X was making some joke about fishing for monsters as A tried to absorb the blow of no laptop for the next few days. It was X who put the backpack in the car. Into which the laptop had, almost definitely, been placed that morning. Fine. Whatever. Phone still in possession. Better for watching videos, anyway. The smaller the people, the less it seemed to matter what happened to them.
“Speaking of your father,” X said, once they were back on the highway. (Had they been speaking of him?) “I guess you know about Angelica?”
Obviously. Scowled at the good-luck charm swinging from the rearview mirror, a jade owl with a red-thread tail. She’s a lot of fun, Y kept saying on the way from the airport at spring break, as if Angelica were a new edition of Monopoly. Tall, taller than Y, thirtyish, with disturbingly white teeth, lots of shiny black hair, and clanky silver bracelets that slid up and down her arms. One night they went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant and Angelica insisted on everyone reading aloud their fortune cookie fortunes. Hers was: You will soon get a big surprise. Wow! clanked Angelica. Wonder what that will be? A month later, a text from Y saying he and Angelica were moving in together.
“I think your father is pretty serious about her.” X raised her voice as a truck roared by, passing so close that it shook the car. “I just wondered if you have any feelings about it.”
Pause. “Okay. Just asking.” Quietly Concerned Smile.
Shut eyes, best defense.
But after half an hour of listening to a TED Talk on lice (“It is thought lice would be among the only survivors of a nuclear winter”) and looking out the window at nothing but trees and an occasional moose-crossing sign, A was bored enough to sit up when X asked, “So perchance could we talk for a few minutes?
“You’re probably wondering,” she said, “why we don’t see Grootie more often.”
Had not been wondering. If considered the matter at all, assumed they saw G only once a year because she didn’t like driving from Vermont to Massachusetts in her prehistoric Volvo. As to why they never visited her, figured they hadn’t been invited.
“There’s something I haven’t told you.” X was staring at the road, a pair of black sunglasses on top of her head, short brown hair blowing around her face from her half-open window. What would Dr. Knapp see if presented with X as a dermatology patient? Moth-colored freckles dappling her cheeks (sun damage). Mole above right eyebrow (suspicious?).
“And since we’re spending a few days with her,” X went on, “and something might come up, I should probably let you know.”
Fan of creases at the eyes, skin faintly pleated around the mouth. Prescription: Moisturizer. Palliative care.
“Basically, it’s that your grandmother left us when we were children. I was seven. Wade was thirteen. We woke up one morning and she was gone.”
For a moment, A was too stunned to hide it.
“Why?”
“That’s a good question. And the truth is, I don’t really know.” X shook her head regretfully. “It wasn’t something anyone ever talked about.”
Mouth hanging open. Close it, you idiot.
“How could you not have talked about it?”
“I know it seems strange,” X said matter-of-factly, as if it wasn’t strange at all. “My father was hard of hearing, as you know, which made it difficult to ask him anything. And back then people didn’t explain things to children the way they would now.
“Also,” she went on, still in that matter-of-fact voice, “I didn’t see her again for a long time. More than thirty years.”
What explanation could there have been? A thought wildly, staring out the window at a stockade of pine trees. Mothers didn’t leave children and not see them again for more than thirty years. Fathers, yes, maybe, but not mothers. Wasn’t it against the law? As annoying as X could be, it was impossible to imagine doing without her; even now, the thought that she would some day die produced an instant labyrinth of grief.
“She went to California, apparently.” Squinting into the sun, X lowered her sunglasses over her eyes. “I think she taught French at a school out there. But when you were about a year old, I got a postcard saying she’d moved to Vermont, with an address and phone number, and I decided to bring you up to meet her. It didn’t go very well, but after that she started coming for Thanksgiving.”
A pressed back against the seat, overwhelmed by a sickening wave of rage, pity, and helplessness, subverting any attempt at disinterest. What to object to more: this outrageous information, or just hearing it now?
Not prepared, not prepared at all for this one.
Though, on second thought, why such a shock? There had been signs: the once-a-year Thanksgiving visits that barely lasted a day. And that G was hardly mentioned the rest of the time. Perfect example: that charcoal sketch in the upstairs hall, with its scribbled rooftop and wavy mountains. X used to point out invisible things in the dark blurry lines. Pastures and a creek, a spring-fed pool, the stables, an old family graveyard. Described jokes she and her brother played on their father, who tried to hide he was deaf by nodding to anything said to him. Dad, we’re going to set the barn on fire, okay? Told stories about how she and Wade would hide in the hayloft to spy on the stable hands, who Wade insisted were Russian agents. They would drop straw on their heads and jump across stacked hay bales pretending to escape from the KGB. Once, Wade tricked her into leaping off the hayloft ladder into a pile of fresh “horse apples,” ruining her new saddle shoes. Otherwise, she hardly mentioned Wade, either. But not a single story, ever, about her mother.
“So why didn’t you say anything before?”
“I wanted you to have a grandmother,” said X reasonably behind her sunglasses. “And I guess I wanted you to like her.”
The weird thing was, had always kind of liked her. Partly because of that story about her as a girl in Amsterdam, which had made A feel secretly related to Anne Frank, but mostly because she hardly said anything. At some point during Thanksgiving she’d crank herself up to mutter, How’s school? A would say, Meh, and that would be the end of it.
Though one year her visit had coincided with the French Phase of tenth grade, following the Drummer Phase and the brief life of the Perps. Not a bad band. They had a lot of sound, someone said. And they were getting better, until the other kids accused A of being too bossy and not being able to keep a beat. Refusal to speak English for two weeks afterward, to discourage advice from X on dealing with disappointment. A resistance tactic G seemed to support. During dinner she’d come out with the useful remark, Il pleut comme vache qui pisse. It’s raining like a pissing cow.
“Did you like her,” A asked, reluctantly, “when you were a kid?”
X frowned. “I don’t really remember. I did think she was beautiful. She had long blond hair back then and she used to wear pink lipstick.”
Beautiful? Unsuccessful attempt to superimpose long blond hair and pink lipstick on the broad gloomy old face behind the Thanksgiving turkey.
“Of course I’ve tried to talk to her,” said X, as if in response to a question she’d hoped to be asked. “Over the years. But whenever I’ve tried to ask her anything, she says she doesn’t remember. Which may, actually, be true.” She began explaining recent neuroscientific discoveries about the effect of stress on memory.
Involuntary interruption: “So why do you think she left?”
“Well, Wade used to insist she was a spy.” X turned to give a too-encouraging smile. “He thought everyone was a spy in those days. It was the Cold War. We lived in northern Virginia. Some of our neighbors probably were spies.” Another smile. “But most likely it was because she met somebody. The usual story.”
Where they had been in the woods before, they plunged now into a true forest. The trees were mostly pine, densely needled. Sunlight shafted down greenly, as if they were driving underwater.
“It was hardest on Wade,” X went on, peering at the road as if she were having trouble seeing in the shade. “I think he was afraid she left because of him.”
She stopped for a moment, and then said, “He was always in trouble for getting into people’s things, especially hers. Going through her dresser drawers, pretending he was looking for clues. If she caught him at it she’d go after him with a hairbrush.”
Time to end this conversation, which was threatening all resolution to stay detached from everything, and would soon lead to corrupting questions like, How do you feel about hearing all this, sweetheart? Also, the TED Talk about lice had incited scalp-itch.
X paused to remove a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. It was loud in the car from wind rushing through the open windows. Ask to turn on the air conditioner instead? Probably the car would feel even more claustrophobic.
“Children usually act out in some way in a family crisis,” she said. “Wade certainly did. It got so bad my father sent him away to military school, although I think it was more because he was worried Wade was gay.”
Outside the window, a clearing in the pines, a meadow with a stream. It was obvious what she was doing: Another calculated assault, an attempt to extract “talk.”
Now she was on to psychological theories: Trauma repeats itself. Because G had still been a child when she lost her family, she’d reenacted that trauma by abandoning her own children. It was difficult to care for others when you hadn’t been cared for yourself, etc., etc. As for not talking about what happened to her during the war, probably she had blocked those memories. It was also true that people who suffered a trauma often felt that if it went unmentioned it was containable, which led to intimacy issues.
At least all this analysis was only irritating; still it must be derailed.
“Sounds like a bunch of excuses.”
“I’m just trying to explain,” X said, sounding hurt, “what might have happened.”
In an instant, the windshield was replaced by the dark lawn of the college library. Arms, legs, a muddle of bodies. A cry. Phone lights flashing. And those terrible words: What are you, anyway—
No. Stop. Press hands to eyes. Press harder. Harder. Until everything goes red.
Nobody would ever understand what had happened. No one. Not even neuroscientists. Let’s take a look at this kid’s brain. Hey, it’s full of spikes, like a medieval mace. Every thought excruciating, and dreams were worse. Last night a nightmare about a mob of gigantic lobsters surrounding the bed, clicking their claws.
No escape. No excuse. Each hour a nuclear winter.
X was still talking. “Though to be honest, for a long time I just tried not to think about her. You can get through all kinds of things by not thinking about them.”
Was that another joke? So extra. Took hands from eyes, letting the red sparks fade, blinking at the sunny windshield. Braced sneakers against the dashboard. Sometimes X made cracks like this with her shrink friends who came over to drink wine on the patio. Or maybe this was why shrinks became shrinks, so they could spend all their time thinking about other people’s problems and pretend they didn’t have any themselves.
The air lost the hygienic scent of pine and filled with the smell of manure; they’d left the forest and were driving into farmland, dotted with barns.
Then without warning, X said, “Listen,” and reached out and touched A’s shoulder before instant flinch-reflex could be activated. “I just want you to remember that things change. You can’t control other people’s behavior, but you’re in charge of your own.”
No more questions. Cease all communication.
Earbuds back in place, some measure of security restored. Also totally clear now that X had told this story to show what a good mother she had been, how wise and understanding. How lucky A was, by comparison.
It was almost sad, to be so obvious.