Louisa Meets Bear (24 page)

“How come Daddy didn't like the city?” It was late morning and Raya was standing on a stepladder to reach the strip of wall over Alan's closet while Marnie sat on the floor painting the radiator.

“It goes way back. When your father was a boy, he and Grandma Mary lived in a tiny apartment over what's now the pharmacy. Grandma Mary would cry and cry about no longer having a house. Ever since, your father has felt that apartment living is only for poor people.”

While rolling the walls in Sam's room, Marnie learned how Grandma Mary had to sell her house after her husband, Marnie's father's father, angry that Grandma Mary's claims about her family's wealth had been vastly exaggerated, took off with the three hundred dollars they had in their checking account to make a life by himself in Florida, leaving Grandma Mary with a one-year-old and a household of expensive wedding presents but no income except what she was able to earn as a switchboard operator for the telephone company.

The most spectacular story had come when they reached Marnie's room and her mother had told Marnie that she'd been married before: to Harvey Miller, a painter and a Communist who three months after their wedding left Raya in their Manhattan railroad flat while he headed with a friend to Mexico, Party business, he hinted, a possible meeting with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but, Raya knew, really an opportunity for a lot of drinking and whoring (would her mother have said
whoring
?—no, probably, not, Marnie thinks), where he died of a spider bite. A twenty-year-old widow, Raya turned a deaf ear to her parents' pleas that she move back to St. Louis. Instead, she found a job as an assistant to one of the curators of Meso-American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and began attending City College at night.

Raya had been almost thirty and at work on a catalogue of Kahlo's paintings when she first met Thomas. How does Marnie know that her mother hadn't loved her father at the time of his proposal but correctly surmised that she would grow to love him for his devotion to her, his hardworking nature, and his appreciation of beauty, acquired from his own mother? Did her mother talk about it that summer while they painted the bedrooms? Probably what she said was that she had wanted children. Indeed, two months after her marriage to Thomas, Raya was pregnant with David, and within five years Alan, Sam, and Marnie followed.

“If we'd stayed in the city,” her mother said with a sigh (they were painting the trim in David's room), “I would have gone back to work. Old Mr. Klopfer was still the head curator and he told me when I left, right before David was born, that as long as he was there, I'd always have a job.”

Marnie turns at the brick ramparts that mark Grant Street, formerly the drive to an estate where Ulysses S. Grant is said to have summered during his presidency, and now a residential street canopied with elms and lined with three-story center-hall Colonial houses. Neither she nor Sam was surprised when, after his residency, David bought the practice of Rapahu's retiring gastroenterologist, making him the third generation of their family to live in the town. She hasn't been to her brother's house since the first week after Raya's accident, when she and Sam shared the guest room. The stay ended badly after Sam, whose temper was even shorter than usual, exploded following Nancy's insistence that they all—Nancy, David, their five-year-old Kyle, Marnie, and Sam—join hands before dinner to say the Serenity Prayer, which Nancy had recently learned as part of what she referred to as her recovery with Adult Children of Alcoholics. “What kind of voodoo crock of shit is this?” Sam yelled—alone with Marnie but loudly enough, Marnie was certain, for David and Nancy to hear. “Neither of Nancy's parents is an alcoholic. They didn't drink any more than Mom and Dad or anyone else's parents.”

“She thinks that they interacted with her like alcoholics and that the meetings are helping her to stop enabling those behaviors.”

Sam tapped a cigarette out of her pack and put it under her nose. She inhaled deeply. “She probably thinks it was the plan of Señor Higher Power for a bread truck to hit Mom.”

As she approaches the house, Marnie can see Kyle sitting in the circular driveway poking with a stick at a patch of gravel a few feet behind David's BMW. He's a silent child who rarely cries or whines or asks for things and spends most of his time digging holes in the ground. It has taken Marnie a long time to understand that unlike her own visits to an imaginary world, her nephew, bored by his parents' patter (
brush your teeth
,
eat more chicken
,
get your backpack
), resides full-time in this alternate reality. Of late, Kyle has taken to feigning intermittent deafness; now he ignores the crunch of Marnie's feet on the drive.

Stopping a few steps away, Marnie quietly watches her nephew. After a minute or two, he glances at her boots.

“Could I take a look?”

Kyle makes a tiny nod. Marnie moves closer and lowers herself onto her haunches. She examines the hole in the frozen ground. Around the edges, Kyle has placed a circle of stones.

“It's a secret tunnel.”

Marnie remains squatting. Kyle has rubbed dirt into the thighs of his pants. In the weak light, his thin hair looks electric. “A secret tunnel,” she repeats.

“It goes under the house and then down a million billion miles to the middle of the earth.”

“That's far. What's down there?”

“Lots and lots of people,” Kyle says, his eyes fixed on the hole.

“Anyone I know?”

“That's where all the people who die go.” Kyle keeps digging. Marnie wonders if this is where he thinks his grandmother is now. For Kyle's fifth birthday, only a week before her mother's accident, Marnie had written a rhyming book that Raya illustrated with watercolors. There were ten pages:
Once in a while, you meet a Kyle. Kyle walks a mile. There's Kyle, in the aisle. Kyle is on trial. Kyle knows how to dial. Kyle has a file. Kyle makes a pile. Kyle dresses in style. Kyle meets a crocodile. Kyle likes to smile
. For the last page, her mother had wanted to paste in a photograph of Kyle. To no avail, she searched her packets of photographs and even called Nancy's mother to see if she had a picture of Kyle with a smile. “Just like Alan,” Raya said, surprising Marnie, since her mother rarely mentioned Alan's name. “Your father could never get a picture of him when he wasn't lost in thought.”

Marnie hears the front door open, and looks up to see David standing at the top of the stairs. He scowls. “What? You couldn't get a cab?”

“No, I wanted to walk.”

“You should have called. Sam took the early shuttle so she could visit Mom. We've been back already half an hour.”

Marnie hugs David. In the past year, his hair has turned from bluish black to salt-and-pepper. “I wanted to walk.”

“Go in, go in. Nancy and Sam are in the kitchen making lunch.” On the front door, a yellow bow that signals support for the troops in Iraq hangs next to a
NO SMOKING PLEASE
sign. Marnie wipes her feet, wondering which will have irritated Sam more: the yellow ribbon or the sign. Outside she can hear David telling Kyle to come in for lunch, and then his annoyance when he receives no reply. “Kyle, answer me. I've told you a hundred times that you're to answer when people talk to you.”

In the kitchen, Nancy is laying out cold cuts wrapped in wax paper and spooning deli salads into serving bowls. Sam sits at the counter, tapping her fingers in the way that she does when she's dying for a cigarette. As usual, Nancy is dressed in overly coordinated clothes: baby blue for her corduroy pants and headband, brown suede for her flats and belt. She looks prissy next to Sam, who with Raya's height but their father's delicate bone structure has for twenty years been wrecking men with her look of careless semi-dishabille—collarbone sticking out from a T-shirt, delicate ankles perched over work boots, long neck exposed by the short crop of her hair. Now Sam sports jeans and an oversized flannel shirt that probably belongs to her most recent boyfriend, Matt, a professor of sociology at MIT who, Sam confided in Marnie, first captured her interest due to rumors of his IRA connections and who writes on rhetoric and culture—dense, theoretical stuff with words like
autochthonous
and
de-realizing
that Sam refuses to read and that even David, the most intellectual of the three of them, has proclaimed impenetrable.

Marnie blows Sam a kiss and gives Nancy a hug. “What can I do to help?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just sit down, everything's organized.” Sam winks. She and Nancy had been in the same grade in the Rapahu schools; by sixth grade, Nancy had color-coded notebooks for each subject and a plaid address book with each of her friends' phone numbers, birth dates, and clothing sizes written inside. “I bet she even poops on schedule,” Sam used to joke.

“How was Mom?” Marnie asks.

“She got up, did a tango, and then just lay back down, eyes closed, in the same position.” Sam grins her toothy Joni Mitchell smile. Nancy looks up from slicing a tomato. She purses her lips.
The joking's good,
Marnie wants to say,
it keeps Raya alive for us, it's what she would want
, and then, for the first time today, it hits her, why they're all here: to figure out what her mother would want.

*   *   *

They eat on lavender paper plates in the Queen Anne dining room. In the middle of the table there's a centerpiece from Nancy's parents' florist shop: red, white, and blue carnations with miniature American flags interspersed and a yellow ribbon wrapped around the container.

“Looks like your folks have quite a business in war propaganda,” Sam says.

Marnie pinches Sam's leg under the table, but Nancy is deaf to derision. “Oh, yes,” Nancy says between delicate bites of her sandwich. “They've used a thousand yards of yellow ribbon since the war began. My father says you can't get a flag anywhere in the county.”

Nancy goes on to tell them who from Rapahu is in the Gulf and about the letter-writing campaign at the middle school. David eats quickly and a lot, as if tranquilizing himself with the macaroni salad. Kyle nibbles at the crust of his sandwich, peels back the top slice of bread to inspect what's underneath, turns the bread upside down so that the mayonnaise is on the outside, and then pokes a hole with his forefinger through the center.

Looking across the table, Marnie can see that Sam has also abandoned her sandwich, her tapping resumed. Before they sat down, David had whispered that Nancy would take Kyle to visit her parents after lunch and that they'd be able to talk freely about Raya then. Sam looks at her watch.
Damn
, Marnie thinks about her sister,
she's literally counting the minutes until Nancy and Kyle will leave and she can head out the back door to smoke.

*   *   *

Forty minutes later—after Sam has returned smelling of cigarettes from her trip to the yard and Marnie has cleared the table and refilled their coffee cups with the weak decaf that Nancy serves and David has headed upstairs for pencils and notepads with the name of a pharmaceutical company printed on top—they sit back down at the dining room table: David and Sam at each of the ends, Marnie on one of the sides, the American flags standing like sentries in the middle. “Let's lay some ground rules,” David begins.

David has always loved parliamentary rules; in high school, he and Nancy had met on the student council, where David had been first treasurer and then vice president. At times Marnie has thought that what most shook David about Alan's suicide was the way it shattered all family order: their father rushed to the emergency room with a gripping sensation around his heart the morning of the funeral, Sam never crying, David fainting at the funeral parlor at the sight of Alan dressed in a turtleneck so as to hide the rope burns on his throat, Marnie pummeling her mother's chest and screaming,
Liar
, when Raya told her the news, Raya's heroic calm—her eyes shielded like Jackie Kennedy behind dark glasses, as though she were clinging to those television images of the beautiful First Lady and her two small children as a guide for how to walk through the meetings with the president of Amherst (the woods where Alan had been found were, it turned out, part of the campus), the negotiations with the town of Amherst police to release her son's body for interstate transfer, the instructions to the funeral parlor director, the talk with the rabbi, who had never met any of them before.

“I think,” David says, glancing at Sam, “that we should each state our opinion fully without interruption.”

Sam leans over to take off her boots. She draws her knees up to her chest, resting her socks on the seat of the chair. “Fine,” she says. There's something biting in the way she lingers on the word that reminds Marnie of her father and the rage that would at times break through in his arguments with Sam. Her father had hated unions, welfare programs, war protesters, and (this said only in the privacy of his home, even her father having realized by the mid-seventies that overt bigotry was passé in the middle classes) “hippies, homos, and all those Negroes promoted on affirmative action,” but he'd recognized in Sam a formidable opponent. Once, after a screaming battle between them about the inherent immorality of capitalism, Sam citing figures about the number of babies killed in Africa from Nestlé's campaign to convert women from breast-feeding to the use of their baby formula, her father jerked the kitchen table as he stood, sending a water glass crashing to the floor. During the ensuing silence, he stared at Sam. When he finally spoke, it was calmly and quietly. “Too bad you're on the
un
-American side.”

Sam runs her fingers through her hair. “Go ahead,” she says, looking straight at David and leaving Marnie with the distinct impression that this must be a tactic: always let your opponent speak first so your argument can include a rebuttal to theirs.