26
JANE and Lucy’s mother, Rita, sitting at her desk in her house in Philadelphia, looked out at the park across the street and reflected on the fact that she thought of herself in terms of her connection to them: she was Jane and Lucy’s mother. Even though Jane was dead, she was still Jane’s mother — to another mother, at least, she would never have to explain that. She did not really feel that she had to explain anything anymore. She could not remember the last time anyone had asked her for an explanation.
In spite of the fact that she was under no obligation to explain anything, she was sitting at her desk because she had gotten up that morning wanting to write Lucy a letter. Lucy felt as bad about Jane’s death as she did. If she called to talk to her about it, though, Lucy would be brave. Lucy would not have to be brave reading a letter.
She was not sure what she wanted to say to Lucy. This, for certain: that from the first, the children had had the greatest interest in anything dangerous. They preferred to stand at the top of the landing, barefoot, toes overhanging the top step as if they were standing on a diving board, rather than to sit in a chair in the living room. They were as comfortable with height as the angels. Also, if anything was slightly precarious, they were drawn to it. They would have walked like the Wallendas on the clothesline stretched from the porch roof to the maple tree if she or her husband hadn’t grabbed them and lifted them down. They shimmied up the side of the tree like mountain climbers, and later in the day they’d be filthy from spelunking in the crawl space under the porch. There was always a reason: the neighbor’s cat had been down there for an entire afternoon, meowing, and it might be hurt; the bird’s nest had to be brought down right away, before Daddy got home, because there was going to be a storm. They always thought of themselves as people on a rescue mission. As though it mattered that the balloon string had gotten tangled around the clothesline. As if the birds didn’t build nests strong enough to survive storms. The way they thought about it, inanimate objects were to be cared for just as if they were alive, and the whole world was there for the saving. They loved little things. Seedlings in the garden. Lucy probably remembered going out after a rain and trying to remove the little clumps of mud that weighted the new plants down. She certainly remembered the gardens. She could recite the names, still, of every flower.
Lucy probably did not know — but perhaps it would not interest her — that one time Jane cried all afternoon when a boy in the neighborhood poured boiling water on an anthill. It was as if she’d turned the corner and seen the river Styx.
They developed their own systems for things. That was admirable, of course. Why should mothers be so disturbed by inventiveness? Lucy had had such a terrible time learning the Palmer Method. “Fluid motion,” her teacher had said. “It is necessary to feel these curves in the hand,” moving her own hand like a metronome. When she wasn’t looking, Lucy would copy a page from the book, as she was supposed to. Then she would go back and add swishes to the letters — a combination of writing and painting, it looked like. “Ladies,” their dance instructor, Miss Jersild, would say, “spine straight, feel no weight. Head high, body dangling from the sky.” They were supposed to think of themselves as marionettes, erect but relaxed, waiting to be put into motion.
One day, in the basement, Lucy had stood on her father’s workbench, with torn nylons she had found in the wastebasket tied together, looking for all the world as if she were about to drop a noose over Jane’s head. Lucy couldn’t possibly have been about to hang her, because she worshiped Jane, always. They were just pretending — wanting to really feel the pull from above. It was one of the few times they ever took an abstraction and tried to be literal-minded about it. They spent their lives doing quite the opposite.
Rita thought that that sort of imaginative ability could help a person. A pleasant notion, to think of dirty clothes piled high in the laundry basket as Monet’s haystack. To see the melting ice cream as a cloud.
Dear Lucy — How you two loved bubbles! I’d try to do the dishes and you two would reach around me and dip your blowers into the sink and lift them out and blow and blow. I had to put so much detergent in the water that the dishes almost slipped out of my hands. It took forever to rinse them. To think that I ever thought of all that fun as frustrating. There we’d be, bubbles all around us, a storm of them mirroring everything in the kitchen — all those mundane things, stepstools and canisters, become for a second mere flashes of color that popped and collided.
They were endlessly fascinated with lightning bugs. They would beg to sleep with a jar of them in their room, air holes punched with the ice pick in the metal top. They’d put it by the night-light because they thought they blinked more when there was some source of light. It had its equivalent in Christian thinking — all the little children prospering under God’s radiance.
Rita felt sure that their religious training had been neglected. They had memorized the recipe for chocolate chip cookies before they knew the Ten Commandments. They were so worshipful of each other that it was hard to make Mary take on any real character. The apostles paled by comparison with the lives of their stuffed animals. She should have sent the girls to church regularly. Eventually, the minister might have prevailed.
He would not have prevailed. It got to the point where no man could persuade them of anything. Jane didn’t even take men seriously enough to bother finding one who was better than the rest. Except that there was a similarity in the men she chose. She liked childish men. Not because she felt threatened by men or because she wanted to have power over them, but because it became increasingly difficult as she got older to find women who were childlike, and Jane always enjoyed childhood so. She would have been perfectly happy to remain a child.
With Lucy, it was another matter. Her father influenced her much more. They weren’t close, but he never begrudged giving her time. Jane seemed to bore him. He and Lucy did seem to have some relationship. It upset her very much when he left. She latched on to Hildon, and stayed attached to him.
They were once so naïve that they thought the paisley sheets would make them pregnant. There they were on the floor in the morning, because they wouldn’t lie on the sheets. It was one of those mysterious tableaux of childhood that didn’t get explained until years later.
They were so busy when they were children that Rita could still not believe that they had grown up and done whatever they could to avoid work. They liked doing things of all sorts. Their days were so scheduled, they barely had time for school. They lived for summer. Night, and summer. At night they turned their bedroom into the Old Vic. Jane’s bedroom. Lucy was always in Jane’s room. One time she had a cap gun. Rita could remember taking it away and wrapping it in newspaper as if it were a fish. Then she threw it away. Real guns or toy guns too often led to tragedy. She had read, recently, that some man had picked up his son’s water pistol, when the paper boy was being adamant about the money he was owed. The paper boy came back with a revolver and aimed it through the window and shot the man in the back of the head. She believed in gun control, no matter what the hunters said. The paper boy with the gun had no more trouble getting it than a person would have going out to buy a candy bar. He was thirteen years old.