Anthropology of an American Girl (11 page)

Maman lay still in her pleats of fluted silk. Physically, little had changed in the days since we’d last spoken. I wouldn’t say she looked peaceful, necessarily, but she had the look of self-possession, of satisfied detachment from the relationships that continued to bind survivors to the grind of existence. What I saw was what I’d never seen elsewhere—the look of
being done
. Maman would give a neat swipe of her arm whenever she’d had enough of whatever, of dinner, of an argument, saying,
“Fin.”

She looked well, I thought, with the slenderest of smiles. I kissed my fingers and touched her cheek, leaving her to rest in kingdom and cradle.

——

The last time we spoke, it was a Friday. July thirteenth. Four thirty-three in the afternoon.

Kate had gone outside to talk to the doctor with Laurent and his wife, Simone. I sat at the bed and held Maman’s hand. Her lips were dry; I wet them.

She whispered to me, calling me Babe.
Beb
. I leaned closer.

“Please,” she entreated, “she is your mother.”

Though we had not been discussing my mother, Maman spoke as if we were concluding a long conversation, which in a way we were. It was a deficit she’d perceived in me from the start because we were a match—what I lacked fit exactly with what she was able to give. Of course I knew my mother loved me. She thought highly of me, automatically, intellectually, by virtue of genetic proximity. Yet, every time we met it was like meeting again, with all I felt compelled to explain and withhold, with all she had forgotten.

Maman’s childhood had been far more difficult than mine. She used to tell us stories of France during the war, when German soldiers patrolled the streets after curfew, when behind locked doors people gathered quietly by the light of a single candle. Once, when she mistakenly spoke out during the enforced silence of dinner, her father removed his cap and threw it at her, forgetting the knot of chewing tobacco he’d stored inside. The hat flew across the table and the wad fell into the tureen of soup and it broke apart like tea leaves, spoiling the precious meal. The family had to go to bed hungry. Her mother was extremely angry.
‘Stup-eed girl,’ elle a dit
, Maman would relate to us, mixing languages in her sorry passion.

Kate’s father would nod, corroborating—he’d known his wife since they were children. Maman would sip her Bordeaux and smile, saying of herself,
pauvre petite
. But I would not smile. I did not like to hear of anyone throwing a hat at her or calling her stupid.

And so it was for us—or, so it had been. She believed in me as a woman separate from herself, and she seemed to take pride in our friendship. This made me feel worthy, and on the inside there was a change in me—a finding, a becoming. One day, perhaps, I would be of equal service to someone.

Her hand shifted slightly. It was a signal, a warning—there was no time to drift. She needed something. In speaking to me, I suspected she spoke to herself.
“Tu comprends?”

“Oui,”
I said, glad to give something, anything. “
Je comprends.”

Her eyes were clear and wet, lustrous and smooth, and she was more present than I could remember her having been in a long time. Inside, something had shifted; it was as though she had moved on. For some reason, I was permitted the honor of joining her there. I felt my soul approach; I felt myself move several steps in, unforgettable steps—they were to be our last. I felt us walking as we’d always walked, with the inside of my arm supporting the nook of her elbow, with the sound of her good brown shoes rapping, with the sweet region of her powdered cheek grazing mine, with the afflicted melody of her voice, provoking, initiating.

“D’accord, ma petite?”
she asked. I laid my face on her bed and nodded into the stiff sheets. She touched my cheek.
“Je t’aime.”
That was the last thing she said to me. That and, “Be a friend to Catherine.”
Ca-trine
.

There were three rings, despondent and shrill. “It’s me,” Kate said. “Are you alone?”

I was alone, but it occurred to me that I might not be alone
enough
. I dragged the phone by its cord into the upstairs bathroom. It was like a miniature body being hauled by the hair, slaggard and obedient. I sat on the tub. “Okay,” I said.

“She’s dead,” Kate said, just like that, and just like that, I told her I was on my way.

I hung up and sat for a while, looking out the window, waiting for the 7:15 train to go by. As I sat, I felt myself undergo a partial breaking. It was as though the forces that had been binding me loosened. When I went down the stairs, I went carefully, feeling conscious of these sudden separations, estrangements between me and the things around me. In the living room, a familiar lamplight warmed the delphinium-blue walls, lined from floor to ceiling with books I’d always known, standing upright on the shelves like soldiers at the ready. The irregular margins in front of the bookshelves were lined with fractured pottery and shards of
glass, framed drawings, diplomas, and photographs. No matter how familiar the objects were to me, nothing could fill the new absence I felt.

I turned into the kitchen and met a flare of bright light. My mother was standing where she rarely stood, doing something she almost never did—the dishes.

I heard myself say, “Mom?”

“Yes,” she answered, and she turned.

“The phone,” I said, holding my hand to the light. “It was Kate.”

She rinsed the last dish and placed it carefully in the rack. Taking a towel to dry her hands, she crossed to the table, and she sat. I could see a change in her eyes, in the green, and then nothing. I wondered if Kate would harden as my mother had when she was young and her own mother died. Some people exist quite well in injury. It’s like having gills to breathe underwater. Some people are clever about not drawing others into their affliction. You could hardly tell by looking at my mother that she was a stranger to providence.

Suddenly she was up again, moving—something big, something eloquent, some business with dash and rush. There was the sound of the phone dialing. She was calling the hospital, calling Kate, calling Kate’s brother. The dialing made a spinning sound like the sound of infinity, like the feel of drawing the number eight, your hand just going around and around.

Kate would live with us through her senior year and graduate from East Hampton High School rather than go to Canada with Laurent and his wife. We often had people stay—Magnus Ove, the Swedish exchange student, known to us as the Great Egg, and Washington, the computer programmer from Seattle who slept on the love seat for six months. There was always some teenager “in transition” or visiting college student or wayworn navy sonarman in need of a bed for a week or two.

“She’ll be safe and happy here with Eveline,” my mother consoled Laurent. “Your mother would have wanted this.”

After the cemetery was lunch. Laurent invited us to join them, but Mom respectfully declined, saying she had to head over to her office at the college. As for me, I could not bear to think of food.

Kate said, “See you,” and when she and her brother crossed the street,
you couldn’t tell the difference between them. Both of their bodies were lean and black and their heads were hunched. They appeared headless, as if they could not bear to admit anything new.

“You okay?” Mom asked as she stepped into her car. “Want me to drive you home?”

I rested my arms on the roof and looked in the window, the casual way people do, except I was not so casual. “No, thanks. I’ll walk.”

I moved as slowly as possible down Cooper Lane, then along Newtown, cutting across to Osborne, staring at the shingled houses, depressed in general by
ongoingness
—the sudden gusts of charcoal smoke emerging from behind garages, and the Big Wheels abandoned at the edges of driveways and the shy twinkling of televisions prematurely on. Everyone was oblivious to the untimely death of Claire Cassirer, leaving me to ponder such imponderable things as the stark brutality of the human condition. So much is made out of an individual life until a life is lost. Then it seems to be quickly forgotten.

At home I undressed carefully, making little contact with the fabric, not wanting to look at what I had worn. I added the clothes to my mother’s dry cleaning sack. It would be months before she took the contents to the dry cleaner and months again before she had the money to pick them up.

Mom always joked with Mrs. Burns, the dry cleaner, when we saw her in town. “I’d get my clothes, Rose, but your building might tip.”

And when the garments eventually did come back, the funeral things would be on hangers mixed in with normal things, and Mom would just stick the whole plastic-wrapped bundle in her closet, forgetting about it until she needed to wear something nice, which could take another six months.

In the barn I climbed to the loft and lay there, hands on my chest. I was a body lying, and Maman was a body lying, both on the same day, three streets apart. Above me was the roof. Above her, the coppery cold earth pressed sizably, like a sulfur quilt. She was still so close, as unaccustomed to death as newborns are to the breezy world beyond the womb. I wondered were there nursing hands to help her, and singsong voices to console her. I hoped that there were.

I kicked off the covers because my legs itched from the stockings I’d
worn. I was hot, so I switched on the fan and moved it close to me, but then I got cold, so I moved it back again. I rubbed my temples. I wished the lawn needed cutting. I wished we had a television. I wished a phone would ring, but there was no phone where I was. I didn’t feel well. When I thought of Kate, I felt worse. I had to get out.

The sunlight struck the westerly wall of the barn at a sunken bevel. That was where I went, where the light was brightest and the heat the hottest. I lowered myself onto the bench, and soon Kate was there, walking over, sitting next to me.

“Simone and Laurent are having a baby,” she said. “It comes sometime in March.”

Kate would be an aunt. I wondered if the baby had hastened Maman to the grave, in the generational sense.

“They asked me again to go with them to Canada,” Kate said. “They’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, “wow.” Tomorrow seemed sooner than usual.

“I told them no,” she said.

I felt relieved; I sighed and said, “I decided I’m going to be cremated.”

“Me too,” Kate agreed. “I was thinking that all day.”

I recalled the gutless thud and the pebbly, spreading sound the dirt made as it slipped and got trapped in the casket’s fittings. I said, “It’s tough. The whole thing is tough.”

Kate’s eyes were fixed on the dampening flame of the sunset. It was the sunset of the last day in which her mother had been a participant. It was the last time she would have to be on time for her mom, get dressed up for her mom, be nice to her mom’s friends.

“Things keep happening,” I went on. “Every day, new things, awful things. It’s hard to think about them,
really
think. But, then, they’re the
only
things. You know what I mean?”

“It’s true,” Kate said. “After this, there’s nothing.”

Just then we heard the driveway gravel popping, a car door, a gentle whistle. My mother was home, calling the cats. At the sound, Kate covered her face with her hands and crumpled to a heap. I patted her on the back, which was hard for me, comforting a person in that patting way.

Mom brushed apart the hedges. “I thought I’d find you two back here. What a gorgeous sunset.”

She squeezed in between us, and our sorrow gave way to hope. Despite her small stature and unconventional habits, my mother was a superhero—arriving infrequently, often late, but repairing chaos nonetheless with her colossal energy and charisma. I was glad to be relieved of the burden of consoling Kate. At least my mother had some idea of how to be. When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you are taken into life’s severest confidence. You are undeceived.

“Has everybody eaten?” she asked.

Kate had. I had not. The idea still repulsed me.

“I understand,” my mother said, and she patted my knee, “but you’re alive.”

I
t was the first yearbook meeting of the year, and the editor, Marty Koch was up front, slumped into one of those shiny beige desk-and-chair units. As Marty mumbled about
objectives
, a lock of unwashed hair drooped persistently over one of his eyes. I tried to follow what he was saying, but it was like looking into a pond and trying to trail a swimming frog.

From my seat on the windowsill, I grabbed a chair with my legs. It squawked lamely as I dragged it over to use as a footrest. I stretched and looked through the half-open window behind me. Outside on the field, the football players were practicing tackles against those padded metal rows that are supposed to be the opposing team. If I squinted, the movement of the boys became almost balletic, like rows of rushing swans.

Though my eyesight was fine, I often struggled with aspects of vision. At close range my mind had the habit of animating inanimate articles, such as coats on hangers and ceramic statuettes. Faraway things looked sad and small, destined for defeat. Either way, near or far, it helped me to squint. Periodically my parents would send me to the optometrist for an examination.

Dr. Kessler would look askance as I rubbed my fists into my eye sockets. “Headache?” he would ask, one eyebrow raised. Behind him, all the machinery sat perched in the violet lizard-tank darkness, like stalled robots or expectant marionettes. It’s crazy, the way eyeballs require all that equipment—the rolling carts with boxes that blow gusts of air, the slide machines for alphabet projections, and those glass goggles suspended on metal arms that pivot to your face, and which, unlike the telescopes at the top of the Empire State Building, do not magnify the view, but, rather, your eyes.

“No,” I would say, “not at all.”

As I read the charts, Dr. Kessler would lean over my knees to flip various lenses around, adjusting magnification, checking for some tangible change—I couldn’t imagine what. The rim of each ring would inch past the twin windows,
click, click
, threatening to rip my lids off.