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BOOK: Autobiography of Us

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Independence
, I wrote.
Exhibit A.

Chapter 2

WHO knows what might have happened if I hadn’t picked up the phone the other day? I might have kept quiet the rest of my life. I always considered what happened
our
secret, understand: hers and mine, Paul and Bertrand be damned. Ours a schoolgirl pact, signed and dotted with blood. Of course I realize now how selfish that was. Nothing about this has been fair to you in the least.

But I did—pick up the phone, I mean. And now, today, even that is broken, that last tacit promise we made on the floor of that restaurant whose name I can no longer remember—or I refuse to remember, I suppose, on the grounds that it may incriminate me. Or else it simply makes me too sad. There are more of those moments in my days now than I care to admit.

Your mother was the great love of my life. I suppose that makes me one of the lucky ones.

* * *

“Well,” I say. I let the spoon clatter against the sugar bowl to make a little noise. “Here I am.” This is what I’ve become with all of you gone, the kind of woman who speaks into her empty rooms just to hear the sound of a human voice. Strange, because I have always thought of myself as someone who enjoys a certain kind of solitude—seeks it out, even. But my days have taken on a new silence now, one I’m startled to find I mind from time to time. That’s something I’ve only recently come to realize children do, lend us the sense for a few passing years that we are never really alone. The awakening, when it comes, cruel.

But I don’t mean to make it sound too dismal. I read to my patients four days a week now, and the hospice started me on a salary just before Thanksgiving—did I tell you? A small check every month, nothing to live off, but still. I like to think it means I’ve come to be valuable to them over the years, though I’m aware I have the easiest job of all: no changing bedpans or bandages, no telling the relatives the time has come to let go. All I have to do is sit in a comfortable chair and keep my voice even, my consonants clear. They say the sound of the human voice is comforting, that it eases the pain. There have been studies; I’ve read them in some of the journals I flip through from time to time at the library, though I don’t need to read anything when the proof’s right there under my nose. I’ve got one right now, a Mrs. Fortham, who’s hung on a full three months longer than anyone predicted. Refuses to hear anything but Dickens, Mrs. Fortham. Cheers the heart, Mrs. Fortham says, and I pick up
David Copperfield
and begin.

But: the call. I was here in the kitchen yesterday, making tea, when the phone rang.

“Is Rebecca there, please?” It was a woman, her voice deep. “Rebecca Madden?”

“This is she.” I stood a little straighter. The sound of that name strange, unfamiliar. It was like someone ringing a bell.

“Rebecca, it’s Betsy.” There was the clatter of something dropping. “Darn it. It’s Betsy Bromwell. Bromwell-Atherton.”

What could I do but see her as she’d been? That round, pleasant face, the shy smile.

“Betsy,” I said. A woodpecker started up in the yard:
rat-a-TAT-rat-a-TAT-rat-a-rat-a-rat-a-TAT
. “Isn’t this a surprise.”

“I’m sorry to catch you like this. I’ve often thought…” She paused. “We’ve all wondered how you were. I used to get little bits and pieces, you know … Well. I finally dug up this new number for you after I tracked down your husband, who told me you two had—I was sorry to hear about that, by the way. Divorce is no picnic.” She laughed a little. “Believe me, I know. I’m on my third, if you can believe it.”

“Goodness.”
Rat-a-tat-a-TAT!
“Well—congratulations, I guess.”

“I just called to say we’re sending flowers and I thought maybe—that is—” She stopped. “Oh, dear. I don’t know why I assumed you’d heard the news—”

“What?” My head emptied itself in a rush. “What news?”

“I’m so sorry.” Betsy let out a little sigh, and it made a rustling noise across the receiver. “It’s Alex,” she said. “She’s”—there was a small hesitation, no bigger than a swallow—“well, I’m afraid she’s passed.”

* * *

Cancer, of course. By my age everyone knows someone, if not endless parades of someones. Lungs, ovaries, kidneys, stomachs, tongues—nothing’s safe these days. People wake up one day and their bodies have turned on themselves; their flesh revolts. Primes itself, attacks. Most of the patients I see are dying from one kind or another, though we get the occasional liver case. A heart disease or two. But most—most are cancers just like hers: a tumor that curled itself around the bladder like a snake, a knot of cells bloomed in the lungs and gone unnoticed until it was too late. The way Betsy tells it, your mother knew long before they told her. She wrote out specific instructions forbidding a funeral and left a will that provided for all the arrangements. She planned accordingly, in other words. Battened down the hatches. And then she took matters into her own hands.

She was nothing if not selfish. I don’t say that to be cruel.

I learned from Betsy that your mother had been living in a little town up the coast from L.A. for years when she died, your sisters remaining in Bertrand’s custody until the age of eighteen and then released to college, free to do as they pleased. It seemed she lived a mostly solitary life, though the neighbor who found her remarked that she had often seen her walking along the beach, that she appeared, the neighbor said, to have gone into the water nearly every day. She left behind a garden, which I found surprising, and a little dog, which I did not. Marlene was the dog’s name. I laughed when I heard that.

It was hours before the neighbor discovered the car in the garage, the noise of the engine just audible from the sidewalk. The fumes when she lifted the door, the neighbor reported, blinding.

* * *

Except even that’s not it, exactly. The truth—I’ve sworn to write it here. Your mother said something else to me that night in the restaurant, three words I pushed down under the murk. A fool, I admit it now. Both of us fools in the end. Fools living out our separate lives on opposite sides of the country. The shame of it now a thing too great to imagine. There is, I’m afraid, too much to apologize for. To think what might have been is to lose myself entirely.
Je ne regrette rien
, your mother said. Piaf, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Picture it one more time: Bertrand standing over us, Paul trying to restore some semblance of order. It smells, on the carpet, of bread and fish, the faint yeasty odor of your small body. She crouches there down on the floor with you squalling in her arms, her expression in that moment beatific, some part of her I have known all too well over the years suddenly vanished or stamped out, thrown to the curb. I will lose her, I know. I already have.

And then she smiles. Your mother: There is nothing like her in the world.

“What if we made one goddamn choice for ourselves,” she says.

“Rebecca,” she says. “Come with me.”

Listen:
I
was the coward. I regret everything.

Chapter 3

October 2, 1981

Dear Alex,

She really is developing the most stubborn little mind. Apparently she’s at that age. The books say this is it for girls: “Seven is learning heaven,” if Dr. Z is to be believed, which I’m not entirely convinced he is. They’re all full of it, these doctors. You were right about that. But if I tell her there’s something she absolutely can’t do, she goes ahead and makes sure she does it. If I tell her she can’t walk any farther than the third tree from the stoop, she barrels toward the fifth. If I tell her not to eat something in the cupboard, off she goes with the stool the second I leave the room, dragging it across the floor. I can hear her on the prowl—
thump
,
thump
,
thumpity-thump
. I’m embarrassed to admit I tried something the other day I’d heard one of the other mothers talking about at school. I let her eat a whole box of Mallomars just to prove the point that, yes, indeed, there
can
be too much of a good thing. Of course she was up all night, and so was I. It didn’t teach her a thing. What do you think I heard the next day after lunch?
Thump, thump, thumpity-thump
.

Then there’s this, the latest disaster. You’ll never believe it. Paul took all three of them into the city for the weekend, and early Saturday morning the bell rings, loud and clear. I was in the kitchen doing the dishes, and when I looked down from the window, there she was.
Violet?
She nodded her head—she’s always so serious, such a focused little girl. And so lovely—God, she’s just the loveliest thing. Eyes like water, green as anything. She waited for the buzzer with her hand against the door, looking like she was about seventy instead of seven. I stood there a moment, still searching for Paul and the boys out the window, not understanding, and then I ran down the stairs. When I opened the door, she trotted right through and went up the stairs into the apartment and sat down on the couch.
I’ve had a day
, she said wearily. She’s an old soul. It’d kill you, some of the things she says.

She was so tired, poor thing, but she insisted on taking off her own shoes.
Sweetheart?
She cut me off.
I’m very tired from my walk
, she said.
It was a very long walk. The buildings got bigger
, she said,
and then they went away
.
The part on the bridge was nice but there were too many people
. She wanted to know what all those people were doing up so early. Why were they taking pictures of the bridge? Why did they keep stopping to take pictures? And then she fell asleep, right smack in the middle of a sentence. She was every bit as determined to finish her story as she had been to make that trip, though, stubborn as anything. Every time her eyes closed, she shook herself and started up again. I can’t tell you how furious I was. Too furious to move, honestly. I just sat there listening to her tell me what she’d seen and where she’d been, and when she finally let me tuck her into bed, she rolled over on her side. Her hair was tangled from the wind, her cheeks still red, and she stuck her finger out at me like she was making a point:

I was just trying to find you, she said.

R.

Acknowledgments

For reading, editing, advising, and encouraging, thank you to Ethan Canin, Lan Samantha Chang, Leslie Jamison, Maggie Shipstead, and Vinnie Wilhelm. Thanks especially to Kate Walbert, whose generosity ought to be bronzed.

For the gift of time and freedom, thank you to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Vermont Studio Center. Thank you to Connie Brothers, whose phone call changed everything.

For cheering me on along the way, thanks to Linda Swanson-Davies and Christina Thompson, editors who go above and beyond.

For many, many years of patience and good faith, thank you to my family. Without my mother and the house on El Molino, there would be no story.

For tireless revising and championing, thanks to my brilliant editor, Sarah Bowlin. Thanks also to Joanna Levine, Rebecca Seltzer, and everyone else at Henry Holt who helped bring these pages to life.

For telling me this was a book from the beginning—and then making sure it became one—I am forever indebted to my agent, the inimitable Claudia Ballard. Also at WME, thanks to Laura Bonner, Ian Dalrymple, and Eric Simonoff.

For all this and everything else, thank you to Dan: You made me one of the lucky ones.

About the Author

A
RIA
B
ETH
S
LOSS
is a graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Arts Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, and the Vermont Studio Center, and her writing has appeared in
Glimmer Train
, the
Harvard Review
, and online at
The Paris Review
and
FiveChapters
. She lives in New York City.