Sunday's on the Phone to Monday (13 page)

In front of her cat's grave, Lucy had to resist the bizarre urge to dig Penelope up with her hands, to lift the remains of the cat she'd loved and let her ash her arms, secured by this issue of possession, this urge of compilation. Penelope couldn't rationalize pain. Lucy couldn't rationalize her collecting.

Lucy slept in her parents' bed that night. Carly and Natasha woke themselves up for school the next day, passing their parents' room, glimpsing the wishbone of Lucy's body in between them. Slight legs, open like a teepee. The holy trinity, this cozened parent-child-parent triangle. Lucy had a place in the middle, snuggled beyond her strength between either her parents or her two sisters. It was what she needed to survive. And it went both ways: she was her family's adhesive, its Heart, what kept it from collapsing.

M
athilde and Claudio's lease expired. Claudio sold his limo to a funeral home to buy a mortgage on a straightforward, simple Tudor house far out east on Long Island, in a suburban town called Babylon.
I guess we're not young anymore,
said Claudio.
Well, it was pretty fun.
They called their new house the mouse house. Claudio called Mathilde the house mouse in the mouse house. And they were happy, mostly playing their doo-wop records.

Mathilde and Claudio now commuted to their jobs, and the suburbs gave them some space they presumed they needed. It had been Claudio's decision to move to Babylon, which he admired in an unfamiliar and conceptual way, for its bluer-collar roots. He'd spent years living in New York City in the 1980s, delimited by urban losers who happened to be the loneliest people he'd ever met (cocaine, he decided, was a boring drug), and then living in the Upper West Side with what he called
charlatan yuppies
. These days, everything was getting more and more expensive. People were selling 212 telephone numbers on eBay. New York was changing, and he wasn't sure if it was for the worse or the better, though he wasn't sure if he had the patience to find out. Instead, he craved the typical unexciting family experience that Billy Joel sang about.

Boring's not bad,
he'd told Mathilde.
It means nothing bad
happening to your kids. It means space. Privacy. We could garden. We could set up a basketball court.
Mathilde knew he'd hoped for boys but never spoke about it (so did she, as a matter of fact, harboring that everywoman fantasy of molding a kind and brave boy from her rib). Besides, daughters mellowed him. After they adopted Carly, he said their family was finished.
Everyone is finally here,
they'd said.

They'd been living in mouse house one week, when Uncle Sawyer and Uncle Noah took the Long Island Rail Road out to warm it, where the inflections on the Long Island Rail Road amused them:
o
's blanketed with
aw
, a parasitical sound.

Welcome home, Longuylanders,
Sawyer mimicked and handed his sister a bottle of Veuve.

This is our new nest,
Mathilde protested. It wasn't just a commuting place: it had insulation of its own.
Not even a real suburb,
she argued, Long Island was a community that served itself.

Home sweet home,
agreed Claudio. He cloistered his lips together, looking like James Dean.

Do you like it?

Well, it's a lot less expensive, so that matters. And the schools that are free are pretty good. There are no kindergarten entrance exams.

How old are you again, pipsqueak?
Noah asked Natasha over dinner.

Ten.

Thank heaven for little girls,
said Sawyer. He needed daughters and sons of his own; at least three. Maybe even six or seven.
Where can I get some? I want to be a dad too.

So you'll be the daddy and who will be the mommy?
Carly asked.
And what will Uncle Noah be?

The other daddy,
said her mother.
They won't need a mommy.

We should invent a mommy,
said Lucy.
Just in case. Then we can have an aunt. Jack C., in my class, his aunt Beverly came to the planetarium with us on our class trip.

Claudio wanted to rip himself into pieces. Her daughters didn't know they had an aunt. Claudio visited his sister every week. He kept Jane a secret. -
The more people involved, the more of a possibility for things to go wrong
, - he supposed.

Would he ever be able to tell them about Jane, and how could he explain why he'd been keeping her a secret? There'd be no pretty or okay way to say this. It was hard enough explaining why their uncles couldn't be wed.

What will the baby look like?
asked Carly.
Will it be tall, like Uncle Noah? Maybe it will have brown hair, like Uncle Sawyer? Or will it have a tanner face, like me?

Sawyer wondered if Carly would ever feel resentful of her adoption by such different-looking people. He understood the self-tension elected when one's way of being wasn't fully accepted. If he'd had his way, he'd have teenagers by now. Sawyer was a homebody and thought he'd be a decent family man. He wanted the kind of life where he and Noah would host Thanksgivings and walk a golden retriever.

Noah was six-five and the type of handsome that only got better as he aged, with white hair and a face that could salt the earth. People compared his features to the Paul Newman on tomato sauce jars. If they'd ever had kids, Sawyer would insist they use Noah's sperm. Sawyer had won the mating lottery—Sawyer with his face like a baby's, with fudgy brown eyes, a scalloped-simian nose, and cheeks like bundt pans. Noah was not a sucker for aesthetics like his partner.

Hopefully more like Uncle Noah than me.
Sawyer laughed.

Why?

Your uncle Noah is much handsomer than me.
Sawyer winked at the man he loved.
Everyone's going to wonder how a fella like me snagged a silver fox like him
. Noah and Sawyer, who weren't married but who shared a love as rejuvenating and percussive as a downpour.

Stop,
said Noah.
You're the handsome one.
When you're in love, you believe in a version of the world, and this is all that matters to you, even if you know it's just a version.

Why is it hard to marry?
Lucy asked.

It will make more sense when you're older, but not too much,
Mathilde purported.

For some people, it's even harder to stay married,
said Claudio,
but you never have to worry about that with me and Mommy.

You should worry,
said Carly,
because now I'm going to marry Mommy. And then I'm going to marry pizza.

That's what I call devotion,
Claudio told his family.

S
anta Claus brought Natasha, Lucy, and Carly a pregnant Barbie doll that Christmas. The Barbie came with a hole in the stomach and a detachable belly, with space for the tiny rubber newborn. Carly grabbed the doll first.
This baby's name is Carly. And the mommy's name is Mom.

It was the year of Carly's impulse to draw pictures of mothers giving birth, in bathtubs, wearing hospital gowns, wearing pajamas. Mothers screaming, stick figures, thought clouds, speech clouds.
It's a boy! It's a girl! Ten fingers and ten toes
. Mothers with premature babies, blaring babies. That May, she drew a stillborn baby, and her teacher asked Mathilde for a conference.

I'm concerned,
the teacher told Mathilde, slide-rule jawed, showing Mathilde the art.
Ded,
Carly had scrawled, her muse's limbs covered with a burgundy cloud.

Of all my students, I worry about Carly.
Her name was Miss Berry. Really! When she smiled, she crinkled her nose. Mathilde suspected it was on purpose, not something her face did organically. Miss Berry smelled like Toaster Strudel, probably bled milk and honey, and knew that she wanted to be a second-grade teacher since she was born. Mathilde wondered what Miss pristine Berry was like outside of the classroom. Did she go on roller coasters? Did she have a secret? Was she a tough customer? Did she know how fucking twee she was?

You don't need to worry about her,
assured Mathilde, to which Miss Berry only nodded.

That evening Mathilde sat Carly down on her bed and asked why she drew birth.

I like the idea of it.
Carly raised a shoulder up and down.
You're mad at me because I didn't come out of you.
Mathilde hugged her daughter and told her again that she was just as much a mother to her as she was to Natasha and Lucy, which of course Carly already knew.

M
ommy died,
Sawyer told Mathilde through the phone.

The news was a lazy trauma, as neither could pinpoint the precise moment their mother had begun dying—for the last few years, at least, the cancer rolling through.

Oh!

Are you okay?

I'm. I'm.
Mathilde felt light-headed with pity.
I'll be okay. Are you?
She'd expected his words; they'd electrocuted all the same.

I'm fine,
said Sawyer. The truth was, for the past few months Sawyer had gotten used to the idea, and for the past hour he'd been thinking of all the ways his life was now easier. He would finally be able to divorce his wife, alleviate himself from his marriage. Because of money, what could have been the worst day of Sawyer's life was also the most relieving.

When Mathilde and Sawyer's father died, he left all of his money to their mother. When their mother died, she'd left the trust to her children. It was the thing to do. The decent thing.

Though Mathilde had already given up her crying for pleasure, it was clear she wouldn't be the same Mathilde for years. The beta-Mathilde had the type of depression that remained in the back of her throat, like a lodged, cashew-size pill without water. She didn't always notice it, sometimes too consumed by her daily trivia, but the grief was always there. She avoided
listening to certain music and reading certain books and cooking certain foods that reminded her of her parents. Shutting off the radio when she heard Elvis or Frank Sinatra. No more movies with Jimmy Stewart. Both her parents had loved Jimmy. Her mother's death brought back her father's death, as death's quality is timeless.

When Mathilde turned sixteen, her father gave her two antique rings, one for each ring finger: a pink-gold and diamond ribbon ring, and an Italian cameo with a shell-carved silhouette.
I was waiting for the day your hands grew,
he told her.
Now you have woman hands.
Mathilde wore the rings all the time, even when she slept. Claudio's marriage proposal had thwarted Mathilde, carried the unconscious reckoning of space needed for her engagement ring and her wedding ring. She'd purchased a safe-deposit box in a vault and placed both there, hoping the space wouldn't be too cold or claustrophobic for them. She'd hoped for daughters too, to pass the rings onto.

But Mathilde's rings didn't have nerves, and Mathilde now had three daughters and two rings.

And so the insight that Mathilde would soon need to draw up a final will and testament, divide her possessions among her daughters. Every year, she planned on meeting with her lawyer, then found an excuse not to. She should have known better. Both of Mathilde's parents died of natural causes, nothing like murder or an accident, but her father died before he could retire, before he could witness the woman Mathilde became—before her soul matched her hands. Mathilde outlived her parents the way a daughter was supposed to, but this didn't make things easier.

Wealth felt marvelous. The inheritance allowed Claudio's dream to come true: he'd be able to buy his sister upper-crust health insurance for the rest of her life. Sawyer and Jane could discreetly split. Sawyer cited the mental illness, and Jane's living situation was proof, so Jane didn't have to sign anything.

Mathilde hadn't found out, nor had Noah. They knew of Jane's postconnubial whereabouts, only because at the time Claudio explained that his own father happened upon a large sum of money acquired through some illegal means—gambling? trafficking?—whose happenstance Claudio had not questioned, for he was just so thankful to acquire the sum that would ensure his sister's safety. Claudio and Sawyer had hoped it would be a story that repelled the possibility of further questions from either party, and it was indeed.
It's enough money to last us until . . . well, until you get your money,
Claudio had said, and the idea of this repulsive time arriving had distracted Mathilde in that same very way.

Jane hadn't found out either, for that matter: nobody told her she was getting a divorce. They didn't need to.

When he reached the point where he didn't have to lose sleep over income, something curved in Claudio's brain. All this money! Scary money. He didn't know how to control it, or himself. It made him feel dumber, not shrewder—like those tragic Powerball winners he'd read about in the news, who'd lose everything after a couple of years.

After spending his whole life forced to be not only concerned but also downright afraid of his economic situation, Claudio gave away his twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills, as though he needed to remit his money to remind himself that he had it, tipping inappropriately and exorbitantly after receiving less than satisfactory service. The first time, Mathilde argued.
Why did you just tip that busboy fifty dollars? He was kind of a jerk.

Spite spending
was all Claudio could come up with.