Glitter and Glue (13 page)

“I still have some, thank you.”

“Very good. We’ll let you rest, then.”

Some families are at their best camping, others making lasagna or playing charades. Ántonia’s family blends together breaking land, driving cattle, harvesting crops. For my family, it was working the sidelines at lacrosse games and playing a card game called 99 that provided the ideal forum for trash talking. For the Tanners—and my mother—it’s managing illness. Filling prescriptions, treating symptoms and side effects, keeping the house quiet, these are things they’ve done together, and it shows. They know how to care-take, and in taking care they are able to do things they otherwise can’t: touch, collaborate, indulge. Even if, just like when I was young, all that gooey tenderness hardens as my temperature returns to normal, I saw it, I know it’s there.

John mentions, as he’s packing for another overnight, that he and the kids are planning a weekend away in a place called Avoca, which sounds like someone tossed the word
vacation
in the air and let it reinvent itself in a new but strangely familiar order.

“We have a place there.” Nothing about John Tanner says
second home
. “We used to like to go quite a bit. We’d love for you to join us … if you like,” he says without looking at me.

“Oh, wow, that’s nice. Sounds great.”

John turns and smiles, and for a moment I feel good, like I’ve given him something he needed. But the very next moment? Hesitation. And the moment after that? Regret. What are John Tanner and I going to talk about for two days? I can’t even imagine the car ride.

“The kids will be happy you’re coming.”

“Even Milly?” I toss out, grinning, trying to convey an easy acceptance of my uneasy relations with his daughter.

“Has she— What do you mean?” He is genuinely puzzled.

“Oh, nothing, I’m just joking. I was just— She’s so funny—I just need to … get her sandwich right.”

What else hasn’t he noticed?

After John leaves, Martin finds me and asks if I want to draw with him.

“Sure. What should we draw? Wait, I know, let’s draw your house at the beach!”

“First do your house,” he says.

Our house was and still is a two-story four-bedroom traditional, which is to say a box built around a central staircase. I draw a rectangle with shuttered windows, a chimney, and a front door right in the middle.

“Now draw your house that you’re going to have when you get babies,” he prompts.

“When I grow up?”

He thinks this is very funny. “Keely, you are grown up!”

“Sort of. Okay, so it’ll probably be a lot like my parents’ house.” His smile sags. He was hoping for more. “But”—I add a large pond in the backyard—“with a place to swim in the summer and ice-skate in the winter.” He likes that. Isn’t that what we all want? A future that’s familiar but a little better than what we knew as children?

“My house is not a box,” Martin says, leaning over the paper, squeezing his pencil until his fingertips turn white. “It is like Legos.”

“It probably was a box, then your sister and you came along, and they added your room; then Pop moved in, and they added his space.” No one would design this layout from scratch. The awkward additions have made too many corners and dead ends, suited less for family time than for hide-and-seek.

“And Ev’s room!”

“Oh, right, there’s that, too.”

After I finish, Martin holds our two drawings up toward the light and layers them. “Look, I can see yours through mine.”

“That’s cool,” I say, looking at the outline of my childhood through the outline of his.

He wants to know where my room was and whether I shared with my brother like he shares his with Milly, and then he wants me to tell him a story. “About when you were five years old!”

“Oh, boy, let’s see …” What story do I have for him? Something he’ll relate to. “Hey, I have an idea! Let’s make model houses. I saw some Popsicle sticks in a drawer this morning—” I divert him because honest to God, right at this moment, I can’t think of one story that won’t bring us straight to my mother, which is the real difference between the outline of his childhood and the outline of mine.

On the second morning of John’s trip, Evan and I are deep into
Santa Barbara
when he says they should sell this season on video. “Just the best scenes, like the top ten.”

“We could make serious money doing that,” I say, accidentally putting a
we
out there. “How long have you been watching this, anyway?”

“Oh—well—” He freezes up like I’ve caught him in a trap. “A couple years.”

Then it hits me. He watched this with his mother. I bet this was her show. I bet she used to sit in this chair. That’s what people do when they’re sick. They watch TV. I would. If I had a bad disease, I’d stay home in my softest pajamas, flip on some daytime drama, and crawl into another life until I fell asleep with someone else’s problems filling up my head.

How much longer will Evan watch? A year? Forever?

After the show, Evan says he has stuff to do, but he’ll be around at dinnertime if that’s cool.

“Sure,” I say, meaning
totally
. “I was going to make carbonara.”

“The kids may not go for it, but it sounds great to me.”

Before dinner, I tighten the straps on my bra to make my boobs look better, and rub lotion into my dusty arms. By the time
Evan comes in, I’ve already fed the kids—plain spaghetti, bacon on the side—and they’re back in their room, working on a puzzle.

“I’m trying to get this sauce to thicken,” I say.

“I’ll do the table,” he says, opening a side cabinet. He digs out two dinner plates, different from the ones we usually use. Pop passes by and runs his fingers across a plate without saying anything, and my guess is that I will never know any more about these obviously special plates than I do now, which is to say they carry some current that begs touching.

While the sauce thickens, I wander into the living room and pick through the rack of albums, which is dominated by musical soundtracks. I see an old Jackson Browne album that I memorized in high school. I tip the vinyl out of its sleeve, lay it on the record bed, and set the needle on the glossy edge. The first song is about lying in the tall grass with someone, filling otherwise empty hours, trading small comforts and, where necessary, mercy—like Ántonia and Jim and maybe like Evan and me. Next to the stereo, tucked to the side, is a photo of Ellen I missed when I first combed through the room. Her hair is short and soot-black, and she’s surprisingly heavy, maybe two hundred pounds. All five of her children surround her.

“You want some wine?” Evan calls out from the kitchen. “There’s a bottle open in the fridge.”

“Sure.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

“I turned down the stove. I think it’s good,” Evan says as he comes into the living room, holding out a juice glass filled with Chardonnay.

“Classy.”

He smiles, but when he sees what I’m looking at he shakes his head. “That wasn’t her,” he says defensively. “Her hair was
growing back after surgery—she didn’t like it dark like that. And she was never a big person. As part of her treatment, they put her on steroids, which made her swell up.”

“She doesn’t look bad.” She looks awful. Who would take this photo? Who would keep this photo?

Evan digs in the drawer next to the sofa. He knows where to find the photo he likes. “Here,” he says, holding out the picture of Ellen and Pop, the one I knew already. “This was her. I mean, her eyes are closed, but you can see she was pretty.”

“Really pretty.”

“Really pretty,” he echoes, then sticks the unseemly image between two albums, not to be seen again until someone plays the soundtrack from
Oklahoma!
or
Mame
. “I don’t know why John keeps that.” I don’t know, either, of course I don’t, but maybe her mangy hair and bloated, distended body remind him of the awful side effects of her treatment, and that helps him think of his wife less as dead and more as free.

Over dinner, I babble about all the plans Tracy and I have for the rest of our travels. Evan says that by the time Tracy and I leave Australia for New Zealand, we will have seen more of his country than he has.

“I’ve been meaning to get out to the reef and up to Cape Trib,” he says. “The timing just hasn’t been right.” He had lists, too. Exciting things he was going to do and see and learn. But then he got stuck here, doing and seeing and learning other things.

After dinner and dishes, before Evan’s shift, we run aground on conversation, so we take the last of the wine over to the TV area and watch a sketch comedy show called
Fast Forward
, sort
of like an Australian
Saturday Night Live
. A comedian named Chenille plays a tarty, self-assured entrepreneur selling a no-frills funeral service for the “budget-conscious bereaved.” She explains that vertical stacking allows them to keep prices “low low low.” I shrink back, so uncomfortable sitting next to Evan. When Chenille says they employ a “bevy of necro-cosmeticians” because “a lassie wants to look her best when she gets to the pearly gates,” he laughs so hard that he practically chokes, loud enough to wake the neighbors. It’s the most noise I’ve ever heard him make.

After my mother’s brother, Uncle Tommy, died of cancer, I heard her laugh at the strangest things, like the apparently hilarious disgrace of puking into a bedpan. That made her laugh hard enough to cry. I wasn’t even thirteen, I didn’t know anything about anything, but I did understand that she was allowed to laugh because she had been there. She had seen it and this black humor was part of how she dealt with it.

I don’t remember one day of Tommy being sick, and that’s just fine with her. My mother has zero interest in exploring mortality—
that’s what noon Mass and rosary beads are for
—and considers anything beyond the headline “My brother has a health issue” to be
hanging out private family business
.

The day of Uncle Tommy’s funeral, I was a month away from starting high school. I remember coming down to the kitchen that morning.

“Where’s Mom?” I asked GT.

“Packing for Baltimore,” he answered flatly, holding everything in. He loved Tommy. We all did. Tommy was Princeton-smart and athletic. My brothers used to play pond hockey with him, and my dad always said Tommy moved on the ice like Fred Astaire in kneepads.

My mom’s door was closed for most of the morning, so instead of being upbeat-cheerleader guy, my dad said all the stuff she usually said.

“Brush your teeth.”

“No sneakers.”

“Make sure you go to the bathroom before we get in the car.”

When my mom came out of her room, the only thing on her that stood out was a gold pin. Everything else was black. She had on her usual makeup, except lipstick. I couldn’t decide whether she was waiting to put it on until we got closer to Baltimore, or she forgot, or she got too tired to keep going. For all I knew, it was inappropriate to wear lipstick to your brother’s funeral.

Before I could say anything, she looked down at me and said, “You used my hairbrush. I took out my hot rollers and picked up my brush and ran it through my hair, and it was all wet, and now my hair …” She petered out. The rest didn’t matter. I looked at the carpet. She had told me three hundred times to stop touching her things, especially her hairbrush.

Downstairs, she took a new pack of cigarettes out of the carton in the kitchen drawer, even though once we got to my grandmother’s there would be Benson & Hedges in silver boxes on every side table. My mom was going to smoke on the way down, and no one was going to complain.

I sat in the back of the station wagon with my mom’s pillow, which I was not to touch. GT and Booker were in the middle. We went from one road to the next, our back-alley route to 95 South. At one point my dad said, “Not much traffic today,” but no one responded. I didn’t know where my brothers’ electronic football games were, but they weren’t making those
click-click-click
s
and we weren’t checking sports scores on the radio. The only sound was the car lighter popping. My mom pinched her lips around a cigarette and pressed the red-hot coil into the tip and sucked while I watched from the backseat.