“Switch seats with Delph,” Lady said. “You can rest your head on my lap.”
But, no, Vee also couldn’t bear to be touched or to touch. She hid her face in the seat cushions, tried to pretend she was already dead and thus could feel nothing.
The train chugged along. We let ourselves be silent. The handful of other passengers were silent as well, their backs to us.
Vee raised her head. She looked confused, a trace of spittle at the corner of her mouth.
“Did you fall asleep?” Lady asked.
“I don’t think so,” Vee said. She lay down again, and Lady and Delph could see that the drugs hadn’t let her go yet, that she’d succumbed to a deep if unnatural slumber, her mouth open, her lips wet with saliva.
“When you were little,” Lady said to Delph, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation, “you’d insist on doing whatever Vee and I did. I’d say, ‘But Delph, you hate scary movies,’ and still you’d carry on until Mom said, ‘Just take her with you already.’”
Delph knew which movie Lady was talking about. She saw herself seated between her big sisters in a dark theater, watching as a man discovers his beloved bride is a vampire, watching him murder her to save himself. For weeks after seeing this movie Delph had lain awake in her bed, unable to calm herself. People could be something other than what they pretended to be, what you thought they were. A sister could be a monster. A mother could want to kill you.
“My point is,” Lady said, “you’re not a baby anymore. You don’t have to do everything we do.”
“I don’t disagree with you,” Delph said. “I’m not doing anything because you two are. I’m doing what I want.”
“You were singing last night when you came in. You and Danny.”
It was true. “We were working on our harmonies.”
“Am I wrong? Did you have a good time yesterday?”
“I don’t know.” She said it automatically. But she did know. No, she did not have a good time. That wasn’t how she’d describe it. What she’d had was a confounding time. A problematic time. And possibly an illegal time, depending on New York’s statutes regarding sexual relations between first cousins.
“All right,” Delph said. “Here’s the thing. Well, here are two things. Thing number one: it turns out that Aunt Violet raised me for the first few months of my life.”
Lady’s eyes widened, then narrowed in rapid succession.
“So said Violet, anyway. And Danny remembers, so I assume it’s true. Mom and our quote unquote father gave me away. Then Mom decided she wanted me back. It sounds like for Danny it was like losing a puppy.”
“I am gobsmacked,” Lady said.
“Thing number two,” Delph said. “Last night? Or rather early this morning? Danny and I had soup.”
“Uh-huh. And?”
“No, no. Not soup. Soup.”
The same facial expression in reverse order: first the confused narrowed squint, then the wide-open goggle of comprehension.
“I wish I’d saved gobsmacked for this,” Lady said.
“We were both pretty drunk. It wasn’t spectacular. At least I didn’t think so. Although by now my expectations may be so out of whack that nothing would live up to them. But I think for a person like me the only reason you have the soup is for the grilled cheese sandwich afterward. You know, the holding and talking.”
“Nothing wrong with grilled cheese,” Lady said. She reached out, pushed Delph’s hair away from her eyes. “Delph,” she said. “This is exciting. Look what happens the minute you leave the house and do something on your own without us.”
“Yes. I have sex with my brother.” Delph paused. “The bartender asked me out too.”
“Really. Wow. Life begins at forty.”
“Not in our family, it doesn’t. Or never has before.”
“Delph,” said Lady. “Listen to me. You’ve always thought the family curse was what caused all of us to take our own lives. But now we’ve learned that only two members of the third generation killed themselves. Why wouldn’t that apply to our generation as well? Not all of us have to give in.”
Vee raised her head. “Violet’s not alive,” she said. “I wish you’d stop talking as if she were. I have the obituary in a shoe box.” She turned over again, burrowed back into her deep, unnatural sleep.
But a friable sleep. It cracked and shattered at the least little interference. “Oh, God,” Delph whispered, “do you think it’s spread to her brain?” and Vee popped up, said, “Oh, we’re on a train all right,” then lay back down and returned to her chemical dreams.
“Everyone’s crazy,” Delph said, “except you and me, and I’m not so sure about you.”
Lady brushed the joke aside. “If we’re going to rethink the pact,” she whispered, “we need to rethink it fast.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Delph said, whispering too. “I think you may be right, I do. I think the curse may never have had its eye on me. Looking back, I see now that it’s been going after Vee this entire time. She’s had such a star-crossed life, hasn’t she? I think I just couldn’t bear to admit it, that she alone would bear the brunt of the first generation’s sins, and I would get off scot-free.”
Her emotions had gotten the best of her: she was speaking in full voice. Heads turned to catch a glimpse of her. She recalibrated the volume of her voice, was once again whispering. “But I think if you and I decide we’re not going through with it, we should try to talk her out of it too.” Lady began to speak, but Delph held up a hand. “I know. I know we can’t save her life. I understand that. But she doesn’t have to die simply because she’s uncomfortable. She can go on a while longer. There are options. There are second opinions. There’s Sloan Kettering. There are experimental trials. And if we exhaust those, there’s comfort care. It was one thing for her to reject palliative chemo or hospice when she was asymptomatic. But now that she’s suffering, she may have an entirely different outlook. She may be hoping and praying that we talk her into changing her mind.”
“Delph,” Lady said. “Vee isn’t going to change her mind. And I’m not going to change my mind. That’s not what I meant when I said we should rethink the pact. I meant you. You’re the one who wants to be talked out of it.”
She felt tricked and trapped, and she denied it.
Lady wrapped her fingers around Delph’s arm, squeezed. There was an urgency to the gesture, but also, Delph thought, a hint of anger. “Yes,” she said. “I think you do. I can see it in your eyes.”
“I’ve never believed anyone could really see anything in anyone’s eyes except for their own reflections.”
“What if Eddie is still twenty-six?” Vee muttered. “That’s the part that concerns me.”
“Listen,” Lady said. “This is a situation that requires no more thinking. We just have to act. You get off at the next station. You buy a one-way ticket right back to Pinelawn. When you get there, you phone Danny and have him pick you up. You go home with him, and you never look back.”
“But the two of you—”
“After a few days you’ll be so wiped out from caring for Violet, plus all the soup you’ll be having, you won’t have the energy to think about us.”
“I would never not think about you.”
“You would, though. You’d move on.”
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
“You would. I think you know that you would.”
“Even if I did, how would I support myself?”
Lady laughed. “Now that’s a question only someone who isn’t ready to die would ask. I don’t know, Delph. You’d work with Danny. You’d learn how to paint mandolins and ukuleles. And you’d still have two sisters. You’d chat on the phone with Sharon and Margo.”
“Do you know what I think is funny?” Delph said. “Aunt Violet was so determined not to name her daughters for flowers, and then she names the first one Sharon. As in rose of Sharon. And Margo sounds a lot like marigold.”
&
nbsp; “Think about it,” Lady said. “Maybe it’s not too late for you to have a child.”
“A child? You want me to have a child with my elderly eggs and first cousin?”
“Have it with the bartender, then. Go to a sperm bank. Adopt. Kidnap. Just stop splitting hairs. You know what I’m saying.”
Delph looked past her and out the window across the aisle. The train had already carried us from Long Island to Queens. It stopped at Floral Park.
“Delph,” Lady said. “Go. Get off the train.”
She doesn’t get off at Floral Park. Nor does she get off at the next station or the next, though she can feel Lady tensing, hoping, each time the train stops. She looks past Lady again, out the window across the aisle. Old cars. A man in a trench coat and fedora. Clothes hanging on a line stretched diagonally from one window to another across an alley. It makes her think of photos from the turn of the century. She would let herself pretend the train has jumped backward through time if most of the items on the line weren’t jeans and vibrantly colored bikini bottoms.
“Cemetery,” Vee says, as if they’re playing a game: I spy with my little eye Cavalry.
Delph has a joke:
Q: Why has every part of this trip begun and ended with a cemetery?
A: To get to the other side.
She doesn’t share the joke, though. Instead she says, “I told him about the horizontal light. He didn’t know what I meant. Intellectually he did, I think. But not in the way we understand it.”
“Lucky him.”
“He just listened. He was sympathetic and nonjudgmental.”
“That’s good.”
“Is it? If someone you care about tells you they are constantly thinking about ending it all, shouldn’t you be unsympathetic and very judgmental?”
“What are you saying?” Lady asks. “Do you want me to be unsympathetic to you? Do you want me to throw you off the train at the next station? Do you want me to say, no, nuh-uh, this time you’re not coming to the movies with Vee and me?”
Vee rolls to her side, raises herself. Her face is yellow. The iron gates and black graves are gone. We’ve been plunged into the East River tunnel. “This trip was a terrible mistake,” she says, “but there’s no getting off now.” She’s right, of course. The next station is home.
Vee is right: there’s no more time, not on this leg of the journey. But Vee is wrong too. Because there’s always more time. Isn’t that what Einstein’s been trying to tell us? You just have to accept that you can’t always keep going forward. You have to accept that you don’t always end up where you believed you were going.
We get off at Penn Station, climb the dark sooty stairs to the terminal. Lady takes Vee’s arm. “Let’s cab home,” Lady says. “You’ll be more comfortable”
“No.” Vee’s teeth are clenched. “Subway’s faster. Let’s do faster.”
“Or,” Lady says, “we could go to an emergency room and get you some serious pain meds.”
“Home,” Vee says. “Now. Please.”
Lady and Delph meet each other’s eyes, but only for the swiftest moment. Lady turns, leads Vee toward the uptown IRT. She doesn’t turn back.
Delph, for once, is the more sentimental. She watches Lady and Vee hurry off, passing the wall where there once was a line of pay phones and a kiosk that sold giant lollipops with faces made of hard candy.
Lady and Vee turn a corner and are gone.
At the information booth Delph inquires about the next train to Pinelawn.
“Are you all right?” the woman behind the window asks.
“Yes,” Delph says. She’s aware that tears are falling down her cheeks so hard and fast, there’s no blinking them away. Even wiping them away with her hands is useless. She laughs. “Well, no,” she says. “Obviously not.” She’s embarrassed, of course. “I’m sorry,” she says. “My sister died today.” She holds on to the small lip by the window, lowers her head.
The woman’s hand seems to rise of its own volition. It presses against her throat. “My God,” she says. “I’m so sorry.” She looks over Delph’s head, at the impatient travelers on line behind her. “You stand there as long as you need to,” she says loudly. “No one’s going to rush you away.”
The woman is middle-aged. She is beautiful. You can tell that she cares about beauty. Her hair has been straightened by some modern technique, her eyebrows threaded into perfect chevrons. She is of a Middle Eastern culture. She is of America. Delph feels a piercing envy, the wish to be someone else.
“Pinelawn,” the woman repeats, and then: “Your sister must be looking out for you, dear. The last train going there’s just arrived.” She hands over a wad of tissues along with a schedule on which she’s written the track number. “Head there directly, and you’ll get yourself a seat facing the right direction.”
CHAPTER 13
How do three sisters write a single suicide note?
By sublimating the egos of the individuals to the needs of the group. By forbidding arias and requiring the entire opera be performed by the chorus. By walking in lockstep, as regimented as an army. By turning off spotlights, even if that means sitting in the dark.
When they do this, when three women spend months presenting themselves as one, they can quickly get used to it. After you say “we” long enough, it becomes uncomfortable to switch back to “I.” Saying “I” feels and sounds strange. It feels alien and alienating, egoism run amok, a betrayal. There is no I in team, as they say.
But the truth is, I should have been saying “I” for some time now. We—the three of us together—wrote our life stories and the stories of our ancestors with emphasis on Lenz and Iris Alter. But only I wrote of this summer. Only I wrote of the blustery weekend when Violet Smoke blew into our lives. Only I—Delph, Julie, whoever I am—have been writing today. I should have been more honest about that. But I’m confessing now: I am on my own.
After I bought my train ticket back to Long Island, I rushed to the platform fully intending to board and return to the Smoke House. But as I neared the open entrance and caught sight of the stairs leading to the underground tracks, I became aware of the horizontal light. It had seeped into the windowless depot from no discernible source. It was perhaps more distinct than usual. It wasn’t harsh like electric light or aglare like sunshine. It gave off no heat. It was the color of the underside of the last cumulus cloud in the sky just before storm clouds blow in, and for the first time it was right upon me, close enough so I could step into it, which I did. It was like being inside the white fog we’d seen from our apartment window after the hurricane. I stood there, enveloped. I held up my hand. It was silver now too.
Then I stepped back out of it. I turned my back to it and changed my course. I tossed the tissues and schedule that I still held in my hand into the first trash bin I came to. As I passed the information booth, I kept my head down lest the beautiful woman notice me and call out, “You’re going the wrong way!”
I went upstairs to the Amtrak waiting room, much newer, much nicer. Here there were not only windows but huge windows, and through them, at its peculiar angle, the horizontal light seeped into the hall. I sat a short distance away from it, on a polished wooden bench. I watched other people pass into and out of the silver. I resented them, the ease with which they passed through.
I considered what awaited me on Long Island—that ready-made family with everyone playing multiple roles: brother and cousin and lover, aunt and mother and mother-in-law—and I knew it was not what I wanted. As for what awaited me at the apartment: I didn’t want that either. It occurred to me that I was homeless.
After a while the requirements of the body took over: I was hungry, and my eyes burned with the need to sleep. I left Penn Station. I walked downtown. On a Sunday in the summer this part of New York feels like a no-man’s-land. It isn’t Chelsea, isn’t Gramercy, isn’t quite Murray Hill. It’s just the tail end of Herald Square, the stores and businesses dark. The only people I saw were silhouettes inside
cabs. I stopped at a corner store, bought a premade sandwich and a bottle of wine. Because I’d acquired the habit of writing, I bought a composition notebook and a Bic pen.
I found a hotel. It wasn’t quite a fleabag, but it was dreary and cheap in every way but for the nightly rate. I didn’t care about the price, though. I offered my credit card and, at my request, they gave me their best room. It had a king-size bed and a small kitchenette along one wall. I washed my face in the small bathroom with liquid soap from a wall dispenser. I tried not to look at myself in the mirror. I sat on the bed and ate the sandwich, using one of the scratchy white hand towels as a napkin. I used the plastic cup in the bathroom for the wine. This is how I will live from now on, I thought, alone in a single room, paying only haphazard attention to my well-being. I lay down and fell asleep in my clothes.
When I woke up, I was lying diagonally across the mattress. The red blare of the bedside clock said 8:00 p.m. Only eight. I picked up the phone. I put down the phone. I began to write. I wrote: “In July, John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane went down, and we had our usual arguments.” We. That’s what I wrote.
I wrote through the night. I didn’t turn on the TV. I didn’t open the window. I finished the wine. I was hungry again. I would have liked more to drink. I thought about going downstairs to the bodega. Instead I plowed on.
Check-out time was 11:00 a.m., and that’s when I left, as exhausted as when I arrived. It was raining hard; there was no light at all, not even from the calcite crystals that usually sparkle in city sidewalks. And yet, even without the light, I knew I’d made a decision. I’d changed my mind again. I could not live this way. I took the IRT home.
As soon as I opened the front door, I could tell my sisters weren’t in the apartment. I closed the door, fastened the locks, the chain, and I stopped to listen and heard no human sounds. Even when I found Lady and Vee, not in Vee’s bed, but in our mother’s, I didn’t revise my initial impression. My sisters weren’t here.
A Reunion Of Ghosts: A Novel Page 32