“What are you doing there all alone?” he asked.
I had been forced to sit at the table, though all I wanted to do was lie down and moan.
“She’s being punished,” my mother had said, as she walked briskly over to him and took his briefcase from his hand. “I made butterscotch fudge, and she ate it all.”
A particular intimacy of my father’s came when he removed his glasses. The metal-and-plastic frames bit into his nose on either side, and he would take them off when he walked in the house. For thirty minutes he was as blind as a bat, but he didn’t need accuracy, as this was the half hour before dinner reserved for a drink.
He had done this that day, as usual, but he had also laughed, as he usually did not, and it had come from someplace deep inside him. During this, he had grabbed my mother and kissed her hard on the cheek and then leaned down and kissed me on the forehead through my wispy bangs.
Working at the Pickering Water Treatment Plant, he measured water levels and analyzed the content of the local reservoirs. He traveled to surrounding cities and all the way to Erie to do the same.
“It’s a little like you sat down and decided to eat a baking sheet full of sediment,” he said. “Anyone would be ill from that.”
I had asked him to stay at the table with me, to talk about water, about how each droplet under a microscope differed from another. His eyes were unfocused without his glasses, and I wondered how blind he was and what he saw when he looked at me.
I walked up the basement stairs and into the kitchen, the braid swinging from my fist. I pulled open the drawer near the phone, which held refolded tinfoil and salvaged twist ties, and found a gallon-size Ziploc freezer bag. I tucked the braid inside, sealed it, and scanned the kitchen. My mother’s clothes lay balled up in moist clumps along the floor.
When I was three years old, I had come into the kitchen and found my mother sitting on the floor, with her legs jutting out in front of her. I could see her underwear, which I had never seen before. She was staring at a white spill of flour at her feet.
“Mom made a boo-boo,” I said.
She stood up and grabbed the five-pound sack of flour from the counter, hugging it to her chest. She scooped her hand into it and let the contents fall from her fingers like snow.
I shrieked in delight and ran to her. She responded by moving away just as I reached out for her. She threw more flour from the sack, this time in wide arcs across the kitchen. I chased her in spinning circles, around and around, shrieking louder and gulping back my own laughter.
The chase went on until I stumbled and fell. I looked up at her for a moment. She stood near my high chair, laughing. I noticed the flour on her forehead and chin, and how it coated the invisible hairs on her forearms. I wanted her to come to me to pick me up, and so I wailed at the top of my lungs.
My purse sat upright on the dining room table. I tucked the Ziploc bag, with its silver prize, inside the center compartment and, as if I might forget something, looked all around me, doing a 360-degree turn. I jumped when I saw Mr. Fletcher in a lit-up window, staring back at me, until I realized I had not turned on a light in the dining room and that he was staring not at me but at a computer terminal, which, as he searched the Internet or played the same Byzantine games that Emily’s husband liked, lit his face in flashes of blue and green.
When I reached my car and looked back up the brick path to the front door, the light dusting of white powder on my chest and legs-the sugar from the pecan meringues, the flour from the Mexican wedding wafers-was the only thing that marked me as having been in my mother’s basement.
I wanted to weep, but instead I thought of where I could go. I had to relax. No one knew except Jake. What felt like other people’s knowing-the call to Avery, the questioning from Mrs. Leverton, the whispering of my name by Mrs. Castle-wasn’t. And no one would go into the house without me there.
I sat in my ancient Saab with the windows rolled up and placed my purse on the passenger seat, resisting the impulse to strap it in like a child. I put the key in the ignition and started the car. Slowly I pulled away, hunching over the steering wheel as if the streets were dense with fog.
Mrs. Leverton’s house was dark except for the timer lights her son had installed. The clock on the dashboard read 8:17. Time for old women to be tucked in. But apparently not old men. As I drove by Mr. Forrest’s house, I could see him reading in his front room. All his lights were on. He had never believed in blinds. At least in the old days, he had always had dogs. There he is, I thought to myself, an old man vulnerable to bullies and thieves.
I was sixteen that day in Mr. Forrest’s house, when I’d first seen color plates of women in various states of undress.
“They call them muses, Helen,” he had said as he watched me turn the pages of an outsize book called simply The Female Nude. “They are women who inspire great things.” I had thought of the pictures that stood throughout our house. Pictures of my mother in outmoded support garments or diaphanous peekaboo gowns, smiling winsomely into the camera.
The thirty-minute drive between my mother’s house and my own had always been an excuse for talk. Some people talk to themselves in front of their mirrors at home, psyching themselves up to ask for a raise or undertake a self-improvement project. I had always talked to myself most inside the car on the back roads that led from Phoenixville to my suburban faux colonial in Frazer. The halfway point, mentally, if not physically, was Pickering Creek and the small one-lane bridge that crossed it.
The night I killed my mother, I sang to myself in a low hum in an effort to create a sort of white noise in between me and what I had done. Every so often I would say, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” as I pressed more tightly on the wheel to feel the squeeze of blood that pulsed at the ends of my fingertips.
At Pickering, I waited on the Phoenixville side for a beaten-up Toyota to pass by, and as I crept over the bridge, my car lurched up briefly on the patched road. My headlights seemed to catch something moving in the limestone ruins on the other side. It looked like a man, lit up and dancing over the dark rock, and I shivered in my clothes.
On the other side of Pickering, the trees were thinner and denser, and struggled during the day to get any sun through the crowded canopy above. A decade ago, excavation crews became a common sight here, and I would drive by to see one hundred birch saplings having been mown to the ground. I hated to say that Natalie’s house, which was halfway between my mother’s and my own, was one of the McMansions that had been carved out of these woods. It shouted up out of the forest, with mock storybook turrets and a front door fifteen feet tall.
Natalie and the now thirty-year-old Hamish had lived inside this gingerbread palace for eight years, ever since Natalie successfully sued the manufacturer that supplied the tires to her husband’s truck. He had been idling on Pickering Bridge in a stare-down with another car and had revved his engine. His front tire exploded, breaking the axle and ejecting him through the windshield, and he hit his head on the old fieldstone bridge that had lain in ruins for more than a century. He died instantly.