The Distinguished Guest (6 page)

Her first thought—her only thought for a while, besides a kind of abstract rage—was that Alan mustn’t see this, mustn’t see what someone had done to his house, his gift
for her. Moving quickly now, panting, although she didn’t notice it, she went back to her car. She drove to the market in the shopping mall, bought plastic trash bags, five rolls of paper
towels, a mop, a plastic pail, dishrags, soap, floor wax, ammonia.

When she returned and was lugging the grocery bags in, she noticed what she hadn’t seen before: that the key was in the door. Alan had one copy, but they’d left this one under a rock
at the side of the house for each other or the workmen as a spare. She came down the steps, went to where it should have been, and turned the rock. Gone. Whoever had done this had known, or been
told, where to look for the key.

As she worked through the afternoon, mostly on her hands and knees, scooping up the paste and soggy paper with the paper towels, filling trash bag after trash bag, she pondered it: who could it
have been? Why? There was a long list of workmen besides the regular crew—whom she dismissed immediately as possibilities: they loved the house. Unfairly though, the faces of the
others—the mason, the tile guy, the plumber, the electrician—all rose up. Their sometimes stupid or sullen helpers, more likely. It wasn’t until she was done and thought to look
in the other rooms, just to be certain they were all right, that she found the little pile of human excrement stinking in a corner of her bedroom. And thought:
teenagers
. Probably
there’d been piss in the soggy mess she’d been kneeling in all afternoon. She checked all the other rooms and found one other heap defiantly deposited next to the toilet on the floor in
the guest bathroom. Her sons’ faces rose before her. They’d both been out the night before, a Friday. Both were home by their curfews, Ettie at eleven, Thomas at midnight. Thomas had
had the car. Ettie had been brought home by a friend who drove.

When Gaby had cleaned up the two piles of shit and scrubbed the floor where each one had been, she carted all the trash bags out to her car. She put the cleaning things away in the storage
spaces Alan had carefully designed for them. She locked the door and pocketed the key this time.

The dump was closed by now, so she couldn’t take the bags there. She drove back to the shop—only a little earlier than she usually returned to close up anyway—and one by one
tossed the bags into the garbage bins around back. She went inside. Carefully she washed her hands and arms up to the elbows. Then her face. Then she sat on the counter and hoisted her legs up and
into the deep-welled work sink. Her knees were red and tender-looking. She carefully scrubbed them, bending down to reach her calves and feet, then working up her thighs nearly to her crotch. The
water ran freely over her ankles, her broad feet. Gaby rested her elbows on her knees and watched it swirl down into the drain.

When she came home, Alan was in the vegetable garden. He waved to her and she went inside. Both boys were in the kitchen, both eating. The bread was out on the chopping block, and crumbs were
scattered over the counter.

“Where
were
you, Mom?” Ettie said. They would have expected her to be home in bed through the afternoon. They would have expected her to fix them a snack before she went back
to the shop.

Gaby looked from one of them to the other. Innocent, innocent. Both were chewing, Ettie neatly, his compact, natural grace evident even in this small act. Thomas had a moustache of milk on his
upper lip, and he opened his mouth with each swivel of his jaw.

“I had a terrible mess to clean up at the new house,” she said, looking back and forth between them.

Both mouths stopped chewing. Thomas’s hand stilled with the bread in mid-air. Ettie looked at Thomas. “See?” he said. “I
told
you you couldn’t trust those
guys.”

“Shut up!” Thomas hissed.

They stood, all three in silence. Neither boy would look at Gaby.

Thomas then, it was clear. Gaby stepped forward quickly, quickly slapped his face twice, two
gifles
.

He stepped back, his eyes opened, liquid and vulnerable.

“No one will speak of this to your father,” Gaby said to them both. She turned to Thomas. “And I want you to think of how you shall apologize to me that I’ve had to pick
up the shit of your friends in my hands.” She held her hands palms up, as though in offering to him for a moment, and then she left the room.

Of course Thomas did apologize, profusely, and with tears. It was sadder than Gaby had thought it could be. He was so unpopular, so difficult at that age, and he’d thought if he offered a
place for a party where there’d be no adults, where no one would know, that somehow he could change his life socially. But they wouldn’t leave when he asked them to, and he’d had
to come home, he had the curfew. But, he said, they’d promised, he’d made them promise, to clean up before they went. And he’d called one of them the next day, and he’d said
of course they had, what did Thomas think? They were complete idiots?

When Gaby thinks of all this now, the vision of the house that day comes to her along with the sight of Thomas’s adolescent face streaked with tears, and she’s saddened and touched.
So she feels moved by the house, yes, by the sense of it as a gift to her; but also weighted by it oddly, by its importance in their marriage, by the feeling of protectiveness of Alan connected to
it.

It is strange, then, that it is Lily’s gift that has made her feel finally at home. Lily, whom she could have forgiven anything, she thought, except the thing she seemed best at:
diminishing Alan, making him seem boyish, unserious, in their almost daily squabbles.

Now in the melting gray light, Gaby sighed, rinsed her cup, put the milk back into the refrigerator. She slipped on her clogs, swung her big bag over her shoulder, and crossed the room. As she
passed behind one of Lily’s chairs, she let her hand fall on the carved fruit at the center of its rounded back, caressing briefly the smooth shapes—apples and pears and grapes, and the
thick-veined wooden leaves.

Violet Roberts, Lily’s mother, had, like Lily herself, married late by the standards of her day. And Henry Roberts was forty-two when Violet became his wife. In the first
six years of their marriage, Violet had five miscarriages. When Lily was born only slightly prematurely and survived, there was an almost religious caution and hush that surrounded her care and
upbringing, that hung like perpetual weather over her cradle, her crib, and then her bed.

There were no more children after Lily. She grew up in a household of adults, most of them two generations older than she was. Henry, who was almost fifty by the time Lily came along, had been
born in 1861. Though he was a successful businessman—he was an executive at Pillsbury—he was also a Victorian, and in a Victorian sense, rigid and remote. Whatever energy Violet had had
as a younger woman had dissolved in the sorrow of the tiny babies she’d produced, and dressed in their frilled gowns, and buried. She was completely overshadowed by him.

On Sunday afternoons throughout Lily’s childhood and youth, while Henry took his ritual after-dinner nap, Lily and her mother dressed again in their church coats and hats and went to the
cemetery to help change the flowers or greens in front of the tiny arched headstones—each with a name and a single date on it, birth and death as one. Violet spoke of each grassy hillock and
stone as though it constituted the child buried under it (“Henry looked terrible”); and over the years, Lily came to think of the lettering of each name, the particular way the ground
rose over each tiny grave as somehow
having personality
. Certainly as much as she felt she did.

The whole household centered on Lily, but in an odd way—without making a single concession to her being a child. The concern was primarily for her physical well-being, a particular
obsession of her death-ridden mother. There were liniments and cod-liver oil, there were weekly enemas. The whole family Fletcherized, meals were nearly silent but for the endless required chewing.
Glass straws were used to drink with, even at the dinner table, and the light musical clink of these straws falling against the sides of their glasses—only this noise and her father’s
pronouncements about politics—punctuated the other minimal sounds.

Lily grew up a peculiar child, almost lifeless but for her caution. She dressed in clothes which were simultaneously too fancy—as though every day were Sunday—and strangely dowdy.
(Often they were purchased or sewn to match a dress or coat of her mother’s, who was now in her mid-forties.) Lily had a strange, elderly way of speaking, too. She called children her own age
“tykes” or “little fellows.”

These children didn’t actively dislike Lily—there wasn’t enough there to dislike. They simply ignored her. There were many examples around Lily of the painful alternatives to
being ignored, and she was grateful for whatever it was—her own silence, her family’s wealth—that allowed her invisibility. And she was invisible in spite of being an
extraordinarily pretty child, for other children notice animation long before they can see beauty, and there was very little of that to notice in Lily.

When Lily was stricken with polio at sixteen, it seemed a long spell cast over the house was broken; the thing they’d all been waiting for had happened at last. There was a kind of wild
relief in Violet, an energy and resolution in her grief, and a sudden attentiveness in Henry. The months Lily spent in the hospital were the first she’d spent away from her family. The food
was different, there were sweet drinks with her meals, always red, in Lily’s memory. The other children, if they weren’t desperately ill, were encouraged by the nurses to be lively, and
Lily for the first time had friends, learned dirty words, heard tales of the interesting, and to her utterly bizarre, ways other households were run.

When Violet visited the hospital, she seemed transformed—dynamic, insistent on Lily’s pushing herself, trying harder, moving more. Lily understood that her mother had been rehearsing
for this moment all her life, that she was passing her will into Lily. Lily also understood that it was on account of Violet’s will, which slowly did become her own too, that she would
survive. There was a kind of laxity on the nurses’ part about certain children; though they seemed no worse off than some others, it was understood that somehow they weren’t what the
nurses called “fighters.” They wouldn’t make it. Lily saw that she was a fighter, at first almost against her own will, and then, as she recognized it in herself, purely on
account of it.

She was sent to her grandmother’s farm that summer to continue her recuperation. This was her father’s mother, ancient and abstracted, who talked to herself wherever she was in the
house—talked and laughed, with animation so intense that Lily was certain the first few times she heard her that company had arrived, and she hid in her room. There were three cousins on the
farm too, younger children of her father’s sister, who lived in another house on the property. Lily was expected to play with them, to stay outdoors, out of her grandmother’s way, and
she did. She should have been far too old to play in this sense, but she was still so unused to other children that she brought a naive energy to the task, and this let her pass for ten or twelve.
At any rate, the others seemed to accept her as a child, in spite of her adult body. They treated her as though they thought of her as damaged, somehow retarded or slow-witted; but she was of real
service in their games. One of the strongest, clearest memories of her young life originated in these circumstances. Lily included it in her book.