Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  There in the local pub he insisted that I rent us a car and fly us back to New York, no matter what the cost. But I soothed and fed him, paid the bill and hated him, walking back with him on the towpath in the dark to the barge where by then Maggie and George had gone to sleep. We crept into our bunk where I hated him even more, the prodigy who had become my prodigal, my prodigal who had become a wastrel.

  Forbearance on all our parts allowed us to endure the rest of the trip, and in spite of myself, the pleasure of being driven down the canals with nothing to see but trees gnarled as if for the homes of gnomes, and sheep curled in poses for etchings, and busy black and white dogs going about their herding business, and nothing important to say to Maggie, indulging in gossip and idle wordplay, went to the quick of me.

  Tilla was shy and truculent but obedient. George was gracious. Maggie’s intrepid energy filled me with the resurgence of a life I was not aware had ebbed so completely away. Because trust and respect were too eroded to be counted on, it was politeness we leaned against. After we finally found Maggie’s grandmother’s town and even the gray stone house she had lived in, we finished the trip in a mannerly exhaustion.

  There in the mail on the return home was the notice that I had gotten a grant I had applied for and been turned down for again and again over a period of eighteen years. Sometimes fate really does wait for the right moment. Now I had a way to pay my bank loan, and a lever. My money, tied with the tiny piece of the fabric of decency left over from our trip, was the lever I used when I asked Tilla to leave our apartment, when we drew up a legal agreement that let me buy him out of the lease, with some help to build a new troupe, and when he insisted we should never see or speak to one another again. And as a measure of the adroitness of our final dance, we have not.

  “My God, Lily, look at your derriere!” Maggie shrieked as Lily banged the door to Maggie’s parents’ screened-in porch.

  “I did it!” Lily announced. “I had my ass done!”

  “Removed is more like it.” Maggie half sneered. She took a dim view of face lifts, tummy tucks, and certainly ass sculpting. “Molly,” she demanded, “get out of that chair and get over here and observe this pair of cheeks!”

  “Don’t even ask me how much it cost, I’m refusing ever to say.”

  “You look fantastic,” I said loyally. In theory I’d imagined the three of us aging into wise, wrinkled women, but here was practice. Her disfiguring buttocks had been shaved into the negligible derriere of a well-exercised, media-wise local politician. Lily Allisman was running for her city council.

  “Whatever they write about this ass, it’s going to be a helluva lot better than what they said about the old one! No more jokes about my ‘seat’ on the council. Give me a hug, you two!”

  Nearly three decades after we first came here with our poison rings, the three of us toasted each other with iced tea. Maggie’s father was in the hospital again, her frail mother lay upstairs in bed, and it was Maggie’s turn to hold the fort—three of the four sisters shared the parent-sitting schedule. The last sister had entered an alcoholic treatment center. A troop of bees crawled up the beachhead of the honeysuckle by the porch railing.

  “Make sure that door’s latched!” she shouted.

  Beyond the bees, beyond the honeysuckle, the Jacobs sheep mowed the late June lawn. Deep inside summer, safe inside the shade of the porch, we sank into the ragged cushions of the wicker chairs. Maggie had thrown a white tablecloth over the old square table. We put down our glasses.

  “I can’t believe we all got free today!” Maggie said. Innumerable phone calls and reschedulings had navigated us to that porch, all our schedules coinciding for a mere two hours.

  “A free couple of hours on a summer afternoon, sitting on my new rear end,” Lily said dreamily.

  “I’m free all right,” I said nervously.

  “You certainly are, madam,” said Lily.

  “Tilla-free, and childfree,” I said.

  “Childfree”—Maggie made a face—“sounds like fat-free.”

  “I sort of like it,” I said.

  “I’m sticking to my standard statement,” Lily declared. “I tell people I don’t have the Call for children.”

  “That’s great, Lily. You can sound like a nun,” I said, pouting. “Ordinary people have to have a word for what they mean, not a religious tag line.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be so prickly about it!”

  I was being prickly and didn’t deny it. “Oh, Lily, I’m out here alone in the world armed only with a tubal ligation,” I began, but she interrupted me.

  “Poor Mol, you’re really having a hard time. I’m sorry, doll.”

  “You’re the only person who can call me doll and get away with it.”

  Lily, who notoriously hated dolls, called all her intimates “doll.” During her mother’s illnesses, little girl Lil had quarantined her plastic babies in their carriage, laid a blanket over the top, and announced to her family that her dolls had measles and couldn’t play. Then one by one she engineered worse diseases, until each of them dropped dead.

  “Does Gail still have her Marilyn doll?” Maggie interrupted. My sister had carted the nearly wigless platinum blonde through many changes of address.

  “I’ll have to ask her.” Slowly through the decade I spent with Tilla, Gail and I had begun speaking again. It started with the box of china dogs I received in the mail not long after Gram and Grandpa Peacock died. They hadn’t wanted any funerals, and my uncle had agreed. Neither Gail nor I had seen them after our father died, and I had long since suspended my dutiful holiday cards, never receiving any from them. Gram and Grandpa seemed to have been swallowed into our uncle’s family, merged with their favorite son and favorite grandchildren. Instead of their funerals, within months of one another, there were phone calls from my uncle’s family. Did Gail and I want mementos? Clearly any inheritance would not be coming to us. Half dumbstruck, half guilty, I asked for the china dogs and the cabinet my dad had made in high school; then I rustled around and called Ed, Gail’s old boyfriend, for her number. We were only getting the dogs, I explained to her after I broke the news, since nobody knew where the cabinet was.

  “I want the boxer!” she yelped into the telephone. “And the spaniel, and the terrier, and the Doberman pinscher! You get the collie, Molly. It rhymes with you. You’re the poet!” Apparently we weren’t going to mention the fact that we hadn’t spoken for nearly two years.

  “Is she still with Jules?” Lily asked.

  “Oh God, no, she’s with somebody else now. My mother loves this guy because he bought Gail a toaster oven. But she’s delusional, Lily. She actually called me and told me she was going to medical school!”

  “She’s just so jealous of you she can’t stand it,” Maggie said. “You’re running the Poetry Society and your poems are in The New Republic making your mother proud. Gail has to lie to keep up.”

  Maggie made sense of course. The iced tea pitcher sweated, the bees bombed the bushes, and the talk shifted to our work. Maggie agonized over changing publicists, Lily outlined her opposition, and I rattled on about the Poetry Society. “We’re transforming it, Lil,” I said, “just like your ass.”

  “Invasive body surgery is a social statement of an entirely different order,” Maggie pontificated.

  “Oh, shut up!” Lily grinned. The sense of sheer release from what had plagued her was as palpable as its absence. “Speaking of invasive surgery,” she turned to me and said, “you’re not really having second thoughts about the tubal ligation now that the Hungarian is gone, are you? Tell the truth,” she badgered. “You’re talking to the woman who first introduced you to birth control pills.” Typically Lily, she was going to get my emotional life packaged up to make perfect sense.

  “I’m…I’m at sea,” I found myself saying. “I’m out here in a little boat and I’ve left one shore and I can’t see the other shore yet.”

  Maggie leaned forward and Lily cocked her head.


  “I finished something, I really, really finished something, not only with Tilla, but with the whole children thing, and I’m…going on, but I don’t really know what that…” I hesitated.

  “Means?” Lily supplied.

  “Is?” Maggie offered.

  “Well, what shape my life will have. I’m kind of scared, and I’m kind of thrilled.” It was as if I spoke from that little boat, floating, my voice an echo from water, even to myself. “I’m rowing, but I really can’t see what’s in front of me.” It was an image of mourning I described. I had abandoned what would no longer define me, yet felt abandoned myself.

  “Now you need courage,” Lily began, then swatted at a slow bee flown in through the tear in the screen, ushering it with a newspaper to the porch door, “to lead,” she continued romantically, “your ambiguous life.”

  “Oh, shut up!” Maggie parroted Lily. “You have plenty of courage, chickadee,” she said to me as she heaved out of her chair and padded upstairs to her mother, cursing all her sisters for leaving her alone. The shadows elongated on the lawn.

  “My favorite time of day,” I said. “Long shadows remind me of La Grange.”

  “What a magic place it was,” Lily rhapsodized.

  “It’s terrible to have it gone!” Maggie yelled from the stairs.

  The year before Polly had sold it to the neighbors. She needed the money to retire on, and the place went. The death of the house had its own smell to me, a dry, burnt odor, so far from the sweet dampness of the place I’d loved. I missed it purely, from the lilac that had got its seasons reversed and bloomed in November to the rain barrel at the side of the store. Now all the furniture was in the basement of Polly’s apartment in Buffalo, stacked there by Howie and Flo and me—Polly had conveniently thrown her back out on the day we moved it. Now the La Grange smell was transferred to her basement.

  But by a hideous accident I drove past the house en route to a poetry reading in Rochester. The neighbors had it half torn down. I almost squeezed my eyes shut and sped on but found myself stopping, grabbing the camera from the car seat, and running out to the site. It was a site now, not a house. The roof had caved in and the front had collapsed onto the hydrangeas. You could see the beige flowered paper of the living room wall exposed to the air. La Grange had a squashed, sunken look, like a pumpkin face when too many candles have been lit in it. It was a fluke that I had a camera with me, and that I’d arrived in time to make a death mask in snapshots. Later I almost tortured Polly with the pictures but instead kept them for nearly three months in the inner pocket of the Friends Seminary book bag I always carried.

  Now I shoved them impulsively at Lily. She flipped through and offered me a Gram-like platitude, “Well, that house had a nice life for itself in your family and now it’s going on its way.”

  “But it’s dead and done,” I flashed, “so, let me miss it, Lily. And I miss Tilla, too,” I added, “even though he was a tyrant.”

  “You’ve got plenty to miss, there, doll,” she said, wry and unoffended, standing up to smooth her pants over her new hips.

  Maggie stood in the doorway, ready to usher Lily out to her car.

  Before she headed out, while we all hugged good-bye, I was still unaware that someone had secretly accompanied me on a parallel journey for the last twenty years. Stung with solitude, I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought when I dragged back to Maggie’s porch and prepared to sit with her mother while Maggie visited her sister in the treatment center.

  “I can’t stand it,” she moaned, shoving a scrunchee around her gathered hair, “running from the hospital to the treatment center to my mother upstairs. Here”—she fished a scrap of paper from her pocket—“here’s what pills to get down her, if you can.”

  “I don’t know what Gail is doing now, alcohol or drugs or both,” I said wistfully.

  “Molly,” my friend admonished me, “it’s Gail who’s got to decide what to do with her life, not you.”

  Not me. I was all alone and responsible for no one. No matter what the weather, or what I wore, or how I did my hair, every day I felt that I had the shortest haircut of my life and was wearing a blouse without sleeves. My skin prickled at every breeze.

  Two hands holding two pencils in mirror images of one another—an M. C. Escher drawing—poked out from the envelope with Mike Groden’s return address. Years before, nearly a week after the abortion, on a Friday night when Cookie and I had shared a pound of asparagus for our dinner, I’d finally opened that card. It was packed with his fast, small scrawl—the cramped handwriting I remembered from high school and college. Even before I read it, I recognized and enjoyed the complexity of the drawing and the symbolism of the opposite hands. He reintroduced himself matter-of-factly: In college, he’d left math and become a literature major, got declared 4F because of his eyesight, went to Princeton for his Ph.D., then to Canada where he became a professor. The card was neutral and informative. He had let many friendships lapse, he said, and was sorry he did that. Now he was picking them up again, if the other people were willing. He did not say what prompted the urgency to renew these friendships, but I thought I knew what it was. He’s been sick, really sick, with cancer, his—what was she, his girlfriend?—had said to me at the dinner after a poetry reading where I had suddenly heard his name spoken after nineteen years.

  “I think I know someone you know,” the thin, scarfed, and suited assistant professor had purred, “Michael Groden.”

  “My old boyfriend!” I blurted out. “I remember the smell of his shirts! We went to all the high school proms, and I slow-danced with my nose pushed into his collarbone.”

  She informed me that he’d become a prominent James Joyce scholar. And that he had cancer. What kind? How was he? Where was he?

  “In Canada,” she said coyly. A ripple of possession in her tone let me know that she was his girlfriend now, but I pushed my address at her anyway, almost beseeching her to give it to him, even though she had not wanted to. The brassy note in my voice must have bullied her, because she wrote out the name of his university on the dessert card. I was going to contact him, afraid he was sick. But he beat me to it—not that sick, I guessed.

  He was coming to New York, he’d said in the note.

  Lunch with an old boyfriend had been a surefire path to a blowup with Tilla, but I had carefully explained that Mike was dying. Tilla knew perfectly well that you couldn’t catch cancer, but he despised being around sick people and refused, as I knew he would, to come to lunch with us. We met at Caffe Bianco, with its white tables and chairs out in the sun of Second Avenue, and Mike Groden, now a thin, stringy-muscular man in the way that runners are—a marathon runner, it turned out—began a purposeful search for the deepest shade he could find and suggested we sit there. I was embarrassed because I had chosen the place for its sunlight. Of course someone with, well, it must be skin cancer—what kind? the kind you die from?—would not want to sit in the sun, however mild. How unthinking of me. After our very soft hellos, and settling in at a cramped table in the only shade, a terrible awkwardness fell on us, like another form of unwanted light.

  Mike didn’t look like he was dying—not that I was sure I knew what a young person dying of cancer looked like—he just looked nervous. He had always been a nervous sort of person, quick to get flustered, as if he were giving an oral report in a possibly hostile classroom. But there was only me. We picked at our salads and focaccia and later dove into our gelati without ever mentioning our mature bodies: his that had been so ill, mine that had just endured its abortion—or, for that matter, our young bodies that had given us so much pleasure.

  “I guess Tilla—is that how his name is pronounced?—is a pretty serious relationship,” Mike Groden had ventured.

  “It’s really serious all right. But we don’t live together. We have a…a serious weekend relationship.”

  “Lots of academics have those kind of relationships.”

  “And you? Are you in a relationship with someone?”
I had asked him back.

  “Well yes, I’m…ah…I’m dating someone.” He paused. “Urn, seriously.”

  So if he was dating someone seriously, was he also seriously dying or what? I didn’t ask.

  The shade had shifted, and then we were in the sun again. When the waiter cleared our table and we had relaxed enough to realize that of course there were tables inside the restaurant we could move to, we moved, easily finding a comfortable spot, a table with elbow room and fresh place settings and filtered light from a skylight above. We started over, able to smile at our exasperated waiter, ordering two cappuccinos. While we waited for our coffees, we told each other about our accomplishments: We had both published books, he had edited all the James Joyce facsimile manuscripts and gotten early tenure. We had stuck to our guns. We had not been derailed into jobs we hated. We had chosen what we wanted and steered our courses toward it.

  “God, how did your father feel when you left math and became an English major!” I exclaimed.

  “Not so great, it wasn’t so great, he couldn’t understand it, but just after I graduated from college he died.”

  “Oh God, really? Oh, I’m sorry,” I said goofily. I never knew what to say when people died. “My father died, too.”

  “Was that hard for you?” he asked.

  “Well, it was complicated when he died, it took a lot of psychotherapy even to start to understand it all.”

  “Oh, are you in therapy too?” he asked with delight. “This is great,” he murmured, lowering his voice to a barely audible pitch, “can I, can I call you when, ah, when something comes up in therapy that you, ah, that you, um, might know about? Like my family?”

  “Oh sure!” I smiled. “I love conversations like that.”

  We both needed to understand the things that had happened to us, that had formed who we turned out to be. We never mentioned sex. We didn’t veer down the sensuous memory path of each other, nor did we mention our breakup in college. And certainly we did not talk about his cancer or my abortion. But we had thrown two important rappelling ropes to one another in our determined scaling of the face of who we were: we had made it out of Buffalo! and we hungered to understand what formed us.