Rooms(10)

But he’d also been honest. Brutally, totally honest. Trenton still remembered the time they’d been at Boulud, and Trenton had been trying to conceal the fact that he had a hard-on (why the f*ck did he have a hard-on? The waitress, who wasn’t even that hot, touched his shoulder with her breasts for one second, as she leaned down to take away his wineglass), and his dad had suddenly said to him: “Look, you’ll hear a lot of bullshit from your mother. And I was a shit husband. I was. But the woman is batshit crazy and I did my best. Remember that, Trenton. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And later, after half a glass of wine, Trenton had found himself in the back of a taxi, blinking away tears and feeling grateful.

“Dinner, Trenton!” His sister’s voice came through the floorboards, and he thought he heard a slight sigh.

Integrity. That word was still there, like a small staircase in his mind, leading up to the inevitable.

Trenton wanted to die with integrity. There was one reason—and one reason only—that he had agreed to come back to this place that was no longer a home: to die.

As he passed into the dark hallway, and felt his way to the stairs and the light down below, he turned that idea over inside of him, and it brought him comfort.

And he ignored the wisp of a whisper that seemed to say, from very far away, “I wish they’d let the whole place burn.”





ALICE

Dinner is delivery from Mick’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant. I recognize the name from the dinners the night nurse would pick up for Richard, when he was still eating solid foods. Macaroni salad and roast beef sandwiches were his favorite.

I’ve never been to Mick’s. In my day, Coral River had only a general store, a Woolworths, a post office, a bar, and a movie theater that showed one film a month. Sandra informs me that when she was alive, Coral River added an Italian restaurant and a McDonald’s, a new bar, two more gas stations, a hardware store, a bookstore, and a clothing boutique called Corduroy. The town can only have grown since then.

Minna, Caroline, Amy, and Trenton eat their dinners straight from the deli containers, not even bothering to throw out the plastic bag, which they leave balled on the center of the table. Trenton eats a cheese sandwich, plain, on white bread. He chews moodily, noisily, occasionally letting a bit of cheese drop onto the wax paper the sandwich came in, now unfurled on the table like a stiff white flower.

Caroline eats cold macaroni salad—an unconscious echo of her ex-husband’s preferences—and hot chicken soup, and becomes increasingly withdrawn as the vodka in her water glass takes effect. Minna picks at a chef’s salad and complains that the produce is disgusting. Amy eats a tray of baked ziti and winds up covered with tomato sauce, a ring of red around her lips like a second mouth.

Sandra misses drinking. I miss food. It’s funny—I never had much of an appetite when I was alive. Even when I was pregnant with Maggie, I was hardly ever hungry, and what little I did eat came up just as quickly. My doctor said I was the skinniest pregnant woman he’d ever seen. I made it through all nine months on tinned green beans, tuna fish, and a little bit of beer. That was all I could keep down, and of course we weren’t so concerned in those days about drinking when we were carrying a baby.

Now food is practically all I can think about: pork roast and gravy; buttered potatoes and my mother’s spiced Christmas loaf; fried eggs, yolks high and proud and orange as a setting sun; toast dipped in bacon fat and the first summer peach; pools of cream; and fluffy biscuits.

I remember the first time Ed and I ate a TV dinner in front of our twelve-inch black-and-white, how happy we were balancing the small plastic tray on our knees and eating the mass of mushed peas, the disintegrating roast. And I remember the first time I took an airplane to visit Maggie, when I was already in my fifties: the shiny look of the pleather seats, and the way the stewardesses smiled; compartmentalized mashed potatoes, a flat gray disk of turkey, and Jell-O, each thing separated by small plastic dividers. That’s modernity, if you ask me: endless division.

Yogurt and blueberries; margarine and brussels sprouts.

I remember:

A copper pot: a wedding gift from my mother, presented to me covertly, so my father wouldn’t see. (“God help you,” she said, her last words to me.)

A large saucepan, of blackened cast iron: a welt swelling on my thumb, shiny red and taut, like the head of a newborn.

The window: open above the stove; the smell of chicken fat and oil. Blue columbine clung to the windowsill; the shadows outside were long and lavender.

One shadow was longer than the rest and grew more quickly: this was Ed coming home.

This is how it always was, how it would be for almost every day in the thirty-four years of our marriage, except for the years when Ed was away in the war. The shadows grew on the hill; the kitchen was hot and smelled, when money was good, like cooked meat, and when it was not, like old bacon fat and potatoes. One shadow grew longer than the others, like a slowly spreading stain, until it seeped into the doorway and became a man.

“What’s for dinner?” Ed would say, if he was in a good mood, as he shrugged off his coat and sat down to unlace his shoes before wiping them carefully with the stiff-bristled brush he kept by the kitchen door.

If he wasn’t in a good mood, if he’d been drinking, he would say: “What the hell have you been brewing in here?”

But in the beginning it was always good. We had our own house, and the freedom to do what we wanted. After Ed’s first day at the Woolworths in Coral River (we furnished half our house with things from there—half on discount, the rest on credit—smells of wool and furniture polish; so many objects crammed together in memory, jostling for space), I gathered handfuls of Jacob’s ladder and leaves from the yard—burnt-edged and brittle, like ancient lace—and arranged them in the old stone hearth, which by then had been cold for twenty years.