The Kitchen Daughter (20 page)

After Kitcherati I pull up one of my favorite advice columns and read the day’s quandary. The writer complains about something hurtful her mother-in-law said, something she let pass at the time but has never forgiven or forgotten. The columnist counsels her to either address it head-on or let it go, because the pent-up resentment is harmful.
Channel negative energy into something positive
, says the advice.

I decide to give it a try.

I’m on the Internet anyway, so I look up Asperger’s, for Amanda. Maybe I can tell if Shannon has it. That’s how Amanda said she starting thinking about it, wondering what syndrome might make a girl unusually quiet in preschool, enough that her teachers would remark on it.

Lots of sites come up. Blogs, discussion groups, the whole smorgasbord.
I go for something that looks clinical and not homemade. That way it’s likely to be more precise. I’ve learned this over time. You can learn from the Internet but you can’t be sure what you’re learning is true. Same as life. Be careful.

I pick a white-and-blue site with a consistent font, not too large, not too small. The definition comes in bullets.
Difficulty with eye contact. Inability to read emotions. Lack of empathy. Inappropriate social reactions.
Doesn’t sound like Shannon so far. I read on.

Tendency to obsess on particular topics that may not be of interest to others.
This symptom has the opposite problem. In short, it reminds me of everyone I’ve ever met. Everyone has something they like to talk about. I remember a boy in kindergarten who only ever talked about caterpillars, and a girl in the fourth grade who was the same way about butterflies. The girls who sat behind me in college classes only ever seemed to be talking about beer and sex. Even Dad talked nonstop about surgery. And Amanda—unicorns. When we were kids Amanda obsessed about unicorns for more than a full year. She bought unicorn stickers and unicorn shoes and begged Ma to sew unicorn appliqués inside every item of her clothing. Does that mean Amanda has Asperger’s? I know she doesn’t. She wouldn’t have made a big deal out of telling me she thinks I have it, then. But do I? I don’t want it, so I push that idea away, and keep reading.

As part of the autism spectrum, can be more or less severe. May also include facial tics, repetitive behaviors, aggression, poor gross motor coordination. Key distinguishing characteristic from autism is lack of speech delay. Like autism, more common in males.

More common doesn’t mean only. And the more I think about this list, the more I think it fits Shannon more than it fits me. And Amanda did say she didn’t know for sure if Shannon had it.

I copy the list of symptoms into an e-mail and send it to Amanda’s address, with just a one-word comment,
Shannon?

Maybe she has the syndrome, maybe she doesn’t. Of course she is normal. We are all normal. I wonder if Shannon would like her own version of the Normal Book. Maybe when she’s older.

I can’t think about it anymore. I need to think about something else. I look over at the closet and remember what’s hiding under the carpet there.

I turn up the corner of the carpet in the closet and pull out the pictures of Evangeline. I put the one I showed Amanda back with the others. I haven’t really looked at the whole series since I saw Evangeline’s ghost. I was too shocked, but as time passes, I think I can control my feelings now. I think I can look at them in the right way. Analytically, instead of fearfully.

The woman in the photographs looks nothing like the ghost I saw. Maybe it wasn’t even the same Evangeline. I consider the differences. The ghost’s bald head and huge sunken eyes. The wrinkled skin of her neck. Those gaunt toothpick arms. The woman in the picture is round and soft and young. But when I look at her face—it isn’t pleasant but I can do it—I begin to see the similarities. The eye shape, the ear shape. A faint discoloration on her left temple. There’s more here than I’ve already seen, I know it. I just need to figure out what it is.

Could Dad have loved this woman? Run his fingertips along that neck and kissed those lips? Why would he, how could he, when he had Ma?

I line up all twenty-nine pictures in a long row on the floor of my room. The gray sky stretches above her head and the white collar marks the spot under her chin. It is all the same, the same, the same.

A nurse at the hospital
, Ma said. The white collar is part of her uniform. I can’t tell if they were taken at the hospital or not, but it was definitely outdoors. Maybe in the courtyard out back.

I remember thinking maybe she was looking at something, something she was holding in her hand. She is looking down and to the right.

Not always.

Her eyes are looking down in some pictures, but in others, she is looking directly into the camera.

I change the order of the pictures. Getting up and moving from one end of the line to the other gets tiring, so I kneel in the middle of the room and spread the pictures out in a circle around me. I start with all the ones where she’s looking down, then all the ones where she’s looking up. There’s some kind of pattern there but it’s not quite right. I try a different approach.

I stack all the pictures and straighten their edges to make them match, straight up and down. I hold them at the bottom with a one-handed grip and put my thumb at the top, then flip through. Evangeline’s eyes flick back and forth. I scatter the photos around me again and put them back in a different order, checking the tiny variations between each to make sure each one follows from the next, then stack them neatly again, then flip through again, fast.

The effect is this: her eyes slowly look toward me, then slowly look away.

It’s uncomfortable at first. I hate it when real people look toward me, and because of the motion, it’s like she’s looking at me that way. But I remind myself. This is not a person. This is a series of photos. I flip through it again. She looks toward me and away again.

Did he keep these as a reminder of her? Does this mean they had a relationship? That Evangeline, as terrifying as her ghost was to me, was once a tender young woman my father loved?

“Are you feeling more reasonable now?” comes Amanda’s voice from the doorway. My back is to the door. I’ve been so absorbed in the photos, I didn’t even hear her. I hunch over to protect them. I don’t think she can see.

I make myself be calm. I couldn’t do it earlier.

As I turn around and look up at her, I make sure my eyes connect with hers, and I say, “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

Her eyes are on mine. With a flick of the wrist I toss the stack of photos under the bed. I finish turning, standing up, to face her.

She says, “I’m sorry if I came on too strong, but I’m really frustrated. It could really help you, to deal with this. Knowing what you are.”

“I know who I am.”

“Let’s not fight,” she says, and holds her hands out for me to take. I can’t tell if it’s a genuine gesture or a test. I offer her my hands and she gives them a quick squeeze, a friendly action.

“Okay.”

Amanda drops my hands and says, “Sorry I didn’t call. Brennan got back early, so everything was a madhouse. I drove the girls home, and now they’re with him. I thought you and I could get a little more done in the peace and quiet.”

“Sure.”

“The library is next on the list.”

We pack another wall of books in the library. As I put them away, I shake each, just to see if there’s anything in it. If she notices what I’m doing, she doesn’t say. But there’s nothing. No letter, no recipe, no hint about the past. The most interesting thing I find is another book of Dad’s with a strange title,
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
. I show it to Amanda.

“Haven’t read that one,” she says. “I haven’t had much time to read lately.”

“You love to read.”

“I used to. These days, I can’t find the time.”

“You can always find the time,” I tell her.

“No, Ginny,” she says, shaking her head. “You can. I can’t. Actually, that—You know what, let me show you something.”

We walk down the hall to her old room, the one painted buttery yellow, and she walks to the stack of labeled boxes along the wall. She opens the
AMANDA KIDHOOD
box.

“Unicorns,” she says, flipping through a notebook, pointing. “All over the place. Here I’m copying a recipe for chocolate peanut butter balls from the Mini Page. Here I’m in love with Trent Dillinger.” She picks out another notebook, “Here, this one’s high school, this is only ten years ago. Here’s backward writing that Angelica and I used to write notes to each other during study hall. This one says, lemme see, ‘JW has great big zit on nose.’” She flips a few pages forward. “Here I was writing SO BORED in the margins and practicing to see how tiny I could write ‘Mrs. Amanda Davis’ because I wanted to go to prom with Greg Davis so bad I thought I’d die. And he didn’t ask me and I didn’t die. But at the time that was the most important thing in the world to me. That feeling. Now I can’t even picture him.”

I can picture Greg Davis—she brought him to the house once that summer—but I don’t mention it. I don’t know what she’s trying to tell me, but I know what she doesn’t want to hear.

“He’s buried under years of details,” she says, talking faster, “all the things I did and had to do, paying bills, for years, figuring out how to get our security deposit back when we moved to a new apartment, the little things like making reservations on our anniversary, the big things like deciding on a hospital to give birth, the time we had to drive in a snowstorm to get to Brennan’s parents’ house by Christmas and how scared I was and how sure I was we were going to drive into a ditch and die, I mean, it’s thousands of things, it’s millions of things.”

She picks up a notebook in each hand and says, “You know what all this tells me?”

“No.”

“I’ve changed,” she says. “A lot. Getting older, getting married,
being a mom, moving from house to house, all that has changed me. I’ve grown up.”

“I know.”

“You haven’t,” she says.

I’m stunned for a moment, then I say, “That’s not true.”

She says, “It’s not your fault. I see that. Mom and Dad took care of things so you didn’t have to. You live here and it’s all so comfortable. And the question is, can you even be an adult? Because you didn’t grow up. You’ve never had to.”

“I am grown up!”

“Are you?”

“Yes!” I’m done being stunned. I’m angry.

“A person who hides in a closet is not a grown-up,” she says. “That’s not normal.”

“Just because it’s not what you would do doesn’t mean it’s not normal.”

“Grown-ups finish college,” she says.

“You didn’t,” I snap back.

“Because I got pregnant! That’s not the same thing at all!”

“Then why’d you bring it up?”

“Whatever. My plan got derailed because real things happened to me. Real things. Nothing real ever happened to you because Mom wouldn’t let it.”

I yell, “Do you think I wanted that? I hated that!”

“Bullshit,” says Amanda. I have never heard her swear.

I’m so furious I realize I’m starting to lose control, and I can’t do that, especially because Amanda will just assume that means she’s right. That I’m not a grown-up if I can’t even handle an argument. I know I can’t slap her so I slap one of the boxes, it makes a loud sound, I know I’m about to break apart.

I focus on food. I need it.

I pick the slick nuttiness of sesame oil. I don’t know any other words for what sesame oil tastes like. It tastes like toasted. It tastes like brown. A drop of any oil on the tongue will spread and slide, except sesame oil. Canola, sunflower, grapeseed, olive, they all slide. Sesame oil stays where you put it.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” she says.

I say, “Yes. No matter how much you push me, I am not going to any doctor. A lawyer, maybe.”

“What for?”

I work hard on keeping my voice soft, keeping the anger out of it. “This house is half mine,” I tell her. Logic is all I have. “Legally. And if you insist on trying to sell it, I will make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“It’s half mine too,” she says.

“Yes. Only half. Not all.”

“Yeah, exactly half. That’s how things work. We’re supposed to be equal, even if we’re not.”

“We’re equal,” I say.

“Yeah,” she sighs, tossing the notebooks back in the box. “We’re equal. You know what? I have two little girls who depend on me for everything. I had friends, really good friends, back in Los Angeles. But I wanted my girls to know their grandparents. Dad was retiring, I knew they’d both have time on their hands. So I talked Brennan into getting transferred back to the East Coast. I gave up that life to come back here and then the rug got pulled out from under me. They
died
, Ginny.”

She slams the lid onto the box.

“I know you’re sad,” I start, but she holds up her palm.

“Don’t even try,” she says. “You don’t know how. You don’t have a clue what it’s like for me. Did you get the call that they were dead? Were you the one who made all the arrangements? Headstones? Flowers? Coffins? Did you have to go and identify their
bodies
?”

She looks at me and I know she wants an answer and I look at the cardboard box and give her the only one that’s true. “No.”

“No! That wasn’t you! It was me. You, you’re standing here helpless with no one but your stupid cat in this big empty house and I am your
sister
and you can’t even look me in the face when you talk to me and you’re saying we’re equal? You’re saying we get to go halfsies? Bullshit, equal. I’m leaving. You’re on your own.”

I chase her down the stairs, but I don’t know what to say to her. I’m angry and scared and a lot of other things.

At the front door she says, “And don’t think I haven’t noticed. They’re not coming back, Ginny. They’re not going to need their shoes.”

Instead of slamming the door she leaves it hanging open, and I watch her get smaller and smaller as she goes down the street, cold air blowing in around me.