How to Be Lost (9 page)

F
OR A TIME
, there was so much to do that I did not think about what my life would be like without my mother. In a strange way, it felt good to say, my mother died. And: my mother was in an accident. I would speak the words gravely, with a shake of my head, and wait for the shocked response, the outpouring of sympathy. I didn’t understand, you see. It was all a big new thing, a reason for getting on with every day. I had no job, now, no lover, no fucking life. My mother was dead. It was something.

I went back to New York. Still, it was like she was on a vacation. Her condo was the same. It was filled with her friends, with cocktail conversation. A Christmas party in January. There was the funeral, a closed casket. Madeline, despite feeling tired from her pregnancy, handled all the details. I drank and listened to my mother’s friends talk about the things that kept them rooted to the world: their children, their jobs. Now there were grandchildren to talk about, and retirement plans. None of my mother’s friends seemed to think about what was underneath the surface of their lives: did the years add up to something that made them proud? Were they satisfied, at peace? Had my mother been happy, I wanted to know. Had she been happy in her life?

It was a terrible accident. What else could you say? She was driving home from the Cherokee Club, after the New Year’s Eve Ball. She had surely been drinking, and yet the accident was not her fault. It was a teenager from Port Chester, an outsider. What had he even been doing in Holt? people wondered, though Port Chester was only a few minutes away. But he wasn’t one of us. He wasn’t drunk. He was seventeen, and he wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t stop at the red light on Woodland Road. He drove right on through, hit my mother’s Mercedes going forty. You wouldn’t think forty could kill anyone.

She lived a good life. She loved you girls. She lived every day to the fullest. She’s up in heaven, waiting for you. She’s with your father. Maybe Ellie’s with them. She’s watching you. She was so proud.

Was she proud? Not of me. When I played piano for long afternoons, she’d stand at the doorway of the living room, lean her head to one side, and close her eyes. She was filled with pride when I was accepted to Juilliard, but was baffled that I decided to go to New Orleans instead.

Maybe I had made the wrong decisions in my life. At my mother’s funeral, I wished I could go back in time. I could have been a famous pianist, or at least played a few songs on occasion. I could have made my mother proud; it wouldn’t have taken much.

I slept forever. I lay in my mother’s double bed and stared at the ceiling. Madeline came and went, brought me tea and toast, gave me Xanax, half a tablet at a time. One day—a week had passed, or almost a week—she sat next to me on the bed, her knees pulled into her chest. “What are we going to do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I mean, about the condo. About…” she gestured with both hands, splaying them open. “All this stuff,” she said.

“I lost my job,” I said. Of course, I could have worked for the last month of The Highball, but it seemed pointless now.

“Yeah.”

“Did I already tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“So what are you saying?” said Madeline. “You want to live here?” She looked around my mother’s bedroom. When my father died, my mother tried to keep the big house up, but soon tired of dealing with the lawnmower and empty rooms. I could still remember the hope in her voice when she called to tell me about the condo. “If I sit up in bed,” she’d said, “I can look out at the sea!” But a view of the water was her dream, not mine.

“No,” I said, “that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Should we sell it?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

You had to be impressed with Madeline’s organizational skills. A few hazy days after our conversation, a frenetic woman named Irene began “popping by” to show the condo to potential buyers. I could hear her, pushing into my mother’s closets, her bedroom, talking about remodeling options, about promise. Couples—some my age—trailed behind her. They asked if we had rodent problems (no), if we were including appliances in the purchase price (yes). I thought about stopping the whole process, but I wasn’t going to stay in Holt, and neither was Madeline, who loved city life. We talked to the lawyer; my mother left us everything. We were all she had, and it made me so very sad that I had not really understood that, had not tried to make more of myself.

Madeline and I picked rooms and went to work. Madeline packed my mother’s beautiful clothes into boxes. I took a pair of yellow high heels that I had seen her wear on special occasions. Madeline took a Chanel suit.

I tackled my mother’s desk, which she had used to store papers and photographs. The desk had a large wooden panel that folded down for writing, and many small drawers and cubbyholes. Every little space was crammed full. I made a cup of tea and settled on the floor. In one compartment, there were dozens of my mother’s manila folders. Each, I knew, represented a dead-end.

I paged through the typewritten reports. My mother had tracked down everyone we had ever known, it seemed: there were reports on her family members, my father’s old girlfriends, and parents of our childhood friends. She had saved everything, and I imagined she’d drunk spritzers at night and re-read these papers, hoping to see something she had missed before.

She hounded people, year after year. And though she had shown me pictures of women who looked vaguely like Ellie, the People Magazine picture was the first one that made my heart beat fast.

After flipping through the papers for a while, I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I put the Ellie folders in a pile and stuck them back in the desk. I wasn’t ready to throw them away.

From other compartments in my mother’s desk, I emptied handfuls of family photographs. There we were, all three girls dressed the same, playing on the lawn, sprawling in the hammock. There was my mother in a bikini, a tiny Madeline resting on her hip.

Even earlier: pictures of my mother as a Savannah debutante, her hair short and framing her head like a cap: the pixie cut. There were photographs of my grandparents: my grandmother relaxing on a chaise in the sunlight; my grandfather smiling, leaning against a splintered wooden door at their house on the Vernon River. I had heard about the river house. It was part of the blissful life before. My mother talked often of before, the dreamy days before she married my father. Afternoons spent crabbing, the smell of the river. My mother ditched her fiancé and ran off to New York when she was eighteen. She knew she was destined for more, she told me, and Manhattan represented freedom. She met my father on a blind date when she was twenty, and felt like a movie star on his arm. She married him, ending the glorious days before.

*

Madeline had gone to the Container Store and bought wooden boxes for photographs. Maybe she thought her baby would want to look through these, dive into these jumbled memories. And though I didn’t even have a boyfriend, much less a hope of a family, I began to cry when I realized that if I ever did have a child, it would never know the smell of my mother’s soft neck.

I piled the pictures in the boxes with little regard for order or theme. I started wondering what a stranger would think, happening upon these pictures. Could they pick, out of a group of young men and women at a party, which two would marry? I found my mother’s engagement portrait, spent a while looking at her knowing smile.

Was my mother’s faint unhappiness visible only to me, as she stood stiffly under the Christmas tree with my father? And Ellie: what would a stranger see in her faraway child’s gaze?

Each wooden box had a square on the front cover, a place for an identifying photograph. I chose a picture of my mother, a teenage girl on a rickety dock, her feet in the water, chin thrust high.

My father didn’t have many childhood pictures. He grew up on a farm in Ohio, where, he told us a hundred times, he had learned the value of a dollar. I stared for a long time at a picture of my father at five. He wore an oversized coat and looked forlornly at the camera.

I had long wondered why my parents had married. They were both good-looking, but could they really have thought that would be enough? I remembered being small and thinking my father ran the world. He always guided my mother, one strong hand in the small of her back. She would ask him how to cook things, how to dress.

When I was young, I waited for my father to come home each evening. He would hang his coat on the coat tree, place his briefcase on the floor. He would loosen his tie. I would hold out my hand, and he would take it. We had tea parties in my room or read books, but the first hour of the evening was for me. He would check in on baby Madeline, give my mother a dry kiss, but it was I who helped him shed his workaday demeanor, who made him laugh and sing songs from Free to Be You and Me.

I remember telling him stories, the way he would focus on me. He was so important to me that capturing his attention felt like the biggest prize. I suppose we all believed that my father could keep us safe. Maybe that’s what love is, in the end: a shared illusion of safety.

I found my mother’s love letters from various boys, saved as ammunition against my father, as private comfort. I read a few, but they all started to sound the same: Dearest Isabelle; beautiful Isabelle; missing you, Isabelle. It took me hours to comb through the contents of the desk. By dinnertime, I was finished, a neat stack of boxes ready for the closet.

“Done?” I looked up, and Ron was standing in the doorway to my mother’s bedroom.

“Yeah,” I said, standing and stretching my arms.

“Want to come to the Grill for dinner?”

“Well,” I said, thinking of being alone, of watching television and ordering a pizza. “I think I might just stay here.”

“Would it bother you if we went into the city? I think Maddy could use some time away….”

“Of course,” I said.

“You’ll be OK?”

I nodded. “I’ve got a good book,” I lied.

“Really?” he said. “What?”

“I can’t remember…something about…Egypt.”

“Oh. That sounds interesting.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The condo was quiet without them, and without my mother. I opened a bottle of her pinot grigio and turned on the TV, switching channels for a while. Finally, I went back upstairs to her bedroom and lay on my mother’s bed, which still smelled of her. I pressed my nose to her pillowcase, and fell asleep.

I
DREAMT OF
my mother at eighteen years old: Isabelle Bonnot. She was bones in a bathing suit, sitting on the edge of a dock. Her hair was long and salty, her eyes clear brown. It was August in Savannah. The heat was overwhelming, and she moved her feet slowly through the water.

The air smelled of the river: marshy and thick. The river stretched past their house, which was white, and completely surrounded by a screen porch. Ten wide steps spanned the space between the lawn and the porch door. Isabelle’s father said that he always knew when she was coming. “She makes an entrance,” he would say, “ten thuds and one big slam from that goddamned door.” The door was thirty years old, and cracked from the heat, but Isabelle’s mother wouldn’t let anyone replace it.

There was a wooden swing hanging from a tree to the right of the house. The family called it the Lovers’ Swing because it was where almost every marriage proposal in the family had occurred. Isabelle was the most recent; her beau, Bernard, had asked for her hand at the beginning of the summer, and they were due to be married in the fall. Isabelle’s engagement portrait had arrived from the photographer, and tonight she would give a copy to Bernard.

Isabelle started when she heard a cry. Aunt Betty was visible over the water: a wide straw hat, a brown arm held high, a flash of pink lips. “Here I come!” she yelled. She was floating on her back from her house to theirs. The Vernon River ran past all Isabelle’s relatives’ houses. Next door was her grandmother’s, then the house that had been bought up by a Yankee outsider, and then the house where Aunt Betty lived.

The current carried Aunt Betty steadily closer, and Isabelle could make out the gin and tonic in her hand. “Isabelle, sweetie!” said Aunt Betty, “get ready to grab my drink!”

It was a humid Sunday night, a white rum night, as Isabelle’s mother called it, though there were bottles of every sort lined up on the porch bar. Sunday clambakes always began with Betty floating down the river from her dock to the Bonnots’, and when the current changed, around midnight, she floated home and another week began. Betty’s arm was strong; Isabelle pulled her from the water. “Well!” said Betty, smoothing the skirt of her bikini bottom. Her stomach was soft and brown, and her toenails were painted. “Give me that drink, sweetie,” she said, “and while you’re at it, go tell your mama to mix me a fresh one.”

“Yes’m,” said Isabelle, and she ran down the dock over the lawn to the porch, where her mother lay on her chaise. “Mama?”

Isabelle’s mother opened her eyes. “Hi love,” she said. “Aunt Betty here?” Isabelle nodded. “Wants a drink?”

“I’ll mix it,” said Isabelle, “don’t get up, now.”

“You’re my angel from heaven.” Isabelle’s mother closed her eyes. “Take a shower, after,” she said.

Isabelle made the drink, and then went up the stairs to her bedroom. Each step creaked underneath her. The setting sun shone straight in her window, and she sat on her bed. Her room had been her mother’s, once. The canopies over the twin beds had faded, but were still a rich yellow that matched the cotton bedcovers.

The night before, when Isabelle’s mother came to kiss her goodnight, Isabelle said, “Mama, I’m not sure I want to get married yet.”

Isabelle’s mother sat on the bed. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, and the smell of her lotion made Isabelle’s stomach relax. “Bernard’s a sweet boy.”

“But what if he’s not my one true love?”

Isabelle’s mother smoothed her hair. “Roll over for a scratch,” she said. Her nails were cool and wonderful on Isabelle’s back.

“I know how you feel,” said Isabelle’s mother. “I almost didn’t marry your daddy,” she said, and then she laughed. “I had all sorts of dreams and plans.” The room was quiet, and the scratching stopped.

“Like what?” said Isabelle, rolling over and looking up at her mother.

“Like.…” She looked out the window, where the stars were blocked by clouds. She put her hands to her eyes, and then took them away.

“Isabelle,” she said, “I was a good daughter to my mama. I’ve been a good wife to your daddy, and a good mama to you and your sister.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “Now what could be more important?” she said.

“Nothing,” said Isabelle, though the sick feeling had come back.

“Life is not always just right and just perfect,” said Isabelle’s mother. “But you don’t give up and you push on. You put some dreams in a drawer.” White light moved across her face, and the sound of Isabelle’s father’s car came close. Her stare was blank, and Isabelle felt scared.

“Now that’s your daddy home,” said Isabelle’s mother, and she kissed Isabelle and stood up. Her bathrobe trailed behind her as she left.

After showering, Isabelle changed into a pink dress and applied her mother’s lavender lotion. She slid her engagement photo from its envelope. In the picture, she looked beautiful. Her hair was pulled into combs, and she wore the pearls Bernard had given her the night before the photo shoot. The photographer had done something to the background of the portrait: everything looked hazy except for Isabelle’s face, which was clear and lovely. Even her shoulders were blurred; it looked as if she were rising from smoke. In the portrait, she stared at the camera, a half-smile on her face. She looked confident, adult. She looked as if she knew what she was doing.

Bernard arrived with his hair still wet, his cheeks red from a day spent fishing. Isabelle held the portrait as she watched Bernard give her mother a bunch of irises. He wore a pale pink shirt and pressed khaki shorts. His eyes sparkled with mischief. Ever since childhood, he had been up to something. Isabelle remembered the time he hid a frog in her bed, and the time he pretended she had a twig in her hair and leaned in close, surprising her with a kiss. When she looked at him—the confident way he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back, listening to Isabelle’s father—she could see the boy inside him.

The moon rose, round and light. Glass and silverware and jewelry flashed in the candlelight. The heat did not thin, and perspiration made Isabelle’s family’s faces shine at the edges. Her mother lifted her hair to reveal damp skin underneath, and her father rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, shaking his head at the heat, the one situation he could not fix. Bernard brought the electric fan out, pulling it as far as its cord would stretch, and everyone turned toward its breeze in mid-sentence as it passed over them.

“We can move inside,” said Isabelle’s mother, more than once, but no one could bear to leave the moonlight and the clicking of crickets. The river ran nearby, its currents catching the light like a mirror.

Bernard poured from his flask into Isabelle’s lemonade, and the edges of her vision grew slippery. Bernard’s lips were warm on her shoulder blades and her neck. Isabelle’s mother put out the crab, baskets full, and the lemons and butter. They cracked the salty bodies and left the empty shells in large clay bowls. “There will be no ceremony here!” said Isabelle’s father, and he set the precedent of ignoring the tiny forks and silver crackers. He sucked the meat from his crabs, and the butter ran down his wrists and made his lips shine.

Isabelle ate five crabs, and six buttered slices of corn bread. She filled a bowl with grapes, and sat on the Lovers’ Swing. Next to her, Bernard fed her grapes, the cool juice mixing with the salty crab on his fingertips. “Do you love me?” she asked Bernard, and he said, “Of course, darlin’. What’s not to love?”

It was late when Bernard asked Isabelle to walk down by the dock. They spent evenings there, on a blanket they kept folded on the crabbing boat. Every week, Isabelle tried to wash the blanket with the hose behind the house, rubbing soap into it and hanging it to dry in the sun. It had grown brittle and rough, and it smelled faintly of fish, marshy water, and soap. Isabelle hated the smell. She wished they could lie in a featherbed, with clean, soft sheets. They spread the blanket on the dock, and the waves rocked them and they talked and did not have sex. Bernard had stopped asking, but his kisses were probing. Isabelle could feel the wooden boards underneath her hipbones when she lay on her side to look up at Bernard, and she could hear the splashes of fish and bugs nearing the surface of the river.

Most everyone had gone home. This time of the night—too late for adults—belonged to Isabelle and Bernard. They lay on the lawn and planned their life. Bernard wanted five children to fill his family’s brownstone in Savannah. He talked about coming home from work and taking his family for evening strolls around the city to look at the azaleas. “We’ll get you help with the cooking,” he told Isabelle, “but you’re going to have to mix my drinks.”

The story of their future pleased Bernard, and he twirled Isabelle’s hair around his finger as he talked. But increasingly, Isabelle had begun to wonder about other lives she could lead: painting landscapes in Paris, or being a fashion model in New York City. She felt panicked at the thought of staying in Savannah forever, and becoming a woman just like her mother.

Isabelle told Bernard to wait a minute, and she fetched the portrait. She went into the bathroom to put a drop of perfume behind each ear: a surprise for Bernard when he kissed her there. She looked into the mirror and saw that her cheeks were flushed. She did not want to leave the bathroom.

Isabelle looked at her portrait. This girl hasn’t even lived, she thought. She doesn’t know a thing.

Isabelle’s mother always talked about the same memories, as if only a few instants burned themselves into her mind. Isabelle didn’t know it, but this would be one of the moments she would come back to again and again when she tried to make sense of her life. The portrait would always remind her of a night full of moonlight and Bernard’s mouth and the smell of the river. The night when she decided to run away to New York, thinking she deserved better than what she had.

When Isabelle handed him the photo, Bernard took each of her hands and kissed them. He pulled the picture out and took a long look. “Oh my,” he said. He pulled Isabelle close and kissed her hair. “My beautiful girl,” he said.

“I’m not a girl, you know,” said Isabelle. Bernard kissed her neck and her collarbones.

“Be quiet, doll,” he said. And Isabelle was quiet. It was time to leave, to shed the old Isabelle like a cocoon. Bernard put his arms around her. They lay on the blanket and the heat came up in waves from the river.

When Bernard was asleep, Isabelle stole into the house. She filled her suitcase with clothes. She took all her money and most of her shoes. She did not know that she would meet the wrong man, and marry him. She did not know that she would have three daughters, and lose one. She was filled with hope and purpose. She knew that she had to leave her home to find herself.

The bus station was two miles away. As she walked, she pretended she was there already, at the top of the Empire State Building, a cigarette in her fingers, the lights of Manhattan spread before her like stars.