The Art of Mending (9 page)

14

IT WAS SUCH A DIFFERENT CAR RIDE, GOING BACK. NO
fighting in the backseat. Only a respectful silence, occasionally punctuated by a neutral observation or a request to have the radio tuned to another station. I looked out the window and thought about the three of us siblings lined up on my parents’ bed that morning, being offered various things of my father’s by my mother, she in her bright, brittle way pulling open his drawers, rummaging through his closet. Her eyes shining with tears that she clearly wanted not to acknowledge. I’d taken only his hankies, his initials embroidered in navy blue in one corner. Steve had taken his watch and his cuff links—Steve is the only man I know who still wears cuff links—and his stamp collection. Caroline took a photo of him that was taken just before he married my mother. He stood beside an old jalopy, his foot up on the bumper, smiling broadly. Everything else that my mother had offered—his sweaters, his pipes, a bathrobe he’d never worn—we had refused. I think it was just too early. None of us kids had been ready to put the kind of seal on his death that taking his things would do.

Whereas Steve and Caroline had tiptoed around each other, not speaking, not even looking at each other, she and I had restored an uneasy truce before I left; I told her I would return within the week, and that I’d call her as soon as I arrived back at my mother’s house. Now, only a few miles from home, I regretted having made that promise. I felt I needed more time to reclaim my own life.

When we pulled into the driveway, I saw Maggie out in her yard, two houses down. She waved, smiling, then walked over to us. “How was it?” she asked as I got out of the car. Then, her smile disappearing, she said, “Oh. Jeez. Bad trip, huh?”

Pete and the kids greeted Maggie and then headed into the house, leaving us alone. “My dad died,” I said.

She stared at me for a moment, trying to understand. “Just . . . now? While you were there?”

I nodded.

“Oh, my God.” She hugged me, then stepped back to search my face. “I’m so sorry. Doug said you’d called. But I didn’t have your number to call you back.”

“I wasn’t calling about that. That was before he even . . . I was calling about something else.” I looked at our house and saw Pete passing in front of the living room window. He’d be checking everything out, making sure nothing had happened in our absence. The kids were undoubtedly ensconced in their rooms, reconnecting to their real selves as opposed to the hampered individuals they became when they were constantly in the presence of parents and relatives.
Anthony lite,
my son called himself in such situations.

“We can talk later,” Maggie said. “You need to go in?”

“Actually, I think I need to go out. Can you?”

“Let me just go and tell Doug, and then I’ll meet you back here. I’ll pick you up. Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, alcohol or sugar?”

“Salty alcohol.”

“Goldie’s?” we said together, because of their famous nachos and margaritas. And laughed. It was so good to laugh. I felt as though I too were reentering my legitimate self.

I went into the house to tell Pete I was going out with Maggie, and he told me there was a message on the machine. My mother. Saying that she’d like to come and stay with us for a while. She wanted to fly in the next day.

“No,” I said.

“
No?
Well, what are you going to tell her?”

“I’m going to tell her no.”

“Laura.”

“I said I’d go there!”

“She wants to come here. Do you really—”

“I’m going out with Maggie. I’ll call her when I come back.” I looked at the pile of mail and newspapers on the kitchen table. Even this seemed insurmountable. “I just need to go out for a while, Pete.”

I went upstairs to tell Hannah I was leaving. She was sitting on her bed, talking on the phone. “Hold on,” she said, and looked at me expectantly.

“I’m going out for a bit with Maggie. Okay?”

“Yeah. Can I go out for dinner and shopping for school clothes with Gracie?”

I’d forgotten all about school. It started in three days. “Yes, that would be great, in fact. Dad will give you some money. But remember—”

“I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t spend too much on one thing. And get things that mix and match.”

“That’s right.”

Next I went to Anthony’s door, knocked. Nothing. I knocked again, heard him say, “Come in.”

He was on his bed,
Sports Illustrated
lying across his belly.

“I just wanted to tell you I’m going out, okay? Dad will take care of dinner.”

“Yeah, okay.” It was defensive, the way he said this.

“Something wrong, Anthony?”

“No!”

I moved over to his bed, sat beside him. “What’s up?”

“Nothing, I just . . . I heard you in the kitchen, with Dad. About Grandma.”

I tried to remember exactly what I’d said, how I’d said it. “Yeah?”

“I don’t know, I just think it’s kind of screwed up that you don’t want her to come here. It’s probably pretty hard for her to be in that house. Like, everywhere she looks, she sees Grandpa. Maybe she just needs to get away.”

“Well, Anthony.”

He waited.

“It’s just that there are a lot of things . . . I mean, I said I’d go there and help her.”

“But maybe she—”

“You know what, sweetheart? Maggie’s waiting for me. I’ll talk to you about this later. I appreciate that you’re concerned for Grandma. I do. But I—”

“Go!” he said. “Who’s stopping you?” He returned to his magazine. I stood there for a moment, then headed downstairs. What was in my head were Pete’s words:
We don’t any of us always say what we really feel, do we?
It occurred to me to go back upstairs and tell Anthony the truth. But I didn’t know it yet.

GOLDIE’S WAS NOMINALLY HALF BAR,
half restaurant. But you could sit at the bar and have everything on the dinner menu, and you could sit in the restaurant for drinks only. Frank, the owner, was an easygoing guy; everything was okay with him. He had a mixed menu, everything from enchiladas to tandoori chicken to pecan-crusted catfish. Normally, you have to be wary of restaurants like that because, when they don’t specialize in anything, nothing is good. But at Goldie’s, everything was delicious. Frank once explained to me that his wife, Goldie, who died suddenly at age thirty-three, “never met a cuisine she couldn’t conquer.” Dinner at their house had always been an adventure; Frank never knew what he’d be coming home to, and he liked that. He’d been a stockbroker before she died; afterward, he decided to open a restaurant in her honor. He knew nothing about the business except that people out to eat were looking for variety and a really good meal, and that was exactly what he provided. He was sixty-one now, a good-looking man with thick gray hair and a stunning physique—he worked out every day to compensate for what he drank every night. I suppose Frank is an alcoholic, but he’s an elegant and a sympathetic one. He started drinking seriously only after Goldie died; she’d been everything to him. They never had children, so Frank has fashioned a family out of his customers. He makes it his business to know—at least by name—anyone who comes in more than once.

So it was that when Maggie and I walked in, Frank, seated at the bar, called out, “Hey, Laura! How was the fair?”

“Oh, it was great.” I looked over at Maggie, and without saying anything she agreed with me. Now was not the time.

“Bar or restaurant?” Frank asked. Then, reaching into the menu bin, “Late lunch, early dinner, or just drinks?”

“Loaded nachos and margaritas in the restaurant?” I said.

“You got it.” Frank threw the menus back in the bin and led us to the back area that served as the restaurant. It was five-thirty, and we were the only ones in the place. “Sit anywhere you want,” Frank told us, “and I’ll put the order in for you.”

I sat at a corner table and folded my hands tightly together on the white tablecloth. “So.”

“Did you bring Kleenex?” Maggie asked.

“For what?”

She reached in her purse, took out a pack of tissues. “Here.”

“I’m not going to cry.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not!”

She put the Kleenex back in her purse. Then she leaned forward, smiled a small smile. “It was awfully sudden, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Stroke. He was in the hospital for a little stroke. And then he had a big one.”

A young waitress appeared, using both hands to balance the tray holding our drinks. “
Here
we go!” she said, her loud cheerfulness an attempt to compensate for her insecurity. As far as I was concerned, her tip had just gone up threefold. She very carefully set our drinks before us, the pink tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. “And!” She looked brightly at us. “Anything else?”

“We ordered nachos,” Maggie said. “Loaded.”

“Uh-huh, Frank told me. But . . . anything else?”

“We’re fine for now,” I said. “We’ll let you know if we need anything more.”

“Okay. Oh! My name’s Paula? And I’ll be your server?”

“Okay, Paula.”

I needed to make a suggestion for Frank’s
COMMENTS
box.
Hey, Frank. Please be the only restaurant left that does not encourage your waitstaff to form intimate relationships with the customer.

“So he died instantly, huh?” Maggie said. “I guess that’s good. That’s how my dad died too—a stroke. Only he didn’t die right away, he was in a coma for a couple of days. It gave me some time to say some things. Sort of. I mean, I sat by his bed and said some things. And then—well, this is sort of embarrassing to admit—I was trying to be all New Age, and I said, ‘It’s okay, Daddy. You can go. Just go toward the light.’ And my mom leaped out of her chair and rushed over and said, ‘Oh, no, Tom, don’t go! Don’t leave me!’ And she grabbed hold of him and started sobbing, and I stood there feeling just terrible.”

I held up my glass, clinked it with Maggie’s in an ironic toast, and had a long sip. “So what did you tell him?”

“My dad?”

“Yeah.”

She looked away, watching Frank put a couple of tables together so he could seat a large group of people who had just come in. “I told him—oh, you know—thank you for helping me sell Girl Scout cookies door to door, for trying to teach me to catch a football, for telling me I was the prettiest girl in the yearbook when we both knew I wasn’t. And I told him I loved him, you know, that I’d always . . . that he’d always be—” Our eyes filled with tears, and she dug in her purse to get us each a tissue. “Nothing covers it. No matter what you say. So don’t feel bad that you didn’t get a chance.”

“But I do feel bad. I really do.” I wiped at my eyes again.

“This will take some time, sweetheart. There’s always going to be an ache. Our dads are—”

“I know.” I started crying harder, making noise now, and looked at Maggie, panicked.

“You want me to quick change the subject?”

I nodded.

“Okay. Okay.” She stood up, turned her back to me, and said over her shoulder, “Does my ass look like two watermelons in these pants?”

I blew my nose. “Yes.”

“No, no, don’t hold back, just tell me the truth.”

She sat down, laughing, and we accepted the nachos our new friend Paula had brought over. I ate one, two, and then looked around the room, trying to steady myself. “Before my dad died, my sister Caroline told me some things about my mother.”

“Okay, but first:
Does
my ass look like two watermelons?”

“No.
.
.
.
Hams,
maybe.”

“Oh, I see. Thanks a lot. I feel much better now. So. What things?”

I took another drink and began.

MUCH LATER, MAGGIE AND I
were sitting in the bleachers of the high school football stadium, where we’d come to talk after Goldie’s closed. The stars were so clear; constellations stood out as plainly as star maps. I squinted at my watch. “Whoa, it’s two-thirty!”

“Will Pete worry?”

“No. He’ll go to bed. How about Doug?”

“He’ll worry a little, but that’s all right.”

I stood, a bit unsteady. I didn’t know how much I’d drunk, but it was much more than usual. “We should go.”

She took hold of my hand, pulled me down. “In a minute. I want to tell you something first.”

“What?”

“Just this story, about . . . well, I used to stay with an aunt and uncle every summer. My family would go to visit them because they lived on a lake—in fact, the whole extended family would come up and find cottages and use their house as headquarters. But I stayed in the house. They had a daughter my age, and I slept on a cot in her room. I loved that family, especially my Uncle Harold. He was handsome, and funny, and so kind. But one summer when I was nine, he spanked me—grabbed me by the arm and swatted me maybe five, six times. He did it in front of other people, I remember; that was one of the worst things, it was so embarrassing. We were in the hallway, but there were a bunch of relatives in the living room who could see us. The front door was open; it was a beautiful day. I remember a breeze that smelled like water, I remember the cotton ball they had bobby-pinned on the screen to keep the flies away, I remember the red shorts I was wearing with this striped shirt with spaghetti straps that tied over my shoulders and the straps hurt that day because I was sunburned. I remember all that. But I don’t know why he spanked me, I cannot for the life of me remember why. It was just that one time, but it devastated me. I never wanted to stay with them again. I felt afraid of him; I just saw him as a completely different person.”

“Meaning what? That Caroline suffered one little thing and blew it all out of proportion?”

“Well . . . is it possible? Does it make sense to you that that might have happened? Perhaps . . . a few times?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I mean, I never changed my mind about that uncle. Even now when I see him I feel a little afraid. And he’s just this little stooped-over gray-haired guy. Last year, at a family picnic, I was sitting by him and I all of a sudden said, ‘Do you remember the time you spanked me?’ And he said, ‘No. When did I do that?’ And I knew he really didn’t remember, and there was no point in bringing it up. I don’t know why I
did
bring it up.”