Trompe l'Oeil (29 page)

Forever she calls out to her father; forever he saves her—though she will no longer be herself—the story a soundless repeating loop.

And if he cannot save her?

Another story, another loop, a girl for whom desire and flight have merged.

And what if in Daphne's expression you recognize a haunting both nameless and familiar? If in Apollo's? No one can run fast enough. Down near the Piazza del Popolo, there are cafés, shops, ordinary conversations. A glass of wine? Count the days, years you've dreamed of stone and leaves.

THE MURPHYS III

Mistaken for twins on occasion, as young children. Later, even during high school years, referred to as “the twins” by neighbors who knew they were not. Neither Sara nor Delia would make the correction. At a distance one might notice only the sandy-blond hair, the slender builds and short statures, the fair skin; closer up the blue-gray eyes, one oval face with a slightly aquiline nose, one round face, a more buttonish nose, the same precisely curved lips. They were thirteen months apart, and some years that mattered; but no one would confuse Delia's face for Sara's, or Sara's for Delia's. To Joanie MacFarland, “Nora's girls” referred to all the Murphy daughters, “twins” to Sara and Delia only. Shorthand, yes, but also slippage from that early resemblance between Molly and the young Delia? At times it seemed “twins” conjured Molly too, referring to an approximate category centered around Delia—Molly Delia's dead twin, Sara her fraternal one, the number of pregnancies irrelevant.

To Sara, at times they had seemed a trio, though Molly appeared as a peripheral blur Sara struggled to define. Delia's curiosity—intermittent, less vexed—had focused on Molly's taste in games or food or color (did Molly also love jam?) and rarely
involved Rome. Nor was Delia troubled by resemblance and mistaken assumptions. During childhood, if relatives slipped and called her Molly, she answered “Delia” in the lighthearted tone of a party hostess. As a teenager, and later, she too mixed up the baby photos. “Maybe my cheeks were fatter?” she'd say. “Hard to tell.” Yet how fully Delia occupied her own body: for her, the questions ended here.

Paired, yes, but not mistaken. Acquaintances referred to Sara as “the quiet” one, Delia “the lively.” In school, Sara earned straight As, Delia—bright but unpredictable—a few more Bs, the occasional C if the teacher was, as she explained to Nora, “a turd.” It was Sara who remembered to bring their lunches to school; Sara who closed the house windows during storms; Sara who knew when they'd visit James. Delia planned beach picnics and baked cookies and lobbied for trips to the mall.

They were unserious competitors, though they joined teams and sometimes won (Sara mainly wanted to swim; Delia to socialize). Only to each other did they speak of disappointments in their siblings and their father; together they worried about Nora. Well liked, both of them; still, Sara could be morose, Delia clownish to a fault. Boyfriends. To Sara, Delia's resembled retriever puppies. To Delia, Sara's were dopily earnest or brooding and mute. As high school girls, both first had sex, Sara with a boy who lived near the harbor and showed her his boat designs and stole beer from his parents. He rushed, not needing, he said, a warm-up. “Oh, God,” Delia told her. “I hope he gave you a beer.” Though Delia's own first time was unlaughing, a constrained educational exercise with a boy from varsity soccer.

Not twins. After high school the moniker dropped away; once they left Blue Rock for college, they were plainly sisters, though only later could they sort the implications. Sara moved to Western Massachusetts; Delia stayed near Boston. They talked on the phone, they pursued degrees; in certain ways they mystified each other. Delia joined social committees: she event-planned, she networked. Sara hung out in cafés and slept with disaffected men. And mulled: really, did the mulling help? Would sports? Maybe she could try a local league, or pickup games; Delia played Frisbee and met a sweet guy named Mike.

High
GPA
s, both of them, and graduate programs. Delia trained in physical therapy; Delia wanted kids. In these choices, she was clear. Less clear about Nora, who'd sometimes be unavailable for weeks; less clear about the distance from Theo, to whom she mailed outlandish postcards and holiday gifts. He sent comic responses and expensive presents. It was something, a relationship of sorts, if from a distant sphere. Only once, when Theo had been out of touch longer than usual, Delia said, “Maybe I have too much Molly.” “He's like that with everyone,” Sara told her. Delia did not worry about her relationship to James: amicable monthly visits and weekly phone calls seemed enough. She did not worry about Katy, whom she saw often, and whose life her own soon began to resemble.

A marriage. Two girls. A house in the outer suburbs.

To Sara, Delia's life seemed lucid and precisely chosen and unimaginable. In college the subjects Sara studied—sociology, art history—posed abstract questions that led meanderingly to rare concrete jobs. She waitressed; she temped; she joined a community garden. Only later, after a master's and a return to
Boston, did the work improve. In the intervening years, Delia spoke to her with an apparent patience that continued even after Sara resettled and found what Delia called a “grown-up job” in nonprofit media. Delia at thirty sent rainbow-colored party invitations and thank-you notes; this Delia arranged family dinners—pizza, but dinners nonetheless—and invited Sara to block parties and birthday gatherings.

Sara could not explain Delia; neither could she explain herself. By her early thirties, her work anchored her as much as any work might. She too could write thank-you notes; she too remembered birthdays. It occurred to her that for Delia a spouse might be another kind of twin. Unclear how many such pairings a life might sustain, or how long they might last. A bond separate and distinct from the kinship Sara felt in friendships and relationships, though she'd been in love—or a state she understood to be love—several times. Men. Thrilling, at first. It was always easy, in the beginning, to lose herself in sex, but the more intimate the relationship became—and the more familial—the more she retreated. As if she were at first escaping into pleasure, but later (and more dangerously) began to vanish from herself. It had happened even in the most hopeful of relationships, despite apparent trust, elated future planning—that brief feeling of arrival as if the place of arrival might not also be a point of departure. And then? A growing disorientation, her body again becoming a separate thing. Questions arose, reasonable questions—other cities, children, how to shape a married life—and there appeared, again, a vanishing point beyond which she could not imagine or travel, and in its contemplation felt herself receding. It did not seem to be a matter
of wanting or not wanting; she had never said, “I don't want that.” She didn't know. It was as if she couldn't speak the language. As if she were hearing Russian: she knew only English and French.

At thirty-two, she left a man she'd been with for three years. Hadn't she loved him? He had not pushed for children; he too did not know. He'd studied architectural history. What he'd wanted, it appeared, was a worldly recognition she understood to be fame, though that desire was hard to parse from his dazzling curiosity and solid work ethic. He would not have used the word
fame
. He would have said
professional advancement
, perhaps correctly. The desire, the ambition, had nothing to do with her, but it appeared to take on a life of its own, like a permanent house guest from whose company she'd withdrawn. Maybe she could not judge; maybe her own desires were timid and sparse.

“Your own what?” Delia said. “Maybe you just don't like him anymore.”

This sounded true. “I thought I did,” Sara said. “I thought a lot of things.”

“You did,” Delia said. “I know.”

SARA'S PLACES

The first time Sara visited Theo in California—before she started college, long before she really traveled—it seemed she was flying to the edge of the world, a point from which she could fall, or, if not fall, become lost in anonymity. As if, so far from New England and Nora and Delia, she became unfamiliar to herself. For a panicked moment, she imagined herself stranded there, exiled, unable to adapt or return. Then the panic abated; she struggled to explain it to Theo. They were at a café in Berkeley. He nodded and kissed her on the cheek. “We all miss the house,” he said. He suggested sushi for dinner.

Had the house still existed when Sara finished college, like Katy, she might have schemed to return (conjuring an early September house, occupied by Nora and Delia). The longing for the vanished house and those moments persisted. From the years of the condo through her college years—and beyond—temporary perches became the norm, as they had for Katy. James and Josie's Beverly house was an occasional refuge, though the occasions grew infrequent. She traveled but held fast to New England: here was the familiar coast, familiar small towns and farms; here was Boston; here was Cambridge.

After she split with the historian, she found her own Cambridge apartment, a small one-bedroom off Huron Avenue near Fresh Pond. Relieved to live alone, though the place felt provisional. Perhaps it would always, despite her efforts—new paint, silk pillows, shelved books, framed photographs, tapestried rugs on the hardwood floors. Perhaps rentals always felt provisional: or would the sensation persist regardless of place? She could not see beyond the temporary, even when imagining a house. In the redbrick house where Katy and Tim had settled—solid, inland—she guessed one might believe in permanence, or Katy might; unlikely, it seemed, that Katy would entertain the question.

Yet possession seemed to make a difference: what if Sara owned a house? If she also bought a two-story, redbrick? If one owned a redbrick house was
self
-possession then a different matter? She could say without thinking, “my boots,” or “my radio,” but today, beyond her apartment window, orange leaves fell from high branches onto the hood of a small blue car that was, surprisingly, her own—a car she'd driven for a year. How had she arrived at this moment, in her one-bedroom apartment so far from the sea and from the houses and apartments in which the rest of her family lived? As if they'd all been flung from Blue Rock and yet remained in some ghostly orbit—orbiting, say, a dead star? Or if not in orbit, then what? Free-floating? If floating, one could merely say: here is a woman by a window gazing at a car on the street. There are other women and other windows; men and windows; various streets, various cars. Random flashing signals from random shifting points. Perhaps those other women, those men, were guided by
stars unknown to her. Perhaps also floating. At this moment, should someone have phoned Sara—at the window, watching leaves, amazed by her own car—and asked,
How are you?
how would she have answered? Might she have cited the Blue Rock fire, her subsequent lags in cognition—months after, rummaging for a particular green scarf before remembering its place in the vanished house? The day of the orange leaves seemed the opposite: on the street, a car—apparently hers! How had it arrived? In response, Delia or Nora might have offered, “Do you need a new scarf?” and invited her to dinner.
How are you?
To Katy—she had few real conversations with Katy, even rarer ones with Theo—Sara might have answered “Fine,” and marveled at the color of the leaves.

James? He called most days, not only since Sara's breakup but also before—since she first sensed the relationship's slide, though neither she nor James remarked on it. Apparently, he'd heard the telling note, or the muted one, she'd otherwise managed to conceal. Little alarmed him: lately nothing surprised him. If she'd mentioned the green scarf and the blue car to James, he might have recognized not their contrast but their common marking of displacement.
How are you?
Had she told him, “I'm not sure how I got here,” he'd be the one to say, “I know.”

For Sara, just as there would never be a return to Blue Rock, it seemed there would never be a complete departure. Or maybe whatever still tethered her to the earth would remain gossamer. Not the lost house but a ghostly aura expanding outward from the space the house once occupied. What is a place? Its inverse? Over time? She had no idea.

WALKING

“She's off birding or something,” Katy might say—or Delia, more wistful, “She's in a studio class.” Both routinely noted the ways Nora disappeared into the life they all claimed they wanted her to have. For months Sara had listened—attentively, she'd thought—as she had to other weekly news of child-care dilemmas and car repairs and workplace dramas. For her, Nora's busyness—the drawing classes and gallery openings and nature walks, the allusions to friends they'd never met—posed no problem (nor did Nora's holiday evasions). Nora visited with grandchildren every week: surely, for Katy and Delia, that had to count.

And Sara too had been busy; Sara too often missed holiday events. Every other week, she met Nora for dinner; every few days they e-mailed. Then Sara became single again, which seemed like a return from exhausting foreign travel: who might be there to greet her? Nora sent encouraging notes, bought her perfume, a merino sweater. “You call me anytime, sweet pea,” Nora said, though Nora habitually silenced her phone, answered nonurgent voice mails with texts. Nora had plans and other plans. Like Sara, she was single—at least so far as Sara
knew; but here Sara found herself stymied. They would not, it seemed, be single together—as Sara had somehow presumed. From what dream had she drawn that idea? As if upon return from her partnered life she'd find Nora as, say, the Nora of her college years, frosting cake for her arrival (only once had there been such a cake). When Nora declined invitations—
Oh doll, I'd love to meet for (dinner/a movie) but I'm going to a (potluck/museum tour/birding group)
—Sara was taken up short. The once-sufficient e-mails and voice mail messages now seemed flimsy representations. Too often—message or not—Sara couldn't really find her.