She walked away from most fights with Zoe, her face set, her mouth thin, everything about her a refusal. She was willing enough to scream at Zoe’s father, though. If the fight was with Zoe’s father, she was perfectly willing to freak out.
High school was high school: classes, friends, dating. Learning to drive. A baby in the house—that was a striking development. And seeing your mother in a movie theater with some guy, performing a confident hand job. There’s one that stays in the brain. She’d like to have seen the teacher’s face if she turned in a timeline with that on it. But that happened before high school—she’s jumbling everything up. That happened around the time she decided to quit dancing.
She has good memories from high school. She and her father chase Milo in the backyard. He’s wearing a little yellow sweater. He laughs his delighted baby laugh. Her father catches him and throws him in the air and Milo screams with joyful terror, and then her mother pokes her head outside and says, “Be careful,” and they all stand very still, like deer, until she goes back inside. “Baby catch!” her father says, and tosses Milo to Zoe, and she catches him with a hand on either side of his solid little torso and he looks at her with a face that says yes yes yes, a face full of trusting happiness, and she kisses him on his little nose and then turns him around and tosses him back to her father.
But this is stupid, this has always been stupid. Listing her memories, marking off her life. It’s all a lot of blah blah blah. She did this, she did that. Time progressed, like it does.
And then she walked into a room in search of a hairbrush and found her father dead.
What People Do
Last night I had a dream that I’d gone to an enormous building, where all the surfaces were shiny, the floors were enormous conveyer belts, and everywhere I went someone gave me exactly what I wanted. I carried a cup that was repeatedly filled with silver liquid, like mercury.
I don’t know what this means. Maybe that’s my odd little notion of heaven. It was one of those dreams so vivid they compete with actual events in your memory, insisting on their realness. I look down and feel faintly surprised not to see that cup of mercury in my hands.
An actual memory: When I was small I spent some weeks quarantined in my room, sick with a fever. In the morning I listened as my father left the house and at night I waited to hear him return. My mother said that after I got better I started telling everyone, “I go to work someday,” which, depending on your point of view, was either a shocking or an amusing thing to hear a little girl say. You might wonder if I became a nurse because I’d once been ill, but there’s no need to apply psychology to that particular decision. There weren’t many careers open to women back then.
The reason I didn’t join the army right out of school is because my father kept telling me to wait. He’d been in the First World War. There was a framed picture of him on his study wall, shaking hands with some general, and the look on his face, of joy and admiration, was not one I ever saw in person. I told him I wanted to enlist long before I did it. Wait, he said, wait. He wrote, This war is going to last a long time. He said, and he was right, that I didn’t have the remotest idea what it was going to be like. I was so innocent. Or dumb. I was still in nursing school then, and it really was like a convent. All you did was you got up and you worked and then you went back to the dormitory and you had to study, because you had classes, and then you went to bed. You didn’t go on vacation, take trips, go abroad. You didn’t do any of that stuff, because you didn’t have any money, but it didn’t matter because what did you know of another way of life? We scrubbed furniture and soaked linen. We had two weeks’ annual vacation, and other than that not a single day off in three years. We had to get written permission to be out past ten o’clock. We got five dollars a month.