Thirty-Six
THAT WEEKEND, Claire and Bernard and Sebastian move to the new development.
The streets there are smooth and everything is new.
Claire shows me every detail. She got to pick out all the finishes for the house—the floor tile, the light fixtures, the brand of appliances.
We go room to room, Adele’s absence growing stronger every minute.
“You did invite her, didn’t you?” I ask.
“I thought about it, but this should be a happy day. Without any judgment.”
By the time I leave her late in the evening, her kitchen is unpacked and organized, the beds are made, she’s waving at me from the perfect lawn, smiling.
But two nights later she comes over, distraught, tells me they were invited to their next-door neighbor’s house for dinner, all of them remarking on the pleasantness of their new community.
“‘Best thing about it,’ the husband told us, ‘is there aren’t any Negroes.’ Only, he didn’t use that word. He used the ugly one instead.”
“What did you do?” I ask.
“I froze,” Claire says. “Didn’t know what to do.
But Bernard stood up and said, ‘Oh yeah? You’re looking at a family of them right now.
’ And we left, just like that, the burgers on the grill and their mouths wide open in shock.
” She wrings her hands. “I don’t know what I’ll say, next time we’re in our driveways at the same time. ”
I fix her a strong drink, carry it out to her on the patio.
A tremor in her hand as she takes it. She wears a sparkling garnet ring, a matching brooch at the collar of her Western-style shirt.
Her hair is pulled into a chignon, every strand in place.
Dressed to get to know her neighbors, to impress them.
“I hate that Adele was right,” she mutters.
“Hate it. It’s what you must be thinking right now—how she knew all along and I didn’t. ”
“No, not at all. I’m thinking about your beautiful house, on your beautiful street.
You can see yourself there for a long time, can’t you?
That tile you chose. That yard.” I search for something meaningful, something true to console her.
Then it rushes into my mind. I take her hand, remembering how it felt to hear the words when I was young.
“Listen,” I say. “Claire. What does it matter, really, what anybody thinks of us?”
She snatches her hand away, looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind.
Later, after she’s left, I call Elise at her New York hotel.
It’s near midnight for her, but she keeps late hours while she’s away, complains that the art scene there is obscene, that she’s forced to stay out until three in the morning sometimes.
I’m connected to her room and she answers and I tell her about Claire.
“I had this memory of Delphine, not only her words but exactly the way it felt to hear them.” I’m in the kitchen, the phone cord stretched to the table.
The door opens and Nathalie and Clément come in from the night.
Each of them kisses me on the top of the head as they pass to the living room.
“But apparently it was not a transferrable experience,” I say.
“What’s Claire going to do?”
“She’ll have to deal with having bigots as neighbors, I guess. I don’t envy her, that’s for sure.”
“I’m glad Bernard spoke up,” Elise says. “I hope the neighbors are mortified. I hope they go over and apologize with their tails between their legs.”
“Doubtful,” I say. “But we can dream. How’s the gallery coming?”
She tells me that the white she originally chose for the walls ended up with a gray cast, too cold.
She had the painters back and now the walls are just right, softer, the barest hint of warmth.
The installers come tomorrow morning to hang the show, and the photographer will arrive in the afternoon when the light is right.
“We’re in the paper already,” she says. “It’s thrilling, the entire thing. You’re sure we can’t fly you out?”
“I’m sure,” I say. “I can’t miss Nathalie’s show, and graduation’s right after. And I don’t know if I could stand it, anyway. I’d be so full of nerves. I’d much rather let the paintings speak for themselves.”
When I hang up the kids are listening to a record in the living room, low so as not to disturb me. “What was that you were saying about Delphine?” Nathalie asks.
I join them on the sofa. “It was about a memory I had earlier tonight. When we were around your age, we had a stretch of weeks when we spent a lot of time in a garden. It was so beautiful and strange, a courtyard between two buildings in the middle of a city block. Clearly cared for and tended, but we never saw another person there, didn’t know who it belonged to.
We were both struggling with who we were, who we loved.
And she took my hand and said, ‘What does it matter, really, what anybody thinks of us?’ And for a little while, it felt like the key to everything. ”
“I wish I met her,” Clément says.
“I do, too,” I say.
“I remember her,” Nathalie says. “Only a little bit, but some. Isn’t it strange that I don’t remember a funeral, though?”
And there’s a blackness across my vision.
I’m plunging deep, being swallowed. Sinking, sinking.
Lost in it. Time passes. I resurface and blink and shock blankets Nathalie’s face.
“Oh,” she says. “She isn’t…?” and my words don’t come fast enough, don’t come at all, until the wordlessness has said everything and there’s no turning back.
“What?”—she’s frantic, shrieking—“What? My mother isn’t dead?”
I am your mother, I want to say, but she needs an answer, not that one.
She needs the story of it. I don’t know where to start, her cries fill the living room, and I can’t think, and I’m dipping in and out of time, I’m here and then I’m underwater again.
I say, “Sweetheart, let’s be still for a moment.
” My words faint against her cries. “Let’s be still, okay? And I’ll tell you all of it.”
She’s standing now, careening from one corner of the room to another, her arms tight around her chest. “My mother and my father? Both of them alive? And neither of them…?”
“I don’t know your father. I never did. But I saw what losing you did to Delphine. She had no choice.”
“And so you told me she was dead?”
I want a quiet room. I want her to sit next to me.
I want to take her hands. I want to start from the beginning and tell it all the way through.
“Sweetheart,” I say. “Let’s just take a minute, all right?
Let’s just take a minute and then we’ll start.
I’ll tell you everything. I’ll make us some tea and then we’ll start. ”
“Are you serious? You told me my mother was dead!”
“Okay,” I say. “I understand.” I close my eyes.
I need to do it her way. “I did tell you she was dead. She asked that I tell you that. More than asked. She demanded it. I didn’t want to, I promise you, I didn’t want to.
I knew it was wrong, but what she was going through—it was beyond the imaginable to be so sick, to be forced to lose you—and it was something she needed from me.
Something she demanded that I give her. And so I did. ”
“Something you gave her,” Nathalie says. “And something you took from me.”
“I know,” I say. “I remember saying that out loud. I remember saying that it would mean lying to you for years, for your whole life maybe, and I knew that it would damage us.”
“Who did you say that to?”
“Lionel.”
“Lionel. So everyone in my family has been lying to me since I was five years old. Everyone has been keeping this secret. This secret about me. Do you know where she is? Do you all talk to her? Do you meet each other at restaurants, you and Auntie Adele and Auntie Claire and my mother? Do you laugh at me and how little I know? Do you congratulate yourselves on how clever you all are? Or no. You wouldn’t laugh, would you?
You’re all far too good for that. Do you make little sad faces?
Poor stupid Nathalie. Poor unsuspecting Nathalie.
No idea that Mommy’s alive and well. The guilt. Does it just eat you all alive?”
A wildfire in my body. Burning, burning. Voice thick when I say, “None of this is how you think it is. Let me explain. Please.”
But Nathalie’s turned to Clément now. He’s been silent on the other end of the sofa. “Not you, though?” she’s asking. “Right? Not you.”
“No,” Clément says. “Of course I didn’t know.” And he stands and she goes to him. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.
My body goes cold. I’m frozen as they move to the door and put on their shoes and leave me. They don’t tell me where they’re going. They don’t spare me a glance. The room blurs, my heart thunders. No room in my lungs.
What if they can’t forgive me?
Hours pass, and I grow unforgivable in my own estimation.
Remembering Nathalie’s purple lips after we threw the flower petals.
Remembering everything I told her about her mother, each time I mentioned a likeness and left out the most important piece of information.
I wish I’d told her that I lied to myself, too.
I tricked myself, too. I climb into bed, sick in the dark until, past one, I hear them come in.
They go straight to their room and shut the door.
In the morning, I make them breakfast, pack their lunches.
I hear murmurs from their room. Door opening, one set of footsteps.
Clément’s. “Nathalie’s staying home,” he says.
“I’d stay with her but I have a test and she says she’ll be fine if I go. ”
I call in sick and wait and around noon she emerges. Standing in the doorway and looking past me. “Will you talk with me?” I ask. “Will you let me explain?”
She shakes her head. “I want to go to the moon room.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“There was the laundromat.”
“Yes, on Figueroa.”
“We can start there,” she says.