Family Dancing (19 page)

Bear, the sister asked, are you still upset about what Corinne said?

Yes. No. I guess I am, the brother said. I don’t know. I just think, she put him through college. Three hundred sixty-five days a year, welding battleships to put him through college. It’d be nice if he didn’t have to travel so much.

He returned to the magazine.

You know they have problems, Bear, the sister said, big problems. There’s so much anger between them. But anger’s different than hate, Bear.

It’s not like she’s going to die in a year, the brother said from inside the magazine. Corinne wants to make Mama sicker than she is.

Bear .
.
.

Don’t say it, Ivy, the brother said, standing up. You think you know so much. I’ve lived with them. He does love her. More than you know. Maybe even more than he knows. I tell you, I’ve seen it. There are things none of us know, things you don’t—

Bear, when are you going to face the fact—

But he had turned from her.

The mother came out again, in a white hospital gown, smiling big.

Isn’t this the height of fashion, she joked, turning a pirouette. The son laughed. Through the slightly parted back of the gown, he could see small legs, her bra, her large flowered underpants—briefs, they called them in ladies’ stores, as opposed to panties.

She went behind the glass and lay down on the table. The son stood to watch. He thought he saw her flinch as her skin touched the cold metal. He could see on the far side of the glass a technician operating the controls.

Once, twice, the machine went over her in a dark sweep. She had to lie perfectly still. You couldn’t see it, the miraculous, burning radiation that was making the lumps go down.

I wonder how it works, the sister said. But her brother wasn’t listening. He had his whole face pressed against the glass. He was remembering stories his mother had told him, he thought, to anguish him. About the boy who stole her lunch every day for a year; about the doctor they said was going to just give her a check-up, but forced her down on the dining room table and tore her tonsils out; about the dog she had when she was first married, the dog named Brownie who was poisoned for no good reason by a psychotic neighbor, and that was why they never got a dog as children. And he remembered how a year ago she had told his father, maybe I’ll go to Italy with you this year, and the father, in some private hour, told her, no, he did not want her to go to Italy with him and she had said fine, fine, that’s just fine, I’ll stay here. I have the pool, my friends, everything I need, and when she told her son about it she warned him, don’t you dare tell your father I told you, I still have some pride.

No, the son thought, he would remember the other stories. Stories she told when she was drunk or happy. Stories of the docks where she welded. I was the best in my division, she had told him. But I was a woman, so I never got a raise. If it were today, I would’ve complained.

Then she modelled lady welder uniforms. The unions were crooked. Italian men traded her hot eggplant sandwiches made by their wives in the ghetto for her tuna on toast. And the son knew they wanted her in her tight metal suit.

All that was long ago, she would finish.

Why don’t you weld again?

I couldn’t ever. I’m too old, Bear, too set in my ways.

He looked at her through the glass. The machine passed over her again. He wanted very much to touch her through the glass. But of course he could not.

She still lay perfectly still. He heard his sister gasp. He turned, and she was bent over, her hand on her mouth, her eyes red, choking back a fit of tears that had come over her like a cough. Then the normal light went on. The mother got up. She came out.

Is that all? the son asked.

That’s it, that’s all. Simple as one-two-three.

I have to go to the bathroom, the sister said, running.

Eventually she came out. The mother got dressed. They left.

When they got home, the younger sister and the cleaning lady were watching “The Edge of Night.” The younger sister had been indulged, and had baked cookies, so the kitchen was filled with bowls and knives and pans, all sticky with grease and dried dough.

April doesn’t know Draper’s alive, and she’s gonna marry Logan, the younger sister said excitedly. And they’re gonna kidnap Emily to get Kirk’s money, but Kirk’s not Kirk, he’s Draper.

Oh, my God, the mother said, staring at the filthy kitchen. Goddammit, I told you never to do this unless you asked me first. You cook, and I have to clean up all your goddamned messes. It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.

She lifted her hands toward them all, whether to push them away or embrace them none could tell. She looked at them, and her face twisted like when she had the palsy. Then she turned from them. They could hear her sobbing as she ran down the hallway.

Her children were stunned. Though they were used to her annoyance with them, they were not used to crying. They sat there. The younger daughter began to hum.

It’s funny how people on soap operas die on one show and come back on another, the girl said.

So on earth, in heaven, answered the cleaning lady.

The other two were silent. The son stood and walked to his mother’s room, ignoring the sister’s warnings.

Her bedroom door was closed. He stood outside it for what seemed a long time. Finally he knocked. She didn’t answer. He opened the door gently. On her huge bed the mother lay curled, very small, weeping quietly. He stood back from her.

Ma, he said.

She didn’t answer. The crying had stopped, replaced by heaves.

Ma, he said again.

She did not look up. It’s O.K., Bear, I’m all right, she managed to say.

The son wanted to hug her then, but he knew he couldn’t. Something held him back—what had always held him back. There were rules.

I hope you’ll feel better, Mama, he said. Then he left the room.

She nodded. She was glad he was gone. It annoyed her to have to comfort him in her suffering.

Once I knew a sailor, she sang to herself, a sailor from the sea . . . and she thought of her own mother, with too many children and no English.

Gradually she got up. She dried her eyes, blew her nose. Standing in front of the mirror, she pulled violently at the short hairs. None came out. Well, she thought, another day. Still, perhaps she would take her hairdresser’s advice and get a wig. Funny how with time one can grow accustomed to even the most frightening changes; how even the unimaginable can become manageable.

There, she would be fine. She would apologize and dinner would be fine. Why, just five years ago, the tests she now sat through routinely, without flinching, would have made her faint with pain. She would have vomited at the sight of the scars on her body. She would have wept for fear of death. No more.

But looking at herself in the mirror, she remembered the rebellious girl she had once been, and she was only sorry she could not find it in herself to be courageous.

Out Here

They line up, from eldest to youngest: Gretchen, Carola, Jill. Leonard frames them in his viewfinder. When they stand together, posed, he can see similarities—the arcs of cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, thin lips—but if these women were strangers to him and he met them separately, he would never guess that they were sisters. Gretchen, Leonard’s wife, is the tallest as well as the oldest. As she arranges herself, she shakes out her hair and laughs. Carola—hair shorter, mouth smaller than her sisters’—sighs loudly. Jill, standing barefoot next to her, jumps from one foot to the other on the hot cement.

“Hurry up, Leonard. I have to get dinner,” Carola says.

“Just let me focus,” Leonard says.

The sisters grumble and link arms. Through his camera, Leonard thinks, he has captured an image that has nothing to do with these women as individuals but, rather, with how they lean away from one another, how their arms strain against touching.

“It’s too hot to stand like this much longer,” Jill says. She unlinks her arm from Carola’s to brush away a fly.

He takes the picture. The camera spews out a piece of photographic paper, fog green. Immediately the sisters disentangle and go back to what they were doing—Gretchen to the porch, Carola to the kitchen, Jill hopping from stone to stone across the lawn to where her friend Donna Lee sits leaning against a maple tree, reading. Leonard shades the picture with his left hand and, squinting, bends over to watch the image emerge.

Even though they both live in New York City, Carola and Jill hardly ever see each other, and never on social occasions. They have been meeting only to haggle about bank accounts, trust funds, their father’s health-insurance policy. Carola works at a publishing company, in subsidiary rights, and lives on the East Side; Jill lives with Donna Lee in a nameless region just below Tribeca, and is doing temp work to pay for a film course at NYU. Gretchen has been living in Mill Valley, in Northern California, since college, and for the past three years she has been married to Leonard, who has a job with a software company. What has brought the sisters together again now is the death of their father. He died of emphysema, in his late sixties, and they have gathered in an old house in Connecticut that is not “the old house” but a house completely unfamiliar to them. Their father moved into it three years ago, after their mother’s death and his almost immediate remarriage to a divorcée named Eleanor Manley. It is Eleanor’s “old house.” She died six months ago of a stroke; her children then cleaned the house of its knickknacks, scrubbed it as best they could of early memories, and left it to the widower, whom none of them knew very well. In spite of this recent cleaning, there are still hints of another family’s life here that has nothing to do with Gretchen, Carola, or Jill. They have come to sort through the few things their father brought with him when he moved here.

Jill has never been to the house before. Gretchen and Carola visited once, two years ago, in the summer. Jill refused to come that time, without explanation. It is a nineteenth-century stone house, with turrets, and ivy climbing up the walls. “Stately,” the Westport real estate agents would say. That summer, Eleanor’s mark was everywhere: The beds were made with flowered sheets, the halls lined with her photographs of Parisian street urchins. There were saltcellars and little pepper mills at each place at dinner, chairs with paws. The house, Carola thought, was so quintessentially Eleanor’s domain that she doubted whether her father could have felt very comfortable there. Even Eleanor’s children seemed to have no interest, no stake in it. Of course, Eleanor is gone now, and their father is gone. Still, his children walk the halls quietly, like invaders.

“Leonard and I are going to think of this as a vacation,” Gretchen said at dinner the first night they arrived, four days ago. “A healthful retreat.” They would get up at six, she said, and run—five, six miles—and in the afternoon they would do exercises. She would work out a regimen for each of them. And they should eat as little sugar and salt as possible, Gretchen told Carola, who had put herself in charge of cooking. Gretchen ate hardly any salt, and was in marvellous shape—her skin bronzed, her hair golden, her body lean.

“You’re not getting me up at six,” Carola said, sticking out her tongue and with great deliberateness salting her meat.

“I’ll run,” Jill said. “And Donna Lee will run. Donna Lee used to be a track star.”

Donna Lee, surprised to be mentioned, paused in the midst of putting a forkful of stuffing into her mouth, blushed, and smiled. Everyone looked at the table.

“Tomorrow morning, then,” Gretchen said. “Carola can decide if she wants to join us.”

Now, in the late-afternoon sunlight, Jill, her face smudged, is climbing a tree. There are twigs in her clothes and in her hair, which hangs down to her waist. Donna Lee is watching her from behind her book, while on the porch Gretchen is watching Donna Lee. The porch is far enough away so that Gretchen can say to Leonard, “What
is
the story with that girl?”

He shakes his head, and gazes absently at the line of maples bordering the lawn. He is disappointed because no one cares about his photograph. He showed it to Gretchen, and she brushed it off—glanced at it, said, “Neat,” and put it down next to her iced coffee.

“I’m still puzzled,” Gretchen says. “She’s nice enough, I suppose, but she’s so withdrawn. It’s impossible to talk to her. She’s on her guard every second.”

“She’s probably scared.”

“Why?”

“Coming into a strange family is scary,” Leonard says. “You feel like an intruder. Especially at a time like this.”

Gretchen puts on her sunglasses and lies back in the chair. “Jill probably shouldn’t have brought her,” she says.

“Young love,” Leonard murmurs.

“
What?
”

He turns, and Gretchen is staring straight at him.

Carola, in the kitchen, notices through the window how suddenly Gretchen has turned her head, and is pleased to see her taken off her guard, particularly by Leonard. The kitchen is hot. Carola has cooked every meal so far; she feels in control, at ease, only in the kitchen. This is why she refuses when Donna Lee and Gretchen offer to help. She knows they’re only doing it to be polite, and she’d rather not have their help anyway. It has been her experience that people who try to help in the kitchen usually end up just milling around—getting in the way and nibbling at the food. Carola hates to have anyone touch the food before it’s served. Her father used to infuriate her by eating spoonfuls of jam right from the jar. He and Gretchen and Jill always came into the kitchen and disrupted everything just when dinner was ready. Gretchen picked the bacon out of the salad, Jill refused to eat what their mother had prepared and made herself a grilled-cheese sandwich. And then they all disappeared when the dishes had to be done—all but Carola. She would stay and help her mother dry.