Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  “You never wanted any? What about when you wanted to marry that hairdresser who died?”

  “Who the hell wants to copy our childhood, Molly!” she whispered.

  I laughed. She laughed her rickety laugh.

  “I miss that hairdresser guy, Mol. He died in my bed, ya know. I got up to make some coffee and came back with a mug for him and the guy had bit the dust. OD’ed on methadone. I just sat there and stared at him. I stared at him almost a whole day before I got myself to the phone. I miss my little house, Mol.” She brightened. “Why, during Woodstock Two I had the Hell’s Angels staying there! I left the door right open and said, ‘Move on in, boys, my casa is the party casa!’ And those Hell’s Angels, Molly, were the cleanest guests I ever had. They even scoured out the shower!”

  Clean house, clean mind, I said, quoting Gram. We laughed again.

  “But, Mols, I’m so goddamn sick.”

  “Have you been to the doctor, Gailie?”

  “Yeah, yeah, but I gotta see a specialist, a specialist in Kingston, and I ain’t got no car. And the bus, Mol, I’m too sick to take the bus.”

  I arranged for the local taxi to have an account where my sister would only be taken to and from medical offices or hospitals.

  “We’re going to get you going to the right place, Gailie,” I said.

  “I love you!” she said. Then she put the dog on the phone.

  —

  “Now, Mrs. Peacock,” said the woman’s voice, calling me my mother’s name. “This is the taxi service. I know you said the account was only for medical offices, so I called to say, we refused a fare from a friend of your sister’s.” Already, Gail was handing out the taxi service.

  “Gail, for crying out loud, I can’t afford for all your friends to take cabs around Woodstock!” I yelled into the telephone that night.

  “Lighten up, Mols,” she wheezed. “It’s only a goddamn cab.”

  “Did you go? Did you see the specialist?”

  “She thinks its throat cancer, Mol, but I gotta go to another guy and make sure.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  “I’m not thinking about nuthin’. Not till I see the next one.”

  “So let’s talk about something else.”

  “Yeah, wanna talk to the dog?”

  “Honey, I’ll talk to the dog next time.”

  “Hey, wanna talk about Ted? What a fuck he was. I could tell you stories about him when you were in college, Molly. It would curl your hair.”

  “So, tell me.”

  “Nah. Ya know your tubal ligation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I had one too! I said none of this shit, I’m not havin’ no kids. I hate the smell of ’em and I’m not having no abortions, neither, so I went and had my tubal and Medicare paid for it. I’m one of the truly needy, Mol!”

  “You did! You had a tubal ligation? We did the same thing?”

  “Yup. Sisters to the end.”

  I could barely assimilate the information. Gail was so wasted with years of alcohol and drugs, and I had just swum a self-righteous half hour in the university pool. But we were sisters. We loved the same domestic treats: gardening and food and animals and friends. And we had made the same choice not to have children.

  —

  During the next call her raspy whisper quavered with alarm. I was standing up at a file cabinet as we talked, but her panic made me sit and force air into my lungs. “It hurts so bad, Mol, I can’t stand it!” she whispered. “My honey says Woodstock’s weather’s hot as Phnom Penh, but I’m cold, Mols, I can’t stop shakin’. I’ve got throat cancer, Mols, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, Mommy, oh Mommy, I’m gonna die.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry, so sorry.” I rocked back and forth with sorries.

  “Oh, Molly, I called you Mommy! I’m so fucked up!”

  “I know you did, hon. Have you got your bathrobe on? You need to keep warm.”

  “I love my bathrobe! Thanks for sending it! It’s the best thing in the house! I got my nice bed and my bathrobe. Mols?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I call you Mommy?”

  There it was, as it always had been. The bud of motherhood caught in the bulb. Part of me said, You can’t, you can’t do this! and the larger part that was stable as a house said, “Sure, you can call me Mommy.” After all, it would only be for a little while.

  “Mommy, I’m not going there.”

  “Where, honey?”

  “Down the cancer road. I’m not going down it. I’m not going through the hospitals and all the shit. I’m not doin’ it.”

  “I don’t blame you, Gail. You don’t have to. You can do it the way you want.”

  “They’re gonna bury me in potter’s field, Mol, I’m gonna have an unmarked grave! Welfare don’t give nothing to bury you!”

  “I won’t let you be buried in potter’s field, sweetheart, you’ll get a nice little plot, and I’ll make sure you do.”

  “That’s what I want, Mol, a nice little plot!” She was sobbing and suddenly her voice was clear. “I’m so scared,” she said.

  “I know you’re scared, Gailie, you have every right to be scared.”

  “Oh, Mommy! I’m so scared I’m gonna die and go to potter’s field!”

  “You might die, honey, but you’re getting a nice grave like everybody else and a nice marker with flowers on it.”

  “I’m not going to the hospital, Mol.” She was whispering again.

  “There’s no reason why you should.”

  “I’m not doin’ that shit!” Her voice was stronger.

  “You can die just the way you want, Gail, just like you live the way you want.”

  “Yeah!” She was sobbing again. “I lived the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll lifestyle, Mol.”

  I pictured La Grange just after it was sold and before the neighbors tore it down. The roof was leaking, it had no basement. Raccoons had gotten in from the top and woodchucks from the bottom. The road that cozily ran past it had been widened till the semis grazed the oval island where the Esso pumps once stood. The big maples had gone from road salt poisoning. Where had I put those pictures I took when they demolished it? Shoved into a box of Polly’s tax statements I couldn’t throw away.

  —

  My mother’s cancer, and my sister’s cancer, and Mike’s history of melanoma made the illness always present. On the skin cancer checkup schedule, it was time for Mike to endure a visit to a specialist. After such appointments we would feel homeless. We would leave the blank walls and metal chairs of the office and sit like two skeletons in a coffee shop, crumbling over our teacups. But the cups, like Miss Muffet, sat on their saucers, and the thick saucers sat on their Formica tables, the tables framed by booths. And these solid facts we knew and understood and the flesh would grow back on our bones and the lips would grow over our teeth and our eyes would reappear, and our hair, and a softness would grow into the world, and after a time daylight would pool in the spoons we held.

  But this time the cancer specialist was absolutely sure the lump in my husband’s leg was metastasized melanoma. However, Mike’s own surgeon was distrustful. In a little examining room in our hospital in Canada, the surgeon planned to take the surface lump out, and I had asked to watch. He made a nice neat incision and popped up a glob of fat like the marble of a sirloin. It was yellow as a buttercup, and as benign.

  When we came home I planted lavender. Leo came by with a load of ferns I plopped in the shade garden. The university year was over. The chives bloomed. I planted chamomile. The phone rang late at night, a boozy voice from long ago. It was Ed, Gail’s boyfriend at the Christmas when Fergus Buxton came for his drink. Was I sitting down? he was asking me. “Oh, Ed!” I coughed, and after catching my breath coughed again and again and finally stopped when I was able to hear him say why he called. The police had found Gail dead in her apartment, with six drained bottles of vodka and every pill bottle in the house empty.

  She had done it, made her exit,
and there’d been an autopsy. I had to call the hospital to instruct them about the body. By the time I saw her she was a plastic bag of ashes. Maggie, Lily, and my cousin Howie met Mike and me at the funeral home in Woodstock to pick out an urn. It was to be her last house, so we picked out a tiny mansion: pale green onyx you could see the light through, though it would be dark down there underneath the hand-carved stone we also chose, full of morning glories and her name, Gail Peacock, and her dates, 1950–1996.

  Rain poured down on the graveside funeral, where the Episcopal priest spoke and I spoke and her old boyfriend Jules showed up and her other old boyfriend Ed read the Twenty-third Psalm. From under umbrellas her friends stepped up to throw garden flowers numbly on the little square of earth, like the basement dug for a dollhouse, that was prepared for her urn. At the graveside, I remembered the getups she had worn all her life—her cheerleading outfit, her buckskin jacket with fringe, Polly’s fur coat, the Egyptian cotton robe she died in—and at last her wooden wheel toy, riding round and round the kitchen floor, driving us all crazy, before she finally slumped over her handlebars, exhausted, a ragamuffin.

  Mike held my left elbow and Maggie held my right elbow and Howie stood next to Lily as Gail’s friends came up to mumble at me. A few took off their sunglasses in the rain. I took the box of snapshots from Gail’s vet friend and I asked about the dishes with the gold rims.

  “I don’t remember them,” he said.

  I asked about the bed.

  “She was sleeping on the couch,” he said.

  I asked a woman whether Gail had been wearing a diamond ring. “She didn’t have no diamond ring!” the woman said. “I woulda known that!”

  “You wouldn’t have recognized her, Molly,” said Jules, humble and sober, curls clipped, wearing a baseball hat. He threw his arms around me. I remember that goddamned Maalox bottle, I thought as I patted his back.

  At the end of the service, our feet sunk in the grass, soaked from the downpour, we waited for the piper Ed had found. Up she stepped, in full regalia, to pipe Gail’s last song. Gail would have squealed at the purple delphiniums we brought, and loved that all the flowers were garden blooms, no corny funeral glads, and she would have loved her stone and her urn and the fact that we all turned out in the pouring rain as if we were in an art film. The bagpiper piped and I wept. Lily held the tissues and Maggie held my purse. The piper played, moving farther and farther from the grave, then down to the road to the gate.

  It had been a long time since I cried so hard lying down on Ruta Arbeiter’s beige couch with its woven square of royal blue mat for her patients’ feet. Early summer sun illuminated nearly each thread of the rug on the gleaming bare floor, high above New York. I tucked the paisley pillow under my neck and continued to mumble.

  “I should have been able to do something, but I can’t think of a goddamn thing I could have done.”

  “Maybe that’s because you couldn’t have done anything else.” Her voice flowed out from the rocking chair behind my head which was turned so her good ear was at an advantage. In the twenty-one years we had known each other, I had reached the conclusion that a so-called cure with a beginning, middle, and end, progressing linearly over time, was not what I was after, nor was it in the nature of what transpired between Ruta and me. What we have with one another is Conversation. The Old French root of converse, convener, means to pass one’s life, to dwell with habitually, familiarly.

  The sun almost gilded each thread in the antique carpet when it streamed through the room. Conversing makes a life into threads, which curiously glow through repetition. Weaving is the repetitive movement that creates the textile, and inside that word textile is another word, text. Ancient personal history, like an antique carpet, almost burnishes in this process. I had come to love Polly and Ted and Gail as golden characters in the story of how I made my paradise, piece by piece. And now they were all dead.

  “I could feel everybody at the funeral thinking, Why didn’t the sister DO something!”

  “I thought you said they all wore sunglasses and could barely speak.”

  “There were different groups of them, from different parts of her life, people from her childhood like Howie, looking suburban and clean, and then Ed in a Sunday suit, and Jules, scrubbed and sober, and then the vacant-eyed characters behind the sunglasses who could hardly put one foot in front of the other, the drugged-out ones.” By this time I knew that no one was blaming me, so I wept in the sunlight and blew my nose, then howled again.

  “She asked to call me Mommy!”

  “What did you say?”

  “I let her. Why not? She really needed one.”

  Ruta and I hadn’t scheduled a regular appointment for years. I called when I needed to talk, either from Canada by phone or in New York in person. Our interactions had transformed over the years into a gossipy shorthand.

  “Jules called. Even after she died the boyfriends don’t stop calling me!”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That Gail would tell him over and over how Ted would make her dance for him, saying he’d beat the shit out of her if she stopped. That was when I was in college, after I’d abandoned them.”

  “Abandoned them?”

  “Oh, Ruta, you know what I mean.” I sighed. “After I went off to have my so-called selfish life.” I continued with what Jules had said at the funeral: “ ‘Your father, Molly, your father wrecked your sister. All the things he did.’ ”

  “What things?” I’d asked him.

  “You know, she’d go off in a bar sometimes and start slugging me, calling me Teddy, and once I even hit her back. God, I wish I hadn’t hit her back,” he said. Gail had left him after he slugged her, crawling out a bathroom window and running shoeless through the snow to a neighbor.

  On Ruta’s wall was an old Dutch painting of a gray sea and a long horizon: the long horizon of the sea, beyond which we see nothing.

  “I looked straight ahead, Ruta, I walked out of that house and went to college and refused, refused to be her mother.” Oh Daddy’s girl who rode on his boot, I thought, little Gailie. “Whenever I considered reaching out toward her…I should have…I’m cold-hearted,” I said numbly.

  “Molly, there are some people you know you can’t reach out toward. If you do, you’ll be dragged under,” Ruta said, and I knew she was right. It was a little girl I wanted to reach, not an alcoholic, or a drug user. I thought of Lily at the funeral saying, I hope she finds more peace in death than she did alive.

  “You have five minutes,” Ruta said into my silence.

  “The whole story is so sad I can’t even think of whose fault it was.”

  I went to the bathroom and peed interminably—I’d held it all this time—then washed my hands and looked in the mirror: forty-nine years old and sole survivor. Shouldn’t my head be bandaged? Shouldn’t I be walking with a cane? I combed my hair. I wielded a hypoallergenic lipstick, then walked of my own muscular volition into Ruta’s living room to see her standing there in a yellow vest, reaching up her arms—she’s shorter than I am—to hug me good-bye.

  At home the cats, by now as accustomed to two houses as we were, greeted me at the door. They wanted their dinner. I know what people mutter about the animals of the childfree, that the animals are shadow-children, that the affection lavished on them is misplaced. But ours teach me how to live, as my parrot did. Feline Buddhists, who live in the moment, they insist on their needs with nonchalant purpose, as Hannah Banana must have done. Gail called Hannah my baby. When she referred to herself as she talked to the dog, she called herself Mommy. Why is it that I am who I am and she was who she was? Hap. The root that means fate or fortune. What happened? Old Norse happ is chance. Old English gehaep is orderly, fitting. Happiness comes from hap, but what happened to Gail? I became whole while she stayed in pieces, and the reasons are as tangled as the necklace chains at the bottom of a child’s jewelry box.

  Now I am an orphan, no parents or sister—and no children to pas
s on to, no nieces or nephews, either, only a few cousins. Let go from the family tether, like a balloon let go from a child’s sticky hand, I wander through the countryside. And how do I feel? I am relieved it’s over. I’m done with it all, and a landscape unfolds before me, the landscape I looked at through a window all my life.

  There are some people who might describe my marriage with tragic overtones: Ah, just when Mike and Molly found happiness, it was too late for a family! But we are happy through and through with the hap that has nothing to do with when things are going right or when things are going wrong. Things always go wrong and right. Happiness is the underpinning, the gehaep, the fitting orderliness that became happy, the underlying pleasure of living.

  I wanted to have a journey, not a family. And I wanted to live through time and not be bitter. A journey for a woman of my generation and income and artistic ambition—inchoate as it was when I started out—did not include children. I never did think I could have it all, and now I am sure of it. Long ago in that kitchen in Buffalo, I saw what I would not replicate and my tiny fury ballooned, and long ago at La Grange I had an idea of what I loved and meant to claim, and now I sail that idea through its vistas. Back then, in a world of overalls and housedresses, no one I met outside school or church had a college education. What I aspired to, having read about other lives, was a way of being that aimed at wholeness, not motherhood.

  Trying to make sense of what has happened, and what I’ve done, has led me to try to break down the process into logical steps. But so often what happens in life makes a circle rather than a line. Realizing I was motivated by conscious survival, I hoped I could make a wise connection between the flowering of my needs and the progress of my circumstances. In the growing security of that link, my chances became my choices.

  The mechanism of chance that is choice is like a carousel. The carved horses go up and down like the people in a life, and the central pole revolves like the decision to be childfree. In turn, the decision propels the platform where the horses rise and fall. Life moves both up and down and in circles. Perhaps you cannot decide to be whole any more than you can decide to be happy—though you can carve and paint your horses. And aren’t those shapings decidings? That carousel, out in all weather, needing to be repainted, regreased, attended to. How human a machine it really is.