Diary

  “. . . murdered despite all your money and status . . .”

  “Look,” she says. “There's your stove. Right where you thought.” And she steps back and gives him the little flashlight.

  Every contractor, Misty tells him, they'll sign their work. Mark their territory. Finish carpenters will write on the subfloor before they lay the hardwood parquet or the carpet pad. They'll write on the walls before the wallpaper or tile. This is what's inside everybody's walls, this record of pictures, prayers, names. Dates. A time capsule. Or worse, you could find lead pipes, asbestos, toxic mold, bad wiring. Brain tumors. Time bombs.

  Proof that no investment is yours forever.

  What you don't really want to know—but you don't dare forget.

  Angel Delaporte, his face pressed to the hole, he reads, “. . . I love my wife and I love my kid . . .” He reads, “. . . I won't see my family pushed down and down the ladder by you low-life parasites . . .”

  He leans into the wall, his face twisting hard against the hole, and says, “This handwriting is so compelling. The way he writes the letter f in ‘set foot' and ‘fat fucking slob,' the top line is so long it overhangs the rest of the word. That means he's actually a very loving, protective man.” He says, “See the k in ‘kill you'? The way the front leg is extralong shows he's worried about something.”

  Grinding his face against the hole, Angel Delaporte reads, “. . . Waytansea Island will kill every last one of God's children if it means saving our own . . .”

  He says, the way the capital I's are thin and pointed proves Peter's got a keen sharp mind but he's scared to death of his mother.

  His keys jingle as he pokes the little flashlight around and reads, “. . . I have danced with your toothbrush stuck up my dirty asshole . . .”

  His face jerks back from the wallpaper, and he says, “Yeah, that's my stove all right.” He drinks the last of the wine, swishing it around, loud, in his mouth. He swallows it, saying, “I knew I had a kitchen in this house.”

  Poor Misty, she says she's sorry. She'll rip open the doorway. Mr. Delaporte, he probably wants to go get his teeth cleaned this afternoon. That, and maybe a tetanus shot. Maybe a gamma globulin, too.

  With one finger, Mr. Delaporte touches a big wet smear next to the hole in the wall. He puts his wineglass to his mouth and goes cross-eyed to find it empty. The dark, wet smear on the blue wallpaper, he touches it. Then he makes a nasty face and wipes his finger on the side of his bathrobe and says, “I hope Mr. Wilmot is heavily insured and bonded.”

  “Mr. Wilmot has been unconscious in the hospital for the last few days,” Misty says.

  Reaching a pack of cigarettes from his bathrobe pocket, he shakes one out and says, “So you run his remodeling firm now?”

  And Misty tries to laugh. “I'm the fat fucking slob,” she says.

  And the man, Mr. Delaporte says, “Pardon?”

  “I'm Mrs. Peter Wilmot.”

  Misty Marie Wilmot, the original shrewish bitch monster in the flesh. She tells him, “I was working at the Waytansea Hotel when you called this morning.”

  Angel Delaporte nods, looking at his empty wineglass. The glass, sweaty and smeared with fingerprints. He holds the wineglass up between them and says, “You want I should get you a drink?”

  He looks at where she pressed her face to his dining room wall, where she let one tear leak out and smeared his blue-striped wallpaper. A wet print of her eye, the crow's-feet around her eye, her obicularis oculi behind bars. Still holding the unlit cigarette in one hand, he takes his white terry cloth belt in his other hand and scrubs at the tearstain. And he says, “I'll give you a book. It's called Graphology. You know, handwriting analysis.”

  And Misty, who really did think the Wilmot house, the sixteen acres on Birch Street, meant happily ever after, she says, “You want to maybe rent a place for the summer?” She looks at his wineglass and says, “A big old stone house. Not on the mainland, but out on the island?”

  And Angel Delaporte, he looks back over his shoulder at her, at Misty's hips, then her breasts inside her pink uniform, then her face. He squints and shakes his head a little and says, “Don't worry, your hair's not that gray.”

  His cheek and temple, all around his eye, he's powdered with white plaster dust.

  And Misty, your wife, she reaches toward him, her fingers held open. Her palm turned up, the skin rashy and red, she tells him, “Hey, if you don't believe I'm me,” she says, “you can smell my hand.”

  June 30

  YOUR POOR WIFE, she's racing from the dining room to the music room, grabbing up silver candlesticks, little gilded mantel clocks, and Dresden figurines and stuffing them in a pillowcase. Misty Marie Wilmot, after working the breakfast shift, now she's looting the big Wilmot house on Birch Street. Like she's a goddamn burglar in her own house, she's snatching up silver cigarette boxes and pillboxes and snuffboxes. Off fireplace mantels and nightstands, she's collecting saltcellars and carved-ivory knickknacks. She's lugging around the pillowcase, heavy and clanking with gilded-bronze gravy boats and hand-painted porcelain platters.

  Still in her pink plastic uniform, sweat stains wet under each arm. Her name tag pinned to her chest, it lets all the strangers in the hotel call her Misty. Your poor wife. She works the same kind of shitty restaurant job her mom did.

  Unhappily ever after.

  After that, she's running home to pack. She's slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some of them as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.

  Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they'll turn. She's trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She's trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. And each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.

  Today is moving-out day. It's another longest day of the year.

  In the big house on East Birch Street, everybody's supposed to be packing, but no. Your daughter comes downstairs with a total of nothing to wear for the rest of her life. Your loony mother, she's still cleaning. She's somewhere in the house, dragging the old vacuum cleaner around, on her hands and knees, picking threads and bits of lint out of the rugs and feeding them into the vacuum hose. Like it matters a good goddamn how the rugs look. Like the Wilmot family will ever live here ever again.

  Your poor wife, that silly girl who came here a million years ago from some trailer park in Georgia, she doesn't know where to begin.

  It's not like the Wilmot family couldn't see this coming. You don't just wake up one day and find the trust fund empty. All the family money gone.

  It's only noon, and she's trying to put off her second drink. The second is never as good as the first. The first one is so perfect. Just a little breather. A little something to keep her company. It's only four hours until the renter comes for the keys. Mr. Delaporte. Until they need to vacate.

  It's not even a real drink drink. It's a glass of wine, and she's only had one, maybe two swallows. Still, just knowing it's nearby. Just knowing the glass is still at least half full. It's a comfort.

  After the second drink, she'll take a couple aspirin. Another couple drinks, another couple aspirin, and this will get her through today.

  In the big Wilmot house on East Birch Street, just inside the front door, you'll find what looks like graffiti. Your wife, she's dragging around her pillowcase of loot when she sees it—some words scribbled on the back of the front door. The pencil marks there, the names and dates on the white paint. Starting from knee high, you can see dark little straight lines, and along each line a name and number:

  Tabbi, age five.

  Tabbi, who's twelve now with lateral canthal rhytides around her eyes from crying.

&n
bsp; Or: Peter, age seven.

  That's you, age seven. Little Peter Wilmot.

  Some scribbles say: Grace, age six, age eight, age twelve. They go up to Grace, age seventeen. Grace with her baggy jowls of submental fat and deep playsmal bands around her neck.

  Sound familiar?

  Does any of this ring a bell?

  These pencil lines, the crest of a flood tide. The years 1795 . . . 1850 . . . 1979 . . . 2003. Old pencils were thin sticks of wax mixed with soot and wrapped with string to keep your hands clean. Before that are just notches and initials carved in the thick wood and white paint of the door.

  Some other names on the back of the door, you won't recognize. Herbert and Caroline and Edna, a lot of strangers who lived here, grown and gone. Infants, then children, adolescents, adults, then dead. Your blood relations, your family, but strangers. Your legacy. Gone, but not gone. Forgotten but still here to be discovered.

  Your poor wife, she's standing just inside the front door, looking at the names and dates just one last time. Her own name not among them. Poor white trash Misty Marie, with her rashy red hands and her pink scalp showing through her hair.

  All this history and tradition she used to think would keep her safe. Insulate her, forever.

  This isn't typical. She's not a boozer. In case anybody needs to be reminded, she's under a lot of stress. Forty-one fucking years old, and now she has no husband. No college degree. No real work experience—unless you count scrubbing the toilet . . . stringing cranberries for the Wilmot Christmas tree . . . All she's got is a kid and a mother-in-law to support. It's noon, and she's got four hours to pack everything of value in the house. Starting with the silverware, the paintings, the china. Everything they can't trust to a renter.

  Your daughter, Tabitha, comes down from upstairs. Twelve years old, and all she's carrying is one little suitcase and a shoe box wrapped with rubber bands. With none of her winter clothes or boots. She's packed just a half dozen sundresses, some jeans, and her swimsuit. A pair of sandals, the tennis shoes she's wearing.

  Your wife, she's snatching up a bristling ancient ship model, the sails stiff and yellowed, the rigging as fine as cobwebs, and she says, “Tabbi, you know we're not coming back.”

  Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”

  Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.

  Your wife, your daughter, and your mother. The three women in your life.

  Stuffing a sterling silver toast rack into her pillowcase, your wife yells, “Grace!”

  The only sound is the roar of the vacuum cleaner from somewhere deep in the big house. The parlor, maybe the sunporch.

  Your wife drags her pillowcase into the dining room. Grabbing a crystal bone dish, your wife yells, “Grace, we need to talk! Now!”

  On the back of the door, the name “Peter” climbs as high as your wife can remember, just higher than her lips can stretch when she stands on tiptoe in her black pair of high heels. Written there, it says “Peter, age eighteen.”

  The other names, Weston and Dorothy and Alice, are faded on the door. Smudged with fingerprints, but not painted over. Relics. Immortal. The heritage she's about to abandon.

  Twisting a key in the lock of a closet, your wife throws back her head and yells, “Grace!”

  Tabbi says, “What's wrong?”

  “It's this goddamn key,” Misty says, “it won't work.”

  And Tabbi says, “Let me see.” She says, “Relax, Mom. That's the key to wind up the grandfather clock.”

  And somewhere the roar of the vacuum cleaner goes quiet.

  Outside, a car rolls down the street, slow and quiet, with the driver leaning forward over the steering wheel. His sunglasses pushed up on top of his face, he stretches his head around, looking for a place to park. Stenciled down the side of his car, it says, “Silber International—Beyond the Limits of Being You.”

  Paper napkins and plastic cups blow up from the beach with the deep thump and the word “fuck” set to dance music.

  Standing beside the front door is Grace Wilmot, smelling like lemon oil and floor wax. Her smoothed gray head of hair stops a little below the height she was at age fifteen. Proof she's shrinking. You could take a pencil and mark behind the top of her head. You could write: “Grace, age seventy-two.”

  Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace's hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.

  Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You'll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it's time.”

  And your wife, who doesn't have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”

  Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.

  Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn't that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn't you always want to paint?”

  The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.

  Why Grace Wilmot is even cleaning, God only knows. What they need to do is pack. This house: your house: the sterling silver tableware, the forks and spoons are as big as garden tools. Above the dining room fireplace is an oil painting of Some Dead Wilmot. In the basement is a glittering poisonous museum of petrified jams and jellies, antique homemade wines, Early American pears fossilized in amber syrup. The sticky residue of wealth and free time.

  Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

  Instead of packing anything of value, something they could sell, Grace brings this old box of paints. Tabbi has her shoe box of junk jewelry, her dress-up jewelry, brooches and rings and necklaces. A layer of loose rhinestones and pearls roll around in the bottom of the shoe box. A box of sharp rusted pins and broken glass. Tabbi stands against Grace's arm. Behind her, just even with the top of Tabbi's head, the door says “Tabbi, age twelve” and this year's date written in fluorescent pink felt-tipped pen.

  The junk jewelry, Tabbi's jewelry, it belonged to these names.

  All that Grace has packed is her diary. Her red leather diary and some light summer clothes, most of them pastel hand-knit sweaters and pleated silk skirts. The diary, it's cracked red leather with a little brass lock to keep it shut. Stamped in gold across the cover, it says “Diary.”

  Grace Wilmot, she's always after your wife to start a diary.

  Grace says, Start painting again.

  Grace says, Go. Get out and visit the hospital more.

  Grace says, Smile at the tourists.

  Peter, your poor, frowning ogre of a wife looks at your mother and daughter and she says, “Four o'clock. That's when Mr. Delaporte comes to get the keys.”

  This isn't their house, not anymore. Your wife, she says, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four, if it's not packed or locked up by then, you'll never see it again.”

  Misty Marie, her wineglass has at least a couple swallows left in it. And seeing it there on the dining room table, it looks like the answer. It looks like happiness and peace and comfort. Like Waytansea Island used to look.

  Standing here inside the front door, Grace smiles and says, “No Wilmot ever leaves this house forever.” She says, “And no one who comes here from the outside stays for long.”

  Tabbi looks at Grace and says, “Granmy, quand est-ce qu'on revient?”

  And her grandmother says, “En trois mois,” and pats Tabbi's head. Your old, useless mother goes back to feeding lint to the vacuum cleaner.

  Tabbi starts to open the front door, to take her suitcase to the car. T
hat rusted junk pile stinking of her father's piss.

  Your piss.

  And your wife asks her, “What did your grandmother just tell you?”

  And Tabbi turns to look back. She rolls her eyes and says, “God! Relax, Mom. She only said you look pretty this morning.”

  Tabbi's lying. Your wife's not stupid. These days, she knows how she really looks.

  What you don't understand you can make mean anything.

  Then, when she's alone again, Mrs. Misty Marie Wilmot, when no one's there to see, your wife goes up on her tiptoes and stretches her lips toward the back of the door. Her fingers spread against the years and ancestors. The box of dead paints at her feet, she kisses the dirty place under your name where she remembers your lips would be.

  July 1

  JUST FOR THE RECORD, Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife's a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.

  Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She's “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She's your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She's queen of the fucking slaves, and you're a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.

  Dear sweet Peter, you're in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.

  With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. Your hands, the fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist. Every muscle and tendon getting shorter and shorter. The muscles in your back, your spinal erectors, they shrink and pull your head back until it's almost touching your ass.