But by October the town is half-empty and by February dead. They keep the place open for something to do and to pay the heating bills; they drink coffee and decorate the windows over Christmas and, gossiping together, watch the empty street. It’s feast or famine here on the Cape, and lately it’s been famine: the plague and seven lean years in which she somehow managed to get fat. Just how, Joanna asks herself,
how
did I get into this and how do I get out of it and where do I go next?
Leah will leave Wellfleet soon enough; she’s been practicing departure and trying on identities for size. Last year she was a cheerleader and then a poetry-slam-wannabe and now she’s a girl on the dark backseat of a souped-up broke-down car. Her daughter’s father Mr. Ex-Right Ex-Husband #1 lives in Chicago now, and every birthday and for holidays he gets in touch and sends Leah fifty dollars and says, Whenever you’re ready, there’s more. Mr. Ex-Right Ex-Husband #2 preferred Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s and Johnny Walker and George Dickel and even Ezra Brooks to her, Joanna, and by the time he was in detox in Hyannis the preference was mutual; they haven’t seen each other since—when was it?—1994. Her mother is dying, her father is dead, her brother David has been doing whatever he does these days in California and paying no attention, and she’d rather not deal with the kind of attention her little sister pays. The house, the lovely ancient house, is an albino elephant, a picturesque wreck like its owner and beyond her to maintain. And Harry is no help at all; her dirty Harry lies there, feet on the afghan and pants on the floor, and expects her to serve him his dinner in bed but won’t even take out the trash.
It has been, Joanna thinks, a long slow slide since college and the degree she didn’t finish in 1979. It has been a downhill slope and steeper all the way. She is forty-four years old, a woman with an attitude, or so Harry claimed last night while they were fighting; there’s only so far you can travel, he said, on a pair of what used to be excellent tits. That’s not fair, she said to him, that isn’t fair, and he said what does fairness have to do with it, who’s talking equity here? You’re such a smug son of a bitch, she had said, why don’t you try checking the mirror yourself, and he said because it doesn’t matter, not to me. She has tried to teach her daughter, do as I say not as I do, don’t do the things I did when young, you’re worth much more than that.
She closes her eyes an instant while the birds in the living room fly through her head. Those grackles or starlings have nothing on her; there’s air outside they’re hungry for and once they find the open window there’s a slipstream and escape. They’re up in the trees now, away. But Joanna herself can’t imagine escape; she will remain in her mortgage-strapped house, the staircase off kilter and rooms needing paint, the shingles half-rotten and roof like a sieve—will remain here with her little sign, “B&B, the Bay View Inn,” while in the summer couples come to fuck, and off-season fish or sketch, and in the winter no one stays—remain here till there’s nothing left and she’s the old lady she never imagined she in her turn would become.
My mother is dying
—she says this out loud—and maybe that’s why birds appeared and battered at the windows, just the way the old song says they do when a soul escapes this vale of tears: a bird of passage fluttering and gone from dark to dark.
And sure enough, when she returns, walking through the stockroom door and hanging up her parka, feeling the heat of the shop and smelling the sandalwood incense and telling Maisie,
Hey, I’m back,
she knows on the instant that something has changed and not for the better. Her friend has that solemn look on her face that means there’s news, and the news is bad, that Maisie is misery’s company now and ready and willing to cry . . .
“What’s wrong?” she asks, and Maisie holds her hands up, spreading them, her fingernails bright crimson, chipped, and says that Harry called.
“About?”
“Not Leah,” she says. “It isn’t her.”
“When?”
“Fifteen minutes ago, maybe ten. He says they’ve been calling and calling your line, until finally he picked it up, and it was a lawyer. Oh sweetie I hate to be telling you this. Except your mother’s passed.”
It’s not relief exactly, this shock that floods and fills her chest, but when Joanna, sitting, says, “I knew it, I knew something like this would happen today,” she feels a kind of rising release, a sort of confirmation: the gull’s maw and desperate grackles and everything bottoming out. “What else,” she asks, “what else could go wrong?”
“They want you there,” says Maisie. “In Saratoga Springs, I mean. Your sister’s flying out from Michigan to deal with the remains.”
When the call arrives Claire is making the bed, fluffing up the pillows and folding the duvet; she loves this domesticity, these acts of meticulous habit, and the room is decorated to her satisfaction. From the Léger print on the south wall where light pours in but cannot reach and therefore fade it to the Calder on the west wall and the pot of freesia blooming; from the wallpaper with its intricate pattern of interlocked grapevines and a trellis to the chandelier and kilim rug; from the yellow shot-silk curtains to the marble-topped oak bookshelf, she has positioned it all: the ottoman, the rocking chair, the cedar blanket chest. The effect she strove for and achieved is one of busy harmony, of clashing motifs that nonetheless match, and everybody admires her eye.
Oh Claire, they say, you should have been a decorator, you
could
have been one anyhow, you have such a feel for design. I do expect, she tells her friends, to live with things I value; it isn’t too much to expect, and the world would be a better place if others thought so too.
The whole house is her nest. There are spaces for the girls, of course, and Jim’s study on the second floor and his exercise room in the basement, but the master bedroom suite is hers and hers alone. She cherishes the way the color scheme and light and furnishings just
work.
It’s hard to put your finger on, hard to explain precisely why, but when her friends say, Claire, you should have been a decorator, she believes they have a point; once the girls go off to music camp at Interlaken this summer she might just give it a try.
She has thought about this lately: branching out. It would be gratifying, wouldn’t it, to put your own individual stamp on other people’s houses and to unlock the energy and realize the potential of other people’s space. She doesn’t need the income and wouldn’t want to charge her friends, but yesterday at tea, for example, when Julie Cantor said, what’s
wrong
with this room—standing in what she insists on describing as her parlor and saying it doesn’t feel friendly enough and just doesn’t make people welcome—Claire understood in a heartbeat that the problem was the lighting fixtures and how they didn’t work at all with that overstuffed couch set and the Queen Anne armoire. The Chinese call it, she knows, feng shui, the art of arrangement and setting, and she supposes she must have an instinct for feng shui. It’s the way a room gives out on a hall, or the hallway on the porch beyond; it’s a matter of proportion and precise location, really, of knowing where and how to situate your things.
When Claire and Joanna were children they liked to play an address-game: let’s go to Manhattan, they would say, in New York City in New York State on the East Coast of the United States in the continent of North America and in the Western Hemisphere and on the earth and in the solar system and then the universe and in God’s palm. What’s God’s palm got to do with it? their mother asked, and Joanna said, oh, Mummy, it’s only a mailing address. Don’t take His name in vain, their mother said, He’s not a mailman, girls.
When the call about her mother comes she is unsurprised. Her mother has been dying now for years. Last month in Saratoga Springs, the last time Claire had visited, she understood they were saying good-bye, or would have done so if her mother understood what they were saying. Alice lay in the upstairs bedroom, the one that gave out on what used to be a meadow and now is Skidmore College, lying back with both eyes closed, white hair fanned across the pillow—the hospice woman in the kitchen saying,
Your mother is expecting you, she’s doing fine, just go right up, I gave her a shampoo
—the sheet above her rising, falling with each breath.
“Are you awake, Mom?”
“Who
are
you?”
“Claire. Your daughter Claire.”
Her mother opened one eye. “Who? Claire? Claire.”
“How
are
you, Mom?”
It is peculiar, isn’t it, how something you don’t notice becomes all you notice suddenly—how, for example, she had taken air for granted and paid no attention to her mother’s labored breathing, and then all of a sudden she noticed the sheet and how it rose and fell. Alice had been sturdy once, not fat or plump so much as sturdy, but now she seemed near-skeletal, the long slow declension from congestive heart disease and the body’s collapse near-complete.
“How did you get here, Claire de Lune?”
“No problem. I flew from Detroit.”
Alice was lucid now. “When?”
“Do you want anything?” she asked. “Is there anything . . .”
“How was the trip?”
“You’re
looking
well,” she lied.
The room was hot. The whole house was stifling but this room was worst: the windows shut and sweating from the hot-water humidifier, the space heater turned to high.
“How are the girls?” her mother asked. “How’s Jim?”
“Fine, fine. Becky’s loving algebra. Everything is sine and cosine and tangent with her lately; I know more about triangles than I ever cared to learn. SOHCAHTOA, for example; it’s what you call an acronym. No, a mnemonic device, that’s the word. It’s something you just can’t forget as soon as you remember it, and it’s what Becky uses for her test. SOHCAHTOA means sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cosine means adjacent over hypotenuse, and tangent is opposite over adjacent. Or something like that, anyhow.”
She could hear herself babbling, incomprehensible, continuing to chatter about right triangles and similar triangles and isosceles and identical triangles, and how Hannah was finished with geometry and trigonometry and told her younger sister that it didn’t matter, she wouldn’t ever need to know the word SOHCAHTOA after the test except for, maybe, SATs, which Hannah was preparing for and was a nervous wreck about; she talked on and on about nothing at all (the upright piano they were buying, the amount of snow, the flight from Detroit and how she had rented a Hertz at the Albany airport and it had been no problem, five hours door to door) until her mother’s fingers ceased their scrabbling at the bedsheet and she seemed asleep.
Then Alice opened both eyes wide. “How are the girls?”
“They’re hunky-dory. You remember that expression, Mom? It’s what you used to say.”
“How’s Jim?”
Claire’s husband is the CEO of a string of nursing homes, the Alpha-Beta Corporation. He did not understand why Alice planned to die at home, why she refused the comfort of round-the-clock service and knowing in advance her situation would be monitored, with everything under control. He took it as a personal insult or at least as a kind of rejection that his mother-in-law wouldn’t come to Ann Arbor and settle into one of his establishments. When Claire reminded him that Saratoga Springs was home, and Alice had been born and raised in her half-timbered “cottage,” he trailed off, cracking his knuckles, saying, “All the same. Round-the-clock care . . .”
“Or she could come and live with
us.
”
He studied her. “If that’s what you want . . .”
They have sufficient room. The house is an extravagance, but one they can afford—with Jim’s new exercise space in the basement, his Nautilus and NordicTrack and rowing machine, his freestanding weights and Jacuzzi. There’s a stereo set with headphones and a StairMaster and mirrors all along one wall and indoor-outdoor carpeting and a telephone. “Jim’s Gym,” the family calls it, and he works very hard to keep fit. He’s down there two hours a day.
The truth is Claire worries a little he’s growing antisocial and would rather be doing sit-ups with his headset on than in the kitchen with her and the girls, or at the office even, or a football game. He used to be a booster, with season tickets at the fifty-yard line, and every home game Michigan played Jim would be wearing maize and blue and cheering on the Wolverines until he came home hoarse. When they won he’d come back from the game with no voice left from cheering but—it’s how he put it—blissed out. He cared about their coaches—first Bo Schembechler and then Gary Moeller,
Bo and Mo,
and now the quiet one, Lloyd Carr. He cared about those football teams more than she thought possible—with his flag attached to the car’s aerial on game days and his “Honk If Ufer Michigan” bumper sticker and his high-fiving at an interception or touchdown and his outrage when they lost. It was embarrassing, a little, how he and his buddies rehearsed every play and rehashed what happened over beer and huddled like overage schoolboys outside at the barbecue and made travel arrangements to the Rose or Citrus or the Outback Bowl . . .
Now all of that is finished, or anyhow it seems to be; now Jim stays in his basement-gym and works on his pecs, glutes and abs. That’s what he calls them,
pecs, glutes, abs,
and Claire supposes it means something—this new preoccupation—and hopes it doesn’t mean that he’s depressed. It might just be the time of year: February, football done, and the basketball program so hot-and-cold he doesn’t bother with Crisler Arena or the remaining diehards in the stands. When she complained about the blues, the
blahs,
and asked him if he felt them too he said it’s just the opposite, you feel much better after exercise, it’s an energy booster instead. Then he smiled that closed-mouth smile of his, the one that she knows means he’s lying, and turned the volume up and said,
Still got ten miles to go this morning,
and started pumping the Exercycle, working up a sweat.
Her mother coughed. The sound was liquid, sputum-veiled. “Who
are
you?”
“Claire. I’m Claire.”