Very in Pieces (17 page)

v.

My father is in the kitchen the next morning, taking cupcakes out of plastic containers and smoothing out the frosting so they look homemade. He used to do this when Ramona and I had to bring cupcakes in for classroom parties. He'd decorate them with sprinkles for our birthdays, and we'd tell our teachers and friends that he had made them himself.

“Cool do,” he says.

I rub my hand over my hair, which is spiking out in all directions. “What are those for?” I ask as I fill a glass with water at the sink. My mouth is parched.

“Advisee lunch,” he replies.

I gulp some more water. “Can I have one?” I ask.

“For breakfast?”

“Why not?”

He grins. “Are you going to love it like it's the best cupcake you've ever had in your life?”

“I can pretend I do.”

“Okay, then.”

I take one of the ones he hasn't smoothed out yet and sink my teeth in. Like most grocery store cupcakes, the frosting is too sweet and stings my gums. It probably turned my mouth blue, too, staining my lips like a puritanical punishment. “Any cool new advisees this year?” I ask, more to distract myself than out of genuine curiosity.

“One's from Mongolia. A comparative lit major. I wonder what Mongolian literature is like. I wonder what Mongolian
music
is like. I'll have to see if I can download some.”

I know that not every professor is like my dad. Nonnie's excused from having advisees; even before she got sick she only took them on in the rarest of circumstances. Mom meets with hers one-on-one once a semester and invites them to art-department functions. Dad, though, takes a real interest. He knows where they come from, knows their strengths and weaknesses. He sends
them emails on their birthdays. He makes room for them in his overcrowded classes, even if they aren't music majors.

“You're a good adviser,” I say. “I hope when I go to college, I get one just like you. But maybe he can really make his own cupcakes.”

“Sure,” he laughs. “But, you know, giving your advisees cupcakes doesn't help with tenure review, and you can't put it on your curriculum vitae for the old job search, can you?” He takes another cupcake from the plastic container. He licks the knife before he begins spreading.

“Ew, Dad, that's gross.”

“Our little secret,” he says with a wink.

“Listen,” I begin, and then I use the oldest trick in the book. I just go for it with gusto and hope that my dad lets it slide. “I have this friend—Grace, actually. There's this guy who might be interested in her, she can't quite tell if he's flirting with her, or just like, I don't know, messing with her.”

“Messing with her how?” He sounds concerned. He really likes Grace. “Is he making her uncomfortable?”

“No,” I say quickly. “No, it's more like she's having trouble understanding his intentions. One day he's funny. Another day he's aloof. Or he's trying to prove how smart he is. Plus he has a thing for—” I cough. I'm not exactly sure how to translate Dominic's interest in poetry to Grace. “He has a thing for Asian girls, so she's not sure if he's interested in her for her, or because she's Asian. If he's interested in her at all.”

“That's tricky.” He puts the knife down on the counter,
leans back, and crosses his arms over his chest.

“It's a bit more complicated than that.”

“How so?”

“Well, they were at a party and they kissed.”

“Like lips brushing or a take-your-breath-away kind of a kiss?”

“Somewhere in between,” I lie.

This seems to satisfy him. “Here's the thing about teenage boys, Very. They are clueless. They think they know everything—an attribute that only gets worse when they get to college—but they are also painfully aware that there is one thing about which they know nothing. And that is girls. So there are a few routes they follow. Some bumble, some stumble into suaveness that surprises even them, and some try to imitate the characters they see in movies and books and try to be cool—which might be why he's aloof sometimes. Or they try to make these grand gestures that, sadly for them, often fall flat. I mean,
Say Anything
is one of my favorite movies—fantastic soundtrack—but if a boy showed up with a boom box outside of your or Ramona's window, well, I'd be calling the cops. You see?”

“Sort of.”

A grand gesture: like graffitied song lyrics.

“I'm guessing this guy falls into group number three. He wanted to do something big and unforgettable, so he just grabbed her and kissed her. No big deal if she's into him. If she's into him, then it's the most amazing thing and he's the most amazing guy. But if she's not into him—well, then it's awkward.”

Or a grand gesture like a bottle cap sculpture. No. The
bottle caps are for Nonnie. Unless they are for both of us.

“What if she's not sure?”

“Well then she'd better figure it out before this guy's heart breaks.”

He squats down and starts rooting around in a drawer for something to carry the cupcakes. “If someone invented Tupperware that absolutely would not lose its top, they would be a millionaire.” He sticks his arm into the drawer as far as it will go. “I mean, honestly, it wouldn't be that hard. Magnets maybe. Or maybe flip tops so they'd always be connected.”

“You're onto something there,” I said. “Forget music, become an inventor.”

“If only. But the heart wants what it wants, and my heart wants to study music. Oh hey, that reminds me, do you think kids would read a book called
A Hip-Hop History of the United States
? I'm thinking of writing a book aimed at high school students that shows how hip-hop reflects politics and society in US culture. It would be great for high schools, right? I mean, teachers are always talking about how they need to have new ways to connect kids to the material. Do you think your teachers would use something like that?”

The social studies faculty at my school has an average age of approximately sixty-seven. So the thought of any of them using hip-hop in the classroom seems far-fetched. Dad senses my hesitation and looks down at his cupcakes.

“Maybe,” I say. “I think it's a great idea. I would totally read that book.”

But I'm thinking about what he said, setting it up like a mathematical equation in my head:

If she likes him, then all is fine. If she doesn't like him, then there is a problem.
If, then . . . if, then. But she is me and I don't know how I feel about the ifs.

Let V = she and D = he.

If V likes D, then +

If V likes D, then −

There are other conditions to consider as well. How will the outcome be affected if he thought I knew about his grand gestures? And what if he really is making the bottle cap sculpture?

Another complication: What if I'm coming at this backward? What if it was Nonnie who first drew him to me? He said it was me staring at the picture, but what if his interest in poetry made him want access to Nonnie, and the best way to do that is through me?

I don't want it to be for Nonnie.

Of course there was another piece—a bigger, larger piece—if V likes D, what does that do to C?

Thinking about it like a mathematician does make sense in one way: my problems are not a system of equations. I do not need to solve for C to determine D, or vice versa. In fact, it seems wiser to keep them separate. The problem, I know, is that there are two equations at all.

Dad nods and begins arranging the cupcakes in the Tupperware he found. “Okay. Done and done.”

“Thanks for sharing with me,” I tell him.

“Sure thing, jelly bean.” He closes the cupcake carrier and starts out of the kitchen with it. Then he stops. “Tell Grace she'll be okay. And he will, too. But as for you, I'm thinking a women's college might be the best choice. I hear Wellesley is good.”

“I hear they bus in boys from MIT,” I say, using my finger to swipe some frosting off the cupcake. “Have fun at your lunch.”

He grins over his shoulder. “Oh, don't you worry about me.”

The door shuts behind him. As it swings back and forth, I get a freeze-frame view of him, cupcake box under his arm, keys in the other hand.

In math, it takes at least three terms to determine a pattern. You have one and four and nine, and you think,
Squares!
That's math, though, and this is life. Kissing Dominic once is enough to prove me unfaithful. I have to break up with Christian.

Dominic isn't the reason: he is the catalyst, the thing that finally allows a necessary change to happen. Like you could have two elements just sitting there totally stable, and then the catalyst came in and bam! Explosion! I am pretty sure, too, that the catalyst usually gets completely destroyed in the reaction, which maybe was the best thing that could happen. Kissing Dominic made me realize things were over with Christian, but I need to forget all about that kiss. It's best to be on my own.

Now I just have to set the chemical reaction in motion.

i.

THE COUGHING IS LOUDER
than usual. More insistent. I can picture her inside the room. Hunched over. Then a moan. A gasp.

I hesitate.

This is it. This is it, this is it, this is it.

ii.

Up the stairs two at a time. I throw open the door without knocking. She will yell. She will yell and make some remark about how just because she's old and dying doesn't mean she's given up her right to privacy. All this goes through my mind as the door swings open on slick, silver hinges. Hope, that thing with feathers—
I understand it now
—still clings to the branch.

But no. She is not churlish. There is no reprimand.

She is slumped in her armchair, bent at an odd angle, her face white, glassy eyes circled in black. Sweat on her upper lip. A drop of red-brown (blood? mucus?) on the collar of her white, white shirt. Like one of Marcus Schmidt's paintings in miniature.

“Very,” she whispers. “Very, it isn't good.”

“Mom!” I yell. “Dad!”

I don't bother to yell for Ramona.

iii.

Ambulance chaser. That's me. Careening through traffic in Nonnie's blue Rapier right behind the blue and red flashes of the ambulance. The sun is orange-red as it lifts itself into the sky. The ambulance pulls around the back of the hospital while I find a parking spot. I choose one right by a streetlight, still lit. It makes the whole car glow white. I freeze. How can I get out of this car and face the possibilities?

iv.

“There's so much I haven't told you, Very. So much you need to know. About life. About my life.”

I'm lying in the second bed in the hospital room, on my side,
facing her. “So tell me.”

They had to drain fluid from her lungs.
Pleural effusion
,
that's what it's called when fluid fills your lungs so it's like you're drowning out of water.

When Dad finally met Mom and me at the hospital—held up in some meeting or phone conference or something—he told me there was nothing I could do for her, but I stayed here to watch her sleep, watch her breathe.

She closes her eyes and I can see every blue vein on her eyelids. “My father used to take me fishing off Snapper Bridge on Carolina Creek. We'd catch trout mostly—never snapper—and we'd bring them home and Mama would cook them in the frying pan with the heads and everything still on. My brother Rufus liked to eat the eyes just to make me squirm.”

When she says “Mama” a bit of the southern accent comes back and it sounds like “Mawma.”

“Did you practice?” I ask, interrupting her story. “Did you rehearse to get rid of your accent?”

“Yes. I could have kept it,” she says. “But northern folks like their southerners to be sweet as sugar—refined southern belles. Not Appalachia. I'm no belle.”

She coughs and I get out of bed to hold the straw from her ice water to her lips.

“I lost it quick. Soon as I realized what their game was, I lost that accent, buried it deep.” As she speaks, it flits back up to the surface. “They were proud of themselves. Arthur Miller and all the rest of them. They patted themselves on the back for
finding this diamond in the rough. A chambermaid. A
southern
chambermaid. And she could write. They pranced me around like a show dog. Like I was their big discovery. Their treasure. Their project. I was Pygmalion's Galatea to them.”

She coughs again and I squint, checking the chest of her hospital gown for blood. Dad went back to campus, saying he had an appointment with an advisee that he couldn't miss, and Mom went down to the cafeteria for some coffee and a snack, so it's just me up here. As I crawl back into my bed, I eye the call button, ready to press it and yell if she slips back under.

“Well,
I
was the one who got on the bus.
I
was the one who scrubbed their toilets. And
I'm
the one who wrote the words. And if they needed that story to make sense of it all, well, sure, I would let them have it. You've gotta give people their stories, Very. You know that.” She looks at me through heavy-lidded eyes. “People have their story of you, don't they, dear? And you play that part just fine.”

“What if I'm sick of this story?”

“You write a new one.”

Another cough. Another sip of water. Her eyes are still closed, so maybe she's falling asleep. She coughs again and then says, “The hardest thing about writing a poem is the beginning. In your head it's whole and lovely and perfect. Shakespeare would weep. It's when you sit down to write it that the words get jumbled and you have to rein them in, put them in line. It's exhausting work.”

“Are you trying to talk to me in metaphor, Nonnie? Because
I don't understand it.”

“Well you'd better start because I'm not going to be around much longer to explain it to you.”

“Nonnie, don't—”

“Did I ever tell you about Andy Warhol?”

I nod. “The painting of your poem. The woman who shot him.”

“Valerie Solanas. Pretty in her way. He took me to Studio 54. You should have seen it. The clothes, the music, the drugs. It was like everyone heard the stories, and the stories grew, so the reality grew to meet them. I had brown patent-leather platform heels in a tortoiseshell pattern and a gold minidress. People hardly recognized me all glammed up like that. But there's a picture. He's walking a few steps ahead of me with his hand shielding his face. I'm looking right at the camera like a deer in the headlights. I hate that picture.”

I'd like to see it sometime, but I don't tell her.

Nonnie coughs again. And then again. “My mother saw the picture. It was in
Life
magazine. She cut it out and framed it. She hung it on the wall right between my confirmation picture and a crucifix. She never saw how funny that was.”

I press a button on the side of my bed and it lifts the whole thing up so now I'm looking down at her. The light is better on her this way, more forgiving. It softens out her wrinkles and makes her eyes shine like they used to.

“I've had nine cats. Nine. That's more cats than lovers, Very. Never have more cats than lovers.”

Since I've never had a cat, it seems I'm ahead in that game.

A tinkling of bells rings. “What's that?” I ask.

“A baby was just born. Every damn time a baby is born they ring those bells. This is the third time they've rung since I've been in here. Why are all these people having babies?”

“That's what people do.”

“They shouldn't,” she says dismissively. As if she herself hadn't done it. As if she herself wished she hadn't.

Someone opens Nonnie's door, and then closes it again just as quickly. A mistake.

“I thought about being a recluse, Very. I thought I should just leave my work and hide in the woods.”

“You just didn't go far enough north.”

“You'd think anywhere in New Hampshire I could be a hermit. What would have been perfect is if I could've inherited Salinger's place. We could've called it the Hermitage. You write. You stop writing. You go there. People whisper and wonder, and when you die, it's all over the news.”

“You'll be all over the news.”

“What matters is being remembered.”

I'll remember you, Nonnie.

I don't say it, though. Because I know when it comes to Nonnie and her legacy, I am not
the
New Yorker
or a museum in her honor. I am not enough.

“It's my fault. I should have just gotten up and gone. Could I have been a hermit in Mexico? Puerto Rico? I would have liked that better, Very. It's my fault.”

“It's not your fault.”

“In Puerto Rico, I wouldn't need a passport or a visa or anything, right?”

“I'll bust you out, we'll go together.”

“It's not your fault,” she says back to me. She looks up at the blank television. She is as still as slack tide. Then she raises up the back of her bed with a robotic groan. “You have to leave.”

“What?”

“It's Sunday. The weekend. Surely you must have something better to do today.”

There are things I could be doing. Homework, of course. Starting my college applications. It's still warm enough to meet Britta for some tennis. I could be sitting with Christian in his basement rec room, watching a movie or something else like sex or the breakup that this rush to the hospital has forestalled. He texted me last night, over and over, more and more insistent:

Hey!

What're you up to?

How was your mom's party? Lame?

Are you sleeping?

Are you there?

Hellloooo?

Is something wrong???

Then he actually tried to call me, but I just let it go to voice mail. You aren't supposed to talk on your phone in the hospital, and anyway, what could I possibly say to him?

I do text Britta and Grace so they know where I am.

“I don't have one single solitary thing to do other than this,” I tell Nonnie.

“I can't tell you how much that depresses me.”

I curl myself into a ball on the bed. I've been hoping they would just let me stay here all night with her. I don't mind the beeps of the machines, the nurses going in and out. “I just want to be here in case anything happens.”

Nonnie lifts her arm up and lets it fall onto the pillow. “I won't let anything happen without you. No sudden recoveries. No horrible descents.”

“Nonnie—”

“You should spend time with that boy.”

“Christian?” Now she's grasping. She never wants me to spend time with Christian.

“No. The other one.”

“What other one?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Didn't you know that there's a vent that goes right from the kitchen to my room? I can't believe your father fell for that
my friend
story.”

I redden. As soon as she mentions him, it's like I'm in that moonlit forest with him again, the scent of smoke drifting up and around us.

I wonder what else she's heard. Conversations about her health, about her life.

“Leave,” she says, more firmly now, and I can't tell if she wants me to go because she's worried about me, or because she wants to be alone.

“You just said you had so much to tell me.”

She turns her head away. “I'm tired, Very.”

“Okay,” I say. “But don't count this as a victory. I'm not going to do anything fun. I'm going to go to the library and study.”

“That seems a waste of a Sunday to me.”

“I'll be back later tonight,” I tell her.

She picks up the remote that's attached to her bed by a cable, clicks on the television, and flips to the home shopping channel. “I'll be here,” she says without looking up. “Unless I'm not.”

Sometimes I can't handle Nonnie's sense of humor. Still, I kiss her gently on the forehead on my way out of her room. Her breath crackles through her lips. They are countable now, those breaths, falling away toward zero.

v.

It seems strange that awful things can happen and yet the sun still comes up. But it does. In fact, it's a beautiful afternoon outside, the sky a Technicolor blue, so when I get home I walk around the house to the lawn, which slants down toward a wall of trees. I slide through a break between two pines and onto our short, crooked dock that juts out into the bay. Sitting, I let my feet hang down, so close to the water I can feel its cool.

I pick up a rock and skip it one, two, three times before it sinks. I look out at the ripple line in the water where the current
changes from slight to severe. If I lean way forward I can follow the coast as the bay expands, and maybe see the bridge over the bay into Portsmouth, where it opens up to the Atlantic Ocean.

I dip my toe into the water, too cold for swimming, though when we were kids it hadn't bothered us. The current around the bridge is one of the strongest in the world. At our beach, the strength's just a shadow. You have to swim out about twenty yards to get where it's really strong. I've felt it only once. I waded out to where the water was almost neck deep. It tugged at my foot. Incessant. I knew that if I took just one step, one stroke more, it would suck me under. I thought, though, that I could go back. Just turn around and swim back, as simply as I had come. But the water was an invisible force field, holding me there. I began to panic. Dad dove in and swam to me in quick strokes, his head out of the water, eyes on me. He pulled me back out of the spiral by my wrist, tugging so hard my shoulder popped.

Normally it was Nonnie who walked us down to the water. She sat under her tree and took her thin silver cigarette case from her suit jacket pocket, engraved with her initials, IRW, and pulled one skinny cigarette out and lit it. When she finally quit, she claimed it was because the government kept raising the cigarette tax. “They get enough of my money to fight their tin soldier wars.”

The cigarette case is cool to the touch when I take it out of my bag. This would please her, I know: that I took the case from her dresser drawer without asking. Others would lay claim
to it, of course. My mother first of all. Or the college, maybe, to keep with other memorabilia. Perhaps even Ramona. But I took it, slipped it into my bag before anyone could notice. If they remember it at all, they'll think it has been lost.

I run my fingers over the engraved initials, thin as the whorls of fingerprints.

IRW

Imogene Rosemary Woodruff.

Nonnie.

I flip open the case. Inside is one old cigarette. “I might be shipwrecked, Very. Or maybe I'll be at one of the great dive bars in New York, and some young man will ask me for a cigarette. You have to be prepared.”