“Oh, no, I don’t mean that. It’s just strange, that’s all, to be back after all this time. Everything seems so busy.”
Ida gave her a look. “I’d say busy is just what you want — myself, I felt half-dead out there on the island, dead of boredom for one thing. Do you know I went down to the market this morning, just that, just there and back, and it was like being transported to heaven — and on the wings of angels, no less.” She was going to say more but just then there was a fierce breathless burst of coughing from above and they both paused to lift their eyes to the ceiling. “Your mother seems worse today,” Ida observed after a moment. “It’s the moving, is what it is.” She shook her head. “The dampness of that boat…”
“She pushed me away.” Edith tried to control her voice, tried to focus on drying the plate in her hand and finding a place for it in the stack on the counter, but she couldn’t help herself. “She was having a spasm — outside, in the chair, when I’d just got home — and all I wanted to do was, was—” She could feel it all coming up in her, all the tension and fear and loneliness — her mother was dying and she’d been dying a long time and once you started dying it was like being dragged down the side of a hill and all the dirt coming with you. To the bottom. To bury you. “I just wanted to help.”
“Hush, it’s all right, she doesn’t mean it.” Ida laid a hand on her shoulder and they stood there a moment without moving. “When people fall ill they’re not themselves anymore. It’s like dogs, same thing. I can recall when I was ten or eleven maybe and living with my Aunt Maeve — remember I told you about her, my father’s sister, the one that took in the three of us? We had a dog, just a mutt, really — Lucky, his name was — and he liked me most of all, maybe because I fed him scraps when no one else would bother with him, but then a wagon ran him over and broke his leg so the bone was showing through and my aunt warned me not to go near him because in his pain he wouldn’t know me—”
“But she’s so angry all the time. Angry at everybody. You especially. Why is that? It’s just not right, the way she won’t have you in the room anymore, won’t even come to the table if you’re there.” She looked away, out across the yard to where the woman next door was cutting flowers and arranging them in a vase the little girl beside her held out patiently, the moment crystallizing, butterflies, birds, the sun like syrup poured over everything and all the trees reaching in unison for the sky. “What happened?” she asked, turning back to her. “What did you ever do to her?”
Ida’s eyes. Her moon face. The pursing of her lips, dry lips, lips that clung together with a thin film of soft pink flesh. “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I just don’t know.”
The Empty Shell
Then everything changed. They went back to San Francisco, as promised, though it was to rented rooms and not the apartment she’d grown up in because strangers lived there now, and if she walked past it she told herself it was only to get where she was going by the shortest possible route and she never allowed herself to look up at the second-floor windows where her mother had kept her geraniums and Sampan would bunch himself against the glass to bask in the sun so that you could see him there from all the way down the block. There were doctors for her mother, new medicines. The cook — Ida had stayed behind in Santa Barbara and there was no arguing with her mother about it — was an irascible old woman named Mrs. Offenbacher, who could have played one of the weird sisters in Macbeth, and without a wig or a touch of greasepaint either. The rooms were dreary, furnished by somebody else, withered plumes of pampas grass sprouting from a vase at the door, the furniture nicked and worn, a smell of dust and disuse in the air. It might have been depressing under other circumstances, but not to her, not after the island. She was in San Francisco, and nothing else mattered. Her friends were here, her true friends, girls she’d known all her life, not just acquaintances like Becky Thorpe and the other girls in Santa Barbara, and they hadn’t forgotten her — within days of her arrival she began to receive invitations to parties and dances, carriage rides in the park, picnics, outings at the beach. Better yet, there was money again and that meant she could go back to her ballet and voice lessons.
At the end of August, when it came time to return to Santa Barbara—For the air, her stepfather said, and school, school of course—she began to feel dejected all over again. She wanted her mother to recover, of course she did, with all her heart, but as far as she could see the air was no better down there than it was here — it was all California, wasn’t it? Why couldn’t they stay? Why couldn’t they wait till the lease was up on their old apartment and move back in and have a normal life instead of packing up and moving from one place to another like gypsies? She didn’t want to whine, didn’t want to be a complainer, but she did and she was.
She came up the stairs one afternoon after ballet class, trudging, dragging her feet, angry at the world, the hallway reeking of Mrs. Offenbacher’s sauerbraten and the odious woman in the flat next door crowding the staircase with her two brats in tow so that she had to put on a false smile for them though all she wanted to do was tear out her hair and scream like one of the damned in Dante’s river of fire, and was surprised to see her mother and stepfather sitting in the parlor at that hour. It was odd to see them together like that, especially in the afternoon. More and more, her mother was confined to bed, where she read or knitted or dozed off sporadically throughout the day and then let her lamp burn into the small hours of the night, and Edith’s stepfather was always out somewhere doing whatever he did when he wasn’t wrestling sheep on a muddy ranch in the middle of nowhere. Business, that’s what he called it — he had business — and left it at that.
Before she could even remove her coat, she could feel the tension in the room. Her stepfather sat rigid in the armchair by the window, his jaws clamped and his gaze fixed on the street below, and her mother — in a pretty plum-colored dress instead of her chintz wrapper — sat just as stiffly across from him. They’d been quarreling, that much was evident. “I’m back,” she said, slipping out of her coat and hanging it in the hall closet — it had been brisk out on the street, the fog creeping in over the rooftops to dissolve the sun and a chill breeze running in ahead of it, though she’d never admit it. San Francisco? Cold? Never.
Her mother coughed gently into one fist. “We’ve been talking, your father and I,” she said — and here she shot a look at Edith’s stepfather, who wouldn’t acknowledge her, wouldn’t even turn his head—“and we’ve agreed that you’ll be staying on here, in boarding school, for the academic year.”
It took a moment to register the words, and then suddenly it was as if the sun had broken through the fog and struck the room with light, meteoric, blinding. She was there on the edge of the carpet, feeling as if she were at the very beginning of a recital, every head turned to her and the conductor holding his baton at the ready. She didn’t know what to say.
“Miss Everton’s Young Ladies’ Seminary,” her mother went on, “where Rebecca Thompson’s daughters attend classes. Carrie Abbott speaks highly of it. And the curriculum should suit you perfectly: French, German, Music and Art.” Her mother was smiling her beautiful smile, full-lipped, her teeth shining and perfectly proportioned, and for just that moment she looked as she had before the disease claimed her, vibrant, young, sure of herself. “I’ve already spoken with Miss Everton. You’re to begin September fourteenth.”