PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA, 1972
The last letter Claudette and James got from their daughter advised that they keep their television off on a certain evening, and on this point, for perhaps the first time since Fay had been a ballerina in a crown of milk braids, they trusted her. Though she had not mentioned the radio they avoided this, too, even the sight of it. To the question of her son they had agreed, remembering how patient he had been with peas, with the dog who sniffed his fat diaper.
The night in question they ate outside, on the balcony that looked over their animals and their town, anticipating the other’s request for wine or butter before it was spoken. James had given the housekeeper the evening off, thanking her for the meal she left in the oven. It was one of their chickens, a lemon from the tree that straddled the hill beyond their bedroom window, rosemary from the fat row of herbs where the cat slept afternoons.
They set the cast-iron skillet the bird had roasted in right on the table. Claudette sat with her hands on the slight shelf of her belly, her round bun moving a little as she tried to see to each edge of the property, as he carved away the breasts. The knot of hair, the red-blond she had given her daughters, had always been an indicator of her hurt or fear or love, as much as any expression she made, even anything she would say. When she was free it became freer, wobbling as she performed an anecdote or bent a look to some question, and when she was furious it was erect and visible, making sharp turns, the thing that was apparent because she would not show her face. It was high and tight, now, reddening the skin at her hairline, tilted to the landscape while she kept her chin tucked and ate. He never imagined what it felt like, to have that much hair, all the way down her back, to keep it locked up that way. If it hurt he didn’t want to know.
The question of heeding the letter had not been discussed, but on the calendar by the pantry Claudette had circled the date in fine blue ink. There was the air of a wake to the way they ate. Neither sipped any from the crystal glasses of water before them, but once their plates were empty they drank without interruption, draining them like children who have come in from a long time outside. When he belched a little she almost smiled, although a correction passed over her face in half a second. In town that day he had bought her the cookies she liked, madeleines dipped in chocolate.
“None for me,” she said when he appeared with the milk-glass platter on which he had arranged them in a fan, and he understood and felt ashamed. There was nothing to celebrate.
They had been prepared, the two of them, to accept some responsibility. Even the modest farmhouse they lived in now in Northern California, the transition from their life before in the south of the state—the lawns of their Spanish Colonial mansion spotted with imported trees, the parties they had gone to every year, the pink and green tamarisk whose feathery branches seemed suited to the ocean floor, the Whitneys’ Valentine’s gala with the sedated lion cubs rented for the evening—had been a concession to this, to the embarrassment of how far each of their daughters had gone from them. It was understood that, for the rest of their lives, there would be no company coming.
On the table she was folding her linen napkin in some elaborate way, to make it look like a bird or a flower, a talent she had been known for in the decades of dinner parties.
THEY FORGOT IT ALL OUTSIDE. In the night the carcass of the chicken in the skillet took on a coat of dew and the fog bloated the madeleines and upstairs their sleep was dreamless under the lights they left on. When he woke up to piss, he saw she was not even using a pillow, that she had her palms tucked under her thighs and one foot slid under the other. He had always known her to be unkempt in her sleep, Claudette, a leg hinged up at the hip in a crazy angle and a hand high above her, and had teased her about it, calling her the colonialist, saying, Could you stay out of my country over here. Tonight she was like an epiphyte, a thing clinging to its host, almost undetectable in the bed.
In the morning they each kept a leash to the other, never drifting from earshot. He was very aware of the radio that was usually on, local and national and weather, the detailed forecast that usually filled the rooms of the house. By the afternoon he was unable to concentrate on the most minor of tasks, some paperwork sent over by the accountant or the crossword puzzle folded back on his knee where he sat on the porch, and he called to her. “Trip into town,” he said. Somehow he had adopted the belief that the news of their daughter, whatever it was, had their address, would reach them at home. The thought of a drive was a comfort. “A matinee,” he said. “We’ll drive by the theater and see.” Implicit in this was that they could not check the listings in the paper.
They floated down the hill with the windows up and his foot never pressing the gas, Claudette in a dress he hadn’t seen in thirty years, navy silk padded at the shoulders. She was a woman whose younger self had been eaten angrily by the older. He no longer knew her by her face or body but by how she used them, a way of crossing her feet when she didn’t approve, tipping her forehead back to consider an alternative.
There was a soap she wanted and she asked if he would stop at the market first, and he waited in the car with his seat belt on, the metal of the buckle right in the line of sun and capturing so much heat he could feel it in his gut. She emerged ten minutes later, through the automatic doors installed that year, her purse open and the soap held like a ticket, and he understood from this and how she crossed the lot, her chin buttoned to her neck, hardly lifting her feet, that she knew. On the drive home, the marquee out the window forgotten, he kept telling himself that at the next stop sign, after the next crest of the hill, he would ask her what their daughter had done.