The lawyer had told her a week, maybe two. And maybe the waiting was the worst part. Cat wrapped herself up in death. She was ready for it. She’d sit in the chair by the window, looking down at the people on the street. You could hear their voices rising up. Laughter or somebody shouting. Her skin had gone yellow. Sometimes I could get her to go down to the wharf and we’d walk around and I’d hold you up on my chest like a little kitten and even the wind could make you cry, even just the wind. She’d have this blank, frightened-foal look that made my heart weary. I’d have to take her to the clinic sometimes, rows of orange seats, and I’d make a cradle for you on my legs and people would hunch over and look at you out of their ruined faces. A week later the lawyer called to say arrangements had been made. I thought I’d made my peace with it, but I went into the bathroom and threw up my supper.
We left that place, that awful apartment, and we owed the bastard landlord plenty. I helped Cat into the car and buckled your little car seat in the back. I remember the sunlight, bright as Dunkin’ Donuts at three o’clock in the morning, when the smell lures you in off the street and you sit down at the counter and they put the coffee in front of you and you think to yourself: There is nothing better than this. The heavy white cup in your hand.
I drove straight to New England, only stopping to use the toilet or buy some food. Cat slept most of the way, waking only to feed or change you. I tried to get her to eat. I had some applesauce and peanut butter and I made her drink some milk. What she needed was a hospital, not some car ride across the country, but she wouldn’t let you go until she met them, your future parents. It was all arranged. It was the only way she would give you up.
I want to tell you about the drive, the way I felt. The hours passed slowly, unraveling in a blur, almost like a dream. Sometimes it rained and you and Cat were sleeping and I’d listen to it pounding the roof of the car. I knew I was losing you both. It was the end of something and it made me feel desperate. I remember driving through this town with its dark corners, looking to score. We lost a whole day with me fucked up out of my mind and you screaming in the backseat and Cat hardly moving.
They had a farm in Massachusetts and Cat liked the idea of you growing up someplace pretty, and they had horses, which clinched it. We pulled up this long driveway and my body began to shake a little. It was a mixture of feelings, both awful and good but mostly awful. The rain was coming down hard and I stopped for a moment and put the window down and just listened to it. There is nothing that compares to the sound of a hard rain.
We got up to the top of the driveway and this house appeared, this fucking mansion. They saw the car and came out with umbrellas. Cat wasn’t doing well. She started to wheeze like she couldn’t breathe right. She couldn’t bear it, the whole ordeal; she didn’t want to get out. We sat for a moment looking through the fogged-up windshield with the wipers going back and forth, back and forth, and them standing out there in the rain under umbrellas, waiting, and Cat took my hand. She took my hand and she squeezed it. Then she said, “You take her.”
She couldn’t get out of the car. She just didn’t have the strength. And I could feel her slipping away from me. It worried me. It worried me so much. I got out and gave the people a little wave to let them know everything was on like we’d planned, and then I opened the back door and took you out. Cat wouldn’t turn around and I understood that she couldn’t. The woman who would become your mother ran over with the umbrella, her blue eyes filling with tears. I could see she wanted you like nothing she’d ever wanted before. I could see a lot of things about her in that single moment. I could tell she had suffered in her life and that you were a gift to her. She gasped out loud, putting her hand over her mouth, and touched your head. The rain fell harder, harder than I’d ever heard it before or ever would again, and we ran into the house. I could feel them wanting you so bad. I shook his hand. I don’t know what else to say about him. At that point I couldn’t really look at him. She smelled like lilacs, I think. Anyway, I took you out of your seat and held you up like the prize that you were, and kissed you on your little forehead, soft as a flower petal, and then I handed you over to her.
They made me sign some papers, and I had to go out and get Cat’s signature. Cat said, “Are they all right? Are they good people?” And I told her that they were. And she signed. I left her there in the car to bring in the papers, and I remember feeling the distance between the car and the door was like a whole country, and I did not belong in either place anymore.
When it was all over, when everything had been signed, they walked me out. The woman was holding you close, her back curved like a shield around you. You had started to fuss and she took you inside to give you a bottle, but I didn’t think you were hungry. It was another kind of hunger, and you couldn’t satisfy it with milk or food, and I knew in my heart it would linger and I found myself wondering if you would eventually get used to it.
The rain had stopped and the sun started shining and the whole car dazzled with raindrops. The windows were all fogged up, and I couldn’t see Cat and I had a feeling, like I already knew—and then I thought maybe that’s why the sun had come out, that she had made it happen. Even so, I went along with the man and brought him over to the car to meet her. I genuinely liked him and, even though my heart was busted open, I trusted he would be a good father to you. When I opened Cat’s door, I saw that she was gone. I guess I started to cry, I don’t know, I can’t remember, but I took her into my arms and held her there while he went in to call someone. My heart was busted apart. Once it had played music, but now it was smashed on the ground and all the springs had jumped out and were wobbling. Now it made a dull whine.
I held on to her, feeling her body go cold in my hands, and time passed, minutes, maybe hours, and I told her that I loved her, I adored her. Be patient, I whispered. It won’t be long before we meet again.
Part One
Prone to Depression
[sculpture]
Claire Squire, 50 Year Warranty, 2004. Beeswax and microcrystalline wax on metal stands, vacuum cleaner parts, horsehair, 66¼ x 62 x 26 in. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: gift of the Wellman Foundation.
The sculpture depicts a woman, whose spinal chord is formed out of the hose of an Electrolux vacuum, whose pelvis and coccyx region is formed from the triangular-shaped metal floor nozzle, whose pubic area is formed from the brush attachment, whose nipples are canister wheels, and whose stomach is the bulging vacuum bag, bursting with debris.
The sculpture typifies the artist’s assertion that the female body is interpreted as little more than the sum of its parts.
1
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, 2007
Claire waited out on the porch for a long time, wrapped in her ratty gray sweater. It was cool for August and all of the trees were moving and the wind jangled the chimes in the darkness. It made the flag whip around on the pole. The flag had been there for as long as she could remember. She’d been the one to lower it to half mast when her mother died, the taut rope trembling in her small hands. Her father had stood there with her, smoking a cigar, looking up into the bright sky, watching the flag snap and twist. Now she was losing him too.
She grasped her hair and twisted it into a braid. People always said her hair was her greatest feature, but over the years she’d been reckless with it, contemptuous of anything that made her beautiful. She had no interest in being beautiful. It was her work that made her this way, and all that she’d been through that drove her to it.
She looked out into the darkness where hundreds of fireflies flickered like the lights of alien spaceships. Tiger lilies stretched over the porch railing like the greedy hands of children. Her mother had been the one to plant them. In her straw hat and wooden clogs she’d go out before breakfast and tend to the beds. Her mother had told her that lilies were nearly invincible. You could neglect and abuse them all you wanted, but somehow they always found the strength to uncurl their fists and bloom. It began to rain, splatte
ring the floor of the porch. The air was damp and she could smell the wet grass, the earth. It was a smell she had known well as a child, growing up here in the country. She felt a chill all through her body and went inside. Her son had fallen asleep on the couch with his boots on. The boots were big and black, what he fondly called his prison boots, purchased at a vintage store on Melrose, and he was immeasurably proud of them. Gently, she untied the laces and pulled them off, then covered him with a blanket. In the tender light she could see how the room had been abused over the years by a steady traffic of strangers. It looked like there’d been a party and no one had bothered to clean up. Glasses left behind on the piano, the coffee table, the radiator. Ashtrays full of cigarettes. Out of habit, she picked up the empty glasses, balancing the ashtrays on the rims, and brought them into the kitchen and set them down on the counter. There was a bottle of vodka on the counter—she thought perhaps it would make her feel a little better. It was good vodka, expensive. She poured a glass and sat at the round table, which was laid with her mother’s blue cloth from Provence. The cloth was worn now, and there were a few cigarette burns. Claire had the sudden memory of finding her mother, a perennial insomniac, down here at three o’clock in the morning, drinking sherry and playing solitaire, a cigarette between her lips. She lit her own cigarette and drank the vodka and looked around the unchanged kitchen. There were the same warped cabinets that never stayed shut, painted a butter-knife gray, the shelves stacked with mismatched plates and teacups, the black-and-white tiled floor, the enormous porcelain sink. The pine secretary with its green velvet desk, crammed with old cookbooks. She opened the desk and found a stack of bills and wondered who was keeping his books.
The vodka burned her throat. She drank and waited, hearing the rain. It was a quiet old house; it wasn’t hers. She was a stranger here.
Sometime later, maybe an hour, she felt someone’s hand on her shoulder. She’d fallen asleep at the table. It was early still, the sky white, nude. The rain had stopped.
“You fell asleep,” a woman said in a Jamaican accent. “I’ve made the assumption you’re not a criminal.”
Still, she felt caught. Ashamed, she pulled her sweater around her. “I’m his daughter. I grew up in this house.”
The woman examined her face as though she were looking for proof. “He’s very sick,” she said. “I’m his hospice nurse.”
Unwittingly, Claire started to cry. It was the last thing she wanted to do in front of this stranger, but she couldn’t seem to help it, and they were old tears, they’d been waiting to come out for a long time. The nurse sat down at the table. The sky suddenly looked bruised and it started to rain again and you could hear it beating on the ground.
“I haven’t been home for a long time,” she said. “We weren’t close.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the nurse said. “It’s good that you’re here, now.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Come, we’ll go up. He’s been waiting for you.”
They climbed the stairs, and she entered the cold, blue dream of her father’s death. It was very quiet. The air smelled of alcohol and Clorox and burned toast. And when she passed the opened windows she could smell the earth too and she could smell the rain. She sensed that strangers had been here, a parade of friends and caretakers, the kind souls who understood what death was, who nurtured it like a garden of delicate black flowers.
There was a draft in her father’s room, the window was cracked. Beyond the dirty glass was the yellow field, the ruined garden. Lilacs trampling the fence.
“Isn’t he cold?” she asked the nurse.
“The fresh air is good.”
“Can he hear us?”
“Yes, I think so.” Claire swallowed hard; she would not cry her guilty tears. She sat down on her father’s bed and looked at his face. It was an old man’s face. His blond hair had gone white. His chin pointy, his broad cheeks hollow, his mouth fixed in a gargoyle’s grimace. His eyes dim, colorless. She put her palm to his cheek. His skin was warm, damp.
“Look who’s here, Mr. Squire. It’s your daughter, Claire. She’s come home.”
“It’s me, Daddy,” she muttered, taking his hand. It was soft in the way a child’s hand is soft, before it has learned to be hard. She heard the door settling into its frame and realized that the nurse had left them alone. The room seemed to close in on her. This was her parents’ room. The paint-chipped radiators with clanging pipes. The yellow window shades. The Chinese dish on the bureau where her mother had kept her earrings. The Tibetan rug her mother had dragged back from one of their trips. Claire remembered one of her birthday parties, she was eight or nine, all her friends sitting on the steps in party dresses, the lovely Turkish runner, and her mother in a handmade apron, wearing her trademark red lipstick. Say cheese! The big windows full of sunlight, pussy willows pressed up against the panes. Something good in the oven. Pink icing on the cupcakes. And her father, in one of his camel-haired sport coats, getting all the girls to giggle and blush.
Her father’s chest expanded then deflated. “I’ll just sit here with you, all right, Daddy?”
He closed his eyes then opened them again. She held his hand tighter. She sat with him for a long time, looking at his face. Maybe the nurse had been right, she thought. Maybe the past didn’t matter now. What mattered was this moment. This moment right now and the one that came next. His dying was a bridge she could cross, and he was waiting for her there, on the other side.
2
For lunch, the nurse made soup, the chicken bones like babies’ fists floating in broth. Claire couldn’t bring herself to eat. After lunch, she took Teddy up to see her father. Her son stood in the doorway like an uninvited guest with his long arms and legs, hands shoved in his pockets. She nudged him gently, taking his arm. “It’s okay,” she said.
They went to the bed and looked down at the old man. Her father’s face hadn’t changed. His eyes stuck on the ceiling as if someone had Velcroed his gaze. “He’s awake?” Teddy asked.
“Yes,” the nurse confirmed. “Your grandson is here, Mr. Squire.” The nurse tugged on the old man’s blanket as if to straighten it, even though it was already perfectly straight. Her father looked like a Kewpie doll in a giant’s pocket.
The wind rushed against the house, the screens. The window shades slapped their frames. You could hear the chimes outside. Everything seemed to be moving, but her father was still, his arms at his sides. Claire sat on the bed and took his hand. His fingers were tapered, his fingernails wide and flat like seashells. She had never looked at his hands so carefully. He had lived a long time with his hands and now they were useless. “Dad,” she said. “Teddy’s here.”
Teddy hunched over the bed, his arms crossed over his chest. His face pale with worry, doubt. “He doesn’t see me.”
“He hears you. He knows you’re here.”
He left her there with her father. She could hear him going outside, the slam of the screen door. A little while later she could smell his cigarette. He was angry at her, she knew, for keeping him away from here, for refusing her father’s charity, and he’d had a shitty life because of it.
She sat on the bed, moving with the guarded solicitude of a stranger. “I could tell you how hard it’s been for me,” she spoke softly. “I could tell you all that. But I won’t.” She squeezed his hand hard. “We’ve hurt each other enough, haven’t we?”
Abruptly, his eyes closed. She watched his face, wanting to believe he understood her. His eyes were half moons, slippery, gray. She waited for him to open them, a confirmation of some kind, an apology, but they stayed like that, shut tight.
Later, they walked in the rain. They took umbrellas and crossed the back field. She showed him the old greenhouse, the windows shattered, the grass inside waist high. It was a fragile place, she thought. “There used to be flowers here,” she said.
They went down the sloping lawn to the pond and you could see the clouds on the black surface and all the upside-down trees. Moss like spille
d paint at their feet. They crossed the tennis court with its torn net, cracks sprouting weeds. The empty pool full of leaves. Overturned Adirondack chairs left out in the grass like some breed of extinct animal. She pictured her mother walking beside her in one of her party dresses, her father in a tuxedo, their shoulders sprinkled with confetti. Claire had never even come close to having a relationship like that. There had been Billy, Teddy’s father, but that had been a short-lived, drug-induced adventure that had lasted a month. And she’d messed up that relationship too.
The years had piled up like dull books. Pages of anger and resentment. She’d rip those pages out if she could. Maybe she’d gotten lost, she thought. It happened to people, it had happened to her. She’d made mistakes; no one had to tell her. Her lousy judgment when it came to men. She knew. But she wouldn’t take all the blame for it.
She took Teddy out to supper at a café in town. She drank vodka, watching him eat. They went to a movie at the tiny theater, a French film with subtitles. Driving back to the house they let the windows down. Horses were running in the darkness. Teddy made her pull over so they could hear them. It was a sound, a kind of fury.
The house was silent. She crept up to her room and got into bed. Listened for a while for Teddy; didn’t hear him. At last, she succumbed to sleep, a murky deluge, sewer-tepid. Hours later, the nurse woke her. Birds were screaming at one another across the field. “He’s gone,” was all she said.
They buried her father in the town cemetery, next to her mother. It was a small gathering, mostly people she didn’t know. People her father had worked with over the years, some of whom had driven up from the city. Skinny, beautiful women in black dresses and high heels. Men poised in their suits, holding flowers. Claire smiled at them, grateful that they’d made the trip, but their eyes came back empty. We didn’t know he had a daughter—he never mentioned you.