Emily, Alone

by Stewart O'Nan

  NO WHEELCHAIRS, read a sign by the opening of the Stove Room, STEEP RAMP AHEAD. Trailing, Emily dawdled, as if giving Arlene the option. The path dropped down around a curve, a mossy rock wall rising on one side, water welling from the bottom. Arlene never hesitated, using the handrail to steady herself.

  “Watch,” she warned Emily, “this is a little slick.”

  Below the curve, they passed through a tunnel, the air surprisingly cool and dank. The ramp on the far side wasn’t much more than a gentle rise. Emily suspected the trustees were just covering themselves.

  The highlight of the room was the chocolate tree, the name of which excited the children but in itself was less impressive than the banana trees with their tempting green bunches.

  “They always look upside down to me,” Arlene said.

  “I used to know the reason they do that.”

  They’d had enough of ferns, and retraced their steps through the Serpentine Room and the Palm Court to the South Conservatory, where all pretense of imitating nature gave way to a symmetrical display of pastel tulips and stepped reflecting pools framing another dreadful blown-glass confection. They liked the Sunken Garden and its trickling fountains better, though a wailing toddler strongly disagreed. Emily felt a bit tired herself, but kept on, knowing there wasn’t much farther to go.

  Mercifully there was no music in the Desert Room—Kenneth’s favorite, with its baked air and austere rocks and potted cacti: bunny ears and squat barrels and man-sized saguaros. Beside a massive aloe with bladelike leaves stood a denuded, sawed-off trunk about four feet high with a sign: I’M NOT DEAD, I’M DORMANT. It was supposed to be a joke, though Emily failed to see the humor. She immediately rejected the idea that it might apply to her.

  “What does it say?” Arlene asked, and shouldered in close as Emily read: “African tree grape. As winter approaches and the amount of natural light decreases, African tree grapes lose their leaves and become dormant, just like maples and oaks. Watch for new leaves to appear in the spring.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I guess it’s not spring yet,” Emily said.

  As they pressed on, surrounded by teeming green life, the bare stump nagged at her. Like the gussied-up garden club ladies, they’d come to celebrate beauty and renewal, to worship perfection and pick nits, but now the falseness of the entire enterprise struck her. Where were the blighted and dried-up plants, the withered and sere? Hidden away, discarded. Why did it bother her? Was it just the sign, and her too-hasty denial? She knew she was being morbidly sensitive, taking it personally, and yet the more she pondered her reaction, the more she resented the African tree grape, as if whoever included it did so just to puzzle her.

  The Victoria Room was entirely black and white, Doric columns and plaster casts of classical statuary rising from an inky pool. Emily supposed the design was meant to point up the decadence of those turn-of-thecentury botanists who finally succeeded in breeding black orchids and roses, but why were visitors (in this case two noisy boys) encouraged to monkey with a console on the railing that controlled the fountains?

  The East and Broderie Rooms were taken up by similar dioramas, fussy fantastical stage sets meant to astonish, one all blue, the other all white, including live butterflies.

  “It’s too much,” Emily said.

  “I like the butterflies.”

  “That’s about it, though.”

  They’d completed the main circuit, and their feet hurt. They’d seen enough for one day, they agreed. They’d come back when it was warmer out and tour the Japanese and aquatic gardens.

  “It was nice,” Arlene said, looking about the Palm Court as they waited for the elevator.

  “It always is,” Emily said.

  There was nothing they wanted in the gift shop, and the café was too loud and expensive. On the way out, Arlene couldn’t pass the wishing well without digging in her pocketbook. She did this everywhere they went, and had for years, it was a compulsion with her. At their age, Emily wondered, what was there left to wish for?

  Arlene turned to her. “Do you have a penny?”

  Emily sighed and fished one from her change purse.

  “Thank you.” She dropped it in and smiled as if she knew she was being childish.

  Outside, they returned to the gray world of Pittsburgh, which now seemed even deader and more dormant than before. Dark-bottomed clouds sat right down on the treetops. The air was bracing and smelled of mud and last fall’s leaves. It would rain later—no, it was already starting, drops dotting the sidewalk, dappling the car windows.

  They’d arrived early enough to find a space in the long atoll that bracketed Edward Bigelow’s statue. Emily unlocked the doors with her remote, the lights winking acknowledgment, and they hustled across, ducking inside just as the downpour struck, drumming the roof, plinking white off the hood. Emily got the wipers going, and the defroster.

  “I think we were very lucky,” Arlene said, wheezing.

  Emily was tempted to bring up her smoking, but thought it would be small of her right then, and agreed. It was so rare that they could say that. And to think she’d begrudged Arlene a penny. At the mercy of the fates, they needed all the luck they could get.

  “You know,” Emily said, “I get half of your wish if it comes true.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “In a capital market, yes.”

  “You already do anyway.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I wished that we’ll both be back next spring.”

  Why was she so surprised? Because she hadn’t been thinking of Arlene in nearly the same way? Or because she didn’t think the odds of that happening were very good?

  “That’s a nice wish,” Emily said. “I hope it does come true.”

  THE PROBLEM WITH GOOD FRIDAY

  For weeks she’d been trying to pin down Kenneth on the specifics of their visit. Were Ella and Sam still coming? What time did they expect to arrive? Please, she needed to know as soon as they booked their flights so she could plan accordingly. Betty was coming special, and she had food shopping to do. Her real worry was that while he waffled and stalled, Ella might make other plans with her friend Suzanne. He refused to commit to anything, saying it depended on whether Lisa could get Friday off. As crazy as it sounded, the Cambridge Public Schools didn’t consider it a holiday.

  She knew he wasn’t telling her the truth. Like Henry, he didn’t want to disappoint her, and often withheld upsetting news until it was too late for her to intervene. The promise of their visit had sustained her for so long that any deviation from the ideal felt like a slight. Maybe in her frustration she was being uncharitable, but behind his evasiveness she sensed the hand of Lisa. It would be just like her to drag her feet and then cancel at the last minute.

  Last Christmas when they visited, Lisa had affected a fraudulent helpfulness, cheerily pitching in with the children to clear the table and do the dishes rather than sit and talk over coffee. She joined the family around the fire, playing Scrabble and Parcheesi, but said little to Emily, and nothing of substance. They’d never gotten along. It wasn’t as if there’d been a honeymoon and then a falling out. Over the years their mutual dislike had calcified, their relationship fixed and incomplete. Emily didn’t expect that to change now. While she was aware it was a great failure of character, she wasn’t magnanimous enough to forgive her. In fact, she held it against Lisa that by surviving Emily she might think she’d prevailed.

  The shame of it was that Henry’s mother had been so kind. Lillian had taught Emily so much that she would always be grateful to her. Coming from Kersey, alone in a forbidding city, Emily had been eager to learn. As a new motherin-law, she’d wanted to do the same for Lisa, but from the beginning Lisa acted as if she knew better—as if, in her insistence on passing along those time-tested lessons, Emily was ignorant and out of touch. Any motherly advice she might give, Lisa would counter by citing her gaggle of friends, all of whom relied on child care while they
worked full-time. Emily thought it only common sense to protest this scheme of things, voting in favor of her staying home until Ella was at least three or four, a suggestion that more than once met with disdainful silence.

  Emily tried to appeal to her counterpart, on generational grounds, but, having resorted to nannies herself, Mrs. Sanner sided with Lisa. Born on the North Shore, Ginny Sanner belonged to a loftier set than Emily had ever aspired to, the world of Miss Porter’s and sailing lessons on the Vineyard. There was nothing Emily could teach her daughter, nothing practical, that is, unless one included the outmoded principles—prized only in places like Kersey—of frugality and basic etiquette.

  Emily liked to think she didn’t need anything from Lisa, yet Lisa held the ultimate power over her—the ability to deprive Emily of time with Kenneth and the grandchildren. Even Margaret at her worst understood that family trumped their personal battles. Lisa felt no such compunction. Thanksgiving was typical. She invited Emily to the Cape, belatedly, knowing she wouldn’t have time to make arrangements, sentencing her and Arlene to the buffet at the club.

  It wasn’t the first perfunctory invitation, transparent to all involved. Their every exchange—channeled unfairly through the intermediary of Kenneth—involved calculation and subterfuge, and Emily feared this was just another instance. Lisa wasn’t a teacher but a guidance counselor. How hard would it be to take the day off?

  The problem, Kenneth said, was that she’d used the last of her vacation days for their twenty-fifth anniversary trip to Florida, and her principal wouldn’t let her take a sick day to make a three-day weekend.

  “What if she was actually sick?” Emily asked.

  “It’s too obvious.”

  “But the three of you are still planning on coming?”

  “We’re still planning on coming.”

  That hard-won admission should have been a victory—Ella coming by herself would have been enough—yet Emily still felt cheated, as if once again Lisa had publicly insulted her.

  Why did she let it bother her? Honestly, she didn’t want to see Lisa, had nothing whatsoever to say to her. The visit would go smoother without her. It was just pride.

  “I swear,” Betty said over their plate of Milanos, “you two are a pair.”

  “I beg your pardon, but I am nothing like her.”

  “I bet she says the same thing.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, Emily. Just that it’s nothing new between you two. I wouldn’t have the energy for it. It’s like me and Jesse. It’s not that we’re getting any mellower in our old age, we’re just too tired to fight all the time.”

  “It’s not all the time.”

  “Just whenever you’re together.”

  “Not true,” Emily protested, as if it were a joke, but later, making the bed in Kenneth’s room, she realized it was technically untrue for another, uglier reason. She and Lisa didn’t even need to be in the same place to argue. A face-to-face confrontation was rare, and by design they barely spoke on the phone. No, at this stage all Emily had to do was think of her.

  CURIOUS

  Of the grandchildren, Ella had always been her favorite. Slim and bookish, she reminded Emily of her younger self, a judgment that changed only slightly when, her freshman year at Wellesley, Ella declared that she was—and had always been—a lesbian. Kenneth had broken the news to Emily, joking that he and Lisa weren’t exactly shocked, as if Emily, who was, should have picked up on the clues.

  Emily wasn’t sure what those would be. Compared to Sarah, who’d inherited Margaret’s and her own straight nose and high cheekbones, Ella was plain, a bit moon-faced and weak-chinned like Lisa, but still appealing. Dimpled and long-limbed, she had a nice smile and a lean figure perfect for evening wear. Her hair was bobbed but not severe. She wasn’t a tomboy, like the few Emily had known in her youth, but a shy, smart girl. Emily had never been distressed at Ella’s lack of boyfriends, attributing it not to any lack of attractiveness or desire but to her seriousness and discriminating taste. In retrospect, Emily wasn’t sure if she’d been fooled or if she’d fooled herself.

  Ella Bella met a fella, she used to tease her, and she supposed she just assumed that would happen. In her vicarious pride she’d anticipated those same milestones she herself had felt lucky to reach: marriage, children, grandchildren. Not that Ella couldn’t have all of these things—times had changed, there were infinite variations of family—and yet Emily, while righteously vowing to be supportive, had to admit some sadness at the revelation, as if life had suddenly gotten harder for Ella, and Emily could do nothing to protect her from it.

  At first, Emily half entertained the idea that this adamant and showy stand was just a phase, like Margaret’s many attempts to scandalize them, or her own overeager rejection of Kersey. In her sorority, it was common for sisters to share a bond as strong as—if not stronger than—any fleeting romantic attachment to men, who orbited the house like distant, mysterious planets, making brief, seismic contact and then receding without explanation. Women would always be more understanding, their feelings toward each other deeper, more complicated, for better or worse. It might be that Ella, never outgoing, had mistaken the quieter, more reliable affections of friendship for love. Emily wondered what tenderness had moved and then convinced her, and when, though as time passed, this line of questioning grew more and more moot, so much so that Emily realized it might be perceived as objectionable (by Lisa, if no one else), and set it aside.

  Ella and Suzanne had been together nearly a year. They shared a one-bedroom in Somerville with a Scottie named Jack Sparrow. Suzanne was getting her PhD in environmental engineering at Tufts. Emily had seen pictures of her—a gaunt blonde with a ponytail and a marathoner’s body, always sporting a windbreaker and athletic sunglasses for some outdoor activity—but had yet to meet her in person.

  While Emily was supremely interested in the domestic arrangements of all her grandchildren—as she was concerned with their well-being and happiness—she drew the line at their intimate lives. She might picture Sarah and her beau Max enjoying a glass of wine at a candlelit restaurant or kissing on a balcony overlooking Lake Michigan, but her imagination, possessed of a delicate censor, didn’t follow them any further. She wasn’t interested in the couplings of the boys and their various girlfriends, the mechanics of which she expected were similar, the commonplace ecstasies of the young. Though she wished it did, the same decorousness didn’t extend to Ella and Suzanne.

  Despite herself, at the most inopportune moments (speaking to Arlene about them, or on the phone with Kenneth) she was seized by visions of them in bed—not vaguely pornographic, let alone in flagrante, just the two of them lying there side by side, occasionally reading, sharing the covers and pillows like any other couple. This pointless voyeurism disturbed her, signaling, as it did, her ongoing confusion and curiosity about Ella’s orientation. Whenever Emily’s mind strayed toward the bedroom door, she tried to remember what a pleasant, helpful child Ella had been, a proud holder of yarn and folder of towels, and what joy Emily had taken in her company, the two of them kindred spirits. Back then, unfairly, she often fantasized about how much easier her life would have been if Ella had been her daughter. Did she still feel that way?

  Just the fact that she had to ask made her worry. She considered herself tolerant and cosmopolitan, as if by leaving Kersey she could escape its small-mindedness. In her childhood the Italians and Swedes lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and were thought not just poor but filthy, breeding freely like animals. Well into the 1980s, her Grandmother Benton used the term “darkies,” and parroted the racial clichés of her youth. Her own mother, a dedicated teacher and proud suffragette, had a habit of reading names from the paper and asking, “Is that Jewish?” Henry and the children were properly horrified. Emily, knowing the climate that bred such ignorance, was both more forgiving and more resigned. Isolated and intractable, they were victims of the times. As sad as it was, nothing woul
d change their views except death. She was afraid that in this case she might be the same, that somehow, unconsciously, against her will, she harbored a deep-seated prejudice against a person she adored, and, terrified that Ella might find out and their relationship might change forever, Emily tended to overcompensate, as she did now, smothering Ella in a hug the moment she stepped through the door and holding on too long. Rufus capered around them, barking as if Emily were being attacked.

  Even in her bulky old peacoat Ella was willowy, her wrists bony—just as Emily had been at her age.

  “Look at you,” Emily said. “You’re wasting away to nothing.”

  “I am not.”

  “Down! I’m kidding, you look good. You look happy.”

  “Hey, Grammy,” Sam said, and lightly embraced her by the shoulders, as if she might break.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kenneth said, and set his bag down to kiss her cheek. There were more in the car, and the boys went to get them.

  “So,” Emily said, hanging up Ella’s coat, “how is Suzanne?”

  “Good.”

  “I wish she could have come.”

  “Her dad’s having an operation, and she really wanted to be there for her mom.”

  “I’m so sorry.”