She didn’t want to be her mother. Scarlet had been the fire of her hair, of her name. And Libby had been burned. All of them had. Except Danny. To her face, she was called Mom, but between them, she was always Scarlet. Because she was bigger than the diminutive; because, like a hurricane, she needed her own name. And now she was just a swirl of sand in an urn, a ship in a bottle.
After dragging two coolers into the kitchen, Libby knelt on the floor of the pantry in front of the open refrigerator and attempted to put things away. Soon every shelf and drawer was full, and she sat on the floor with a jumbo jar of mayonnaise and a pitcher of iced tea. No matter the configuration, she was inevitably left with two extra things, jam and a block of cheese, a head of lettuce and a family-size tub of hummus, a net bag of lemons and two pounds of sliced ham. Finally, she shuffled and stuffed and finagled the lemons and the tea as the remainders, and she left them both on the kitchen table, its oilcloth shining in the sun.
A glass of iced tea in hand, Libby walked through the dining room toward the door to the porch. She stopped in the entrance to the great room, and glanced up at the door to her parents’ room at the end of a long balcony. It was separate with its own porch and bathroom. When she had first opened the house she had left her parents’ bathroom empty of soap or the bucket often needed to assist the plumbing. But she had made their bed. The sight of the bare-buttoned mattress had made her cry. That was three weeks ago. Now she was settled; she hadn’t cried since. Libby hated missing her mother and hated hating her, so she didn’t want to think of her at all. Libby looked over the great room; through the bay windows the sunlight stretched beneath the Ping-Pong table and wicker chairs showing the dull spots on the floor fringed with white water stains. She added “refinish floors” to a growing list in her mind.
The house was sinking, growing old, and that list was getting longer and longer. The chimney was cracked above the fireplace in Libby’s room, and her Toile de Jouy wallpaper had faded so much she could barely read the months that were spelled out beneath each bucolic scene. The great room’s white cathedral ceiling, girded with beams, was veined with brown water stains. Sailing pennants and animal heads—moose, deer, a boar, even an angry-looking fox—that hung from the interior balconies that looked out over the room were shaggy with dust. The house had come to them as it was: furniture, animals, pennants that marked races beginning in 1914, the 1938 ferry schedule still pinned to the kitchen wall. This was what happened when you bought from the wife of a disgraced politician who had fled in the middle of the night with his starlet girlfriend, leaving all the furniture behind, leaving dishes in the sink. To this they gradually added their own permanent features: a toddler’s shoe resting on the stovepipe, a feather tucked in a cracked tile on the dining room mantel, a sketch of the fireplace pinned beside the same fireplace. The kitchen doorframe was repeatedly marked in pencil with the same names, different years, different heights, each of them growing steadily past the latch.
Libby returned to the porch steps with her iced tea and sat down looking out toward town. Tom sidestepped Libby and thumped down the steps.
“Taking the Whaler for a quick ride,” he said. He scrubbed her head as he went by.
“Have fun.” Thanks for asking.
Six months ago, three years after their father had died, their mother Scarlet became sick. Her thyroid. Normally the easiest type of cancer to fight, but they had found it too late. They agreed that Tom would pull the plug. Tom said it should be him. Gwen tried to talk him out of it, tried to say she was the one to do it so he wouldn’t have to. Libby didn’t volunteer. She had spent the last seven years wishing her mother was dead. Some irrational part of herself worried that she had somehow caused the cancer. Her rage had grown a tumor in her mother. She couldn’t bear to kill her again. And Danny was practically catatonic already. So it had to be Tom or Gwen. Tom just made up his mind and closed the discussion, like he was finishing some giant leather-bound book.
Afterward, they wanted to be at the house, they wanted the comfort of it, of their childhood, a place where their mother could still be, a place that could never be robbed of her presence. But it was winter, and so they had settled in Tom’s living room with its brown velvet upholstery and Tiffany-blue walls, and each took turns holding Danny. He couldn’t stop crying, not to eat or drink. He even cried in his sleep, struggling with the sheet on Libby’s foldout couch.
Danny had held Tom’s beagle-terrier mix, much to the dog’s dismay, until Melissa replaced the dog with a large glass of wine. When she wasn’t holding Danny, Libby washed dishes, dried them, and then washed and dried the dish rack. When she started in on the oven, Melissa put her to work making pasta for dinner. From her place at the kitchen counter, through the darkness of their front hall, Libby had seen Tom go to his wife. Then he kissed Melissa, pulling open her shirt and grabbing at her breasts, her neck, pulling her hair, as if he wanted to devour her, as if she was the one who was dying, and he could save her by eating her alive. He crumpled against her, and Libby heard him say, “Now we can finally sell that fucking house.” She had never heard him swear before. Libby had looked away, back to her pasta.
From the porch she watched Tom glide out into the thoroughfare. Libby finished her tea, picked up the case of pinot noir, and headed into the house. She could hear running water from the upstairs bathroom. After depositing the bottles in the sideboard, Libby readjusted a straw hat with fake lilacs and a yellow slicker on their hooks in the small hallway off the dining room. She held the brim of the hat for a moment. The last time she’d seen her mother wear it, Scarlet had been standing in the kitchen, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms mud smeared, audibly glugging a glass of water. Sometimes she had seemed almost human, wearing hats and everything, not some great scaly beast. Libby could hear Gwen and Danny upstairs.
“These mattresses are gross,” said Danny. “We’re going to be asphyxiated in our sleep by all the camphor. What’s with the fucking mothballs anyway? Is it 1953?”
“Let me just take some quinine for my rheumatism,” said Gwen, “and a DEET rubdown to soften my skin.”
“You’re both going to burn in hell,” Libby called up the stairs. “I should’ve just let the mice nest in your beds. Then it could be toxoplasmosis for everyone.”
“We’d have to eat the mice for that to happen,” shouted Danny.
Gwen broke into a chorus of “Burning Down the House.”
“Do you think David Byrne and Jeff Goldblum were separated at birth?” said Danny.