Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
She turns on lights as she moves through the quiet house, though there’s enough moonlight filtering in the windows to see her way to the kitchen. There’s something spooky about the darkened rooms, and it isn’t so hard to believe that there are ghosts lurking in the shadows.
In the kitchen, Michelle crosses to the cupboard and takes out the box of saltines from this morning. It feels lighter than it should.
Frowning, she opens the flaps and looks inside to see that there are only two saltines left in the bottom of the waxed paper bag, along with some small broken pieces and crumbs.
There were more than this earlier today—weren’t there?
At least a dozen crackers, maybe more. She remembers how she ate only one from the handful she took out and put the rest back into the bag.
Where did they go?
Lou didn’t eat them. He worked late tonight, and came straight to bed when he got home.
And Molly didn’t baby-sit today. There’s been no one in the house but Michelle and Ozzie.
Could Ozzie have . . . ?
No, she thinks, shaking her head firmly. Ozzie can’t reach this cupboard. Even if she
had
taken her eyes off him long enough for him to sneak alone into the kitchen.
But she hadn’t. He was under her constant supervision after the toilet brush incident this morning.
Okay. If Lou hadn’t eaten the crackers and Ozzie hadn’t eaten the crackers . . .
I must have done it,
Michelle tells herself dubiously.
I must have done it, and forgotten all about it
.
She’s momentarily shaken by the thought that she could actually have done something and not remember.
Am I losing my mind?
she wonders.
No. Of course not.
After all, isn’t forgetfulness a symptom of pregnancy? Just last week, she’d spent a good hour searching the house for her library books before she’d given up and gone in to say she’d lost them. The librarian had given her an odd look and told her that she’d dropped them off the day before, and she’d instantly remembered that yes, of course she had. She’d somehow forgotten.
And she still hasn’t managed to call her cousin John, the architect, even though Lou reminds her constantly to take care of it. It keeps slipping her mind, the way everything else seems to lately.
Mulling that over, she methodically chews and swallows the last two crackers and tosses the empty box into the trash.
Then, slowly, she makes her way back through the house up to bed, turning off the lights again and trying not to be spooked by the path of darkness behind her.
When she’s back in bed beside Lou, with the pillows once again strategically placed and her bladder empty and her stomach settled, she can’t fall asleep, even though she was yawning only minutes ago.
For some reason, she keeps thinking about those stupid crackers.
Keeps wondering why, if she really did eat them, she hadn’t just finished them, instead of leaving two measly crackers and some crumbs in the bottom of the bag. Lord knows, she’s eaten everything else in sight lately.
Okay, if you didn’t eat them
, she asks herself reluctantly,
then who did?
“W
hat are you doing?”
Rory jumps at the sound of a voice behind her and turns to see her mother standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Her hair is disheveled and she’s wearing a faded floral sundress Rory remembers from her childhood, which means it must be at least ten years old, probably more. Her feet are clad in heavy burgundy pumps and she’s clutching a black faux leather handbag, neither of which go with the summer dress. Despite the June heat, there’s a white sweater over her shoulders, the long sleeves hanging empty and the top button fastened at her throat.
“Good morning, Mom. Are you going out?”
Like that?
But she doesn’t say the last part. She’s not a teenaged girl anymore, worried about what her friends will think of her crazy mother in her crazy get-up. She has her own life, far from here, and she couldn’t care less if people talk about Maura.
“I just came back from church.”
“Oh, right.” Rory hadn’t realized she was gone. But she should have known. Maura never misses daily mass. “Can I make you something for breakfast? There are bagels and lox and—”
“What are you doing, Rory?”
Mom is staring at the open paint can on the newspaper-lined linoleum; at the dripping white-coated brush in Rory’s hand.
“I’m painting the woodwork,” she says in a small voice, feeling suddenly like a little girl.
She braces herself for her mother’s reaction.
There’s no raised voice. No
how dare you?
Her mother’s eyes move to the frame around the window over the sink. There’s a vivid line between the bright new white paint and the dingy old part.
“Good” is all Maura says, with a shrug.
She moves to the stove, sets the beige teakettle on the burner, and lights the flame.
Rory goes back to her painting, trying to think of something to say as her mother measures imported tea leaves from a metal canister. Mom has always been frugal, but she orders the tea directly from Dublin, her one indulgence.
Finally, her mother seats herself at the kitchen table with her steaming mug—liberally sweetened as always, Rory notices as she counts the heaping spoonfuls of sugar Maura dumps in.
“Where’s Molly?” she asks; there has been no sign of her sister yet this morning.
“In bed, I guess.”
“Does she always sleep this late?”
“It’s only nine o’clock.”
Rory, who has been known to sleep until noon if undisturbed, has no response to that.
There’s silence in the kitchen for a while, broken only by the soft, swishing sounds of Rory’s paintbrush and her mother’s occasional sips and swallows.
Finally, Rory says impulsively, “I know the stereo in the den is broken”—she had already tried that, earlier—“but is there a radio around someplace, Mom?”
There’s a pause. “I don’t know.”
“I just thought it would be nice to listen to music while I work. There used to be that transistor radio of Dad’s in the hall bathroom upstairs, but it’s gone.”
“Mmm.”
“And I know Molly has a boom box in her room, but I can’t ask her to borrow that. I know how teenaged girls are about loaning their stuff to . . .”
She trails off. She was about to say,
To a sister
.
Once again, Carleen’s ghost seems to have seeped into the room. Rory wonders if her mother is remembering, as she is, the battles she and her sister used to wage over clothes, record albums, books.
She used to sneak into Carleen’s room to borrow things, and would promptly put them back in perfect condition, yet, somehow, Carleen always knew. Sometimes, she would let Rory slide, only later making a catty comment like “I hope you enjoyed wearing my jean jacket last weekend.” But most of the time, Carleen would throw a fit.
As if she never borrowed my black velvet headband or my one perfect pink frost lipstick that didn’t clash with my hair
.
Rory realizes that she’s thinking like a fifteen-year-old again. That, in her mind, Carleen will be forever seventeen.
We never got the chance to get past all that sibling rivalry stuff,
she thinks with a pang of loss.
We never got the chance to grow past it, to become friends
.
She glances over her shoulder and sees her mother just sitting at the table, her hands cupped around the half-empty mug of tea in front of her, a faraway expression in her eyes.
“I thought I’d take a ride over to Saratoga Springs one of these days,” Rory says, after more uncomfortable silence.
There’s no reply.
“Would you like to come with me, Mom? We could go to lunch at Hattie’s Chicken Shack, and maybe do some shopping. There are some nice stores on Broadway and I’d like to get—”
“I can’t.”
That’s all Maura says, in a clipped tone. Just
I can’t
. No reason. No excuse.
Why can’t you?
Rory wants to ask. But she doesn’t dare. She knows the reason. Which reminds her . . .
“So, Mom,” she says conversationally, “what’s up with Sister Theodosia these days?”
Her mother blinks. “What do you mean?”
“Is she still in Buffalo? What church was she at? Wasn’t it Our Lady of . . . something-or-other?”
“No. No, it was St. Lucretia’s.”
“Is she still there?”
Her mother nods.
“Do you see her often?”
“Not often.”
When was the last time? And does she realize you’ve gone crazy?
Rory dips her brush and slaps more paint onto the woodwork; too much. It spatters and starts to run down and she quickly catches the drips with her brush, smoothing the excess paint over the edge of the frame. She concentrates on getting it into the cracks at the corner, making sure there are no bare patches.
“It would be nice to talk to Sister Theodosia after all these years,” she says after a few minutes, when the painting is under control again.
Will her mother know she’s lying? Of course she will. Surely Maura can’t think Rory was actually fond of the dour-faced nun. But then, Carleen was the only one brazen enough to vocalize her dislike for Sister Theodosia.
“Mom?”
Rory turns to see that the chair at the table is vacant; even the mug of tea is gone.
She hears footsteps slowly ascending the creaky hall stairs.
With a sigh, she dips the brush into the paint again.
“N
o, Ozzie, on the paper. On the
paper!
” Michelle grabs her son’s chubby hand, which is dripping with red goo, just as it’s about to come down on the top of the picnic table. She guides it to the shiny white paper, already covered in smears of green and blue.
“That’s right, sweetie,” she says, watching him spread streaks of red over the page. “See? Isn’t finger painting fun?”
“Fun,” agrees Ozzie. “More paint.”
She catches his hand before he can tip over the shallow foil dish of red paint, and helps him coat his fingers with more.
With a sigh, she watches him go to work again, an expression of pure bliss on his chubby features. After a moment, she grabs a blank sheet of paper for herself and dabs her forefinger into the red paint.
“Mommy paint, too?” Ozzie asks, delighted.
“Sure, why not?” She drags her finger over the page, creating intricate swirls of red.
Gee, haven’t you come a long way?
she asks herself sardonically, thinking about the long-ago summer she spent in Paris, seated before an easel on the Seine. It was ten years ago this year, she realizes. She’d been a college student then, an art major at Buff State, and dazzled over the opportunity to study watercolor technique with Marcel du Bois, one of the world’s greatest living painters. When she’d left Lake Charlotte in May, she’d been reluctant to go so far from home—from her mother and Lou, whom she’d been dating for a few years by then. But how could an aspiring artist stay homesick for very long in Paris?
August had arrived much too soon, and her instructor had encouraged her to stay, telling her she had a rare talent and he’d like to keep working with her. Praise from the great du Bois never came easily, and Michelle had actually hesitated, albeit briefly, before telling him that she had to get home. Back to Lake Charlotte and Lou, for a brief week together before she went back to Buffalo and he left for Long Island, where he would enter his first year of law school.
Now she remembers how much they’d argued during those fleeting days together. Lou seemed to have changed over the summer; he was no longer his happy-go-lucky self. Part of that might have been due to the summer job he’d taken to pay his law school tuition—working on the new sewer line the town was building out on High Ridge Road. Great money, but who would be thrilled with the long, grueling hours in the heat of summer? Certainly not Lou, who had been a lifeguard out at the Curl beach every summer since he was sixteen.
But Michelle had known the job wasn’t the only miserable thing about Lou’s summer. He resented her for leaving for three months; he’d even tried to talk her out of going to Paris before she left. And once she was back, it seemed as though all he did was gripe about all the great times they
could have
had together, making her feel guilty for ruining his summer. She had half expected Lou to break up with her that fall, but when they saw each other again at Thanksgiving, he was his old self again.