by Terry Gamble
Ian studies me with a sideways look. He knows when I tumble into self-pity. I have no sympathy for you, Maddie Addison, he has said to me more than once. Your cup runneth over.
“Do you have any ideas? Because this service is going to be a travesty if we don’t get our act together.”
Ian adjusts himself to sit cross-legged on the bed. “Not for Evelyn’s service, no. But I do have an idea for a film.”
“My mother just died, Ian.”
“Yes, and I’m rarely appropriate. So I was thinking—” Ian’s face has that intensity he gets when he’s tracking a subject. “Let’s make a film about your family!” He leans back as if he’s just bestowed me with a brilliant gift.
I fight my eyebrows, but there’s no stopping them. “My family? How fascinating. I’m sure it will have mass appeal.”
“I’m being very serious, Maddie. Think of an Altman film. Think of Chekhov.”
Ian can cajole me out of a mood like a parent distracting a pouting child. “We just…follow them around with a camera?”
“Actually, I’m thinking of moving away from documentary and more into dramatization. Sedgie, of course, can play himself.”
It occurs to me that Ian isn’t being entirely flippant. I try to wrap my head around the concept, but the creepiness of using one’s family as material notwithstanding, why would anyone be interested? Every summer, we return to our childhoods to play charades and Sardines. As a family, we’re prone to substance abuse. We fret about an old house and argue points to which none of us is qualified to speak. Besides, everyone hates rich people. Even when they’re not rich anymore.
As if he’s read my thoughts, Ian says, “People use their families as material all the time, Maddie. That’s what artists do. And you don’t give your family enough credit. You underestimate them.”
“Oh, please…”
Ian sighs and shakes his head. He rolls over and lies back on the pillows. The bed creaks. Through the window, he regards the woods. “The Appassionata.”
“Excuse me?”
“Beethoven’s Appassionata. Miriam told me it was one of your mother’s favorite pieces. Someone should play it at her remembrance.”
I lie back with him, marveling at Miriam’s ability to resurrect a mother I never knew. Side by side, Ian and I stare at the ceiling. “Does it smell like lavender in here?”
Ian closes his eyes and inhales deeply. Then he sneezes. “And dust.” From behind his head, he yanks one of the old throw pillows that have lain on the bed since the beginning of time. The pillow is flattened and so barren of stuffing it doesn’t warrant the name. Ian sniffs it. “There,” he says, tossing the offending object away. “Lavender. The Victorians made everything into a sachet.”
I cast my eyes around the room. The Tigger bedding is gone from the crib. Someday, another baby will lie here. It was just about this time of day that I found her. Midmorning. I had been talking on the phone to Angus. For years, I blamed him for keeping me on the line. For years, he blamed me for not noticing the monitor was too quiet. Mother strained for every last gasp of air, so why does a baby simply stop?
Where do they come from, your ghosts? Dr. Anke asked.
Are they memories that cling like cooking smells? Or are they our lost children, our lost selves, beating like moths against a window? When I was a child, I thought I knew.
“God,” I say, regarding the scented pillow on the floor. “Not even the ghosts were ghosts.”
It is not Beethoven that Beowulf is playing when I come into the living room, but something dense and marshier that fits the heaviness of the house. “What’s that?” I say.
“Berg. Wozzeck.”
The sequence of discordant notes describes exactly how I feel. It seems appropriate that Beowulf has chosen an opera about madness. From time to time, someone goes upstairs to visit Mother’s body. At the moment, Derek and Adele are sitting cross-legged on the porch like bookends, their hands resting palms up on their knees. I make out Adele’s shorn head next to Derek’s shaggy one backlit by the lake. Whatever they are meditating on, I’m sure it has to do with a reinterpreted reality. Maybe we’re all looking for our separate universes—mine one of celluloid and videotape; Sedgie’s ablaze with klieg lights; Dana’s orderly sequence of stitches. Edward disappeared altogether. And now Ian wants to make a film.
I find Dana in the kitchen making peanut-butter sandwiches. The counter is patina’d with years of cooking and cursory cleanups. Dana sets out a plate depicting one of the buildings of Princeton University. The edge, I notice, is chipped.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” I say.
She looks askance, but I smile to show I’m kidding. Ever since she made her confession the other morning, I have seen her through kinder eyes.
“It must be exhausting,” I say, dipping my fingers into the peanut-butter jar, “to have to be so good.”
“What are you talking about?”
I lick my forefinger. “Mom and Dad had such high expectations for you.”
Dana cuts the sandwiches in half, sets them on the blue plate. “Like they didn’t for you?”
“It wasn’t the same.”
Dana raises an eyebrow. She takes a paper napkin from the little holder on the counter, folds it into a triangle, tucks it under the sandwich. “I’m not doing a very good job,” she says.
“You are,” I say, meaning it. “You’re doing a wonderful job. Jessica’s fine.” I pause, waiting to see if this small dart of praise can pierce my sister’s stoicism. When she doesn’t budge, I press on. “I wish we’d had half the support that she does.”
Dana gives a faint, defeated smile. “And now they’re all gone.”
“The last of the grown-ups,” I say.
“I don’t suppose the cousins will be able to afford to keep the house. Adele’s broke, and Sedgie’s run out of money. His last divorce…”
Yet Ian—who’s not a part of this family (but who seems to think he is)—sees gold in our stories.
“Dana,” I say, “would you ever go see a movie about a family like ours? You know, a family on the cusp of…something.” It occurs to me that we are on the brink, like the dinosaurs with their pea brains that had no idea of what was about to transpire when the meteor hit.
Dana chews vaguely at the crusts of her sandwich. “You mean a big family of cousins who are forced to live together for a few weeks each summer in a once-grand house?”
Weather reversals, apocalyptic geological upheaval, the demise of life as we know it. “Something like that.”
Dana picks at the bread. I find myself waiting too eagerly for her verdict. “Maybe,” she says finally. “But to make it interesting, you’d have to have a murder.”
Dana thinks we have to have a murder,” I tell Ian as we walk along the sand. I have dragged him down to the beach to get out of a house where everyone seems at sea.
“Hmm. Are there any that you know of?”
Scanning my family’s history for trauma and scandal, I come up with Grannie Addie’s breakdown, Uncle Jack’s alleged wartime cowardice, and Edward’s psychosis. Other than that, not much. Derek’s tower shimmers in the sun. “An abortion?” I say hopefully.
Beneath the straw hat he stole from Sedgie, Ian is slathered in sunscreen. “Who had an abortion?”
“Dana. When she was nineteen.”
“Ah,” says Ian. “That explains it,” as if it all makes perfect sense.
I marvel at his ability to intuit things I miss entirely. At the same time, I’m annoyed. “Explains what?”
But Ian is regarding Derek’s construction of wood and rock with an expression similar to the one he assumed when he first saw the lawn jockey. He crouches down like a golfer gauging a putt. Then he rises, stands back, and shakes his head. “How people betray their secret histories,” he says. “Dana is very, very careful.”
“Oh, she’s always been like that.”
“I’ll bet she hasn’t,” says Ian. “People often project the
opposite of what they feel.”
“Thank you, Dr. Anke.”
“Organization compensating for chaos. Virtue for shame.” He stares at Derek’s mound. “God, what is this?”
I think of those pictures of our parents, those fading testimonials to happiness, smiles forever fixed, arms thrown around one another as if they can’t believe their good fortune, and I realize that Dana and Philip provide a center—something immutable in an ephemeral world. Exhaling imaginary smoke, I study the lake. It looks cooler today, potentially autumnal. “Did you know,” I say, “that when you have a stroke, you actually lose awareness of part of your body? Think about it. How exquisitely perfect for my mother, who did exactly that. For forty years, she kept denying, denying, cutting off part of herself with booze and cigarettes and naps until—ta-da!—she finally lost awareness altogether.” I pause to punctuate what I consider to be a brilliant analogy concerning the moribund facets of my mother’s self. “And what did my father amputate in the service of marital longevity?”
“Ever the philosopher, Maddie,” says a voice from behind. Sedgie, in his Hawaiian shirt and a towel around his hips, works his way down the dune and lands on the sand beside us. Beowulf tags along wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt that says THE END IS NEAR. GET SERIOUS. Sedgie takes a long look at Ian, starting at his toes, finishing at his head. “That’s my hat.”
“Is it? It was just lying there.”
“Hmm,” says Sedgie, his eye still on Ian.
Beo tells us they are going to bond over a “lithesome doobie.” Perhaps we’d like to join them?
“Alas,” says Ian, fanning himself with Sedgie’s hat. “We’re abstainers.”
“You’re getting high?” I say.
“Until the bartender comes,” says Sedgie. “We are having a bartender?”
The first thing Dana did after Philip called the undertaker was to call hospice. Then she called the yacht club.
“We’re getting high and looking for heart-shaped stones to put in Evelyn’s grave,” Beowulf says. “It’s a tradition.”
“Whose tradition?”
Beowulf thinks about this. “Well, it should be.”
Practicing serenity, I fight not to say, Why don’t you two grow up?
“By the way,” says Sedgie, “the phone’s been ringing off the hook. Your sister’s looking frantic.”
I look at my watch. It’s already 2 P.M. The news must be spreading. And I feel the inexorable pressure of having to work out details. When my father died, Mother took to her bed, relinquishing the details to Aunt Pat. Not yet sober, I wasn’t even in Sand Isle when they threw his ashes off the stern of the Green Dragon. Years ago, we used to time Coke bottles we’d chucked off the stern, counting the seconds until they sank beneath the waves, someday to wash up on the shore as smoothly sanded shards of emerald or aquamarine.
“I’m heading up,” I say, turning to Ian. “You coming?”
Ian shakes his head. He’s going to help Sedgie and Beowulf search for rocks. As they head down the beach, Ian trails them, holding up his hands as if he’s framing “the middle-aged guy and the kid getting stoned” scene—the one that we’ll put toward the end of the film when the family starts to unravel.
Mother has been dead for less than eight hours, and the flowers have started to arrive. In the kitchen, I see a Portmerion casserole and a plate of cookies wrapped in plastic. Upstairs, I find Miriam in Mother’s room. Seeing me, she slams shut the book she’s holding and shoves it back on the shelf.
“Where’s Dana?” I ask.
“Resting. She’s rattled.”
I look at Mother who isn’t Mother. When life leaves the body, the difference becomes eminently clear. And when someone is as emaciated and frail as Mother, it’s hard to recognize the woman who used to decoupage with the aunts, tipping her cigarettes with kisses of pink. Now her teeth and cheekbones are exaggerated like the bold lines of a caricature. Miriam has already picked up all of her pills and removed them. The bedside table looks unnaturally empty. Mother used to cover its surface with photographs and ashtrays and Kleenex boxes and glasses of water or vodka. She always kept See’s candies in the drawer.
I had moved to New York before my father died. It was September. Like most of us, Dad wanted summer to go on forever—but he dutifully returned to Pasadena. A portrait of my grandfather hung over his desk alongside a nautical chart of northern Michigan and a barometer. His secretary, who at first thought he was taking a nap, dropped the glass of water he’d sent for, splattering his desktop. She was mortified, she told me later. His desk was always so neat.
At the time, I hadn’t seen him for more than a year. It had been such an awkward departure from Sand Isle the summer after Sadie died that I couldn’t face him. I found your detritus in the boat room, he told me, referring to the bottles I had hidden. As demoralized as I had felt then, I wonder why I even bothered.
Miriam’s voice is brisk. “You’re going to have to tell that undertaker what to do. She wanted to be cremated.”
Cremation is a family tradition. There is something unseemly about lying intact and allowing nature to take its course. Still, they wouldn’t allow me to go with Sadie to the crematorium. I was at home, sedated, secured to my bed by well-meaning relatives who thought they knew best.
“Can I be alone with her?”
“Of course,” says Miriam. She looks around the room and, with a sweep of her arm, indicates the vases that have been arriving from the florist since this morning. “All these flowers. This last year I’ve been with her, I’d never know she had so many friends.”
After Miriam leaves, I sit by the bed. Although I’ve talked to the dead many times in my dreams and my imaginings, it is another thing to speak to a body. Where are you, Mother? If you’re with Sadie, will you do a better job watching over her than you did watching over me?
My mother’s corpse doesn’t answer. If her spirit is in this house, I can’t find it yet. Her hair is combed, but her lips are pale. Except for her wedding ring, she wears no jewelry. The early-afternoon sun spikes on the lake and, for a moment, I can imagine she is napping. Aside from the hospital bed, all of the trappings of sickness are gone. The lilies have the strongest smell. They remind me of my wedding. Soon, the undertaker will be coming. I take my mother’s hand, remove her ring, and pocket it.
Carnations,” says Dana, standing over the pantry sink, plucking the carnations out of a vase of roses and baby’s breath. “Mom would have croaked.”
She starts to laugh, and I join her, both of us quaking with the absurdity of attributing Mother’s demise to a tasteless flower arrangement.
Suddenly Dana stops. “The undertaker will be here any minute. Jessica’s gone. I have no idea where anyone is.” A few indigenous-sounding notes drift in through the window from no specific location. “And that damn recorder. Where’s Philip?”
I tell her that we have plenty of time, and that Mother will stay dead.
“But they’ll take her out of the house. Doesn’t everyone want to be here?”
I see her point. There should be something more ritualistic about removing a body. What would the Irish do? The Sufi mystics? Can’t we ululate and rend our hair?
“I’m here,” I say.
The doorbell rings, and we jump. No one ever rings the doorbell; they just walk in.
“Where’s Miriam?” Dana says.
If Aunt Pat were alive, she would immediately take charge and gather the forces, but the best I can summon is a paltry whistle that no one will hear from the porch. I go to the door. It is not the undertaker but the hospice ladies standing like Mormons, earnestly paired.
“We’re so sorry for your loss,” says the older one.
I wait for the platitude I know is coming. Death is a natural part of living. They see it all the time. Their job isn’t to deny death, but to steward it. “Come in,” I say.
Ten minutes later, we are drinking tea at the kitchen table. The two ladies knowingly nod when we tell them how t
he last breath was such an anticlimax; how Mother seemed so small; how final it was to witness the cessation of life and know she’s not coming back. Yes, yes, the hospice ladies say. That’s how it is.
“Ghosts,” I say.
The white-haired one looks at me. “Pardon?”
“In this house.”
“I’ve never seen them,” says Dana.
“The world is a mysterious place,” says the younger hospice lady with the dyed red hair. She is wearing loads of turquoise. The look in her eye strikes me as ghoulish. Who would go into this kind of work? Who would pretend to translate death? They are necrophiliacs, the two of them, getting off on our loss. I decide to give them nothing.
“Maddie lost a child,” Dana tells them.
Traitor, I think. But if it weren’t for the tattooed initials on the dining-room wall, I might wonder if I imagined the whole thing.
“Ah,” says the older one.
“It’s a huge loss,” says the one covered in turquoise.
How does your loss feel? Dr. Anke asked. Does it remind you of something else?
“How old?” the older asks.
“Four months,” says Dana.
“Meningitis? Flu?”
They remind me of Aunt Pat and Aunt Eugenia, efficient know-it-alls miming concern. Do you feel threatened by authority? Dr. Anke once asked.
“The death of a child…” says the turquoise one, her voice trailing off.
“So difficult to get closure,” says the other.
I almost spit out my tea at the word. Where’s the closure when you look at other people’s children and feel both repelled and fascinated? What kind of closure is it when each year hinges on a birthday in May, the years marked off by what grade she would be in, what she would look like, if she would be athletic, pretty, smart? Will I finally have closure when I go through a day without having to scrub the idea of her from my mind like a stain?
“Never completely,” says the turquoise one.
I look at her sharply. The ladies sip. Again, the doorbell rings. This time, it is the undertaker. He is surprisingly tan. For a moment, he and I stand blinking at each other. His suit is linen, like Jamie’s. “You rang?” I say.