The Underside of Joy (8 page)

Now she made it sound like it had been easy. Out the window I saw a squirrel stop on our porch railing to inspect some kind of pod, turning it in its paws. ‘I still think about Dad all the time. All those camping trips on the Olympic Peninsula, how much he taught me in eight short years.’ She reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘So, Mom, how did you make it through that?’

She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of pinot blanc.

‘Oh,
that’s
how.’

She smiled. ‘Tempting, I admit, but no.’ She poured us each a glass.

‘Actually, at first I did check out, as you probably remember . . . But then I kept thinking about my grandmother. Your great-grandma Just. She waited in Austria while her husband went to America. He said he’d find work and send for her. She waited a year and never heard from him. So she sold every single thing she had and took her two children and got on a boat bound for America. She didn’t speak English. She didn’t know a soul. I can see her as if I were there: a tiny woman with a braid past her waist, an arm around each child, freezing and miserable, holding on to them for dear life. Can you imagine? Huddled on that ship, bound for the great unknown . . .’ She shook her head and looked at me. ‘And when I felt bad about my situation, I drew strength from her.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Well. She found him. She actually found him! He’d drunk away everything he’d earned. Penniless, sleeping around, and worse,
violent.
So she kicked him back out and, ironically, set up a moonshine business during Prohibition, and raised those two kids – my mom and Aunt Lily – with a trapdoor covered by a braided rug under the kitchen table. It’s the same kitchen table I still have.’

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out what part of the story she and I could relate to. Not the secret trapdoor. Not the moonshine business. Not the tiny mother with the two kids on the ship. Not the sneaky drunk husband. Callie barked and I turned to see the squirrel dive for the trunk of an oak and disappear.

‘Ella.’ My mother held my shoulders. ‘We come from a line of strong women. I see that strength in you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, our faces only inches away, almost too close to each other, too close to all the unspoken. I could have asked more right then, but I knew better; I’d learned my lesson long ago. I stepped back and picked up my wine, and she did the same. ‘Hey, does that mean I get the old pine table? I love that table.’

She raised her glass. ‘Not while I’m still breathing you don’t.’ We clinked our glasses. A wordless toast to another success: once again, we’d talked about my dad without talking about my dad.

Chapter Eight

The next morning I dropped my mom off at the airport shuttle bus, but not before she offered to postpone leaving and get someone else to cover for her at work.

I didn’t want her to go. But I knew postponing her departure wasn’t going to help us all get to the other side, or wherever the hell we were headed.

And so we drove her to the DoubleTree Inn, where she stepped onto the shuttle bus to the San Francisco airport and I pulled out cookies and juice to distract Zach, who otherwise would have definitely run up and grabbed her. We all waved, and I felt inspired by the fact that Zach’s tantrums from the previous day had vanished. I buckled the kids into their car seats and headed home. At a stoplight, I turned to them and said, ‘I’m sorry I yelled in the car yesterday. That wasn’t a nice way to tell you to stop fighting. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?’

Zach nodded big exaggerated nods and said, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.’ I’d never heard him do
that
before.

Annie said, ‘Of course we forgive you, silly. But if you need a break, now might be a good time for us to visit Mama in Lost Vegas.’

The person in the car behind us honked, and I just made the light as it turned yellow again. Need a break?
That was an odd thing for Annie to say,
I thought, but the kids started singing ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’ and seemed almost happy. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by drilling her. I just said, ‘Annie, believe me, I don’t need a break
.
Being around you and Zach is what I love most in this world.’ But the thought niggled at me. Either Paige was asking Annie to visit, or perhaps Annie had come up with the idea all on her own. I wondered what Paige wanted, but I wondered more what Annie wanted. It made sense that she might want to spend time with Paige. But what if Paige built up something with the kids and then pulled her disappearing act again?

We drove up the driveway, past Joe’s truck parked in its spot; the empty, hollow house waited, hungry, ready to swallow us whole.

Callie trotted up wagging her tail, but I felt as if we walked on a movie set, and everything was an illusion, and once I got closer and looked and prodded a bit, I’d have to face the truth. Maybe the cute, cosy house was just a cardboard façade. The vibrant garden, plastic and dusty silk. Word had got out that the director had abandoned the film and the studio was pulling out of the financing and there the three of us were, standing outside the pretend door without a script. I unlocked the door anyway, and we went inside.

The screen door slammed behind us. ‘Well,’ I said. Annie and Zach stood in the not-so-great room and looked at me, expectantly. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked. They shook their heads. It was only nine thirty a.m. and my mom had fed us breakfast before she left. The house still smelled of toast and coffee. ‘You want to go out and play?’ They shook their heads again. Outside, the sun made everything sparkly and phony. The birds sang praises. The birds needed to give it a rest.

‘Well,’ I said again. I went to the armoire and pulled open the drawer and picked out three movies.
The Sound of Music, Toy Story,
and
Beauty and the Beast.
I walked to my room and closed the blinds and popped in
The Sound of Music
DVD. I took off my jeans and pulled on my sweats. The kids stood as if they were in a stranger’s house. Movies were for night; they knew the rules. In the kitchen I made popcorn, then climbed into bed with the bowls. After a few minutes, I patted both sides of the bed. ‘Come on.’ And then I sang,
‘Let’s start at the very beginning . . .’
and they climbed up onto the bed, giggling, plugging their ears. Another family joke Joe had started. Apparently, I didn’t have the world’s best singing voice.

Zach held Bubby with one hand and took his bowl of popcorn with the other. Callie jumped up and stuck her nose in Annie’s bowl, then lay across the foot of the bed, chomping. We didn’t get up to answer the phone. We didn’t get up to answer the door. ‘Shhhh,’ I said when we heard a knock, and they stifled their giggles in the pillows. Even Callie agreed not to bark. She just whined and thumped her tail against the mattress and cocked her head at us as if to say,
You know, it could be
him . . .

With Joe’s picture gazing at us from the nightstand, we watched movies and we slept and we watched more movies. For dinner, I ordered a pizza delivered from Pascal’s and stuck in
The Little Mermaid.
I almost got up to change it as soon as I remembered that Ariel saved Prince Eric from drowning. But I left it in. It might upset them, but better that it happened when they were with me than somewhere else, like at a friend’s house. Or with Paige.

The storm came up. I wrapped my arms around each of them as Prince Eric fell to the bottom of the sea. I wondered again what it had been like for Joe. Had it been like Frank had thought, that he’d hit his head right as he was pulled under, that he didn’t even know he would never see us again? I hoped so. I hoped his last frame of reference was the frame through his lens of the rusty ragged sea cliff against deep blue sky, not thoughts of Annie and Zach crying in my arms. When Ariel lifted Prince Eric up, up, up to the surface, and brought him back to life with her beautiful voice, all three of us had tears streaming down our faces. Annie planted her wet cheek into my neck and said, ‘I wish mermaids were real.’

I said, ‘Yeah, Banannie, me too.’

Zach said, ‘If I were King Triton, I would have
ROARED
so that all the fishes and mermaids would lift Daddy back up to the
AIR
! I muchly would.’ He laid his head in my lap and I smoothed his hair back. But then Zach started to sob, ‘I want my
DADDY
! I want my
DADDY
!’ and Annie broke down too, yelling even louder than Zach, the same words, over and over.

I held on tight. I thought of Great-Grandma Just and her two children on that big ship, headed for the great unknown. Eventually Annie’s and Zach’s yells and tears dissipated, their stuttered breaths evened out, and they finally slept, their small faces streaked with trails of dried salt.

Chapter Nine

The people of Elbow hung up their black clothes one day, and by the next week they were donning red, white, and blue. It was not out of disrespect for Joe, but in many ways in honour of him. In fact, Joe Sr and Marcella upheld their civic duty by being the first to swaddle their porch columns in Fourth of July banners, while the rest of the town soon followed their lead. Elbow does the Fourth of July like New York City does New Year’s Eve. And if we keep that exaggerated analogy going, Joe was our own Dick Clark, and the front porch at Capozzi’s Market was our own little Times Square. The Beach and Boom Barbeque was a forty-three-year tradition begun by Grandpa Sergio after the war, and it wasn’t going to stop now. Yes, the man who had been sent to an internment camp apparently celebrated the Fourth with a vengeance. Joe had told me that it was such a part of their family’s and town’s tradition, he’d never questioned it.

Lucy found us in the garden. Zach’s superheroes were taking over some long-lost planet from their spaceship
Tomato Basket,
and Annie had converted Callie into a horse.

I stretched my back and gave Lucy a hug. ‘Your hair’s warm,’ she said. ‘I thought you guys would be in your costumes by now.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s too weird. I can’t even picture it without him.’

‘I know. You’re going, though, right?’

I nodded.

Annie said, ‘I think we should wear our costumes, Mommy.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to, Banannie.’

‘I didn’t. But now I do. And I bet Zach does too.’

Zach nodded and did his
uh-huh
thing while he threw Batman into the cucumbers. Since Joe had been the town crier who led the songs and read from the Declaration of Independence, the four of us had dressed up in period costumes every Fourth. Annie and I wore long dresses and bonnets; Zach and Joe had pantaloons and vests and black hats.

David was going to take over the emceeing, so he had already picked up Joe’s costume.

‘Okay, then,’ I said.

‘Okay, then.’ Annie hopped off Callie. ‘Let’s get this show on the road, people.’ And she led us up to the house to get changed.

A year ago, I had swayed in the front row, holding Zach on my hip, blowing a plastic kazoo, while my husband stood on the front porch of Capozzi’s Market and led the crowd in ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’ and ‘America the Beautiful’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’. When he got to the line ‘I’ve got a Yankee Doodle sweetheart, she’s my Yankee Doodle joy,’ he’d pulled Annie and me and Zach all up onto the porch and twirled us around and around while the crowd cheered and the patched-together band played on. The whole day was one ultra-corny, amateur ode to nostalgia, and I’d loved every minute of it. Can you see me? I was the one leading the march to the beach barbeque as if I were leading a top-university marching band, my happiness twirling up in the treetops and landing obediently in the solid grip of my hand.

None of us could have imagined then that the jovial man who’d sung out, holding his hat to his heart in front of his grandpa Sergio’s store, would soon be a part of the history we celebrated. Or that he’d been dancing on the front porch of his hidden failure. Now I languished towards the back, sweating in my long, heavy dress, nodding and smiling to those who offered hugs or squeezed my arm; there was nothing left for any of us to say. I got through the moment of silence held in Joe’s honour, and ‘Yankee Doodle’, but it was when David started us in on ‘This Land Is Your Land’, and we got to the line, ‘From the redwood forest to the river’s waters’ – those last lyrics Joe had changed to fit Elbow – that tears ran down my cheeks. Lucy handed me a tissue. The tears weren’t all sadness, though. Joe was gone. But his land was my land, his town was my town, his kids were my kids. I really had found home when I’d found Joe, and it was my home still.

‘I’m scared,’ I told Lucy later, while we sat on a rock watching Annie and Zach build a sand castle that looked more like a sand Quonset hut, the crowd dispersing to head upriver for the fireworks. Across the river, hungry cries echoed from the large osprey nest on top of a dead tree that Joe had photographed less than a month before. ‘I suddenly feel constantly aware of how much I can lose.’

She put her arm around me. ‘Most people in your circumstances can’t even see anything past what they’ve already lost.’

‘Yeah. But not everyone has them.’ I jutted my chin towards the kids. ‘I never let myself think like this before. It all feels ridiculously fragile.’

‘You
were
kind of la-tee-da,’ Lucy admitted. ‘I mean, no one’s life is quite
that
carefree.’

‘What do you mean?’

Lucy blushed. ‘I didn’t mean . . . well, you know. Nothing. Too much wine and too much sun make me blabber nonsense.’

It stung. La-tee-da? But I didn’t want to ask. Maybe Frank had told her about the store. Frank could be a blabbermouth, with or without wine and sun. While Annie and Zach scooped river water into their plastic pails, Callie and a border collie raced down the beach towards the water. ‘No!’ I called out. But it was too late. They landed smack-dab on top of the kids’ sand creation and flattened it.

If Elbow was still my town, Capozzi’s Market was now my store, and the bills were now my bills. Julie Langer, one of the school moms, insisted on taking the kids for a play date that Saturday, and so I was left to worry about finances while I dug in my garden.

If only my garden were a true reflection of the workings of my inner soul. All that rich, fertile abundance in precise and ordered rows! No wasted space, no shrivelled stems. And that life-affirming fragrance of clean dirt. I loved the paradox and truth of those two words:
Clean. Dirt.

I set down my hand weeder and picked up the compost bucket and headed over to the bins. Our compost was the secret to our garden. And the secret to our compost was keeping the moisture down, giving it enough nitrogen and just the right amount of stirring. This batch was heating up nicely and soon would be ready to spread on the garden. I stirred in the coffee grounds, the egg shells, and the rest of the kitchen waste, along with some magical chicken manure. I added dry leaves I’d saved from the fall. Leaves Joe had raked.

The store, the store. What to do about the store? I didn’t want to just let it die too. It had been so clear to me on the Fourth that along with being the family’s legacy, the store was the heart of our town. Albeit a heart with badly clogged arteries. The tiny town of Elbow could no longer support its own store, and Capozzi’s wasn’t snazzy enough to bring in the wine connoisseurs and the foodies. But the ever-expanding wine country surrounded us, and tourists flocked. Joe had been bugged that everyone in Sebastopol was chopping down their apple trees and putting in grapes, but after living down south, I’d told him, ‘Hey, vineyards beat the heck out of strip malls.’ Still it was a change he didn’t welcome; he called wine country
whine
country.

I turned the compost, dark as coffee. What did I know about running a store? Absolutely nothing. I could go on with my plan to start working in the fall as a guide. I’d just have to see if they could hire me full-time instead of part-time. Did they even hire full-time guides? And then I’d need to hire a babysitter for Annie and Zach, when they got home in the afternoons. But what would become of Capozzi’s Market? A vacant, cobweb-infested eyesore, the retro sign hanging by its corner, the screen door banging off its hinges while children dared each other to run up to touch the front step, scared by tales of lurking ghosts? If we could somehow save it . . . with the family’s help . . . maybe Gina could keep filling in . . . David and Marcella might be able to work some hours . . . then I’d have more flexibility. Annie and Zach could hang out sometimes in the afternoons, do their homework in the office and help when they got a little older, like Joe and David had. I added more leaves. But hello? The store was not making it. It was as withered as the oak leaves I stirred into the compost.

Joe’s meal scraps were in there too, decomposing and reincarnating. The last bagel, the last banana peel. The scraps from our last picnic together. I turned the shovel, full of compost. God, he loved those picnics.

He used to say that he wanted to bring back the picnic, that this area was founded on the pleasure of picnics.

That wasn’t how it happened, exactly, but I liked the sound of it, and there was some truth to it: Whites first came to the region not to lay out a blanket under the redwoods but to chop them down. And yet, a hundred or so years ago, San Franciscans started building summer cabins and houses by the river so they could come up to picnic and swim.

There was an old photograph at the Elbow Inn of a group, the women wearing high-necked dresses with long skirts, the men wearing hats and suspenders and trousers, everyone relaxing on a huge blanket – or looking like they were
trying
to relax as much as possible in those getups – with a spread of food out before them.

The store had once offered ‘Everything Italia’ . . . before the wartime paranoia set in. But now, all these decades later, everyone adored Italian everything – art, food, wine, lifestyle. Dining alfresco, outdoors. Using the freshest ingredients. Growing your own garden. Slow food as opposed to fast food. The whole slower food and farm-to-table way of eating that I believed in had even sprung from Italy, jumped an ocean and a continent, and landed in Sonoma County. I knew the rest of the country would eventually catch on, but so many people in Elbow, and the surrounding communities like Sebastopol, which people referred to as Berkeley North, already ate organic foods and supported local farmers.

And then I saw it. I saw the store, the same, but different, and wholly formed. I could even hear the bell on the creaky door, ringing on and on, as a steady line of customers came and left with full arms, full baskets, the chiming becoming incessant, like blessed church bells, clamouring on about resurrection and new life.

‘Holy shit!’ I shouted. That might just be the answer. I dropped the lid on the bin, pulled off my gloves, and ran up to the house. It was a crazy idea. But it might just work. I needed to call David. I needed to call Lucy. I probably needed to call a psychiatrist.