The First Time She Drowned (8 page)

GREAT-AUNT DORA CAME
with November, arriving on a day when the wind was up and the dead leaves were doing gymnastics on the driveway. She was my grandmother’s older sister, and the fact that Leigh despised her was likely the very reason that Dora was invited to visit us. I had never met her before but had often heard my grandmother refer to her as “that fat bitch who lives in Queens.” Considering that her impending visit had inspired a cleaning frenzy, the likes of which I did not want to experience again, I was inclined to dislike her as well. And yet, standing with my mother and Matthew on the doorstep that day with the autumn sun in our faces, I was also eager to meet this aunt who was so great that
Great
preceded her name and who lived in a place called Queens.

When Dora made her way out of the cab and stood to announce, “I’m here!” she was not at all what I expected. In contrast to my grandmother’s cold beauty, Dora was round and smiley with a puff of gray hair as soft and fuzzy as dryer lint. She wore a floral housedress and white orthopedic sneakers, and though she was quite old, she was also sturdy and quick the way she dropped her bags and ran to my mother.

“Bevy,” she cried. “My God, it’s been too long!” She threw her arms around my mother’s slim shoulders and rocked her side
to side. Then she stepped back and took my mother’s face in her hands, gazing warmly into her eyes. “It’s so great to see you. You are as beautiful as ever.”

My mother beamed. “I’ve missed you so much, D,” she said. “You look wonderful too. You haven’t aged a day.”

“Oh please,” Dora said, batting her hand at the air. “I’m so old I can hardly remember to breathe. Which reminds me . . . Before I forget . . .” She reached into her big purse and pulled out a small blue box from Tiffany’s. “It’s just a little thing, but I thought of you when I saw it.”

“Oh!” my mother exclaimed. “You didn’t have to get me a gift!”

Before my mother could open it, Dora shouted, “Hold on!” and scurried back to her luggage, which sat on the edge of our lawn. “Speaking of gifts . . . I want to show you something!”

“Hey lady,” the cabdriver interrupted as he stood scowling in the driveway with his hand out. “I’d love to stick around for the tea party but . . .”

“Oh right, right,” Dora said, reaching back into her purse and shoving some bills at him.

He tipped an imaginary hat before jumping back in his taxi and tearing out of our driveway.

“Now what was I doing?” Dora muttered. “Oh yes!” She rummaged around in one bag and then the other until she finally produced a childlike drawing tucked inside a frame. “Do you remember this, Bevy?” She brought it over to my mother. “You made it for me on my fortieth birthday.”

My mother took the frame and looked at it as if she might burst into tears. “Oh my God, I must have been, what, five? You kept it
all this time?”

“Of course I did!” Dora said. “It’s one of my most treasured possessions. You were an artist even then. I keep it right on my nightstand.”

My mother hugged her for a long time, clutching the Tiffany’s box in one hand and the drawing in the other. When they finally parted, Dora stepped back and looked at our house. “Oh, Bevy, this is where you
live
?”

I cringed. This was a sore spot for my mother, the source of her greatest shame, and the very reason we had been so frantically cleaning and gardening all day. But then Dora looked at my mother with such sympathy and understanding that once again I thought my mother might cry.

“Isn’t it awful?” my mother said.

The two of them stood side by side now, gazing up at our small, mustard-yellow house with blue shutters.

“I’m just trying to understand the color scheme,” Dora said, rubbing her hand on her chin.

My mother looked at her grimly. “There was a sale on paint,” she said.

They turned to each other gravely and then burst out laughing.

“Oh, Bevy,” Dora said when she had composed herself. “I can only imagine how much my witch of a sister is enjoying this. You’re like Snow White living in a trailer!”

“I am!” my mother said. “That’s exactly how I feel!” Then calm and happy as if she had been relieved of this terrible burden, my mother said, “Now, before I give you the grand tour of the rest of this dump, let me introduce you to my kids. This is Matthew.” She
put her hands proprietarily on my brother’s shoulders. “Isn’t he just the most gorgeous child alive?”

Dora looked Matthew over, squinting in the sun that stood low and bright in front of her. “Oh,
gorgeous
doesn’t even begin to describe . . . He’s the spitting image of you, Bevy.”

My mother glowed at the compliment. She crossed the lawn to grab Dora’s bags and then, as if suddenly remembering, she called back over her shoulder, “And that’s Cassie.”

Dora stepped toward me, bent down and stuck her big smiley face in mine. “Well, hello there,” she said. “Why haven’t you given your Great-Auntie Dora a kiss?”

I smiled back at her but passed on the kiss. She was ancient and smelled like baby powder.

She drew back with a sigh. “If that’s how it’s going to be, I guess you don’t want the candy I brought you.” She made a sad face.

Clearly she had no idea who she was talking to. I stepped forward, held my breath and squeezed my eyes tight. Her cheek skin was rough and dry, like kissing a paper towel.

“Much better!” Dora said, standing erect.

I held out my hand like the cabbie but she didn’t seem to notice.

My mother returned with Dora’s bags in tow. “That was a good idea the cabdriver had about the tea. Why don’t we have some?”

The two began moving into the house so I called, “Aunt Dora, wait!”

She turned.

“What about the candy?” I said, big smile on my face.

“What candy?”

“The candy you said you brought me.”

Dora looked perplexed. “I don’t remember saying anything about candy.”

“Yes, you did!”

She turned to my mother. “That one sure has a big imagination, doesn’t she?” she said, bemused. “Well, she’s absolutely right, I should’ve brought the kids some candy.”

“She’s lying!” I said.

My mother’s eyes went wide with embarrassment and she shot an apologetic glance at Dora. Then she marched over and bent down to my level. “What has gotten into you?” she hissed. “I’ve raised you better than to act like this.”

“But—”

“No buts. Now get inside,” she said, slapping me on the back of my legs.

• • •

Dora was to stay for two weeks, and although my mother loved having her and was happier than I had ever seen her, to me it felt like her time with us was not so much a visit as a hostile takeover. For the first week and a half I could not approach my mother without Dora hovering around like a linebacker, blocking me at every pass. “Run along,” she’d say to me as she massaged my mother’s feet or helped her with the dishes or folded the laundry while my mother napped on the couch. “Leave your poor, exhausted mother alone.”

With Matthew, Dora was different. She did not prevent his passage to my mother because there was no need. Matthew did not seek out my mother as I did, but was instead sought by her. He
could stay away for hours because he carried my mother inside him. But my ties to her were looser, a thinner thread that did not bear up under too much distance. This, in Dora’s opinion, was a problem.

“It’s downright oppressive the way she always wants to be near you!” Dora said to my mother one day as the three of us sat in the kitchen. “An adult needs her space, for God’s sake! Go out and have a shopping spree, have lunch with a friend. I’ll stay here and care for her.”

“That does sound nice,” my mother said, stirring her tea.

“No, it doesn’t,” I said, stirring mine.

But it was clear that my mother had taken Dora’s words to heart, the way you can’t help but do with advice given by a mother figure. A short time later, she slipped her keys into her hand and announced she would be back in a few hours.

“Where are you going?” I followed her to the car.

“Out,” she said, climbing into the driver’s seat.

“Can I come?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Adults need space sometimes, Cassie.”

“But I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“You’ll be fine. Dora is here if you need anything.”

“But I hate Dora!” I cried. It was true. I hated Dora for sending my mother away. And for forgetting her promise about the candy—quite possibly the worst two crimes a person could commit against me.

“What is it with you?” my mother said. She closed the door and then rolled down the window, her face tight and tired. “Dora has
been nothing but an angel to me, and if you loved me as much as you say you do, you’d make an effort to be friends. Wouldn’t you?”

“But—”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“But—”

“It’s a yes-or-no question.”

I nodded yes.

Sometimes I didn’t understand how I could be so terrible.

My mother rolled up the window and then backed out of the driveway. I watched her go, my longing stretched toward the car like a rubber band, snapping back with a sting as she disappeared around the bend.

I turned to see Matthew and the neighborhood gang chasing each other in the backyard, clamoring with the sounds of kids at play. They were in the midst of a game of tag and my body stirred to watch them run, wanting to be a part of the rush and the wind and the thrill of the hunt. But then I thought of my mother, and headed toward the back door with a sigh.

The house was quiet when I entered, and still carried the trail of my mother’s perfume. Dora was in the upstairs bathroom, and since I had often seen her bring enough newspapers in there to start a paper route, I knew it might be a while. I went to my room and waited on my bed, passing time by playing dress-up with Betty and my other dolls, all of whom were getting a stern lecture on behaving themselves. I was lost in the world of pretend until I heard a singsong voice say, “Caasssieeee.”

“Hi, Aunt Dora,” I said, smiling as big as I could.

She stepped into my room, fanned herself, pushed open a
window. “Stuffy in here.”

The sounds of Matthew and the neighborhood gang drifted into the room. They must have started playing hide-and-seek because someone shouted, “You’re it!” and another shouted, “Hide!”

Dora examined my bookshelf. A soft breeze floated through my window, a soupy wind of autumn and our neighbors’ barking dog, the sounds of boys in play.

“My grandchildren love books. I read to them all the time.”

“I love books too!” I said.

“That’s nice. But I only read to good little girls.”

“I’m good!”

She raised an eyebrow and turned back to the bookshelf. She looked like a nurse in her white housedress and orthopedic sneakers. “I don’t know about that. You haven’t been nice to me at all.”

I could hear my mother’s voice in my head again telling me to be nice to Dora. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to be nice. I wanted to be good.

She turned to the window and pressed her lips together as if considering my apology. Outside, the neighbor screamed for her barking dog to shut up.

I waited for Dora’s forgiveness. It was more than the story. I needed her to like me so my mother wouldn’t be mad at me anymore.

“You promise you’ll be nice from now on?”

I nodded vigorously.

“Okay, then,” Dora said. She pulled out a thin book of nursery rhymes, sat beside me and smoothed out the creases of her dress. I
sat up straighter and smoothed out the creases of my own dress as well, a blue jumper with a rooster on the front that was my favorite. I felt like I had won something as she opened the book and began to flip through it.

“Oh, that’s a good one!” I said, pointing my finger across her lap, and “That one has an old lady who lives in a shoe!” and “That one’s my favorite!” and “Look at the frog!”

I was never able to play it cool like Matthew, who was accustomed to such singular attention.

“Here we go,” Dora said finally, draping her arm around me and clearing her throat. “This is a good one.”

“Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie . . .”

• • •

I don’t remember Dora leaving my bedroom, only that I was alone again and that time had somehow elapsed without my being conscious of its passing.

The sun fell through my window in an absurdly bright and discordant yellow pool. The book of nursery rhymes lay tossed open on the floor like wreckage floating up from a bad dream. I sat with my legs dangling over the side of the bed, fixed there as if lost and waiting for somebody to find me. A vast and lonely sadness encompassed me, a sadness so pure and borderless, without thoughts to contain it, that it was less a feeling than its own bleak universe, so far removed from everything else that when the sporadic shouting voices of Matthew and the neighborhood kids punched again through the window on a breeze, the distance
between us seemed so great that I never dreamed I could just walk outside and find them there.

My Betty doll sat on my bed, looking at me, her shiny black eyes full of shiny black fear. I picked her up and squeezed her to my chest. I rocked her in my arms and sang “Jimmy Crack Corn” the way Matthew had always sung it for me when I was sad or scared. I sang it quietly, so quietly that it was more like mouthing the words, and I sang it over and over again without stop or pause, until the song became a spell, until the spell erased the day, until the day had been only this song and nothing more.

When my mother came home, she poked her head in my doorway. She looked strange to me, as if she was someone I had not seen in a long, long time.

“Were you a good girl for Dora?” she asked.

I nodded yes, but the sadness found its edges and gathered into the shape of arms that groped desperately inside my chest, reaching as if through prison bars, unable to break free. I felt there was something I wanted to tell my mother, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

• • •

Later that evening I found my mother sitting outside on the front steps. I plopped down beside her, eager to be close, to feel her warm body beside mine.

“Dora’s gone,” she said glumly, staring out toward the street. She put her hand to her neck and fondled the necklace that had been Dora’s gift—a delicate sterling silver heart on a chain. “You just missed her taxi. I tried to convince her to stay longer, but she wanted to be with her grandchildren for Thanksgiving.”