June 30
YOUR POOR WIFE,
she's racing from the dining room to the music room, grabbing up silver candlesticks, little gilded mantel clocks, and Dresden figurines and stuffing them in a pillowcase. Misty Marie Wilmot, after working the breakfast shift, now she's looting the big Wilmot house on Birch Street. Like she's a goddamn burglar in her own house, she's snatching up silver cigarette boxes and pillboxes and snuffboxes. Off fireplace mantels and nightstands, she's collecting saltcellars and carved-ivory knickknacks. She's lugging around the pillowcase, heavy and clanking with gilded-bronze gravy boats and hand-painted porcelain platters.
Still in her pink plastic uniform, sweat stains wet under each arm. Her name tag pinned to her chest, it lets all the strangers in the hotel call her Misty. Your poor wife. She works the same kind of shitty restaurant job her mom did.
Unhappily ever after.
After that, she's running home to pack. She's slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some of them as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.
Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they'll turn. She's trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She's trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. And each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.
Today is moving-out day. It's another longest day of the year.
In the big house on East Birch Street, everybody's supposed to be packing, but no. Your daughter comes downstairs with a total of nothing to wear for the rest of her life. Your loony mother, she's still cleaning. She's somewhere in the house, dragging the old vacuum cleaner around, on her hands and knees, picking threads and bits of lint out of the rugs and feeding them into the vacuum hose. Like it matters a good goddamn how the rugs look. Like the Wilmot family will ever live here ever again.
Your poor wife, that silly girl who came here a million years ago from some trailer park in Georgia, she doesn't know where to begin.
It's not like the Wilmot family couldn't see this coming. You don't just wake up one day and find the trust fund empty. All the family money gone.
It's only noon, and she's trying to put off her second drink. The second is never as good as the first. The first one is so perfect. Just a little breather. A little something to keep her company. It's only four hours until the renter comes for the keys. Mr. Delaporte. Until they need to vacate.
It's not even a real
drink
drink. It's a glass of wine, and she's only had one, maybe two swallows. Still, just knowing it's nearby. Just knowing the glass is still at least half full. It's a comfort.
After the second drink, she'll take a couple aspirin. Another couple drinks, another couple aspirin, and this will get her through today.
In the big Wilmot house on East Birch Street, just inside the front door, you'll find what looks like graffiti. Your wife, she's dragging around her pillowcase of loot when she sees it—some words scribbled on the back of the front door. The pencil marks there, the names and dates on the white paint. Starting from knee high, you can see dark little straight lines, and along each line a name and number:
Tabbi, age five.
Tabbi, who's twelve now with lateral canthal rhytides around her eyes from crying.
Or: Peter, age seven.
That's
you, age seven.
Little Peter Wilmot.
Some scribbles say: Grace, age six, age eight, age twelve. They go up to Grace, age seventeen. Grace with her baggy jowls of submental fat and deep playsmal bands around her neck.
Sound familiar?
Does any of this ring a bell?
These pencil lines, the crest of a flood tide. The years 1795 . . . 1850 . . . 1979 . . . 2003. Old pencils were thin sticks of wax mixed with soot and wrapped with string to keep your hands clean. Before that are just notches and initials carved in the thick wood and white paint of the door.
Some other names on the back of the door, you won't recognize. Herbert and Caroline and Edna, a lot of strangers who lived here, grown and gone. Infants, then children, adolescents, adults, then dead. Your blood relations, your family, but strangers. Your legacy. Gone, but not gone. Forgotten but still here to be discovered.
Your poor wife, she's standing just inside the front door, looking at the names and dates just one last time. Her own name not among them. Poor white trash Misty Marie, with her rashy red hands and her pink scalp showing through her hair.
All this history and tradition she used to think would keep her safe. Insulate her, forever.
This isn't typical. She's not a boozer. In case anybody needs to be reminded, she's under a lot of stress. Forty-one fucking years old, and now she has no husband. No college degree. No real work experience—unless you count scrubbing the toilet . . . stringing cranberries for the Wilmot Christmas tree . . . All she's got is a kid and a mother-in-law to support. It's noon, and she's got four hours to pack everything of value in the house. Starting with the silverware, the paintings, the china. Everything they can't trust to a renter.
Your daughter, Tabitha, comes down from upstairs. Twelve years old, and all she's carrying is one little suitcase and a shoe box wrapped with rubber bands. With none of her winter clothes or boots. She's packed just a half dozen sundresses, some jeans, and her swimsuit. A pair of sandals, the tennis shoes she's wearing.
Your wife, she's snatching up a bristling ancient ship model, the sails stiff and yellowed, the rigging as fine as cobwebs, and she says, “Tabbi, you know we're not coming back.”
Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”
Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.
Your wife, your daughter, and your mother. The three women in your life.
Stuffing a sterling silver toast rack into her pillowcase, your wife yells, “Grace!”
The only sound is the roar of the vacuum cleaner from somewhere deep in the big house. The parlor, maybe the sunporch.
Your wife drags her pillowcase into the dining room. Grabbing a crystal bone dish, your wife yells, “Grace, we need to talk! Now!”
On the back of the door, the name “Peter” climbs as high as your wife can remember, just higher than her lips can stretch when she stands on tiptoe in her black pair of high heels. Written there, it says “Peter, age eighteen.”
The other names, Weston and Dorothy and Alice, are faded on the door. Smudged with fingerprints, but not painted over. Relics. Immortal. The heritage she's about to abandon.
Twisting a key in the lock of a closet, your wife throws back her head and yells, “Grace!”
Tabbi says, “What's wrong?”
“It's this goddamn key,” Misty says, “it won't work.”
And Tabbi says, “Let me see.” She says, “Relax, Mom. That's the key to wind up the grandfather clock.”
And somewhere the roar of the vacuum cleaner goes quiet.
Outside, a car rolls down the street, slow and quiet, with the driver leaning forward over the steering wheel. His sunglasses pushed up on top of his face, he stretches his head around, looking for a place to park. Stenciled down the side of his car, it says, “Silber International—Beyond the Limits of Being
You
.”
Paper napkins and plastic cups blow up from the beach with the deep thump and the word “fuck” set to dance music.
Standing beside the front door is Grace Wilmot, smelling like lemon oil and floor wax. Her smoothed gray head of hair stops a little below the height she was at age fifteen. Proof she's shrinking. You could take a pencil and mark behind the top of her head. You could write: “Grace, age seventy-two.”
Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace's hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.
Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You'll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it's time.”
And your wife, who doesn't have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”
Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.
Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn't that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn't you always want to paint?”
The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.
Why Grace Wilmot is even cleaning, God only knows. What they need to do is pack. This house: your house: the sterling silver tableware, the forks and spoons are as big as garden tools. Above the dining room fireplace is an oil painting of Some Dead Wilmot. In the basement is a glittering poisonous museum of petrified jams and jellies, antique homemade wines, Early American pears fossilized in amber syrup. The sticky residue of wealth and free time.
Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
Instead of packing anything of value, something they could sell, Grace brings this old box of paints. Tabbi has her shoe box of junk jewelry, her dress-up jewelry, brooches and rings and necklaces. A layer of loose rhinestones and pearls roll around in the bottom of the shoe box. A box of sharp rusted pins and broken glass. Tabbi stands against Grace's arm. Behind her, just even with the top of Tabbi's head, the door says “Tabbi, age twelve” and this year's date written in fluorescent pink felt-tipped pen.
The junk jewelry, Tabbi's jewelry, it belonged to these names.
All that Grace has packed is her diary. Her red leather diary and some light summer clothes, most of them pastel hand-knit sweaters and pleated silk skirts. The diary, it's cracked red leather with a little brass lock to keep it shut. Stamped in gold across the cover, it says “Diary.”
Grace Wilmot, she's always after your wife to start a diary.
Grace says, Start painting again.
Grace says, Go. Get out and visit the hospital more.
Grace says, Smile at the tourists.
Peter, your poor, frowning ogre of a wife looks at your mother and daughter and she says, “Four o'clock. That's when Mr. Delaporte comes to get the keys.”
This isn't their house, not anymore. Your wife, she says, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four, if it's not packed or locked up by then, you'll never see it again.”
Misty Marie, her wineglass has at least a couple swallows left in it. And seeing it there on the dining room table, it looks like the answer. It looks like happiness and peace and comfort. Like Waytansea Island used to look.
Standing here inside the front door, Grace smiles and says, “No Wilmot ever leaves this house forever.” She says, “And no one who comes here from the outside stays for long.”
Tabbi looks at Grace and says, “Granmy,
quand est-ce qu'on revient
?”
And her grandmother says,
“En trois mois,”
and pats Tabbi's head. Your old, useless mother goes back to feeding lint to the vacuum cleaner.
Tabbi starts to open the front door, to take her suitcase to the car. That rusted junk pile stinking of her father's piss.
Your piss.
And your wife asks her, “What did your grandmother just tell you?”
And Tabbi turns to look back. She rolls her eyes and says, “God! Relax, Mom. She only said you look pretty this morning.”
Tabbi's lying. Your wife's not stupid. These days, she knows how she really looks.
What you don't understand you can make mean anything.
Then, when she's alone again, Mrs. Misty Marie Wilmot, when no one's there to see, your wife goes up on her tiptoes and stretches her lips toward the back of the door. Her fingers spread against the years and ancestors. The box of dead paints at her feet, she kisses the dirty place under your name where she remembers your lips would be.
July 1
JUST FOR THE RECORD,
Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife's a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.
Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She's “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She's your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She's queen of the fucking slaves, and you're a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.
Dear sweet Peter, you're in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.
With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. Your hands, the fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist. Every muscle and tendon getting shorter and shorter. The muscles in your back, your spinal erectors, they shrink and pull your head back until it's almost touching your ass.
Can you feel this?
You all twisted and knotted up, this is the mess Misty drives three hours to see in the hospital. And that doesn't count the ferry ride. You're the mess Misty's married to.
This is the worst part of her day, writing this. It was your mother, Grace, who had the bright idea about Misty keeping a coma diary. It's what sailors and their wives used to do, Grace said, keep a diary of every day they were apart. It's a treasured old seafaring tradition. A golden old Waytansea Island tradition. After all those months apart, when they come back together, the sailors and wives, they trade diaries and catch up on what they missed. How the kids grew up. What the weather did. A record of everything. Here's the everyday shit you and Misty would bore each other with over dinner. Your mother said it would be good for you, to help you process through your recovery. Someday, God willing, you'll open your eyes and take Misty in your arms and kiss her, your loving wife, and here will be all your lost years, written here in loving detail, all the details of your kid growing up and your wife longing for you, and you can sit under a tree with a nice lemonade and have a nice time catching up.
Your mother, Grace Wilmot, she needs to wake up from her own kind of coma.
Dear sweet Peter. Can you feel this?
Everyone's in their own personal coma.
What you'll remember from before, nobody knows. One possibility is all your memory is wiped out. Bermuda triangulated. You're brain-damaged. You'll be born a whole new person. Different, but the same. Reborn.
Just for the record, you and Misty met in art school. You got her pregnant, and you two moved back to live with your mother on Waytansea Island. If this is stuff you know already, just skip ahead. Skim over it.
What they don't teach you in art school is how your whole life can end when you get pregnant.
You have endless ways you can commit suicide without
dying
dying.
And just in case you forgot, you're one chicken-shit piece of work. You're a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap. In case you don't remember, you ran the fucking car in the fucking garage and tried to suffocate your sorry ass with exhaust fumes, but no, you couldn't even do that right. It helps if you start with a full gas tank.
Just so you know how bad you look, any person in a coma longer than two weeks, doctors call this a persistent vegetative state. Your face swells and turns red. Your teeth start to drop out. If you're not turned every few hours, you get bedsores.
Today, your wife's writing this on your one hundredth day as a vegetable.
As for Misty's breasts looking like a couple dead carp, you should talk.
A surgeon implanted a feeding tube in your stomach. You've got a thin tube inserted into your arm to measure blood pressure. It measures oxygen and carbon dioxide in your arteries. You've got another tube inserted into your neck to measure blood pressure in the veins returning to your heart. You've got a catheter. A tube between your lungs and your rib cage drains any fluids that might collect. Little round electrodes stuck to your chest monitor your heart. Headphones over your ears send sound waves to stimulate your brain stem. A tube forced down your nose pumps air into you from a respirator. Another tube plugs into your veins, dripping fluids and medication. To keep them from drying out, your eyes are taped shut.
Just so you know how you're paying for this, Misty's promised the house to the Sisters of Care and Mercy. The big old house on Birch Street, all sixteen acres, the second you die the Catholic church gets the deed. A hundred years of your precious family history, and it goes right into their pocket.
The second you stop breathing, your family is homeless.
But don't sweat it, between the respirator and the feeding tube and the medication, you're not going to die. You couldn't die if you wanted to. They're going to keep you alive until you're a withered skeleton with machines just pumping air and vitamins through you.
Dear sweet stupid Peter. Can you feel this?
Besides, when people talk about
pulling the plug,
that's pretty much just a figure of speech. This stuff all looks to be hardwired. Plus there's the backup generators, the fail-safe alarms, the batteries, the ten-digit secret codes, the passwords. You'd need a special key to turn off the respirator. You'd need a court order, a malpractice liability waiver, five witnesses, the consent of three doctors.
So sit tight. Nobody's pulling any plugs until Misty figures a way out of this crappy mess you've left her in.
Just in case you don't remember, every time she comes to visit you, she wears one of those old junk jewelry brooches you gave her. Misty takes it off her coat and opens the pin of it. It's sterilized with rubbing alcohol, of course. God forbid you get any scars or staph infections. She pokes the pin of the hairy old brooch—real, real slow—through the meat of your hand or your foot or arm. Until she hits a bone or it pokes out the other side. When there's any blood, Misty cleans it up.
It's so nostalgic.
Some visits, she sticks the needle in you, stabbing again and again. And she whispers, “Can you feel this?”
It's not as if you've never been stuck with a pin.
She whispers, “You're still alive, Peter. How about
this
?”
You sipping your lemonade, reading this under a tree a dozen years from now, a hundred years from now, you need to know that the best part of each visit is sticking in that pin.
Misty, she gave you the best years of her life. Misty owes you nothing but a big fat divorce. Stupid, cheap fuck that you were, you were going to leave her with an empty gas tank like you always do. Plus, you left your hate messages inside everyone's walls. You promised to love, honor, and cherish. You said you'd make Misty Marie Kleinman into a famous artist, but you left her poor and hated and alone.
Can you feel this?
You dear sweet stupid liar. Your Tabbi sends her daddy hugs and kisses. She turns thirteen in two weeks. A teenager.
Today's weather is partly furious with occasional fits of rage.
In case you don't remember, Misty brought you lambskin boots to keep your feet warm. You wear tight orthopedic stockings to force the blood back up to your heart. She's saving your teeth as they fall out.
Just for the record, she still loves you. She wouldn't bother to torture you if she didn't.
You fucker. Can you feel this?