My mother’s sister Carol lifted her eyebrows, her hands modest in her lap, counting the different kinds of forks and knives fanning out on both sides of her plate, while her husband Jimmy started a story. All of Jimmy’s stories were about sex or machines. The same thing with his jokes.
“This widow was lonely,” he was saying, “so she goes to her husband’s grave and digs up his you-know-what and nails it in her bedroom so it sticks up through the floor. She makes a little trapdoor for it, so, during the day, she can put it down. You know, for company.”
“Oh, Jimmy, not with the kids here.” Then she looked at me and laughed. “You know, you just can’t stop him.” Carol was eleven years older than my mother. She looked like a country woman, with her tight curls and undistinguished color of brown hair.
My grandmother shook her head as if she’d just tasted something bitter. “I don’t like to hear such stuff.” Her voice thumped like the weight of her footsteps when she walked around her house at night.
My mother carried in a pewter soup tureen. She bent over the candles, serving. The soup was from fancy cans we’d bought in the gourmet department of Shreve’s, cans imported from France. “It’s madrilene,” she announced. Jimmy was rolling back his sleeves, still telling his story, but in a softer voice. Jimmy had respect for a few things. One of them was food.
He winked. “And so another guy, a neighbor, he catches on. He looks through her window one night and sees. So he goes in the next day with a saw and a shovel and two-by-fours and he builds himself a little room under the floor where her husband’s thing is. He throws that out.”
“He doesn’t bury it properly?” My cousin Hal carefully unfolded his napkin on his lap, over his knees. Hal was thin and straight, all right angles. You could tell Hal hated his father.
“Okay, say he buries it.”
“So,” my mother said, sitting down. She smiled and slowly lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips.
“The house looks very nice, oh, so much better,” Carol said.
“Every night, he crawls into his spot and he’s ready. And so they do it. And this goes on a few months. And then one night, she comes with a knife”—and Jimmy lifted one of his own knives, the butter knife, for emphasis—“and she goes, okay, Harry, come on, we’re moving. I bought us a new house.”
“Dad,” Hal said.
“They’re at it again.” Carol’s head twitched back and forth, resigned.
“No more now,” my grandmother said. “You had to have your one, so now you’ve had it.”
Jimmy Measey was still laughing, sputtering, repeating the gesture with his knife. “Come on, you’re going to a new house, fella.”
He looked over at Benny, who was pretending to smile like he understood. Benny got this smile whenever his dad looked at him, a thin smile you felt you could wipe off with a rag. When Benny was little, his father used to tease him around other people. Once we were sitting at a restaurant, out for steak dinners. Jimmy kept telling Benny how good chopped sirloin was, how that was what he should really want, how nothing in the world was as delicious as chopped sirloin. Jimmy thought that was wildly funny, tricking Benny out of his steak, making fun of him for not knowing the names. Benny had that same wan smile then, when the whole family was laughing, as a waiter set down his hamburger. Benny was afraid of his father.
“What’s this, tomato broth?” Jimmy said.
“It’s madrilene,” Ted said quietly, looking down.
“Yeah. S’good.” Jimmy speared a lemon slice with his fork. “Now what am I sposed to do with this?”
Carol nudged him. “Just leave it, Jimmy. Leave it on your plate.”
Hal smiled deliberately at my mother.
The next two courses came on small, hand-painted plates. Everyone finished the endive salad and the salmon mousse before my mother. She smiled and talked, eating slowly, looking at each bite before she put the fork in her mouth. She was really enjoying herself. It made me happy. Then Ted cleared the small plates and followed my mother into the kitchen.
“Don’t you want us to hold on to our forks, Del?” Carol was asking.
My mother shouted back. “No, there’s plenty clean. Just look to the left of your plate.”
I brought out the pâté, each plate garnished with a limp-stemmed violet from the refrigerator. We’d paid fifty cents each for them at Debago’s nursery.
Jimmy looked at his watch. “It’s been almost two hours and all she’s done is make me hungry.”
When I set down their plates, Carol and my grandmother giggled and shook their heads. Jimmy lifted his violet. In his big hand it looked like a specimen, something dead.
“Addie, what’s this flower for? Am I supposed to eat it?” he yelled into the kitchen.
“Shhh,” I said.
My grandmother frowned. “It’s like those fancy little butters you two used to get from the factory, such little portions,” she whispered.
Then my mother glided in and they all hushed. She was beaming. Ted stood behind her, pulling out her chair. She still thought her dinner was a success. I looked at her cheeks, high and proud, and I bent over and started eating my pâté. It tasted delicious. I felt like telling her people laughed. They were hungry. But it was so good and she was happy. Why couldn’t they just wait?
“So, tell me, how is your work, Adele? How do you like the new school?”
My mother sighed. Whenever my grandmother asked her questions, she sighed and she slumped back into her chair. “Well, Mom, I don’t like that drive out there every day in my old car with the window that doesn’t roll up. Ann knows. But these administrators are bright, just out of college, most of them. It’s a good team.” She looked down at her hands on the tablecloth. “I have plenty to do this weekend still. Those darn reports. Ann, maybe tomorrow we’ll drive downtown to the library and both just work.”
Jimmy Measey was talking to Ted about moving the water softener store to Three Corners, because they were tearing up the road for the new highway.
Ted never talked about his own work at all, as if he were embarrassed. I didn’t blame him. It didn’t exactly seem like a job. My mother once told me Ted was an orphan.
My mother rustled in her chair and stood up. “Ted, could you please come in and carve? And Ann, would you mind taking our plates?” We both stood up beside her, the family. I felt behind us they were laughing at the way we did things. It seemed unbearable for my mother not to know. She was trying so hard.
In the kitchen, I tugged her arm. “Mom, I think they’re really hungry. It’s getting late.”
“Well, I hope they’re hungry.” She’d stepped out of her shoes and she was leaning with both hands on Ted’s shoulder, watching as he cut. “Oh, it’s perfect. Just pink enough. Per-fecto. Honey, you take the bread basket out. Go.”
“It’s prettinear ten o’clock. Ugh, I don’t like to eat so late.” My grandmother smiled at me then, as if it were all right to complain about my mother. I was supposed to know she didn’t mean me too. But I felt so sorry for my mother. I wanted them all to leave, before she knew anything.
“Ta-da,” my mother said, setting down the platter of sliced steak and new potatoes. Her face stalled, waiting for compliments.
“Well, that looks very good,” my grandmother said.
“Adele, you don’t mean to tell me that after all this time, we’re not even going to get a turkey,” Jimmy said, laughing but not really.
My mother looked around the table at each of us as if the lights were just turned on. She looked down to Ted, as if for help.
“Jimmy, this is châteaubriand, ordered five days ahead from the butcher down at Krim’s, at eight ninety-nine a pound, it’s the best meat you can buy in the whole world, I hope that’s good enough for you.”
“Come, let’s shush and eat,” my grandmother said.
“Well, Adele, it is Thanksgiving. It’s ten o’clock, we have been sitting here since five waiting. If you’d told us, sheesh, we could have had it at our
house. Carol would have baked a turkey.”
My mother’s chair screeched across the floor. She left, running into the other room, her dress a black swatch in the hall. “You can’t do anything right with them,” I heard her sobbing, as Ted followed. He was smiling his awkward, zipper smile when he stood up.
Benny and I both sat, very straight, with our hands on our laps.
“Oh, Jimmy, if you would only once just be quiet. You know how she is.”
“Carol, I don’t care what’s wrong with your sister, I want a turkey on my Thanksgiving, all right? And if we can’t eat now, you can get your purse and we’ll go.” Jimmy stood up, stuffing a slice of meat from the platter into his mouth with a hand, his napkin still tucked in his collar. Blood dripped on my mother’s tablecloth.
Hal got up, making a noise with his chair, and walked down the hall towards my mother.
“Should I fix you each a plate?” My grandmother looked back and forth between Benny and me. The food was resting in the center of the table. Parsley and lemon slices garnished the potatoes. It was a beautiful platter, neat like a field.
Benny told her no.
“We’re old enough to wait,” I said.
Jimmy shook his head, looking at me. “Your mother.”
It seemed we waited a long time, still there, and then I heard Ted’s voice, shaped and kind, like a curve around my mother. “Before it gets cold,” he was saying. They came back, Ted and Hal on either side of my mother. Standing, her face lit with the candlelight where she’d been crying, my mother seemed beautiful and strange and I felt sorry I hadn’t run back to her with Ted. She wasn’t looking at me now.
“Shall we eat before it’s cold?” she said. “Hal, why don’t you start the vegetables and I’ll serve.”
We ate quietly, careful.
“It’s wonderful, Adele. This whole meal has been wonderful,” Hal said.
“Yes, it’s very, very good.”
“Thank you,” my mother said, primly.
Jimmy leaned back in his chair. “Well, Adele, for the very best meat available in the world at eight ninety-nine a pound, I’ll tell you something. It’s not bad.”
My mother’s face hung in the air a second while we waited. Then it grew to a slow smile. She couldn’t help but laugh. She looked over at Carol. “I don’t see how you put up with him.”
“Well, you know, Adele, sometimes I don’t either. Sometimes I just don’t know either.”
They never went to bed that night. I heard them. They moved from room to room on the new furniture, the way people turn over and change positions while they dream. I think they were amazed. They had been married three years but they had never had any furniture.
The next morning my mother came in and sat on the edge of my bed. She looked at the room behind her.
“I think he’s running around,” she said. She was nodding her head in assent with herself.
“Who is?”
“Shhh. I’m sure of it.”
“You’re nuts.” I turned around to go back to sleep.
Her hand pried my shoulder up. “I don’t care if he is, I hope he is. If we caught him with another woman, boy, that would really be it. That would really help.”
“What?”
“In court. Then we’d get everything and we could move.” She shook her head. “It’s no more than I deserve, Gramma paid for the house, it should be mine. She’s my mother.”
“What are you talking about?”
She looked down at her foot. A slipper dangled off the bottom, she was bouncing it on her toes. “Today, at noon, Horst is going to call and ask him out with some girls. We’ll just see what he says. I’ll bet he goes.”
“Who’s Horse?”
“You know, Horst, downtown. The tailor. He’s the one who took up your raincoat.”
The morning was slow and pretend. We all stayed around the house, doing nothing in the kitchen. My mother offered to cook Ted an egg. He refused, but he stood next to her and let her pour him more coffee. She made me cinnamon toast. That was the kind of thing she never did. She hated white sugar. We all ate the leftover château straight from the refrigerator. One of us would open the door and leave it hang while we stood chewing.
Then, at noon, the phone rang.
“It’s for you, Ted.” My mother handed him the receiver and walked to the stove. My mother rubbed the same spot on the counter, over and over, with her dish towel. I sat where I was, blowing the sugar on my plate, then writing my name with a finger.
“No,” Ted said, into the phone. “I’m not interested in that.”
Then he was off. He took his coffee cup from where it was on the counter and went back to the screen door hinge he’d been trying to fix. I walked into the living room. All the candles had melted down, the wax flat on the plates like fried eggs.
“So, what was that all about?” my mother asked.
“It was Horst.”
“What did he want?”
“Nothing. He wanted to go out somewhere.”
“Oh, well, are you going?”
Ted put the screwdriver down. “Adele, you heard what I told him.”
“Oh, well, I was just wondering. I mean I was right here, are you sure your answer wouldn’t have been different if I wasn’t around just then?”
I went back to look in their bedroom. The bed was tight and untouched. They never had gone to sleep.
A nun’s flashlight carved out a cave in the darkness and we followed. The old orphanage had closed. Now, they’d built an annex on the west side of the Fox River, small wooden cabins where older girls, girls who’d been in trouble, lived by themselves, four of them with one nun. My mother and Lolly and I walked through the woods to a benefit dinner in one of the cabins.
My mother nudged me. At the small round table there were candles, that was most of what we could see. The windows were dark and it was dark outside.
All around us girls hovered in white high-necked blouses, their long hair pulled back in plain liver-colored rubber bands, lipstick a little over their lips and dabs of nail polish on their nylons. They seemed tall and awkward, they didn’t know what to do with their hands. They’d made our meal and they hovered, waiting to take our plates away and wash them. But I knew sometime, once, they were bad. When one leaned down to pour coffee, my mother touched her sleeve and asked a question. She looked up, distracted, and then explained. As a project, they’d made the centerpieces. Ours was an old 45 record melted down, that’s how they got the edges to frill. They put the candle in the hole.
My mother nudged me and whispered. “You could do that.”
After school, downstairs, I lay in the cool basement. There was a bed with an old bedspread and a television. I lay on my stomach and watched the reruns in the cool dark. I heard my mother coming down the stairs. She had a load of laundry in her arms. The pipes banged, as she set the machine going. Then she came towards me.
“What are you doing down here? Why do you always come down here when you could watch the big TV upstairs? Are you ashamed of something?” She was talking a certain way. I kept looking at the TV, not moving, though a commercial came on.
“And why do you bounce up and down like that with your hips, people don’t do that, it’s vulgar.”
I still didn’t answer. I was barely breathing.
“Did someone fuck you?” She said the word long, with air in it. I wasn’t allowed to say it. “They did, didn’t they? I can tell. Tell me, Ann, who did, tell me, who fucked you. Because they really ruined you.”
I saw her then like an animal, her teeth huge in her face, her body stiff and small. Her feet clicked on the cement basement floor and she moved back and forth with her hands on her hips, her head bent forward, stalking. She wouldn’t come any closer. It was as if I had a smell. I made myself stay the same.
“No,” I said.
“Come on, tell.” Her eyebrows lifted and fell once and she kept her smile. She was excited. “Tell me who did it to you, who fucked you.?
??
I still didn’t look at her. “Oooooh,” she came towards me with her arm. “Stop twitching like that.”
I got up and walked past her to the stairs. She grabbed my arm and I shoved her away. “Leave me alone,” I said. She made marks on my skin. “What’s wrong with you.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” she yelled at my back. “I go upstairs in my own house. I’m clean. I don’t twitch. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
I locked myself in the bathroom. In a few minutes, she knocked and scraped on the door.
“Ann, come out here a second.
“Ann, I have something to tell you. There’s something we have to talk about.
“Open this door. Otherwise, otherwise, I’m going to open it, I’ll get the key.”
Circles. My head was against the cool tiles of the bathtub. The door had a gold metal doorknob. There was no keyhole, there couldn’t be a key. She said she was going to get a key. But there was no keyhole, there couldn’t be a key. But she said there was a key.
I pressed myself into the corner, like something molded there. I tried not to hear, not to think. And then, after, there was always a lightness, a feeling of air inside, like you are an impostor, eating only the appearance of things, living in holograms of light. There in the corner, almost gone, I had one feeling above my stomach, like a flutter. No one but me could ever know about this time, not if I wanted love.
Later, Ted came home and everything was normal again. My mother acted nice to me, she made sautéed mushrooms for over our steaks. She seemed to have forgotten. I watched her, but it seemed rinsed away, all gone. We were friends again, I was her daughter, she liked me. And I was relieved, happy in some recovered way. She picked up my hand and squeezed it. And all evening, there was that lightness. I wasn’t hungry, I wasn’t interested, I wasn’t tired.
I didn’t want anything. I’d lost my attraction for gravity and I couldn’t get it back by myself. I knew it would always be there again in the morning, after sleep. But for that night, I didn’t care. I didn’t want a thing.