Everything I Never Told You (10 page)

The next morning, she called the housecleaning company the undertaker had recommended. The two men who arrived at her door wore blue uniforms, like janitors. They were clean-shaven and courteous; they looked at her with sympathy but said nothing about “your loss.” With the efficiency of movers they packed dolls and dishes and clothes into cartons. They swaddled furniture in quilted pads and trundled it to the truck. Where did it go, Marilyn wondered, cradling the cookbook—the mattresses, the photographs, the emptied-out bookshelves? The same place people went when they died, where everything went: on, away, out of your life.

By dinnertime, the men had emptied the entire house. One of them tipped his hat to Marilyn; the other gave her a polite little nod. Then they stepped out onto the stoop, and the truck’s engine started outside. She moved from room to room, the cookbook tucked under her arm, checking that nothing had been left behind, but the men had been thorough. Her old room was hardly recognizable with the pictures peeled from its walls. The only signs of her time there were the thumbtack holes in the wallpaper, invisible unless you knew where to look. It could have been a stranger’s house. Through the open curtains she could see nothing, only panes of dusk and her face faintly reflected back to her in the glow of the ceiling light. On her way out, she paused in the living room, where the carpet was pockmarked with the ghosts of chair feet, and studied the mantel, now a clean line under a stretch of bare wall.

As she pulled onto the highway, heading toward Ohio and home, those empty rooms kept rising in her mind. She swallowed uneasily, pushing the thought aside, and pressed the gas pedal harder.

Outside Charlottesville, flecks of rain appeared on the windows. Halfway across West Virginia the rain grew heavy, sheeting the windshield. Marilyn pulled to the roadside and turned off the car, and the wipers stopped midsweep, two slashes across the glass. It was past one o’clock in the morning and no one else was on the road: no taillights on the horizon, no headlights in the rearview, only farmland stretching out on either side. She snapped off her own lights and leaned back against the headrest. How good the rain would feel, like crying all over her body.

She thought again of the empty house, a lifetime of possessions now bound for the thrift shop, or the garbage dump. Her mother’s clothes on some stranger’s body, her ring circling some stranger’s finger. Only the cookbook, beside her at the other end of the front seat, had survived. That was the only thing worth keeping,
Marilyn reminded herself, the only place in the house there was any trace of her.

It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she had cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags. How was it possible to spend so many hours spreading peanut butter across bread? How was it possible to spend so many hours cooking eggs? Sunny-side up for James. Hard-boiled for Nath. Scrambled for Lydia.
It behooves a good wife to know how to make an egg behave in six basic ways.
Was she sad? Yes. She was sad. About the eggs. About everything.

She unlocked the door and stepped out onto the asphalt.

The noise outside the car was deafening: a million marbles hitting a million tin roofs, a million radios all crackling on the same non-station. By the time she shut the door she was drenched. She lifted her hair and bowed her head and let the rain soak the curls beneath. The drops smarted against her bare skin. She leaned back on the cooling hood of the car and spread her arms wide, letting the rain needle her all over.

Never,
she promised herself.
I will never end up like that.

Under her head she could hear water thrumming on the steel. Now it sounded like tiny patters of applause, a million hands clapping. She opened her mouth and let rain drip into it, opened her eyes and tried to look straight up into the falling rain.

Back in the car, she peeled off her blouse and skirt and stockings and shoes. At the far end of the passenger seat they made a sad little heap beside the cookbook, like a melting scoop of ice cream. The rain slowed, and the gas pedal was stiff under her bare foot as she coaxed the car into motion. In the rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of her reflection, and instead of being embarrassed to see herself stripped so naked and vulnerable, she admired the pale gleam of her own skin against the white of her bra.

Never,
she thought again.
I will never end up like that.

She drove on into the night, homeward, her hair weeping tiny slow streams down her back.

•   •   •

At home, James did not know how to make eggs behave in any way. Each morning, he served the children cereal for breakfast and sent them to school with thirty cents apiece for the lunch line. “When is Mom coming home?” Nath asked every night, crimping the foil tray of his TV dinner. His mother had been gone for nearly a week, and he longed for hard-boiled eggs again. “Soon,” James answered. Marilyn had not left the number at her mother’s, and anyway, that line would soon be disconnected. “Any day now. What shall we do this weekend, hmm?”

What they did was head to the Y to learn the breaststroke. Lydia hadn’t yet learned to swim, so James left her across the street with Mrs. Allen for the afternoon. All week he had looked forward to some father-son time. He had even planned out how he would begin:
Keep your arms underwater. Whip your legs out. Like this.
Although James himself had been a swimmer in high school, he had never won a trophy; he had gone home alone while the others piled into someone’s car for celebratory hamburgers and milkshakes. Now he suspected that Nath had the makings of a swimmer, too: he was short, but he was wiry and strong. In last summer’s swim class, he had learned the front crawl and the dead-man’s float; already he could swim underwater all the way across the pool. In high school, James imagined, Nath would be the star of the team, the collector of trophies, the anchorman in the relay. He would be the one driving everyone to the diner—or wherever kids would go in the far-off 1970s—after meets.

That Saturday, when they got to the pool, the shallow end was full of children playing Marco Polo; in the deep end, a pair of elderly men glided in laps. No space for breaststroke lessons yet. James nudged his son. “Go in and play with the others until the pool empties out.”

“Do I have to?” Nath asked, pleating the edge of his towel. The only other kid he recognized was Jack, who by then had been living on their street for a month. Although Nath had not yet come to hate him, he already sensed that they would not be friends. At seven Jack was tall and lanky, freckled and bold, afraid of nothing. James, not attuned to the sensitivities of the playground, was suddenly annoyed at his son’s shyness, his reluctance. The confident young man in his imagination dwindled to a nervous little boy: skinny, small, hunched so deeply that his chest was concave. And though he would not admit it, Nath—legs twisted, stacking the toes of one foot atop the other—reminded him of himself at that age.

“We came here to swim,” James said. “Mrs. Allen is watching your sister just so
you
could learn the breaststroke, Nathan. Don’t waste everyone’s time.” He tugged the towel from his son’s grasp and steered him firmly toward the water, hovering over him until he slid in. Then he sat down on the vacant poolside bench, nudging aside discarded flippers and goggles. It’s good for him, James thought. He needs to learn how to make friends.

Nath circled the girl who was
It
with the other children, bouncing on his toes to keep his head above water. It took James a few minutes to recognize Jack, and when he did, it was with a twinge of admiration. Jack was a good swimmer, cocky and confident in the water, weaving around the others, shining and breathless. He must have walked over by himself, James decided; all spring, Vivian Allen had been whispering about Janet Wolff, how she left Jack alone while she worked at the hospital.
Maybe we can give him a ride home,
he thought.
He could stay to play at our house until his mother finishes her shift.
He would be a nice friend for Nath, a good role model. He imagined Nath and Jack inseparable, rigging a tire swing in the backyard, biking through the neighborhood. In his own schooldays, he’d been embarrassed to ask classmates to his house, afraid that they’d recognize his mother from the lunch line, or his father from mopping the hallway. They hadn’t had a yard, anyway. Maybe they would play pirates, Jack as the captain and Nath as the first mate. Sheriff and deputy. Batman and Robin.

By the time James focused his attention back on the pool, Nath was
It.
But something was wrong. The other children glided away. Silently, stifling giggles, they hoisted themselves out of the water and onto the tile surround. Eyes closed, Nath drifted all alone in the middle of the pool, wading in small circles, feeling his way through the water with his hands. James could hear him:
Marco. Marco.

Polo,
the others called back. They circled the shallow end, splashing the water with their hands, and Nath moved from one side to the other, following the sounds of motion.
Marco. Marco.
A plaintive note in his voice now.

It wasn’t personal, James told himself. They’d been playing for who knows how long; they were just tired of the game. They were just messing around. Nothing to do with Nath.

Then an older girl—maybe ten or eleven—shouted, “Chink can’t find China!” and the other children laughed. A rock formed and sank in James’s belly. In the pool, Nath paused, arms outstretched on the surface of the water, uncertain how to proceed. One hand opened and closed in silence.

On the sidelines, his father, too, was uncertain. Could he make the children get back in the pool? Saying anything would draw attention to the trick. He could call his son.
It’s time to go home,
he might say. Then Nath would open his eyes and see nothing but water all around him. The smell of chlorine began to bite at James’s nostrils. Then, on the far side of the pool, he saw the blur of a body sliding silently into the water. A figure glided toward Nath, a sandy head broke the surface: Jack.

“Polo,” Jack shouted. The sound echoed off the tiled walls:
Polo. Polo. Polo.
Giddy with relief, Nath lunged, and Jack held still, treading water, waiting, until Nath caught his shoulder. For a moment, James saw sheer joy on his son’s face, the dark furrow of frustration wiped away.

Then Nath opened his eyes, and the glow vanished. He saw the other kids squatting around the pool, laughing now, the pool empty except for Jack in front of him. Jack himself turned to Nath and grinned. To Nath, it was a taunt:
Joke’s on you.
He shoved Jack aside and ducked underwater, and when he reemerged at the edge, he climbed straight out without shaking himself. He didn’t even wipe the water from his eyes, just let it stream over his face as he stalked toward the door, and because of this James could not tell if he was crying.

In the locker room, Nath refused to say a word. He refused to put his clothes or even his shoes on, and when James held out his slacks for the third time, Nath kicked the locker so hard he left a dent in the door. James glanced back over his shoulder and saw Jack peeking through the door from the pool area. He wondered if Jack was about to speak, maybe apologize, but instead he stood silent and staring. Nath, who hadn’t spotted Jack at all, marched out into the lobby, and James bundled up their things and let the door swing shut behind them.

Part of him wanted to gather his son into his arms, to tell him that he understood. Even after almost thirty years, he still remembered P.E. class at Lloyd, how once he’d gotten tangled up in his shirt and emerged to find his pants missing from the bench. Everyone else had already dressed and was stuffing gym uniforms into lockers and lacing shoes. He had tiptoed back into the gym, hiding his bare thighs and calves behind his knapsack, looking for Mr. Childs, the P.E. teacher. By then the bell had rung and the locker room had emptied. After ten minutes of searching, mortified at being in his undershorts in front of Mr. Childs, his pants were revealed under a sink, legs tied around the U-bend, dust bunnies caught in the cuffs. “Probably just got mixed up in someone else’s things,” Mr. Childs had said. “Hurry along to class now, Lee. You’re tardy.” James had known it was no accident. After that, he had developed a system: pants first, then shirt. He had never told anyone about it, but the memory clung.

So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his son, to slap him. To shape him into something different. Later, when Nath was too slight for the football team, too short for the basketball team, too clumsy for the baseball team, when he seemed to prefer reading and poring over his atlas and peering through his telescope to making friends, James would think back to this day in the swimming pool, this first disappointment in his son, this first and most painful puncture in his fatherly dreams.