What I Had Before I Had You (22 page)

 

16

I
WAIT UNTIL EVENING,
when Tom is still at work and my sisters are out swimming, and I ask Christie for the rest of the story. She gets us tall glasses of iced tea, and we sit on the sofa in the living room. I can almost see the wheels turning in her head as she calculates what she can say and what she can't.

“Is there stuff you haven't told my sisters?” I ask her.

“You mean your cousins.”

“My sisters.”

She looks at me in horror, and for a moment I think I'm wrong about Tom. Then she breathes, “Are you angry?” I shake my head. She takes a long pull on her tea and sets it down firmly, nods once to herself, and starts to talk. She bumbles at first, repeating herself. These are memories rarely summoned. As she relaxes, her diction grows sharper, as she must have talked when she was a younger woman, furious with a sister who couldn't help but leave a trail of disaster through the years of her growing up.

I listen closely, putting together images of my mother as Christie describes her and images of the mother I know in order to form a composite Myla. I remember everything Christie told me that evening and on into the night, in low tones, after we moved to retired old armchairs in the sticky attic so as not to be heard. As I have grown older, Christie's version of events has become part of my own, tempered with my own imaginations and improved by the million small revisions of memory.

THE SECOND FLOOR
hallway of the Seventy-third Street house is a dim interior artery, light escaping the door cracks of the northeast-facing rooms and gleaming, pooled in the grooves in the floorboards. When I imagine my mother's childhood, this is where I start. I conjure the hallway as it is now, and I think myself back through time until I am standing in the hallway of my mother's childhood, and it is the same hallway, but now I see posters tacked to two of the doors: Bob Dylan holding up the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” card reading “basement,” and Klimt's
The Kiss.
Now there is a white cat shadowing along the baseboards.

This is the theater of selective memory, where imaginary versions of my mother, my grandparents, Aunt Christie, and Tom play out scenes from the time before me. I blink and the story changes. I blink and the sympathetic version scrolls out before me, where my mother is a persecuted lover, weeping into her pillow as my grandmother stands in the doorway, shaking her grave head. I blink again, and Christie's version flares up, and my mother is unbearable, breaking plates against the wall, cajoling, deceiving, sliding her toes up Tom's leg beneath the lace tablecloth as Christie passes a platter of meat to her father.

Here, I am a glint in my mother's eye, a ghost from a future she hasn't begun to imagine. It is 1970, and she is nineteen. She ties her hair back with thick bright ribbons, she smokes on the stoop, paging through
Les Fleurs du Mal
for her course in the French Romantics at Marymount. She goes to Marymount because it is only blocks from the house; her parents can keep her safe here. Everyone understands safety differently.

She holds the cigarette with a certain arch to her wrist, a certain absorption in her young face. Her skin is perfect. When she walks down the sidewalk, men turn to watch until she is gone. She pretends she doesn't notice, but she does. She checks her reflection in the windows of parked cars.

MYLA ASCENDS INTO
the heights of her mania, winging easy on the rush, ideas coming quickly, the poems she read last week opening up and splaying themselves out for her like willing autopsies singing yes yes
yes
. She asks to be excused from dinner, her red hair loose, her left hand fingering chords on the stem of her wineglass, and my grandparents glance at each other. My grandmother is a small, collected woman. After a glass or two, she will tell stories that knock you out, stories from her days of running clubs for U.S. servicemen in Australia, India, Romania. She is a member of the Junior League; she knows every ballroom dance. She tells her friends that her youngest has a nervous condition, and they nod understandingly, as if it is not 1970 but 1870, and Myla bound for an asylum for hysterics.

The psychiatrist at Columbia Presbyterian has told them that Myla is manic-depressive, but they are hoping she will grow out of it. It is not the lows that shake my grandmother. Myla lies princess-still in her canopied bed, her flesh a dead weight on her bones, the passage of time a dull march toward nothing. My grandmother brings her strong coffee and strokes her hair and tells her that she is too pure for this world. Depression is something she can understand; after all, the world can be for her, too, a dull and killing place. It is when Myla hits the highest highs that my grandmother frantically rushes her to Columbia, where she sits stiff-necked and prim in the waiting room, as if this posture will signal to passersby that here is a woman of proud stock, here is a mother whose daughter has not just been found sucking off a stranger in a Central Park grotto or trying to borrow a four-hundred-dollar gown from Bergdorf's or painting all the interior walls of her home different shades of green while everyone was out, drops of paint hardened like mossy coins on the oak veneer of the sideboards, the end tables, the carved Indian chests.

I OPEN THE
Bob Dylan door and I'm in Christie's room. Christie's room is orderly. Her intelligence is everywhere. Records in milk crates, framed photographs of friends on the walls, a writing desk pushed flush to the window, where she labors over formulas and proofs. A fish tank.

Here loop all the stories of the sisters. They age from little silken-haired girls racing pet mice in wooden-block mazes, playing house, pulling hair, to lanky preteens sprawled on the rug reading Jane Austen and sharing school secrets, to teenagers, and here they split. Christie in an army-surplus jacket, her chestnut hair darkening, her face growing long and thoughtful, her time spent already on serious things: chemistry and math, the perfect natural logic of the world. She trusts implicitly that, as she ages, more and more doors will unlock for her, and she will never lose the easy facility of her mind. She trusts the world to make sense. She is right. She is lucky.

I get carried away in this room.

My mother, two years younger than Christie and, as a child, easier to love, breaks everyone's fragile hearts when she starts acting out (as my grandmother calls it). Here she cries her secrets out to Christie late at night. They both test into Hunter; my grandfather believes in the quality of American public schools. Christie, budding genius, listens with concern to the tragic epics of Myla's school days. Christie quietly wins a national science fair while my mother's quest for a choir part in
Our Town
has her parents wrapped up for weeks. Myla shoves a police officer at a peace rally and spends a night in jail. Myla brings home four stray dogs a month. Myla gets ragingly drunk at a college party, Christie rescues her. Myla tells everyone about Christie's secret crush and then weeps for a week before she can apologize. By then, it's Christie comforting Myla rather than the other way around. Christie accepts these frequent apologies. This is how her sister is. She only has one sister.

ON THE RIGHT
side of the hallway, my grandparents' door is always closed. Their bed is navy-sheeted and made with hospital corners. Flowers on a nightstand are freshened twice a week by the part-time maid. Large windows look out over the patio and the garden, the traffic noise fainter at the back of the house. My grandparents sleep in S shapes, facing each other. My grandmother makes the rules and runs this family, but at night in this room, she is silly with love for her beau. My grandparents read to each other: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. If there is one thing my grandmother is sure of, it is the strength of her marriage. She hopes the same for her girls: husbands of wit and integrity. A deep and certain bond.

She dislikes Tom from the moment Christie introduces him; my grandmother has some prescience in her, too.

WHEN CHRISTIE BRINGS
Tom home from college, Myla wants him immediately. She feels like she knows him from somewhere, she feels like he's part of her future. Tom wears a brown corduroy jacket and knows about macroeconomics. He nods as people talk. He rests his hand around Christie's waist when they walk up the stairs.

My grandfather approves of him, and Christie is suffused with pleasure. After lunch, she helps my grandmother with the clearing up. Tom mills around the living room, picking up objects and setting them down. He reaches for a book from the top shelf, and his sweater lifts above his weathered belt, his abdomen soft and taut. Myla sits in an armchair by the fireplace and looks. “I can get you a ladder,” she says.

Tom takes the book down and smiles at her, buoyed by a sense of accomplishment at having wanted something and gotten it. Myla crosses her legs in front of her on the footstool, yawns, arches her long back. Tom loves Christie, but he lives in a city of women—women yawning like cats, women in lipstick and blazers running for cabs, goddesses diving into the city pools with strong thighs and shining hair. In the moment of seeing, he loves them all.

Tom is a man my mother loved who did not deserve it. He has no more claim to me than a test tube would have. Yet there he will always be, claim or no claim, in my thoughtless patterns of speech, on the medical history forms I fill out in doctor's offices, in expressions on my children's faces, on my own face. I have his mouth, this Cupid's bow, this slender lower lip.

I OPEN THE
Klimt door and I'm in my mother's room. Here is the furniture of my childhood but younger, innocent and just-bought: the ceramic swans, the brass library lamp with its green shade like a banker's visor, the pink and gold saris dripping their tassels across these New York windows. Scattered animal figurines from boxes of Lipton tea. Books stacked in towers by the bed. Mugs on the books, flowers wilting from the mugs.

I was conceived here.

There they are, my parents, Myla and Tom, rutting sweaty, rolling together on my mother's childhood sheets—white with little pink flowers—the duvet kicked to the floor, the white cat watching sleepily from the cupola window seat. A little girl's canopy bed, lace curtains trying their translucent hardest to conceal the act underway. She is off her lithium. This is the first time. Tom gasps, breathless with the thrill of doing the wrong thing, and Myla gasps, breathless with love. Tom is fascinated with the way he can feel the bare outline of Christie beneath Myla's voluptuous movement; this wild thing is inside his fiancée, too, but buried deep, while in Myla it trembles raw on the surface. She bites his lip, she grins. She felt that if she never had him, she would waste away, as if under a spell. (She would cry for rampion, she would promise her firstborn!) Now that she has him, she is a million times strong, she is the happiest girl in the world. She does not even think of Christie. Christie belongs to another story.

Inside my mother, two eggs have traveled a long blue corridor. They cling to the wall of her uterus and they wait.

THROUGHOUT, MY GRANDFATHER
is absent. He works in accounts at an aeronautical engineering firm. He drinks brandy in his study with men from Pan Am who wave at Myla as she passes through the foyer with Marymount friends, a blur of bright colors and swishing hair. He goes on business trips that he does not like to explain. He says it's dull stuff, dull as bones. Christie meets him for lunch in midtown, and he orders her roast beef every time. Sometimes Myla sits in the backyard to watch him work on his models, gluing tiny plastic pieces and clamping them to set. At times like these, he doesn't hear a word spoken to him. He works with complete focus. He does not acknowledge sandwiches left on the patio table.

He has been unfair to Myla since she hit fourteen and developed her moods. She reminds him of his father, of whom he does not speak. He is deeply ashamed of the gene swimming in his code that he has passed to his daughter. Nobody knows the sort of memories that rise when he is made to think of his father: a purple-faced drunk bearing down on him for a hiding, the belt slithering from its loops, the devil in his eye. The outlandish claims of injury, the threatening letters unfurling from the clackety typewriter, the plate-breaking, the neighbors afraid. Then the apologies. The fits of crying, the lost jobs, the hard times. The shame.

It could have helped Myla to know, he thinks later. There could have been a vitamin to take, or a set of exercises to keep the mind strong. It could be his fault, all his fault. His thoughts die with him at sixty-eight, of adrenal failure, in a wing of Columbia Presbyterian not far from the room where Myla used to lie on a couch and tell the psychiatrist what it felt like to feel nothing at all.

MY SISTERS ARE
born into the toilet, not into the hands of mournful nurses, as my mother always told me. They are a bloody spurt, they are a stomach cramp. They are unexpected and then they are gone.