The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [74]
As her daughter, I could fill her prescriptions, and though she would not medicate herself, I often popped a pill before I had to wrestle her into the car. I was sanguine about it—if, by taking a sedative, I crashed the car and killed one or both of us, life would be easier as a result.
“Emily must fuck because she’s married,” my mother said, but by the end of the sentence I’d put the towel over her head and muffled the sound. It was actually better if she got onto a topic like this. Her aggression was strength and therefore preferable to the alternative, which was her moaning in fear as I guided her down the front steps and toward the car.
I had done this too many times to worry about what the neighbors thought. I learned from Manny that many of the newer neighbors assumed my mother was a burn victim and that the blankets and towels were meant to hide her scars.
“But she’s a really nice old lady,” he’d said. “I was surprised.”
“Right,” I’d said, and then Manny went down to the basement for some unidentified chore for which I’d have to figure out what to pay him.
“Alistair Castle just stared at me,” my mother said as she sat next to me, under her towels. “He stopped coming around.”
“And Hilda started,” I said.
“He rejected her after the operation. We had that in common.”
“A hysterectomy?”
“No, sexual rejection,” my mother said. She had lifted the towel up just enough to make sure she was heard.
“Got it,” I said.
“Change!” Tanner barked.
I heard the students growing restless. Three poses was usually the max of their attention spans. The adjustment for Woman Washing in Her Bath was minimal. I had to lean farther over and replace the hospital-gown towel with the sea sponge, which I would hold at the back of my neck. My shoulders ached now but in ways I was long familiar with. Quickly, I glanced up to find Dorothy at her easel. She stared intently back at me.
Jake had come from a family that prayed. Emily had taken up the call by covering all bases: New Age spiritualism, Christian revivalism, and an ecumenical inclusiveness that bordered on the sublime.
I thought of my father tending the sheep in a graveyard for a church he had never been in. Churches spooked him, he said. “I prefer it out here, with the dead.”
In the weeks following his suicide, I had freighted that sentence with more meaning than it had most likely deserved. I did this with everything. I remembered the particularly sweet kisses he had laid on the heads of Emily and Sarah in the days before. I was struck by how all his suits were hung perfectly in the closet, with one Jake had complimented freshly dry-cleaned and ready to wear. And I went searching in his workshop for a photo I had found there as a girl.
It was still in his tool drawer. I stared at the boy who would become my father and who would kill himself in the end. How far back did it go?
I had held on to the picture as I dialed Jake’s number in Wisconsin. His work was just beginning to garner attention. He was in the midst of applying for a Guggenheim to travel abroad. He had only recently left the temporary faculty housing we’d shared and was renting a house outside Madison—the carriage house of a mansion on a lake.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
“I can’t.