Lost Art of Mixing (9781101609187) (12 page)

•   •   •

HER SON RORY ROSE
from his seat, raising a wineglass.

“I think the occasion deserves some stories,” he said.

“And you'll start,” Isabelle added with a smile. It had been the way he had stalled every night as a child, while she sat by his bed. “I think the occasion deserves a story,” he would say, knowing the wording would catch her up, make the day fall away from her.

“I remember one time with Mom,” Rory said, looking affectionately at Isabelle. “There was a summer when we were at the cabin, just you and me. I guess I was five or so and you said I was brave enough to see something special. You took me to the edge of the water, and you lifted up one of the rocks. There was a little pool of water underneath and in it there were these two horrible fish-creatures, with these mean, awful faces.”

Rory sent his gaze out across the table. “She told me they were dogfishes,” he continued, “and if we were very quiet we might hear them bark. She said they weren't angry; they were just scared. If I wanted, I could be their protector, and they would think I was magic. I remember taking the rock and putting it back in place, so carefully, because I was the King of the Dogfish.”

Isabelle remembered the sunshine heating the rocks that would, when the tide came back in, warm the water. Rory next to her, always wanting to reach out and touch everything, know the story behind it. The pride on his face when the rock covered the fish once again.

It was Rory who had come and helped her fix up the cabin after the divorce. He had been in college then, and he arrived with the beginning of summer, eyes wide at the sight of his mother with a hammer in her hand. They fixed the roof, rebuilt the porch steps, ate dinners with their hands while sitting on a driftwood log on the beach, letting the crumbs fall to the rocks where the birds would find them later. They had talked late into the evenings, and the separate languages of mother and child shifted into a vocabulary they could hold in common. Even after he left in the fall she still felt him there.

From across the table, Chloe stood up.

“There was one night. Not my best,” she said to Isabelle with a small shrug. “I'd left my boyfriend and it was ten o'clock at night and I didn't know where to go. I'd taken you home one time after Lillian's cooking class; we sat in the car and talked and you'd said I was always welcome at your house. I wasn't really sure if you meant it, but I drove by that night anyway. And I saw you, out in the garden with a headlamp.” Chloe laughed. “It was January, and it was freaking cold, but there you were, all bundled up, covering your roses against the freeze. You took me inside and made me tea. And here I am.” Chloe sat down and reached her hand across to Isabelle. Isabelle could feel Abby's body straightening at the other end of the table.

It was interesting, Isabelle thought, the children that chose you. Some came through your body; others came in cars in the middle of the night. Sometimes it seemed as if the ones who had their own transportation were easier.

“Sweet girl,” Isabelle said, and tightened her fingers around Chloe's.

Abby wiped her mouth with her napkin and addressed the group.

“I've thought a lot about my memories of my mother this week,” she said. “About how she used to bake brownies at ten in the morning, or the way she would make one dinner for us kids and then a grown-up one for Dad when he came home late. I used to sneak downstairs when we were supposed to be asleep and listen to them eating together.”

“I know,” Isabelle said.

Disconcerted, Abby stopped and looked at her mother for a moment.

“But,” she continued, “I decided my clearest memory of my mother is the time she came to visit me after she sold our house. It was the first time I can remember seeing her look truly happy.”

Abby had grown subtler over the years, Isabelle noted—but then again, Isabelle had never discouraged her daughter's defiant streak, even though defiance could come perilously close to petulance at times. But when Abby was born and Isabelle had seen the fireworks of intelligence in her baby's eyes, Isabelle knew that more than anything, she wanted for her daughter to have her own life—to draw her own lines. The problem was, Isabelle realized, she had always thought she would be inside them, which hadn't been the case at all.

But she couldn't have been inside them, could she? Shouldn't have even thought that—if she was the thing her daughter wasn't supposed to be. The anti-example, held at arm's length. The only hope was that the nearsightedness that came with age would eventually cause Abby to pull things closer to her again. It appeared, however, that Isabelle might be growing older faster than Abby.

“Chocolate?”

Isabelle heard young Rory's voice next to her. She looked over and saw a round, cinnamon-dusted truffle in his outstretched hand.

•   •   •

“THANKS,
that was really helpful.”

Walking by the partially opened bedroom door, Isabelle could hear her daughter's voice inside, talking to someone. Not happy.

“What do you mean?” The second voice lower, tired. Rory. Her Rory. Isabelle stopped.

“Come on, Rory—King of the Dogfish? Jesus. It's hard enough to get her to think about selling that cabin without you waxing all nostalgic.”

“Maybe I don't think that's the answer.”

“Really? And just where is the money for long-term care going to come from? She's heading into stage two; if you just looked, you'd see it. She almost never talks—she didn't even know her own grandchild today.”

“Maybe she doesn't want to sell the cabin.” Rory's voice lowering another notch. Isabelle knew that tone—the reasonableness that was merely covering the sound of her son's heels digging in. She had an image of five-year-old Rory at the local swimming pool, not wanting to go home, gazing at his red sandals as if he had completely forgotten how to put them on.

“I don't know why not. She didn't have any trouble selling the house.”

“Christ, Abby, when are you going to let that go? You were in college.”

“Medical school.”

“My point exactly. It's not like she sold the house out from under your toddler ass.”

“But it was
our
house.”

“Dad
left
her, remember? We did too, for that matter. Was she supposed to stay there just in case you wanted to drop in? I mean, how many times a year do you visit her, Abby? When was the last time she saw Rory? No wonder she didn't recognize him.”

“I've got a practice to take care of.” Abby's porcupine voice. “And my son's in high school, he's got things to do. Besides—I don't want him to see her like this.”

“Because it's going to get better?”

Isabelle stood by the door, listening to her children talking. As if they were her parents. She had a sudden vision of Abby as a toddler, furious at the limitations her age put upon her, at the way her mother treated her like a child. And now here they were, reversed.

Isabelle had done a lot more reading about the disease that had taken up residence in her brain than the pamphlets her daughter had given her. She knew what she could expect, the slow unraveling of her life. She had walked a labyrinth once in England, on her honeymoon, more than fifty years ago. Her feet had followed the lines that led her back and forth, back and forth, seemingly endless, until she reached the center—and realized she would, after a moment's pause, start the whole process again going out instead of in.

The hardest part, in the end, was the knowing. Knowing that she would change places with her children, lose every skill she had ever acquired. She would give up buttons. Forks. Taking a walk alone. The words of all the books she had read, slipping from her mind while she slept or ate breakfast or went to answer the front door. She had heard that Medicare would cover hospice only when you were reduced to five words. How long would it take, she wondered, to follow the labyrinth all the way out to wordlessness? What would the last five be? And the sixth?

She had read that someday she would no longer recognize her children, and the prospect was almost beyond comprehension. She couldn't imagine how far her life would have to unravel before they would leave it, she would leave them.

And yet, Isabelle thought as she listened to her children, there were times these days when it might be easier if she didn't know who they were. If she heard their words as those of strangers.

•   •   •

“ISABELLE.”

Isabelle turned to see Lillian standing behind her.

“Could you help me in the kitchen?” Lillian asked, and Isabelle nodded.

The kitchen was blissfully quiet, the counters covered with the aftermath of eating. Lillian turned on the water in the sink, added some dish soap, and began carrying over plates and serving spoons, cups and bowls. Isabelle picked up a sponge and began washing, placing the clean dishes in the drainer. They didn't talk, the only sounds the splash of the water, the muffled clink of glass against ceramic as one object settled against another under the surface of bubbles. It felt good to hold things in her hands, Isabelle thought. The water was warm. She knew what she was doing, and relief washed through her body.

Out of the soapy water, Isabelle pulled a bowl, white with blue flowers trailing along the rim. She was surprised. She hadn't seen it in years; someone must have dug back deep in the cabinets, or in the top of a closet. The bowl had a habit of disappearing, and returning when you least expected it.

Isabelle had seen it for the first time when she took her three small children to her family's cabin, for what she had hoped would become an annual summer tradition. Isabelle's father had died soon after Rory was born, and Isabelle's brothers, who lived on the East Coast by then, had said they had no particular use for the cabin, an attitude Isabelle's husband, Edward, had shared. But Isabelle remembered the way summer at the cabin had marked the forward movement of her childhood, the photographs her parents had taken over all those years—children's ages determined later by swimsuits, haircuts, heights relative to the railing of the big front porch that the children loved even as its boards left splinters in their feet. Isabelle wanted the cabin, and finally Edward had relented.

The bowl hadn't been part of the cabin when Isabelle was a child, but there it was when she arrived with her children—on the center of the table, empty, ready for fat clusters of purple grapes, a child's collection of wishing rocks—or, as it turned out, everything.

“That's
my
bowl!” seven-year-old Abby had declared joyfully and so it was. No matter that it was the size of a fruit bowl, not meant for daily, individual use; no matter that a child-sized portion of Cheerios appeared dwarfed, huddling at the bottom of the bowl like starvation rations, leading to daily arguments regarding just how full a bowl should be. Abby argued passionately about the perfection of a bowl filled halfway to the rim and no more, about the benefit of extra milk-soaked Cheerios—if there were any, and there wouldn't be, but just in case, they could surely be put to good use with the stray cat that Abby had spotted as they unloaded the car and which would surely come to love them if only they fed it.

The bowl had stayed with Abby that whole August. It was a perfect mold to create the base of sand castles; a giant sand dollar could fit in its base without a centimeter to spare. If you didn't need it for eating soup at lunch, it could remain outside all day—an impromptu pond that just might attract never-before-seen insects.

When they arrived the next August, the bowl had mysteriously disappeared. Abby and Isabelle looked through all the cupboards, and Abby sulked for two days, until new people showed up at the cabin down the road, with an eight-year-old girl who became Abby's best friend for the rest of the summer.

One day, as Isabelle sat on the beach building a rock castle with Rory and Lucy, she overheard Abby talking with her friend.

“You know,” Abby explained, “that the waves come far up the beach at night, right? Well, one night, a little girl left a beautiful white bowl on the beach, and a wave came up and carried it far away. It looked just like a moon floating in the middle of the ocean. But only the moon knows where it went, because only the moon can see itself in the water.” And Isabelle—who had heard the magic leaving her daughter's imagination as she grew determinedly toward adulthood—listened, as if to the last clear notes of a radio station that would soon be out of frequency range.

In the end, the cabin had been a family tradition for just a few years. Edward claimed he couldn't take that much time off in the summer; Abby declared she wanted to go to horse camp and Lucy, not to be left out, clamored to go, too. For the three summers after that it was just Isabelle and Rory, until Rory discovered soccer and the cabin became only an annual argument with Edward, when it was time to pay the property taxes.

After the divorce, after the family home had been sold, Isabelle had come back to the cabin. When she arrived, not even certain why she was there, shocked at the state of disrepair it had fallen into, she saw the bowl sitting in the middle of the table. And everything was all right, after all.

Astonishing how many recollections could be held inside one bowl, Isabelle thought, her hands in the warm dishwater. Things could be that way—a bowl, a photo, the smell of anise or talcum powder—holding memories, as if her mind, knowing it couldn't possibly contain everything, had packed them elsewhere for safekeeping. There were days she would walk through her house, looking at one object after another, checking to see if a story was waiting inside. Minds, however, Isabelle had realized, were far more like squirrels—constantly forgetting where they had hidden what would keep them alive through the winter. Still, it was a small miracle these days to happen upon a secret cache and feel memories open up before her, clear and vivid, as solid in her hand as the object they came from.