New Jersey, 1985
Weeks pass, months, a year. The memory of that strange backward afternoon my mother ran across the lawn crying, and the sound of my grandfather up the stairs at night both sit inside me like a summer cocoon, sheltered up tight against the heat. I’m holding my breath from the inside, trying to keep what’s there from igniting.
Each Easter, just before we go to my grandparents’ house and sit around their big wooden table for the manicotti my grandfather has made and the thin sheets of beef he’s rolled and tied twine around like presents, my parents give us baskets that each have an egg inside. Their shells are white and made of sugar, the sugar along the seams colored and piped like frosting. Inside, they shelter tiny scenes made of sugar, too: a baby chick, cheeping in its nest, or a bunny with a basket. Each scene is a delicate, worked thing. But the shell, though sugar, is not fragile. It’s dense and hard.
The silence works like that. It’s not fragile. It shields the glittering moments and the confusing ones, too. Such as the times my throat gets parched in the middle of the night and I brave the dark stairs to go down to the kitchen for a glass of water. There, I find my father at the white table. He’s got a big glass bowl of potato chips beside him. An empty bottle of wine with another started. Ice cream wrappers litter the ground near his feet. The television blares a news program. He smiles wryly as I enter the room.
“You OK, sweetheart?” he says then.
This is the softest he ever is, so sometimes I tell him. “I had a nightmare,” I say. I have been dreaming about witches that come to me in my sleep.
“Go back to bed,” he says. “I love you. Come here,” he says, and I go to him and kiss his cheek.
He’s best like this, sweeter than at any other moments during the day. But I know he won’t remember any of it in the morning. In the morning these moments will have blurred and faded into a distant, unreal dream.
The bright solid morning. The morning is the time for action. He buys a new speaker set and wires it through the house so the kitchen’s on one control, the living room another, all from a central console. He shines his shoes upstairs and refuses to answer the phone calls from creditors and blares his opera music through the house, sometimes so loudly my ears ache. He and my mother sit at the kitchen table and plan parties, parties that will help people know my father’s name in this new town, and my mother teaches me to separate the leaves on a stalk of endive and smear Brie into the center of each, mound sour cream onto a cracker and place a perfect dollop of caviar in the middle. At the parties the grins are toothy and hard and everyone’s breath smells like wine.
That summer, my father decides to run for town council. They have T-shirts made for us for the Fourth of July parade: matching red with fuzzy white iron-on lettering that says MY DADDY FOR TOWN COUNCIL. My mother’s matches, too, but says DREW. In the picture taken of us at the parade, we stand squinting into the sunlight, our red T-shirts tucked into high-waisted shorts. My sister Nicola waves a tiny American flag. I stand a few feet apart from the family, the sun’s sheen off my glasses hiding my eyes. My curls have been cut too short; they frizz around my head. One arm cocked across my chest, I’m not smiling. I cup my arm with my other hand, holding myself together.
I am still and taut as a chrysalis this summer. Do I sense that the silence can’t last? Is that what I wait for? Afternoons my father mows the lawn, the air is suddenly thick with fresh green dust from the clippings, the smell pungent and musty, alive and heavy. The waiting feels like that. It crams my lungs. It weighs on my chest.
Then summer swerves and starts its long descent. In the vegetable garden my father has made on the side of the lawn, the basil bolts, tall and tough. The trellises of beans slump pregnant with heavy pods, and the neat rows of lettuce heads swell fat and round. The corn stands straight while the sunflowers bow. From the sunflowers we lop off a head at a time and my mother roasts it flat in the oven until the seeds fill the kitchen with their nutty smell. Each night now what we eat together comes from the garden as we race with bounty, trying to keep ahead of the coming spoilage.
On one of those nights, my mother sits at the end of the picnic table in a white sleeveless shell sweater, her arms tanned. I burn as a kid, but someday when I hit thirty my skin will suddenly tan easily no matter how many times a day I slather on sunscreen, as if claiming itself to her. My father sits opposite her, in a chair we’ve pulled up to the table. My siblings and I are on the benches, two to each side. The six of us fit neatly around the table. I have started to note this: how we fit perfectly around our belongings, everything spaced for six, and how there is never any extra room. My mother dishes the pasta onto our plates, the pesto sauce, the zucchini spears sprinkled with Parmesan and oregano. The tastes, sweet and bright and sharp, are as steady as devotion: the tastes of last summer, and the summer before that, and the summers to come.
But this time she puts down the serving spoon and looks around the table at us.
How she starts—the words she uses—are lost to me. My father is both the ballast and the break of the house, the jagged rock and the wave that cracks over it, and as a child I am attuned only to what he says and his mood, and never to my steady mother. The dinner table is his to command—his court to teach us about the world, to talk of politics and countries and the values he wants to instill. My mother is quiet. Years will pass before I realize, with the jolt of my own world snapping into view, how smart she is.
“Are you listening?” she says to me that night. “Your father and I have something to tell you.”
Such a grave sentence. It wears its seriousness like an alert flag. Something in her voice tells me that whatever she has to say, I don’t want it. The air is thick with unspoken words already, I am all full up with my own secret. A clot forms in my throat. Can’t she see that the night is a light one, the breeze soft and the setting sun aglow? Vivaldi’s violins waft from the speakers my father has strung up in the trees. No one is fighting, my father is not yelling, and my grandparents are far away across the bridge in New York.
Don’t ruin this, I think.
“I need a sweater,” I say. I snap onto this answer like a prize, my voice triumphant.
“You need it right now?” she says.
“I’m cold.”
She sighs. “Hurry up, then.”
“I’m cold, too,” my baby sister, Elize, says.