Good Family (19 page)

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“What does it look like?”

I can see Miriam’s pressing flowers, but I want to understand why.

“So I can remember,” she says.

It seems so Victorian to embody memory in the flattened and parched remnants of flora.

She says, “Don’t you have any hobbies?”

I consider telling her how, when I was pregnant, I used to drive aimlessly, waiting for ideas to come. Sometimes a scene would catch my eye, stirring my imagination in such a way that I could envision it on film. “I’m not a hobby person.”

Miriam places the pages into a viselike contraption and says, “Then what kind of person are you?”

We got Miriam through an agency. Nothing on her résumé mentioned her tendency toward bluntness. My mother would have liked her—probably
does
like her. Except that Miriam would never have put up with my father. She would have looked him right in the eye and said, “If
you’re
so smart, why don’t
you
run for president?”

“I tried to knit once,” I say. “Dana taught me.” I remember that pink yarn, the tiny pattern, those four pieces I never sewed together.

“Why’d you stop?”

I concentrate on the snoring coming from the monitor clipped to Miriam’s breast. I am struck by the absurdity of my mother’s persistent breathing. It takes me back to a time when I’d ignored the monitor on the kitchen counter while talking on the phone.

When I was a child, Louisa would fold me into her outstretched arms and tell me I was special, but I can’t fold into Miriam, nor she into me. I want to ask her why she went into nursing, why she cares for the sick, and if along the way she has made her peace with death. I want to ask her what she sees when someone takes his or her last breath. Is it something to be feared or welcomed? Is it no more eventful than finishing a meal? I want to know what Miriam knows, but the moment passes, broken by a halting snore. I can see Miriam’s age in the tender way she lifts to her feet. Her stockings are rolled down, and the pink quilted slippers are crushed at the heel.

“You should get one,” she says. “A hobby, I mean.”

J
essica and Beowulf are singing in clear, harmonically perfect voices. Beowulf lies back on the couch, his eyes closed, his fingers occasionally plucking an articulated chord. Mostly, though, they sing a cappella. Their voices blend, swerve, match in mysterious ways—Jessica’s high and singsongy, Beowulf ’s raspy—in a song I recognize from Godspell.

Where are you going? Where are you going? Can you take me with you?

It strikes me that they hardly know my mother, that for the last ten years while they were growing up, she was practically a ghost. She’d sit at the table and smoke, mutter something to the help—a different person every summer after Louisa died—push her food around on her plate while all around her swirled random conversation. At least, that’s how I imagine it for the last decade since I’ve been here. The cousins and the cousins’ children must have fled the table as quickly as possible in search of talk and laughter away from the glum gaze of my mother.

“Would you sing that for Evelyn?” I ask. The request surprises even me. Jessica breaks off and eyes me inscrutably. I wonder what Edward would have made of my niece’s brand of jungle eyes.

“Mom said we weren’t supposed to bother Grannie Ev,” says Jessica.

Beo produces a languid chord. “Do you think she’d even know?”

“Why not?” The proper music nourishes the soul, or so they say. Even plants seem to thrive.

Now it is almost evening, and the house is filled with unfamiliar smells. Odors as succulent as sautéed onion and garlic, tinged with something even more exotic like ginger and basil that don’t mesh with my memory of Louisa’s cooking. It’s actually Dana’s turn to make dinner tonight, but coming into the kitchen, I hear her laughing with Sedgie and wonder where they found such ingredients when all I could find were dreary lettuce and American cheese. The two of them are standing over the old Magic Chef stove, Sedgie with a dishtowel wrapped turban-style around his head, brandishing a pan and speaking in a dead-on East Indian accent, “You must not bruise the basil like so.”

“I’m going to pee,” says Dana. Tears are trickling down her face.

I look at Sedgie, who continues in the melodious accent. “What is one to do, sahib?” I must have done the eyebrow thing because Sedgie suddenly looks exasperated and drops back into his normal baritone. “Oh, Maddie, lighten up for once.”

I feel affronted. I want to protest that it’s Dana, not me, who’s the serious one. But Dana can’t even catch her breath, and every time she looks at Sedgie, she starts to laugh again.

“Where’d you get the basil?” I ask.

“
Fabulous
basil,” says Sedgie. “Farm stand out the shore.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I say, my glance falling on a stained, amber-colored bottle with
Extra Virgin, Cold Pressed
written on the label. “Where’d you get the olive oil?”

Sedgie looks at me patiently. “From New Yawk, cuz. Sometimes, you’ve got to bring your own.”

I sniff. It seems a little unseemly, this bringing of one’s own ingredients. We’ve always made do with Crisco and locally grown produce like parsley. Now the table is stocked with an array of tomatoes and lettuces and beets.

Dana, who seems to have composed herself, says, “We’re making a pasta sauce.” Over the backs of chairs, they have strung long strands of flattened, homemade noodles. Obviously, Sedgie has brought his own kitchen equipment as well. “And check out these tomatoes,” Dana adds. “Heir-loom.”

Dust motes swim in blades of fading light cast from the venetian blinds. Dana flips on a switch; the fluorescent light pulses on. She holds a cookbook, but Sedgie takes it from her and, in an uncanny imitation of Louisa, says, “You jes’ look at the recipe, but nothin’ is rule.”

“Dana,” I say abruptly, “what do you think about Jessica and Beo singing to Mother?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. Music.”

Dana’s eyes narrow. “Is this Adele’s idea?”

I cross my arms. “Did you know Mother used to play Mozart?”

Dana has that same suspicious look she had the other day when Miriam and I dressed Mother up.

“I read the hospice brochures,” I say. “They suggest music to soothe the patient.”

“What do you mean, she used to play Mozart?”

I hold up my hands. “Evi-dent-ly, it’s what she told Miriam when she was still talking.”

Sedgie adds a dollop of red wine. The sauté pan sizzles maniacally. “I remember Evelyn playing the piano when I was a kid.” He yanks the pan, and the onions hop in unison. “I wonder why she stopped.”

I can imagine all sorts of reasons for stopping. Maybe it was something my grandmother said. Or my father. Or the aunts. Maybe she decided there was no point in going on. There are myriad reasons for walking away from something you love. “Remember how she used to sing ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’?” I say.

“Dancing,” Dana says, shuddering, “in her bedroom after dinner.”

“She’d had too many cocktails. Besides,” I say, running the arugula under a faucet, “she was capable of better.”

Dana warily eyes a cluster of beets. “I hate beets.”

Sedgie is still dancing around the kitchen like a deranged swami. Already a little drunk, he deglazes the pan with a spatula, then twirls to the sink, where the pots and pans are soaking. Years ago, a vole or a mouse got into the pipes and died. For a week, flies kept swooping out of the drain whenever Louisa turned on the faucet. By the time the plumber fixed the pipe, the flypaper we’d hung over the kitchen door was coated with tiny black corpses.

I stare at the mound of suds, pondering the mystery of Chippy, my long-vanished chipmunk. After a brief hesitation, I say, “Why do
you
suppose she stopped?”

“I don’t know.” Dana sounds depressed, but it could be the beets. “Why do people stop doing anything? Why do kids stop talking to their parents?”

I know she’s worried about Jessica. They were close when Jessica was a child. Then Dana could read her, but now her daughter is as inscrutable as runes.

“You, for instance,” says Dana. “All those years you just stopped talking to Mother. Or Edward.”

I shake out the arugula, pat it with a paper towel. Sedgie hums, up to his elbows in suds as he swizzles dishes and tosses them into the drainer. It’s been a long day, and I suddenly want to lie down in the hammock and rock myself to sleep. I feel inevitably forty, my past dragging behind me like a train. I can’t remember the last time I marked my height on the wall behind the door in the dining room. The calendar on the kitchen wall depicting the lighthouses of northern Michigan tells me it is August 14, 1999, but it could be the summer of 1987 for all my failure at moving on. I run my hand across my breast, remember how tired I was that August. Sadie was a colicky baby who cried a lot. I would walk her up and down the hall. No one could sleep on those hot, crying nights.
You’ve got to get her on a schedule
, my mother had said.
When you were a baby, we always let you cry.

Sometimes we stop speaking to our parents the way we stop speaking to our friends, our lovers, our spouses. The throat closes, and no sound comes out. Rust forms. Like the pipes in these old houses, clotted with the minerals of hard water, words become a trickle if they come at all.

The last time I spoke to Edward was after we lost Sadie. I had furled into myself the way Mother is furling into herself now, but my pathology wasn’t physical. I made myself sick with longing and guilt and wine, thinking, If you try to remember your baby, and you can’t see her face, but can still smell her, are you crazy? At the time I thought maybe Edward could tell me, but I didn’t know how to find him. It was in the days when no one was talking about Edward. I called Aunt Eugenia.

Honestly, Maddie. I’m not sure
where
he is.

When Derek phoned from France to tell me how sorry he was about Sadie, I asked him how I could find Edward. He gave me a number with a Boston area code. I called it for days. On the fourth day, Edward answered.

How do you know if you’re going crazy
? I asked him.

If you ever hear voices
, he said,
don’t tell anyone. I don’t give a shit about what you’ve seen, or who she was, or if she smelled like lavender or dead fish, do you hear me? It’s the voices they’ll use against you. Trust me on this one
.

“I saw him, you know,” I say. “Right before I went to California with Angus. I ran into Edward in Washington Square.”

“What on earth was he doing there?”

“He’d gotten out. He’d fooled his doctors, or gotten the meds right, and flown the coop.”

“Which coop was it that time?”

“I don’t know. Menninger or McLean. One of the Ms.”

A month or so later, he emerged in Boston. Aunt Eugenia had him recommitted, and when he was released, he disappeared.

Where are you going, Edward?

Beneath the surface.

“No one told me he’d disappeared,” I say.

“You had your own problems,” says Dana succinctly.

“Still, someone should have told me.”

“Whoops!” says Sedgie as he drops a cup. It shatters on the floor. He picks up a shard as if he’s examining a broken egg from a rare bird’s nest. Then I see the name painted in red—
Sedgie
rendered fastidiously, lovingly in our grandmother’s cursive. For a moment, I think he’s going to cry, and it strikes me again how much stock we put in our memorabilia, our evidence of having had a past, a family member who cared enough to trace our name.

“Oh, Sedgie,” I say, seeing his eyes glisten as he cradles a piece of the shattered cup.

“Crazy Edward,” Sedgie says, but Dana is quiet. I can tell she is hurt as if I’m reprimanding her, and I suddenly want to reassure her that it wasn’t her fault. If I can stem
her
anxiety before it starts, I won’t have to feel anxious myself.

“What kind of schmuck am I…?”
sings Sedgie slurrily to the tune of “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

“You mean schlemiel,” I say, remembering Ian’s brief flirtation with Judaism.
We all have our mishigas, Maddie
, Ian would say. We all have our craziness.

“I would have been scared,” Dana says.

For a moment, I don’t follow her. “Scared of what?”

“Oh, you know Edward. He was in and out of nuthouses. We were
all
scared of him.”

From the wall, the portrait of Louisa looks down, her pasted-on smile rendered by Derek. I still have a torn piece of one of his drawings. In it, I am looking back over my shoulder, my lips parted, but my right side is torn away.

“Let me see that cup,” says Dana. She takes the broken pieces from Sedgie, pulling them close to her eyes. “Philip might be able to fix this.”

Beo and Jessica are practicing their duet in the living room; the spaghetti sauce on the stovetop exudes its rich aroma; and for a moment I wonder if, given the right adhesive, our world could be glued together again. I pick up a gargantuan tomato, the product of sand and manure. It is the size of a baseball and veined with streaks of green. I grab a knife and begin to slice it, saying with affected indifference, “Edward wasn’t scary if you knew him.” The red juice and seeds spill onto the cutting board. “He never bothered me.”

D
inner is over, and Mother is holding court, lying propped up on her pillows, her hair combed up into a Pebbles Flintstone sort of swirl. Diamond clips fastened, rings on her fingers. Miriam has even attempted lipstick.

Mother’s right eye beadily regards this sudden influx of children, nieces, nephews, and grandchild. I search her face for a reaction—the mere suggestion of a smile or a frown. Does she approve? Or would she prefer to dismiss us? Even if she could comment, Miriam doesn’t give her the chance as she briskly informs her that her
family
(Miriam emphasizes the word) would like to sing to her. “And you know how you love music, don’t you, Evelyn? Isn’t it lovely they’re taking the time?”