Milk (3 page)

“Gabe, Bruce—is this your rabbit?”

“Yeah,” they answer in unison, absorbed in their second helpings. A far cry from when they were seven or eight and couldn't sit still—they played soccer with cherry tomatoes, made gullies and rivers out of mashed potatoes and gravy; they stuffed their mouths with food, gulped milk, and fled from the table out the back door. Back then they chattered to me nonstop about sports, Legos, their pals, the science projects they dreamed up themselves involving ice cubes and dental floss, cardboard tubes and plastic soldiers.

“So how are we going to convince Dad to have this operation sooner?” Corb says.

I stop mid-bite. “Operation for what?”

“For his cataract. Come on, you're kidding,” he says when he sees my face. “You know about this. He's had it for a year.”

“He's never said anything about it. I swear to God. Not a word.” I shouldn't be surprised—I was the last to know about his high blood pressure, too, though he managed to keep it from Corb for nearly as long. “How serious is it?” I picture old people with bandaged eyes, in wraparound dark glasses.

Diane serves herself more salad. “Well, it needs to be fixed. Not such a big deal anymore these days. It's outpatient. As for how he's doing, he says it's like looking through waxed paper. He can't see to drive.”

“He can't drive? How does he get to the office? The grocery store?”

“He says he walks, but Diane drives him half the time,” Corb says.

“I can't believe he hasn't said anything to me! How does he read, how does he do his paperwork?”

“Magnifying glass.”

“Oh.” The magnifying glass I saw on his desk that I found so comforting, not to mention all those lamps.

After dinner Corb and I walk the dogs around the block, at Diane's insistence—the dogs are getting fat, she says. They have just two dogs now, a golden retriever and a collie; their spaniel died last year, hit by a car. I'm never sure of their dogs' names, or the names of any of their pets, each in turn gotten from the animal shelter and fussed over for approximately six months, at which point the new baby becomes simply one of the dogs or cats. Or the rabbit. Iguana. Hamster.

The real reason Diane insisted on this walk has nothing to do with the dogs, of course. She thinks I'm going to unburden myself to Corb, about Jackson. She should know better. At best we cover factual information.

“Why did you leave him?” Corb asks.

“His drinking.” There. I've said it. It's both the truth and not the full truth.

Corb nods uncomfortably. My brother avoids personal confidences—mine, his, anyone's. A legacy of our childhood, I've come to believe.

He makes another well-meaning stab at it. “So what will you do?” His complexion is dark, like our mother's was, hollows under deep-set eyes that might be ironic, might be tragic.

“I don't know,” I say. “Live here maybe.”

Simultaneously we notice where we are and stop—exactly across the street from the house we grew up in. Which is bound to happen if you're at Corb's house and you go on a walk around the block. A walk the two of us have managed to avoid in all the years Corb has lived here.

“Don't you find it strange,” I say, “that you wound up living so close to this house?”

Dangerous territory for Corb. I know he won't answer. As if on cue both dogs sit down, the golden retriever holding the leash in his mouth.

“Remember riding down this street in inner tubes?” Corb says.

I chuckle, but only a little. “Yeah.” Any mention of the past makes us nervous, leery of each other.

“The water seemed so deep.”

“It was,” I say to him. “We were children.”

The water was up to our waists. Whenever it poured, the street flooded; the gutters became rivers of dirty brown rainwater. Kids ran from their houses screaming, throwing down inner tubes and riding them to the end of the block.

We weren't raised as our father was (at least until the Depression), in a grand house with a pet goat and a dog cart and servants; no, our house—this house we're across the street from now—is a one-story ranch, its flat roof strewn with chips of dolomite, which was the style after World War II. Ours was the first house to be built in the orange grove; this was to be a premier neighborhood. It never quite reached its potential, however, and for a time it was downright seedy by San Marino standards, bordering on a so-so section of Pasadena and containing a few too many vacant lots—nobody wanted to build here. And when eventually that changed and houses were built, they were either peculiar or atrocious: with towering doors reminiscent of cathedrals, or pagoda-like roofs, or golf course landscaping—all lawn, no shrubs or trees (to better display the house, presumably). Or all bonsai trees and hedges-trimmed so that they resembled poodles, barbells, or flat top mesas.

Now the neighborhood is toney enough, but then everything in San Marino is, any garage converted to a house, any square foot of land. There are no vacant lots.

Our house, though, the house we grew up in, remains down-cast-looking and sad, the ivy fences brown and dying, trees pruned awkwardly.

At one time, a Japanese blind shaded our front windows, a freestanding object of papery wood held in place by a frame. The blind fell down years ago, never to be replaced by the various owners that followed, and now, all that remains is the frame itself, set out before the house like a picture frame missing its picture.

You'd never know this house was featured in the newspaper once for being “modern,” with its cork floors and children's bedrooms that opened into a playroom and Japanese/Mediterranean-influenced landscaping. All our mother's doing, her designs, her wrangling with contractors and interior decorators, her always wanting more—a swimming pool, an enclosed patio—our father insisting they couldn't afford it, she insisting they could,
she
could, she had her own money. My father saying no, enough; her saying no, never enough.

But it's not a remarkable house. Only remarkable in what went on inside, that neither Corb nor I can recall. It's a blank. “What else do you remember?” I've asked him over the years. All he ever mentions are things like riding down the street in inner tubes, or playing kick-the-can—things outside the house. I ask him again now as we walk the dogs: “What else do you remember?”

He won't meet my eyes. “Not much.”

“You were older than me.”

“Hardly anything.”

This house with its missing Japanese blind appears surprised, exposed, caught in the act. Naked: a person rudely shorn of hair and other adornments—jewelry, makeup, eyebrows, lashes. Humiliated and ashamed.

“How come I never believe you?” I ask.

“I don't remember anything, Theo. Do you?”

“It's a very short list, what I remember.”

“Well?”

“Well what?” I know he doesn't mean for me to tell him: the rule is that we don't exchange memories, memories from inside the house, even though I always ask.

“You don't remember either,” he says. He seems glad of it, almost gloating.

“Tell me one thing. One.”

“There isn't anything to tell, Theo. She wore braces on her teeth.”

“Braces?” It's like falling or stepping off a carousel, disorienting. “Why braces?” I say.

“The shock treatments. They put in the mouthpiece wrong. She had to wear braces after that.”

“Braces.” I can see them before me, floating, just braces and teeth. Metal, no lips or face. “What else do you remember? What about Charlotte?”

He flinches, doesn't like to hear her name. In fact, I'm not sure we've ever said her name out loud. Charlotte was our sister who had died in her sleep as an infant. SIDS, they call it now.

“But you were old enough to remember her. Did you hold her? Did she smile at you?”

He walks faster, the dogs trotting ahead of him. “I'm not stonewalling you, Theo. I really don't remember.”

“But you remembered the braces.”

“That just happened. Forget it, Theo. There isn't anything there. It happened a long time ago; it's gone.”

He always says that when I press him. And then we drop the subject for years.

T
WO

Inventory

I have exactly nine memories of my mother:

1. Her brushing my teeth with Nivea cream instead of toothpaste once, holding me so tight I couldn't escape or tell her she'd grabbed the wrong tube.

2. Spanking me with a hairbrush bristle side down. A hot, spreading, burning sensation.

3. Putting my hair up in pin curls, digging in the bobby pins crossways, my pin curls hard and sticky with clear green hair spray she kept in a spray bottle.

4. A friend is over for the afternoon when I soil my under pants. I must be four or five, too old to have made such a mistake. My mother scoops the mess out with a spoon into the toilet, the bathroom door not closed all the way so that my friend witnesses my humiliation.

5. My mother sitting in a chair filing her nails, a towel across her knees.

6. Holding her hand at Charlotte's funeral. The warmth of her white glove, how her hand trembles.

7. The middle of the afternoon; we're alone. A tumbler of crème de menthe left on an end table. She's gone to answer the phone in the next room. I try a sip.

8. Her wearing a light blue dress with strawberries on it.

9. With Corb, finding her the morning of her death. Being the ones to discover her. Drawing back the curtains, calling her name, shaking her. Our father is in the kitchen fixing us breakfast.

She'd overdosed, though we had no way of knowing that. All we knew was that her face was bluish, still.

Other memories are not specifically of her, but of a time when she was still alive, as in the afternoon with the crème de menthe: she is in another room or in another place, yet in this dimension.

1. Me at the dinner table forced to sit there until I finish my vegetables; occasionally Corb floats by to tell me to make believe they're candy.

2. The dinners she prepared: lamb croquettes, parsnips, twice-baked potatoes. Crab, the white flesh tinged with red. Foods that make me blanch still, except for the cottage cheese sprinkled with sugar—a treat or an apology? Or a bribe?

3. Going to the hospital where my mother is a patient.

4. Being made to sit in the basement among the cans of food.

5. A long hallway in our house that could be closed off with doors, until it was pitch black, a place I called
the woods
, and avoided.

6. Scuffing up and down the hallway in my mother's castoff high heels.

7. My dollhouse.

8. Waking up screaming so loud the neighbors could hear me.

9. A recurring nightmare from that time: I'm in my room, the curtains are closed, everything appears as it is in real life. Then suddenly the lights switch on and off, on and off, the curtains open and shut madly, whipping back and forth as if in a wind; things go upside down, become cartoons flying in my face.

10. I twist up a corner of the dress I am wearing and suck on it.

11. Nap time in my room. The curtains are closed. I have to go to the bathroom but am afraid to leave my bed. Afraid of
the woods
. I squeeze my legs together, imagining what it would be like to pee into my toy pots and pans.

12. I do not sleep during naps. I watch the door. Sometimes I play “here is the church, here is the steeple” with my hands, making a convolution of my fingers until I can't remember where they connect to my body. I choose one finger to stare and stare at, willing this finger into numbness. Is this before or after Charlotte died? I might ask this of every memory.

Some memories are ones given to me by others, ones I don't recall myself but have sought out. The hospital, for instance. When we went to visit her—just once—she didn't know who we were, her memory blighted by shock treatments (my father).

The most recent: the braces on her teeth. A result of a shock treatment improperly done, the mouthpiece the wrong size (Corb).

The eight to ten hard drinks a day she consumed, in addition to the tranquilizers and sleeping pills she ingested (Evan, my mother's nurse who stayed on after she died).

How, if a doctor wouldn't give her a prescription, she'd drive all over town until she found one who would (also Evan).

Her suicide was the last of three attempts. In the first, she saved up pills in the hospital, then took them all at once. In the second, at home, she slit her wrists, then got into bed. My father found her early the next morning, drenched in blood. An ambulance was called, we children told nothing, her bedroom cleaned while we were at school (Evan again). I remember getting dressed for Brownies that day, long after the ambulance left. I remember the ambulance arriving, the medics having trouble getting the stretcher around the corners of the hallway. Go back to bed, my father said, everything's fine.

Also not my own memories, but ones I've collected, are the things people said about her, anecdotes, facts.

When she was a baby, she spit peas all over the walls of the kitchen. This is the only memory her sister, Aunt Lyla, has told me. I knew nothing about their parents, my grandparents, only that my grandmother died before I was born and my grandfather later on, when I was four or five. We didn't see him much, only on occasion. There were no pictures of these grandparents displayed, nor were there any of my mother and Aunt Lyla together as girls, although I believe some existed once upon a time.

Other things people said about my mother:

She was afraid of horses.

She was beautiful. Smart, talented. They mentioned her skill in Japanese flower arrangements, her lovely thank-you notes.

She was president of the women students at Stanford and graduated magna cum laude.

She rolled bandages for the Red Cross. She volunteered as a docent at the Henry E. Huntington Library.