“She hates them!” Ted said. “They’re turning her into a fucking zombie!”
“They’re managing her symptoms, Ted.” My mom salvaged what pills she could.
“Symptoms? You meanemotions? Since when is feeling things deeply an illness, Linda? It’s what makes us human!”
He stormed off to his art studio in the garage, my mother at his heels. They were yelling so loud, Lexie and I could hear them in the kitchen.
Their argument ended with her throwing him out. It didn’t seem like that big a deal at the time. She’d told him to leave before, but he’d always come back. This was different, though. This time he left and stayed gone. Our mother had gotten rid of him once and for all, and Lexie hated her for it. She loved our father fiercely and was devoted to him, no matter what.
Mom moved through the house like a woman on autopilot, a strange brokenhearted ghost. She knew she’d done the right thing, and that if there was any hope at all of Lexie getting a handle on her illness, it wouldn’t happen with my father around.
Our father took an apartment above Al’s Bar in town and moved his things little by little with a friend’s van. It was a crappy one-bedroom place that basically became his live-in art studio. When Lexie and I spent nights there on weekends, we slept in sleeping bags and camping mattresses on the floor between unfinished paintings and sculptures. His drinking took a turn for the worse, and Lexie and I sometimes skipped our weekend visits with him because it just wasn’t all that much fun to eat frozen dinners and watch him get shit-faced then pass out.
After Lexie went off to college, our father gave up his apartment and headed south. Eventually, he went as far south as you could go without hitting the ocean: Key West. We didn’t see him a whole lot after that. A couple times a year, he’d drive up to New England, bags loaded with crappy presents, and regale us with tales of his life in Florida: a life full of artists, strippers, fishermen, and beach bums. He was drinking a lot but seemed tan and happy. He started painting landscapes and selling them to the tourists. For the first time in his life, he was actually making a living from his art.
I went away to college in Seattle, and my father never came to visit me. Not even for graduation.
My mother never dated another man. She confessed to me once, not long before her death, that my father had been the great love of her life, and once you’ve experienced that, everything else pales in comparison. “Your father,” she’d said, “for all his complications, is the only person I ever felt whole with. Sometimes I think our brokenness held us together. But maybe, Jackie, maybe that’s enough.”
She died three years ago after a long struggle with breast cancer. We were all with her those last days in hospice: me, Lexie, and Ted. Ted had flown up from Florida and brought Key lime pie and a suitcase full of his old sketchbooks, dating back years. He fed Mom bites of pie and showed her his drawings from their lives together: Niagara Falls, where they’d had their honeymoon; my mother naked and pregnant, smiling up at him from the bed in their first apartment; baby Lexie sleeping in her crib; Lex and me on swings in the backyard; Lex and me in homemade Halloween costumes, both of us dressed as aliens from outer space; Mom sitting under a Christmas tree, laughing.
Together, they turned the pages and told stories that all started with “Remember…”
Mom died with our father holding her hand and Lexie telling her one of her fabulous stories that went on and on, one unbelievable turn after another.
I took a big sip of wine, turned to my aunt on the couch. “It’s so strange, isn’t it? That me and you and Ted, we’re all that’s left.” I looked around. “Us and the house.”
chapterten
August 17, 1929
Lanesborough, New Hampshire
Ethel!” Will was shaking my shoulder.
I opened my eyes, sat up, heart racing, nightgown soaked with sweat.
“Another nightmare?” he asked, stroking my hair.
I nodded, sure that whoever had been chasing me in my dream had just been there in the bedroom; had somehow followed me into this world.
And they left a damp, rotting odor behind.
“Do you smell that?” I asked.
“Smell what?” his voice went up a bit.
“Nothing. It’s just my silly dream.” I forced out a little giggle, just to show how silly it was. The pale square of the window was just starting to lighten in the early dawn. “I’ll go make breakfast.”
Will gave my hand a squeeze. “They’re just dreams, Ethel. Don’t let them trouble you.”
I pulled on my robe and made my way to the kitchen to get the coffee percolator going on the stove.
It wasn’t just the strange dream and nightmares. There were the physical symptoms: feeling queasy, a fullness in my breasts, my dresses a bit too tight. Still, I dared not to hope. I told myself it was all the rich food I’d been craving: whipped cream cakes, butter scones, eggs fried in sweet butter.
Morning after morning I would wake up and make breakfast and try to distract myself with the world around me. I brought in the paper for Will and read the headlines each day: President Hoover celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday and Charles and Anne Lindbergh were among the guests, Babe Ruth hit his five hundredth home run, Winston Churchill gave a speech in Ottawa. How strange it all felt: this world spinning around me, the faces looking back up at me from the pages of the newspaper; people who had no idea who I was or that I even existed at all. “I am Mrs. Monroe from Lanesborough, New Hampshire,” I would whisper to them.
Sometimes, when I felt too lost, felt like I was in danger of floating away, I would give myself a little prick with a pin.
