35
Eleanor
WHEN Lily got back, she half expected Olivia to be waiting up for her, but it was Eleanor who was sitting at the dining room table, the New York Times crossword puzzle in front of her, and a pen, and a dictionary.
Lily walked through the darkness and stood in front of her mother. When she was a teenager, she would do the same thing, but back then, she had nothing to hide. She was the kind of girl who would stay out all night at parties, drinking nothing. The kind of girl who would go on a date with a boy and just talk. Sometimes Lily thought that her mother was disappointed by her straitlaced ways. Sometimes she thought her mother was waiting up for her with the hope that Lily might actually come home tipsy, with smeared lipstick, a shirt buttoned the wrong way.
“What are you doing?” Lily asked. The light coming in from the night was hazy, gauzy, from all the smoke still in the air.
“You weren’t running errands, were you?” Eleanor asked.
Lily raised her hand in the air as if to say, So what? and let it fall against her thigh with a slap. “No,” she finally said.
Eleanor knew how comforting desire could be, how easy it was to go to it, and to give in to it. She knew how easy it was to get what you wanted when all you wanted was to be held, for a time. She guessed where Lily had gone, and she felt a shock of recognition now that she knew she was right. This daughter, who was so different from her, who had gone through the world on such a different path, had the same impulse in grief that she herself had once had—to reach out to someone else, to find instant comfort wherever you could find it. In the end, maybe they weren’t so different after all. “You went to see that boy Jack,” she said.
“Jesus, Mom,” Lily said. “He’s more than fifty years old. He’s not a boy.”
“Am I right?”
“Right? Right? Of course you’re right. And you love that, don’t you?”
“Lily ...”
“You probably actually love that Tom died, too, because didn’t you tell me it wouldn’t last? That he couldn’t give me everything I wanted? Well, you’re right about all that, too. It’s all over. And I have nothing.”
Eleanor stood up in the eerie glow. “What I was going to say was that I understand this thing with Jack. I was going to tell you that it’s okay. You take comfort where you can find it.”
Lily held her breath. The words her mother was saying were so perfect, so exactly right, but she couldn’t accept them. It was too much for her mother to be so right. “By the way,” she said, “I’m going to fix up the shed and move back up there.” Her voice was crisp and matter-of-fact. “I’m going to put a refrigerator and a stove in the front room, and a bed in the back.”
Eleanor took a step forward. She wanted to wrap her arms around Lily’s shoulders, to stroke her cheek. “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like.” She swallowed and looked at the ground. “I like having you here,” she said quietly.
“I know,” Lily said. “I just think it would be best for us both.”
SHE dreamed of fire, of flame, of smoke, of heat. She dreamed of angels—cartoon angels with cartoon wings—who lift people gently from the earth and fly them through the sky like Peter Pan and Wendy, over a glittering lighted earth. She was sometimes in the audience watching with amazement, and she was at other times in the wings of the stage watching with worry to see if the wires might break. In both instances, the angels smiled down at her, but the people they carried just flew; they never looked back.
In the morning, she got out the yellow legal pad. On a fresh piece of paper, at the top in the center, she wrote one word:
A few days later, Shelley called to say that Lily’s bowl had been fired. Lily drove to the studio to pick it up. Shelley had set it on the worktable with the lid on top. It was just as misshapen as when Lily had made it, but there was a sense of permanence about it now, as if nothing could change it. She lifted the little lid, and inside was a ring of ash, and a two-and-a-half-carat diamond.
