Cross-country practice was just what she needed, though, sadly, the phrase cross-country was a misnomer. When the two hours of jogging around the park were up, Liv found herself still stuck in Bloughton, Iowa, with little rage burned off. It was at least more time with her friends. Monica, Krista, Darla, Laurie, Amber—the team was where she had managed, after her dad’s downfall, to find friends, and although there wasn’t much to be done in practice beyond gasp and sweat and shoot pretend bazookas at Coach Carney, it was the best part of Liv’s day, with endorphins eclipsing all emotion.
She fell into the station wagon, her soggy shirt and shorts gluing to the seat plastic, and did the twenty-minute drive home with only slight attention given to stop signs and red lights. Only when the white gravel cloud of Custer Road swallowed the world did she feel invisible and safe.
John didn’t lift his chin from the steps when she reached them. He rolled his brown eyes upward as if to warn her that there was nothing inside the house any better than what was outside.
Liv assumed that floors of beer cans and tabletops of bottles were more typical signs of insobriety, but Aggie Fleming’s intoxication was signaled by tidiness. Her poison was wine, and her defense was to dress it up as something classy. You saw it on TV all the time. Girlfriends at a brunch, laughing over sauvignon blanc. Women in movies, luxuriating in bubble baths while candlelight made their Bordeaux twinkle. Aggie dressed to drink, in skirts, blouses, and pantsuits as if she were about to leave for a function, and to perpetuate the illusion, she neatened up before getting down to business.
The living room, then, was the antithesis of the jungled yard, as surface-clean as a cheap motel. Sofa cushions were equilaterally placed, magazines squared away in racks, tables cleared of detritus, and a single wineglass was centered upon a glass coaster. Aggie had missed only one spot, in the corner, an anthill of plaster dust from the crumbling ceiling. She was facing away as Liv approached, high-heeled shoe bobbing amiably over a knee.
“First day of school,” Aggie sang.
She uncrossed her legs to look over her shoulder.
“How’s my girl.”
Her lips were too numb to make it a question.
Liv tried to will her sadness into anger. It would be easier. Aggie Fleming’s life had been ruined by her husband’s public fall from grace. The secretarial job at Sookie’s she’d been on pace to parlay into marketing director had turned into an abrupt layoff; now she shopped there in disgrace, because where else was there to shop? She had two jobs these days, answering phones at the vet clinic by day and waiting tables at a steakhouse by night. Right now she was between the two. She used a pinkie to dab wine from her lip, and Liv suffered a contraction of sympathy. Why remove a single drop? She was afloat in it.
“They’re doing Oliver!,” Liv said. “The school.”
“Hmm? Dickens?”
“No. Yes. The play.”
“Baby, would you mind fetching me a paper towel? I think this glass has a crack.”
Of course it had a crack—the constant picking up, setting down. Liv dropped her bag onto the dining room table hard enough to split it, ripped off a towel, and handed it over. Her mom took it, folded it daintily, and blotted at the black hose under her skirt. Liv didn’t see wine stains, unless you counted the permanent ones on her mom’s fingers. Liv noted the current bottle (a third full) as well as the previous bottle (empty) snugged neatly alongside the sofa, though not quite neatly enough to disappear.
“When’s your shift?”
“Ugh, you’re such an adult. People like a waitress a little loose.”
“Mom. I hope you don’t say that in public.”
“I don’t mean it in a vulgar way. Just … relaxed. Prepared for witty repartee.”
“I also don’t like you driving like this.”
Aggie lofted her wineglass imperially in her left hand and with her right tugged Liv’s wrist. Liv resisted.
“Sit with your old momma.”
“I’m sweaty.”
Her mom pouted and tugged. Liv inhaled, said nothing, and let herself be pulled down. The glass of wine sloshed, but Aggie was a virtuoso of liquid counterbalance. She sipped, then leaned into her daughter, nuzzling Liv’s neck. Liv closed her eyes, anything to be able to melt into her mom’s embrace.
Aggie wrapped her arm around Liv’s waist.
“You’re so strong,” Aggie sighed. “Feel those muscles. You’ve got such a nice body.”
“I feel like that’s gross, Mom.”
“Shush. I’ve been holding you since you were itty-bitty.”
Liv, though, was holding her mother. How could Aggie not notice that? Aggie’s free fingers ran through her daughter’s hair, her long nails slicing through damp strands and sliding along the sweaty scalp. It did seem motherly, Liv had to admit, this acceptance of her child’s dirtiness. Curled up against Liv, nearly in her lap, her mother looked tiny. The years revealed by the corners of her eyes and the backs of her arms only made her smallness more heartbreaking.
“I’d hold you,” Aggie cooed, “while your daddy read you poetry. He wanted to turn you into a little … what’s her name. Sophia someone. Sophie. Sylvia. Plath.”
“Sylvia Plath killed herself,” Liv said.
“Well, I’m sure he didn’t want that. He wanted the whole town strolling around being all poetic all the time. He had this whole fantasy.”
“Mom, I know. Resurrection Update, remember?”
“Oh mercy. If I never see another book-shaped package, it’ll be too soon.”
Lee Fleming’s poetry push had solidified around the hardscrabble collection of poems by James Galvin, who scowled from the back cover in an old denim shirt, as if furious about being photographed. Lee had won some victories in broadening the curriculum—wedging Toni Morrison’s Beloved into the mix of dead white guys, carving out a whole week for Philip K. Dick—but no one understood why you’d dump Frost and Thoreau for a living poet, despite Lee’s insistence that Galvin being alive was half the point, not to mention his Iowa connection. When the school had balked at the purchase order, Lee bought thirty-five copies out of his own pocket, scouring the Internet for used paperbacks and, when they ran out, paying full retail price.
“He always wanted me to pick my favorite poem from the book,” Liv said.
“Me too. I’d make it up. ‘The seventh one.’ Something like that.”
“I always chose ‘Sapphic Suicide Note,’” Liv said.
“Blarg. Suicide again. That’s poets for you.”
Liv shrugged against her mother’s warmth. “I only liked it because it was short.”
Aggie snapped her fingers in a pretty funny pantomime of a slam-poetry fan. She was loose. Liv could imagine her being plenty charming before steakhouse patrons, and wasn’t loose and charming better than what she’d been during her husband’s final year—tense, helpless, sick with worry?
“Recite!” Aggie cried. “Recite!”
Liv could have. Seeking a leg up on future classmates, she’d cracked Resurrection Update as a freshman. At seven words, “Sapphic Suicide Note” was the first—and only—poem in the book she’d read, one so short she’d unwittingly memorized it while trying to figure out how someone got paid for putting a mere seven words on a page.
day out
no worldly joy
italics mine
The whole thing puzzled her, though it was the last two words that most baffled. When she’d asked her dad what they meant, he’d explained that “italics mine” was a phrase writers used when adding their own italicized emphasis to a quoted source. Fine, but there weren’t any italics in “Sapphic Suicide Note.”
“Dad always said poetry was full of secrets,” Liv sighed into her mom’s hair.
“I’m sorry, baby,” Aggie said.
Liv didn’t think Aggie was apologizing for the thirty-five copies of Resurrection Update missing from Baldwin’s shelf.
“It’s okay,” Liv replied.
“One day it’ll be better. You’ll see. The house and the yard. The bills. Somehow they all got lost, but we’re going to find them. They’re around here. I’ll neaten up the place. We’ll find them. My phone has a flashlight. Does yours, baby?”
Liv’s eyes swam in tears.
“Mm-hm,” she said.
“Good.” Her mother yawned. “Now what’s all this about Charles Dickens? A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim. I remember George C. Scott as Scrooge. He flew through the night with a ghost. Doesn’t that sound lovely?”
Liv looked from the pile of ceiling plaster to the ruptured ceiling above it, wondering if the fracture was big enough to permit her passage when, at night, a certain ghost in a certain memory tried to pull her through it.
“Oliver Twist,” she said.
“Your school is doing the play, hm?”
“The musical. The one Dad did.”
“That’s odd.”
Liv sniffled hard, hoping the sharp inhale would spark her dampened rage. “How can they do that?” she pleaded. “It’s only been two years.”
“Has it been that long? Seems like”—Aggie clicked her tongue—“nothing.”
“Everyone will start talking about it again. The whole thing.”
“Nobody saw that show, baby. It was a … what do you call it?”
“Dress rehearsal. I know. But everyone heard about it. They still talk about it. Maybe you don’t hear about it, but I sure do.” Liv listened for any change in her mother’s breathing. “Doesn’t this make you mad?”
“I’m trying to be, baby. It’s just … I’m so. I’m so. The wine, I guess.”
“I mean, Ms. Baldwin—how could she? She’s a bitch. Isn’t she?”
Her mother yawned into Liv’s neck. “That’s right, baby.”
“With me still in school? She couldn’t wait one more year?”
“Shh, baby.”
“They won’t let it die. They won’t let him die.”
“We don’t own the play, baby. We don’t own people. We don’t own anything. It’s all just—poof. Dandelions in the breeze.”
Hot sadness filled Liv’s chest and burned to be cried out. Why was it only when her mother was drunk that she uttered words of such perfect, inadvertent beauty? Liv raised her hand, placed it on the back of her mother’s head, and pet it. The hair was brittle and poorly dyed, but still pretty. Liv’s hand, meanwhile, was not. Her nail polish was chipped to hell and her knuckles scabbed. She watched the scabs dive into her mother’s hair, then resurface, then dive, and it felt like her life.