Parts Unknown (18 page)

“Of course you do! They’re your family,” I said, surprised. “You should.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Josh fiddled with a button on his polo shirt. “I love them, and I love you. That’s two worlds that don’t match up.”

I shook my head. “I’m no threat. My family’s Methodist, but except for some obligatory church appearances a couple times a year just so my dad can angle for some votes, we’re pretty lapsed.”

“Listen—if a mother’s not Jewish, her child won’t be. And if I marry someone who isn’t Jewish, I’ll be disowned. Now do you understand?” Josh’s voice was fierce.

Marriage—that was something impossible even to think of. “Josh, we’re still in college,” I said, panicked. “You’re thinking about this too much! And you’re thinking too far ahead.”

“I know.” He picked at his cuticles, not looking at me. “I just wanted you to know. But, you know, we’ll be fine. Love finds a way, and all that.”

I felt as if I’d failed some test. But really, what was there to worry about? Disowned—that was like something out of a movie, not real life.

Still, I shuddered, my hands feeling icy, suddenly, and numb. So few weeks left, till that Bank Holiday Monday when Josh was leaving. But like Dov said—things figured themselves out. Somehow.

He put his arm around my shoulder. “You’re shivering.”

“It’s nothing,” I said quietly. “Just cold.” I blinked back tears. Everything in front of me, snatched away already. I couldn’t let it happen.

“Here I am talking about my crazy family, and I haven’t given you a chance to tell me about yours,” said Josh.

“I’m here, because they’re there,” I said. “If that makes sense.”

“You don’t want to talk about them.”

We’d reached the Tower of London and I lowered myself onto a bench facing the dour gray edifice. “I don’t even want to think about them. But I love my two brothers, and I should do more. Especially for my little brother Marty. I haven’t been a good sister to him--as good as I could have been. I just went away to college and left him there, you know? To fend for himself. And I feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough to do something. All I cared about was getting as far away from home as possible.”

Josh held my hand, and I could sense his relief. We didn’t have to talk about his family anymore. Now we could dissect my screwed-up one.

I told Josh about what had happened during winter break that year. One more reason why I was so eager to turn away from art, to go away to London.

I’d arrived home from the airport, gone straight up to my room, and could tell something was amiss. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I had a sinking feeling as I peered out my window and saw what looked like the soggy remains of eggs and toast atop the trees and shrubs below. Marty must have been using my room lately as an ideal location to dispose of unwanted meals.

Wait a minute--what else might Marty have been doing in my room?

With trepidation, I opened my closet door to look for my portfolios. I kept all my high-school and college artwork in a set of large brown portfolios: carefully rendered watercolors, Dali-esque oil paintings on board, a whole series of charcoal portraits of Barbie dolls. Paging through my work with increasing desperation, I saw that since I’d last been home, Marty had been using my room as his de facto art workshop. With Sharpie markers and crayons, he had systematically altered most of my art to resemble Jackson Pollock paintings.

The oils could be cleaned. The rest, unsalvageable. I threw myself onto my bed, pulled the pillow over my head, and cried for the rest of the afternoon. How little my art meant. All those pictures, made for nothing. And my room—my one safe place—violated.

“What I don’t understand,” I observed at dinner that evening, “is how he managed to put the artwork back so neatly in the portfolios, afterwards.”

My family’s dining room was in the same style as the rest of the downstairs—full-on Victorian. No holds barred. Vintage-style wallpaper covered every square inch of wall, in alternating William Morris patterns up to, and all over, the ceiling. Sepia-toned photos of presumed ancestors glared balefully from ornate photos arrayed along the sideboard. A gas-lamp-style chandelier hung so low over the table, we were always hitting our heads on it. Doilies were everywhere.

“I did that,” Mom confessed.

She had served dinner on her Wedgwood wedding china, as she always did. The gleaming plates had a thin gold band around the rim and had to be washed by hand. Mom spent at least half an hour in the kitchen after dinner, sudsing them in the sink, drying them, and placing them carefully back in the glass-fronted cupboard. Not like we usually all dined together like this. It was supposed to be my welcome-home meal, and Dad had made the effort to be home during dinner for once.

“So you were hoping I wouldn’t notice? That I wouldn’t look through my old stuff?”

Tonight, the meal was sautéed duck breast. Mom had seared the skins to crackling perfection, carefully sliced and fanned the pink slabs on the plate, and scattered them with juniper berries over a wine-reduction sauce. Haricots verts and fingerling potatoes topped with tarragon from Mom’s herb garden completed the ensemble. I wasn’t too impressed. Mom cooked like this all the time. Food was one way that Mom showed off. Our family finances might be precarious, but you could count on her getting the genuine William Morris wallpaper, no matter the cost, and the duck breast instead of chicken.

“I didn’t know what to do!” she exclaimed, genuinely upset. And she probably hadn’t. If it didn’t have something to do with housework, gardening, or cooking, it was like she was blind. Marty just didn’t fit into any of those categories, and neither had I and Alex.

“Mom—can’t you stand up for me, for once? Why couldn’t you just do something about it? You could have gotten the oil paintings cleaned. You could have told me what happened. You didn’t do anything except hide it all and hope I wouldn’t notice!”

She spent a while cutting her sliced duck neatly into cubes. Finally she apologized, “I’m very sorry, dear. I’ll do better next time.”

“C’mon, Mom, there won’t be a next time. The artwork’s ruined.”

I chased a juniper berry around my plate with my fork. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to eat it or if it was just for show. Dad just ate intently, with the same lack of affect as if he were eating a fast-food cheeseburger. He didn’t look up. As far back as I remember, he’d always looked the same. Round face, with shiny pink cheeks—I bet his aunties pinched those chubby cheeks when he was small. Brown hair with just enough gray in it to make him look distinguished. The perfect picture of the councilman. Like any good politician, he wasn’t going to get involved in a battle that wasn’t his.

“It’s not like you cared about the art anyhow,” I dared.

“You know we always support you in anything you want to do, dear,” Mom said placatingly. “We’ve all been so proud of you, haven’t we, Howard?”

“Sure,” Dad said. “We’ve got your certificate from that Christmas card contest hung up in the office upstairs. You’ve seen it there.”

Right. My little certificate, lonely in its slim wood on-sale frame, next to the stunning array of Alex’s awards: Law Day winner, debate team first place, a UCLA book award, twelve perfect attendance certificates. On top of the nearby bookcase, twenty soccer and basketball trophies.

I rubbed at my reflection in the polished mahogany table surface with my finger. The table was so shiny I could see nearly the whole room reflected upside down, in miniature. In this looking-glass upside-down world, we could pass for another family, living other, better lives.

Dad said, “What do you think about the Sharks getting to the playoffs this season? I don’t think they stand a chance, personally, but don’t tell that to Bob Whitney. He’s started a pool, and I’m tempted to put a little something in.”

Mom intervened with an anecdote about a lady named Shirley in her book club who’d accidentally dyed her cat pink.

Marty was having his dinner under the table.

We finished eating, nothing resolved, or to be spoken of again.

I finished my story, staring at the tower windows—long, narrow, and dark. The worn gray and ochre bricks. That’s what history was: a series of mistakes made over and over. I felt so sad for all of us—Alex, me, and Marty—on a tight wire, with no net beneath. No one we could count on to keep us safe. I had to keep Josh. I had to.

“Marty . . .” my eyes filled with tears. “Maybe—I’m wondering if Mom thought he could be her second chance. ‘Cause she and Dad screwed things up big time with me and Alex.”

“Is he really her second chance?”

I shook my head. “She might have wanted him to be, but I don’t think it worked out that way. I’ve never seen more gourmet cooking than I did this summer. Anything to keep her busy and away from him. I think she’s always felt guilty about what happened with Uncle Paulie, but she doesn’t know how to show it.”

“Uncle Paulie,” said Josh.

“I’ll tell you about him. Soon,” I promised. It was the last bit I was keeping to myself. The final secret I’d told no one, ever. If I could tell anyone, it would be Josh. But not today.

I wondered what it would feel like to stand atop one of those turrets on the Tower, arms out, the wind blowing fiercely through them, my last moments of freedom before the axe fell.

Holding hands, we walked toward the Tower Hill tube station.

~ ~ ~

I couldn’t stop thinking about Marty as we walked. In fact, I had been thinking more about Marty lately than I ever had when I was home, and feeling worse every time I did so. I should have done more. Should have protected him, played with him, spent time with him. Instead, he was stuck with Mom, and she was always far too busy with her hands—gardening, dusting, or cooking. Instead of energizing her, all that activity seemed to sap her strength more and more. If she didn’t find enough to do, she might disappear: her continual housework had a smell of desperation to it. Back at home, whenever I walked past her in the midst of some chore I’d feel, guiltily, that I should be contributing. Walking to the tube station with Josh, I saw my parents’ house instead of the street in front of me. Mom, on her knees one morning last month, scrubbing the hardwood stairs with a bucket of diluted Murphy’s Oil Soap. I’d asked, “What can I help you with?”

“Oh, thank you, dear, I could use a hand. I’m way behind. If you want to grab a rag and start at the top of the stairs, then we can meet in the middle.” I did as I was told, creaking my way back upstairs with a dripping cloth. Every step squealed as I stepped on it. This house was so noisy, it would be impossible to rob undetected.

“How’s your day going?” I asked.

“Fine, fine. There’s just so much to do. I can’t see how I’ll ever finish my list by the end of the day.”

Every morning Mom wrote a to-do list on floral notepaper and stuck it to the fridge with a refrigerator magnet. It had at least ten items on it, and as she completed each one, she drew a dark, decisive line through it.

“Where’s Marty today?” My parents were holding the kid back a year until he was “ready” for kindergarten, and he was usually somewhere underfoot. I was surprised that I hadn’t heard a peep from him all morning.

She stared down at the steps. “We’re trying something new with him. It’s a full-day program. Your dad thinks it’s a good idea too.”

“So—all day, every day? Is something
medically
wrong with him?” I’d wondered whether something had been going on with Marty from the start. He didn’t fit into our lives, like a changeling—a child from elsewhere, some loud, reckless other family.

“No—Dr. Morris evaluated him. He’s a little hyperactive is all.” Just like my family—something always
almost
wrong, but not quite.

I felt bad for Marty. Mom had never put me and Alex in full-day preschool programs. In my distant memories, Mom always brought us home and we had lunch and afternoon naps. Then we’d play the rest of the day, climbing the glorious, huge magnolia tree in the backyard, or constructing elaborate fantasy worlds inhabited by our stuffed animals. Mom never featured in any of these memories. She shuttled us back and forth to activities; otherwise Alex and I were left to our own devices.

“Whatever works for you,” I said noncommittally.

“You don’t know how hard it’s been,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And I just have so much to do—I haven’t been able to get anything done. Every day I have to carry over least five items on my list to the next day. I just can’t fall behind like that.”

I didn’t understand and scrubbed the steps thoughtfully for a while. Who cared whether the kitchen was mopped today or tomorrow? But maybe if Mom couldn’t finish her chores every day, the tensile nerves holding her psyche together would just collapse. And if Mom couldn’t cope, everything would fall apart. Weak as she was, she was the one thing tenuously holding our family together.

“Anyhow, you know what I’ve been really wondering?” she asked. “What’s so good about Murphy’s Oil Soap. That’s what I’d like to know. I mean, everyone uses it. But what would happen if I got the store brand? Safeway has its own floor cleaner, you know. Maybe I’ll give it a try. But then, there was the time I switched from Dawn to the store brand, and it just did not suds as well. It took forever to use up that dishwashing liquid so I could go back to Dawn again.” And she was gone again, lost in a reverie involving household products.

I wondered what would happen to Marty. I couldn’t imagine him grown up. He seemed more like a primate than a kid. But what did I know? I realized that I’d never actually attempted to converse with him. When he’d started talking—late, around age three—I was already on my way to college. And when I’d come back for vacations, I had no idea how to relate to him. No one did.

I was going to talk with the kid, I decided. He was my brother, after all. I needed to get to know him.

Somehow, though, the days went by, and I was always meaning to sit down with him the next day. Read him a book. Play blocks with him. Pretend we were superheroes.

But before I knew it, it was July 31, and it was too late.