If anyone asks: the very notion was enough to put us on our guard. Other people’s curiosity, even if well intended, was the equivalent of fighting words. It could only mean that our lives were going to be interpreted in the harshest possible light. It was our cue to circle the wagons and hunker down against the enemy.
“You might as well face it. Your mother’s never going to remarry. I’m going to stay a widow forever. I’m not the type to find a new husband.”
In fact, we faced it early on. What fantasies of a stepfather I entertained took on the irritating dot-to-dot vagueness of some generic physician who sang “Waltzing Matilda” while fixing the tires on our Schwinns, who bore the faint odor of sweat and Chesterfields, and whose stubble during a chaste good night kiss would supply a giddy transport.
Our mother kept up a good front, for instance, watching her figure to the tune of eating the same punitive lunch every day, a banana and a cup of skim milk.
She loved fashion and would flip through the pages of the women’s magazines for outfits she liked, sighing with longing when she saw ads for dinner gowns, dresses described as “a column of crepe with a tunic embroidered with matte bugle beads— no glitter, just the subtle gleam of color on ice.”
“Oh,” she would say, “doesn’t this sound dreamy?” quoting from another ad: “‘Graceful, flattering, and cool as a sea breeze is this colorful summer dress with white daisies all over the bodice, while an attractive little capelet to be worn casually over the shoulders completes the costume. Gay as a lark!”
It was the notion of the capelet that got to her, you could tell.
There are photos in which she could have been mistaken for a movie star, wearing a scarf and sunglasses, dangling a cigarette, at the beach. Despite her striking looks, my mother was not the type to flirt, to bat her eyelashes and pretend that everything some guy said should be put on a billboard, next to the Coppertone and the “Which twin has the Toni” ads. The women in the fifties who tended to get a second chance in the marriage sweepstakes all knew how to turn their men into heroes of the most down-to-earth situation. You should have seen the way Al changed that flat or I shudder to think what would have happened if Phil and Scott hadn’t been there to figure out which way was Vermont! This became clear to me when the father of a girl I knew dropped dead of a heart attack and her mother did not skip a beat, summoning the kind of raw energy that soon translated into a wardrobe of capri pants and mohair sweaters and dates galore.
We became, in effect, her second husband. We courted her with pictures of flowers and odes in her honor, studying her like a painting, often exploring her bureau drawers; one was filled with lace collars, shawls, and snoods—we thought she had her own private collection of spider webs. She said she had access to another dimension, and we believed her. She liked the idea of seances and Ouija boards. In the bureau with the spider webs she also kept a deck of telepathy cards marketed by Duke University in the fifties. She liked to test us to see whether we had inherited her Braille for the beyond. She held up the cards and kept a record of how many times we could correctly guess the shapes on the other side, hoping we would exceed the law of averages. I wished she had more access to this dimension and was not so easily befuddled by childproof caps on aspirin or following directions for defrosting or finding a channel on a portable radio. She had a pretty low standard for judging whether someone had mastered destiny itself, and it had to do with the ability to self-serve gasoline.
Like all suitors, we eventually came to see her defrocked.
We took note of a certain frailty. Once when we were older and my mother went to visit Jacqueline, who could not greet her in person, there was this note:
The television is set for the Channel 3 news. I am almost afraid to give you instructions because it is so easy to turn on, and somehow you’ll anticipate it should be complicated. Just pull out (gently) the little switch on the bottom. That is all.
Also, the red tea kettle is full of water, ready for tea if you want it. There is wine too.
If you feel like taking a bath, you should be all set.
The letter was signed “Jay” and followed by several postscripts.
P.S. There are clocks all over the house, on the living room sill, kitchen and bedrooms.
P.S. The thermostat is off. Please feel free to zip it up. It’s in the dining room on the wall.
P.S. The wine may be a little sour. Please taste first.
She thought of herself as a pansy forced into hard duty as a perennial. Although she soldiered on, it appeared at times to be an act of pure will, as if her feet were stuck in taffy. Her very sensibility was at odds with the upbeat nature of the postwar mentality. Behind her back we called our mother not only Miss Orange Brown, but also Our Lady of Sorrow. In her life, Maureen Blais had her fair share of loss, presuming fair shares exist. But as if the actual cataclysms weren’t enough, she kept an invisible Rolodex of minor disappointments, a democratic hodgepodge in which she welcomed the traumas of people she barely knew, virtual strangers she met while returning a book to the library who told her about someone’s distant cousin in Cincinnati who was “a touch catatonic” or someone else’s kin down in Washington who got fired from his job with the State Department because he believed in UFOs. She hated to see certain styles change and longed for the triumphant comeback of face powder, dotted swiss, and tomato aspic at summer parties. The Blessed Mother had ten sorrows, but my mother could challenge her to a duel any day: everywhere she looked she found evidence of ineffable sadness, the mateless mitten discovered after the winter thaw, the sight of baby grass stirring in a spring breeze, the sound of a child scratching away at a violin, the hum of the wind in an empty parking lot.
In my memory, my mother had only two dates.
One with an extremely short judge. I think it was a blind date with a confirmed bachelor put together by well-meaning friends. I was predisposed to be a favorable member of his jury. At the time I possessed something of a law-and-order streak, and I liked the notion of what it would be like having a man who dispensed judgments for a living as a new member of our household. At the very least we would become more organized. We would have paper routes, maybe even get a pencil sharpener that worked. At night at dinner we would hear harrowing stories about hardened criminals and learn the fascinating difference between injunctions and torts.
The evening he arrived to take her out we all crouched on the upstairs floor, peering through the railing, like so many miniature, pajama-clad convicts.
“Quiet down,” I told the others. “You don’t want to make a bad impression.”
When they refused to stop whispering, I told them that the next time we had mashed potatoes, I would take their portion and squash it in my hands.
Rampant giggling.
“Stop now, or else if there’s an accident when we’re driving, I won’t let you look at it.”
Suddenly, a hush.
She was descending the stairs.
Did she really sashay down them like Loretta Young in one of those dresses in which the bust is delineated and the skirt is all swoosh? Did she and the judge really drink “highballs,” the most adult drink in the world, distilled, we thought, from the essences of grown-up activities, such as complaining about taxes and making small talk and registering to vote? Did she serve, as I am certain she did, cheese squeezed onto Ritz crackers topped with—and this was the cosmopolitan touch, the clever home-entertainment trick encouraged by the magazines—pimentos?
Our mother floated out of the house on the petal of an imaginary tulip, and returned, it seemed, far too soon, deflated. It was like a fast forward in a nature film when the plant shoots up, exfoliates, and then droops in mere seconds.
Afterward, all she said was, “You can just imagine the kinds of verdicts he was likely to deliver on days when he was feeling self-conscious.”
Not much later, she had a date with a dapper sort of fellow with a trite Irish name, something like Paddy O’Rourke, who hung around for a while and then fa
ded off into the New England sunset, unconvincing even as a memory, like trying to summon the feel of snow in July.
After that brief encounter, she gathered her four daughters and told us sternly, “Girls, I want you to listen, and I want you to listen carefully. I have something important to say, and I’m only going to say it once.”
Out of the dregs of a doomed relationship arose gallant and memorable an adage.
“Never, and I mean never, trust a single man with a station wagon.”
Chapter Six
In the Company of Sisters
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1957, I DREAMED OF GETTING AWAY.
We were housebound. My grandmother was in her sickroom, and there were no plans except to sit and wait for death to arrive, a vigil as tiresome as it was terrifying. Only our grandmother’s room had an air conditioner, its rumble another kind of tribulation. The house was filled with the routine of death: the fatigue in the faces of the living, the pharmaceutical odors, the ticking silence, the constant trade in basins and towels and chips of ice.
In age she had faded, this woman born in Ireland, my namesake, the mother of two sons and two daughters, Maureen, Kevin, Dermot, and Eileen, two boys, two girls, a “rich man’s” family. My impression was that we children hastened her death, not deliberately, but because the constant noise and commotion unsettled the nerves of someone who liked a quiet game of bridge, whose piano playing was said to be of concert caliber, who was referred to, more than once in her life by people unknown to each other, as a Perfect Lady. To a ten year old she had a distant, ceremonial air, like a pope.
The newspapers that summer were advertising cooked hams, ready for the Independence Day holiday, for 43 cents a pound. Two pounds of peaches for 39 cents. You’ll Never Get Rich with Phil Silvers, Gunsmoke, and To Tell the Truth were on television. Movie theaters proclaimed, in snow-capped letters, that they were “air-conditioned year round.” Peyton Place and Compulsion were among the best-selling novels; if you preferred nonfiction, you could read The FBI in Action. A man named Khrushchev, short and snarling, dominated the foreign news. A man named Castro was organizing rebel troops in the hinterlands of Cuba. The Catholic Church had a new rule: You had to fast only three hours before receiving Communion. In the magazines there were ads for airlines, with stewardesses wearing white gloves and Bulova watches promising miniature meals in the clouds, with real silver and actual glasses. The ads, with their promise of a larger world, had a special ability to torment.
My mother became distant and distracted in the face of her mother’s mortality. Seeing her move about the house, in a drained, hesitant manner, was like watching a Technicolor movie reduced to black-and-white in slow motion.
There are certain laws that govern the universe:
Nature abhors a vacuum.
The happiest apple falls by virtue of its own patience, not to prove a point.
The wise child times her supplications wisely.
Waiting until that moment at the end of the day when my mother sank into her favorite perch in the living room and lit a cigarette, sensing she would be a soft touch for anything that lessened her load, I wangled two weeks of Girl Scout camp. I had seen a leaflet with a smudgy black-and-white photo of its placid pond; it beckoned with the promise of shade and solitude. My mother agreed on the condition that Jacqueline accompany me, a condition that was easy to accept because I was used to feeling responsible for her and the others. When I was first exposed to the notion of a guardian angel, which is to say, a spiritual pilot attached to another human on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis, I asked if everyone had one.
Yes, I was told by my mother.
“Including Jacqueline?” Again, yes.
A cloud of confusion filled my head, suddenly yielding to the hard bright light of recognition.
“Am I him?”
I started packing for camp weeks ahead of time, cramming my duffel with flashlights and bug spray, emergency Life Savers, and some stationery with a picture of a poodle and a legend I thought of as the height of literary sophistication: “A pen and some ink and here’s what I think.”
All the while I imagined I was leaving for a much longer and more dramatic interlude.
Boarding school, the Alps.
“You can come,” I told Jacqueline, “but you better behave.”
I was probably closest to Jacqueline, mainly because we shared a room, a forced umbilical from which we never fully recovered. With her I was guilty of a series of lower-case tyrannies. She remembers how I made her turn off the lights at night when I wanted to go to sleep, forcing her, among other indignities, to study the catechism in bed in the dark, a challenging endeavor because although we sometimes had batteries and we sometimes had flashlights, we never had both at once. Together she and I would take the Street Railway bus the six miles to Holyoke; the fumes from the bus caused us to gag, but they also underscored prosperity as shoppers were deposited and removed in a constant dialysis. We might take in a show at the Victory or the Strand or the Suffolk unless they were featuring one of those stupid mushy movies with grown-ups in pajamas chasing each other. We visited Woolworths for a thrilling lunch consisting of chocolate milk, grilled cheese sandwiches, and our favorite part, manna beyond any conscious expectation, the free, unsolicited pickle. Afterward, we would go to Child’s Shoe Store, where our neighbor, Mr. Brooks, was the manager, and play with the x-ray machine, which revealed the bones of our feet in big goopy shadows, a forerunner of strobe lights and Lava lamps. In front of Child’s were a series of oversized, permanently mounted brass footsteps, certain in their stride.
My role with Jacqueline, as I interpreted it, not necessarily accurately or fairly, was to get her to shape up. Instead of praising her for her good nature, I took advantage of it. Our exchanges were filled with elaborate sighs, eye rolling, and toe tapping on my part. I responded to her heartfelt remarks with pat phrases.
“Do you think a person would go to hell if she stole candy bars for her little sisters?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“Someone wrote inside my math book and I think it was Michael, and now my teacher wants me to stand in the corner.”
“Tough toenails.”
“Can I look inside your diary just this once?”
“Mind your own beeswax.”
I greeted any endeavor on her part with a scowl. “You think this is a science project?” I said when I discovered she wanted to put a recently extracted tooth in a glass of Coca-Cola with a sign that said, “Decay.” “You think that kind of lazy attitude is what we need in the U.S. of A.? No wonder the Russians are winning. You HAVE to make something better than this, something that gets people to sit up and notice.”
“Like what?”
“Like something with flashing lights or toads or an explosion.” Thus, I inspired her in a doomed enterprise in which she actually tried to devise an electric toad exploder.
She and I were in constant races to see who knew all the words to songs like “Silhouettes” and who heard of the Beatles first. We both adored Annette Funicello, the most popular girl in the world, and when I sent our idol a fan letter with half a piece of Juicy Fruit gum (I couldn’t resist chewing the other half myself), I let Jacqueline read the two-page “Greetings from Disneyland” form letter I got back listing all the rides and attractions, but not until she had made her bed and cleaned up her side of the room. Although these Greetings were no more than an advertisement, they had the cachet of coming all the way from California, and we pretended there had been a genuine personal exchange.
I called Jacqueline “Slowpoke” for all to hear as we trudged home from school. At night I wouldn’t let her climb into bed unless she had laid out her outfit for the next morning for inspection. We even readied our toothbrushes, with a squiggle of toothpaste dispensed in anticipation of saving time in the morning. We rearranged our furniture constantly, so that sometimes the beds were both against the back wall, sometimes they jutted forth next to
each other, and sometimes they were arranged like the letter T. A radiator in one corner rumbled and hissed throughout the night: we draped our clothes on it so they would be cozy and warm in the morning. Of course, mine were closer to the grill. Tucked behind the crucifix above the radiator were the dried-out palms we had gotten at church on the last Palm Sunday, and during one especially pious interval we even had a vessel with holy water for blessing ourselves every time we entered or exited the room.
“You’ve got to be more ladylike,” I would tell her. “Watch how you sit.”
“What’s wrong with the way I’m sitting?”
“Remember how Mrs. Guild told us to cross our legs at the ankles? Jacqueline, you’ve got to be more careful.”
I lowered my voice and turned around to make certain the younger children weren’t eavesdropping.
My tone was shocked and stern.
“Jacqueline, you don’t want people to see your England and your France, do you?”
In the company of my sisters, there was no mistaking me for anything but the oldest.
There was a kind of sick power inherent in my role as Oldest Sister, and I embraced my despotism. Whenever any of them said or did something that was the least bit foolish or ill advised, I would say, “At least I’m not mental, like some people.”
A NO TRESPASSING sign decorated my half of our shared bedroom; violators were charged a fee of one cent. When my sisters got old enough to retaliate verbally, they called me a battle-ax, and then transmogrified my name into Mad, Mad, Maddle-ax. As slurs went, it had a cleverness even I had to admire. But it did not stop me from retorting with a semi-nonsensical phrase I’d seen in some book or another: “Why, you insignificant piece of psychological ingenuity! How dare you insinuate that I should tolerate such a diabolical insult?”
At camp, my first reaction was one of guarded disappointment. Everything looked faded, like a party dress worn once too often— the grass, the main lodge, even the American flag hoisted with all due ceremony in the mornings. The empty cabins with their bare bunks and orange-crate nightstands appeared in desperate need of the giggles of girls. The screen doors had no springs, so of all the sounds that registered during that two-week stay, none was more insistent than bang, bang, bang.
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