Perfect Family (15 page)

The picture had been taken at one of the summer slumber parties. She was about eleven. There were five or six girls. Their mother always made them use the sleeping porch for slumber parties, so she'd hear if somebody got up in the middle of the night with the bright idea to go swimming. Their mother was petrified of the water. She was always on high alert during those things. They'd arranged their sleeping bags all in a circle, like the spokes of a wheel, heads in the middle. They were going around from one to the next, telling which boys they liked, and then—Mira thought it was because Katherine Nicely's grandfather had shot himself in the head the winter before—Pony said they should go around the circle and tell how they thought they were going to die. Tinker got all bent out of shape over it. She kept saying, “Don't ever!” and what bad luck it was. She said they'd regret it one day, wanting to die a certain way, and didn't any of them know what a self-fulfilling prophecy was? Mira had told her that was the whole point, because everybody dies, so why not come up with a good end and then hope it actually
did
turn out to be
a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, duh! And Katherine Nicely, who was light-years ahead of them all even then, had said nobody was wishing to spend their last days in hospice care, in case Tinker hadn't noticed. “And anyway,” she told Tinker in the kindest way, “it's not how you
want
to die, because nobody wants to die. It's how you
expect
to die. There's a difference. It has to do with the way you live.” So it was about living, not dying. Katherine said her older sister had had to write her own obituary for an English class at Skidmore, that it was a very in thing to do in college courses. Tinker still wouldn't do it. She said they were all dooming themselves.

Mira remembered looking for the most flamboyant and shocking death she could conjure up. Finally she said she expected to die like Isadora Duncan, with her scarf caught around the wheel of a moving car, or shot by a jealous wife. And what had Pony said? Mira studied the picture in the album Keith was holding and tried to remember. Pony's hair bushed out around her face. Her smile was electric, huge. Pony was all life. What could she possibly have said?

Keith continued to look through the pictures. He was an evolved man, in some ways. Or trying to evolve. Like he knew it was important to be sensitive, but he didn't have it down yet. She found that endearing. He'd slip sometimes, like that question about her mother, and then realize he'd been out of line and do something to recant, even if it was clumsy. She got up and went to the bathroom. Looked at herself in the mirror. She looked great. Her skin was perfect, her eyes wide, her lips full. She could be beautiful sometimes. And right now she had it in spades. She went out to the porch and sat on the wicker sofa, her feet propped up on the rail, listening to the peepers and other far-off sounds that traveled over the water. After a time Keith came outside and sat beside her. “You're lucky,” he said.

“How's that?” she asked.

“All this. A nice family. You're just lucky.” He took her hand and brought it to his lips. She wanted to feel something. She was desperate to feel something, and yet she didn't. The numbness of grief, she supposed.

“Somebody's out there,” he said. “Did you see?”

“Where?”

“Over there.”

She could see someone in a white shirt near the edge of the woods, almost at the lawn. “It's probably one of the Bell kids. Those kids are up half the night. Don't worry about it.”

“Where do you keep your flashlights?”

“In the front closet,” she said.

Keith went inside and came right out again with the biggest light they had. He was down the steps of the porch and heading toward whoever it was. “Hey,” he shouted, the beam seeking the person out. “You!”

Mira stood, astonished. Whoever it was ran off. She didn't know if it was one of the Bells or not, but she never would have done what Keith had done.

“You've been through too much, Mira,” he said when he came back. “Your whole family has. You don't need somebody gawking at you in the dark. What if it was a Peeping Tom?”

She had to laugh.

“I'm serious.”

“I really think it was just the kid from next door. What did you say to him?”

“He ran off. Let's get going.”

Well
, she thought,
maybe what he did was nice
. Maybe she did like the feeling of being taken care of, a feeling she wasn't exactly used to.

 

He took all the back roads too fast as they headed for the highway, skidding around corners and throwing up gravel. Mira said nothing. And once on the highway, Keith again opened it up. They were doing eighty-five, sometimes ninety. He was hunched over the wheel at first, and then he leaned back and drove with one hand, the other looped behind himself over the seat back. She thought it was possible he'd drive the car through a guardrail or off a bridge and
they'd plunge hundreds of feet. But she didn't tell him to slow down. She considered the possibility of being dead. She thought of Pony as frozen in time. Pony was dead, the first of them to die. Crossed over, some people called that, and Mira knew what they meant. Not that Pony had stopped living but that she'd gone somewhere Mira couldn't follow.

Tinker arrived at Pony's apartment with a sense of purpose. She let herself in and stood in the gloom, looking around. She was ready to work, ready to do what she did best, bring order to this corner of the family's life, and in so doing, find relief for herself and for them. A fine veneer of dust had settled over everything in the month since Pony died. The last time Tinker had been here, she'd come to pick out something for Pony to wear.

She'd come while Isabel was in school, but she'd had to bring Andrew along. She'd intended to get in and out quickly. She'd set Andrew down and bolted across the living room, through the bedroom, and opened Pony's closet door. But then she'd dropped to her knees in the darkness of Pony's closet, overwhelmed by the scent of her youngest sister. When she had recovered, she'd sorted among the mishmash of shoes and purses and art supplies stored in shoe boxes stacked at the back of Pony's closet, looking at everything. Ten wide, the shoe boxes said, a detail Tinker hadn't known. Large feet for a woman. Larger than Tinker's own, which were narrow and only
seven and a half. It had given her a rush of guilty delight to learn that in one area of femininity, she reigned. She'd tried on Pony's shoes and swam in them. She'd clopped around the place like a little girl playing dress-up. Pony and her big feet.

Tinker had slid the wire hangers across the rack one by one, seeing all of Pony's familiar clothes from years and years. Pony never threw anything out. There were men's shirts she used to paint in, old sundresses from when she was in high school, and, way at the back, a Mexican peasant blouse with the tag still attached. Tinker had held it up. It was beautiful and a good color for her, turquoise with bright embroidery. It was loose on her, too. She'd turned this way and that in the mirror, then took it off and stuffed it into her purse. At that very moment, the blouse was at the back of her closet at home. She liked thinking about it. Liked imagining the day she would wear it. She'd need to wait, of course.

Finally, she'd found an electric-green dress at the back of Pony's closet, still in its plastic dry cleaner's bag, which was what she'd dropped off at Becker's and then worried that it was too shiny, too dressy, too promlike.

It had been on her mind so much after that—waking her at night, even—so that before anyone arrived at Becker's, she had gone into the viewing area. She'd run her hands over the casket, over the shiny hardware, and then looked down. Pony was beautiful. Her color was high, her lips full. She was serene. To Tinker's relief, the dress had been a calmer green than she remembered, a fabric not so shiny as she'd thought. She'd tugged the neckline a bit and was surprised to find the dress wouldn't move, as if it had been glued to Pony's skin, an idea that made her shiver.

Now she stood again in Pony's living room and took in the place. On her way over, she had picked up a dozen boxes at U-Haul and some rolls of tape, which she dumped on the floor. She went about, opening shades to let in the light, opening windows, closet doors and kitchen cupboards, drawers of furniture. She took inventory.

The apartment was very small. The living room held only a brown
couch, a coffee table, and a wooden chair. A small table and a high chair sat against the wall where Pony must have taken her meals. Pony had piled her belongings here and there so that it seemed everything she owned showed. A stack of books was in the corner. Portfolios of her sketches leaned against the wall next to a stack of shoe boxes holding the things most people kept in drawers—Scotch tape and pens, maps and receipts. In the bedroom, the bureau was empty, but on top of it were Pony's clothes, folded in stacks. Her thong panties, her brassieres, her T-shirts.

Tinker still felt numb to Pony's death. She was able to remember both the wake and the funeral in detail but without feeling grief. She knew it was peculiar, not something she could mention to anyone, especially not Mark. And what she certainly couldn't tell Mark was that her grief was really for her father. She felt his agony far worse than her own. Just last weekend she'd gone to his house and noticed the neglect. The grass was too long. The rosebushes were already lacy with Japanese beetles.

She'd gotten out of the car and gone around back. He was sitting on the stone bench in his bathrobe, in the middle of the afternoon. He'd looked so broken. She was struck by how thin his legs were, white as fish bones. Overnight he'd become an old man. It had been like opening a hotel room door on something you shouldn't see. Shameful in a way she couldn't explain. Tears had welled in her eyes at the sight of him, at the job ahead of her, getting him dressed, seeing to it that he ate something. But when he'd noticed her, oh, the transformation in him. The sudden taking over. Himself again, on his feet, striding toward her and the kids as if everything was normal. She wished he'd just give in and let her take care of him the way she wanted to.

She made her way to Pony's cramped bathroom. The toothbrush still lay on the sink, welded to the white enamel by a spill of once watery blue toothpaste. Pony's long dark red hairs were stuck to the sink. Her medicine cabinet was bare except for Band-Aids and Tampax, a roll of dental floss, some scrunchies, and a rectal thermometer
for the baby. Pony apparently used no makeup, took no pills. A small bar of soap sat in a dish. Tinker held it to her nose and sniffed. Ivory. She threw back the shower curtain. The tub was full of colorful rubber toys. The word “unsanitary” crossed her mind. She would have to throw out the toys.

She turned back to the sink and looked at her reflection in the mirror.
That awful curtain of hair, dear
, her mother used to say to her.
It hides your beautiful eyes.
And so Tinker pulled it away and off her face and secured it with one of Pony's scrunchies, a great frizzed knot on top of her head. She turned slightly to the right, leaned in to see her eyes more closely. They were gray and large, and they sloped downward at the outside edges, like a puppy's. She undid her hair again, twisted it at the nape of her neck. Was that more flattering? She had no idea. She could try it both ways and not see the difference, and yet her mother used to say to her unexpectedly,
How nice you look today, dear
, and Tinker would never know what it was she had done. She still didn't know. Not that it mattered. The whole reason women made themselves attractive was for men, i.e., for sex, which was something she didn't need to worry about. She and Mark made love four or five mornings a week. Mark would reach for her, lifting her gown, and she was always pure compliance. She would take him in her hand and feel satisfaction at the size of him, the strength, and at her own power to do this. The act itself was automatic and satisfying not so much for the sex, since she rarely had orgasms, but for her wonder at being so needed, at her ability to satisfy her husband blindly, unconsciously, without coquetry or complication. Their mornings, she believed, were what bound them, not just her and Mark but the three of them, and now Andrew, too.

She thought with satisfaction about how she'd handled Donna, the secretary at Mark's office. Were they still called secretaries? Tinker didn't think so, but Donna was the person who often answered the phones in her cigarette voice, the voice of a much older woman even though she was only in her thirties, a single mother with a son to support. She was the source of speculation fairly often for
the remarks she came out with. About a month earlier, apropos of what, Tinker didn't know, Donna had said,
I can get it up on a dead man
.
A showstopper,
Mark had told her, shaking his head and grinning in mock disbelief. While laughing and seeming to share her disapproval, Mark was also intrigued, Tinker knew. Donna was like an exotic foreign country.

She turned from the mirror and went back to the living room, where she set about assembling one of the larger boxes. She opened it, flattened down the flaps on the bottom, and taped it shut. The box stood fresh and square, ready to receive, evidence that life went on. The man at the U-Haul had told her to use the larger boxes for lighter-weight and bulky things like clothing and bedding and lamps, and the smaller boxes for books and records and dishes. Tinker liked the whole symmetry of that, the fact that somebody had already figured out an approach. He told her that people always left the kitchen for last. A big mistake. They'd think they were almost done, and then they'd start on the kitchen and it would take as long as the rest of the apartment put together. “So do the kitchen first,” he told her. “Get that over with, and you'll sail through the rest of it, believe me.”

She was emptying the kitchen shelves when Mira finally showed up. Mira appeared at the door in a black dress so thin it was more slip than dress. Her body was visible underneath, a child's body. Her hair, ungelled today, lay flat. Her face seemed larger, younger, and whiter.

“Oh God,” Mira said, glancing about the kitchen. “I don't know if I can do this.”

“Sure you can,” Tinker said, trying for equilibrium in her voice, trying not to show her annoyance, because she might have predicted this. Mira the drama queen. “The thing is to begin.” She explained about the boxes, but Mira didn't seem to be listening, she was walking around the small kitchen, trailing her fingers along the countertops. She disappeared into the living room. Tinker could hear her out there and went back to packing up the things in the kitchen. She
was pulling canned goods out of the cupboards when Mira came back and sat down at the kitchen table.

“This food is all perfectly good,” Tinker said. “We can divide it up.”

“Ugh,” Mira said.

“It's just soup,” Tinker said. “Spaghetti sauce. You eat that, don't you?”

“I'm not taking Pony's food.”

“I don't know why not,” Tinker said. “It's just food.” She held up a can of creamed corn.

“You can have it all,” Mira said, and Tinker felt the slap in that remark.
Let the fat one have the food.

“But you can—” Tinker began.

“I can what?”

“Never mind,” Tinker said.
But you can pick up a guy at Pony's funeral,
she thought. Outrageous, inappropriate, for Mira to be on the prowl at a time like that, and what kind of a man hits on the bereaved sister at a funeral, anyway? “Are you still seeing that guy?” she asked. “The guy who spoke at Pony's funeral?”

Mira hopped up on the counter and swung her bare feet so they banged against the lower cabinet. She had a fresh pedicure. “He might come over later,” she said.

“First Pony and now you.” Tinker couldn't resist saying it.

“He's an old soul,” Mira said. “It's not like that.”

I'll bet
, Tinker thought.

“I told him I'd be here. He's looking for an apartment, so I thought maybe—”

“First things first,” Tinker said.

“Anything new about that guy at the lake that Denny Bell saw?”

“We'll probably never know,” Tinker said, and pointedly went back to work.

“I'd like to rip his face off. He just left her there. It so sucks,” Mira said.

“Maybe he had nothing to do with it,” Tinker said quietly, and
thought that maybe Denny was just confused and the guy he'd seen was only William.

“He, like, came out of nowhere and went back to nowhere,” Mira said.

“We can talk while we work,” Tinker said.

Mira was looking through some of Pony's drawings. “She would have been so good,” she said.

“See that roll of plastic bags? Those are for the trash. There's a Dumpster outside.” Tinker was still thinking about Denny Bell. She wished he hadn't seen the guy at all. The news that somebody had been there had sent everybody into a tailspin and opened everything up all over again, just when they were starting to heal. “Daddy's calling everybody in her address book,” Tinker said. “To find out if any of them were there that day or know anything. He's a wreck. I'm so worried about him.”

“He'll be okay,” Mira said.

“But what if he isn't? He's getting old,” Tinker said. “We need to acknowledge that.”

“Like he'll let us.” Mira pulled one of the plastic bags from the roll, dropped to her knees at the refrigerator door, and started emptying the contents. She wasn't paying attention to what she was doing, just reaching in and grabbing. Tinker would have sorted through things, salvaged what she could. There were cans of beer and soda in there, full containers of juice, expensive jams still within the expiration date.
Keep your mouth shut,
she told herself.

Mira slammed the refrigerator door. “I can't do this. I can't touch her things like this. It feels like we're throwing her away.”

It didn't feel that way at all to Tinker. It felt useful. It was the best way she knew to cope.

“It's like she's just vanished off the face of the earth,” Mira continued. “And now we can't wait to get rid of everything she had.”

She
did
just vanish off the face of the earth,
Tinker thought.
That's what death is.
“Look at the dust in here already,” she said.

“So what? It isn't right to do it so fast.” Mira got to her feet and left the room.

“Daddy wanted us to,” Tinker shouted behind her. That wasn't exactly true. On the same day she'd found him in the yard, she'd gone inside to make lunch. He'd come in and gone upstairs to dress, and when he didn't come down, she'd gone looking for him. She'd found him in Pony's old room, sitting on her narrow bed with the contents of a drawer spilled out. He was sorting through the things Pony had left behind years earlier. School supplies, her hastily written papers, poorly typed, C or D written across the top, her old sketchbooks and report cards, the dusty debris of an old desk, pencil shavings, and paper clips. He could die of sadness. “Daddy, you need your lunch,” she'd said, urging him to come downstairs and eat the sandwich she had made.