The Violet Hour: A Novel (26 page)

“No,” Cassandra said, flipping another page. “I’m loading the dishwasher.”

“Well, don’t overdo it on the detergent. If you use too much you’ll end up with a residue on all your plates and glasses.”

After they hung up, she dialed her brother’s dorm. The phone rang and rang, as dorm phones often did. She hoped Howie was out enjoying himself, doing whatever it was he did for fun. But then the sound
of her mother’s voice came back to her, the way it had risen when she complained about Howie, as though she’d wanted him to hear.

Cassandra dialed the house again. “Is Howie there?” she asked when her mother picked up.

“As a matter of fact, he is.” Eunice allowed her children to live in the college dorms only if they promised to return home for dinner twice a week. Howie, unlike his sisters, seemed to be home more often than required.

“Well, will you put him on?”

Eunice’s suspicions flared. “What’s this all about?”

“It’s nothing. There’s just something I’ve been meaning to ask him.”

Reluctantly, Eunice called for her son. For what couldn’t have been longer than a minute or two, but felt like a whole fast lifetime, Cassandra waited in suspension on the line. The faraway sounds of her childhood home—the creak of old wood floors under soft carpet runners, the mournful chime of the antique clock in the hall—ticked and shifted in her ear like the wrappers and receipts at the bottom of her purse, the remains of some past week or month that continued to ride around with her, no longer of any use and fated to be thrown away, just as soon as she got around to doing it.

“Hello?” Howie said at last, as though he didn’t know he was speaking to his sister.

“Where’s Mom? Is she in the room? Answer vaguely so she doesn’t know what I’m asking.”

“Yes,” he said. “She’s—yes.”

“Listen, she told me about your plan to come west, and I think it’s a good one. I think you have to get the hell out of there as fast as you can and make your own life away from all that gloom and doom.”

“Okay.”

“And tell Mary I said so, too.”

“I will.”

“Of course, I’ll also tell her myself.”

“Okay.”

“But if Mom asks you, I didn’t encourage you. If anything, you tell her I told you to stay near home, so you’re defying me, too. It would be worse for everyone if she thinks we’re all just ganging up against her.”

“I agree.” She pictured him wavering in the kitchen doorway, absently swinging his long, large flipper of a hand, while Eunice monitored him from across the room. He was the only one of the three of them who didn’t seem to mind being watched. It was as though his inner self were deep enough that he could just turn in and reside there, leaving him with very little connection to the polite surface figure other people saw.

“Now make sure you have a specific story ready to tell her the second you get off the phone,” Cassandra said. “About what I told you just now. Because you know she’s going to ask.”

“Well, that’s a great idea,” Howie said. “I’m also going to see a production of
King Lear
downtown. I’m sure it will help with my paper.”

His quick reaction impressed her. “Oh, wow, are you really doing that? That’s great.”

“Of course,” he said, so brightly toneless that she had no idea if he was continuing to fake a conversation or giving her genuine information about his life. “The professor really recommends it. Here’s Mom again. Bye.”

“You hear that,” Eunice said, before he could’ve possibly gotten out of earshot. “At least he’s taking his education seriously. A whole class on Shakespeare. He seemed excited, didn’t he?”

Cassandra had always known Howie to be an even-tempered person, appearing to take the world as it came to him, rarely protesting or otherwise making a fuss, even as he quietly forged his own trail. He had almost never seemed excited about anything, certainly not in front of their mother, to whom he always solicitously deferred. She tried to picture him again and couldn’t. All she got was a figure of
a boy, with arms and legs and a head and hair. It seemed as though she hadn’t seen him in years, though in reality it had been just weeks since she and Abe had made their Christmas rounds, stopping both in Maryland and in Virginia over the course of a long, ragged week. Her wedding, in which Howie was the stoic best man, had been just two months prior to that. For a moment she felt she had missed some opportunity with her brother, to take that outstretched hand and hold it, and in doing so, somehow convey all that she couldn’t otherwise say.

But this was what it meant to grow up and marry. It meant that her old family had become less familiar as her new one took its place.

And, really, how her life had changed! Never before had her family been so small, or so satisfying. Abe came home each day with fresh news. This senior physician had praised his paper. That residency program had rated his application at the top of their list. Each compliment she took personally, as again and again the world seemed to confirm her instincts in love.

When he was awarded a residency at UCSF—his top choice—she felt as though
she
had been awarded a residency. As though a team of orderly, bespectacled intellects in long white coats had come into the studio where she sat throwing pots and announced over the whir of the wheels before her entire weekly class that she was the only one in the room who understood what truly mattered. The only one in the world, actually, other than Abe. They drank a bottle of champagne that night, just the two of them. He walked his fingers up her leg and gnawed upon her neck, striking spots she hadn’t known until that moment were somehow connected to her toes.

S
HE KNEW SHE
had to be careful, being so happy. Other people were still searching for what she had. Her sister, her friends. Diane, with whom she’d grown close over the months spent working side-by-side, was wishy-washy about every man she met, and Cassandra soon found that this was not an easy way to live.

“He’s so nice, but he’s an awful dancer,” she’d say of a new man. It had never occurred to Cassandra to seek out specific abilities or characteristics. That was why she and Abe worked, she wanted to say, but you could never tell people that kind of thing.

Diane often came over after work. Abe would return home, sometimes with a classmate, but most often alone, to find his wife and her friend flung across the two sofas in their living room, the air fragrant with the grass they were still or had just finished smoking. However far apart from herself she felt, Cassandra never failed to leap at him when he came in the door, her husband, her happiness, the center of all the goodness of her life. He had grown a beard, a full manly pelt that hid his face for her to find. Intimacy wanted a face. It demanded it, and so she never stopped seeking his out. His eyes would invariably water when she pressed her forehead into his, feeling the bones there. It was the smoke, she thought, the dense leafy air hitting him the moment he entered the house. It was her. It was everything.

“Hi, Abe,” Diane would say from her sofa.

“Hi, Diane,” Abe would say with his wife at his chest. He loved her friends as much as she did, and she loved to show him off. See, she was saying to Diane, there are good men. You just have to wait around long enough for one of them to walk in the door.

And then Abe would have a few hits if there were hits to have, and they would all go out for Indian food or pizza loaded with eggplant, zucchini, and other vegetables that were never found on pizzas back east.

Spring was approaching and Howie may have been planning to move west, but it was Mary who actually paid them a visit. The university’s spring break fell in April, Easter week, and while Howie would be researching his senior thesis in the library, Mary, a freshman, wanted nothing more than to see the other side of the country where her sister and brother-in-law had lived all this time. Even Eunice hadn’t been out to visit, declaring, almost in protest, that it was impossible to leave the funeral home at this critical time of year. All times were critical to Eunice, who saw the future not as something
that was dawning and reaching wide, but as the next day and the day after that and the day after that. So much the better, thought Cassandra, who had no interest in hosting her parents.

Mary, though, was another story. She had grown into a real person since Cassandra had moved out: nineteen, fish-lipped, dramatic. She appeared in the arrivals hall underdressed for the weather in sunglasses the size of small plates and white shorts so infinitesimal her long blond hair almost covered them. She was dragging a wobbly pale blue suitcase by a strap and had to stop every few seconds to right it.

“They let you out like that?” Cassandra asked, pressing her sister’s head into her shoulder.

“Of course not. Why do you think I had to come here? A whole week with them again? I couldn’t stand it.” Mary straightened with an awkward, balance-checking swoop, and Cassandra understood that her sister was using this trip as an opportunity to practice being someone new, perhaps even newer than the person she was in college.

They went out into the sunny afternoon between the terminal and the parking garage. Mary stopped on the sidewalk, not, as Cassandra first thought, to adjust her careening luggage, but to gape at the air and the light that were for the first time hitting her skin.

“Is it
always
like this?” Mary breathed, forgetting her new self. Her suitcase, still coasting on its momentum, plowed into the backs of her legs, an impact she hardly seemed to register.

Cassandra laughed. “Not always. But pretty much.” She had been in California too long. She’d forgotten how it felt—how the mild weather could be like a mattress after years of sleeping on a plank. Even in a space as narrow and uninviting as an airport parking garage.

“I see why you don’t come back!” Mary looked appalled, as though she sensed there was something not quite right about living in such weather, something vaguely dangerous about the whole sparkling, splendid thing. She pushed her suitcase back and regarded a giant potted palm with suspicion. It was still too soon to tell if Mary would undergo Cassandra’s conversion, and this uncertainty
alleviated a pressure Cassandra had been experiencing: a hard little bead of guilt she’d been carrying in her chest that she might be responsible for everyone leaving her parents. The bead shifted a little and resettled, in a place where it bothered her less and she might soon forget it was there.

On the road, Cassandra cracked the windows to offset the heat of the sun. The air that blitzed into the car was bright and cool. In the passenger seat, Mary pressed her legs straight against the floorboard and looked ahead at the road that wound them toward the city.

“I still can’t believe Mom let you come,” Cassandra said. “Some part of her must be counting on you to hate it. What does she know that I don’t?”

“Nothing.” Mary shrugged. “I mean, seriously, she knows nothing. I feel bad for her sometimes.”

Cassandra made her standard calculation; it was nearly seven o’clock, dinnertime there. She pictured their mother laying out three full place settings, for Howard, Howie, and herself, in an effort to not think about her absent daughters, daughters who were even now talking about her across the country. “I know what you mean. But, come on, she knows more than we give her credit for. She went through a lot at a young age. Seeing her father humiliated like that.” It was the one thing they had to cling to, the thing that could account for their mother’s hard-heartedness, her relentless striving. That her father, a Colorado farmer, had once owed money and been beaten bloody in his own yard while a young Eunice watched from the window. It wasn’t really an excuse, but it sure explained a lot.

“It’s actually the opposite,” Mary said in a pedantic tone Cassandra recognized from childhood, when Mary would share something new she’d learned in school, as though it truly were new knowledge, instead of something the rest of them had already been taught. “We used to give her credit for all kinds of things she was completely ignorant about.” As the youngest, Mary had things the easiest, and had, as if in return for her freedom, usually been the quickest to defend Eunice’s rules. Cassandra felt her chest tightening again.

“Anyway,” Mary said. “I promised I’d call her when we get to your apartment. So she knows I didn’t end up on the street.”

“God forbid!” Cassandra wailed.

Mary laughed; the joke never got old. “Will Abe be there?”

“In a few hours. We can all go out for dinner to celebrate your arrival.” She could feel Mary looking at her, as though she were trying to decide whether or not to say something. “What?”

“I just want you to know you guys don’t have to hide your stuff from me while I’m here,” she finally said.

“Well, thank you. What stuff exactly?”

“Your grass. I’m in college now. It’s not gonna shock me.”

“What makes you think—”

“Please,” Mary snorted. “I heard you talking at Christmas.” She stretched her legs farther, so that they began to look more like legs made of rubber than of flesh. “All I’m saying is I’m cool with it. And I won’t even be offended if you want to offer me some. Maybe I’ll even try it.”

Cassandra thought for a moment. “You minx.”

Mary grinned triumphantly.

Had she smoked grass at Mary’s age? She must’ve but she couldn’t remember. It was ages ago that she was in college, another life. She hardly wore any of the same clothes.

“Well, you won’t be the first person to come to California for the grass,” she finally said, still unsure what she was going to let her sister do.

Mary hugged herself, shivering. “Maybe what I really need is a California boy.”

Cassandra laughed. “They’re pretty nice, all right.”

“But you picked one from Virginia.” Her voice had formed an edge. She sounded jealous, which was ridiculous. Anyone could see that Mary had the long blond hair and erupting chest that attracted men on any coast.

“Who says he can’t be both? That’s why people come here.”

“I thought it was for the grass.”

Cassandra shook her head, and they lapsed into silence, cresting along in their pack of vehicles, sometimes gliding ahead of the others, sometimes drifting back. Cassandra felt herself sitting at a great distance from her sister, as though the passenger compartment had stretched, shifting Mary several lanes to the right and depositing her in another car altogether. But the distance gave her clarity. She glanced at Mary out of the corner of her eye and saw that she was puckering her lips, so used to watching others that she always expected she was being watched as well.