Up Island (14 page)

“What would I do then?” I said desolately. “Who would I have then who’s left of my family?”

“Honey, you have to start now making a life for yourself,”

Daddy said, as if Kevin and Sally were not on the patio with us. “And you have to make it by yourself. It can’t be built around Teddy or me. Neither one of us is going to be with you that much longer. Besides that, I just can’t…take the weight right now. And Teddy shouldn’t have to.”

“Then what can I do for you?”

It was a cry out of the innermost part of me, where the child he had loved and lifted up still lived.

“Well, you can come take care of her clothes, if you want to do something for me,” he said, smiling a little. “I thought I could do that, but it turns out I can’t seem to.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll start on it in the morning.”

* * *

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But I couldn’t, either. I got up the next morning so freighted with heaviness and darkness that I could scarcely breathe; I thought I was actually sickening with some sort of virus. After breakfast I threw up, something I do so rarely that the very throat and stomach muscles involved felt alien, and I realized that I could not sort through my mother’s clothes, could not touch and finger and fold away her spare little dresses and sweaters, could not handle her hats. They would smell of her and her smell would cling to me; they would swarm with memories, like bacteria. The bacilli of love and rage and hurt that they harbored would paralyze me. I rinsed out my mouth and called Carrie Davies, who had said she would do anything, anything at all that I needed. I got her answering machine.

I called Livvy.

We met at my parents’ condominium. My father was not there. He had, he’d said on the phone that morning, some things he needed to pick up around town, and then he was going to lunch with Harry and a couple of his other fishing and football cronies. I knew he would be collecting things of Mother’s that she had left in the various dressing rooms or offices of the theaters and auditoriums where she had acted and danced.

“If it’s too hard, I can do that,” I said. “But I’m glad you’re going to see people. It’s the way, isn’t it? Just start right in?

I hope it helps, Daddy.”

“No, I want to do it,” he said. “And I don’t know if it’s the way or not. Is there a way? I don’t think it’s going to help much, baby, but you can’t sit down and die, too, can you?”

Why not? I thought suddenly.

“Of course not,” I said.

So Livvy and I went into the orderly, banal rooms UP ISLAND / 115

where my parents had lived the latter part of their lives together, and into the bedroom that my mother had used, and into her closet, and I watched as Livvy methodically folded away her things into the plastic leaf bags I had brought. Afterward we would take them to the Salvation Army. It was not so hard after all, not if I did not have to touch her clothing. I could watch. I could do that.

“Isn’t there anything you want?” Livvy said as we got ready to carry the bags to my car. “Some of her things are lovely, and they’re in perfect condition. You’ll be sorry later if you don’t keep something.”

“No. Nothing would fit me. And her handbags and accessor-ies would just look silly. They’re for little people. They’d look like toys on me.”

“Keep this,” Livvy said. “You’ll regret it terribly if you don’t keep something, so keep this. It would make a terrific sun hat if you took the flower off.”

She tossed the black hat my mother had worn to our last dinner, at the Ritz-Carlton, on to the bed, and I smiled in spite of myself. Livvy was right. I found that I did want it, after all. My mother would indeed follow into the rest of my life in the warp and weave of her big black hat.

“You know,” she said as we trudged out with our bags,

“you and that hat should just get on a plane and come up to the Vineyard in a month or so. I’m going up by myself then; Caleb isn’t coming till much later. We’d have all that time together, with no obligation and no pressures, just you and me and the beach and the ocean.”

“I can’t be social now, Livvy,” I said. I knew that she and Caleb knew half the summer population of Martha’s Vineyard.

“We won’t be,” she said. “I don’t want to, either.

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You’d be a great excuse. You know, you’ve never really been anywhere on your own, without Tee and or the children along. You ought to see how it feels. You might end up liking it very much.”

“Next year, maybe…”

“Why ‘next’?” I saw that she was going to push it. “Why, exactly?”

“Well, Teddy and school and all…”

She just shook her head impatiently, but she did not say anything else.

My father left two days later for Lake Homosassa with Harry and Martin Short and Philip Hines. I had been spending a good part of each day with Daddy, though he had not asked me to, and I got up very early and went over to say good-bye on the morning that they left. In the hot, colorless dawn he looked much thinner and older, and so ill and bruised that I had the sudden, panicky feeling that he would not be coming back to me. I hugged him fiercely.

“Please call me every day,” I said into the shoulder that, as it always had, smelled of starch and laundry powder, clean and acid.

“I’m going to be out on the lake most days,” he said. “How about once every two or three days?”

“Daddy…what if I need you?”

“What if you don’t?” he said, and hugged me hard. I didn’t say any more, and they drove away, and I stood staring in the driveway until Harry’s old wagon vanished around a long curve of Peachtree Road. Then I went home and sat down on the patio and drank a cup of coffee. Teddy was spending the night at T. J. Campbell’s house.

“I don’t know where my folks are,” I said aloud into the brightening day. Nothing in the still air responded.

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In the following weeks I fussed over Teddy until he became distant and sullen with me, and after we had an out-and-out fight, ugly and flaming with accrued pain, I realized what I was doing and called Caroline and Alan and arranged for the visit that they had said they wanted. Caroline sounded distracted and dull; of course I must come immediately, she said, they’d been waiting for me to decide when. But she did not sound glad. She did not sound any way at all. The pretty lilt that had always lived in Caroline’s voice, that always seemed to me so essentially Southern, was gone. Anger at Tee flared afresh, for the dying of his daughter’s lilting voice.

From Tee, back from his fire-walking, I heard nothing.

There were no more calls from Sheri Scroggins, either. The whole world seemed caught in a bubble of hot, stale timeless-ness. I was glad, finally, to board the plane that took me out of my own summer miasma and into that of Memphis.

But it was not a good visit, and I cut it short by two days.

Caroline was so faded and snappish that she seemed someone I hardly knew; there was literally nothing left of the flush of easy vivacity about her that had always reminded me so of Tee. Alan was distracted and silent; he often stayed late at his office, apologizing and talking of a landmark case being readied for court. The baby slept, cried, and slept. Caroline had a cleaning woman and an afternoon sitter for the baby, and we did indeed go to lunch and shopping and around to see the sights of Memphis, but the heat and humidity were stupendous, and we did not talk much about anything of substance. Every time I ventured into her life, or spoke of mine without her father, her eyes filled with tears and she cut me off

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sharply and shrilly. She did not say so but I knew that she was still angry with me for not, somehow, preventing Tee from leaving her, and I knew that if I stayed much longer, the childish hurt I felt at her accusatory pain would turn to anger, and I would widen and harden the gulf between us that was, I hoped, still temporary. So on the third day of my visit, when the baby developed one of the indistinguishable thin, mewling, summer colics that the children of the South are heir to, I simply went home. Caroline wept and hugged me and promised a long Christmas visit and did not protest my leaving. I felt nothing on the trip home but fatigue and relief.

When I got out of the cab and went into the house in Ansley Park, the front door was unlocked and I heard voices on the patio. I had not expected Teddy home from Eddie’s parents’ summer place in Highlands until the weekend, and my heart lifted. I was finding that among the myriad small deaths surrounding this separation, one of the worst was coming home at twilight to an empty house. The thought of hugging my son and Lazarus made me as giddy as a sudden whiff of pure oxygen.

“Guess who’s coming to dinner?” I called out, and ran through the dark library and out on to the sunny patio.

Instead of Teddy and Lazarus, it was Tee, who looked blankly up at me from the chaise. Sheri Scroggins, in shorts and a tank top, sat at his feet. Both were frozen in place, sweating tall glasses in hand. Both stared at me as if I were trailing tattered grave accouterments.

I felt that patio wheel around me. It was like walking into the wrong house. Tee’s long body owned this UP ISLAND / 119

patio. I had seen it stretched out there on the chaise countless times. I almost expected to see my own face on the body of the woman who sat at his feet.

“Molly—” Tee began. My heart lurched at the sound of his slow, deep voice saying my name.

“I want you to go now,” I said. I sounded in my own ears like a prissy little girl mouthing words her mother had taught her.

Sheri stood up. Her body was splendid; it did not look real in the slanting afternoon light. It simply had no imperfections.

She made a smile, which did not reach her eyes, of her long red mouth. After the first glance, I did not look at her.

“You had no right to come into my house when I was gone,” I said to Tee. “I want you to leave, and I don’t want you to come back again…”

But my heart shook with my wanting him to stay.

It was Sheri who answered me.

“It’s his house, too, Molly,” she said in the grating twang that I had come to loathe. “In fact, it’s solely his house, I believe. Your name is not on the deed.”

I still did not look at her.

“Why are you here?” I asked my husband.

“I wanted to see it,” Sheri said again. “I wanted to see Tee’s house. There was no reason for me not to. We’d have called before we came, of course, but we didn’t know you’d be here.

Tee’s been having some ideas about it, haven’t you, Teeter?”

She smiled down at him around the dreadful nickname.

Tee still did not speak. He just looked at me.

“Cat got your tongue?” I said. I knew I sounded bitchy. I could think of no right way to talk to this man who was and yet was not my husband. I wished that
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they would just vanish, and I could go upstairs and go to sleep.

“I’ve been thinking that it might be a good idea if I bought the house from you, Molly,” he said finally. He looked at Sheri, not at me, and I knew whose good idea it was. This woman had come with my husband into our home, and seen it, and wanted it for herself.

“The house is not for sale,” I said.

“That’s really not your decision to make, is it?” Sheri Scroggins said.

“Shut up,” I said to her, and to Tee, “You want my house, too?”

He looked at me then. There was something new in his eyes, a kind of edge, a thin hardness like lacquer.

“I’m prepared to make you an extremely generous offer for it,” he said.

My throat thickened until I could scarcely push words past it.

“You said…you said it would be mine always,” I said. “You
said
that. You said it the first night, when you told me about all this. You said anything I wanted or needed. I assumed you meant the place we live, the place the family lives…”

He looked away, and I could no longer see the new hardness.

“You assume a lot, Molly,” he said in a low voice.

“When did I get to be the enemy, Tee?” I said.

He looked down at the bricks of the patio. I did, too. I thought of the autumn weekend we had laid them, he and I, an October long ago, with Teddy helping resignedly and Lazarus tracking wet grouting in and out on his big paws.

“Don’t, Molly…” Tee said.

“You don’t need this big house, Molly,” Sheri UP ISLAND / 121

Scroggins said. She spoke soothingly, as you would to a child or a demented person. “Why would you want it? A big old white elephant…with what we’re prepared to give you, you could get yourself the most fabulous condo in Atlanta, or another, smaller house…anything you wanted. But we all need to be sensible now, and get down to talking about specifics. We’ve let this go on too long as it is. Can’t you see the sense in letting Tee have it?”

“No, I cannot see the sense in it, because this is my fucking home, you idiot,” I shouted at her. Her face went still and narrow.

“My life is here,” I said into the fox-sharp face. “My memories are here. My history is not disposable, and if it was, it would not be to you. Do you understand me?”

She was silent, then she shrugged.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that if I were you,” she said.

“Sheri,” Tee said.

“No!” Her nasal voice cracked like a lash in the still, thick air. “I’m tired of placating her! I’m sick of soothing, and indulging, and waiting for her to be reasonable about all this!

I’m running out of time, Tee!”

She turned and stormed off the patio. Her butt did not jiggle in the short, tight pants, I noticed. At the door she turned.

“You make her understand that,” she said, and vanished.

I just stared at Tee. He looked back. Presently he shrugged, a tiny movement.

“You look pretty, Molly,” he said. “I like your hair that way.”

I turned away and stood looking over the ivy-carpeted
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wall at the skyscrapers of midtown. We had often stood here just so, he and I, looking at them; we were suburban enough so that their proximity still charmed and thrilled us.

“Get out of here, Tee,” I said.