The Pretend Wife (19 page)

F
ALL ROLLED IN QUICKLY
. The days got shorter, and cool air started to tunnel into the apartment. The windows rattled with the wind. It was a gray, rainy season that seemed only occasionally punctuated by sun. My mother died during autumn, so that season always had a strange hold over me. With the cold chill and the leaves falling from trees, everything losing its greenery, it's a death-haunted season anyway. This particular fall, I felt haunted not only in part by the dim memory of my mother but also by Vivian. When she confused me for her sister Giselle, I'd promised her that I would “tell him the truth.” Months had passed, and I still wasn't living fearlessly. Every day I felt like I was betraying a trust, and it just got harder and harder to ignore Vivian's goading in my mind.

I wanted to call Elliot and ask about his mother. I waited for word, but no word came, and I wondered if she was still alive or if she'd died and Elliot hadn't been able to call me or didn't want to. I wondered if he was okay. In the middle of one obsessive night, I convinced myself that his mother hadn't been dying at all, that she'd been faking
it, for reasons beyond me. In the morning, I knew that was crazy, but still I considered looking up his course schedule at Johns Hopkins to watch him walk out of his class so that I could measure his expression, his gait—to make sure
he
was still alive, really. I went so far as to find his schedule online, but I avoided what would have proven to be a devastating blow to my self-respect. I resisted the urge.

I thought of Elliot every day, but I didn't mention his name. I didn't mention him to Peter and Peter didn't mention his name to me. I made sure not to ask Eila any big philosophical questions about my life—held together as it was or not. And I blatantly told Helen and Faith that I didn't want to talk about Elliot Hull. He was “off the table.”

“Can we do that?” Helen asked. “Can we take entire subjects off the table? Do we even have a table? Is that healthy?”

Faith shrugged. “I'm fine with it. Consider Hull off the table as far as I'm concerned.”

Helen looked at Faith and then back at me. “Fine,” she said. “But one day I might want to take something off the table and I want this to be a real precedent.”

“But we can't make a habit of it. It should be like the get-out-of-jail-free card. A one-time usage,” Faith suggested.

“Fine,” I said. “Everyone gets one ‘off the table' without question. And this one is mine.”

Then one day I was pulling out of a grocery store parking space and I saw him pushing his cart toward the designated drop-off. It was late. He was pushing the cart and then he stood on its ledge, under the carriage, and he rode it, gliding across the empty spaces, drifting downhill. He
was straight-faced, almost solemn, but so responsible. I never returned my carts.

I thought of driving up to him. But I wasn't sure what I'd say. I'd wanted to know that he was alive. He was. I watched him stuff his hands into his pockets and walk back in the direction he'd come. He no longer had a limp. His ankle had healed. Finally, he arrived at his jalopy. There, in the passenger's seat, was a woman with a pretty face and short brown hair. Her mouth started moving as soon as he sat down. Was she someone he could have a conversation with that would last a lifetime? He was nodding, then pulling out of the spot and merging into traffic, then gone.

And I sat there, as if I'd had the wind knocked out of me. Was he seeing someone—someone he could buy a cartful of groceries with instead of just one lime? Was he over me, just like that? I wasn't over him. I wasn't any closer to getting over him than I had been on the rowboat on the lake. I eventually straightened up and shook my head and said aloud, “Good for him,” but I didn't believe the words myself. I started to say them again, with more conviction, but my throat cinched. My mouth folded in on the words.

 

Maybe Elliot had moved on. I couldn't accept this, but I was trying. Still, I couldn't let everything about that time at the Hulls' house slip away. I decided that I had to confront my father. I couldn't let another day pass.

The following Sunday, I went to my father's house for lunch. It was a few days after his birthday.

My father hated anything that seemed close to a celebration for him. If I mentioned his birthday in the weeks
before it, he issued stern warnings not to celebrate. I was always forced to ignore the actual day and do something after the fact and purposefully low-key. When Peter saw me making a German chocolate cake—my father's favorite—from a box, he'd offered to come along, adding, “Though I know it would throw him into an attack of unworthiness.” This was true.

“He can barely handle a box cake made in his honor,” I reminded him. Bringing Peter would make it seem almost like a party, and my father would spend the visit apologizing to us for having gone to too much trouble.

I brought the German chocolate cake. My dad made his specialty—fried salmon cakes. The salmon came from a can. I was anxious and not hungry. I watched him eat, and before he took a bite of his cake, I told him to make a wish. We didn't have candles.

“A wish?” he said. “Oh, well, I just want you to be happy.”

“You're supposed to wish something for yourself,” I said. “It's your birthday.”

He gave me a scholarly stare that seemed to say:
That is a wish for myself, my darling little dope.
He ate his cake, pressing the crumbs with his fork.

“If you're not going to use your wish, then I will,” I said.

“Feel free—you know I'm frugal and hate to waste,” he said.

“Then I wish that you would tell me the truth.” I stared at his plate. I couldn't look at him.

“The truth? About what?”

I felt my eyes sting with tears. “Mom,” I whispered, struggling to find my voice. “What really happened? The truth …”

The room was quiet. The heater ticked on and hummed. My father put his hand on top of mine. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling a little unsteady if only because this was so unusual for him. I felt like we were in some new part of our relationship, and I was a little disoriented. He'd always been the guide—the one who led by example, his example being how to let things sit, how to avoid.

I followed him upstairs to the hallway where he pulled on the thin rope attached to the attic stairs, which unfolded from the ceiling like spindly legs.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Come on up,” he said. He walked up the stairs first, the hinges tightening as he made his way, the stairs squeaking under his weight. Once he pulled the string on the bare bulb, I climbed up too. The air was cool and dry. It was a huge attic, running the entire length of the house. The fake Christmas tree stood in the corner, some tinsel still dangling from its limbs. The rest of the space was filled with boxes, floor to ceiling, packed in tight. I recognized the one marked
Gwen
in thick black marker. It contained my yearbooks, cap and gown, a few grade school report cards, likely gnawed at by silverfish, and a few odd trophies. I'd never wondered what was in the rest of them—every house had boxes. I shivered and crossed my arms against my chest.

“Watch yourself,” he said. “Only step on the beams.” The rest of the floor was faded insulation, which was probably too flattened to do much good.

“This is where I put all of your mother's knitting. I boxed it up and put it here. I didn't know what else to do with it.”

“Which boxes?”

“All of them.”

I was astonished. I let my eyes tour the room. There must have been over fifty boxes, big boxes taped up and unmarked. “All of these boxes are filled with knitting? All of them?”

“My mother's punch bowl is in that one and there are some old picture frames in there,” he said, pointing. “But the rest is knitting,” he said. “Jam-packed, in fact.”

“But, is that even possible? There's so much!” I said. “When could she have had enough time?”

“She didn't sleep much,” he said.

“Even still …” I walked along a beam to a stack of boxes, dragged my fingers along their dusty tops.

“She knitted a lot,” he said.

“But this much? That's crazy,” I said, turning a slow circle to take it all in.

“Yes,” he said, quietly.

And then I turned and looked at him. He was tapping his fingertips together nervously. “It
is
crazy,” I said again, seriously now.

“It is,” he said.

“What you're telling me,” I said, “is that my mother was crazy?”

“She was suffering,” he said, clasping his hands together and bowing his head, almost in a posture of prayer. “It's different.”

I thought about my mother—suffering? I hadn't ever considered it. She was dead. That had been enough for me to manage, to feel guilty about. But she'd been suffering? “In what way?”

“Well,” he said, suddenly a little flustered with anger. “Crazy sounds like something she might have done on purpose, for fun! Being wild and crazy!”

“I didn't mean it like that,” I said apologetically.

“I know,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“It's just that there's so much,” I said, taking a step forward.

“Be careful,” he reminded me. “Only step on the beams.”

I secured my footing. “This just seems so sad to me,” I said, picking at the tape on the lid of the closest box. “It's just that there's so much … suffering,” I said. “Why didn't you show me this before?”

“I wasn't sure if you'd want to see it, to know. I thought it might scare you to know.”

“I think I had a right to know!”

My father glanced around the room. He patted down the sparse hair on his head and then said, “You did. I just didn't want to scare you.”

I wasn't sure exactly what he meant by this, but I felt like he was insinuating that I was frail in some way. “You thought I'd be afraid that I'd go crazy too?”

“I don't know,” he said. “She scared you sometimes when you were little. You'd sit with your head in her lap and she would hum you to sleep, and she would be knitting so furiously the whole time. You knew something was wrong—the way kids know without knowing … It was in the way you sometimes looked at her. I can't explain it.”

I needed facts. “She was compulsive.”

He shook his head. It was clear that he still wasn't comfortable talking about her problems. “She suffered.”

“Was she depressed?”

“Yes,” he said, buttoning up his cardigan. “She was anxious and depressed, both.”

I looked at the boxes again. It seemed like they were pressing in from all sides. “I want to go through it all,” I said.

“The boxes?”

“Yes.”

“No, don't,” he said, looking teary-eyed. “It's too much. It's all packed away. Let it stay packed away.”

“I want to go through it all,” I said again. “I'm going to.” I turned and looked at him. He stood there, his hands clasped together in a gesture I didn't recognize. Supplication? “What did you expect?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to tell you something about her. This is what I had to offer.”

“I'm going to go through it all,” I said.

“The boxes are cumbersome. I'll help you bring them down,” he said. “Let me help.”

 

I started out quickly, frantically, in fact. I worked for hours rummaging, picking things up, making piles of folded blankets, sweaters, mittens, and socks. After I had some kind of order, I spread one of my mother's blankets on the floor. I knelt down on it, my eyes blurred by tears. It had tassels on the ends of it, and I remembered their wooliness from my childhood in a vague way. The volume of knitting—scarves, pillowcases, hats, sweaters—told me one story, but I decided to study one blanket in particular, only one, deeply, to see what I could learn about someone from her knitting alone. I knew very little about knitting. I'd only gone through a short phase of it myself, in college. It had reminded me of my mother at the time. I'd only known that she'd knitted things for me as a child. I had no idea that it had been an obsession. I ran my fingers over the stitches as if trying to read Braille.

My father brought me a cup of tea, and would occa
sionally amble in to ask, in a quiet voice, if I wanted any more.

“No, thank you,” I'd say.

He would pause there, waiting for me to tell him what I saw or, at least, what I was looking for, but I had nothing to offer on either count. He would always say, “Okay, then. Let me know if you need anything,” and he would retreat to his notations at the dining room table.

One of the things made immediately clear was that my mother was not compulsive about the perfection of her work; far from it. There were rows that were taut and fretful, too close and knotted, and then some evenness might be regained for a while, but the small knots would invariably appear again. And then there were loose patches, as if done in a period of distraction. I assumed that I was the distraction.

At the bottom of one of the boxes was a set of oversized paperbacks on knitting. The pages were dog-eared. She'd circled certain patterns and lessons with a blue ball-point, and at one point, a purple crayon, which I assume was what she'd had handy. But the other stitches—lace, cable, ribbing—never showed up. She seemed to stick to the basics.

I knelt down on the blanket, which was stretched out on the floor. I could see the pattern of a few days—the intricate flow of emotions, a fraught desperation that gave way to a wandering despair, the lilt of anxiety and depression. I called my father into the room. He came quickly as if he'd been hovering just on the other side of the doorway. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes expectant.

“I have a question,” I said, and I stood up so suddenly that I felt light-headed. I still held on to the blanket with one hand, squeezing a woolly tassel.