After Life (11 page)

“Hey,” I said, holding out my hands for her things.

“Why do you say ‘hey’? You’re supposed to say ‘hi,’ or ‘hello.’ ”

“Well, all right. Hi!”

“Hello,” said Vivian.

She wouldn’t let me carry anything. We walked home across the grounds, Vivian making wide circles around the puddles.

Vivian had been an odd, funny-looking baby, and now she was an odd, funny-looking little girl. She had thick, small glasses and a peculiar way of laughing; she’d bare her teeth and roll her eyes and not make a sound. Her curly black hair was in two small pigtails, round as meatballs, over her ears. I was finding it difficult to slip back into Vivian-mode; everything I said to her felt stiff and inappropriate.

She told me her new teacher was named Miss Strunk and that she had to sit next to a boy she didn’t like.

“Why don’t you like him?”

“He’s mean. He shakes my chair.”

“Shakes your chair?”

“Like this.” She pantomimed a mean boy shaking a chair. “Then I almost fall out.”

“Sounds to me like he likes you.”

She grimaced, showing her small gapped teeth. “I don’t think so,” she said.

Back at the house I got her a snack, a plastic tumbler of grape juice and some squares of cheddar cheese. Ron was in the kitchen with nothing on but a pair of boxer shorts, grinding herbs with a mortar and pestle. “I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,” he said to Vivian.

“I like it,” she said, gulping her juice.

He shook his head. “It tastes funky to me.”

“Funky?” I said.

He picked up his mortar and poured the gray powder onto a sheet of paper. “You know what I mean. Just…funky. Rotten. Like someone made it in the dark.” Ron was obsessed with food. He was like a person on a perpetual starvation diet, which I suppose he was. He was always drinking brothy things he called “infusions” and trying to get me to taste them. You could not eat a thing in our kitchen without fielding a comment from Ron. I wanted to ask him about his beaver pelt but could not come up with a good way to broach the subject.

“I like it,” said Vivian again, kicking her heels against the table legs.

“That’s good. I’m glad everyone’s different,” Ron said.

This was one of my favorite times of day: afternoon light filling the kitchen, and no one in a hurry to do anything. For several minutes the only sounds were Vivian’s rhythmic kicking, the scrape of the pestle, and someone’s distant wind chime. I wiped the toast crumbs off the counter and emptied the draining rack of dishes.

“I don’t like the name
Strunk,
” said Vivian after a while. “It makes me think of a skunk.”

She told us how they were going to be studying Indians in the third grade, and that Miss Strunk told the class that she would try to see if they could go on a field trip to the excavation by the lake.

“But maybe not. She wants to make sure it’s an Indian first.”

Ron took an apple from the refrigerator and began chomping on it. “That doesn’t sound very respectful to me,” he said. “When I pass over, I won’t want a busload of third-graders walking all over my bones.”

“Would we walk on bones?”

“Of course not,” I said.

“You
might,
” said Ron. “But if I were your mom, I wouldn’t sign the permission slip, I can tell you that.”

This conversation was making me tense. Though I had my back to him, I could sense Ron looking at me. Lately, he’d been giving me long, appraising glances. It gave me the impression that since he was almost done renovating the house, he needed a new project, and would like very much to renovate me.

“You know,” said Ron, “you two have a lot in common.”

Vivian looked up at me, then back down at her plate of cheese cubes. “We both have brown hair.”

“That’s true. But I was thinking that you’re both only children. You don’t have brothers or sisters. That’s unusual.”

“It’s not so unusual,” I said.

“Actually, it is. I can’t think of anyone else, off the top of my head. I have four sisters, Jenny has a sister and a brother…”

“My mother says one is more than enough,” said Vivian, proudly.

“It must be lonely though. I’d be.”

“I’m never lonely,” I said. This was true, I believed, but it had come out more vehemently than I intended. I sounded defensive, as if he had hit a sore spot, which he had not.

“Never?” asked Ron.

“Not really.” I turned to Vivian. “Homework time. Hop to it. I know you have some.”

“I wish I had a sister,” she sighed.

Her only homework, claimed Vivian, was handwriting. I cleared a place on the kitchen table for her, and Ron wandered off into the living room with his tall, murky beverage. While I drank my coffee and watched Vivian work, I felt myself sinking into something of a torpor. This state was caused not, I realized, by calmness or relaxation, but by panic: both my body and mind balked at the thought of discussing the skeleton with my mother over dinner. I wanted to close my eyes and slump to the floor. I found, however, that if I sipped my coffee at perfectly regular intervals I could keep panic from overtaking me, and thus remained upright.

When she was done with her cursive
A
’s—she had to start over twice, because her vigorous erasing tore holes in the cheap paper Elaine bought her—Vivian showed them to me. They were heavy and dark and misshapen: chains pulled from a sunken ship. But every single one was there.

“Good job,” I told her, raising a leaden hand to pat her head.

“Thank you.” Her bangs stood up from her forehead like a row of fuzzy trees.

Vivian sat in front of the television while I did a crossword puzzle and watched the clock hands creep inevitably toward six.

At a quarter to, I gathered Vivian’s things and we walked to my mother’s house. Dark clouds were beginning to pile up in the sky, but down below the air was still and clear as a block of glass. Most of the time I found it difficult to see Train Line objectively—the shabby houses and giant trees were more familiar to me than my own face, and I overlooked their flaws as I did my own—but with Vivian’s hand in mine I saw the world frankly: the broken picket fences, the plastic sheeting tacked up in place of storm windows, the garish, brightly colored spheres that sat on pedestals in so many front yards. My mother had a red sphere in hers. It shone like a giant planet among the weeds and broken bird feeders. As we passed it, Vivian reached her hand out but stopped just short of touching it.

Sometimes, when I looked at Vivian, I would think it was a good thing I didn’t have my own child, because my own child wouldn’t be Vivian and would therefore disappoint me.

We arrived at my mother’s house to find her in an ebullient mood. She wore a tight, flamingo-colored dress and had piled her hair on top of her head. Sweat beaded her upper lip.

“Come, come,” she said, ushering us into the kitchen. “Your timing is impeccable. I’ve just pulled the chicken from the oven. My, Naomi, you look nice this evening.”

A slow blush moved up my neck and into my cheeks. I didn’t, in fact, look nice. I hadn’t washed my hair in several days, and I was wearing a sweatshirt with bleach stains on it. Was she trying to be sarcastic? I couldn’t tell. My mother’s good moods could be more bewildering than her bad ones.

But at dinner she was solicitous and polite, and she didn’t mention the skeleton, so I began to relax. I asked her about her radio show.

“You mean,” she said, “is it still canceled? Yes, it is, for now.” She gave me an energetic smile.

“For now?”

“Mmm.”

I didn’t press it. Instead we chatted with Vivian about school, and then I found myself telling her about the strange dream I’d had the night before, with the train and the old man. She listened attentively, then said, “Well, that’s about Jenny Butler, of course.”

“What do you mean? How?”

“Haven’t you heard? She’s sick. Everyone knows that, but it’s worse than we thought. She found out last week.” My mother was far more plugged into Train Line gossip than I was, and she didn’t always think to pass it on to me, which was slightly frustrating. Her best friend was a medium named Darva Lawrence, who had bleached-blond hair, a smoker’s cough, and sometimes, fake eyelashes. She was always materializing at my mother’s back door, loaded down with info.

“Found out what?”

My mother raised her eyebrows—which were plucked into thin, penciled fermatas—and gestured toward Vivian, who was distractedly prodding her potatoes with her finger, then mouthed a word at me. It looked like
dander.

Dander?
I mouthed back.

Can-cer,
she repeated.

Oh.

“What kind?”

She shook her head; she either didn’t know or didn’t want to say. “The kind you don’t want to get,” she said.

It wasn’t Darva who gave her the information, she said, it was Troy, who got it straight from Ron, who was the only person Jenny had told so far.

“So officially, I don’t know,” I said.

“Probably not.”

“Still,” I said, “I don’t know how that connects to my dream.”

My mother rolled her eyes. “The train is the train of life. You’re afraid Jenny’s going to jump off it. Jenny
Butler
—a butler’s usually an old man, right? You must have known on some level how sick she is.”

“Hmm,” I said. I wasn’t sure I bought it, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.

When we were finished, my mother and Vivian went into the other room to watch television and I washed the dishes, thinking about Jenny. From the little window over my mother’s sink I could see right into Tony K. the Hypnotist’s house. He appeared to be having a get-together. Ron passed by the window carrying a glass of pink wine, and a little later I spotted Dave Wood eating something. A couple of people I didn’t know were there, too, and so was a woman who went by the name “Beachsong.” Her real name was Gina Saletta; I’d gone to school with her. She was one of a group of girls who came up to me one study hall during seventh grade and told me they liked my outfit. I was newly overweight at the time and none of my clothes fit at all. The outfit was a brick-red pantsuit with a butterfly print. In those days of polo shirts and crewneck sweaters, I had to admit I looked absurd. My mistake was in thinking no one would notice. When I got home that day I changed out of the awful things, balled them up, and stuffed them in a grocery bag with some rocks. When it got dark I ran out to the dock at the end of Fox Street and threw the bundle into the lake. I don’t remember much else from seventh grade.

The dishwater was dirty and cold, but that was all right. I was done. I drained the sink and wiped it down, then cleaned off the counters and the table.
They didn’t invite me,
I fumed. I should be used to it, I thought, but I was not.
It’s not like I’m a newcomer or a beginner or old, or
something
…

I squeezed out the sponge and leaned over the sink again, realizing, suddenly, that Jenny was most certainly there—everyone I’d spotted was a friend of hers—and that the meeting was probably about her. The top of someone’s head—was it red hair?—was just barely visible over the windowsill. Then, as I was looking over at Tony K.’s, careful to look down if anyone happened to glance my way, the lights went out. They were having a home circle, I figured. It occurred to me that with the lights out they’d be able to see me but I wouldn’t be able to see them. They were invisible—seeing but unseen. I went into the living room, picked up the newspaper, then quickly put it down again. I’d had just about enough of newspapers.

Against my better judgment, I told my mother what I’d seen. She and Vivian were flopped across each other, watching a quiz show. She looked up at me sharply.

“They didn’t invite you,” she said.

“Apparently not.”

She turned back to the television, sighing. “I probably wouldn’t have invited you, either. Why aren’t you friendlier to people? I didn’t teach you to be such an ice queen.”

I pretended I hadn’t heard her, and feigned great interest in the game show, my arms crossed tightly over my chest.

When it was time to go, my mother helped me bundle Vivian out to the Oldsmobile. I was holding the driver’s side door open, waiting for Vivian to get her stuff together, when my mother said, “Let me drive.”

“You’re coming?”

“And I’m driving.”

This was alarming. I drove Vivian home every Tuesday, when Elaine worked late, and my mother had never wanted to come before. I slid into the passenger seat and pulled the seat belt across me, grateful for the dark that hid my face.

We rumbled down Rochester Street and out of Train Line. I had to admit, my mother was a good, natural driver. She seemed to be paying more attention to her reflection in the rearview mirror than to what was going on around her—every time I borrowed her car, I had to readjust the mirror so that it reflected what it was supposed to—but she spotted a shadowy trio of deer alongside the road long before I did, and stopped to let them leap past us. Her earlier exuberance had flattened somewhat after dinner, and now she was thoughtful and preoccupied, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel.