Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (18 page)

She heard the rattle of her mother’s bedside table drawer handle as Ruth Rose stored away her reading glasses and Angela Thirkell novel for the night. Harriet listened for the click of her mother’s reading lamp. The pale rectangle of light that spilled from her mother’s room and lay across the hall carpet vanished.

As Harriet’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could hear the murmuring voice of a radio talk-show host flare momentarily before being extinguished as Ruth Rose searched the airwaves for a night baseball game from the West Coast, blipped past music and voices, found one, and tuned it low.

Harriet eased out of the bathroom, taking giant steps onto the hall carpet. She passed the closed door of Adam’s room. She took a breath, held it, and reached out to test the doorknob. Locked, as always.

The door to Adam’s room had been locked for nearly three years now, ever since Harriet came back from her one and only overnight trip to Carrie’s a few weeks after he died. Whenever her mother was in the kitchen or talking on the telephone
or otherwise preoccupied, Harriet methodically searched through every single drawer and riffled every known hiding place in her mother’s desk and bureau and closets, but she had not yet come across the key.

In those days and weeks right after Adam died, after Harriet’s father had moved into the guest room just across from Adam’s room (a move Harriet now recognized was the beginning of his leaving), Harriet stopped being able to fall asleep at night.

Sometimes, after Harriet had lain awake for hours, when she wandered down the hall to the bathroom in the middle of the night, she would see light coming from under his door, and she would hear the impatient sound of newspaper pages turning.

Simon Rose couldn’t sleep either, and Harriet would tiptoe down the hall, not daring to intrude but thinking, “We’re two of a type,” feeling pleased somehow to know that he joined her in wakefulness. How could her mother sleep through those nights? Ruth Rose seemed to spend enormous amounts of time sleeping. Harriet remembered how, when she was little, before Adam died, it was always easy to go to sleep and sleep all night until morning. It was a skill she had somehow lost, like forgetting how to ride a bicycle, no matter what people always say.

The door to the guest room was open and the room was dark. Sometimes Harriet worried that she couldn’t remember her father’s face or the sound of his voice. What if he had come back but hadn’t told them and was living somewhere else? When Harriet went into the city for visits with Gay, she searched the faces of men she saw on the street, on the chance she might spot her father.

A couple of months after Adam died, Simon Rose said he was going to Yugoslavia on a buying trip. Harriet and her mother would have the house to themselves, he said to Harriet
while he stacked shirts on the bed the afternoon of his flight. Harriet sat beside his open suitcase and ranked his rolled socks in order by color: six shades of dark blue.

He said he needed to hunt down the source near Zagreb for a unique small flashing lightbulb that he wanted to incorporate into his line, but later that night, before he left in the taxi for the airport, he stood in the doorway to Harriet’s room and told Harriet, who lay in the dark room under her covers, that he didn’t know where he would go after that and didn’t know when he would be back. Harriet had lain there hoping he would tuck her in, but the taxi was waiting and the driver was honking the horn and then her father was gone, gone, gone. Harriet pretended to herself that her parents talked all the time on the telephone.

“Say Daddy’s on a business trip,” Ruth would coach, still, though no one ever inquired, before lunch at Gay’s or any other occasional Gibson family gathering the two of them might attend.

Harriet paused at the bottom of the stairs that led to the third floor. Faint light from a streetlamp shone through the bathroom window. It was filtered through the leaves of a maple tree that had grown too close to the Roses’ house. When the wind blew, branches brushed against the house and tapped on the windows. Good night, nobody.

Harriet could just make out the place on the wall in front of her, just below the light switch, where she had picked away at peeling paint until the bare spot, showing a queer brown color of varnished plaster, had begun to bear a strong resemblance to the map of South America that hung in the back of the classroom where Girl Scout meetings were held.

She began to creep up the stairs, whose risers were higher than any other flight of stairs she knew. She skipped the fourth
stair, knowing its creak, and when she reached the landing at the turn, she froze like a statue and waited to be sure that her mother had heard nothing.

Harriet’s feet were cold from the bathroom tile floor, and she sat cross-legged on the stair landing and rubbed them. She should have worn socks. Foot mittens. Something moved in the darkness of the third floor hallway and she felt a stab of fear. But it was only Tobermorey, who trilled softly as he strode up to her and butted his head against her thigh.

“Shh,”
she cautioned him absently as he flopped at her side and began to purr.
“Mrkgnao!”
he trilled again, and began to knead her pajama leg with sharp starfished paws. She stroked him and pushed his paws away, gave him a final rub and got to her feet. As Harriet tiptoed toward the attic door, the cat stared after her, his green, unblinking eyes aglow in the dimness. Abruptly, he turned away and began to wash.

Harriet opened the squeaky attic door an inch at a time, quiet, quiet. Cold air flowed past her. She walked in, feeling in the chill blackness before her for the string that hung down from the bare bulb. It brushed her face, and she reached for the doorknob behind her with one hand while plucking at the string with the other, neither wanting to turn the light on while the door was still open, for fear of detection, nor wanting to close herself into the attic darkness. She always tried to tug on the light cord at the same moment that she shut the door.

Harriet hugged herself and looked around the riot of broken household objects, old toys, file drawers, picture frames, stacks of books, suitcases, yellow packing boxes with green Mayflowers on them, shadeless lamps, lampless shades, and trunks of old clothes. The smell of mothballs and camphor was clean and musty at once. Harriet liked the smell and took a deep, appreciative breath. It was almost as good as the rich perfume of mold in the garage.

Her old nursery-school blanket was rolled up and stuffed onto a shelf crowded with bundles of old magazines, nursery lamps, cheap vases that had come into the house with floral arrangements (Gay always deplored such vases on the grounds that only the lower classes send arrangements, while People Like Us send cut flowers). Harriet took the blanket down and shook it out, then spread it with care over the dusty plank floor. Next, she reached up to a shelf on which sat a row of hat-factory wooden heads that Simon had brought home when his uncle Zelig’s hat store in Brooklyn had burned up. Harriet didn’t like to touch them because their featureless faces bothered her; they reminded her of faceless hordes of distant dead relatives who had burned up in Nazi concentration camps, although these heads, some of them lightly singed, had eluded incineration, as had Uncle Zelig, Aunt Esther, and Uncle Meyer.

Behind the heads, Harriet knew, lay the box of photographs. It was a brown, nondescript, leatherette box, of about the same dimensions as the box in which Harriet’s new ice skates had come. In gold script, over the catch, it said
Records.

Gingerly feeling between two heads, she located the edge of the box. She drew in a big breath and held it, before picking up one head by the ears and moving it aside. She let out her breath with a sigh. Sliding the box out, she balanced it in her hands and lowered it onto her blanket, then settled herself comfortably cross-legged next to the box.

The catch was stiff, but not locked, as Harriet knew. She fiddled it open and lifted the lid. Here were the photographs bound in bundles by short lengths of old faded green velvet ribbon. Sorting past packets she had looked at before (most of which seemed to be tourist snapshots of unknown people standing in front of various monuments and fountains in cities that Harriet assumed were in Europe), Harriet selected a bundle that she hadn’t opened before and released its ribbon.
She allowed herself one new group of pictures per attic mission. A dozen black-and-white photographs, each about the size of a playing card, separated and fanned out on the blanket.

Unlike the photographs Harriet had examined previously, these pictures all had smooth edges. The tourist ones had crinkly edges. She picked up the top photograph. It showed a man, a woman, and a little girl standing alongside an enormous car. The man was wearing a big overcoat and a broad-brimmed hat, and the woman, turbaned and wearing dark glasses, had a big dark coat with a fur collar. The little girl also wore a hat, with a round brim that turned up. She had on a light-colored coat that had two rows of buttons, and a doll dangled from one hand.

Her other hand was clasped awkwardly by the man, who was reaching around and stooping down in order to be closer to her for the picture. His other arm was partly around the woman, who held a purse with both of her hands and seemed to be staring straight into the camera, although Harriet couldn’t tell for sure, because of the dark glasses.

The next photo was of the same man and woman, without the little girl. Harriet examined the picture closely for signs of her. Maybe she was in the car, ducked down out of sight. The couple were posed in front of the hood of the car this time, and the grille of the car was like a grinning shark behind them. They were standing with their arms around each other.

Harriet pushed the photo off the stack and onto the blanket. She studied the next picture. Same woman, but without the sunglasses, same little girl, now sitting on the hood of the car. Where was the man? Harriet could see his shadow on the ground in the right-hand lower corner of the picture. The little girl was looking at him, but the woman was looking away, squinting into the sun.

Harriet could see the license plate on the front of the car. It had fewer numbers, a dark background and light numbers,
not like the license plates Harriet knew. Was it from a long time ago or from another state, or both? She dealt herself the next picture. It was a close-up of the man by himself in front of the car, and he was smiling right at the camera as if he were in the middle of telling the punch line to a joke. His smile made him look familiar.

Harriet suddenly knew that the man was her father. She covered his hat and hairline with her finger. Yes. She moved her finger down to cover the man’s dark eyebrows, too. Definitely yes. Simon Rose, now quite bald and eyebrowless in his fifties, had been a handsome young man with dark hair and bushy eyebrows.

She went back to the previous photographs, covered his hairline with her fingers, and turned the stranger into her father every time. His body looked different in these clothes. The hat seemed jaunty, funny even. His tie was loosened at the collar but still made him look as if he were going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. His pants hung on him differently, somehow charmingly, confidently. His belt was wrapped around his waist as if he were more alive then.

There were two more pictures in the stack. One was a tilted attempt at photographing a moving black cat, whose head was partially cut off by the frame. The blurred body of the cat, punctuated by its upright tail, was crossing in front of one of the car tires, and reflected in the round shine of the hubcap, Harriet thought she could see the crouched figure of the man—her father—with the camera against his face.

The last picture was of the little girl sitting on the hood of the car holding the cat. Where was the doll? The black cat hung limply from the crook in the little girl’s arm. Harriet studied her closely. She covered the little girl’s hair with one finger, but the little girl didn’t turn into anyone she knew. She reminded Harriet of somebody, though. She covered the little
girl’s hair again. Then she covered the little girl’s rather pouty mouth. Now the little girl looked just like—Harriet Rose.

But I wasn’t alive in the olden days when they took these pictures, Harriet thought, suddenly feeling panicky. She dropped the picture and swept all the photographs together. She shaped up the stack, first the sides, then the top and bottom, until it was even all around, with the first picture of the man, woman, and little girl on top. She gazed at them, trying to see into the black lenses of the woman’s sunglasses. A moment later she rummaged through to find that last picture of the little girl with the cat again.

P.S. Your cat is dead, thought Harriet. It was the punch line to a joke she had overheard her father tell someone once. She didn’t understand the joke. The cat would have to be dead because these pictures must be old, she calculated, studying her father’s younger face in the photographs she held in the palm of her hand. So the cat would be dead and the little girl would be a grown-up. Harriet closed her eyes for a moment and tried to think of adult women she knew.

There was Mrs. Martin, her teacher. But Mrs. Martin was from Ann Arbor, Michigan. There was the lady who worked at the dry cleaner, where Harriet sometimes accompanied her mother when she had a new dress that needed to be pinned for hemming. Harriet remembered joking between her mother and the dry-cleaning lady about a twenty-fifth birthday not too long ago. But she was Italian.

And then there was the woman, the little girl’s mother. Who was she? She would be old by now. Harriet sorted back through the pile until she came to her. The pouty mouth on the little girl was hers.

Simon Rose had been married to this woman and this was their little girl. That had to be it. Or maybe he was just friendly with them? Harriet peered at the picture in her hand,
the one of the three of them together, and tried to make out a wedding ring. The woman seemed to wear several rings on both hands, but it was hard to tell from such small pictures if there was a wedding band on her left hand. Harriet knew her father eschewed a wedding ring and had heard him speak contemptuously of men who wore any kind of ring. His hands here seemed blank of jewelry, too.