Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, page 14
Mom, who had been taking us here our entire lives and never once commented on the paintings, went on and on about his paintings while the dentist worked on my teeth. He poked and prodded until I bled, kept wiping the tool thing on the napkin and there’d be a streak of blood.
“You’ve got the light just right,” Mom said, and tossed her hair off her shoulder.
Was Mom flirting with the dentist? Or did she just really like the paintings? Were they good paintings? I couldn’t tell.
“Are you a painter?” the dentist asked and then wiped the tool on the napkin again. “Sally, your teeth, they keep bleeding. Are you flossing?”
I nodded. I wasn’t flossing. Did anybody really floss?
“I almost went to art school once,” Mom said.
“What happened?”
“I had kids,” Mom said.
I knew Mom had been a teacher, but I didn’t know Mom almost went to art school. Did you know this? Mom had submitted a drawing once to a contest and won a free summer of art school in Paris. She didn’t go, of course, because she was pregnant with you.
“You make sacrifices,” Mom said. “It’s what you do.”
“Okay,” the dentist said. “Mom’s up.”
Mom climbed into the seat.
“But why’d you even apply if you were pregnant?” I asked.
Mom didn’t answer. Mom opened her mouth for the dentist so he could make the mold, and her silence made my question sound more like an accusation. I got a strange feeling that I didn’t really understand Mom, either. Who was this woman, opening her mouth, as the dentist filled it with plaster? This woman who wanted to fuck the president. Who gave up art school for us. Who liked the dentist’s paintings. I watched her clamp down and the plaster billow out around her teeth and I worried her mouth might get cemented shut forever, like yours. I felt bad for snapping at her. I looked around at the green and red people in the paintings having the time of their lives. I felt compelled to say something about his paintings all of a sudden, maybe to remind the dentist that there was a better version of himself, or maybe a better version of myself who could one day talk confidently about art as I strolled the streets of Paris.
But the truth was, I never knew what to say about art; I was terrible in museums, stood there and looked at the statues and couldn’t speak. Amazing things always dulled me into nothingness.
But it was my job, I knew, to fill the silence now. You were dead and Mom’s mouth was full of plaster, and so I stared and sighed at the paintings, and said, “Well, I really like your art.”
After, Mom was embarrassed, told me it was insulting to lump all the paintings together as though they were indistinct or something, like you could buy the man’s art in bulk at BJ’s.
“What’s wrong with BJ’s? We buy everything at BJ’s.”
“Exactly. You can buy anything at BJ’s.”
I felt sorry for all of us as we walked out and the bell above the door dinged, but not sorry enough to run back and do something about it. According to Mom, that’s not being sorry at all.
“Let me see those pretty white teeth,” Mom said in the car, but I wouldn’t show her. I refused. It felt like bragging or something. Like, my sister’s teeth are hemorrhagic but look how white my teeth are!
So, it was silence again, all the way back home, until Mom pulled into our driveway and locked the doors. “Who are you talking to at night, Sally?”
“Nobody,” I said.
I made sure to sound angry, because that was how you always got away with lying. You sounded angry when you were lying, as if you were the one being betrayed.
But this was our new mother: She lit candles in her nightgown and prayed with Rosary beads. She was always saying something I didn’t expect. She asked questions that embarrassed me: Had I been speaking with you at night?
“If you’re talking to Kathy, it’s okay,” Mom said. “I do, too, sometimes.”
“You do? What do you say?”
“I just tell her about our day. I tell her about the things I think she might want to know.”
“But why?” I asked. “It’s not like she can hear you.”
“Of course, she can,” Mom said. “Of course, she can hear me. Don’t ever say a thing like that again.”
* * *
It was becoming increasingly hard to predict what Dad would be doing when we got home. Once, Dad had spread out photos of you on the kitchen table and was weeping over them. But when we returned from the dentist, Dad was assessing the fridge. Dad had come to the conclusion that the fridge needed to be two inches higher.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the fridge is too short,” he said. “Look at it. It’s an outrage!”
“Seems normal to me.”
“Well, you’re little. I’m a big man,” he said. “I’m tired of having to bend down for the trays in the freezer.”
“Maybe one of us should start cooking then,” I said.
We cooked that night. We cleaned. Mom and Dad went to bed, and I took the phone to my room. I dialed Billy’s number, and he picked up. I felt nervous as it rang, as if something might be different between us now, but it wasn’t.
“Sorry if that was awkward earlier at the deli,” Billy said. “I was just surprised to see you.”
“I was surprised to see you, too,” I said. “I couldn’t really talk anyway. I was late to the dentist.”
“Oh, that sucks. I hate going to the dentist,” he said. “He’s always poking my teeth, telling me I need to brush better, and that’s why they’re bleeding. And I’m like, I think they’re bleeding because you keep stabbing them with tiny metal spears.”
I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s true. Good point. That’s exactly what my dentist does.”
“Do we have the same dentist?”
“Dr. Kurn?”
“Yeah. I see Dr. Kurn, too.”
“The painter.”
“He’s a painter? I didn’t know Dr. Kurn painted,” he said.
“All those paintings, in his office. He did those.”
“No shit,” your boyfriend said. He sounded really impressed. Like maybe he didn’t hate the dentist after all. “Those are pretty good.”
“How do you know what a good painting is?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “I think you just like it or you don’t like it. I think it’s as simple as that.”
I pulled the bedspread over my head and pressed my mouth closer to the phone. I told him about Mom, about how she had to choose between the life of an artist in Paris or her life here, as Mom.
“I bet she thinks she made the wrong decision now,” I said.
Billy told me about his mother and how unhappy she had been lately, too. She had dreams of divorcing his father—he heard them fight about it all of the time. The accident, the guilt, Billy’s medical care—it had all been hard on them. His father had to re-mortgage the Tree and Garden. Worked overtime on the weekends just to pay off some of the bills, while his mother spent her weekends at the racquet club, playing tennis with people who were not Billy’s father. And it all made sense even as it surprised me—it never occurred to me to feel bad for Billy’s parents. But of course. Something like this was hard for everybody.
We talked for so long that night, Billy actually fell asleep. And whenever Billy fell asleep on the phone, I knew right away. Your boyfriend, he snored. I don’t know if you knew this about your boyfriend, but it was kind of loud.
“Billy,” I said. “Wake up!”
He woke up.
“Who were you with today?” I asked. “Who was that girl?”
The girl, your boyfriend said, was nobody. She was just some girl. From high school. From his bio class. Her name was Karen. They had dissected a frog together in May. And she was kind of funny. Kind of pretty. She seemed to like him, but he didn’t know. He was still a mess. A big fucking mess.
“I just keep thinking about Kathy in the car that day,” he said. “Sometimes, when I close my eyes, that’s all I see.”
“I know,” I said. “Me, too.”
Sometimes, I fell asleep on the phone, too. It was always a deep sleep, the kind I would only get when I fell asleep on our towels at the beach—I’d wake up suddenly, so confused to see the ocean. I felt as if I had traveled from very far away and had no idea where I was or who I was until you looked at me. And that’s when I’d remember: You were my sister. And we were just at the beach.
“Sally,” Billy said. “You fell asleep.”
And then we’d just start talking again.
“You guys going anywhere this summer?” Billy asked. “I mean, other than to the dentist.”
“I only ever go to the dentist,” I said.
“Well, let’s just say you happened to be going somewhere else besides the dentist’s,” he said. “Where would you go?”
“Amish Country,” I said.
“Amish Country?” he said. “That’s random. Amish Country freaks me out.”
“Why?”
“All those buggies,” he said. “They’re so dark inside. I remember passing one on the road, and not being able to see the woman’s face next to the man, and I remember thinking, What the fuck happens to women in those buggies?”
“I never thought about that. What do you think happens?”
“I don’t know. That’s what weirds me out.”
“Are you going on vacation?” I asked.
Billy was going on too many vacations, actually. He was going to Disney World and then Long Island and then California to see his cousins. His mother’s idea. His mother was concerned. Billy was not doing the normal things a boy was supposed to be doing at his age. He was never out with his friends. He was never in the yard playing. He was not having the best summer of his life before he went to college.
“Every day it’s like, Are you depressed, Billy? I honestly think my mom would be relieved if I went to a party and got arrested for being drunk.”
Billy laughed at the thought.
“So Disney World it is.”
“Because it’s the happiest place on earth?”
“Exactly,” he said. “And do you want to know why Disney World is the happiest place on earth?”
“Because Mickey Mouse is there?”
“Because it’s the sluttiest place on earth.”
“That doesn’t sound true to me.”
“It is. Everybody who works there fucks everybody else who works there.”
“That just can’t be true.”
“It is. My cousin, she used to work there, at Epcot. And she said it’s just a bunch of people having sex all the time.”
“You mean, like the characters in the costumes?”
“Everybody, she said.”
We laughed, thinking about it all. Mickey Mouse having sex. Donald Duck getting to third.
“Cinderella getting a rim job,” he said.
“What’s a rim job?
“Oh God. I probably shouldn’t tell you this.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s when someone licks someone else’s asshole.”
“But why?”
“For fun.”
“For fun?”
“Some people like that, I guess.”
“No way,” I said. “Nobody likes that!”
“I bet you even Cinderella likes that,” he said.
I laughed. I didn’t even realize how loud I was talking or how late it was, how we were both basically asleep, talking with our eyes closed, until Dad burst into the room.
“Who are you talking to?” Dad asked.
“Nobody,” I said.
Dad knew better than to reprimand me. He was a longtime admirer of John Locke and Benjamin Franklin. Read biographies of the great American presidents every night before bed now. He believed we were all innocent until proven guilty.
So he grabbed the phone.
“Who is this?” Dad said.
I don’t know what Billy said.
“Billy,” he said. “I told you to never contact us again. I suggest you never call back here again, unless you want to wind up in court.”
Then Dad looked at me.
“Meet me downstairs, now,” he said.
* * *
We met on the white couch. There, Dad was mad. He was Mad Dad. I don’t think you know this man. I didn’t meet him until you died. This father yelled, so loudly, it was like his voice was coming from the center of the earth. His words like liquid magma, bubbling up and spewing all over our room.
Who knows what he said.
Something about our family.
Something about respect.
Something about Billy, being too old for me.
And I told him it wasn’t like that.
But Dad insisted that it was always like that.
I reminded him that Billy was just your boyfriend, but he didn’t understand.
He just looked at me, and said, “Sally, your sister doesn’t have a boyfriend anymore.”
It was the worst thing he could have said. It made me start to cry, harder than I cried when we buried you in St. Martin’s field, or when Mom finally pulled the sheets from your bed, because even then, I didn’t understand what it meant for you to be dead. I didn’t understand that everything you had, everything we shared, would just disappear.
“Billy has nothing to do with us anymore,” Dad said.
He was right. Billy was going to go off to college in the fall to study poetry and art, and you were going to stay buried in the dirt. Billy was going to move into his dorm and meet new people and make a whole new life for himself, while you were going to rot. You were going to still be in that casket, and the thought made me cry so hard that Dad stopped yelling. Dad put his arm around me, tried to calm me down, but it was too late. I was too upset. I was heaving, near hyperventilation, when it happened again: I threw up all over the white couch.
“Oh no,” I said, looking at the vomit drip down the beautiful fabric. “The white couch.”
“Don’t worry about the couch,” Dad said, going to get the towels. “The couch will be just fine. The couch doesn’t even know what happened to it.”
But Mom did. Mom came in the room.
“Sally, did something happen to the couch?” Mom said. “Did you vomit on the couch?”
Mom got the club soda and some paper towels. She started scrubbing the couch. Took some bleach to it. Then started apologizing to the couch about the state of the couch.
“What a crazy woman I was,” she said, “thinking I could have two kids and a white couch.”
At the end of summer, cats started to appear at our back door at night. Or maybe I was so lonely that I just started to notice them. Either way, it was hard to know what to make of them.
“It must mean something,” Mom said.
Dad agreed.
“It means they’re hungry,” he said, but of course this was not what Mom meant. Mom fed the cats, which she was not supposed to do, because the cats could have rabies or ticks. The cats could kill us—Dad was very afraid of this happening, of us dying from some stupid avoidable thing, and I suppose that was his job.
But I liked them. I liked stepping onto the deck, feeling the cats curl around my legs.
“Get!” Dad said. He came out with a broom like he was some old witch. “Get out of here.”
The cats scattered and Dad sat down on his porch chair.
Dad was still angry at me, it seemed. He was angry for the rest of the year like this. Angry at taxes, angry at the shows about sex on TV, angry at the doctors who weren’t making Mom happier, angry that I left my sneakers at the top of the stairs where anybody could trip over them and break a leg or worse. Dad got so angry about my carelessness, my messy room, which he described as a danger to us all. It gave him heart palpitations to see me run around corners in socks, and if I fell down the stairs one more time, he quasi-jokingly threatened to put me through his summer safety school.
“Being safe,” he explained to me, “requires eliminating all the potential for risk.”
Being safe requires keeping your eye always on task; it requires you to think ahead and be organized and pay attention to where all of your tools are, because when you are a thousand feet in the air on a cell phone tower and your hammer is falling to the ground, well, that’s no good. People die because of that, he said.
Dad taught men how to see the bad things before they happened: To look at a table and see the four sharp corners that any small child could run into. To look out at the deck and see the nail sticking out of the wood and the black ice on the driveway before it formed. Dad could see all of this, and you’d think this kind of thing would make a person a hero, but it didn’t. When nothing bad happened, nobody even noticed. When nothing bad happened, it was just an ordinary day. Sometimes, when Dad was yelling his loudest at me, this was what he seemed to be saying: Do you people know how many ordinary days I’ve provided for you?
But Dad would never say this. Dad just looked out at the yard. The stone wall that lined the property. The three maple trees.
“Those trees need to be cut down, don’t you think, Sally?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, because it felt important to agree.
“At the very least, I should cut off some of the branches,” he said.
The next day, Dad went to Home Depot to get a ladder and a chain saw. But instead, he came back with a red leather chair and plopped it down in the living room next to the white couch. He sat and slept in it so much, I started to call it the Man Chair in my head, because Dad was a man and that was where he lived now.
* * *
At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I tried to think of the good times. That’s what Lydia the therapist suggested. Don’t think about your sister’s teeth. Think about the good times. Maybe make a list of all the good times?
That time we boogie-boarded in Rhode Island.
That time we had to say “fuck” outside on the curb.
That time we drank an entire bottle of Mountain Dew at the ocean. Laughed so hard, spit the Mountain Dew out into the water.
But eventually, I thought of Billy. I wondered what he was doing. I wondered if I should call him. It was very hard not to call him. Even harder imagining him at Disney World, on roller coasters, his mouth wide open as he laughed. On the worst of nights, I could see him so clearly, having sex with all the Disney princesses. Giving a rim job to Cinderella. By the end of summer, I could even picture her asshole, lined with fairy dust.
