BECAUSE MICHAEL HAD come so close to dying but had lived instead, Greta felt that he would be safer in the tunnels from now on. It wasn't rational, exactly, but it felt like the truth. Greta and Michael discussed it, sheepishly at first, it was such a silly idea, but then with more conviction. Where sixteen others had died, death had taken its shot at Michael but had missed. The next accident on the job would be someone else's turn.
The day Michael came home from the hospital was hot, getting hotter every minute, and felt to Greta more like August than June. Even the sidewalk outside was quiet in that August way, older children in groups and younger children with their mothers or their nannies over at Carl Schurz park on the East River or, if they had the energy, west to Central Park, where there was more room and where they imagined they felt a breeze stirring the leaves of the trees. The only sound from outside was the beat of a ball being bounced along the sidewalk, the supple smack of rubber against concrete moving closer and closer despite the handler's drowsy pace. Greta listened as it passed, counted one Mississippi, two Mississippi, kept listening as the sound faded away toward Third Avenue. The smell of spoiled milk wafted up from the garbage piled on the street and slipped through the iron bars of the Wards' first-floor window gate. For twenty years now, the tenants of 222 East Eighty-fourth had been promised a large container for the garbage cans, something made of wood with a hinged door on top to trap the smell and hide the cans from view. For twenty years Greta had been wondering when the handsome wood container was going to arrive.
She stared at the tiny kitchen she'd used for twenty-two years—first the rack of drying dishes, then the sheer cotton curtain as it moved toward her in the humid air. Her look fell upon the calendar, and with her index finger guiding the way, she ran her eye down the column of Wednesdays. June the twenty-fifth. Not possible. Was she looking at May? No, there it was at the very top, June 1986, month and year correct. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and leaned against the counter. Somehow, that afternoon, she had to accumulate as many boxes as she could carry from twelve different liquor stores if she walked down Second Avenue to Fifty-ninth, then back up along Third. Liquor store boxes were best for moving—they were strong, the right size, and they were unlikely to carry roach eggs. If only she'd learned how to drive. There was Michael's car, just sitting there at the curb until Julia came home and moved it to one of the Tuesday/Friday spots on the other side of the street. Julia could drive her from stop to stop, but only if Greta waited until after six o'clock. No, Greta thought. I've already left it too long.
In the next room, Eavan and James were constructing models of their new house out of Legos. Twice now Greta had heard faint sounds of demolition, pieces bouncing and skidding along the scuffed hardwood floor. Twice she'd heard Eavan tell James to cut it out or else. On Saturday, when she lifted the mattress in there, she would find red and yellow Legos along with socks, clips, hair bands, notices from teachers meant for Greta to read and sign. Eavan's voice came through the thin wall again. "You think I'm kidding?" she said, then a thump, something hard—a knee, a head—against the floor. "Oh, go tell," Eavan said a few seconds later, and then whispers, silence, back to the business of building houses.
"What's going on in there?" Greta called, rapping her knuckles on the wall. "If I hear any fighting you're going to be sorry. Your father is trying to rest."
"We're not fighting!" Eavan called sweetly, and then—Greta imagined the nudge—James shouted, "We're being quiet!"
In the dim living room, Michael lay sweating on the soft velour of the couch they'd inherited from a woman who used to live down the hall. His leg was propped up on pillows, his injured arm in a sling across his belly. When James had come along seven years earlier, Michael had cut the room in half with a wall of Sheetrock to make a third bedroom. He didn't see why it was necessary; they could have just put a cot in Julia and Eavan's room, but Greta had insisted. At home, he'd pointed out, the girls and the boys were often mixed and nothing wrong came of it. Plus Julia was so much older, it was like having a parent in the room. You're not at home, Greta told him, as she'd told him a million times before. He reminded her of the same fact just as often. Sometimes they joked about making a tally, who mentioned home most often. Since Lily died, and after getting over that first year or so of silence, it seemed that Greta had decided to fill the mute space left behind with more stories than ever, stories he'd never heard, about the boys, about Big Tom, about raising chickens and selling salmon. And somehow, the more she talked about it, the farther away home seemed to both of them. For Greta, home was not a place that coexisted with America, a place that went on and grew and changed at the same time New York was growing and changing. It felt more like Ireland had ended where America began, as if it were something out of America's past.
Even the children had caught on, saying the word home to each other but meaning Ireland, a place they'd never seen. "They don't have pizza at home, do they, Mom?" James had asked on his seventh birthday. He held the slice at an angle so that the oil formed a current down the center, leaked onto the plate, and made the thin paper almost transparent. "No, love," Greta told him. "They have delicious pig's feet."
"Home," James said, "sounds disgusting."
The side of the living room that became James's room got the larger of the two windows, so the portion of the room left over for the couch, the armchair, the television, and the low table they called a coffee table, though they usually drank tea, was at its brightest a rose-tinted gray. While it lasted, the light was perfect in its pinkness, in the way it airbrushed everything in the room, in the agile way Greta imagined the rays must have bent and turned to avoid the tall buildings up and down Eighty-fourth Street just to shoot an arrow into the Wards' ground-floor apartment. For roughly thirty minutes each day—slightly longer in the summer, slightly shorter in the winter—the living room was awash with pinks and reds. At all other times the room was a black-and-white photograph—the maroon couch, the deep-piled beige rug, the blue-and-white-flecked armchair, the navy-and-green-striped curtain—all reduced to a palette of grays.
They had a single lamp in the corner, but Julia had told Greta recently that it wasn't enough; it would do more harm than good. Who ever heard of a reading lamp that only held a forty-watt bulb? It was this lamp that Michael inched closer to as he listened to Greta move back and forth in the kitchen, the girls' room, the hallway, his newspaper tilted to catch the light. Two weeks of physical therapy in the hospital had done wonders, but a dull ache still ran down his limbs when he craned his neck to catch sight of her. He had three more weeks of therapy to go, and those would be held in the suburbs, at a hospital he'd never seen.
"Did you take your pill?" Greta asked as she crossed the living room to James's room, a single memory of a toy wagon becoming sharper with every step.
"I did. Didn't you give it to me yourself?"
"Oh, right," Greta said, pausing her search to rest her hand on Michael's forehead. She'd asked him to explain it to her a dozen times, where he'd been standing, the size of the cutters, how, exactly, his hood had gotten caught. No, he wouldn't get paid while he was laid up, but he was alive, he would walk, he would be back at work within two months if all went well. The walking boss had come to the hospital with his cap in his hands and said he never should have asked them to look at the mole, that was for the damn engineers to kill themselves over, he should have let those good-for-nothing engineers get injured for a change. The man pointed out that the company always needed someone to supervise the pumps, no matter what the funding situation. "You can read a paper, Michael. You can bring down one of them portable TVs. As long as you're there if the pump stops." Without the pumps, all their years of work would be washed away. It was as Michael had always believed: with the bad must come some good to balance things out. As the rest of the men got laid off, Michael tried to hurry himself to health so he could go back to work.
"We could put off the move," Michael said as Greta took her hand away and he shifted to find a cool spot on the couch. "We could call and ask them if we can stay another month. After twenty-two years, what's another month? They could check with the new tenants to see if that works for them."
Greta smiled, tried to remember what she'd been about to do when she asked Michael about his pill. They couldn't put it off; Michael knew that as well as she did. The new owner had the apartment scheduled to be gutted the day after they moved out. Plus they'd signed something saying they'd be out by July 1 and they'd have no further claim on the apartment. The management company, retained by the new owner, had already taken on all maintenance responsibilities. If they stayed now, after giving up their rent-controlled lease, they'd have to pay four times what they'd been paying since 1964. That—combined with the mortgage they were already paying on a house they hadn't spent a single night in yet.
"I know we signed, Greta," Michael said as if reading her thoughts. "But most people are decent, and when they know what happened—"
"We've put it off long enough, and we've a lovely house waiting for us, and we always said we wanted to be out before the heat of the summer. Julia and myself can handle it, and Eavan and James will do their part and that's that. And I've asked that lunatic Ned Powers to help if he's doing nothing else. He agreed in a heartbeat, which I suppose means he has the guilts about the accident though I didn't say a word. You can supervise. In fact, your first job can be to tell me how in the world I'm going to get all those boxes I've coming to me in one trip. I have to be at work at three o'clock and if I don't get them today they'll throw them out."
They'd looked into hiring movers after Michael's accident, but the men Michael knew from the days of working as a mover had all gotten steadier work in different fields—construction, the phone company, heat and electric. Greta called a moving company she found in the phone book, and they sent a man over who looked in all the rooms of the apartment, opened and closed closets, got out his tape, and measured the apartment door. Greta was so shocked by the price he quoted that she felt her whole body flush. She stood speechless, staring at him, and he lowered it by fifty dollars. Just having him in the apartment made her panic, and she ushered him out the door as quickly as she could. She could fill the new house with furniture for the price he was asking. It amazed her to think there were people who would have agreed.
"You need the old grocery cart," Michael said, trying to make out Greta's features in the dim light. Her dark hair was in a low ponytail. It had been a warm spring, and her arms were already brown from walking to work. She was still rail thin, and unlike Michael, she felt no temptation whatsoever when she passed a bakery with money in her pocket. More than twenty years in America, and Michael still hadn't gotten over all the different things there were to eat and how cheap so many of them were. At home he'd been beaten many times for being caught with his licked finger in the sugar sack, but in America he could pour packet after packet into his tea at no extra charge and no one would look twice. Down on Spring Street a man could eat like a king with just two dollars if he got his toasted cashews from one vendor, his paper box of noodles and pork from the next, a sweet bun from the next, and so on, until his belly felt tight as a drum.
"I stored it in the basement," he told Greta. "The keys are on the ring behind the kitchen door." Sometimes he was struck by how much she had changed since she was a girl, how lost she'd seemed then, how adrift in the wide-open landscape of home and then the immense backdrop of New York City. More often he suspected that she'd only pretended to change, had memorized the pace and language of a new place and had learned to mimic it so well that she forgot she was only playing a part. He'd caught himself at it hundreds of times, barking his breakfast order across delicatessen counters in all five boroughs, pressing his fist against the car horn the instant the light turned green.
Greta bent to kiss his elbow above the sling. She went to get up, but he grabbed her hand with his good arm.
"It's not Ned's fault, you know. It's just the job. You've got to get that idea out of your head."
"Well, then tell me how many had he on him when he met me at the hospital."
"He never drinks on the job." He'd said the same to the walking boss when he'd come asking questions at the hospital.
"But he drinks every hour of the day except the hours he's on the job? And didn't he come straight from the site to the hospital?"
"He stopped off, and I don't blame him. He's been through enough." It had been just three years since Ned Powers's three-year-old son had fallen off the roof of their building in the Bronx. Up the stairs the boy went, up, up, ahead of his mother, who was weighed down with bags and an infant daughter in her arms. "Go easy," Kate Powers had called up the stairwell to her son, and then stopped to swap the baby from her left arm to her right. As she bent to pick up the groceries, she heard the roof door slam shut.
After, she woke up at night after night and accused Ned of watching her sleep, of plotting revenge. Eventually, because he couldn't think of anything else, they decided she should go back to Ireland, to her mother's house, until she felt better. She and the baby had been gone for two and a half years.
"Anyhow, he quit the drink. He told me when he came to the hospital. He's given it up."
"But Michael," Greta started, but then she noticed that he was wearing that expression he always wore when he was bracing himself for something, and she stopped. She freed her hand and crossed the room in three long strides, and a moment later the jangle of her keys could be heard moving down the hall to the apartment door, to the hall outside, to the door leading to the basement. A few minutes later Michael heard the tinny rattle of lightweight metal as she opened the cart in the hall.
"I'm off!" she called into the apartment, and pulled the door closed. Michael listened to the squeal of the rusted wheels as she pulled the flimsy cart down the steps of the stoop, then turned right toward Second Avenue. I hope she remembered twine, he thought. I hope she knows enough not to be tempted by grocery stores or restaurants, however strong their boxes might look. He didn't want to carry roaches to the new house in the suburbs. In the suburbs, they would never peer under a cabinet to find a trail of egg cases, its cargo hatched and gone. In the suburbs, they would slide their feet into shoes without giving it a second thought. In the suburbs, they'd have 0.39 acres of rich brown dirt and green grass all to themselves.
Back in late April, on the day Greta and Michael told Julia that they'd made an offer on a house in a town called Recess and that the offer had been accepted, Julia had spent a week's worth of tips on three pairs of shoes. One pair was absolutely necessary, black flats, slip-ons, easy to walk to and from the subway, easy to slip into her bag once she got to work or campus and wanted to switch to a pair of heels. The second pair, black leather ankle boots with a slim silver chain running along the top of the foot, would go with a lot of outfits and would be great on bare legs or with tights or with sheer black stockings or with anything, really, pants or jeans, short skirts or long. The third pair was the one Julia couldn't get off her mind as her parents were describing a sidewalk, a deck, a large front window, neighbors named Diane and Bill. They were cherry red patent leather peep-toe stilettos, and they'd cost seventy-five bucks. Why had she done it? Jesus, seventy-five dollars? That was a whole semester's worth of books, a jacket, an interview suit — all things she actually needed. She'd done a slow lap around the store in them and then stopped to stare at her transformed lower legs in the mirror. Cherry red! There were her toes, looking right at home and ready to be noticed. There were her slim ankles above the impossibly narrow spike of a heel. They seemed like things to show off under a spotlight, things to be propped up on a table and discussed. "You walk like a natural," the saleswoman had said. "You know how many girls can't go three steps in those babies?" And like that, one throwaway comment the woman had probably quoted from her sales manual, and the shoes were hers.
"Julia," Greta had said, taking her hand and squeezing, "we decided you can have the bedroom downstairs. There's a separate entrance, and now that you're almost twenty-two, we thought you'd like that. You'll have to use the upstairs bathroom to shower, because downstairs only has a toilet, but look, it's a million miles better than what you have now, isn't it? Julia?"
Julia blinked.
"If you want to stay in the city, you can do that too," Michael said. "Visit on the weekends. We would understand. The bus leaves from the Port Authority every nineteen minutes during rush hour and every fifty minutes on weekends. You could come for dinner and be back here the same night."
"Why would she want to stay in the city?" Greta asked. "She wants to come. Don't you want to come?"
From Eavan and Julia's room came the sound of bedsprings, followed by the rasp of bare soles on the wood floors. Eavan should have been asleep hours ago, and Greta had taken the extra precaution of looking in on her before she and Michael told Julia the news. They wanted to wait until school was finished for the year to tell Eavan and James, but Eavan was quick, one of those children who noticed everything, and she had been quietly observing her parents for a full week, while Julia, thirteen years older than her sister, had daydreamed about new clothes, a boy in her accounting class named Ben, whether she should throw herself a birthday party when the time came.
Julia watched her mother walk across the room to shut the hall door. As Greta returned to her spot on the couch, keeping wide of the side table that held the crystal lamp for fear she'd knock it with an accidental sweep of her arm, Julia saw it, one of those rare glimpses of her mother as she imagined a stranger might see her. Greta was young, only thirty-eight. She was young also in the sense that went beyond age, young in the way she moved and held herself, self-conscious of her thin limbs, as a teenager might be, holding her elbows to her side as if she was afraid of what might happen if she unpinned them and let them free. She was young in the way she glided carefully across the room in her strappy sandals, each step landing on the ball of her foot rather than her heel and giving the impression of a stealthy march, a creeping prowler, a person trying to sneak out of Mass before Communion. She was young in the way she flipped her dark mop of curls over her shoulder with one quick twitch of her head. Young in the way she looked at Julia and shrugged in that manner that asked, What can you do?
"What do you think?" Michael asked his daughter.
Julia almost asked, About what? But instead she nodded. "Yeah, okay." And then: "Wait, are you saying you're thinking about moving, or have you already bought a house?"
"We made an offer!" Greta said, reaching over to squeeze Julia's knee. "And they accepted! We have to drive out there on Friday to talk to the man in the bank, and we thought you might want to come for the ride and take a look around. It'll still be a while before a closing. Maybe not until June."
"I have a paper due Friday." It was an old reflex, mentioning school to close the door on further conversation. School was a fenced area of her life that neither Greta nor Michael ever tried to breach, and the reverence they had for the thick pile of books by her bed, the pads covered with rows of her slanted script, were like shields she could use whenever they wanted her to do something she didn't want to do. Only once had she wielded this power in a more tangible way: sophomore year, New Year's plans at a club with a steep cover charge, a party dress she'd seen at B. Altman that she absolutely had to have. She'd told Greta that she needed fifty dollars to buy a new biology textbook and had prepared a whole list of reasons why certain textbooks cost more than others, how she couldn't get a used one because the professor was using an updated edition, how the library copy had already been checked out for the semester. But her preparation proved unnecessary; Greta handed over sixty dollars and told her to get whatever book she needed to do her best in the class. Julia hadn't even been taking bio that semester, but she told herself that if they didn't have the money, they wouldn't have been able to give it to her, so it was no more deceptive of her to have made up a story than for them to always claim they didn't have it to give. Even the next day, the morning of New Year's Eve, when she heard Michael cancel an appointment to get new brakes on the car, she still managed to brush off the timing of her father's call and believe it had nothing to do with her. It was only when she kissed them goodbye, her new blue-sequined dress folded in her bag until she got to her friend Mary's apartment, and Michael handed her a ten-dollar bill and told her to be safe, did she swear to God she'd never do it again.
"Next time, then." Greta had released Julia's knee. "We have all the time in the world." Greta turned to look at Michael. "Don't we, Michael? Don't be saying she mightn't want to come. Of course she wants to come. Who wouldn't want their own door to go in and out that no one else can use?"
All Julia knew about the town called Recess was that it was considered by many people to mark the beginning of that vast wilderness known as upstate. What did people do upstate? She'd been upstate a few times, once to Binghamton to see a friend who went to SUNY, and in high school on a class trip for honor students to see Niagara Falls. She'd been to the suburbs in New Jersey a few times when a new Macy's opened in Paramus and Greta, with her many years of retail experience, had to take the bus out there twice a week to train new hires. Julia knew moving day was approaching, and fast, but it existed on a calendar entirely separate from her own life. The idea of leaving the city to live somewhere else, somewhere north, was impossible to digest. There was too much that had to happen in the interim, and her days were just too fixed and familiar to believe they'd soon be gone. She rode the subway, muttered along with everyone else about the ten-cent increase now six months old, highlighted her textbooks, bought her usual coffee from the stand on Eighty-sixth, starched her blouses for work, washed her clothes for class, waited in the bakery for the day-old rolls, listened to the upstairs neighbors clack back and forth on their new hardwood floors in heels, hurried by the dry cleaners with her head down in case the owner's son asked her for another date, waved to the barber who spent his days framed in the door of his shop and called out each and every morning, "Julia! You are a sight for sore eyes!" And if Eavan and James were with her, "Eavan! James! How tall did you grow overnight? Your papa must put fertilizer in your shoes!"
The rest of the family talked nonstop about the move, Greta and Michael describing the house, even collaborating on a rough sketch so Eavan and James would understand. Eavan colored the sketch with crayons to show the green grass her mother told her would feel like velvet under her toes, the black shutters, the white shingles, and then she stuck it under a magnet on the fridge. There was a driveway, a garage, five windows facing front. The sketch gave no hint of neighbors, and when Julia came home from work late at night, winded from a hurried walk from the subway with her keys clenched tightly in her fist, she'd sip apple juice at the kitchen table and wonder how far the next houses were. If they'd drawn the sketch from a slightly greater distance, say ten feet back, twenty, would she be able to see the start of their new neighbors' houses at the very edges? How much grass did one family need? The driveway, as Eavan had rendered it, was jet black, shiny with the wax of the crayon, and empty. Where did people walk to when they stepped out their front doors? Her father would no longer have to circle every block from Ninety-sixth to Seventy-sixth in search of a parking spot. No more planning days around alternate side of the street parking. No more yelling at each other to decide which of them would run out to Second Avenue with dimes if no street spots could be found.
Julia didn't know the first thing about buying a house, but she was sure, after the accident, that moving would be called off. She couldn't say exactly what one had to do with the other, but they were connected, she was positive. She'd been the one to get the call from her father's friend Ned Powers, and she ran to the park on East End where Greta brought Eavan and James most evenings she was off. Julia, Eavan, and James watched Greta rush off, arm raised for a cab before she even reached the curb. Julia had seen her mother hail a cab only a few times in her life, and the idea of her taking a cab all the way to Long Island brought home the seriousness of what had happened. People died where her father worked. She'd seen the documentaries of men covered in mud and operating machinery a hundred stories under the sidewalk. You can't call an ambulance when you're that far underground. First you had to be brought down the tunnel to the shaft. Then you had to be lifted to street level in the cage. She'd taken a class on the city's infrastructure at City College. "Hogs," her professor had called these men, and his abbreviation of what they called themselves, as if he were more familiar with their work than Julia was—Julia who brought her father's mud-caked clothes to the Laundromat once a week and tiptoed around the apartment all day when he worked the graveyard shift—was infuriating.
"What happened?" Eavan had asked.
"Nothing," Julia said to Eavan. "She forgot to turn off the stove."
"She's taking a cab?"
"Yeah, she's tired. Long day."
With a cross glance at Julia, Eavan kicked up some sand with the toe of her sneaker and marched away. A few minutes later she marched right back and said, "I'm nine years old, you know."
"I know, kiddo."
That night, after putting Eavan and James to bed, Julia had slept on the couch and waited for Greta to come home. At a little after one o'clock the locks turned slowly in the door, giving out two soft clicks. Greta pushed the door open. Without speaking, she jerked her thumb over her shoulder to ask if the other two were really asleep.
"They're out cold," Julia said, and sat up to listen. "How is he?"
"I don't know how long they'll keep him," Greta said. "Maybe all week. Maybe more. My God, he was lucky. You should see the cut of him, Julia. A matter of two inches, and he would have been killed."
But he would be himself again, that much Greta was sure of. And as Greta went on about how lucky they were, Julia's thoughts floated beyond the day's emergency to the month ahead. Her father was safe in a hospital that turned out not to be on Long Island after all. He was strong. He'd be fine. But surely a scare of this size meant that they wouldn't be tackling any other major change. They'd stay in the city. They'd go on the way they always had. They'd been happy in this apartment. Now they'd been lucky as well.
"What will happen with the house?" Julia asked, interrupting Greta as she described the union's complicated policy on workman's compensation.
"The house?" Greta asked.
"Moving. Will they be angry now if we change our minds?"
Greta blinked, tilted her head toward Julia as if she'd missed part of the question. "Why would we change our minds? Don't you want to get out of the city?"
"Why would I want to get out of the city?" Julia asked. From the moment her parents had broken the news about moving, getting out, getting something of their own, it was as if they had confessed to leading secret lives, complete with secret dreams, secret preferences. She'd given serious thought to staying. If she found two roommates, they could divide the rent three ways, and if she got a good job, she might actually have some pocket change left over. For a whole week she had passed time on the subway thinking of who she might ask to move in. There were girls in her classes she'd become friendly with, there were girls who used to live in the neighborhood but had moved away, there were girls from high school who still lived with their parents and might jump at the chance to move out. They could decorate the place in their own style, paint the walls bright blue and red. They could spread a huge zebra-print rug on the floor where Greta's old rugs had been.
As Julia tried to decide who to ask, she pictured different faces sitting across from her at the table, on the other end of the couch. She rotated the faces of her girlfriends in a way that reminded her of James popping the heads off Eavan's Barbies, rolling them across the kitchen floor, and then reattaching them at random so that Malibu was wearing a business suit and Disco was wearing a formal gown. Every time she settled on someone, she got a feeling in her stomach that she'd regret it. It was one thing sitting next to someone in class. It was another thing to come home to them every day and have conversations about whose turn it was to clean the toilet, who'd forgotten to chain the door.
For months now, her friends had been striking out in navy suits, low-heeled pumps, pearl stockings, résumés in hand. Julia, in all her rushing about, finishing papers for class, waitressing five nights a week, deciding whether to stay or to go, hadn't even started looking.
And what would her mother do? The question came to Julia at the oddest moment—as she was finishing up the last essay of an art history exam and her No. 2 pencil broke, the jagged tip leaving a faint trail across the page of the blue book before falling to the floor. Who would watch Eavan and James if Greta got called in to work an evening shift and Michael was already at work? Where do you go for favors in the suburbs when the neighbors are so closed off in their own set of rooms, their own square of velvety green lawn?
"I thought everyone wanted to get out of the city," Greta said, rubbing her eyes. "I always thought of this as temporary, I suppose. Until we got on our feet. Well, it took a little longer than we thought, but we're on our feet."
"I didn't know it was temporary," Julia said. "Twenty-two years isn't temporary." She didn't feel like arguing. She wondered if the house in Recess would ever give her that feeling of coming through the door and being settled, of all the frustrations of the day seeming suddenly minor the moment she inserted her key in the lock. "It just surprised me, is all," Julia said. "Did you ever think of moving back home? That would make more sense to me."
"No, love. Now go on in and go to sleep. I'm sleeping here." Greta patted the couch. "The hospital might ring very early in the morning."
Anyone who might have entered the Ward apartment in late June 1986 would not have guessed that they were moving in a matter of days. Everything was the same as it had always been, or at least as long as Julia could remember. Framed photos covered every flat surface, and inside the frames of those photos were stuck more photos, wallet-size snapshots of Julia or Eavan or James, or all three together. The closets were stuffed with old coats, appliances in need of attention—a blender without a lid, a juicer without a cord, a food processor Greta had never learned how to use. There were also shoeboxes filled with odds and ends, souvenirs from special occasions, matchbooks, candles, ribbons, letters, pamphlets, more photos. There were some boxes that held old lipsticks, buttons, shiny hair combs lined with crystals, bracelets, compacts, scarves, even old stockings wound up and tied into balls. Julia's grammar school papers and projects were crammed on the top shelf of the hall closet, while science projects, book reports, and artistic endeavors by Eavan and James were mixed together and divided between their bedroom closets and the closet in the kitchen. Long before news of any move Julia often wondered if her mother had ever thrown anything away.
Once Greta had the boxes from the liquor stores she'd called—close to thirty in all, uniform in size and strength—she took a week off from work and got down to business. Julia, she said, was off the hook until her finals were over. School was, after all, the most important thing. She gave Eavan and James busywork—line up Mama's shoes in a neat row, organize the Tupperware so they all fitted into each other—while she dumped drawer after drawer and shoebox after shoebox onto the floor of the living room and separated what should be thrown out from what should be packed and brought to the suburbs. When Julia came home from her last exam at City College, she found that the stack of packed boxes lining the hall had grown tall since morning. Empty, the closets and cabinets revealed themselves as Julia had never seen them — expansive, naked, squares and circles of shelf liner bright and dust-free where the cartons of pasta and cans of soup were once stored.
"Jesus," Julia said as she watched her mother, who was sitting cross-legged on the living-room floor with a bandana tied around her hair. "Why don't we get a shovel and just throw it all out."
"It's not garbage," Greta said as she stood to hug Julia. "College graduate! How does it feel? How was the last exam? Are you hungry? You should be very proud of yourself, all those tests. I made a cake, and Eavan's icing it, so don't go in the kitchen."
"It's really not a big deal, Mom."
"Of course it's a big deal. You think everyone graduates from college?"
"Pretty much. It's not like I went to Harvard."
Michael, listening from his bedroom, propped himself up on his good elbow and called down the hall, "Is she home? Was the test very hard?"
"I thought you were asleep," Julia said, walking down the hall to perch at the edge of her parents' bed. "Feeling better?"
"Forget about me. Tonight, Miss Ward, we're going to eat steak and spuds and then we're going to have cake your sister is icing with pure sugar, I think, from the taste on the spoon she brought in for me to lick. Just one little spoonful she brought me, no more. That was awfully hard of her, wasn't it? After supper we're going to have a toast. How do they do it? To Julia. How do they put it? City College graduate, class of 1986."
"But before that," Greta said, coming up behind Julia, "you'll give me some help, won't you? I don't want to face this pile after the celebration."
Once Julia had changed into sweats and a T-shirt, she sat down on the opposite side of the pile from Greta. She'd quit her job at Jackson's Bistro earlier that week, and now, with the last exam behind her, the immediate future was beginning to look like a place she wouldn't mind checking out. She was twenty-one going on twenty-two. She had a college degree. She had nowhere to be in the morning. She would soon have an entrance all to herself. Recess was only a short drive away. Her parents had gone a lot farther from home when they were a lot younger than she was now.
"How about a rule?" Julia asked. "How about if you haven't looked at something in over ten years, it gets tossed."
"Just because I haven't looked at it doesn't mean I don't know it's there. And ten years isn't so long."
"Mom," Julia said as she opened a plastic bag and peered inside. "This bag is full of coloring books. Old coloring books, but," Julia took one out and flipped through the pages, "never used."
"So they're good. They come with us."
"James is too old for coloring books."
"So what? We just throw out a dozen perfectly good coloring books?"
Julia sighed, reached for another fat plastic bag. "Are these what I think they are?" she said, shoving her arm elbow-deep into the bag as if searching for a winning ticket. She pulled out a long strip of glossy paper, torn on one side. She held the paper to her nose. "I think these are old perfume sniffers. Like from magazines." She dumped the bag into her lap. "The whole thing!"
Greta's features drew together in a scowl, the way they always did when she was thinking seriously about something. "Those can go," she said finally.
Julia rolled her eyes and threw the bag into the trash pile. "What about this?" she asked a moment later, tilting the mouth of the bag toward Greta so she could see the tiny balls of yarn inside. Some balls were smaller than marbles, few were bigger than golf balls. Every color of the rainbow was represented in multiple shades.
"Put that aside for now," Greta said.
"I feel I should point out that you don't knit."
"I do knit. I mean, I know how to knit. I used to knit. Crochet too."
Mom—
"Listen." Greta put down the box she was sorting and put her hands on her hips. "I have my own way, and if you're going to argue about it, maybe you should go and clean out your own closet."
"My closet's clean."
"Then bring your brother and sister to the park."
"Okay, I'll shut up," Julia said, and did shut up, pressing her lips together every time she felt an objection forming in her throat. The garbage pile was growing, but very slowly. The pile marked to come with them had grown into a mountain and had spilled over the couch and onto the floor in front of the armchair. At the top of the pile to make the journey to the suburbs were little bundles of Polaroid photographs held together with rubber bands, bags of half-used jars of cold cream and lotion left over from promotions at Bloomingdale's and Macy's. Julia picked up a bright red cookie tin of a brand she knew could only be bought in the Irish parts of Queens and the Bronx. Once in a while, usually before Christmas, Greta took the train to one of the shops that sold these cookies and bought enough to last through all the special occasions of the year.
Julia used her nails to claw at the tin's top, which was jammed tight. She tried to twist the top off, tried to pull in different places in search of a weak spot. Finally, with the help of an old nail file stuck in with the junk Greta had cleared out from under the sink in the bathroom, she finally pried off the lid. Two dozen or so letters were bundled together; others were loose inside the box. Julia plucked out one and looked at it. It was the only piece of paper that did not have an envelope, and she recognized her own handwriting as it had looked almost ten years earlier. It was an old phone message, written on paper from a pad magnet that used to be stuck on the fridge.
"I remember this," Julia said, trying to remember more details of the day. She'd been at school, Mrs. Olarski's class, eighth grade, and had just come home. No, she'd been home sick. No, school had been canceled because of a burst pipe in one of the classrooms. No, it was a Sunday, Greta was at work, Michael had gotten called in, Julia was minding Eavan. James wasn't born yet. Pam from across the street had just buzzed to see if Julia wanted to take turns doing each other's hair in fishbones. She'd just learned how. Then the phone rang, and this was the message Julia had taken from Aunt Johanna, who had not called since. Breaking the news was the first time in her life Julia had felt the same age as her mother.
"Hmm?" Greta said absently, her back turned to Julia as she held some old blouses to the light of the window and searched for stains or pulls beyond repair.
Yes, Julia remembered now. That afternoon they prayed the rosary for the first and last time in Julia's recollection, and when Michael came home, Greta sent Julia to her room so she could tell him. "Does he know her?" Julia had asked. It was confusing enough imagining what her parents had looked like and how they'd acted before she was born. It was harder still to imagine how they came together, who had said what, when they had known they were in love. How did her father know her Nana if he and Greta met on a ship on their way to America and had never gone back home? Instead of answering, Greta had just pulled Julia close and hugged her, squeezing and rocking until Julia could feel her hair weighed down with her mother's hot breath and runny nose.
Julia refolded the note along the old creases and reached for another of the loose letters shoved in beside and on top of the main bundle.
"What's that?" Greta asked, stepping away from the window and wading through the clutter on the floor toward Julia's side of the pile. "What are you reading?"
"I think they're old letters," Julia said, sliding a piece of lined blue paper out from an envelope that was postmarked October 16, 1966. "This one is —"
"Give it here," Greta said, stopping in front of Julia and holding out her hand.
"Why?" Julia smiled. "Is it a love letter?" She cleared her throat as if to begin a dramatic reading. She had unfolded the letter to the first crease when Greta snatched it out of her hand.
"Does it have your name on it.?" Greta asked, grabbing hold of Julia's upper arm and squeezing hard. "Does it? No. It says Greta, doesn't it? Did I raise you to poke your nose in places it doesn't belong?"
"Jesus, Ma. I was only joking around."
"It's fine," Greta said, calmer now that she had returned the letter to the box and jammed the lid on tight. "I'm just exhausted. And that cake, Christ Almighty, the kitchen was so hot with the oven on. You keep going here, but leave out anything for the garbage so I see it first. I want to see how Eavan is doing with the icing."
She left the room with the cookie tin tucked under her arm.
After this first stage, the process of moving swung in the opposite direction, and it seemed as if something major disappeared every day. First the rugs were rolled up tight and leaned up against the growing stack of boxes in the hall. Then the vases and knickknacks, the extra bedding, the pictures that hung on the wall, all the dishes, glasses, mugs, utensils. The large pieces of furniture — the couch, the armchair, their beds — seemed frank and lonesome as they waited in bare rooms. Julia's bed, a twin, would be the only one left behind on the curb. A new full-sized bed would be there to greet her in Recess when they arrived. This is our whole life, Julia thought, staring at the pile in the hall and then at the dusty and cobwebbed corners of her bedroom. As Greta had happily informed them the day before, they would need only a medium-sized truck.
On June 29, the evening before moving day, Greta walked into the living room, where Michael was on the couch watching All in the Family, Eavan and James on the floor in front of the couch, begging him to change the channel.
"No way I'm turning on that oven in this heat," Greta said. "I'm getting a pizza." At the news, James pumped his little fist in the air and Eavan clapped her hands together. "I need Windex as well. Anyone need anything?"
Michael shook his head. "Need help?" he asked out of habit, and then shook his head as he remembered.
James and Eavan looked at each other. "Ice cream?" Eavan ventured.
"Yes," Greta said. "I think we can do ice cream on our last night ever living on Eighty-fourth Street." James and Eavan turned back to the television and were very still, as if afraid one false move might disrupt their streak of good fortune.
"Julia?" Greta called toward the kitchen, where Julia was on the phone with her friend, saying how easy it was to get from Manhattan to Recess, how often the buses went back and forth, how it wouldn't feel like she'd left the city at all, how she could still do a birthday party if she wanted to, maybe in the country, on her new deck, why not give her friends a chance to get out of the city for a day. The girls could bring bathing suits and lie out on the grass.
"Yeah?" Julia answered, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand.
"You want anything from the store while I'm out?"
Julia shook her head. "You want me to go?"
"No, I'll go. I need the walk. The house will be clean, I hope, when we get there. Do you think? No one said anything about that at the closing. Or if they did, I don't remember. They looked like decent people when we met them. They looked like clean, decent people."
"We can always buy what we need when we get there, can't we?" Julia pointed out. "Worse comes to worst, we'll just clean it ourselves."
"That's true," Greta said. "Yes, that's good. Wait and see."
Julia finished her call right after Greta left, and she sat in the kitchen listening to Archie Bunker yell for Edith from the other side of the door. Her clothes had all fit in one large black plastic bag, the same type of bag Michael had used for the building's garbage cans before his duties had been passed over to the new management. In another large garbage bag were her makeup bag, her hair dryer, hot rollers, hairbrushes, and random pairs of shoes that had not fit in the box with Eavan's. In her backpack, which she would keep with her in her father's car, which she was in charge of driving, she had a few of the books she hadn't returned to the university bookstore, her wallet, the hand-carved wooden box an ex-boyfriend had brought home for her from New Mexico, and a framed photo of herself holding James on the day he was born, his face wrinkled under the cotton blue cap, Eavan beside her on tiptoes, peering up to see the bundle in her big sister's arms.
Greta had reserved a truck for eight A.M., and Ned Powers was supposed to arrive at the apartment by seven-thirty for tea and bagels. Julia looked up at the wall where the clock had been for so long and then at the watch on her wrist. It was already past six, an hour later than they usually ate dinner. All day she'd been waiting for the fact of leaving the city to hit her. She waited for the tears, even stared at herself in the small bathroom mirror and instructed herself, once again, on what was happening. Sitting in the kitchen, she tried it again. They're going to knock down the walls of your home, she thought sternly, as if reprimanding herself for something. Someone else is going to pee in your toilet, look out your window.
She left the kitchen and passed through the living room, where Eavan and James had climbed up on the couch and tucked in by Michael's feet. All three were staring at the flickering TV screen in perfect contentment, smiling at Dingbat, smiling at Meathead, smiling at Lionel Jefferson, who'd just come to the door. She passed James's room, his clothes for tomorrow already laid out on his bed, and headed down to her parents' room, which was still, with just a few hours to go, littered with odds and ends: new linens in their plastic cases, new undershirts for Michael, socks without mates, underwear, hangers, old cooking magazines stuffed under the bed long ago and recently rediscovered, presents received for various occasions too dear to ever be displayed. Julia picked up one of the smaller boxes and opened it to find a sterling silver baby spoon.
"She's hopeless," Julia said, sighing. There was probably a name for this thing her mother had, this impulse to collect and collect but never let anything go. Without deciding to do so, after a few minutes Julia found herself sorting what was on the floor, making neat piles, shoving anything that looked like something her mother would never miss into an empty grocery bag hanging from the knob of the door. She took the last unused box from the hall and taped the bottom. Then she filled it with anything that would fit. Finally, when most of the floor was clear, Julia noticed at the back of her mother's closet the red tin cookie box. She picked it up and, moving over to the edge of the bed, held it in her lap.
Once, when Julia was a senior in high school, Greta had forbidden her to go out with a boy she'd met in a pool hall on Seventy-ninth. They'd fought about it, Julia telling Greta she was going to a movie or shopping or over to the park to meet a girlfriend, Greta finding out about it each and every time, saying to Julia "You're grounded," though they both knew she had only a vague idea of what that meant. Greta disconnected the phone; Julia used a pay phone. Greta walked with Julia to and from school; Julia made up after-school activities and forged her teachers' names. "He's a bad one," was all Greta could say. "I can see it in his face." Back then, that was reason enough to go out with him, or at least to be seen going out with him. Four years later Julia knew what her mother meant. He was mean then, and he was still mean, what little Julia had heard about him. Once, as he was kissing her, he put his thumb against her throat and pushed, stopping Julia's breath in her lungs and trapping it there. Julia coughed; he pushed harder. Julia slapped his hand away, and he laughed. "You're an asshole," she said as she walked out, and he laughed her all the way out the door.
Maybe here, Julia thought, looking at the box on her lap, is the answer to how her mother knew he was bad with one glance. There couldn't be too many secrets. She already knew that her mother had had her at sixteen. There would be no references to smoking up, dropping acid, all the things she should have been doing when she was new to America in the 1960s. Her mother, Julia decided, was underestimating her.
Julia listened for the dead bolts of the apartment door, and once she was sure it was safe, she pried the lid off the box, easier this time, and reached for the same letter Greta had snatched out of her hands. October 16, 1966. She took it in first as a whole, with one glance, her eyes sweeping over the penmanship and the length before she absorbed any of the words. It was from her Aunt Johanna, her mother's only sister, the one who happened to be in Ireland when their mother got sick and had never left.
This is going to be good, Julia thought, but before she let herself read the letter slowly from beginning to end, she lifted the tied bundle from the center of the box and broke the aging string.