Every so often, entirely by chance, we found a bargain that looked nice. Transformative, even. Not that it transformed me, but that I imagined it changing the boys in school, who would see me, in my new outfit, as a different person. A girl.
In the cramped changing cubicles, I twirled around for my mother. I knew what would please her—practical, subtle, unsexy. And I wanted to please her more than I cared about looking pretty. Especially when nothing looked pretty. I might as well listen to her. Margaret said she didn’t understand the unflattering outfits I bought with Mom on these trips. How odd that Mom’s thrifty inner Puritan should choose to emerge at the mall.
Now, on the drive home from Frank’s, Mom said, “Do you need anything? New sandals?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”
“The buying cure,” my mother said. “That’s what my mother used to call shopping. You get the joke, right, Nico? The talking cure is what they used to call psychoanalysis.”
“I get it now,” I said. “Ha ha.”
“After my father died,” said Mom, “my mother went out and bought an expensive mink coat. She wore it twice, then put it in mothballs and never wore it again. Your grandma just wasn’t a mink coat kind of girl.”
I hated it when my mother talked about her parents. It depressed me that she still missed them. It was worse now, because it made me realize that missing someone could last an entire lifetime.
My mother said, “What about some new summer stuff?” Shopping was about the future. What future would I shop for? Where would I wear what I bought, and why would it matter?
“I don’t need anything,” I said.
My mother said, “Let’s buy something to go with your cute new haircut.”
“No,” I said.
“No, thank you,” said my mother.
“No,” I said. “Bellissima, okay?”
We didn’t speak the whole way home.
As we pulled into the driveway, my mother said, “I can’t stop thinking about that last argument I had with your sister.”
I said, “She doesn’t care any more, so why should you?” It took me a while to recognize myself in the passenger-side mirror. What a terrible person I was to be so angry about a haircut.
Dad was in the kitchen, reading the paper, and when he glanced up, I understood that I looked even worse than I’d thought.
Dad said, “God, Nico. Sorry. For a second you looked like Margaret.”
“Mom?” I said. “Is that why you acted so weird in Frank’s salon?”
“Weird how?” my mother murmured as she moved toward the fridge. “I wasn’t aware of acting weird. These strawberries are all furry.”
I went to the bathroom mirror. In fact, I didn’t look like myself, or like Margaret, or like the male version of me. I looked like Jean Seberg in Joan of Arc, lit so that the heavenly radiance shone on her upturned forehead even as her cheeks were shadowed by the silhouettes of the flames dancing up to kill her.
WE’D LOVED THE BOOKSTORE, MARGARET AND I. IT WAS OUR OWN private kingdom, which the two indulged princesses could plunder and pillage at will, as long as we read, or promised to read, whatever we took home. I’d loved Goldengrove even before I could read, when the glossy jackets seemed to call out to me, vying for my attention.
Now I loved it in a different way—superior, protective, literally above it all on the platform behind the counter from which I could survey my domain and gaze out the front window. I liked spying on the customers, catching them unawares at that undefended moment of losing themselves in a book. Or I’d watch people walk in and try to guess what they’d buy. Surprise: the ones with dirt on their knees headed straight for the gardening section. I liked the kids looking for information about brand-new pets, and the trembly, hopeful women newly interested in decoupage or sewing nylon-stocking dolls. Sometimes there were surprises: macho road-crew guys seeking advice on how to make their relationships work, one geeky middle-schooler with a passion for Greek tragedy and fat nineteenth-century novels.
I was glad that none of my friends, or Margaret’s friends, came in. Once I thought I saw Aaron pass on the opposite side of the street. The boy, if it was Aaron, glanced my way and kept going. I wanted to run after him, but I didn’t know what to say. All you had to do, whispered the staircase spirit, was say hello and ask how he was.
Dad went over the obvious: where each subject was shelved. He taught me how to work the cash register, which for him was the equivalent of flying a jumbo jet. After I’d mastered the hard parts, I was on my own. My father hid in his office. I’d hear him typing away. One slow day I counted an average of four customers an hour, of which an average of three looked crushed at finding me instead of Dad, and of which an average of zero needed help. So all I had to do was take their money and ask if there was anything else they needed.
Or that’s how it should have worked. Except that an average of two out of ten felt they had to talk to me about death and mourning and loss.
Strangers knew all about me. They’d ask how I was doing, and I couldn’t just say fine. So I’d shrug, and after a silence they’d say something like, “I know. It’s hard.” And bang, they were off and running, telling me about grief and its life span, its half-life and its resilience, the ebb and flow, the sneak attacks, the unpredictable setbacks. They felt they had to let me know that grief lasted forever, and yet they wanted to promise me that I would outlive it. It was a kind of pep talk, I knew, but it went deeper than that. People wanted to believe that their suffering had a purpose, if only so that they could offer me the distilled wisdom of their experience.
Women told me how lovely I looked. Or they’d say I’d gotten thinner. The grief diet, they said, as if everyone knew that death was nature’s magic weight-loss plan. So many of them said the same things that I might have thought that there was common ground, if I hadn’t known that I was alone on an iceberg split off from a glacier.
I sensed that the customers were looking at me but seeing themselves —their former selves—right after a loved one died. They’d tell me their intimate stories in an urgent, confiding tone. When they wept, I cried, too, and for a moment I almost believed that my iceberg might have room for another person. For that moment, it was helpful to see that the bereaved were not only walking and talking but laughing and yelling at their kids.
People gave me useless advice. Was I getting enough exercise? Did I play tennis? Hike? Swim? They got as far as swimming, then remembered how Margaret died. A surprising number told me not to make any important decisions for a year. At least a year. They were forgetting that I was thirteen. What life-changing choices did they think my parents would let me make? I couldn’t decide what T-shirt to wear, what breakfast cereal to pretend to eat, what route to take when I biked from my house to the bookstore. I couldn’t do or say anything without anguish and regret.
One afternoon, a woman came in. I knew I’d met her somewhere. At first she didn’t notice me. She seemed to be on a mission. I watched her guiltily scanning the shelves, like someone searching for a book about sex or some intimate health problem. Red hair, jumpy. Roughened, papery skin. She looked like an older version of Aaron’s mother. Then I realized that was who she was.
I willed her not to buy anything, but it didn’t work. The book she set on the counter was called Ordinary Grief: Helping a Loved One Survive Loss. I looked at the title, then at her. Finally she saw me.
“Nico, sweetheart,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you. You look so grown up.”
“Thanks,” I said. When had I become “sweetheart”? I’d only met her twice. The first time was after a school Christmas concert. Margaret and Aaron introduced the parents, and then stood back and watched them squirm. Everyone knew the score. Aaron and Margaret were going out, my parents didn’t approve, Aaron’s parents weren’t pleased by their disapproval. It took about a minute to run out of conversation, and then we all stood around scuffing our feet on the auditorium carpet.
Th
e second time was after the Senior Show, when the tide of Aaron and Margaret’s triumph practically swept both families into each other’s arms. Celebrity leveled the playing field. They were the parents of stars! They still didn’t have much to say, but they seemed leisurely and calm, like sunbathers basking in the light of their children’s success. Were Aaron’s parents at the funeral? I thought so. I couldn’t recall. Their faces swam up and sank back into the black pool of that rainy day.
Aaron’s mom seemed to be deciding whether or not to hug me. Don’t, I telegraphed. Please don’t.
“How are you, Nico?” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess. How’s Aaron?”
Aaron’s mother eyed the book and let it answer for her.
“Not great,” she said. “It’s been hard.”
“I know,” I said.
“I’m sure you do,” she said.
“Say hi to him for me,” I said. “Tell him to stop by the store and say hi.”
“I will,” she said.
“Really!” I said, startling myself. “I’d really like to see him.”
“I will,” she repeated. “Take care of yourself, dear.” On her way out, she turned and gave me a thin, heartfelt smile. The staircase spirit mimicked, I’d really like to see him.
One afternoon, my former fourth-grade teacher walked into the bookstore.
“How are you, Nico?” she said.
I said, “Mrs. Akins! How are you?”
“Retired.” She smiled apologetically.
I said, “You look the same.”
She held out her arms, and I let myself be hugged, though it meant climbing down from behind the counter. She squeezed me until her amber beads scooped painful dents in my chest.
Kids used to make fun of her, because in the midst of a lesson she’d suddenly clap her hands and say, “Now it’s time for play!” Then we’d fold origami cranes for world peace or make torn-paper collages. Margaret told me that Mrs. Akins used to teach her classes that the origami was in remembrance of the children who were killed or had their faces melted off when we dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. But the school made her stop teaching that; they said it upset the students. After that Mrs. Akins talked to us about tolerance and understanding. Some kids had trouble folding the cranes. But I felt as if the bird was already there, nesting inside the paper, waiting to be set free.
“It’s so hard,” Mrs. Akins said now. “When my mother died . . . you know, I think maybe you were in my class. All I remember is throwing up every day before work.”
I’d always liked Mrs. Akins, though to me she was just another teacher doll that wound itself up when school began and ran down at three. I vaguely remembered she used to be Miss Something Else. We’d made her Happy Wedding cards, and when she’d returned after her brief honeymoon, the class went wild from the embarrassment of thinking she might have had sex. I’d never imagined her having a mother, let alone one who could die. I’d never dreamed she could have been grieving even as she’d ordered us to play.
Pressing me to her pillowy chest, Mrs. Akins wept, and so did I. I knew she was crying about her mother and not about Margaret, or maybe a little about Margaret, but still, we were crying about the same thing.
At last Mrs. Akins released me and, fixing me with her glittery eyes, said, “There’s no reason you should believe me, Nico. But trust me when I say that your sister is looking out for you. I don’t know where they go, but wherever it is, they can watch us. And they can intercede. Right now, even as we speak, your sister is finding a way to help you feel less lonely. Or maybe someone to help you. Right now—”
My father emerged from his office, blinking as if he’d been writing in the dark.
“Dad, you remember Mrs. Akins?” I said.
“Of course!” Obviously, he didn’t.
“My fourth-grade teacher,” I said. “Remember we all made those origami birds?”
My father said, “Nice to see you, Mrs.—”
“Akins,” I said.
“Mrs. Akins,” said Dad.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Akins said.
“Thank you,” said my father. “Did Nico help you find what you were looking for?”
“To be honest,” said Mrs. Akins, “I just stopped in to say hello. My book club is still deciding. . . .”
“Come back any time,” my father said.
“I will,” she said. But I didn’t believe her. I would have done anything to make her stay, to hear more of what she knew— anything but ask her, with my father watching.
Then she was gone, and in the tinkle of the doorbell, I heard the staircase spirit giggling over everything I should have asked in those few precious moments before my father scared away the messenger from my sister.
Six
IT WAS LIKE BEING UNDER A CURSE TO SPEND ALL THOSE HOURS IN Goldengrove and not be able to read. Like being in prison, unable to escape into a book. When I did read, I was only trawling for scraps of information that I found and then wondered why I’d wanted to know them.
I should have been rereading the Narnia stories I’d loved as a kid who longed to enter another dimension through a wardrobe or a snow globe. I should have stuck with the books on botany or marine biology, the ones that described how all of history and world culture had converged to produce the pepper in your shaker.
But the only books that attracted me now were the last ones I should have gone near. I pored over books about the heart. Not as in heartbreak or heartthrob or sweetheart, but as in heart attack, heart disease. As in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. As in long QT syndrome. As in congenital coronary artery abnormalities. Every sentence confirmed my worst fears. The effect was so instant and physical, I’d have to go to the bathroom, but then I’d return to where I’d left off.
Every expert whose kindly face and spotless white coat graced a jacket flap regretted to inform me that these problems were genetic. Fortunately, the conditions were rare. Unfortunately, I was doomed. I read about the symptoms I already had, the dull ache over my breastbone, the grinding in my chest, and new ones—dizziness, palpitations—I developed as I read them. I read greedily, compulsively, and with a shame that, when a customer walked in, made me hide the medical books inside picture books on African lions and New England barns.
I’d read until I had to sit on the floor until the store stopped spinning. Then I’d scoot from the health section to the death-and-dying shelf.
I started with books that promised to help you recover from grief, books whose authors, nearly all female, looked even kindlier and more sympathetic than the cardiologists. Their motherly head shots were meant to persuade me that they knew what I was feeling and wanted me to feel better. They hoped that it might comfort me to read about the personal tragedies—a loved one’s illness or death—that had made them want to help me. They’d gone to graduate school, they had practices, gave lectures, traveled the world. Every day they dealt with people suffering just like me. They urged me to reach out, talk to others in my situation. They illustrated their anecdotes with pie charts and graphs. There were workbook pages for me to jot down my thoughts, tests on which I got zero. What if I couldn’t think of one activity I enjoyed? What if I couldn’t find one thoughtful favor to do for someone else? The books advised me not to blame myself if I couldn’t get with their programs, but they didn’t offer alternate ones, which only made me feel more alone.
I paged through the book Aaron’s mother had bought: Ordinary Grief: Helping a Loved One Survive Loss. I skimmed until the writer, a Dr. Marion Staley, PhD, described bringing home a new kitten that refused to crawl out from the sofa. She suggested that I think of the grieving relative as that poor, confused kitty. That was when I shut the book and put it back on the shelf.
I began to wonder if I’d inherited something else from my father. The only books that kept my attention were a little like the one he was writing. Not end-of-the-world books, exactly, but books that told you what people in other eras and societies ima
gined happened to you after death. I read The Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and though I skipped a lot, I understood the basics. The dead passed through realms and kingdoms, worlds of dark and light, as they shed their memories and slowly let go of their love for the living. I imagined Margaret moving from place to place, each realm more hushed and peaceful and farther away from us.
My days fell into a sort of pattern—a holding pattern, I knew. But at least it was holding.
At noon, my father went into Goldengrove to talk business with Elaine before she had to go get Tycho. I left home at around the same time and biked into town and met Dad for lunch at the Nibble Corner.
The bike ride was my favorite part of the day: the gentle, curving, slow descent through the fragrant misty woods, then a dash across two meadows—one golden, one green—and by then I was on Main Street. I loved the clear air, the sun on my forehead, the landscape streaming past. My bike was a vintage dark red Schwinn that Margaret gave me when she got her driver’s license. It was a part of me when I rode it, and I loved it the way cowboys in old movies loved their horses.
Every day, my father and I ordered grilled Swiss on rye with tomato. The first time, our waitress—Hi! I’m Valerie!—made cow eyes at Dad and said she’d been in Margaret’s class and she was sorry for our loss. But pretty soon she’d just say, “The usual?” and Dad and I would nod. That was the advantage of always eating the same lunch. We didn’t have to talk to Valerie. I didn’t have to decide.
As we polished off the Nibble Corner’s buttery, warm, melted cheese, my father and I concentrated on our sandwiches as if we were teasing the flesh from some lethally bony fish. I chewed slowly and without stopping, to keep my face from going slack and collapsing like a pudding. For my parents’ sake, I was trying to act remotely sane. And in a way, I was. I could get through an hour or so without thinking about my sister. Then a wave of sorrow would crash into me and knock me flat.
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