Stay Gone Days, page 18
“Something-Orange, New Jersey,” she says. “East Orange, West Orange, South Orange … I’m not sure.”
“What are you doing there?”
On the last bus, riding beside a woman who could have been any age between forty and sixty but looked closer to the latter and fell asleep with her mouth open, spit trickling down her chin, Caroline decided to ask if she could come live with Ella, at least for a little while. She’d never told Tom she had a sister, so maybe he’d never find out. She’d get a job—any job, something stable, maybe even waitressing at the steakhouse, if that’s still where her sister works—and try to reconstitute herself. Otherwise, she’s going to end up like her seatmate. Or worse. “I was thinking,” she says, “that I’d come visit you. That maybe we’d spend Christmas together? You like Boston, don’t you? I mean you must, since you’ve stayed there all these years.”
The silence at the other end lasts long enough for Caroline to know that she needs to fill it, that if she doesn’t, her sister will have to and it will provide one more reason to wonder if her own life has become unlivable. She searches for words but finds none.
“Sure,” her sister finally says. “Sure … of course. But … well … here’s the thing, baby.”
Caroline can’t recall either of them ever once employing such a term of endearment. Whatever they are to each other cannot be captured by baby.
“I’m actually about to get married. And the wedding … well, it’s going to be on Christmas Eve down on the Cape. Cape Cod, I mean. And Martin … Martin Summers, that’s my fiancé, he’s a record producer who’s also a CPA … he has this aunt who lives down there in a pretty big house, and it was her idea. Her name … it’s … her name is Tess.”
Across the lobby, Redd Foxx chuckles, takes another swallow from the paper bag, then slowly slides to the floor.
“I think you’d like her. Tess, that is. She’s old but energetic. She’s got a lot of colorful friends too. Like that writer, the naked and dead guy … the one who wrote the book that you got caught … the library book, you know? Norman Mailer. I met him. At Tess’s. He’s kind of awful, actually. But listen, sure, I’ll tell Martin and he’ll talk to Tess. Are you…Do you have a place to stay tonight? I mean, I’m worried about you. Are you okay?”
The voice of the operator, nasal and bored, comes on the line. “Please deposit a dollar fifty for another five minutes.”
Ella says, “Can you reverse the charges and make this call collect?”
But it’s already too late. Her sister has hung up.
A Whole Other World
IN JULY OF 1986, IN THE Cedar Park hospital, she gave birth to their first daughter, whom they named Hayley after Martin’s mother. A second daughter, Alexandra, followed nineteen months later, and they quickly began to call her Lexa, though both of them had sworn they would stick to her full name. Hayley got her mother’s blonde hair. Lexa’s was chestnut-colored rather than red like Martin’s. At various times, from middle school through high school, she would dye it. During one period, if only for a couple of weeks, it was purple.
A quiet baby, Hayley smiled a lot, and like her mother she seldom had trouble sleeping. Lexa, on the other hand, was born with a hiatal hernia, which led to esophageal reflux, and over the first year or so she seldom slept more than a couple of hours at a time. Ella and Martin lost a lot of sleep then too; she occasionally became irritable, but he never seemed to. Pete, his partner in the record company, who came equipped with a towering temper as well as a couple of other problematic traits, dubbed him “Merry Martin.” Ella called him that when she was especially happy with him, which in those days was frequently the case.
Both of them considered it important that they do things together as a family. His folks hadn’t, mostly because his father was so wrapped up in his law practice and his role as a civic leader. Hers hadn’t, because her parents’ marriage, as far back as she could recall, was all but devoid of affection. They’d never gone on family vacations, and lack of money was not the only reason: her parents wouldn’t have been able to stand being together in a car for more than a few hours. She and Martin and the girls drove all over New England—the Maine Coast, the White Mountains, the Green Mountains, the Berkshires—and congregated at Tess’s each June with Irma and Maeve to spend a week or ten days enjoying the Cape. They drove all the way to California, into the Pacific Northwest and back, and most years they also took a trip outside the country: Paris, London, Rome. One year, the Grand Caymans.
For Ella, the best of times. She felt at home where she lived. She knew the big green house on the hill as well as she’d ever known the one where she grew up, which was not even one-tenth as large. She knew the little town six miles north of Boston in ways she’d never known Loring, Mississippi, and she liked it many times more. She’d become friends with various locals who attended high school with Martin, and she’d grown exceptionally fond of Tess, talking to her on the phone almost daily. She remained close to her old friend Liz, too, though during the Clinton years their political differences occasionally led to heated conversations, in which Liz parroted whatever opinions she heard from the likes of Rush Limbaugh. She’d finally achieved her dream and opened a successful Southern-style restaurant in Wakefield, the next town over, and sometimes walked her dog all the way to Ella’s so they could have a drink together on the balcony.
“One day,” she liked to say a little too frequently, “I’ll have a house like this myself. Maybe I’ll marry one just like you did.”
Difficult to do, Ella often thought but never said, when every guy you get involved with already has a wife.
Hayley and Lexa knew her as Aunt Liz. They had Aunt Liz, Aunt Maeve, Aunt Irma and Aunt Tess, though following family tradition they never called Tess “Aunt” to her face. They were on a first-name basis with most of their parents’ other non-familial friends. Every Thanksgiving, when Pete threw his big holiday bash, Ella drove them into Brookline four or five hours before dinner, so they could help him and his wife peel potatoes. Traditions, they learned, were to be adhered to and treasured.
They got along well. Each of them had her own bedroom, but up through middle school they took turns “sleeping over,” as they put it, and even after that they would often spend two or three hours in one or the other’s room chattering away. Hayley was without question the more consistently focused. She never made anything less than an A. She knew early on that she wanted to be an art historian and work at either Boston’s MFA or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and she singlemindedly prepared herself for such a future. Lexa’s attentions turned in various directions. Once, after they spotted a school of porpoises off the Cape, she informed everyone she was going to study marine biology. That lasted until she made a C- on her fourth-grade science project, at which time she decided that like her father she would become a record producer. The problem was that she had no more than passing interest in music. So one morning as the four of them were eating breakfast, when she was all of eleven years old, she cleared her throat and announced, “I’ve thought a lot about this, and I believe it’s just plain unhealthy to decide too soon what you want to be. I’ll figure it out when I have more life experience. I might be around, like, forty or something.”
Satisfying times for Ella, when what she did with her days and nights made sense and what she didn’t do made sense too. Mostly what she did was concentrate on her daughters, reading to them when they were little, Tove Jansson’s Finn Family Moomintroll series their favorite as well as hers and the primary reason that in ‘94 they nixed a trip to Mexico, opting instead for Finland, so they could visit Moominworld. She fed them filling breakfasts and inventive dinners, she took them to ballet lessons, to karate lessons, took them ice skating, roller skating, took them to family concerts at the Boston Symphony. She took an interest in what went on at school, twice serving as president of the Cedar Park PTA. She did everything she wished someone had been willing and able to do for her.
She possessed not only the will but, thanks to Martin and Pete, the means. Yankee Southern Records, hatched one night in 1975 after the pair drank ten or twelve pints of Narragansett at the Boots ‘n‘ Flannel, was hardly breaking even when she met Martin. That it had lasted till then was due to the success of his accounting firm and the fact that Pete married the daughter of a big Boston developer. Over the next decade, though, as the interest in American roots music burgeoned, so did their fortunes. They won their first Grammy in 1987. A slew of others followed. By the end of the ’90s they owned the most successful roots record company in the world.
Easy times for everyone at 1 Rockland Street, so different from the straightened circumstances in which she had been raised. She did everything she could to ensure that her own marriage bore no resemblance to her parents’ and that her daughters’ childhoods bore little if any to hers and that of her poor lost sister, whom nobody had heard from since the night she called Ella from New Jersey.
She’d never told anyone, not even Martin, the whole truth about that final conversation. The truth was that she feared her sister would ruin her wedding, that she’d do or say something embarrassing and that Tess and Irma and Maeve and all of Martin’s friends who were becoming her friends would know it and start wondering what sort of familial dysfunction he was inflicting on himself the second time around: first gangsters, now white trash? It didn’t matter that she overcame her fear and issued Caroline the grudging invitation. What mattered was that her sister heard the hesitation in her voice and understood its source. Rather than slam the phone down in whatever shabby, smelly bus station she was calling from, she quietly placed it in the cradle. Such an emphatic sound, that silence.
Every now and then, when the girls were at school and Martin was at work, those dark thoughts intruded. If the weather was nice, she could usually banish them by going for a long walk, enjoying the natural beauty of the place she’d come to call home, so different from the only other one she’d known. If the weather was bad, she could usually build a fire and put on some quiet music or lose herself in a good book. In other instances—and fortunately, these were rare—nothing could chase them away but two or three glasses of wine and the blurring of time.
HER MOTHER WAS NOT LOST.
She lived in Pine Bluff with Tommy Burns until his death in 1993. On multiple occasions, Ella and Martin planned to take the girls to meet their grandmother and her husband, but something always seemed to go wrong before they could get down there. In June of ’89, when Lexa was still a baby, they bought tickets and booked a hotel, but the day before they were to fly to Little Rock, Tommy Burns suffered his second heart attack. He was ill for a long time. They planned another trip for Christmas of the following year, but Saddam invaded Kuwait, the Bush administration began rattling its sabers, there was talk of bomb threats, and they decided to wait until things settled down. The next attempt was undone by chickenpox, which both girls contracted simultaneously.
When her mother called with the news that Mr. Burns was gone, she seemed more relieved than anything else. “Well,” she said, “that’s that. At least he’s not just having to lay there and stare at the ceiling anymore.” The last few years, Ella knew, had been a slog. She and Martin had begun sending her a check each month after the setback in ’89, and while she protested the first few times, she never let them go uncashed. She couldn’t afford to. They were living off disability and the pittance she earned at the truckstop.
As luck would have it, her call about his death came in the middle of January when Martin was in California with Pete at a music industry trade show. The thought of taking the girls out of school, or in Lexa’s case pre-school, and flying to Arkansas for the funeral without him, seeing her mother for the first time in all these years, finding her living in poverty, made her gaze with longing toward the dining room where the wine rack stood. If only she’d answered one of the cordless phones. Instead, because she’d been in the kitchen, she grabbed the wall phone. The cord was long. But not that long.
“When’s the funeral?” she asked. “I’ll book our flights as soon as we hang up.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, hon.”
“We want to be there.”
“Yes, I know. But the thing is … well, honey, the thing is, Tommy actually died three days ago. We buried him this morning. Or I did anyway. Me and two or three others that remembered him from when he was still able to work.”
“Oh, Momma.” Everything she hadn’t done bore down on her. She could have gone to Arkansas by herself at any time—Martin wouldn’t have objected—but she never wanted to. Not solely because she disliked Mr. Burns, or because she dreaded seeing her mom with another man. She just didn’t want to be alone when she confronted the past that her mother represented. She preferred to face it, if she had to, with everyone who made the present dissimilar. “Why didn’t you let me know?”
“Honestly, Ella?” June Cole said. “I think … well, I think my girls already attended one funeral too many. And I know for damn solid certain I sure have. The next one I go to’ll be my own.”
•
That evening, Martin called her mother from Anaheim, and though he said it took him close to an hour, he persuaded her to fly to Boston. Ella purchased the ticket, arranging for her to land at Logan twenty minutes after his returning flight. Unfortunately, he was delayed by more than an hour, so she was sitting there alone, nervously sipping coffee, when her mother walked off the plane. She didn’t like being photographed and never sent pictures of herself, so Ella had been wondering how dramatic the change in her appearance might be. She recognized her luggage before she recognized the woman holding it: the old strapped-leather suitcase that once belonged to her father. She must’ve used it as a carry-on.
“Maybe tell me hello or something?” her mother said. Fifty-eight years old, she looked closer to seventy: iron-gray hair, leathery face, faded Wranglers, blue-and-white checked blouse and a thin white windbreaker with colored stripes on the chest and shoulders. She was going to freeze before they reached the car, which was parked on the upper deck.
Ella stood, and June set the suitcase down and they hugged. Her mother had never been a smoker, but she smelled like cigarettes, though you couldn’t smoke on planes anymore. “Where’s Martin?” she asked. “I thought he was supposed to get here before I did?”
“His flight was delayed in Orange County. He should be here by two-thirty. Are you hungry?”
“They gave us some little something on the plane. One of those … I don’t know how to say it. One of those quarter moon-shaped sandwiches.”
“A croissant?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t bad. Had ham and cheese in it, and they gave us a bag of chips.”
“Would you like a drink?”
“I wouldn’t mind a Coke.”
“Let’s go get you one. There’s a bar directly across from Martin’s assigned gate.”
Her mother ordered the Coke. She asked for a glass of Chardonnay.
It seemed there was nothing to say. But something would have to be said, and so she asked the cause of Mr. Burns’s death.
Her mother shrugged. “Officially, it was heart failure.”
“Officially?”
“Yeah. In reality, I think he just lost interest. I think that’s what most folks die from. I saw a fellow die once at the truckstop. I was waiting on him. I don’t know who he drove for, I never asked, but he came through Pine Bluff once or twice a month, and it didn’t matter what time he sat down, whether it was eight in the morning, two in the afternoon or midnight, he always asked for the same thing: a cup of coffee, a glass of milk, scrambled eggs, bacon and hashbrowns. The night he died, he’d drunk his milk, cleaned his plate and finished his coffee, and told me ‘Miss June, that sure was fine.’ He looked like he was fixing to say something else. Instead he just kind of smiled—like ‘what are you gonna do?’—and leaned against the wall and died. Didn’t look like there was a thing in the world wrong with him.”
Their waiter brought the Coke and the Chardonnay. Ella drank a third of the wine in one swallow.
Her mother took note. “Don’t be shy,” she said.
“Shy? About what?”
“Enjoying your wine.”
“I’m not.”
“I can see that, hon. I was being ironic.”
“Ah.”
They talked about the girls for a while, then they talked about Boston. Ella said she was going to take her to all the sights: the Old North Church, Faneuil Hall, the State House. She started to add the Granary Burying Ground to the list but was afraid it might prompt another anecdote about death.
“Is that pond still here?” her mother asked. “The one where the hermit went and lived by himself in the cabin?”
“Walden? Of course.”
“You don’t think I could rent the place, do you?”
“Rent it?”
“I was making a joke.”
She’d seldom been happier to see Martin. When he stepped off the plane, she downed the rest of the Chardonnay, consulted the check, laid a twenty on the table and said, “There he is. Let’s go.”
Her mother left her Coke untouched.
•
Despite the inauspicious beginning, the ten-day visit was a good one, and for that Ella would always be grateful. The major reason it went so well was Martin. The moment he walked off the plane, he began to manage the situation. On their way out, he stopped near one of the sports apparel shops you can find in any major airport.
“June,” he asked, “how do you feel about the Boston Celtics?”
“The Boston who?”
“The NBA team. Professional basketball.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to athletics except Razorback football. I used to watch some of that with Tommy.”
