The Woman Upstairs (15 page)

“Holiday assembly. Nobody says ‘Christmas’ anymore, Dad. It was fine. I’ll leave it alone now, but I want to say that it seems important, you know—”

He put his hands up. “Nora. Please. Let’s say we’ve come here for your mother. It makes me remember how much your mother enjoyed it. Is that good enough?”

“Of course, Dad.” I sighed. I sipped my tea. “So the third-grade play this time was
The Fir Tree
. Do you know it? From the story by Hans Christian Andersen …”

From my father, then, I tried to take the WASP’s advice to live
as if
. As if the Fun House were real life. As if I enjoyed things I didn’t enjoy. As if I were happy, and as if I hadn’t been abandoned by the people I loved.

Didi wasn’t buying it. Three days before Christmas, at the busiest time of year, she left the shop in the hands of Jamie, her employee, for two hours, and took me to tramp through the snow around Jamaica Pond, smoking pot and sipping hot mulled wine from a thermos.

“What’s eating you, doodlebug?” Her cheeks were ruddy from the cold, her vivid hair blowing from beneath her cap. She has big feet and took big strides, planting herself with each step.

“What are you talking about?”

“Vegas, Vegas. What happens here, stays here. I won’t even spill to Esther, I promise.” She always said that and I never knew wholly whether to believe her. “You’re miserable about
something
.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re wearing makeup. Sure sign. Spill it.”

“There’s nothing to spill.”

“Flirtation in the corridors? A tasty new science teacher? A fireman who waves when you pass the station each morning?”

“Ridiculous.”

“Somebody’s maligned you? School politics again? That Shauna bitch?”

“She’s not a bitch. She and I don’t always agree, but she’s not a bitch.”

“Do you think the FBI has us bugged? What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“So that’s the problem.” She stopped marching and looked straight at me, straight through me. “It’s the studio, isn’t it?”

“What about it?”

“It’s that woman, and the studio. It’s your work. It’s about your art. I can tell.”

“What can you tell?”

We walked on a stretch in silence. She knew when to wait. It was like shucking oysters: a skill.

“I’m not working,” I said. “Not at all.”

“But that’s crazy—it’s vacation week. You don’t have the brats, you don’t have to travel. What’s going on?”

“I can’t bring myself to go there.”

“Is it a process problem? Are you stuck?”

“No.”

“It’s a personal problem. It’s the Siren. Let me guess: She takes up too much space? She doesn’t stop talking? She smells bad!” Didi giggled a dopey giggle, and then caught herself. “Are you crying?”

“No,” I said, but there were tears behind my eyes and even as I blinked I saw her see them. “It’s nothing.”

And then, I tried to explain. I explained about the weeks of work and conversation, the autumn in which I’d come somehow to feel that Sirena and Reza were mine, were my family almost, my secret; and then the strangeness of meeting Skandar, and the greater strangeness of my dream, that it made me self-conscious even to recall; and I told the story of the attack, the hospital, being in their house; and then the silence afterward.

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in
my head—in my memory, in my thoughts—was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just
less
for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes; shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said.

By the time I finished the telling, I was desolate. The cold of the wind and the snow on the path, the rimed, graded ice of the pond, it was all inside me, and my heart, small and shrunken, was without.

“Don’t you feel better for talking about it?” Didi said, her giant’s hand gently on my shoulder.

“Not really,” I said. “I think I feel worse.”

“So you’re in love with Sirena, and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child. Have I got it right?”

“Not one bit.”

“You summarize, then, in twenty words or less. How would you account for it all?”

“It’s like waking up, you know? At school, each year, I take out this coffee-table book about the wonders of the world, both natural and man-made, and it’s full of the most incredible photographs—of Ayers Rock, the Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat, Petra, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids—”

“I get it.”

“And the point is that whenever I lose faith in my life, I look at those pictures and I think, ‘You haven’t been here’ and ‘You haven’t seen that,’ and I’m suddenly filled with wonder, like the sky opening, you know, to think that all this exists, and hope, because I might someday experience some of it—the smells, the sounds, what the light is like.”

“So, okay?”

“So this fall, them, it’s been a bit like that: the sky opening; hope. A feeling of possibility. Yes, hope. Like maybe it isn’t all over yet.”

“Why would it all be over?”

“Because I’m thirty-seven and single and I teach elementary school and wear clogs every day.”

“I’m thirty-nine next month. Almost forty. I like to think of it as a whole new decade beginning. It’s gonna be great. I know it—Esther is forty-two, after all, and she just gets hotter by the minute.”

“By the minute?”

“To me, yeah. But that’s not the point. What’s got you so downcast, then? They’ve given you hope, and now they’ve gone away for the holidays. I don’t get the big downer. They wouldn’t have invited you over for Christmas dinner even if they’d been here, would they? Or would you have invited them to join you and your dad at Aunt Baby’s place in Rockport?”

I was laughing in spite of myself. We’d circled the pond and were almost back where we’d started, close to the Jamaicaway and the roar of the traffic. An old lady was walking her old dog along the footpath toward us, a gray-muzzled black Lab that picked through the snow as though it pained his paws; but she, the old lady, was muttering to herself, shaking her head in its woolly cap and laughing, like me.

“Come on, it’s got to be hormonal. You don’t have any actual reason to feel sorry for yourself.”

“I took Reza to the hospital. I stayed with them half the night. And then they don’t even call to say he’s okay?”

“So they’re bush pigs. Raised by wolves. No big deal. That describes half of America and probably more than half of the world at large. A handwritten note on personalized stationery would’ve been ideal, but hey, you can’t have everything.”

“But they might not even come back.”

“Why wouldn’t they come back?”

“She hates it here, she told me; and now that Reza’s been attacked twice … it seems possible they’d stay in Paris.”

“Then you’ll get the whole studio all for yourself. Come on, Nora, you’re being ridiculous.”

“If it seems ridiculous to you, it’s because I haven’t properly explained to you what it feels like.”

Didi tossed a stick out onto the ice, where it skittered and slid, and made the black Lab, now far away, bark. “You’ve told me all right. I get
it. But you have to stop thinking that what you’re feeling isn’t in your control.”

“It isn’t. You can’t help how you feel.”

“Says who?”

I shrugged. “It’s cold. Can we go back now?”

“Okay. But you know, you don’t even have to feel the cold if you choose not to.”

“Right. Really.”

“You’re making up stories in your head. There’s nothing real in them. You don’t have any idea what those people are doing, or thinking, or why your Siren didn’t call. You’re just making stuff up.”

“I’m not a fool, you know.”

Didi put her arm around my shoulder. She emanated heat, even in the frigid air. “Nobody’s calling you a fool. Just a pessimist. If all you know is that you don’t know, can’t you let go a bit? Or at least make up a good story?”

“My OCD gets in the way.”

“So put your OCD to work for you. Get back to that studio and sit down and finish Emily’s room. So that whatever happens when they come back, or even if they don’t come back—which I seriously doubt—you’ll have the satisfaction of having used the time. My mother always said there’s no sense worrying about things you can’t do anything about.”

“A cliché for every occasion.”

“That’s my mom. But she’s no fool, either, you know.”

So I tried to take Didi’s advice, too. Christmas itself was spent in Aunt Baby’s condo by the sea in Rockport with her—my mother’s sister—and my father, two lonely and mild septuagenarians not even given to sentimental reminiscence, stultifyingly locked in their present, their small ailments, the weather, the television news, which news was full of nothing—although only a day later, when the tsunami struck in Asia, it would be full of death. We labored jauntily through an enormous meal—the dry turkey I was involved in overcooking, the vast
tray of candied yams, the bready stuffing and roast potatoes and the limp green beans—serenaded by the tinkling loop of Christmas carols from the Vienna Boys’ Choir that Aunt Baby had loved all my life.

Heavily jowled and powdered, physically so different from her birdlike sister, my mother, Aunt Baby, arthritic, limped in such a way that every step put me in mind of her unoiled bones grinding in their sockets. Even with, or perhaps because of, her carefully outlined crimson mouth, she looked like my dead grandfather in drag, had sparse white hair voluminously flossed to mask her scalp, and a scratchy deep voice. She smelled strongly of Yardley English Lavender, difficult, in the twenty-first century, to procure on the open market.

She’d never married, was devoutly Catholic, and what I most feared becoming: doughty, self-sufficient and utterly without issue. I sat on her pristine sky-blue couch and tried not to see, on every flat surface, the rows of framed family photos of my brother and me growing up, of my parents and grandparents, of my second cousins in Atlanta, her cousin June’s three kids, similarly recorded from layettes to graduations to weddings, and even the newest additions, my niece, my cousins’ kids, in frames as carefully dusted and apparently antique as the rest. It had always been faintly effronting to me, the way Aunt Baby claimed our family lives as if they were her own, as if Matt and I were her offspring instead of her sister’s. “Get your own life,” I’d wanted to say, “you can’t have mine!” But how could she have gotten her own life when she’d given it over to the care of others—her parents, her relatives, fellow parishioners. She’d always been the sidekick. Even in dying, my mother got to play the starring role. Now I would want to ask her where she stowed her fury and how she managed always to appear so calm, so humbly thrilled by the smallest attentions (I gave her an espresso machine that Christmas, and although I later discovered she never used it, she grew wavery and emotional when she opened the package: that I’d thought this much of her! That she’d been so valued!), but she is a casualty of these last five years, blessed, as she would have seen it, to suffer an aneurysm in the parish office and never to regain consciousness, a sweet death in repayment for her life of devotion, and a burden, mercifully, to no one.

I can imagine, now, what it cost her, to be our Aunt Baby, an over-aged
infant to the last, instead of the grown-up named Cecily Mallon that she might have become. Knowing my own life and how little of what most matters in it is seen on the outside, how remotely my own outline resembles my reflection, I’m sorry to think that the real Aunt Baby is now lost forever. I, who so feared resembling her, couldn’t ask, and know that nobody else thought to, so brave Aunt Baby lived “as if” until the end. Although then again, maybe she followed my father’s precepts so assiduously that her soul and her self in the world became one.

At least Christmas in Rockport was quick. We went before noon, we helped to cook, we took a drive along the shore to watch the waves bash whitely on the rocks in their eternal rhythm; we ate, cleaned, left. By nine thirty on Christmas night I was back at my apartment, having dropped my father in Brookline on the way home. I’d done all of the dishes for Baby before we left, leaving her to sit in the overheated living room with her swollen feet up on an ottoman, gossiping languidly with my father about the ailments of their generation.