10.
Zelda reemerges from a swim in the ocean, patches of gray streaked through her drying hair, her mouth tightened into a frown, a war trench etched between her eyebrows. Ever since she was a wee thing, she has paced this way, back and forth in laps along the coastline. I was always jealous of her little body, buoyed up by the waves, then dipping and disappearing beneath a crest. It was a ballet, but with a partner more magnificent than any man. Stripped of my own romantic outlet as the years went on, I began to project all of my desires onto the ocean and its movements. I feared it so because I wanted it.
As a child, in those short winter months when the ocean was too cold, Zelda got her exercise by screaming throughout the house, pointing to where she believed we were being haunted—not just by the dead but also by events she claimed had happened in our own lives, only some of which we ourselves remembered. That’s the ghost of where I licked my most favorite ice cream before going to the fairy ball with Mommy in the ocean. Here is the ghost of where Mommy was sitting when she was wearing that pretty blue dress with the polka dots at the mayor’s birthday party and then his mean son dropped his glass on the ground and started screaming at Ethel. Perhaps this childhood fixation of hers is not so unlike the activity that most occupies my days now. I, too, hallucinate the resurgence of an ever-receding past.
Zelda’s ghosts also assumed a standard human form: There was the mysterious woman who wandered up and down the beach, always carrying her red picnic basket and umbrella. In our bedroom lay a sick old woman with blue-stained teeth. And there was the butterfly woman Zelda chatted with in the kitchen, in various made-up languages, the woman who breathed beautiful moth-shaped flames. She was the one, said Zelda, who had burned down the house—the house that stood right in this very spot, Mommy—after the cruel boy chased her so hard through the woods that her baby came out of her dead.
It was only in the old shed, where Zelda always found shelter during a game of hide-and-seek, that she identified a ghost I shuddered to recognize. He’s tall and freckled and really tan and has got a hoarse, deep voice. And he’s always asking for you . . .
The phone ringing throughout the house disperses our ghosts to half a century in the past. “It’s for me,” Zelda shouts.
To spite her, I pick up the line in the bedroom, hardly breathing. At last our roles have reversed. I am her naughty child.
“Gordon’s in the hospital again,” Zelda says. “So I’m here for a few weeks. Apparently the cocaine, the gambling, the booze—they all feed the manic depression. Or maybe it’s the other way around. You don’t have to say it. I already know you told me so.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” the voice on the other end replies. “It’s not your fault. Look at your mother. So many of us marry our fathers, but you, you married your mother. Those types are good at fooling us. Beautiful. Generous. Charming. But then the façade comes crashing down and what are you left with? Your father spent a fortune trying to get Elle help just like you’re doing now. And, my dear, I hate to say it, but none of it ever worked.”
“I have always appreciated your candor, Deborah,” Zelda says sincerely. “Send my best to Joe. I’ve got to get going, though. Have to make sure these two haven’t slit their wrists yet.”
“We hate that we’ve cut Simon off, Zelda, really we do. But we did all we could for him down there. It’s been money down the drain, to be perfectly frank. I know he must feel sore. But now with Joe’s medical bills, and this recall lawsuit that we’re unhappily bearing, the burden—”
“Deborah, Mother’s calling for me!” Zelda cuts in. “Love you!”
Zelda glides up the stairs and comes into my room, smiling as if the prince of Monaco has just asked for her hand.
“Who called for you?” I ask her, staring at the window, trying to look as sick as I ever have, and as sad.
“Colleague from work,” she replies. She makes herself appear wholly occupied by reorganizing the exquisitely organized pillows on the window seat.
“What is your employment these days?” I ask. Zelda ignores me. Aggravation swallows her face. To think I suffered her in my womb for nine months, nourished her at my breast for nine more, and granted her every wish for all the rest of the days she has lived. “Have you given up on having a child?”
“Why do you always want answers to the obvious, Elle?” Zelda snaps.
“Zelda, I was waiting for a call,” I say to her. “Please do not pick it up first the next time it rings. This is still my house.”
Her face breaks before me. She weeps for a good long minute, her mask decomposing like those modernist portraits so popular when I was young. For a moment I see my child in one of the fragments, my ghost-hunting rascal again. She walks toward me, throws herself over my lap weakly. “You’re still my mother,” she cries. “Aren’t you?”
The sky has changed. All the desperate critters of the woods call for one another. It is growing dark. My daughter is thin in my arms, like feathers. A spiderweb of violet light spreads through the trees. I lean toward the window. There must be a party out there. Shimmering bodies. Glasses tinkling, laughter. A woman singing a low, sad song. I have always loved the anonymity of a dark and crowded gathering. As if I could wander in any direction, into anyone’s arms. There will be a day, not so long from now, when there will be no more parties. Everything ends in the room of memory.
“Elle?” Zelda asks.
“Who’s there?” I ask.
“Mother, it’s me,” she says, leading me away from the window. “It’s time for supper.”
A certain Raymond has joined us. Rather than make a mistake by greeting him improperly, I ask Zelda to go into the fridge and find me some mint sauce for the lamb. She looks at me with exasperation. I almost feel sorry for her; I never had to watch my mother’s brain rot. I never even had to truly know my mother.
“There isn’t any mint jelly, Elle,” she announces. The house is slowly emptying itself of the things I love. I long to miss dinner, to walk outside among the trees, which are all alive with wind. The ocean must be doing something out there, brewing storms, ghosts of things that have happened here and will return no more.
“Where is your husband?” I ask Zelda. She looks at Simon, then at Raymond, incensed.
“Why won’t anyone answer my questions today? You know I was expecting a call from my daughter.”
Simon passes the butter to Zelda. “Elle, your daughter is right here.”
“I know she is.” My voice rises to a pitch I hardly recognize. “That’s what I meant. Has your husband left you?” I ask Zelda.
“What did Deb have to say about Joe sending a check?” Raymond interrupts us.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask,” Zelda replies. “You know how Deb just bombards you.”
“Clarke Junior said he’d get us a loan,” Raymond says, turning to Simon.
“You and that Clarke boy, Ray. Did he ask you for your right testicle in exchange?” Simon asks.
“I am trying to talk to my daughter about what’s happening in her marriage,” I shout at them.
“Just because you’re sick doesn’t mean you get to be abusive!” Zelda screams at me, then leaves the table.
I have a thought that perhaps I am dreaming. I look at Simon’s face, his eyes, his lips, his cheeks, which I have looked on all these years, and suddenly have the sensation that this is not my husband at all. That he is a stranger. Isn’t it the case that a beloved usually wears not their own but a stranger’s face in a dream? In dreams I know my daughter is my daughter, even if she favors Ethel. We revive the past and intersperse it with the impossible future. What has been and what will be collide. Time does not move forward, but falls backward.
Raymond’s face is suddenly before me, leading me away from the dining room. His irises are so blue, blue as the Atlantic, so blue I question again whether I am dreaming—and now Simon wears Raymond’s face. “Tonight, Ma, you get to have supper in bed,” he says.
But sleep never comes for me. Once the entire house passes into a snoring chorus, I go into the garden. At this late hour, a blue shimmer branches out from the trees and through the atmosphere, drawing roads between what was hitherto invisible. I feel the desire of the stars, distant traffic lights reaching across their great highways of black. The wind is terrific from the ocean. A silent orchestra plays. C’est une chanson . . . An airplane passes through the night, and all of its trembling souls stare down at me. I cover my eyes and I am with them, thirty thousand feet in the air, my head on Simon’s shoulder, bound for Paris. Zelda in my lap, still a baby, her face tortured by the engine’s sound. Trees were a comfort, rain. The breeze and the sun. Space would tear us apart. The clouds were lavender below us, a blanket, unbroken. But I saw no ancient palaces or golden spears or angels’ wings. Wasn’t that the location of heaven? No, life has only this planet, pitted on the edge of nothingness. Home is nowhere else.
Paris is lost. I cannot see it, though I longed for it so many years after that brief visit. A memory remains: drowsy from the difference in hours across the ocean, sauntering along a cobblestone street, an old man and his canvas, dusk falling, the city impossibly brighter by night, the pirouette of French all around us, a bum wandering by, singing. Love was everywhere, unhidden. We walked hand in hand, Simon and I, but we were not looking for each other. The sky was different, closer, hovering just above the buildings, then suddenly aflame. All of Paris came into the streets, aghast. We were witnessing the end: the war had returned. But then a wise man hushed the crowd. “Aurores Boréales,” he said, pointing to the light.