Chinese man the best to marry, Ma would tell Marty and me. Like American, basically tenderhearted.
Except Daddy. I had killed him in my head long ago, long before he actually died. What he had done to me was horrific. Still, I’d recovered. I’d even gotten married. So what was the problem? Why was he plaguing me now?
USELESS GIRL. WALKING PIECE OF MEAT.
I crossed Canal and went into Pearl Paint. It was mobbed, as usual, with serious and not-so-serious artists. On the second floor I meandered into the mezzanine, where the priciest oils were. Without thinking I picked up a couple of tubes of Old Holland cobalt violet light and slipped them into the pocket of my parka. My heart began to thud so hard I was sure it showed, but as far as I could see no one looked at me twice. I just clomped down those rickety loft stairs and strolled out of the store with eighty bucks worth of paint in my coat. No electronic beeper, no security guard grabbing my elbow.
In a store window I happened to catch a glance of myself and saw what a lowlife I looked, hair hanging down in a tangle. I hadn’t even bothered to wash my face that morning. Amazing that I hadn’t gotten stopped.
At a street vendor, I bought produce: pale chartreuse star fruit, persimmons, giant globes of winter melon. Then I went home and piled it all on a card table and tacked up a stretched canvas on my wall. Using a new palette, including the paint I’d stolen, I made several false starts. Nothing was happening—it was too static. I rearranged the fruit more gracefully, but this time it looked pockmarked and malevolent. I adjusted the light down and then the fruit looked dead again. Nature morte.Over the next couple of weeks I watched it all rot. It became a kind of pleasure to wake up and examine each new stage of decomposition. I almost couldn’t bear to throw it out.
Fran suggested I try Chopin nocturnes. “Remember at school, when we’d get depressed? They always worked for you then.” I dug out the tape and played it over and over, but the only thing it did was make me cry.
The bare night against the panes started to spook me. I unpacked one of my few boxes of marriage stuff, the steel blue Porthault sheets we’d never used, and stapled them up over the windows. The shroudlike heaviness of the drapery spilling down and pooling over the dusty floor was comforting. Now my apartment had two levels of brightness: dark or dim. I rarely turned on the lights.
I tried calling my sister. She was always out—at her job as a clown at the South Street Seaport, acting class, auditions, or the kinds of parties you read about in New York magazine. When I finally got hold of her she told me that her new boyfriend, a producer, had invited her to his villa in the south of France. The next thing I knew she was gone.
“Career connections,” Ma explained to me from New Haven. By then I was hiding behind my machine, listening to the disembodied voices of the few friends who still called echoing in the empty apartment. My mother hates leaving messages and will just hang up and dial again, as if she could wear down the machine that way. She did this so many times in a row that one night I finally picked up, just so she would stop.
I told her I wasn’t feeling well.
“New York City air,” my mother diagnosed. “You come up to the country to rest. Stay as long as you want.” Ma considers anything not Manhattan to be the country.
I decided it couldn’t hurt. Although I had a set of perfectly good luggage Uncle Richard and Aunty Mabel had given me as a wedding present, I just threw some stuff into an old Macy’s shopping bag. Maybe I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t stay in New Haven long, which was a joke considering how soon after I arrived it became obvious that I would never leave.
Ma picked me up at the train station and then went back to Yale for a department meeting. We were in the middle of a January thaw, and I sat outside on the front steps and watched the snow melting off the eaves, plopping onto the gravel border. When you’re clinically depressed something like drops falling can mesmerize you for hours. Then I wanted a cigarette and I’d forgotten to buy some before I left the city, so I went inside and up to my sister’s room. Her desk was uncharacteristically bare, but in the top drawer I found used checkbooks, a letter from an old boyfriend (“My Winky” he called her), a ruffle-edged snapshot of the two of us on the swing set at our old house, and finally a pack of stale Larks.
The backyard was separated from the driveway by a concrete curb, beyond which the terrain sloped steeply into a flat meadow. I sat on the curb with my back to the house and lit up. Even in this season, through the acrid taste of old tobacco, I could smell the clean must of the evergreens. I felt a spark of hope. Perhaps after all it had been a good idea to come home. I could see myself leading a dull, comfortable life for a few weeks, doing errands for my mother until I got my brain back. I exhaled, watching the last of the smoke from my cigarette curl up in slow motion.
When I was still able to, I took the Honda over to our old house on Coram Drive. In physical distance, it was nothing, about five miles. When we lived there, the house, the last on a dead end, had been painted forest green with black shutters. It had changed hands a couple of times since my parents had sold it, and now it was buttercup yellow, with a neat white trim replacing the shutters. At some point the side porch had been insulated to serve as another room, because I saw white curtains at the windows. Thick ruffled curtains, not the delicate lace-trimmed ones my mother favors. The cozy effect was completed by a calico cat sitting on the sill, something that made me realize just how completely wiped out our presence there was. We never had any pets. Daddy said that animals belonged on farms, where they could pull their own weight and weren’t just another mouth to feed.
The bedroom Marty and I had shared had a closet with a window. This had been my hiding place. From the window you could see past the grass island with its hawthorn bush and straight down the block to where the road made a sharp bend, by Witch Dugan’s. You could check out who was out riding their bike, who was playing kickball, who was getting yelled at by their mother on their front steps. I peered up at the window but couldn’t tell whether it was still being used as a closet or whether they had decided to make it into another tiny room.
It was too early in the season to tell if the daffodil bulbs my mother had planted along the front walk had survived. The hawthorn bush had been cut way back, almost to a stubble, and I couldn’t see any berries. I looped the car slowly around the circle several times, wondering whether I should park in front and knock. Someone who’d paint their house yellow and owned a cat would certainly be friendly. Maybe they’d even give me a tour. I hoped my circling wasn’t conspicuous. People were always getting lost on Coram Drive, it was such an odd little street, with its dramatic L-shaped bend and then suddenly the circle, which belonged to us, the neighborhood kids. We’d be out playing and have to scatter to the sidewalks or up onto the island when a stray car came by. “It’s a dead end, stupid!” we’d hoot at the driver, who would either glare or look humiliated, depending on whether it was a man or a woman.
There were no kids out this time, not surprising on a bleak, tail-of-winter day. The Katzes’ house next door had been knocked down a long time ago and someone had put up an ugly rawboned ranch that didn’t go with the modest fake Colonials on the rest of the street. No doubt the goldfish pond out back had long since been filled in. I ended up not stopping at all but instead retraced my route out to Whitney Avenue, past St. Cecilia’s and Lake Whitney and the wicked curve that was the last thing Darcy Katz saw in this life, and back home to the fancy house on the hill that contained only my mother, bent over the desk in Daddy’s old study, paying bills. When she asked me where I’d been I told her out by the lake.