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Authors: Cathy Lamb

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BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life

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I was the big sister. I was responsible for her. I should have used a knife. I should have run away with her.

Click, click, click.

I should have, I should have, I should have.

“You’re trying to get me tipsy so you can take advantage of my innocence,” Grandma said to Granddad as he opened a bottle of wine.

“I would never do that, my darling,” he said, winking at her.

“I know, sexy man.” She waved her hand, a ruby bracelet from Granddad dwarfing her slender wrist. “But I wish you would!” She was wearing a purple ball gown, her hair curling down to her shoulders, her makeup exquisite. She had donned a pretty good push-up bra, too, and her cleavage was up and out there.

“You look radiant, Grandma,” I told her honestly.

“I do it for him,” she whispered to me, one hand half covering her mouth, although the three of us could hear her clear as a tolling bell. “I dress up for my husband. Isn’t he handsome? He makes me tingle.”

“He sure is, Grandma.”

“You minx!” Grandma said to Granddad. “You’re irresistible !”

Nola had made us her famous calzone and fruit salad, then left for her book group. Annie and I set the dining room table with Grandma’s china with the tiny blue flowers, lit about ten tea candles, and took the red roses that Granddad had bought Grandma, trimmed them down, and spread them amidst three crystal vases.

On the wall was one of Grandma’s longest paintings. It was a family of black swans, all at dinner at a polished table exactly like ours, with a chandelier exactly like ours, wearing their finest, most shimmery clothes. They were eating stacks of pancakes. Two swans were leaning together, collapsed in their laugher; two others were clearly arguing, one brandishing a pancake on a fork; and one boy swan had thrown a pancake at his sister swan. There were grandparent swans and two twin baby girl swans in high chairs. That painting was in one of her most popular children’s books ever.

While Grandma tittered and giggled while she ate her calzone, Granddad, Annie, and I talked about the farm, the two coyotes Granddad had seen on his morning walk, how the gazebo needed another coat of white paint, the rainbow that had arched over the hills, Annie’s work with a farmer who had llamas, and Granddad’s stores—they were opening three more this year.

Afterward, Granddad kissed all of us. “It’s been a long day. I’m going to go and lie down, ladies.”

Grandma turned her cheek up for his kiss and winked at him, so coy. “I’ll be in in a minute, dear, don’t you worry. Can you wait?”

“Yes, my darling.”

“I won’t be long.” She blew him another kiss. “My fires are on fire!”

I smothered a chuckle, and Annie did the same.

“But I’m always on fire for you,” she went on. “Ever since I was a young lady, I knew you were the man for me. Tall, passionate . . .” She giggled and whispered, “Sexy!”

“Thank you, Emmanuelle,” Granddad said, as he bowed slightly.

“My flames are leaping, my libido is on high, my lust surrounds me,” Grandma went on with that sweet, vacant smile. “But only for you, the man I have slept with thousands of times. Your touch still stirs me.” She patted her heart, and then, turning a bit, as if to hide her movements from Annie and I, she pointed to the nether regions of her crossed legs. “Right here, too,” she declared.

I smothered another chuckle. They were so dear. Their love passionate, unending, dedicated.

My granddad smiled again, his smart eyes softening. He loved my grandma to the core, as my dad had loved my momma. Grandma was expressing what she’d always expressed to him, only when she was sane she knew to do it privately. But still, who was around? Only his beloved granddaughters who knew, and understood, this love they had together.

She pointed again. “In the private spot! I still have it for you, and I’m going to let you take a peek in a few minutes.”

Granddad kissed both her cheeks, his hands cupping her smiling face. “I’d like that peek. Thank you, my dear.”

“Anything for you, my protector, my friend, my lover!” She glanced at us, halfway covered her mouth and whispered to our granddad, “You are a marvelous lover! Marvelous and creative and—”

Apparently that was a tad bit too graphic for our proper granddad, because he kissed her on the mouth as she smiled, and he said, “You all enjoy your evening.”

“Good night, Granddad,” Annie and I called. Annie had been in Fiji recently. There were still half-moon circles under her eyes. I’d asked her how her trip was. “It was explosive,” she’d told me.

About four states away a breeder, a man notorious for the horrendous conditions in his kennels, had lost his house. Apparently the heating system blew up and the house was blasted to bits. Strange that it blew up as that state was having a heat wave....

“Good night, lover!” Grandma said. “I looovee you!”

After Granddad left, Grandma turned to us and said, matter-of-factly, “He doesn’t know that I know about the other family and the candles that killed them. We had candles, too. From my parents when we left Germany, and from my grandparents who left Russia. The other family had candles, too.”

“What other family?” Annie asked, dropping a chunk of bread.

“I remember them. They were a nice family. A father, a mother, a young girl and boy, a teenage girl. Like us. It was them, they were supposed to go.” She took her finger and outlined one of the blue flowers on the china.

Annie raised her eyebrows at me, while I felt the blood rush down my body like a flood was carrying it away and putting it in my feet.

“Where were they supposed to go?” I asked.

“They were supposed to go to the Land of the Swans, not us. Not us. He doesn’t know I know. It’s a secret. I didn’t know until afterward.” Her voice crackled, and I knew her mood was changing rapidly.

“What secret, Grandma?”

She gazed at me with two types of vacant expressions. One said, “I don’t know what’s going on anymore,” and the other said, “This memory is for me only. You’re not in it, you can’t come in.”

“There’s a lot of secrets.” She wiped the tears off her cheeks as they spurted and ran over the lines of age on her face. “And they’re all sad, they’re all sad! I can’t bear it.” She thumped her heart. “I can’t bear it! And he, he has had to live with this! Eating him up. Eating him!”

I took a deep breath, and so did Annie; I heard it. This was exactly what Granddad had talked about today at Max’s.

I reached out a hand and held hers. “It’s okay, Grandma, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay,” she argued, her head wobbling. “It’s not okay. Nothing is okay. They’re gone. Everybody’s gone. They’re all gone. Your violin knows it. I can see the death on your violin.”

“Would you like to go and walk by the lavender tonight? I’ll play my violin for you?”

“No, no, I don’t. I can’t be happy by the lavender or by the palaces or the leprechauns, I can’t.”

“Why, Grandma? Why can’t you be happy?”

“Because . . .” She burst into broken sobs, her slim shoulders shaking. “You know why.”

“No, I don’t know why.” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Was this real? Was it true?

“You know why I can’t be happy.”

“Tell me again.”

She spoke through her wrenching, terrible sobs. “I can’t be happy”—she leaned over her china plate with the tiny blue flowers and wrenched out, her old voice breaking—“because he left them there and he knew they would die.”

The blood finished pooling at my feet. Annie made a choking sound.

“He left them there to die. Shot and burned or smashed.”

Shot and burned or smashed?

“They died, or we died. But I didn’t know, only he knew. He was a husband then. There were no more swans to take them off. The swans were gone by then.”

I sagged. What on earth was Grandma talking about?

“We ran away. We ran away as fast as we could. Run, run, run, escape. Use the wings to go over the mountains! Bring her violin! Don’t smash it!” She threw her hands in the air, then wrapped them around her thin body. “Wipe the blood off! It’s all over.”

She rocked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“Yes, we killed them. Them for us. The candles burned their throats black.”

“Who, Grandma? Who did you kill?” Surely, she wasn’t serious. She was a storyteller, a gifted storyteller.

“Black and crispy were their throats! Run! Run! You have to get away from the candles or they’ll set fire to your castle and the drawbridge will be ash and you will be incinerated!”

Good Lord.

“Good-bye. Good-bye, you are gone.” She picked up her teacup, turned it over, and placed both hands over it. “No breath in them. Dead.”

After Annie and I watched our granddad put Grandma to bed, not interfering in their love at all, I took a walk to the gazebo, carrying my violin, the moon shining down intermittently through the clouds. My dad would say it was a shy moon tonight. I caught glimpses of stars here and there, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, all familiar friends that my dad had introduced to me at our house by the sea.

I lay on the built-in benches in the gazebo, listening. I didn’t hear any violin soloists that night, or an orchestra, only crickets, an owl, some rustling in the bushes, a dog barking over the hill, a cat fight, and cooing.

I opened my violin case, then drew a finger down the strings and onto the butterfly stain inside, thinking about what Grandma had said.

The violin was my momma’s, which she said belonged to her momma. It was she who taught me how to play the violin at our house by the sea, sometimes inside, sometimes outside on our porch, the churning waves as background music. I learned on a quarter size, then half, then three quarter, as I grew.

When my momma ceremoniously gave me her violin, and bought herself a new one, she said, in French, in a vague, nostalgic way, “Ismael and I used to play together, now you and I can play together, Pink Girl.” Then she closed her mouth tight, and I knew she instantly regretted saying what she had, like my grandma years later.

I asked, “Who is Ismael?” and Momma shook her head. “Who is Ismael?” I asked again, and she put her hand on my shoulder, her eyes filling with tears, and whispered, “Not now, Madeline. I will tell you later, but not now.”

“Why not now?”

“Because now is not the time. The story is not to be told yet.”

“Stories shouldn’t be told?”

“Some stories are not to be told for years, until the listener is ready and the storyteller can tell it properly.”

“What does ‘tell it properly’ mean?”

“It means . . .” She stared over my head at the waves crashing against the sand. “It means a story should be told when you can tell it honestly with truth everywhere, in every nook and corner of the story. I will tell you the story later, when you are not so young; then you can tell it to your children when they are ready, so no one in our family ever forgets.”

“Forgets what, Momma?” I whispered, scared, watchful, knowing as only kids can know there was black stickiness behind her words.

“So that no one forgets who we are, who we were.”

“But, what do you mean,
who we were?
”

She kissed the top of my head. “That is enough for now, darling. Let’s begin.”

And we began, like that, playing together by the sea, the clouds rolling through, mysterious and gray, over the waves, the waves sputtering and cresting, the notes of our violins spinning between them. Our favorite piece was Bach’s Double Violin Concerto.

I have often brushed my fingers over the butterfly stain of blood inside the violin. Where did it come from? How? When?

This is one thing I know: A violin should have no blood on it. None.

“T
he reason women want their hair to look perfect is because that’s one thing they can have control over in their lives,” Momma told me as she painted my nails in one of the pink swivel chairs in Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor, the sun glittering off the chandeliers.

“Now when Graciella came in here the other day complaining, I couldn’t help her control her mother-in-law, who threw out all her sexy negligees and put in place granny-styled pajamas and prayed at a church dinner in front of two hundred people that God would ‘turn her daughter-in-law away from being a sex maniac into a God-fearing servant to her husband,’ but I can trim four inches off her length to give her hair fullness.”

I nodded at Momma. She was wearing a slim pink skirt, black heels, and a black, short-sleeved sweater. I was wearing a pink skirt, black shoes, and a black, short-sleeved sweater, too. Annie was, too. We were the O’Shea Pink Girls!

“And I can’t help Jessie Liz control her child, Shoney, who is dead set on painting pictures of naked ladies on any bare wall he can find in town, but I can help her tame and control those red curls. And I can’t help LaShonda control her addiction to buying bras. She doesn’t know why she needs so many bras, sixty-one at last count, and I don’t either, but I can take some bulk out of that black frizzy hair.”

“She looked a lot better when she left.”

“She sure did. She felt like a lady.”

“You used your magic, Momma.”

My momma laughed. “Love is magic. Don’t you forget it.” She kissed my nose.

One of the best examples of my momma’s magic was Maggie Gee’s grandmother.

Maggie Gee’s grandmother lived with poor Maggie Gee. The grandmother was a fiery, explosive, tiny woman who wore only black, including a long, black lace mantilla. She was from Germany and sometimes spat at people. People said she was still in mourning for her husband, but he’d been dead twenty years, and it was rumored she’d run him over with a tractor, so I didn’t know what to make of that.

Grandmother Schiller refused to get her hair done. “I like this way! No touch, no touch!” It was gray, stringy, and wound up on the top of her head like a cylinder. Grandmother Schiller insisted on decorating her hair with plastic flowers and tiny green plastic gnomes.

She refused to shower more than once a week. “I get sick from water! Sick! Blech!” She threw plates when she was upset, so Maggie had to buy only plastic plates.

“Help me, Marie Elise,” she begged my momma. “If I have to look for one more day at that
thing
she has on top of her head, my spleen will pop open. It reminds me of a twirled-up squirrel.” She clasped her face with both hands. “Do you think the woman will live forever? I can’t bear it.”

So Maggie literally dragged Grandmother Schiller into the beauty parlor one day when Annie and I were doing our homework.

“Help me, Marie Elise,” she called out, panting, straining, Grandmother Schiller’s black heels stuck in the ground. “I’ve got Grandmother! I’ve got her! Help!”

My momma, in her pink heels, swayed on over, her black hair waving down her back, smile welcoming, makeup perfect. Her cheeks looked extra rosy, but I had been told that my dad had picked her up for lunch, so I figured that put the blush in her cheeks. “Love puts blush in your cheeks,” she’d told Annie and me many times. “Plus, your dad and I had a nap. That always makes us feel better.”

We nodded our heads, taking in that serious note of wisdom: Naps and love equal blush in your cheeks.

“Hello, Mrs. Schiller!” Momma called out to the black-clad, wrinkled, disagreeable woman with a pile of twirled-up squirrel on her head.

“Ack! Ack!” Grandmother Schiller threw her purse on the floor as Maggie heaved her in the door, her own hair a frazzled wreck. “Bad granddaughter!” she said, pointing, as if we couldn’t find Maggie on our own. “Bad granddaughter. She here stab me with scissor. Stab me!” She mimicked stabbing herself in the face with scissors.

Maggie held tight to her grandmother, a pathetic, begging expression on her face.

“Mrs. Schiller, no one is here to stab you with the scissors,” Momma said. “We’re here to help you with a new hairdo.”

Grandmother Schiller said, “Bah! I no want hairdo! I got hairdo! Here, my hairdo!” She pointed to her twirled squirrel. “She take my flowers!” She pointed to Maggie Gee again, with grand accusation. “Where my gnome?”

Grandmother Schiller picked up her purse and smacked Maggie. On the second swing, Maggie ducked.

My momma did not like violence. “Mrs. Schiller!” she said, her voice firm, authoritative. “You will stop that this instant.”

Grandmother Schiller froze. “She stole gnome!”

“You will not hit!” Momma pulled herself up to her full height. “Stand up and act like a lady.”

Grandmother Schiller’s eyes widened. “I a lady.”

“You’re not acting like one. When you are in Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor you will act like a lady.”

Grandmother Schiller grumbled. She mumbled. She let go of her very bad granddaughter. “I not get cut hair. You no stab my hair with scissors! Snip, snip, no snip snip.”

“Yes, I am going to snip your hair,” Momma said.

“I say no!”

“I say yes, Mrs. Schiller. You look awful.”

Mrs. Schiller’s mouth fell open.

“Your hair is a mess. It’s not sexy. You need a modern look.”

“I not sexy?” Grandmother Schiller raised her eyebrows toward the squirrel. “Hair like this, many years growing.”

“Exactly. And those years are over. This”—my momma lifted the mantilla and ran a hand through Grandmother Schiller’s hair—“is a disgrace. Come.” She pointed to her pink chair. “I’ll fix it.”

Grandmother Schiller muttered something, low and guttural, and Momma answered in German.

Grandmother Schiller turned in surprise, said a few more sentences. Momma answered, clipped, with her I-Know-What-Is-Best tone.

Then, to the cataclysmic relief of her exhausted, bad granddaughter, Grandmother Schiller nodded and plopped her tiny self and the twirled squirrel into the pink chair.

“Mrs. Schiller.” Momma took off the black lace mantilla. “We’re going to help you get control of this mess on your head. If you get control of your hair, you’ll get control of your life.”

“Ya. Control.” She pointed her index finger up. “I got control bad granddaughter. She stole my gnome. Where the gnome! He good luck.”

My momma unwound that twirled squirrel hair until it hung about five feet long, almost as tall as Mrs. Schiller, then she took her scissors and cut about four and a half feet off with a couple of snip-snips.

Grandmother Schiller yelled, “Ack!”

Maggie Gee spent the whole time in the resting room on a pink fainting couch. She had two coffees with tons of cream, lemon water, almost all the mints, and half a bottle of wine that Estelle Mosher brought in with her to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday.

Maggie Gee couldn’t even speak when she saw her grandmother about an hour and a half later.

Mrs. Schiller spun around in front of her granddaughter, her hair dyed a lovely white color, shaped into a thick bell, cupping her face. My momma had told her, in German, “No more plastic flowers because they’re tacky. No more gnomes because people will think you’re insane. No more being rude to Maggie. She loves you and you don’t want to lose her love forever, do you?”

Grandmother gasped. “Ack! No, no! I no lose her love. That bad.”

“Splendid. I will see you in six weeks for a trim.”

“Ya. I see you in six weeks, Marie Elise. Ya. Thank you.” She spoke in German, then turned to her granddaughter. “You good granddaughter. Ya. I think that.” Then she took Maggie Gee’s face, turned it this way and that, and kissed her. “Now I so pretty. Just like you.”

My dad died in inky darkness.

The storm stampeded across the ocean like it was being chased by Mother Nature on a rampage. It gathered speed, it gathered might, it gathered the lives of eight men on two different fishing boats, and threw them into the swirling wind and the pounding waves, as if they were nothing. As if they were not loved and adored, hugged at night and kissed in the morning.

My dad would have fought against the boiling water, the waves as tall as buildings, and the wind that whipped up the ocean into a frothing, furious, deadly caldron. He would have struggled, he would have battled, he would have tried to save the other men.

And, in the end, when the water yanked him down beneath the freezing waves and held him there, he would have thought of us.

He would have thought of my momma, of Annie and me, his Pink Girls.

Would he have seen us on the porch of our house by the sea or on the cliffs waiting for him? Would he have seen my momma, swaying in pink, smiling, her arms wrapped around his neck? Would he have seen us in our grizzly bear outfits, our tutus, our homemade stick hats? Would he have thought of us all dancing around the house to rock music, to Bach, to jazz, to country-western, he and Annie on the piano, my momma and I with our violins?

When the golden light from heaven grew brighter and brighter and he fought, harder and harder, against the walls of waves, would he, at one point, give in? No, he never would have, not for a minute, not until that golden light surrounded him and gently lifted his collapsed, drowned soul up through the stormy, raging clouds, the sky splitting thunder and cracking lightning, to a calmer place, a place of peace.

The night of that soul-sucking storm we had no peace. My momma did not leave the cliff that overlooked the sea by our home. She stood straight and tall, wearing a pink shawl, the shawl billowing out behind her in the wind until it was too soaked to move, waiting for a light from her husband’s fishing boat.

My momma waited all night and into the morning light. She knew.

Annie and I waited on our covered porch, sometimes venturing out through blustering winds and sideways rain to see her, to beg her to come in, to hold her hand, to plead with her, and she refused. “Go back inside, darlings,” she’d tell us, her voice raised over the thunder. She walked with us, back inside, then returned to waiting on the cliff, where she prayed and begged, that pink shawl like sodden loneliness.

When Sheriff Ellery drove up the drive at dawn, got heavily out of his car, wiped the tears from his face, and lumbered toward my momma with her pink shawl, she didn’t say a word to him. She didn’t look at him.

He caught her when she collapsed and carried her back into the house.

My momma was never truly happy again after losing my dad.

That storm took my dad’s life, then it took our joy, laughter, and love and swept it out over the ocean, way, way out deep, and drowned it as surely as if we’d been caught up in the same speeding whirlpool and spun down to the floor of the ocean with him.

His memorial service was packed. Against each pew a fishing pole leaned. His coffin was covered in a wreath over a fishing net. Grown, hardened men cried when they spoke of my dad, Big Luke, their best friend. He had listened, he had pulled them out of trouble, encouraged them, bought them a beer, whacked them on the side of the head when they weren’t being “family men.” They would miss him forever.

On his headstone, underneath his name, Luke O’Shea, my momma had these words carved, as she knew he loved them:

Scatter me not to the restless winds
Nor toss my ashes to the sea.
Remember now those years gone by
When loving gifts I gave to thee.
Remember now the happy times
The family ties are shared.
Don’t leave my resting place unmarked
As though you never cared.
Deny me not one final gift
For all who came to see.
A simple lasting proof that says
I loved and you loved me.

D.H. CRAMER

It wasn’t long after that, maybe a few months, when she started to have the headaches. We knew they were from missing Dad.

We knew that.

Why? Annie and I had headaches sometimes, too, from not sleeping, from crying that we couldn’t stop, crying that went on and on. It was immediately after my dad died that I started having trouble breathing right, as if the air was stopped up here and there in my body, ragged and chopped, and it was a struggle to get air everywhere at the right time.

Sometimes Momma couldn’t stop crying, either, even when she was making our lunches, or painting our nails, or making paper art with us. When we played our violins, her tears got on the strings. She had to go to bed for long hours while her friends and our neighbors and our grandparents took care of us.

She would get up and cry more, buckets and buckets of tears.

So we knew the headaches were from the crying.

We were wrong about that.

Wrong that the headaches were from crying.

BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life

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