Go Ask Fannie, page 23
She held up a bottle of steak sauce, its paper seal intact. “I bought this in Argentina. It slowed me down in customs. He should have passed it on to you, if he didn’t want it.”
“He would have been afraid your feelings might have been hurt,” said George. “You’d come home and look in the cupboards and not find it.”
Ruth surveyed the collection of gourmet sauces and seasonings, then gathered them up and threw them in the trash.
“What are you doing?” George exclaimed.
“They’re all expired by now,” she said. “You don’t want them.”
“I might,” said George. He began going through the containers. “A small fortune in hot sauce,” he said, removing some of the bottles. “This stuff never goes bad. Jeez.”
“Have at it,” said Ruth, yawning.
* * *
• • •
THE SKY LIGHTENED, the rest of the world got up, and the three Blaire children drove over to the hospital. Murray’s body had been moved to a small room in the basement, and together they went in for one last look. He lay on a gurney, covered with a white sheet, and the nurse lifted it off his face and folded it gently across his shoulders and left them alone.
The first thing George noticed was that his father’s hair had been combed back off his forehead in little rows with some kind of gel, a Brylcreem man at rest. This looked entirely wrong because Murray’s hair was always falling over his forehead in a messy dart, so now George used his fingers and mussed up the styling so Murray looked more like himself.
Meanwhile, they regarded him in silence. For all his experience with people dying in the ICU, George nevertheless found himself thinking like a child: that any moment now his father would wake up. That he could put his mouth to his father’s, and breathe life into the old man’s lungs. “It was just a joke!” Murray would crow. “Now get me that damn coffee!” He looked for a twitch, any twitch, in his father’s eyelids.
Ridiculous.
After a while Ruth bent over and kissed his forehead and left the room. Lizzie did the same. George stayed by his father’s side. He fumbled around under the sheet for his hand, found it, and smoothed the cool, papery skin with his thumb, recalling the massage he’d given him the previous day. He cupped his other hand around his father’s face and stared at his features. He’d always felt a distance with his father, owing to Daniel’s death and Murray’s hopes all being rolled into the one remaining son. So much pressure: Go to law school. Join the firm. Run for office. Do good things. Well, he’d found another way to do good things, but he always sensed a disappointment on his father’s part that he’d gone into medicine rather than law.
For which he wasn’t sorry.
Still, he wished his father had said, just once, “I’m proud of you, son.”
* * *
• • •
BACK AT THE HOUSE Lizzie went up to the attic in search of the box that Ruth had been talking about. It was stifling under the eaves, and the air had the charged smell of overly dry wood. At the far end was a little window, cobwebbed and buggy, which she cranked open, and then, working her way down the length of the attic, she moved aside broken chairs and stacks of boxes but couldn’t find anything labeled “Lillian.” There were canoe paddles and lifejackets, old lamps and a porcelain sink; there was a big old trunk in which she found the army parka in dispute, but when she tried it on, it set off a sneezing attack, so she quickly bagged it up and left it by the stairs, to be taken to the cleaners for George.
She gave up on the attic and went down to the basement, where on carefully constructed shelves Murray kept cancelled checks and old mortgage statements and several defeated-looking tangles of cords and adapters. Against one wall a clutch of old skis threatened to topple over. Who wanted old skis? No one but the hippie craftsmen who used them to make Adirondack chairs. Between the attic and the basement she felt overwhelmed at the job ahead of them. She wanted to put a sign out by the road: “Free Shit, Come and Get It.”
But she couldn’t find a box with Lillian’s name on it.
She was starting upstairs when she happened to glance into the dark, spidery area under the stairwell, filled with a jumble of softball mitts and knee pads and bicycle helmets. Behind all this, a light surface caught her eye. Squatting down, she shoved everything aside to reveal Daniel’s box. So that’s where it was all this time! She pulled it out and was about to lift the lid and go through the mementos, when she happened to glance back into the darkness and noticed another banker’s box. Waving away cobwebs, she leaned far in and hauled it out. It was much dustier than Daniel’s. There was no label. She tipped up the lid.
The box was filled with paper.
Eaton’s Corrasable Bond, to be precise, stapled together in bundles of ten to twenty pages. She pulled the box out into the light and lifted out a stack and fanned through the pages. “Guidance: A Story by Lillian Holmes.” “Home Repair: A Story by Lillian Holmes.” And so on. She made her way down the stack and counted fourteen separate stories, each with four or five red-penciled drafts. At the bottom was a dog-eared manila folder. She didn’t open it just then. Instead she hoisted the box and triumphantly lugged it upstairs and called for Ruth and George.
“Oh, did you find the bracelet?” Ruth asked, coming in from the kitchen. She was wearing an old pair of jeans that made her look bowlegged.
“No,” said Lizzie. “Something better.” She set the box on the floor and lifted the lid. “Mom’s stories!”
Ruth peered down. “Holy shit. Where did you find them?”
“Under the stairs, in the basement! Behind Daniel’s box!”
“Wow. I thought Dad got rid of them.” Ruth squatted, knees popping. She reached down and ruffled through the stack. “That’s a lot of work. I’m still mad at her, you know,” she admitted.
Hearing this, it was all Lizzie could do to keep from hurling her water bottle across the room. “Ruth!” she cried, and she leaned over and gripped her sister’s face between her hands. “I just found a box of Mom’s stories that nobody knew about! This is a gift! And you’re going to pout? At this point in your life? With Dad gone now? She was our mother! She fucked up! We all fuck up! But Dad said it himself—what good does it do to be angry about something that happened a zillion years ago?!”
Ruth’s face had grown somber.
“I can’t help it,” she said in a small voice. “Even now. How do I stop?”
Lizzie sank back. “I don’t know, Ruth,” she sighed. “Maybe you just go outside and . . . and scream it to the stars.”
“And then what?” Ruth was desperate for a good plan, Lizzie could tell.
“Then you forget about it,” she said gently. “Simple as that.”
Ruth looked doubtful, but before Lizzie could think of more words that might be of use to her sister, the kitchen door slammed, and George appeared in the doorway. “What’s this?” he said, kneeling down.
“Mom’s stories!” Lizzie exclaimed. “Fourteen of them! Rough drafts and all!”
“Wow,” said George. “I thought Dad got rid of them. Sure beats a cookbook, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know about that, but—where are you going, Ruth?”
“To scream at the stars,” Ruth said over her shoulder.
“Huh?” said George.
Lizzie silenced him with her hand. They heard the kitchen door open and close, and then they heard a primal throaty roar that echoed off the mountainsides, frightening animals and triggering avalanches and calving glaciers five thousand miles to the north.
“Ruth getting something off her chest?” George inquired.
“Indeed,” said Lizzie.
And then Ruth came back inside, now with the bottle of their father’s gin, and the three Blaire children sat in a circle on the floor with the box of their mother’s stories in the middle. For the next hour they passed the stories and the bottle around, Ruth trying mightily to keep the drafts in proper order. They skimmed and read and sometimes they interrupted one another with a passage they wanted to share. There was a story called “The Neighbors” about a couple trying to reignite their marriage by having sex by the neighbors’ pool. A teenage boy getting drunk.
“Wonder where the idea for that one came from,” George drawled.
And there was a story about a young woman having an abortion. Lizzie’s eyes widened as she read. The imagery itself was vivid, haunting (and not even close to her own experience): a young girl waiting on a soiled sheet on an unpadded table in a ramshackle apartment. She tried to keep reading but her mind was careening. Had her mother once . . . before Ruth . . . ? Quickly she scolded herself for jumping to conclusions, for failing to credit her mother with simply having a very good imagination. It didn’t matter, had she or hadn’t she. It was just good writing, and full of empathy, a word Lizzie wouldn’t have known at the age of six, and sitting there in the living room she felt her mother’s presence, like a radio wave, or light beyond the visible spectrum, there to reassure her that the laws of the universe were on her side, and things would be okay.
At some point when all the stories were out of the box and circulating, Lizzie opened up the manila folder from the bottom of the box. Inside was a sheaf of rejection letters. Some were form letters, preprinted notes that broke the bad news on a mere strip of paper; others were more personally composed pieces of correspondence: “. . . not right for our needs . . .” “Readers found much to admire, but . . .”
“What are those?” George asked.
“Rejection letters,” said Lizzie.
“Ouch,” said George.
For someone who had weathered her share of rejection letters over the years for her scholarly work, it pained Lizzie to think of how much negative feedback her mother had endured. Some of the letters came awfully close, and she pictured her mother at the stove frying onions after getting such a letter, swallowing her disappointment in order to put another casserole on the table for dinner. There wasn’t time for wallowing in self-pity when you had six mouths to feed.
Lizzie was about to put the folder back into the box when a thin, cream-colored envelope fell out. She picked it up. The return address showed it was from The Northern Review, a long-standing literary magazine Lizzie knew well, from people in the Creative Writing department.
Curious, she opened the envelope. She read the letter once, then read it again, and then she passed it to George, who upon reading it made a little O of his mouth.
“What is it?” Ruth asked.
“Ain’t no rejection letter,” said George, passing it to Ruth.
Ruth skimmed the letter, frowning, then looked at the date. “October 29, 1984,” she breathed. “Right before she died. She must have just gotten it.”
“Do you think Dad knew about it?” George asked.
“He would have told us, wouldn’t he?” Ruth said.
“He must have just shoved everything into this one envelope,” said Lizzie.
“But why wouldn’t the editors have tried to get in touch with her again?” George asked.
Lizzie shook her head blankly. “Who knows. Disorganization, is my guess.”
“What’s the title again?” Ruth asked.
“‘Whose Business Is It, Anyway?’” Lizzie shuffled through the pile of stories and found the story in question and read the first line aloud.
“Lucy wanted egg salad but Eleanor was saving the hard-boiled eggs to make deviled eggs for the party that night.” Suddenly a thought occurred to her. She went to the kitchen and got the cookbook, which she’d left at the house on Saturday morning. She slid her fingernail between the pages to gently pry them apart, and turned to the recipe for deviled eggs. Lucy/egg salad/Mother/D.E., read Lillian’s notes.
She came back and passed the cookbook to Ruth, whose eyes went wide. “She must have had the idea for this story while she was making deviled eggs!” she exclaimed. Ruth loved solving a mystery.
“Read more,” said George.
Lizzie picked up the story and continued:
“Eleanor hoped this wouldn’t trigger a meltdown with Lucy, but it did, and she spent the next half hour trying to calm the screaming child, who at six was way too old, in Eleanor’s view, for a tantrum.”
“Oh! That’s you, Lizzie,” said Ruth, nodding eagerly. “You had a lot of tantrums!”
Lizzie blushed and continued:
“But Eleanor didn’t give in, and eventually Lucy fell asleep, which gave Eleanor time to make the deviled eggs and then clean up the kitchen for the caterers, who were due to arrive at four. (Her own deviled eggs were the one concession to food preparation that Eleanor had made for the party.) Her husband would get home from coaching football at five, and the guests were due to arrive at six, including the Governor and his wife.”
“Mom hated giving parties,” Ruth noted. “It was like a phobia.”
“Shush,” said Lizzie.
“This was an important party for Eleanor because people were paying $500 to attend, to raise money for Eleanor’s reelection campaign. Eleanor had the support of a lot of people and groups. She had the support of the labor unions. The teachers. Three of the state’s newspapers. The Governor. But there was one small problem: she didn’t have the support of her husband.
“John had liked being the congresswoman’s spouse for the last year and a half; he’d liked staying home with Lucy while Eleanor commuted to Washington. But he felt it was taking its toll on the family. ‘Look at Lucy’s tantrums,’ he said. ‘Where do you think they come from?’ And he didn’t like her being away for three nights each week. ‘It’s lonely,’ he said. ‘We need you.’”
“Wait,” said George. “Who is Mom in this story? The wife? Or the husband?”
“Just listen,” said Lizzie. “When in fact Eleanor herself was having a ball down in Washington. She shared an apartment with a congresswoman from Oregon. The two of them drank wine late into the night, grousing over stalemates. Sometimes they went to restaurants together, sometimes they ordered pizza at ten o’clock. There were always position papers to read, the newspapers as well. Eleanor had never felt as well-informed as she was these days . . .”
She glanced up. “Should I keep going?”
“Definitely,” said George.
“Yes, do,” said Ruth.
So Lizzie kept on reading. The story took an ugly turn when, during the party, Eleanor got a phone call from the national press. A photograph had surfaced showing John and Eleanor smoking pot. Did she care to comment? She hung up, but the issue wasn’t going away. After the guests left, John glumly said there were probably more photos where that one came from. Eleanor told him that was awfully pessimistic. John said their lives were going to be lived under a microscope from now on. Eleanor accused him of leaking it to the press, to sabotage her campaign.
Lizzie, reading aloud, lost herself in the story. She could see Eleanor’s viewpoint, but she could see John’s as well. It was hard work, she knew, pulling off these contrasting points of view, and her mother had gotten no credit for it except one editor’s set of admiring eyes.
A stalemate: a couple in crisis. A child waking from a nightmare. Parents competing for the right to console the child. And then at the end, Eleanor running a bath, locking the door, lowering herself into the tub, and settling back into the hot water and lighting a cigarette.
“She exhaled dragon puffs through her nose and listened closely,” Lizzie read. “She could hear John out in the bedroom opening drawers and closing them; the clink of change into a dish on his bureau. In a moment he would be in bed with his library book. Sex? Not on your life, tonight. But as she took a long drag, she imagined him in the morning, off for a run while she and Lucy ate the rest of the deviled eggs for breakfast, and when he came back, they would craft an appropriate statement for the press together, saying yes it was me, and no I don’t regret it. The laws are wrong, no one got hurt, and whose business is it, anyway? It was a bold approach to take, but she wasn’t going to hide who she was, she wasn’t going to lie, and if she lost votes, well then, that was the price of honesty.
“By this time the water in the tub had grown tepid. Eleanor was shivering. Using her big toe, she nudged the plug away, then stood up and reached for a towel as the water drained around her ankles.”
Lizzie set the manuscript down.
“What?” said George. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” said Lizzie. “The end.”
“That’s awfully abrupt,” said Ruth.
“And what does it all mean?” George asked. “Was Mom mad about Dad’s campaign? Or was she wishing she could run for Congress herself? Did she have skeletons in her closet that we weren’t supposed to know about? What does it all mean?”
Lizzie didn’t want to be the professor right now. “It doesn’t have to ‘mean’ anything.”
“But do you think they’re going to be all right?” George asked anxiously. “John and Eleanor?”
“Oh, George,” sighed Lizzie, “what do you think?”
“I think they are,” said George.
“I think they are, too,” Ruth agreed.
“Well good, then,” said Lizzie. “Maybe that’s the effect she was looking for.” Carefully she straightened the stack of stories on the rug. Her foot had gone to sleep, and she labored up from the floor, then limped over to the patio door and slid it open. It was midday, and white streaks feathered the sky. Slowly she breathed in the dry September air. Orange rose hips dotted the rosebushes, and a lone scarlet branch slashed the deep green of the maple. She waved to Boyd, out by the barn. He waved back.
“What are we going to do with all these?” Ruth asked.
