The Dutch House(32)

Sandy laughed. “I never thought anyone was going to buy me a horse.”

“Well, that’s just fine.” Jocelyn smiled. “I know he was proud of you, the way you did all this yourself.”

“He didn’t notice,” Maeve said.

Sandy shook her head. “Of course he did.”

But Maeve was right. He’d never seen what she had meant to show him. He had no notion of her self-reliance. The only thing my father ever saw in my sister was her posture.

Maeve made coffee and she and Jocelyn smoked while Sandy and I watched them. We ate the cookies and dredged up every awful memory of Andrea we had. We traded them between us like baseball cards, exclaiming over every piece of information one of us didn’t already know. We talked about how late she slept and every unflattering dress she’d worn and how she would spend an hour on the phone with her mother but would never invite her mother to the house. She wasted food and left the lights on all night and gave no evidence of having ever read a book. She’d sit by the pool for hours just staring at her fingernails and then expect Jocelyn to bring her lunch on a tray. She didn’t listen to our father. She gave away Maeve’s bedroom. She threw me out. We dug a pit and roasted her.

“Can anyone explain to me why he married her in the first place?” Maeve asked.

“Sure.” Jocelyn didn’t need to give it a thought. “Andrea loved the house. Your father thought that house was the most beautiful thing in the world and he found himself a woman who agreed.”

Maeve threw her hands up. “Everyone agreed! It’s not like it would have been so hard to find a decent woman who liked the house.”

Jocelyn shrugged. “Well, your mother hated it and Andrea loved it. He thought he’d solved the problem. But I got to her, didn’t I? Saying all that about your mother.”

Sandy covered her face with her hands and laughed. “I thought she was going to drop dead right on the spot.”

I looked at Sandy and then Jocelyn. Now they were both laughing. “You didn’t mean it?”

“What?” Sandy said, wiping at her eyes.

“About our mother being, I don’t know, like a saint?”

The tension in the room shifted and then we were all very aware of how we were sitting and what we were doing with our hands. “Your mother,” Jocelyn said, and then she stopped and looked at her sister.

“Of course we loved your mother,” Sandy said.

“We all loved her,” Maeve said.

“She was gone a lot,” Jocelyn said, trying to pick her words.

“She was working.” Maeve was tense but in a different way from Sandy and Jocelyn.

I had no idea what any of them were talking about, nor did I know that our mother had ever had a job. “What did she do?”

Jocelyn shook her head. “What didn’t she do?”

“She worked for the poor,” Maeve said to me.

“In Elkins Park?” There were no poor people in Elkins Park, or none that I’d ever seen.

“She worked for the poor everywhere,” Sandy said, though I could tell she was trying her best to explain the situation kindly. “She could always find people who needed something.”

“She went out looking for poor people?” I asked.

“Dawn to dusk,” Jocelyn said.

Maeve stubbed out her cigarette. “Okay, stop this. You make it sound like she was never there.”

Jocelyn shrugged and Sandy reached down for the thumb-print cookie with the round spot of apricot jam.

“Well,” Maeve said, “we were always happy when she came home.”

Sandy smiled and nodded. “Always,” she said.



Early Sunday morning Maeve came into the bedroom and opened the blinds. “Get up, get dressed. We’re going to church.”

I pulled a pillow over my head, hoping to find my way back into the dream I was falling out of, a dream I already couldn’t remember. “No.”

Maeve leaned over and pulled off the pillow. “I mean it. Up, up.”

I looked at her from one slitted eye. She was wearing a skirt, and her hair, still wet from the shower, was braided. “I’m sleeping.”

“I’ve been very nice. I let you sleep through the eight o’clock service. We’re going to make the ten-thirty.”

I dug my face into the pillow. I was waking up and I did not want to wake up. “There’s no one watching. No one can make us go to church anymore.”

“I can make us go.”

I shook my head. “Make yourself go. I’m going back to sleep.”

She dropped down hard on the edge of the bed, making me bounce a little. “We go to church. That’s what we do.”

I turned over on my back and opened my eyes grudgingly. “You’re not following.”

“Up, up.”

“I don’t want anyone hugging me or telling me how sorry they are. I want to go back to sleep.”

“They’ll hug you this Sunday and next Sunday they’ll just wave like nothing ever happened.”

“I’m not going next Sunday either.”

“Why are you being like this? You never complained about going to church before.”

“Who would I have complained to? Dad?” I looked at her. “You win all the fights. You know that, right? When you have kids of your own you can make them go to church every morning and say the rosary before school. But I don’t have to go, you don’t have to go. We don’t have parents. We can go out for pancakes.”