PART I
THE KITCHEN
ALICE
Minna comes through the kitchen, flinging open the door as though expecting several dozen guests to jump out and yell, “Surprise!”
“Jesus Christ” is the first thing she says.
“It isn’t,” Sandra says. “It can’t be.”
But it obviously is: there is no mistaking Minna, even after so many years. Sandra claims it has been exactly a decade; I think it has been a little longer than that.
Minna is changed, but she is still Minna: the tangle of long hair, now lightened; the haughty curves of her cheekbones; the eyes, vivid, ocean colored. She is just as beautiful as ever—maybe even more so. There’s something hard and terrifying about her now, like a blade that has been sharpened to a deadly point.
“Jesus Christ,” she says again. She is standing in the open doorway, and for a moment the smell of Outside reaches me: clover, mud, and mulch; honeysuckle that must still be growing wild all over the yard.
For a brief moment, I am alive again, and kneeling in the garden: new spring sunshine; cool wind; a glistening earthworm, turned out of the earth, surprised.
A girl, probably six, barrels past Minna and into the house.
“Is this Grandpa’s house?” she asks, and reaches out toward the kitchen table, where a coffee mug—one of the nurse’s mugs, half full, which has begun to stink of sour milk—has been left.
Minna grabs the girl’s arm, pulls her back. “Don’t touch anything, Amy,” she says. “This whole place is crawling with germs.” The girl, Amy, hangs back obediently, while Minna takes several tentative steps into the kitchen, keeping one hand in front of her, as though she’s walking in the dark. When she is within reach of the kitchen table, she makes a sudden grab for it, letting out a noise somewhere between a gasp and a laugh.
“This thing,” she says. “It’s even uglier than I remembered. Christ, he couldn’t get rid of anything.”
“Well, that settles that,” Sandra says gleefully. “Minna’s grown into a hopeless bitch. I always knew she would.”
“Be quiet, Sandra.” In the many, many years I have been here, in this house, in the new body, my faith in the Christian conception of the afterlife has been considerably taxed. But there is no doubt about one thing: having Sandra with me is hell.
“Any girl that pretty . . .”
“I said be quiet.” Poor Minna. I can’t say she was my favorite. But I felt sorry for her all the same.
Amy starts to come out of the doorway, but Minna puts up a hand to stop her. “Honey, stay there, okay? Just hang on a second.” Then she calls out, a little louder, “Trenton! You’ve got to come see this.”
I no longer have a heart, so to say my heart speeds up is inaccurate. But there is a quickening, a drawing together of whatever pieces of me remain. For years, I’ve longed to see Trenton. He was the most beautiful child, with feather-blond hair and eyes the electric blue of a summer sky. Even at four or five he had a slightly tragic look, as though he had come into the world expecting beauty and elegance and had suffered such tremendous initial disappointment that he had never recovered.
But it’s not Trenton who comes into the house, practically doubled under the weight of two duffel bags, and lugging an additional rolling suitcase behind him. It is an absurdly tall, skinny adolescent, with a sullen look and dingy-dark hair, wearing a black sweatshirt and long jeans with filthy cuffs.
“What did you pack?” he mutters, as he steps into the kitchen, straightens up, and unslings both duffel bags, piling them on the kitchen floor. He bumps the suitcase through the doorway. “Did you put rocks in here or something?”
Sandra begins to laugh.
“It isn’t him. It can’t be,” I say, unconsciously parroting her remark about Minna.
“It’s him,” she says. “Look at his eyes.”
She’s right: under that jutting, unattractive forehead, covered with a smattering of pimples, his eyes are still the same startling electric blue and fringed with a girlish quantity of lashes.
“God, what a piece of shit,” Minna says. She leans over and places both hands on the kitchen table, as though to verify that it’s real. “We used to call it the Spider. Do you remember?”
Trenton says nothing.
The table is white and plastic—Lucite, Sandra informed me, when it was first delivered—and has jointed, twisted legs that do, in fact, make it look like a spider crouching in the corner. It cost $15,000, as Richard Walker was always fond of telling his guests. I used to find it hideously ugly. Sandra informs me that that is just because I have no modern sensibility.
“Modernity is ugly,” she always says. On at least that one point, we agree.
Over the years, the table has grown on me. I guess you could say, actually, it has grown into me, the way objects do. The table is my memories of the table, and my memories of the table are: Minna hiding, brown knees drawn to her chest, sucking on a scab; Trenton trimming paper for a Valentine’s Day card, holding blunt-edged plastic scissors, his fingers sticky with glue; Richard Walker sitting in his usual place at the head of the table the day after Caroline had left him for good, newspaper folded neatly in front of him, a mug of coffee cooling, cooling, as the light grew and swelled and then began to narrow over the course of the afternoon, until at last it was no more than a golden finger, cutting across the room on a diagonal, dividing him from shoulder to hip.
Other memories—from different times and places, from my old life—have weaseled their way in alongside these. It’s transfiguration, the slippery nature of thought. Wine turns to blood and wafer to body, and table legs to church spires white and stark against the summer sky—and the spiderwebs in the old blueberry bushes behind my childhood home in Newport, draped across the branches like fine gray lace—the spare pleasure of a boiled egg and bread, eaten alone for dinner. All of that is the table, too.
“It smells,” Trenton says.
Minna takes the coffee cup from the table and moves it to the sink. She turns on the faucet, letting the flow of water break up the surface of mold and run it down the drain. She moves in electric bursts, like miniature explosions. When she was little, it was the same way. She was on the floor. Then, suddenly, she was kneeling on the countertop; then she was striking her palm—bang!—against the window.