Eve planted multiple varieties of tulips. Some of them scarcely resembled that species at all—including one hybrid with peony-shaped flowers and another (the red-orange Flaming Parrot) whose petals were ruffled and extravagant as a bird’s plumage. Eve’s favorite was a tall, single-flower, nearly black variety known as Queen of the Night.
One November afternoon, returning home on the late bus from school (I’d been at a rehearsal for a Thanksgiving play), I found Eve and Jordan at the table, picking at what looked like a plateful of small roasted onions. Leaning over and sniffing at the plate, I caught the scent of oil and vinegar along with something else, earthy and sour.
That smells weird, I said.
Not to us, said Eve. She had straight white teeth, and when she smiled, her lips turned up at the corners. Totally delicious, she added.
What is it? I asked, watching my father chew contentedly.
Roasted Queens, said Eve. With a vinaigrette dressing.
I stared. Queens? You’re eating tulips? Tulip bulbs?
Eve and Jordan nodded nonchalantly. Did you know, said Eve, when tulip bulbs were first brought to Europe, people couldn’t figure out what to do with them? So they tried eating them. With oil and vinegar, like this (she pointed at the plate), or else preserved in sugar. They’re best this way, I think! Sort of tangy.
How’d you find that information? asked Jordan casually.
I read it in a gardening book, she answered.
Um. Chewing, he gave a nod mixing interest and approval.
But I thought you liked tulips, I said.
I do, she answered. But there’s more than one way to enjoy something you like, right?
Jordan was still eating, slicing each plump, glistening bulb in half and daubing it in the pool of dressing before popping it into his mouth. His chewing produced soft crunchy sounds.
Want some? Eve asked me. When I shook my head, she gave a little shrug. Too bad, she said, spearing a bulb with her fork. They’re good, really!
You didn’t dig them up, did you? I asked, unable to suppress the accusatory note in my voice.
Dig them up! she repeated, her giggle suddenly making her sound younger than she was. Of course not! I bought fresh bulbs to experiment with. Jordan paid for them, she added, giving my father a small smirk. Merci beaucoup, Jordan.
Still eating, he raised his brows slightly in acknowledgment.
Have Dan and Sarah tried them? I asked.
Nah, said Eve. You kidding? My father eat tulips? He wouldn’t know a Queen if he stepped on one.
Jordan glanced at her. Take it easy, he ordered quietly.
Eve shrugged. Yessir, she replied.
There was something in her tone, a kind of playful rebellion, which struck me as new. I was only seven, but I knew that when she talked with adults, Eve was normally aloof. With Dan and Sarah, she could be caustic, but with all other grownups, her tone was polite but cool.
She picked up the now empty plate, its surface slick with oil, and carried it to the sink. Gotta get rid of the evidence, she said as she turned on the water.
As she washed the plate, my father stretched his legs beneath the table and patted his stomach lightly. Délicieux, he said to no one in particular.
I saw him stare into space for a moment, then shift his gaze to Eve. She was still standing at the sink, her back turned to us. She wore black pants and a red sweater cropped at the waist. Her midsection and legs looked unusually long, perhaps because of the shortness of her sweater, and her hair seemed to dance about her head as she dried the plate she’d washed, then eased it onto a shelf.
I remember standing, waiting for my father to speak to me. He said nothing, his gaze tracking Eve’s movements. After a moment he rose, tousled the top of my head, and walked out of the room. This wasn’t the first time I’d failed to compel his attention, but it marked a new realization: Eve had a rapport with Jordan that eluded me. And this recognition enlarged my understanding of what she’d meant when she told me, that evening in the bathroom, that she was like my mother. She was indeed—except less so for me than for Jordan.
“DID MOM come home for visits?”
We’d stopped for gas. I’d assumed Danny had let the topic of Eve’s college years drop, but I was wrong.
“Not often,” I said. “She wrote letters and phoned from time to time. Every now and then, she’d show up unannounced.”
Eve’s short missives to me had been covered with doodles of plants and flowers. When we spoke on the phone, maybe once a month, she’d sounded energetic and focused, her calls a tonic reminder of actual liveliness happening elsewhere. Visiting home was something she chose to do infrequently. For holidays she got herself invited to friends’ homes.
The family apartment grew exceedingly quiet. The three adults and I, a quartet in a domestic galaxy, were clustered in proximity yet orbited separately. I missed Eve daily, though I knew it was pointless to do so. She was gone, she wasn’t coming back. An explanation hadn’t been necessary for this to register with me.
“I remember one visit,” I said to Danny. “During her sophomore year, I think—maybe junior? She brought me a dartboard.”
“Oh?” We were behind a slow-moving truck. Danny inched the Volvo leftward to check out the possibilities for passing, then pulled back into the center of our lane.
“Yeah. She was a good player, too.”
“Is that right?” Danny pulled the car back in sharply after a foiled attempt to circumvent the truck ahead of us.
I recounted the story of that strange weekend. Eve had been dropped off at the family apartment by a friend; she was carting a large, flat box, which she handed to me. It contained my birthday present, an official-looking dartboard that came with a set of six long, beautifully weighted metal projectiles whose tips were scarily sharp. I was instantly in love with them.
We hung the board at the end of the apartment’s central hallway. Using a bit of masking tape, Eve marked the spot on the floor from which I was supposed to toss. Then she explained how—a procedure that took concerted practice on my part, though after a few hours I’d become reasonably adept.
From Friday night to Sunday afternoon, we played innumerable games of darts. We began with simple ones, such as ’01 and Cricket and their variants, which had funny names: Wild Mouse, Narvak, Half-It. Even when I didn’t get any closer to the bull than she did (a frequent occurrence), Eve still let me throw first in the first leg of each of our matches. A surprisingly patient teacher, she called out an encouraging bull’s-eye! whenever I nailed the inner cork.
At the end of that weekend, shortly before departing, Eve offered to teach me how to play a Cricket-type game called Scram. We were alone in the apartment. After gathering all the darts (I’d misplaced one, so this took some time) and returning to our starting point in the hallway, I saw that Eve had done some rounding up of her own. Arrayed on the inner and outer cork of the dartboard were the faces of the Motley Crew, as she called them—the no-longer-present members of our family: Jordan’s parents, Dan’s parents, Sarah’s parents, Eve’s birth mother, and my mother. Their photos normally sat on the sideboard in the dining room, but Eve had removed the pictures from their frames and affixed them to the board with straight pins. I was surprised to see how unconcerned Eve was about marring these photographs, although no one else in the apartment ever bothered with them. They were too familiar to attract attention.
We’re supposed to throw darts at them? I asked.
You bet!
I must’ve looked skeptical. She picked up a dart and gave it a quick, hard flick; it landed squarely on her mother’s face. Then she turned to me.
Your turn, she said.
I picked up a dart, holding it unsteadily. Eve was staring at me, waiting.
Go ahead, Cammie, she said. They’re gone already—they’re dead, that’s the whole point! Bull’s-eye! she sang, lobbing another dart. It landed squarely on the photo of Jordan’s parents. Bull’s-eye, bull’s-eye, bull’s-eye! He
r next three darts hit the remaining targets: Dan’s parents, Sarah’s parents, and my mother.
Pointing at my dart, Eve nodded at the board.
Try for the double ring, she said. Or hit your mother—let’s say that’ll count the same as either the double or the triple. That should make it easy for you!
Her smile was a taunt.
I don’t think I can, I mumbled, dangling the dart at my side.
She looked away, shrugging disdainfully, then took my dart and tossed it. It tunneled through the air, whistling slightly as it went, and landed directly on my mother’s face. I couldn’t then or now describe the look on Eve’s, after that hit, except to say it was triumphant.
I RECOUNTED this story in an abridged version, leaving out the Motley Crew. The truck ahead of us was slowing down. We were beginning an ascent up a long, gentle incline, and the truck’s weight further reduced its capacity to accelerate.
Danny pulled into the oncoming lane of traffic. Flooring the Volvo so it downshifted automatically, she zipped ahead of the truck and moved back into our lane. She’d left us an uncomfortably small margin for error; an oncoming car beeped angrily as it passed us.
“Oooh,” I moaned, trying to keep my disapproval light.
“Chill,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
“I don’t doubt your driving skills,” I responded.
She performed the same maneuver with another vehicle ahead of us, a slow-moving minivan. We were nearing the top of the incline as she pulled the Volvo back into our lane, and the road had already begun a curve; she couldn’t possibly have known whether anything would show up in the oncoming lane.
“But your lack of interest in visibility has me a little worried,” I couldn’t resist adding.
That broke her. Moments after we’d crested the hill, she pulled the car over and brought it to an abrupt halt. We were on a narrow shoulder; the traffic ran close to us, and the Volvo gave a little shudder each time a car passed. I asked her what she was doing, and she said something to the effect that she was tired of hearing from me about her driving. Then I told her we ought to get off the shoulder, to which she made a retort I couldn’t hear because she’d already begun accelerating, sending gravel flying. After we’d rejoined the moving traffic, she quickly brought the car up to and over the speed limit. As the distance between us and the car ahead narrowed, I braced myself, but she braked at the last minute, dropping back—not as far as she should have, but at least so we were no longer on the car’s tail.
“Why are you doing this?” I said as calmly as I could.
“My question exactly.”
Her sarcasm unzipped my restraint. “Quit being an idiot!” I yelled.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Cam,” she said, and I heard not only anger but something like desolation in her voice. “Just stop it, will you?”
“Stop what?” I was nearly screeching now.
“I’m so sick of trying to wring stuff out of you! You have to know more about my father than you’ve told me! You’re the only person . . .” She pretended to shake the steering wheel: her elbows flexed and her forehead swung toward and away from the wheel in a mock banging movement.
“Pull over,” I said. “But not on the shoulder of the road, please. Let’s find a diner or something.”
She considered this. “We’ll stop in Harriman,” she said. “Another twenty minutes or so.”
We traveled the rest of the way there without speaking.
INSTALLED IN a roadside place not unlike Ithaca’s Cheerful Swan, with weak coffee and unappetizing turkey sandwiches on the table between us, we stared at each other.
“All right,” I said. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
“Mom told me that same story about playing darts,” she said. “Only in her version, there were photos of family members pinned on the board. And she egged you on, but you refused to toss at them—”
“Danny,” I broke in, “what’s your point? That I didn’t tell you the whole tale, and I should have? Or that I didn’t impale any of my relatives with darts?”
“Let me finish,” she stated coolly. “My point is, at least Mom wasn’t hiding what actually happened. I think she told me about that game you’d played to prove she’d gone beyond the whole family apartment thing. Jordan, Dan, Sarah—they didn’t have anything to do with who she was . . .” She pushed away her uneaten food. “Who knows. What do you think?”
“Okay,” I said. “So Eve told you all about the darts to set you straight about her feelings for her family. Was that an admirable thing to do? Or simply another way for her to justify her distance from you? To let herself off the hook?”
“At least she wasn’t afraid to tell me what happened! Whereas you seem intent on hiding every—” She looked away. “There’s something I need you to understand, Cam,” she said, more softly now. “You know what really surprised me about the dartboard story? It was the fact that you were in it. And the way you were in it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Until then I’d thought you and Mom led completely independent lives. You’d both given me the impression you’d hardly known each other when you were growing up. That the ten years’ difference in age made you virtual strangers. But after hearing the story about the darts, I realized I’d imagined it wrong. And I started wondering about other experiences you two might’ve had together, in the apartment on Ninth Street or elsewhere.”
“You didn’t imagine it wrong,” I said.
“Bullshit! You’re holding out on me!” She tugged on her ponytail’s elastic band, stripping it off in one furious movement. “You’ve really got nothing to say?”
“Danny, I keep telling you! Once we were adults, Eve and I almost never dealt directly with each other. I didn’t get to know her better than other people did. She didn’t want that to happen.”
“Did you?”
“Would it have mattered if I had? I’m saying how things were. What am I supposed to do, make up a different version so you’ll feel better?”
At that she rebanded her hair, took off two of her rings, rubbed them together, and returned them to her fingers. These actions seemed to lend her resolve; her next words emerged calmly.
“But there was something else that brought the two of you together, Cam. Your father.”
OF COURSE, I thought.
“I was only six when he died, but I knew that the three of you were like a family in Frenchtown,” Danny said. “And I sensed something was up when I walked into his study.”
“Because of how you found him?”
She nodded, her expression grave now, its angry aspect gone. “I figured he was sleeping. I’d never seen anyone sleep with a black plastic bag over his head, but it seemed like the only possible explanation. Jordan had told me that bright lights sometimes hurt his eyes, so I thought he was trying to cover his head, to keep out the sunlight.
“I went up to him and said his name a few times. Maybe I even shook his arm. Then I asked him if he was playing a game—I thought he’d suddenly yell ‘boo!’ or something. I was scared, but trying to pretend I wasn’t. That’s when I went to find you. You and Mom followed me back to his study. You went over and touched his wrist and said he was dead. I remember Mom said something like, Are you sure, and then something else: I didn’t think he was going to die today.”
“What did you think had happened?” I asked, remembering my own numbed dismay when Danny called out to us from Jordan’s study. She shouldn’t have been the one to find him; I should have prevented that, and I didn’t.
“Well,” she said, “I thought the bag must’ve been a normal thing, even though it was weird. And I figured Jordan was dead—not that I knew what that meant. All summer you and Mom had been saying he’d die, and I understood that one day he’d just stop breathing. You’d both told me it would happen soon, because he was very ill.”
“He was.”
A long silence. “Terminally?”
“Yes,” I answered. “
He wasn’t going to get better. The idea was for him to die in his own house, as peacefully as possible. His doctors put him on pain meds that made him feel like he was losing himself. Like his whole personality was affected.”
“Did he tell you this?”
“He told both Eve and me. At the beginning of the summer he was doing all right, but then everything started catching up with him. I remember arriving one Saturday evening in July and finding him practically in a stupor. He quit most of his meds after that. He said he wanted to feel like himself, even if the pain got worse. And when I came out the following weekend, he talked with me about a specific plan for ending his life.”
I’d said it. Jordan’s secret was no longer something to safeguard. Nor was Eve’s.
“So he had a plan.”
I nodded. “My guess is, he and your mother talked about it, too, right around the same time. But she and I didn’t discuss it.”
“Why not?”
“Jordan asked us not to. At least, he asked me not to, and I assume he also asked Eve, or she’d have broached the subject with me.”
“What exactly did he tell you he wanted to do?”
“He told me he’d gotten hold of some pills, and he planned to use them,” I said. “Seconal—barbiturates. Actually, your mother’s the one who got the pills for him. Jordan hadn’t wanted me to know where they’d come from. I figured it out when I found one of her business cards on the top shelf of his medicine cabinet, after his death. On the back of the card, Eve had written, ‘Another batch coming next week.’ He must’ve forgotten to throw away that piece of evidence.”
Danny contemplated this, then nodded. “Neither you nor Mom ever broke your promise to not talk about any of it?”
“That’s right.”
Thirty-three Swoons Page 19