Outside the Ordinary World (22 page)

“Your paintings look great, you know,” I told him. “They’re the centerpiece.”

“You won’t believe this, but that woman in the furry hat just asked if they were for
sale.
” He was flushed, running his fingers through his hair in a Tai-like gesture of mock humility.

“See what I’m telling you, Eli? Aren’t you glad you came back to class?” I pressed.

“Yeah, but what do I say? Are they for sale? And how much? I’ve never even flipping thought about what I’d charge.”

“Start at five hundred,” Tai instructed, and when Eli raised an eyebrow he shrugged and said, “You can always come down.”

After Eli left, Tai took my hand as if to shake it and pressed it between his own—the exact gesture he’d used to calm me in the Plainfield woods, after our first kiss. I suddenly felt I was made of glass—brittle, transparent—all my need and treachery apparent to anyone who might look.

“If I don’t see you before you go,” he said, “just try being with the family you’ve got.” He released my hand.

“Are you speaking Buddhist again?” My heart was dropping like a pebble through a bog. I felt him preparing to go, taking all my energy with him.

“
My
family’s gone, Sylvie. Parents, grandparents, brother…Except I do have one great aunt in Florida. And a cousin in Brooklyn. The point is—just enjoy them while you can,
if
you can. I’ll be here when you get back.” He pulled himself away, collected his son and left without another glance, only minutes before Nathan and the girls came bustling in, tardy and tousled, bearing white carnations and a cheese platter. Nathan looked haggard and Emmie’s eyes were puffy—she’d clearly just had a meltdown over something. I hugged them all, feeling wretched and faithless as a tomcat.

Strangely, it feels wrong to be at Orchard Hill without Nathan, unsettling to be three thousand miles from his grounding presence, the comforting weight of our shared history. Painful to picture him at the construction site alone, tromping back and forth through the Ashfield snow, the distant sound of carolers reaching him through the pines.

The water has boiled. I fill the rosebud teacup with Postum and warm milk, the way Gram likes it, then bring it to her on the living room sofa. In the five years since I’ve seen her, she’s shrunk to the size of a nine-year-old child, her veins knotted beneath tissue-paper skin, eyes sunken and cloudy. She’s a woman teetering on the brink between worlds, unsure, from one second to the next, which way she’ll lean.

Now she holds out a crooked hand to me and I take it in my own. Her bones feel as fragile as a bird’s wing, and I can sense the nearness of death. My eyes start to fill and I will myself to stay composed. I don’t want to alarm her.

I sit down on the corner of the couch, setting her Postum on the table beside her and tossing a crocheted throw blanket over her lap. She smiles grimly.

“Your daughters are spirited, Sylvie,” she croaks. “Just like you, and your mom.”

I laugh nervously, pushing away my inclination to hear an accusation in her words. “Yeah, they have minds of their own,” I say. Gram looks at me and nods—I can see in her milky irises that she’s chasing some thread of memory.

“Don’t talk to that runaway girl, Mama,” grumbles Poppy as he shuffles past the room, apparently done with his nap. At ninety, he’s still striking, albeit diminished, his shoulders now bowed under the weight of years and Gram’s illness. “That girl’s a deserter,” he calls back, winking once before he disappears into the kitchen.

“I hope this, this—
independent spirit
doesn’t complicate your daughters’ lives too much,” Gram says now. “I hope it serves them.”

“Times are different, Gram,” I note. “Women
have
to have spirit to survive.” But she doesn’t seem to have heard; her eyelids are lowering. Mom is setting out Christmas decorations in the den. She hasn’t stopped working since I got here. Just as I’m preparing to leave Gram to her nap, her eyes fly open and she says, “How’s that house you and Nathaniel were redoing?”

“Nathan,” I correct. “We’re still working on it; a bit of an albatross, actually.”

“Oh, my.” Her tiny face crumples. “Hasn’t that been going on for an age?”

“Nearly a decade,” I admit. “There was more work than we thought, and Nathan doesn’t like to hire it out. That’s where he is now.” I resist the urge to add,
That’s where he
always
is.

“It’s important to have a
home,
Sylvia,” Gram rasps after a pause—it’s costing her vital energy to talk to me. “I don’t know what I’d have done all these years without Orchard Hill…. If I’d have stayed married, even without it. Our home reminded us—” she trails off. I feel I should let her alone now, let her sleep, but I want the conclusion of this thought.

“Reminded you of what, Gram?” I place my hand on the powdery, soft skin of her forearm. “What did Orchard Hill remind you of?”

“Oh.” She smiles sadly, her head quivering. “Just—there were things we both wanted. Good things. Things worth working for.”

I don’t know what to say to this. My mind flashes to the first time Nathan and I saw the property in Ashfield, the first time we sat together on the crumbling front steps of our house, sharing a bottle of Chianti, savoring the view. Hannah was wrapped in fleece, asleep on the picnic blanket under the apple tree, so we spoke quietly of our dreams: how we’d renovate the outbuildings into a studio for me and a shop for him; how we’d grow blueberries and tap the sugar maples for syrup, fill the old coop with chickens and the pond with koi. We’d even have horses and teach Hannah to ride on trails that wound through the Berkshires. I remember how the afternoon light slanted across the planes of his face; how I felt like the luckiest woman alive.

“Here, Gram—you’ve forgotten your Postum.” I pick up the cup to hand to her. Just then Emmie crashes into me, spilling the brown liquid all over my silk jacket, down my jeans to the antique Oriental rug. Gram smiles, and it’s this more than anything—this uncharacteristic disregard for her precious things—that makes me understand she is letting go.

Two days later, we’re standing in the circular driveway—Ali, Kurt, my cousin Nick and I—debating how much freedom to grant our children. Nick’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Ursa, wants to take Hannah, Ben and Donny to the mall. Emmie’s napping, and the teenagers are eager to sneak off before she wakes and demands to be included.

“Why not play tennis or golf?” insists Kurt. “Do something
wholesome,
for crying out loud.” He picks lint off his Ralph Lauren cardigan.

“Yes, why slum it with the
mall rats?
” asks Alison. I stare at my sister in her burgundy cashmere, wondering if she’s forgotten her own “mall rat” days.

“How much trouble can they get into in a few hours?” I wonder aloud.

“Let the kids have some fun, for God’s sake,” bellows Poppy from the lawn chair by the garage, where he’s been observing, legs sprawled before him, straw hat propped over his eyes.

Just as I’m fishing in my pocket for cash, laying down some ground rules, Mom emerges from the guest room, looking shaken, and takes me by the arm. “I want to talk to you, Sylvie.” She leads me across the driveway. “Let’s go for a little walk.”

We start down the hill in the fog, Mom’s arm linked too firmly to mine, her face stony, though when she finally speaks her voice is melodious, betraying nothing. “The kids are off shopping?”

“Yeah. I hope they can stay out of trouble for a few hours.”

“More than we can say for you, huh, angel?”

I’m silent, trying to keep pace with her down this treacherous hill. She suspects something, of course—that much has been clear since our ride from the airport—and I’ve decided not to offer her a thing, to float cool and impermeable outside her radar. Still, I’m not prepared for what comes next.

“Do you love this man, Sylvia?”

“What man?” I halt at the entrance to the orchard, next to the pomegranate tree. Pulling my arm from hers, I cast her a steady gaze, trying to ignore the adrenaline swamping my veins.

“The man that wrote you this.” She hands me one of my own crumpled business cards. I stare down at the familiar logo until she turns it, so that the handwriting on the back is legible.

My first, unbelievable response is regret that I haven’t read this before—that I might have missed an opportunity to be with him one last time before I left. Relief that he still wanted me despite his seeming detachment that night. Then I look into my mother’s remote gray eyes, the elevated chin, arms crossed over her flat belly. She is still lovely in her plum turtleneck and ivory cords, still righteously self-assured, after all we’ve been through. My face starts to smolder with anger and shame. It’s as if not one minute has passed since the day she caught me masturbating in the bath when I was twelve. As if the world hasn’t turned inside out since then.

I turn from her, start walking farther down the hill.

“I didn’t mean to snoop,” she calls after me. “I was just trying to clean your jacket.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t.” I march toward the iron gates. “I wish you would stop trying to take care of people! I’m perfectly capable of cleaning my own jackets and managing my own affairs.”

“Sylvie, wait! Where are you going?” She’s behind me, trying to keep up in her slick-soled loafers.

“I don’t know. I need to walk,” I practically shout. Then I twist my ankle and stumble, losing my clog. My mother catches my arm.

“I’m not here to chastise or preach,” she pants. “Though I do think a relationship with the Lord might be crucial during such—”

“I’m forty-two years old, Mother,” I interrupt, struggling to get my shoe back on.

“I know you’re old enough to make your own choices, honey — obviously, since you’ve chosen not to even be a part of this family for nearly a decade!”

“That’s not true, exactly —”

“I just want to give you a little advice.” Her eyes soften and fill. “If you’ll take it.”

For a while we just stand there, facing each other outside the spiked gates. I remember the day—almost thirty years ago—we stood in this exact spot, accepting contraband fireworks from Mr. Robert, how she snipped at him for being with his family that day, how she told me to lie.

“How can you advise me about infidelity or marital responsibility, or whatever it is you’re going to say?” I cross my arms against the damp, heavy air.

“Because I’ve been there,” she snaps. “I know how intoxicating it is to have a man’s desire and secret devotion—to be adored, seduced,
seen
—married life pales in comparison!” She’s trembling, whether from the cold or from emotion, I can’t say. Somehow this gratifies me. “But it’s a dangerous game, Sylvia. It will tear you apart,” she concludes.

She’s right about that. I want to ask if she ever felt she was falling through her life, pulled down through dream and memory by a force larger than gravity. I want to know if she felt the splintering pain of it —a terrible, fruitful pain like birth, a pain you can’t stop because you have to know what’s on the other side.

“Maybe my situation is different.” After I say it, I realize with a start that this is just what I’ve been telling myself, how I’ve been justifying my actions—my story is different than hers. I sigh, putting my hands over my face. She touches my arm, pulls me back.

“Do you
love
this man? Is he worth risking everything for?”

“No—I don’t know,” I blurt, my hands flying out insanely, grabbing at the ends of my hair. The weight of despair squeezes my chest, as if I’m being shoved into a corner, pinned by something massive and invisible. “Yes,” I whisper. “I love him, okay? And I love Nathan, too, Mom. I love Nathan, too.” The tears spring out of their own accord, despite how hard I’m holding them.

“Well.” She grips my upper arms. “Then saving your marriage will be the hardest choice you ever make, Sylvia. And the most important.”

“How can you say that?” We’re both shivering now, like saplings vibrating in an earth tremor. “How do you know, Mom? You didn’t save your marriage.
We
didn’t save it! We threw Dad over for someone else, because—because I told you to. Because we wanted to be happy, right? And now he’s dead and there’s no way we’ll ever know, is there? There’s no one who can tell us how that story would have gone!”

“Is that what you think?” Her face is chalky; she looks as if I’ve slapped her. “You really believe that you, at age twelve, were somehow responsible for my choices?” One thin hand floats over her mouth, the other still grasping my arm.

“Well—I did tell you to.” I wipe my face with my sleeve, pull in a tattered breath. The rain starts, softly at first; I can see it beading on her carefully sprayed hair. I start pulling away again. “I need to walk, I need to walk for a long time.”

“You can’t go off now. Emmie will be up soon. She doesn’t want Alison or me. She barely
knows
us. She’ll want her mommy.” I pause and sigh, turning back. She’s right again. My daughter will wake grumpy as she always does. She’ll be inconsolable if I’m gone.

She places her hand on my cheek. “The reasons for our family coming apart were far more complicated than that, sweetheart. Sometime, when we have more time—”

There are so many things I could ask her, standing on the border of Gram and Poppy’s property. But the rain is starting to soak through our clothes and Emmie will wake any minute. I know I’m running out of time for this conversation.

My mother offers me her arm and we start up the long hill together.

THE SUNDAY BEFORE LABOR DAY, MOM DELIVERED HER
final answer, while Ali and Theresa and I splashed in the pool during a rare, perfect summer afternoon. At the time, we knew nothing about the fateful conversation occurring on the other side of the house, but later my mother would tell me.

He was in the garage, doing some typical Sunday task amid the ten-speeds and dust, the flashlights with burnt-out batteries, hammers hanging down like question marks against the white plaster. Perhaps he was waxing the infamous red car the day she told him—something that made him shudder with satisfaction. He was waiting for her answer, sure she’d want to give their marriage one more chance. At least, I want to picture him that way, assured and hopeful, his manhood settling and shifting in his joints, but feeling okay, really, until she came in.

I imagine her wearing a pair of white and green palazzo pants, a slim white halter, shoulders freckled and warm from the sun. Maybe he was thinking, “How thin she looks!” or “She’s still beautiful!” Or perhaps he was wondering how he looked to her. He was still handsome, wasn’t he? At the very least, he was rich and getting richer—chief cardiovascular surgeon at the hospital now, head of his practice. He could give her almost anything she wanted.

I can feel the tingling in his toes and fingers as he dropped the chamois cloth, felt the words a moment before she spoke them.

“I don’t love you anymore, Don. I want a divorce.” Did she say that? Did the grim lines around her mouth soften into sorrow? “I’m tired of the struggle.” I can picture my mother there so clearly, every mole on her shoulders, the slight sag of the forearms, regret hardening to resolve in those wide gray eyes.

She said he cried then. Did his head drop slowly into his hands until she pried his fingers away? Or did he wait, holding tight to his grief and shame the way a child holds a bruised shin, fingers laced over the hurt? I can imagine him holding on, watching her leave, opening the door to his car and getting in. I can picture him sealing himself in with his sorrow while my mother went back to her housework, while we girls screeched in the yard, practicing cartwheels off the diving board, as if it were an ordinary Sunday afternoon.

Sammy came for dinner that night. I wonder now if my mother invited her out of fear. Dad had undercooked the leg of lamb, but we all ate it bloody and pink—even Mom and me, the vegetarians of the family—afraid to say anything that might push him over the edge of his loaded restraint. At the time, I couldn’t imagine what had caused this shift. Just that morning he’d been practically jovial as he clipped the roses, filled my shirt with fresh tomatoes off the vine. Now his jaw muscles were as tight as guitar strings as he sawed into his meat, filling his glass again and again, splashing dots of red wine across the ivory linen tablecloth, which Mom didn’t even try to salvage.

“Are you girls looking forward to your new school this week?” Sammy tried, unaware of the nerve she’d be hitting, unprepared for the geyser of complaint this would unleash.

“No, we’re not looking forward to Seventh-day Adventist school,” Ali started. “We’re not looking forward to leaving all our friends and riding the stinking bus for an hour every day to some ugly old school that doesn’t even have a cafeteria.”

“
Alison
—that’s enough! It will be a welcome change,” Mom countered. “I’m hoping there will be fewer distractions, and that the girls can concentrate on important things for once. A change of scenery is sometimes good for the soul, right, Sylvie?”

“I guess,” I said, stuffing a glistening sliver of meat into my mouth. I didn’t really want to go to the Christian school either, but I decided to keep quiet.

“It’s an asinine move,” my father said after an awkward pause, opening a fresh bottle of wine. “The public schools in this neighborhood are exceptional, Sammy. This Palmwood is a step down. Not that anyone wants my opinion.”

“I want my children to learn something besides how to sneak out to dance clubs on Saturday nights,” Mom clipped, looking at Sammy.

“
Your
children?” Dad growled.

“When was the last time you went to a teacher conference?” Mom said, returning his stare. “When was the last time you drove around looking for your kid at midnight, or had to drag her out of a nightclub?”

“Jeez, Mom, you make me sound like a fucking criminal,” said Ali.

Mom raised her hand in the air, then caught herself, brought it back down to her lap, trembling.

“Go to your room, Alison.” Her voice clenched. “Stay there until your mouth is clean.”

“Fine!” My sister threw her napkin on the table and stormed down the hall, slamming her bedroom door. After a pause, Mom apologized to Sammy and we ate the rest of the meal in silence, as we so often did. Calamity Jane sulked in from the kitchen and twined herself around my legs. I fed her pieces of the bloody lamb when no one was looking.

Immediately after dinner, Sammy got up to leave, making excuses about an early shift in the morning. Mom followed her outside, where they talked for a few minutes on the front lawn before she came back in and disappeared down the long hall toward her room.

Then only Dad and I were left at the dirty table as the sky turned tangerine and magenta. I sat with him in the quiet dusk, though every cell of me was screaming to go. “I guess everybody’s leaving tonight,” he said after a silence. “You going, too?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving.” I finished my ice cream, taking careful bites in the shadows while my father poured himself a final glass of wine, draining his second bottle.

“Well, I wouldn’t blame you.” His voice was wrecked and rusty—a piece of old farm equipment dragged across the Nebraska prairie. “I know I haven’t been the best dad in the world. These last couple years haven’t been easy.”

I stared at him in the near dark, utterly at a loss.

“My own dad was a terrible father—even worse than me. D’you know that?”

“No. I mean yes. I mean—you’re not such a bad dad.” My throat felt as if I’d swallowed a fistful of dirt. “We all make mistakes.” It was all I could come up with. For years I’d revisit this comment with shame and longing. If only I could have said something else: that I’d only ever wanted his love. That I was sorry for my part in everything. That I forgave him, even for the things he hadn’t yet done. We live forever with the words we don’t say.

“That’s for damn sure,” Dad said, tripping on his consonants. “But let’s try not to regret the past, shall we? Life’s hard enough, Sylvia, without regrets. You just have to do what you can, and hope for some pardon along the way—okay?”

“Okay,” I said, thinking this was the saddest and truest thing he’d said to me.

After a while he emptied his glass, cracked his knuckles and slurred, “Well, sporto, guess we’re left with kitchen duty, eh? Best clean up this mess.”

“Yep.” I quickly started clearing the table while my father emptied the dishwasher. His movements grew more manic and careless as he worked. Then he dropped a crystal wineglass, and it shattered against the tile.

I gasped.

“Goddamn it,”
he said, and then we both turned to see CJ hunched on the counter, licking the juice from the leftover meat. Dad leaped across the room.

“Don’t—” I started, but he was already shoving my cat under one clenched arm, where she hissed and squirmed. I followed him, pulse thudding in my throat as he marched to the screen door, slid it open and tossed CJ onto the patio. She crouched there, dazed.

“Jeez, Dad, she was just hungry,” I snapped, opening the door, scooping my stunned pet off the ground and bringing her in. “You don’t have to be such a jerk!”

My father pounced at once, pulling CJ from my arms by the scruff. She tore at my skin, clawing the air as he hurled her onto the patio again—this time with such force I thought he’d broken her—then slammed the door, wrenching it off its track. When I reached for it, he yanked my arm, eyes bulging, insane. He looked like a man with nothing left to lose.

My own anger boiled in my throat now, shook me to the core. I wanted to foam like a rabid dog at him, curse and claw and tear him up for every cowardly thing he’d ever done. My fury expanded me, made me bigger than him, my heart steely and stupid. I stepped around him, pried open the screen door with freezing fingers.

“Don’t you defy me again,” he whispered, and I paused, considering this, my crazy heart pounding beneath my breasts. After a moment, I lifted CJ off the pavement where she still hovered, terrified. I carried her through the door, held her close to my body in front of my dad, as if to show him what it was to hold a thing, to care for and love a thing. For an instant, it seemed we’d reached some silent understanding—I thought I saw a blue flash of recognition in his eyes. Then he was on me, the cat flying, his fists grabbing my hair, wrenching my neck backward, unearthing me. I crumpled to the tiles and he dragged me to the family room like a dog, arms flailing, orange carpet rising fast to meet my face. Just when I thought it was over, the point of his shoe caught my back, my ribs and arms, his feet kicking and kicking until my limbs curled up, mouth full of snot and carpet and a scream that never got out.

Then he was gone. I heard him grab his keys off the counter, rattle the shutters on the back door. The clock ticked hollowly on the mantel, and my breath came back in a sickening rush. I smelled something rancid and realized with a shock that I had shit in my underwear. After a minute, I rolled onto my back, felt my face, my neck and arms. There was no blood, though my body throbbed in places. No broken skin, no proof of this moment except my hot soiled underwear, which proved nothing but my dirtiness. I lay there for a while, hearing the faint, tinny sound of Mom’s voice at the far end of our house. Her talk fluttered on for a while and then there was a stark, awful quiet. I got up and went to the bathroom, to clean myself.

Later, I lay on their bed in my nightshirt, listening to her yell at him over the phone. Alison sat scrunched in an armchair in the corner, looking green. I had told them everything, even allowed Mom to lift my nightshirt and see the bruises, already spreading and turning purplish. I’d told the story in a clipped, matter-of-fact voice, like a reporter, and a few minutes after my stilted confession, Dad called with his own.

“You made her
defecate
in her underwear,” Mom kept saying. “You made her
defecate,
do you realize?” Each time she said that word, I got smaller and sank farther into the bedspread until I was no more than a speck of lint floating in the air between them, so small that I couldn’t utter a word when she finally put the phone to my ear. “He wants to say sorry,” she told me, but all I heard were my father’s thick, horrible sobs. Then the line went dead.

That night, I started having the dream—a man I couldn’t recognize fell from an impossibly high cliff, his body tumbling like a rag doll, battered and breaking against rocks while I stood by, watching. I had a vague feeling I’d pushed him, or at least given a little nudge. A Santa Ana wind was brewing when I woke panicked and hot, and I couldn’t get back to sleep through the racket. I lay on my bedroom floor, running my fingers over the marks he’d left on my arms and back—a map of fire. I was listening for his return, but there was only the dry, frantic clapping of palm fronds, people’s trash barrels knocking down the street. Sometime after midnight, the streetlights sparked out and my night-light went black. I heard sirens, and in the darkness my body seemed to swell as though it would fill the house. The weight of my dread pressed down like water—vast, immovable.

After a while I got up, stood on tiptoe to reach the pine box and the Kinney’s shoe box in the upper corner of my closet and brought them, bulging with contraband, into the night. It was nearly impossible to light the fire pit in that swirling Santa Ana, but I kept at it, lighting match after long wooden match, holding each letter firm until it caught, curled and blackened into flame, until the boxes were finally empty. Bits of ash danced and dispersed across our patio.

Then I climbed the fence, joined with the wind. I walked up La Loma to Crestwood to Skyline Drive, wind thrashing my hair, dirt pelting my eyes. Tumbleweeds the size of televisions cartwheeled across the road and I felt I might walk forever, over those mountains, across whole states and through other lives, until the land ran out. I walked until an orange dawn bled over the San Gabriel Mountains, until I could no longer feel my toes, when my mother finally drove up beside me, her face ashen, and told me to get in.

Somehow, I knew. Maybe her waxy cheeks and swollen eyes confirmed my knowing, or the fact that she didn’t yell at me, not really, for walking through the foothills all night alone. Perhaps she sensed that my life was already on fire without the fuel of her wrath. As we coasted down our street, I glimpsed the moon—a tender sliver of light upturned over Highway 5, beyond the Pacific. It looked so irreproachable, that moon, so ridiculously pure and remote. I stared at it as I took in my mother’s broken, mechanical words, anguish and horror pumping through me like a drug. Still stared at it as we sat in the driveway, Alison rushing out like a wild thing to bury her face in my lap.

“It’s Daddy, it’s Daddy, it’s our daddy,” she wailed, pressing her grief in my open hands, though neither of us had ever called him this in his life.

Shortly after 2:00 a.m., he’d crashed his beautiful Corvette on Newport Freeway, hitting the center divider at ninety-five miles an hour. The shattered car had flipped and spun like a toy across the highway, then exploded into flames. There was no way he could have been saved, according to three witnesses, who all described how suddenly the car ignited in that wind, how fiercely it burned—so intensely, catastrophically bright, it hurt their eyes.

That was the image I held on to, after all the others were gone.