Authors: Carmen Rodrigues
even with danny in my life, the next few days pass in a blur.
The closer I get to my mother’s memorial service, the harder it is for me to feel…normal.
When Thanksgiving arrives a few days later, it’s just me and my dad. All the other usual suspects have disappeared:
And then there’s me and my dad. Alone.
We make the most of the day. We sit in front of the TV and watch the Macy’s parade. We don’t talk a lot, but that’s not unusual. Still, somehow, words work their way out.
“That’s interesting,” I say at one point.
“Yeah,” he says, some time later.
“Can you believe they used that tired theme again?” I ask.
“Can you turn up the volume?” he asks. “I’d like to hear what he’s saying.”
Then we eat a simple meal: two TV dinners, two Capri Suns. Nothing fancy in our house.
When the sun goes down, we go our separate ways. Like always.
on saturday, november twenty-sixth, i remember the death
of my mother. Alone. My father is off on his own. I don’t know where he goes. I’ve never asked. I don’t want to know.
I have my own rituals, my own way of dealing with things. And maybe it’s best that we don’t share this day. Maybe it’s best that it stays this way.
So I wake up, I sit in my garden, and I talk to myself. I say, “Today is the day that my mother died.” I don’t say it to be melodramatic. I say it to make it real. Because sometimes it feels like I’ll never fully understand. Like my mind isn’t big enough to comprehend that I will never see her again.
Then I remember, because that’s what today is for. I remember how when I was small and scared, I used to crawl underneath her shirt and wrap my arms super-tight around her waist. She tried to get me to let her go, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
I remember the way she laughed when I made my fish face. And that she had her right ear double pierced, and she promised that I could get mine double pierced, too, on my twelfth birthday.
I remember that she liked to read Danielle Steel books before going to bed at night. And that she would lay my head on her lap and clean the inside of my ears with a wet Q-tip. I remember so much about her.
And then I wonder why I remember so much about her and so very little about my dad. My specific memories of him start on the day she died.
Him, at the hospital, talking to the doctors. Me, trying to read his lips, trying to see what they were saying. Him, standing tall, then suddenly his shoulders drooping like somebody sucked the life out of him. The doctor walking away from him, shaking his head, cleaning his glasses with the hem of his pristine white jacket. My dad, there, on the floor, leaning his head against the wall. The hours that passed and passed and passed until I called Grandma and Grandpa and they came to take us home.
Him, next to her coffin, holding her cold hand for so long I thought he’d get frostbite. Me, next to him, watching the way his legs trembled.
I remember it all because I have to remember. I have to let her know that I remember. Because today is the day that my mother died. Saturday. November twenty-sixth.
on sunday my grandfather brings my grandmother over
early and leaves with my father to get ready for the big day.
Because my grandmother has trouble remembering lately, I’m supposed to keep an eye on her. So I sit with her in the living room, partially watching her, partially trying to distract myself by reading a book. She’s watching me, too.
Although my grandmother’s crazy, she’s not really crazy. She’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, which is just a fancy way of saying that 50 percent of the time she has absolutely no clue who I am. Which sucks. I guess.
Today is pretty much no different. She’s on her end of the sofa chitchattering about this and that, talking about all kinds of dead people, when suddenly she looks at me and says: “You look a lot like your mother.”
That’s it. “You look a lot like your mother.” And then she’s gone. Moseying her way back to senility. Leaving me to wonder exactly what she means.
“your uncle martin rubbed up on me.” later, over the fruit
platter, Marisol and I gossip. “I think he’s finally reached the age where he’s senile.”
“I think he was senile when he hit ninety. Now he’s pretty much infantile.” We both turn to Uncle Martin sitting on the sofa in the living room, drool running down his chin.
“I want to go before I’m eighty-five,” Marisol says. “That way I’ll at least have some decency.”
“Don’t worry,” I assure her. “If you make it to eighty-five, I’ll throw you off a bridge.” I start to smile but then fall short.
“Don’t you find it weird that Marc is here?” Marisol nods in Marc’s direction. He’s sitting with his parents at the dining room table.
“No.” I take a long sip of my tea, which I’m drinking because it’s supposed to calm my nerves. “It’s different now, I think.” I’m pretty sure that once a guy has cried on your shoulder, it will be different for the rest of your life.
“Well, what about Tamara? I can’t believe she had the nerve to show up here with her parents.” We turn to look at Tamara, decked out in her it’s-Sunday-and-I’m-at-a-memorial-service best. “She’s such a bitch,” Marisol snaps. “I bet you she came just because she’s hoping to run into Danny. She knows you two are together now.”
“How do you know that? It’s only been a few days of whatever.”
“I don’t know how,” Marisol says, “but she does. Abby, her best friend, asked me what was going on between you two. She said you stole Danny away from her.”
“I what?” I want to laugh. If I weren’t at my mother’s memorial service, I would. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope.” Marisol shakes her head and raises her hand, like she’s being sworn into office or something. “God’s honest truth.”
“Whatever.” Crap like this seems so petty to me today.
“I guess. So, where’s Danny?” Marisol looks around, as if between the two adjoining twelve-by-thirteen rooms, she might have possibly missed him. Then she checks her watch. “He’s coming, right?”
“No.”
“Why not?” She picks at the fruit on the table. “He does know, right?”
“Nope.” I turn my head away, hoping that my subtle body language will communicate that this is not a conversation I want to have with her. But of course it doesn’t.
“Why didn’t you invite him?”
I shrug. “Didn’t feel like it.”
“But he knows about your mother, right?” she asks, looking over at the front door.
“Yeah, I told him. But
this
is different.” I look over at Uncle Martin. He is leaning kind of crooked against the sofa. His daughter, Cecile, is trying to straighten him by shoving a pillow behind his back, but it isn’t working. “If I’m not dead by ninety, throw me off a bridge.”
“Sure,” Marisol says. Then a few seconds later, she mutters, “Maybe I’ll throw you a little earlier.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I give her a look.
“Just wondering why you’re avoiding my questions.”
“I’m not.”
We turn back to the fruit platter. The fruit platter is safe. It’s freaking Switzerland. It’s not I’d-like-to-kill-my-best-friend territory. Marisol picks up a grape and studies it intently. “I invited Ryan.”
“What?” My mouth falls open in disbelief. “I thought he was going skiing this weekend with his family.”
“Nope, he got out of it. He didn’t want to go without me,” she adds rather smugly.
“Why would you do that? Why would you invite him
here?
”
“I don’t know,” she says, suddenly realizing that she’s miscalculated the level of pissed-off I would be. “I just did.” Her voice shrinks, and she looks away. “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. I thought you’d invite Danny.” She touches my shoulder. “Hey, don’t be mad.”
“You should have talked to me!” I was so angry at her that I could feel my insides shaking. This was my loss.
My
loss. Did she think my mother’s memorial service was, like, a house party?
“I tried calling you last night, but you wouldn’t answer your phone. You wouldn’t talk to me—”
“It was the anniversary of my mother’s death—”
“I know,” she cuts me off, “but you still could have talked to me. So I called Ryan. I was upset because I knew that you were shutting me out, and I told him. And he said he’d come. You know,” she says weakly, “for moral support.”
“You shouldn’t have invited him. This is private. For me, this is private.”
“Susie.” Marisol sets the grape down and grabs my arms so that I’m forced to turn to her. “I understand how hard this is for you. But you’ve got to start letting it go. It’s not a private thing. It’s something that happened to you. And your father. And your grandparents. And me. And my mom. You know, they were good friends. It’s something that happened to all of us. Not just you. Besides, Tamara and Marc are here, too.”
I look over at Tamara talking away to her mother, and Marc sitting uncomfortably between his parents, trying to loosen his black tie. And then I look at Leslie, rubbing my father’s arm consolingly. The doorbell rings. Marisol takes a step forward and then looks at me. “It’s probably Ryan,” she says apologetically.
“I’m going to the garden.” I set my teacup on the table and put my hand on my stomach. It hurts terribly, like someone is kneading my flesh into meatballs.
“Susie,” Marisol’s voice wavers. “This is hard for me, too, sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I look over at Marisol’s mother still rubbing MY father’s arm. “I can see that.”
“Susie,” Marisol begins, but the doorbell cuts her off.
“Answer it,” I tell her, knowing that she will. And, when she walks away, hating myself for being right.
Alone now, I look back at my dad, trying hard to concentrate on what our neighbor, Mr. Mickles, is saying. Then I look at Leslie. She’s nodding in agreement, standing so close to my father that the corner of her silk blouse is touching the left arm of his cotton jacket. I guess she’s lending him her form of “moral support.” Then I look at Marisol, standing in the doorway, smiling up at Ryan, his hand protectively holding hers.
And I try to figure out how, somewhere along the line, everything changed. For a long time, the three of them—my dad, Marisol, and Leslie—were all that I had. And that worked for me. For all of us. But not anymore. I know that because here we are, all three of us together. And I still feel so very alone.
somehow i find my way outside. amazingly, nobody is sit-
ting in the garden. Today has turned out to be one of those freak days at the end of November that makes you think it’s still summer. But the heat doesn’t bother me. I sit on my bench and wait. And after a while, I try to be one of those girls who sits on a bench in her garden and cries for, like, dramatic purposes. But the tears won’t come, just an ache that begins in my abdomen and spreads to my chest, and starts to really, really hurt.
I try to control the pain. I count my breaths. I flex my hands in and out. I bite my lip. Nothing works. I’m stuck in a perpetual state of panic.
later that day, i wander into my parents’ bedroom. or i
should say my parents’ old bedroom. My dad doesn’t come in here much. His clothes, his work, his entire life has somehow moved into the study, and when he needs to
sleep
(which in Dad language means rest his eyes for all of five seconds), he lies horizontally on the sofa in the study.
In my parents’ old bedroom everything is pretty much the same. Except now when the door creaks open, I smell dust instead of my mom’s Estée Lauder perfume.
One day, I made the mistake of asking my dad why we just didn’t sell the house. Just up and move. I guess what I was saying was,
Why don’t we move on?
Anyway, the look that he gave me was so strange, like someone had stitched invisible strings into his face and then pulled those strings downward as fast as they could. His eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, everything dropped into one big puddle of grief. It doesn’t make sense to describe. It’s one of those things that has to be seen for itself. I know. But still. That look. I’ll never forget it.
after my mother died, i saw my father less and less. he
woke me up in the morning and later said good night, but what happened between those two markers of the day, I can’t say. I mean, I knew that he was in his study or at work, but other than that, I have no clue.
Maybe I’m partially to blame for the distance. It’s not like I ever tell my father how lonely I feel, even when he’s around. Particularly when he
is
around. I don’t tell him how the door to his room seems to make room only for those who exit and never for those who wish to enter.
One time when I was eleven, I stood outside his study with my nose pushed against the pressed-wood door. My bare feet stuck underneath the crack. I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to see how long it would take him to notice. It was a Saturday, I believe.
I stood there all day. I measured time by my heartbeat. First seconds passed. Then minutes. Then hours. And I thought about my father, about who he was, and how I no longer knew what to say to him. In the vacuum of my mother’s death, I had been abandoned.
in my parents’ room, i lie on my mother’s side of the bed.
I listen to the voices outside. I watch the light fade through the partially cracked vertical blinds. I count time. I try to be the type of girl who cries herself to sleep on her dead mother’s bed. But this time, I really try only for dramatic purposes.
I do eventually fall asleep, wrapped in my mother’s robe, my head resting on her pillow.
Some time later, I wake up. Marc is sitting next to me. His legs hang over the side of the bed. His back rests against the headboard. He’s watching me.
“What are you doing
in here
?” My voice is rough like sandpaper.
“What else?” He holds out a half-empty bottle of wine. “Drinking.”
I sit up. My head is pounding. And my stomach hurts even worse now. My heart is
rat-tat-tat
-ting along my rib cage.
“Why are you here?”
I wipe the sleep from my eyes, remembering that day when Danny wiped the drool from my cheek.
“I don’t know. I saw you come in here, and I waited for you to come out, but you never did. So I came in. Can you believe they’re still going out there?” He tilts his head and listens to the din of conversation coming from outside the room.
“What time is it?” I ask. My throat is itchy from dust and dry from sleep.
“I don’t know.” He takes a slow sip of the wine and hands it to me. I take a small sip to keep the cobwebs from my throat. It tastes sweet. A rush of heat fills my abdomen and spreads over my chest and lips.
“Let’s get drunk,” he says a minute later.
“Huh?” I turn to look at him. What is he thinking?
“Let’s get drunk,” he repeats and hands me the bottle. “Why the fuck not? I don’t want to be here,” he says. “You don’t want to be here.” He hands me the bottle and I take it, not really sure what I’m doing or what I’m thinking. Or if I’m thinking at all. “So, let’s get drunk and then it’ll be like we’re not even here at all.”
“But what if someone walks in? What if someone catches us?” It seems like an obvious concern. Though the fact that I’m asking questions makes me realize that I’m considering the possibility of getting drunk with Marc. Which I am. I TOTALLY AM.
I mean, what do I have to lose? I don’t want to be here—not with Leslie rubbing my father’s arm; not with Marisol, who’s probably making out in the backyard with Ryan; and not with my crazy grandmother who doesn’t even know who I am.
And with Marc? Do I want to be here with Marc? Why aren’t I here with Danny?
“Well?” He nudges the bottle. Slowly, I lift it to my lips and take a long sip. I hand the bottle back to Marc and hiccup self-consciously.
“Slow down.” Marc takes his turn. He puts the bottle to my lips, gives me a short sip.
“Where’s Marisol?” I ask.
“Last time I saw her, she was outside in the garden with Ryan.”
“Oh.” It figures. Any doubts I have suddenly wash away.
“More?” he asks.
“Sure. Why not?”
when it’s all gone, marc contemplates sneaking another
bottle out of the living room.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“No.” I lean my head against the headboard and watch the room spin around. Except for holidays, I don’t drink. And even then, it’s normally a few sips of wine from my grandfather’s wineglass.
“How do you feel?” Marc asks, giving me a sloppy shove so that he can fit his entire body on the bed.
“Half retarded,” I reply, and we laugh. “What times is it?”
“You already asked me that. I don’t know.”
“Well, find out.” I shove him hard so that he almost falls over the bed.
“Hey.” Marc pushes me back. Then he leans across me so that his chest is pressed against my thighs.
“What are you doing?” I look down at his body in my lap. It makes me laugh.
“Telling you the time.” He reaches for an object on the nightstand table. “Seven p.m., I think.”
Slowly, Marc pulls himself off me. His face is near me. It swims in my eyes. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“Are you?” Why were there two of him?
“Yeah. Are you?” He rubs the hair from my eyes. He leans down and I can smell his breath just inches from my nostrils. It smells like potato salad and wine.
“You know what…” he says, his face too close. “You look a lot like your mother.” Absently he traces the area around my eyes and lets his fingers rest on my temple.
“Everyone keeps telling me that,” I whisper because he’s too close to speak in a normal tone.
He stares at me.
“You seem different tonight,” I say, to stop him from staring at me.
“That’s because I’m not an idiot tonight.” He moves away from me, closes his eyes. I follow his lead. They feel so much better shut.
“You never answered my question,” he says sleepily. He lays his head on my shoulder, and I can feel his heartbeat on my arm.
“What are you doing?” I open my eyes. This is all so weird.
“Nothing,” he yawns. “Question: does it bother you that you look like your mother? Don’t think,” he tells me when I hesitate, “just say the first thing that comes into your mind.”
“No, not if I really looked like her,” I tell him.
He rolls over on his back and tucks his arms underneath his head.
“Do you remember that night that your mom was babysitting me, and I cut my hand with the kitchen knife?” His voice cuts in and out. At least to me it does. “Do you remember?”
“Yeah.” I picture Marc in my kitchen, bawling his eyes out. He looks so little in my mind. It’s hard to think about him as being little. But he was, at one point. And so was I.
“Oh my God, I cried for like an hour. I was such a pussy.” He laughs, shakes the bed with it. “And your mom was so nice. She wrapped my hand in a towel and found that butterfly bandage that she had, and cleaned out my cut and then held me in her lap for like two hours. Do you remember?” Marc turns on his side and our eyes meet.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “I remember.”
“And she put us in bed, and made us something stupid like hot chocolate. And you were scared because there was all this blood and so she sat between us in your bed and put one arm around each of us and read to us that story that you liked so much. What story was that?”
“The Giving Tree,”
I tell him, though I can barely find my voice. It’s hiding behind a wall of tears that is building in my throat.
“My mom never did shit like that. She was too busy. Busy with my father. Busy with her business. Busy with the dog. I don’t even know if she likes me.”
“I’m sure she likes you,” I whisper. What else can I say?
“Maybe…Whatever…But that day I remember, like, all the time. I don’t know why. It’s like I love your mom for that stupid day.” His voice is weak. “Is that possible?”
I try to speak, but it’s hard. The tears make it too hard for me to tell him that I do think it’s possible to have lifelong feelings from one single moment.
“Hey—” His hand brushes across my cheek. “Hey, now.” His breathing is moist. “You do look like your mom. It freaks me out.” He stares at me, through me, into me. He presses himself against me, and the tears come quickly now.
He brushes his lips over mine.
“No,” I say quietly. “Don’t.” But he doesn’t listen. He lays himself on top of me. His body covers mine from head to toe. He takes my arms and wraps them around his waist. “Please,” he whispers. His tongue pushes my mouth open, gets lost in its warmth. His tongue is soft, reassuring, kind.
“You taste sweet,” he murmurs. His lips graze my eyes, my ears, the tip of my nose, and then a path down my neck. “Sweet, like a cough drop.”
His hands rub hesitantly along my sides. I close my eyes. My thoughts swirl hazily.
I think about Danny. I think about our kiss in the library. I think about Halloween, his body between my thighs, my hand in his hair. I think about Danny and slowly I find myself kissing Marc back.
It may be seconds or it may be days before I hear the smallest noise, like the sound of a door being opened and closed. I stiffen. “Did you hear that?” I ask.
“What?” Marc says, still kissing me.
“The door.”
Marc twists on top of me, and then moves back to kissing me. “It’s shut,” he says, and then I feel his fingertips brush underneath the hem of my shirt.
“Hey,” I say, pushing them back. “Hey.”
“Hey,” he whispers, pushing his lips onto mine.
His hands are cold across my belly. His hips push into me. I can feel that he’s excited, and it scares me. I feel as if I can’t breathe. I feel as if I’m starting to think clearly.
His fingers are moving everywhere, up over my rib cage and underneath my bra. His hands cup my breasts. He presses his palms in gentle circles over my soft mounds.
“Stop,” I whisper against his lips, not trusting myself, not trusting him. “Stop.”
I feel my hips wiggle, push up against his. His hand lifts up the waistband of my skirt, slips silently underneath. His fingers brush the top of my panties.
“No,” I twist underneath him. “Stop. I mean it.”
“Huh?” he murmurs; his mouth nuzzles my neck.
“Stop,” I say, arching up to kiss him.
“Okay.” He sighs, burying his face in the pillow, moaning. “Okay,” he repeats and then he rolls off me.
“Are you mad?” I ask, afraid to look at him.
“No.” He grabs my hand, settles it into the curve of his chest. “I’m not mad.” He closes his eyes.
A few minutes pass. I’m not sure what to do. I want to take my hand back, readjust my clothes, wipe the hair from my lips, and then sneak silently off to the bathroom to throw up. But I don’t. I can’t because that would be mean. So I lie there with Marc. But I think about Danny.