Truth & Dare (22 page)

“Well,” cousin Declan said. “She knows now. All right?” The phrase “All right?” asked as a rhetorical question turned out to be one of my cousin’s signatures. I wondered if he’d picked it up in Canada.

My mother just shook her head. “It’s funny,” she said. “There was a time in her life when she was a happy person.”

We stared out the windows. It was raining. We didn’t talk for while.

“The Yaqui Indians have a name for a day like this,” said cousin Declan as we pulled into the cemetery.

“Yeah?” I said. “What’s that?”

“Minas Derendah,” he said.

“What’s that mean?” The car stopped. A man with an umbrella opened the door.

“It’s kind of hard to translate,” cousin Declan said. “All right?”

After the ceremony we went to a local brew pub called John Harvard’s. Years earlier it had been called The Covered Wagon. I’d had my senior prom there. Before that I’d seen Count Basie and his orchestra perform in the same place. The spot where the Count’s piano had once been was now occupied by an enormous copper kettle containing thousands of gallons of ale.

“So, Eleanor,” cousin Declan said, after our beers had arrived. “I wanted to tell you I’m getting married.”

“You are?” said my mother. “That’s great. Who to?”

“This woman,” cousin Declan said. “I met her on a vision quest.”

We all sat there in silence for a while. There was a table of secretaries next to us who all burst into laughter at something. Finally my mother said, “Well. Isn’t that nice.”

“I wanted to invite you to the wedding.” He looked over at me. “You, too, Jenny. If you want. It’s going to be in California. During the equinox.”

“The equinox,” my mother said. “And when is that again?”

“September twenty-first,” said cousin Declan. “I want you to be there if you’d like to come. You should know, though, we’re going to have a vision quest as part of the ceremony. All right? I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“Of course I wouldn’t be uncomfortable at a vision quest,” my mother said. “Not if it makes you happy.” She supped her beer, then thought about it. “Now what would this involve exactly?”

Declan chose his words carefully. “Well, we’ll all be camping
out. This is near Big Sur. The ceremony itself will be performed by a shaman in a teepee. Then we sit in the sweat lodge.”

“A sweat lodge,” my mother said, fascinated. “Jenny, have you ever been in a sweat lodge?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Oh, wait,” my mother said. “September twenty-first is the Philadelphia Flower Show. Darn it.” She looked at me. “Jenny, you’ll just have to represent the family.”

Declan finished his beer. For a guy who ate only plums, I thought, he sure could put away the beers. “What do you think?” said my cousin. “Can you make it?” He smiled strangely. “I’m telling you, it’ll be something to remember! All right?”

“All right,” I said, and at that moment saw the future in all its completeness.

Seven months later, I was in a teepee by the Pacific Ocean watching cousin Declan exchange vows with a woman named Dakota. I was wearing a long blue dress. You could hear the waves hitting the shore as the two of them said their vows. As it turned out the ceremony wasn’t all that mystical—the shaman read from the Book of Common Prayer.

After the wedding, a big fire was lit outside and people danced around it playing drums. Cousin Declan came over to me and gave me a giant hug. I could feel his ribs through his poncho. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “You and me, we’re the last of the Mohicans, all right?”

Dakota was standing by the fire with her arms spread wide. I noticed she had a ring on every finger. The shaman approached her, beating a drum.

“It’s important,” said cousin Declan. “Family.”

The shaman was wearing some sort of headdress that had once been part of a goat. He began chanting.

It’s humiliatin
’, I thought.
It’s mortifyin
’.

One day as I looked out the window at the lovely red trees of autumn I imagined that I saw someone drop an anvil out of a window, an anvil tied to a long rope whose nether end was firmly affixed to my own leg. I saw the anvil disappear. I saw the rope rapidly playing out. I felt the knot suddenly tighten around my leg. The next thing I knew my head fell down on the desk. A student came into my office but I couldn’t talk to him. After a while he went to get the department secretary and the secretary got the department chair and the chair called security and security called an ambulance. For the next few months I spent some time resting and thinking over my recent mistakes. During this period my mother wrote me lots of cheerful letters. She reminded me that, in spite of all of this, there are good things in the world and that it’s important to keep sight of these good things and not to forget them. I noticed she didn’t mention any of these good things by name. I didn’t figure I was one of them.

The window in my room at the Maine Medical Center was open, and a hummingbird buzzed among some red flowers outside. My husband was staying at Ronald McDonald House. I smelled the smell of burning leaves, heard the sound of rakes moving across suburban lawns. Now and again I sang my aunt’s little song.

Where am I going to live when I get home?

One of the things that’s surprised me since I came out of the hospital is the fact that almost everyone I talk to has some sort of similar story to tell. Oh, for heaven’s sake, they tell me. I’ve had times when I thought I was never going to be able to leave the house again. A good friend of mine told me about a period she went through when she took five showers every day. Another friend told me about going to the beach
in Florida one time and staying inside with the shades pulled down for six days. Someone else told me he went through a time when he slept less than an hour every night, lying there the rest of the time frozen in self-loathing, insomnia and horror.

I think sometimes about Perry van Roden, covered with oil paint. I think about my grandfather, buried in an unmarked grave on Hart Island. I think about my aunt, so relieved to find that her own death did not hurt.

Mostly, though, I think about how fragile we are, how full of love and imagination and hope, and how simply all our little boats can crash upon the rocks. It is a world full of easily broken people, people like my aunt and me, who worry whether or not they’re insane. Maybe like you, whoever you are.

For weeks before my eighth birthday, Aunt Nora was upstairs in her attic apartment, playing with my present. Whatever it was she had bought me had batteries, that much was for sure. I could hear the thing beeping and whistling as its gears turned and its wheels moved it around the floor.

On the big day, the doorbell rang and I went to the door and opened it. A horse was standing there. “Hi, Jenny,” the horse said. I could tell that the voice actually came from my father, who was hiding behind the horse, not very effectively as it turned out, because I could see his legs. The next thing I knew, my sister and her friends jumped out from behind some hedges and everyone shouted, “Surprise!” It was very exciting. Moments later, lots of eight- and nine-year-olds were riding a horse around our yard.

The only problem, of course, was that I didn’t like horses. My sister rode them and my parents went off every weekend
to watch her ride while I stayed home and ate pancakes. I didn’t like the way they smelled, I didn’t like the noises they made, and above all I didn’t like having to watch one walk around and around in circles with my sister on its back.

So after a while I left my parents and my sister and all of her horsey friends and the horse itself and went back inside. For a while I thought about eating the cake by myself, but I knew this wasn’t a good idea because it would too
self-evidently
declare my sadness. There wasn’t any rule against being sad in my house; you just weren’t supposed to be public about it.

From the attic came the sound of singing. I walked up the stairs and found the door to Aunt Nora’s apartment open. She wouldn’t live with us much longer. Sunlight filtered down the stairs.

“Is that you, Jenny?” she called.

I ran up the stairs to find her in a kind of Japanese kimono she’d made for herself. She bowed to me. “Honorable niece,” she said.

In her arms was a doll she’d sewn herself out of a sock and some yarn. It had feline ears and long whiskers and luxurious eyelashes. “Her name is Mao-Mao,” she said. “She’s a kittygirl.”

It was the most wonderful gift in the world. I hugged the kittygirl as hard as I could. I was consumed with astonishment, unable to speak.

She put a needle on the hi-fi. She’d recently purchased a novelty record by a bandleader named Eddie Lawrence called “Old Vienna.” As his band performed Strauss waltzes, Eddie Lawrence performed a monologue about a strudel-eating contest. The climax of the story was a moment when a giant strudel went out of control and rolled down the Matterhorn, thus destroying Old Vienna once and for all.
Zee giant strudel 
slid down ze mountain and viped out ze entire population! Und zey put up a zign, zaying, “By order of zee emperor, zere will be no strudel eating on zee mountain today.”

Aunt Nora walked in her kimono to the window and looked out at my parents and my sister and her friends riding their horse in circles around the yard. Light slanted through the window and shone upon the floor.

“Ah!” Aunt Nora said wistfully. “Zat was Vienna!”

The clock in the corner softly chimed the hour. I lay on the floor for a while longer and listened to a story about an avalanche of strudel.