Goldengrove (5 page)

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Mom said. “I can’t always do the thinking for both of us.”

“Maybe you think too much,” said Dad. “Maybe that’s your problem.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.” I imagined Margaret saying, “At least it was Korean.”

Dad said, “Nico, are you okay? Were you all right, alone here . . . ?”

I said, “I was fine. I had a nice time.”

The truth was, I couldn’t breathe. I was trying to see Margaret’s face, but I’d forgotten what she looked like.

Which reminded me of the final rule:

6. No photographs. Why had I never noticed that our house was a Margaret museum? I couldn’t walk into a room without seeing two little blond girls preserved under glass, beaming from my mother’s piano or my father’s desk. Every time I opened a kitchen drawer, Margaret smiled up at me from a nest of receipts and rubber bands.

I’d made these rules for my own protection. But every so often I broke one just to see how it felt.

One afternoon, in the supermarket, I faked a craving for cookies. My father was so thrilled that I was showing any interest in food, he handed over the shopping cart and said, “Go. Fill it with every delicious, teeth-rotting baked good they have.”

Marigold-colored biscuits, marshmallow mounds, sandy discs swirled with hibiscus beckoned to me from the shelves. I opened a package and inhaled, playing to the security cameras. Let them get this on tape! The box smelled like baked chemicals, but nothing at all like Margaret. I’d thought I could recapture her smell, but it was gone forever. I couldn’t imagine asking my parents if they remembered what she’d smelled like. I stretched out my arms, as if to lean back on the evil waves that the cookies were transmitting to innocent baby brains.

As we pulled out of the supermarket parking lot, Dad said, “Nico, is something wrong?”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

“I mean, did something happen in the store? You seem . . .”

“Nothing happened,” I said.

“You didn’t find any cookies you liked?”

“They were gross,” I told him.

We were passing Golden Oldies, where Margaret used to make Mom and Dad stop and buy things for the house. Our red kitchen table, a giant orange floor lamp—stuff that my parents didn’t really like because it reminded them of their childhoods, but that they’d bought to please Margaret, who convinced them that mid-century modern was beautiful and cool. The shop was owned by a guy named Brad, Mom’s friend’s Sally’s ex-husband. I purposely averted my eyes until we passed the store. Everything was a timed grenade set to explode on visual contact.

After a silence, my father said, “There’s this new book that’s selling really well. It’s about wizards and magic. Harry Potter for grown-ups. I never understood why so many people were buying it until . . . all this . . . this thing with your sister.” Dad couldn’t bring himself to say
Margaret
, he couldn’t make himself say
death
. “But now it makes perfect sense to me why someone would want to escape. And now when someone asks for the book, I always wonder if that person is suffering like I am, and if they’re just pretending to be normal.”

I said, “That’s what
we’re
pretending. Sometimes, walking down the street, I’ll see somebody and think, Someone that person loved has just died.”

“I love you, Nico,” my father said.

“I love you too, Dad,” I said.

Dad said, “I always felt that Goldengrove had a sort of, I don’t know, semi-social-work function. Someone would come in with a problem, and I’d think I could find that person a book that might actually help.”

“Peace and love.” I spread my fingers in a V sign.

“Don’t be cynical,” said Dad. “It’s unattractive in a person your age. A customer would limp in on crutches, and I’d say, ‘You should read
A Voice Through a Cloud
.’ ”

I thought,
A Voice Through a Cloud: The Story of Dad
.

“What’s that?” I said, only because he expected me to.

“It’s a great book about a guy who gets hurt in a bicycle accident. I don’t know why I thought it would help. Or why
anything
would help.”

“The point is, Dad, you were trying,” I said. “You
wanted
to help.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Dad said.

Back home, I stood outside Margaret’s door. I closed my eyes and concentrated so hard it was like praying. Whom was I praying to? Margaret, I guessed. I did that sometimes in those days. Give me the nerve to walk into your room and go through your things, which you would have hated.

Once, I’d walked into Margaret’s room and found her nude, in front of the mirror. She didn’t seem embarrassed, which may have been why it felt less like seeing a naked person than like seeing a girl in a painting. I watched the naked, painted girl turn in tiny increments, like a rotisserie chicken

“It’s a wretched morning,” she was saying. “I’m so bored with my face. I wish I had someone else’s face. But I suppose you get the face you deserve.”

“What’s that from?” I said.

Frowning into the mirror, Margaret said, “Nico, how about knocking?”

I’d learned my lesson so well that even now I knocked on the air. I don’t know how long I stayed in the dark hall with my fist raised until I found the courage to inch open the door.

Margaret always liked it when I noticed what was new, what image or fresh piece of junk she’d added to her collection. I’d learned to do it so well that even now I looked for what was different until I remembered why nothing would be.

I made myself stand up straight. I said aloud, “There is no afterlife.” Where was heaven? In the sky? How were the dead transported after their Houdini escapes from their coffins? I knew kids who went to church and believed that after death you and your family sprouted wings and played instruments, like at some eternal band picnic. I envied them. I wished I believed that some day I would be able to tell Margaret everything that had happened since that last afternoon on the lake.

I repeated, like a spell, “There is no afterlife.” So why had I been trying to contact her, to pick up some sort of signal? I liked it when my right knee ached, because that was her weak point. I would have settled for any indication that she was at peace, or better yet that she missed me or needed me to do her a favor. I wanted her to appear in a dream and say, “Nico, go burn a candle at my Billie Holiday altar.” My logical mind had been invaded and possessed by the spirit of a superstitious lunatic. I thought about Margaret helping me, pulling strings from beyond. But what did I want her to do except not be dead, a miracle that, even I knew, was beyond my sister’s powers?

I stood, very still, in her doorway. Then I crawled into her bed. The pillow smelled like Margaret. Not like cookies, exactly, but cookielike. Purely her. I inhaled, and it was like sucking on one of those plastic pipes that help asthmatic kids breathe. The lump in my throat dissolved enough for me to get some air, but only for a second, and I was choking again. Maybe I did have a heart condition. I rolled over onto my side and curled up into a ball.

When I opened my eyes, I was staring into a snow globe on Margaret’s night table. I’d always loved it and wished it were mine. I used to imagine that if I stared into it hard enough, I could dissolve into atoms and pass through the scratched plastic globe, and a miniature version of me would reassemble inside it, twirling in the storm beside the tiny ballerina that I realized, only now, was a figure skater.

One summer, when I was a toddler, we rented a summer cottage. In the kitchen was a wall-sized ’70s photo mural of a meadow in the Rockies. My parents told me that I used to scoot my walker across the room and get a running start and hurl myself against the wall, trying to break through to the wildflower field. It was the same with the snow globe. I’d shake it, longing to enter that other dimension, staring and staring until Margaret ordered me to stop.

Now I shook the snow globe and watched the miniature skater stalled in mid-pirouette by the storm of cottony flakes bigger than her yellow head. How wintry Margaret’s room was! My fingertips were frozen. I pulled the tie-quilt up to my neck. I must have slept, because I woke with that ravenous nausea that can follow a restless nap. I dragged myself out of bed and walked over to the closet. I touched a feather boa, a sequined vest, an organdy skirt I couldn’t remember Margaret wearing, until I was stopped by the sight of Margaret’s favorite vintage T-shirt, dark blue with a silver shooting star trailed by a glitter comet.

As I pushed the shirt toward the back of the closet, Margaret’s Hawaiian shirt pitched itself straight at me. Pineapples, bunches of coconuts, splashy purple orchids grew from palms with fronds like the arms of the hula girls swaying beneath them. Margaret was generous with her clothes, but she would never lend me that one. She claimed it was some ancient synthetic that disintegrated, like Dracula, on contact with the sun. I didn’t see how that could have been true, because Margaret wore it day and night, especially when she went out with Aaron.

I tried on the Hawaiian shirt. The rayon was cool, almost slimy. I was thinking the unthinkable: I could have anything Margaret owned. My parents would let me, they’d
want
me to take whatever I wanted. How angry Margaret would be if she came back and discovered what I’d done. But she wasn’t coming back. I felt light-headed, almost weightless.

I didn’t want Margaret’s snow globe
or
her clothes. I wanted to see her, just once.

I looked at myself in the mirror. And I saw her. With each step, Margaret’s ghost expanded. Gingerly, I touched the glass. I thought of those fairy-tale mirrors that show you your dearest wish in return for some terrible price. Mirror, mirror on the wall. Your firstborn son for straw woven into gold, a glimpse of your drowned sister for something more expensive. Margaret filled the mirror and floated off the edges, and by the time I’d backed away far enough for the glass to contain her, Margaret had vanished, and there I was, wearing her hula shirt.

The girl in the mirror still wasn’t me, but the creature that would have been produced by swapping half of my cells for half of Margaret’s. Maybe it was the weight loss, or the fact that I’d grown taller, but for the first time I understood why Margaret used to say that some day I’d look like her. No one, not even Margaret, could have known it would happen so soon.

I was glad to see Margaret in me. It was proof that she still existed, even if some part of me must have had to move over to make room.

I went next door and took off the Hawaiian shirt and hung it in my closet. I would save it to wear, like a magic cloak, for those especially dangerous moments when I most needed its help.

Four

S
UNDAYS WERE UNBEARABLE, LONELIER THAN BEFORE
. Two, three Sundays since Margaret’s death, I knew the count from the moment I woke. Weeks would turn into months and years, but the meter would keep ticking.

Margaret’s death had shaken us, like three dice in a cup, and spilled us out with new faces in unrecognizable combinations. We forgot how we used to live in our house, how we’d passed the time when we lived there. We could have been sea creatures stranded on the beach, puzzling over an empty shell that reminded us of the ocean.

Occasionally, I’d find my parents in unexpected places: Dad in the middle of the stairs, Mom in the garage, as if she’d gone out with a purpose that got vaporized by the paint fumes. She took on massive housecleaning projects that she left half done. She ordered a paper shredder, and on Sundays, instead of music, I’d hear the hum of Mom making confetti from ancient tax returns she’d found in the attic.

She never again played that Chopin waltz she was playing that afternoon. She took a leave from writing liner notes. She hardly played at all.

She did keep going to yoga class. From my window, I’d spy on her, balanced on one leg with her hands joined as if she was praying to the lake. Or I’d see her arched over the grass like an upside-down lawn chair. When she stood up, she stumbled. Her arthritis was getting worse.

She asked if I wanted to join her. She still claimed that it helped. But I couldn’t see how standing on my head would change what was inside it, or how it would help to hear Mom’s friend Sally remind her to relax her shoulders and tuck in her butt.

Sometimes, after yoga class, Sally would follow Mom home in her car, and they’d hang out in the study where my mother used to write. I’d smell Sally’s cigarette smoke wafting down from upstairs, though before, Mom had never let anyone smoke in the house.

Margaret never liked Sally. She said Sally was an example of how, given enough vanity and money, you could make your face look like a junior-high sewing project. Margaret was hardly ever mean like that, so it must have been something else. Sally always seemed wary of Margaret. But she’d treated me with a sly, flirtatious weirdness, as if we were coconspirators keeping secrets from the grown-ups. She’d ask how I was and then laugh and say, “You don’t have to answer.” Then we’d both laugh, embarrassed, because she’d thought she was rescuing me from teenage conversational hell, when all I was
ever
going to say was, “Fine.”

Now, for my mother, yoga had become like the piano. She tried and failed and lay on the ground and got up and tried again, and got steadily more anxious instead of more relaxed.

Once, I watched from the upstairs window as Mom crumpled to the grass and Sally went around to the back of the house, where Dad was weeding a patch of bee balm. The afternoon sun picked out the gold streaks in Sally’s hair. I wondered how much time and money she’d spent to make the sun do that. She looked up. I stepped back from the window. I moved closer again as she leaned toward my father, and Dad leaned away. I could tell she was saying she was worried about my mother.

That night, at dinner, Dad said, “I don’t know what it is, Daisy. Instinct, maybe. There’s something vampiristic about how Sally is feeding off our . . . situation. Remember that friend of your mom’s? The one who showed up at the end and wouldn’t leave her bedside? You said there were people like that. Human buzzards, you called them.”

Dad must have been really serious. In those days, we never criticized, never complained, never mentioned other deaths, certainly not that of my mother’s mother, who died just before I was born. For my father to call Sally a vampire was to stray perilously far from the narrow path we were walking from minute to minute.

“Whom
do
you trust, dear?” my mother said. “You didn’t trust poor Aaron. Who knows how things might have turned out if we hadn’t listened to your so-called instincts.”

“Meaning?” said my father.

“Aaron’s a fabulous swimmer,” she said. “The kid with the screw loose, remember?”

She couldn’t mean what I thought she did. Was my mother suggesting that if they’d let Margaret go boating with Aaron that day, he could have saved her? Unlike me, who’d taken a nap and let my sister drown. Did Sally tell my mother that Aaron was a swimmer? Was it even true? Neither he nor Margaret had ever mentioned that. I might have said so, if I hadn’t been afraid that they might ask why I was such an expert on Aaron. But it didn’t matter compared to what Mom had said. Somewhere inside my wise, loving mother was a furious child who blamed my father and me for my sister’s death.

The three of us mimed eating, until finally my mother said, “Sally had a suggestion.”

“Those are four scary words right there,” Dad said.

“Very funny,” said Mom. “She suggested it might be helpful to go see Dr. Viscott and ask how he could have missed what was wrong with Margaret.”

Our pediatrician had come to the funeral, then phoned a few times to see how we were doing. Until one night my mom grabbed the phone and told him to stop calling. He’d been my doctor since I was born. I’d always liked him. He had video games in his waiting room and a model train that ran on a track. We’d learned to believe him when he said that something would only hurt for a minute. But lifelong pain, apparently, was not his field of expertise.

“He doesn’t know,” said Dad. “He never did. How would that be
healing
? How would that make you feel better?”

“Well, Sally didn’t mean
better
.” A coleslaw speck had attached itself to my mother’s bottom lip.

“Advice from Sally . . . ,” my father said. “Watch out, world.”

“She meant it was something I might do to—”

Dad said, “The guy’s a year from retirement. He’s a broken wreck. It’s
our
fault for taking the word of some country doc. What do you care what he admits? How’s that going to change things?”

He looked from my mother to me and back. There it was.
Our fault
. We dissected our cornbread-coated catfish and stone-ground grits.

“I think we should make Viscott pay. Not a fortune. But something. Something for what he did. For what he
didn’t
do.”

Dad said, “Do we really want to spend all that time with lawyers, pumping out all that venom? I know it’s a cliché, but it won’t bring Margaret back.”

“I know it’s a cliché
.” Mom’s flash imitation of Dad was precise and fiendish, and her tone had a reckless, razory edge I’d never heard before.

After its echo faded, Dad said, “You should try playing the piano, Daisy. Just try.”

Mom said, “Did I ever tell you about my great-aunt Maeve? After her daughter died, she developed an allergy to music. She was always crying in elevators, and when you went to a restaurant with her, you had to call ahead and ask them please, no background sound track.”

Dad said, “Daisy, I
knew
your great-aunt Maeve. She was nothing like you. Try, just give it a shot. Maybe if you noodled around for half an hour a day—”

“Noodled?” Mom spat the word back at him. “Sir, yes sir! Noodle. Relax. Any other instructions?”

Dad said, “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just making a suggestion. Work’s the only thing that helps.”

“Nothing helps,” Mom said.

My father said, “I know that. But we need distraction and time. Distraction to get us through the time between now and then.”

“Between now and when?”

“The future,” my father told her.

“Ah, the future,” my mother said. She pondered that for a while. Then she said, “Actually, come to think of it . . . I already went to see Dr. Viscott.”

“I see,” my father said.

I didn’t. Why had Mom fake-casually brought up the possibility of something she’d already done?

“How did it go?” asked Dad.

“Very nice, actually. Very apologetic. Very eager to help. He gave me a new medication for my hands.”

“What kind of new medication?” asked Dad.

“Did I say
new
? I meant old. Something older. Time-tested. And you know what? It seems to be working.”

No one said anything for a while as we watched Mom pick at her food.

“How’s your book coming along, Dad?” I asked, to cut the silence.

“Okay, I guess,” he said. “Yesterday I read an article that said the scientists feel pretty sure that the planet’s got maybe five billion years left.”

“That’s a comfort,” said Mom.

“It is, in a way,” said Dad. I think he found it consoling to imagine having all that company when the world ended. Otherwise, it was all so isolated and pathetic. One death, one family, one grief at a time.

M
Y FATHER MUST HAVE BELIEVED THAT WORK COULD BRIDGE THE
gap between the dark now and the slightly brighter future. He was spending every spare moment working on his book. Or maybe he was writing more because he had to do
something,
and he could barely make himself go into the bookstore.

One day, I went to Goldengrove with him to find something to read. But I’d forgotten the logic of how one word followed another. The sorts of books I used to like—fantasy, science fiction, world civilization compressed into the history of salt or cotton or tuna—seemed pointless, incomprehensible. Why would anyone care?

As I rejected book after book, I saw what my poor father had to endure. His customers practically walked on their toes as they approached the counter. They asked how he was getting along and began sniffling before he could reply. Or they’d tell him how sorry they were and gaze into his eyes, their own eyes brimming with puppylike adoration. Their literary Romeo, he was everything their husbands weren’t—a reader, a listener, sensitive and handsome. Now that he’d been wounded, they took on his injury as their own. Every one of them could have healed him, and she knew just how she would do it.

Dad and I learned to brace ourselves whenever the doorbell sounded. After an hour he fled to his office at the back of the store.

With my father gone, I could stop pretending to look for a book and just hang out with Elaine. Elaine had worked at Goldengrove almost since it began. She knew how to use the computer, order from the distributors, keep accounts and pay taxes. Along the way she’d managed to read practically every book worth reading.

When you read a hundred books, you could join Elaine’s Groucho Club and have your picture taken in a Groucho mask, which you got to keep. One wall was plastered with Polaroids of every kid in town in a mustache and glasses and a huge plastic nose—everyone except Margaret and me. Margaret read her hundred books but declined to be photographed wearing the Groucho face, and later I did the same, because my sister had. Which turned out to be fortunate, because now I could go to the bookstore without having to see her photo. Even so, I searched for her, as if I could still be surprised.

Elaine hugged me, pressing my face into her mane of bristly, colorless hair. Then she held me at arm’s length. I let her look. I trusted her not to ask how I was feeling.

“Honey,” she said. “I don’t want to upset you. But you’re starting to look more like your sister.”

I said, “You couldn’t upset me any more than I already am. Anyhow, I know. The other day the strangest thing happened. I looked in the mirror, and I saw Margaret.”

“Eek,” said Elaine. “
Persona
.”

“What?” I said.

“Ingmar Bergman,” she said. “Swedish. Black and white. Subtitles. Dull. You’d hate it.”

Old films were a passion that Elaine and Margaret had shared. You couldn’t mention an old movie Elaine hadn’t seen. Not only did she know all the stars and directors, but she had a mental filing system so that, if you told her about a conversation you’d overheard at the supermarket or some incident at school, she could name a film in which something similar happened.

“What’s
Persona
about?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Elaine said. “Just promise me you won’t watch it for another ten years.”

“Okay,” I said. “I promise.”

Elaine loved to make us promise her things. Promise you won’t smoke pot or have sex until you’re twenty-one. Swear you won’t smoke cigarettes ever. Margaret found it easy, because she’d already done all those things, just as I found it easy because I believed I never would.

Drugs and sex seemed like open invitations to confusion and shame, two emotions I dreaded long before I’d been forced to take our school’s useless antidrug program. Our DARE instructor was a uniformed cop named Officer Prozak, which the parents thought was hilarious. Once a week, we’d listen to her ramble on about the ways in which various substances would destroy us. Maybe the accident of her name was why she seemed to expect to be doubted or mocked, and why her manner veered from cringing to hostile. Everyone said
she
was on drugs, and as she stood before us, chalking the back of her uniform against the blackboard, her terror of us—of everything—rubbed off onto her subject so that even the kids who smoked dope daily were temporarily worried. Just say no, we’d chanted with her. Say no to the recurring hallucinations, the car wrecks, the crack-addled murders, the dried-chestnut brains.

Sex was scarier than drugs. Drugs could only drive you crazy. But sex meant getting naked in front of another person. I’d seen lots of Hollywood sex, perfect people with peachlike skin tumbling with balletic grace in the flattering light. I understood the biology. But textbooks didn’t explain why you would
want
to take off your clothes with someone you hardly knew.

I thought about kissing, or at least about a boy saying he wanted to kiss me. In sixth grade, there had been a party at which the girls and boys paired off and went into a closet. Twice it was my turn, and both times the boys asked if we could just pretend to have kissed. Once might have been about the boy, but twice had to be about me. Plenty of kids had offered me joints, but not one boy had ever hinted he wanted to hold my hand. How did you know what boys wanted? I would never find out, unless the impossible happened and I became someone’s funny valentine.