Never Coming Back(78)

A lump swelled up in my throat. My mother, not a match for me? My mother, not knowing how to help me? I tried to picture a Buddha in my mind, one of those potbellied laughing ones that people like to put in their gardens. Calm, Clara.

“She sent you away for your sake,” Annabelle said. “Do you know that now? ‘There’s too much hurt here for her, Annabelle. It’s a big world out there.’ She figured you were stronger than you knew at the time. And she was right, wasn’t she?”

“She was. Which doesn’t make it easier. Then or now.”

“That’s the way of the world, I guess,” Annabelle said. The exclamation marks were gone from her voice.

“Annabelle?”

“What?”

“Can you??—” But what? What could she do? “Can you tell me something I don’t know about my mother?”

“Like what? That she loves Leonard Cohen?” she said, and rolled her eyes because Tamar’s love of Leonard Cohen was something we both knew.

Had I ever seen her groan and roll her eyes like that, the way a teenager would, the way I used to do? Annabelle Lee was once a teenager too, Clara, I reminded myself. Of course she had been a teenager, and of course so had my mother been. But most of your life you knew that only in a factual way. You didn’t feel it. Until you saw your mother’s childhood friend roll her eyes at your mother’s Leonard Cohen worship and suddenly she was young again, and so was your mother, if only in your mind. Memory, reconfiguring itself.

“She was addicted to that man,” Annabelle said. “Neil Diamond and Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell too. But Leonard Cohen? She used to refer to him as her future husband.”

“She did not!”

“She did! She used to call him Len! Len, can you imagine?”

Yes. Yes, I could imagine. I shook my head.

“It’s so unfair,” I said. “She never had a chance! She never got to do anything she wanted to do!”

My voice was full of exclamation marks again, chasing one another around the table, angry points of black. But Annabelle shook her head at me again and half laughed in an Oh, you poor dumb girl kind of way. Then she opened a drawer next to the stove and pulled out an envelope.

“This is for you,” she said. “Your mother left it with me, said to give it to you when the time was right.”

Clara. My name on the manila envelope in my mother’s angular, elegant scrawl. Inside was a bank statement to a savings account in my name, with a single cash deposit made a year earlier. A huge amount, many tens of thousands of dollars. Sterns National Bank, Clara Winter, for deposit only.

“The house,” Annabelle said, when it was clear that I didn’t understand.

“What do you mean, the house?”

“You know how the Amish are. It’s cash only, with them. Where’d you think that money went?”

“To the nursing home.”

Annabelle snorted. “She got a long-term-care policy for that. Years ago. I told her she was nuts—those things are way too expensive. But she got it anyway. ‘I don’t want Clara to have to worry about money,’ she said. ‘Ever.’”

I looked at the bank statement, at my mother’s signature and back at Annabelle.

“Am I an idiot?” I said. “My whole life, did I misread my mother?”

“Idiot? You?” Annabelle said. “Maybe in terms of financial forensics, but you were the state spelling bee champ, for God’s sake! No one in the whole goddamn valley would call you an idiot. You’re the farthest thing from an idiot, Clara Winter.”

She strained upward to the high cupboard above the stove and pulled down a dusty bottle of Jim Beam, uncapped it and poured us each a shot. Jim, not Jack. Cut from the same cloth, though.

“You’re a daughter,” Annabelle said, the teenager gone from her voice and eyes now. “That’s what you are.”





* * *





The key to surviving the heinous interview, if and when I ever made it to Los Angeles and onto the show in real life, would be advance preparation. Survival lay in the clues that you gave the producers beforehand. You had to give them only tiny tidbits of your life, impartable information that you didn’t mind others knowing. Fragments chosen with care.

What would I not mind anyone knowing? That I was afraid of doing a headstand. That I was good at French-braiding hair. That I was a piano major in college.



TREBEK: So, Clara, rumor has it that you were a piano major in college?

ME: That’s true, Alex.

TREBEK: And something of an obsessive piano practicer?

ME: That’s true too.

TREBEK: But you never played the piano for your friends?

ME: Nope.

TREBEK: And you no longer own or play a piano?

ME: True and true.

TREBEK: Is that so! Well.





At that point, I would have survived the contestant interview portion of the show, having given away nothing of value, nothing of importance. The viewing public would have no clue that all those years of practicing the piano had ingrained it into me, so that there was a permanent piano in my heart and in my brain, and that sometimes when I woke up at night I closed my eyes and placed my fingers on the invisible keys and played and played and played, until the dark went away and I played myself back into sleep.