REDHEAD
(Literary magazine, “Santa Monica Review,” Spring 2011)
On the morning of the celebration for Thomas’s dead wife Isabel a chilly rain fell, unseasonal for late May, though these days who could bank on seasonal. Seeing the umbrellas and raincoats, the quick dashes for cover as the clan gathered, Morna was glad to be in her apartment, warm and snug, settling in for her first nicotine fix of the day. She scanned the crowd, wondering which one of them would be the next to die, casting her vote with a woman who stood at the edge of a small group, skittish and curiously alone. They might be genuinely sad down there, but from Morna’s vantage point their appropriate little faces looked like bereavement emoticons. Morna hadn’t really been part of this clan since graduation, and she didn’t wish to be part of it. They were sons and daughters of toney-brained parents: neurosurgeons and novelists, economists and astronauts, eco-entrepreneurs and bishops. “My dad’s an insurance adjuster,” Morna used to say when people asked in the early days of her freshman year. “And my mom’s in HR.” They gave her uncomfortable, vaguely scandalized looks, and the conversation would grind to a halt. By second semester she had a new story. Her mom was leading HIV education programs all over Africa. Her dad was a neuroscientist who delivered regular reports on the state of the post-millenial brain.
The rain began a new tirade, pelting the sidewalk, clearing the small crowd that had stopped to exchange condolences. Emptied of people, the courtyard berated her. She should have made alternative plans for the day, something to distract from the unfurling drama across the street which, though it held no more emotional juice for Morna than a back page news story, was impossible not to watch. It had been one of the gossip items circulating for the past few weeks among her former college classmates. Married before graduation, dead by twenty-five from a stage four something-or-other.
A person in a black trench coat darted across the courtyard, exited through the iron gate, and crossed the street. He went into the newsstand and a minute later retraced his path back to the church. Inside the gate he stopped. It was Thomas, standing in the downpour with his face to the sky, his famous ringlets soaked and punished into lifeless strands. He remained there for what seemed like a long time under the circumstances, knees bent as if he might collapse, trench coat no longer repellent under the sheer volume of rain.
She dressed in thirty seconds, grabbing the most available clothes—black skirt, black sweater, knee-high zippered black boots, her own black trench coat. In the elevator she swiped her lips with mauve lipstick. By the time she reached the churchyard, taking the short cut, splashing through puddles, Thomas was gone.
She entered the church tentatively. Would Thomas have chosen this church if he’d known she lived across the street? She’d only been here twice before, both times for dance concerts, both times thinking of it as a place both hip and historical more than religious, though it was true they held Sunday services every week. She stood at the back, behind a packed house, standing room only. For an event that had been billed as a celebration, the atmosphere was forbiddingly solemn. A male cellist seated on the stage in a pocket of celestial blue light played an adagio solo. Morna vaguely recognized the guy from college though she couldn’t have said his name. He rocked back and forth with each stroke of his bow. Behind him a harpist awaited her turn in the shadows, head bowed. The Facebook announcement had encouraged people to bring offerings—artworks, poems, songs—it was so like Thomas to want to dress an event like this in the gauzy garb of art. He was a painter with flirtatious blue eyes that sometimes turned inexplicably inward, a low center of gravity, swarthy skin from his mother’s Italian-American family, and hair that, when dry, fell past his jaw in Little Lord Fauntleroy ringlets. His congenial manner drew people in and hid his artistic ambition. Morna had gone out with Thomas herself at the beginning of junior year, but broke up with him after spring break in a preemptive strike, sensing he was about to break up with her. He’d been an intense lover, but spacey and inattentive, and after a while Morna had lost track of who she was with him.
She scanned the crowd, looking for a place to settle, trying to match the backs of necks and cant of shoulders with classmates she expected would be there. Christopher Johnston, Sarah Bernstein, Hope Finley.
Only a few feet from her Thomas leaned against the wall. He had shed his soggy trench coat in a heap on the floor, but his black shirt and pressed black pants were also drenched, and locks of his wet hair shed drops like leaky spigots. His body shocked Morna; it was so much scrawnier than when she’d known him, and his once-swarthy skin now exuded an unhealthy pallor. His torso quaked, and a filament of mucus hung from his nose, swinging like a broken spider web. She had never seen him cry before, and if she’d ever tried to imagine it she would have pictured eloquent, high-minded grief, a behavior abstract as dance, not this ghastly, snotty, quivery display.
He felt her stare and looked over, eyes unguarded, surprise and recognition bubbling up through his sorrow. Stumbling to her, he laid his wet head on her shoulder, compelling her to drop her umbrella and lay an arm around his back. “Oh Thomas, I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
It was not possible that she had ever wished Isabel dead, that she had chanted to herself after learning of Thomas’s imminent marriage—less than six months after her own breakup with him—Iz is not.
Everyone loved Isabel. Morna only knew her from afar; she would see her eating lunch at the Commons, sometimes swimming at the gym. She was a big woman, tall and soft-bodied, with Callipygian hips, long dark hair, and a languid, French-y manner that Morna thought pretentious. She dressed in skirts that played around her calves, and she pinned up her hair asymmetrically, fastening it with whatever twig or chopstick or bone was available. When Morna saw Isabel she was often laughing or eating, her full mouth wide open as she savored whatever was before her.
The cellist had played the last long note, and a man approached the podium, no one Morna recognized; he was dark-haired and suited, someone long accustomed to being a full-grown man.
Morna was giving her entire strength to holding Thomas upright. She looked for a chair she might guide him to, but saw nothing nearby. Sound gusted through the church as the so-called celebrants reassembled themselves, whispering, changing positions, readying for what was next. No one seemed to see Morna’s predicament.
“I can’t do this,” Thomas said, directing his soggy words straight into Morna’s ear.
“I’m Philip, Isabel’s oldest brother,” the man said. “I know you’re all here because you loved Isabel as much as we did.”
“Were you sitting somewhere?” Morna whispered.
“Up front.” Thomas’s addled blue irises were inscrutable.
The most efficient way to get up front was down the center aisle. She off-loaded her trench coat and heaped it on top of his, secured her grip around his waist, and the two shuffled forward, Thomas’s head dipped, angled slightly toward her. Her face was on him too, so she would not have to acknowledge the scores of inquisitive eyes they were passing, like so many neon post-its. Philip was making bloated claims about death and friendship, but Morna ignored him. Under her grip Thomas still shivered, and his wet clothing gave off a peculiar doggy odor.
The first seat in the front row on the right hand side was empty. Thomas collapsed into it gratefully, still gripping her hand, oblivious to the fact that she was stranded in the aisle, hovering blimp-like above the assembled company. Someone at the end of the aisle shifted over, and after a flurry of movement a seat opened up; she took it, willing her own disappearance. As a redhead her personality had to be constantly managed. She never knew how big or small to be, how soft or loud, if she thought too well of herself, or not nearly enough. Her hair was an unfortunate light rust-red, a shade that made it hard to find clothing, that faded in summer to a grandmotherly grayish orange, and always suggested the possibility of a histrionic character or white trash origins.
When Philip stopped talking, she dared to look up. For the first time she noticed the huge black-and-white poster of Isabel mounted at one side of the stage. In it Isabel was laughing, her lips parted, so you could see the tip of her tongue that Morna knew for a fact was large and avid. The high contrast reproduction accentuated the extremes of her face—the black of her eyes and her hair, the pallor of her skin, the features themselves so big Morna had never been able to decide if they were beautiful or garish.
Thomas bent over to retrieve a paper under his chair. He slipped it onto Morna’s lap. A poem by Pablo Neruda: “I Remember You as You Were.”
“Read it for me,” he whispered. “I can’t.” He didn’t wait for her answer; he knew she would. “He was Iz’s favorite poet.” She heard in his querulous whisper a need that, in their eight months together, she had never witnessed.
The hall was cadaver-quiet when she mounted to the podium, except for a slight thrumming that she understood to be rain. The lights above her were bright, theatrical, not like church. It was a dream, faces you knew and didn’t know merging in front of you, saving you one moment, deriding you the next. The only face that came clear to her was Thomas’s, bleached and blotchy, raised to her like a cistern.
She read slowly so as not to trip over the unfamiliar words. She could feel herself flushing. She had the telltale skin of a redhead; with the slightest wisp of emotion in the air—her own or anyone else’s—blood rushed to her doomed vessels like water to a Bangladeshi flood plain. “Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul,” she concluded. Done. “Neruda was Isabel’s favorite poet,” she said quickly. Sniffling and rain mingled with the echo of her platform-heeled boots as she descended, step by clunking step.
* * *
She stationed herself at the food table alone, suddenly ravenous. There were chicken skewers, sushi, spanikopita, bruschetta with chevre and salmon spread, brownies and petit fours. White wine was being served, and no one seemed to be holding back, as if now were the real celebration.
She had abandoned Thomas, or had he abandoned her—like the entire history of their relationship it was impossible to tell. Anointed by his tragedy, he was deluged with caretakers; everyone wanted to stand in his aura. He hung on them, drank their condolences. His color was regularizing, and his ringlets were springing back to life.
There were bowls of garlic-infused olive oil, and the warm bread was porous so the oil settled perfectly into its pockets. Eventually she would have to talk to people—she’d seen a few former acquaintances eyeing her—but for now she had tunnel vision. Olive oil, food of the gods, dripped from her lips, and she leaned forward, grabbing a napkin to protect her sweater.
“You remind me so much of her.” A woman who could only be Isabel’s mother stood in front of Morna, studying her with a frank gaze. She was tall as Isabel had been, with a corona of upswept hair that billowed in certain places inexplicably, not shiny like Isabel’s, but still adamantly brown. She had the same full regal body that Isabel had had, though her breasts had capitulated to gravity, and maybe grief. Silver disks, costume jewelry, hung from her ears, and a matching disk lay at the base of her throat. The only nod to funeral tradition was a crocheted black shawl over her ecru rayon dress.
“I’m Esther, Isabel’s mother.” She reached out and took Morna’s oily hand.
”Your reading, you make me weep.” The French accent was unmistakable. “Such a gift. Morna, that is your name? When you read I can see my Isabel standing right next to you.”
Esther smiled through a fresh round of tears. “I knew it will be this way. I am a piece of seaweed.” Her fingers warbled, became minnows, swam out to sea.
“Yes,” Morna said.
“I piece her together. Everyone here is a little bit of her—you know, DNA. I learn many things I never know before. Daughters are secrets tight from their mothers.” Esther sighed, and a ghastly, guttural animal sound erupted from her, followed by a pudding’ish burp. Was this a prelude to something much worse? Morna waited, terrified.
“It will get better,” Morna said. “They say it gets better.”
“Oh. Do you really think so? I don’t believe that.”
Morna hated to contradict people, and she really had no idea. Philip appeared and wanted to talk to his mother privately.
“Philip, this is Morna, friend of Isabel. Her reading is so lovely?”
“Yes, lovely.” But he didn’t smile, didn’t even seem to see Morna despite her red hair. Esther, before being whisked away, leaned down to Morna’s ear, bringing an entire world of scents, along with her nimbus of grief. “Thank you for taking care of our Thomas. I like to know you. You have some stories for me, I think.”
* * *
Whitney Vandermeer accosted Morna. She and her boyfriend were both in medical school. “I work in film,” Morna said, when pressed. She had no actual film job at that moment. Isabel had been dead for four weeks, the exact amount of time that Morna had been un-partnered and unemployed.
“Have we seen any of your work?” Whitney wanted to know.
Morna smiled hard. There were the YouTube pieces with the stuffed armadillo, but god, she wouldn’t mention them. After a year and a half of soul-killing production assistant work, she was up for a script supervisor position on a low budget slasher film. She’d never been a script supervisor before, but she was a quick study and had cobbled together a resume that led to the conclusion of experience; not an outright lie, only a survival strategy. “I’ll keep you posted,” she told Whitney.
She owed Thomas a goodbye. He was still surrounded, still wallowing in embraces. She tapped his back. He spun, stared at her without comprehension, his blue eyes retracted. Behind him his pack of followers seemed annoyed by the interruption. She thought he would thank her for bailing him out, but when after a moment the thanks failed to come, she was flustered. “’Bye,” she said. “Later.” She fled without a hug, a touch, a further word of sympathy.
* * *
Back in her apartment she squinted in the mirror, trying to discern the structural underpinnings of her appearance. She looked nothing like Isabel. Isabel looked nothing like her. Morna’s hair had no sheen; she was short and skinny; she had breasts like mosquito bites as Thomas once said. What had Esther seen?
The window remained a magnet. She sucked a cigarette and watched people leaving, lingering for wistful goodbyes at the gate under the partially clearing skies, exchanging cards and suggesting dinner plans on which they would never make good. She watched the caterers loading the empty trays into a small white van, oblivious to the famous New Yorkers buried in the churchyard beneath the cobblestones. She wondered if Isabel had been buried somewhere. If she’d stayed longer she might have found out. She thought of one of the few times, maybe the only time, she’d been face to face with Isabel. Morna was coming out of the Astor Place subway station, and Thomas and Isabel were suddenly there standing by the cube, arm in arm, idling like tourists. Thomas made the introductions: “Morna, this is my wife, Isabel.”Isabel held an ice cream cone that was drooling onto her hand. “Sorry,” she said, smiling but scarcely looking at Morna, intent on her cone, and accustomed to being the look-ee, not the look-er. She wore a lavender, cleavage-featuring sundress, and her hair was upswept as her mother’s had been today, casual and swank. As Thomas fed Morna the pro forma status questions—work? relationships? grad school plans?—Isabel’s broad raspberry tongue, busy and unabashed in its appetite, devoted itself to the cone. “Morna’s dad is a neuroscientist,” Thomas informed Isabel. “You know—brainy about brains.” Morna smiled wanly, irked that her father was being corralled to impress this woman. What about Morna herself—had Thomas even bothered to mention to Isabel that he and Morna had once been lovers?
“Beautiful hair,” Isabel said as they parted.
* * *
Morna and Thomas had met when he had a show of his paintings on campus. She went because her roommate was going, and she stayed because she was riveted by Thomas. He wore a red shirt and a Jackson Pollack tie, and he guided groups of fawning admirers from painting to painting, explaining the genesis of each. They were huge canvasses, eight or ten feet tall, with bright colors overlaid with gaunt, face-less figures. Morna outstayed the other visitors. She and Thomas walked the dark paths of the campus then later drank wine in his room. “What about you?” he said. She told him about the movies she made, silly little movies that she edited on her computer, wheezy little sound tracks, noir’ish lighting, not more than three minutes long.
“Can I see them?”
“They’re stupid.”
“I need to see them,” he said and reached out to touch her fiery hair.
His paintings confounded her. They seemed so random. How did he know what to paint? He had no clear answer. Maybe he was wired that way, he said.
Once he stretched a canvas for her, and they went to the studio together, the place where the art majors worked, off limits to others. It was a warehouse-like building with high ceilings and cement walls; overhead was a hissing, eructating duct system with white pipes wide as sewer drains. Each student was assigned to an area around the periphery or next to an island at the room’s center. It was mostly deserted that Saturday morning, but for one woman named Anne who greeted them with a collegial wave and returned to her encaustic work. A few months later Morna, an anthropology major, would make a documentary film about the tribe of artists that frequented this studio.
Thomas laid Morna’s blank canvas on one of his easels, adjusted his table of paints and brushes so they both had access to them, and turned his attention to a painting in progress.
She looked at her blank rectangular canvas and tried to see what it told her. It was eighteen inches square, tiny compared to his. Were there shadowy people traversing its snowy surface? Were there philosophical ideas that could be embodied by choosing to make a plume of yellow or blue? Was there a girl, maybe, floating on a bed, looking blankly at the viewer out of the middle of nowhere?
The light from outside bore through the dusty windows and collided too brightly with the white of the canvas, diminishing the scanty threads of ideas she’d come with. Thomas had begun applying paint. As if in a trance he moved slowly from the paint table to his canvas, to an evaluating position several feet away, then back to his canvas with more paint. He had been known to perform this ritualistic dance for eight to ten hours at a time.
A draft barreled through, and she put on her coat. The warehouse was vast and industrial; it invited nothing, encouraged nothing. Thomas liked having a place to work where nothing intruded on his own expressive outpouring.
Morna stood over the tubes of paint—the vermillion and burnt sienna and cadmium blue. If you chose vermillion how did you ever retreat from the shapes and feelings vermillion unleashed, even when you understood it to be the wrong choice?
After an hour and a half her canvas was still blank. From a kitchenette in the corner of the studio Thomas brought coffee for her, and for Anne, and for himself. He laid the cups down wordlessly, a quick nod to Morna, then resumed his work. Another man and woman arrived, silencing their chat at the doorway as if entering a cathedral. They settled into their areas, locking quickly into the work at hand. Ashamed of her glaringly empty canvas, Morna turned her back to everyone, walked close to her easel, brush filled with a blob of green.
A few inches from the fibrous surface, she stared at its incorrigible white. Under such scrutiny creativity was impossible. She brought the brush to her hair and stroked. The hair stood out from her scalp so she could scarcely feel the cool paint.
* * *
Esther wanted Morna to visit. She could take the Decamp #33 bus from Port Authority, get off at Bloomfield Avenue in Glen Ridge. Esther would pick her up there. Would this Saturday work? Morna listened to the message three times. It was the Tuesday after the Saturday service. Morna had been trying not to think of the event, hadn’t mentioned it to a soul, had not been in touch with Thomas, nor he with her, but there had been a flurry of group e-mails and Facebook entries about how unspeakably moving it had been.
She couldn’t believe how detailed Esther’s message was. A similar message from her own mother would have been vague and conditional, but Esther was not, apparently, going to take no for an answer.
After two sixteen-hour days that week on the slasher film, she’d been fired due to incomplete notes, and since then she’d been sleeping until noon, but on Saturday she was up by eight, weaving past the drunks and pushers at Port Authority by nine thirty, and sitting on a bus to New Jersey by ten fifteen. The bus galumphed through the Lincoln Tunnel, stopped once in Newark then began its labyrinthine crawl through the New Jersey suburbs.
Esther had asked her to bring a copy of the Neruda poem, and stupidly she’d agreed. She didn’t have the poem, didn’t have time to seek out a copy, could have e-mailed Thomas, but didn’t want to get into it.
The bus let her out on a main drag that skirted the edge of a residential neighborhood. The bus driver had assured Morna that this was the right place, but she stepped out unsure, a conspicuous stranger. People made armpit jokes about New Jersey, but this wasn’t half bad, a rolling park on one side of the street with enormous, newly-leafed maples, on the other side commodious, well-maintained houses.
It took her a moment to realize that the maroon Cadillac on the opposite side of the street was waiting for her. The driver was waving—Henry, Mr. Barrett, Isabel’s father. Morna had seen him at the funeral. He was tall and quiet and formal, a black hole of a man, neither French nor interesting, not at all like Esther. He made no attempt at small talk as they drove the short distance to the Barrett home.
“My wife is inside,” Mr. Barrett said. “I’m afraid I must go to work. She’ll bring you back to the bus stop herself.”
He drove off, leaving Morna on the sidewalk in front of a large, two-story wood-frame house, Cape Cod blue, with a well-tended front yard and a porch. It was comfortable certainly, but conventional, and she couldn’t imagine pretentious Isabel growing up here, playing soccer or kick the can with the other kids on the cul de sac.
The door opened before Morna even knocked, and Esther vacuumed her in, breathless and maternal as she kissed Morna on both cheeks and ushered her into the living room. Lace curtains dimmed the light from outside so Morna had to blink several times before the room came to life. Small wooden tables with doilies and teacups. Chests with glass doors holding vases and china. A grandfather clock. A bay window with leaded glass and a window seat. It was a room that whispered of past generations, past centuries.
Esther sat Morna on the couch and took a seat next to her. She seized both of Morna’s hands in hers. “I look forward to this all week.” She sighed. “I don’t do so well. And you?”
In the church Esther had looked not young exactly, but sophisticated and stylish in the way of European actresses, embracing her age like Sophia Loren. In her own home, however, she seemed quite a bit older; her skin had a waxy transparency; it flaked a little; and tick-like dollops of ivory makeup clung to her hairline. Beneath her navy skirt her thick legs were sausaged into hose that looked as if they’d been prescribed. That and her powdery lavender scent suggested that Esther was closer in age to Morna’s grandmother than to her mother.
“It’s hard to stop thinking about her,” Morna agreed.
“Do you bring the poem?”
Morna’s palms in Esther’s capacious hands began to slicken. “I’m so sorry. I forgot.”
The skin of Esther’s face, unhinged from its underlying bone structure, slipped a little. “Oh well, not today. Another day.” She withdrew her hands and shored up a flagging section of her hair, gazing at the carpet, absorbing the disappointment. When she looked back up she seemed to be pitying Morna, as if she understood Morna’s pathetic life precisely.
“When you read that poem you break my heart. Then you put it together. You know Isabel. If someone is known—what more can there be?”
“I won’t forget next time,” Morna said, miserable in her failure, on the verge of tears and finding it unbearable that she would cry in Esther’s presence for so much the wrong reasons.
“I have prepare us some lunch. First—an aperitif? I show you photos of Isabel I think you have not seen.”
Morna excused herself to the bathroom to regroup, and when she came out Esther had laid out two delicate glasses on a small doily-covered table. On her lap was an open photo album, and she leaned against the couch back, her face awash in a cascade of silent tears that brought with it snail trails of eyeliner. Morna wondered if she should offer a gesture of comfort, or if Esther preferred to ride it out alone. After a moment of internal debate she extended a tentative hand to Esther’s lap, squeezed the soft navy skirt and the womanly thigh beneath.
Esther regarded Morna gratefully, almost lovingly, and Morna was relieved that, for once, she had made the right choice. With the back of her hand, Esther swabbed her tears. “With her sister—she make things difficile, you know.”
Morna lifted her eyebrows. She had identified the sister at the funeral from a distance. She was smaller than Isabel and Esther, with more pointed features. Morna didn’t even know her name, let alone how she might be making things difficult.
Esther lifted her glass. “A ton santé.” She drank with a considering, possibly warning eye on Morna. “I think I understand why Isabel keep you to herself.”
The photo album documented the activities of a young family: birthday parties, backyard picnics, sailing in Maine, a family trip to Washington, D.C. Esther pointed to Isabel in each photograph. At nine or ten she’d been lanky and long-haired, orb-eyed, face always angled to the camera and painted with her signature, full-lipped, captivating smile.
“She is born to joy. Some people are that way—from babies.” They gazed at a sequence of images that captured Isabel doing a cartwheel, wearing a white skirt and white tank top. In the final picture her arms were raised in a triumphant V, her smile goofy, the image of an endearing entrepreneurial show-off, someone who might, as an adult, be either scorned or admired.
Morna’s mother did not keep photograph albums, so Morna could not say how the summer vacations of her childhood had been spent. So many days, so many hours, it was scary to tally them. Swimming at the local pool was all she could remember, coming home in the evenings dizzy and slightly nauseated after so many hours in the water, waking up in the mornings still smelling of chlorine, but was there a single picture recording those days of swimming? If so, she’d never seen it.
Esther skipped over the pictures of the other three children—the sister, Philip, and one other brother, Peter—but Morna noticed that there weren’t as many photos of them. Isabel was clearly favored. Even in the group photographs she showed up most clearly, always in the center, always smiling, her fierce focus on the camera’s lens burning through the fourth wall. Was Esther aware of feeding Isabel’s ego, of making her feel more important than the others?
“Oh, there’s Dimitri,” Esther said, laughing quietly. “You remember that story? I always wonder what happen to him.”
Morna had not had any breakfast, and after a few sips of the sweet white wine she was light-headed. Alcohol in the afternoon was surely stronger than at night, she thought, but Esther had almost finished her glassful, and it seemed to have energized her. She rose suddenly, as if she could un-wilt herself at will.
“Viens. À table! You tell Isabel stories. Bring your glass.”
Sunlight streamed into the dining room, flirted with the polished silver, the water and wine glasses, the hand-painted china. “We have a bit of soup, a bit of sandwich.”
Esther would not allow help, made Morna sit, pour the wine if she insisted on doing something, and soon they both sat with bowls of white bean soup, plates of ham and cheese sandwiches on crusty bread, glasses of chilled white wine, less sweet than what they’d been drinking earlier. Did they always dine this way, Morna wondered, or was her visit an occasion?
“I am alone many days. Everyone is back in their life. Henry, he lose himself in work. He take off days, but he must go back now. I am terrible company. The sadness, it comes in like the wind. But you know this.” She sighed. “I talk too much. Eat. Drink. Then perhaps you talk.”
Morna thought of her own days as an unemployed person, treading a rail of loneliness, her efforts to find work erratic and made more difficult by her tendency to sleep until mid-afternoon.
Esther took up her spoon and slowly stirred the dollop of pesto into the sea of steaming white beans. A tear plunked into her bowl, rolling slightly before dissolving into the soup. She began to laugh.“My life, you see. Cry in the sugar bowl. Cry in the soup.” She laid down her spoon and took up her glass. “Merci.” She drank, chuckled, drank some more.
Morna was on a high wire, aware she would soon have to speak.
“You come to the church without a boyfriend. You have a boyfriend? A husband?”
Morna stirred her soup in the same contemplative way Esther had, the pesto swirling out into patterns like tea leaves, spelling obscure meanings, possibly lies, the one true thing microscopic, and for all practical purposes, invisible.
“My boyfriend dumped me.” The word dumped, spoken aloud, embodied her humiliation perfectly. Julian, boring Julian, had given her the boot. Julian, who had worshipped her for over a year, begged to move in with her; now, only six months after moving down from Boston, he was gone. He said Morna was too cynical for him, and he left her in the weeds to decompose.
“Oh, no!” Esther was indignant. “This man knows nothing. That is what I tell Isabel in high school when her first boy, as you say, ‘dumped’ her. Does she tell you? Heartbroken.” Remembering, Esther laughed, eyes floating in tidal grief. “I let her stay home from school. We eat ice cream together. But it is good for her, it make her tough. A beautiful redhead like you who can read a poem so beautiful—this man is no good for you.”
“Thank you,” Morna said.
“In the end she is lucky with Thomas. From the beginning he is so broken, but he always loves her strongly. She is fragile, but he is more fragile. He does not call. Do you think he is all right?”
Thomas, robust and beloved by all, had never been fragile. Morna couldn’t stand to think of the way he’d used her in his mourning as he’d always used her. Nor could she stand to think of how he’d once sat at this table, sucking up to Esther and earning her adoration. “He’ll be all right,” Morna said. She wanted to steer the conversation to Esther’s own life, her years in France, but any subject other than Isabel seemed disrespectful.
“I cannot stop thinking of her feet. In the end they hurt so much, you know? And there is nothing to do. Not a thing to do.”
* * *
“Was I a happy child?” Morna asked her mother on the phone.
“Oh, Morna, what’s the problem now?”
“No problem, I’m just curious. Was I mostly happy, or mostly unhappy?”
“You had tantrums.”
Morna didn’t remember tantrums.
“That black watch coat you hated when you were in second grade—remember? You cut off its collar so you wouldn’t have to wear it.”
Morna didn’t remember. Well, she remembered the coat, not the cutting.
* * *
It rains this afternoon. I make a fire. Like winter and I am bear in a cave. I pour myself a glass of wine. I think about our lovely visit. Thank you. You come again soon.
Morna spent a long time crafting an energetic response, creative and comforting, trying to inhabit the lovely girl that Esther saw her to be instead of the snarky one who had once, momentarily, wished her daughter out of existence.
* * *
Morna hadn’t thought much about feet before Esther’s gnarly left extremity lay in her lap. The toes were exceptionally long and skinny, their tips small eraser heads, the nails tough and dappled with red specks of months-old nail polish. The foot itself was lean and arched, its gently spatulate bones and tendons visible, an enormous red bunion skewing the angle of the big toe.
Morna had planned this in advance. She had brought oil and towels with her, had suggested the massage. Esther was game for anything. “You do this for Iz, no?” She had removed her prescription pantyhose right there in the living room, had adjusted the pillows on the couch, and had lain back with surprising alacrity. Whatever Morna had in mind would certainly be to her liking.
But now Morna was stymied. She had never actually done this before and hadn’t entertained the delicacy of feet. With so little flesh to grab how was she to proceed? She squirted oil on her palm and lifted the foot, cupping the bulb of the heel, her other hand taking the weight of the spotted calf. She worked the crusty heel, the bony ankle, advancing slowly toward the high arch of the instep. The oil was scented with lavender—which she thought was Esther’s favorite—and it mingled with the musty, footy smell, noticeable, but not disgusting. Esther moaned with pleasure, so Morna felt encouraged and applied more oil and used her knuckle to rake the entire length of the sole. The regular rocking and kneading brought on speech.
When they were both unemployed they frequented the cheap afternoon movies, favoring old French movies with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anouk Aimée, Simone Signoret, actors who understood how to penetrate the hidden surfaces of things. She and Isabel would duck from the day’s accusing work-a-day brightness into the dim lobbies; the velveteen seats; the dreamy worlds of hope and wish fulfillment; the fantasia of beautiful bodies, witty words, harrowing love affairs.
They emerged at dusk, blinking and sighing, knowing how reprehensibly lazy they were, but weren’t they finally happier than most, sucking the marrow of life as they did?
Esther, grief-worn, wine-filled, had drifted off. “Iz?” she said suddenly, opening her eyes, seeing her oiled feet, then noticing Morna and gradually remembering.
Morna returned to Port Authority at dusk. Altered by the wine, slowed by the massaging rhythms still in her fingers, she decided to walk downtown. The city gleamed. She veered to the Hudson where the leaden water glowed a pearlescent pink from the sun’s final rays. A few people walked toward her on tender, over-worked feet and, though it might have been too dark to see, she smiled. Hadn’t she strolled here with Isabel, sharing a bag of Licorice All Sorts, discussing the children’s book they would write?
When she had left that day Esther gripped her tightly. They were both tipsy. “You have your way with me,” Esther said. “You are a bit of a devil, I see.”
* * *
Behind the wheel of Esther’s cream-colored Cadillac Morna had to pay extreme attention. She had never driven such a huge car, hadn’t driven at all since moving to the city. Beside her Esther was quiet. She wore no makeup today, and she’d pulled her hair into a seedy ponytail. Her outfit seemed to belong to some other kind of woman—black athletic pants with a matching jacket all fashioned from some shiny fabric that chattered with her movements. She told Morna she’d had a few days that week when she couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t find a reason for doing anything. She was glad Morna had come. They would be meeting Isabel’s sister Adrienne at the cemetery where Isabel’s ashes were buried.
The New Jersey towns they drove through were all deserted. It was the kind of summer day for a beach trip, a day of languor accompanied by tuna fish sandwiches, deviled eggs, popsicles. Esther’s quiet was frightening, and Morna’s ineptitude billowed beyond the length and breadth of the outsized Cadillac. Until now she had only seen in Esther the funeral’s giddy aftermath and now some truer, more intransigent state of mourning had set in.
“When we couldn’t sleep we would go to the cemetery,” Morna said. “We’d walk and talk and sing. ‘Good Night, Irene’—do you know that song?” Morna sang a few bars. “Sometimes, if it was warm enough, we’d take off our clothes, just to see if we could get away with it.” Isabel thought she heard something and darted for the safety of a thick-trunked maple, forgetting her clothes. What a sight she was, surprisingly nimble, bare ass swaying and glinting, only emerging from the tree when Morna began laughing.
Esther touched Morna’s forearm.
A web of narrow roads afforded access to all the cemetery plots. Morna drove at five miles an hour past stately, broad-leafed trees. Esther leaned forward, peering through the windshield, instructing Morna to turn, turn, turn again. They went up hills and down, circled, found themselves in the same place they’d begun.
“Mon dieu. I am lost. I am so sorry.”
Morna turned off the engine, and they were both stricken with a harrowing case of inertia. Esther withered against her seat back. It was wrong for Morna to have come here with so many spirits at large.
Adrienne drove up in a red Ford Fiesta and they followed her.
“I should stay in the car,” Morna said when Adrienne had parked and was leaping from her car, frowning. Unlike the other Barrett women she had short hair, and a lean body that, in its tight-fitting jeans and black T-shirt, suggested a needle.
“Oh, no.” Esther looked stricken. “Please. I am so afraid.”
The heat was shocking again after the air-conditioned car. Adrienne had taken off through the grass, winding around trees and headstones; Esther hooked Morna’s arm and they followed, Esther’s suit rustling irreverently.
Isabel’s headstone was a rectangle of white granite, substantial but simple. Wilted white roses lay at its base. Isabel Picard Barrett. Adorée.
“Ta-da. The angel,” Adrienne said.
“You remember Isabel’s friend Morna?”
Adrienne blinked. “Thomas’s friend.”
“She and Isabel do naughty things together. Très méchantes.” Esther chuckled and patted Morna’s forearm, her arm still linked in Morna’s.
“Really?” Adrienne’s gaze was trenchant as the rest of her body. “I never heard her mention you.”
“Some things we keep to ourself—we must have secrets,” Esther said. “They write books together. At night they dance naked.”
“Woop de doo.”
Seeing Adrienne’s niggardly smile, Morna’s heart raced. “Aren’t you sad?” she said.
“Of course I’m sad. I can do sad in Philly perfectly well on my own. Sad isn’t some performance you do for an audience to get them to clap.”
Morna nodded, but Adrienne’s attention was on other things, far from here.
“Everyone thinks they own her. Who’s got the right to the biggest load of grief.” Morna said nothing and Adrienne, playing the moment, scanned the cemetery where hazy sun and heat clung like lint.
“She and I always had issues. Just as we’re maybe getting a teeny tiny grip on things, she had the audacity to die.” Adrienne wiped the air. “Boring old business that only concerns me. Okay, are you satisfied, Mother? Can I go now?”
“You come back to the house? I make some crème caramel for you.”
“I have to get back,” Adrienne said. She spun. “I’ll call.” She retraced her steps to her car and drove off.
“You see,” Esther said.
“Is she driving back to Philadelphia now?”
“It is possible.”
They stared at the headstone, and Esther bent to collect the desiccated roses. The stone itself was inert and unsatisfying. Morna felt sorry for Adrienne, stuck with that anger. “She could—” Morna began.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Please,” Esther begged. Her fingers were beaded with blood, but she didn’t seem to notice.
Morna hesitated. “Isabel just gave people the brush-off sometimes, as if they weren’t as important as she was.”
Esther blinked. She looked down at her fingers, suddenly noticing the blood.
* * *
Morna sat at Veselka alone in front of a pile of soy-sauce-soaked noodles for which she had no appetite. She’d brought a book of Neruda poems, but she couldn’t get into them. Some man who was sick of being a man, another who was looking at blood, daggers and women’s stockings—who the fuck cared. Since the firing she’d felt tainted. Her friend Gina, who was a film student and terminally busy, had canceled tonight at the last minute, verifying somehow that Morna was a loser. Around her students bent toward one another, talking endlessly, endlessly animated. Many of them were film students, talent-less but still thick with prospects. She hated their easy access to parental funds—the huge tuition and beyond that money to make their navel-gazing films. Isabel’s family had money too, she thought. Their house was nice, and her father had one of those money-moving jobs. Maybe it was the money that made her sometimes unwittingly cruel though she’d never been cruel to Morna.
Thomas was the one who’d been cruel. She remembered too acutely the time when things began to go wrong. After months of communicating daily by phone calls and e-mail, spending at least every other night together, Thomas was suddenly incommunicado. All her e-mails and phone calls went unanswered. Three days passed, then five. She was furious. She learned that Thomas had spent several nights in his studio, crashing on a mattress he’d dragged there. Just because he was lost in his work didn’t mean he couldn’t pick up the phone once or twice and call her. After a week she stopped leaving messages. It was spring break. She went home to her parents’ house and tried to forget him. Back on campus a week later she torpedoed the final text, crafting neutral words about needing to move on, though in her heart it was pure fuck you.
* * *
No one cared about you and then, on a dime, everyone appeared to. Her mother wanted her to visit North Hampton that weekend for a celebration of her brother’s birthday; Julian was having a housewarming with his new partner Anthony; Whitney Vandermeer, who she’d talked to only briefly at the funeral, wanted her for dinner.
Esther prevailed. Morna brought with her a bagful of things: two bottles of Esther’s favorite white wine, a sourdough baguette, a round of brie, some silver tapers, and a fat lavender-scented candle for the bedroom or bathroom, all items she was fairly certain Esther would like. She had stretched her budget, but she’d done the reckoning and wanted to feel indispensable.
Esther’s delight was clear but muted. She peered into the bag and took out the bread and one of the wine bottles then left the bag on the counter like some passed-by hitch-hiker. They settled at the table right away, foregoing time in the living room, so Morna wondered if Esther wanted her to leave.
“Of course not,” Esther said. “I make all your favorites.”
She brought out dish after dish and laid them on the table: a tureen of onion soup, two roast chickens, roasted potatoes, green beans and carrots, a salad. For dessert she’d made un gâteau framboise that she put on the sideboard along with a cheese plate. It was enough food for an entire neighborhood, far more than she’d served Morna before. The sight of so much food sickened Morna a bit. She had gotten used to eating two small meals a day, usually composed of one dish only: eggs, a plate of noodles, a bowl of soup.
“It soothe me to cook,” Esther said, but she didn’t seem very soothed; she seemed to be sinking far away into a world Morna couldn’t begin to reach.
“It’s wonderful,” Morna said, setting aside her distaste—these were her favorite dishes apparently, or Isabel’s—tucking into the chicken and the crispy potatoes, using knife and fork European-style, trying to bolster Esther’s mood with her own display of gusto.
“Really?” Esther said, watching Morna eat, but not picking up her own knife and fork. She sighed. “It is too much. What am I thinking?”
“You’ll have plenty of leftovers.”
Morna cut and ate and drank, cut and ate more, cooing and chuckling and praising each dish as she went, trying to get Esther to follow suit, but Esther, immune, sat at the head of the table, fondling her silverware and pondering the windows, the cake on the sideboard, Morna herself.
Morna gulped her wine. “I don’t think I’ve told you about the film I was writing for Isabel. She had so much potential as an actress.”
“You think so?”
“She was so pretty—no, not pretty, beautiful. And she had screen presence.”
“You see her in film?”
“We did a screen test, and her large features were so expressive. She was an amazing actress.”
Esther leaned forward, hungry for this knowledge, and Morna could feel the words making pictures in Esther’s mind, images she would fold into her Isabel narrative, the movie in her mind where all her daughter’s dormant, unsung potential came into full bloom.
“Oh my. It does not surprise me. What is the film about?”
Morna swallowed an unmasticated piece of chicken and began to choke. Her eyes teared. Esther offered her a water glass. “Drink. Drink.”
Morna drank the water and the chicken piece moved along the appropriate pathway, but Morna was left feeling sheepish and could feel the color shooting from her stressed vessels to her gullible epidermis. Esther rose and went to the front door where apparently someone was knocking. Morna tried to compose herself.
“I thought you can’t come,” Esther said.
“I changed my mind.” Thomas.
“Wonderful. Come in. I have plenty of food and Morna tells about the film she and Isabel make.”
Thomas’s arrival energized Esther, and she bustled back and forth locating a plate, glasses, a napkin. Morna, still flushed and flushing anew, turned to greet Thomas, half rising from her seat, then sitting again, then pushing back her chair and standing. She couldn’t hug him, not now, and he wasn’t hugging her.
“Hey,” she said. “I didn’t expect you.”
“I didn’t expect myself—or you.”
Morna nodded, and Thomas sat in the designated place opposite her. Morna felt disgustingly full. It bothered her that the scrim over Esther’s mood had been lifted by Thomas’s arrival. He had cut his hair so it bushed out around his ears. It wasn’t becoming at all and he was still painfully scrawny. Esther laid a full plate in front of him. “We fatten you up,” she said, laughing. She urged more food on Morna, but Morna stood her ground. The vapor of profound exhaustion had descended, and all she wanted to do was sleep.
Esther resumed her seat, but she’d forgotten the silverware. She started to get up but Thomas stopped her with a tamping palm, turned and reached into the sideboard’s second drawer, helping himself to knife and fork. He ate European-style, looking around the room as he chewed as if to note its changes. After watching him for a moment Esther took up her own fork and knife.
“So,” she said. “The film. You know this film, Thomas?”
Thomas’s blue-eyed gaze was framed by the two white tapers. “A film. Really?” he said.
“It’s not—” Morna hedged.
“We’re interested,” Thomas said. He laid his utensils on the side of his plate and picked up his wine glass, his gaze stitched to Morna.
“She says Isabel has—what is the phrase?”
“Screen presence.”
“And—?” Thomas prompted.
“The kind of face that reads well on film.”
“Big lips, big eyes, big laugh—that kind of thing?” he said. “Big ass too—would that be photogenic?”
Morna looked down at her plate, a terrible moment returning to her in painful clarity. She and Thomas coming out of his studio. Isabel, who neither of them knew at the time, was outside talking with another woman, laughing. What a beautiful woman, Thomas remarked. She’s too fat for you, Morna said. And I happen to hate her.
“Morna begins to tell me what the film is about.”
“It’s not finished, the script I mean.” Morna stabbed a piece of chicken. “I was working it out.”
“But the gist?” Thomas prodded.
“A girl who’s—looking for—there’s a maze in it like the Minotaur’s labyrinth. It’s based on the Neruda poem about the man walking around, sick of being a man, but in this case it’s a girl.” She sighed. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I’m sure it is,” Thomas said.
“It’s not realistic.”
“I guess not.”
“Don’t be mean,” Morna said, forgetting Esther for a moment, the taper flame flickering at the corner of her vision, her voice a quiet hiss trying to snare the part of Thomas that had once been devoted to her.
“Is that what I’m being?”
“Dessert? I get plates.” Esther rose, knocking the table so the stemware rattled. She went to the kitchen and closed the swinging door behind her.
“Don’t say anything,” Morna whispered. “Please.”
He gave her the challenging gaze she remembered him giving his canvasses: I know you’re in there. Give it up. “Don’t fuck with her. She’s precious. Don’t bail when it gets inconvenient, or when it interferes with your personal development.”
“I’m not mean like that,” Morna hissed. “She’s precious to me too.”
“Right. You’re not the type to dispose of people.”
Esther returned to the room with a tray of cake plates and demitasse cups. She maintained her silence while laying down the tray, replenishing the wine glasses with a careless flourish that made Thomas’s glass overflow.
“Cake here, or in the living room? Gâteau framboise. Isabel’s favorite.” She nodded to Morna.
“I need some air,” Morna said, rising unsteadily.
Outside she propelled herself through the quiet neighborhood, houses with blinds pulled, air conditioners purring, the homes of residents who kept their houses painted, their gutters clean, residents who were not cynics or practitioners of sarcasm, people who assumed the best about others. When she and Isabel were last here they had walked this neighborhood with a can of spray paint. Breathe, they scrawled on one stop sign. Laugh, one another. Dance.
She walked for two hours, emptying herself first of expectation, then of dread, so when she reappeared at the house she was blank and mute. Esther opened the door, as usual, before she knocked. “Thomas is gone. He has fatigue.”
She had rebuilt the tower of her hairdo, retouched her makeup; her manner was assertive. She cut Morna a piece of cake and made her sit in the living room. “You stay the night,” she said. “Henry is away. I don’t like nights alone.” She sat in the easy chair with her glass of wine and watched Morna eat. Morna was afraid to say a word, afraid of the momentum of even one syllable. She knew the cake was delicious, but her taste buds were dormant.
Esther put her in Isabel’s room which was still intact, as if Isabel still lived there, had never left for college, never married, certainly not died. Posters of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn. Books of poetry. Purple sheets. A red quilt. It was the room of a person with an appetite for life.
Esther had given Morna a large white nightgown, eerily bridal, once Isabel’s. It was much too big for Morna, but she wore it anyway, as some kind of penance. It was only eight p.m., still light, and Morna had no idea how to fill the hours until dawn. In the morning there was an eight thirty bus back to the city; she could walk to the stop if necessary. She sat in bed listening to Esther puttering in her room at the end of the hall.
Sleepless, she ventured downstairs at two forty-five, tripping on the long white gown. She would begin with the first photo album, page through all nine of them, memorize the way families were supposed to behave. She would be able to tell if Adrienne was congenitally angry. If Isabel had always been joyful. What was truly god-given and forever in your DNA.
Esther reclined on the living room couch in the semi-darkness. She wore a lavender robe over her long pink nightgown, and she clutched a half-full wine glass. Morna thought of retreating, but it was too late, Esther had certainly heard her.
“Help yourself.” Esther’s voice rose like grit-filled smoke from the depths of the shadows.
Morna poured herself a fortifying glassful and sat in the easy chair, and they sipped in tense silence, Thomas a phantom between them.
After a while Esther rose and disappeared and came back to the living room with her purse, still in nightgown and robe, rattling the car keys in front of Morna. “Drive me to the cemetery, s’il te plaît.”
It was three fifteen, night and morning both. The streets were deserted, the streetlights casting their lurid light. Morna hiked up her nightgown to negotiate the Cadillac’s pedals, feeling like a criminal. She had never driven in bare feet. The iron gate to the cemetery was locked. “Now what?” Morna said.
Esther got out and began walking. She wedged her body through a narrow space to one side of the gate and continued without looking back, eschewing the roadway. Was she crazy? Furious? Morna killed the engine and hurried after Esther’s vanishing silhouette.
The grass was dewy, and Morna had to jog to catch up with Esther. She scurried along the shadow-dappled landscape, avoiding monuments and headstones, slowed by the gown, twigs and pebbles stabbing her soles. This time Esther’s sense of direction was infallible. Up a short rise, down, a left, another left, and they were there.
Morna stopped ten feet or so behind Esther. After a few minutes of stillness, Esther turned. “We are in this together. You are the expert.” She lifted her nightgown over her shoulders, and it billowed with a slight breeze. She dropped it into the grass and stood in the buff, her pale, quasi-lit body both statuesque and sagging. The matronly swoop of hip and belly, the thickly muscled calves and dainty ankles, the breasts loose as testicles or hackey sacks. Fleshy and thin, beautiful and despairing. She waited, weight swung into one hip like Venus de Milo, hair adrift.
“Viens. Show me. Teach me this.”
Morna lifted her own nightgown, Esther, a cool assessing mirror reflecting back Morna’s cape of redhead’s freckles, her mosquito-bite breasts, the scurrilous shape of her shame. She moved closer to Esther and sat in the grass. Esther towered above her, huge and hesitant, calculating how she would lower her own frame. Morna held out her hands. Esther took one of them, rested the other on Morna’s slight shoulder and lowered herself, huffing, first to her knees then rolling onto her buttocks.
They lay down at the same moment. Side by side, they looked up through the branches of the magnolia at the faintly brightening sky. Light years away stars winked and died and continued to churn out their light.