Upstairs, sunlight came through the windows and spilled into the hallway. Little dust bunnies were gathered up and down the floor. “Oh dear,” Patty said. She said that a few times, sitting on her bed. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she said.
It was a twenty-mile ride to the town of Hanston, and the sun was still bright as Patty drove by the fields, some with the little plants of corn, some brown, one field was being plowed under as she drove by. Then she came to the place where there were wind turbines, over a hundred of them along the horizon, these huge white windmills that had been put up across the land almost ten years earlier. They fascinated Patty, they always had, their long white arms twirling the air all at the same speed but otherwise without synchronicity. There was a lawsuit now, she remembered, there were often lawsuits, about the destruction of birds and deer and farmland, but Patty favored the large white things whose skinny arms moved against the sky in that slightly wacky way to make energy—and then they were behind her, and once again were only the fields with the little corn plants and the fresh bright soybeans. These were the very cornfields—in their summer fullness—where, by the age of fifteen, she had allowed boys to thrust themselves against her, their lips huge-seeming, rubbery, their things bulging through their pants, and she would gasp and offer her neck to be kissed and grind herself against them, but—really?—she couldn’t stand it she couldn’t stand it she couldn’t stand it.
Patty came into the town that had changed very little since she had grown up there. There were the old-fashioned-looking streetlamps, black, with their lights in a box at the top. And there were the two restaurants, the gift shop, the investment firm, the clothing store—all had the same green awnings and signs in black and white. In order to get to her mother’s house she had to drive past the home she had grown up in, a beautiful red house with black shutters and a wide porch with a porch swing on it. Patty had sat on that swing with her mother for hours at a time as a young child, curled against her mother’s stomach, crumpling the fabric of her mother’s dress, her mother’s laughter above her head. Her father had lived in that house until he died, which had been one year before Sibby died. Now a family with lots of children owned the house, and Patty always—every single time she drove by it—looked the other way. Through the town and just a mile past was her mother’s small white house. As Patty turned in to the driveway, she saw her mother peering through the front curtain, then could hear her cane thump against the floor as Patty unlocked the side door and let herself in. Her mother had become as little as Patty had become big. This is what Patty thought each time she saw her mother now. “Hey,” Patty said, and stooped, and kissed the air beside her mother. Standing straight, she said, “I brought you some food.”
“I don’t need food.” Her mother had on a terrycloth bathrobe, and she gave the belt a tug.
Patty unpacked the meatloaf and the coleslaw and the mashed potatoes, and put them in the refrigerator. “You need to eat something,” Patty said.
“I won’t eat anything sitting alone. Can you stay and eat with me?” Her mother looked up at her through her large glasses, which had slipped partway down her nose. “Pretty please?” Patty closed her eyes briefly, then nodded.
As Patty set the table, her mother sat in a chair, her legs apart beneath the robe, looking up at Patty. “It’s awfully good to see you. I never see you anymore.”
“I was here three days ago,” Patty said. Her mother’s thin hair—the scalp so visible—stayed in Patty’s mind as she turned toward the counter, and inside she felt herself crumble. Returning to the table, pulling a chair up, she said, “We have to talk about you going into the Golden Leaf. Remember we talked about that?” Confusion seemed to appear on her mother’s face; she shook her head slowly. “Did you get dressed today?” Patty asked.
Her mother looked down at the lap of her bathrobe and then up at Patty once more. “No,” she said.
At a conference in St. Louis, Patty had met her husband. The conference was on dealing with children from low-income homes, but Sebastian was not part of that. He was staying in the hotel room next to Patty’s; there for a conference himself, he was a mechanical engineer. “Hello again!” Patty had said as they both stepped from their rooms. She had seen him at night going into his room when she went into hers. What it was about him, she could not have said, but he made her feel completely comfortable; she was already gaining weight from her antidepressants, and she had once stopped a wedding from happening only weeks before she was to be married. Sebastian would not even look at her the first few times they spoke. But he was a nice-looking man, tall, thin, his face was gaunt, his hair on the longer side. His eyebrows were so thick they were like one line across his forehead, his eyes indented beneath his brow. She just liked him. And by the end of the conference she had obtained his email address, and their correspondence was something she’d never forget. Within just a few weeks he wrote, There’s something you should know about me, Patty, if we’re going to be friends. And then a few days later: Things happened to me, he wrote. Awful things. They’ve made me different from other people. He lived in Missouri, and when she wrote and asked him to come to Carlisle, Illinois, she was surprised that he agreed. After that, they were together. How had she known—she hadn’t known—that he had been taken as a boy again and again and again by his stepfather? Sebastian could hardly stand being with people, but it was very early on that he looked at her and told her in some detail what had happened to him, and he said to her, Patty, I love you, but I cannot do it. I just cannot do that, I wish I could. And she said, “That’s okay, I can’t stand it either.”
In their marriage bed they held hands, and never went any further. Often, during the first years especially, he had terrible dreams, and he would kick the covers and squeal, it was a frightening sound. She noticed that he was aroused when this happened, and she was always sure to touch only his shoulders until he calmed down. Then she rubbed his forehead. “It’s okay, honey,” she always said. He would stare at the ceiling, his hands in fists. Thank you, he said. Turning his face toward her, Thank you, Patty, he said.
—
“Tell me, tell me. Smell me. How are you?” Her mother poked a forkful of meatloaf into her mouth.
“I’m well. I’m going to see Angelina tomorrow night. Her husband’s left her.” Patty put mashed potatoes on her meatloaf, then put butter on the mashed potatoes.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Her mother placed her fork on the table and looked at her quizzically.
“Angelina, she’s one of the Mumford girls.”
“Huh.” Her mother nodded slowly. “Oh, I know. Her mother was Mary Mumford. Sure. She wasn’t much.”
“Who wasn’t much? Angelina’s a great person. I always thought her mother was really nice.”
“Oh, she was nice. She just wasn’t much. I think she came from Mississippi originally. She married that Mumford boy, he was rich, and then she had all those girls and plenty of money.”
Patty opened her mouth. She was going to ask if her mother remembered that Mary Mumford had left that rich husband only a few years ago, in her seventies, did she remember that? But Patty wouldn’t ask. She would not tell her mother that she and Angelina had become friends over it: mothers leaving.
I wanted to kill him, Sebastian had told Patty. I really did want to kill him. “Of course you did,” she had said. And I wanted to kill my mother too, he said. And Patty said, “Of course you did.”
—
Patty looked around her mother’s small kitchen. It was spotless, thanks to Olga, a woman older than Patty who came in twice a week. But the table she sat at had a linoleum top that was cracked at the corners, and the curtains at the window were very faded in their blue. And Patty could see from where she sat, down the hallway to the corner of the living room, the blue beanbag chair that her mother, after all these years, refused to give up.
Her mother was talking—so often this was the case these days—of things from the past. “All those d
ances at The Club. My goodness, they were fun.” Her mother paused to shake her head with wonder.
Patty put another slab of butter on her potatoes, ate the potatoes, and then pushed the plate aside. “Lucy Barton’s written a memoir,” she said.
Her mother said, “What did you say?” And Patty repeated it.
“Now I remember,” her mother said. “They used to live in a garage, and then the old man died—whatever relative he was, I have no idea—but they moved into the house.”
“A garage? Is that where I remember going? A garage?”
Her mother said, after a moment, “I don’t know, I can’t remember, but she was very inexpensive, that’s why I used her. She did wonderful work really, and she barely charged a nickel for it.” After a long moment, her mother said, “I saw Lucy on TV a few years ago. Hot shot. She wrote a book or something. Lives in New York. Smork. La-de-dah.”
Patty took a deep, unquiet breath. Her mother reached for the coleslaw, and as her bathrobe fell open slightly, Patty could see—briefly—the flattened small breast beneath the nightgown. After a few minutes Patty stood up, cleared the table, and did the dishes rapidly. “Let’s check your meds,” she said, and her mother waved a hand dismissively. So Patty went into the bathroom and found the container with the divided daily sections, and saw that her mother had not taken any of the pills since Patty was last there. Patty brought the container out to her mother and explained again why each pill was important, and her mother said, “All right.” She took the pills that Patty handed her. “You need to take these,” Patty told her. “You don’t want to have a stroke.” She did not say anything about the medicine that was supposed to slow dementia.
“I’m not going to have a stroke. Stroke poke.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
“You turned out the best,” her mother said at the door. “It’s too bad your be-happy pills added that weight, but you’re still pretty. Are you sure you have to go?”
Walking down the driveway to her car, Patty said out loud, “Oh my gosh.”
The sun had just set, and by the time Patty was halfway home—past the windmills—the full moon was starting to rise. The night her father died the moon was full, and in Patty’s mind every time the moon became full she felt that her father was watching her. She wiggled her fingers from the steering wheel as a hello to him. Love you, Daddy, she whispered. And she meant Sibby as well, for they had merged, in a way, in her mind. They were up there watching her, and she knew that the moon was just a rock—a rock!—but the sight of its fullness always made her feel that her men were out there, up there, too. Wait for me, she whispered. Because she knew—she almost knew—that when she died she would be with her father and Sibby again. Thank you, she whispered, because her father had just told her it was good of her to take care of her mother. He was generous now in this way; death had given that to him.
At home, the lights she’d left on made her house appear cozy; it was one of many things she had learned about living alone, leaving lights on. And yet as she put her pocketbook down, moved through the living room, the ghastliness descended; her day had been a bad one. Lila Lane had shaken her profoundly, and what if the girl reported her, told the principal that Patty had called her a piece of filth? She could do that, Lila Lane. She was up to doing that. Patty’s sister had been no help, there was no point in calling her other sister, who lived in L.A. and never had time to talk, and her mother—oh, her mother…
“Fatty Patty.” Patty said these words aloud.
Patty sat down on her couch and looked around; the house seemed faintly unfamiliar, and this was—she had learned—a bad sign. A taste of meatloaf was in her mouth. “Fatty Patty, you get yourself ready for the night,” she said out loud, and she rose, and flossed her teeth and then brushed them, and washed her face; she put her face cream on, and this made her feel just a little bit better. When she looked into her pocketbook to find her phone, she saw the small book by Lucy Barton that she had slipped in there earlier. She sat down and examined the cover. It showed a city building at dusk with its lights on. Then she began to read the book. “Holy moley,” she said, after a few pages. “Oh my gosh.”
The next morning, Saturday, Patty vacuumed the upstairs of her house and then the downstairs, she changed the bed, did the laundry, and she went through the mail, tossing out the catalogs and flyers. Then Patty went into town and bought groceries, and she bought some flowers too. It had been a long time since she had bought flowers for her house. All day she had the sense of having a piece of yellow-colored candy, maybe butterscotch, tucked inside the back crevices of her mouth, and she knew that this private sweetness came from Lucy Barton’s memoir. Every so often Patty shook her head and said “Huh” aloud.
In the afternoon she called her mother, and Olga answered. Patty asked her if she could come every day now instead of two days a week, and Olga said she’d have to think about it, and Patty said she understood. Then Patty asked to speak to her mother. “Who is this?” her mother asked. And Patty said, “It’s me, Patty. Your daughter. I love you, Mom.”
In a moment her mother said, “Well, I love you too.”
After that, Patty had to lie down. She could not have said the last time she’d told her mother she loved her. As a child she had said it frequently, she may have even said it that morning when her mother agreed that Patty didn’t have to be in Girl Scouts anymore, Patty being a freshman in high school, and her mother said, “Oh, Patty, that’s okay, you’re old enough now to decide,” her mother standing in the kitchen handing her lunch to her in a paper bag, just being herself, Patty’s mother. And then Patty had come home from school that same day, in the middle of the day, with cramps—terrible cramps Patty used to have—and Patty came home, and she heard the most astonishing sounds coming from her parents’ bedroom. Her mother was crying, gasping, shrieking, and there was the sound of skin being slapped, and Patty had run upstairs and seen her mother astride Mr. Delaney—Patty’s Spanish teacher!—and her mother’s breasts were swaying and this man was spanking her mother and his mouth reached up and took her mother’s breast and her mother wailed. And what Patty never forgot was the look of her mother’s eyes, they were wild; her mother could not stop herself from wailing, this is what Patty saw, her mother’s breasts and her mother’s eyes looking at her—yet unable to stop what was coming from her mouth.
Patty had turned and run into her bedroom. After a few minutes, Mr. Delaney’s footsteps were heard going down the stairs, and her mother came into her room, a housecoat around her, and her mother said, “Patty, I swear to God you must never tell a soul, and when you’re older, you’ll understand.”
That her mother’s breasts were so big Patty would not have imagined, seeing them unharnessed and swinging over that man.
—
Within days, horrible scenes occurred in a home that had once been so placid and ordinary that Patty had not considered it so. Patty did not, in fact, tell anyone what she had seen—she wouldn’t have known what words to use—but she never returned to Mr. Delaney’s class, and then—oh, it was so sudden!—her mother, after exploding in a confession, moved into a tiny apartment in town. Patty went to see her there only once, and there was a blue beanbag chair in the corner. The entire town talked of her mother’s affair with Mr. Delaney, and to Patty it felt like her head had been cut off and was moving in a different direction from her body. It was the oddest thing, and it went on and on, that feeling. She and her sisters watched as their father wept. They watched as he swore, and became stony-faced. He had been none of these things before, not a weeper, or a swearer, or a stony-faced man. And he became all these things, and the family—they had all just been innocently sitting in a boat on a lake, it seemed like—was gone, turned into something never imagined. The town talked and talked. Patty, being the youngest, had to wait it through the longest. By Christmas, Mr. Delaney had left town, and Patty’s mother was alone.
When Patty began to go to the cornfields with the boys i
n her class, and even much later, when she had real boyfriends and she did it with them, there was always the image of her mother, shirtless, braless, her breasts swaying as that man grabbed one in his mouth— No, Patty could not stand any of it. Her own excitement caused her always terrible, and terrifying, shame.
Angelina was still slim and youthful-looking, although she was a few years older than Patty. Yet when Patty saw them both briefly in the mirror at Sam’s Place, she thought that she, Patty, looked much younger—and that Angelina looked drawn. Right away Patty was going to tell Angelina about the book by Lucy Barton. But as soon as they sat down, Angelina’s green eyes swam with tears, and Patty reached across the table and touched her friend’s hand. Angelina held up a finger, and in a minute she was able to speak. “I just hate both of them,” she said, and Patty said she understood. “He said to me, ‘You’re in love with your mother,’ and I was so surprised, Patty, I just stared at him—”
“Oh boy.” Patty sighed and sat back.
A few years ago Angelina’s mother, at the age of seventy-four, had left town—had left her husband—to marry someone in Italy almost twenty years younger than she was. Patty had tremendous sympathy for Angelina regarding this. But she wanted to say right now: Listen to this! Lucy Barton’s mother was awful to her, and her father—oh dear God, her father…But Lucy loved them, she loved her mother, and her mother loved her! We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it’s okay.
Patty had been dying to tell her friend this, but she sensed now how paltry—almost nutty—her words would seem. And so Patty listened about Angelina’s children, in high school, almost ready to fly the coop, she listened about the mother in Italy, how she emailed all her girls—Angelina had four sisters—and how Angelina was the only one who had not gone to see her mother, but Angelina was thinking about it, she might go this summer.