The Uses of Enchantment (15 page)

She inhaled. Smiled.

They sat in silence.

There, she said, finally, pointing to a small window on the third floor of the man’s former home. That’s where it happened.

The man looked at the window, a bland and unsuggestive porthole into a past life that wasn’t his.

Your wife was at work. You’d taken me rowing in the Commons. We were cold. You made us tea. Or maybe it was hot chocolate.

He watched as her eyes glazed over, her mind spinning and spinning, hooking images in far-off corners, pulling them forward and making them into words, sentences, a story for his benefit. He thought to himself, a not particularly original thought: What is the difference between one’s memory and one’s imagination in the end? What, really, is the difference?

Did you tell anyone, the man said.

The girl shook her head. No, she said. No, who would believe me?

Was it so unbelievable? the man said. Sadly it has happened before. Probably on this very street. Maybe in that very house. This is New England, after all.

The girl looked at him quizzically.

A joke, he explained.

There’s nothing funny about implied child abuse, the girl said. I’m not implying. You’re implying.

I’m not implying, she said. I’m accusing.

I thought you said you’d never blamed me, the man said. I didn’t, she said. I don’t.

You could if you wanted to, the man said. I can handle it. How could I blame you? the girl said. After all, I enjoyed it.

West Salem

NOVEMBER 9, 1999

M
ary pedaled the two miles back to Rumney Marsh in the rain. She’d stripped her damp sweater and jeans and was boiling water for grief tea when Regina and Gaby returned from the art appraiser’s. The two of them blew into the kitchen along with some errant dead leaves and a jointly generated bad mood. Regina unwound her scarf and plucked leaves off her ballet flats, flinging them onto the linoleum floor where they stuck with a wet slapping sound. Gaby lugged the portrait of Abigail Lake by the piece of electrical tape that secured the pink bedsheet in which the painting was unlovingly wrapped. She banged the bottom corner against the door frame, she grimaced and groaned, kick-carrying Abigail Lake to the far side of the kitchen.

The bottom of the bedsheet was soaked. Clearly someone had propped Abigail Lake in a puddle while searching for meter money or the car keys.

“How was it?” Mary asked, biting back an impulse to criticize the handling of Abigail Lake. After all, she hated the painting too.

“Waste,” Gaby said. She pulled the sickle-shaped remnant of a soft pretzel from her coat pocket. She tapped it with a fingernail, determining it inedible. She tossed it onto the counter.

Regina wiped her wet face crossly with a dish towel.

“It was not a
waste
,” Regina said. “Mr. Bolt said the painting was ‘an interesting novelty item.’ ”

“An interesting novelty item worth $100,” Gaby said. “Not quite enough to cover his appraising fee and the ticket we got on Newbury Street because Regina parked in a handicap spot. What’s for lunch?”

“We were grieving,” Regina said. “We were handicapped by grief.”

Gaby opened a cupboard door and faced off against the unopened jars of pickled onions, pickled fiddleheads, dilly beans, cornichons, olives.

“Gross,” she said.

“
But he who is weak eats only vegetables
,” quoted Mary.

“If she’d chosen to be embalmed, we could have saved some money,” Regina said. “She’d been self-embalming for decades.”

“I’m surprised we’re not all anorexic,” Mary said.

“We’re not
not
all anorexic,” Gaby said, shutting the cabinet in disgust, then reconsidering, opening it, withdrawing a jar of pickled onions.

“I have poor circulation,” Regina said. “I also have a high metabolism.”

“You don’t eat anything,” Gaby said. “How would you know what kind of metabolism you have?”

She opened the jar of pickled onions. The lid came loose with a wetly suctioning
pop!
sound. The kitchen filled with the needly stink of vinegar.

“So,” Regina said to Mary, “any chance you came across my white ski hat with the blue-and-red pompon?”

“From high school?” Mary said.

“That one.”

“I didn’t,” Mary said.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Regina urged. “Mum stole it. She asked if she could borrow it. I said no. The next day it disappeared.”

“When was this?” Mary said.

Regina pushed on her cheekbone with her finger.

“Late eighties,” she said.

“She was punishing you,” Gaby said through a mouthful of onion.

“When we were at the beach last summer she touched my hair and said, ‘I bet your head’s cold, darling. Your head’s been cold all these years.’ ”

“She meant that she finds you emotionally and creatively frigid,” Gaby said.

“She meant me to have my hat back,” Regina said.

“Speaking of lost things,” Mary said, casually, “do either of you know where Mum put my signed copy of
Miriam
?”

Gaby stared at her blankly.

“Don’t blame Mum if your silly book is missing,” Regina said.

“I’m not blaming her,” Mary said.

“You’re accusing her.”

“
You
just accused her of stealing your hat,” Mary said.

“I don’t know why you’d want that book anyway,” Regina said. “Mum
despised
that book. Hyper radiance,” she said. “What is ‘hyper radiance’ anyway?”

“It’s a theory about—”

“I
know
what it is,” Regina said. “I’m not stupid, I’m saying the theory is.”

“These feel like little embalmed eyeballs,” Gaby said, gazing at the onion she held between her thumb and forefinger.

“I just wish—” Mary began.

“
What
,” snapped Regina.

“I just wish we could be a little warmer with one another,” Mary said. “Don’t you think that would make this easier?”

“Sorry to be such a disappointment to you,” Regina said.

“I’m only suggesting that—”

“I wasn’t the one who made a fool of herself in front of everybody at the wake yesterday. ‘Strike!’ You can’t even be unironic about your own mother’s death. How sad, Mary. No, really. I find it sad.”

“It was your own mother’s death too,” Mary said quietly.

“And so what—you’re accusing me of not grieving properly?” Regina said.

Gaby chucked another onion in her mouth.

“That’s hilarious. That really is. I wrote a poem specifically for her funeral and you’re accusing me of…forget it.”

“Leave Mary alone,” Gaby said.

Regina ballooned full of indignation.

“You,” Regina warned, “you should stay out of this.”

Gaby chewed, swallowed, winced, coughed.

“Mum hated your poems,” Gaby said. “Your poems suck. Save your poems for someone who gives a shit.”

“Hey,” Mary said.

“
Don’t
stick up for me,” Regina snapped. She turned to Gaby. “You’re right. Mum doesn’t give a shit about my poems. She
gave
a shit. She’s
dead
.”

Gaby’s mouth twinged. She chewed furiously on another pickled onion. Her eyes watered. Regina and Mary diverted their attentions to distant quadrants of the kitchen. Gaby never cried, and when she did they knew it was wise to pretend she wasn’t.

The telephone rang, its repeated peals echoing through the cardboard boxes and the bare walls and the ever emptier house.

Mary reached for the kitchen wall extension.

“Don’t,” Regina cautioned. “It’s Aunt Helen.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” she said.

The phone continued to ring until the kitchen felt like the inside of a bell, maddening and claustrophobic.

Finally, it stopped.

“I’m sorry,” Regina said.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Mary said.

“You’re right. We should try to be nicer to one another.”

“Wonderful,” Mary said. “I’d like that. Really.”

Gaby nodded.

Regina nodded.

The three of them stared at the linoleum.

“Did you clean out Mum’s study?” Regina finally asked.

“I did,” Mary said,

“Find any checks?”

“Checks for what?”

“Dad said he thought Mum had been squirreling away her insurance reimbursement checks.”

“I didn’t find any checks,” Mary said. Then: “Do you remember Roz Biedelman?”

“Dr. Roz,” Gaby said. “The school shrink. We got high once. In her office.”

“You were involved with Dr. Biedelman?” Mary asked.

“I always suspected she was a lesbian,” Regina said.

“She thought it made her seem cool to get high with me,” Gaby said. “It kind of did.”

“Dr. Biedelman never mentioned that you were her patient,” Mary said.

“Lesbian-lesbian confidentiality,” Regina said.

“It was medical marijuana,” Gaby said.

“Right,” Mary said, wondering if perhaps her mother had also been Roz’s patient. Unlikely, given her mother’s position on therapists, but who knew what other whims possessed her toward the end? The nonreligious seek out the priests. The fascistically mentally sound seek out the shrinks. It would be unlikely, yes. But inconceivable?

Yes. No. The fact that she couldn’t soundly gauge the level of inconceivability only underscored how formal and unrevealing her relationship with her mother had been for the past fourteen years.

“Did Mum have anything more to do with Dr. Biedelman that you know?” Mary asked. “I mean, after we were out of high school?”

If so, Regina hadn’t heard of it; neither had Gaby.

“Why do you ask?” Regina said.

Mary considered telling them about the letter, the cigarette case, the antique store receipt—Regina, after all, could be helpful sometimes. Regina could be sympathetic and even wise, and besides she might know something. The chances of this occurring were probably less than one in one thousand, but it was that slim possibility that continually fooled Mary into trying.

“Actually—” Mary began.

“You look tired,” Regina interrupted. “Doesn’t she look tired, Gaby?”

Gaby shrugged.

“I am a little tired,” Mary admitted. Regina rarely observed that a person outside herself might be suffering. She appreciated that Regina was trying to be nicer.

“I mean you
did
clean out her desk this morning, while Gaby and I were wasting time in Boston. Isn’t that what you did?”

“That’s what I did,” Mary confirmed. “She sure has some stuff.”

“Huh,” Regina said. “No doubt she does. You must be exhausted.”

“Mentally, yes.”

“But also physically.”

“Not so much—”

“Have you been exercising?” Regina interrupted.

“Me?”

“I mean today.”

“
Exercising?
No.”

“Just wondering,” Regina said. “Because did you notice that somebody recently rode my bike?”

She scrutinized Mary with a familiar look of victory.

“I hadn’t noticed,” Mary said, retreating up the back stairs with her tea.

R
oz’s Boston address was easy enough to find. A mode of transportation less so. Regina claimed that she could not be stranded without a car, it was absolutely not a possibility even though she had no plans and nowhere to go, even though Dad had promised to be home by five so they could have dinner together, probably terrible pizza ordered from the pizza place in the West Salem minimall, another historic anachronism that Mum had fought against and lost.

Gaby agreed to drive Mary to the train. She didn’t ask Mary why she was going to Boston, not because she respected Mary’s privacy but because she truly did not care enough about Mary’s plans to ask her. The train, the 3:56, was empty save for three aggressively exuberant Semmering Academy students and a despondent domestic day worker. Clearly the Semmering girls saw their friendship as a sport where points are scored by making the spectators feel excluded and shitty. They laughed riotously and often, shedding their boots in the train aisle and giving one another foot massages, feeding one another orange sections, hitting one another with rolled-up magazines. After one artificially loud outburst, Mary and the domestic day worker exchanged a look of exasperation, but when Mary returned to the newspaper she was fake-reading she felt less exasperated than joyless and old.

The train arrived into North Station at just before rush hour. She hopped the T, emerging at ten minutes to five. Roz’s office was still housed in a converted brownstone on a side street northwest of the commons, in the middle of a two-block concentration of mental health professionals whose tasteful black shingles covertly hung inside the first set of doors, below the buzzers and above the umbrella stands. The first time she’d met Roz at her new office she’d forgotten the business card Roz had given her and had wandered from building to building, each foyer identical to the next as though regulated by a mental health architectural board seeking to enforce a soothing, anonymous experience for its sheepish clientele. Implicit in the discreet placement of these shingles, of course, was the shame still associated in Boston with seeing a therapist. No one saw which bell you rang, no one, save those people already seeing a mental health professional, knew of the extremely high odds that anyone entering a brownstone on these two blocks was also en route to see a mental health professional. That explained the skulking quality to the pedestrians on this block, hats low and chins tucked, eyes tight to the bricks. They looked cold and put-upon, these people, as if walking headlong into an icy wind.

She checked her watch—5 p.m. to the minute. She assumed that the bulk of Roz’s patients scheduled appointments at the end of the workday, since Roz’s career focus remained educated women, an ever more-afflicted segment of the population according to an interview she’d read with Roz in
The Oregonian
last year. Roz toured the West Coast to promote her follow-up to
Trampled Ivy
, a book having to do with a seasonal depressive disorder that occurred among educated women during the holidays. It was called
The Tarnished Trivet
or
The Trivet Trigger
, at any rate something to do with trivets because according to the interview she’d read, Roz’s own mother was institutionalized after the Thanksgiving dinner preparations one year when Roz was a teenager, the domestic detail that tweaked her mother for good being the last-minute need to polish an old trivet for a chafing dish of yams. Roz gave a reading at the northwest headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Mary had been tempted to sit in the crowd or maybe even buy a book and wait in the signing line to see if Roz recognized her. But in the end, she hadn’t gone to the reading. That was something the younger Mary would have done, and she was no longer the younger Mary.