All the Finest Girls (27 page)

“You don’t have to do anything to it,” I said, ashamed by my sentimentality. I scrutinized the hands on my old Bambi clock for signs of life.

“Oh, but it’s so
fusty.
It can be any way you like!” Mom replied with a magical twirl of the hand.

We’d had this conversation before, and nothing had ever come of it. But still, I thought, who’s to say this time won’t be different?

“I like it this way,” I said, trying for firmness. Simplicity.

“Come on. Your taste is so much better than mine.” Mom was energized. Hands bracing her lower back, she surveyed the moldings. “How about color scheme?”

“Whatever,” I answered. Her sunny will, as always, had depleted me.
I don’t live here.

“I don’t live here.”

Mom let out a wounded hiccup of a laugh.

“Hmm. What an odd thing to say.” She sounded genuinely puzzled. “Well. Get settled. I’ll be downstairs.”

I heard the back door and through the bedroom window watched her, still in her blue jacket, crossing the lawn to the seawall. When she wrapped her arms around her waist and stared out at the ocean, I turned quickly and, disgusted with myself, went to the business of unpacking.

I would be staying a week. It’s what I do each August. I much prefer Bay Shoals off season, but August means my mother’s birthday. It’s also, I’ve discovered, a likely time for peace between the two of us. We’ve always had a better chance of surviving each other’s company when there are distractions, other ways to occupy ourselves. That particular August, though, after St. Clair, I wasn’t very sanguine about my visit. Or anything at all.

My life had more or less returned to normal. I’d gotten past my hysteria over the damaged predella and, working sometimes eighteen hours a day, finished the restoration only slightly behind schedule. Emmeline thought I’d done a great job. And, truth be told, even I could no longer see the discrepancy that had upset me so. I moved on to other projects, and did some experimenting with Grenz ray analysis, a little-used technique that had baffled everyone else in my department. By April any lingering effects of my sickness had vanished.

The only sign that my life had turned turtle, besides the impetuous decision to shear my hair, was that I’d lost some sort of resistance to myself. Louise’s death, and my three days on St. Clair, had, ultimately, undone me. I was in mourning, and I was unspeakably lonely, and the feelings hung on me with the permanence of a second skin. There were days when I was literally sick to my stomach with loneliness, nauseated by an emptiness that felt just like hunger eating away at my stomach wall. And for the first time in years, I actually wanted to go home. Whatever I thought that was.

I loitered in my room at Edith’s for a while, looking at pictures, picking through the flotsam of drawers, making sure my memories were in their places. I needed to go slowly, to take things in doses. Finally, when the sky turned sapphire, I gathered myself together and went downstairs. The dining room table, where we seldom ate, had been set for two, and the meager place settings made the echoing room seem even more vast. By my plate, Mom had put little gifts wrapped in tissue, as she’d always done when I was small and
she
came home from far-off places. Seeing them made my heart flutter. The packages were rarely more than trifles. Soap, or tea, perhaps some chocolates. But there they’d always been at the first meal upon her return, a persistent challenge to my conviction that I’d been tossed off, forgotten. Their consistency maddened me, even as I lusted after the beautiful ribbons and paper. Often, I feigned indifference, then waited until I was alone in my room to greedily unwrap the boxes, with a care all out of proportion to the gifts’ value. I wanted the little things so, but prayed no one would know that I’d wanted them at all.

Mom was in the kitchen, still in her tennis dress. The light was lousy, mostly coming from the gaping refrigerator door, but it wasn’t hard to see she’d already deranged the room completely. Half a dozen grocery bags from the gourmet shop spilled their loads onto the linoleum, pots burbled on every burner, and I noticed something buttery making a slow, dripping journey from the counter to the floor.

“Won’t be too long,” Mom said, consulting with a bag of rice as I walked in. “I don’t think.”

She appeared to be making risotto. A gob of something, maybe a mushroom, flecked her hair. I shut the fridge and flipped a light switch.

“Thanks,” she said, looking up at the ceiling with surprise.

Now I could see why we weren’t eating in the kitchen. The top of the round oak table was invisible beneath a mountain of stuff. Newspapers, dirty coffee cups, fruit, and their accompanying flies. Where Edith had once presided with a drill sergeant’s precision every morning, an undisciplined basket of laundry now lollygagged, waiting with the mail to be attended to. I eyeballed the sink, already overfull of dishes. As I moved toward them, Mom stopped me.

“Leave it, honey. Carla comes tomorrow morning.”

My mother’s dinner production was not half over yet. Carla, I thought, might have trouble getting in the door by tomorrow morning.

“Your uncle Larry said he might come by later and say —” a short scream from the blender swallowed Mom’s voice — “think Siri isn’t feeling well, so I wouldn’t count on it.”

I pulled up on the handles of a shopping bag and watched as it split in two, the brown paper soaked by three sweating pints of melting ice cream that rolled across the floor. Mom bent to pick up a container at her foot, exposing a flank laced with red spidery lines and thick veins like bluish rope. Their trails were mesmerizing, like a road map. Been places, going elsewhere. My knees did that, too, curved in funny at the sides. Didn’t they?

“Addy!” Mom said, jolting me back. “There’s cheese, yummy Brie, in one of those.”

Methodically, I began to put away the groceries. I made space in the fridge, shifted and stacked and threw away, created order out of the cans and boxes in the pantry. I could usually count on organization to soothe me. Mom talked
they waited for the committee boat for more than an hour and what with the rain
and I straightened up. When the groceries were put away
coming in third is not worth the flu
I pulled out a platter and balanced it gingerly on a stack of printed paper.

Mom had been doing her travel research. Glossy brochures for walking tours in Ireland, African safaris, birding expeditions through the Azores, were strewn in blazing color about the table. She and Bruce used to travel every winter after they retired. Each time a new country and a different kind of adventure. Since Bruce’s death, Mom had asked me over and over to accompany her, but I’d always begged off with some excuse or other. The truth, that I hated the
disruption
of leaving home, was too stupid to admit.

My eye was caught by something else on the table: checkered squares of newspaper, scratched and inked. She’d been doing crossword puzzles. A lot of them. When I was younger, there would never have been time. Now it seemed there was just a little too much.

OLEO LIANA ATWATER

“Addy?”

I turned around. She was holding up a bottle of red wine, pointing the neck in my direction. I demurred. She pushed out her lower lip.

“You sure?”

“Yup. I don’t drink,” I answered, and began trying to disunite plastic wrap and runny cheese.

She refilled her own glass and, up on her tiptoes, lifted a pot top. Dubiously inspecting the contents, she hesitated, then replaced the lid with a gentle drop. She looked to me like a little girl in front of her Easy Bake oven.

Bruce had taught Mom to cook. Or encouraged her, anyway. He was a soap opera director who had wooed my mother into joining his cast after Dad had gone. Not feeling like there was much left to lose (I had already won the fight for boarding school), she came out of retirement and agreed to a one-year contract. At the end of the first season, she and Bruce were married on the soundstage, and her year turned into seven. What I remember of their wedding day — I was thirteen and the ungainly, unlikely maid of honor — was limited to two items: I got my period for the first time, and I flipped Bruce the finger when he asked me to dance.

Bruce was actually a decent, probably a lovely, man. When he died, my mother’s grief had seemed bottomless. I finally realized she’d had a life with him as long as the one she had shared with my father. With Bruce, Mom was flat. Contained. And being the snob that I was, I had scorned them both, christened them stupid and dull. Now I looked at my mother’s hand against the copper pot, Bruce’s pretty solitaire on her finger, and I thought how much she’d lived. How lucky she was.

Maybe if you want a game of Scrabble later

Mom was still talking, turning the crank on the salad spinner. I was lost. I licked the Brie off the heel of my hand and picked up a cracker. Beneath a brochure for the Okavango Delta, a piece of yellow stationery peeked out. My father’s name, in Mom’s loopy handwriting, caught my eye. With a sticky finger, I slid the paper out.

Dear Hank, it began,

Chalk it up as just another mash note from an old fan, but I think the new book is absolutely perfect. Just splendid. Really, each chapter knocked me out.

Mom went on, citing passages and ideas, warning my father not to listen to any of the critics.

They’re only jealous. Always have been.

She had her back to me. I pulled the letter out farther till I could see the whole page. The last paragraph read this way:

I’ll never forget what you wrote when Bruce died. And I quote “There are revelations great and good, Sweet Pea, to be found in the darkness. Take it (if you can) from the Old Pissmire himself.” Well weren’t you right, O.P. So. Back at you.

With I and d,
Your Gal

I looked up toward the stove. My mother’s eyes were on me, anxious and expectant.

They were hazel. Her eyes.

“What?”

“I
said
what do you think?”

Mom was holding a spoon out to me, her head cocked to one side and her brow furrowed. I got up and tasted the risotto. What I
thought
was that I didn’t know where in the world I had been. All this time when my mother and father had been busy being kind to each other. Where had I been?

“Good. It’s good,” I answered.

My mother sighed. She put her hand to my cheek. Her palm was soft and cool. I could not remember ever feeling the inside of her hand. My teeth chattered.

“I know you’re sad,” she said.

Scooting away, I assured her I was fine, and pulled a singed baguette from the smoking oven.

“I think it’s so good you went, Ad. I don’t think I could have done it. But you’re so much better than me that way. So generous.”

We hadn’t talked about St. Clair. And now I wasn’t certain I could handle it. The blackouts had, I knew, deserted me for good. I cut the bread in diagonal slices, keeping my shoulder to her.

“I’m sure they were so glad to have you,” Mom continued. “You were probably such a help.”

Out the kitchen window, the moon was rising over the harbor, orange and fat as a prize pumpkin. I began watching it and, in relation, felt breathtakingly tiny. It seemed my entire world would fit on the head of a pin.

“Not really,” I said.

Mom was ladling the risotto onto plates. The moon cleared the treetops across the harbor, creating a spectacular nightscape.

“Well, you may not think you were, but I’m certain of it. You don’t know, Addy; when someone dies you just want people there. It makes such a dif —”

“They didn’t. Want me there.”

“Oh, but Louise loved you so —”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Not at her. At myself.

“You know what, Mom? They didn’t know a thing about me.”

In the harbor, a coast guard cutter was steaming out to sea with her searchlight on. The long beam caught the windows of my grandfather’s dilapidated studio and, for an instant, illuminated the old barn as though by lightning. I could not turn around but knew my mother had stopped what she was doing.

“Oh, come. You were a daughter to her,” she stated emphatically.

“No. I wasn’t a daughter to her.”

“But —”

I took the plates from my mother. Her hands were empty now, turned out toward me.

“Let me do this, Mom,” I said, ready to move on. “It’s OK. I wasn’t.”

Her eyes were soft, almost sleepy, as though something unwieldy had just been lifted from her back. She smiled.

“Well, you loved her, Ad. That’s what matters.”

As we walked into the dining room, Mom threw one last question my way.

“Were the flowers nice? At the service?”

We spoke very little at dinner, neither of us knowing how to bridge the new landscape that had begun to reveal itself about us. I’d like to say it was an enjoyable reunion, but it was instead a funny kind of agony. We were giving painful birth to something. When we had finished eating, I didn’t clean up. Leaving it instead for poor Carla, I stepped outside into the warm August night. My mother, lost in her own thoughts, repaired to the living room and soon a sweet, jazzy tune shimmied out the screen doors.

Edith’s two giant elms still kept their posts before the sweep of the porch. I passed between them and let the green perfume of new-mown grass fill my head. Each step I took felt like the circuit of a year, running backward. And by the time I reached the cliff’s edge I was small again, when Further Moor was not a place of subtle shades but of primary colors. Of blinding light and monumental shadows. I turned around and stood looking back for the longest time, allowing myself to remember.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the enormous debt I owe to friends, family, and others who have helped me to tell this story.

My terrific editor, Michael Pietsch; agent and friend Esther Newberg; Judith Taylor; Helen Schulman; Charlotte Hale; David Michaelis; Susan Minot; Bridget Tobin; Michael Barclay and Sydney Bachman; Marjorie Bowen, Mavis George, and, of course, Daphne Lewis; my siblings, Susanna, Polly, and Tom Styron; my extraordinary parents, Rose and Bill Styron; the late, great Selma “Nana” Burgunder; Ethel and James Terry, wherever you rest; faithful Wally; and my husband-to-be, Ed Beason.