The Last Life (14 page)

I was old enough, or considered distressed enough, to merit a room of my own. The Robertsons lived in a picture-book white frame house set back from the road in a suburb south of Boston. It was a large house, but not as large as its neighbors', which were closer in on either side than others along the street.

"Ours is the original," Eleanor explained. "They sold off the land later, and built the others. I like to picture it alone, surrounded by trees, the way it was in the beginning."

It was still surrounded by trees. Everywhere was green, rampantly green, and growing. The sky was all but invisible for the verdant canopy. I missed the reluctant, thirsty trees of home, with their twisty trunks and scrabbling limbs. The fertility around the Robertsons seemed obscene.

My room, though, was wonderful. I had a high, old double bed with ringed posts at the corners, and taut white sheets. There was an armoire and a chest of drawers—a highboy, I learned it was called—to match ("Your grandmothers bedroom suite," Eleanor volunteered; I sometimes forgot that my mother had had parents too, and that they had died). The floor was glossy, and creaked, and the wing chair in the corner seemed to sit gingerly upon it. The big window—which gave onto a cluster of trees, through which, when the branches moved, blinked a light from the house next door—rattled in its frame. Eleanor had put a bunch of daisies in a glass and a copy of
Seventeen
magazine by my bed, next to the fringed lamp.

"I hope you'll feel at home in here," she said. "We want you to feel right at home. We only have a few rules: consideration for others, help when asked, and keep your sense of humor."

Becky appeared in the doorway behind her mother and rolled her eyes at Eleanor's humanist litany. "Mom," she said, "get real." She took her hands off her hips. "Dad says, does Sagesse want dinner or is she too tired?"

"I'm okay," I said.

"Which means?" Becky crossed her arms over her breasts. She was impressively sullen.

"Yes, please. I'd like to join you for dinner."

Becky turned and went. Her mother sighed. "I'm sure you're not like that with your mother. We all go through it, but it can be hard to bear. C'mon, I'll show you the bathroom. You share it with the girls."

That first night, I woke before dawn to the sound of Etienne's crying, a hollow, keening sound. It was in fact a cat in heat, somewhere outside the window. At first, I didn't know where I was, and the bulbed bedposts menaced in the gloom. Aside from the wailing, the silence was absolute. I got out of bed and tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom. All the doors were shut. I peed, and the trickle resounded, embarrassing. I was afraid that the flush would waken everybody, and stood peering into the bowl for some time before I found the courage to flick the handle. I felt as though the house itself were listening with me. Back in bed, I didn't fall asleep for a long time. My insides were gassy. I lay waiting for intruders. Only when I heard the first stirrings of my aunt and uncle did I allow myself to let go, my vigil kept. I dreamed of the safe, pale shapes of my bedroom.

Life at the Robertsons' was backwards: Aunt Eleanor left for her office (she worked as a family lawyer in a glass tower in the city, uncoiling bitter divorces and bickering over custody cases) before I got up in the morning; Uncle Ron, a professor at one of the local colleges, a small, un-famous one where he lectured on the history of sport, a subject I had not hitherto known to exist, was on vacation for the summer, and it was he, with his broad, lazy gestures and thin, persistent laugh, who kept the rhythms of the household. He drove Rachel every morning to her tennis camp, where she spent the day's hottest hours lined up among other sparky children of privilege, practicing ground strokes with balletic aplomb; and he picked her up at four each afternoon. He packed her lunches, too—tuna salad or salami and cheese piled between hearty slabs of brown bread, a waxy piece of fruit, a pair of cookies in a plastic sack—meals which she scorned and smuggled home again as often as not to slip untouched (except the cookies) into the trash. Sometimes, fearful of being caught and forced to choke down the limp but formidable sandwiches, she stuffed them under her bed for a day or two, awaiting the biweekly garbage truck. There they festered and perfumed her room as surely and offensively as the air fresheners that lent the Robertsons' bathrooms their antiseptic twang.

But Rachel, at eleven, was at an age where she could do no wrong, and her malodorous hoarding passed unnoticed. Rather, Ron and Eleanor focussed their concern (it was a family in which discontent was manifested as loving concern) on Becky—who refused, often, to eat at all; who flounced; who circled around her family with a terrified haughtiness and spent several days trying to gauge whether I was of it (and hence to be despised) or not, like a dog sniffing at a stranger's pant leg.

Becky had had, at the outset of the summer, the prize my mother had always hoped for for me: a summer job. As she was on the threshold of her junior year in high school, this prize was professionally necessary. Eleanor explained this to me on my second evening there, as she darted around the flower beds after work in her suit and sneakers, yanking weeds, while I trailed behind holding open a plastic garbage bag for their remains. (We had a garden too, of course, but my mother let one of the gardeners from the hotel tend to it. "Dirt," she used to say, "does not interest me.") If Becky was to secure a place at a decent university, as they hoped (and tacitly demanded) she would, it was necessary to be able to prove that her summers had not been wasted, that she had either been earning or learning, and preferably both.

Becky had had the ideal job for a girl her age, Eleanor said. Eleanor had helped her to find it. She had been the assistant to a woman named Laetitia, a lady of independent means and a daughter of the sixties, whose mission (she had trained as a doctor) was to bring food and medical care, without judgment, to the downtrodden of Boston's Combat Zone. Laetitia was a self-starter: she didn't go in for government programs. She made up and delivered over a hundred packed meals a day to the homeless and diseased (so many salami sandwiches—I pictured them stacked up, an inedible mountain), and once a week she drove her van to a specific corner where she tended the coughs and cuts of the same, and—"Don't tell," cautioned Eleanor—passed out free needles to the junkies, although it was against the law then to do so.

"She is such an impressive woman," Eleanor said, fiddling with the garden hose. "She does remarkable work. But try telling that to Becky. Becky—" she wrinkled her nose, officially disappointed "—only lasted two weeks. To each her own, I suppose. But I don't know how she expects to get into college at this rate."

Becky would later confide that she had found the work alternately dull and frightening. She was either slathering entire loaves of supermarket bread with Hellmann's mayonnaise, milky goo which got under her nails and into her hair, or steeling herself to approach the twitching, dead-eyed bundles of rags to whom Laetitia ministered, to press the food upon them. I could not, myself, have done such work; I didn't understand how Eleanor and Ron could expect Becky to do it either. Becky told me, too, that Laetitia was herself alarming: bony, with wild hair that smelled of seaweed (her own diet was macrobiotic), she seemed, always, to be shedding skin, in amoebic patches, on her arms and neck. She would fall asleep at odd moments—in the van, in the Zone—leaving Becky to wonder if her employer was dead, or succumbing to a coma, and uncertain whether to waken her or to send away the jittery crowd strung along the sidewalk outside. And most of all, Becky said, she couldn't stand the needles. They gave her the creeps.

Becky had quit without telling her parents. For several days afterwards she left each morning as if going to Laetitia's house in Back Bay, only to stop at the Common and sit there, like a homeless person herself, waiting for the day to pass. Of the revelation, when it came, Eleanor said: "We were sad only that she didn't feel she could confide in us. We're on her side, you know." And Becky: "They were mad as hell. Mom especially."

It dawned on me in those early days that I was, in this place, remarkably, a cipher. I didn't speak much (the tidal wave of American English was tiring for me, and it took all my energy to keep up), and anyway I felt that my personality didn't translate. I couldn't make jokes in English, or not without planning them out before I spoke, by which time they ceased to be funny and I couldn't be bothered to voice them. It was that way with most statements of more than a sentence or two: I passionately did not want to make mistakes, because my identity as an American was at stake. So I confined myself to questions, and encouraging echoes, their idiom easy to mimic: "Cool" and "Awesome" and "You're kidding!"

But because they didn't know me, my cousins didn't notice. They thought me reserved, perhaps, or pensive, or homesick (which I often was, but they didn't ask about my home), and each projected onto me the character she wanted or needed me to have. I suddenly looked different from every angle, and was free. They didn't seem to remember, even, about Etienne, or else they thought him better not discussed, and for the first time I felt that part of myself cut away. I was absolved of all responsibility, and I liked it.

For Eleanor, I was cast as the enviable adolescent daughter, the placid girl that Becky ought to have been and that Rachel would, with luck, become: old enough for proper conversation, and yet obedient. Clearly my mother had not mentioned that I, too, was difficult. The sisters were not close. Eleanor did imagine in me a complacency, the complacency of her own and my mother's middle-class childhood, with which she felt my mother had never broken.

"I don't see how she can stand not to work," she said once, looking hard at me as though I should have an answer. "But I guess she's in a different culture now. I guess it suits her." She paused. "It wasn't easy for me. But I'm a little older, and I had the sixties on my side. Your mother was just never interested. I was the weirdo in the family. Mom and Dad were thrilled when she went to France the first time. Less thrilled, of course, that she fell in love with the place and then with your father. She was a French major. A real twinset-and-pearls girl. She liked being at a women's college. I didn't have the choice, but a few years later, she did. Things were changing that fast, back then. We're just very different, dear, that's all. I've always been one for a fight. You've got to be, in life, Sagesse."

For Ron, my silence was coy and flirtatious: "There she goes again, speaking with her eyes," he'd say. "Louder than a thousand words." He was bluff, but not convincingly so, a gentle soul in a footballer's body who masked his fear of being laughed at only by laughing constantly himself, at things that weren't remotely amusing. I came to this conclusion only long afterwards: at the time he merely made me nervous, and I did all I could to avoid being left alone with him. But I think he, too, who deferred to his wife in all things, absorbed an impression that I was a "good" girl, more conservative and reliable than their Becky, more withdrawn than the exuberant Rachel. And, in my troubles, to be left alone as much as I wanted.

Rachel thought me exotic. At the beginning she was forever wanting to show me things, to include me with her friends. She marvelled over my clothes and my little bag of makeup ("Your lipstick's by Chanel? Wow! Can I try it?"), wanting me to be an older sister still close enough to care about, rather than dismiss, her preoccupations. She called me "Gesso," and then "Gesso the Gecko," and because I could not trust myself to express my annoyance lightheartedly, I let her, which allowed her to believe I was the sort who could be played with, and trusted, and which kept me in her favor.

Becky wasn't so sure. We became friends, in the end, over a misunderstanding. I'd been there three or four days, and although the family was welcoming enough, I was lonely, and bored. Becky, jobless now for some weeks, was too, but she kept her comings and goings secret from me. She had friends, with whom she disappeared for hours. I slept a lot, and spent afternoons on a blanket under one of the immense trees, reading
Jane Eyre
in English and writing imaginary letters to Marie-Jo and to Thibaud, communiqués which my pride would keep me from ever setting out on paper, let alone sending. Once I tried to sketch the house from the yard and abandoned the project in disgust.

I was pretending to read about Jane's miserable experience at the Lowood School, my eyes skating over the paragraphs as if they were so many squiggles, when Becky ambled across the lawn, her long, reddish hair fluttering loose, catching the sun. She wore a tank top, and her throat and shoulders were smattered with freckles. Her breasts, smaller than mine, hardly moved as she walked. She flopped down onto the grass a few feet away from me and tipped her face to the afternoon light. It was around four, and Ron had gone out to pick up Rachel and buy food for supper. ("Wanna come? See the thrills of Star Market?" he'd asked from the kitchen door, nasal and laughing. "I didn't think so. Must be a good book!")

When she spoke, her words were directed away from me, at the blobs of cloud.

"I'm sorry?"

"I said, 'Do you smoke up?"'

It was not an expression I had heard before, and I took it to be a colloquial reference to smoking, period, which would have been a sufficiently illicit thrill in the Robertsons' anti-tobacco world.

"All the time, at home," I said, then clarified: "Not at home, I mean, but with my friends."

"Good." She whipped out a little plastic bag and a stone sliver, which I didn't immediately recognize as a pipe, from the back pocket of her cutoffs. "Dad won't be back for at least an hour. There's plenty of time."

With exaggerated concentration she proceeded to select a seedless thumbful of the contents of her bag, and to jam it into the bowl of the tiny pipe. She had a lighter, too, although I didn't see which pocket it emerged from.

"This is great stuff. Doesn't take much to work."