CAN I TOUCH you? Can I trace the archipelago of bruises on your face? Can I lay my hand on your heart and feel it beat? I want to put my mouth on yours and exhale so you can breathe. You’re purple and blue and there’s blood on your face from the men down the river who like to pick on boys who play instruments. My grandfather padlocked my mother’s door just in case she gets the urge to play warden and executioner. Night after night she cooks rare meat but doesn’t eat it.
I want to be normal. What’s normal? What we see on television is normal: dinners at six, ankle socks, cheering from the field and stomping in the bleachers, gossip on Mr. O’Hara, who can’t stop talking about the Cold War and the bomb that never dropped, Can you please pass the potatoes? I want this normal; I want to be afraid of the men on the radio, not what’s behind my front door. As long as my grandfather is alive, I’m safe. In five years’ time my mother will grow weak and her hands will involuntarily shake, and in ten years she will no longer remember her own name. I will find myself crawling my way back to her, and later I will become her. I’ll drag my daughter Kate underwater in hopes that the mermaids will sing her a song.
Not yet, not yet.
In two days, Tim, your mother will lose both of her legs in an accident at the Pavilion. Weeks later, in a moment of weakness she’ll make her mayonnaise, pack you a week’s worth of lunches, and after she sees you to bed she’ll pay a man to pour a bottle of pills down her throat so she can sleep full-time. You will both fall asleep at the same hour but she’ll never wake. You will run down a half-deserted street shouting her name until the police pin you down and toss a sheet over your mother’s cooled body. The police will tell their wives—Can you please pass the salt?—how you stretched out on the floor beside her, how you wept and prayed to the same God who couldn’t save Delilah Martin—What’s Jesus ever done for me? You will feel guilty for the accident and for her legs sawed off at the knees, for all of it. Your aunt will tell her friends that you sleep with the sandwiches wrapped in plastic under your pillow, as if this act of contrition will bring her back. I am Lazarus, come from the dead / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all. But we don’t know any of this yet.
ELLIE LEFT A garden and walked into a cathedral, sat in the pew, tore a page from the Bible, and ate it. Outside, a man aimed his camera at the sky and photographed white. When they left, Norah shielded her daughter’s body as they approached the crosswalk. Norah waved at the photographer, who couldn’t see her because of all the light in his eyes. Temporarily blinded, the photographer walked into the street and got hit by a car. Ellie clutched the side of her mother’s skirt. Norah screamed. The camera shattered the car window and struck the driver. The photographer was dead. The photographer was Ellie’s father.
TIM WAKES WITH a start. Something’s wrong. Something’s not right. It’s too quiet in the house in which they sleep. His mother never rests; she’s always poised with one foot off the bed, ready to run. She takes naps standing up, but never does she allow herself to settle, to drift calmly to sleep. Rather his mother is a metronome, a body that oscillates from one part of the house to another. Now that body is missing a quarter of its total, confined to a wheelchair. Now that body needs a bottle of pills to keep it straight. Tim slips downstairs and sees a week’s worth of sandwiches arranged in one long row on the counter. They’re individually wrapped but he can still see the oil stain of the mayonnaise through the plastic. He smiles because although his mother takes pleasure in laying a wire hanger or a wrench on the small of his back on occasion, he knows she loves him in her own way. He opens the back door to see the sky painted black, pricked with stars. A man runs down the block. Even surrounded by all this beauty and quiet, something gnaws at him. Calling his mother’s name, his voice is soft at first, and then it crescendos to a shout. His feet take inventory of the handful of rooms, until he runs into the bedroom and finds her there. He closes her eyes with the pads of his fingertips.
Tim kisses his mother good morning and goodnight before he calls the police. When they come he’s in the kitchen, standing over the row of sandwiches.
There’s a platoon of officers on Tim’s street. He sits on his porch with a blanket draped over his shoulders while a woman leans in, talking, but he’s not listening. Instead he stares out into the street, at me, as I sit on my bike and wave. What happened? Why all the gruesome blue? From then on I will forever hate the color blue. A policeman tells me to go on home, there’s nothing to see. Tim pulls up his blanket and covers his head with it. Cradles his head between his knees. Ever set fire to an anthill and watch as the colony scatter and cover the ground only to inch their way back once the smoke clears, once the flames have gone out? All I can hear is a buzz, a whisper of that poor boy, that poor woman. I overhear something about legs all tangled up in a machine, and then I see an insurance adjustor and his notebook. He’s just here to get the preliminaries, take some pictures, and file a report because there’s always a claim, always an estimate and adjustment. I ride on home and later someone will tell me that the distance between Tim’s mother’s stumps and the ground were like a whole other country. I saw her in a wheelchair only once.
Ellie and Norah wore all black. Ellie didn’t understand death, she only knew her father had taken a long trip from which he’d never return. Would he send postcards? she wondered, feeling blue. Would he write? Ellie clapped all the way to the funeral: Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack. All dressed in black, black, black. With silver buttons, buttons, buttons. All down her back, back, back . . . Norah remembered a holiday she and her husband had taken, before their child, before the glass that splintered his face, where they’d stood behind giant rocks in front of the ocean. Norah couldn’t swim and he could, and he’d pulled her into the water, and she’d said, No, I’m scared. Of what? he’d asked. Of everything. So that day he carried her into the water, kneeled down, and held her as she dug her heels into the wet sand. I will always carry you, he’d said. It broke her now, as she rode in a black car, that she couldn’t carry him home. That’s men’s work, carrying a coffin on your shoulders while the women sat in chairs with linen napkins and quietly grieved. But she didn’t want to fucking grieve; she wanted the weight of her husband on her back. She wanted her daughter to shut the fuck up.
“You are not what I wanted,” Norah said.
A WEEK AFTER Tim’s mother’s death, I call him. Winding a telephone cord around my finger I say, “You don’t have to talk. We can just sit here, breathing. But if you want to talk, we can do that, too.”
“Why are you calling me?” Tim says.
“I don’t know. I wanted to,” I say. “I guess I’m sorry.”
“For what? Did you push her under that machine or shovel pills down her throat?”
“I guess I’m sorry you lost her. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Tim laughs, so loud I have to pull the receiver away from my ear. “Lost her,” he says. “You make it sound like she’s a mitten. I didn’t lose my mother, Ellie. She was here, in my house, in her room. I didn’t lose her; she didn’t run away. She killed herself. So there’s no way you can be sorry about that unless you were standing over her bed handing her pill after pill.”
“I know your mother’s not a mitten,” I say. My mother stands in the doorway and tells me we’re having beef stroganoff for dinner. Mashed potatoes, peas—the whole lot.
“Maybe what you can be sorry for is the way your family won’t take responsibility for my mother’s accident. Your grandfather sent a man out here with his forms and big words, talking to me as if I couldn’t read, but I can read, and the words on the claim form said free of culpability, which is just a fancy way of saying we get away with murder. Think about that when you’re eating your beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes and peas.”
Before Tim hangs up, I hear the sound of paper ripping.
At dinner, my mother inquires as to why I haven’t touched the food on my plate.
“Is it true?” I ask my grandfather. “We won’t pay Tim’s family what we owe them.”
“What is it that you think we owe them, Ellie?” Grandfather says, wiping sauce off his chin.
“His mother is dead,” I say.
“Have you ever seen the inside of a hospital? Have you ever had to pay a bill? The Pavilion—”
“Our family,” I interrupt.
“The Pavilion paid for all of her medical bills and aftercare. We hired a nurse and made sure she received a monthly allowance so that she could survive. Considering that woman did more drinking on the job than actual work, I’d say that we were more than generous. So if she’s going to get it in her head that she wants to swallow a bottle of painkillers because the going got a little tough . . . well, I don’t see how we can be responsible for that.”
I feel like Tim now. I feel like laughing. “She lost her legs and we gave her nothing.”
“No,” my grandfather interrupts. “You’re just not satisfied with what we gave.”
“I think we can do with a little pie,” my mother says. For a moment I wonder how badly she wants to lock me in the basement again. How deeply she longs for the return of Ingrid.
“We gave?”
“I don’t know why you insist on asking questions you already know the answers to. It seems to me that I’ve given you a lot,” my grandfather says.
“I think apple,” my mother says, laying a plate before me.
WILDFLOWERS GREW IN the field where the husband was buried. Norah picked them and pulled a ribbon out of her daughter’s hair. She bound the flowers together before laying them down on the grave. Norah couldn’t bury him alongside those other people and their crumbling headstones, arranged lilies, and relatives with their perfunctory grief. No, the husband belonged here, in front of the water; he belonged where her eye could see. There was a moment in the space between her inhales and exhales when Norah considered following the husband into the dark, but then Ellie sang and she was reminded that this child was what her husband had wanted. Sometimes she thought it was all he had wanted, and he would never forgive Norah if she abandoned her child. This made Norah resentful of a daughter who trampled gardenias and sang nursery rhymes, and every day that Norah was separated from the husband, every day she couldn’t smell his sour breath or feel the worms that stuck like pearls on his withering skin, she would remind her child of the dark. The depth of it, the ache of it, the pain of it.
A place of origin doesn’t exist. It’s just beyond our sacrifice.
TIM BLOWS INTO his saxophone as if it’s the first time he’s played it. His chest is flooded with air, and he heaves like he wants to storm everyone in his wake. Mr. Harmon sits down on his conductor’s chair and places his wand on the music stand. There’s so much anger in this room—it hovers over us as we play sonatas and fidget in our seats. But there’s also sadness, and we feel that too. Words exist that can pull Tim out of the darkness and into the light; we know they exist, we’re sure of it, only we don’t know the arrangement. We only know the music. So we do what we know how to do: we play off-key until the bell rings. Clutching his instrument to his chest, Tim doesn’t move. Even as the guys lay hands on Tim’s shoulder as they file out, even as the girls smile and carefully tiptoe over his feet. There are no words, only the silences in the beats between them.
“I’m sorry I’m related to greedy assholes,” I say.
Tim shrugs. “At least they’re still alive.”
Outside the window a girl in a cream sweater conceals her face with her hands while five other girls dressed in matching cobalt blue form a human pyramid. Tim and I watch the smallest one flip off two shoulders—back arched, chest to the sky—to the ground. A group of boys sporting letter jackets toss around a football even though they’re not really good at it—our team hasn’t won all year—but they don’t care. They cackle and snort over every fumble and talk about the big plans they have for the summer. This will be the summer they score. I think of Delilah and her belief that the whole world was her private television.
“I think my mother had something to do with Delilah’s disappearance. I came home from school one day, sick from what I don’t remember, and I heard them in my bedroom. In my fucking bedroom—how weird is that? Delilah and my mother were sitting on my bed, and I watched my mother take Delilah’s hair in her hands, saying, ‘This could be yours if you want it. Do you want it?’ And Delilah said, ‘Yes, but what do I have to do to get it?’ I hid in the closet and then my grandfather came in and I still get the chills when I remember how he howled, ‘Get the fuck out of my house!’ My mother had to have known it wasn’t possible, right? She had to have known that you just don’t bring strangers into our house. But maybe she hoped that she could, and that was enough to make her stand up to her father, who cared only about our name and preserving it. And now Delilah’s gone. The only question is, who got what they wanted? So when you tell me that my family’s still alive, I have to disagree. I have to tell you they’re not. I live among the remains of people.”
“I miss the sandwiches,” he says, laying his instrument beside him. He stares out the window, stares through it. “I can’t bring myself to eat the ones she’s made, but I can’t throw them away. It just feels wrong, you know?”
“You’re playing,” I say, pointing to the saxophone.
“Everyone knew about your father and Farah Martin. About the affair. But no one knows about your mother.”
“She performs on cue.” We sit for a time and the sky folds into dusk. “I heard you’re moving.”
“California. My aunt’s moving here until the end of term and then I’m gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“That I didn’t try to know you more.”
Who are you again? I’m Lazarus. I’ve come back to see you.
SOMEONE TOLD NORAH that she needed to consider the possibility that she would never be reunited with her husband. This time, this earth, are all we may ever have, so why not use it to watch the daughter grow, everyone told her. As if Ellie were a geranium that required tending to (watering, repotting, small words of whispered encouragement). After a respectable mourning period, perhaps Norah should consider remarriage? Norah considered killing all of her friends, but decided against it because her husband would be furious that she would abandon their daughter as a result. Years ago the husband had built all of the furniture in the house with his hands, and Norah remembered the smell of pine and how she’d laid her naked body on the kitchen table to feel the raw, unfinished wood against her skin. She’d endured the splinters because that meant a piece of him would always remain in her. If she stood still, she could almost feel him again, swimming. Then Ellie, fucking Ellie, ran in with her arms extended, begging to be held, asking to be loved.
It was late one night or morning, Norah couldn’t remember which, when a friend knocked on her door and said, “I don’t know if your husband’s accident was an accident. There’s been talk.” “What talk?” Norah hissed, her hair coming undone at her shoulders. “He knew things, horrible things, and he was going to tell.”
Ellie was at the foot of the stairs, for the knocking had woken her too.
“Your father loved you. I endure you,” Norah said.
TIM’S AUNT, MINNIE, is a baker of pies and tarts, and will torch you if you make any reference to “that Disney character.” Minnie will say, most emphatically, that she is a woman not a mouse. However, she will acknowledge the character of Minnie Castevet from Rosemary’s Baby, because Ruth Gordon is “one sharp dame,” and who wouldn’t relate to a childless woman who drinks root beer in bed, and only wanted to take that guileless Rosemary under her wing?
“So they tricked her into giving birth to the Antichrist. Think of the upside. Living in Beverly Hills, taking the sun. What wouldn’t I give to be with a man in tails, drinking out of a champagne glass, instead of living in this fleabag of a town? What is that? Is that a mosquito?”
“A wasp,” I say. “They come this time of year.”
“Like a plague, no doubt,” Minnie says. We are at the Pavilion because Minnie wants to see the beginning of the end, although she confides her younger sister’s end was a long time coming. “That woman’s been yearning for the grave as soon as she came out of the womb. It’s like she took one look at this place and decided, ‘No, not for me. None of it.’”
“Tell us what you really think, Aunt Minnie,” Tim says.
“If I had half a mind to tell you what I really thought, you’d be on some headshrinker’s couch with a blanket, crying crocodile tears. I know you don’t see it now, kid, but my sister, God rest her soul, did you a favor.”
“This used to be a resort in the twenties,” I say, and with a mixture of pride and shame I recount the history of the place that indirectly killed Tim’s mother. As we walk, I describe the main building, which used to be two stories high. The colonnades were made of stone, and when you stared up at the ceiling from the inside, you believed that paradise was possible. Regardless of where you stood you were bathed in light, so how do you explain the warmth that felt like an embrace, a lingering kiss on a cheek, otherwise?
Those headed farther west in search of luck paused to bathe in the man-made pools and make love in the rooms concealed only by flimsy gossamer curtains; the Pavilion used to be a stomping ground for fathers who waltzed with their daughters under the glare of the afternoon sun and, glass of gin in hand, foxtrotted with their wives and mistresses in the evening. Many a bastard child was conceived here, and sometimes, young brides were abandoned on their honeymoons when their husbands fled for the desert. This used to be a place where the sun gallantly rose and fell.
“People came here to be found, even if they didn’t think or know they were lost,” I say with a wistfulness that was borderline embarrassing.
“Then the thirties happened and everyone lost their money and their hope, and soon everyone stopped jumping into the pool and started hurling out of windows,” Minnie says. “Back then, that was the more gallant option.”
“Something like that,” I say.
“I’m much more interested in the other stories: the one about the starlet who drowned her mother in the pool. Or what about the stockbroker, all tangled up in his greed, hanging himself with those pretty curtains you spoke of. Tell me about the avaricious. Tell me those stories. I imagine they make for more indecent conversation, but who cares, because, quite honestly, who gives a flying fuck about the entablatures and Roman-inspired architecture that influenced this dump.”
“I want to go home,” Tim says, as we approach the ride that excised his mother’s legs. Children bury their faces in tufts of white cotton candy while girls adjust their skirts; they fold them above their knees in Tim’s presence. He doesn’t notice, but Minnie does. It seems as if Minnie notices everything. Eyebrow cocked, she says, “Maybe we should stick around, kid. Perhaps this town is more interesting than I thought. I’m always looking for a good show.”
“We’re leaving,” Tim says. The certainty in his voice is a clock ticking, a reminder that every moment with him is a moment not with him. Why is it that death casts a light on all the things you never notice? When Delilah Martin’s mother died, I suffered from horrible migraines because suddenly everything was so loud. Rustling leaves were landmines. Hushed voices were bombs. After Tim’s mother died, something shifted. I felt the texture of things. Colors appeared violent in their willful saturation, and I could see.
All I could see was Tim.
“So, kid,” Minnie turns to me. “Tell me a story.”
“I’ll tell you a story about a man and a woman that you won’t read in any of the guidebooks. It’s 1919, and a husband discovers his wife has been having an affair with his father. The husband takes her on a trip to the bathhouse and says he has a surprise for her. The wife doesn’t want to go for obvious reasons, but she suspects that the husband knows something—maybe it was the tone in his voice when he issued the invitation, or his insistence—because he never cared about spending time alone with her before. So she goes, and when they arrive and settle into their room, he tells her that he’s been taking magic classes and tonight he’ll debut some tricks. The wife is confused, naturally, because her husband is a stockbroker, and she’s practically speechless when he asks her to be his assistant for the evening.”
“Now this is what I want to hear,” Minnie says.
I continue. “Later on that night, he puts her in a wooden box and says he’s going to saw her in half. He wears a cape and tails. He looks the part of a man who knows tricks, and suddenly the wife feels unsettled. Something’s not right but she can’t move, and there are a hundred people beyond the lights cheering her husband on. But he never took a magic class and the trick is on the wife as he works a saw down the box and proceeds to cut his wife in two. The room thunders with applause, which muffles the wife’s screams, and everyone talks about how real it all looked. They talked about the terror they felt. Yet no one ever mentioned, until later, until a body was found buried ten miles down the road and the husband was found with his face blown off from the barrel of a gun, that maybe it looked too real.” I finish, triumphant in my eerie tale and Minnie’s smile.
“Now you’ll find this place pretty tame. My family rebuilt it from the ground up five years ago, and nothing really happens in this town except for teenagers on heavy dates and kids sneaking rides on the Ferris wheel.” As I say this, I watch lacquered mares go around, and I can’t help but think that, in one way or another, children are forever held hostage.
“Except for the Bible-thumper drowned by the lake, and the suicide in a bed,” Minnie says.
“That suicide was my fucking mother, for chrissake. You may not have loved her, you may have even hated her, but I love her,” Tim says. He kicks dirt all around him and the earth rises up, converges, and falls. “She’s not one week in the ground and already you’ve got your one-liners cued up.”
I hold my breath and suddenly become aware of the chill. It’s as if I’ve interrupted an unfinished conversation between Tim and his aunt, the words jutting out are entirely too painful to bear. When I think what it would be like to lose my mother, the only feeling that registers is relief. I would be relieved. My mother would not be mourned or argued about in amusement parks, and I wonder if she knows this. I wonder if she understands that anger and sorrow, not relief, are what happens to your loved ones when you pass to the other side. I wonder if she realizes that no one in our family loves anyone. But maybe she does and that knowledge is what keeps her going.
“Your life is your life, and you only know it while you have it,” Minnie says. “There’s a difference between hate and anger over a woman who wasted her life, who didn’t know what she had when it was right in front of her. So she lost her fucking legs? I don’t hate my sister, Tim, but she was cruel, impetuous, and selfish, and there’s no denying that. She didn’t beat death; she opened up her front door and let it in. Threw it a goddamn parade.”
Tim’s voice was hoarse. “You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about my mother.”
“I know she did nothing about the bruises on your back. I know about her drinking, how she liked her anesthesia.”
I think about my mother and how her father provided the dressing for the daily wounds he inflicted. We have meat every night and our pain is private, but we’re the same as Tim’s family in all the ways you couldn’t see.
Do I just walk away and give them their privacy?
“I’ve got an idea,” Minnie winks at me. “I picked up a steak at the butcher’s today. Why don’t you be a good egg and invite your family over for dinner? As you can imagine, I’m not good at taking no for an answer.”
“Leave these people alone,” Tim says.
“Calm down. I’m asking for a meal, not the Antichrist.”
I start rummaging for excuses but Minnie is fast. “My mother and grandfather don’t really go out all that much. We tend to have dinner at home.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Minnie says, pointedly.
“Jesus, Minnie,” Tim says. “I want to go home.”
“You tell your grandfather that either your family sits at my table or I’ll sit at theirs.”
I open my mouth to speak, but Tim pulls Minnie toward the car. I follow.
Before they drive away Minnie rolls down the window and says, “Did anyone ever tell you just how good you look in blue? It suits you.”
“THERE’S NOTHING HERE for me,” Norah had told her husband once, before they were man and wife. “Just give me a moment of peace,” she’d implored, “to be still amidst all this sadness.” Her husband took her hands in his. “Squeeze,” he’d said, “so I can feel how much you hurt.” And she did, so hard she thought his fingers would break, but he didn’t let go. This small gesture awakened a great love. Had she been asleep this whole time to suddenly wake up? Had the sun shone her entire life? If so, how was it that this was the first time she’d seen it? Norah felt sick, fell to her knees because love was not supposed to become her. Then her husband kneeled down too, and in his eyes she saw church. Let me run my hands along the pew, she’d thought. Let me breathe in the mahogany. Let me stare through the glass window and see the sun and feel the ache of you. Let me feel this heart that suddenly stops.
“There’s nothing here for me,” Norah said, as the coffin closed over her husband’s face. “Let me feel this heart that suddenly stops,” as the coffin was lifted up and gently lowered underground. “Just give me a moment of peace,” she snapped at Ellie, “to be still amidst this sadness.”
“Why did you show me the possibility of love only to take it away?” Norah cried over an open grave.
“IT’S A SHAME about Delilah Martin. Did they ever find that retarded child?” Minnie says, sawing through tough beef. Dressed in fuchsia, she’s an assault to our dining room with its gray walls and dark furniture, and I suspect she knows this.
“Delilah Martin isn’t retarded,” my mother says coldly, and I regard her tireless defense of Delilah with suspicion. None of us really understood her condition, much less had it diagnosed. The doctors observed that Delilah Martin was many things, but not one thing in its entirety.
“Past tense, dear,” Minnie says. “Unless you know something the papers don’t. I’m always game for a good gossip.”
“My granddaughter tells me you’re a baker,” Grandfather says, refilling his pipe.
“I put things in and out of ovens, yes, that’s true.”
“I never could get my head around the chemistry of it,” my mother says. For the whole of the evening, she circles the table, picking up things and putting them down.
“You could say chemistry agrees with me while biology always eluded me. I lived here with my sister for a time, and, as I said before, I do love a good gossip. We lived in that house up on Cavanaugh Street.”
“I know the place,” my mother says.
“Odd,” Minnie says. “I’ve been here for a total of thirty-four minutes and I’ve yet to hear one condolence, a word of sympathy, not even a pithy ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’ Even the butcher, a man I don’t know, got teary-eyed at the counter. Told me he was sorry, and I said, ‘You better save your apologies, unless you plan on gypping me on that cut of beef.’”
My grandfather takes a puff of his pipe and clouds the air with his smoke. “We’re so sorry for your loss.”
“How is Tim?” my mother asks, following suit. “He must be devastated.”
Minnie snaps her fingers. “You’re fast with the platitudes. How is Tim? Well, his mother’s current address is a box six feet below. And while that woman, my sister, was a horrible human being and a terrible drunk, she was his mother and she’s dead, leaving this boy with the fantasy that he could have done something about it. Prevented it, somehow. In two months’ time, he’s going to have to uproot his life, change his school, leave his friends—your daughter, the silent one over there, being one of them—to come live with me, a woman he doesn’t know, much less like. ‘Devastated’ is one way of putting it. I’d say ‘fucked up beyond words’ is better. For people like us, the hand Tim got dealt, the hand I have to play out, is the only kind we’re likely to get.”
Do I detect a smile? Is my grandfather smiling? It seems Minnie amuses him.
“I’m sure we can arrange to have the funds that were allocated to your sister after the accident transferred to Tim.”
Minnie regards my grandfather with mild interest. “I’m sure he’ll be grateful. We’ll never be without toilet paper and a leaner cut of meat.”
My mother finally sits down and tucks into the steak. Her hands quake. “I remember you. You used to make the cakes for the church banquets. It’s all coming back now.”
“Most of the ladies pass off that Betty Crocker shit as homemade, but I make my own, from scratch. Why, a cake’s just some butter, sugar, and flour. Once you got the basics, there’s a whole wide world of possibility. Before this business with my sister, I nearly signed a lease on a small place back east. I had the idea of calling it Minnie Cakes and Pies, and I’d sell miniature cakes of every variety. Picture rows of cakes behind glass—chocolate, lemon meringue, banana cream, and coconut—stretched as far as the eye could see. Imagine a mini Baked Alaska? Just the talk of it will give me business for months. But I’ve said too much. I can do that sometimes. Not know my limits.”
“Do you have a fellow?” my mother asks.
“I tell you about my dream and you ask me about a man.”
It seems as if Minnie is pushing for a fight but nothing sticks. My grandfather looks amused and bored while my mother regards Minnie with confusion and terror. But something stirs, bubbles right below the surface.
“I like the name,” I say to Minnie. “I like it a lot.”
“She speaks! Kid, did you finally get hold of some of the life rafts I’ve been begging for?” Minnie’s eyes glint, and I relax in her presence. It takes everything in me not to plead her to take me with her. I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.
“You do say what’s on your mind,” my grandfather says. “That’s rather bold for a woman.”
“Well, Simon, if I said what was on my mind, I’d tell you that the first time Tim introduced me to your daughter, I felt as if I’d met her before, which is impossible, of course. Yet, every time I look at Ellie’s face I’m reminded of someone.”
“Small town,” my mother says.
“Too small for my own taste,” my grandfather says.
“And in this, we agree.” Turning to me, Minnie says, “You remind me of your dead father. How long has it been since he died in that accident? Ten, twelve years? How many years, Norah?”
“It was a car accident.” My mother seethes. “A camera smashed his face.”
“Did the car kill him or the camera? No, I don’t think it was an accident,” Minnie says. To my grandfather she says, “But you would know more about that than I would, Simon.”
“For a low-grade piece of trash, I have to admire your verve. Coming into my house, eating my food, taking advantage of the fact that your sister was an incompetent drunk. For what? Petty threats? Blackmail. What is it that you think you know, Miss Mouse?” my grandfather says.
“You’re insulting me if you think this is about money. Or perhaps that’s the only hand you know how to play. Stuff wads of bills into people’s mouths until they choke—that sound about right?”
“What is she talking about?” I ask. You don’t just raise your voice at Grandfather, you whisper. You speak when spoken to, and you certainly don’t come into his home and antagonize him. Something about Minnie frightens me; perhaps it’s the way she’s unafraid of my grandfather when everyone else perpetually tiptoes around him.
“Take your dinner upstairs,” my mother says to me.
Minnie rises and drops her napkin on my grandfather’s lap. “Your dead father, rest his soul, was a good man. But he was also a man who knew things about this family. Secrets I’m sure your grandfather didn’t want other people to know.”
“I think it’s time you leave now,” my grandfather says.
“Do you remember your father, Ellie?”
The only response I’m able to give is a whiplash of the neck, a shake of the head, no.
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE.” The storm assails.
To me she says, “These two could start a knitting circle with all the lies they weave. Your father didn’t die in a car accident, as these two would have you believe. In fact, there wasn’t anything natural about his death at all.”
“Remove the woman.”
“Oh, the woman doesn’t need removing, Simon. The woman is leaving on her own accord.”
I try to run after her, but I can’t. My legs buckle and I fall to the floor.
Outside Minnie shouts, “You come see me, Ellie. I’ll tell you stories.”
HAVE YOU SAID your farewell to your father, as you sent him where he is now? He said you didn’t. He said you just killed him, said Ophelia, said Norah, to Ellie who wasn’t listening. Norah choked from the stench of the white lilies that crowded every vase in the house her husband built. Everyone seems so slow, so immobile, that I sometimes wonder if I’m living amongst statues, said Ophelia, said Norah, while Ellie chased fireflies and insects in the grass. They lived in a home plagued with shadows, old music, and everything they could want but never needed. Norah was often lonely. It had been two weeks since she was laid to unrest, and during this time she realized their home was not dissimilar to the box in which her husband was buried. There were windows, yes, but her view was the undertow; she looked out to see the waves pulling her further under. You will forgive me in time, she said aloud to her dead husband. And just as Norah set out to join her husband, her father burst in with Ellie and said, “Every day I look at the child I’m reminded that she is not the image of you. In fact, she’s the image of me. I gave you my seed and you gave me what? A girl? If only she were a boy. If only she’d grow into something useful.”
“Stop talking,” the mother said.
“I wonder,” her father said, “are you sad because he died, or because you had something to do with it? Does it break your heart to know that when given the choice between you and someone else, you will always, invariably, choose you? What would have happened to you, to our family, had people found out about our indiscretion? Do you feel proud that you seduced your father and bore his child? That dirty little secret you fought so hard to hide, finally let loose upon the world because that God-fearing man you let crawl into your bed planned to go to the police? Things had to be done. In the end, we do what we have to. We do what we must.”
Ellie played hopscotch over the flowers inside the house. “Don’t play inside the house, Ellie,” she snapped. She even hated the sound of her daughter’s name. Ellie. Ellie. Ellie.
Norah’s father picked up the bottle of pills, laughed, and said, “Don’t play inside the house, Norah.”