SIXTEEN
"No more," said Ella, and passed her hand over the top of her wineglass. It was their first dinner out, their first official dinner-date, which she'd finally consented to after weeks of effort on Lewis's part, and she'd agreed to share a bottle of wine with him, which was a mistake. It had been years—maybe even as long as a decade— since she'd had wine, and it had, predictably, gone straight to her head. Lewis set the bottle down, and wiped his mouth. "I hate the holidays," he said, as casually as if he'd been telling her that he'd never liked artichokes. "What?" she'd said. "The holidays," he continued. "Can't stand them. Haven't been able to for years." "Why?" He poured himself another half-glass of wine. "Because my son doesn't come to visit me," he said shortly. "Which makes me the same as the rest of the yentas." "He doesn't come ever?" Ella asked hesitantly. "Are you ... Is there ..." "He spends the holida ys with his in-laws," said Lewis, and from the halting way he spoke, Ella could tell that this was a painful
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topic. "They see me in February, when the kids have vacation from school." "Well, that must be nice," said Ella. "It's very nice," said Lewis. "I spoil them rotten. And I look forward to it, but the holidays are still not that great." He shrugged a little, as if to say that it wasn't the worst thing in the world, but Ella knew it had to be hard, being alone. "So how about you?" Lewis asked, the way she knew he would, because as nice as he was and as well as they were getting along, she couldn't avoid this question forever. "Tell me about your family." Ella forced herself to relax, reminding herself not to tense her shoulders or clench her hands into fists. She'd known that this was coming. It was only natural. "Well," she began. "My husband, Ira, was a college professor. The history of economics, that was his specialty. We lived in Michigan. He died fifteen years ago. Stroke." This was the acceptable Acres shorthand for a dead spouse: name, rank, how long they'd been gone, and what had carried them off, in generic terms (the ladies would, for example, not hesitate to whisper "cancer," but nothing could drag the prefix "prostate" from their lips). "Was it a good marriage?" asked Lewis. "I know that it's none of my business ..." And he trailed off and looked at Ella hopefully. "It was ..." she began, toying with her butter knife. "It was a marriage of the time, I suppose. He worked, and I ran the house. Cooked, cleaned, did the entertaining ..." "What was Ira like? What did he like to do?" The funny thing was, Ella could barely remember. And what rose in her mind finally was the word enough. Ira had been nice enough, smart enough, had made enough money, had cared for her and for Caroline enough. He'd been a little cheap (frugal was how he'd put it),, and more than a little vain (Ella couldn't help but cringe as she remembered the comb-over he'd maintained well past the point of plausibility), but for the most part he'd been . . . enough.
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"He was fine," she said, knowing it was, at best, a tepid endorsement. "He was a good provider," she added, aware of how old-fashioned that sounded. "He was a good father," she concluded, although it hadn't been quite true. Ira, with his economics textbooks and smell of chalk dust, had been mostly bewildered by Caroline—beautiful, fragile, strange, furious Caroline, who'd insisted on wearing her tutu on the first day of kindergarten and had announced, at age eight, that she wouldn't answer to anything but Princess Maple Magnolia. Ira took her fishing and to ball games, and probably, secretly, wished that their one child had been a son, or at least a more normal sort of girl. "So you have children?" Lewis asked. Ella took a deep breath. "I had a daughter, Caroline. She died." She'd broken with protocol here. There was a name and the fact of a death, but nothing else: what Caroline had been, when she'd died, and what had killed her. Lewis laid his hand on hers gently. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't imagine what that must have been like." Ella said nothing, because there were no words for what it was like. Being the mother of a dead child was worse than all of the cliches said it was. It was the worst thing. It was so bad she could only think of Caroline's death in snatches and snapshots, and not even many of those, a handful of memories, each one more painful than the last. She remembered the sleek mahogany stretch of the coffin, cool and solid under her hand. She could see the faces of Caroline's girls in their navy dresses, dark-brown hair swept into identical ponytails, and how the older girl had held the younger one's hand as they approached the coffin, and how the younger one was crying and the older one was not. "Say good-bye to Mommy," Ella remembered the older sister saying in her husky voice, and the little sister just shook her head and cried. She could remember standing there, feeling utterly empty, as if a giant hand had scooped out everything inside of her—her guts, her heart— and left her looking the same, but not being the same at all. She
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could remember Ira leading her around as if she were crippled, or blind, his hand on her elbow, helping her into the car, out of the car, up the funeral parlor steps past Maggie and Rose. They don't have a mother, she'd thought, and the thought had hit her like a bomb going off in her brain. She'd lost her daughter, which was a terrible thing and a tragedy, but these girls had lost a mother. And surely that was worse. "We should move here," she'd told Ira that night, after he'd guided her into the chair in their hotel room. "We'll sell the house, rent an apartment ..." He'd stood beside the bed, polishing his glasses with the end of his tie, and looked at her with pity in his eyes. "Don't you think that would be locking the barn door after the horse has already gotten out?" "Barn!" she'd screamed. "Horse! Ira, our daughter is dead! Our granddaughters have no mother! We have to help! We have to be here!" He'd stared at her . . . and then, with the only piece of prescience she'd ever seen from him in almost thirty years of marriage, he'd said, "Maybe Michael doesn't want us here." "Ella?" Lewis asked. She swallowed hard, remembering how it had been raining the night she got the phone call, and how, days later, back at home, she'd dismantled the telephone: unscrewing the mouthpiece, detaching the coiled cord that joined the receiver to the phone itself, prying off the dial, unscrewing the bottom, and pulling out the telephone's wires and circuits, breaking the telephone that had brought her such horrible news into its component parts, and then staring at it, breathing hard, thinking, irrationally, Can't hurt me now, can't hurt me now. She could tell him how this had soothed her for about five minutes, until she'd found herself at Ira's dusty workable in the basement, his hammer in her hand, smashing each of the pieces into a thousand shiny shards, and how she'd wanted to smash her own hands as punishment for believing what she'd
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wanted to believe—that Caroline was telling her the truth, that she was taking her medication, that everything was fine. Lewis was looking at her. "You okay?" Ella took a deep breath. "Fine," she said faintly. "Just fine." Lewis studied her, then got to his feet, and helped Ella up. Once she'd risen, he kept one hand warm upon her elbow, steering her toward the door. "Let's go for a walk," he said.
SEVENTEEN
Maggie Feller spent Sunday afternoon in Sydelle's all-white fortress, playing Information. She had woken up with the phone shrilling through her hangover. "Rose, the phone!" she'd moaned, except Rose wasn't answering. And Sydelle the Terrible kept calling until Maggie finally picked up and agreed to come over and get her things out of her bedroom. "We need the space," Sydelle said. Stick it up your nose, Maggie thought. There's plenty of room there. "Well, where am I supposed to put everything?" she asked instead. Sydelle had sighed. Maggie could practically see her stepmother—thin lips compressed to the width of a paper cut, nostrils flaring, strands of freshly colored ash-blond hair wagging stiffly as she shook her head. "You can move your things to the basement, I suppose," said Sydelle, her tone indicating that this was a concession akin to letting her wayward stepdaughter set up a roller coaster on the front lawn. "That's very generous of you," Maggie said sarcastically. "I'll be over this afternoon." "We'll be at a workshop," Sydelle had said. "Macrobiotic cooking." As if Maggie had asked. Maggie took a hot shower, helped herself to Rose's car keys, and made the drive to New Jersey. The
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house was empty, except for the idiot dog Chanel (whom Rose had nicknamed Knockoff), who, as usual, howled as if she were a burglar, then tried to hump her leg. Maggie shoved the dog outside and spent half an hour hauling boxes to the basement, which left her a whole hour for Information. She started with Sydelle's desk, but didn't find anything interesting —some bills, stacks of stationery, a sheet of wallet-sized pictures of My Marcia in her wedding gown, a framed eight-by-ten of My Marcia's twins, Jason and Alexander—so she'd moved to the more fruitful hunting ground of the master bedroom's walk-in closet, which had previously yielded one of her prize finds—a jewelry box made of carved wood. The box was empty except for a pair of gold hoop earrings and a bracelet of narrow gold links that rattled inside it. Her mother's? Maybe, thought Maggie. It couldn't be Sydelle's because she knew where Sydelle kept her stuff. She'd considered pocketing the bracelets, but had decided not to. Maybe her father looked at these things, and would notice if they were gone, and Maggie didn't like the thought of him reaching for the jewelry box and finding nothing there. She started at the first shelf. There was a rubber-banded stack of old tax returns that she picked up, flipped through, and replaced. My Marcia's cheerleading trophies, Sydelle's sweaters. Maggie stood on her tiptoes, reaching over rows of her father's summer shirts and brushing her fingertips along the top of the shelf until they stopped at what felt like a shoe box. Maggie pulled the box off the shelf—it was pink, old-looking, crumpled around the corners. She brushed dust off the cover, carried it out of the closet, and sat down on the bed. It wasn't Sydelle's because Sydelle labeled her shoe boxes with a description of the shoes they contained (most of them very expensive, with painfully pointed toes). Plus, Sydelle wore a six narrow, and this box, according to the label, had once held a pair of pink Capezio ballet flats, girls' size four. Little kids' shoes. Maggie opene d the box. Letters. It was full of letters, at least two dozen of them. Cards,
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really, in colored envelopes, and the first one she pulled out was addressed to her, Miss Maggie Feller, at their old apartment, the two-bedroom place they'd lived in until her father had moved them all into Sydelle's house. The postmark read August 4, 1980, so it had been sent right around her eighth birthday (which, if she remembered right, had been a very glamorous affair at the local bowling alley, with pizza and ice cream afterward). There was a return-address sticker in the upper-left-hand corner. It said that the card came from someone named Ella Hirsch. Hirsch, thought Maggie, feeling her heart beat faster at the prospect of this mystery. Hirsch had been their mother's maiden name. She eased one edge of the envelope open. After almost twenty years, the glue let go easily. It was a birthday card, a little-kid's card with a pink frosted birthday cake and yellow candles on the front. "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" it read. And inside, beneath the preprinted "WISHING YOU A VERY HAPPY DAY!" she read, "Dear Maggie, I hope you're well. I miss you very much and would love to hear from you." Then a telephone number and a signature that said "Grandma," with the words Ella Hirsch written in parenthesis beneath it. And a ten-dollar bill, which Maggie shoved in her pocket. Interesting, Maggie thought, getting to her feet and walking to the bedroom window, checking out the street for signs of Sydelle's car. Maggie knew she had a grandmother; she had vague memories of sitting on someone's lap, smelling flowery perfume, and feeling a smooth cheek against her own while her mother took her picture. She vaguely remembered the same woman, this grandmother, at her mother's funeral. What had happened to the photograph was no mystery—after they moved in with Sydelle, all public evidence of their mother had disappeared. But what had happened to the grandmother? She remembered, years ago, on her first birthday in New Jersey, asking her father. "Where's Grandma Ella? Did she send me something?" A shadow had crossed her father's face. "I'm
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sorry," he'd said—or at least, that's what Maggie'd thought he'd said. "She can't come." And then, the next year, she remembered asking the same question and getting a different answer. "Grandma Ella's in a home." "Well, so are we," said Maggie, who didn't understand what the big deal was. But Rose knew. "Not this kind of home," she said, looking at her father, who gave her a nod. "In a home for old people." And that had been the end of that. But still, home or not, their grandmother had sent these cards. So why hadn't Maggie and Rose ever received them? She wondered whether the cards were all the same, and selected another one from the stack, this one from 1982, addressed to Miss Rose Feller. This one wished Rose a happy Chanukah, and was signed the same way—"I love you, I miss you, I hope you're well, love, Grandma (Ella)." And another bill, a twenty, this time, which joined the ten in Maggie's pocket. Grandma. Ella, she thought to herself. What had happened? Her mother had died, and there'd been a funeral. The grandmother would have been there for sure. Then they'd moved, from Connecticut to New Jersey, within a month of their mother's death, and as carefully as Maggie searched her memory, she couldn't remember seeing or hearing from the grandmother ever again. Her eyes were still closed when she heard the garage-door opener churn into life, followed by car doors slamming. She added the Rose card to the money in her pocket and jumped to her feet. "Maggie?" called Sydelle, her heels clicking on the kitchen floor. "Almost done," Maggie yelled. She put the box back on the shelf and walked downstairs, where her father and Sydelle were unloading grocery bags full of various sprouts and whole grains. "Stay for dinner," her father offered, kissing her cheek as she shrugged on her coat. "We're making ..." He paused and squinted at one of the bags.
