If the Ice Had Held
Page 9
When she was bitter she’d think that Kathleen had only wanted her brother Sammy’s baby, but keeping the secret had linked her and Kathleen. They’d been made sisters, and Mel belonged to both of them. Irene knew this.
Her own mother had left when she was ten, the same year her father lost his only sibling in the accident with the chicken truck. She knew what she had done was better, staying close, even if shadowed.
Irene had to admit that she wanted, just once, to hear Melanie call her “mom,” but after so much time, telling the secret seemed even less possible.
When Mel was small, folks would remark on how much she looked like her mother. And she did look like Kathleen and Kathleen’s side of the family. Still, Irene saw her own face reflected in Mel’s as well, and if anyone noticed, they’d never mentioned it.
Sometimes she’d bite the inside of her check so hard the skin broke, and remind herself that as much as that hurt, it would hurt Mel so much more. How it would seem like a lie to her. Sometimes she whispered daughter to herself, and sometimes she wished that Mel would guess it.
When Andy and Kathleen divorced, Kath had come to her in a panic.
“He never adopted her, formally,” Kathleen said. “What if he says something?”
“He won’t,” Irene said. “He’s turned out to be a real shit, but what would he say, really? I raised her as my own and now I don’t care?”
“If he gets mad enough, he might,” said Kathleen. “I can’t read him anymore.”
When they’d met, Kathleen had told Andy the baby was hers, that her husband had been killed in the war. Andy, was himself just back from Vietnam, and the story of the young widow with a newborn had been enough for him to make his own promise, to raise the girl, to keep the devastation from her. Perhaps he thought of it as his final act as a soldier, in service to another soldier.
Irene had never been good at reading him either.
For years, missing Sammy had sustained her, but it was harder and harder to miss him, because she didn’t know the type of man he would have become. He might have stayed close, he might have drifted like Kathleen’s other siblings, or like Andy.
When her father was dying, she spent time with him, in the cramped house she’d grown up in. She had questions for him, about his brother, about her cousin Lucy Estelle who’d she’d not seen in years, but again, she bit the insides of her cheeks. He was an old man. The longer she kept her own secrets, the more she realized how others had to keep theirs.
Upset by the divorce, Mel used to pine and pine for Andy, and Irene wanted to tell her, You don’t have to be so upset about it, you know, he’s not your real dad. She wanted to tell her, I picked your name, I named you.
But what good would that have done? She should know as well as anyone that’s not how family worked.
Chapter Seventeen
Melanie
Summer, 2007
There was a time in Melanie’s life when she could barely imagine living beyond thirty, and as she approached thirty-four, she reflected on the feeling of being sure she would die young, and how the feeling had sometimes motivated her, but how it had mostly made her live her younger life as a fatalist.
All through her twenties, she went to the shows of great and horrible bands, installation artists, and drama troupes; she worked jobs, and she visited her parents, but she did it without purpose frequently. Occasionally, she would catch a few lines at a reading or see a performance that was inspiring—the smooth vowels of a poet with a practiced voice, or shreds of old linen draped on a dressmaker’s dummy and shellacked in glitter displayed in perfect light—that would make her want to create, or write, and after work sometimes she would pull out her old notebooks and scribble or sketch in them self-consciously, the way she had when she was in college, when it was enough just to be young and optimistic and feel time stretched out in front of her. What she admired about amateur painters—or anyone whose work might be very bad but was still being shown, even if it was just at a never-busy coffee shop—was that they had finished something. Starting was not so hard. Sustaining through lines and lines, strokes and strokes, seemed impossible to her, and then she would tuck the notebooks away again and read magazines.
Years ago she had drawn maps, which her mother had saved. The travels of Ponce de León, the Oregon trail. She wouldn’t call it art, but she remembered liking the work.
Maybe her email, her constant, ridiculous email, had saved her. Some direction, in ones and zeros. Salvation through a server.
* * *
Another part of the dying-young fear—there was a time when she would have called it a premonition, but now she was sure it was only a fear—was the flashes of the fragile nature of her own body, imagining being knocked flat by a stranger who hurled, punched, stabbed. Moments would come when she thought it was finally happening, like when a strong-looking man bumped her outside of the bank, just as the security guard ducked out on break. The man excused himself, and that was all, but she was left staring at her shoes, waiting for a blow or some pressure at the neck that never came. There was the time when she was in college that a man who was on the same bus as she was suddenly jolted up and got off at a neighborhood stop, following, it looked like to her, two pre-teen girls. He was tall, rumpled looking. Stringy hair. She remembered looking around at the other men on the bus and none of them moved, so she pulled the stop handle and ran after the girls, passing the man who was shuffling after them. Do you want me to walk you home?, she had said, and the older one holding the hand of her little sister said, Yes. She looked behind her, and the man was there, watching them, she thought. Let’s walk fast. Don’t run. And she led them through the quiet streets to their front door. There was a light on in the house, and she heard a television, but no one appeared when the girls called. She breathed for a second, and she told them to lock the door.
Her own apartment was not so far away, so she decided to cut through the houses instead of going back to the bus line, and when she came around the next corner, the man was there, like he had been waiting. Smiling, she remembered he was smiling, he tried to loop his arm around her shoulders, and she thought she should scream, but she was mute, as if in a frustrating dream. It was not hard to break free of his grasp, and then she ran in the direction of her building but keeping close to the more well-lit streets, the early spring air pushing her, giving her speed, and when she got home her key shook in the lock, but the door opened easily, and she closed it behind her and turned the dead bolt. She lived in a corner unit, and she kept the lights off and peeked through the blinds, but she did not see the man anywhere, so she flipped on all of the switches and made a cup of tea. She pulled a chair to one of the windows and opened it, leaning outside so the smoke from her cigarette would curl out into the night.
Then, she wondered about these girls and who was letting them ride the bus after dark. Her mother, or her father, or even Irene—none of them would ever let her do that.
Chapter Eighteen
Jenny
Winter, 2005
The first time Brian left on a trip after his promotion, she thought maybe it would be okay. He packed a small bag, folded his shirts carefully, and he kissed her good-bye. He let her know his progress, a connection in Chicago, a landing in Baltimore, and when he got back to Denver, he seemed ready to be home. The car dropped him off in front of their house, and he hugged her when he came in and later that night he sidled up to her in bed, kissing her mouth and yanking at her underwear. In that moment, she thought his promotion could be very good—it would give them a chance to miss each other. That night, she enjoyed their lovemaking, and she told him so. It gave her the feeling that they were new, and she thought he would start to understand why he should come home.
Yet, as he grew into his new role, Brian started to spend more time “on the road” as he called it, but it was not the road as she thought of it, not a station wagon packed to the gi
lls with sandwiches and a cooler of sodas, it was him, spread out in business class, a slim leather carry-on tucked into the overhead with his laptop at his feet. The purser would offer cocktails, but he would have water, pretending to be disciplined.
The first time, she worked at being flexible. She was doing laundry when she found a business card in the pocket of his jeans, a woman’s name imprinted on the heavy paper. She panicked, thinking she should have been checking his suit pants before they went to dry cleaning, but then she calmed herself with a breathing technique she had learned at yoga and simply set the card on the desk that he had eventually hauled into their guestroom, directly in the center, so he would know that she had seen it. It was not the card itself that bothered her, it was the ballpoint inked across the back: Call my cell! with the digits and a smiley face. She could not remember ever personalizing her business card when she worked at the law firm like this, she only thought of Brian’s old friend Gary, slipping his number into her coat.
Then she did start to check, every pocket. She found receipts wadded into his trousers—she had been an accountant after all, she understood that the slips she discovered were the ones he could not submit for reimbursement to his company—and more cards with notes. She wondered why he was not being careful, because if it were her, she would be more careful. A hundred dollar’s worth of cocktails on a Wednesday or, for example, an itemized slip which included two entrée salads, one dessert, and several bottles of wine; this was the way people ate when they were courting: booze, lettuce, chocolate. She recognized it from having been there, sitting in a padded booth, eating lightly, before sharing a sweet, and then drinking too much.
She wadded up the dry cleaning and put it in the bag. She did not ask him about the crème brûlée nor the cabernet. This was when she thought the most about going back to work, about having both spaces. One where she was Mommy, and the other where she had her own tipsy dinners with the board or some new junior partner who might remind her that the years of yoga and Pilates had paid off.
At home with Stella and Connor, she brooded sometimes, and she remembered when she said she would never do this: move to the suburbs, organize herself around naptime, and pay such close attention to bowel movements and laundry, but she also liked her life. While she did not like what she saw as the evidence in Brian’s pockets, she appreciated what it afforded her. Her mother had worked twice as hard as him to just barely pay the bills, and even now, when her mother Lucy Estelle was scraping by on Social Security, if she needed something, Jenny wrote her a check, deducting it from the register without thinking about it. They did the same for Brian’s parents, and they both liked being able to help them all out.
When she thought about it, she was not entirely sure how things could be different. If she was the one at work and Brian was the one at home, would she be able to say no to flirty business trips and long hours? Would she even want to? She did not know if he had slept with anyone, she reminded herself, and she did not know how much it would really bother her if he had.
Sometimes she thought about what would happen if she packed up the children into the car, grabbed a few personal things, and started the long drive to her mother’s. Her mother was still in the tiny home she had grown up in. In her hometown, out on the eastern Colorado plains, there were poor schools and few jobs, and everything was dusty, always. But she remembered how close they felt. Once they were sitting at the kitchen table when the lights flickered out, but Jenny could see a beam coming from the neighbor’s porch—it was only them.
“Damn power company,” her mother had said, but they both knew it was the unpaid bill causing the blip in service. “I’m sorry, girl.”
Jenny remembered saying it was okay, that she was almost ready for bed anyway, but her mother had suggested they go outside and sit awhile. It was summer and there was still some dim light from the long dusk, so they moved to the porch, Jenny with a glass of lemonade made from powder and her mother with what was probably the last cold beer, and they sat in the gathering dark, rocking chairs creaking, and watched the red taillights from the cars on the highway in the distance.
There was a sound that her mother said was a sound like cicadas, but she said she hoped that she was wrong, because they did not need a pestilence along with everything else. Jenny agreed with her, and she reached out to hold her mother’s hand.
They had many nights like this, sitting on the porch or at the kitchen table. Lucy Estelle taught Jenny to play cards and cribbage, the games a way to mark time. They had a rain barrel that they checked the level of every morning, and except in spring or after a late snow, it was usually dry, but they kept to the ritual of it. Her father had been gone so long she was not sure she would know him if she saw him in the street, and even as a child she understood how lucky she was that her mother was not bitter. They were a girl and a woman making their way.
She did not worry that her own children were growing up without love, even Brian, as distant as he was sometimes, doted on them, but she worried they would not know this feeling of quiet togetherness, when life feels mean and hard, but still cannot break the family.
Chapter Nineteen
Kathleen
Winter, 1974
Irene’s belly grew in the space of a few months, and all Kathleen did was spend time with her, skipping basketball practice to meet her in the library, shadowing her almost. She brought some of her sisters’ old clothes in case she finally began to put on weight, she told her she should stop with the smoking, and she made an appointment at the small public health clinic for a checkup. They ditched school to walk the few blocks through the crunchy snow to learn there was nothing irregular, as far as the nurse practitioner could tell.
Kathleen quit the basketball team for good and got a job in the hospital kitchen standing on the concrete floors until she thought her legs would give out. She molded tub after tub of Jell-O, and after the chickens were roasted, she picked the carcasses clean and boiled them for stock for endless bowls of soup. The other kitchen ladies asked her about her boyfriends—her long legs, her long hair, she must have a steady—but she ducked her head and focused on water coming to a boil or on perfectly cubing potatoes.
“You should learn to type and get a job where you don’t have to wear a hairnet,” said one of the women. She lifted her dress to show Kathleen her web of purple and blue spider veins visible even through the compression hose. “These floors will wreck your pretty calves.”
After work that day, Kathleen went to the drugstore and purchased orthopedic shoe inserts and a jar of witch hazel. She soaked a cotton ball and rubbed her skin to ease the tension and strengthen her vessels, because she had heard this produced results. Her mother sighed and said she wished Kathleen were still on the basketball team—she had her whole life to work, and anyway, she thought castor oil and elevation were better for veins. She brought Kathleen a pillow and massaged her feet.
* * *
The money was adding up very slowly, but Kathleen was thinking of Sammy. She was thinking of Sammy when she pulled tendon from the bone, when she dressed salads of nearly translucent iceberg lettuce with grated carrots, when she broke down the wax-covered produce boxes and fed them to the trash compactor. Irene’s grades had improved, and Kathleen had brought her home several times to study—the first time, Kathleen saw her eyes shine at crossing the threshold of her lover’s home, not a bride exactly, but welcomed. Her mother asked, How do you know that girl? Kathleen said, From school. Her mother said, She’s got a baby on her, and Kathleen said, I know. Her mother said she liked Irene, and she thought she knew her father. She said he was mean twenty years ago, and he was probably meaner now.
Kath wanted to say, That’s Sammy’s baby. She wanted to say, Can we take Irene to live with us? But she could not yet, so she smiled at her mother and made Irene a cup of tea, the mug chipped from Sammy’s clumsy dishwashing and the water steaming.
* * *
“I’ve gained some weight,” she said. “I’m not happy about it either.” Her jaw was set in the lie, and Kathleen thought she looked believable.
The counselor shook his head, and he referenced school policy. Kathleen wondered if it was a bad idea for her to be there, if perhaps he remembered the uniforms. The girls’ basketball team was at the district finals, though the boys’ team had failed to qualify. For a moment she recalled being on the court and how she had loved the finality of the rules. The parameters of the game were very unlike life. Steady. Refereed.
The radiator in the counselor’s office was making a popping sound. It had been painted bronze once, and the color was coming off in small chips, sparkling on the dull tiles.
“She married my brother before he died,” said Kathleen. “She’s widowed.”
The counselor did not look convinced. The radiator burped, and Kathleen felt in control. She knew she could not change what happened to Sammy, but she could change what it meant. When she said that she had been their witness, the glow in her eyes was real, thinking of her brother, too small for her father’s one good shirt, walking proud toward his lover in a collar that was permanently crumpled, the loaned fabric stiff from starch and bluing. Irene would have borrowed a dress from one of his sisters, a dress that had already been remade several times, so the stitch marks crisscrossed like quilting. Even low heels would have sunk into the soft grass in her parent’s yard as Irene walked the aisle made by splitting the family into two lines. In the absence of anyone to play the wedding march, they would have rung bells from her mother’s Christmas pile, glass and pewter, copper- and brass-plated to look like gold.
They would have barbequed afterward and drunk beer all night, and when the water took Sammy, he could have thought of the late autumn sun and his wife and the smell of charcoal and the heat of their lips pressed in matrimony.