“She opened what she assumed was another closet, and discovered a dressing room she didn't remember. It was full of empty tie racks and barren shoe trees. Then she looked up, into the painted gray eyes of an oddly serious child swinging from a gate.”
The Things We Keep
by Liane Kupferberg Carter
A week after their father Gene's funeral, Barbara and Aggie Harrell and their cousin Emma went to clean out his apartment. Barbara had not been there since a disastrous dinner with her father and his second wife Pauline three years earlier. The building had seemed elegant, but now one of the art deco letters over the awning was missing, and the chandeliered lobby smelled of last week's lamb stew. Barbara had a key that Gene's neighbor, Mrs. Milner, had pressed on her at the funeral. Her eyes had been an ugly red. "I can't go back in there, Ms. Harrell," she'd said, sounding apologetic. She was the one who had found him.
Barbara arrived first, feeling like a guilty trespasser. The apartment seemed foreign and masculine; no trace of Pauline remained. She opened the window and stood as uncertainly as she had the last time, waiting to be invited to sit. So much furniture to give away. She had no use for it and she doubted that Aggie and her husband Jerry would want anything that they hadn't specifically chosen for the house they were building on the North Shore. Jerry had just installed voice-activated lights in every room. "What if you get laryngitis?" Barbara had said, but Jerry hadn’t been amused.
The trick, she thought, was to work quickly, not to think. She flipped several light switches before she found the hall light, and opened the first closet she saw. The butterscotch Lifesaver smell she had once loved so much still clung to his jackets. The last time she'd been there, the assailing smell of Pauline's perfume had hung everywhere.
Barbara pulled suits from the closet, feeling like a suspicious wife as she emptied the pockets of change and match books and ticket stubs. She'd have to see that the electricity was turned off soon. Stop the mail. The phone service too, she thought, noticing an antique brass telephone on the hall table. As she folded clothes, she remembered the summer she was five, when Gene ran a string from the basement to the garage, and they had talked to each other through two tin cans. Sometimes she would place a finger lightly on the string to feel the vibration of his words. She tried to remember the sound of his voice now, but only heard it dimly, as it was that still summer, whispering metallic promises in her ear. They had started this game after Barbara saw a movie about Alexander Graham Bell, and she liked to imagine that her father was Don Ameche. "Watson, come here, I need you," he would say. "Watson here. I need you," she would answer, and he would run and catch her in his arms. He applauded when she fearlessly climbed ladders, or held back tears after falling into a bee's nest. She had been his first born, much photographed, petted and praised. But slowly, subtly, that had changed. The winter she was twelve, Pegasus had been hit by a car. She had carried him to the side of the road, covered him with a blanket, and called the vet. Her father drove them to the animal hospital, braking and accelerating wildly. The dog had been in bad shape. “There’s nothing more I can do,” the vet had said. “I’m so sorry. Would one of you like to stay with him?” Her father had hesitated, and in that moment, Barbara had spoken. “I’ll do it,” she said, following the vet into a room without any windows. She held Pegasus in her arms, murmuring into his puzzled, cloudy eyes. The needle slid between sinewy folds; the dog quivered, then slumped warm and heavy against her chest.
“You are your mother’s child,” her father had said in the car going home, almost as if he were speaking to himself. She’d kept silent, sensing even then it was a double-edged compliment. She had seen how he’d begun to wince at her mother Eleanor's brisk voice. One summer evening months earlier, they had barbecued swordfish and eaten supper on the back patio. “Can’t you just leave that grill alone? I said I’d get to it later,” Gene had said, watching Eleanor vigorously vacuuming out ashes. He tipped back on the legs of his chair, staring moodily into the neighboring yard.
“Gene, you’ll break the chair that way,” her mother had said. Her father brought the chair down hard and flung himself out of it. Later that night, after Barbara had dragged the furniture back to the porch, she sat to watch the fireflies make darting pinpoints of cold light, listening vainly for the sound of his returning car.
The doorbell chimed. Aggie was wearing a sleek black silk suit and pearls, looking beautiful and unhappy as only she could, wearing her suffering, thought Barbara, like a prize ribbon. Their cousin Emma stood behind her.
"You'd think Mrs. Milner could have managed to at least wipe up," said Aggie, running a proprietary hand over a bureau top.
"It wasn't her place. If you don't want to clean, why don't you pack up the rest of the clothes?" Barbara said, thrusting an armful of shopping bags at her.
"Aggie told me on the way up that she visited here several times after Pauline left," said Emma a little later, as they opened cartons they'd found piled neatly against the front window.
"Look! Your old school essays." Her legs slid gracefully under her. "Imagine saving these. Okay, how do you spell vicissitude?"
"That's what dictionaries are for."
"You never needed them, though," Emma said. "I'll bet you were a tough act for Aggie to follow in school. She once told me she always felt like Barbara Harrell's underachieving sister."
"I didn't know that," said Barbara. "I always felt like Agatha Harrell's plain one."
"Give it a rest already. Besides, it’s not even true. You've got character."
"That sounds like something my mother would have said,” Barbara said. “One time when I was thirteen, she took me to buy bras. Not that I needed them. She followed me into the dressing room and watched me try on every damn one. Afterwards, as we were driving home, I said, 'Mom, I'm ugly.' You know what she said? 'Don't worry, dear, it's just a stage.'" Barbara and Emma laughed.
"What's so funny out here?" Aggie said plaintively. She piled bags full of shirts and socks in the hall, and watched them uncertainly. "Haven't you even finished one box yet? We haven't got all day."
"Is Jerry picking you up?" Barbara said.
"He's playing racquet ball."
Aggie’s husband had recently joined a trendy new health club popular with masters of the universe types and models. Barbara wondered how he was managing it all. But he didn't want Aggie to work, and she was flitting between decorating the new house and taking classes in designing what she referred to as “tablescapes.”
"Well, anyway, I'm done," Aggie said. Her mouth twitched, and Barbara thought, it was a mistake to let her go into that room alone.
"How about if I make some coffee?" Barbara said. “We can't remove anything until the appraisal, but why don’t you make a list of what you’d like to keep?"
Barbara returned with a tray; Aggie sipped the coffee warily and made a face. "It tastes like mouthwash."
"It's cinnamon blend. Sorry. It's all I could find.”
"And it's stale," Aggie said accusingly.
"It was probably left over from Pauline. Dad only drank espresso."
"I always thought your father was the most cosmopolitan man I ever met," said Emma. "You know, I even had a little crush on him once."
"I know," said Barbara. "So did most of his students. Sometimes I think that if he’d died young, he would never have had to shrink to life size."
"Well, you made that wish come true," said Aggie. "Maybe if you had let Mom take him back, this wouldn't have happened."
"He told you that?" Barbara said. "Oh, Aggie. Do you really believe I would have done that?"
"Dad blamed you," Aggie said.
"Dad always blamed anyone but himself."
"Look!" said Emma, trying to deflect the sisters. She held aloft a thick stack of black and white photos that looked as if they'd been trimmed with pinking shears.
Aggie looked longingly at a picture of herself in the ocean, sitting astride her father's sunburned shoulders. "Remember the cottage inMaine
He must have planted the pearl there, Barbara realized. He’d done the same conjuring trick for her once, before Aggie was even born. "Don't you remember the swarms of black flies? There was a crust of them on the outhouse door,” Barbara said. “And no running water inside. We had to take the dishes outside and hose them down. Mom hated every minute there."
"Then she should have made more of an effort."
Barbara sucked in her lips to keep from speaking. She hated it when Aggie criticized Eleanor. What did she know? After her initial grief at Gene's departure, Eleanor had refused to speak about him. Barbara had often wished she could have siphoned off some of Eleanor's sorrow, taken it and embraced it as her own to spare her mother. After Eleanor's surgery, Barbara had bathed her mother, soothed her, cooked delicate broths and hearty stews, and nursed her mother as tenderly at the end as Eleanor had once nursed her. Gene had pleaded with Barbara to convince her mother to let him come home, but Eleanor was adamant: she had suffered enough.
"What's this?" Aggie said, studying a photograph of eerie light swirls.
"It looks like an abstract painting," said Emma.
"No," Barbara said softly. "Don’t you remember? It was the Aurora Borealis." The year Barbara was nine, they had spent Christmas week at their grandmother’s compound inVermont
"He always loved the planetarium," said Aggie.
"I remember how your father always used to point out the constellations to us on summer nights," Emma said. "Such beautiful names. Cassiopeia... Andromeda.... Your mother loved those stories."
"Mom?" said Aggie.
"Oh, sure," Emma said. "She loved those old myths. Old movies too. She once told me that when she was a girl she slept on collar buttons for six months because she thought it would give her dimples like Margaret O'Brien. And that later she used to wash her hair with cherry soda so it would be the color of Rita Hayworth's."
"It's nice to think of her that young," said Barbara. It sounded like something Aggie might have done. As a teenager, Aggie had steamed her face with chamomile, made masks of oatmeal, applied cucumber compresses to her eyelids, pumiced her feet, even slept on her back so her face wouldn't wrinkle. The sisters were so unalike that strangers never believed they were related. Aggie's face was punctuated by dimples--and not from collar buttons--that made pleasing secrets when she smiled. Growing up next to her, Barbara had felt monotonously untextured. There was a world of difference between plain and ugly; sometimes, Barbara had almost longed for ugly. At least it gave definition. Aggie was beautiful, and Barbara had learned early that beauty confers power.
"Speaking of cherry soda..." said Emma.
"I'll see if I can scrape up lunch."
Barbara rummaged in the cupboard. Not much to choose from. Tins of anchovies. Jars of macadamia nuts. She opened a can of salmon, thinking about all the Sundays a long time ago, when Emma and her parents came to visit. Barbara and her father would drive to Lox, Stock and Barrel, where all the fathers waited on line clutching slips of papers with numbers. When they got home he would slice tiny bagels and line them with dollops of cream cheese and slivers of fish, making sandwiches no larger than his little finger for Barbara and Emma to nibble as they squatted over the comics spread along the floor.
Barbara emptied the refrigerator of sour milk and rust-edged lettuce, sliced an onion to add to the plate, but when she reached for a wrinkled tomato, her fingernails slid through the soft red skin.
Aggie had set the dining table with lace placemats and had folded linen napkins to look like fluttering birds. It felt oddly festive. Emma picked up a plate. “What are you going to do with all the kitchen stuff?"
"There’s very little here,” Aggie said. “He didn’t take much when he left. He said he needed to make a clean break."
"Breaks are never clean," said Barbara, buttering the toast and crumbling it into little pieces.
"I think he was ashamed,” said Aggie.
"Of what?” said Barbara. “That his latest girlfriend wasn't much older than his daughters? Oh, don't look so shocked. You think Pauline was the only one? Grandma’s money just made it easier for him."
"Stop," said Emma. "Please stop."
"Who are you to sneer at Grandma's money?" said Aggie. "What do you think paid for summer vacations? Or school?" she crammed half a sandwich into her mouth.
"All that money doesn't seem to have improved your table manners."
"Enough." Emma slammed her fist against the table; the china clattered. "Don't you realize your parents are gone? All you have is each other."
"We're orphans," said Aggie, beginning to cry.
It sounded so Dickensian, thought Barbara.
"That's what dictionaries are for."
"You never needed them, though," Emma said. "I'll bet you were a tough act for Aggie to follow in school. She once told me she always felt like Barbara Harrell's underachieving sister."
"I didn't know that," said Barbara. "I always felt like Agatha Harrell's plain one."
"Give it a rest already. Besides, it’s not even true. You've got character."
"That sounds like something my mother would have said,” Barbara said. “One time when I was thirteen, she took me to buy bras. Not that I needed them. She followed me into the dressing room and watched me try on every damn one. Afterwards, as we were driving home, I said, 'Mom, I'm ugly.' You know what she said? 'Don't worry, dear, it's just a stage.'" Barbara and Emma laughed.
"What's so funny out here?" Aggie said plaintively. She piled bags full of shirts and socks in the hall, and watched them uncertainly. "Haven't you even finished one box yet? We haven't got all day."
"Is Jerry picking you up?" Barbara said.
"He's playing racquet ball."
Aggie’s husband had recently joined a trendy new health club popular with masters of the universe types and models. Barbara wondered how he was managing it all. But he didn't want Aggie to work, and she was flitting between decorating the new house and taking classes in designing what she referred to as “tablescapes.”
"Well, anyway, I'm done," Aggie said. Her mouth twitched, and Barbara thought, it was a mistake to let her go into that room alone.
"How about if I make some coffee?" Barbara said. “We can't remove anything until the appraisal, but why don’t you make a list of what you’d like to keep?"
Barbara returned with a tray; Aggie sipped the coffee warily and made a face. "It tastes like mouthwash."
"It's cinnamon blend. Sorry. It's all I could find.”
"And it's stale," Aggie said accusingly.
"It was probably left over from Pauline. Dad only drank espresso."
"I always thought your father was the most cosmopolitan man I ever met," said Emma. "You know, I even had a little crush on him once."
"I know," said Barbara. "So did most of his students. Sometimes I think that if he’d died young, he would never have had to shrink to life size."
"Well, you made that wish come true," said Aggie. "Maybe if you had let Mom take him back, this wouldn't have happened."
"He told you that?" Barbara said. "Oh, Aggie. Do you really believe I would have done that?"
"Dad blamed you," Aggie said.
"Dad always blamed anyone but himself."
"Look!" said Emma, trying to deflect the sisters. She held aloft a thick stack of black and white photos that looked as if they'd been trimmed with pinking shears.
Aggie looked longingly at a picture of herself in the ocean, sitting astride her father's sunburned shoulders. "Remember the cottage in
He must have planted the pearl there, Barbara realized. He’d done the same conjuring trick for her once, before Aggie was even born. "Don't you remember the swarms of black flies? There was a crust of them on the outhouse door,” Barbara said. “And no running water inside. We had to take the dishes outside and hose them down. Mom hated every minute there."
"Then she should have made more of an effort."
Barbara sucked in her lips to keep from speaking. She hated it when Aggie criticized Eleanor. What did she know? After her initial grief at Gene's departure, Eleanor had refused to speak about him. Barbara had often wished she could have siphoned off some of Eleanor's sorrow, taken it and embraced it as her own to spare her mother. After Eleanor's surgery, Barbara had bathed her mother, soothed her, cooked delicate broths and hearty stews, and nursed her mother as tenderly at the end as Eleanor had once nursed her. Gene had pleaded with Barbara to convince her mother to let him come home, but Eleanor was adamant: she had suffered enough.
"What's this?" Aggie said, studying a photograph of eerie light swirls.
"It looks like an abstract painting," said Emma.
"No," Barbara said softly. "Don’t you remember? It was the Aurora Borealis." The year Barbara was nine, they had spent Christmas week at their grandmother’s compound in
"He always loved the planetarium," said Aggie.
"I remember how your father always used to point out the constellations to us on summer nights," Emma said. "Such beautiful names. Cassiopeia... Andromeda.... Your mother loved those stories."
"Mom?" said Aggie.
"Oh, sure," Emma said. "She loved those old myths. Old movies too. She once told me that when she was a girl she slept on collar buttons for six months because she thought it would give her dimples like Margaret O'Brien. And that later she used to wash her hair with cherry soda so it would be the color of Rita Hayworth's."
"It's nice to think of her that young," said Barbara. It sounded like something Aggie might have done. As a teenager, Aggie had steamed her face with chamomile, made masks of oatmeal, applied cucumber compresses to her eyelids, pumiced her feet, even slept on her back so her face wouldn't wrinkle. The sisters were so unalike that strangers never believed they were related. Aggie's face was punctuated by dimples--and not from collar buttons--that made pleasing secrets when she smiled. Growing up next to her, Barbara had felt monotonously untextured. There was a world of difference between plain and ugly; sometimes, Barbara had almost longed for ugly. At least it gave definition. Aggie was beautiful, and Barbara had learned early that beauty confers power.
"Speaking of cherry soda..." said Emma.
"I'll see if I can scrape up lunch."
Barbara rummaged in the cupboard. Not much to choose from. Tins of anchovies. Jars of macadamia nuts. She opened a can of salmon, thinking about all the Sundays a long time ago, when Emma and her parents came to visit. Barbara and her father would drive to Lox, Stock and Barrel, where all the fathers waited on line clutching slips of papers with numbers. When they got home he would slice tiny bagels and line them with dollops of cream cheese and slivers of fish, making sandwiches no larger than his little finger for Barbara and Emma to nibble as they squatted over the comics spread along the floor.
Barbara emptied the refrigerator of sour milk and rust-edged lettuce, sliced an onion to add to the plate, but when she reached for a wrinkled tomato, her fingernails slid through the soft red skin.
Aggie had set the dining table with lace placemats and had folded linen napkins to look like fluttering birds. It felt oddly festive. Emma picked up a plate. “What are you going to do with all the kitchen stuff?"
"There’s very little here,” Aggie said. “He didn’t take much when he left. He said he needed to make a clean break."
"Breaks are never clean," said Barbara, buttering the toast and crumbling it into little pieces.
"I think he was ashamed,” said Aggie.
"Of what?” said Barbara. “That his latest girlfriend wasn't much older than his daughters? Oh, don't look so shocked. You think Pauline was the only one? Grandma’s money just made it easier for him."
"Stop," said Emma. "Please stop."
"Who are you to sneer at Grandma's money?" said Aggie. "What do you think paid for summer vacations? Or school?" she crammed half a sandwich into her mouth.
"All that money doesn't seem to have improved your table manners."
"Enough." Emma slammed her fist against the table; the china clattered. "Don't you realize your parents are gone? All you have is each other."
"We're orphans," said Aggie, beginning to cry.
It sounded so Dickensian, thought Barbara.
After lunch Emma took the bags of clothes to the homeless men's shelter. Aggie stood at the window, pinching buds on a blanched coleus plant. "This was purple when I gave it to him," she said. She twisted off her diamond wedding band and stared at the band of pale skin. "Jerry wants to start a family."
Barbara sat beside her on the window seat and watched her play with her charm bracelet.
"What do you want?" Barbara asked gently.
Aggie shrugged. She would have looked petulant if she weren't so clearly unhappy. "Does it even matter?" she said. She walked to the piano, and lightly touched the keys. "Dad didn't play," she said. "I wonder why he even had a piano."
"Maybe it was for Pauline."
"No," said Aggie. "She wasn't musical."
"Pauline wasn't much of anything," said Barbara. "It wouldn't have killed her to come to the funeral." After Barbara had called Pauline with the news, she'd stayed up all night, unable to write any words she could bring herself to read at the service the next day. Finally, she had chosen a poem. "'And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'" But he hadn't; Barbara was left to rage for him.
She sat at the piano bench, picking out a series of chords. She had loved listening to her mother play. Eleanor had taught herself, and played not very well, but with great feeling. She had often played "Someone to Watch over Me" when Barbara was young. For years, Barbara had thought her mother had written that song, until the day she heard it on the radio. That was after her father had run off with Pauline. Eleanor had never touched the piano again.
Barbara had been 24 when Pauline moved into house next door to her family. A tall, graceless woman, with frizzy brown hair and a helpless air that for reasons Barbara would never know had appealed to her father. Aggie had been away at school that year. Pauline had asked Gene to fix things about her house, and to thank him had plied him with cool drinks and warm looks. One summer evening at twilight Barbara had gone out to cut Ophelia roses, and across the honeysuckled-scented garden she had caught a glimpse of a bare, tanned shoulder, and on it, her father’s long, fine fingers. The intimate laughter floated across the stone patio as she snipped creamy pink flowers and dropped them on the warm, damp earth. The scent of roses has sickened her ever since. Friends sent floral arrangements to Gene’s funeral, but Barbara told the delivery boy to take them to a hospital instead. “Do for the living, not the dead,” Eleanor used to say. After Gene left, he was dead to Eleanor.
"You saw a lot of them here?" Barbara said.
"Not a lot." Aggie looked up; she was examining an ashtray made of glazed clay and pebbles. "I saw him mostly after Pauline left. Remember this?" she held out the misshapen ashtray.
Barbara remembered. She'd made it in day camp, choosing only the palest blue pebbles she could find to match her father’s eyes. She nodded. "I made that when I was six."
"No you didn't!" Aggie's eyes got round as she shook her head. "I made it. In kindergarten. Dad said so."
Barbara was suddenly very tired. "It's too hot in here," she said, yanking at the window. Soot blew across the sill. She went to the bathroom to wash her hands, and looked for aspirin. Wedged between the grimy, abandoned tubes of Pauline's cosmetics were more bottles of prescription pills than she cared to count. A frayed negligee hung on a peg behind the door. She sat on the lid of the toilet, and ran her hands over and over her cheeks.
She heard Emma return, and the muffled sounds of conversation. "How could he do this to me?" she heard Aggie say. Barbara rose and stood in the doorway of the bathroom, carefully wiping her hands on a towel. "Aggie," she said slowly, "do you think no one else is grieving?"
"Barbara," Emma said warningly.
"She acts as if she had a private monopoly on him.”
"You’re both rubbed raw," Emma said. "Let's just finish and get out."
Everyone was silent.
"I know!" said Aggie. "Before we leave, let’s each choose just one thing. Something significant."
Aggie always did like romantic gestures, thought Barbara. She remembered when Aggie was sixteen, and thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world that Lord Byron had kept the cremated heart of his best friend Shelley. "It just refused to burn, Barb," she'd said, her eyes large. "Too much spirit."
Barbara nodded. "Why not?" she said. She returned to the bedroom, and stripped the king size bed. The room looked as impersonal and reassuring as a motel room. Anywhere,U.S.A.
She opened what she assumed was another closet, and discovered a dressing room she didn't remember. It was full of empty tie racks and barren shoe trees. Then she looked up, into the painted gray eyes of an oddly serious child swinging from a gate. A small watercolor, it had been painted in a burst of friendship one summer inTruro
"You're much prettier than I am," he said, then rubbed his stubbly cheek against hers. "This way you'll always stay my own little girl," he'd said, in a tone infinitely sad.
She turned and took in the bedroom. Where were all his canvases? She knew he'd let go the studio space he'd rented; where could everything be? Had he sold them all? She wondered yet again what he had done that last day.
"Barb?" Emma stood in the doorway.
"Leaving?"
"In a minute. Don't be too hard on your sister. She’s not like you."
"You know the saying. ‘If you can't be rotten to your family, who can you?’ Sorry. Poor joke. You're absolutely right." She followed Emma to the foyer.
Aggie was peering into the mirror, meticulously painting on lipstick with a small brush, much the same way she used to work in a water coloring book. Barbara and Emma smiled at each other.
Barbara sat beside her on the window seat and watched her play with her charm bracelet.
"What do you want?" Barbara asked gently.
Aggie shrugged. She would have looked petulant if she weren't so clearly unhappy. "Does it even matter?" she said. She walked to the piano, and lightly touched the keys. "Dad didn't play," she said. "I wonder why he even had a piano."
"Maybe it was for Pauline."
"No," said Aggie. "She wasn't musical."
"Pauline wasn't much of anything," said Barbara. "It wouldn't have killed her to come to the funeral." After Barbara had called Pauline with the news, she'd stayed up all night, unable to write any words she could bring herself to read at the service the next day. Finally, she had chosen a poem. "'And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'" But he hadn't; Barbara was left to rage for him.
She sat at the piano bench, picking out a series of chords. She had loved listening to her mother play. Eleanor had taught herself, and played not very well, but with great feeling. She had often played "Someone to Watch over Me" when Barbara was young. For years, Barbara had thought her mother had written that song, until the day she heard it on the radio. That was after her father had run off with Pauline. Eleanor had never touched the piano again.
Barbara had been 24 when Pauline moved into house next door to her family. A tall, graceless woman, with frizzy brown hair and a helpless air that for reasons Barbara would never know had appealed to her father. Aggie had been away at school that year. Pauline had asked Gene to fix things about her house, and to thank him had plied him with cool drinks and warm looks. One summer evening at twilight Barbara had gone out to cut Ophelia roses, and across the honeysuckled-scented garden she had caught a glimpse of a bare, tanned shoulder, and on it, her father’s long, fine fingers. The intimate laughter floated across the stone patio as she snipped creamy pink flowers and dropped them on the warm, damp earth. The scent of roses has sickened her ever since. Friends sent floral arrangements to Gene’s funeral, but Barbara told the delivery boy to take them to a hospital instead. “Do for the living, not the dead,” Eleanor used to say. After Gene left, he was dead to Eleanor.
"You saw a lot of them here?" Barbara said.
"Not a lot." Aggie looked up; she was examining an ashtray made of glazed clay and pebbles. "I saw him mostly after Pauline left. Remember this?" she held out the misshapen ashtray.
Barbara remembered. She'd made it in day camp, choosing only the palest blue pebbles she could find to match her father’s eyes. She nodded. "I made that when I was six."
"No you didn't!" Aggie's eyes got round as she shook her head. "I made it. In kindergarten. Dad said so."
Barbara was suddenly very tired. "It's too hot in here," she said, yanking at the window. Soot blew across the sill. She went to the bathroom to wash her hands, and looked for aspirin. Wedged between the grimy, abandoned tubes of Pauline's cosmetics were more bottles of prescription pills than she cared to count. A frayed negligee hung on a peg behind the door. She sat on the lid of the toilet, and ran her hands over and over her cheeks.
She heard Emma return, and the muffled sounds of conversation. "How could he do this to me?" she heard Aggie say. Barbara rose and stood in the doorway of the bathroom, carefully wiping her hands on a towel. "Aggie," she said slowly, "do you think no one else is grieving?"
"Barbara," Emma said warningly.
"She acts as if she had a private monopoly on him.”
"You’re both rubbed raw," Emma said. "Let's just finish and get out."
Everyone was silent.
"I know!" said Aggie. "Before we leave, let’s each choose just one thing. Something significant."
Aggie always did like romantic gestures, thought Barbara. She remembered when Aggie was sixteen, and thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world that Lord Byron had kept the cremated heart of his best friend Shelley. "It just refused to burn, Barb," she'd said, her eyes large. "Too much spirit."
Barbara nodded. "Why not?" she said. She returned to the bedroom, and stripped the king size bed. The room looked as impersonal and reassuring as a motel room. Anywhere,
She opened what she assumed was another closet, and discovered a dressing room she didn't remember. It was full of empty tie racks and barren shoe trees. Then she looked up, into the painted gray eyes of an oddly serious child swinging from a gate. A small watercolor, it had been painted in a burst of friendship one summer in
"You're much prettier than I am," he said, then rubbed his stubbly cheek against hers. "This way you'll always stay my own little girl," he'd said, in a tone infinitely sad.
She turned and took in the bedroom. Where were all his canvases? She knew he'd let go the studio space he'd rented; where could everything be? Had he sold them all? She wondered yet again what he had done that last day.
"Barb?" Emma stood in the doorway.
"Leaving?"
"In a minute. Don't be too hard on your sister. She’s not like you."
"You know the saying. ‘If you can't be rotten to your family, who can you?’ Sorry. Poor joke. You're absolutely right." She followed Emma to the foyer.
Aggie was peering into the mirror, meticulously painting on lipstick with a small brush, much the same way she used to work in a water coloring book. Barbara and Emma smiled at each other.
"Thanks for coming," Barbara said to Emma, and hugged her. "Talk to you later?" Aggie placed her cheek against her sister's.
"Aggie," Barbara said. "Why don't we go up toVermont
Aggie hesitated, glanced at Emma, then back at Barbara. "That might be nice," she allowed.
Barbara closed the door, then walked through the apartment, closing windows, turning off the refrigerator and leaving it ajar. The pebble ashtray was gone; let Aggie keep it. She switched off lights, then returned to the dressing room to stand silently. Gently she lifted the watercolor of herself from the wall, leaving a ghostly outline where it had hung, and wrapped it in an old pillowcase.
Finally, at the front door, she turned and reached under the table, pulled the phone cord from the wall, and straightened slowly, cradling the silent receiver against her ear. "Watson," she whispered. "I'm here."
Liane Kupferberg Carter’s articles and essays have appeared in more than 30 publications, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Parents, Child, McCall’s, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Skirt, and numerous newspapers and journals. She is a 2009 winner of the Memoir Journal Prize for Memoir in Prose, and a Glimmer Train Finalist in Poetry. Carter is working on a memoir about raising a child with autism.
"Aggie," Barbara said. "Why don't we go up to
Aggie hesitated, glanced at Emma, then back at Barbara. "That might be nice," she allowed.
Barbara closed the door, then walked through the apartment, closing windows, turning off the refrigerator and leaving it ajar. The pebble ashtray was gone; let Aggie keep it. She switched off lights, then returned to the dressing room to stand silently. Gently she lifted the watercolor of herself from the wall, leaving a ghostly outline where it had hung, and wrapped it in an old pillowcase.
Finally, at the front door, she turned and reached under the table, pulled the phone cord from the wall, and straightened slowly, cradling the silent receiver against her ear. "Watson," she whispered. "I'm here."
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© 2010 Liane Kupferberg Carter, All Rights Reserved
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