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Chapter One

MORNING

    On Saturday, they found a house. They drove far past Philadelphia, into the country, the newspaper with the circled ad between them on the seat, the radio playing. On the news, the talk was of Vietnam.

    "Will Dad have to go in the army?" asked Isabel.

    "No," said her mother. "He has a family." A wide headband held her hair back, and she had pushed her sleeves up as she drove. She sipped from the mug of tea she always brought with her in the car. She seemed almost happy, as the countryside spun by. "This is like where I grew up," she said. "Look for cows, Isabel."

    Isabel counted several cows, not a single one walking anywhere. They turned down a road, then another, passed a little store, then rumbled onto a road that led to the top of a hill, where the house was. The agent's name was Madge, and she met them at the peeling front door, seeming cheery. Everything about Madge was wrinkled except her feet, which were beautiful in white slingbacks. She led them around, pointing things out in her raspy voice. She was skinny as a piece of celery.

    The house wasn't particularly nice, in Isabel's opinion. There was an enormous water stain cascading down the living room wall, and the kitchen wallpaper was peeling. Pairs of boots of different sizes sat up on a muddy shelf in the kitchen, close to the floor. The living room was full of books stacked up like firewood, none on shelves. There was an intriguing small door cut into the side of the staircase. Isabel rattled the handle, but it wouldn't open.

    Madge sent them up the steep wooden stairs alone. "You break it, you buy it!" she rasped out, then laughed a deep laugh, as if she had told a very hilarious joke indeed. Isabel wanted to tell Madge how stupid that was, that they weren't going to break anything, but didn't, following her mother up the stairs.

    "Oh, look at this," her mother said when they reached a narrow room with a painted floor and a small desk set all by itself in the middle, like an island. Against one wall was a mattress on the floor, covered by a chenille bedspread. From the desk, out the odd, oblong window, Isabel could see a field. In the field, there was a car up on cinder blocks. All its doors were gone. There wasn't anything else in the room but the bed, the desk, the desk chair, and the window with the field and the car in it. Beyond the car, the land sloped and fell away into woods. Isabel, squinting, took a picture of it with her mind so she could think about it later.

    Isabel's mother sat down at the desk; her knees didn't quite fit under it. She lifted the lid.

    "Mom," said Isabel.

    "I'm just peeking," she said. Inside, there were maps, a messy notebook, pens, pencils, some thread. A yo-yo. A book about the birds of South America. "They must travel," said Isabel's mother, opening to a photograph of a bright lime-green bird that seemed to be hugely tall, with bulging eyes. "The people here travel." The bird's eye bulged unpleasantly at Isabel.

    Isabel sat down at the very edge of the mattress. Why, she wondered, was there no furniture in this room besides the bed, the little desk, and the matching chair? "Are we near Springston?" she said.

    "Springston?" said Isabel's mother, dropping the lid back down with a hollow bang. She leaned back in her chair, stretching out one long leg. "We're not moving to Springston. That's your father's big idea. What do you think of this house?"

    "It's okay," said Isabel. She passed her hand over the country of the bedspread. There were the mountains. There was the sea. There was a farm where she lived with her friend Ann. "Mom. Have you heard of The Doors?"

    She wrinkled her forehead. "Who?"

    "The Doors . It's a group."

    "Chiggy-wiggy music?"

    "Yes," Isabel giggled.

    "What kind of group?"

    "I just told you. Rock -and- roll music. They're really good."

    Her mother was quiet for a minute. Her lime-green bird mood seemed to have passed suddenly She leaned her head in her hand at the little desk. Her two rings shone in her hair. "You know, Isabel," she said, "sometimes I want to die."

    Isabel retied a shoelace, light-headed. The room seemed to get brighter for an instant, then faded to normal again. Maybe that was a sunspot. The sea roiled as the sunspot blazed, overturning a ship sailing over the sea past the farm where she and Ann lived. "Why?" she said, staring at the sea.

    Isabel's mother pressed her long fingers into the corners of her eyes, squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. "I just do," she said. "I just want to die."

    Isabel flicked the farm off the planet. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said, and she tried to sound cold, like a cold girl in a book. "It's Saturday. We're looking for a new house. You drove us here in our car. You'll drive us back. It isn't that hard."

    Isabel's mother shook her head again, as if in response to a silent question. She looked like a stranger to Isabel for a moment, and that was worse than seeing her get upset. "How would you know what's hard?" she said quietly, her dark blue eyes wet, turning in the small chair to face Isabel. "How would you know, Isabel?"

    Isabel had no reply. She picked at the chenille bumps, which were in a feather outline. What town were they in, then, she wondered, if they weren't in Springston. Several minutes went by Isabel's mother stood up, and looked out the window.

    "Hey," called Madge from downstairs. "Look out that window. Do you see the rosebushes?"

    "Madge," said Isabel's mother loudly. "I'm in love with this house. It's perfect. What are they asking?" She turned around, no longer crying, and gave Isabel the little pinch that meant I'm back .

    Madge came up the stairs, slingbacks making a fast Morse code Isabel couldn't quite read. "Twenty-five," she said, lighting up a cigarette and opening the window. "They'd probably take less."

    "Oh, let me sneak a puff," said Isabel's mother.

    Madge handed her the pack. "I've gotta quit anyway."

    "Who lives here?" said Isabel.

    "Renters," said Madge. "Three or four girls all live out here together. Hippies. One of them's a mechanic, if you believe that. The owners are in Florida."

    "A lady mechanic?" said Isabel's mother, blowing smoke up into the air.

    Madge shrugged, tapped her ash out the window. "She's the only one I've dealt with. Big friendly girl."

    Isabel stood up. "How are the schools?"

    Madge laughed, exhanging a glance with Isabel's mother, who shrugged. "The schools?" said Madge. "They're all right, honey." She stubbed out her cigarette on the windowsill, closed the window. "They're just fine."

    Isabel decided that she would never smoke as long as she lived. "I'd like to see the rosebushes, Madge," she said.

    The three of them went back down the loud wooden stairs, Isabel in the lead, the winner. Outside, on the tilting porch, there was an orange cat with one chewed ear.

    "What's his name?" said Isabel.

    "Kitty," said Madge. Isabel, despising Madge, resolved to be superpolite to her for the rest of the day.

    Madge walked them through the backyard, proudly pointing out the rosebushes, which were little more than a few stringy bundles of thorns. "How lovely," said Isabel loudly to Madge.

    They walked past the car, Madge, in her slingbacks, giving it a wide berth. "They'll take that with them," she said. Isabel peered at the car, wondering if there was anything interesting left in the glove compartment. She attempted to excavate it with X-ray vision, but nothing happened. These people, she thought, were poor, and not nearly as smart as the Romans, who built aqueducts.

    The March air tipped all of their noses with red as they walked, bit their cheeks. The marks of Isabel's mother's tears faded away into a general flush. She put her arm around Isabel, and Isabel held her breath. Then she couldn't help it. She moved closer, hard. "Whoa," said her mother, stumbling. They walked together into the wind, awkwardly, hip to hip. Isabel noticed that her head was not so far from her mother's shoulder when they stood side by side. She would be so much taller than her mother when she grew up. Isabel put her hand in her mother's pocket and felt crumpled Kleenex, some change. A quarter, a nickel, she figured out. Two pennies. From the yard, Isabel could see the peaked window of the room that would be hers, because this was going to be their house, and they were all going to live there, and paint it over. Isabel's room had eaves. Jeannie's room didn't. From her window, Isabel would look out over the yard and muse on the empty car until she grew up, and moved away.

    Sitting in the living room, in chairs covered with Indian print bedspreads, Isabel's mother discussed prices and taxes and land with Madge. The book on the top of the stack nearest to Isabel was called The Diary of Anaïs Nin , 1931-1934. Isabel began reading it, but the person didn't seem to have any friends, so she put it down, bored. The house came with fifty acres, Madge informed them, and Isabel's mother said that they could have a pool, back in the forest, down a path. Isabel and Jeannie would learn to swim. She stretched her arms over her head. "I just feel right about this one," she said. Isabel noticed a stain on the Indian print bedspread her chair was covered in, and wondered what had made it. The stain was the shape of Texas, more or less.

    When was it, Isabel thought later, much later, long after her mother was dead and she herself had grown up and moved away, and visited Philadelphia only reluctantly--when was it that she began to feel so full of dread? When, in other words, did she know? She knew that the exact answer hardly mattered. She knew that the exact answer was from the beginning and never . She knew that her question was really a screen for a deeper and more troubling question, which was, When could her mother have been saved? Again, the answer was at the beginning and never . When her mother finally did it, she did it at the hospital where she worked, locking herself in a supply closet with a vast amount of pills, as if to say: This is the size of my hunger . It circled outward: a pill, in a hand, in a room, in a hospital, in Philadelphia, in April 1968. As she got older Isabel increasingly referred to her mother by her first name, both in conversation (proprietarily) and in her own mind (ritually); her first name, Cassie, made her mother small, like a nesting doll, circled inward.

    For every day of the seven days of the shivah, Isabel wore a black dress with a stiff bow on the back supplied by Nana, white ankle socks, patent leather shoes, and her mother's high school ring on its fine gold chain. The dress began to smell, but she wouldn't wash it. She wore the same dress at the unveiling a year later, her wrists extending past the wrists of the dress, the material tight across her shoulder blades, and at the elbows. She ripped the sleeves, pushing them back as they drove in from Springston, where dirt was piled up next to the open pits that would be houses. Heavy in her hands was the paradox her mother had left her: Cassie, a woman so hungry she couldn't eat, so tired she couldn't sleep, so lonely she couldn't speak. Cassie landed awkwardly on her shoulders, and pulled at her hair. Cassie had a keen, crude, innate sense of irony, saved from being entirely lethal to her children only because her lack of education made her somewhat overblown in her dramatic presentation. Toward the end, she often seemed like a girl playing a mad scene in a high school play; she walked around the house with her hair undone. Cassie adored "The Waste Land," lines of which she had memorized in high school: April is the cruellest month . Later, much later, Isabel hated her mother for that. "The Waste Land" was such a high school poem.

    As an adult, Isabel had a refined, even playful sense of Irony. She was not as desperate as Cassie, with her high school education and her Philadelphia playbills, had been. But secretly, or perhaps not so secretly, she did still really want to know what, and why, and when. It could be significant, she quietly insisted to herself, to pinpoint the moment. There was a woman behind the scrim, at the beginning, and never, and always, throwing the oversized shadows. Cassie Gold.

    In fact, sometimes Isabel thought she really did know the answer after all, she had always known the answer, and her possession of this knowledge caused her to feel both smug and comforted. In the first year after her mother died, Isabel wore her mother's ring under her clothes all the time, even in the shower, even to bed. It left marks on her in the night.

    Was the stain really the shape of Texas? Or was it a fish, upside down? Madge and her mother talked on and on, until the sun began going down. The house grew colder.

    "Thank you so very much, Madge," said Isabel, as they finally got into their car, and shut the door on her.

    Riding home, they were happy Isabel explained who The Doors were.

    Later, a fight ensued. Isabel's father, jiggling his leg, said, "That is not a commuter neighborhood, Cassie. That's rural. They don't need a dry cleaner out there." Isabel's mother picked up her plate, and sat alone in the kitchen, staring at her food, while the three of them silently ate dinner. After a while she put on her coat and walked out the front door into the front yard, in the dark, leaving her food behind. There was a flash as she lit a match. She stood there a long time, the lit end of the cigarette marking where she was, like X marks the spot. It was as if she were refusing to move back into the house they already had. Isabel, eating peas one by one, wondered if her mother could live in the backyard, maybe in a tent, with a lantern. They could bring her dinner in a basket. At night, from the house, they would see the lantern light, shining through the walls of the tent.

    March was supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, or in like a lamb and go out like a lion. The formula was reversible, like a reversible jacket. This March hadn't come in any particular way It was just cold. So maybe that was a lamb. Isabel and Ann sat at the dining room table at Isabel's house, doing their Roman projects. Isabel's project was a Roman house; Isabel looked at the sheets of cardboard, brought home by Isabel's father from the dry-cleaning store. They were flimsy. The two precious gray ones would have to be glued together, for the stone floor. The rest were dull red, a dusty, clouded red, like clay. That was history: Romans did make their houses out of clay, and limestone. Plus, they weren't even houses. They were compounds, with fountains in the center. They had bathhouses, and wine-pressing rooms, and temples. Isabel's Romans were wealthy, with many children. They would all have their own rooms. Isabel planned to make the fountains last, out of shredded Kleenex. On the corner of one of the dull red sheets, Isabel wrote the date in tiny letters, then cut it out in a little square, to be glued down later.

    Ann unrolled a long sheet of white paper. Her project was a mural of Christians being fed to lions. Authoritatively, she picked up her paintbrush, dipped it in red paint, and began painting a long, seeping spot, like a red shadow, along the lower edge of her paper.

    "Aren't you going to draw it first?" said Isabel.

    "No," said Ann. "I know what happens."

    Isabel began measuring out the lines where the walls of the compound would go, drawing them with a pencil against her ruler. The pencil marks were silver, nearly invisible, on the gray cardboard. This, thought Isabel, is the floor. This is the floor now.

    From the living room, there was the faint smell of cigarette smoke, the sound of the TV. General Hospital .

    "I just love Jesus," said Ann, and sighed.

    "I know," said Isabel. One of her lines seemed to be leaning; Isabel tried to erase it, but it smudged instead. She regarded the smudge for a moment, thinking. Maybe there could be a little inside garden there. Romans could have that.

    "I'll baptize you later if you want," said Ann, cracking her knuckles. Ann was spectacularly double-jointed, and a Baptist. She had been reborn last year at Bible camp; since then, she said, she took Jesus with her everywhere, even to the bathroom. She could say the Lord's Prayer as fast as if it were one continuous word, like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious . She had taught the Lord's Prayer to Isabel over the course of one long afternoon that left them both feeling mesmerized. Ann was also extremely good with glue, even though she herself seemed to be held together with string. Isabel did not love Ann, but she was fascinated by her.

    "I don't know," said Isabel casually. She did not say what she privately believed: that getting baptized might cause her to disappear, or become a zombie. They would begin it as a game, and then it would be terrible.

    Ann did not reply, starting on her first lion. His yellow tail curved energetically several times, whiplike. Through the window, Isabel could see her little sister, Jeannie, and Jeannie's friend Donna, who always had tomato soup in the corners of her mouth, dropping orange seeds in the bushes outside. The March wind blew in their hair as they bent their heads together, teaspoons in hand, planting oranges. From the living room, there was the sprightly sound of a commercial.

    "I got this line wrong," said Isabel.

    "Just keep going," said Ann intently. She bent over her mural, painting abundant fur.

    The smoke in the other room freshened. Isabel knew that her mother would be lying on the sofa in her nurse's uniform but with her white shoes off, nyloned feet on the sofa, her arms crossed over her chest, as if holding herself in. She would be watching for her favorite character, Nurse Audrey, who always wore a scarf. The scarf was like Audrey's shadow.

    Isabel made a corner. Strands of dark hair would be falling across her mother's face. Isabel thought: Marmee, Bertha, Ma, a ghost. But Cassie was her name.

    "I'm hungry," said Ann. "Ask your mom if we can have something."

    "I don't have to ask," said Isabel. She went into the kitchen and came back with crackers and a slippery plastic pile of American cheese on a plate. Ann unwrapped her cheese a bit at a time, holding the slice by the plastic, taking a bite of cheese, then a bite of cracker, dropping crumbs into her box of paints. Isabel folded her cheese into squares, fit the squares onto circles of cracker, then crunched down quickly, surprising them, the rough and the smooth together. She wondered if that was religious, to eat the way Ann was, keeping things apart. She wondered if that was a way to get to heaven.

    Jeannie and Donna ran inside, giggling. The front door slammed as they began clattering up the stairs.

    "Shut up, you guys," said Isabel, going to the foot of the stairs. "Mom's resting." They continued laughing, hands placed theatrically over their mouths, clattering into Isabel and Jeannie's bedroom.

    Ann leaned over, peering into the living room, as Isabel returned to the table. "No, she isn't, Isabel. She's sitting up."

    "No," said Isabel. "She's resting."

    "I don't think so," said Ann, still peering. "She's watching TV. Look."

    "She's my mother," said Isabel, not needing to look. "I would know."

    Ann, cheese wrapper in hand, considered Isabel. "I have to go home now," she said. She dropped her paintbrush in the water jar. The yellow made a streaky swirl, then vanished.

    "All right," said Isabel.

    At the front door, Ann said, "Good-bye, Mrs. Gold," and Isabel's mother, leaning her head in her hand, said, "Oh, good-bye, Annie. See you." Ann, holding her mural by two corners, gave Isabel a distinct stare.

(Continues...)

Copyright © 2000 Stacey D'Erasmo. All rights reserved.