After Melanie

by Gloria Goldreich

  Judith surveyed the all too familiar mess, choking on the pointless and ridiculous mental reprimand that sprang to mind. When would Melanie learn to be more careful of her things? The question came unbidden; the answer boomeranged and pierced her heart. Never, of course. Never. Never was a word she would have to learn to accept.

  She lifted a pink cashmere cardigan, remembering that she had not wanted to buy it. It had been very expensive and Melanie was so careless, but she had agreed in the end, because she wanted to see Melanie smile and earn her daughter’s swift and impulsive hug. And there had been a hug, she remembered, and a kiss, deliciously damp upon her cheek.

  She held the cardigan close, stroked the soft wool and inhaled the lingering scent of lilac. She folded it carefully, buttoned each pearl button and placed it on the unmade bed.

  She picked up the hairbrush and one by one she plucked out the dark strands of Melanie’s hair, winding them about her finger in a silken ring. She went to the window and opened it wide, grateful for the sudden breeze that breathed its way sweetly into the room. And then she began to work in earnest.

  Swiftly, she consigned still useful garments into a bag to be donated to the synagogue thrift shop. Her efficiency served as a protective shield against the invasive thoughts that intruded with each item she handled. She steeled herself against the memory of when Melanie had worn a cute plaid skirt, an apple-green woolen dress, a magenta fleece – magenta, always bright, gay magenta, Melanie’s favorite color since nursery school. The magenta crayon in the giant box of Crayolas had, inevitably, been worn down to a stub.

  She pulled the price tags from a white tennis dress bought on sale in anticipation of the spring season and the onset of tennis lessons. She tossed it into the bag. They had been too optimistic. There had been no tennis lessons. Melanie had never known another spring. She had died before the season of warmth.

  Tears came without warning. Judith wiped her eyes, bit her lip and went back to work.

  The ring she had fashioned from the strands of her daughter’s hair slipped from her finger.

  The floor was swiftly cleared, the closet emptied. She did not pause. One bag was filled and then another. She cinched them shut and heaved them down the stairs. She would have coffee. Coffee would restore her. She made herself a cup, drank only half of it and carried an entire box of trash bags up to the room.

  She filled one of them with shoes, sandals and boots, barely worn ballet slippers, party pumps and sneakers, Bass oxfords, still new because Melanie had hated them, magenta flip-flops, worn thin because Melanie had loved them. She filled the next bag with underwear. She tossed in training bras for the budding breasts that would never mature into a full bosom and nylon panties, the colors of the rainbow, embroidered with the days of the week. There were pajamas, socks and a clutter of headbands and neckerchiefs, scrunchies and barrettes. Judith barely looked at them, intent only on emptying the bureau drawers, before turning to the desk.

  They had bought the small white desk at Ikea when Melanie entered middle school.

  ‘It will help her get organized,’ David had said with the certainty of a man who had fought a natural propensity for disorganization and distraction all his life.

  ‘We live in hope,’ Judith had laughed.

  But Melanie, of course, after the first paroxysm of delight, had abandoned the desk to chaos. Scraps of paper poked out of the small cubbies. Half-filled notebooks were scattered across the surface, scarred by neon Magic Markers, hardened scabs of pink nail polish, and pale-blue doodles – happy faces and sad faces, musical notes and flowers. There was a box of personalized stationery, Melanie’s name printed, inevitably, in magenta, a gift from Denise, Brian’s fiancée, who often gave whimsical, thoughtful gifts in her attempt to become part of the family. Denise had wanted to be Melanie’s big sister and now she wanted to be Judith’s daughter, occasionally and hesitantly calling her ‘Mom’. It was an intimacy that Judith resented but which she allowed. She would not be unkind to the pleasant, caring girl whom Brian loved.

  She threw the box of stationery into the wastepaper basket and opened a drawer that contained a jumble of rubber bands and paper clips, pencil stubs and dried-out Bic pens. A small pile of carefully folded notes on rainbow-colored Post-its was crammed into an envelope. She read one, then another.

  Do you want to come to my house this afternoon? Don’t tell Angela. Claire.

  Do you want to sit next to me at the pep rally? Harvey.

  Judith smiled. Melanie had had friends. Claire had liked her. Harvey had liked her. She felt grateful to these children, whom she knew only by sight. All Melanie’s classmates had come to her funeral; pale and bewildered, they had trailed after Miss Fein, their young teacher, who had also been pale and bewildered. They had all sent carefully composed letters of condolence, a class exercise, she supposed. Judith had tied them together with a magenta ribbon and hidden them in a corner of her closet.

  She turned to the largest cubby where a bright pink diary nestled. It was her own gift to Melanie on her last birthday, chosen because it had a small gold lock and she wanted her daughter to know that she had gifted her with privacy. Judith herself had kept a diary as a girl, obsessively filling the blue lined pages of a standard black-and-white speckled notebook with her thoughts and feelings and hiding it each evening at the bottom of her underwear drawer. She had been, she knew, inspired by Anne Frank. She, an only child, born to hardworking parents late in their lives, had, foolishly, dramatically, imagined herself to be as unhappy and isolated as the martyred Dutch girl. A latchkey child, returning from school to an empty apartment, she had consigned her secrets to her diary, writing of her loneliness and misery, her desperate yearnings, her irrational fears. Those entries, read and reread, vested her with clarity of a kind, offering her relief and comfort.

  She had thought that Melanie might derive the same comfort from confiding in the pink leather diary. But Melanie had not locked it, and Judith opened it and began to read.

  Melanie’s handwriting was cramped, each brief entry punctuated with exclamation points, hearts and stars. She had experimented with pink ink and then with purple. She favored single sentences.

  I don’t want to go to tennis camp!!!

  I love Denise but I like our family just as it is – the four of us. I wish we could stay that way forever. Still, the wedding will be so much fun. Oh, why am I so confused?

  I hate Mr DeAngelo. He picks on me!!! But I love Miss Fein. She’s so pretty, so sweet. She gave me an A on my essay about snow.

  I wish Mommy would stop nagging me about my room. It’s my room.

  I don’t think Angela wants to be my friend any more. She sits with Lena at lunch. But I don’t care. Claire wants to be my best friend.

  I think I like Harvey – I mean really like him. I love my pink cardigan. It makes me feel really pretty. I’m going to wear it to the pep rally***. Harvey is going to sit next to me. I guess he thinks I’m pretty. I hope he does!!!

  Judith smiled. Her daughter’s words comforted her. She thought to tell David that they had buried a happy child, a girl who had hated her math teacher but loved her English teacher, who treasured her brother, tolerated her parents’ loving interventions and knew herself to be pretty, or, at least, pretty enough. She was glad that the pink cardigan, so grudgingly purchased, had made Melanie feel pretty. The boy named Harvey had wanted to sit beside her at the pep rally. The girl named Claire had invited her to her house. Melanie. She closed the pink diary, pressed it to her heart and set it aside.

  In another cubby of the desk she found a sheath of clippings from bridal magazines, photos and illustrations of teenaged girls in wide-skirted pastel gowns. She fingered the swatches of magenta velvet and magenta silk to be considered for the gown Melanie dreamed of wearing when she glided down the aisle as a junior bridesmaid at her brother’s wedding.

  Judith carried the diary and the swatches of fabric into her own room and placed them beneath her silk scarves in the bottom d
rawer of her bureau. A senseless salvage of her daughter’s brief life, she knew, but it was oddly important to her.

  ‘Enough,’ she told herself sternly and went downstairs to put the water on for spaghetti.

  ‘I made a good start on the room,’ she told David at dinner that night. ‘I’ll work on it again tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s not too much for you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m managing,’ she said.

  She did not ask about his day. He did not mention Nancy Cummings.

  It took her two days to box up the contents of Melanie’s crowded bookcases. Melanie had tenaciously retained books from every stage of her brief life. The oversized picture books of her childhood with their brilliant illustrations on glossy paper shared a shelf with the chapter series of her girlhood. Babar and Goodnight Moon nestled against Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.

  Judith sat cross-legged on the floor, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, the dark helmet of her hair covered by a red bandanna. She opened and closed one book after another, wiping the spines, sneezing at the clouds of dust that floated free as she turned pages.

  She stared at the etchings in a book of fairy tales and tried to remember the endings. What had happened to Rapunzel after she let down her hair? Did the sleeping beauty and the prince live happily ever after? A foolish question. Everyone lived happily ever after. In the land of fairy tales, thirteen-year-old girls did not die. If they fell asleep, even into the most profound and ominous sleep, the kiss of a prince awakened them. She sighed, put the oversized book into the carton and reached for the copy of Little Women that she had given Melanie on her tenth birthday.

  They had read it aloud, alternating chapters. Judith confided that Jo had always been her favorite. It fell to Melanie to read the chapter on Beth’s death. Her voice had faltered and she had wept.

  ‘It’s so sad.’

  Judith too had cried. They offered each other scraps of Kleenex, then laughed in embarrassment at the luxurious catharsis of their own foolish sorrow.

  She set the book aside and decided that she had filled enough bags and cartons for the day.

  The next morning she leafed through the tattered copy of Make Way for Ducklings, Melanie’s favorite book during her toddler days. Her grape-jelly-stained fingerprint purpled the picture of the parade of ducklings headed toward the safety of the pond. Judith hesitated and then consigned it to the carton. She read an entire chapter of A Wrinkle in Time before adding it to the bag of chapter books. She decided to keep the beautifully bound volume of Andersen’s fairy tales that David had bought at a book stall in Copenhagen. She placed Goodnight Moon and two volumes of Curious George and the Harry Potter books on a separate pile. She would keep them. Brian and Denise would have a family. These books would be Melanie’s tender legacy to her brother’s children.

  The thought, irrational and whimsical as she knew it to be, comforted. She held tight to it as she left the room and repeated it to Evelyn at her morning therapy session.

  The wise bird-faced woman perched on the edge of her leather chair and chirped approvingly.

  ‘A good thought. Progress. You are moving toward the future.’

  ‘Am I?’ Judith wondered.

  Her hand flew to her head. She, always so careful of her appearance, had forgotten to remove the red bandanna. She smiled and Evelyn smiled. That too, she supposed, was progress, a relaxation of control. A dismantling of useless grief. A moving on.

  She returned to Melanie’s room with renewed determination the next morning. She removed the candy-striped curtains, stripped the bed of the matching candy-striped comforter and the gaily patterned sheets and pillow cases, and carried them down to the washing machine. She pulled the poster of Taylor Swift from one wall and the one of Justin Bieber from the other, ripped them up and tossed them into the wastepaper basket. She opened the battered wooden jewelry box in which Melanie had kept the few pieces she seldom wore – a heart-shaped gold locket, a slap watch that no longer kept time, two narrow silver bracelets. She slipped both of the bracelets on to her own wrist, pleased by their musical jangle, and placed the box on a shelf in her own closet.

  She managed to roll up the red area rug and drag it out to the hallway and, with a spurt of energy, she vacuumed, dusted and washed the windows, furiously scouring each pane, looking out now and again at the apple tree across the way, wondering when it would burst into blossom. By late afternoon the room smelled of Windex and shadows danced across the barren mattress, the cleared and empty surfaces of the white desk and bureau and the empty white shelves of the bookcases. The new sterility reminded her of a hospital room. She stared at the cartons and the black bags, filled to overflowing with the sad residue of Melanie’s brief life, and a wave of nausea swept over her.

  Thrusting Melanie’s bracelets into her pocket, she left the room and hurried downstairs. There was a meatloaf to be heated, an apple cake to be baked, salad to be cut up. Brian and Denise were coming for dinner and staying over, as they did every few weeks.

  She knew that Brian and Denise saw their visits as an obligation, assuming their presence to be a comfort. Which it was. Judith was grateful. David was grateful. The young couple’s discussions, their confidences about Brian’s courses and Denise’s community fieldwork, shattered the silence of their sorrow. Glancing at each other, listening with as much interest as they could muster, she and David were reminded of their own lives as graduate students, when their hours of intimacy were furtively scavenged from the deadlines for papers and the demands of their part-time jobs. Like Brian and Denise, they had anticipated a bright future. Death had not been part of that long-ago scenario. She wondered now if they had ever uttered the word.

  She thrust the dark thought aside and concentrated on her preparations for the evening, darting from the kitchen into the dining room, hurrying upstairs to place clean towels in the bedrooms.

  She reminded herself to be grateful for Brian’s concern, for Denise’s cheerful and patience acquiescence. She would teach herself to like Denise. David was already fond of her, despite his mild hesitation when Brian announced his engagement.

  ‘They’re too young to be getting married. Brian has two more years of law school.’

  ‘Actually, they’re older than we were,’ Judith had reminded him. ‘And we both had years of grad school ahead of us.’

  She and David had married one week after graduation, their wedding small and full of joy. She had carried a bouquet of wild flowers, the sun had shone golden upon the gossamer fabric of their wedding canopy and a string quartet had played softly.

  Everyone had marveled at how well and economically Judith had managed the service and the reception.

  ‘But that’s my Judith,’ David had said proudly. ‘She can organize anything.’

  Was that still a source of pride for him, after all these years? She dismissed the thought. Hastily, she added hearts of palm to the salad because they were his favorite.

  Denise brought flowers – daffodils, the first blossoms of the season. Brian brought wine. They smiled proudly at each other as they held their gifts out to Judith and she kissed them both. Her handsome son was tall and grave-eyed like his father. His petite freckled bride, her auburn hair caping her shoulders, her green eyes glinting behind her oversized red-framed glasses, kissed David on the cheek, took Judith’s hands in her own.

  Judith told them, over dinner, that the room was now empty except for the furnishings.

  ‘The room?’ Brian asked. ‘Oh, yes. Melanie’s room.’

  He blushed as though he had uttered a forbidden word; his hand trembled as he reached for his water glass.

  ‘I put everything in bags and cartons. Books, clothing, other stuff. The synagogue thrift shop will take most of it. They insist that all donations be gently used, so we’re OK on that score. Whatever I saved is in good enough shape. Very gently used. There’s only the furniture to deal with,’ Judith said.

  ‘I think Nancy will want it for her daughter’s room,�
� David said.

  ‘Nancy. Who is Nancy?’ It was not a name she had heard before.

  ‘She’s one of our senior administrators. A nice woman. A widow with a young daughter. She happened to tell me that she just moved into a new apartment and has very little furniture. Her little girl is sleeping on a futon.’

  He poured himself a cup of coffee without looking up.

  ‘If it’s all right, I’ll ask her if she wants what we have and if she can arrange to have it moved to her apartment.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Judith said, flinching at the thought that another child would sleep in Melanie’s bed, sit at Melanie’s desk, hide her secret treasures in its clever cubbies.

  ‘I can take the bags and cartons over to the thrift shop with you tomorrow,’ Denise offered. ‘I don’t have a class until late in the afternoon.’

  ‘That would be helpful,’ Judith agreed.

  They ate the apple cake in the den and watched the news, before going upstairs. They were all tired, they agreed.

  ‘Let’s have an early night for once,’ Brian said, and Denise nodded.

  Judith did not tell them that all their nights were early. Evening after evening, she and David carried their books up to their room and trained their bed lamps on the unread pages. Now and again they struggled for conversation.

  Was the room too hot, too chilly?

  Had he remembered his dental appointment?

  Did she want to renew their subscription to the Philharmonic?

  Judith tried to remember what they had talked about before Melanie’s death. Everything, she supposed. Everything and nothing, weekend plans, household trivia and, of course, Melanie. She was ever central to their lives. Their home rang with her laughter, was dominated by her moods – now up, now down, tantrums and exuberance exploding in inexplicable sequence. With Melanie in their lives, there had been no vacuum of silence to fill. With Melanie gone, they drowned in the solemn silence of her absence.