Trompe l'Oeil (17 page)

She did not take it back, and he said, “Okay then,” and “See you next week.” Said
good-bye, Katy
without
love
.

FIFTH BIRTHDAY

Sara and Delia were distinctly themselves. Nora would say this, believing it—yet still they remained not-Molly. Sara because she slipped first into the space Molly left, Delia because she so resembled Molly. As if she'd been Molly's twin. The similarity continued through Delia's toddler years, less eerily exact: the mouth slightly fuller, the face rounder, the eyes gray-blue and long-lashed and a bit more widely set. And yes, Delia's exuberance was not unlike Molly's, but absent the aggression, absent the pinching and petty theft. Delia seemed without guile. For Nora there had been occasional breathless instants—the sped-up sensation of losing and regaining balance—when, from the beach blanket, she would glance up at Delia, close by, sculpting sand with a red plastic shovel and yellow bucket, and instead see Molly. As if years had evaporated, leaving Nora again and always with the beach blanket and her youngest girl, the fleeting nearness of a morning at the beach with Molly, the fleeting glimpse of herself untouched by the impending calamity. Then Nora would stand and walk over to Delia: “What are you building, sweetie?” and Delia would gaze up, clearly now Delia, pleased by Nora's attention, and pat Nora's arm, and
announce, “This fort!” or “Our house!” And Nora would offer to lug sand or arrange a miniature stone path, until the tasks of construction and design settled her back into the present.

Delia always the more exuberant, Sara more pensive, the two a tight pair. In moments when Nora might be housekeeping or cooking, letting her whirring mind momentarily float while her body sliced apples or sorted laundry, the breeze might stir, or the quiet might accumulate into a question, and Nora would glance up, as if waking, to find Sara steadily watching her. Then Nora would summon herself, step forward into her body, find her voice: she'd offer Sara and Delia apple slices, or toss a sock to Sara and say her name, or join the girls at the table with their crayons.

Sara elicited a different kind of breathlessness in Nora. If both girls were playing on the beach, the present did not collapse into the time before Rome. With Sara there, Delia did not become Molly, but on rare days Nora's vertigo recurred. The fact of Sara and Delia playing in the sand seemed to be the most fragile of realities, one kept aloft by hypervigilance and counted breaths. Any undetected random force might intervene and sweep them away. Nora remained still, waiting for the atmospheric charge to dissipate. And again someone would speak: Nora herself, or one of the girls, and the moment would flip, the day settling into a benign fair-weather day. Here was a bucket of water to splash; here was a neighbor's dog; here the stack of shells with which to ornament a castle. A few minutes later Nora might laugh, or make the girls laugh, the world again known. Now and then they would ask about Molly—where was she now? Why not here? Nora found herself
scrambling, lamely answering “In heaven” and “I don't know.” Sara asked if Molly might come back. “No, love,” Nora said, and flatly changed the subject.

The night of Delia's fifth birthday, it was not the sensation of vertigo she felt, but something just beyond; what seemed to be the stunning relief of vertigo allayed, a surer balance. Because Delia was five. This relief had not arrived on Sara's fifth birthday—hope, yes, but not balance—only Delia's, because Delia was the youngest, and yes, because of the resemblance to Molly, the perennially four Molly. And even
balance
, Nora understood, was provisional, but that night balance nonetheless. She thought of James, and in that moment not the James who had divorced her, the James of legal squabbles and late support payments, but the James who had returned without Molly to the hotel in Rome. It was the Rome James she wanted to find. On such a day—in its way transcendent—the desire alone felt potent enough to summon
that
James, and by telephone, from the house in Blue Rock.

While Delia and Sara slept and Katy finished her homework, Nora dialed from her bedroom, and he answered.

“It's me,” she said.

“Nora. What is it?”

“Delia's birthday.”

“Well, I know,” James said. “She got the little bike, right? Katy put her on the phone with me this afternoon.”

At “bike” she knew that she had called the wrong year, the wrong man. Self-flagellation and a cigarette would soon follow.

“Yes,” Nora said. “She's five.”

“Nora?”

“She's five, James. Everybody's five. That's all.”

“Okay. Everybody's five.”

James sighed, perhaps in plain exasperation. Or—too late—spliced with comprehension? Did he think or not-think of Molly? Maybe in fact he could keep the past in place, Nora thought; or maybe steady avoidance had cratered his mind.

“The girls will see you next weekend,” Nora said. “I'm going now.”

Here again the recurring paradox; irrefutable, dramatic evidence proved James—the present-day James—was not the James she remembered or imagined, yet she could still lose track. How could she forget? It seemed a form of stupidity. And now the conversation seemed a rebuke she'd provoked. She left the room to check on the little girls, who were both asleep; downstairs at the kitchen table, Katy drew angles on graph paper. At the sink, Nora lit a cigarette and smoked as she waited for the kettle to boil, and the salt wind and the sounds of the waves swept into the room when she opened the window. On the counter, half a chocolate cake sat beneath a domed glass cover. If she could refocus on the house, the chores, the girls, perhaps the sting and self-abasement would fade.

Katy was quietly watching her now; at least today, Katy had been easygoing, sweet with Delia and Sara. She'd made a fuss over Delia, frosted the cake, read Delia's new books aloud after dinner. There had been, in fact, no brooding or thudding or outbursts over minutiae. Nora stubbed out her cigarette and brought her tea to the table and offered Katy more cake. It was Katy—as she pushed aside her angles and proofs and reached for a plate and fork, Katy who said, “Mom. Delia's five. You know?” and cut herself a slice.

COLD

Even in the flush, promising years of the marriage, when bonuses topped James's estimable salary and investments mushroomed, Nora was cautious with money. They saved—for college, for retirement—and they lived in comfort; they did not stint, but Nora budgeted, shopped for the fairest deals, conserved. After James left, she did what she could to protect joint savings, the girls' savings, her own. The joint-account balances dropped the week James left. She had not thought—and why not?—to save more in her own name. She kept the house. James agreed to alimony for the time being; child support, of course. Enough for school clothes and medical bills, the basic running of the household, enough to keep up with repairs. Nothing extravagant.

Yet by Theo's second winter away, money dwindled unpredictably. Late support checks, occasional missed ones, the alimony separate and sporadic. It was simply a matter of cash flow, James told Nora. A few more obligations. James hadn't planned for Theo's bills; Theo's grades had been uneven—high in favorite classes, low in ones he disliked—and he'd lost a scholarship. Static fizzed through the phone line. They'd saved
for Theo's college, hadn't they? “How high,” Nora asked, “were those bills?”

“I've taken care of it,” James said.

“Good,” Nora said. “How about the girls?”

“I saw the girls last weekend,” James said.

And what did that mean? They could eat mac and cheese, pea soup, dinner omelettes, but in the heart of winter she could barely pay utilities. The house leached heat; she'd made new window quilts, but sea wind permeated the walls. On school days, she dropped the heat to fifty-five, sixty-four when the girls were home.

“What would you like them to live on?” she said.

“Okay,” James said. “Enough.” And then he promised, “Tomorrow.”

That winter, Nora wrote letters she copied to her lawyer, informal notes she did not. Meg bought her a tank of heating oil. It was the beginning of the house as another kind of house, a house of cold girls. In the evenings, Nora would bake. The girls stayed in the kitchen, and dressed in extra sweaters, and drank peppermint tea, hot chocolate, hot milk. Major repairs would wait, one season and then another; house maintenance would wait. The trick was to distract the girls until spring; the trick was to hold on.

MISSIVES FROM NORA

Handwritten on dime-store paper, shoved into the nearest envelope at hand (sometimes used, x-ed out addresses like abandoned flags, gray spots thinned by erasure): in those years, her notes piled up on his glass coffee table, and by the telephone, and in his briefcase. Tangible objects trumpeting financial woes. Maybe, James thought, this was the nineteenth-century side of Nora, maybe her retro form of aggression. Admittedly she'd always used whatever was at hand: when they'd courted, she'd written him notes on scraps, half sheets taken from brown paper bags. She'd drawn comic animals and caricatured his professors. But since the divorce, she'd avoided leaving the short erasable phone messages so common during their marriage. Sometimes she'd send a letter with the girls: here was today's, delivered by Katy, on the broad-lined tablet paper the girls used to practice their alphabets. So it was Nora-as-Nora, sending him the notes, her hurried script:
Remember school clothes? I need the checks. The last is three weeks overdue, the next due by Friday. The lawyer will call. P.S. The girls weary of spaghetti
.

If only it were merely Nora-as-words, the past and therefore inessential Nora rattling around. But school clothes were
school clothes, and today at lunch, Delia surprised him with news of a bad roof. Katy shushed her as Delia described wet feet on a rainy night, a plastic bucket she circumnavigated en route to the toilet.

“Has your mother called a roofer?” he said.

Sara, silent, traced and retraced her plate rim with her index finger. Delia shrugged, meaning
I don't know
, possibly meaning
What's a roofer?

“She's working on it,” Katy said, a note of warning in her voice.

“Well, she should be,” James said.

“If you tell her that?” Katy said. “You'd better send her a check.” Katy had become sharp-tongued—when had that begun? (Was it the boyfriend?) And too, she'd developed a mature woman's body, solid-hipped, full-breasted, vexing. Sixteen. Hadn't she been shy? Nothing about her seemed shy.

“How long has the roof leaked?” he said.

Katy shrugged. “A while.”

And the image rose of a four-gallon bucket filling with water, a steady clear line from ceiling to bucket, dully pinging in the dark of the bathroom he'd retiled years ago.

“Wait,” he said. “Isn't there a light fixture in that ceiling?”

“Oh,” Katy said. “We don't use it.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, his face now hot. After he cleared the lunch plates and served the girls cookies, he wrote a three-thousand-dollar check to Nora.

“Perfect,” Katy said.

He'd just paid Theo's tuition, the girls' medical insurance; each month he contributed to their college funds. The latest
check to Nora? He had not meant to defer, but then—what? Months ago he'd been impulsive with investments—a stock gambit had failed. He'd been stunned by his misjudgment; at least it was private, not professional. And now? He needed to transfer funds; he had not stopped at the bank. Next week he'd be paid. He loved his daughters—of course he loved them. Still, one gap, then another, would open between intentions and results.

When he pictured the house (and often in those years he did not: his daughters simply appeared in restaurants or at the doors of train stations or cars, or in his own condominium), he pictured it as it had been before he moved out. If prompted, he could recall the flooded storage room, the seasonal wind damage, the annual need to regrade the drive and add gravel. But in his mind, the drive was well graded, and the house had neither a leaking bathroom ceiling nor a splintering deck. No, for James thick towels still filled the closets, along with new sheets, new boots, new coats; in the leak-free bathroom, amber glycerin soaps and pastel-handled toothbrushes lined the tile counter (these from the era the Murphys moved in year-round, after Rome, before Delia or even Sara—when Nora spent hours at the department store with Katy and Theo to distract them). What could he say of this? It was not the only slippage.