Happy Family (28 page)

“Fuck!” Cheri's shin throbs; she's gnashing her teeth, and her mother is looking at her like
she's
the one who's batshit crazy. “Damn it, don't go moving things,” she says, trying to push the trash can with her hip. It's full and heavier than she thinks. Or she's weaker.

“You cannot keep up like this. You hurt yourself. Let me have that,” Cici says, taking the coffee grinder from Cheri's hand.

“I'm fine.”

“No, you are
not
fine,” Cici says forcefully. “Nothing is fine. You are in the depression; this is normal when someone dies. But it is not normal to shut yourself away from everybody for so long, to be hurting yourself, wearing the same clothes for days, drinking yourself sick.”

“You really want to compare normal?” Cheri stares at Cici, who claps her hands together and waves them up and down in an effort to stop herself from saying the first thing that occurs to her.

“You want me to bite; I do not want to bite.
Cara mia,
when someone you love dies, nothing feels the same. A part of your heart is gone and never comes back.”

“I'm afraid it's more complicated than that.”

“Everything is always more complicated. And also always more the same,” Cici says.

Cheri turns away and when she turns back Cici has put the coffee grinder and other things in her tote. “I don't know what you want me to say. I can't explain it myself,” Cheri says. How could she describe to Cici that her pain was about more than Michael's death? That she'd lost him in the marriage and then, just as she saw him again, she lost him and everything else she cared about permanently. “I can't feel anything, and when I do, it's all too much.”

“I have been in the shoes you are in,” Cici says, sitting down at the table. “I shut myself away like you do. I could not get out of the bed. I had no reason to move forward. I wanted to hurt myself…” There's not a trace of the puffed-up lizard left in Cici. She looks all too human.

“You lost a husband too, I know…”

“I am not talking about Solomon.” Cici takes a deep breath and pauses. “I lost a baby.” The plainness and weight of the statement levels Cheri.

“You had a child?” Cheri asks, sitting down.

“I was pregnant before you.” Cici's voice sounds distant. “There was an emergency. The doctors had to make an operation so I would not die and they got the baby out. But he was so small and so sick. He lived only a few hours. I could not have children after that.”

“You had a hysterectomy? You could have told me,” Cheri says, remembering the trip to Italy when she found out that she was adopted. Nobody told her anything in her family, but when she did hear something, it was dropped on her out of the blue. “Why didn't you say anything?” Cheri asks.

“Maybe I should have told you. But it caused too much pain to look back. Your father and I never spoke of it. But losing a child is something you can never forget.” Cheri thinks of Karen, the funeral and the baby in the tiny coffin. For the first time, she thinks of her mother as a young woman, bereaved, emptied. Had there been a funeral for Cici's baby? Cheri's head is spinning and she doesn't feel at all well. Her mother is looking at her with concern.

“Enough talk of sad things. Sit. I make you something to eat.”

Although Cheri wasn't hungry, she ate a few bites of the risotto that Cici miraculously threw together from the seemingly empty pantry. She drank water and napped, and when she woke up, Cici came into her bedroom and said, “I am going to help you pack up Michael's clothes. It is not good to sit with them there for so long. You are ready?”

Is she ready? To let the memories in, the images she'd kept at bay by sinking into the mound of overarching despair? Cici opens Michael's closet, takes something off a hanger, and approaches Cheri with it. Is she ready to feel the softness of Michael's favorite shirt, the one that made his eyes the color of blueberries in summer? He had this shirt when they first met and there was a time she would wear it when he was away, feeling protected and attached. Cheri has never been particularly sentimental, but she knows she's not ready to let that shirt go. Cici is sitting on a corner of the bed, looking at her expectantly.

And suddenly, moments that were commonplace float up in Cheri's mind. How he'd throw off his boots and then later ask, “Have you seen my other boot?” The boots with the caulking splatter from when he decided to put up shelves and made such big holes in the wall that they had to call the handyman to redo it. How he would run his hands over his face when he was tired. The day she caught him listening to mariachi music and actually liking it. She sits, clutching the shirt to her chest, until she feels her mother's hands on her shoulders. Instead of withdrawing, she allows herself to lean back. “We will keep this one for you,” Cici says, gently taking the shirt. Cheri gets up and moves like a cluster fly, pausing in front of his closet, then circling to his chest of drawers, not knowing where to start. His clothing is stained with food and accidents that smell of indignity. She is looking at the remains of his last days and thinks she should have taken care of them better. The struggle to feed and be fed, worn on his sleeves. She can hear her mother exclaiming,
“Che schifo!”
Where to start?

Without uttering another word, Cici swoops in and picks up Michael's things from wherever they met their inglorious end weeks ago. Cici sorts and folds, making neat piles of clothes to be donated or thrown out. “We decide this one later,” Cici says when Cheri gets stuck, which is more often than she would have thought.
Is she ready?
There is much more letting go to do, she knows, and not just of objects.

After all of Michael's clothes have been sorted, Cheri and Cici sit in silence on the edge of the bed. Cici puts her hand on top of Cheri's. They sit like this for a few minutes, until Cici says, “I will stay in a hotel. But you must promise me that you will not hurt yourself. No razor blades. No pills.”

“I promise,” Cheri says.

“I want you to remember that God is always here for you. I know you do not believe as I do, that you think I am simple…but this is what helps me. I know your father and my baby are in heaven. And so is Michael.” Cheri quells her impulse to say,
Do you actually believe in this?
Cici continues. “Going to church, talking to Father Joseph—this helped me with my loss, with all my problems. When you make the confession, you put all your sin and sorrow at the feet of God. His forgiveness and love are so big, it makes your troubles feel smaller.”

As soon as her mother leaves, Cheri regrets not asking her to stay. She wanted to be alone because she's jonesing and there's the last bit of chopped-up Sudafed-pain-pill powder to consume. But as soon as she cuts her last lines and inhales, she knows it's an empty gesture, like sex with someone you once loved but now can't stand. She wanders through the house. It feels too big. Like she's lost weight and it hangs off her. Who knows, maybe Cici and the millions of believers out there are right. Maybe Michael and Sol have reconciled in the Great Beyond. They're at the seaside chasing waves with Cici's baby boy and numerous vestal virgins, laughing. Maybe she'll just pop the last pain pill and take a bath.

The world might collapse, but as long as there is running water, Cheri will survive. She adjusts the water temperature. The yellow washcloth draped over the side of the tub smells of her mother's tea-rose perfume. She feels a deep longing; for what, she's unsure. The kind of painful sweetness that makes her want to call and wake her mother up and say, I'm sorry, come back, please come back. But it's one o'clock in the morning. First thing tomorrow, she promises herself, I'll get up and do things differently. Start small: Put on pants. Work my way up to being kind.

C
ici likes air travel. She finds it soothing to be in the capsule of neither here nor there. But first class isn't what it used to be. She's had to tap her champagne glass twice to get the stewardess's eye and decides to switch to vodka and orange juice. For the first time since Cheri was a small child, Cici feels like she was actually able to help her. She would like to have stayed longer but she knew she'd done as much as Cheri would allow. It doesn't get easier. She thought that maybe with age she wouldn't feel the referred pain that comes from seeing your child suffer. She was wrong. If she could, she would take Cheri's burden away, breathe in her loss and expel it like smoke. But she can't do that for Cheri any more than Sol could do it for her when she lost the baby. You were once my salvation, she could have whispered to Cheri, you gave me a reason to live and now you must find the same for yourself.

Why does she think of the right thing to say only after the fact? She felt she had said both too much and too little to Cheri. A child does not want to know the intimate things that go on between her parents. How could she tell Cheri that she was also to blame for the woman with the emerald ring? That after her baby died, she became numb to pleasure she knew Solomon wanted to give her but she could not receive. Or give to him. She turned her face away, pretended for so long that one day the mask she was wearing had become her face. She had put so much of her love and energy into being a mother, wanting to do better than her mama. She had only one child; there was plenty of room in her heart. But she had not left enough room for Solomon. She knows this now. But then, she was so young. She understood so little.

She could not tell Cheri about Solomon's confession. She would like to erase that memory and focus only on the fact that they found happiness again. Solomon had shown her that he was still the man she had fallen in love with. He'd awakened something in her that she had given up hope of ever feeling again. But she found herself able to speak of only the small things to her daughter. For such big things, she could never find the words. You did nothing. It might have taken Cici years, but she did do something. If I could forgive Solomon, so can you, was what she meant to say. “God forgives us so we can forgive each other,” Father Joseph told her and Solomon when they sat across from him in his office at the church. “Are you prepared to do that, my children?”

She was not prepared when Solomon confessed. He had been on a phone call at work when his eyes suddenly went dark. She had raced to the hospital. He was sixty-six years old. His veins were bad; the phlebitis could give him a stroke and kill him. He was getting special attention, surrounded by doctors who said he was lucky—it was only a miniature stroke. A TMI, she was sure, but she was saying it wrong because Cheri corrected her. They did not want to worry Cheri; she had told her afterward, when most of his eyesight came back. She had seen him struggling with his gout, his swollen legs, but he was always so strong. “Doctors make the worst patients,” he'd told Cici when she worried about his health. Now the man with all the answers, the proud doctor she'd married, was like a little boy in his hospital gown. She slept on a chair by his bed and would wake up in the middle of the night and find his hand searching for hers. She got in next to him; his arms looped around her waist and his head rested on her neck.

The next morning, his sight had come back in one eye and the doctors said he could go home. “I have to tell you something,” he said as they were packing to leave. “It's over with her. It has been for a long time, but I needed you to know.” Cici could not have said when, exactly, but she'd sensed Sol's attention was slowly returning to her.

“I made a mistake,” he continued. “I'm not proud of it or of how I handled it. I never loved her the way I love you. But it wasn't just the two of us.” For a moment, Cici could not breathe. He and the Emerald Woman had a son. And that boy was going to be a man; he was soon to be in college. “It wasn't planned,” he said, and she'd snorted. She did not want to hear any more. Was it worse or better that he'd stayed with the woman because they'd had a child? She could not give him his own child. Was this why he'd sought out someone else? As much as she tried to block them, these thoughts crept in with cat's paws later. But for now, she needed Sol to stop talking. She held up her hand.

“If you don't want me to come home, now or ever, then I will have to accept that. But I needed you to know the whole story.” How could her husband have a child that was not hers? In all her years of thinking about the Emerald Woman, she had somehow never imagined such a thing. Men wandered, had affairs. Not children. Because he had confessed, was she supposed to forgive? Was that what his eyes were pleading? She had to ask herself: Could she imagine a life without Solomon? “We are going home,” she said.

Cici wraps the cashmere throw that she brought around her, glad that nobody is in the seat next to her. Never once had she considered a life without Solomon. They had the glue of their marriage: beautiful homes to run, food she knew to buy and cook for him, the suits she picked out and packed and unpacked, the daily calls, his always knowing what to do, how to fix things. Her papa had died when Cici was so young, but she remembered the look on her mama's face the day it happened, a look that said the world would never be the same, would never feel like a safe place again. Solomon had kept Cici's world safe.

It is hard to remember the gradual way the shoot of forgiveness surfaced. She had not gone looking for it. To celebrate the fresh start, he had bought her a gift—lilacs, just like the ones he'd planted for her in Montclair. He knew to get tight clusters with the purple buds just awakening. Where had he found lilacs in winter? “Nothing is impossible,” he had said, but not about the lilacs. A perfect spray sitting there on her white plate at the dinner table.
Someday, when I'm awfully low, when the world is cold.
Frank Sinatra crooning on the stereo.
Croon
. Solomon had taught her that word back when his touch made her shiver as if with fever. When her teeth were white and her knees unwrinkled and her heart tender. “You are my home,” he said. “I only ever wanted you, us, as we were.” He poured her some wine, an excellent vintage. “I only ever wanted to make you happy, Cici. The houses, the jewelry, these were things I could give you when you didn't seem to want everything else I had to give. More than anything, I wanted to know that you still wanted me. When you cut up my clothes, I thought that you'd scream and threaten to leave me. A declaration would have stopped me in my tracks.”

A declaration—where were the words back then for all the emotions she had held in? “It was not my duty to tell you to stop,” she said. She thought of her mother and sister. “Men slow down when they are older,” Genny had said about her Ettore when he had his women, “they come home again.” A declaration. Now, that evening, she'd found the words. She shouted and called him a liar and a motherfucker, screamed that she should have taken a whack out on him when she could. When she was exhausted and about to call to Cookie because the dinner would be cold and she was probably drunk, watching TV, he stood up and took her in his arms: “We can't go back to where we began—we are both different people than we were twenty years ago. But I want to share who I am now with you. But you have to be willing to share yourself too.” He touched her cheek with his hand. She could see the passage of time, reflections of all the men she'd known or thought she'd known in his face. He talked about how he would retire and become a doctor again, work in a clinic for no money. He was going to help the people who most needed helping. “I am going to be a better man, just let me show you.”
And the way you look tonight.
And then his hand was on her back like a knife, cutting the buttons off her dress. His breath on her ear: “Forgive me. Please, forgive me.”

“Are you all right, ma'am?” The stewardess is leaning over, handing Cici a tissue. Cici nods her head; she didn't even realize she was crying. She pats her eyes and then checks herself in her compact, fixes her makeup. There is still an hour left of the flight; she settles back to try to nap. “A woman is born with only so many butterflies,” her mother had said when Cici told her she was in love with Sol. “When your heart is broken by a man, when he hurts you, he steals one. Don't let your butterflies go easily, Carlotta
mio
—one day you may be left with none.” The last gift Solomon gave her was a gold necklace with a mother-of-pearl butterfly, tiny diamonds around its wings. It had been too painful to wear that necklace after he died, but now she thinks she can. And one day, when she passes it to Cheri, she might just find the courage to tell her a little bit more.