The attic is unexpectedly bright and clean. So this is what her mother was doing up here—mopping and organizing and washing the windows, so that the room smells equally of mothballs and Windex. Margaret has to duck among the wooden rafters, but even these have been dusted, with only one lonely spider attempting to refashion its web between boxes marked
CHRISTMAS ORNAMENTS (GLASS)
and
TABLE CENTERPIECES (FORMAL).
A half-drained beer by Margaret’s side is leaving damp astonished O’s on her SAT scores: 1560, the best in her graduating class, enough to get her into Harvard, though she’d preferred Cornell for its more liberal curriculum. A clay bowl she made in first grade—she remembers giving the malformed lump to her mother for Christmas—serves as an ashtray for the cigarette she is smoking, unconcernedly, indoors.
Her mother has saved all this, the record of her accomplished youth, and looking at the hill of paper, at years of achievements so numerous that she’d forgotten half of them, Margaret can only think,
Why?
She wants to rid herself of this precocious kid who excelled in everything she did, who got A’s without even cracking a book, whose vocabulary at age six rivaled that of many high schoolers. If Margaret could only find just one F among the report cards and essays, just one glimpse of the failure that she would become…but there is nothing, just a uniformly optimistic series of A’s and 100’s and
“Well done!”
s. They had all lied to her—all those authority figures, encouraging her, telling her that if she worked hard the world would be her oyster, and she’d blindly believed them, believed in that entire American Dream sham. She tosses a blue ribbon from her junior year debate team championships on the top of the pile and the precarious mountain collapses, sliding in every direction across the attic floor. With one bare foot, she kicks the heap even farther, sending papers skittering fearfully away from her toward the corners. What a burden achievement is. She is glad to be done with all that! All hail Margaret, the failure! Her new mantra:
Fuck it!
Having emptied the file cabinet of its contents, she gathers papers up in a crumpled lump at her chest. Leaving a trail of perfect scores fluttering down behind her, she descends the attic stairs and marches past her sister’s room (the door shut firmly against any intrusion), down the grand staircase to the living room, and to the fireplace, where she tosses in the lot. One match and the papers flicker into flame, the fire gaining strength so quickly that she has to step back so that she doesn’t singe her eyelashes. Magnificent! In just a minute all that is left of her past is smoldering ashes, dancing up the chimney and away.
Back up the stairs she marches for another armful—next, she thinks, she’ll burn her yearbooks, and her high school photo albums and then the trophies in her bedroom! Will the burning plastic be carcinogenic? Who cares! She laughs out loud as she ascends the staircase, feeling as light as the ashes now lifting off into the Santa Rita air.
The last couple of weeks, since she hit rock bottom, have been a revelation: She just doesn’t care, about anyone or anything, as if she had woken up one day and discovered that she no longer had nerves to feel pain and was therefore liberated from fear. On Tuesdays and Fridays, she gets stoned with James, sitting on the inflatable mattress in the pool shed and talking about nothing she can later remember. (Books? Movies? Eastern philosophy? Somehow it all fades into a blur.) She reads Lizzie’s back issues of
Us Weekly
(fascinated, now, rather than repelled, as if she’s an acolyte studying at the feet of the new despot). She sleeps, for ten or twelve hours at a time, and otherwise, she happily does nothing.
Nothing!
She waits for someone to notice and say something, but for the past week the Millers have been studiously avoiding each other. Her mother spends her days in her own bedroom, watching television. Her sister floats in the pool on an inflatable lounge chair, her iPod perched in the beverage holder, bulbous headphones clamped over her head, like a frog sunning itself on a lily pad. Meanwhile, the phone rings and rings. Margaret can hear it from her bedroom, where she often lies for hours at a time just staring at the plaster frieze on the ceiling while listening to musty old albums by Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr., but now instead of an electric charge the ringing triggers no response in her at all. She reads the messages her mother shoves under her door with a total lack of interest, almost as if they were intended for a stranger.
Let the credit card companies come for me!
she thinks. What could they possibly do to her?
In the upstairs hallway, near the attic stairs, Margaret bumps into her sister returning from the bathroom. Lizzie averts her eyes and tries to pass, but Margaret blocks her path. “What are you doing?” she asks, feeling cheerfully belligerent. Some nameless disappointment has been hanging in the air between them for the past week, something bad that Margaret recognizes she herself has brought about, though she doesn’t exactly know what it is. It reminds her unhappily of a time when, as a freshman in college, she was entrusted with the care and feeding of a friend’s pet rabbit while the friend was visiting her sick grandmother for the weekend. Margaret spent the weekend at the library pulling all-nighters as she studied for her final exams and completely forgot about the rabbit. When she finally remembered, two days into her friend’s absence, she discovered the bunny lying on its side—eyes glazed over, its breathing labored, nearly dead from dehydration. Looking at the suffering animal, Margaret felt a horrible shame. She spent the rest of the day tending the rabbit, feeding it water with an eye dropper and bits of lettuce leaves from the dorm cafeteria, so that by the time her friend returned the animal was as good as new—but still, Margaret couldn’t look her in the eye for a month. She was, she had discovered, a selfish person, thoughtless in her single-minded intent, and it made her feel ill. And although she can’t put her finger, this very minute, on how she might have wronged Lizzie, she notes that same sickening sense of having failed someone horribly. Only now, she reminds herself, she’s not going to let it bother her anymore.
Fuck it!
“Nothing,” says Lizzie, and squeezes past Margaret. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Why are you not talking to me?” Margaret calls to Lizzie’s back. But Lizzie has already scuttled back into her room, leaving only the faint smell of bubble gum in her wake. The door to Lizzie’s room shuts quietly—even when angry, Margaret notes, Lizzie doesn’t really have the inner rage required to give a door a satisfying slam. She feels a protective stab of love for her baby sister, who seems so naïve and so utterly incapable of handling the ugliness of the world outside these walls.
When Lizzie was born, Margaret was almost fourteen, and she still remembers how light and vulnerable Lizzie was when Janice allowed Margaret to hold her. The infant Lizzie seemed as fragile as a porcelain teacup, something to put on a shelf and carefully dust but never expose to the dangers of actual use. They slipped into natural roles from the first day: Margaret, the knower and protector, and Lizzie, the eager acolyte, always wanting to know what Margaret was doing, wearing, eating. Lizzie was only five when Margaret left for college. The summer before she left, Margaret read her sister to sleep most nights from Kerouac’s
On the Road,
Margaret’s favorite book at the time. She would lie under Lizzie’s covers with a flashlight, crushed between her sister’s stuffed bears and plastic-faced dolls, carefully skipping over the swear words and the sex. “Are you sure you want to read this?” she would ask. “We could always read one of yours.” But Lizzie, drowsy and warm, would just hum and nod and cuddle up closer until her skin buzzed with sleep. Margaret left the book with Lizzie when she went to college; she wonders if her sister has rediscovered it yet.
Being the older sister has always been an ego boost—that flattering mimicry, that blind adoration—and Margaret has learned to count on it. In fact, she has probably taken their dynamic for granted; and only now does she realize that Lizzie’s adoration is palpably absent. Her sister feels distant, a stranger, and probably Margaret feels the same to her. She’s so much older, she’s been gone from the house so long, and absence doesn’t ensure eternal idolatry. Maybe it’s only natural that Lizzie has become disenchanted with her, just part of the growing-up process. Kids get older, grow jaded, and discard their well-worshipped heroes. It happens. Especially when they discover, as Lizzie recently has, that those heroes were just dumped by their boyfriends and currently have no form of gainful employment. Margaret shrugs—
Fuck it!
Margaret collects a second batch of papers, shuttles them down to the fireplace, and is en route to the attic for a third when she is startled by the sight of her mother standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Margaret comes to a dead halt. For a moment, she thinks she’s seeing a ghost. Her mother, in her gauzy white nightgown, hair hanging uncharacteristically loose, black circles under her eyes, looks ethereal, as if Margaret might be able to push a hand right through her. Her ribs are visible through the nightgown.
“Do I smell smoke?” Janice asks, her voice phlegmy and ragged. She clutches the doorway with one hand and peers past Margaret, as if there might be flames erupting behind her.
Margaret hasn’t seen her mother in five days, not since Janice was chauffeured home from the summer country club gala by Dr. Brunschild. Janice stumbled in, gave a startled Margaret a moist, clutching hug that smelled of vodka and violets and lasted about five seconds longer than Margaret felt comfortable with, and then vanished upstairs to administer the same to Lizzie before retiring to her bedroom and shutting the door. Since then, Janice has stayed in her bed, watching the Food Network in her bathrobe and coming out, only occasionally, for a mug of herbal tea. She has stopped cleaning and cooking and gardening; the preternatural energy she’s exhibited all summer has vanished, and the house is quickly descending into chaos.
Lizzie and Margaret had been unable to elicit any details from their mother about why she’d arrived home bedraggled and damp and in someone else’s passenger seat, other than the fact that Janice had had “a bit too much to drink.” But Margaret senses that something critical has happened—her mother, falling-down drunk! She can’t remember the last time that happened, if ever, and this, combined with the sudden decline in her mother’s housekeeping skills, would alarm her if she hadn’t already decided to stop caring about everything.
“I’m just burning some old papers,” Margaret says, coming closer, until she is standing a foot away. Her mother’s blue eyes are gray and oddly flat, like a pond reflecting an approaching storm, and as Margaret looks into them her triumphantly aggressive apathy vanishes abruptly. Something is terribly, terribly wrong. This wraith is not Janice Miller. Margaret is paralyzed by the sensation that the mother she has known all her life has vanished, leaving behind this desiccated husk. The hair on her arms stands on end.
“Oh,” says Janice flatly. “Well, I hope you remembered to open the flue.” Behind her, the television is on, and Mario Batali is braising a shank of lamb in a Dutch oven. Janice turns back to watch him and then gestures vaguely toward the bed. “I’m learning how to make lamb crostata. It’s a kind of savory pie. Maybe I’ll make it for us for dinner tomorrow night?” She looks at Margaret and straightens, forces a small smile across her face.
Despite her smile, Janice’s expression is somnambulant, as if she were looking out from inside the gates of death. And something else is off. Margaret watches for a minute and realizes what it is: Janice is strangely still. It occurs to Margaret that her mother has seemed unwell for the better part of the summer—gaunt, moody, jittery as a Tilt-A-Whirl—and Margaret has written it off as a postbreakup/pre-divorce case of anxiety. But now, watching her mother retreat into her bedroom, walking with an unbalanced gait back toward the unmade bed, Margaret wonders if something more is at work. Her mother reminds her of a crashed-out drug addict, the kind of emaciated half-dead junkie you might see propped against a liquor store in downtown Los Angeles. She recalls, with a start, James’s mention of her mother’s “problem”—perhaps he wasn’t talking about the divorce at all. Could he have been insinuating that her mother is taking pills or, or…?
Pills? It’s impossible to fathom. And yet. She recalls her Betty Friedan, the legacy of the suburban housewife hooked on tranquilizers—back then it was quaaludes and Valium and ephedrine-packed diet pills (that would explain Janice’s weight loss). God—could her mother, who Margaret has seen cry only a half dozen times in her life, really be
so
down that she’s turned to tranquilizers? She remembers that Lizzie found a Vicodin bottle in the cabinet—empty. Vicodin? It seems implausible that Janice Miller could be addicted to something—and yet there is the bruised skin around her mother’s eyes, her drawn expression, the near emaciation. Not to mention the erratic behavior.
Her mother is climbing back into bed when Margaret finally blurts, “Are you taking something?” Instantly, she wishes she could take it back:
She doesn’t want to know.
And yet she has to know—she can help!
Startled, Janice turns, and sits on the edge of the mattress. She swallows tightly. “What do you mean?” she asks. She gesticulates toward a notebook, where she has been transcribing the chef’s instructions. “I’m taking notes—recipes?”
“You know. Like…have you been taking Vicodin?” She watches her mother carefully.
“I can’t believe you would think that,” says Janice. Her voice is a tense wire, high and tight.
“I’m sorry,” says Margaret, backpedaling from an accusation that already sounds preposterous. “But, well. You just look like death. And you’ve been in bed all week.”
Janice’s mouth twitches. “Like death, huh?” she says, sinking back into the pillows. “That’s very flattering, Margaret. Well, I’m glad you’re worried about me. But I’m going to be fine. I’ve just been a little under the weather. I’m actually feeling much better today. And I’m not taking Vicodin.”