Famous Builder (7 page)

4.

How not to poeticize the unspeakable? How not to heighten for dramatic effect the thing that resists being written? I cannot fill it out, cannot give it color.

The day is entirely unremarkable, without drama. My mother and Paul are in the backseat, my grandmother and Uncle Alfred up front. Alfred is behind the wheel. They’re on the White Horse Pike in Collingswood, on their way to school or to work. It’s winter. Someone in that car might be thinking about Easter, the green of the crocus pushing through thawing soil. A truck veers out from a side street—or does it cross the white line? Flash forward: my young mother steps out over the body of her brother, whose head has been cut open by the sheer force of the impact; someone’s leading her out, away from the car. People stand at the curb, hands to their mouths, faces silent. Someone whispers a prayer. There’s a metallic drop on the tip of my mother’s tongue. Then, waiting for the medic to attend to the cut above her right eyebrow, she turns to a stranger. “That’s my twin brother.”

5.

Only recently have I noticed how I tense my hamstrings, if slightly, when I’m a passenger in the front seat of a car. If the car ahead comes to an abrupt stop, brake lights blaring, I instinctively glance in the mirror to my right to see whether I should brace my feet against the floor. I’d be exaggerating if I said I hate to drive, but when I’m in a car, I’m always pulling in my breath or cursing those cars passing on the shoulder, swerving in and out through the traffic.

My first car, a used, poppy red hatchback, was like a first love. I might not have been making mortgage payments or living in some basement studio with a single barred window at sidewalk level, but I owned a car. I might have been thinking these thoughts, proud that I’d finally mastered the stick shift—watch me work it through the gears—when another car flew through a stop sign as I was traveling east on Kresson Road and broadsided my front end.

I wasn’t hurt. (Well, a little: within hours, my hand, which had been broken, swelled up to the size of a tiny oven mitt, the skin a shiny, lurid pink.) Still, I stood out on the street and yelled. I yelled and I yelled, forgetting who I was, forgetting that there was another person on the other side of my words, a man who put a tentative hand to my forearm, as if to cool down my skin.

6.

“Let’s go for a ride,” she said.

Bobby turned off the
Channel 27 Noon Report
, Michael latched the jalousie door, and soon enough, my mother drove the four of us up the Garden State Parkway through the wetlands, across the bridges, the smell of scrub pine, charred wood, and bay mud in the air. I opened the flapping map across my lap. How I loved her sense of possibility, her eagerness to keep us interested, excited. More often than not, she let us choose wherever we wanted to go. Lakehurst, with its airship hangar, so towering and vast the clouds inside formed tiny lightning storms. The tip of Cape May, with its concrete, cylindrical lookout towers from World War II. Love-ladies, Strathmere, Brigantine, Manahawkin, Forked River Point—and model home after model home. Our destinations couldn’t have been further from typical ideas of beauty or worth, but my mother went along for the ride, in a manner of speaking, and taught us, without being entirely aware of it, to crave difference, otherness, the
world out there.

It’s hard not to appreciate the negotiations she must have made in order to sit behind that wheel. The farm markets along the road, the dark green spartina of a flooded marsh: she took in everything she could as she whipped the car around the curve, pressed the gas pedal deeper into the floor mat.

7.

In the years following the accident, my mother and her mother went roundabout ways to their jobs in Philadelphia and Camden, determined to avoid that particular stretch of the White Horse Pike. When they finished work, they went to the cemetery every day, even if it was too dark to see, and they’d kneel before the gravestone, before the headlights, damp grass seeping through their knees. Sometimes they’d say part of the rosary. Sometimes they were absolutely silent. I’m not sure whether my mother fully approved of these rituals, but she did it for Anna, whom she was devoted to, and who, by this time, must have felt that she was being tested. (What could it have felt like to lose the two people closest to you, your husband and son, to suicide and car accident, within three years?)

Then a respite. Just as my mother’s high-school classmates were marrying and having babies, my grandmother sold the dairy farm, which had become too much to handle, and moved to a duplex in suburban Collingswood—only a few miles from the site of the accident. It’s hard not to wonder whether my mother would have stayed on had the unthinkable not happened. If you’ve lost your twin, then what do you do but look for another, even if that twin happens to be your mother? How else to feel closer to whole again, to make yourself real, if he was the outgoing one, and you were the shy one, and the outgoing one has left for good? No other way to fill up that
lack.
And certainly Anna probably couldn’t have made it easier for her to pack up her things. (I used to think, if she knew what was best for her daughter, she’d have sat down with her on her bed, placed a hand on her back, said, “Go, make a life for yourself.”) But love can’t ever be entirely unthreaded from dependence, guilt, and need. And, finally, my mother probably wasn’t ready to marry or to set up housekeeping on her own. Although it could not have been easy, she stayed on fourteen more years with her mother, who kept a watch on her boyfriends and huddled in the dark hall at the top of the stairs.

“Time’s up,” she’d wail, when things got a little too frisky.

8.

My father thinks that my mother shouldn’t dwell in the past. He thinks she should keep a firm eye on the here and now. I’m not sure whether that’s so much about an unwillingness to empathize, as much as it is about his relationship to his own past, which, like all pasts once we reach a certain age, must be full of regrets and missed opportunities.

Or maybe he’s only telling her what he’d been told himself. It goes without saying that both of them grew up in hard times: Depression, World War II. My mother has told me stories of a hearing-impaired, middle-aged woman with a brittle voice who showed up at their front door in 1936, valise in hand, after she’d lost everything: children, husband, house. She moved into their back bedroom and became a part of the family until she died in her sleep one night. The way my mother tells it, their taking her in wasn’t some act of self-sacrifice. Rather, they let the woman share their soup and scrub her forehead with their washcloths, because with a missed payment or two, there they’d be, a mother and three children, knocking on some stranger’s door.

So how would my mother’s grief have seemed larger or more urgent than any of the other griefs surrounding them?
You have to forget
, said a friend.
We all have it hard.
And she murmured those words to herself long into the night, curled upon her side, tearless, rigid.

9.

The driver drove a maintenance truck for the borough. It’s always been a deep brown in my mind, with splashes of mustard-colored water behind the tires. Or is it road salt? I think of him taking that last drink—in the bar, in the bathroom of the borough hall, wherever he was—in those numbed minutes before the accident. I hope it meant something to him. I hope it did for him what he wanted it to do. When I think of all the people who are finishing up drinks right at this moment, putting their glasses to their lips, swallowing those last clear drops as they fumble in their pockets for their car keys, I want to keep them still for a minute. I want to sit them on the curb until their heads clear, until the pavement steadies beneath their shoes.

10.

To name your firstborn after the twin you lost is an extraordinary act. How strange it must have been to say it again—Paul—to feel, all at once, your lips meeting in the center of your mouth, the depth of the vowel where your throat hits your nose. To connect that name to the baby in the playpen, who pulls himself toward you, on his stomach, in his diaper, with his pink, dimpled arms.

I wonder sometimes whether the particular quality of our relationship might have been different if I’d been a Duncan or a Craig. How could she not have been more fearful of losing me than she was of my younger brother, Bobby, born sixteen months behind me, who pitched and reeled a full mile down the shoulder of busy Kresson Road, at five, to visit some imaginary friend? (As challenging as he was, it must have been hard not to admire his chutzpah.) Of the two of us, I was the “good” child, so good, so desperate for approval, that I couldn’t, in retrospect, have been anything but a trial. What had I been thinking? Refusing to cross the emptied Cranford Road without the assistance of an adult. Voluntarily turning over to my father my beloved bottle of rubber cement after I’d been brushing the stuff onto strips of blue construction paper for six months, because I’d read the label one day: Not Recommended for Children under Eight. It couldn’t have helped that I caught colds more frequently than my classmates, and like the little Proust, was subject to fits of nausea at the slightest prospect of excitement. Too anxious to eat a real lunch in the school cafeteria, I’d eat a single sandwich on Pepperidge Farm party bread brought from home in a brown bag, until my habit caused a bit of a stir among my classmates at the table: “Look at that little sandwich!” Which was not what I’d wanted at all. Which was simply to eat it as fast as I could and disappear.

Silly boy.

Was I my mother’s little twin? The question gives me a twinge. Could we have created this dynamic together without even being aware of it? Was it even avoidable? Growing up, I couldn’t bear to be separated from home, and what’s home when you’re that age but
mother?
I sat at my fourth-grade desk, pretended to be absorbed by the pressure of my pencil on the paper, when all I wanted was to save her: to sit at the kitchen table, to hear her chatting, cheerful, phone clenched between her chin and her shoulder blade, as the eyes of the dead—her brother, her father, then her mother—watched from other places in the room.

11.

“Bye, dear,” she says.

“Good-bye.”

I’m standing outside the car, bending toward her in the passenger’s seat. She pats the top of my head. A kiss. And there it is again: that tap, that crack to the rim; the light comes in. The white separates from the yolk, almost, not quite. Something gluey loosens and pools, collects into the bottom half of a household cup.

I clench the suitcase handle tighter, until my knuckles go white, just to make sure I haven’t disappeared.

I clear my throat, smile, then hurry toward the doors of the airport.

We drive through Panorama Shores, Florida. Although it’s 1992, it might as well be 1962; the houses have been meticulously preserved right down to the jalousies, the pylons, the alarming geometry of oblongs and fins. Mint greens and pinks and ice blues and saffrons: it’s hard not to fall a little in love with the town’s Palm Springs atmosphere, whatever you think of midcentury design. My brother, Bobby, is practically in heaven. For most of his adult life he’s been entranced by the architectural charms of the era, the sweetness and optimism, its faith in a decent populist esthetic. We turn north onto Mahogany Drive. Amid the travelers trees and the coffee shops and the neatly tended motor courts are bars, more bars than I could have imagined in such a pretty little beach town. I imagine stylish lonely widows lurking behind their gates. I think of the older Joan Crawford. Or else, the aging Vivien Leigh, who’s worrying the pearls around her neck, dressed in that inimitable color that could only be described as
champagne.

We pull out the address from the glove box. We’re surprised that Mrs. Fox isn’t presiding over one of the fancy houses on the causeway. We make a few more turns and soon we lurch up some side street, and then an alley barely wide as a Lincoln Town Car. Palm fronds swipe the windshield. It’s obviously not the clipped, constructed paradise from which we’ve just emerged. There are trash cans and tomcats and stacks of weathered lumber in the yards. Not that there isn’t a ramshackle allure to the place (I can’t help but think of Key West), but it’s on the edge of something seedy and exhausted.

Number 16406: the Sting Ray Motel, outside of which a skinny woman with starved eyes smokes a brown cigarette, exhaling through her nose.

Number 16408, not two feet to the north. The sign clues us in:
The Foxes: Time Out.

The house itself is an L-shaped rancher, a narrow affair, which appears to have been specifically designed with a problem lot in mind. A forbidding garage wing extends toward the street. The walls are blinding white, the roof tile is blinding white. Oddly enough, it’s the only yard on the block without a scrap of vegetation. Only a bed of white white stones where the grass might be. It’s so white that it’s hard to look at; our eyeballs ache, blue, then throb.

But that’s not really what startles. To the left of the garage, we see a wrought-iron gate through which circular stepping stones lead to the front door. And the color of that wrought iron? Orange. Not a subtle, cheerful orange, but an alarming orange like the color of a traffic safety cone.

Who would paint wrought iron orange? The thought is so disturbing that I’m certain that Bobby, an architect and designer with intractable standards, will press his foot on the gas.

Instead, he shifts the car into park and opens his door.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to see Mrs. Fox.”

“She won’t even open the door.” And I remind him of the incident twenty years ago when, with our parents, we made a surprise visit to her house in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and she refused to answer our insistent knocking, even though we saw her frozen silhouette through the curtains.

“Oh, stop it. We’ll just say hello, then leave.”