“We should get back to work,” I said. “I’m almost done with this shelf. I’ll go through his study next. You can help me when you’re done with the albums.” I dropped the last few books into the box haphazardly, bending a few of the pages.
“ ’Kay,” Mary said, still looking at the photo on the floor. I snatched it up and went into the study to unfold another box.
The study was cramped and dark, full of floating dust motes that flurried every time I picked up one of Daddy’s clothbound 1960s textbooks and heaved it into the box. I was wondering what to do with the cigar box that held his class ring when there was a rustling sound from the other room and then music began to filter into the hallway.
“Mary?” I called.
I went back into the living room. Mary wasn’t there. I followed the music down the hall, feeling sicker and sicker the closer I got to the open doorway.
She was standing in the middle of Robin’s old bedroom, facing away from me toward the record player propped up on a chair. When she heard me push the door farther open, she turned around and grinned. “Look what I found!” she said over the noise, holding up the record sleeve with both arms like Vanna White. “He’s got so much ancient stuff here. I love it. Have you ever heard of Laura Nyro?”
“No.” The photo on the cover of the album was of a long-faced, heavy-browed woman pulling on her own dark hair. She looked like my mother the way I remembered her, with the thin, round bangs. “Come back out to the living room.”
“You barely got to this room at all,” Mary said. “Wow, I feel like I’m being stared at.”
She didn’t mean me. She meant the posters.
Robin’s room was covered in faces. Photographs lined the walls and ceiling. Iggy Pop approximating Munch’s scream, Grace Jones snarling, Britney Spears ducking her head, Kate Hudson as Penny Lane, Ava Gardner as herself, Lincoln, Kahlo, Courbet’s desperate man. From behind, bits of the pale blue wallpaper peeked out, the prim white wainscoting. Two mirrors faced each other at either end of the room. In between, an enormous bureau and a third, smaller mirror, garlanded with dusty plastic hibiscus flowers. The comforter was a dull black, incongruous, strewn with clothes, which were scattered over the rug and hung from the open drawers of the bureau. The mess was a teenage girl’s, in medias; she might have returned at any moment. Daddy had never touched it.
Now Mary was standing in her room, wearing her face.
“You don’t want me to be in here, huh?” she asked with Robin’s mouth, wrinkling Robin’s forehead.
I felt dizzy. “We need to pack.”
“Okay, but you gotta listen to the song first. I’ll start it again.” Mary gathered up the record player and carried it out into the hallway. I shut Robin’s door firmly behind her.
“You look stressed out, Leslie,” Mary said, setting the needle and lying down in the middle of the sunken living room, closing her eyes, spreading her arms and legs like a snow angel. “Come rest with me. I’m sorry I went in Robin’s room. I didn’t know it was hers.”
I sat down next to her. “It’s all right.” After a second I said, “Oh. I do know this song. I recognize this song.”
“Lie down,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“Why?”
She didn’t answer. After a moment I lay down next to her.
Laura Nyro sang fuzzily, “In your voice I hear a choir of carousels. Oh, but am I ever gonna hear my wedding bells?”
The carpet smelled like the rest of the house used to. No antiseptic lemon, just cigarettes and Brut and old lasagna.
“Bill! I love you so, I always will…”
20
Robin
That photograph was the only one he displayed of her. Do you see those earrings? Leslie asked me once when we were children, pointing to the little bride, my mother. He gave them to her as a wedding present. Five pearls in each, five-pointed stars. He used to refuse to kiss her if she didn’t have them on. It was a romantic joke between them, full of affection, To the moon, Alice! She kept them in a bowl on the night table, but sometimes she forgot and slept in them. The next morning her earlobes would look red and sore, and he would pinch them, telling her he was giving her a massage as she winced. Leslie used to watch with that curled-lip look on her face, an expression like she’d been caught in a sneeze, the disgust trying to disguise the satisfaction.
I was never angry with my mother like Leslie was, maybe because I had never expected anything of her. It seemed natural to me that Leslie should be responsible for the day-to-day ablutions while Christine came and went. Three times during our childhood she disappeared for months at a time, which meant she had gone on a trip, according to my father. He always gave her yellow roses when she came back, so we knew he had missed her. I assumed these vacations were much like Daddy’s business trips; it was only later that I realized she had no job, so they couldn’t be business trips at all. At the time I viewed them just as I did her occasional all-day errands—it was as if she exited the house directly into a void, and I didn’t think about her again until she returned.
I think it was this attitude that earned me, not Leslie, the prize of accompanying her into the void one day. I was six, halfway through first grade, Christine freshly returned home after months away. I was called to the office to meet my mother just before school ended, but when I got there I hardly knew her. She had curled her hair so tightly it resembled a perm, and wore hot streaks of blush across the tops of her cheeks. Instead of her loose, soft cardigan, she wore a light blue skirt suit with matching vest and white chiffon blouse that tied at her neck and wrists. The makeup gave her face that blurry Vaseline-lens effect that I recognized from television. “It’s you!” I said.
She smiled, revealing the same crooked canine that Leslie had only recently inherited with her adult teeth. “It’s me. Do you want to come with me to a party?”
Had her errands been parties all along? I was electrified by being entrusted with such a worthy secret. I imagined her sneaking off to dozens and dozens of formal affairs, like the twelve dancing princesses. “Does Daddy know?” I asked her in the car, trying to get a look at her shoes.
“No,” she said, coming to a stop so slowly that the car behind her honked. She was not a frequent driver. I don’t even remember if she had her license. She looked over at me, blinking her lengthened eyelashes. “Don’t tell him, okay? This is just for you and me.”
I was a practiced sidekick; I gave her a wink. She laughed.
We drove for what seemed like a long time. I expected that we were going to a ballroom, or maybe somebody’s enormous house, so I was surprised when she pulled into the Monroe’s parking lot near Arroyo del Oso and began touching her hair in the rearview mirror, as if she were about to get out of the car. “Are we here?” I asked.