Red Hook Road (22 page)

Iris stood in front of the closet, discarding one outfit after the other. She yanked a white linen skirt off its hanger, examined its frayed waistband, and tossed it aside. She rejected a flowered cotton skirt because it pulled across the top of her thighs. The confetti-colored sundress made her arms look big. She found a white blouse draped crookedly over a hanger. She held the shirt out in front of her with a lump in her throat.
She’d last worn this to the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding. A year ago today. There was a yellowish grease mark on the placket and now she remembered having spilled butter down her chin while she was eating her lobster. She should have blotted the stain with cornmeal then soaked the blouse in shampoo, one of the household hints her grandmother had collected in a small scrapbook that hung from a nail in the laundry room. Iris relied on this book, had even updated it with hints of her own—hair spray gets out acrylic paint, vinegar and egg whites loosen chewing gum—but last year she’d failed to follow its prescription for a butter stain. She hadn’t, in fact, done any laundry after the accident. Within a few days, a neighbor they didn’t know well, one who hadn’t even been invited to the wedding, showed up and went quickly through the house emptying hampers, stripping beds, and taking the towels from the bathrooms. That same afternoon a fragrant and folded pile of laundry appeared in a basket just inside the back door. The neighbor had returned a few more times over the summer, ignoring both Iris’s perfunctory objections and her grateful tears. Later on Iris found out that the woman had lost her husband in the battle of Khe San, in Vietnam. She knew all too well what the bereaved were likely to forget to do for themselves.

Iris crumpled the blouse in her hands and tossed it in the trash. Then she thought better of it and took it out. She’d tear the blouse up and use it for rags. The soft cotton would be perfect for polishing silver.

Why was she worrying about her clothes, of all things? She knew very well that there was nothing in her closet that didn’t make her look like a fifty-one-year-old, menopausal proto-crone. She and Daniel had reached that awful age where a man looks youthful and distinguished and a woman like his elderly aunt. She flicked rapidly through the shirts hanging in the closet. She found a white tank top and went through the closet again, looking for the silvery-blue tunic that she usually wore over it, trying to remember the last time she had it on. Last year, on Memorial Day, to a party at the yacht club. And then Becca had found the tunic hanging on the clothesline and pilfered it; she’d worn it out a few times, and the last time Iris had seen it, the girl was wearing it on the beach as a cover-up. She’d given Becca a piece of her mind, but now couldn’t remember if she’d ever gotten the tunic back.

Iris considered going upstairs to look for the tunic in Becca’s room, but so far this summer she had managed to avoid even climbing the stairs to the third floor. Anyway, she knew the tunic wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there last August when she and Daniel had packed up Becca’s things.

They’d put off the chore until the last minute. If she’d let him, Daniel would never have done it at all. But he had caved in to her logic that this was not something they’d want hanging over their heads next summer.

“Best just to get it over with,” Iris had said, piling his arms with empty cardboard boxes and leading him upstairs.

They’d hesitated in the open doorway. Iris tried but could not remember the first night Becca had slept in this room. When they’d taken possession of the house, the third floor hadn’t been used in decades. Iris supposed that when her grandmother was a child there must have been a domestic or two living in the rooms under the eaves. But no one had inhabited those rooms since then. They’d turned one third-floor room into Daniel’s office and left the other vacant.

The summer Becca was eleven years old she’d petitioned her parents to be allowed her own room, and over Ruthie’s near-hysterical objections, they’d agreed that she could move up to the bedroom next to Daniel’s office. Becca had at first made do with a folding cot and a few milk crates, but over the course of the summer, she and Iris had furnished the room, going to yard sales and junk stores as far away as Bangor. Iris recalled the day they’d found the little iron bedstead. It hadn’t fit in the Volvo, so they’d left it hanging out the back and driven it home with the hatch open. Becca had to lean over the front seat and clutch the top rail to keep the bed from flying out of the car, Iris’s free hand clamped to her ankle, as if that would have kept her from sailing out through the rear door right after the bed. At the time they had found it all terribly funny, and by the time they arrived home they were laughing so hard they were crying and they both needed to pee. But now, after the accident, Iris couldn’t bear to think of the careless abandon with which she had driven her children along the winding back roads of Maine.

Nothing in Becca’s third-story room matched—the bed was iron, the little desk was walnut, the dresser was painted lemon yellow and decorated with pinkish strawberries. During Becca’s childhood the room had been
almost spartan, decorated with nothing more than her summertime memorabilia—sailing trophies, pretty shells, shards of beach glass. But when she had left the Conservatory she had brought with her to Maine the contents not just of her dorm room but of her Riverside Drive bedroom as well. The room was packed with clothes, books, jewelry boxes, photographs. And because the kids had been living here the year before they died—during the winter they lived in and took care of the house, and they had decided not to move out until after the wedding—it was full of all of John’s things, too. His hockey stick, his jumble of boat-sized sneakers and hiking boots, his clothes, his ball caps, and his dop kit, crowded with a hopeless abandon among Becca’s things.

Standing in the doorway of Becca’s room that August afternoon a month or so after her death, Daniel had said, “I don’t think I can face this.” He’d dropped the boxes in the doorway and turned to leave.

Iris grabbed the sleeve of his shirt. “I can’t do it by myself.”

“Let’s just leave it.”

But Iris was determined that they take care of it then, before they left. “It’s never going to get any easier,” she said, and stepped across the threshold, giving him little choice but to follow.

Daniel looked about him with what had seemed to Iris to be a kind of murderous rage. She was sure that if she had not stopped him he would have punched a hole in the wall, or worse. She gave in, told him to leave, and did it herself. She first packed up everything of John’s, a task complicated by the fact that she kept breaking down in tears. The poignancy of John’s white briefs with their stretched-out leg holes and frayed elastic, of his jeans hanging over the back of a chair, the shape of his body still visible in the creases behind the knees and the white line worn into the brown leather belt looped around the waist. It was almost too much to bear.

But by the time she finished with John’s things she had exhausted all her tears. Dry-eyed, she packed up Becca’s belongings, packed them all up, except for a few things—Becca’s sheet music, a sailing trophy, some old letters, Baby Flame, the little red beanbag horse that had been Becca’s lovey when she was a baby. Some of the clothes Iris set aside for Ruthie, figuring that even if she could not bring herself to wear them now, so soon after Becca’s death, someday she would be glad to have something of
Becca’s to wear. Everything else Iris put in boxes and garbage bags. The next day she went to the Salvation Army, where she donated what was usable. On the way home she stopped at the county dump and threw away what the thrift store would not deign to accept.

In any case, her silvery-blue tunic had not been in Becca’s bedroom last summer, Iris was sure of that. So where was it? She went downstairs and ransacked the laundry room, going through the cupboards and pulling out the hamper bins. When it was clear that the tunic was not there, she stood with her arms akimbo, considering the various rooms of her house for a place a shirt might hide. On her way to search the hall closets, Iris passed through the mudroom. She looked at the dozens of L.L. Bean totes in various sizes hanging from hooks on the wall. There were the oversized ones she took to the farmers’ market, the beach bags, the ones they used in lieu of picnic baskets. There were the little totes she used as summer purses, and the ones she’d picked up at the factory outlet, monogrammed with other people’s initials. Hanging amid all the others, like it was expecting at any minute to be thrown over a shoulder and taken out for a sail, was Becca’s old, pink-strapped canvas tote.

Iris pulled the bag down from the hook. The cloth was worn, covered in what appeared to be grease stains. When she opened it up the first thing she saw was a pale-green towel with a pattern of seashells and sea horses, one of a set of beach towels she had picked up a few years back for next to nothing at Reny’s. The towel was damp and stank. When she unrolled it she found the red racer-back one-piece bathing suit Becca liked to wear sailing, when she knew she would be working hard and not just sunning herself on deck. The bathing suit was stained with mildew; grayish spots fanned from the crotch all the way up the front. The fabric of the seat was pilled, and the leg holes furred with tiny elastic threads. The suit smelled as wretched as the towel, but still Iris placed it against her cheek and closed her eyes.

Iris had imparted to Becca, through example or nature, a love of the water, of swimming out in the cold and open sea. She’d been a remarkable child. How many seven-year-olds could practice violin for two hours and then jump into a rowboat and take first prize in the harbor pea pod race? How many girls managed to look at home and at ease both on a concert
hall stage and up to their knees in bilge water? How many young women looked as beautiful in a stretched-out old bathing suit as they did in performance formal wear? Over the course of her life Iris had met hundreds of musical children, but none had ever been as cheerfully normal as Becca. She had certainly not been an intellectual, but then she hadn’t had to be. Becca had embodied the best of all of them: her grandfather’s musicality, her father’s athleticism, her mother’s bustling competence.

Clutching the bathing suit to her heart, Iris turned the tote bag upside down, sending a hail of sand skittering across the tile floor along with a tube of Iris’s own French sunscreen, a wide-toothed tortoiseshell comb, a hair band, and a small clamshell case for CDs. And there, balled up in the bottom of the bag, crumpled and smelly but miraculously unstained, was Iris’s silvery-blue tunic.

Iris shook the tears from her eyes and put the tunic in the washing machine. She hesitated for a moment, looking at the towel on the ground and at the bathing suit in her hand. With a snap of her wrist she slammed closed the lid of the washer and gathered the contents of Becca’s beach bag. She threw away almost everything but the box of CDs, even the bathing suit, taking care to push it all down into the bin so that it wouldn’t catch Daniel by surprise when he went to take the trash to the dump. The bag itself she couldn’t bring herself to throw away. Instead, she hung it back on its hook, buried behind all the others.

While she waited for the washer’s cycle to end, Iris took the box of CDs into the kitchen and flipped through it.
Who’s Greatest Hits, Nevermind
by Nirvana,
Sparkle and Fade
by Everclear, and
Walk On
by U2. John’s music. Rattling loose in the box, missing its plastic case, was a cassette tape labeled in black marker: “Becca, New England Conservatory of Music Audition.”

Iris held it in her hand for a few moments. Then she took it into the living room and tucked it behind a random stack of CDs that had teetered on a side table, untouched, for years.

There are only so many ways to set a picnic table, and in spite of Iris’s best efforts the backyard looked almost exactly as it had on the night of the
rehearsal dinner and on the dozen or so Fourth of July picnics before that. They were using the same tin plates, which Iris had bought at various yard sales and secondhand stores and always used for the picnic. Ruthie had strung fairy lights in the apple tree, although Iris had managed to prevail upon her to refrain from lining the driveway with paper bag luminaria. They’d only ever done that once—last year—and it felt wrong, ghoulish even, to try it again. Just as he did every year, Daniel picked up three dozen steamed lobsters from the pound at the end of Swainsbury Neck. Iris made coleslaw. Tumbling the eight cabbage heads out onto the kitchen counter she tried to remind herself that she’d sliced this many cabbages before, for the picnics, for village gatherings, for library fund-raisers. The rehearsal dinner was not the only time she had ever made coleslaw.

Daniel, too, seemed uncomfortable with how reminiscent the scene was of last year’s happy occasion. He stood on the porch holding a massive platter heaped with bright red lobsters, and stared through the screens out to the yard. Ruthie was busily setting up the twenty folding chairs she borrowed from all their neighbors. The same chairs, he thought, that they’d borrowed last year.