Rooms (3 page)

“What are you doing?” Minna asks.

“I’m looking for something to have for dinner,” Caroline says. “What does it
look
like I’m doing?”

Minna leans over the kitchen island and slams the cupboard shut. “We can’t eat his
food,
” she says, as though Caroline has just suggested she eat an insect.

Caroline tries to open the cupboard again; Minna keeps her hand on it firmly. “Minna, please. You’re as bad as Trenton. He won’t miss it, will he?”

“No, I mean—” For a second, Minna looks ashamed. “I mean it’s disgusting. I mean, it’s been sitting here just—just absorbing his germs.”

Caroline widens her pale blue eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Minna. The last time I checked, death isn’t contagious. It isn’t an infection, you know.”

Minna wrenches her hand away from the cupboard. “I won’t eat it. And I won’t let Amy eat it, either.”

“Oh, Minna.” Caroline sighs dramatically, but she removes her hand from the cupboard and instead picks up her wineglass and drains it.

SANDRA

I
’m not afraid to say that what you’ve heard so far is a big honking load of bullshit. And no, I won’t mind my language. Jesus Christ, it’s practically the only thing I have left.

I bet she didn’t even tell you this: my death was no accident.

I’m not saying Alice lies, per se. Her problem is she’s a prude, straight out of the
wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap
generation, and secretive as anything.

Take Minna. Alice is always going on about how beautiful she is. Yeah, if you like that look—a great big pair of fake tits screwed on like a lid, and eyes that always look like they’re trying to see through your pants to how much money you’ve got in your wallet.

No thank you.

I know Minna had a rough start. All those years in that crusty basement practicing piano until her fingers ached and God knows what else. But listen, we all get served a deck with some cards missing. Get up and get on with it, is what I say. I’ve done my reading about all of it: neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, and compulsions, blah, blah. I used to work for
the
Dr. Howard Rivers, of the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, for God’s sake. And I’ve seen my fair share of churches and twelve steps.

It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?

For example: I didn’t exactly have it easy growing up. We were in Silverlake, Georgia: land of shotgun houses and trailer parks, an all-white county park, peach trees with fruit like drooping tits, and summers that slapped you in the face like a dog’s tongue. Dad had a mouth like a closed-up zipper, and when he looked at me at all, it was usually to ask how come I couldn’t play nice like the other girls and stop getting into brawls on the playground and
why can’t you ever learn to listen
.

I don’t think I ever once saw him kiss my mother or even hold her hand. He spent all his time with his friends at the Rotary Club, especially his friend Alan Briggs, and my mom used to go into hysterics on the phone with her sister, wondering where he was and whether he was cheating on her and what she would do if he left her for some young tramp. And then one day when I was seven, she came home early from her once-a-month steak-and-lobster buffet dinner with the girls in Dixie Union and found my dad and Alan in bed, buck naked. At least, that’s the way my mom told it to me later.

My dad and mom divorced, and Mom and I had to move to a small one-bedroom in what was still called the colored part of town. It was 1960 in the South, which was like 1940 anywhere else in the world, and at school whispers went around that my dad was a queer and I was a nigger lover besides. Those aren’t my words. Silverlake, Georgia, was a pretty place, full of ugly people. I remember houses set up in a row like dominoes, yellow in the morning sun, explosions of bright red trumpet creeper, and picket fences dusty with pollen; and I remember “Whites Only,” and fields crawling with chiggers, and cockroaches the size of a child’s palm wriggling out of the drain.

Colored, black, white, yellow, queer, straight—from the beginning, it never mattered to me, maybe because even though my dad hardly ever said a word to me, and liked to diddle his male friends behind my mother’s back, and wore the same bowling shirt every Saturday and Sunday, I still loved him. Who knows why or how. Maybe only because he brought me candy buttons, or let me sit on his lap while he cruised down Main Street in his sky-blue El Dorado, big as a boat, shark finned and smooth.

Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don’t get to choose it.

My point is, I didn’t sit around sobbing about my problems and expecting everyone to feel sorry for me. I wanted out of Georgia, and so I got out of Georgia, and I didn’t wait for some man to saddle me with a ring and a lifetime of laundry to do it.

By then it was 1970, anyway, and things were changing. The farther north I got, the more they changed, until finally, in New York City, I discovered it had been the future all along.

Funny, isn’t it, how quickly the future becomes the past? I bet Trenton doesn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was. Joplin, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia—forget it.

What can I say about Trenton? A sad sprout of a human being, halfway between a boy and a broccoli. Then there’s Caroline, a big sodden biscuit, soaked morning through night. I’m not one to talk—I liked getting knockered sometimes, who doesn’t?—but at least I had the decency to do my drinking alone.

Richard was probably the worst of all of them. Couldn’t keep his prick in his pants and made everybody’s lives miserable with his whims and his moods and demands, especially at the end.
No chicken soup, I want tomato.
Turn the heat up. Now turn it down. Now up again.
We used to catch his poor nurses crying in the dining room, hidden in the dark, hunched between dusty furniture—grown women, blubbering silently into their palms. The biggest favor Richard Walker ever did for anyone else was die.

Do you think I’m being harsh? I’ve never been one to sugarcoat the truth, and at least I’ve still got a sense of humor, even if I’m all splinters and dust everywhere else. That’s another thing that drives me crazy about Alice: no sense of humor at all. I can feel her, wound up tight, like a soda about to explode, like clenched butt cheeks.

So I ask you: What’s she holding in?

TRENTON

T
he truth: that’s all Trenton wanted. For someone in his family to tell the truth.

It was seven o’clock and he was lying in his old bedroom, which looked almost exactly the same as he remembered it except for the piles of junk everywhere, listening to the murmur of his sister’s and his mother’s voices. They were arguing about what to do for dinner. And it occurred to him that since the last time he’d been to Coral River, he probably hadn’t heard a single word from either one of them that wasn’t some kind of lie.

He didn’t know why it still mattered to him. Maybe it was because he’d been hoping for
integrity
. He liked that word,
integrity,
had picked it up in Brit Lit II, which among the guys at Andover was known as Boner Lit. The teacher, Ms. Patterson, was hot. Most of the teachers at Andover were really old, past forty, and strapped into their clothes like psychos into straitjackets, as though their fat might attempt an escape.

But Ms. Patterson wasn’t. She was twenty-eight—she’d told them so—which wasn’t
that
old. And she looked even younger. She wore her hair loose. It was soft and brown and kind of fuzzy, and all the girls made fun of her because they said it was frizzy and she didn’t know how to blow-dry it right. They made fun of her clothes, too, because she wore sneakers sometimes with her skirts and dark old-lady tights; and other times, loose black pants and a shapeless fleece on top.

But Trenton liked that. He found he couldn’t even jerk off thinking about the girls at Andover, even the girls younger than him. They were all out of his reach. Their jeans were suctioned to their butts and their hair was slick as an oily river, and their mouths were always curled up and laughing at a joke he was never a part of, and on weekends they took planes and cars down to New York and came back, triumphant and smirking, with a new story: they’d gone down on so-and-so in a cab. They’d done ecstasy and taken over the DJ booth at Butter.

Plus they were smart. He, Trenton, slouchy and barely hanging on to his grades, had nothing to offer them.

Integrity.
Integrity was showing up with your hair fuzzy, in a fleece. Integrity was doing your best in school because you liked it, even if people called you a fag and elbowed you into the walls, when they weren’t busy pretending you didn’t exist.

Everyone in his family lacked integrity. They were
corrupt
(antonym). His mom, Caroline, was the worst. She had lied to everyone for so long, Trenton wasn’t even sure she knew the difference anymore. He thought probably she’d always been fake, and he had only noticed recently. Now he knew he couldn’t trust anything she said, especially things about his father.
“He loved you, Trenton, very much . . .”

Bullshit.

He had believed for a long time that Minna had integrity, but he’d been wrong. He could hardly look at her, ever, without noticing her
additions,
which seemed to point at the world like an accusation. And he knew, from his mom, there had been other stuff: tugs and pulls, needles and pills, all things she didn’t need. He might have been prepared to forgive her if it hadn’t been for what had happened during Family Weekend in the spring.

And Minna hadn’t even apologized. She avoided the subject neatly, the way she avoided everything, because she
lacked integrity,
because she was
corrupt,
because she was
full of shit
.

Amy was all right. But Amy didn’t count because she was six and didn’t know better. She would probably grow up to be as full of shit as the rest of them.

He’d hardly seen his dad since his parents divorced, and Trenton had never been back to Coral River. Instead, Richard came to New York. He took Trenton to shows he didn’t care about seeing and dragged him to restaurants where everything on the menu had some disgusting ingredient, when Trenton would have preferred to get a burger. But in a weird way, Trenton had been closest to his father. Trenton knew his dad was impossible—particular, obsessive, pompous (another word from Ms. Patterson), a complete egomaniac and kind of a dick.

But he’d also been honest. Brutally, totally honest. Trenton still remembered the time they’d been at Boulud, and Trenton had been trying to conceal the fact that he had a hard-on (why the fuck did he have a hard-on? The waitress, who wasn’t even that hot, touched his shoulder with her breasts for one second, as she leaned down to take away his wineglass), and his dad had suddenly said to him: “Look, you’ll hear a lot of bullshit from your mother. And I was a shit husband. I was. But the woman is batshit crazy and I did my best. Remember that, Trenton. It’s not your fault.
It’s not your fault
.” And later, after half a glass of wine, Trenton had found himself in the back of a taxi, blinking away tears and feeling grateful.

“Dinner, Trenton!” His sister’s voice came through the floorboards, and he thought he heard a slight sigh.

Integrity.
That word was still there, like a small staircase in his mind, leading up to the inevitable.

Trenton wanted to die with integrity. There was one reason—and one reason only—that he had agreed to come back to this place that was no longer a home: to die.

As he passed into the dark hallway, and felt his way to the stairs and the light down below, he turned that idea over inside of him, and it brought him comfort.

And he ignored the wisp of a whisper that seemed to say, from very far away, “I wish they’d let the whole place burn.”

ALICE

D
inner is delivery from Mick’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant. I recognize the name from the dinners the night nurse would pick up for Richard, when he was still eating solid foods. Macaroni salad and roast beef sandwiches were his favorite.

I’ve never been to Mick’s. In my day, Coral River had only a general store, a Woolworths, a post office, a bar, and a movie theater that showed one film a month. Sandra informs me that when she was alive, Coral River added an Italian restaurant and a McDonald’s, a new bar, two more gas stations, a hardware store, a bookstore, and a clothing boutique called Corduroy. The town can only have grown since then.

Minna, Caroline, Amy, and Trenton eat their dinners straight from the deli containers, not even bothering to throw out the plastic bag, which they leave balled on the center of the table. Trenton eats a cheese sandwich, plain, on white bread. He chews moodily, noisily, occasionally letting a bit of cheese drop onto the wax paper the sandwich came in, now unfurled on the table like a stiff white flower.

Caroline eats cold macaroni salad—an unconscious echo of her ex-husband’s preferences—and hot chicken soup, and becomes increasingly withdrawn as the vodka in her water glass takes effect. Minna picks at a chef’s salad and complains that the produce is disgusting. Amy eats a tray of baked ziti and winds up covered with tomato sauce, a ring of red around her lips like a second mouth.

Sandra misses drinking. I miss food. It’s funny—I never had much of an appetite when I was alive. Even when I was pregnant with Maggie, I was hardly ever hungry, and what little I did eat came up just as quickly. My doctor said I was the skinniest pregnant woman he’d ever seen. I made it through all nine months on tinned green beans, tuna fish, and a little bit of beer. That was all I could keep down, and of course we weren’t so concerned in those days about drinking when we were carrying a baby.

Now food is practically all I can think about: pork roast and gravy; buttered potatoes and my mother’s spiced Christmas loaf; fried eggs, yolks high and proud and orange as a setting sun; toast dipped in bacon fat and the first summer peach; pools of cream; and fluffy biscuits.

I remember the first time Ed and I ate a TV dinner in front of our twelve-inch black-and-white, how happy we were balancing the small plastic tray on our knees and eating the mass of mushed peas, the disintegrating roast. And I remember the first time I took an airplane to visit Maggie, when I was already in my fifties: the shiny look of the pleather seats, and the way the stewardesses smiled; compartmentalized mashed potatoes, a flat gray disk of turkey, and Jell-O, each thing separated by small plastic dividers. That’s modernity, if you ask me: endless division.

Yogurt and blueberries; margarine and brussels sprouts.

I remember:

A copper pot: a wedding gift from my mother, presented to me covertly, so my father wouldn’t see. (“God help you,” she said, her last words to me.)

A large saucepan, of blackened cast iron: a welt swelling on my thumb, shiny red and taut, like the head of a newborn.

The window: open above the stove; the smell of chicken fat and oil. Blue columbine clung to the windowsill; the shadows outside were long and lavender.

One shadow was longer than the rest and grew more quickly: this was Ed coming home.

This is how it always was, how it would be for almost every day in the thirty-four years of our marriage, except for the years when Ed was away in the war. The shadows grew on the hill; the kitchen was hot and smelled, when money was good, like cooked meat, and when it was not, like old bacon fat and potatoes. One shadow grew longer than the others, like a slowly spreading stain, until it seeped into the doorway and became a man.

“What’s for dinner?” Ed would say, if he was in a good mood, as he shrugged off his coat and sat down to unlace his shoes before wiping them carefully with the stiff-bristled brush he kept by the kitchen door.

If he wasn’t in a good mood, if he’d been drinking, he would say: “What the hell have you been brewing in here?”

But in the beginning it was always good. We had our own house, and the freedom to do what we wanted. After Ed’s first day at the Woolworths in Coral River (we furnished half our house with things from there—half on discount, the rest on credit—smells of wool and furniture polish; so many objects crammed together in memory, jostling for space), I gathered handfuls of Jacob’s ladder and leaves from the yard—burnt-edged and brittle, like ancient lace—and arranged them in the old stone hearth, which by then had been cold for twenty years.

“What’s for dinner?” Ed asked, as he shrugged off his jacket. Ed Lundell was the most handsome man I had ever seen, and every time I looked at him, I could think only of my plainness and how lucky I was that he had chosen me. He had ink-black hair, a strong jaw, and walnut-colored eyes.

“Chicken,” I answered. It was a joy to say the word. This was life, and being an adult: to respond this way to one’s husband about dinner. I was twenty and believed we would always be happy.

We ate. We must have. I remember that Ed talked very little about the store, and a lot about the railroad. That was a favorite topic of his in those days. There were rumors that a train line would soon be laid between Boston and Buffalo, cutting within a mile of Coral River. It had been Ed’s big reason for buying the house, which was, at the time, remote: it was a two-mile walk to and from the bus that carried him the remaining two miles into Coral River, and at least a mile jaunt to its nearest neighbor.

Once the train line came, Ed assured me, there would be houses cropping up and down the hills like mushrooms after a rainstorm, a forest of bleached white skeleton-houses, shingled siding, modern plumbing. We’d be the pioneers. He wouldn’t be surprised if the rail company offered to buy us out for three times what we’d paid or more—he’d heard of such things happening.

In the end, the line never came; and the house remained as remote as ever—even more remote when Mr. Donovan, our closest neighbor, died in the war and his widow had to move in with a sister in Boston. That was when Ed began to lose his interest in progress, stopped saving up for the newest vacuum cleaner models, stopped exclaiming over the advertisements for electric kettles and televisions.

That was also when there weren’t so many good days anymore.

But that was all down the road. We had years to get through first—a war, winters of cold and hunger, Maggie’s birth, long, bitter seasons of silence. We couldn’t have known that the railroad wouldn’t come. We were kids and didn’t know anything.

I overcooked the chicken. I remember that. The skin was rubbery but Ed was too hungry to notice, and he finished his plate and asked for seconds, and I was so glad. I kissed him on his beautiful forehead when I got up to make him another plate.

At the end of the meal he noticed the leaves and the Jacob’s ladder in the hearth. He pushed away from the table.

“What is that trash?” he asked, standing up abruptly.

“Leaves and flowers from the yard,” I said. “I thought they would look pretty.”

He frowned. “Clean it up,” he said, belched loudly, and left the room.

It was the first time in our married life that I felt like crying. But I didn’t. I thought of my parents, and how pleased they would be to know I was unhappy—
we warned her,
they would say—and instead I went straight to the stone fireplace and began picking out the leaves, one by one. The hearth was coated with a fine layer of ancient ash, like a soft, gray snow, and by the time I was finished, it streaked my skin to the elbow. I couldn’t bring myself to throw the flowers and the leaves in the garbage; instead, I gathered them in my arms and took them out into the yard, released them to the wind, and let them scatter over the hills, where the purple shadows had dimmed to uniform darkness. I had a sudden, desperate urge to run; but instead I stood still, frozen, while the wind picked up and the bats began to race across the moon, until Ed called out to me to come inside.

I went inside.

I remember:

The metal bed frame, knocking, knocking, knocking against the wall; the sound of a coyote screaming in the night.

You see? Even now, I can follow the memory thread down. The past stirs under the ashes and pokes its petals from the dust.

Once everyone is asleep—Minna in the Yellow Room, with one arm looped around Amy’s waist, their hair intermingling on the pillows; Trenton in the Blue Room, lying on his back, arms flat at his sides, as though he has been felled by a blow; and Caroline in the Daisy Room, because at the last minute she expressed a horror of sleeping in the master suite, which looks identical to the way it did during the years of her marriage; and even Sandra, although awake, of course, has gone silent and still, so that her presence is nearly imperceptible—I can’t stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death.

It isn’t an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we’ve nested in the walls like bacteria. We’ve taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing—we’ve made it our own.

Or maybe it’s life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.

In the morning, Minna gets up early to pick up large boxes from the hardware store downtown. By the time the others are waking, she has assembled a dozen of them and lined them up neatly like a series of cardboard coffins, ready to enfold the remains of Richard Walker’s earthly existence.

And so the cleansing begins.