While I Was Gone Read online

  Thinking of her, looking at myself, I wondered if she’d ever felt this sense of dislocation from her past, from her present, from her own reflection in the mirror. This empty unease. And then I smiled at myself, remembering her answer to questions of this nature. “Now, why would I bother to do that?” she’d say. She wouldn’t stop what she was doing, she wouldn’t turn to look at the eight-year-old, or ten-year-old, or thirteen-year-old girl who stood next to her, asking. She wouldn’t wonder where the question had come from or what its deeper meaning was. She’d slap the sifter to loose the flour, she’d slam the iron down on the shirt under attack, she’d rat-tat-tat even harder on the typewriter and violently fling the return across. “Now, why would I bother to do that?”

  “Just ’cause, Ma,” I said out loud now. And then I turned and said it to the dogs, who’d gathered in a circle behind me and were staring up, pondering my immobility. “Just ’cause, guys and gals.” Their tails thudded the floor. The little one, Shorty, growled in pleasure just at being spoken to. I felt, somehow, comforted. This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.

  Ah, well, it had vanished, hadn’t it? As surely as the rooms upstairs stood empty and neat in the dark.

  I washed my face and put on fresh makeup. Daniel came back from the barn and we began to move around the kitchen, making dinner. He hadn’t been able to reach Mortie, but he’d talked to everyone else he needed to talk to. Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard—the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.

  When we were sitting at last at the kitchen table, with a curry I’d quickly put together and a salad he’d made, he looked over at me and frowned. “What’s wrong?” he said.

  Beattie’s question. I laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said. “It’s either ‘What’s wrong?’ or ‘What’s so funny?’ It can’t possibly be both.”

  “But it is both. I can’t keep up with what goes on in your face, it changes so fast.”

  “Well, nothing’s wrong” I said.

  “Aha! But something”—he lifted his fork and waved it in rhythm—“ ‘is not right.’ ” And we smiled at each other, in honor of Sadie’s favorite book. We began to eat.

  “That’s about it, I guess,” I said after a moment. “The unnameable something.”

  “Give it a shot,” he said. “Name it.”

  I took a breath. And then, abruptly, I had the sense of how much I loved this, this conversation freed of the reports of what one or another of the girls had done in school that day, of what she needed, wanted, had to have before the junior prom or the class day or the party at Sarah Malone’s. We’d had five months of it, alone together, and there were times like this moment, Daniel pushing me, wanting to know me again, that made me feel it would be enough, more than enough. That it would call forth all that was in me. Later I would remember this moment, too, and wish I’d held on to that feeling of possibility.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I shrugged. “Earlier, in the boat today, I was feeling odd. Just a sense of . . . dislocation, I guess, in my life.”

  “From what?” And when I didn’t answer right away: “Dislocation from what?”

  “From . . . just one thing from another, I guess. I don’t know.” I looked at him and made a face. It seemed, suddenly, an embarrassing, even a foolish feeling to have indulged. I settled for an easy answer. “It’s probably a little bit about the girls, actually. In a way, missing them. But more . . . just all that energy, all that work and closeness. Where did it go?”

  “It went into making them wonderful. Making them who they are.”

  I made a noise, and he frowned, which with Daniel was the tensing of a single faint line between his brows. “Don’t go pfft. It’s true,” he said. “I’m not consoling you, Joey. I’m not humoring you, so don’t act as though I am.”

  “Ach. I know,” I said. “I know.”

  More gently, he said, “You always go pfft when I say something good. You should let me be loving to you.”

  “I know,” I said again. “I need to learn to just say thank you.” I reached over and rested my hand on his arm. I could feel the wires under his skin. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he said. “And you’re welcome.” After a minute, “But name it better than that.”

  “Oh, Daniel!” I cried.

  Still, I stopped and thought for a moment. “I really don’t know. I don’t. I’ve just felt . . . creepy. Crepuscular? Weird, anyway, all day. It feels . . . admonitory or premonitory or something.”

  “Which?”

  “What’s the difference, exactly?”

  And he explained, Latin-lover that he was, the derivation of each. “But I don’t believe in premonitions,” he said thoughtfully, after a moment’s silence.

  “I don’t either, really.” And then I remembered. “Except, remember the time that Cass and Nora got up on the roof?”

  “That wasn’t really a premonition, though.”

  “I saw them. In my mind’s eye, I saw them there, with the sky behind them, toddling around.”

  “But that was the result of thinking. You hadn’t heard them in a while, your brain ran through a few options, the kind of stuff they might be up to. You thought of the ladder and the skylight—”

  “I didn’t, Daniel. That’s not the way it happened. I just saw them in my mind and ran upstairs. I knew. I knew where they were, and I knew I needed to get to them.”

  Daniel was helping himself to more curry. He looked over at me. “Yeah, but I bet that somehow, maybe so quickly you never remembered it discretely, you went through those steps.”

  “I suppose I might have. But that’s not what I remember. What I remember is popping up through the skylight and seeing them just as I’d seen them mentally, staggering around, happy as larks. As close to death”—I held my fingers an inch apart—“as that.” I remembered their faces lifting in delight at the sight of me, just my head sticking up through the open skylight at first, then my hands rising too. They laughed, as though I were doing a kind of magic trick, conjuring myself out of thin air. I stayed right where I was, on the ladder, so they wouldn’t be tempted to tease me by running away, a favorite game. So they wouldn’t step back, back over the edge and down. I made my voice as richly cozy and seductive and welcoming and calm as I could through my panic. I spoke as slowly as ooze. “Hi! Hi, you cuties. Come here and tell me what you been doing. I didn’t see you for a long time. Come right here by me, come by Mumma. Come for smoochies, sillies. Come right here”—and as they ran forward into my grip, “Oh, my good girls, my loves.”

  “But you know,” Daniel was saying, “the way memory works, you might have attached that image—the real image, the way they truly looked—to your earlier thinking.”

  “Which was premonitory.”

  “Yeah, but maybe not in that exact, image-based way.”

  I stopped and looked at him. “Why are you arguing endlessly with me, Daniel?”

  “I’m not. I don’t mean to be.” He looked sheepish suddenly. “I just think it’s interesting. I’ve been doing all this reading about memory, how it actually gets laid down and altered over time. It’s fascinating. ‘Memory,’ ” he sang suddenly in his light tenor, “ ‘lights the corners of my mind . . .’ ” He let the song trail off. I was smiling at him. “Plus, of course”—he smiled back quickly—“I do like to talk. Talking is life. Right?”

  “For you, yes.”

  “So what was this feeling? Today. Talk. Talk to me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It was silly.” I leaned back. “No. Here’s what it was. I was looking at myself
in the mirror, and I saw myself, and I don’t know how I got this way.” I made a dramatic gesture down my body. I wanted to amuse him. He had amused me.

  He looked me up and down. “What way?”

  “Older. Not young. Not what I once was.”

  “Ah, but which of us is?” He grinned, a flash of dry pleasure.

  “Of course. It’s silly But just, from time to time, don’t you kind of get swept by it? By the sense of separation between the parts of life. Don’t you? Doesn’t the part that was crazy and doing drugs and having random sex in the sixties sometimes sit up and wonder what you’re doing here? Look at that,” I said. I pointed to the counter. “There’s a Cuisinart there. There’s a dishwasher. That’s indefensible.”

  He laughed. And then he said, “People change, my Jo. That’s all you’re saying.”

  “No it isn’t. I don’t think it is. What I’m saying is I don’t like this business of whole lives being taken from me.”

  “Who’s taking? Who’s taking anything from you? ‘Whole lives.’ ” He made a face. “Too melodramatic. It’s just life.”

  For a few moments we ate, we talked about the food, I poured myself more wine. Daniel wasn’t drinking, because he thought he might be going out later.

  Then, abruptly, he pointed at me with his fork. “I mean, Jo, look at my parents. Born on farms, raised on farms, both of them. Farming, raising their kids on a farm. And lo and behold, the kids don’t want to farm, so they sell it. They move to town, they grow old looking out at the parking lot by Meadow Glen Acres. That’s disjunctive as hell. But that’s the way life goes.”

  “See, I don’t think it has to. I think it can feel more connected. I bet it used to. I bet this has something to do with goddamned modernity.”

  “Could be,” he said.

  I sighed. I drank more of my wine.

  “It’s life, Jo,” he said after a few moments of silence.

  “It isn’t,” I said.

  We both laughed, small, rueful laughs.

  “Ready to clean up?” he asked.

  After dinner, Mortie called back. Daniel turned his back to me while he talked. His voice was grave, a series of quick, short responses. Okay, okay. Yes. Okay.

  When he hung up, I said, “She’s dying.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know.” He went to change, and I moved more slowly now around the kitchen. The windows had gone black, they were steamy with our life. I was thinking of Amy, his parishioner. I’d met her only a few times. She’d been pregnant the last time I’d seen her, singing in the choir. Her hands, holding the music, had rested on the shelf formed by her big belly in the maroon robe.

  When he came back, he said, “I’m not sure how late I’ll be.” His face was stricken, frightened-looking, and I thought about how difficult his job was.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Don’t wait up.”

  “I want to,” I said.

  He nodded, and gripped my arm for a second, and left.

  A while after he’d gone, Sadie called, and her small, light voice made me see her and yearn for her. She was the youngest of my daughters, the easiest, and my love for her was the least complicated.

  The twins had always been much more difficult. Unplanned, they’d come at the wrong time in our marriage, just when I was starting out as a vet, needing to put in long hours of scutwork as the junior partner in a practice. Daniel had their care more than I did, and I sometimes felt shut out from their life together. And from the two of them, too, their mysterious dark twinniness. They cared most about each other.

  And then suddenly, when they were two or so, they began to fight. Within seconds they could move from a wild mutual joy to murderous violence. They left the tracks of their tiny fingernails on each other’s faces, the beautiful, even, red circlet of their teeth marks in each other’s soft flesh. They pulled out clutches of each other’s wispy black hair. They pushed and scratched and grabbed and would not let go, and woe unto him who tried to separate them. We rarely got through a meal without one of them attacking the other, without wails and shrieks and inconsolable sorrow.

  Intermittently they’d be best friends again for a while. Oh, maybe it’s over, we’d tell each other. Oh, thank God. But at the slightest offense, the mildest difference, they’d start again. “Why must we live like this?” Daniel and I would ask each other. I sometimes wept, it was so different from what I’d hoped for or imagined when they were born, these two perfect, helpless creatures nested bonelessly side by side.

  And then, when they were five, along came Sadie. Planned for, adored by us all, pliable, sweet, she sat like a small Caucasian Buddha in our midst. I was able to take a maternity leave of three months this time, and I lay in bed long mornings, nursing her and sleeping, while the twins were off at kindergarten and then their after-school program. When they came home, they swarmed her. They carried her everywhere with them. She was their doll, their toy, their beloved. She walked and talked late because they were so eager to serve her, to anticipate her every need.

  They vied for her affection, and Nora, finally, was the winner, the one Sadie began to gravitate toward most often. I think that for Nora, Sadie may have offered a way of escaping from the demands of her bond to Cass—from the wild love, the maddened jealousy. At any rate, she became a kind of second mother to Sadie, and as Sadie got older, she often turned to her before me or Daniel for help and information.

  Cass was angry, she felt left out. She wanted to go on fighting. And that’s what she did, really—with herself, with us, with the world. Dukes up, she charged at everyone and everything. She became the outsider, the tough one, the one we worried about. Even now. Here was Nora, living in New York with a young man we genuinely liked, going to film school. Sadie had just started college in western Massachusetts, still loving, still easy, voluntarily in touch all the time. And Cass?

  Well, Cass played guitar in a band. The last time I’d seen her, her hair was dyed a plummy black that rose around her head in a wildly teased tangle, and she was wearing lipstick so dark it seemed the color of violence itself—it put you in mind of bruises, of dried blood. The band made no money to speak of. Who knows what they ate? A lot of the time they all slept together in their van in parking lots along the highway, on derelict empty streets in faraway cities. Sometimes we didn’t know where she was for two or three months at a time. Then one of us would pick up the phone in the middle of the night and it would be Cass, collect, from a pay phone in Louisiana, or North Dakota, saying she could talk only a minute, they were about to go on, there’s more snow here than I’ve ever seen in my fucking life, I dyed my hair blond, the van broke down, I broke up with Tod, now I’m with Raimondo, oops, they’re calling me, love ya, gotta go.

  Not Sadie. Sadie called and lazily talked and talked. What’s new? she’d ask. What have you guys been doing? Though all she wanted to hear was that everything was the same.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Sade,” is what she said tonight in her little voice. (If it isn’t Betty Boop, Cass used to tease.)

  “Oh!” I cried in pleasure. “Sadie, Sadie, my shady lady.”

  There was a second of silence. Then she said, “God, isn’t it bad enough to give me the name?”

  “It’s a beautiful name.” It was Daniel’s mother’s name. She’d wept when we told her, though she warned us, too, that it was a hard one to live with.

  Sadie snorted now.

  “What’s up?” I asked. I could hear background noises—music, a muted conversation. She had a roommate, she had a boyfriend, she had a whole life, only fifty or so miles away.

  “Yeah, well. I had this kind of, like, favor to ask.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try anyway.”

  “I’ve got this professor in my poli sci class? You know, I told you about her—Jean Bennett? She’s just so brilliant. And it turns out she lives in Adams Mills! I mean, she’s new. She just moved there.”

  “Hey,”
I said.

  “So after I made that connection, I was mentioning you guys to her. Like if she ever needed religion, she could call Dad, and if she ever needed a vet, she could call you. Which I assume was fine.”

  “Of course.”

  “Though actually, you know, it was really just, like, being polite or something. The way you do. But today. After class? She mentioned to me that her dog is having some kind of trouble. She actually told me, but I forget what she said it was. Anyway. She wanted your name, and I gave it to her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Which means, I assume, that she’s going to call you. So . . . I wanted you to know.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “Mom, she is so amazing. She is just so extraordinary.”

  “Well, I’ll try not to embarrass you, dear.”

  “You think I’m exaggerating, but it’s true, Mom. It’s true. You will love her.”

  “And what is her name again? This paragon.”

  “Jean Bennett. Jean. That’s one of the cool things, that we call her by her first name.”

  “But you’ve always called everyone by their first name, haven’t you? I mean, grown-ups.”

  “Not around here, Mom. Not professors. Everyone is Dr. This or Professor That.”

  “I see. Well, I’ll look forward to meeting her,” I said. “Jean Bennett, right?” She made a noise of assent. “And what’s new with you, sweetheart?” I asked.

  Suddenly a deep sigh. “That’s my problem, I bet,” she said. “There’s absolutely nothing new.”

  “But every little thing you do is new to us.”

  “Mother.”

  “I mean it, hon.” I allowed a beat of silence. “And then, of course, I don’t.”

  She laughed. And then she sighed again, less dramatically. “Well, if you must know, I’m really stressed. I’ve got papers, I’ve got this dance thing”—a recital she was in. Daniel and I were planning to attend. We’d have a fancy dinner at an inn we knew on the way, and then get to see Sadie in motion. “I’ve got tons of reading I’m so behind on. And I’ve been having those dreams, you know, where you’re taking some test you’re not ready for.”