It was late one night or morning, Norah couldn’t remember which, when a friend knocked on her door and said, “I don’t know if your husband’s accident was an accident. There’s been talk.” “What talk?” Norah hissed, her hair coming undone at her shoulders. “He knew things, horrible things, and he was going to tell.”
Ellie was at the foot of the stairs, for the knocking had woken her too.
“Your father loved you. I endure you,” Norah said.
TIM’S AUNT, MINNIE, is a baker of pies and tarts, and will torch you if you make any reference to “that Disney character.” Minnie will say, most emphatically, that she is a woman not a mouse. However, she will acknowledge the character of Minnie Castevet from Rosemary’s Baby, because Ruth Gordon is “one sharp dame,” and who wouldn’t relate to a childless woman who drinks root beer in bed, and only wanted to take that guileless Rosemary under her wing?
“So they tricked her into giving birth to the Antichrist. Think of the upside. Living in Beverly Hills, taking the sun. What wouldn’t I give to be with a man in tails, drinking out of a champagne glass, instead of living in this fleabag of a town? What is that? Is that a mosquito?”
“A wasp,” I say. “They come this time of year.”
“Like a plague, no doubt,” Minnie says. We are at the Pavilion because Minnie wants to see the beginning of the end, although she confides her younger sister’s end was a long time coming. “That woman’s been yearning for the grave as soon as she came out of the womb. It’s like she took one look at this place and decided, ‘No, not for me. None of it.’”
“Tell us what you really think, Aunt Minnie,” Tim says.
“If I had half a mind to tell you what I really thought, you’d be on some headshrinker’s couch with a blanket, crying crocodile tears. I know you don’t see it now, kid, but my sister, God rest her soul, did you a favor.”
“This used to be a resort in the twenties,” I say, and with a mixture of pride and shame I recount the history of the place that indirectly killed Tim’s mother. As we walk, I describe the main building, which used to be two stories high. The colonnades were made of stone, and when you stared up at the ceiling from the inside, you believed that paradise was possible. Regardless of where you stood you were bathed in light, so how do you explain the warmth that felt like an embrace, a lingering kiss on a cheek, otherwise?
Those headed farther west in search of luck paused to bathe in the man-made pools and make love in the rooms concealed only by flimsy gossamer curtains; the Pavilion used to be a stomping ground for fathers who waltzed with their daughters under the glare of the afternoon sun and, glass of gin in hand, foxtrotted with their wives and mistresses in the evening. Many a bastard child was conceived here, and sometimes, young brides were abandoned on their honeymoons when their husbands fled for the desert. This used to be a place where the sun gallantly rose and fell.
“People came here to be found, even if they didn’t think or know they were lost,” I say with a wistfulness that was borderline embarrassing.
“Then the thirties happened and everyone lost their money and their hope, and soon everyone stopped jumping into the pool and started hurling out of windows,” Minnie says. “Back then, that was the more gallant option.”
“Something like that,” I say.
“I’m much more interested in the other stories: the one about the starlet who drowned her mother in the pool. Or what about the stockbroker, all tangled up in his greed, hanging himself with those pretty curtains you spoke of. Tell me about the avaricious. Tell me those stories. I imagine they make for more indecent conversation, but who cares, because, quite honestly, who gives a flying fuck about the entablatures and Roman-inspired architecture that influenced this dump.”
“I want to go home,” Tim says, as we approach the ride that excised his mother’s legs. Children bury their faces in tufts of white cotton candy while girls adjust their skirts; they fold them above their knees in Tim’s presence. He doesn’t notice, but Minnie does. It seems as if Minnie notices everything. Eyebrow cocked, she says, “Maybe we should stick around, kid. Perhaps this town is more interesting than I thought. I’m always looking for a good show.”
“We’re leaving,” Tim says. The certainty in his voice is a clock ticking, a reminder that every moment with him is a moment not with him. Why is it that death casts a light on all the things you never notice? When Delilah Martin’s mother died, I suffered from horrible migraines because suddenly everything was so loud. Rustling leaves were landmines. Hushed voices were bombs. After Tim’s mother died, something shifted. I felt the texture of things. Colors appeared violent in their willful saturation, and I could see.
All I could see was Tim.
“So, kid,” Minnie turns to me. “Tell me a story.”
“I’ll tell you a story about a man and a woman that you won’t read in any of the guidebooks. It’s 1919, and a husband discovers his wife has been having an affair with his father. The husband takes her on a trip to the bathhouse and says he has a surprise for her. The wife doesn’t want to go for obvious reasons, but she suspects that the husband knows something—maybe it was the tone in his voice when he issued the invitation, or his insistence—because he never cared about spending time alone with her before. So she goes, and when they arrive and settle into their room, he tells her that he’s been taking magic classes and tonight he’ll debut some tricks. The wife is confused, naturally, because her husband is a stockbroker, and she’s practically speechless when he asks her to be his assistant for the evening.”
“Now this is what I want to hear,” Minnie says.
I continue. “Later on that night, he puts her in a wooden box and says he’s going to saw her in half. He wears a cape and tails. He looks the part of a man who knows tricks, and suddenly the wife feels unsettled. Something’s not right but she can’t move, and there are a hundred people beyond the lights cheering her husband on. But he never took a magic class and the trick is on the wife as he works a saw down the box and proceeds to cut his wife in two. The room thunders with applause, which muffles the wife’s screams, and everyone talks about how real it all looked. They talked about the terror they felt. Yet no one ever mentioned, until later, until a body was found buried ten miles down the road and the husband was found with his face blown off from the barrel of a gun, that maybe it looked too real.” I finish, triumphant in my eerie tale and Minnie’s smile.
“Now you’ll find this place pretty tame. My family rebuilt it from the ground up five years ago, and nothing really happens in this town except for teenagers on heavy dates and kids sneaking rides on the Ferris wheel.” As I say this, I watch lacquered mares go around, and I can’t help but think that, in one way or another, children are forever held hostage.
“Except for the Bible-thumper drowned by the lake, and the suicide in a bed,” Minnie says.
“That suicide was my fucking mother, for chrissake. You may not have loved her, you may have even hated her, but I love her,” Tim says. He kicks dirt all around him and the earth rises up, converges, and falls. “She’s not one week in the ground and already you’ve got your one-liners cued up.”
I hold my breath and suddenly become aware of the chill. It’s as if I’ve interrupted an unfinished conversation between Tim and his aunt, the words jutting out are entirely too painful to bear. When I think what it would be like to lose my mother, the only feeling that registers is relief. I would be relieved. My mother would not be mourned or argued about in amusement parks, and I wonder if she knows this. I wonder if she understands that anger and sorrow, not relief, are what happens to your loved ones when you pass to the other side. I wonder if she realizes that no one in our family loves anyone. But maybe she does and that knowledge is what keeps her going.
“Your life is your life, and you only know it while you have it,” Minnie says. “There’s a difference between hate and anger over a woman who wasted her life, who didn’t know what she had when it was right in front of her.
So she lost her fucking legs? I don’t hate my sister, Tim, but she was cruel, impetuous, and selfish, and there’s no denying that. She didn’t beat death; she opened up her front door and let it in. Threw it a goddamn parade.”
Tim’s voice was hoarse. “You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about my mother.”
“I know she did nothing about the bruises on your back. I know about her drinking, how she liked her anesthesia.”
I think about my mother and how her father provided the dressing for the daily wounds he inflicted. We have meat every night and our pain is private, but we’re the same as Tim’s family in all the ways you couldn’t see.
Do I just walk away and give them their privacy?
“I’ve got an idea,” Minnie winks at me. “I picked up a steak at the butcher’s today. Why don’t you be a good egg and invite your family over for dinner? As you can imagine, I’m not good at taking no for an answer.”
“Leave these people alone,” Tim says.
“Calm down. I’m asking for a meal, not the Antichrist.”
I start rummaging for excuses but Minnie is fast. “My mother and grandfather don’t really go out all that much. We tend to have dinner at home.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Minnie says, pointedly.
“Jesus, Minnie,” Tim says. “I want to go home.”
“You tell your grandfather that either your family sits at my table or I’ll sit at theirs.”
I open my mouth to speak, but Tim pulls Minnie toward the car. I follow.
Before they drive away Minnie rolls down the window and says, “Did anyone ever tell you just how good you look in blue? It suits you.”
“THERE’S NOTHING HERE for me,” Norah had told her husband once, before they were man and wife. “Just give me a moment of peace,” she’d implored, “to be still amidst all this sadness.” Her husband took her hands in his. “Squeeze,” he’d said, “so I can feel how much you hurt.” And she did, so hard she thought his fingers would break, but he didn’t let go. This small gesture awakened a great love. Had she been asleep this whole time to suddenly wake up? Had the sun shone her entire life? If so, how was it that this was the first time she’d seen it? Norah felt sick, fell to her knees because love was not supposed to become her. Then her husband kneeled down too, and in his eyes she saw church. Let me run my hands along the pew, she’d thought. Let me breathe in the mahogany. Let me stare through the glass window and see the sun and feel the ache of you. Let me feel this heart that suddenly stops.
“There’s nothing here for me,” Norah said, as the coffin closed over her husband’s face. “Let me feel this heart that suddenly stops,” as the coffin was lifted up and gently lowered underground. “Just give me a moment of peace,” she snapped at Ellie, “to be still amidst this sadness.”
“Why did you show me the possibility of love only to take it away?” Norah cried over an open grave.
“IT’S A SHAME about Delilah Martin. Did they ever find that retarded child?” Minnie says, sawing through tough beef. Dressed in fuchsia, she’s an assault to our dining room with its gray walls and dark furniture, and I suspect she knows this.
“Delilah Martin isn’t retarded,” my mother says coldly, and I regard her tireless defense of Delilah with suspicion. None of us really understood her condition, much less had it diagnosed. The doctors observed that Delilah Martin was many things, but not one thing in its entirety.
“Past tense, dear,” Minnie says. “Unless you know something the papers don’t. I’m always game for a good gossip.”
“My granddaughter tells me you’re a baker,” Grandfather says, refilling his pipe.
“I put things in and out of ovens, yes, that’s true.”
“I never could get my head around the chemistry of it,” my mother says. For the whole of the evening, she circles the table, picking up things and putting them down.
“You could say chemistry agrees with me while biology always eluded me. I lived here with my sister for a time, and, as I said before, I do love a good gossip. We lived in that house up on Cavanaugh Street.”
“I know the place,” my mother says.
“Odd,” Minnie says. “I’ve been here for a total of thirty-four minutes and I’ve yet to hear one condolence, a word of sympathy, not even a pithy ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ Even the butcher, a man I don’t know, got teary-eyed at the counter. Told me he was sorry, and I said, ‘You better save your apologies, unless you plan on gypping me on that cut of beef.’”
My grandfather takes a puff of his pipe and clouds the air with his smoke. “We’re so sorry for your loss.”
“How is Tim?” my mother asks, following suit. “He must be devastated.”
Minnie snaps her fingers. “You’re fast with the platitudes. How is Tim? Well, his mother’s current address is a box six feet below. And while that woman, my sister, was a horrible human being and a terrible drunk, she was his mother and she’s dead, leaving this boy with the fantasy that he could have done something about it. Prevented it, somehow. In two months’ time, he’s going to have to uproot his life, change his school, leave his friends—your daughter, the silent one over there, being one of them—to come live with me, a woman he doesn’t know, much less like. ‘Devastated’ is one way of putting it. I’d say ‘fucked up beyond words’ is better. For people like us, the hand Tim got dealt, the hand I have to play out, is the only kind we’re likely to get.”
Do I detect a smile? Is my grandfather smiling? It seems Minnie amuses him.
“I’m sure we can arrange to have the funds that were allocated to your sister after the accident transferred to Tim.”
Minnie regards my grandfather with mild interest. “I’m sure he’ll be grateful. We’ll never be without toilet paper and a leaner cut of meat.”
My mother finally sits down and tucks into the steak. Her hands quake. “I remember you. You used to make the cakes for the church banquets. It’s all coming back now.”
“Most of the ladies pass off that Betty Crocker shit as homemade, but I make my own, from scratch. Why, a cake’s just some butter, sugar, and flour. Once you got the basics, there’s a whole wide world of possibility. Before this business with my sister, I nearly signed a lease on a small place back east. I had the idea of calling it Minnie Cakes and Pies, and I’d sell miniature cakes of every variety. Picture rows of cakes behind glass—chocolate, lemon meringue, banana cream, and coconut—stretched as far as the eye could see. Imagine a mini Baked Alaska? Just the talk of it will give me business for months. But I’ve said too much. I can do that sometimes. Not know my limits.”
“Do you have a fellow?” my mother asks.
“I tell you about my dream and you ask me about a man.”
It seems as if Minnie is pushing for a fight but nothing sticks. My grandfather looks amused and bored while my mother regards Minnie with confusion and terror. But something stirs, bubbles right below the surface.
“I like the name,” I say to Minnie. “I like it a lot.”
“She speaks! Kid, did you finally get hold of some of the life rafts I’ve been begging for?” Minnie’s eyes glint, and I relax in her presence. It takes everything in me not to plead her to take me with her. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.
“You do say what’s on your mind,” my grandfather says. “That’s rather bold for a woman.”
“Well, Simon, if I said what was on my mind, I’d tell you that the first time Tim introduced me to your daughter, I felt as if I’d met her before, which is impossible, of course. Yet, every time I look at Ellie’s face I’m reminded of someone.”
“Small town,” my mother says.
“Too small for my own taste,” my grandfather says.
“And in this, we agree.” Turning to me, Minnie says, “You remind me of your dead father. How long has it been since he died in that accident? Ten, twelve years? How many years, Norah?”
“It was a car accident.” My mother seethes. “A camera smashed his face.
”
“Did the car kill him or the camera? No, I don’t think it was an accident,” Minnie says. To my grandfather she says, “But you would know more about that than I would, Simon.”
“For a low-grade piece of trash, I have to admire your verve. Coming into my house, eating my food, taking advantage of the fact that your sister was an incompetent drunk. For what? Petty threats? Blackmail. What is it that you think you know, Miss Mouse?” my grandfather says.
“You’re insulting me if you think this is about money. Or perhaps that’s the only hand you know how to play. Stuff wads of bills into people’s mouths until they choke—that sound about right?”
“What is she talking about?” I ask. You don’t just raise your voice at Grandfather, you whisper. You speak when spoken to, and you certainly don’t come into his home and antagonize him. Something about Minnie frightens me; perhaps it’s the way she’s unafraid of my grandfather when everyone else perpetually tiptoes around him.
“Take your dinner upstairs,” my mother says to me.
Minnie rises and drops her napkin on my grandfather’s lap. “Your dead father, rest his soul, was a good man. But he was also a man who knew things about this family. Secrets I’m sure your grandfather didn’t want other people to know.”
“I think it’s time you leave now,” my grandfather says.
“Do you remember your father, Ellie?”
The only response I’m able to give is a whiplash of the neck, a shake of the head, no.
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.” The storm assails.
To me she says, “These two could start a knitting circle with all the lies they weave. Your father didn’t die in a car accident, as these two would have you believe. In fact, there wasn’t anything natural about his death at all.”
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