Jonathan and I had helped each other emerge into what we could barely admit we were: a thin energetic man, and a seriously ambitious woman. The pudgy Hansel and the vague Gretel fell from us like carapaces. Polly had led me astray with her axiom that people never change. They do, all the time. Intently we both applied to graduate schools in cities half a continent away from each other, and when we were both accepted we had to face the fact that we were going, literally, our separate ways. We didn’t recognize each other, or at least I did not recognize Jonathan, and I barely recognized me. The crumbs we had dropped on our journey were unnecessary. We weren’t going back.
Little Ruthie the attendants called my grandmother in the nursing home when they braided her hair and tied little ribbons around it. She was their pet. Hard of hearing all her life, she turned stone deaf in the home, and then blind, too. When I would visit, she gripped my hand as if she knew me by vibration. Sweet tempered, she let attendants prop her in a wheelchair in a pink housecoat Polly provided, while at the opposite end of the same nursing home in another wheelchair sat my grandfather, tears continually streaming as he gave my mother imaginary sets of orders for stock at La Grange Garage. Meanwhile, Jonathan and I were drawing up separation papers, and I was waiting to hear if I’d gotten into graduate school at Johns Hopkins. When Grandpa Gillie died, Polly instructed me not to bother to come to the funeral, and I obeyed. “Don’t come,” Polly said swiftly and clearly. This death belongs to me, she seemed to say. Just after Gillie died, Aunt Roberta was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She, too, was dead within months. “You don’t have to come here, Mols,” Polly said, warding me off with the fierce flatness of her voice. Ragged and fearful, I stayed where I was.
But when I heard her “Don’t bother!” on the phone after she told me my grandmother had died, I disobeyed. Ruth had belonged to me, too. Gradually I had tucked benevolent pieces of her inside me, like drying flowers inside the leaves of books, forgetting them until they fell out in my hand as I turned a page. Curiously I was not sad or lonely at her death, because she had taken the time to cut herself into pieces and tuck them here and there in the continuance of my life. Leaving the Baltimore rowhouse apartment I’d recently moved into, I climbed in my car and drove furiously north to the funeral, getting there in time to read a poem and greet Ruth’s friends, most of them my mother’s age, daughters of the quilters and embroiderers and gardeners and Bible readers who were her pals.
Before I could think or feel too much, I was driving back to Baltimore to catch up on my first semester. The student I called to get the lowdown on the graduate seminars I missed was Sean, the lanky, opinioned Irish American poet I sat next to in class. He smelled of apples and wool. I’d watched his long, spidery fingers pass a fountain pen over his notebook to produce the curliqued script the priests taught him. More and more I desired to be that paper the long hands caressed in their urge to produce meaning. Perhaps I could be what he meant. Ridiculous. Sean Byrne was far too young—twenty-two years old, the age of the students I had counseled in the job I left to come to graduate school.
He met me at Helen’s, a Fell’s Point bar, where we were served by the bartender, Helen herself, who, I thought, looked like Lilian Hellman. He sat his high, round rear end on the leather stool and spoke to me in his cultivated bit of a burr, though he’d grown up in Wisconsin. He was wonderfully fake, as full of artifice as his poems which, he told me, surely would be ranked with Yeats. With a wicked memory for detail, Sean recounted the seminars over a coke. He didn’t drink. Nothing, he’d decided, would come between him and his page, certainly not the Irish virus. When he took a break in the evenings from writing—and every poet should, he felt—he did it according to his rules: one coke, never dessert, nondairy vegetarian dinner. And he had other rules: no cars, they clutter up your life with going places. No smoking. I wondered if one of the rules was no sex, as I sat drinking a Virgin Irish Coffee. God, it was cold in there. A Chesapeake chill had settled on the city. My mind wandered to Ruth in her best blue dress in her coffin, cold, and Jonathan out in Chicago in the public policy program he’d decided to attend, the wind cold on him, then the damp chill of Baltimore. I must be getting sick. I shivered.
“Cold?” Sean asked.
“No, I’m fine.”
Far away in freezing Buffalo, Polly in her thin hospital smock wrote doctors’ orders. I thought of her bare feet in her loafers long ago….And Gail had suddenly taken to writing one- or two-word notes with no return address on postcards of snowy Catskill outposts like Bearsville and Woodstock—Hi! surrounded by a heart, or Hi Molly!, nothing else. Ted, too, had sent a letter that made me shiver, though the postmark was Florida. He’d gotten married to a wonderful woman, he said. But another letter a few weeks later said it didn’t work out. I coldly determined not to answer either of them.
I rubbed my hands up and down my shoulders at Helen’s bar, and spent more of my fellowship money on another Virgin Irish Coffee.
“I wish I had my sweater,” I said, then felt what seemed like every cell in my body collapse when Sean threw his long arm around me, as if I were his favorite Irish setter. I nearly whimpered, dog-like, as I looked up from my notes.
—
Brilliant cloth rolls off a bolt…only to reach patches so threadbare that the bolt can’t be used. That’s how my life was unrolling, I thought, in patches—some whole, some worn right through. Make something out of the bright swathes, I thought. Let the thin spots roll past. Let me make a piece of my life right here, starting in this bar with a man who orders a coke instead of a beer. Could a life be made from piecework, like my grandmother’s coverlets Polly had given away? First she had cleared out the store at La Grange, selling off car parts and groceries, then she scourged the house, dragging to the dump drawersful of old dress patterns and piles of fabric triangles, squares, and tiny octagons Ruth had cut for quilt reserves.
Polly had a horror of redheads like Sean, even though her favorite grandmother had flaming red hair, domesticated in braids. “I checked your head daily, Molly, to see if you’d come out a redhead. Thank God you didn’t!” Bringing a redhead into the house was like opening an umbrella indoors. “We’re the black Irish, Molly,” she said to me always, “fair skin and dark hair, the darker the better. I wish my hair was so black it was blue, like Elizabeth Taylor’s.”
I had light brown hair—where did that fit in? I wondered as I drove my flame-headed boyfriend of one month, three shopping bags of Christmas ornaments, and a fresh turkey up from Baltimore through the icy Poconos, along the frosted Susquehanna, then, north and west through the hills, past the vineyards, into the apple and dairy country of La Grange, where black and white cows mooed in the snowfields and fruit tree branches were delicately inscribed with snow. Sean no longer objected to cars, as long as they belonged to other people. In the trunk we carted a Christmas tree, a long-needled pine so conical in shape, so plump at the bottom and sides, so slender at the tip top that it could be situated at any angle in any room and decorated with the hammered tin angel ornament I found for its crown. The windows of the house at La Grange Garage were already steamy with interior heat as we drove up in the dusk and began to unpack the car.
“We’re going to make a wonderful Christmas!” I announced to Polly. “This is Sean!” Polly blanched at the red hair sneaking out from the tweed poet’s cap he affected. “And Gail and her boyfriend, Ed, are coming tomorrow, and Howie, too.” I had called them several times, coordinating arrangements. We were going to have a real Christmas, us, the next generation, at La Grange.
“I’m not going out into that snow and help you unload, kids,” my mother announced. “I’ll just hold the door.” She was wearing a pair of sweatpants and one of my dead grandfather’s flannel shirts. Behind her, the dining room looked beautiful, the newly refinished sideboard and china cabinet gleaming. But bare. There were no poinsettias or Christmas cactus.
“Christmas city,” Polly said dryly as the bags of ornaments and holiday flotsam c
ame by. The Christmas ornaments were part of my booty from the divorce, as was the temperamental car I was driving. Sean lankily, sexily, innocently introduced himself to my mother and handed her the fancy dates and figs and apricots I bought for him to give her. “Well, thank you,” she said. “You know I haven’t got any money and I said no presents. I haven’t got any presents for you kids.”
For years she had been declaring no presents. And for years she had not bought a single one. She meant it. She wasn’t giving a goddamned thing to anybody, and didn’t want a goddamned thing from anybody. But I couldn’t believe it. Maybe she had gotten me a little something. I was thirty-one years old, but I craved a gift from my mother as if I were ten. Just as Polly saw me with thick black hair when my head was covered in fine fieldmouse down, I could not accept that she wanted no part of birthdays and holidays. She sent both Gail and me a card. That was all, and all, she said, we could ever expect. She was husbandless, motherless, fatherless, sisterless, dollarless, and she intended to be holidayless, too, whether I wanted to make Christmas or not.
Of course I had pulled out my credit card and gotten presents for everyone, including my sister, who was on welfare, and the mysterious Ed, and my cousin Howie, Aunt Roberta’s surviving son, who was probably more solvent than any of us but was so paralyzed with indecision he couldn’t decide what to get for himself let alone for anyone else. I had bought a braided rug for my mother, and an electric broom to clean it with. It wasn’t a personal present; it was really for all of us, something to put a little warmth under our feet.
Warmth in our hearts was an entirely different matter. Polly still had two days left to go out and buy something, I thought—maybe she would relent and get me a private little gift she could press into my palm when no one was looking.
“I see those packages, Molly-ooch,” she said, using an old nickname for me, “and I don’t have any packages for anybody. That’s it.”
By this time Sean had leaned the Christmas tree against the wall in the tiny living room and had begun looking around the gerrymandered house that connected to the garage. Gillie had built the place with just a dirt foundation and no running water. I showed Sean where the pump was, and how he could pump water to fill a bucket to flush the toilet, and how he could wash in the morning—in the narrow kitchen which led to the garage. The toilet had been fairly recent, lodged in an old closet. But everything that got washed—bodies, dishes, laundry—had to get scrubbed in tubs in the kitchen. Christmas dinner, a production under any circumstances, would have a nineteenth-century cast to it because of the slop bucket continually being emptied and the water continually being pumped. The sheer physical outlay of it was housework raised to a power of three, like doing dishes and pressing weights in between loads. Little Ruthie had had great biceps.
Electricity we did have: a bare bulb operated by a long string hung in each room, though the living room had outlets and lamps. The floors were linoleum. The white-curtained windows went all the way to the floor and the white woodwork gleamed. On each deep sill were geraniums that had bloomed year round in Ruth’s day and cactus that bloomed in January. The windows were positioned for the best possible light, and the daylight washed fancifully printed wallpaper in a happy bath. There were oak chairs and an oak rocker. There was an upright piano by the old couch, and stacks of sheet music. And there was a farmhouse smell full of apples, rainwater, and baked goods, though no one had baked a pie in the place for years. There was a hint of gasoline in the air, too, since the pumps were right around the corner. The ceilings, coffered with plain white-painted wood, were low. It was a handmade house with nothing elegant about it except the elegance of what anyone makes with their hands. Outside was a blackness as deep as the back of a black Angus bull.
“Why the hell did you bring that Christmas tree, Molly? You’ll never learn! You’re allergic to those things!” Polly exclaimed to my back. Then she turned to Sean. “Why I remember getting those trees out of the house as fast after Christmas as possible, my daughters were so allergic to them. Gail, now she had shots, but Molly wasn’t as bad, so she didn’t have shots. You’ll see. She’s still going to sneeze her brains out. And roses, she’s allergic to them, too. My mother was awful allergic, and my sister, she had asthma, and Howie, he has it, too. I seem to have gotten away with it.” She lit a cigarette. “Molly, throw that tree out right now, and put those poinsettias in the back room away from everything.”
“Forget it, Ma, I’m not that allergic. We’re going to have a wonderful Christmas.” We had hauled the tree through the snow, into the house, and now snow puddles were all over the floor.
“Get the mop,” Polly moaned.
“We’re having it, Ma, we’re having Christmas. We’re all here and we’re all having Christmas. Take this.” I handed her a bag of chocolate-covered sponge candies.
“My favorites!” she crowed. They really were, too. “Well, you kids clean up and keep that tree in the living room.” She had given in, temporarily.
Howie, my cousin and man of few words, drove up. While Polly made us all sandwiches, I hugged him awkwardly and introduced him to Sean, who immediately admired the new Swiss Army knife Howie had dumped on the dining room table.
“Didn’t you want the Ford, Howie?” I asked him immediately. When Polly cleared out the garage, she’d had Howie’s beloved model A towed down Route 246. It wasn’t really Howie’s; it was Polly’s own first car, but Howie had played in it all his young life.
“Nope,” he said. At least I’d gotten a syllable out of him.
“She asked you if you wanted it, didn’t she?”
“Yeah,” he said, “she did.”
“But you didn’t want it?” I asked incredulously.
“Nah, not now.”
Polly brought in the sandwiches on dreamy soft rolls and watched us eat them. Sean, always looking for material for his narrative poems, pumped Howie for details and Howie ceded information bit by bit. He’d finally finished college after Aunt Roberta died, but now he had no job and milked cows for his dad and hated it.
All Howie’s high school friends had left for jobs in Buffalo. He followed my mother around like a lost duckling in a flannel shirt. And sometimes he imprinted on me, like a baby brother, educated but aimless in his jeans and baseball cap. There was a cozy unspeakingness about him. He liked to arm wrestle and track animals. He was supposed to like hunting, but he was not interested in shooting.
Sean tore open the boxes of Christmas ornaments, and Howie fished around in the tissue looking for the missing hooks while Polly scowled and smoked. Howie was at his most purposeful looking for things. In the woods he’d notice the broken twig, the half-buried spoor, tracking what had been there and now was out of sight, like his mother. Aunt Roberta had died so quickly I had only visited her once in the hospital, where she’d talked about how women could wear pants to church now. You don’t discuss clothes if you’re dying, do you? I thought wrongly, then remembered the blouse she had embroidered for me when Polly and Ted had precipitously arrived in La Grange to return me to the suburbs when I was ten. She had given me a piece of wearable sanctuary. And the following summer she had given me a birthday party, with confetti angel food cake.
In the hours it took to decorate the tree, Sean and Howie and I regressed years: Soon we were arm wrestling and Sean was making me guess what my present was, not as an adult game paraphrasing childhood, but as a real game. Then we shined a light on the wall of the dining room and played shadow finger games. But Polly outlasted us, reading a Louis L’Amour western and eating the chocolate-covered honey sponge and looking up periodically saying, “You’re going to start sneezing, Molly. You never should have brought that tree in here.”
I began to feel achy. My sinuses were clogged. I had driven eight hours and decorated a Christmas tree and it was two in the morning and I was making the figures of dogs and birds in shadows on the walls with my lonely cousin and my redheaded boyfriend. Polly was staying up to oversee us, in a way she had
never overseen what I had done when I was younger. The issue of where Sean and I would sleep had been glossed over. We would sleep in what had become my room. I had simply instructed him to dump our bags there. Gail and her boyfriend would take the living room couch and a cot. There was another bedroom, but it was full of dust and junk and treasures. “I have to get some sleep,” I announced, so Howie went home, and we turned out the lights in the dining room. Polly stayed in the living room, smoking and reading. My room was off the living room, a few feet from her chair. Sean and I traipsed to the kitchen to go through the elaborate procedure of brushing teeth and washing faces without running water. I showed him the art of less soap, less water, and how to use the slop bucket. We gagged when we brushed our teeth. Then I sneezed.
“I heard that sneeze, Molly,” my mother called from the living room. I wouldn’t give up. All I had to do was hold out till Christmas Day. My eyes had begun to get puffy and my throat was sore. We gathered up our toothbrushes and toothpaste because there was no place to leave them in the kitchen. Then Sean and I traipsed past Polly to my room, got into bed, and waited for Polly to shut off her light and go to bed herself. She had been staying to make sure we were asleep, but we were not asleep, we were waiting for her to go, because we wanted to make love. I was exhausted, but I knew that sex would bring me back to the adult I was, from the five-year-old I had regressed to. I shushed Sean, and we lay breathing quietly in the dark until Polly finally shuffled to her room.
I felt for my diaphragm among the tumbled clothes and bags we had not organized or put away. Got it! Then I felt for the tube of jelly and squeezed my usual generous amount into the middle, slathered it around the edges and some even on the reverse side. I was slow and thorough. We would completely enjoy this safely protected sex. Then, quietly, I got into bed and urged Sean to be very quiet and we were, we were stealthy and delighted that we were making love in my mother’s house until the burning began. When Sean’s penis pressed against the diaphragm an excoriating burning began in my cervix, then radiated into my vagina. This has got to he psychological, I said to myself. You have a burning sensation because you are making love in your mother’s house. So I ignored it until my vagina felt like it was being cauterized, and Sean said, “I can’t come like this, Molly. My penis feels really weird.”
Paradise, Piece by Piece Page 11