Trompe l'Oeil

by Nancy Reisman

  The plank, all week. It took a few days to recognize the other kids in her class. There were safe spots: her cubby, the end stall in the Pepto-Bismol-pink girls’ bathroom, the cafeteria seat at the far end of the third table. Fractions in math, which she’d already learned. Her homeroom teacher, the treelike Mrs. Graham, didn’t shout, even when Katy’s attention wandered. “Katy? Kathleen?” It happened most late in the day, but also some mornings, when the invisible rope she clung to slipped and moved in one direction, while she seemed to move in another. The chalk squeaked and the rustling of other kids in their seats sounded like rising birds; a girl near her named Cynthia leaned in to whisper to another girl. A spitball hit the floor. Her index finger collided with hardened gum stuck under her desk; her shoes pinched her feet. From the playing fields outside the window, boys yelled Here, and then a murmuring background voice again became sensical, Mrs. Graham saying, “Katy? Do I have your attention?”

  She didn’t lose track of Mrs. Graham’s voice, but the sounds stuck the way Italian had, strings of vowels and consonants she heard but did not interpret. The words stretched and puckered. She copied what Mrs. Graham wrote on the board, but sometimes missed a piece. A page number. The third week of school, her mother visited her classroom at the end of the day and spoke with Mrs. Graham and copied down all the assignments Katy had already copied. “She needs to be given written instructions,” her mother said, as if Katy weren’t in the room. “Most of the instructions,” Mrs. Graham told her, “are written down. She only needs the right page.”

  “We just moved here year-round,” her mother said.

  “She’ll adjust.” Mrs. Graham smiled, but now Katy was marked.

  It would happen in other places. Outside. Around other kids. On the bus. She tuned in halfway, missing the first parts of stories, the beginnings of bus fights or jokes. “What?” she’d say to Theo—when he was around—and in whispers he’d explain.

  Theo never misread the instructions, never misheard the others. He was cautious: these were year-round kids from the harbor town streets and the bluff. For passing instants his face would go blank before settling into ordinary watchfulness, like a television skipping through the empty, electric-snow channels, but he didn’t lose information. Teachers liked him, they had always liked him—he was handsome, well-mannered—but he wasn’t a pet. It didn’t take long for him to make friends. A few, even in the first weeks, normal boys who seemed lively and unconfused. Sometimes when he joined them, Katy would panic, but all September he was patient with her, explaining, sticking by her in new places (as if she were Molly or in fact retarded). At home, he brought his reading into her room while she finished homework; then he’d return to his room, where he’d sleep. She did not follow him, nor did they sleep in the living room again. He stayed in her room longest—long enough to need a blanket—the night after Molly’s nursery school refused to refund a deposit; through the walls they could hear their father shouting, She’s dead—you want to have that conversation? their mother shouting, Shut up.

  Some mornings upon waking Katy had to remind herself that Molly was dead, and in that way Rome kept repeating, and Molly kept running into the street.

  By October, Theo’s old impatience returned. He wouldn’t hold Katy’s hand in public, though sometimes he’d walk close to her, nudging her, letting her know he was there. She couldn’t blame him, really. She’d drift, sometimes just giving up, letting herself slide, and then discover she was alone in a deep dirt pit. Everyone called down clever suggestions of how to climb out but no one lifted her to solid ground. Perhaps she’d have to live there, part-time, always it seemed, everyone nodding in quiet recognition and pitying consolation. Yes, too bad she isn’t like the others, a shrugging acceptance that she was defective but meant no harm. The way, in Newton, her classmates had talked about Candace Green, a plain girl with skinny white legs and narrow, slightly out-turned feet, a girl who didn’t say much, and sometimes was the butt of mild jokes, though not the worst jokes, the worst reserved for even more objectionable kids. Candace Green. Maybe Katy was now Candace Green, only unskinny, and as the weeks progressed, and she comforted herself with cookies and chips, further and further from skinny.

  It was better in gym, when she ran or played soccer. By mid-fall her concentration improved; she could follow the through lines of Mrs. Graham’s lessons. Still, every success felt provisional, Katy herself tainted—permanently? Nothing seemed more permanent than now.

  Afternoons when she did homework, her mother would sometimes sit next to her and smooth her hair and read, as if Katy were a small cat. But when Nora turned her face or crossed the room, Katy could see how brittle she was; and in neighborhood conversations she was strangely cheerful, smiling and chatting with the other women as if she’d parachuted into the world she’d always wanted.

  Outside the house, no one spoke about Molly.

  HOUSE II

  From the wraparound deck, you entered through the kitchen: white walls and long side windows, a broad oak kitchen table, the white peninsula of the breakfast counter separating the work space from the table. Painted cabinets lined the far left wall, above old laminate counters. A chunky white electric stove, a decades-old refrigerator, its edges curved, the manufacturer’s name embossed in chrome script. A stainless-steel kitchen sink along the entry-side wall, a window just above—sometimes lined with tomatoes—from which Nora gazed at the house across the narrow road and the brook-fed pond, and later blew smoke from rationed cigarettes. Sand, always, on the kitchen floor (oak planks beneath the table; linoleum near the stove), uncontrollable in summer, a warm soft grit the family swept twice a day. Two parallel doorways led from the kitchen to a broad living room big enough for two sofas and several chairs, windows on three sides facing the bay and the east- and westward stretches of beach—on sunny days swaths of blue. Below and beyond the windows and the back deck, a concrete patio abutted a seawall of concrete and stone. In fair weather, the blue wooden shutters stayed open, held by steel hooks, and in storms they were bolted shut, the light and the views of the sea cut off. Other touches here and there: a small alcove beneath the stairs, for a time a toddler’s playhouse, for a time a one-desk office.

  The clouds of gnats infiltrated the kitchen in May—prompting Nora to hang mosquito netting for a few days before the gnats died and fell into shoes and coffee cups. On the second floor, four bedrooms, modest, the largest at the far end of the hall, with its own tiled bath. What had once been a single large room James and Nora had divided into two, one mid-hallway, one at the near end, beside the bathroom at the top of the stairs. These also faced the bay. For a time, the mid-hallway room was Molly’s and pink; soon after Rome, painted white and emptied. A fourth bedroom—Theo’s favorite—opened at the top of the stairs along the street side facing the pond, a side window catching the eastern shoreline.

  The night view from the deck: a vast sky clotted with stars.

  AFTER I

  If it had been her own father, her beloved late father, appearing across the street, Nora too would have run: for her, too, there would have been nothing but his face, his wave. Imagine making the leap toward him, recognizing him but not the objects around him, apprehending the man but not the moving traffic. Only in your mind is there clear space between you and your father; only the mind can make a truck vanish. She did not mention this to James. Yet had she told Lydia this, Lydia would have nodded—yes, love, minds, trucks. Just as, for hazy liminal moments, flying dreams can leave us verging on ascent. But Nora had not called Lydia, or answered Lydia’s phone messages; nor had she sent Lydia the engraved memorial card for Molly (unsent cards waited stacked in a box, death repeated in tasteful script). Even when she’d settled Theo and Katy into school routines, she did not write to Lydia. Because after Rome you do not get other doorways. Because another Nora might exist—this seemed clear now—only if the children were safe; if Molly still existed, if Theo and Katy had lost nothing. It did not surprise her that both Lydia and Molly
showed up in dreams, sometimes together, or that they crossed into dreams about Nora’s mother. It seemed that they might all occupy the same unreachable place.

  Of course in waking life, the actual Lydia could appear. One October afternoon, she arrived, her presence made palpable by the downshifting of a motor outside the house, a blue VW, quick steps up the stairs. A sunny day, Theo and Katy still at school. Through the kitchen window, Nora saw Lydia’s hair falling loose over a dark suede jacket, then a sheaf of yellow chrysanthemums. She did not want to open the door. She waited, but Lydia was knocking, Lydia had seen her.

  “Nora.”

  It seemed the light was too bright, dizzying. She opened the door to wind and Lydia, Lydia rushing forward as Nora backed away.

  “Nora?”

  An odd heat flooded Nora: she propped herself with the curved back of a wooden chair.

  Lydia stopped. She slid the sheaf of flowers across the table, took the chair closest to the door. “Will you talk to me?” An herbal scent, the familiar Lydia. “I’m so sorry.”

  Nora shook her head, refusing what, exactly? In May, they had talked in a familiar kitchen. Here was another familiar kitchen. Two still points, it seemed, over the chasm of months, ocean, Rome. One might gesture at the chasm; one might peer down, identify shapes.

  “Nora. Come on.”

  Between them, the table, the chrysanthemums, the muted wind, which seemed to blow pointillist light through the windows and plain kitchen air, onto the flowers, the bowl of apples. She wavered. Perhaps the blowing light might tip her over. Imagine an armful of grass falling onto the table. Imagine it falling to the floor. Lydia repeated her name. Nora had been looking for oranges; she had been distracted. In Rome there had been no Lydia; there, Lydia had been absent. But if oranges were elements of distraction, Lydia was a deeper element. A layer upon which the oranges might float.

  And now Lydia watched Nora from the far side of the table, the Lydia who’d found her way to Cambridge with her two girls intact. If one’s kids were intact, one might move. One might then be Lydia; one might accompany Lydia, or visit her.

  “Theo and Katy are in school,” Nora said. “Adjusting.”

  “Of course,” Lydia said.

  It was difficult to suspend certain knowledge. Lydia too, had taken care of Molly, and of Katy and Theo. Loved them. At least, in the Blue Rock kitchen Lydia did not weep or assault Nora with her own grief. Offered no false comforts: chrysanthemums were only themselves. Nora had been distracted, and was now more so. She had Theo; she had Katy. Certain desires could lead to ruin, though how to identify which ones? You could not say ruin began with oranges, only that oranges were present. What was her desire for Lydia? Let’s sit. She had said that in Rome. A flimsy command, hardly words at all. There had been hand-holding, hand-waving. Why recount any of it? You had to accept the ruin: here, this is yours. On the far side of ruin, Lydia wore a fringed jacket. She belonged there. Nora did not.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” Nora said. She seemed to be speaking underwater; or perhaps the light had thickened. “Talking,” she said.

  “Do you want tea?” Lydia said. “What do you need?”

  The kettle stood in the sink; Nora had been filling the kettle. “Oh,” Nora said. Could she drink tea? This was something she did. It seemed irrelevant.

  “I’ll rest,” Nora said. “Maybe I’ll just rest.” She heard herself tell Lydia, “Today’s not the best day.”

  A space Nora had once associated with Molly remained as an empty quadrant of air, or a kind of silence housing all things Molly or attached to Molly’s death, and therefore ever-deepening. Distraction, yes: regularly, the day’s anchors would slip, Nora would slip with them into that space, and then rediscover her kitchen minutes later. As if she were driving a long distance and, coming upon a tollbooth, realized she’d made no notice of the last fifty miles. What had happened in those miles? There must have been road signs, exits. On the radio a broadcast of some kind. Or, in the kitchen, Katy or Theo, asking a question, or handing her a plate, and the dishwasher now emptied.

  So, the territory took shape: solid ground would accumulate after Molly, but that blank air would remain, and Nora would continue to disappear into it and reappear in a different moment. Italy, when it surfaced, was always overlit, the piazzas swimming. Time please for lunch. The hotel. Time to return to the hotel with the family, with Molly, as they had for days without thought. Perhaps this was how they’d gone wrong: delaying lunch.

  And James. With the routines of the office, he could skate over the accumulating weekdays. But the grief would open up in him at night: his bad nights seemed all the same repeating night. Once or twice a week, in the early hours, Nora would find him struggling in sleep, overwrought, his breathing labored, his face damp. “What?” He’d be shaking his hands, flapping them around. “Jimmy,” she’d say. His hands. “Jimmy,” she’d repeat. “Bad dream.”

  He’d become alert then; for him, the bedroom would define itself as bedroom, Nora as Nora, his dream already becoming a dark cumulous layering pushed into the distance, and his heart racing. And his hands? He’d curl and flex his fingers.

  She might be stroking his face. Some nights she’d give him glasses of water. Some nights they’d make love, and his panic would melt into that.

  WINTER

  Beyond the windows the sea turned from greenish gray to slate gray to solid onyx. Katy trailed Nora from kitchen to living room to laundry room and back, often on pretext of helping. When Nora finally stationed herself in one spot to read the news or mix biscuit dough, Katy would settle nearby. This pattern repeated over weeks, months, the distance between Katy and Theo having widened, Nora having found steady routine. Say that for Katy, the house became saturated with Nora, or what she could find of Nora. Say its imprint on her as home originated now: after Italy, in the variations of winter light, the months indoors with her mother. Perhaps this was the germ of Theo’s slow retreat into a different life: he took refuge on the blue living room sofa, from which vantage point he could glance up from his books to the kitchen, the stairs leading down to the laundry room. Separate but still within view. Nora appeared to be Nora. Katy appeared to be Katy; Theo, Theo. And yet. At moments the house might seem to be a constructed set, solid furniture apparently hollow and insubstantial; this perception floated from one of them to the next, occasionally resting with James. At moments their bodies seemed equally hollow; at others, completely in charge. In all weather they ran and walked on the beach. They kicked soccer balls against the interior seawall (Theo) or threw stones (Katy), ran, or swam at the local pool until exhausted.

  Short days, the coast bound in slush, wet snow, thin panes of ice, pelting rain. Other days snow swept across the coast. The cloud cover seemed permanent, varying between a featureless gray sheet and ridged, surging dark storm clouds. The longing for spring blurred into other longings: James longed for the very house in which he lived, but a past, summer-tinted version. Surely it could not help to look back. Subversive, how such longing came upon him, say, in the early mornings when the roads were barely salted, as the moving red trails of taillights glowed through the blue-black predawn, or after work, when dusk had already passed and the sky along the South Shore was a blanket of chalky indigo. Always, it seemed, he was driving in darkness, and in the wash of traffic he imagined he could hear the surf. There were occasional clear days, clear frigid nights. He longed for cool nights in spring and summer, and autumn, when the days might still be brilliant, the bay a fat sapphire melting at the edges—longed for autumn as if the recent one had failed to arrive. He could not say what this meant.

  Occasionally at work, too: in the office elevator while punching buttons, an unbidden image might appear. He’d mentally review a risk analysis, sift numbers, wait through the floor stops, and then he’d tumble from the analysis to the deck under a slant of orange light, a slant of yellow light, cirrus clouds sweeping east. Salt. The old October feeling of walking away while one’s name is
being called.

  COCKTAILS

  “How long do you think you can stand still?” James said. “Everything around you is moving.” Though in fact certain things, many things, stood in place. The blue sofa, the kettle on the stove. And it depended, didn’t it, on how you defined motion? Often Nora seemed to go somewhere; she seemed to return. She waved an arm in the direction of the lamp.

  “What?” James said.

  If each day she too commuted, to Boston or nearer—if each day she too arrived at an office, a school, a gallery, gave over to that particular clock—and later each day returned to the same address, would she have discovered a different kind of motion (say, his) and sooner? Or was the fact of being Nora, rather than James, or James rather than Nora, the key? For months they’d received invitations formal and casual, for company dinners at restaurants, company soirees in private homes; for months they’d politely (Nora) or more effusively (James) declined. Nora could imagine herself on a small olive-shaped boat crossing the pool of a martini glass, but not at a cocktail party itself.

  “An olive-shaped boat?” James said. The James who courted her might have laughed, but their courtship itself was a tiny receding boat. His tone had become corrective.

  And he would persist. Because he was James. Because as a boy he’d learned to travel to another place in his mind, as if there were two chambers linked by a corridor, with doors he’d learned how to close. Since then the number of chambers had increased, hadn’t it? In the time she’d known him.