Читать книгу 31 Hours - Masha Hamilton - Страница 12

Mara, listening outside the door. Ear pressed to it like a nosy parent checking a teenager’s room, except that Mara was eleven, and she was listening to her mom. Stifled, intense soundlessness emanated from the other side of the door, and Mara knew what created that.

Mara, listening to her mother weeping. It qualified as weeping because it was thicker, fuller, and more private than mere crying. Her mother tried to hide the noise, to trap it in her throat. And so Mara thought of the weeping as an object with physical form that clogged her mother’s windpipe, cutting off normal breath. Mara heard the repeated silence of her mother not breathing and then the sound of little gasping breaths. Mara feared her mother might eventually stop breathing altogether. That was one reason she listened—so that if the weeping halted and actual silence fell in its place, she could pound on the door. She imagined that she might even be able to break open the door—she’d heard of small people finding astonishing powers in extraordinary situations.

Mara listened, too, because she wanted to know certain things. She needed to know them, actually, here alone with her mother, and she didn’t know how to find out. Asking wouldn’t work because her mother wouldn’t answer. So she listened hard, as if the weeping might tell her. She wanted to know, primarily, how long this might go on and how it would end. Sometimes she tried to think it through as if it were a scientific experiment. Take, as the first ingredient, a mother who rarely goes to work as she used to because the office that used to belong to her and Daddy is somehow only Daddy’s office now, and who rarely goes to the grocery store as if that were too challenging, and who rarely bathes or brushes her hair, and who emerges from her room for no more than three hours a day. Combine that with a disconnected voice on the phone, at once authoritative and tentative, who is the father, living, apparently cheerfully, someplace without the mother. Then add a daughter who spends her Saturday hovering outside a bedroom door in an apartment eight floors above the city, listening to the mother weep. What was the end product? Mara had no immediate hypothesis. She had to take it step by step. Materials, procedures, observations. And then conclusion. Mara was good in science, very good, though her grades had recently begun to drop. For the moment, Mara was balancing homework with Mom-alert.

If Vic still lived at home instead of in her own place downtown, or if she even had more time between dance rehearsals, maybe Mara wouldn’t feel so responsible, so involved in her mother’s tears. There’d be two daughters to share in this. And of course, if her dad still lived here, Mara wouldn’t be responsible at all. The weeping had begun about six weeks ago and her dad had left a month ago and at that point the weeping had gotten worse. Her father and Vic had to know what was happening with Mara’s mother. But everyone in her family always called Mara “the little angel,” so maybe they thought she spread her wings and floated to some serene place while her mother cried. Maybe they thought Mara didn’t need help.

Since it was all up to her, Mara had been working to fine-tune her aural senses. That way she could better hear the sounds that had become primary in her life: doors opening and closing, and her mother’s muted tears. Mara’s method: she filled the bathtub just enough to cover her ears and then lay down. Listening through water made the unnecessary sounds go away—the cars passing on the street below, or an airplane overhead. Miraculously, it also magnified the small, necessary ones, the internal sounds. All she had to do was pay attention, and she could make out the hisses of the old couple next door arguing in Russian. She could hear the rumble of the subway that ran directly beneath their building and even, she believed, the voices of commuters talking. She could hear the walls breathe. She would lie there until her skin grew dimpled from moisture and the water began to cool and goose bumps rose on her body. Later she could hear from the other end of the apartment when her mother finally cracked open her bedroom door and quietly emerged, almost shamefacedly, as if she were tiptoeing in after curfew. Then Mara could run to join her for as long as she stayed outside the cave of her bedroom, as long as she could hold the tears at bay. Even when the door remained closed and Mara had to press herself against it for comfort, the listening exercise paid off. Sometimes, it was true, Mara couldn’t hear anything except sirens and traffic helicopters. But in general, the undertone of weeping appeared to grow louder and clearer as Mara’s hearing sharpened.

Today Mara’s mother had been shuttered in her room for the past four hours. With luck, she would come out of the bedroom, blinking as if she’d emerged from darkness, and say, “How about some scrambled eggs?” though it was way past breakfast time. Or she’d ask some question about school, though it was Sunday. Or she’d squeeze Mara’s shoulders and suggest an activity, though they wouldn’t end up actually doing it. She would smile and be cheerful, especially if the phone rang, and Mara would be grateful, but she would not be fooled. It would be a case of barely hanging on, like when Mara had to do chin-ups during gym, and before long her mother would scuttle back into the bedroom and the door would close.

She’d once overheard her dad’s racquetball partner say kids knew everything. The partner—a tall, mostly bald psychologist—often made silly pronouncements, but in this case she knew he was right. At least, partially right. Kids knew everything about their families—maybe because their families were everything for a while, the entire world squeezed into a few people and a small space. Kids had nothing else to pay attention to, so they soaked it all up. But one point the psychologist failed to make: knowing something was a long way from understanding it.

This latest weepisode, as Mara privately called them, had been touched off by a morning phone call from Mara’s father that had come as her mother was in the kitchen, putting on water to boil. Her mother gaily answered the phone and then slipped into the bedroom, pulling the door behind her slowly so it closed with a quiet but definite click, and her voice grew too low to catch, and Mara turned off the stove and then debated with herself for about two minutes before she went into the bathroom near the kitchen. An old-fashioned black candlestick phone stood on a small hand-painted table, a whimsical decorative item chosen during more cheerful times. It was the best phone, and the best location, for telephone eavesdropping. She lifted it up carefully, as she’d learned from Vic. Noiselessly, midconversation.

“Down the street, there’s this pool hall. Back Door Billiards.” Mara’s father’s voice nearly trembled with warmth and intimacy. “A restaurant at the corner sells Jamaican patties, hot and spicy.”

“For God’s sake,” Mara’s mother said, almost under her breath.

“It’s all so real, Lynne. Everything else in my life had stopped being authentic.”

“Everything?”

Mara’s father sighed. “I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to explain.”

“Shit,” she said.

“I’m forty-seven,” he said. “I have to look at this.” For a moment, all Mara heard was her mother strangling on her breath, and then her father spoke again. “There’s this saying around here: De higher de monkey climb, de more he expose. I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe I just, I saw too many monkeys climbing too high. It seems pointless now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mara’s mother said, and Mara could hear in her voice that she was wrestling with an enormous force, still winning for the moment, still calm or calm enough, but not yet the final victor. “Moving from the Upper West Side, five minutes from the office, into a small, dingy flat an hour and twenty minutes away in Brooklyn doesn’t give your life more meaning.”

“But that’s what I’m trying to say, Lynne. You’re not listening. The work, the apartment, our little neighborhood—for quite some time now, it’s all felt artificial.”

“Don,” she said, and Mara could hear that she was straining her patience to its limit, “Jamaican patties and Sunday gospels isn’t your reality. It’s not authentic to you.”

“Why couldn’t it be?”

“No. Stop.” Mara’s mother’s voice sounded like broken glass, and Mara could almost see her waving her arms. “Oh. God. Just stop.” The line was silent for a beat, and then she spoke again, and it was clear she’d begun to cry. “You think I don’t know this? How stupid do you think I am? This isn’t about goddamn authenticity. This is a lot more cliché even than that. This is about you banging that,” she caught her breath, “that Caribbean author Vic’s age—”

Mara yanked the phone away from her ear, not sure what her father meant by “authentic” or the monkeys thing but certain that she was finished listening. She quietly replaced the receiver.

Since then, lingering outside her mother’s door, she’d been thinking about how to change things for her mother—would a kitten help? Should she throw a party? Maybe buy some cupcakes at the bakery on 81st? It all seemed a bit lame. She was wishing a solution would just pop into her head, the way answers sometimes did on multiple-choice tests, when she heard a key in the door. She wondered, for a breath, if it might be her father, fresh from Brooklyn and here to talk things through with her mother. Sometimes, as her father said, her mother didn’t really listen; she seemed so lost in her own thoughts—always had, now that Mara considered it. Maybe a good set of ears from his wife was all her father needed, and he’d returned to claim it.

But of course it was not her father at the door. Her father would not simply wander back in at this point. There would be no magic wand; this was not a musical. Mara herself was going to have to figure out how to fix it.

She moved away from her mother’s bedroom door, still shuttered, and headed toward the living room. “Hey, Vic,” she called out, because only one other person had keys to their apartment.

“Mar-muffin, the angel.” Vic stood smiling in the center of the room, holding a white plastic bag with one hand, her hair pulled away from her face. Vic was so beautiful she glowed, literally, as though her skin were a thin veneer covering pure gold. Mara was smart, really smart; she knew that. She’d been tested, and though her parents didn’t discuss it because they thought it unhealthy to dwell on, she knew the scores had surprised even them. But she also had wiry, brittle hair and a small, sharp nose. She wore glasses. She had bony shoulders that gave her prominent angel wings, contributing to the family nickname. As to which would prove in the end more useful, being smart enough and very beautiful or very smart and not too attractive, she hadn’t yet figured out.

“I’m so sorry. It’s been insanely busy. Rehearsals—well, you know. I’ve missed you, though, baby. I brought a loaf of whole-grain and some sawbies,” Vic said, using the word Mara used to say when she was a toddler, before she could say “strawberries.”

“We already have sawbies,” said Mara, flinging one arm behind her toward her parents’—her mother’s—bedroom, with a play on the words she knew her sister would get.

“Jeez,” Vic said. And then, “Mom?” And in a louder, more authoritative tone, “Mom.”

After a long moment, the bedroom door pushed open, the hinges squeaking a little in protest, making Mara think of muscles stiff from disuse. Her mother swept in, arms open. She wore jeans and a fresh, long-sleeved white shirt. Her tangled hair, blond with a few scattered strands of silver, fell to just below her shoulders; her face was splotchy and mirror-shiny at once. “Vic!” she said almost manic-gaily, adding, “Mara!” a moment later, as though Mara had just arrived as well. She pulled both daughters into her arms, rocking them for a moment, and then said in a bright tone, “What time is it, girls? Shall we have some breakfast?”

“Breakfast?” Vic glanced at Mara. “What’d you eat today?”

Mara didn’t respond. Vic didn’t know how bad it had gotten.

Vic shook her head. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s wash the berries.”

Their mom followed them into the kitchen—as if she were the kid, Mara thought—and sat, crossing her arms on top of the table. Vic pulled a brush from her purse and handed it to Mara. “You brush,” she said, gesturing toward their mother’s head. “I’ll do food.”

Mara took the brush and pulled out some of Vic’s golden auburn hair, twirling it around her finger and setting it carefully on the table. Then she held the brush over her mother’s scalp for a second. Mara was uncoordinated; that was another thing about her. While Vic was a dancer who seemed to control her body as easily as she might lift a cup to her lips, Mara had trouble cutting along a straight line for school projects. Sometimes she wondered how she and Vic could be sisters. She lowered the brush and began slowly working on her mother’s hair. Her mother allowed it, even leaned her head back a little, her eyes narrowing as she watched Vic at the sink.

“Have you gotten thinner over the last couple weeks?” their mother asked.

Vic shrugged. “Same as always, I think,” she said over her shoulder. “Though Alex has been working us.” She bent to a lower cabinet to find a colander.

“Hmm.” Her mother tapped her fingers on the table. “Are you . . .” she paused, “. . . seeing anyone?”

Mara stared at Vic, eager to hear how Vic would answer. She liked catching little bits of a world removed, one in which she didn’t yet have to participate. She was also curious because Mara knew something that her mother, caught up in her own drama, had failed to notice. Mara knew—at least she was pretty sure—that Vic liked Jonas. At another time, a pre-Dad-leaving time, this would have been big news. Vic and Jonas had been friends since high school, when he lived four blocks away and they used to share meals at each other’s houses, do homework together. Jonas had even seen Vic with pimple cream on her nose. No big deal.

About three weeks ago, though, Vic came to visit and brought Jonas with her, and Mara saw that something had changed. When Mara walked into the living room, they were standing near the window, their fingers barely touching, and they were looking at each other in a certain way that startled Mara, then scared her for a second, and then made her feel like giggling—from embarrassment, mainly. But she was glad. Jonas was sweet. Jonas was the only one who seemed to notice Mara—at one point during the visit, he knelt down to Mara and asked, “How’s it going?” and when she shrugged, he squeezed her shoulder and said, “It will get better. Promise.” Mara thought if she had a brother, she wouldn’t mind him being like Jonas.

Vic waved her right hand in the air dismissively. “Dancing is taking up all my time right now.”

“Well,” said their mother, and then she stopped, but she looked pleased. “How are rehearsals coming?”

“Good.” Vic brightened. “Want to come opening night? It’s Tuesday, remember.”

“Is your father . . .?”

Vic sighed audibly. “No, Mom.” She turned on the kitchen faucet and began rinsing the strawberries.

“Just—just asking,” their mother said. Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head back a little into Mara’s brushing. She seemed to relax, and that allowed Mara to relax, too. Mara thought about the sense of peace that came from listening to Vic busy herself at the kitchen sink, and she thought about what it would be like to be grown-up and to be the one who brought that comfort to someone else. She tried to imagine herself Vic’s age, but it seemed too far away to envision. When she was very little, five or six, after a family road trip to California, Mara told her parents she’d decided to grow up to be a billboard painter and paint new billboards every day that would make drivers feel peaceful instead of wanting to honk their horns. She was too young to understand her parents’ amused reaction. A few years later, she announced she would write a book that her parents would edit, though what kind of book remained uncertain since her mother worked on nonfiction and her father edited poetry. A poetic book about pretzel baking, or maybe mountain climbing? That plan, too, drew indulgent smiles. Now, when she closed her eyes and thought about the future, it seemed fuzzy, full of sharp edges and dark holes and no colors at all. Was this only since her father had left? She couldn’t remember.

Vic turned off the faucet as their mother murmured.

“What?” Vic turned.

“Oh. Oh, nothing. He just takes himself too seriously, your father.” She cleared her throat. “Do you see him much?” Her voice was affected. She was trying to pretend the question was casual.

“Mom,” said Vic, “I don’t want to talk about Dad, or you and Dad. If I get involved, I’m going to end up having to pay two hundred bucks a week for three years of therapy. As a dancer, I can’t afford it.”

Their mother waved her hand, her eyes still closed. The gesture was unclear: Did she accept Vic’s refusal, or was she waiting for a chance to ask again? Vic seemed concentrated on cutting the ends off the strawberries, and for a few minutes the only sound was the brush pulling through their mother’s hair.

“Don’t hold close to anything, girls,” their mother said at last. “That’s my best piece of maternal advice. Don’t count on anything because everything changes and that’s all you can count on.”

Mara looked up from her mother’s hair to exchange a glance with Vic. When their mom began talking to them like that, making pronouncements and saying “girls,” it meant nothing good. It meant she was feeling morose. That had been true even before their dad had moved out.

“Isn’t that kind of a cliché, Mom?” Mara said, not unkindly. In fact, she sounded like her mother herself, who used to point out clichés when looking over Vic’s or Mara’s school papers. Their mother ignored her.

“Some changes are for the best. Sure, they are,” their mother said. “Learning how to make rice pudding. Consummating my relationship with your father. Earning more money. Those were good changes.”

Vic grabbed a dishtowel, held it under the colander, and brought the strawberries to the table. “Eat,” she said to Mara.

“But the rest—well, the bottom line is, cling to nothing. Even when I was your age, Vic, and I could feel men watching me as I walked down the street, and even when my energy was boosted by every breath I took, I knew what was coming. That eventually my hair would lose its sheen, my skin would turn fragile, and I wouldn’t bounce up a set of stairs.”

“Mom,” Vic said, “you look great. Besides, everything doesn’t change.”

“What? What doesn’t change?” Their mother’s voice had grown loud and a bit harsh, the way she had spoken to their father at the end, in the days before he’d left.

“Mom,” Vic said soothingly, “we’re always going to be your daughters.”

Her mother shook her head as though to shrug Mara off, so Mara stopped brushing. “No more cribs, no more wet wipes or playgrounds. You live in your own apartment, and Mara will be next,” their mother said, not pausing to allow Mara to protest that she wasn’t yet in high school. “It changes. It already has. So. Name one thing that doesn’t.”

Vic shook her head and looked up at the ceiling. “Memories,” she said after a minute, grinning like she’d called out the right answer on a game show. “Memories don’t change.”

“Are you kidding?” their mother said. “Whatever happens in the future makes whatever happened in the past look different. Sometimes completely different. Try again.”

Vic sat at the table and leaned forward. She hesitated, her expression searching and determined. Mara was rooting for her older sister, although in much the way one would root for an underdog—full of doubt and trepidation. And then Vic smiled. “The stones.”

The stones. Yes. Vic was brilliant to remember them. Everywhere they went over the years, the four of them collected everything from large pebbles to small rocks and brought them home. The stones were rich with memories—their own family memories and those that predated them, their mother said. The stones were their family’s version of a photo album. Sometimes for special meals, they put four or five in a pile on the table, a centerpiece. Generally they were kept in two bowls on the bookcase. Vic and Mara had spent many hours sorting through them. Their dad sometimes carried one in his pocket, and after a hard day, their mother would sit in a chair by the window and rub one.

Their mother stared at the palm of her right hand as though she could see her future there. “Even stones change,” she said. “Smoothed by waves. Pitted by sand.” But her voice sounded less certain. “And wind . . .” She trailed off.

“Those stones are exactly the same as the first time we brought them into the house, Mom.” Vic handed Mara another strawberry before she moved to the living room and then returned, bringing a bowl of stones with her.

Mara’s mother glanced at them, then turned her face to the wall.

“Look at the quartz streaks in this one,” Vic said, holding one out and waiting until their mom took it. “Remember how we found it on that trip to the Southwest?”

“And this orange one with a smooth spot in the middle of all the rough,” Mara said, emboldened by Vic’s success. “Remember how Vic used to say it was the stone with a stomach?”

“And this one, Mara, you said looked like a peach with a bite missing,” said Vic.

Their mother looked at both of them. “You girls,” she said, and finally, shaking her head, she laughed. She actually laughed. It sounded gentle, like a real laugh, and it filled Mara with hope, and with a sharp longing she’d been denying—a yearning for those old days when twice as many people lived in this apartment, and it felt alive, and she’d never felt scared, like she did sometimes now, of shadows that stood in corners.

Their mother reached for the bowl, letting her fingers skim over several stones before she selected one. “This is the one that fits in your eye,” she said to Vic. “Remember?”

“And this one,” said Vic, “I used to be able to balance it on the bridge of my nose.” She tried, but it fell to the table and all three of them laughed. Mara loved the way laughter made her chest feel lighter. She’d never noticed that before, in the old days. Still laughing, she reached up and pulled another stone out of the bowl.

“Look at this one,” she said, giggling. “The lopsided heart.”

As soon as she said it, she knew she’d made a mistake. Her father had collected the heart stone along a Scottish beach where her parents had spent a week alone together when she’d been a toddler. She still vaguely remembered staying with Vic at their grandmother’s house in Virginia. Her father had hidden the stone in his luggage until Valentine’s Day, and then, sitting at this very table, he’d given it to their mother and recited some silly rhyming poem he’d written himself on the 1-train on the way home from work the night before. Mara didn’t remember actually witnessing that part, but she’d been told over the years. A favorite Valentine’s Day memory.

Their mother looked at Mara, her gaze accusing, and then got up.

“Mom?” Vic said.

“Be right back,” their mother said, her voice sounding labored. They heard the bedroom door close. Vic looked at Mara.

“She won’t be right back,” Mara said quietly.

“How long will she stay in there?” Vic asked.

Mara shrugged, feeling loyalty toward her mother surge up from somewhere unexpected. She wondered how much she should reveal. “A long time,” she said noncommittally, hoping Vic could read between those words.

“Well, I guess it’s better than screaming,” Vic said. “With Jonas’s parents, there was screaming.”

Mara would have preferred screaming to the apartment’s eerie, constant silence, but she didn’t say that. “How is Jonas?” Mara asked. It was an adult-sounding question, a question their mother or father might have asked at a different time.

Vic smiled. “Fine.” She ruffled Mara’s hair. Then she picked up a strawberry from the colander and rotated it between her fingers. “I’m going to make you a sandwich,” she said. “Do we have cheese?” She put down the strawberry, opened the refrigerator, and began moving food around, scrounging.

“Vic, I’m sorry,” Mara said after a minute.

“For what?” Vic pulled some Dijon mustard from the refrigerator door.

“You know. Saying that about the heart stone.” Her carelessness made her feel so guilty that her stomach actually hurt, and she rubbed it gently.

“Oh, angel.” Vic paused to give her a hug. “Mom’s got to stop being so damn sensitive. Maybe she needs to take antidepressants.”

“She won’t do that. You remember that book she edited about overmedicated America.”

Vic sliced some cheese, placed it on the bread, and added lettuce. She set the sandwich before Mara. “Eat,” she said.

Mara took a big bite. The cheese was a little dry and the bread a bit stale, but she didn’t mind much. Vic brought her a big glass of orange juice, and she drank some of that, too. “You know, Vic,” she said after a minute, “I have an idea about what we can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“How we’re going to make Dad come back.”

Vic sat down, her slender form suddenly seeming heavy. “Sweetie,” she began, but Mara decided to ignore her.

“If Dad knew how sad Mom really was—” Mara began.

“I think he knows, sweetie.”

Mara shook her head. “Every time he calls, you should hear her—she sounds really happy, like she’s just gotten home from a party or something. And then they start fighting. So he probably thinks she’s doing fine until he calls. But, Vic, she’s like some zombie.” That was the most explicit Mara had ever permitted herself to be to anyone about her mother over this past month.

Vic stood up, moved behind Mara, and began massaging her shoulders. “They’re so tight,” she said, but Mara shrugged her off. She didn’t want to be pacified, not now.

“You know how softhearted Dad is,” Mara said. “Whenever we got hurt, remember? Mom told us to buck up, but Dad came running with the bandages and the worried expression. He wouldn’t want Mom to feel this way. So we’ll take him the stones, get him remembering, and then we’ll tell him how bad it is, how much she misses him.”

Vic sighed. “Look, sweetie—”

“He loves these stones. He used to say they held magic, remember?”

“But you heard Mom. Memories do change.”

“We can’t take them all on the subway, but we don’t need all. Just this one,” Mara lifted a black-and-white speckled rock, “and this,” choosing the one that looked like the partly eaten peach, “and this,” picking up the lopsided heart, cradling it in the palm of her hand.

“Baby, I think it’s more complicated than that.”

Mara knew it was complicated; of course she knew that. She thought about mentioning their mother’s reference to a Caribbean author to prove it. “There’s always a way to simplify,” Mara said. “Like the answer to a math problem. Right down to the prime numbers.”

Vic smiled. She took Mara’s hand, and this time Mara let her. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard for you, still being at home.” Vic shook her head and added, almost as an aside, “Why couldn’t he wait, damnit?”

“Mom can’t go on like this,” Mara said. She wanted to add, “I can’t,” but she didn’t.

Vic rose and released a deep, sighing breath. “So talk to Dad if you want. Just don’t blame yourself if it doesn’t work, okay?”

“But I thought—” Mara stopped. What she’d thought was that Vic would help her; she’d counted on it, assumed it didn’t even need to be said. She wouldn’t act like a baby about it, though. Lots of things she used to depend on were changing, and maybe that was what it meant to grow up.

“You okay, angel?” Vic said

“Hmm.” Mara nodded.

Vic lifted one foot, grabbed her ankle behind her back, and stretched out her leg. “Already getting stiff,” she said, laughing softly. “It was one long rehearsal. I’m going home to take a shower and a rest. I’ll call, okay?”

So, fine. Mara would do it alone. She could go tomorrow morning. She’d take the subway to Brooklyn early so she could be there before her dad went to work. If all went well, maybe he would drive her home and they could go into the apartment together. Her mom wouldn’t be happy that Mara had cut school, but she’d understand once it was all explained.

“Hey, you in the fog. Plotting away, are you? Give me a hug good-bye, okay?” Vic pulled her close and bent so their heads were touching. “It’ll be all right,” she murmured.

“I know.” Mara straightened, feeling the responsibility that came with seeing what had to be done. Vic was like their mom, wanting everyone to buck up, so Mara would have to be like their dad, bearing the Band-Aids. “I know.”

Vic pulled away and ruffled her hair again. Mara hated the gesture for its implied meaning. But they would know, soon enough, that she was not a kid. She followed her sister into the living room and watched as Vic, with one last wave, closed the door firmly behind her, leaving Mara and her mother inside.