Ms. Hempel Chronicles (19 page)

“You have an apartment,” Maggie said. “You could keep it there.”

"My apartment is minuscule!” Beatrice wailed. "We're talking about important cultural history here!"

Their mother laughed. “What do you want me to do? Keep your bedroom hermetically sealed? A shrine to your youth?"

“Well, yes." This was exactly what Beatrice wanted. A shrine. Dim, magical, hushed, undisturbed. Ideally climate controlled, so the vinyl wouldn’t warp. She had never put it into words before, but this was precisely what she was looking for when she came back to the house where she grew up. And, as always, her mother had managed to divine her heart’s desire. She had an uncanny ability to do so, which made her refusal to grant its secret wishes that much more exasperating. How had she known, one summer morning long ago, that Beatrice walked out the back door so purely delighted with herself, feeling like anything at all might occur that day, dressed as she was in torn T-shirt, leopard mini, ripped fishnets, red heels—an outfit ingeniously designed to disguise sluttiness as irony (So Sid and Nancy! she’d thought in the closet)—how had she known her daughter’s happiness? And happened to drive from the post office to the market along the same route that Beatrice was tottering her way to the bus stop? Beatrice heard a car honking from behind (in appreciation, she’d thought) and was discouraged to turn around and find her heat-seeking mother, face aglow, hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. Somehow the episode—of thwarted desire; of surprise and humiliation—was remembered as a little piece of family comedy an opportunity for Mama to roll her eyes and everyone to laugh about the time Bea left the house looking like an insane prostitute. And Beatrice knew even as she now spoke, even as she sighed, "Yes, actually, that’s what I want,” this very moment was becoming laughable, toothless, the time Beatrice tried to turn her bedroom into a museum.

“It’s not like you’re dead!” said Maggie cheerfully, and be-gan kicking at the yew bushes again.

But their father was dead. It was impossible to come home and not think this thought every hour you were there. Maggie the biter had been right all along—everybody in that rackety house would disappear. First Beatrice, off grudgingly to college. Then Calvin, a few years later, with his towering backpack and his untouched passport. Their father next, falling to his knees on a tennis court. And their mother—still strictly present, of course, still standing there agitating her pans on the stove, but you could argue that she had been the first of them to leave. Beatrice wasn’t sure, but she thought it might have happened when Papa moved into the carriage house. Something shifted then; some agreement was reached between their mother and solitude. “You have to understand, Chinese don’t get divorced,” she had said one night when Beatrice and Calvin returned from a long afternoon of cheese sandwiches and Hearts. But she said it with defiance. She said it with a strange sort of exultation. She would be doing what no one else in her family or her acquaintance had ever done. She’d go back to graduate school—something useful, like accounting? University administration? She’d make appearances at parties alone. She’d practice a wartime frugality, keeping wings of the big house unheated and the children in hand-me-down clothes. It was doable. It was demanded of her. She’d pull through; she’d find ways; she would manage. The thought terrifying, but also bracing—like jumping out onto an unknown highway from a car crowded with quarrelsome people and half-eaten bags of cheese doodles and loud staticky music on the radio. The car would screech off into the distance and she would be left by herself on the side of the road, putting one foot deliberately in front of the other, the wind whistling all around.

She would show them!

And so she would have, if not for that stubborn zygote. Who knew that at this late stage things could still take root? She had always given money to Planned Parenthood; she had no qualms in that regard, no qualms at all. Then why she did let nature follow its unruly course? It was the mystery lying at the deep heart of her. Or maybe the answer was simple: maybe she had for once in her life succumbed to sentiment, an occurrence so rare that it tended to confound her, like when she had paid to have Calvin’s first sneakers preserved in bronze.

Unborn Maggie brought everyone home. The shaving kit took up its post in the bathroom; the book of poems returned to the shelf. But pointedly life did not resume where it had left off—upon his return, it was difficult to escape the feeling that their father was anything more than a longtime visitor, there on sufferance. His stay in the carriage house had made him older, and now, like an abashed and absentminded relative, he tried to keep out of their mother’s way. Beatrice wondered if one day she and Calvin would sit down with Maggie over little glasses of sherry and, in the wistful manner of Russian emigres, attempt to explain what life was like before. The fireflies, the linden trees, the dusky walk down to the edge of the lake—oh, such beautiful brawls! Their handsome father screaming and their lovely, long-haired mother in tears. (Someone forgot to pack the bathing suits.) Then the ceaseless, silent car rides home, with the rising moon close on their tail. The children carried up the staircase: girl in father's furry clasp, boy in mother’s smooth one. Lying stiffly in bed under the cool sheets, listening to more shouting from below. Or maybe instead (it was equally possible) to the sounds of the newspaper crackling, of something read aloud in a resonant voice, followed by elliptical laughter.

“And don't you remember?” Beatrice would ask eagerly of her brother. “Don’t you remember the time we were all watching that dumb vampire movie—you know, the one with George Hamilton? We were watching it on Channel 56 and Papa comes into the room with his big Dracula laugh and your plastic fangs and a big glass of cranberry juice? He chased Mama all over the house ...”

Incredible. Maggie would listen to their stories in disbelief. Are you talking about my father? My mother? She had grown up under an entirely different regime.

Back inside they examined their scratches, small and large. Everyone smelled agreeably piney. “Mission accomplished,” said Beatrice darkly. She would have to take her car coat to the cleaners. Dazed, she and Maggie held their hands beneath the kitchen tap, warming their fingers in the stream of hot water, until their mother walked by and turned it off. She was moving about the room in her old ballet, reaching and dipping, opening and shutting, and Beatrice felt with relief that perhaps the weekend had finally begun: for here was her mother, making them something to eat.

Maggie stationed herself at the table and flipped open a puzzle book. Her mouth found the comforting eraser again. Beatrice watched as a heavy, blank calm settled over her sister’s face.

“Hey!” said Beatrice. “Maggie! I have an idea. Why don’t you read Mama your new essay?”

“She doesn’t like being read to,” said Maggie slowly. “She likes reading things for herself."

“She's right,” said their mother, without turning from the

counter.

At the far end of the table, Beatrice regrouped. "Not for her sake, for yours. Hasn’t anyone told you about the benefits of reading your work aloud? I make all of my students do it. You pick up mistakes. You hear the rhythm of your sentences. It's a vital part of the revision process.”

“Oh, all right.” Maggie bent down wearily and dragged forth her backpack. Beatrice smoothed the tablecloth in front of her and tried to arrange her face into a disinterested expression. “Stand up,” she instructed. “Use your diaphragm, it’s good practice”

“Practice for what?” Maggie asked, but then did as she was told. She held herself erect and read clearly from her notebook. The act of reading seemed gently to change her. She no longer stuck out one skinny hip or did unconscious things with her toes. Her voice was unaffected, pleasant to listen to, and only a few of the words gave her any trouble. As she read, a softness drifted over her like a veil. She looked young and promising and possibly lovely, like a girl her own age, like the girls at Beatrice’s school. She could easily have been one of them: on the verge of something, brimming. With what, it had yet to be revealed, but still there it was, that fullness. As she read, it appeared very possible that she wouldn’t be stuck forever behind the scenery, or pursing her lips above a flute, or folding the guest towels with fastidious content As she read the words carefully from her notebook, her sister, listening, felt that there was hope.

Maggie looked up and smiled; the last sentence hung charmingly in the air. Beatrice beamed at her from the end

of the table. By now their mother had paused in her chopping and was studying them both.

“That essay,” she said, “was about a musical."

“Yes,” said Maggie, closing her notebook. “Cats.”

“But the play you did was The Caucasian Chalk Circle “I know," said Maggie. "But Cato just seemed to fit better" “Did you notice the parallels she made?” asked Beatrice. "Between the kids who work backstage and all the characters in the play? Each with their own funny quirks and personality!'
¹

Their mother ignored her. She looked steadily at Maggie, “You haven't even seen Cats!’

“Beatrice told me the whole story. She sang some parts from the songs.” Maggie opened up her notebook again, uncertainly. "You didn’t like it?”

“I’m not saying I didn't like it."

“You have to admit, this version is much stronger than the other one," Beatrice said.

Her mother turned to her. “You were in Cats!’

“It’s called creative nonfiction!” Beatrice cried. She glanced over at her sister, who was silently rereading the pages with a puckered, doubtful expression. “This is a better essay, believe me.”

“I don’t care if it’s better,” their mother declared, and went back to her cleaver and cutting board and the eviscerated bell peppers. “We'll keep working on it,” she said over her shoulder to Maggie, and then to Beatrice, now standing beside her, “Is this how you help your students at school?”

The question was real, which made it far worse than if it were merely mean. It was all Beatrice could do to keep from throwing herself beneath her mother’s rat-a-tat knife, moving at lightning speed across the board. She was only trying to give Maggie an edge, an advantage—didn’t they understand the urgency? She knew, better than they, what the competition actually looked like. But the two of them seemed determined to proceed innocently, undaunted. Outside in the cold, as Maggie calculated her profits, their mother had mentioned that the high school offered a Young Entrepreneurs Club (Beatrice had asked, Is that like a Young Republicans Club?), then Maggie had chimed in that she could take classes in Mandarin, too. Who needed an ancient, rolling campus? Beatrice realized with a pang that they were busy making the best of things, something that she, so accustomed to the best, had never quite learned how to do.

“Sorry,” she murmured.

She stole a sliver of green pepper; she ran her fingers along the edge of the kitchen table, unearthing her student's homemade birthday card from beneath the newspaper. On it was a picture of a stick-figure girl with a bubble head and a tiny red mouth—out of her mouth issued a yellow balloon containing the words: Today Is Great!—and inside the card the yellow balloon continued, explaining: Great Because YOU Wert Born! (with a smile!) The exclamation marks all carried hearts instead of dots. Standing there, her fingers resting lightly on its surface, Beatrice found herself fighting the urge to open this card, but in the end she lost.

That night she retreated to her former bedroom, where she sniffed the comforter warily and wondered who else might be sleeping there in months to come. Near eleven Maggie appeared in the doorway with a Ouija board as an offering. “The directions say that you’re supposed to do this with two people.” She climbed up onto the foot of the bed. “A lady and a gentleman preferred, it says, but I think it’ll still work if it’s two ladies.”

Beatrice put down her book. “You've really never done this before?”

“In fifth grade Evie Rosenthal came face to face with pure evil,” said Maggie.

She was wearing a faded sweatshirt and a pair of thermal underwear. She didn’t look especially prepared to welcome messengers from the spirit world. Whatever happened to cute pajamas? Beatrice wondered. She thought back sadly on all her little nightgowns, the flowers, the bits of eyelet, the ruffled hems. Even when she turned punk rock she wore pretty things to bed, things sent to her by her grandmothers. But Maggie had no grandmothers—they were all gone, exiting in quick succession, by the time she was four.

"Who are you trying to contact?” Beatrice asked. She saw her Po-Po and her Nana and her Grandma Sara standing there expectantly on the other side, their feeble arms full of red Macy’s boxes with nightgowns tucked into tissue paper. It would be nice to talk to them. They looked as if they desperately wanted to say something kind.

“Oh. I didn't know you had to pick someone in particular. I just have a few general questions I need answered.” Maggie unfolded the board, and Beatrice, by the water stain in the corner, recognized it as her own. Her father would forget to go down to the basement and empty the dehumidifier. “Can we do that? Just ask the universe? We don't want to bother anyone/'

“Sure. Why not. We'll ask the all-purpose universe,” Beatrice said, though this seemed the supernatural equivalent of worshipping at a Unitarian church, with sofas instead of pews, and not a cross in sight. “What are we asking?"

“Just a few business-related things,” said Maggie. “You should think up some questions, too. That way we can take turns.”

"I wouldn't even know where to begin. We’d be here all night.”

"I don't mind. Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“I’m tired, Maggie."

“I know!” She gave a little bounce at the end of the bed. "You can ask who your next fiance is going to be!”

Beatrice smiled. That was sweet. She liked how it sounded, as if she were a restless beauty with husbands and broken hearts trailing in her wake, and not a seventh-grade English teacher of dubious judgment and middling abilities whose brief and lucky engagement had ended, and who was now alone. Today was her birthday; today she turned twenty-nine years old.