As Josie crossed the street back to the Chamber Music Society offices, she glanced up and Shelly ducked away from the window, looking back at her computer fast, feeling her cheeks flush, her heart beating in embarrassment.
Josie Reilly seemed to her to be precisely the kind of sorority girl who would assume that because Shelly was a lesbian she was attracted to her. She was, Shelly thought, precisely the kind of girl who went through the world assuming everyone was attracted to her.
Josie would assume she was being watched by her boss from the window of her office because she was so irresistible. She would come back into the offices bearing that paper cup of hot chocolate, or mint tea, or peppermint chai, and Shelly was going to have to look into her amused expression without batting an eye, and take it from her, and thank her, and offer to pay her the outrageous three or four dollars it had cost. And, this time, because she’d been caught watching the girl cross the street—horny old dyke in a position of power at a university so sensitive to such matters that the very air around them felt censored, as if it had actually become possible to neuter the mind—Shelly would now have to wait at least another week before she fired her.
12
The twins threw themselves onto the living room floor—Andy on his butt, Matty on his face—when Mira walked in the door. It was a part of the routine.
She came back from her teaching and her office in the afternoons, and they wept and screamed for a solid hour while Clark stomped around the apartment. When she asked him if they’d been fussy during the day, he shook his head with his lips sealed tightly, letting her know that this behavior had to do with her, and was, therefore, her problem.
But what, she wondered, did it mean? Were the boys weeping with excitement because she was back, or crying with their just-realized grief that she’d been gone? Mira’s terrible suspicion was that they’d longed to cry all day, but because their father seemed either so unsympathetic in his weariness or so close himself to cracking, they’d suppressed it until she came home.
She pulled off her shoes and sat down on the floor, and gathered them to her. Matty opened his mouth and sucked onto her kneecap, sobbing. Andy grabbed a fistful of her hair, stuffed it into his mouth, and wept into her neck. “Clark?” Mira called to him over their sobbing. She needed a glass of water but couldn’t risk standing up yet, having to disengage the twins.
He didn’t answer.
“Clark?”
Mira had grown up in a traditional family. Her father sold insurance all day while her mother slammed doors and screamed at the kids. Mira had little idea what her mother did with those precious hours when they were at school. Early on she’d imagined her lying on her bed staring at the ceiling, hands crossed over her chest until she heard the school bus pull up to the curb at 3:45.
Later Mira considered other possibilities: A secret life of some sort. Not a lover, surely, but maybe a group of friends to whom her mother confided, over neighborly cups of tea, the disappointments of her marriage, her difficulty with her children. Or maybe she read romance novels, bodice-rippers she kept hidden around the house. Maybe she pursued some passion Mira hadn’t considered: bird watching, poetry-writing.
But no sooner had Mira turned twenty, the age at which she might actually have gotten to know this stranger who’d raised her, than her mother died, and the only genuinely revealing scene of her childhood she could remember with clarity was an afternoon when she’d had to stay home from school, suffering as she was from such debilitating menstrual cramps that even her mother, who had no patience at all for female-related troubles, had to admit that Mira looked green, and let her stay in bed.
That afternoon, Mira was fourteen. She’d gone straight back to bed after breakfast and slept until noon, and then she’d woken up to a silent house, and tiptoed into the hallway.
Why had she tiptoed? Had she expected to find her mother doing something she wouldn’t want her daughter to witness?
Whatever the reason for it, Mira could still remember her sense of being on a furtive mission—the way she’d stepped gingerly over the floorboard that creaked, and then how she’d slid, rather than stepped, down the hallway in her socks.
Their house was small. There were only three bedrooms, one of which her brothers had to share (an endless source of conflict: Why does she get her own room?) She moved from the hallway’s bare floorboards to the living room’s orange shag with only the vaguest of whispered footsteps, and then peered around the corner, to the living room.
Her mother wasn’t there.
She’d held her breath as she passed under the low arched doorway of the dining room, separated from the kitchen by a swinging door (one side of which would no longer swing, since either Bill or Frank—neither of whom would admit to it—had pulled it off the door frame by hanging from it, and because their father, who had no carpentry skills, also refused to hire anyone to do any work around the house.) If her mother was behind that door, she was standing too still to be detected.
Mira pushed open the side that still opened, and stepped into the kitchen.
Nothing.
Only her mother’s half-empty coffee cup on the counter, with a bright red imprint of her lips on the rim.
Mira touched the cup. It was cold.
There were only two other places in the house her mother could be, Mira knew: the half-finished basement (except that Mira didn’t hear the washer or dryer) or the walk-in pantry. They had only one car, and her father would have taken it to work, so unless her mother had walked into town (unthinkable, as she didn’t even own a pair of real walking shoes, and it had rained that morning, so there would be puddles, and what would she do in their small town anyway?), she had to be in the house.
Perhaps, Mira thought, her mother was alphabetizing soup cans in the pantry or checking expiration dates. There was one bare bulb in the pantry, and the space was large enough, even crammed as it was with cans and jars and boxes of pasta and Pop Tarts and Frosted Flakes, that her mother might comfortably stand inside it or even sit on a chair if she wanted to, looking around, making lists.
Mira walked to the door and put her hand on the warm solidity of the fake brass knob, and had the sure sense of something beyond the door. But what? Not her mother, exactly, but some suppressed energy, some barely perceptible movement, some silent intense activity, like cell growth or furtive sex. It crossed Mira’s mind that there might be someone behind that door who was not her mother at all—or that her mother might be in there with someone.
She hesitated, and then pulled the door open so quickly she felt a rush of wind on her face and neck, and the bright overhead light nearly blinded her after the darkness of the hallway, and she gasped when her mother turned around, seeming less bathed in that light than emitting it, standing as she was in the center of the pantry, directly under the one bare bulb, wearing what looked to Mira at first like some kind of white choir robe made of feathers, or giant wings wrapped around her body, eyes closed but lips and cheeks vividly, garishly, painted red (although in real life Mira’s mother wore makeup only on Sundays, for church, or on the rare weekend nights Mira’s father took her out to dinner). Her skin looked wet, coated with dew or sweat, and Mira got a quick but definite impression that her mother had just hatched or was in the process of hatching, or being born, or being reanimated after death.