“Do you remember anything, Daisy Mae?” I asked.
“About the time before you were born?”
She thought for a moment and said no, she didn’t think she did.
“You don’t remember God?” I said.
“Or heaven? Or the angels? Or the other children waiting to be born?”
She frowned.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“You don’t remember meeting Kevin” (one of her younger brothers) “or Brian or Patrick,” (the others) “before you were all born?”
She shook her head.
“You should try to remember,” I told her.
“You’re only eight. I remembered a lot of it up until just a few years ago.
You should think about it more and see what you come up with.”
I told her I could remember the name Robert Emmet. I said I had once asked my mother, probably when I was about your age, who Robert Emmet was, and she, after a long pause, had said he was an Irish patriot her father had been particularly fond of. I said no, he was a little baby boy, the one I was talking about. A little baby boy still in a blanket. That’s the Robert Emmet I was talking about.
Later on I found out that before me, my mother had had another baby who’d died just as he was being born and who was baptized Robert Emmet by the delivery room nurse because that was the name my grandfather offered when my father was asked and had no response to give.
Clearly, I said, my brother and I had met, and exchanged names, sometime between his birth and mine. I’d had a glimpse of my grandfather, too, I was certain, but the memory was not as clear.
I walked over to the old dresser and pulled open its bottom drawer. There were a number of shoeboxes lined up inside, and in one of them my mother had her father’s old shaving things: a cup wrapped in tissue paper, a brush, a long thin razor.
A brown bottle of bay rum with a cork stopper and, on its label, a stained and yellowed drawing of a palm tree and a beach. I took out the bottle and showed it to Daisy. I pulled out the cork. The bottle was empty, but there was a faint whiff of the stuff still inside. Again, I told her to take a sniff.
She leaned forward and breathed deeply.
I remembered smelling this same smell, I told her, sometime before I was born. I think my grandfather and I must have passed each other, he on his way in, me on my way out-he died in March, I was born in April. I think I must have smelled it when he leaned over to pat my head as he walked past.
I put the stopper back in and returned the bottle to its box.
“That is,” I said, “I think I remember.”
I looked at Daisy. She was nodding, her eyebrows raised, her mouth turned down, as if she were considering all this and finding it very reasonable, very likely. I loved the way she looked, in my old dress, in her pink shoes and socks, so I picked her up and turned her around a couple of times and then put her down again. Going back to the clothes rack, I told her how my Uncle Tommy slept up here whenever he visited, and how he always said, before he climbed the stairs, “If I see the ghost, I’ll give him your regards.”
I told her how sometimes he said the old fisherman who built this house appeared during the night, just standing over there by the window, looking out, smoking his pipe. The first time Uncle Tommy said, “Can I help you, sir?” And the man just turned around a little bit and waved his hand behind his back and said, “No, no. No, thank you,” in a voice so choked with emotion that Uncle Tommy didn’t ask anything else, just watched the man staring out the window and smoking until he fell back asleep again.
Once he asked him, “Can I get you a chair, sir?” And the man again waved him away, saying, “No, no.” But the next morning, Uncle Tommy moved the chair over to the window anyway and was very happy to wake up during the next night to see that the man was sitting in it, his legs crossed comfortably.
And oddly enough, Uncle Tommy said, there was a little boy asleep on his lap.
“Who was he?” Daisy asked.
I shrugged.
“Who knows?”
I pulled out a checked sundress, red and blue, with ribbon ties at the shoulder.
“This is cute, too,” I said. And another of white eyelet. And a pair of pink pedal pushers that would go with her shoes.
“Maybe some night we’ll sleep up here,” I said.
“You and I.”
She hesitated for a moment and then said, “Okay,” looking down at the dress I held against her.
“Chances are, the only ghost we’ll see is me at your age,” I said.
“Looking to see who’s wearing my old clothes.”
Before we went back down, I told her to take off the shoes if the stairs made her nervous.
She shook her head.
“I’m okay,” she said.
I went ahead of her, the clothes on their hangers draped over my arm, turning at each step to make sure she was all right. There was no banister, but she kept both hands flat against the wall and descended so slowly, and with such cautious trepidation, you’d have thought she was edging along some building ledge.
“Are you afraid of heights, Daisy Mae?” I asked her, halfway down.
She shook her head. She would not take her eyes from the stairs, or the hem of my old dress, or the pink shoes whose wooden heels and slippery beige soles slapped loudly against each bare step.
“I’m only afraid of falling,” she said.
I awoke every morning to the sound of my parents’ voices coming through the wall behind my bed. They slept in twin beds with quilted leather headboards, a nightstand in between, and their voices in those first moments of the day were subdued and conversational. I imagined at one point that they simply told each other their dreams, and in much the same matter-of fact way they might relate the details of an ordinary and unremarkable trip to the market. I don’t pretend to understand it: why they never slept in the same bed but began each morning talking to each other as if they shared the same mind. The wallpaper in my bedroom, and in theirs, was full of yellow roses, fist-sized yellow roses that became, as I stared and listened and tried to make out what they said, the fist-sized yellow faces of wrinkled babies and grinning gargoyles and startled guardian angels, of choir boys in war paint with open, oval mouths.
My parents got up at five, bathed and had breakfast, and were usually out of the house by six. During the school year I went with them, to be dropped off with the nuns at my private school twenty miles to the west—essentially a boarding school for the daughters of wealthy Asians and South Americans, with only a handful of us day students squeezed in to keep the locals agreeable—but in the summer the house was mine. This had been the case for nearly as long as I can remember, although there was a time, before I started school, I suppose, when old Mrs. Tuohey would be stirred into the mix before my parents left for work, stirred like the hasty half teaspoon of sugar my mother always added to the black tea she made for herself and my father. Even before I was old enough for school, Mrs. Tuohey was a gesture only, mostly a second thought, and quickly diluted by the vast solitude of the tiny house, and my own preference for it. The poor woman, a pale and frail little widow who lived in the village, usually spent the day in the first seat she had taken when my father brought her in, not much more than a ghost herself.
I loved that house, as I’ve said, and I loved it especially on those summer mornings when the sun lit the kitchen and the bedrooms but kept the living room cool and damp and smelling, because of the old stone fireplace, like a recently inhabited cave. I’d cross it in my bare feet and go into the kitchen, where my parents would be having their bacon and eggs, continuing that same back-and-forth, just-passing-the time-of-day conversation they’d been having since they’d first regained consciousness. When they saw me, my father would pull out the third chair and my mother would stand up to get an extra plate, as if I were an unexpected guest. She would pour me some of the tea she had made for just the two of them, and scatter a bit of sugar across it while I took a piece of toast or bacon from the plate between them. They would then continue their conversation, with only an occasional word or two addressed to me, like a sidelong glance. They kept their voices low, as if I were still asleep, and their eyes, it seemed to me, were always somewhat averted.
I believe my parents had grown a little wary of me by then.
Not merely wary of the physical changes, of the long, bare legs I pulled up under my chin as I bit my toast into odd shapes, or the widening shoulders under my T-shirt, the budding breasts, the way my easy-to-admire childish beauty was quickly becoming something a little thinner and sharper and certainly more complicated, but wary as well of what they must have believed was the fast-approaching time of my fulfillment of their dream for me—of my absorption into that world they had taken so much trouble to place me on the threshold of. I suppose it was one of the ironies of their ambition for me, of their upbringing and their sense of themselves, that they Would not see me as fully a part of that brighter world of wealthy people and supposed geniuses if I did not at some point recognize that they were not. That the best assurance they would have that I had indeed moved into a better stratum of society would be my scorn for the lesser one to which they belonged.
They were dear people, both my parents, but the vividness of their dream of my rise, their absolute confidence in the inevitability of my success, made them resent what they saw as its consequences even that summer when I was fifteen and part of no other social set than my own. Turning away from me in anticipation of my turning away from them, they left me more alone that summer than perhaps I’d ever been.
Once they had gone to work, I took a peach from the bowl of fruit on the counter and crossed the living room again. Our front porch was short and square, its floorboards painted a glossy gray, the trim and balustrade white and wet at that hour of the morning. I sat on the steps with the newspaper and my summer reading book. There were lilac bushes on either side of the porch, my father’s dahlias all along the split-rail fence.
Across the narrow macadam road there was only a high hedge, a deep green
dropcloth
the length of the street, meant to conceal the summer house beyond it, but serving also to make our house seem the only inhabited place—or maybe the only place (and us the only family) bold enough to live within easy sight of strangers. I read the paper and ate the peach and then tossed the pit into the grass. I walked down the three steps to the lilac bush and shook the branches and caught the dew that fell in my palm and rubbed the sticky juice from my hands.
Then I turned my face up and closed my eyes and shook the branches again to get the peach juice off my lips. The dew was cold, despite the sunshine that had already begun to hit the leaves, and I lifted my hair and bent under the branches to feel it on the back of my neck. I shook my head to make the bush shake and felt a drop of dew slide down my shirt and along my spine. A branch caught my hair as I straightened up, and as I reached for it, I felt it press into my scalp, a bony finger drawn along the back of my head. I moved against it, pulled away a little, and then moved back against it again, entangling the hair even more, no doubt, but enjoying the grip it had on me, the sweet pressure and scratch. I turned under it, let my head fall back, pressed my shoulders into the green leaves, arching like a cat and feeling the dampness of my T-shirt, the drops of dew scattered across my arms. I ran my fingers through my hair, from temple to crown, and met the single hard branch that had caught me. Gently, I freed myself from it and stepped away, and the words I was looking for were in the paperback book on the step:
Send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.
I shook the hem of my T-shirt, lifted and twisted it not because it was soaked but because I wanted to feel the new sun on my midriff. I would have taken it off altogether if I’d had the courage. I shook out my hair and wound it at the back of my neck. I brushed the dew from my arms and walked through the grass and the sun to the back of the house, where there was a hedge under both bedroom windows. I stepped behind it, my bare feet in the soft, damp dirt, and at my own window leaned down toward the sill. I put my mouth to the screen, at the place where the window was raised, breathed its metallic taste, and said, “Margaret Mary Daisy Mae, will you ever get up?”
Through the shadowy mesh I could see her stir in my bed, and then, after the briefest pause, sit bolt upright and look around. I pressed my lips to the screen. The taste of the peach was still at the back of my tongue.
“There’s work to do,” I told her, and she rubbed her eyes and said, still groggy, “I’m awake.”
I slipped out from behind the hedge and in through the back door. There were English muffins in the pantry and I toasted her one and spread it with butter and my mother’s beach-plum jelly. I poured her some juice and was carrying both to her when she emerged from my room in the floral dress and her white socks and the pink shoes, her hair a mess and her skin so pale it seemed to be made of nothing more substantial than the cotton gauze of my mother’s summer curtains.
I placed the glass and the dish on the dining-room table.
“You okay, Daisy Mae?” I asked her, and she nodded and obediently sat down.
“Just sleepy,” she said. I watched her as she ate. She ate demurely, one hand and the napkin on her lap, one bite at a time and the careful chewing with the mouth closed.