The word hovered in the room; the idea of safety, twinned as it must be with danger, was there now. Her mother had said it.
Madison waited for moments, watching the tiny beads of sweat form along her mother’s hairline, clustered together like champagne grapes.
“I miss Buck,” her mother said, unprompted, worrying her bottom lip between her thumb and index finger. Her mouth had slackened, giving her whole face an unfinished sheen.
“I know you do.”
“He was very good in a crisis. Say what you will about my father, but he was good in a crisis. Your father, Madison, the man is excellent at preventing crises, but God forbid something actually goes wrong.”
“That’s not true,” Madison said. “I remember the paper, after September eleventh. That’s literally exactly what they said about him. He got them through a crisis.”
“He got them through it,” Isabel whispered, and again Madison felt the chilled knowledge all around her, that her mother was not talking to her at all.
“That was his job, Isabel.”
Madison hardly ever tried to get away with using her mother’s first name, but now it didn’t even register on Isabel’s face.
“You trust him, don’t you?”
“I do,” Madison said. “I trust him. Do you?”
Isabel shrugged. “I trust our tribe. Just like Buck used to say.”
“All right,” Madison said.
Her mother leaned back into the water, closed her eyes again. “But I’ll tell you what really gets me. I’ll tell you what kills me. That we’re going to be the example. We’re going to be the cancer eating away at everyone else. It doesn’t matter that we’re far from the worst. It should, but it won’t.”
The sentences came out slowly, as if her mother could see them behind her closed lids and was reading them to her daughter as they appeared, one by one.
“You have no idea, how petty. Everything my mother hated about the world you’re in, once you’re somebody’s wife.”
It wasn’t clear to Madison anymore if her mother cared what she thought. Whether she truly wanted her only daughter to stay in the room with her, or just didn’t feel a particularly strong aversion to having her there.
“But you aren’t like that,” she said to her mother. “You aren’t someone’s wife.”
Then, without warning, her mother was in motion. The bathwater sloshed in shark-fin waves as her mother drew her legs into her body.
“Hand me a towel from the shelf, will you?”
Madison reached for one and when she turned back, Isabel was standing, the bubbles and suds sliding down her body like a second, ill-fitting skin she’d decided finally to shed.
Her mother’s breasts were perfectly even, something Madison had learned to recognize as unique as she got older, as she and Amanda had started to compare their own with incessant anxiety. Most people had one bigger than the other, but not her mother. They looked perfect on her chest, hanging below her sharp collarbone, sloping down from her shoulders. Like the most elegant that breasts could possibly look. This is what people meant when they called her mother an ice queen. They just meant they were jealous.
Madison was embarrassed, to be looking at her mother’s breasts like this, and she realized that she was waiting for her mother to recall herself to her own physical body, remember she was naked. Her mother couldn’t possibly want her to see this. But then Isabel put out one hand and stared at Madison, fingers waving in the air, waiting for her towel.
Two parallel cords of muscle led your eye down from her breasts to her hip bones, so angular, pointing you down toward the tiny, trim blond rectangle of pubic hair. There were soap suds wreathing her mother’s hips and thighs but her actual pelvis—Madison could not think the word vagina about her mother’s body, not even inside her own mind—was completely exposed, glistening with only droplets of water. When was the last time I even saw her naked? Madison thought, feeling herself grow more frantic. Did I even know to think about her pubic hair back then, to be jealous that hers is such a light color?
There were these women in Greenwich, Lily called them the Biddies. They had grown up here, always stayed, but now they lived in the guard cottages on land that had once been tiny corners of their family estates. The town had changed, for them. They’d approach you, sometimes, in the grocery store, near the plumped and glossy cuts of organic chicken breast. They’d lurk there, in the anticipatory frost of that aisle, and at first you’d assume they were just charmed to see a cute little girl. But then something would be off, and you’d realize they didn’t know you, or where they were, had forgotten that they weren’t still little girls themselves. You’d have to look away, because there was no way to watch them, driven in circles by their own frailty, the abandonment of the lives they could remember. There was no way to look without stealing something from them that you didn’t even want.
She handed her mother the towel, averting her eyes, and then Isabel reached for Madison. She put one hand to either side of her temples, and kissed the top of her head. Madison wreathed her arms in her mother’s and they stood there. Madison told herself not to cry, not to move, not to do anything that would make her mother notice the intimacy she’d given away for nothing at all.
It might happen again, she thought. Even if she throws away the pills, she might still do this with me again.
She understood, possibly for the first time, what it meant to be so comfortable with someone you could sit with them in silence. She had always felt this way with her father, but it had never seemed like silence with him. He was always in motion, always muttering to himself. Taking up space in the room. Now, with her mother, it felt like the room was expanding.
ELEVEN
Amanda didn’t know what she’d expected, really, but this wasn’t it. She sat on the steps of the Met, the last dregs of the city’s summer influx of tourists straggling up toward her, their cheeks and necks pebbled red in the oppressive Friday-afternoon heat. She herself had unwisely worn leggings beneath her sundress.
“At least take a sweater,” Lori had repeated as she drove Amanda to the train that morning. “You know how chilly they always keep those train cars. Always bring a cover-up.”