Goldengrove (6 page)

After we’d promised Elaine not to smoke or have sex, she’d say, “And if you
do
, promise me you’ll make the guy use a condom.”

Once Margaret asked if that was how Elaine wound up having Tycho, and Elaine went all dreamy and said, “That’s another story.”

I was encouraged that a guy had wanted to have sex with un-glamorous Elaine. Maybe he’d even loved her for her many admirable qualities. Elaine knew lots of tricks involving pennies, matches, paper napkins you burned with cigarettes until a coin dropped into a glass. She called them bar games, which suggested a sketchy youth of playing strangers for drinks in seedy dives.

Sometimes Margaret and I visited Elaine at her apartment, which she’d decorated with shag rugs, plastic bucket chairs,
Sputnik
radios, clocks in the shape of spaceships. Margaret laughed about Elaine’s excessively organic, tree-hugging style, but even so she saw Elaine as a cool adult, as proof that you could grow up and even have a kid without turning into our parents. I’d catch Margaret eyeing Elaine the way she watched a film from which she was planning to copy a gesture or snappy line.

Elaine had asked me something. What were we talking about? I vaguely remembered promising her not to see some Swedish movie.

“How’s Tycho?” I said.

“Fine, I guess,” said Elaine. “Any day he doesn’t chew through an electrical cord is a good day.”

Tycho was always a funny kid. I could still picture him as a frowny, superintense little baby with zero interest in the normal goo-goo games. When he finally learned to talk, his voice rasped like a kazoo. He’d gotten more peculiar since his diagnosis. Every so often he’d bang his head against the wall, and at stressful moments he’d bite his hands all bloody.

I’d known him so long that it hardly startled me when he’d yell for no reason, or ask loud, inappropriate questions, like did I have hair under my arms? Sometimes you could feel the pressure build, and he’d ask if he could go rock, then he’d bounce himself into a trance on his large rubber ball, a cross between a beach toy and some kind of Pilates equipment.

Elaine had ways of distracting him and talking him down from his obsessions.
Perseverations
, she called them, a word I’d come to love. My response to Margaret’s death had been one long perseveration, so I felt even closer to Tycho than I had before.

Elaine said, “When do you think is the best time to give your dad some bad news?”

“Bad news?” I said. “What could bad
be
at this point?”

“Not
that
bad,” said Elaine. “Oh, honey, I keep telling myself how important it is to remember the difference between a tragedy and an inconvenience. If only we could keep that in mind every minute of every day—”

“I do,” I said. “Every minute of every day.”

“I know,” said Elaine. “I know you do. But you won’t always. No one can. No one could live that way. No one would want to.”

“You just said you wished you could.”

Elaine said, “Let’s take it from the top. My babysitter quit, so there’s no one home after one o’clock when Tycho gets back from his mind-blowingly expensive special-needs day camp. That someone’s going to have to be me. I’ll have to take off until I find a replacement
me
to stay with him. Which isn’t easy.”

“Bring Tycho to the store,” I said. “He can play his Game Boy.”

“Not an option,” said Elaine. “He can rip the covers off the whole manga section in the time it takes me to go to the bathroom.”

I said, “Dad can handle the store on his own for a while.”

Then, just to prove me wrong, Mrs. McPhail from the post office came in and wanted to know if we had the new P. D. James mystery. She asked if Henry was around, and when Elaine said he was taking a break in back, Mrs. McPhail said, “How is he?” Her voice caught, and a micro-sob hiccuped down in her throat.

“You see?” Elaine said, when Mrs. McPhail left. “With all the best intentions in the world, they’ll chew your dad up and spit him out in little pieces. He needs to hire a kid to run interference for him until—”

“Until when?” I said.

“Until I find someone to stay with Tycho.”

“
I
could stay with Tycho,” I said. “We get along great. We could play video games all day.” In fact, it seemed like the perfect way to get through the rest of the summer.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” said Elaine. “But it’s always a crap shoot with Tycho.” Elaine was being kind, as usual. She didn’t say I was having enough trouble taking care of myself.

In theory, it should have been easy to find a temporary Elaine. School was out, and working in Goldengrove was every high school book nerd’s dream. But when Dad put a sign in the window, not one person applied. A cloud hovered over the store. It was one thing to stop by, flirt with my dad, have a good cry, go home with a new book. But to be there all afternoon would have been like buying a house on an earthquake fault or a flood plain. Misfortune could rub off on you. Your odds rose if you were around us.

After that, my father went in every day and came home at six. I hated thinking of him there, alone with the customers, each of whom imagined that if he would just ditch Mom and me and move in with her, her tears would wash away his grief and they’d have their own little book club.

One morning, Mom and Dad came into my room.

“Your mother had a brainstorm,” my father said. I rolled over and faced the wall.

Mom said, “How about working afternoons in the store with Dad? Keep him company. You can be at the counter, he can write in his office. We’ll pay you.”

“No,” I said. I knew they were worried about me. Lately, almost all I’d done was lie on the couch and sigh.

“Why not?” my mother asked.

“Because I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything. Anyhow, aren’t you afraid that someone might come in and rob the place when I’m there?”

“In Emersonville?” said Dad.

“Main Street,” I said. “Serial killers drive through.”

Mom said, “Here’s the choice. Bookstore or we medicate you.” Dad and I shot her quick looks. She laughed to make sure we knew she was joking, and I laughed too, not because it was funny but because for a moment she’d sounded like herself.

“Medicate me,
please
.” I sat up and stretched both arms out in front of me. “Turn me into a zombie.”

“That’s it,” said my mother. “The new choice is bookstore or bookstore.”

“Bookstore,” I said. “How much?”

They could have said nothing or a million dollars. Money was one of the things I’d forgotten the use for.

“Five bucks an hour,” said Mom.

“Make that ten,” said Dad.

“Fine,” I said. “When do I start?”

The truth was, I was glad for a reason to get out of the house. Mom was beginning to scare me. Sally was spending more time up in my mother’s study. I’d hear my mother’s ragged new laugh, together with Sally’s bark. None of us were laughing then, and for a while I imagined that any laughter was an improvement.

Mom seemed fine in the mornings. But by afternoon, she seemed to have blurred around the edges. She alternated between moody silence and chatty monologues I’d heard before, anecdotes about all the crazy people she’d known in her twenties: nudists, junkies, cross-dressers, Charlie Manson wannabes. Partway through a story, she’d forget what she was saying.

One night, Dad and I watched Mom sculpt her grilled scampi and mashed potatoes into a pyramid. She sat back, contemplated it, and said, “Don’t you think that food has been underrated as an art medium? Henry, remember
Close Encounters
?”

“Unfortunately,” said Dad.

“Remember that conceptual artist who used to eat cookies and throw up? Wasn’t he the pet artist of the shah of Iran?”

“I don’t know,” said Dad. “I think it was the shah’s sister.”

“Whatever.” Mom layered what remained of her food into a Leaning Tower of Shrimp.

“It’s not art, it’s dinner,” said Dad. “Maybe you should
try
a bite instead of playing with it.”

Mom rose from her seat. Her mouth opened and shut, like a marionette’s. She left the table, left the house. We heard her car pull out of the driveway. What if we never saw her again? My father tried not to look worried.

“Maybe I’d better go find her,” he said. “She shouldn’t be driving.” But before he could locate his car keys, Mom reappeared.

She said, “I can’t remember why I went out. Or what I was going to get.”

“Killed,” my father muttered.

“What?” said my mother.

“Nothing,” he said.

My mother knocked on wood.

In the past, she’d been proud, even boastful, about her memory. She used to say that music was yoga for your brain cells. She liked us to appreciate it when she went to town with a long mental list of errands and got every detail right and came back with everything that we’d asked for.

But now she often drove off and returned, sometimes twice, for her wallet or glasses. Her driving had gotten erratic: too slow, too fast, too slow. The light changed from red to green, and she’d sit there till someone honked, a rare event in the country. Lines of traffic snaked behind her.

I felt I should mention this to Dad. I wasn’t telling on Mom. I was concerned about her safety. I was afraid that Margaret’s death might have damaged my mother’s brain. A few times she mentioned that she’d been having constant déjà vus. She hoped it wasn’t a symptom of a tumor or early-onset dementia. I wished she wouldn’t talk that way. What if Mom or Dad got sick?

I waited till one evening when my father was peeling carrots to ask, “Dad, have you noticed anything odd about Mom’s driving?”

My father dropped the carrot and the peeler. He sat down at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands, a gesture as clear as speech.

I thought he said, “I’ll talk to her.” But I couldn’t really hear, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask him to repeat it.

Five

O
NE MORNING, A FEW DAYS BEFORE
I began working at Goldengrove, Mom said she was going for a haircut and asked if I wanted to come along.

Margaret had always cut my hair. The first time, she hacked off my baby curls with cuticle scissors. My parents had been horrified, but my sister was so gentle I don’t think I even knew that the feathers sifting down had been attached to my head. After that, she’d practiced on herself, and she always looked so beautiful that eventually I asked her to cut mine, too.

We’d steam up the bathroom and mist the air with Mom’s sandalwood oil. My sister wore her bathing suit, and her bare stomach brushed my arm as she danced around me, a half-naked sprite I watched in the mirror she squeegeed with her hands. Margaret was always so pleased with the result that her confidence convinced me, even when I was pretty sure I’d looked better before. In photos from that time I often seem to be wearing a pale, crooked helmet beneath which my round face bulbs out like a shiny plum.

For years, she’d been snipping my bangs short and straight across. Margaret said nerdiness was stylish, but I suspected her of overdoing it with me. She’d worn her own hair in a shaggy cap— an
homage
, she said, to Jean Seberg in
Joan of Arc
.

Our father used to joke that Margaret could always cut hair if the singing didn’t work out. Usually Mom laughed at his jokes, funny or not. Margaret said that Mom was conditioned from birth to respond to male humor. She never seemed to get our jokes, and her own were so deadpan that you couldn’t tell if she meant to be funny. But when Dad joked about Margaret cutting hair, Mom never even smiled. Her plans for Margaret didn’t include a future in cosmetology.

Mom wore the same hairstyle she’d worn in her soybean commune days. Margaret said it was a ’60s thing. You couldn’t get them to change their look. The only thing that consoled me for not being beautiful like Margaret was seeing how her beauty caused a crackling in the weather between her and our mother. Once I overheard them arguing about Mom’s hair. Margaret said Mom should let her cut it. She’d do a better job than the butchers Mom went to at the mall.

“Only one butcher, dear,” our mother said, “and strictly speaking,
near
the mall.”

Frank’s was where our mother went. Frankenstein’s, Margaret called it. Sometimes when Mom scheduled a haircut on our way to somewhere else, I’d have to leaf through the dimpled magazines and try not to stare at the women, who did look like Brides of Frankenstein in their tinfoil antennae.

It was cruel of my mother to remind me of something that Margaret and I would never do again because my sister had left me to the mercy of butchers like Frank.

“We can get there when Frank opens,” said Mom. “I’m sure he can fit you in.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “That’s okay.”

My mother’s expression combined pure sympathy with the suggestion that I might want to go look in the mirror. Who
was
that person across the sink? A taller, thinner version of me, a stranger who needed a haircut. Mom wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to make me feel better.

“Sure,” I told her. “Why not?”

Mom seemed to be looking forward to it, as if a trip to Frank’s eggy-smelling salon was a comforting mother-daughter bonding rite, a test of faith that would involve entrusting ourselves to a guy with a comb-over who specialized in hennaing old ladies into redheaded Elvis imitators.

I liked the idea of going somewhere with Mom, at least in the morning when she was still clear. It was easier to talk in the car, with no eye contact required and the changing scenery constantly wiping away the gummy residue of whatever we’d just said.

But Frank couldn’t take us till afternoon, and by the time we left, Mom was drifting in and out, like a radio station on the edge of its broadcast range.

She said, “So . . . are you looking forward to working . . .” I monitored her turn onto Route 9. “In the bookstore?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

I’d become the squirrelly one. My grief over Margaret was the hard little acorn I clutched to my chest. Knowing that my mother missed her too only made me feel more alone. Why couldn’t she help me first and do her own suffering later?

We passed a tree in outrageous white bloom. A catalpa? An acacia? I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten. My mother whistled a classical melody that dribbled out of tune.

“What should we talk about?” she said.

I’d always known my parents loved Margaret more. Like everyone, they’d brightened when she walked into the room. I knew they loved me, loved being with me, but there wasn’t that same excitement. I’d never blamed Margaret. It wasn’t what she would have chosen. But I
did
blame my parents, at least for not hiding it better. It served them right that they’d lost her, and now they were stuck with me. But I knew that was foolish, because I’d lost her, too.

It was a challenge to make conversation with Mom’s car drifting into the oncoming lane. The first time, I let it go. The second time, she was heading for a red pickup truck. I screamed, “Why are you driving this way?”

“Which way?” said my mother, swerving at the last minute.

I waited a beat. “Remember you said you were having all these déjà vus?”

Mom said, “Hang on. Didn’t this happen before?”

I twisted around to stare at her.

“Only kidding,” she said.

When we got to the parking lot, she said, “You want to go first?”

I’d caught Mom’s forgetfulness, like a cold.

“Haircut,” my mother said.

“Oh. Right,” I said. “Sure. Frankenstein can practice on me.”

Frank said he was sorry for our loss. I flopped into his chair. His looked apologetic, but competent and determined, like a veterinarian getting ready to mercy-kill a child’s doomed pet.

“Don’t make it too short,” I pleaded. Frank smiled as if the child was instructing him on how to put Fluffy to sleep.

I watched the sheets of hair drop. Frank ordered me to pick up my head, but I kept my eyes closed. I was afraid to look in the mirror and see Margaret dancing around me in our tropical, fragrant bathroom. When Frank leaned in to snip my bangs, I clenched my face like a fist.

At last, Frank sprayed on a coat of shellac and hardened it under the dryer. As he stepped back to admire his ugly-duckling-into-swan miracle, I looked at my reflection. I hadn’t just gotten a haircut but a sex-change operation. The fish boy masquerading as me swam away, and I saw my mother staring. Her expression extinguished all hope that it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

“You look lovely,” said Mom.

“Thanks.” I glared at her. Was she satisfied? Happy now?

“So?” Frank said. “
Bellissima
, no?”

“
Bellissima
,” I agreed. What did it matter, really? I’d left the world in which people cared about bad hair days.

While my mom got her standard trim, I lost myself in a magazine devoted to which starlets wore which evening gowns to which Hollywood events. I glanced up from a story about the miracle Beverly Hills fertility doctor responsible for a whole generation of celebrity babies. Mom was grinning at me—all done!—and looking the same as before.

“
Bellissima
,” I said, fighting tears. I told myself, It’s only hair. It grows back. But I didn’t believe it. Because like everything else in those days, my hair was itself and something else. The bad haircut didn’t bother me half so much as the feeling that Margaret had withdrawn her protection. She would never have let Frank and Mom conspire to maim me this way. Obviously, I’d lost my mind along with my hair. The Nico blaming an ugly haircut on her dead sister was no more like me than the froggy hermaphrodite frowning at me from the mirror.

My mom seemed clearer—sharper somehow—after our visit to Frank’s. On the drive home, she asked if I wanted to go shopping. It was one of the few activities that seemed relatively safe. Margaret had mostly worn vintage, so she’d never come with us.

Mom and I used to drive to the Albany mall, always a little buzzed, as if something transformative might happen to us there. The same thing always happened. Mom zoned in on the sale racks. It thrilled her to find a dress by a designer I’d never heard of, and her joy splashed over onto me, regardless of how the dress looked.

As we’d swung through the racks of clothes and carried them to the fitting room, conversation was even easier than it was in the car. It was like the chatter of nursery school kids playing in separate corners. I’d talk about school, Mom might describe a sonata she was learning. Or sometimes, like all grown-ups, she felt she had to give me advice, which in my mother’s case was often mystifying. I remember her saying you had to learn to exist on the line between loving the world and wanting to live in another world completely. I sensed that if I’d asked what she meant, her answer might involve more than I wanted to know.

Every so often, entirely by chance, we found a bargain that looked nice. Transformative, even. Not that it transformed
me,
but that I imagined it changing the boys in school, who would see me, in my new outfit, as a different person. A girl.

In the cramped changing cubicles, I twirled around for my mother. I knew what would please her—practical, subtle, unsexy. And I wanted to please her more than I cared about looking pretty. Especially when nothing looked pretty. I might as well listen to her. Margaret said she didn’t understand the unflattering outfits I bought with Mom on these trips. How odd that Mom’s thrifty inner Puritan should choose to emerge at the mall.

Now, on the drive home from Frank’s, Mom said, “Do you need anything? New sandals?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”

“The buying cure,” my mother said. “That’s what my mother used to call shopping. You get the joke, right, Nico? The talking cure is what they used to call psychoanalysis.”

“I get it now,” I said. “Ha ha.”

“After my father died,” said Mom, “my mother went out and bought an expensive mink coat. She wore it twice, then put it in mothballs and never wore it again. Your grandma just wasn’t a mink coat kind of girl.”

I hated it when my mother talked about her parents. It depressed me that she still missed them. It was worse now, because it made me realize that missing someone could last an entire lifetime.

My mother said, “What about some new summer stuff?” Shopping was about the future. What future would I shop for? Where would I wear what I bought, and why would it matter?

“I don’t need anything,” I said.

My mother said, “Let’s buy something to go with your cute new haircut.”

“No,” I said.

“No, thank you
,” said my mother.

“No,” I said. “
Bellissima
, okay?”

We didn’t speak the whole way home.

As we pulled into the driveway, my mother said, “I can’t stop thinking about that last argument I had with your sister.”

I said, “She doesn’t care any more, so why should you?” It took me a while to recognize myself in the passenger-side mirror. What a terrible person I was to be so angry about a haircut.

Dad was in the kitchen, reading the paper, and when he glanced up, I understood that I looked even worse than I’d thought.

Dad said, “God, Nico. Sorry. For a second you looked like Margaret.”

“Mom?” I said. “Is that why you acted so weird in Frank’s salon?”

“Weird how?” my mother murmured as she moved toward the fridge. “I wasn’t aware of acting weird. These strawberries are all furry.”

I went to the bathroom mirror. In fact, I didn’t look like myself, or like Margaret, or like the male version of me. I looked like Jean Seberg in
Joan of Arc
, lit so that the heavenly radiance shone on her upturned forehead even as her cheeks were shadowed by the silhouettes of the flames dancing up to kill her.

W
E’D LOVED THE BOOKSTORE
, M
ARGARET AND
I. I
T WAS OUR OWN
private kingdom, which the two indulged princesses could plunder and pillage at will, as long as we read, or promised to read, whatever we took home. I’d loved Goldengrove even before I could read, when the glossy jackets seemed to call out to me, vying for my attention.

Now I loved it in a different way—superior, protective, literally above it all on the platform behind the counter from which I could survey my domain and gaze out the front window. I liked spying on the customers, catching them unawares at that undefended moment of losing themselves in a book. Or I’d watch people walk in and try to guess what they’d buy. Surprise: the ones with dirt on their knees headed straight for the gardening section. I liked the kids looking for information about brand-new pets, and the trembly, hopeful women newly interested in decoupage or sewing nylon-stocking dolls. Sometimes there
were
surprises: macho road-crew guys seeking advice on how to make their relationships work, one geeky middle-schooler with a passion for Greek tragedy and fat nineteenth-century novels.

I was glad that none of my friends, or Margaret’s friends, came in. Once I thought I saw Aaron pass on the opposite side of the street. The boy, if it
was
Aaron, glanced my way and kept going. I wanted to run after him, but I didn’t know what to say. All you had to do, whispered the staircase spirit, was say hello and ask how he was.

Dad went over the obvious: where each subject was shelved. He taught me how to work the cash register, which for him was the equivalent of flying a jumbo jet. After I’d mastered the hard parts, I was on my own. My father hid in his office. I’d hear him typing away. One slow day I counted an average of four customers an hour, of which an average of three looked crushed at finding me instead of Dad, and of which an average of zero needed help. So all I had to do was take their money and ask if there was anything else they needed.

Or that’s how it
should
have worked. Except that an average of two out of ten felt they had to talk to me about death and mourning and loss.