s hand.
‘Hello?’
‘Who’s Liz?’ Gitsy asked again.
‘Wait one sec,’ said Maya. ‘I’m going downstairs.’
Maya ran down to the basement with the phone. Simon managed to slink through the useless door before she slammed it shut.
‘I’ve been calling your phone,’ said Liz.
Liz’s voice calmed Maya down instantly. Liz sounded completely normal, as though the order of their relationship was unchanged.
‘I threw my phone into a field a couple of nights ago.’
‘Seems reasonable enough.’
Maya walked over to the corner of the biggest room in the basement. A leak from the first floor had formed a small puddle on the polished concrete and left a tea-coloured cloud on the ceiling. Maya placed the leak somewhere near the crèche, in the pianoless room.
‘What’s up?’
‘Not much,’ said Maya. ‘They’re all driving me crazy. I miss you.’
‘I miss you too.’
‘Mum?’ Gitsy called through the door. Maya stood still and muffled the receiver with her hand. ‘Mama?’ After a while, Gitsy stopped calling.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘There’s something weird going on between my sister and the dog.’
‘What do you mean, weird?’
She wasn’t sure what she meant. Just that Lois, like her parents, had suddenly become a dog person. It sounded crazy, but Lois seemed to favour the dog over her niece and nephew.
‘She could at least take them out to make a snowman.’
‘I’m not following,’ said Liz.
Maya thought she heard a splash in the background. She looked through the French windows, which connected the underused basement to the garden and hadn’t been washed in years. Beyond the window was the pool, covered by a fine sheet of ice. The whole garden was a deathtrap, thought Maya.
‘How’s your colleague?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sleeping with her if that’s the question.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
Simon started to lap up the water that had pooled on the floor. Maya gave him a gentle kick to move him away from the puddle. He looked up at her with indignant eyes.
‘I think when we get back you should leave your husband.’
‘OK.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you.’
Simon walked over to the other side of the room and lay down next to his old crate.
‘Tell me the truth,’ said Liz. ‘Is that even on your radar?’
‘There’s no such thing as truth,’ said Maya. ‘Only present and future decisions.’
‘Mama?’
Gitsy’s little voice came up from the dark corner of the basement like a wisp of clear air.
‘I have to go.’
Maya hung up and followed the corridor round to the room that Frank had originally intended as a wine cellar. Gitsy was sitting on the floor looking up at the ceiling. Her night-sky projector was plugged into the wall, and throwing up spiralling constellations onto the unfinished concrete surfaces.
Maya walked over and put her hand against her daughter’s hot cheek.
‘Is it the dark times, Mama?’
The words came out of Gitsy’s mouth like tin soldiers, and came to point their muskets at Maya’s face. Maya saw how the light in h
er own world was being sucked out of Gitsy’s peace, drop by drop, and how her feelings for Liz were an oil slick waiting to happen in Gitsy’s heart.
Gitsy was too young for the dark times. Maya remembered the dark times as having landed when she was eight. She could remember the exact moment. She and Lois were playing upstairs with their dolls’ house. There was a light switch on the outside wall that turned the lights on and off inside. The tiny bulbs all went on and off at the same time, like a power outage. Joan, who had been making reassuring sounds in the kitchen, suddenly went quiet. The silence coaxed both Maya and Lois away from the dolls’ house and onto the mezzanine. Joan was still in the kitchen, talking in hushed tones to someone on the phone. Every now and again she whispered, ‘No!’ and then, ‘I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.’
Later that night, the girls spied on Joan and Frank and found out that a friend of Joan’s had just lost her sister. Her sister had jumped out of a window. The dark times had slipped into Maya and Lois like a curse, punishing them for eavesdropping. They had grown progressively darker, until that light of no fear was no longer even distant but altogether gone, a thing from another time.
‘Is it the dark times, Mama?’ Gitsy insisted.
‘The dark times?’
‘Yes. I mean, is it dark outside?’
‘Oh.’
Perhaps Gitsy could be spared for a few more years.
‘Not yet, darling. It’s just very dark in the basement. Let’s go upstairs and find the others.’
Gitsy wrapped her fingers around Maya’s hand, locking her there, away from the phone, which connected back to Liz, who also needed her. Maya was trapped in Gitsy’s goodness, Gitsy’s love of their unit, and as she felt the squeeze of her daughter’s paw every time her hand grew lax, she cared less and less about the phone call, and about the things Liz might be saying, or thinking, or asking for, had she not hung up.
*
That night, Lois found Frank’s Christmas gift on her pillow. He must have put it there just before leaving for the airport to drop off Nick. It lay on the pillow like an afterthought, crudely wrapped in paper retrieved from the recycling. It was book-shaped. Each one of those three facts was as predictable as the other.
This was the order of things. Frank observed, watched his family expiate their little rituals from afar, but eventually he chimed in. Is that what it was? Or was it just that he was always won over by the spirit a bit too late? The idea that she might have misread her father for thirty-two years was too daunting for Lois to grapple with, so she let it rest.
Inside the package, which was held together with the masking tape Joan used to label things, anything, were three old notebooks. The binding on the notebooks was faded and coming apart at the corners. The first notebook was filled with writing that was trembly and dense, like a child’s handwriting in an old person’s notebook. Little grey words filled the page and margins. The letters were long and spindly, like fly legs.
Lois opened the notebook to the first page. At the very top, a date: Argenteuil, 1951. Below the date, in the middle of the line, a name: Maria Acerbo. Below that, a title: ‘A Remarkable Moment in Our History’. The History in question started just underneath, without so much as a line break from the title’s promise.
It was when I was five that Mother put us on a boat to Villa San Giovanni, and then on trains to France. It took forever to leave Italy, and until we had crossed the border we thought she might still change her mind, and abandon this plan that made sense only in an abstract, adult way. Which is to say no sense at all to us. My brother didn’t speak a word the whole way. Benedetta and Rosamaria were giddy with excitement, and spent most of the journey doing and undoing each other’s hair so they could practise fashionable hairstyles. Mother, who usually would have scolded such vanity, stared out of the window the whole time.
I wish I could remember the sight of Italy growing more distant through the window, but all I can remember is her furrowed, sad brow, and her eyes that seemed to say don’t ask anything of me now. We spent two nights in Turin, all six of us in a hotel room. It was the first time we had stayed in a hotel room, but it didn’t feel glamorous. The room was small and smelly, and there was no light. There was a sink at the end of the corridor, where we and everyone else on the floor had to wash. In the end we spent two nights there. I don’t know if she had planned it that way, or if Mother was afraid of the final leg of the trip, like she still might change her mind. In any case, we stayed in Italy one more night, knowing that the next day we would hold hands as the train went across the border and that there would be no turning back.
I spent my first day in France on a train, eating bread. Benedetta and Rosamaria were pretending to speak French and putting on airs and steaming up the train window, and then kissing it to see the mark their lips left there. They had a kissing competition. Each thought she was the winner. The colours were different in France. The roofs were dark-brown, and the trees not scorched. I remember the farms looked particularly different. The towns we stopped at seemed huge to me, and terrifying. I can’t remember the names of those towns now. The people looked cold – as in chilly – and not particularly happy. No one spoke to us the whole journey. When we got out in Paris, Mother made us hold hands so we wouldn’t get lost. As we walked through the station like a long snake, I was concerned that if I got lost here I would never see anyone I loved ever again.
We left Mariella back in Salice, in the cemetery. We covered her with flowers the day before we left, like people who leave food out for the dog when they leave for days. I didn’t want to live in a different country from my favourite sister.
The reason we moved is that Father stopped sending money. Mother wrote to him, and when he didn’t answer she wrote to his brother’s wife, and then to his brother, who were also in France. No one wrote back, and there wasn’t enough for all the children with the money Mother made in the fields. Mother told her sister that my father must have another woman in Paris. My sisters overheard them talking about the other woman in Paris and played at being her.
In the end, we never saw another woman. Mother purchased some land from an Italian mason who came from the same village as her parents, and we all helped make the bricks. We slept at our aunt and uncle’s house for three months while we built ours. When the house was finished is when we went to find Father. Not before. Mother went to find him in a bar where she’d heard he bet on the horse races. She dragged him out by the scruff of the neck and marched him to the new house with us kids following behind, and no one ever spoke another word about it.
*
‘Hopi art’, from The Yelp Travel Plaza Review Poetry Log, by Lois Lemaire (Incomprehensible Womb Press, 2014)
eastbound for Hopi art we fuel here
(we, six adults and three children)
fountain drinks to hot-air hand dryer
you’ve got your dining options out rear
and your nickel discount per gallon
eastbound for Hopi art we fuel here
McDonalds, Honey Dew Donuts, we’re
giving high praise: the restrooms are clean
fountain drinks to hot-air hand dryer
must-stop joe, they shuttered the diner
mirrors missing from the pavilion
eastbound for Hopi art we fuel here
condiments free, friendly cashier,
save our spinach for this number one
fountain drinks to hot-air hand dryer
modern remodel, nice souvenir
there was no salt but the dog had fun
eastbound for Hopi art we fuel here
fountain drinks to hot-air hand dryer
Cole closed the chapbook and put it back on the shelf. Definitely an oddball, that one, he thought. In the kitchen, the dog was licking up the crumbs that had been swept off the counter.
12. Historical Monument
THE CITY BENEATH him looked like a circuit board. The familiar electricity of its avenues and motorways was turned on fo
r his landing, welcoming him home. All those windows and lives and pilot lights. All those beating hearts and distinct wills. He thought of the cleaners, sopping up the hallways of office buildings on streets that would keep on dwarfing them till they died. Of the security guards and doormen who worked the graveyard shift, and watched over the city’s down hours. He thought of those who still took baths in their kitchen. Like that girl he’d dated briefly, before he met Lois. She had a spot on Tomkins Square Park, with a corner window and a huge chopping board under which the bathtub vanished in the day. He imagined the men who would soon be inside their street-corner fortresses, selling coffee and egg sandwiches near the city’s building sites. And then he thought of Lois, fast asleep and dissatisfied, grinding her teeth under her mother’s quilt.
He was happy to be home. Away from those crazy, self-obsessed French people who finished each others’ sentences but couldn’t tell the truth.
Before he left, Frank had given him one of his purple mountain crystals. It was a stone he’d prized off the mountain as a young man, when the mountains were still a thing to be conquered. When Frank was not yet an old man getting lost in the hills behind his house.
The gift of the crystal came out of left field. It wasn’t the culmination of a conversation about rocks, or even geology, or youth, or anything. Frank just appeared with the rock and handed it to Nick. Nick took it as Frank’s way of belatedly sealing their relationship, of acknowledging – not without relief – at least one shared interest with his son-in-law.
On his last night in France, Frank had shown him pictures of a recent chalet renovation. Old beams and lots of glass, a neat mineral-grey infinity pool overlooking doll-sized valleys – wealth that got stashed away in barn conversions and altitude.
He wondered how Joan could bear it. How she could still, after thirty-five years, run her errands in this rarefied town, which changed so slowly that whatever change did occur got lost in time. And how could she bear living with Frank, who seemed less and less able to empathise with anything that didn’t relate directly to him, these days.
He worried about Joan. He worried about Joan in the same way he worried about himself. He saw Frank’s isolation drag her down, harden her. You could no longer ask Joan how she was doing and give any credence to her answer. Lois often told him she thought Joan should leave Frank. She and Maya said that now – now that they had flown the coop, now that the impact of their parents’ separation on their own lives would be minimal. They hadn’t always thought that way.
Stories We Tell Ourselves Page 18