31 Hours (4 page)

If Vic still lived at home instead of in her own place downtown, or if she even had more time between dance rehearsals, maybe Mara wouldn’t feel so responsible, so involved in her mother’s tears. There’d be two daughters to share in this. And of course, if her dad still lived here, Mara wouldn’t be responsible at all. The weeping had begun about six weeks ago and her dad had left a month ago and at that point the weeping had gotten worse. Her father and Vic had to know what was happening with Mara’s mother. But everyone in her family always called Mara “the little angel,” so maybe they thought she spread her wings and floated to some serene place while her mother cried. Maybe they thought Mara didn’t need help.

Since it was all up to her, Mara had been working to fine-tune her aural senses. That way she could better hear the sounds that had become
primary in her life: doors opening and closing, and her mother’s muted tears. Mara’s method: she filled the bathtub just enough to cover her ears and then lay down. Listening through water made the unnecessary sounds go away—the cars passing on the street below, or an airplane overhead. Miraculously, it also magnified the small, necessary ones, the internal sounds. All she had to do was pay attention, and she could make out the hisses of the old couple next door arguing in Russian. She could hear the rumble of the subway that ran directly beneath their building and even, she believed, the voices of commuters talking. She could hear the walls breathe. She would lie there until her skin grew dimpled from moisture and the water began to cool and goose bumps rose on her body. Later she could hear from the other end of the apartment when her mother finally cracked open her bedroom door and quietly emerged, almost shamefacedly, as if she were tiptoeing in after curfew. Then Mara could run to join her for as long as she stayed outside the cave of her bedroom, as long as she could hold the tears at bay. Even when the door remained closed and Mara had to press herself against it for comfort, the listening exercise paid off. Sometimes, it was true, Mara couldn’t hear anything except sirens and traffic helicopters. But in general, the undertone of weeping appeared to grow louder and clearer as Mara’s hearing sharpened.

Today Mara’s mother had been shuttered in her room for the past four hours. With luck, she would come out of the bedroom, blinking as if she’d emerged from darkness, and say, “How about some scrambled eggs?” though it was way past breakfast time. Or she’d ask some question about school, though it was Sunday. Or she’d squeeze Mara’s shoulders and suggest an activity, though they wouldn’t end up actually doing it. She would smile and be cheerful, especially if the phone rang, and Mara would be grateful, but she would not be fooled. It would be a case
of barely hanging on, like when Mara had to do chin-ups during gym, and before long her mother would scuttle back into the bedroom and the door would close.

She’d once overheard her dad’s racquetball partner say kids knew everything. The partner—a tall, mostly bald psychologist—often made silly pronouncements, but in this case she knew he was right. At least, partially right. Kids knew everything about their families—maybe because their families
were
everything for a while, the entire world squeezed into a few people and a small space. Kids had nothing else to pay attention to, so they soaked it all up. But one point the psychologist failed to make: knowing something was a long way from understanding it.

This latest weepisode, as Mara privately called them, had been touched off by a morning phone call from Mara’s father that had come as her mother was in the kitchen, putting on water to boil. Her mother gaily answered the phone and then slipped into the bedroom, pulling the door behind her slowly so it closed with a quiet but definite click, and her voice grew too low to catch, and Mara turned off the stove and then debated with herself for about two minutes before she went into the bathroom near the kitchen. An old-fashioned black candlestick phone stood on a small hand-painted table, a whimsical decorative item chosen during more cheerful times. It was the best phone, and the best location, for telephone eavesdropping. She lifted it up carefully, as she’d learned from Vic. Noiselessly, midconversation.

“Down the street, there’s this pool hall. Back Door Billiards.” Mara’s father’s voice nearly trembled with warmth and intimacy. “A restaurant at the corner sells Jamaican patties, hot and spicy.”

“For God’s sake,” Mara’s mother said, almost under her breath.

“It’s all so real, Lynne. Everything else in my life had stopped being authentic.”

“Everything?”

Mara’s father sighed. “I’m not trying to
hurt
you. I’m trying to
explain
.”

“Shit,” she said.

“I’m forty-seven,” he said. “I have to look at this.” For a moment, all Mara heard was her mother strangling on her breath, and then her father spoke again. “There’s this saying around here:
De higher de monkey climb, de more he expose
. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I just, I saw too many monkeys climbing too high. It seems pointless now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mara’s mother said, and Mara could hear in her voice that she was wrestling with an enormous force, still winning for the moment, still calm or calm enough, but not yet the final victor. “Moving from the Upper West Side, five minutes from the office, into a small, dingy flat an hour and twenty minutes away in Brooklyn doesn’t give your life more meaning.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to say, Lynne. You’re not listening. The work, the apartment, our little neighborhood—for quite some time now, it’s all felt artificial.”

“Don,” she said, and Mara could hear that she was straining her patience to its limit, “Jamaican patties and Sunday gospels isn’t
your
reality. It’s not authentic to
you
.”

“Why couldn’t it be?”

“No. Stop.” Mara’s mother’s voice sounded like broken glass, and Mara could almost see her waving her arms. “Oh. God. Just stop.” The line was silent for a beat, and then she spoke again, and it was clear she’d begun to cry. “You think I don’t
know
this? How stupid do you
think I am? This isn’t about goddamn
authenticity
. This is a lot more cliché even than that. This is about you banging that,” she caught her breath, “that Caribbean author Vic’s age—”

Mara yanked the phone away from her ear, not sure what her father meant by “authentic” or the monkeys thing but certain that she was finished listening. She quietly replaced the receiver.

Since then, lingering outside her mother’s door, she’d been thinking about how to change things for her mother—would a kitten help? Should she throw a party? Maybe buy some cupcakes at the bakery on 81st? It all seemed a bit lame. She was wishing a solution would just pop into her head, the way answers sometimes did on multiple-choice tests, when she heard a key in the door. She wondered, for a breath, if it might be her father, fresh from Brooklyn and here to talk things through with her mother. Sometimes, as her father said, her mother didn’t really listen; she seemed so lost in her own thoughts—always had, now that Mara considered it. Maybe a good set of ears from his wife was all her father needed, and he’d returned to claim it.

But of course it was not her father at the door. Her father would not simply wander back in at this point. There would be no magic wand; this was not a musical. Mara herself was going to have to figure out how to fix it.

She moved away from her mother’s bedroom door, still shuttered, and headed toward the living room. “Hey, Vic,” she called out, because only one other person had keys to their apartment.

“Mar-muffin, the angel.” Vic stood smiling in the center of the room, holding a white plastic bag with one hand, her hair pulled away from her face. Vic was so beautiful she glowed, literally, as though her skin were a thin veneer covering pure gold. Mara was smart, really smart; she knew that. She’d been tested, and though her parents didn’t discuss
it because they thought it unhealthy to dwell on, she knew the scores had surprised even them. But she also had wiry, brittle hair and a small, sharp nose. She wore glasses. She had bony shoulders that gave her prominent angel wings, contributing to the family nickname. As to which would prove in the end more useful, being smart enough and very beautiful or very smart and not too attractive, she hadn’t yet figured out.

“I’m so sorry. It’s been insanely busy. Rehearsals—well, you know. I’ve missed you, though, baby. I brought a loaf of whole-grain and some sawbies,” Vic said, using the word Mara used to say when she was a toddler, before she could say “strawberries.”

“We already have sawbies,” said Mara, flinging one arm behind her toward her parents’—her mother’s—bedroom, with a play on the words she knew her sister would get.

“Jeez,” Vic said. And then, “Mom?” And in a louder, more authoritative tone, “Mom.”

After a long moment, the bedroom door pushed open, the hinges squeaking a little in protest, making Mara think of muscles stiff from disuse. Her mother swept in, arms open. She wore jeans and a fresh, long-sleeved white shirt. Her tangled hair, blond with a few scattered strands of silver, fell to just below her shoulders; her face was splotchy and mirror-shiny at once. “Vic!” she said almost manic-gaily, adding, “Mara!” a moment later, as though Mara had just arrived as well. She pulled both daughters into her arms, rocking them for a moment, and then said in a bright tone, “What time is it, girls? Shall we have some breakfast?”

“Breakfast?” Vic glanced at Mara. “What’d you eat today?”

Mara didn’t respond. Vic didn’t know how bad it had gotten.

Vic shook her head. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s wash the berries.”

Their mom followed them into the kitchen—as if she were the kid, Mara thought—and sat, crossing her arms on top of the table. Vic pulled a brush from her purse and handed it to Mara. “You brush,” she said, gesturing toward their mother’s head. “I’ll do food.”

Mara took the brush and pulled out some of Vic’s golden auburn hair, twirling it around her finger and setting it carefully on the table. Then she held the brush over her mother’s scalp for a second. Mara was uncoordinated; that was another thing about her. While Vic was a dancer who seemed to control her body as easily as she might lift a cup to her lips, Mara had trouble cutting along a straight line for school projects. Sometimes she wondered how she and Vic could be sisters. She lowered the brush and began slowly working on her mother’s hair. Her mother allowed it, even leaned her head back a little, her eyes narrowing as she watched Vic at the sink.

“Have you gotten thinner over the last couple weeks?” their mother asked.

Vic shrugged. “Same as always, I think,” she said over her shoulder. “Though Alex has been working us.” She bent to a lower cabinet to find a colander.

“Hmm.” Her mother tapped her fingers on the table. “Are you . . .” she paused, “. . . seeing anyone?”

Mara stared at Vic, eager to hear how Vic would answer. She liked catching little bits of a world removed, one in which she didn’t yet have to participate. She was also curious because Mara knew something that her mother, caught up in her own drama, had failed to notice. Mara knew—at least she was pretty sure—that Vic liked Jonas. At another time, a pre-Dad-leaving time, this would have been big news. Vic and Jonas had been friends since high school, when he lived four blocks away and they used to share meals at each other’s houses, do homework
together. Jonas had even seen Vic with pimple cream on her nose. No big deal.

About three weeks ago, though, Vic came to visit and brought Jonas with her, and Mara saw that something had changed. When Mara walked into the living room, they were standing near the window, their fingers barely touching, and they were looking at each other in a certain way that startled Mara, then scared her for a second, and then made her feel like giggling—from embarrassment, mainly. But she was glad. Jonas was sweet. Jonas was the only one who seemed to notice Mara—at one point during the visit, he knelt down to Mara and asked, “How’s it going?” and when she shrugged, he squeezed her shoulder and said, “It will get better. Promise.” Mara thought if she had a brother, she wouldn’t mind him being like Jonas.

Vic waved her right hand in the air dismissively. “Dancing is taking up all my time right now.”

“Well,” said their mother, and then she stopped, but she looked pleased. “How are rehearsals coming?”

“Good.” Vic brightened. “Want to come opening night? It’s Tuesday, remember.”

“Is your father . . .?”

Vic sighed audibly. “No, Mom.” She turned on the kitchen faucet and began rinsing the strawberries.

“Just—just asking,” their mother said. Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head back a little into Mara’s brushing. She seemed to relax, and that allowed Mara to relax, too. Mara thought about the sense of peace that came from listening to Vic busy herself at the kitchen sink, and she thought about what it would be like to be grown-up and to be the one who brought that comfort to someone else. She tried to imagine herself Vic’s age, but it seemed too far away to envision. When she was
very little, five or six, after a family road trip to California, Mara told her parents she’d decided to grow up to be a billboard painter and paint new billboards every day that would make drivers feel peaceful instead of wanting to honk their horns. She was too young to understand her parents’ amused reaction. A few years later, she announced she would write a book that her parents would edit, though what kind of book remained uncertain since her mother worked on nonfiction and her father edited poetry. A poetic book about pretzel baking, or maybe mountain climbing? That plan, too, drew indulgent smiles. Now, when she closed her eyes and thought about the future, it seemed fuzzy, full of sharp edges and dark holes and no colors at all. Was this only since her father had left? She couldn’t remember.

Vic turned off the faucet as their mother murmured.

“What?” Vic turned.

“Oh. Oh, nothing. He just takes himself too seriously, your father.” She cleared her throat. “Do you see him much?” Her voice was affected. She was trying to pretend the question was casual.