Tenants who recently departed Ms. Winslow’s former house in Cape Wood discovered a small personal date book, hidden within a small alcove in the basement near the chimney. Apparently it had been untouched for twenty years. In the last pages of the book of personalized stationery, dated August 16, 1980, was what appeared to be a confessional. In the hand-written entry, Ms. Winslow stated that she would drive into the Maine waters that very next day. The sorrowful discovery of what may have been a suicide, contained within the date book, was immediately handed over to nearest surviving relatives.
Mom, I think.
The newspaper clipping feels like thin pastry in my fingers. My hand trembles, and I feel a rush of heat to my head, pressure behind my eyes.
I imagine the reporters when the book was found, running to phone booths like they do in movies, digging into files and family records like maggots. They may have even hounded Mom and Dad, wanted to interview our family or take pictures, anyone who knew Adeline Winslow. And meanwhile, I sat in my Cambridge apartment, in my own post-death stupor.
Suicide, I think. Why hasn’t Mom told me?
I remember Aunt Adeline’s face in the coffin: plumped and painted, surreal, like one of those rosy-cheeked queens from my fairy-tale book. But there was no sign of suicide—no tight-wrapped wrists or head wounds; this death had been neat and clean, an easy poison. And she was only twenty-seven years old.
There were many things I knew about death when I was seven. But there were things I didn’t understand then: all this regret, all the stuff between Mom and her sister—the unsaid apologies, unspoken emotions. Aunt Adeline’s death happened before I learned about guilt and regret, all those layers I would grow up and discover, layers that clouded and confused.
I always believed it was Aunt Adeline who was the stable sister, the responsible sister, the one who went to school and came back with a career, the one who didn’t get pregnant. That it was Mom who got screwed up and knocked up at fifteen and a half, who didn’t get her act together until long after her sister was dead. But maybe it had been Mom who was the smart, sound one—studying human psychology to better understand the instability her sister kept secret. To be better at keeping secrets herself.
Why didn’t she tell me?
When I first found out Aunt Adeline had drowned in her car, I imagined her death: trying to get out, scrambling for a door, a window—any window; holding her breath. The image destroyed my sweet memories of her; it pained me to remember her laughing and being happy, not knowing how her life would be, a pathetic creature. Now it pains me even more to know that she chose this ending for herself—to picture her scrambling to get out of a car she drove into the water on purpose. How sad it is that she had planned this, and then decided at the very last minute to stay alive—that her last-minute attempt at a swerve was to rectify a stupid mistake. In this new vision I have she is more passionate, more desperate than before, as she changes her mind about the importance of life. Why? she must have thought just before going in, Why am I doing this? What is so awful that I cannot live?
What did that date book say?
I wonder what day it was that Mom found out about it, if it was one of those recent days when I visited, one of those gray, velvety days within the past few weeks, when Mom’s normally marble face seemed more anguished somehow. On that day Mom must have relived what she had heard years before, that Aunt Adeline’s car had driven steadily down the pass across the water toward Mackerel Point, that the car had swerved back and forth, witnesses said, trying to gain control, then slid off the road through the brittle wooden rail, and tumbled down the steep incline of rocks, finally turning over into the water.
Mom, too, must have relived the tragedy. And she must have this date book. I can picture it, all warped and dusty in a box in the attic.
***
I feel angry words building as I step up the front walk of Mom and Dad’s, as Mom opens the front door. These aren’t the same words I rehearsed the whole way over here—to make sure I’m gentle and rational and open to whatever excuse she might give me. These are different words, words from my gut ready to explode from my mouth.
“Have you seen this?” I say, throwing the newspaper down onto the armchair by the window.
“What is it?” Mom pulls her dust mop out from her armpit, begins to brush the mantelpiece. She turns, peeks over at it on the chair, doesn’t bother to pick it up. “Why would I read the Maine newspaper?” She turns back to her mantel.
“The article, Mom. Look at the article.”
“What?”
“Mom, look at it!”
She turns around, her face pale, timid, then looks down at the paper. She picks it up, and her eyes suddenly widen and fix. I wonder if this really is the first time she has seen the article. “My God, they didn’t,” she says.
“They who?”
“Damn reporters. Anything for a story.” She throws the paper back down on the chair.
“Mom!” I move to stand in front of her. She tries to duck around me. “Mom, did you read it?”
“I saw enough.”
“You know what it is, right? The suicide?”
Mom closes her eyes, forcefully. “Yesss, Jenna.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She opens her eyes again. “Look, I just found out, too. It was just a few weeks ago when they called me.”
“Who—reporters?”
She chuckles, wipes her hair back from her forehead with her hand. “No, the police. I didn’t even know any reporters knew about this.”
“So you probably figured I would never know, too.”
“I would have told you eventually,” she says, her voice trembling. “I just didn’t want to bring it up, with Seth and all.”
I don’t jump on her lame answer. I’ll give Mom some latitude for at least not making up her usual textbook excuse, some psychoanalytical reason why a daughter of twenty-six should not know. I’ll grant her a little sympathy for again having to deal with this horrible death, and for having to look at it in a new light.
“Sorry,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?”
“Yes.”
Mom turns away, begins dusting again. “Jenna, it happened so long ago.”
“Yes, but—”
“Look,” she interrupts, “I’m not as surprised as you may think. You didn’t know her as well as I did.”
“No,” I say. “But I did know her.” I can’t believe how cold Mom sounds, how indifferent. Aunt Adeline deserves something more from her own sister, even after twenty years, even if there were bad feelings in the past. To mention this will be a mistake, though; I’m sure of it. “Anyway,” I say. “Can I see it?”
“What?” Mom turns around.
“The date book.”
She goes back to the wall, brushes the silky yellow mop over the brass candlesticks. “Oh, I had to throw it out,” she says. “It was mildewy and rotten, full of dust mites and God knows what else.”
I shudder.
Mom has done it again. She has displayed her apathy toward the meaningful, her concern and control of the absurd. I want to shake her, jiggle her brain so a nut will come loose and make her feel something. But a dispute will be pointless; Mom will win. The conversation will twist and deviate and finally slam into some unexpected barrier. And there will be some reason to let me know, once again, just how miserable I’ve made my mother’s life just for being born.
part three
a more horrible death
{renee
eight
Renee sits on the floor of the attic den, smells the orange spice tea still brewing at her side, hears the almost-spring wind against the eaves. Bill is in his workshop in the basement, clanking around; Elisabeth is just below in her bedroom, thumping the floor to a disco beat. Jenna must be back at home now, angry with her mot
her, stomping back and forth across the floor the way she used to in her room. Jenna’s stomping, her very movement before the pale bedroom wall, always reminded her of Adeline.
She can’t blame Jenna for being angry. Not just for the date book, but for many things. She knows she was cruel twenty years ago when they moved here—plucking a seven-year-old from everything she knew, relocating her like an old couch. She knew Jenna would hate her for a while; perhaps Bill would, too. Better now than later, Renee told them, because as years passed, it would be more difficult to leave. Get it over with, she was thinking; the pain will be over soon enough.
Bill disagreed with her. Why leave at all? he would ask day after day, and Renee would just give him that look, the one that means she is serious. All she has to do is look at him and he will stop asking. She feels guilty sometimes, having this kind of power over him.
She opens the trunk beneath the dormer window, sees the green and white afghan, the hand-embroidered handkerchief. Adeline was good at everything—sewing, knitting, cooking, and gardening, of course. There had even been a time when she’d been good with the men, until there weren’t any more. She must have one day decided to be alone the rest of her short life.
Inside the trunk are some of Jenna’s things, too—a finger-painting from first grade—her last year in Maine: the old house in pale yellow, the lime-green lawn, dots of pale purple for lilac bushes, the name JENNA in bright red across the blue and white sky. There is another drawing from years later—junior high, Renee thinks, of the same yellow house—this time a tiny house—nestled, almost buried, within a forest of gigantic green leaves.
She remembers the Jenna from high school, always attempting different groups and activities, never sticking with one. The appearance didn’t stick either; it was a new look every week. First, the brown hair shorn and dyed blonde, the triple piercing in the left ear; then the next year a head of permed curls in Bozo red, with renaissance clothes and heavy silver chains. The only thing that didn’t change was the box of paints and sketch pad under her arm as she walked up the road to the school bus.
But when Jenna began college she cleaned up. She grew her hair to a natural, shoulder-length brown, and dressed in neutral slacks and sweaters. And suddenly she looked just like Renee.
Then she began to do all the things Renee wished she had done at age nineteen—to go out and frolic, to be free. It was not until Seth came along and Jenna got pregnant that Renee could relate, when suddenly there was this familiar shadow. How awkward it felt to suddenly feel connected, and want to make up for all those missing years.
Talking to Jenna is more difficult now. When Renee tries, it comes out all wrong. Perhaps she’s speaking too much of her own suffering, of her unfinished teenage years. How does one prove how much they care, and show how much they’ve sacrificed, without sounding like a martyr?
Without telling every detail.
She thought that talking to a daughter would be easier. She thought they would have more in common, but instead they have separate experiences, different philosophies. Renee was insecure as a teenager—a follower, with no choice but to emulate Adeline, while Jenna is stronger than her mother somehow. And Renee knows how others see her: testy, heartless, incapable of emotion. She knows it especially when she hears people say Poor Adeline about her sister, poor Aunt Adeline.
It has always been this way.
How strange, to be thinking about her sister again. When the date book arrived it went away just as quickly; it was the best thing to do. Now she sees it again: the tiny sunflower logo, the name Adeline Winslow printed in red on every page. The hand-written words drive into the ocean. But that wasn’t all it said. On that single page of writing there were words not meant for just anyone to see.
At the bottom of the trunk are some of Renee’s own things—more things best kept hidden so she can forget, go on with her daily life. There are photographs—a young Renee and Adeline, dressed like twins in pea coats and fuzzy berets, each holding a brown paper lunch bag; then a young Bill with Jenna in his arms, sitting on a big rock in the yard; and finally Jeanette Winslow, the grandmother Jenna was too young to remember. In the background of each of the photos is the yellow house. Stacked along with the pictures are cards and letters, school concert programs, an invitation to Jenna’s first art exhibit. And something else forgotten over the years.
It is the one letter she kept from him, the last words he wrote to her before he left for good. She opens it, fingers trembling, heart racing in her ears, sees the words that affected her most on that day when she first read it.
It can’t ever happen again, not for a long time.
He never wrote again.
Renee thought she was safe from this memory, just like the memory of Adeline, of the old house. Why she kept this letter, she wonders; it must have been for some reason beyond her recollection. Some subconscious reason, she thinks now, the way she thinks about many other things. Recognizing the subconscious can give reason to so many things.
It may not help her this time.
She thought his memory was gone forever, ripped to shreds in her mind, incinerated with the rest of the garbage. Just like Adeline’s words, which could be distinguished in such a way. But every now and then she sees a tiny scrap of paper on the floor and thinks Adeline’s words have returned the way this has returned. These words may try to infect her, to sink in, and bring back all memories of that time.
jenna}
nine
It was eight o’clock in the morning when the phone call came in. “It’s the police,” Mom whispered to Dad, covering the receiver.
Mom’s eyebrows came together, sharply and suddenly, and her mouth opened and let out a gasp. She flopped against the wall and began to shake, and the phone slid from her ear to her neck, then chest, until she finally let it go. Dad ran over as the phone crashed against the counter and to the floor. Mom collapsed into the doorway and began to pound the floor with her fist. “No, no!” she cried, over and over.
Dad reached out to me, pulling me close to him. “It’s Aunt Adeline, honey. There was an accident...a car accident. Jenna...your aunt is dead.”
My body began to tremble, then shake hard, like there was a machine inside me, making it do this. I couldn’t stop shaking.
But I did not cry. I didn’t even know what I felt; it was a strange feeling I had inside, more of bewilderment than sadness. Aunt Adeline was just talking to me the other day. She couldn’t be dead.
Mom cried all night. I had never seen or heard her cry before, but on this night she wailed so loudly it came through my bedroom wall. I heard sobs and choking. It sounded so strange to me, so violent and uncontrollable, like something inside her was alive and trying to get out.
Still, I couldn’t cry. I was numb; at least that was what others were saying. Aunt Adeline’s neighbors came by and said it, and Dad’s relatives. All of them said the same thing, that they were numb: they didn’t know how to feel.
By the day of the funeral Mom was numb, too. She was quiet, perhaps so weak from crying that she couldn’t speak. Or maybe she just felt terrible about how she had treated her big sister.
***
Mom and Dad let me go to the funeral. It was an open-coffin ceremony because, as I heard Dad say, Aunt Adeline didn’t look too bad. He said an open coffin was a healthy way to deal with death. All I’d heard about death was that your body stopped working and you went somewhere else, to some place where it wasn’t so painful.
When I first saw Aunt Adeline I trembled again. I was afraid. I expected her body to move or sit up as I approached. Still, I knelt before her, the way everyone else did. The coffin was shiny and brown and had white satin inside that was folded tight like ribbon candy; it looked like a big brown Cadillac convertible. Aunt Adeline lay inside, only the top half of her body showing. Her skin looked orangey and dry like putty, and her cheeks seemed fatter than usual.
The tight-shut eyes appeared made up, unnatural. I leaned closer and saw stitches on her lids, black thread like her lashes, and thought of the Venus flytraps she had shown me in her greenhouse.
Suddenly I hated the open casket, the wake, because this tucked and painted body didn’t seem like her. Maybe everyone was pretending she was alive so they could forget the way she really looked when she died, so they could stick her in the ground with good memories.
With Mom and Dad I sat on the first-row pew of the church, listening to one of Aunt Adeline’s neighbors. “We remember her smile from just yesterday,” she said, and I thought it odd that I had never seen this woman before, or many of the other people there. I felt like I didn’t know who Aunt Adeline really was. The reverend delivering the sermon spoke loudly, and his voice echoed throughout the chapel. He said that Aunt Adeline had gone somewhere else, that she was in a safe, better place, in Heaven. I wondered if this was true. I looked at all the faces crying around me and wondered if they believed it. It didn’t feel like anyone there really believed she was in Heaven even though they kept saying it, over and over.
I looked up at Mom’s face and saw the tears just on the edge of her lower eyelids trying to come out. I remembered the last time Mom had spoken to her sister, how they’d had a terrible argument at the house. Mom had been so upset with Aunt Adeline that she didn’t want me going to visit anymore.
I wondered if she was thinking of this now, and finally I felt like crying.
On the drive home from the graveyard I asked Mom and Dad about the accident. I wanted to know more because I didn’t know what happened in a car accident.
“Those details,” Mom said, “are not for seven-year-old ears.”
I sighed and sat back into my seat. Dad looked at me in the rearview mirror. “It happened on the Mackerel Point,” he said.
The One True Ocean Page 5