Tess nodded.
Allie ran her hand through her hair. “We’re all looking for someone to make us feel special, to reassure us that our ugliness is okay.” She smiled. “That’s the glass slipper.”
“Are you saying you don’t have it? I think of you and Dana as having it all.”
Allie sighed. “Dana and I? We’re basically living two different lives right now. Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know him anymore.” Allie fingered her wine glass. “I think we’ve gone back to hiding the ugly.”
A cocoon of silence wrapped around them.
Allie realized with horror that she just added to an already overwhelmed Tess. “But we’ll get through it. I honestly don’t know how you do all of it and work too.”
“I’ve learned it’s better if I work. I feel like I’m accomplishing something.”
Allie sank back in her chair.
Tess leaned in towards her. “You’re the only one I’ve told about this. I can’t tell Megan, not yet at least. She’s been through so much this past year. And… I love Megan, but she can be judgmental. I knew you’d listen without getting all moralistic on me.”
Allie wondered if Tess suspected that on some level at least, Allie would be sympathetic, maybe even excited about the idea of an affair. “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.” Allie paused, and then tentatively said, “Before we order, can I say one more thing?”
“Please.”
“If you do end up taking this further with Rob, make sure it has nothing to do with getting back at Gavin.”
Tess was quiet for a moment. “I’m not so sure I can just separate that out.”
Allie nodded.
Chapter 11
Journal Entry #11
April 27, 2001
As I perch here at my desk, I am stunned into sobriety, an observer at the window, and the world is reeling around me, inebriated. The bright, pungent colors of spring and the tiny screen squares through which I see them are blurring in and out of focus, and I half-expect towering giraffes to walk by and graze at the oak tree in the yard. I close my eyes, hoping that when I look again everything will be as it should—the grass here, the daffodils there. But no; when I look again, everything is unfamiliar, backwards, and still in motion. The only thing that seems solid and unwavering is the journal page in front of me, and my pen bleeding blue onto the crisp white page.
Right now this journal, this brown leather book that has grown into a patient friend, is the only thing that will keep me sane and stop the spinning. My pen is poised above it, itching to capture the chaos that is ricocheting around my world, begging me to release it onto paper, to remember and relate the whole of the story; not only our words, but our essence. In its precise markings, the ink assures me that if I can deliberately attend to and reconstruct the narrative on these pages, then maybe I’ll be able to assimilate the enormity of this truth in a way that my imagination alone now cannot.
Sarah has always urged me to write. And so I do.
Over the course of many, many years, and more intentionally over the past few months, I’ve been building up the courage to confront, or rather to just plain ask my father for more details about Eva (I always view any contact with my father as confrontational). For almost three decades now—30 years—her shadow has loomed over all of us, clouding not only our past, but as I have learned, my present as well. And now I know that I can’t fully patch together my marriage—or myself—until the fog around my mother has dissipated, and the holes in my past have been filled in.
So with my heart in my throat, one afternoon while the raw drizzle outside turned the shy spring buds fluorescent green and shiny, I picked up the phone and dialed my father’s number, and with each push of a button, began my ascent up Mt. Everest. He seemed surprised, and then happy to hear from me, then slightly wary, or maybe more resigned, when I blurted out that I wanted to talk about Eva.
He changed the event from lunch at a restaurant to cocktails at his house with a nervous guffaw, and the conversation was over.
After I put the phone down, I realized my shirt was damp and sticking to me. Not your normal response to making a short phone call to your father.
As Dana and I have sworn, in Sarah’s presence of course, to make a heroic effort to communicate with each other, I immediately called Dana. He too, sounded happy, but wary (I must make people cagey). He asked if I wanted him to go with me. YES! I wanted to shout, but old habits die hard, and I said something about doing it myself.
“Why?” he asked me.
Fair enough. Why indeed? Because I’m scared. Because I’m finally going to ask the question that has been lodged in my throat my whole life. Because I might completely, utterly break into a thousand pieces when I hear the answer. Because I’m afraid of you seeing me like that.
I’m afraid of you seeing me.
“I don’t know.” I laughed nervously. I took a deep breath and with it, a giant step. “Actually, it would be great if you came.”
“Okay,” he said, and I could hear him smiling over the phone.
I smiled back through the plastic.
After a moment I said, “That was really good of us. Sarah would be so proud.”
Dana laughed. “Yes, she would.”
About a week later, after reminding myself that this wasn’t a festive occasion and casting aside a black dress and my initial urge to accessorize, I settled on worn jeans (to keep me grounded) and a white silk blouse (a warning to myself, don’t spill, don’t sweat). I did both in the car on the drive over.
When we arrived, Joseph and Dana formally shook hands; then my father and I shared an awkward, adolescent moment in which our eyes connected briefly and then mine dropped to the floor, ostensibly to study the intricacies of the carpet. After a minute I said hello and bolted by him, not wanting to be deterred from my mission by the confusing emotions that were washing over me. He immediately poured us a drink, and I could see from his wet glass that he had started well before we arrived. Whatever gets you through, I remember thinking. He refreshed his scotch, the glistening liquid glowing in his eyes like a craved elixir. I noticed a platter of cheese and crackers on the coffee table—an unexpected touch—and I wondered if there was a lady in his life who had advised him, or had maybe just bought the cheese party for him.
Dana and I sat next to each other on the living room couch, and I stole a quick look around. The house was not at all what I’d envisioned—which was an austere, spartan shrine to my mother, kind of like a cellblock with photographs. This house was comfortable, definitely masculine in variations of blues and browns, but soft and lived-in. And as far as I could tell, there was not one picture of my mother on the walls or shelves. There were however, several very outdated pictures of us kids: traditional, posed snapshots of birthday parties and graduations. There were no pictures of us all together.
Once my dad sat down, the painful small talk commenced with chatter so porous it was translucent—Dana’s job, my dad’s job, the kids. The cheese waited patiently, untouched, smirking at our discomfort. We all sat back a bit in our chairs, trying to seem casual, but we held ourselves straight up, as in, one wrong move and we’re out of here.
Finally, my dad, designating himself as the adult in the room in a way I never remembered him doing even when he was the only adult in the room, opened the Q&A. “So you had some questions about Eva.”
This was quite obviously my prompt, and I took a swig of my chardonnay and nodded, unable to locate my voice.
He waited. I remember hearing distinct sounds—birds chirping, kids on the street laughing and screeching, a lawnmower. The everyday noises somehow calmed me, gave me my voice. “When she left I was only four. I can barely remember her. Can you tell me about her?”
His shoulders softened, possibly with the relief of a lob. He looked up as if he was retrieving the memories from the air. “She look
ed like you, that’s for sure. Same long dark hair, same green eyes. Even when you were a baby, when all three of you were small, people would joke that it was clear who wore the pants in the family, because you all looked so much like her.” He paused. “Even my genes were submissive to Eva.”
It was a typical comment—a husband or wife amusedly reflecting on the dynamic in the family—and the appropriate response would have been a polite chuckle. Except in that instance, laughter would have been grotesque as there was no amusement in his demeanor, none of the requisite twinkle in his eyes, delight on his lips. Even 30 years later, his reminiscence was tinged in acrid remorse.
He continued, “She had so much energy. She was like fireworks exploding into a room with crackle and flashing red lips. She always had a slightly uncouth idea for something to do, and whether or not you knew the details of her plan, you were up for it because you knew that with Eva in charge, it was going to be fun.” He rattled the ice in his glass.
“I met her when I was 20. I was just one of her many admirers; at 19 she had lots of them. Lots of admirers and lots of aspirations. She was convinced she was going to have a big life—those are actually the words she used, ‘big life.’ It was this sunny, buoyant thing she would toss out: ‘let’s have a big life.’” He offered a feeble smile. “She didn’t often say ‘let’s,’ but when she did it felt pretty great. I’d get swept up.” He paused. “And I always assumed she meant ‘full.’ A full life. I could provide that, right?” He looked into his glass.
I remember cringing during this part of his monologue, thinking here it comes, I’m going to hear that my mother couldn’t stand being bottled up with the three of us; that we were not part of her ‘big life’ plan. I waited, but my father had stopped. He seemed stuck.
“So how did you two get together?”
He was jolted back from far away. He sighed. “Eva had some dark times too, days and days in which she would just sit in the dark. Shades pulled, lights off, dark. It seemed almost fitting, as if that was her way of recharging after expending so much energy. And during one of those times, I decided I was going to save her; I was going to be the one to step up and offer myself to her. While everyone else just marched by her raised drawbridge, I was going to be her knight in shining armor.
“And it worked.” He still looked astonished. “We were married six months and several rescues later. We bought a house, had Paul, had you, had Kevin; boom, boom, boom. Everything was going as planned.” He exhaled deeply. “Except that about a year and a half after Kevin, she went into one of her dark periods and never really came out of it.”
I was trying to get my mind around what he was saying, what he was inferring. “What do you mean, dark periods?” I looked at him intently. “Are you talking about depression?”
“Oh God. We certainly never called it that. Depression wasn’t as common a phenomenon, or maybe it was just as common, just not commonly understood like it is today. Like I said, in college we all assumed it was just her way of recharging her batteries. And even after we were married, that’s the way I understood it.
“Let me backtrack.” He shook his head as if to rewind his thoughts. “You never knew your grandparents, your mom’s parents. We told you that they’d died, but really, your mom had broken off all contact with them.”
I looked at Dana; he squeezed my hand.
My dad shook his head again as if to ward off questions, although none had formed yet on my lips. “I’m not sure exactly what happened, she never went into it with me. All I know is that they were terrible to her.” He added softly, “Maybe I never really asked her.” He reached for his drink and got lost for a moment somewhere in the amber of his scotch. After a gulp, he said with certainty, “I just know she had a bad time of it. So you see, for her to sink into herself for short periods seemed… appropriate.”
I hadn’t known any of this. “Did you ever get help?”
“No. She didn’t want to, and I didn’t force it because I didn’t want her to think I was accusing her of something. Besides, every time it happened, I just assumed she would emerge from the darkness as her old self again, like she always did.”
“But she didn’t?”
“Not that time. She was depressed,” he looked at me, “to use your word, for months; the longest she’d ever been that way.”
In answer to my wide eyes, he said, “She was functioning. It wasn’t like we had to hire a babysitter for you guys or anything. But she was low. Really low.”
It seemed impossible to me that this had all gone unaddressed. It was pretty clear that something had been going on with my mother, whatever the diagnosis. How had this not been investigated? For the millionth time in my life I thought, I do not understand this man.
The noises from the street dripped into the room intravenously, trying to hold us in the present.
“And then,” he sounded like he was choking, “I came home one night from work and Eva’s eyes were wild and the house was mayhem.” He looked at me, cleared his throat. “Do you remember any of this?”
I shook my head slowly. He looked at the floor.
Dana took my hand again.
“She was crying. She was hysterical actually, all four of you were, and it took me a few moments to grasp what was going on.” He took a deep breath. “Eva had just broken Paul’s arm—I mean literally minutes before I walked in the door—by accident. She was frantic, both because of Paul’s pain and because of the enormity of what she had done. God, I think of it now,” he rolled his eyes towards the ceiling with a little shake of his head, “and know that she must have been out of her mind with shame, guilt, fear, panic, and obviously extreme alarm for Paul, but of course I couldn’t begin to see all that. My focus was Paul; Paul who was in pain, Paul who needed to get to the emergency room. And I think you and Kevin were terrified and upset empathically from all the commotion and chaos.
“So I scooped up Paul and took him to the hospital. I was so furious and upset that I don’t think I said two words to Eva after we got home later that evening. This was hours later, and I still didn’t trust myself to hold it together, and I certainly didn’t want to yell and reignite all of you. She tried to explain, she was desperate to explain it to me: everyone had been cranky and irritable all day—I think the house itself was tantruming—and Paul had thrown something across the room. She had reached out to stop him as he tried to run away from her and she grabbed him too hard, his arm twisted… ”
I grimaced. My father affirmed the horror with a nod. He continued, “Eva couldn’t bear the guilt and I think, although I certainly didn’t consider this at the time, she thought that what happened had been preordained somehow. I think she believed this proved that she was fated to live out the legacy that had been slapped on her when she was a little girl; that this accident with Paul was the beginning of the recycling of the abuse she had suffered. I think that at her core she was suddenly afraid of herself, afraid of the hurt that she had the power, and now she believed the disposition, to inflict on you and your brothers.
“Of course I couldn’t see this, couldn’t begin to understand what her nightmares were that night. I was furious. All I could think was, she should have been able to control herself, control her feelings. And underneath that, I was furious with myself. I felt guilty that I hadn’t had the power to pull her out of her darkness, as I’d always been able to do in the past.”
He paused and said softly, “Then further underneath all that anger and guilt, I was also confused. What was I supposed to do? I had lied to the doctor—in front of Paul—and told him Paul had fallen. I was panicked, scared you all would get taken away from us.” He paused, rattled the ice in his glass, watched the cubes settle back to stillness. “And I think I was also questioning Eva. Had it really been an accident?”
“Oh my God, so she left because of Paul? Because of you?” I was desperately ransacking old memories, dumping out broken
pieces to see how they fit back together.
He lifted his glass in slow motion and took a long sip, almost an inhale, the scotch a yellow oxygen mask that had dropped from the ceiling. The ice cubes clinked in the glass as he lowered it from his lips. “So it’s still your understanding that she walked out?” He was looking at me so intently that his eyes looked crossed.
I froze.
Dana answered for me with a puzzled, “Yes.” He squeezed my hand tightly, a powerful clamp.
My father took a deep breath. “I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure what you had found out, what you knew.”
I had the sensation that I was sliding backwards. The sounds outside the window disappeared as if someone had pressed mute, and all I could hear was the blood pounding in my brain. I wanted to put my hands on the sides of my head to contain it, to stop my head from imminent explosion. I’m not sure if I actually put my hands there or not.
My father moved forward in his chair, possibly to reach out for me, to stop me from sliding even farther away from him, but if that was his intent, he changed his mind at the last minute and rested his elbows on his knees. He sat there for a moment, looking down at his hands.
“Allie, the next day… ” He looked up at me. “Your mother killed herself.”
I don’t know who reached for whom first, but in milliseconds, Dana was pulling me in close with both arms. Which was lucky, because if he hadn’t been anchoring me, I might have slipped away.
“What?” was the only word to creak out of my dry mouth.
Although I had heard him clearly.
October 1998
New York City
Zoe forced herself to get up off of her cushy couch. Darkness was descending over the city, a curtain of indigo bumping up against the preternatural, rebellious glow of the street. She had to get in the shower or she’d never be primped and ready for Colin. She didn’t feel like dealing with the icy attitude she’d receive if she kept him waiting. Such a prima donna. So gorgeous he can afford to be a pain in the ass.
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