She understood that she was not to think about what went on in the world. That the New York Times no more reflected the problems of the day than a statement made by the Queen of Hearts. She was not supposed to embarrass people by reading the paper and telling them what she had read.
Dear Lucy — I try not to think of Jane as dead. Frankly, this means, lately, that I try not to think about Jane.
Jane probably got too much attention. People would say, Oh, it must be wonderful not to have the children fighting all the time, jealous of each other, but the two of them together — they were almost always united in everything — were an ebb tide to a person’s reasoning. Insist, and you’d feel like a bully.
Rita believed that little things did get remembered. The small things in her house were quite lovely. One lovely thing made a more perfect statement than half a dozen objects put out on a tabletop.
What were Jane’s last thoughts? She hoped that they were peaceful. Jane must have been scared to death even before she died. Or perhaps it made her angry, because she hated predictable things that she couldn’t control. Friday night traffic, backed up on the road to the beach.
Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” came to mind. It was her favorite painting, for purely sentimental reasons.
It must be very difficult for Lucy. In some ways, she acted as if she were much older than Jane: placating her, indulging her. She was good at distracting her. She could invent a game right on the spot. They loved to scare each other. They would take any excuse to jump out of a closet. Even if one knew the other was in there, she would be frightened enough to jump or scream. They would play Ghosts. Or Africa. What did jumping out of a closet have to do with Africa? She remembered the time Lucy knocked down the clothes bar and all the clothes fell on the floor of the closet. Henry had said, “What game is this? Niagara?”
Henry. Henry Nolan Spenser.
She thought: the aspen is the most beautiful tree, followed by the birch.
She found herself thinking that Mozart was born in 1756, Blake one year later. What an age that must have been. Contemporary poetry was all about young fathers’ perceptions of their sons. Speculative poetry, about rocks talking and planets humming.
They loved music. The carrousel. Music boxes. Dear Lucy — Do you remember that I would sing you to sleep when you were restless? Those songs always seemed sad, sung at night — songs such as “I Love You Truly” and “You Are My Sunshine.” The sadder the song, the later the hour, the prettier my voice. That really was true. Until I had children I was inhibited about singing. I still would not sing in a room filled with people. Not even a Christmas carol. Two years ago I found myself in such a situation and lip-synched “Jingle Bells.”
Most people simply stopped seeing her when Henry left. A common reaction — people felt awkward, as if they themselves had deserted the person. This resulted in their deserting the person.
It was written somewhere that Joseph P. Kennedy agreed with his father that there were only two great things about the modern age. One was that there were window screens. The other thing … there was another thing. There were actually many things to like. Digital clocks, although they were not functionally an improvement over regular clocks. The kinds of teas that were readily available were amazing. In almost any small grocery store, you could find camomile, rose hip, mint. Women’s shoes were now often quite stunning, though there seemed to be no standardization of the M width. A skate blade would not fit in some M width shoes. In others, the span was adequate.
Dear Lucy — One of the advantages of being old is that you do not have to endlessly explain things. People are afraid to ask you questions — partly because they become deferential and partly because they are afraid that the answer will be too lengthy and boring. They will ask you how you feel instead of what you did on a particular day. This makes it easier to do strange things, because it is unlikely that anyone will question you about what you did. Also, since most people have no way of checking, you can say what is convenient. For example, there is a sepia-toned baby picture on my upstairs table. I have been asked, once or twice, who it is. I have shrugged and said, “Some relative.” Actually, it is the baby picture of the first man I loved. His mother, who thought we would marry, gave it to me the Christmas before he died of the flu. The look in the baby’s eyes is the same as his look when he was a twenty-year-old man and I knew him. I don’t think I would remember that without having the picture set out. I remember taking a walk on a snowy day and running into his brother, and hearing that he had been taken to the hospital. I was supposed to be home, but I cut across the park with the boy — a younger brother, perhaps fourteen, though he seems in my mind to have been a mere baby compared to Nicole — and I went to see him. He recognized me, but the next day he recognized no one, and the following day he was dead. It was still snowing when he was buried, and they had to delay the funeral until they could dig again in the cemetery. Imagine: the flu, which was so contagious, and I sat at his bedside for an hour.
Or, she could write: People are reluctant to believe that a parent doesn’t prefer one child, however slightly, to another. Sometimes there would be a period when one of you seemed sweeter than the other, but then the situation would be reversed. It evened out.
Or, that when she went to the hospital, it was the first time that she saw a hospital room that was not painted white. It was painted green.
Or, that Henry had just come right out and said that he was going to leave. For years he had struggled, with little subtlety, to keep himself rooted. He had held on to the wheel of the station wagon, and before that to the handle of the baby carriage, as though all day, everywhere, he was hearing the voices of the Sirens. He was always grabbing onto things. Grabbing the phone, instead of holding it. All that tension was apparent to everyone. Why not admit that it made Jane and Lucy stay childish longer than they might have. They had had better luck with him when they were young, so they thought that being sprites would please Daddy. They always looked at him full face, with their large, lovely eyes. They always had their arms around his neck. They wore long white cotton nightgowns with punchwork and embroidery at the neckline. It seemed that he would carry them, and they would stay plastered against him, until they were so tall that they would have to be dragged. There were nights when he wouldn’t come home. They would cry and cry. Lucy would make up a story to tell Jane. Lucy hated him a little in the end, and Jane became a dreamer.
Lucy: when Henry left, I no longer rolled toward the center of the bed at night. The mattress wasn’t weighted down, and I stayed where I was. I was always astonished to wake up and find myself on one side of the big bed. For a while I doubted that I had slept.
Homonyms. The trouble you had with those, Lucy — you would have thought that you had been raised in a foreign land. Some people seize on some one thing about someone else and then blow it out of proportion, overestimating its symbolic potential. With you, Lucy, it would be homonyms. Once you heard a word and attached it to a particular thing, you couldn’t admit that there was an alternate reality. The struggle we had with pair and pare. How you wept over there and their.
My memory of the end of day: Reading you Pride and Prejudice. That was like singing “La Marseillaise” to a Frenchman. I would sit at the foot of the bed and read while you were propped against your pillows, the covers pulled high, arms underneath, only head and shoulders visible, toys all around you. Dobbin the donkey. Jeepers the monkey, with that mouth that Henry painted on, not very well, when its felt mouth dropped off. Can’t you still see Silly the goose clearly? It was left at a playmate’s house, and the family moved to Denver and never did mail it back the way they promised. If I had known, I would have driven back to get it. I hadn’t doubted that it would arrive. As time went on, I was as upset as you were, but I knew it would be unwise to show it.