The Art of Falling (17 page)

I opened the door to find Tina Franke astride Dmitri in the tub.

Stark naked, dumb-ass smile and all, I tried to make sense of the scene in front of me: my lover fucking a thinner, smaller, younger version of me.

All of us gawked for a moment. I took a few steps farther into the room, unable to detach my gaze from Tina’s body. She looked so youthful, her pink nipples like rosebuds about to bloom. And below her spine, against the dark hair of Dmitri’s thighs, her ass nestled like two pale orbs, one in each of Dmitri’s hands.

“Penny—” Dmitri started.

Hearing his voice connected me to mine, but still I did not take my eyes from Tina. “Get out.”

“This is awkward,” she said. “Could you give us a little privacy?”

“You forget, Tina. I live here.”

• • •

“I marched right past them, closed the toilet, and sat down on the lid,” I told Angela. Nothing amused me about it at the time, but in the telling of it, I started to laugh. “I sat and watched while Tina climbed out of the tub and wrapped herself in my towel.” When I looked up at Angela, she just lay there, breathing. Listening.

• • •

I waited for Dmitri to say something, anything. Maybe Russians let the womenfolk duke these things out. I stood. “Get out, Tina.” I thought I was on firm ground. What had he said, just hours ago?
You
aren’t just another body. You are smarter. Many can dance.

Tina’s eyes darted to Dmitri for affirmation of their—whatever. Dmitri closed his eyes and shook his head as if to tell her “not now.”

Tina got dressed and left. Left the bathroom, left the apartment, left the planet for all I cared. Dmitri lay in the tub, offering nothing.

I suddenly felt way too exposed. I wrapped myself in Dmitri’s towel and left him in the bathroom with nothing to dry off with but the nonslip rug. I was so angry I would have walked right out of his life except for one thing: Dmitri was the center of my world. I needed him. So although he never asked me to, I stayed.

For the next few days, Dmitri swung wide of me at the studio. I didn’t see him much. At night, my muscles stood guard so I wouldn’t accidentally roll toward him in bed. I wanted him to be the one to slip his arm around me, pull me back from the edge, beg forgiveness. But the magic we had conjured was an illusion that had vanished. I felt diminished. Empty, even of tears.

I told myself we’d be okay. We had the big premiere coming up. He needed me. But my quiet certainty soon devolved into a hysterical grasping at straws, as lack of productive sleep gave way to exhaustion. Dmitri ordered me about on errands; I tried to please him.

Perhaps a nice hot soak would have relaxed my muscles enough to bring on the rest I needed so badly. But the night I found him with Tina, I scoured that tub with Comet until its finish was gone and it was a lighter shade of beige. I would never again surrender to its warmth.

• • •

Angela’s hand stirred in mine. She never opened her eyes, but she used her other hand to pull the oxygen mask from her mouth. In a breathy voice she said, “You got a story with a happy ending?”

What do any of us know about the schedule of our own demise? Angela may have known how she was going to go, but not when. I wasn’t any better at guessing than she was—it shocked and thrilled me when she stabilized. By all accounts, my own time on earth should have already expired. And who knew how long my mother might have? Now that I’d shared with Angela some of the clutter in my own emotional closet, it was time to clear a few mothballs back home. Once it seemed safe, I left Angela in Kandelbaum’s capable care and went to spend the weekend with my mother.

“So what’s this all about?”

I led my mother to the door of the garage and opened it.

“Whatever you want, Penny, get it and come back. With all that junk, there isn’t enough room for both of us.”

Regardless, I pulled her over the threshold and onto the landing at the top of the wooden steps. After he’d died, my father’s belongings had only gotten as far as this garage. Spread before us were clothes still on hangers, rusting tools, piles of magazines, and a few things she couldn’t part with when she sold his sporting goods store. The room was so full and musty it was hard to breathe.

I hit the automatic door opener. After a clunk that seemed to signal indecision, the door rose, allowing a wave of spicy air and sunlight into the garage.

My mother looked a little shell-shocked. When she found her voice, she said, “Close that, Penny. The neighbors will see.”

“Or we could move this stuff out into the driveway in case they want any of it. We’ll need the extra space to get it all organized. What to toss, what to sell, what to give away.”

I feared she might turn and run, but she surprised me by descending the steps, picking up a few fishing poles, and moving a step deeper into the garage to look around. She lifted a box lid, peeked at its contents, and took something out.

“Do you remember this, Penny? We were having such a good time at that circus. You could barely read, but you were fascinated with this program your father bought. Then something in it scared you, and he had to take it away.”

I couldn’t believe this program still existed, or that she remembered anything about it. I avoided my mother’s eyes but couldn’t help myself: I took it from her, still as drawn to its contents as I was embarrassed to have her watch me open it.

The full-color pages had seemed larger in my five-year-old hands. I had been tucked between my mother and father on the top row of bleachers, turning pages with fingers sticky from cotton candy. I found again the part that had so intrigued me: the gallery of characters in the “Sideshows of Yesteryear.” All these years later, the ways in which human bodies could be so different still fascinated me. The Siamese twins, the human rubber band, the married midgets. The handsome strongman.

I had tugged on my father’s sleeve. “Look, Daddy, it’s you.” He smiled and ran his hand down my hair. Nothing made me happier than earning that smile. A few pages later I found the fat lady, who had my mother’s curly hair and kind eyes. I tugged his sleeve again. “And look, here’s Mommy.”

He ripped the book from my hands so fast I started to cry.

“What is it, honey?” my mother had said.

“She’s thirsty,” my father said, picking me up. “We’ll be right back.”

I would mull over my father’s lie and our swift escape for years, finally realizing its significance: it was the first of many times I would associate body shape—my mother’s, and by extension mine—with shame.

These days, my mother no longer resembled the fat lady. Rather than soft and weak, she looked sturdy and strong.

I moved to the far end of a canoe resting upside down on sawhorses, pushing stacks of boxes to the side to make a path as I went. “Let’s set this out in the yard for now. Can you grab the other end?”

Moving the canoe revealed our recreational roots: stored beneath were croquet, badminton, volleyball. I pictured my dad, jumping up over the net to spike, Uncle Pete diving low for the save. My mother on the side, cheering.

I laid all the sports equipment on the slope beside the driveway.

“Would you look at this.” She brought a box out into the light and set up a camping chair beside it. “These are programs of performances I took you to. Must be two dozen ‘Nutcrackers’ alone. And look—this was from that talk Edward Villella gave at Lafayette College. Remember?”

I grabbed a handful and leafed through them. “I can’t believe you kept all these.”

“Guess I couldn’t face the end of it all.”

“The end of what?” I looked up at my mother.

“Our partnership, I guess. You were growing up.”

“It was a special time in our lives.” I hugged her shoulders. “I know it’s hard. Let me.” I took the programs from her hand.

“Wait! Give me back Villella.”

“Mo-om—”

She plucked the Playbill from my hand. “He signed it.”

For some reason, only the circus program seemed worth saving. I tossed the rest back into the box and carried it to the curb.

My mother fiddled with the latch on a trunk and opened it. “I can’t believe I still have this.”

“What is it?”

She went over to sit on the steps. Due to her weight loss, there was enough room for me to sit beside her. She held a framed photo. My mother smiled at the camera, her cheeks chubby and radiant. My father supported her elbow with one hand and enveloped her shoulders with the other, looking into her eyes with a magnetism that seemed to have defied the photographer’s attempts to get him to look forward.

“Of course you kept it. This must have been your wedding day.”

“Notice anything?”

They wore suits. His was navy pinstripe, hers ivory with a jacket and pleated skirt.

“I guess I’m surprised you weighed so much here,” I said. She looked at me askance, but didn’t jump down my throat. “Daddy used to say your weight was baby fat, so I always assumed you gained weight when you were pregnant with me.”

A moment of awkward silence stretched long between us. “I was pregnant,” my mother said, slowly.

“Wow.” I didn’t know how to react to this. “You’d think I would have done the math.”

“Why would you? You were still pretty young when your dad and I stopped having anniversaries.”

“But you were in love, right? I mean, you can see it.”

“He adored you from the first.” She traced her finger over her contours in the picture. “It’s no wonder I put this picture away. Even if I was pregnant, I can’t believe I really looked like that.” Her cheeks flushed as if she were embarrassed for herself.

“I don’t really like to look at pictures of myself, either.” I peeked in another box, hoping not to find too many more surprises. “Had you always been big, Mom? I mean, if you don’t mind talking about it.”

“I guess I can, now. I’ve lost so much weight it feels like I’m talking about another person, anyway.” She sighed, and looked again at the picture. “I couldn’t play softball and dodgeball and all the games your dad loved. While other girls played jump rope and roller-skated, I stayed in to practice the piano. But I became a decent pianist.” She looked over at me and forced a chuckle. “Your father never let me despair over it. If I felt low, your dad would pinch my cheek”—here, her voice wavered—“and tell me not to worry, that it was baby fat, and if I was meant to grow out of it, I would.”

I slipped my arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “Dad would be proud of you, you know. For finally losing the weight.”

“You think so.”

“He might even call it heroic.”

She rolled her eyes.

“I often think about how Dad died. All alone, away from home on that business trip. You haven’t mentioned it in so many years—do you still think about it?”

My mother slumped forward, elbows on knees. “I didn’t think you remembered.”

“How could I forget? It was a Sunday. I was watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs.”

“You know what you were eating?”

“Even you had food standards back then. You wouldn’t let me have chocolate cereal on a school day.”

She cracked a smile, barely. “What else do you remember? About that day.”

“I ran up the stairs to wake you and tell you Uncle Pete was at the door in his fire chief uniform. You were inconsolable, carrying on about the hotel fire in Allentown, how bad it was, how Uncle Pete had found him burning in the flames of hell.”

My mother started crying. I went inside to get her a tissue, fearing the rest of our project would dissolve into more wallowing. I’d always suspected the grief she’d packed away was part of her weight problem. Part of our problem. But it was time to move on. “That was fifteen years ago. Come on, let’s get to work.”

I scrapped the idea of a yard sale, though—my mother would never hold up—and decided instead to donate the sports equipment to the township for their summer rec program, and call Purple Heart to pick up the rest.

“Let’s grab a bite, Penny.”

• • •

I whisked balsamic vinaigrette at the kitchen counter while my mother assembled ingredients for a salad.

“It’s time I told you the rest of what I know about your father’s death,” she said, washing greens in the salad spinner.

“Like what?”

“For one thing, he wasn’t on a business trip.”

“But he was in a hotel.”

“In Allentown.”

“Oh.”

“When your father didn’t come home that night, even I didn’t know where he was until Uncle Pete came the next morning to tell me.”

“You’d had a fight?”

“Your father and the woman he was with had been drinking—”

My life suddenly seemed to depend on the thorough emulsification of oil and vinegar. I could not look at her.

“She was smoking, they fell asleep… They both died.”

My arm ached. Pressure built in my gut.

“God, Mom. All these years—” I slapped the whisk into the bowl too hard. Brown drops spattered the wall and counter. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“When, exactly? You still needed to believe in your father. You needed to believe in me, too. I’m afraid there’s no good time to say your father found your mother lacking.”

She lifted the knife and slammed it through the cucumber so hard it made me jump.

I still wanted to believe in my father. Still needed to. His genes, I’d always felt, would be my salvation. And Dmitri’s betrayal had cut me to the bone; for so many reasons, I had to know my father was the better man.

“But most of the time, when he was away at night, he was on purchasing trips. Right?”

Each chop of her blade scored my heart as I awaited the result of my genetic testing. She chopped faster; I bled. She said, “His partner did the purchasing.”

I could think of only one just reason for the subterfuge. I said softly, “He must have been in love.”

“Yeah, well, there was plenty of that going around.”

I felt like she’d struck me with her own wedding picture. “You don’t have to be crass.”

She turned to me, the cucumber now a weepy mush. “Why are you defending him?”

“Could you give me a few minutes to catch up here? All this time I idolized him.” As I’d idolized Dmitri. I felt his betrayal again, doubly deep, and threw the whisk into the sink. “I can’t believe he’d hurt you like that. Hurt us. Choose to leave us!”

“How did you think I’d feel when I heard you’d jumped off a building?”

“We do
not
know that’s what happened—”

“Don’t give me that crap, Penny! How else could you have parted from that balcony?”

Her words summoned the darkness once again. I saw the void, felt the wind, dizziness struck—I had to grab hold of the sink.

She sprinkled the dressing on the salad and gave it a few angry tosses. “Well?”

“I can’t tell you what happened!” Tears had their way with me. “I run over and over the facts, but I can’t remember anything, or make sense of what happened. I just feel the dark and the cold of it. And I’m scared because once I do know, the memory will be stuck inside me forever, and I won’t know what to do with it!”

Now that I’d named it, my fear decompressed and all that was hidden rushed up my throat. I leaned over the sink and retched, over and over, putrefied emotions spilling out like an imagined waterfall even though only a thin line of drool hung from my lip. The sweetness I’d tried to preserve—my adoration of my father, of Dmitri, of the career I’d longed for—now tasted like bile on my tongue. I fought to swallow them back down. What would I be without my most precious dreams, especially once Angela was gone? Alone. I retched again.

Sobs wracked my belly. My mother did not rush forward to take me into her arms, nor did she speak. But she didn’t turn away, either. She stood her ground, witnessing my pain.

Once my sobs died down, I splashed cold water on my face, rinsed the sink, and made my way to the table. I felt hollow. My mother got out forks and plates. Dropped a napkin in my lap. A moment ago the entire foundation of my world had cracked, and now it all felt so normal. I was not alone—my mother sat beside me, at the head of the table. Had anything changed, really? Dmitri had still left me. And my father hadn’t been around much when he was alive—this new knowledge didn’t change that. With no startling revelation about my fall, I’d have to continue piecing together what life I could. Still, I struggled for orientation.

My voice was hoarse when I finally spoke. “So you weren’t consumed with grief all these years?”

“I grieved plenty, for a while, for all the ways he had left me,” she said.

“He left
us
, Mom.”

She nodded and put her hand over mine. “More than anything I didn’t want you to suffer. I worked hard to give you what I could of a stable home life, however flawed that was.”

Something had changed after all. Sitting here with my mother, with her talking to me this way, felt an awful lot like love.

I looked at her and smiled. “You did good.”

My mother used the tongs to transfer modest portions of salad onto our plates. “And it’s a good thing you’re still here, because God knows without you in my life I wouldn’t be eating a lunch like this.”

Out of habit, I teased out the fatty olives with my fork and pushed them to the side. “So if it wasn’t grief, why is it you never cleaned out the garage?”