Falling Angels (24 page)

“Don’t,” Norma moans.

“I heard him crying,” Sandy says. Her bottom lip quivers.

“Ah, he’s pissed,” Lou says. She looks speculatively at the phone dangling off the hook.

After lunch Norma walks over to Stella’s house. She feels drunk. She meanders. The sun beats down.

Stella and her parents are wearing their clothes from church. All of them answer the door, as though they had been watching for her. Stella’s eyes are red. She pulls Norma inside. “We just heard on the radio!” she cries, hugging her. She has on a dress made of white rose-petal shapes sewn together. If Stella’s parents weren’t there, Norma would run her hand down the petals on Stella’s arm. She would allow herself that small consolation.

“Let’s go into the living room,” Stella’s mother says, leading the way.

Stella pulls Norma onto the chesterfield. “You never told me about the baby!” she cries.

“Well now, Bunny,” Stella’s father says,“that was before Norma’s time.”

His eyes are sympathetic, but they hold Norma’s. Their message is: “For Stella’s sake you must be brave and, if necessary, dishonest.”

“I didn’t really know about the baby,” Norma murmurs.

“But dropping her own baby. It explains why she—” Stella bites her lip. What was she going to say? It explains why their mother drank? Norma didn’t think Stella knew about their mother’s drinking. Maybe there was something about it on the news.

“Thank God death was instantaneous,” Stella’s mother says. “Likely the heart stopped during the fall. From fear.” She looks pointedly at her daughter. “Which means there’d be
absolutely no pain.”

Is she talking about Jimmy’s death or their mother’s? Norma regrets not having listened to the radio.

“We want to do whatever we can to help,” Stella’s father says.

“Yes, what can we
do?”
Stella asks, her eyes welling.

“I’ll make you up a food hamper,” Stella’s mother says.

“No, it’s okay, thanks,” Norma says. “We have lots of food.” Holding on to the smooth, bone-white arm of the chesterfield is like holding their mother’s ankle on the roof. She is going to cry. She stands up. “I have to get back,” she says, already heading for the door.

“You just got here!” Stella calls.

“Let her go,” Stella’s father says.

Stella doesn’t. She chases Norma down the driveway and catches her hand. They are both crying, but they walk normally, as if they aren’t. Norma keeps squeezing Stella’s hand to signal something: gratefulness, sympathy, apology, surprise at Stella pretending to her parents, who are almost certainly watching from the living-room window, that she’s not crying, surprise at her guile.

At the end of Stella’s street is a little park—a green bus-stop bench and a drinking fountain hidden among the only big trees in the subdivision. Today, for a change, there isn’t a couple necking on the bench, so Stella and Norma fall onto it. They fall into each other’s arms.

Norma can’t stop crying. She outcries Stella, who begins to pat her back and say,“I know.”

A slight lift of the chin is all it takes for Norma to bring her lips to Stella’s. She does it with a sense that she deserves the comfort and that it was bound to happen.

It’s a soft, sweet kiss. Norma is delirious with tenderness … until Stella starts to draw away, and then Norma won’t release her. It’s as if a string that has been tugging her all her life is let go.

Stella squeals to have the breath squeezed out of her. Her mouth opens, but at the touch of Norma’s tongue, her tongue recoils, her teeth clamp shut. When she jerks her body
sideways to escape Norma, that just slides her other breast into Norma’s hand.

“What did you do that for?” Stella is now standing in front of Norma, violently shaking her head. Her long hair whipping reminds Norma of the night that they did the shimmy. “That’s terrible!” Stella cries. “It’s sick. Why did you
do
it?”

“I guess I wanted to,” Norma says with a serenity that she wonders at herself. Stella wipes her nose on her rose-petal sleeve. She looks reproachful and clueless but prepared to listen. But all Norma can think to say is,“I’m sorry.” She doesn’t mean she regrets it. She means she’s sorry that Stella is so upset. She’s sorry that she isn’t sorrier or even repelled by herself. She’s sorry for transferring her pain, because the fact is she feels a breathtaking relief. She’s sorry that pain
is
transferred, like a hot potato.

“But what were you
doing?”
Stella asks petulantly.

Norma shrugs. “I couldn’t help it.”

“But why? Are you a lesbian or something?”

“I guess so.”

Stella looks staggered. “Well—” She bites her bottom lip. In her clear face the transition of her thoughts is touchingly evident. The last thought causes her eyes to fill. “We can’t be friends anymore,” she says.

“Yeah,” Norma sighs. “I know.” She adjusted to this months ago. She takes a good last look at Stella. Fairy-tale hair, darling, perfect face; long white hands with pink-painted nails; long slender legs; knock knees.

“I’m sorry,” Stella says. “Your mother just died, but—” She begins to cry, open-mouthed, arms hanging, irresistibly childlike, except that there’s nothing Norma can do, and all of a sudden she is anxious to get back home to her sisters. “I’ll go so you can stay here for a while,” she offers.

“I won’t tell anybody,” Stella sobs.
The night before the funeral Lou has a dream that their mother is sick in bed. Lou climbs into the bed to hold her, but their mother turns into a mist. In the dream it’s obvious to Lou that if she had been a nicer person, their mother would have been proportionately more substantial and not so easily vaporized.

She wakes up crying, still mixed up between the death of their mother and the death of the best part of herself. She buries her face in her pillow and cries for a long time, eventually waking Norma up.

“Are you okay?” Norma asks.

“Yeah.”

“I wondered if you were going to cry.”

Lou is silent.

“I keep seeing her eyes,” Norma says.

When Norma falls back to sleep, Lou starts seeing their mother’s eyes, too. Also Tom’s, which is like seeing an angel and a devil. It was hopeless, she realizes, expecting Tom to love her, considering that what she loved about him were his cold eyes. She probably got what she deserved. Thank God she had an abortion.

No baby. No mother.

A bird chirps. It must be about five o’clock. They have a blind, which keeps the room dark. Lou folds her arms behind her head. She isn’t sad now. It’s strange, but she feels a bit high, the way she did on the roof. Even though she knows that their mother was scared up there, she wants to believe that their mother felt like this, that just before she dropped over the edge, or maybe when she was in midair, she felt for a second that, miraculously, she was light enough not to land.

Norma keeps expecting to feel ashamed but doesn’t. When she thinks of Stella, she’s only nostalgic for a thing of beauty. She can’t bring herself to hate herself. She knows that Stella will
survive. One disappointment might even do Stella good. Where before there was no possible obstruction between her heart and Stella, there is now something that feels like the wind blowing back. Not back from Stella. From nowhere, from life—a current of wind in the pure air that was between them.

She tells herself that it’s time to forgive their father. But no feeling, of forgiveness or the lack of it, follows the command. Maybe she already has forgiven him, she can’t tell. The pity she feels now is because he’s so pitiful, drinking, crying at the breakfast table, collapsing anywhere, holing up in their mother’s bedroom, fouling himself the night of the funeral—dropping with a barrage of farts onto the pile of towels and sheets that Aunt Betty brought over for some reason and left in the hall.

Norma cleaned him up. At the smell Sandy ran into the bathroom to be sick to her stomach, and Lou said soak him with air-freshener spray and cover him with the sheets. She said,“Can’t we get him committed for this?”

All day the three of them watch t?. Sprawled on their mother’s couch and on the floor. Their mother’s ashes sit on top of the set in what Lou maintains is a used, lacquered cigar box not big enough for all of her.

“Her legs aren’t here,” Lou decides, confirming Norma’s suspicion that they had to cut her legs off to fit her into such a short coffin.

The phone rings a lot, and either Sandy or Norma runs to answer it ahead of Lou, who doesn’t care who it is, she doesn’t ask, she just lifts the receiver, then drops it, leaving it off the hook.

Everyone is worried about the food situation. The day after the funeral Lou calls out,“Tell him to order us some Chinese!” when Norma is talking on the phone to their father’s boss, and the boss, hearing Lou, does. From then on Lou makes Norma
and Sandy tell anyone who phones that some order-in Chinese would be nice.

Lou won’t let anybody in the house, except for their Aunt Betty, who has a key anyway. “We’re in mourning,” Sandy explains to Dave, and he backs off with the same look of uncertain respect that he used to get when she said, pushing his hand from her leg,“I’m on my period.” They kiss by kissing the screen. Through the screen Sandy finds it possible to tell him she loves him and to think maybe she will someday. She tells him he can announce their engagement now, and she instructs him as to wedding preparations. She opens the door a crack to allow him to pass her the mail, left on the porch on account of the
GET LOST, GHOULS
! sign. His hand, sliding around the door, is big and hairy and capable—she doesn’t forget—of fixing anything you plug in.

On the fourth day after the funeral the principal arrives with ten boxes of groceries collected from a school food drive. “Noticed the sign,” he commiserates, as if obviously it’s not directed at him. When he realizes it is, when Lou says just leave the boxes on the porch, she’ll carry them in, he stares at her for a minute, then punches the palm of his hand and declares that to heck with the rules, what he’s going to do for Lou and her sisters is to see to it personally that they graduate without having to write final exams.

“That’d help,” Lou allows.

Afterward she says to Norma and Sandy,“Let’s drag this out for as long as we can.”

Norma and Sandy are game, but not because of the free food and the wages without work and the diplomas without exams, and those aren’t Lou’s real reasons, either. They all have the same feeling of being in a sanctuary together and of being in vigil.

Every day they come across something, or they think of something, and the anguish, which every day they imagine must be
over with, is a small shock. All through the house are reminders, and these are also unexpected, since their mother lived mostly in one room. There are her empties under the stairs, her circular Light Fantastics suitcase in the furnace room, her toothbrush, with bits of food in it, in the bathroom. There are strands of white hair in a comb, and in the clothes hamper there is one of her nightgowns, steeped in the smell of her.

There is the imprint of her mouth on the pieces of toilet paper that she smacked after putting on lipstick Christmas Day. “Bring your Bibles!” Aunt Betty screamed into the phone the night before the funeral. It turned out there was no reason to, and all of them forgot anyway, but right after Aunt Betty called, Sandy took her Bible out of her bottom drawer and found the seven mouths on toilet paper she’d saved and stored between the all-red pages. What made her cry was that every mouth was the same colour—“English Rose”—that their mother had only ever had the one tube of lipstick.

Most of the time, though, they don’t feel like crying. They feel as if they are waiting for something to happen and as if nothing ever will. This is an inexpressible, deeply, deeply exciting feeling.

After a few days Lou starts calling the t? room “the wake room,” because their mother is present in the cigar box and because the empty stacks of Chinese-food containers, the empty Coke bottles, the newspapers and strewn clothes, the full ashtrays, make it look as though a party went on there. Not even Norma is inclined to straighten things up. When she has to leave the room, she hurries right back. The sight of the mess and garbage is a relief—a liberation and a kind of compact, or the evidence of a compact, between her and her sisters and their mother.

One morning Sandy’s acceptance to the fashion design course at Empire College arrives. It takes her aback. In the wake room they’ve been studying the photo albums, for the
first time in years, and the letter of acceptance has the same effect on Sandy that several of the pictures of herself do. Did she ever look like that? Was she ever that person?

She shows the letter to her sisters, who can’t get over her having academic ambitions. “Are you going?” Lou asks. Ever since Tom dumped her, Lou hasn’t given a minute’s thought to college or university. She feels uncomfortable about this.

“No,” Sandy answers. Her twinge of guilt is entirely over Mrs. Dart from the fabric store. Mrs. Dart wrote a letter for Sandy to include with her application, but because of the “hell” (“this little girl is one hell of a talent,” Mrs. Dart wrote) Sandy couldn’t send it. Mrs. Dart turned up at the funeral and was rushed to a chair by Aunt Betty, who thought her shakes were heatstroke.

Sandy’s hands rise to cup her belly. “Of course I’m not going,” she says.

“It’s not too late for an abortion,” Lou says.

“Quit saying that,” Norma says, and Sandy, gazing down at her stomach so lovingly you’d swear she could see in, says in a far-away voice,“What a thing to say.”

“What a thing to
do,”
Lou says.

It rains the next day, ending the heat wave. Their father shaves, puts on a clownish green-and-red-checkered suit and a grey fedora, neither of which he’s worn in ten years, and sets off for work.

After breakfast none of them goes into the wake room. Sandy returns to her bedroom and draws designs for baby clothes, one after the other, draws fast and yet still can’t keep up with her inspirations. Norma does nine days’ worth of dishes, then calls the hardware store to say she’ll probably be at work tomorrow. Then, forgoing the squeegee mop, she gets down on her hands and knees and washes the kitchen floor.