Sleep, page 23
* * *
She roasted a chicken. She scrubbed the pan. Was it possible he was right about the soap?
* * *
She gasped awake from a nap in the armchair.
“Just checking on you,” Neal said.
* * *
She swam in the pool in the rain.
* * *
She went outside. The house was clean, the for-sale sign staked in the yard. She could go home soon. But she would miss this yard. It had given her something, a sense of possibility—there was danger out there but freedom too, past the property line, in the wilder dark, where her family would never go.
She wandered across the driveway down to the blackberry bushes. There might be some berries left, if she could see to pick one. But she heard something, the hiss of steps through the grass. Someone was coming.
Neal. She hadn’t seen his car, hadn’t realized he was there. Since Hugh had refused to keep talking about subdivision he hadn’t been around as much. He’d only come to get some things. But it was good he’d run into her, he said. He’d been meaning to take her aside, find a time to talk.
He wanted to make sure they were aligned on what was best for Hugh. She didn’t understand about the house. His idea was too good to pass up; it would give everyone the greatest financial security possible; it would mean he could make sure that Hugh was properly cared for no matter how long he lived. There wasn’t as much cash on hand as she thought. But it wasn’t just about the house. He had also asked Hugh to give him power of attorney, in case of incapacity. So—that would be handled. Well, Hugh hadn’t agreed yet, but he would. Formality, he used that word. He was being polite by including her—he found a way of making this clear.
“But there’s nothing wrong with Dad.”
“Well, he’s getting older too. You know how fast things can happen now. It wouldn’t kick in until it was necessary, obviously. But he’s already so emotional about these decisions.”
Could she make him go away? She would like to. “I think maybe I should have the power of attorney.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Why?”
“You have no experience managing finances, no experience with the law. You can barely pay rent on your crappy apartment. No offense. I’m the one who lives here, I’m the one who was here for Mom. You barely even visited, and then you stormed off at the last minute in a temper tantrum. Not that anyone’s blaming you, of course.”
“At least my main concern isn’t my parents’ money.”
“Don’t you dare speak to me that way.”
I’ll speak to you any way I want, she thought but did not say. He was angrier than she was, and that made her feel powerful. Power of attorney. Neal was right—she had only the vaguest sense of what that entailed.
She could hardly see his face now. The lightning bugs had turned on and were flashing, flashing.
“Why did you do that to me?”
She had not planned to ask him this; had in fact never imagined asking him. She asked it now clinically, casually, as if it was only of academic interest, and maybe it was—the interest of a historian trying to make sense of the ancient past, of some barbaric, long-forsaken pattern of behavior.
“Do what?” he said.
“Why did you do that to me? When we were children.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Come on, Margaret, seriously. Do what?” It was the tone you used with a madman, with a child, with someone incapable of listening to reason.
“Touch me. Film me. Bring the Riccis to my room. I was your sister.”
“What film? What are you even talking about?”
He took a step toward the house, but she moved in front of him, blocked his way. “Why did you do it?” she asked.
“I barely even— It was like three, four times. Those guys didn’t even get in.”
“What happened to the tape?”
“Have you been obsessing over that all these years? It was nothing. It was barely anything. The tape—it didn’t even work. I mean the angle was all wrong. It was, like, the edge of the bath mat, and your feet going by. Hardly anything else.”
“Hardly anything?”
“It was a waste, a joke—they were actually mad at me. This isn’t healthy, to be fixating on that. You really need to be in therapy, you need to be talking to someone about this.”
“But why did you think you could do it?”
“I’m not having this conversation, this is crazy. I’m going inside.”
She did not want to be this near him. She couldn’t see his hands in the dark. But she would make him answer. “You’ve never thought about it, all this time? You’ve never wondered what it was like for me?”
“It, it, it—it was nothing. We were kids, we did dumb things all the time. The Riccis were bullies. They made me, they wouldn’t give it up. Kids do that kind of thing all the time.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think they do.”
“It didn’t hurt you.”
“I was sleeping.”
“Exactly.”
He pushed past her—she felt his shoulder, his arm—and all her loathing and terror returned, slicked out of her pores.
“Look,” he said, walking away, “I can see that this has been bothering you a lot. I apologize. But this isn’t about you now. This is about Dad. This is about us coming together in the memory of Mom.”
He sounded so sane, so right and rational. She followed him into the porch light, followed him up the steps. He was wearing black loafers, and the leather was covered in the lawn’s dead grass.
They had come from the same place, been made by the same people, learned the same words from all the same stories. With the loathing at last came pity, and sorrow for whatever it was in their upbringing that had failed him too. And yet she did not know him, could not love him.
She tried again. She asked him one last time before he opened the door to the house. “Why did you do it?”
And he answered the question. He answered without turning around. He said:
“I was curious, and you were there.”
37
Elizabeth had been right: the house sold fast. And a few days after the service Margaret was back, back for the last time.
Two small children, a boy and a girl, were in the yard. “Look,” they were saying, running over to things she couldn’t see. The girl put a hand inside the blackberry bush, tugged at what must have been a berry there. Margaret was surprised they had found one this late in the year; it was probably shriveled or rotten. Don’t eat it, she wanted to tell them. And also: Go ahead and eat it. It can’t hurt you.
They bent their heads together over the girl’s hand, their foreheads almost touching, and she watched them, the lancet-window shape of their brother-sister bodies.
She was waiting in the driveway for We Take It All Away, a junk-removal company that charged $500 for taking as much as would fit in the bed of its truck. She had on one of Elizabeth’s dresses—a lime-green number with a pattern of pink umbrellas. It looked hideous on her, and it was sleeveless, and she was cold in the new fall air. Behind her on the lawn stood a mountain of the unwanted: books, box fans, toys, beach things, snow things, some things so disconnected from their original context that their purpose was entirely obscure—mysterious metal hoops and rods, spools within wheels. The pile kept snagging her vision, jagged bits like fins or blades glinting dangerously on the lawn, though it was only the sun that did that, only the sun shining off plastic or glass. The chaos suggested violence, as if the house had been bombed and this was all that was left, though the house was fine. The house was clean. The house wasn’t theirs anymore.
That day the new family had brought over an architect to begin drawing up plans for a renovation. She was trying to stay out of the way, but there was so much to get done. Neal had helped her clear out the basement that morning. She had waited for him to come up the stairs before she went down; she gave him a wide berth in the hallway; she navigated around him the same way she’d been navigating around him for twenty-five years, and would for twenty-five more, her arms full of the heaviest boxes she could find.
* * *
The We Take It All Away guys pulled in and got to work. She was worried they would ask her, You sure you don’t want this? about all the things she was paying them to trash. She was afraid they’d ask her what on earth had happened here, how had it gone so wrong. But your life, they might say, as she threw it all away.
Of course they didn’t. Probably all their customers were women like her, looking sweaty and sad beside their stuff.
“Stand back, kid,” one of the men said, and obediently, she stepped back. She was thinking how long it had been since the moving van had come to her and Ezra’s apartment, and the men they were paying by the hour had had to stand there listening while they discussed in polite despair who should take which piece of furniture. Now she watched everything go into the truck and it wasn’t so bad. She could feel an echo of the work in her own body—the heave and release, the rhythm suggesting some more honest and archaic labor, the hauling up of bales of hay or buckets of water.
“Hey, lady,” the man said. “Hello? Can you get your kids to stand back?”
Oh, right. When he said kid he didn’t mean her. The brother and sister were standing by the truck’s big wheels, too close to the line of tossed junk.
They’re not my kids, she thought but did not say.
“Sorry,” she said. Then: “Come on, you two, let me show you something.”
They followed without asking who she was.
“This is where I grew up,” she told them. “I was a little younger than you when we moved in.” She remembered—the house, the yard, the statue of the naked man, the strangeness that dissipated, the strangeness that never would. She thought they might have questions, but they didn’t. That was something she liked, how children were never curious out of manners alone.
“Do you like to climb trees?”
“Sometimes,” the girl said.
“Okay, well, this is the best climbing tree, and that one is the second best. This one is harder to get up into, but you can go really high once you’re in it, and you can see into all the windows of the house. And in the spring it’s covered with blossoms. You want to try it?”
“Okay,” the girl said, and raised her arms and waited to be lifted. Margaret laughed. That was just like Jo. She felt a shiv of anger toward these children. Because they were taking her house, her tree, her blackberries. And because they were not her own children, whom she missed suddenly with a feeling more like panic or grief, though it was no big deal, really it wasn’t—she’d be home again tomorrow.
She lifted the girl, then her brother, then followed herself. They accepted this as normal, though she was a grown-up, though grown-ups didn’t climb trees. She sat on the lowest branch, her back against the trunk, kicking her sneakers into the air. “You’ll be able to climb up yourselves in no time,” she told them. “My friend Biddy could do it when she was seven.”
“Who’s that?” the boy asked.
“Biddy, my best friend.”
“No, who’s that man there?”
“Where?”
He pointed toward the road. Walking up the driveway was a hard-bellied man in jeans and white sneakers, his hair in need of trimming, walking as tentatively as a stranger toward the big house, as if he wasn’t sure what he might find there, what kind of people lived inside.
“Dad,” she called, but he didn’t look up. She called his name. “Hugh!”
What would he do now? He didn’t know who he was without Elizabeth—he’d told her that. She had always been so…Elizabeth, the center of all action and interpretation, and he a benign presence slinking around the edges.
She knew her father loved her, in the sense that he sincerely wished her well. She had never been angry with him because she’d never, she realized, expected very much of him. She’d treated him always the way she’d treated Elizabeth only at the very end of her life—like someone you demanded little of because you knew they could do no more. Was it because he was a man? Gross. She wanted, out of long practice, to blame that on Elizabeth, but surely it had something to do with him himself, her father, Hugh.
But that couldn’t possibly be the big twist—could it? That she should have been more pissed off at her father?
She felt in place of anger only tenderness, an exasperated generosity for them both. There in the driveway he reminded her of that other man—what was his name?—Mrs. Ricci’s dad from Baltimore, who had been kind to her. She felt the ghost urge to run and get her mother, to tell her it was an emergency, an adventure, an occasion—to see her rise up from the flower beds.
Someone’s mother was shouting from the porch, but it wasn’t hers. “Jessa, Theo.” She swung out of the tree and turned to help the children. They clambered down her impersonally and ran off without saying goodbye.
The men finished packing up the truck. The We Take It All Away truck took it all away. Gradually the silver patches of crushed grass unfurled, turned green again, left no trace.
* * *
—
She woke in the night. It was not that something disturbed her, but that nothing had. She was woken by the sudden startle of new silence, like when you realize the AC has switched off, or the cycle of the dishwasher ended, something that you hadn’t realized was going until it stopped, the quiet its own alarm. She didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep.
She stripped the sheets from the bed and walked down through the house. The rooms were emptier than she’d ever seen them. The chessmen and the soldier doll were gone. The glass box with the dueling pistols was gone, packed away like an impostor’s reliquary. Moonlight shone off clear counters. Tassels and trim hung around an empty center.
She had some chores to do. She opened the fridge and dumped out the condiments—her mother’s mint jelly, her mother’s cocktail sauce—all of it slurrying around the drain. Then she got the china, the white plates covered in butterflies, and started wrapping each one in yesterday’s newspaper.
Soon, she told herself, I will take the train home: I will get the kids; we will eat, and play, and read, and in the morning I will be there, in my own life—tomorrow when I wake. And when the sun rose, she was there to see it happen—there as it dawned for the last time on Elizabeth’s house. The light ratcheted up through the windows, and when it hit the cabinets, a revelation: they were covered in dust, milky fingerprints all over the glass, a long scummy smear of jam like the first stroke of a message written in blood.
Ichor! She reached for her mother’s cloth.
38
“Don’t, you’ll tip us over,” said Biddy.
The cuffs of Margaret’s jeans were sodden, and a ribbon of algae was stuck between her toes. She was lying against the back of the canoe, a knee hooked over the edge, trying to swish the mud off her foot.
On the shore things moved through the weeds—rats, probably, or small birds easily mistaken for rats. Take-out cartons flashed. The place smelled of mud and salt and things rotting past all recognition, all that rankness whirled up in the fresh air. It was a sense experience too profuse to be redolent. Nothing reminded her of anything else.
“This place is really part of the city?” Biddy asked. An edge of the skyline was visible, but very far off and insignificant compared to the gray water lapping around them.
“Yeah. It feels so far away, doesn’t it? Like the edge of everything.”
“But you’re not going to move out here, are you?”
“With Duncan? No. It’s his place, not mine. We’re not together that way. And anyway, it’s too far from Ezra, for the girls.” She pointed across the bay. “Last time we tried to make it to that island out there, but it got too stormy. You want to go?”
It was only a small island, with nothing on it—rocks, sand, some grass at the pinnacle. But it was set apart, a destination, while still being close enough that they could see the kids on shore, come back quick if they were called.
“Sure, let’s do it.”
“But first you have to tell me what you really think.”
“He’s so different from Ezra.”
“Biddy! Come on. Aside from Ezra, what do you think?”
It was Duncan’s forty-fifth birthday, and he’d invited his friends and neighbors out for a bonfire. He’d said Margaret should bring anyone she wanted, and she’d asked Biddy so they could finally meet. Margaret recognized some of the guests from Dante’s party, and the boys were there, and even June, their mother. She was wearing coveralls and old sneakers in a way that looked insanely chic and had said hello in the friendliest way possible, and yet Margaret, a coward, was hiding from her now. The kids were playing with a dog; Helen and Jo were taking turns with the tennis ball. A pack of neighbors had brought out a garage-full of rusted beach chairs and arranged them in a gossipy circle, their butts inches from the damp sand. Duncan was squatting at the center, building the fire that she couldn’t yet see.
“I like him,” Biddy said begrudgingly, so Margaret would know she meant it.
Margaret had told Duncan what there was to know. He had taken it in, and then stormed around the room as if the past was something you could punch in the face, and then put his arms around her. She loved him for making just the right amount of big deal about it. She would start over with Louie. She would be watchful and hopeful at the same time. That was basically parenting, right? Joy and vigilance.
They paddled deeper, inexpertly, sweating in the cool air. Soon they got better at matching each other’s rhythm. Biddy was in front, and Margaret was glad; she could watch her total devotion to the task. Her curls were sticking to her neck; she’d started getting highlights and her hair was suddenly once again the exact color it had been when they were children. Biddy! There was nothing Margaret didn’t love about her—her sarcasm and steadfastness, her conventionality shot through with sudden rebellion, her puzzles, her tulips, her saying “You idiot.”
