Dead Letters(8)

I smile widely. “So you did know.”

“As I said, doll, I’m not insane. Not entirely. I just despise that woman, with all her clucking and sanctimonious…good-naturedness.” Mom has to pause for the right word, but I can tell she’s lucid-ish. “She’s thick as a plank and doesn’t have the good grace to realize it. I’ve been listening to her prattle for the last twenty-four hours about how it’s going to be fine, you’ll be here soon, et cetera.” She rolls her eyes in exasperation. “I came out here and parked in front of the barn, hoping that it would scare her off. But she’s got to do the right thing. God, and that casserole…” She shudders theatrically.

“What happened, Momma?” I ask.

“How the hell should I know? I slept through the whole thing. Goddamn drugs your sister gave me.” Mom takes a slug from the wineglass in her hand, which trembles as she clutches the stem. Reflexively, I look around for the bottle, to gauge how much she’s had. She catches me looking.

“Jesus, you’re worse than your sister. At least she has the manners not to make me drink alone. You haven’t ended up in AA, have you, Little AA?” She’s sneering, making fun of my father’s nickname for me, and goading me into drinking with her. I know it, and it doesn’t change the fact that I want to.

“Dad’s on his way up with glasses and a bottle,” I say casually, and enjoy watching her flinch.

“Marlon is here? The big fish that got away?” She tries for a lighthearted tone, but I can hear the anxiety in her warbling voice. She touches her face in instinctive, irrepressible self-consciousness, the gesture of a woman who knows she doesn’t look good.

“Got in this morning. Surely you must have known he would come home for his daughter’s funeral.”

“Yes, I gathered he would. Surprised he didn’t bring that new ball and chain of his.”

“Maria is hardly new, Mom. They’ve been married almost eight years.”

“Maria? I thought her name was Lorette.”

“That was my girlfriend when we met, Nadine,” my father says from the doorway. He’s studying her with a strange expression on his face; I can’t remember the last time they saw each other, but I know she has to look shocking. She is so thin.

“Oh, of course, I remember,” Mom says automatically. I know she doesn’t, but she will work very hard to convince us otherwise.

“You could be forgiven for forgetting. The relationship was very brief,” I snipe. Nadine snorts. Dad holds up a bottle of sparkling wine and three Champagne flutes with a slightly sheepish look on his face. The glasses hang suspended between his fingers, clinking magically. I love that sound.

“There’s only sparkling in the fridge,” he apologizes. I nod, giving him permission. He puts the glasses down on the deck railing and deftly divests the bottle of its wire cap and cork with a practiced series of movements. All three of us cringe at the jubilant sound, and Mom and Dad both flick their eyes toward the barn, as though that Pavlovian signal will summon Zelda, perhaps even from beyond the grave. Champagne is her favorite drink, of course. Though this is obviously a sparkling wine, made in our own cellar. Dad pours our delicately burbling wine into flutes and distributes them, my mother first, then me. I lift my glass defiantly.

“Well, family. Cheers.” They both look at me blankly, and I turn my head toward the lake, draining my glass in a hearty gulp.



To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Mademoiselle Pout

October 1, 2014 at 12:45 AM

Dearest Begrudgeful, Silent Sister,

Don’t you think this a little silly, Ava? You really are milking the whole thing quite atrociously, as though we were still in high school. I mean, yes, it all goes back to high school, so perhaps you get SOME leeway for behaving like a hormonal hot mess, but surely with our blossoming maturity you can LET IT GO? If it makes any difference, I’ll get rid of him; just say the word.

In other (frankly more interesting) news, our mother is a psycho. And a lush. Last night I had to scrape her out of the field, raving and half clothed, drinking a bottle of that atrocious Faux-jolais Nouveau that Dad insisted we try to manufacture, in spite of the fact that it always tastes like grapy horse piss. And yet, out of some dark-seated nostalgia, Nadine insists on reproducing it every year, as though this vintage will be drinkable. It’s like she thinks if she could just produce a bottle that was even a little palatable, Marlon would reappear, and she could sit on the deck and watch him work the fields, as ever. Her very own contadino.

Anyway, last night she was yelping and sobbing, insisting that she wanted to return to the earth or somesuch. I think she was trying to make it down to the lake, quite possibly to throw herself in. One of these days I may just let her. But as it was, I gave her some of her “medicine” (what a useful euphemism for heavy-duty sedatives!) and dragged her back to bed, the whole while listening to her screech like a demented banshee. You can bet I poured myself a substantial tumbler of the good stuff. I’m not just being selfish: Her wee pills give her a respite, as well as me!

Autumn has really dug in its heels; the leaves are leached of their chlorophyll and are whirligigging their way to the ground at an alarming rate. And Paris? I Googled photos of Les Tuileries to see what it looks like (that’s where we wanted to live when we were little, right? Though I can only assume you live near the garden, rather than in a fairy fortress within it, as previously planned), and it does seem very picturesque. Still, hard to beat the view from Silenus. The harvest was brutal; another year or two of this and I’ll be dribbling into my Riesling like Momma. We’ll see what we get out of it. I’m guessing it will be more of the same.