“There were other birds. The third Cuddles came from the pet shop. Uncle Victor bought it for me and said parakeets from the pet shop were supposed to be better than from the five and dime. It was green and had a bad disposition, bit Mama when she changed its water, came after me and got its wings into my hair…made me feel like Medusa. We were all glad to see that Cuddles go.”
“Do I dare ask what happened to that one?”
“Papa took it to our milkman in New Jersey. He liked pets and always took ours when they got too big or too messy to live in an apartment. I believe that all my pets had a better life in New Jersey. Listen to me. If that doesn’t sound Catholic—some weird notion of heaven, New Jersey.”
“A personal notion of heaven. We all have that.”
“Not the Santa Claus God on the clouds for you?”
He shook his head. “How many more Cuddles?”
“One more. The fourth Cuddles. From the pet shop.”
“I hope that one lived for a long time.”
“It did.”
“I’m relieved. I don’t think I could handle another dead parakeet.”
At HoJo’s, Anthony ordered Dr Pepper and a BLT, “heavy on the B.” I got coffee and onion rings. Like his mother, Anthony was short and skinny; but where she got by as petite, he was scrappy. A runt. He made up for it with green eyes and drop-dead eyelashes and a mouth the size of Pelham Bay Park. That was, if he decided to talk. And with Anthony, you never knew.
“Listen, Belinda,” he started off, “when your father got you that job for Frankly, he—”
“Franklin,” I corrected Anthony, who obviously was in the mood for outrageousness. Good. “My husband’s name is Franklin. And don’t tell me Papa got that job for me. Because I surely don’t want it.”
“Well, he did it for you. Out of gratitude.”
“Gratitude for what?” I scowled to warn Anthony I knew him inside out.
“For not having to sit through another Sunday dinner with Jonathan.”
Ever since Papa met Jonathan, he’d teased him by offering him only the most pungent food. He’d make chipmunk faces behind Jonathan’s back, twitchy nose and buck teeth. Curl his fingers close to his mouth—fussy little paws. Mama would tell him, “Don’t be so childish, Malcolm.”Childish. From early on, Papa was my concept of what childish meant: not being able to count on someone to buy you school supplies, to teach you an entire song, to be there when you die. Childish meant that promises were no more than teases.
“Okay, then,” I told Anthony, “I ditched Jonathan entirely for Papa’s sake. Now that we’ve established that—what’s this with Franklin and those goddamn church roofs?”
“Your father gave Frankly the choice of working in the office.”
“Then why didn’t Franklin tell me?”
“Because, quite frankly, Frankly—”
“Will you stop calling him that?”
“—wants to be on the roof and does not want to tell you everything. Why is it so difficult to understand that he likes working for your father? Or that I like working for your father?”
“You wanted to be a cook.”
“And your husband wanted to be a priest. But then the priest wanted to be a husband. And now the husband wants to be on the roof.”
I had to laugh.
“So—let me decide what I like. Let Franklin decide. And maybe assume that your father is good at what he does. Why do you think Franklin didn’t tell you that your father offered him an office job? Because you would make him take that office job.”
“You’re damn right I would. Because I don’t want him stuck on some church roof.”
“I don’t see why they’re different from other roofs.”
“Because Franklin used to be a priest.”
“You really want your father to turn down jobs because you snatch priests from altars?”
“I snatched him from the confessional. If you care to be accurate.”
“I always care to be accurate. Listen, your father and I have trained Franklin for a job he had zero training for. I mean, we get very few confessions on the roof, and so far we haven’t had requests for him to bless water. As for last rites—”
“You’ll be needing those for yourself if you don’t keep him off church roofs.”
“We’ve all gotten stuck on roofs. Just a few weeks ago, I was cleaning gutters on a three-story in Queens when the hose looped around the ladder and pulled it down, so that—”
“I’m so fucking sick of that story.”
“I’ve never fucking told you that story.”
“I’ve heard it. Believe me. Countless versions of the same fucking story.”
“Well, this one’s a different fucking story about a different fucking roof.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“You talk filth like that around your priest.”
“Sure.”
“And you still pee standing up?”
“Eventually I figured it wasn’t worth it.”
“Good. Because otherwise—” Anthony grinned his smutty-little-boy grin.
I could guess where he was heading with that one, and I quickly took it from him. “Because otherwise I would have grown balls.”
“You got balls.”
“Takes balls to grow balls.”
“So that’s how it works. Balls to go with that make-believe pecker. Which leads to make-believe-pecker envy.”
“The only time I get pecker envy is when it comes to peeing outdoors.”
“I hope you’re not corrupting your priest with any of this.”
“You would blush.”
“Church isn’t what it used to be.”
“Thank heavens and the parakeet for that.”
Though Anthony and I no longer threw rabbit droppings at each other or elbowed each other in the backseat of his father’s car, we still liked to go at each other with words as we did when he called my sinus problem “ugly boogers,” and I convinced him he would turn into a cocker spaniel because the liver-tasting spread on his sandwich was Alpo. While he kept spitting and crying, Bianca and I danced around him, told him if you ate dog food you turned into a dog.
“A cocker spaniel.”
“All cocker spaniels are really children who ate Alpo.”
“That’s why they look so sad.”
We could barely hear each other over Anthony’s howls.
How easily he cried. Bianca and I tormented him, fought over whom he liked best, fought each other while we fought over him. We negotiated a schedule for when each of us could play alone with Anthony, and we got jealous if one of us was friendly to him during the other’s time. Secretly, I knew I was his favorite. Even when I broke his belt buckle. Even when I scratched his leg. Whenever I wished I had a brother, I’d imagine him like Anthony, and then he’d be around anyhow and I wouldn’t need a brother of my own.
Anthony grabbed one of my onion rings. “So I was waiting on that roof in Queens, hoping for someone to hear me. But no one did.”
I resigned myself to listening. As I’d listened when Papa had come home with his stuck-on-the-roof tales.
“It was an uncommonly steep roof, Belinda.”
“Amazing how the roof gets steeper and higher whenever one of you tells that story.”
“It was steep.”
“A big steep treacherous roof.”
“You got it. And all along, the owners’ dog was watching me—a Dalmatian mutt.”
“Not a Great Dane?”
“Different roof. Anyhow, I finally managed to lasso that hose around the ladder and pull it up. I had to miss dinner.”
“You and Papa—” All at once I was furious. “Missing dinner. Missing—”
“Your father wasn’t even with me.”
“Missing dinner. Missing a school concert. Arriving weeks later, breathing apologies…lies.”
Anthony raised both palms toward me. “Hey—”
“You know how many versions of that roof story I’ve hea
rd?” I could barely swallow. “The breed of dog changes. The pitch of the roof. The size of the ladder. What remains the same are the lost hours…days. And then he’d try and charm me by letting me win at dominoes.”
“Eat your onion rings,” Anthony said gently.
I slid my plate toward him.
“Dominoes…” He sighed. “Games…I don’t see you often enough to stay in practice.” He slopped ketchup all over my onion rings. “If you weren’t my favorite relative…” He shook his head, suddenly serious. “What have I done to you?”
I felt that old question between us, giving me power, too much power. What if it had been me by the window? I’d come close to asking him before. But not this close. “Anthony—”
He looked at me, startled.
My heart was tilting. The question felt too dangerous, because knowing could be worse than what I imagined, could change what I was accustomed to seeing: Anthony by the open window, keening the way wind will trap itself in rain gutters. While Mama leans out and screams, “BiancaBiancaBianca—” While Uncle Victor races down flights of stairs as if he believed he’d catch my twin before she’d hit the sidewalk. While Aunt Leonora grips Anthony by the shoulders, her eyes wild, but what she sees in his face she hides from everyone—from herself—by yanking him against her bathrobe, moaning, rocking with him as if, together, they were the kind of rocking toy that’s weighted on the bottom and will eventually right itself.
“What is it?” Anthony leaned back, away from me.
So many ways of falling…I gripped his hands.
He tried to tug his thin fingers from mine.
But I held on—tight, so tight—held on for him and for myself. And asked him: “What if it had been me, Anthony?”
He shook his head.
“By the window? That day?”
He shook his head.
“You’re the one who was there with her. What if it had been me, Anthony? By the window? Would you have pushed me out instead?”
“I didn’t push…” Something in his eyes shifted. “That winter…?”
“That winter.” I held my breath.
“That winter I learned to hunt. I was seven,” he said, his voice suddenly that of a seven-year-old. “I went to Canada and came back with an earache. Remember?”
“I know what you’re doing.” By offering me his hunting story, he was dodging my question, mining for sympathy.
“I shot three rabbits.”
“Did they bleed?”
He blinked.
I felt queasy. Still, I pushed. “Did they bleed, Anthony?”
“First time you cry for ten minutes. Second time you whimper. After that it’s nothing.” He stalled while the waitress filled my coffee cup. Then he said, “Most of that trip I cried.”
“You just said you stopped crying after ten minutes.”
“Crying about the rabbit, yes. But I kept crying because of the cold. Dad and Grandpa…they took me hunting for hours in icy weather. When I told them how my fingers and feet were hurting, Grandpa said that was good.”
“Grandpa? I can’t picture him saying that to a child.”
“He said it was good because…” Anthony’s scrawny face grew hollow—“a man has to understand that killing is not fun. I already knew that.”
I felt all stiff through my neck, my shoulders. “I’m so sorry,” I said, and as I looked into his frog-green eyes, I had other memories of tormenting him—how easily he cried—memories that made me uneasy. Bianca and I wrestling him down, sitting on him, tickling his armpits and crotch. Maybe we had to see where he was different from us. Where he was like us.
I pressed my fingertips into my shoulders, drummed them into the muscles to loosen them a bit.
“I like that Franklin of yours.”
I felt him across from me, the closest I ever had to a brother, and in that instant he became every man who’d moved through my life: Papa; Franklin; my grandpa; Uncle Victor; my third-grade teacher; even my first husband. At first I didn’t like it that anything about Jonathan should remind me of these other men, considering his despicable comment about cats eating their young; but then there was that other side to him, too—familiar and tender and generous—that linked all of them. It was definitely there in Franklin and in Papa. It was also there in Anthony, despite the crap and the bluffing, and as he looked at me and nodded, I knew I could trust that he’d keep Franklin off church roofs even if he couldn’t quite see why. It was enough for him that it mattered to me.
“Sorry for the Alpo,” I said, “for the tickle game, for stealing Bianca’s giraffe, for—”
“I knew all along you had it.”
“I’m still afraid of throwing it away, of being found out.”
“You could bury it—” He grimaced. “No. That’s too weird.”
“Bury it where?”
“In her grave. But—”
“It’s not that weird.”
“If you want…” He bent toward me, no longer keeping me away.
“But I’d need you to do this with me.”
“Maybe some weekend when—”
“Next Sunday?”
“Today.” His eyes locked with mine.
I nodded. “You mean get it now.”
“You know where it is?”
When I said, “Yes,” it was with the certainty that Anthony and I would restore the onyx giraffe to my sister, today, and I felt toward him as if we’d already done so—relieved and grateful and amazed—felt as though I were already remembering the two of us kneeling at my twin’s grave site, the onyx giraffe in my hand, smooth veins of green within other greens. Opening the earth above the coffin feels odd. We reach into the ground, not to tuck the giraffe into Bianca’s coffin, but into the earth that yields to us though we have braced ourselves to come upon bone: rib or skull or femur. Yields to us.
Book Three
Floria 2001
The Weight of All That Was
Never Brought Forward
Floria is dying. Her husband has darkened the living room where she lies on the couch, and he’s holding her hands. Julian’s fingers are softer than hers
sinews and bones and mottled skin that’s been burning ever since Julian peeled strips of gauze from her, miles and miles of white gauze, paring her down to this last layer of herself, to her lungs half transparent with the lace her mother taught her to crochet as a girl. White on white
light and voices hanging above her
rubbing against her
“Try this, Mama.” Bianca…a spoon against Floria’s teeth. “Anthony cooked this soup for you.”
“It’ll be easy on your throat.” Julian. Standing between her couch and the china cabinet he made for their dance trophies. Cherry and aspen
blood and light
inlaid wood, like all the furniture he builds in his shop.
Soup like seaweed…lukewarm and salty on Floria’s tongue. Her nostrils feel bruised from the oxygen. A spoonful is all she can swallow. For nine days she has been dying—ever since Julian carried her out of Montefiore Hospital, his tweed coat flapping around her flimsy johnny. She made him bring her home because of the promise they made when they married, more than two decades ago. They were both fifty-five then, both old enough to consider their deaths despite this fierce-blooming passion that astounded them.
“Imagine, at our age,” she would marvel as she’d reach for him once again.
“Imagine…” he’d sigh as his mouth searched her skin.
Their promise was not to let each other die among strangers. “You’ll be dead first,” he’d scold when he’d find her on their fire escape at night, sneaking cigarettes, or when he’d taste tobacco on her despite the cough drops after smoking.
“I’m smoking less since I married you,” she’d protest and remind him of her compromise—no smoking in their apartment or in front of him.
But Julian wanted her to stop altogether, swore he’d take her for a visit to a convalescent home in Washington Height
s where smokers—mouths eaten away by cancer—sucked on cigarettes through tubes that stuck from the front of their necks. “Is that how you want to end up?” he’d ask.
Every argument they had—even arguments she started whenever he repaired the furniture of her relatives for free in his shop—ended with Julian predicting she’d die of lung cancer. Not that there were many quarrels in their marriage. Amazingly easy, getting along with Julian
the way she explains it to Belinda and Julian’s son, Mick—both past thirty when their parents marry—is that she and Julian left their thorns in others before they came together.
“Makes me queasy,” Belinda says, “to think of Papa with any of your thorns.”
“Jesus Christ, Belinda,” Leonora says. “Your mother is not talking about some bleeding Jesus with a thorn crown hanging from some bleeding cross.”
“It means the older we get,” Julian explains, “the more your mother and I know what’s worthy of fight.”
But then Julian is proven true about the cancer, and he’s not even the kind who likes to be right. Except about knowing as a young man that he loves her. Knowing on the day she marries Malcolm. Just as she knows. Telling her—when she calls him after her return from Italy—that he thinks of her often.
“Quite often…every day.”
Stunning her into admitting how she watched his eyes in the rearview mirror of the limo and imagined driving away with him.
“I almost did,” he confesses, “I almost drove past that church with you in your wedding gown. God, I wanted to—so much.”
“When I was in Italy,” she tells him, “I decided to leave Malcolm
“Malcolm…”
“It’s me, Julian.” Julian. His face above her. Gray
Years of marriage to Julian before he admits that Malcolm borrows money from him. Julian doesn’t want her to know, but she prods because she recognizes the discomfort in his turned-away eyes. Long-borrowed money will cause that discomfort. Never-returned money. It’s the look she’s seen in the faces of her brother, her Aunt Camilla, her father, various neighbors