The Paper Palace(9)

“Oi! Breakfast!” I pound on the door. “Up and out.”

Jack, my eldest, turns in his bed, gives me a look of cold disdain, and pulls his scratchy wool blanket over his head. He is being forced to bunk in with the little kids for a few nights while my mother fumigates his cabin for carpenter ants. Seventeen is a vile age.

The younger two emerge, bleary-eyed, from their cocoons, blinking in the morning light.

“Five more minutes,” Maddy groans. “I’m not even hungry.” Madeline is ten years old. Astonishingly beautiful, like my mother. But unlike most of the women in our family, she is small-boned and delicate, with pale English rose skin, Peter’s gray eyes, and Anna’s thick, dark hair. Every time I look at her I wonder how this creature came out of me.

Finn climbs out of bed in his sweet saggy underpants, rubs the sand out of his eyes. God, I love him. His cheeks have tiny sleep wrinkles on them from the pillowcase. He’s only nine—still on the verge of being a small boy. But soon he, too, will come to treat me with utter contempt. When Jack was born, I looked at the tiny baby in my arms, suckling, pig-perfect, kissed his eyelids and said, “I love you so much, and someday, no matter what I do, you will hate me. At least for a little while.” It’s a fact of life.

“Okay, my lovelies. Come, don’t come. But your father is making eggs, and you know what that means.”

“A total nightmare and a huge fucking mess,” Jack says.

“Correct.” I bang down the stairs. “Language,” I call over my shoulder as I head down the pine-needled path.

I wait until my cabin door slams shut behind me before allowing myself to take the breath I’ve been holding since Peter startled me on the porch. The normalcy of everything in our room seems impossible: clothes hung on ancient metal hangers along a makeshift wooden pole. Our oak dresser with a bottom drawer that sticks when it rains. The bed where Peter and I have slept for so many years, curled together like fiddleheads, entwined in sweat and sex and kisses, his sweet-sour smell. He has left the bed unmade.

I hang my bathrobe on a rusty nail that serves as a hook. Next to it is a cloudy full-length mirror aged by half a century of moisture and frost. I have always been grateful for its dim reflection, its pockmarks. I can look at myself through a mottled scrim of silver that hides my bumps and imperfections: the jagged scar on my chin that has been there since the night Peter and I were burglarized; the long thin scar that splits me across my belly, still visible after fifty years; the small white scar beneath it.

Jack came right away. But after Jack, nothing. No matter how hard we tried, what position, legs up, legs down, relaxed or tense, bottom or top. Nothing. At first I thought it was Jack. Maybe something had torn during my labor. Or maybe I loved him too much to allow myself to share him. In the end, the doctor made a small cut above my pubic bone and put a camera inside me, plumbing for answers.

“Well, young lady,” he said when I came out of anesthesia, “someone made quite a mess in there when you were a baby. It’s like a Spaghetti Western with all that scar tissue. What’s worse, the surgeon managed to chop off your left ovary in the process. But there’s some good news,” he said as I started to cry. “Your healthy tube had a kink—got tacked to a bit of scar tissue. Eggs were piling up behind it. I’ve cut it free.”

Maddy was born a year later. And Finn eleven months after that.

“Congratulations,” the doctor said to me and Peter as I lay on the exam table. “You’re having Irish twins.”

“Irish twins?” Peter said. “That’s not possible.”

“Of course it is,” the doctor said.

“Well,” Peter said. “If you’re right, I’m going to find the drunken Irishman who fucked my wife and throw him off the highest cliff in Kilkenny straight into the sea.”

“Kilkenny is landlocked,” the doctor said. “I was there for a golf tournament a few years back.”



* * *



—

I position myself in the largest remaining patch of mirror and stare at my naked body, assessing it, looking for something on the outside that might give away the truth, the panic inside me, the hunger, the regret, the breathless desire for more. But all I can see is the lie.

“Breakfast!” Peter shouts from the Big House. “Chop-chop.”

I pull on my bathing suit, grab a sarong, and sprint down the path, banging on the kid’s door. As I near the Big House I check myself, slow to a walk. It’s unlike me to snap to attention, as Peter well knows. I push through a thicket of bushes onto the damp shoreline, dig my toes into the wet sand. Out on the pond, my mother’s steady scissors kicks leave a white trail behind her. The water is blue-ing up. Soon even the transparent brown-greens of the shallows will be mirrored over. For those few hours at least, the minnows and largemouth bass hovering over their sandy crop-circle nests will be invisible. What lies beneath will be hidden from us.





1972. June, the Back Woods.


I am running through the woods in my cotton nightgown along the narrow path that connects our camp to my grandfather Amory’s house. The path follows the shape of the land uphill and down around the pond’s ragged shoreline. My father cut it between our two properties when he and my mother were first together. Granddaddy Amory calls it the “Intellectual’s Path” because, he says, it wanders around and around without ever getting to the point. Where the path approaches my grandfather’s house there is a steep downhill run. I race along it, careful not to stub my bare toes on the stumps of the bushes my father cut down. Those nasty little stumps are my father’s only other legacy to this place.