Losing It (3 page)

“Your mother and I have decided to rent out our house this summer. We're going to Costa Rica. There are some things we need to work out.”

“What?” I said.

“We found a tenant. A nice guy. A carpenter.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“What don't you understand?”

“Any of it.”

My dad was silent.

“You guys never do stuff like this. And who just rents a random house in a random neighborhood?”

“We found a guy, he's a carpenter.”

“You said that.”

“People rent things all the time,” he said. “You're renting an apartment, are you not?”

This kind of indignant, sideways logic that it was always hard to refute in the moment was my dad's calling card.

“This is different,” I said. “You know what I
mean.
”

“No I don't. If you're so set on leaving D.C., you could always go stay with your aunt.”

“What kind of carpenter? Is he in some sort of recovery program?”

“What? I don't know, Julia, but we've signed an agreement and it's happening.”

“What the hell?”

My dad was silent again.

“There's no way I could stay with Helen,” I said. “She's a psycho.”

“I didn't mean Helen.”

“Remember when she painted all those pine cones and flipped out about it?”

“I wasn't talking about Helen.”

“Or Miriam. What, does she have like five dog-walking businesses now?”

“I was talking about
my
sister. Vivienne. Remember Vivienne?”

I paused. Three memories came flooding back: Vivienne presenting to me, with quite a lot of fanfare, a framed seashell on some kind of burlap background, and not knowing how I should react; Vivienne getting her hand caught in a glass vase, her fingers squished in its neck like a squid as she developed a fine sheen of perspiration
on her forehead; Vivienne's head tilted back thoughtfully against a stone fireplace. Vivienne. Weird, distant Vivienne.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “How is she?”

“She's fine. She's still in North Carolina.”

“Really?”

My father never talked about his family, or his childhood in the South. His father was an alcoholic, he had a sister who died. A car accident. And that was it. When I pictured his upbringing, which wasn't often, I always imagined a series of sturdy, tired, old people standing next to an overgrown pickup. We'd only ever spent holidays with my mother's side of the family—all the cousins and aunts were hers.

He muffled the phone. “What?” he yelled. He came back. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

“Where in North Carolina?”

“Where I grew up, outside Durham.”

“And, I mean, what is she doing?”

“She's fine. She works. She's got a business painting scenes on plates.”

“Excuse me?”

“A business. Painting scenes. On plates. She's actually pretty good.”

“She paints plates?”

My father sighed. “It would be nice for the two of you to reconnect.”

I wasn't sure where this came from. He'd never cared before if I spent time with his relatives.

“Like, dinner plates? Does she make a living that way?”

“Hi, Julia.” It was my mom.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How are things?”

“Fine,” I said. “I heard about your plan.”

She cleared her throat. “Yes!”

“Dad said you needed to work out some stuff?”

“Yes, well, no, this isn't . . . We're
fine
.”

My parents had been married for a long time. They'd started their own business together, an online retailer called the Trading Post where they sold used saddles, a niche they'd managed to corner, and that drew on my mom's know-how from her riding days when she'd been Collin County's regional gold medal eventing champion. They'd always been dismissive of each other in a way I'd taken for granted and sort of admired. I thought that's the way it was with married adults; you ignored each other all the time in a brassy, warm way. It occurred to me now that maybe it hadn't been so warm.

“I overheard,” my mom said. “You're thinking of spending the summer with your aunt?”

“That was just something Dad said.”

“Well, it might be nice.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Have you seen her plates?”

“No,” I said. “When would I have done that? Why would I have? I don't even understand what they are.”

“She's pretty good at it.”

“Yeah, well. No. Nope. I'm not going there. There's no way I'm doing that.”

—

One month later I drove down a thin driveway, gravel popping beneath the tires, toward a house with white columns in the distance. All around stretched raggedy green fields, shiny in the late-day heat. I looked at the piece of paper on which I'd written Vivienne's address: 2705 Three Notched Lane. I had no idea if I was going toward the right place. It had been a while since I'd seen a turnoff, much less a mailbox with an address on it. I passed a large twisted weeping willow. I passed a slumping wire fence. The house, bright in the sun, was on a gentle swell, and behind it was a dark line of trees.

It was only after I'd gotten off the phone with my dad and adjusted to the idea of not being able to go home that the idea of Durham began to take shape. I looked it up and saw that it was a midsize city with a lively downtown area and a historic-district repaving project, and that's when the idea began to take shape. Scrolling through the stock pictures on the tourism part of the website, I saw one of a man and woman laughing at a candlelit dinner. Another showed a couple wearing bright T-shirts and lounging in each other's arms and staring at a hot-air balloon in the sky.

I thought, This is where I'm going to lose my virginity. It would be like going to another country; I would be completely anonymous. I could do whatever I wanted, and it wouldn't be attached to the chain of small failures I'd managed to accrue in Arlington, where I might run into Jessica and Kidman, or in Arizona. I could go to a bar, meet someone off the Internet, join some kind of singles-outing group, whatever. I could be one of these people, walking
hand in hand in the sun next to a glass building in a revitalized business district with refurbished cobblestones. I didn't even care that the graceless plan formulating in my head—of just getting it over with, in some anonymous encounter—was so far from how I'd always thought it was going to be, because I was so desperate to get rid of the albatross around my neck. The new plan also had the added incentive of basically being my only option.

I continued slowly along the driveway. A humid breeze came through the windows. It had been a sticky seven-hour drive that included two wrong turns and lunch at a shopping complex where elevator music stood in the air like pond water. Northern Virginia had been a three-lane highway lined with sound walls, which opened up into strip malls, churches, thrift shops, and gun stores as I got farther south. Then it was pretty, sloping fields, and pastures and farms; small towns with deserted streets and mansions set back from the road and fruit stands and dark, closed-down shop fronts. The way got narrower as I approached Durham, and for forty minutes I trailed a truck with two haunted-looking horses inside.

I tried to bring up all my memories of Aunt Viv. I kept thinking of us playing the card game Spit in our kitchen in Texas. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I thought of our hands whirring over the table, over ever-building and eroding piles. Viv is wearing a cotton shirt and she has an air of quiet superiority over her. But I don't mind, because the companionship I felt with her was like being the sidekick to someone immensely capable. I remembered walking slowly through the backyard—she must have been visiting for the summer—and she's pointing out what different plants are called, satisfied by my interest, a soft tower of facts. The feeling I had about
her at the time was that she knew a lot of secrets. That there was a funny helix at the center of everything and she was the only one who was aware of it, and she would convey this with an amused side-glance that only you were meant to be in on.

I pulled up, got out of the car, slammed the door, and stretched. I looked around. A hot, wide, creaking day. There was the echo of faraway hammering. In the distance on each side were the trees and fences of other properties. The house was weather-beaten red brick, with a wraparound porch and a copper roof. Weedy wildflowers dotted the grass along the foundation. Three tall windows on the bottom level looked dark. An overgrown path led to what looked like a storage shed.

I went up the porch steps and knocked on the door. Nothing. I crouched down and looked through one of the windows but saw only heavy-looking furniture and dark shapes. I turned around, shaded my eyes from the sun. In the distance, a pickup truck crawled by on the road. I went back down and walked toward my car and was about to get back inside when I heard the door open behind me. I turned around and saw Aunt Viv for the first time in probably sixteen years. I tried to compose my face in the right way.

She walked toward me, smiling. She was wearing a T-shirt tucked into khaki pants. Her face had a scrubbed-fresh, almost abraded quality. Her long, dyed-red hair was swept to the side over one shoulder and tied in a floppy orange bow with fake berries sticking out of the knot. She smiled at me, a warm, conspiratorial smile.

“Julia,” she said, in a low, excited way. I remembered that from when I was a kid—how her voice could have a thrilled treble in it. We embraced. We pulled apart and regarded each other. She had
aged, and there was a jowly heaviness to her face that hadn't been there before, but you could still see the shadings of the girl she had been, how I'd remembered her from long ago—when she'd been pretty in a sort of game, clear-eyed way. “That's a pretty bow,” I said, and then for some reason: “Did you make it?”

Her hand shot up, touched it. Something, ever so slightly, dismantled itself in her expression.

“Oh,” she said, “does it look that way?”

“No, in a good way!”

She smiled again, recomposed. “Look at you,” she said. “Come on up. I'll show you your room.”

—

I leaned my suitcase against the wall and looked around. I was in a sparse, clean room with faded wallpaper. After we'd made some small talk about the trip, Viv had led me up the creaking stairs. “Well,” she said, “I'll let you get settled. The bathroom is just down the hall.” She hesitated, then left.

I walked over to the bed and hauled my suitcase on top of it. There were two windows, surrounded by frilly curtains. I opened one. The room bloomed with warm, humid air. The wallpaper was a pattern of beige and pink flowers. The furniture was all wooden and looked antique, handed down. There was a white-painted chest of drawers that let out a musty smell when I opened them, a closet, a small wicker desk, and a night table with a decorative pitcher on it. It all had the feeling of a slightly moldering bed-and-breakfast, down to the little satchels of potpourri leaning against a mirror. I stared at a framed poster that read “The 1976 Newport Jazz
Festival,” which showed a flower piping out some musical notes. I picked up a heavy silver jewelry dish with rippling sides.

I unpacked and went to the bathroom. I sat on the squeaking bed and stared straight ahead. Then I lay on my stomach and looked out at the field and the trees in the distance, and the hazy yellow late-day sky, and tried not to feel like a rope had been cut, and I could only tell it had ever been there by the new sense of drifting.

Half an hour later, I wandered down the stairs and found Viv in the kitchen, savagely mixing something in a small bowl with a towel slung over her shoulder.

“Can I help with anything?” I said.

“No,” she said distractedly, and then gestured toward the table. “There's wine if you like. The opener should be in one of those drawers.”

I busied myself looking for it, rummaging around. I couldn't tell—should we be talking, making small talk, laughing and catching up at this point? Everything I did seemed too loud. “Here it is,” I said to fill the silence, when I found the opener.

I hovered for a moment, and then wandered into the adjacent living room—a dim area with a cinnamon air-freshener smell and pashmina shawls draped over things. I sat down for a moment, then got up. I looked at a frame with a bunch of seashells hot-glued to it. I thought of our hands whirring over the cards. We'd had a few pleasant, polite phone conversations in the weeks leading up to my arrival, and I wouldn't have thought it would be like this, like it was fifteen minutes later when we sat quietly across from each other at a long table in the red dining room under a badly tilting brass chandelier. She chewed quickly. Her hair was parted down
the middle and tied back. She had changed clothes—she was wearing a shirt with pastel handprints on it. Her nails were painted red and she looked abrasively clean.

“Wow, this all looks great,” I said.

“Good,” said Aunt Viv. She arranged a napkin in her lap. She smiled. I smiled. I took a sip of my water.

“I really like my room,” I said.

“Good, good,” she said. She nodded expectantly, like I was supposed to say more. Like something more was supposed to happen in that moment.

“I was looking at that poster,” I said. “Do you like jazz?”

“You do?” she said politely.

“No, I mean, do you? I was asking if you do.”

“If I . . .”

“Like jazz. Jazz music. Are you a fan?”

It dawned on her. She tried to shimmy herself into the conversation. “Oh, oh of course,” she said, waving her fork, squinting. “I've tried, you know?”

“Sure, yeah,” I said.

She nodded and went back to her food.

“Dad says you paint plates?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, dabbing the side of her mouth with a napkin. “‘My little hobby,' right?”