The World Below Read online

  I nearly jumped when the knocker on the front door sounded. On my way down the stairs, it was struck again, four times, loudly.

  I opened the door.

  An old woman stood on the granite block step outside. She was tiny and slightly curved over, so that she had to look up and a little bit sideways to see me. It made her seem sly, and I had a quick odd moment of what felt almost like a child’s fear of her. She introduced herself—Mrs. Chick—and only then did I recognize her. Of course. Mrs. Chick, Chick, Chick, we’d called her as children, imitating the way you call hens in. She lived two doors down.

  Mary Chick, she told me now when I tried to call her Mrs. She’d brought over sticky buns for my breakfast tomorrow; she’d made a double batch and didn’t need them all, she said. She handed me the heavy packet in aluminum foil.

  I thanked her profusely. I offered her coffee. She said she didn’t mind. I hung her coat up and led her back to the kitchen. I took down a cup for her and filled it and then refilled my own—though I didn’t really want any more—nattering on pointlessly all the while about this and that: my trip, the ease of the drive up, the way things in town looked exactly the same.

  “Well, I suppose they might, to you,” she said.

  We carried our coffee to the back parlor, and I turned on a few lamps, still making nervous chatter, the more nervous now because of her silence, because of her eyes moving shrewdly over everything.

  In the faint whoosh of air that rose when I sat down, I smelled sex again, and I wondered if Mrs. Chick had noticed that as I walked in front of her. Whether she would even recognize it if she had. As she set her cup down after the first sip or two of coffee, she said, “Changed a bit, idn’t it?” and nodded, a quick flip up of her chin.

  “The house?”

  She nodded again.

  “So much,” I said. “I know it’s lovely, but I can’t get used to it.”

  “Your grandmother would spin in her grave to see it.”

  We both surveyed the room. In the warm lamplight everything looked fresh and welcoming. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she’d like it.”

  Her mouth pulled straight, as though insulted. “Oh, no, not her,” she insisted. “ ‘Where’s my …?’ ”—she looked around—“ ‘Where’s my rocker? Where’s my old sofa? Where’s my down puff?’ Oh, she had to have her old things.”

  I looked at her, smiling so gassily at me. My grandmother had never liked her; I remembered that now. It was a comforting notion somehow. “Do you have any idea what happened to all that stuff?” I asked.

  She sniffed. “Your aunt took some, I know that. Silver and the like.”

  “Oh. Well, we got some of that too, actually. Lawrence and I.”

  “Hm!” she said.

  “Do you think she sold the rest? What’s not here?”

  “She did, some. They had an auction, I’m told. It was over to Rutland, and I didn’t go, but some did. She only sold what was worth real money, I think. Some more silverware. Some rugs, they say. You know, those old Oriental ones she had. And some rag ones too, apparently. Those are worth something now. We used to think they were just a good way to use up our old clothes.” She smiled grimly, and I smiled back.

  There was a little silence. She shifted, and her chair protested. “You going to stay on, you think?” she asked at last, with the little glance sideways and up. Her ears were slightly outsize and pointed at the tops, I saw. Maybe she was an elf. A gnome.

  I shrugged. “I just don’t know,” I said. “It would depend on so much.”

  “I suppose your family might not like it,” she said in a leading tone

  “Well, there’s not much family left at home to consult.” I set my coffee down. I just couldn’t drink it. “None, really.”

  “Well, but I imagine your husband might have an opinion or two.”

  Ah, here it was. The gossip had reached even this far corner of the country, apparently. All right then. “As it happens, my husband and I are divorced.” I tried another smile at her. “So even if he did, it’s not an opinion, or even two opinions, that I’d have to listen to anymore.”

  “Hah!” she said, it seemed, for a moment, appreciatively. She stopped to lift her cup and have another swallow of coffee before she said, musingly, her eyes gone distant and flat, “Now, if I recollect, you divorced the first one too?”

  “Why, what a good memory you have!” I tried to keep my voice innocently enthusiastic.

  “Some years back,” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “There were children there, I recollect.”

  “Yes. Three.”

  She turned her head. “None from this one, I imagine.”

  “Three seemed enough to me,” I said. “Sometimes it seemed like too much.” I was trying to change the tone, trying to include her in a kind of tired-parent joke.

  She didn’t bite. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s the way you do it now.” Her mouth made a tiny bundle of righteousness. “I’ve been married for sixty-two years come February. Only one way to do that.”

  “Amazing,” I said. I stood up. “You know, I’m awfully sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’ve got to keep at it, or I’m never going to get unpacked.”

  When she’d left, I went directly to the kitchen and threw away the heavy packet of sticky buns. I wouldn’t have eaten them anyway—all sugar and butter, not what a middle-aged woman still afflicted with vanity needs—but it gave me pleasure to close the lid of the trash can over them. I took the back stairs to the second floor two at a time. Wild with irritation, I went into the bathroom and washed my face. As I scrubbed, I was thinking of Mrs. Chick’s sly sideways look.

  Abruptly I recalled that my grandmother had always made funny stories of her visits, her descents. She’d amused us all with her retelling of Mrs. Chick’s self-satisfied judgments. “ ‘They say,’ ” she would imitate. “Who? Who says, Mrs. Chickadee? Who besides you?” That was the tone I needed to take, the attitude I needed to strive for.

  But it seemed such an effort. And suddenly I thought I’d made a mistake, coming here. This world was too small, too insular, too full of judgment and history for me to fit into it in any way. Hadn’t I been in flight from it when I chose to go to college in California? Hadn’t I deliberately stayed on to live at the other end of the country, in a place where people were allowed to reinvent themselves, over and over if they wanted?

  Of course, I hadn’t thought of it this way at the time. At the time I stayed because I’d fallen in love with Peter, my first husband. Because I’d entered his seductive world completely. Because when I came back to visit my grandparents, it felt like time-traveling to me, and I wanted to live in the now, the now of Peter’s life, with him. He was a political scientist. He’d been my instructor my junior year, and I felt singled out by him, chosen, recognized in some deep and important way, when he asked me for coffee, when he touched me, when I moved in with him and began to share his life—a life full of his political convictions, of meetings he chaired. Of articles he wrote and interviews he did. Of people turning up suddenly to spend a week or a month on our couch, a week or a month in which it seemed the talking and the drinking and the dope and the music never stopped.

  We were married in my world, my old world, back here in West Barstow, in the Congregational church at the top of the green with the sun streaming through the clear glass windows and all the early-summer flowers in the churchyard glowing like jewels in its clean light.

  My father and I had come east a week ahead of time to help organize things and to have a visit with my grandparents before I began my new life in the West. I had looked forward to this time when I was still in California, but once here, installed in my room above the kitchen, I was almost crazed with impatience, with my appetite and need for Peter, with my eagerness to be gone. When he arrived, two days before the wedding, I picked him up at the station in my grandfather’s car. We stopped in the parking lot of the wildlife management area�
�many jokes about this—and made love frantically for hours, climbing and draping ourselves this way and that over the seats. When we got to my grandparents’, late for dinner, we were so clearly postcoital—our hair in disarray, my lips swollen, my face chafed; I’m sure we even smelled yeasty and sexual—that no one bothered to ask what had happened to delay us.

  After the ceremony, we took the train to New York, where Peter had academic meetings to attend. As we rolled and ticked along, he stared out the window at the hilly rockstrewn fields, at the old villages we were passing through. At one point he said, “You must feel sometimes as though you came from another country, Cath.”

  “No, not really,” I answered.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s not the same country I came from.”

  I finished putting away my few things, and then I stood in the upstairs hallway, looking from room to room. I went back through the bathroom to the rooms that had been mine and Lawrence’s. There was one window in each space, in the dormer. The light leaking in now in what had been my room was dim and melancholic—a soft gray rectangle.

  I thought of my life in San Francisco, the bright light falling into the kitchen there late of a fall afternoon, the cheerful loud noises of my Hispanic neighbors performing their eternal car repairs in their driveway. I thought of Joe, of the way he used to call out from the front door when he arrived home in our happier days, of his habit then of bringing me small gifts several times a week—four cookies in a white box with a bow from a bakery he liked on Green Street, or a pair of antique earrings, or a book I’d expressed interest in, or a little brown paper bag of some spice neither of us had ever heard of from the Syrian market. I thought of the children. Of Karen, so happy, but so unrealistic, as I saw it, about how she’d manage everything once the baby came. Of Jeff, who’d written from Ecuador of standing on the equator and jumping from one side to the other. Of Fiona, in college in New York and in love with the city. All this life. All this past. Mine.

  None of it had any connection that I could feel to the hungry, lonely girl who had come to live in this room.

  Three

  I came to stay at my grandmother’s for the first time when I was seven. Lawrence was nine. It was my mother’s first breakdown in the eleven years since her marriage, but the family was so well prepared that it seemed they’d all been expecting it for a long, long time.

  She’d gotten us up in the night. My father was away. He was often away when we were small. He was a lawyer. He dealt with business mergers, and he frequently had to travel at a certain stage in the negotiations to help work out issues of seniority and of salary schedules.

  Mother made us get dressed. She herself was wearing an old wool coat, tweed, and galoshes over which her pajama legs belled out. She was very gay, very happy and excited, so we didn’t protest too much, though Lawrence has told me since he knew right away that something was wrong. It was as if at that moment, as he woke from his thick sleep to her urgency, he could see how everything was going to be with her from then on.

  We went for a long walk in the pitch black of our suburban neighborhood. At first it all seemed very orderly, very well planned, in spite of the hour and the deep stillness of the dark streets. “See, children? Now here we turn left,” she’d say, pleased; and we’d turn left. But it didn’t end, and it didn’t end, and Mother seemed increasingly desperate as we flagged. Certain things had to be done certain ways. We couldn’t stop! We couldn’t rest. Down here we had to go right. Wasn’t it right? Maybe it was left. She began to moan a little to herself as her uneasiness and uncertainty grew.

  It was Lawrence who finally broke away, who rang someone’s bell—by now the sky was turning a pale pink—and told the frightened-looking woman who opened the door that we needed help, that something was wrong with our mother. The woman came out in her robe, came down the walk and tried to talk to Mother, but that was no good, we could all see that right away. Mother began to get shrill and angry. “I cannot—I cannot tolerate your stupid, stupid interference! You mind your own goddamn business, why don’t you? You … interference. You … stupidity!”

  A little while later the police came, driving up slowly alongside our odd procession, smiling and affable. We all got in. Mother thought they’d come to help us get to where she needed to go, so she didn’t protest. And after that, everything unfolded as if according to some master plan. We went to family friends and spent the day, not even having to go to school, to our delight. That afternoon my father came back early from his trip and took us home, and the next day we all got on the train in downtown Chicago to go to my grandparents’. Our rooms at their house were ready for us, and we began going to the village school just a few days later.

  What I remember of the strange night that triggered this change in our lives was the long walk between the widely separated streetlights on the grand, leafy Oak Park streets, each light the oasis that called us forward, that we had to pass through to plunge again into the blackness ahead of it. That, and my mother speaking to the kind woman who tried to help, using a tone of voice and words I’d never heard before. And the police, appearing so suddenly next to us—the gentleness, the friendliness of the big men in their uniforms and the way their car smelled inside: leathery, male, reassuring.

  I can call up, too, the magical ride on the train, where we had our own sleeping car. Lawrence and I shared the berth above our father. We slept with our heads at its opposite ends, and in the morning we leg-wrestled for a while before we got up; and the porter called me “little missy” as we stepped off the train onto the platform, which Lawrence and I found hilarious.

  I don’t think I ever asked about my mother once we were settled at my grandparents’—it seemed somehow we were not supposed to. I thought of this later, when I was a parent myself, of how impossible it was for me as a child to bring something up in what seemed like a cautionary void. “Wait until they ask,” “Wait until they want to know,” the books and advice columns say. But my theory is everyone always wants to know, even when they don’t have an inkling of what they want to know about. I explained everything to my children, long before their questions could have been framed. Mostly the divorce and their father’s absence from their lives but also the meaning of swear words, the reasons people were so often unkind to one another, pregnancy and childbirth, sex and all its intricacies. Karen used to say that she was the only person she’d ever met who’d learned what a blow job was from her own mother. Better me than some others, I thought. She wasn’t so sure.

  We stayed with my grandparents that first time for the whole school year, swaddled in thick not-knowing, safe. My mother went home from the hospital in April, but it was thought that her transition back—to us, the unspoken goal—should be gradual. And it was thought we should finish out the year in one place. So we stayed on with our grandparents in their enchanted village. Mother came east to be with us the last few weeks of school, and then we all went back to the Midwest together—my grandmother too, to help Mother manage for a while. She didn’t linger long. Mother seemed calm. She seemed, as everyone kept saying, “herself” again. Herself, but somehow different too, I thought.

  I’m not sure what her treatment was, but I suspect electric shock therapy or insulin therapy. And she was medicated even after she was back.

  Still, she could be easily upset. “What are you looking at?” she said to me abruptly, angrily, one day.

  “Nothing,” I answered. A lie. I’d been staring at her.

  “Well, just keep your big fat cow eyes to yourself,” she said. But she went on with what she was doing—sewing—and the next words she spoke to me were unremarkable and normal, something about what she was making.

  She had seemed taken over when she was ill, and after that first breakdown (it was her second, actually, she’d had one in college also, though Lawrence and I didn’t know this until much later), this came and went more frequently, so that she’d slip into sudden anger or wildly coarse or threatening language for a few seco
nds at unpredictable moments in our ongoing lives. It was like having a tic. Like Tourette’s. We learned, all of us, to ignore it, to turn away and go on as though it hadn’t happened: the rage, the hurtful, childish words, sometimes the hitting.

  And it didn’t affect the love Lawrence and I had for her, except perhaps to intensify it. You read sometimes of abused children weeping in court to be returned to a parent who has beaten them or burned them with cigarettes. It seems almost incomprehensible that this should be so, but I understand it. Our attachment to our mother was deeper, wilder, more profound after she was ill. Those moments when she laughed, when she was relaxed and easy around us, are lit with a golden lantern in my memory. It was years before I let myself understand that what had seemed so special to me were what passes in most households as the most ordinary acts of parenthood: the table set, the beds made, the question asked about school, the smile when affection was offered, the willing touch of a hand to another’s hair or cheek, the food cooked and served.

  I still don’t know what was wrong with her. No one ever gave it a name to Lawrence and me, and I suppose that the name—the diagnosis—changed over the years anyway, as psychiatry and medicine altered the way people like my mother were looked at and thought of. At the time, though, we felt to blame. It seemed she had wanted something from us, from Lawrence and me, that we couldn’t give. Something you might call, simply, more. It was probably the least of her symptoms, I realize now, but it was the one that most touched us, this need of hers to be the focus of our attention; the apple of our eye.

  It is hard for a mother to achieve this; usually the reverse is true—the adoring parent, the unconscious child. But we tried, Lawrence and I. We strained to give her what she might feel was enough. And somehow angered her even with that, when she had the need to be angry.