Today Will Be Different(19)
“You and your sister,” Spencer said quietly. “It’s none of my business what happened. I’m not judging. You can stop.”
“Stop what?”
“Why are you guys fighting?” Timby asked.
“How about you show me that art,” Spencer said.
I hustled into Joe’s office. For the first time since the shock of The Flood Girls, it was just me and me. My body knew it and involuntarily dropped into Joe’s leather chair.
This. Shit!
The lethargy pressed down on me. My breathing slowed. I lowered my face into my spiderweb fingers.
Ivy. Whenever I think of her, the first image I always have, she’s in profile, in her twenties, smiling, curious. She was born trusting and stayed that way, believed in people, saw the good in their stories, in their intentions, played along with how they wanted to be perceived. Her skin was so delicate you could see a blue vein running along her strong jaw. Her physical beauty was the first thing people noticed. She spoke quietly, drawing them into where they wanted to be, closer to her.
I wonder if she learned that from our mother, who could only whisper toward the end. Mom’s friend Gigi would pick Ivy and me up every day after school and take us to the hospital. Each day, Mom’s voice grew weaker.
Then one day, it was Daddy standing at the school gate.
I was nine. Ivy was five.
My memories of our mother’s death (not the dying itself, but the days after) are a numb jumble dominated by my father’s cluelessness and the flamboyant grief of show people.
Forty years later, though, the memories that cause my chest to curl in and ache are those of Ivy.
Within a week of her death, Mom’s friends threw a celebration of her life. Broadway was dark on Mondays, so they borrowed the Minskoff, where Bette Midler was doing a one-woman show.
Daddy, Ivy, and I arrived at the theater and found ourselves receiving condolences in a random huddle in the center aisle. At the back of the stage, in the shadows, was the huge mechanical ape hand in which Bette Midler made her entrance.
The lights flickered. Father Kidney started up the steps to the mic. But the theater wasn’t a quarter full.
“Shouldn’t we wait for everyone?” I asked Daddy.
“It’s a big theater,” he said, and we took our seats.
I began to tremble. This was how her “tribe,” as my mother called her theater friends, wanted her remembered? A priest speaking on a borrowed stage in front of another woman’s props to an empty house?
My mother wasn’t theirs to humiliate. She belonged to me. She was elegant and precise. She’d gone to boarding school in Switzerland and made us cheese soufflés in little ramekins and posed nude for a German photographer and filled our house with fresh flowers.
I turned to Ivy. “We’re leaving.”
“I want to see the show.”
I yanked her away. We sat on velvet chairs in the lobby and fell asleep, awaking to the wail of bagpipes.
Daddy couldn’t face sleeping in their bed so he’d been spending the nights on the couch. But it was the cat’s couch. The morning after the memorial, the three of us were silently eating the food people had brought. (Weird stuff in unfamiliar casseroles: shepherd’s pie with ground beef, not lamb; lasagna that tasted of cinnamon; macaroni and cheese with peas: all of it only compounding our dread of what the world would be like without Mom in it.) The cat hopped up on the couch, squatted over the spot where Daddy’s head had been, and, staring straight at us, peed. It was completely evil and felt personal, as if Pumpkin were saying, You think you have it bad now? Try this.
I guess Daddy had to take his bottled fury and fear out on something, and better the cat than us. But still, I should have hurried Ivy out of there.
That afternoon, Gigi and another friend of Mom’s, Alan, came over, and Daddy took Ivy and me to the park.
When we returned, Gigi and Alan were gone. The couch was gone. Pumpkin was gone. Everything of Mom’s had been removed: the dresses in her closet, the sweaters and silk scarves folded in her drawers, the hats on the shelves, her jewelry, her makeup. Even her lingering smell had vanished.
In the hallway sat two boxes. One marked ELEANOR. One marked IVY.
The only thing Daddy kept were Tyler family heirlooms: a pair of antique derringers.
That night, while Daddy snored in his bed, I stared at those two boxes for hours. I finally picked them up, walked them to the incinerator chute, and tossed them in. (The scratch of sequins and beads against cardboard still haunts me.)
A week later, Daddy drove us to Colorado. He didn’t tell us it would be one way. He’d met a woman from Dallas who had a second house in Aspen. We could live in the guesthouse in exchange for Daddy doing maintenance and small repairs. (In the ’70s, Aspen was a funky former mining town with the best powder in the world, attracting mostly Texans. It was more cowboy hats and Wranglers than Mariah Carey and Gulfstream 550s.)
In New York, Daddy had installed sound systems for a living. His hope was to do that in Aspen, but something must have happened. I’ve since learned that many bookies started as gamblers who got in too deep and had to work off their debts.
The first time he left us alone was our first winter there. “You can take care of your sister?” Daddy had asked me. It was an odd question. He said we could sign for what we needed at Carl’s Pharmacy. (Everything with Daddy is still a puzzle with missing pieces. My best guess is that he drove to Vegas to lay off Super Bowl bets.)