1997
Bear right on Argilla Road, past Douglas Orchards, down the hill. Wrought-iron gates mark the Ingram estate (est. 1928) on the left. Turn a sharp corner and the trees out your window peel away, revealing the shoreline. Of course, you can’t see the sand in the winter; snow blankets the beach and the marshes, thick and inevitable and heavy. So drive slowly, and follow the caravan of cars toward the ocean.
On the beach, amid the cloud of dark winter coats, you’ll see a pair of twins standing small and bereft, their neon parkas incongruous against the sea. They are waiting for their mother to arrive. The air is punishing and the crowd is silent. A small, ancient-looking vessel splashes to shore,ELYSIUMpainted in large green letters on the starboard side. The crewmen jump off and heave the boat onto the beach; an unusual arrangement, but the captain made an exception for the Bliss family. The young men loiter on the damp sand.
At last she comes, at her leisure, wearing thick makeup and her wedding-day earrings, her car churning up sand and snow. The crewmen shiver as they remove her from the back of the hearse.
“Sebastian, Viola, come along!”
The twins are lifted now, up onto the back of the boat, and they’re pushing off—tear-streaked relatives and friends growing smaller and darker as the beach recedes.
It’s only on board that the twins realize their mother is not in a box, but a bag. “It’s cotton,” their father explains, “so she can return to the earth.”Is there earth under the water?they wonder. The material reminds them of a guitar case, like their mother is an instrument. They glance at their father, perturbed. He’s looking at the sky.
The water is choppy and rain begins to spit against their faces. The bag is still. When they have passed the point where they can see the land, the engines thrum to a stop and everyone gathers at the bow. A shriveled man in a dark suit says a few words. A wonderful person, wasn’t she? Strong, courageous in her work as she was in the battle for life. A true New England woman. This, the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety-seven. It’s hard to hear him against the crashing surf.
Time for a last look. The zipper on the bag riffles halfway over their mother’s body and catches like a broken fly. Nothing in the universe has ever sounded so morbid. The twins stare as the wrinkled man fails to jam it down, catching again and again at the same warped tooth, and settles for crudely spreading the synthetic flaps apart with outstretched arms to reveal their mother’s face, a mask in an expression she has never worn. Their father is crying.
From the hold of the ship, the crew produces four cannonballs, wrought iron, heavier than both twins combined. Their father and the captain lower the weights into the bag. Small flowers are pressed into the twins’ small hands,Throw them into the sea. Someone plays an endless, somber note on a trumpet, and their mother—indelicately—is thrown over the side of the ship.
A bell is rung eight times. The engine skips a beat as it turns back to shore, leaving in its wake a pair of shipwrecked hearts.
Aunt Sadie bulges against the cheap material of her funeral dress, the only black clothing she has ever voluntarily purchased. The nylon rubs against the floral embroidery of the chaise longue in the dining room, and Viola understands instinctively that these are fabrics that do not belong together. She and Sebastian are sitting underneath the dining room table, watching the throng of suit trousers and stockings that have entered their house to eat their food and say nice things about their mother. Most of them are unknown to Viola, and so she fixates on Sadie, whose voice carries across the room, unmuffled by the tiny cocktail sausages that she is shoving into her mouth two at a time.
“They’re addictive,” she is shouting. “I’m stress eating.”
Sebastian sprawls out longways under the mahogany table, belly down and transfixed by the details of a coloring book that Sadie brought along for him. He is lost in the stripes of a tiger hunkering between the low leaves of a paper jungle. Occasionally he kicks back his legs (still clad in small suit trousers) onto Viola’s lap. For her present, she had received a doll that apparently practices aerobics. The doll is like a Barbie but, importantly, is not a Barbie, so there is no point.Her hair is dark, like yours. The not-Barbie’s smile is hollow. The not-Barbie is as pointless as the million tiny grains of sand that have been tracked into the house on the bottoms of people’s shoes. Viola is calculating how long it will take to undo. Even now, on the inside of her Mary Janes, she can feel where sand got in, where it is rubbing against her tights.
“We should go to the zoo,” Sebastian says. He is blending green and blue wax with his index finger on the rainforest fronds. The gaps under his fingernails are crusting with rainbow sludge.
“I thought animals have diseases.” They were going to get a dog before her mother got sick, and now she’s glad they didn’t. She shifts onto her side and takes Sebastian’s idle hand in hers, begins methodically excavating the wax. His hand is limp and compliant.
“Yes,” he says gravely. “They can make fur grow all over your body.”
“Even in your mouth?” Over the past few months, Viola has developed an aversion to all possible carriers of illness. The reason for this is uncomplicated. She avoids: handshakes; the kitchen trash; large, still bodies of water. Sebastian, though messy, is exempt from her precautions because he is more or less an extension of herself. And he reminds her not to worry.
“Yes, even in your nose and all over your eyes.” He reaches up and pops the metal barrette out of her hair and tosses the curtain in front of her eyes. “Like a rug.”
“I’m a rug-a-saurus,” she says, laughing her musical machine-gun laugh. Sebastian pokes her in the stomach and she convulses into sharp tickled elbows and knees. He can’t help following her into hysterics, loudand hiccupping, and it sounds like a pair of legs is joining in the laughter until they realize that the noise is actually a loud sob and they remember that their mother is dead. From the floor, Viola can see a pair of tearful silk trousers being comforted by a wide pair of slacks and led away.
“You don’t have to touch them if you don’t want to, Lola.”
“What?”
“The animals.”
Lola is the leftover product of a fat baby tongue that found the three pretentious syllables of her name too complicated. He is the only one who calls her that now. She pushes her hair back and watches as he returns, with a sense of deep purpose, to his coloring book. It is critical that neither of them dies, but in the event that they had to, she would rather they did it together. The idea of living without him makes her sick.
“It’s horrible,” Sadie is saying now, in as hushed a voice as she can force. “It’s just not what she would have wanted.”
Sebastian pulls himself forward and Viola follows his attention. If they lean out through the chairs, they can see Sadie is addressing a long pair of nude pantyhose that resolve in sand-flecked heels leaning against the table. Her face is a mess of runny makeup, dark smudges covering the pouches under her eyes. She is holding, under one arm, a framed photograph of her sister, Viola’s mother. Her legs are splayed wide and unladylike.
“You want a spot on the earth that people can go to,” Sadie continues, her voice rising. “You want to belong to somewhere.”
The slacks cut back in front of Sadie (pardon me, excuse me) and Sadie shifts onto her haunches. All around the room, snatches of her mother are traded between strangers, the currency of grief:
“It’s so unfair. Isn’t it? Just desperately—”
“So young, so much talent—”
