While I Was Gone (21 page)

“Darling!” I cried. She was thin, her hair was nearly shaved, but her face was innocent and open in embarrassed pleasure, and she looked pretty. I held her. Bones, bones. How mushy I must feel to her! We rocked together a moment. Then I felt her slight withdrawal.

Quickly I released her.

“Let me see you. Let me see this incarnation,” I said.

She laughed and twirled around in a charming gesture—but gesture, too, that let her move farther away from me. Her expression was still perfectly pleasant, but it had somehow closed up. She was much too thin, I saw now. Her jeans hung loosely off her hips and legs, bagged a little at her bottom. Her hair was bluish fuzz on her skull. She had an earring in one eyebrow and a semicircle of a dozen or so more arcing along the outer curve of one ear. She wore a tight orange top, leopard-dotted. Her breasts had gotten nearly flat, her rib cage was clearly outlined. On her feet were thick, orthopedic-looking black boots. But she had smelled clean and soapy when I held her, her eyes now were bright, and her skin, Daniel’s pale skin, was clear and taut.

“The hair is an adjustment for me, I have to say, but you look great.”

“Well, I had to shave it.” She made a face.

“It was so fucked up from the last dye job that I had no choice.” She was wearing dark eye makeup, like kohl, all around her eyes. They looked, as my mother used to say, like two burned holes in a blanket.

We went into the kitchen so I could heat up the chili and pour her some wine. She began to talk, pacing, sipping, finally sitting down at the table. The talk seemed pressured, as though she needed it—a miracle, for silent, sullen Cass. I busied myself putting clean dishes away, wiping counters. I was fearful of coming too close, even of sitting opposite her, fearful of seeming to want more than she was giving.

Or of wanting anything at all, really. Cass made you careful.

“I’ve gotten so I really really hate it,” she was saying.

“Just the kind of stupid interactions, the way things have to get negotiated. You know, who has power over who, who’s going to decide. But it’s all such crap. Like, decide where to spend the night? I mean, what are the options? Ever? We either have one place or none. And who cares? And it’s, like, once Stellie left”—the other girl in the band—“I was supposed to be, like, everyone’s mother. They were always confiding things. Ugh. Creepy things. Even Raimondo. Who wants to know? I’d tell them. Who wants to know stuff like the girl you once beat up, or the time you made it with a guy, or who followed you into the men’s room and did what to you tonight after the show.”

Sometimes I thought she wanted me to probe—I could feel her eyes skit ting over to me after she said something that might have shocked me—but I stayed quiet. I made the most noncommittal of comments, or just mild noises. Olive Oyl on Prozac.

“So I think this is it for me. We have, like, six gigs after Christmas all up and down the coast, and then I’m done with it. I bail.”

It suddenly occurred to me with a kind of yank of the heart—fear?

pleasure?—that she might be suggesting she’d like to live at home again.

“And then what will you do, you think?”

“New Yawhk!” she cried.

“I’m gonna go get famous.” She laughed.

“And spit in all their eyes.”

Whose eyes? I wanted to ask. Why? But some part of me relaxed-my life with Daniel wouldn’t have to change—and then I felt mean because of that.

I was hoping she hadn’t noticed my relief. But she was safely launched in another direction, “See, I met this guy in Washington, and he handles models, sort of drugged-looking models. Not, like, pretty girl stuff—I mean, it wasn’t like he was coming on to me.

But he said he was sure I could do it. I guess I have that certain sordid beauty they want.” She posed suddenly, pouting, pushing her shoulders forward, elongating her arms, deadening her face, and I saw that she was like an ad I’d seen. For what? Underwear, maybe. Perfume. I wasn’t sure.

“My hair should get kind of, like, a little longer, but no problem, it will be by then, and then, if I can just get some cash together, maybe Stellie and I can cut a demo or something. That’s the big dream. The modeling, if that works out, is fine, but it’s more, like, kind of a means to an end.”

“So you got thin for that.”

She laughed roughly.

“I got thin, Mother dear, because I haven’t had enough food to eat. Because I’ve stayed up too late doing naughty things.” I could hear that she was pleased to be telling me this, pleased to introduce me to the harsh realities of her life.

“But that is why he offered me the job, so I classn’t fatten up much. We have to keep the home-cooking scene here pretty minimal. We want those bones to stick right out there.” She tapped her clavicles with her purple fingernails.

When Daniel came home I relaxed a bit. He was much easier with her, much more able to ask her things directly. I felt, though, that the version of her life she offered him was different from what she had wanted to show to me. With him she talked about the music she’d written, the limitations of the band, what she thought she might be able to do with Stellie in New York. Once or twice she alluded to something darker, but she didn’t seem to have the desire to shock Daniel, or to wound him, with what was painful to hear about in her life. If that’s what she’d wanted from me.

Was it? I had never known with Cass. And the truth was she probably didn’t know either. When I was most confused by her, it helped me to remember myself at her age—just that egocentric, just that lost, just that uncaring about the pain I might be causing others, because I felt I was in so much pain myself.

After supper, Daniel left and Cass helped me clean up.

Then she asked to borrow my car. She wanted to go to the Sidecar, a bar two towns over that featured local bands.

“I just want to see what’s happening, see if anyone I know is around. I won’t be late.”

But Daniel was long home from his church group and we were both in bed with the light out when she came in. I listened to her moving slowly through the living room, murmuring to the dogs as she made her way. Their paws clicked wildly on the floor in their dance of excitement. She stumbled on the first step up and said, “Shit!”

clearly.

The floorboards upsuirs creaked and groaned and marked her progress until she’d gotten safely into bed.

I relaxed then, I changed position. I spoke Daniel’s name, barely audibly.

“I’m awake,” he whispered back.

“Reminds me of the bad old days.

Doesn’t it?”

Yes. Yes, it did. The times when one of the girls was out until dawn and we didn’t know whether to call the police or not. The time when friends had brought Nora home so drunk that she threw up before we could get her to the bathroom. The time when Sadie called from Hadley to say she’d wrecked the car and cut her forehead open. All the times when Daniel and I lay like this, side by side in the dark, unsure, unknowing, scared as children, while the children moved dangerously around in the world, learning to be adults.

THE NEXT DAY, A HALF DAY OF WORK FOR ME, CASS OFFERED

to go get Sadie at school and to do the shopping I needed done on the

I !

way. Both girls came stumbling in with grocery bags just as dusk was falling—and the first few flakes of what was predicted to be a blizzard.

They were noisy and cheerful, and their speed and energy and sheer volume reminded me of the happiest days of their adolescence.

We had a light supper—chowder and corn bread, fruit for dessert.

After dinner, I got the stuffing ready while Daniel and Sadie made two pies. Cass sat at the table with a glass of wine, disappearing outside occasionally to have a cigarette. We could see her through the kitchen windows under the falling snow, her breath itself as cloudy as smoke, her skull covered by a wool cap, her body huddled against the cold as she drew luxuriantly on the cigarette.

When the pies were in the oven, we all moved to the living room.

Cass played us a few of her own songs—gloomy and elliptical, but with complex, even lovely rhyme schemes. It was hard to get a sense of what they might sound like in performance, she kept interrupting herself to tell us what Stellie would be doing now (“She’s going, like, ‘aa-oaah, ah, ah’ “) or what the bass player would be up to. But when she finished we all applauded, and she flushed and suddenly looked girlish and sweet. Sadie pulled two red tulips out of the pitcher on the table next to her and tossed them to Cassie, who stood to pick them up, pressed them dramatically—elegantly—to what there was of her bosom, and then suddenly curtsied to the floor, showing us fully the smooth, shadowy surface of the top of her head.

Afterward she played some tapes for us, tapes of her band and of a few others she knew. Standing by the tape deck after the first few songs, she started to sway in rhythm, tentatively, then assuredly.

Sadie jumped up and joined her. Together they moved around the room, as all three girls used to do occasionally in high school, each lost in a separate, wild response to the beat—Sadie’s more a matter of bouncing, almost leaping, up and down, her arms moving like wings, elbows in the lead, Cass doing a kind of step dance in her clunky boots.

They both kept their eyes nearly closed in pleasure, they wore eager, rapacious smiles. They were showing us something, marking some difference between themselves and us with their loose, beautiful bodies, with their response to the music. I loved to watch them, but it made me sad too.

Both of them were pinked and glistening with sweat when and I met each other’s eyes and he announced, in the break between two songs, that we were going to walk the dogs and then go to bed.

Cass ran to the tape deck and clicked it off.

“No, no, no, let us do it. Sadie, loo kit the snow!” She went to the window. We all got up and followed.

Outside, the world had been transformed, all the particular shapes and structures of our yard gentled, humped. Each dark branch of the horse chestnut was outlined in white. The light post wore a jaunty, perfectly balanced cap of it. The snow still fell, slow fat flakes in the windless air. We were silent a moment.

“This is perfect,” Sadie announced then.

“God, isn’t it great? I have a holiday and we get snowed in. I ordered this!” she cried.

“I worry about Nor,” I said to Daniel.

“Don’t. It’ll all be plowed by the time she starts out,” he said.

“Especially because it’s Thanksgiving.”

“What time is she getting here?” Cass asked. I was standing right behind her. She smelled of wine and tobacco and bath oil, and faintly, too, of perspiration, a salty odor.

“Noony, she thought,” I answered.

” Noony’?!” Sadie cried. She and Cass looked at each other and grinned. ” Noony,”

” Sadie repeated.

“She said Noony’!”

“What’s so funny about that?”

“It’s the kind of thing you’re always saying, Mom.”

Cass began to sing, moving her splayed hands in stylized punctuation, “Noony.
By the way, it rhymes with moony.
If you’d rather, Georgie Clooney.
But Mom said ik
Noony…”

I waved dismissively at them and headed for the bedroom.

But I was feeling a kind of sweet delight at their amusement—an amusement Cass would never have indulged on her own. Maybe Sadie could show Cass a way to be occasionally affectionate about my foibles, my failures, instead of always angry. Just as I shut the bedroom door, I thought to yell at them, “And bundle up! You’re all overheated, and vulnerable.”

They burst into laughter and drifted out to the kitchen.

” Overheated and vulnerable,” I heard Sadie repeating.

When Daniel came to bed, I leaned over and bit his shoulder through his flannel pajamas.

“What for?” he complained.

“For being the old progenitor here. I love what we made.

I love having them home.”

“Um,” he said. And then he made his voice formal and raised a warning finger, “Let us see what the morrow brings.”

“Oh, don’t be a pill! You love it too. You know it.”

“I do,” he said.

Just then there was a sharp rapping at the window. Daniel slid out of bed and pulled the shade up. The two of them stood under the falling snow, waving to us. Their hats were pulled down over their ears, across their foreheads, which rounded their faces and made them look like children again. Their cheeks glowed.

Now they stepped forward and pressed their faces against the glass, smashing their noses flat and white, smearing their lips to one side, gooey monsters. Daniel feigned horror and quickly pulled the shade down again. We heard them laughing. A moment later, a snowball, then another and another, hit the glass. Then their voices faded into the storm, and the dogs’ excited barking slowly moved away.

Off and on through the night I woke to the clanking passage of the plows, nearby or furred through distance. Beyond that there was only the cocooning silence of the thick snow surrounding the house. It was still falling heavily when I rose in the dark at six-thirty. I’d offered to do the morning and suppertime shifts with the boarding animals. Ned and Mary Ellen would handle the rest.

I ate a slice of toast while the car warmed up. It took me a while to clean its windows, and I had to rock it twice to get it out of the driveway, but the roads were scraped and sanded, and then salted, too, once I got out on the two-lane highway.

Our mall hadn’t been plowed yet, so I parked at its edge and trudged across it through the prairie of deep snow. The dogs heard me opening the front door and began to cry and bark, and when I turned the lights on, the din became general.

The dogs we had for this long weekend all got along, except for a male husky-German shepherd mix named Lucky. I left him in his cage for a while and released all the others. They milled around me like so many scattering pool balls, sniffing me and each other, and then moved loosely with me to the back door. When I opened it, they burst into the yard—a flood of seven happy dogs, more than usual because of the holiday—and began larking around. All but one, a fat old Cairn named Watson. He stopped by my feet in the doorway, taking in the hostile transformation of the universe. The snow was deeper than he was tall. He turned and started to go back in.