The After Party (8 page)

I
can recall every inch of my mother's body, even now, all these years later. What happened to her was not a thing you forget. The first time I saw her wounds, when a nurse was changing the bandages, I ran into the bathroom and vomited. It looked like a child had gone to work with a pair of scissors, not like the careful handiwork of a surgeon. I was grateful my mother was asleep. The nurse had looked at me sympathetically.

“You'll get used to it,” she'd said, but I never got used to it. My mother had gone into surgery with a hard knot in her left breast, which her doctor had discovered after she had complained of a burning sensation. She woke up in the hospital and both her breasts were gone. She was thirty-six years old. She couldn't lift her arms because the muscle had been taken along with her
breasts. Carrying her to the bathroom back at home was nearly impossible, because she couldn't cling to my neck, so she used a bedpan. And it was only me there to help her—she wouldn't tolerate the nurse the hospital sent, and Idie's presence was only permissible if my mother was so knocked out by drugs she no longer cared who saw her.

And the thing was, I understood. Which is not to say I didn't resent this sudden intimacy with my mother—I did—but I understood why she didn't want strangers in her presence. I understood why she only tolerated me. She loved me, because loving me was a biological fact: I was her daughter. She was my mother. She had no choice. When my mother fell ill I would have told you that she didn't love anyone. But dying laid bare her animal instincts.

Strangely, she tolerated Joan. Or at least, she ignored Joan when Joan came to sit with her, turned her head on the pillow and fell asleep. When I remember my mother dying I remember her in her bedroom, on her back because she didn't have the strength to turn to her side, her head tilted away from the person sitting next to her, which was usually me. Her head on her beautiful pillow, her bedroom as pretty and neat as it always had been. I was rarely allowed to go in there when I was a child, and as a young teenager I had no interest. But now I spent most of my time with my mother, waiting. Lifting her head so she could swallow a pill; grinding the pill into dust and spooning it into her mouth with applesauce when she was too weak to do that. Bringing her a bedpan, helping her relieve herself. Sponging the debris of
death—her skin was covered in a granular substance, almost like sand, during her last few weeks—from her body.

The intimacy embarrassed me, but I had no choice.

“You're good to her,” Idie told me once, over grilled cheeses and tomato soup. And it seemed such a strange thing to say, because what else could I be? There was no future with my mother, no past: we were simply two bodies in a room, one dying, one well.

Before my mother's illness my concerns had been typical: School, which I had all but dropped out of for now. A boy named Charles who was very devoted to me, though we had never touched. Joan. We could spend hours talking about Charles, or whatever new boy Joan was seeing. We could spend hours talking about whether or not Ciela meant to be so sharp-tongued, or if it was just her personality. I understood I would return to these concerns, to that life, after my mother died, but for now I put aside my former life as easily as a book that didn't quite hold my interest.

The doctors spoke to my father, not me. He came to the house three times, and each time he sat with my mother, alone, for half an hour or so. I could hear them quietly talking from outside their door. I had briefly harbored a hope that my father might return to us for good for at least as long as my mother was alive, but when he came his presence in the house felt odd. I was always glad when he was gone, when it was just me and my mother in her room, Idie beyond the door.

The last time, my father sat with my mother and then found me in my bedroom. She'd had a difficult day, been unable to keep
even water down. Sometimes I thought she didn't want to keep anything down, didn't want any part of this to be easy or comfortable. That she wanted to punish herself, and me, as she was dying.

But when I told her my father was there she was strangely calm.

“Do you want to see him today?” I asked. “He can come back another time.”

She gave a short laugh. “I better see him while I have the chance,” she said, and I understood she was referring to both my father's history of running away and her own situation.

My mother had been beautiful all her life. When we went anywhere together—to the gas station, to my school to meet the principal, to my riding lesson—men stared, made any excuse to be near her. Sometimes my mother entertained their attentions, and sometimes she ignored them. Beauty, after all, had not kept her husband near, had not made her richer than the homely Mary Fortier. It should have. But it had not. And yet I understood, from a very young age, that my mother had not wanted my father near. She, like most unhappy people, wanted contradictory things.

Illness turned my mother into a grotesque. The incisions where her breasts had been wept, constantly, and her chest looked like a bombed, pitted country. Her skin was gray. Wrinkles appeared overnight. She aged thirty years in a day. Once I caught her looking at her reflection in the silver coaster I kept next to her bed.

“Do you want a mirror?” I asked.

I thought she might cry, but then she laughed.

“I think I've seen enough.” I rose, but she shook her head. “Stay a moment.”

I did what she asked. I did anything she asked, in those days. Always.

“Days are gods to years,” she said. “Time will fly. You'll forget this.”

I shook my head. I would never forget.

Back in my room, my father knocked, gently—his knock was unfamiliar, as his footsteps had been outside my door.

“Come in,” I said, and he opened my door gingerly, stepped inside. It was the first time he'd been in my room in I couldn't remember how long. Ever? No, surely he had been in there at some point. I watched him take in my room, which was still done in different shades of pink, or, as my mother called it, rose, accented with little flourishes: a collection of sterling silver card cases that my mother had been collecting since she was a little girl; five Limoges boxes; a picture of Cary Grant I'd cut from the pages of
Photoplay
and taped to the wall. My father looked relieved when he saw the picture, proof that his daughter was normal. She liked Cary Grant. She had crushes on movie stars.

Because the truth was that my father didn't know me at all. How could he have? He was a little softer around the middle than when I'd seen him last, and balding now. He stood at the foot of my bed, awkwardly, waiting for something. I felt an unexpected tenderness for him, which is what I'd always felt for this man who was my father, for as long as I could remember. I was never angry at him for leaving. I understood why he wanted to be somewhere else, why he could not take me with him. Children belonged to their mothers.

“Cecilia,” he said, “are you fine?”

What a strange question.
I
was fine. It was my mother who was not fine.

“Fine,” I said, and felt a rush of anger. I looked down at my pretty manicure, which Joan had done last night. I looked up again. “I have help,” I said. “Joan. Idie.”

“From what Idie says, your mother won't let anyone else help.”

I said nothing.

“Your mother is going to die, Cecilia. Soon, I think.”

I wanted him gone, out, disappeared from our lives. Of course I knew my mother would die soon. Nobody had ever told me—doctors weren't frank, in those days, especially not with teenage girls—but I wasn't an idiot. There had been no hope in her hospital room. No reason to think she might leave that place a well woman.

“I know,” I said.

“Well,” he said, after a long moment. “Do you need anything from me?”

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said.

He stood against my doorframe, half in, half out. He did not know what to do with his hands. My father was neither short nor tall, neither handsome nor homely. He looked like any man, every man. My mother had been a catch. They had met through her older brother, who had been my father's fraternity brother at the University of Texas.

“What was she like when you met her?” I almost clapped my hand over my mouth. The question had come, unbidden, into my throat; it felt like it had asked itself.

But my father didn't seem surprised. “What was she like when
I met her?” he mused, staring onto the yard, where our gardener was weeding a bed of camellias. I cut some every afternoon, brought them into my mother's room, and floated them in silver bowls.

“She was a sight to behold,” he said. And I sighed impatiently. I knew that she had been beautiful. I wanted more.

My father glanced at me, but I couldn't read his expression.

“She was smart, too. Smart as a whip. Could cut any man down to size in a second.” He laughed. “I suppose a lot like she is now.”

I nodded. I'd never heard him speak so affectionately of my mother. Perhaps it was easy to speak well of the near-dead.

“All right,” my father said, and took his hands out of his pockets, then put them back in. “I should get going. I should skedaddle.”

He walked over and kissed me on the forehead.

I used to think that my father had married my mother because of me—because she was already pregnant with me. But when I was thirteen I found their marriage certificate in my mother's files, which proved that was not the case.

Suddenly he turned halfway around so I could see his profile.

“I asked your mother to marry me after we'd known each other for three weeks. It was 1931. Everything felt like it was falling down all around us. And then there was your mother. She seemed . . . untouched.” He shrugged. “I don't know, Cecilia.”

Through the window I watched him leave, tip his hat at the gardener, open his door, and slide into the car. All while my mother lay two doors down, dying her slow and painful death. My father would die painlessly, in his sleep. His wife who loved him by his side. Clean, smooth sheets beneath him. My father was
someone who moved easily through the world; my mother was not, never had been.

And who was I? I wondered that, then, sitting on my pink matelassé cover, leaning forward to catch the last glimpse of my father's blue car as he drove away. How would I move through the world?

1957

I
was standing near the sink, listening to the rain and holding a plate with half a tuna fish sandwich and a cup of fruit cocktail on it, when Maria spoke.

“There's a man here,” she said. I joined her by the window, from which you could see the front door; there was a person standing there, in a shapeless coat, soaking wet, trying to shake the water from his hands, his hair.

We weren't expecting anyone. Not in weather like this. And nobody dropped by without calling these days, not with children who napped.

“It's Joan,” I said. Maria shook her head, but I recognized the way she stood.

“A man,” Maria insisted.

The doorbell rang.

•   •   •

I
ran my tongue over my teeth to check for bits of bread and tuna as I opened the door.

I would act a little peeved, I decided. Joan would act sheepish. Just a little bit. She would apologize, tell me where she had been—or maybe she wouldn't, maybe she would make an easily dismantled excuse—but I wouldn't care. I would take her into the kitchen, her distinct odor of cigarette smoke and sun trailing us, and she would be kind to Tommy, she would be happy to see him, and I would forgive her.

When I opened the door she was smoking a cigarette, or trying to; she was too wet to light it properly. She looked awful: thin, mascara running down her cheeks—why was she wearing mascara in the first place?—her hair falling around her face. I leaned forward to hug her and she stiffened but let me touch her anyway, and I confirmed my suspicion: her hair hadn't been washed in days.

“Joan,” I said, “come in. Right this instant,” I continued, when she stood there, hesitating, as if she were going to stand on my front steps and I were going to stand inside my warm, dry house. She stood there another moment.

“Now,” I said, and something in my voice made her obey.

I took her wet coat, which was indeed her old Burberry trench—I'd seen it a million times—and led her into the kitchen, where I meant to make her tea, or coffee, something warm.

“It's been a few days,” she said, as she sat down at our table, in Ray's spot, the best spot, with a view of both the kitchen and the big bay window. Her voice sounded completely normal. She plucked a napkin from the holder, her compact from her purse, and went to work on the mascara smudges. She was fine.

I was suddenly infuriated.

“It's been two weeks,” I snapped. Joan looked at me, her face tilted as if she were nothing more than a curious child. “Two weeks,” I said. I stood there with my hand on my hip, and I was aware of the ridiculousness of my pose, as if I were a schoolteacher and Joan was my bad pupil. I sat down across from her.

“Should I make us tea?” I asked, and sighed.

Joan shook her head. It occurred to me that Joan didn't really want to be here at all. It was starting to seem like that, more and more as we sat there.

“I was with an old friend,” she said finally. “From my Hollywood days.”

I felt my cheeks turn hot, my palms dampen. I took a deep breath before I spoke.

“I didn't know you had friends from your Hollywood days.”

Joan lit a cigarette in a single, practiced motion. She looked like Kim Novak when she smoked.

“I don't have many. But I have some.”

She turned her head away as she said this last part; she didn't want to make eye contact. It wasn't like Joan, to provide explanations, to account for herself. My instinct had been correct: this man meant something to her.

“So this is something serious.”

“Did I say it was serious? He's an old friend. Just an old, old friend.”

“So that's where you've been. With your old friend,” I said, surprised by my own sarcasm. I'd been worrying about the wrong thing: a stranger, not someone with whom she had some mysterious history. Though a stranger might have been preferable; it would have been temporary.

She gave a hard, short laugh. A peculiar laugh. Everything about this moment was bizarre. There was no warmth between us, no understanding.

“Yes, with an old friend, but not like that.” She tapped her cigarette against the rim of Ray's ashtray. I felt shaky, panicked. Joan was lying, keeping a secret from me again.

“But not like what?” I persisted. “What are you doing with him?”

“Do I have to spell it out? We aren't fucking, Cee.” She turned and looked outside. The rain had stopped, and you could see by the soft glow of the clouds that the Houston sun would be out again before you knew it. A moody morning, a bright afternoon. In Houston, anything could be erased.

“He's an old friend, that's all. I ran into him at the Cork Club. He was here for business and we got to talking about times gone by.” She stood, stubbing her cigarette in the ashtray, drawing out her slim cigarette case to retrieve and light another. “He's gone now. He won't be back.”

I almost laughed. Did she really think I would believe they weren't, as she put it, fucking? I knew all of Joan's habits. Men she wasn't fucking held no interest for her.

Hollywood was a wound. We never spoke of her year away. She'd left me. She'd never apologized, never offered any good explanation for why she'd not let me in on her plans. And now
old friends
were appearing? I went to light Joan's new cigarette; my hand shook. Joan looked at it, then up at me. But he was gone, I reminded myself. He was no longer someone I needed to worry about.

“Why'd you tell me, then?”

That got her attention. “What do you mean?” She fiddled with the diamond bracelet on her slender wrist.

“I mean, why bother coming over and telling me if you're not going to tell me the real reason he was here?”

Joan studied me, as if she'd forgotten, and then remembered, who I was.
I'm your friend
, I wanted to say, though “friend” was a flimsy word for it.

For an instant I thought she might confess. For an instant I thought she might tell me everything. But then she smiled, and the old Joan returned. She leaned over the table and kissed my cheek.

Just then Tommy peeked around the corner of the kitchen door. “Go see Maria,” I said, and then I checked my voice—this encounter with Joan had rattled me—“or you can come see Miss Joan. Would you like to come see Miss Joan?”

Tommy disappeared from view except for his small hand, which lingered on the doorframe.

“I don't know where Maria is,” I muttered under my breath. Joan wasn't in the mood for children today. My questions were already frustrating her, and I didn't want to irritate her further.

“It's fine, Cee,” Joan said softly. She stood. “Come see Miss Joan,” she said, and walked to the kitchen's entryway, knelt on the floor, and placed her hand over Tommy's.

The soles of her shoes were badly scuffed. Her hair, held in place by a metal nest of bobby pins, hadn't been brushed in days. “Come see Miss Joan,” she said again. Tommy's hand disappeared.

“He won't come,” I said. “He's being shy today.”

Joan ignored me. “Tommy,” she called. “Please.” Her voice sounded plaintive. It made me want to cry, though I did not understand why, exactly.

Tommy's head emerged, a small smile on his lips. He'd been playing a game with Joan. Joan had won.

“Oh,” Joan said, and gathered Tommy to her, “you love Miss Joan, don't you?”

Tommy's cheek rested on Joan's shoulder. His hand toyed with her earring.

I was glad Joan had found some person to take comfort in, today.