Murder in the English Department (2 page)

She winced now, remembering Lisa's first visit to the student hospital. Nothing much, Lisa had insisted, just this funny butterfly rash on her face and sudden fatigue. Nothing they could trace. Maybe she was allergic to strawberries. Nothing much, but she had been in and out of the hospital so often last year that her parents were reluctant to allow her back to college. Briefly, Nan had played with the idea of a solitary Christmas in Mexico. She could not contain her worry for Lisa. As usual, Nan's protectiveness vied with her ambition and independence. How could she desert her niece to face a Christmas of Hayward cowboys and hospital tests?

Nan switched on Isadora's radio and swished the dial for distraction. It looked like this traffic wasn't going to unsnarl until the Desert Palms turn-off. All the stations—even FM—were clogged with carollers: ‘Deck the Halls', ‘Good King Wenceslaus', ‘Jingle Bell Rock'. And a new disco version of ‘Frosty the Snowman'. She switched back to

Good King Wenceslaus looked out

On the feast of Stephen …

Nan's mother Ruth had
always preferred
these religious carols. She had had a fine singing voice, something Nan definitely did not inherit, and a great memory for lyrics. Mom would be washing up in the kitchen, singing away while the rest of the family napped under bellies stuffed with turkey and mashed potatoes. Nan dearly wished Mom could be here today. She had loved these big holidays. She had such joy and faith in the family. Mom never gave up hope about Pop's promotion at the cannery. And she always said Nan would go far ‘with all that will power'. At least Pop had lived long enough to see her hired at Berkeley. ‘Imagine,' he said, ‘Jim Weaver's kid, a big time university professor. And neither me nor your mom going past sixth grade.'

When the snow lay round about

Deep and crisp and even.

Brightly shone the moon that night …

Nan checked her watch. 11.45,
Jesus god, Shirley would be steaming. Her sister probably had the entire day organized. Eggnog from 11.30–12.30. Dinner at 12.45. Presents opened at 2.30. And poor Lisa. She must be thinking Nan had deserted her.

Lisa loved her two brothers, cheered at their drag races, was bridesmaid at both their weddings. But she felt suffocated in Hayward. As she had confided to Nan one afternoon on the Terrace, ‘I just don't know what to talk to them about. Do you think I'm a snob?'

‘Of course not, sweetie,' Nan told her earnest niece. ‘Listen, I got hooked into ten years of being a doctor's wife—before I divorced Charles and went to graduate school—because I didn't believe I had a right to feel bored.'

Lisa looked relieved. ‘I'm so glad you decided not to go to Mexico. What an awful Christmas it would be with the TV, Dad and the boys whooping over the football games. I mean I love them…'

‘Yeah, sweetie,' Nan had said, ‘we marginal characters have got to stick together.'

Remembering this, Nan stepped on the accelerator.

Chapter Two

NAN PULLED INTO THE
GRAVEL
driveway
at precisely noon. Half-an-hour late on the nose, she noted. Since their earnest Catholic girlhoods both Nan and Shirley had scrupulously examined their own conscience and helped to calculate each other's sins. Nan had been distracted, thinking about Lisa, during the last half mile of this familiar drive past the public swimming pool, the veterans' hospital and Cordoba's Furniture Warehouse. But no matter: Isadora knew the way on her own. Isadora had been driving to Shirley's house every few months for ten years now, which was almost her entire automotive career.

Nan cut her headlights and noticed that the fog had thickened. She climbed out of the car, stretching to unknot her body from the overlong journey. Damn traffic. You'd think God could unsnarl roads on Christmas morning. Now with her arms in the air, Nan found her mouth open, gaping at the jellybean yellow ranch house. Oh, Isadora
had
made a mistake. This wasn't Shirley's place after all. And now she would be even later. Nan was climbing back into the car when she noticed someone flagging from the window. It was her nephew Bob, waving a piece of mistletoe in one hand and holding a can of beer with the other.

The surprise, Nan remembered. Shirley had promised a surprise. A big change in their life. Of course, Shirley hadn't meant that she was starting a job or having a baby (thank heaven) or getting a divorce (more's the pity). She had meant this. This jellybean yellow paint job! ‘Polish yellow,' Pop would have called it. Their father was neither particularly prejudiced nor particularly aesthetic. But one of his favourite Sunday sports was driving around the tract homes in Southern Alameda County speculating on the ethnic paint jobs—‘I-ti pink,' he would say. And sure enough, to Nan's utter exasperation, the name on the mailbox would be Cellucci. Their own house had been a tedious grey and brown Anglo. But jellybean yellow! Poor Shirley lived in a jellybean yellow house. And poor Lisa.

Opening the trunk for her shopping bag of presents, Nan considered the jam of cars in the wide gravel driveway. Two broken-down Ford sedans which the boys had been repairing for the last five years, a new Mustang which Tom had bought on credit. Bob's VW with the Ferrari hood. And Joe's beat-up Buick. Nan felt a twinge of disloyalty to Isadora, as if she were leaving her in a kennel of mangy dogs. She patted the old red car on the right fender as she walked toward the house. ‘I'm not going to enjoy this day any more than you,' she whispered.

Bob welcomed her with a bear hug. He was a sweet, if somewhat boring young man. Not boorish like his father, just boring. Nan reminded herself not to be snide.

‘Merry Christmas,' she greeted Bob, kissing his cheek, checking again that it was, in fact, musk cologne he wore. She hoped that she had chosen as well with the silver earrings for Shirley and the silk blouse which she had splurged on for Lisa.

Joe and his older son Tom were parked in front of the Magnavox TV. A floor lamp shone on Joe's balding head.

‘Hi, Nan,' Joe called, his eyes fastened to the screen. ‘It's one down to go in the middle of the fourth quarter.'

Nan remembered absently how her whole childhood had been set against the radio static as Pop followed basefootbasketball year after year.

‘How are ya, Joe?' She noticed once again how her diction changed when she moved from Berkeley to Hayward. Looser here, more colloquial and with a certain Country-Western twang. She was assuming her old voice, unconsciously, unavoidably.

‘Just fine,' said Joe, turning from the television. She noticed that the screen was occupied by a handsome black man shaving white cream off his face.

Could they feel her irritation, her tension, Nan wondered. She thought of her friend Amy's frantic stories about Jewish family holidays, where people argued and fought from beginning to end. Matt also said his family rituals got pretty lethal. Nan didn't think that Hayward holidays were any safer; the mines were just laid deeper.

‘Hi, there, Nan.' Tom waved to her. A kiss would be unthinkable to Tom, the shyer of the two young men.

‘Merry Christmas to all,' said Nan. She was unpacking her presents and distributing them beneath the pink tree which shimmered with white lights and pale blue balls.

‘Good game?' she asked, having promised herself to be civil, really to
try
this year.

‘Naa, nothing terrific,' said Joe. ‘Reruns. So how goes it, sister-in-law? You finished all your homework for Christmas?'

‘Almost,' she smiled. ‘How about you? How long are ya off from the shipyards?'

‘Ah, the docks only closed down for two days. They gotta keep us on our toes.'

The shaving commercial flickered into a picture of a woman draped over a large, red car. Silently they all drew back to the TV. Next, a barbershop quartet quenched their mighty thirsts on Tom's favourite ale. The game would be resuming any minute now.

‘So I suppose all the good women are barefoot in the kitchen,' she said to their three broad backs.

‘Most of them,' Bob spoke over his shoulder. Then he was riveted by a long pass to the thirty-yard line.

‘Except Lisa,' Joe said after the play was completed.

‘Where's Lisa?' Nan asked.

‘In her room,' continued Bob as his father's attention returned to the TV. ‘She said she didn't feel so well when we got back from Mass.'

Nan frowned, remembering for some reason Mrs Ramsay's thoughts in
To the Lighthouse
, ‘And Rose would grow up and Rose would suffer so.' She didn't know why Virginia Woolf was haunting her now, ‘Choose me a shawl, for that would please Rose who was bound to suffer so.'

‘Fucking fumble,' Joe was shouting. ‘Fucking asshole fumble.'

Nan left the noisy room unnoticed.

The long ranch house was just like every other place on the block when Shirley and Joe arrived in March 1960, three months before Lisa was born. They had been so proud of this brand-new home in Desert Palms Estates, quite a step up from the old family place which they and their two small sons had shared with Pop and Mom on Kelly Hill. Here they had a big picture window and a built-in dishwasher. For the first five years Shirley and Joe almost broke their necks on mortgage payments, but since then they'd been able to afford a number of small improvements.

After Mom and Pop died, Nan let Shirley have all the family furniture.

‘At least take the big oak table,' Shirley had protested.

But Nan was only too glad to witness the disassembling of the Kelly Hill house in which she had always felt constricted.

Still, when she came out to visit her sister, it was like returning to a museum, dusty with old feelings. The stuffy furniture had absorbed all those unsaid words, had been beaten down with all the unstruck blows. Nan felt slightly uneasy here, as if she were running a low-grade fever. Snobbery. She was ashamed of her physical aversion to the plastic fuchsias and the Woolworth knick-knacks and the case of unread
Readers' Digest
Condensed books. Nan knew that what really bothered her were her own ghosts. She quickened her step to Lisa's room at the end of the hall.

Nan knocked.

‘Hello,' came the cheerful, high-pitched reply.

Before Nan opened the door, she speculated on the latest metamorphosis she would find inside. Last year, Lisa's room had been a foamy pink dream with the rose-petalled bedspread and cushions the colour of bubblegum. Her desk had been assembled with stuffed animals, and her walls bannered with mellow reminders that ‘Friendship is the Voice of Sharing' and ‘Love is a Stillness in the Heart'. It had reminded Nan of that frightening film, ‘The Stepford Wives', where all the women are robotized into docile domestics. However, Lisa had maintained some marks of individuality—an atlas, the Table of Elements. And now, during the year since Lisa had started at Berkeley, it was exciting to watch the changes. First to go where the mellow posters, replaced with a huge sign protesting nuclear power. Then the desk had been cleared for a portable typewriter. The shelves were filling with new books—the Carson McCullers biography she loved, the texts on public speaking which were winning her prizes in the Rhetoric Department. Ultimately Lisa did plan a complete exit, but the family couldn't afford a dormitory this year.

Nan opened the door very, very slowly, as she used to do to tease Lisa when she was a child.

‘Ohhhh, the Wicked Witch of the West,' Lisa's voice quavered now in a dramatic imitation of Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz'.

‘No, no, the good witch has come to save you,' said Nan, remembering the dozen Thanksgivings she and her niece had watched the old movie on TV.

The door was opened far enough for Nan to see Lisa in the heart-shaped mirror, bundled under the bed covers.

Nan hurried into the room.

‘What's the matter, sweetie? How come you're in bed?'

‘Hi Nan,' said Lisa. ‘Nothing serious. Take the Grim Reaper look off your face.'

Nan noticed how the soft lamplight haloed Lisa's hair, a shade they used to call ‘strawberry blonde'. She could never figure out how this golden American beauty had been produced by a union of Joe's stocky Polish genes and her own angular family.

Lisa put a feather bookmark in
Northanger Abbey
, recommended by her aunt. Nan sat on the edge of the bed, with the back of her hand to Lisa's forehead, as she had learned from mothers in the movies.

‘Mighty suspicious,' Nan said, ‘you coming down with Bubonic Plague on Christmas day.'

‘Don't I know it,' laughed Lisa. ‘Right after Mass, right before all the big cooking. Mom said, “Do you suppose it's that Feminist Disease again?”'

‘Feminist Disease?' asked Nan.

‘Well, you know, any time I don't want to do housework or I ask one of the boys to share chores, Mom says, “Oh, oh, you've caught the Feminist Disease”.'

Nan frowned. She had promised herself not to fight with Shirley today.

‘It would never occur to her to ask Dad to help,' said Lisa, with a mixture of affection and exasperation. ‘If there's one reason I'll never be a housewife, it's the unfair domestic stuff. Of course there's more than one reason.'

Nan was annoyed at Lisa's tone, although she agreed with her politics. She thought about the different choices of this new generation, about the questions she and Shirley never asked. Lisa had the clarity of their hindsight, as if she stood on their shoulders, one foot on Shirley's and one foot on Nan's, seeing beyond Hayward, beyond their lives to her own. But Nan didn't resent this inheritance. If Lisa had more choices, she also had more decisions. She still had the strain of pulling away. Nan saw this tension in the taut line of her niece's mouth.

She took Lisa's hand and said, ‘So if it isn't the Bubonic Plague or the Feminist Disease, what's happening, kid?'

‘I don't know,' said Lisa with uncharacteristic nervousness. ‘All of a sudden I felt woozy and dizzy. Nauseous. I just needed to lie down for a bit. I'm sure I'll be fine for dinner.'

‘Oooops,' gulped Nan, ‘that reminds me, I ought to report for duty. Your mother will think I'm stuck in line at White Front or somewhere.'

A rap sounded on the door. Nan and Lisa exchanged guilty glances.

‘Come on, Mom,' said Lisa.

‘Ah, I knew I'd find you two conspiring,' said Shirley. She hugged Nan and kissed Lisa on the forehead. A smile broadened Shirley's wide face. When she was a girl, the kids used to tease Shirley about her buck teeth, saying that she looked like Milton Berle. As she got older and rounder, the likeness was confirmed. Shirley was as broad and settled as Nan was wiry and ‘hyper'. The only thing which marked them as sisters here was their concern for this golden child-woman in the bed. In fact, Lisa had visibly revived during the last minutes with Nan.

‘Listen baby,' Nan kissed her sister. ‘Sorry I'm late. The traffic was backed up between Gemco and the Superway something awful. Season's Cheer and all that. I hope I haven't absolutely charred the turkey.'

‘No, don't fret, I counted on a little leeway.'

Of course, Nan thought, Shirley wasn't going to scold her. Why was she so paranoid about her sister's criticism. They hadn't had a fight in six months. Nan knew her former therapist Annie would say that Shirley repressed her sibling rivalry. Maybe so. But Nan suspected that her sister was simply a nicer person.

‘With that special warmer in the new oven,' Shirley was saying, ‘it's no bother at all.'

She turned with a serious frown to Lisa. ‘I wonder if we could ask the Fairy Princess to join us for some eggnog before Christmas dinner?'

Nan listened to the confused irritation in Shirley's tease and watched the guilt cross Lisa's tired face.

‘Well, Mom …'

‘I don't think the child should,' said Nan before she could remember not to interfere. Child, indeed. Protectiveness. Where did she get this protective streak? Was it because she didn't have kids of her own?

‘Christmas only comes once a year,' Shirley said firmly. ‘One time when you can pull yourself away from the books to be with your family.'

With that,
Northanger Abbey
was closed for the day, and the three women proceeded into the living room.

Lynda and Debbie were sitting on their husbands' laps, looking far more like sisters than Nan and Shirley. Both young women had newly permed hair. They wore complementing long dresses, one pale green and the other pale blue. It had taken Nan months to distinguish between them, to remember that Lynda was married to Tom and Debbie was married to Bob. Nan wondered how much of this was her own resistance. Debbie, with her quiet humour, was very different from earnest Lynda. She tried to be kind to the younger women, to ask about their interior decorating and their plans for children—which, from the looks of Debbie, were right on schedule. But somehow the conversation always finished with that cloying sensation, like teeth pulling on Turkish Toffee, leaving grotesque pastel strings hardening in the silence.