Everything I Never Told You(21)

In fact, Tom Lawson had been surprised at the tone of her request: it had the murmured, breathless quality of a proposition. Marilyn looked up at him and smiled, and her deep dimples gave her the earnestness of a little girl.

“Please,” she said, putting her hand on his elbow. “I’d really enjoy doing some more academic work again.”

Tom Lawson grinned. “I guess I could use some help,” he said. “If your husband doesn’t mind, that is. Maybe we could meet and talk about it after New Year’s, when term starts.” And Marilyn said yes, yes, that would be wonderful.

James was less enthusiastic. He knew what people would say: He couldn’t make enough—his wife had to hire herself out. Years had passed, but he still remembered his mother rising early each morning and donning her uniform, how one winter, when she’d been home from work with the flu for two weeks, they’d had to turn off the heat and bundle in double blankets. He remembered how at night, his mother would massage oil into her calloused hands, trying to soften them, and his father would leave the room, ashamed. “No,” he told Marilyn. “When I get tenure, we’ll have all the money we need.” He took her hand, uncurled her fingers, kissed her soft palm. “Tell me you won’t worry about working anymore,” he said, and at last she had agreed. But she kept Tom Lawson’s phone number.

Then, in the spring, while James—newly tenured—was at work and the children were at school and Marilyn, at home, folded her second load of laundry, the phone rang. A nurse from St. Catherine’s Hospital, in Virginia, telling her that her mother had died. A stroke. It was April 1, 1966, and the first thing Marilyn thought was: what a terrible, tasteless joke.

By then she had not spoken to her mother in almost eight years, since her wedding day. In all that time, her mother had not written once. When Nath had been born, then Lydia, Marilyn had not informed her mother, had not even sent a photograph. What was there to say? She and James had never discussed what her mother had said about their marriage that last day: it’s not right. She had not ever wanted to think of it again. So when James came home that night, she said simply, “My mother died.” Then she turned back to the stove and added, “And the lawn needs mowing,” and he understood: they would not talk about it. At dinner, when she told the children that their grandmother had died, Lydia cocked her head and asked, “Are you sad?”

Marilyn glanced at her husband. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.”

There were things to be taken care of: papers to be signed, burial arrangements to be made. So Marilyn left the children with James and drove to Virginia—she’d long since stopped thinking of it as home—to sort out her mother’s things. As mile after mile of Ohio, then West Virginia, streamed past, her daughter’s question echoed in her mind. She could not answer for sure.

Was she sad? She was more surprised than anything: surprised at how familiar her mother’s house still felt. Even after eight years, she still remembered exactly how to wiggle the key—down and to the left—to get the lock to open; she still remembered the screen door that slowly closed itself with a hiss. The light in the foyer had burned out and the heavy curtains in the living room were closed, but her feet moved by instinct despite the dark: years of rehearsal had taught her the dance step around the armchair and the ottoman to the table beside the sofa. Her fingers caught the ribbed switch of the lamp on the first try. It could have been her house.

When the light came on, she saw the same shabby furniture she’d grown up with, the same pale lilac wallpaper with a grain, like silk. The same china cabinet full of her mother’s dolls, whose unblinking eyes gave her the same cold tingle on the back of her neck. On the mantel, the same photographs of her as a child. All the things that she needed to clear away. Was she sad? No, after the daylong drive, only tired. “Many people find this job overwhelming,” the undertaker told her the next morning. He gave her the number of a cleaning company that specialized in making houses ready to sell. Ghouls, Marilyn thought. What a job, clearing the homes of the dead, piling whole lives into garbage bins and lugging them to the curb.

“Thank you,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’d rather take care of it myself.”

But when she tried to sort her mother’s things, she could find nothing she wanted to keep. Her mother’s gold ring, her twelve settings of china, the pearl bracelet from Marilyn’s father: mementos of an ill-fated wedding day. Her demure sweater sets and pencil skirts, the gloves and hat-boxed hats: relics of a corseted existence that Marilyn had always pitied. Her mother had loved her doll collection, but their faces were blank as chalk, white china masks under horsehair wigs. Little strangers with cold stares. Marilyn leafed through photo albums for a picture of herself with her mother and couldn’t find one. Only Marilyn in kindergarten pigtails; Marilyn in third grade with a missing front tooth; Marilyn at a school party, a paper crown on her head. Marilyn in high school in front of the Christmas tree in a precious Kodachrome. Three photo albums of Marilyn and not a single shot of her mother. As if her mother had never been there.

Was she sad? How could she miss her mother when her mother was nowhere to be found?

And then, in the kitchen, she discovered her mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook, the spine cracking and mended, twice, with Scotch tape. On the first page of the cookie section, a deliberate line in the margin of the introduction, the kind she herself had made in college to mark an important passage. It was no recipe. Always cookies in the cookie jar! the paragraph read. Is there a happier symbol of a friendly house? That was all. Her mother had felt the need to highlight this. Marilyn glanced at the cow-shaped cookie jar on the counter and tried to picture the bottom. The more she thought about it, the less sure she was that she had ever seen it.