THE MONTHS AFTER my return from Indianapolis were the most harrowing time of my life. Our mother was vaporous. She emerged from her bedroom only at night and always in her nightgown, a sheath of flowered flannel with a disturbingly childlike bow at the neck. She’d stopped combing her hair so that it twisted about her face, chaotic as smoke, and her eyes were so sunken they looked bruised. She would start to speak, her hands lifting, and then be suddenly silenced by the sight of that motion, her own hands in the air.
She hardly ate and did no cooking. Dad picked up the slack, but halfheartedly. He would come home from campus and look in the cupboards. I remember dinners of peanut butter on saltines, cans of tomato soup for starters and cans of clam chowder for mains. Every meal a passive-aggressive cri de coeur.
Grandma Donna began coming over every day to watch me, but, in Bloomington in 1979, watching me didn’t mean I could never be out of her sight. I was allowed the roam of the neighborhood, just as I’d been allowed the roam of the farmhouse property, only now it was the street I had to be warned about instead of the creek. Crossing the street without a grown-up was forbidden, but I could usually scare up one of those if needed. I met most of the neighbors by holding their hands and looking both ways. I remember Mr. Bechler asking if I was maybe in training for the talking Olympics. I was gold-medal material, he said.
There weren’t many children on the block and none anywhere close to my age. The Andersens had a baby girl named Eloise. A ten-year-old boy named Wayne lived two houses down; a high-school boy lived on the corner across the street. There was no one I could reasonably be expected to play with.
Instead I got acquainted with the neighborhood animals. My favorite was the Bechlers’ dog Snippet, a liver-and-white spaniel with a pink nose. The Bechlers kept her tethered in their yard, because, given half a chance, she ran off and she’d already been hit by a car at least once that they knew of. I spent hours with Snippet, her head on my leg or my foot, her ears cocked, listening to every word I said. When the Bechlers realized this, they put a chair out for me, a little chair that they’d gotten back when the grandchildren were young. It had a cushion on the seat shaped like a heart.
I also spent a lot of time alone, or alone with Mary (remember Mary? Imaginary friend no one liked?), which was not something I’d ever done much of before. I didn’t care for it.
Grandma Donna would change the beds and do the laundry, but only if our father wasn’t there; she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. If Lowell was angry that Fern had been sent out of our lives, Grandma Donna was angry that she’d ever been let in. I’m sure she’d deny this, say that she’d always loved Fern, but even at five I knew better. I’d heard too often about my first birthday, how Fern had dumped out Grandma Donna’s handbag and eaten the last photograph ever taken of Grandpa Dan, a Polaroid that Grandma Donna kept in her purse to look at whenever she was feeling low.
If there’d been a second photo, I probably would have eaten one too, Lowell said, as I followed Fern’s lead in most things. And Lowell also said that Dad had found it very telling that Grandma left her bag, filled as it apparently was with poisonous objects, where Fern could reach it, but I could not.
Our father had planned to name Fern and me after our grandmothers, one of us Donna and one of us Fredericka, a coin toss to see which was which, but both grandmothers insisted that I be the one with their name. Dad, who’d meant it as something nice, maybe even compensatory, was annoyed when it turned into an argument. He’d probably expected this of Grandma Donna, but not of his own mother. A hole was about to open, a rupture in the space-time continuum of the Cooke family, until our mother stepped in to plug it, saying that I would be Rosemary and Fern would be Fern, because she was the mother and that was the way she wanted it. I learned of the earlier plan only because Grandma Donna once referenced it in an argument as further evidence of Dad’s peculiarity.
Personally, I’m glad it came to nothing. I suppose it’s because she is my grandmother that Donna seems like a grandmother’s name. And Fredericka? A Rose by any other, if you say so. But I can’t believe that being called Fredericka my whole life wouldn’t have taken a toll. I can’t believe it wouldn’t have mind-bent me like a spoon. (Not that I haven’t been mind-bent.)
So Grandma Donna would clean the kitchen, maybe unpack some dishes or some of my clothes if she felt energetic, since it was clear by now that no one else planned to open those boxes. She’d make me lunch and cook something medicinal, like a soft-boiled egg, take it to the bedroom, put our mother in a chair so she could change the bedsheets, demand the nightgown for the wash, beg Mom to eat. Sometimes Grandma Donna was all sympathy, delivering in salubrious doses her preferred conversation—details on the health and marital problems of people she’d never met. She was especially fond of dead people; Grandma Donna was a great reader of historical biographies and had a particular soft spot for the Tudors, where marital discord was an extreme sport.
When that didn’t work, she’d turn brisk. It was a sin to waste such a beautiful day, she’d say even when it wasn’t such a beautiful day, or, your children need you. Or that I should have started nursery school a year ago and already be in kindergarten. (I didn’t, because Fern couldn’t go. Or Mary, either.) And that someone had to put the brakes on Lowell, he was only eleven, for God’s sake, and shouldn’t be allowed to rule the house. She would have liked to see one of her children running the emotional blackmail game Lowell got away with; he should have a close encounter with his father’s belt.
She drove once to Marco’s, intending to force Lowell home, but she came back defeated, face like a prune. The boys had been out on their bikes, no one knew where, and Marco’s mother said Dad had thanked her for keeping Lowell and she’d send him home when it was our father who asked. Marco’s mother was letting the boys run wild, Grandma Donna told Mom. Plus she was a very rude woman.
Grandma always left before our father returned from work, sometimes telling me not to say she’d been there, because conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes. But of course, Dad knew. Would he have left me there otherwise? Later he’d bring whatever she’d cooked back down from the bedroom and shovel it into the disposal. He’d get himself a beer and then another and then start on the whiskey. He’d put peanut butter on a cracker for me.
At night, from my bedroom, I’d hear arguing—Mom’s voice too soft to be heard (or maybe she wasn’t speaking at all), Dad’s laced (I know now) with liquor. You all blame me, Dad said. My own goddamn children, my own goddamn wife. What choice did we have? I’m as upset as anyone.
And finally, Lowell, home at last, climbing the stairs in the dark without anyone hearing him and coming into my room, waking me up. “If only,” he said—eleven years old to my five, socking me high on the arm so the bruise would be hidden by my T-shirt sleeve—“if only you had just, for once, kept your goddamn mouth shut.”
I have never in my life, before or after, been so happy to see someone.