The girls had been raised Unitarian, which had seemed a nice sensible compromise to Ross and Daria between having no religion at all and having to lie to the children about what they believed, enough religion to be respectable but not enough to get in the way. Daria had been as appalled as Ross when Tracy turned Catholic with such fervor. That was how Tracy experimented: she tried new things by diving in over her head.
Daria made a wrong turn only once, finding the triple-decker without difficulty. Two buildings on one side of it had been burned to the ground, although the row then marched on over a hill undaunted. When Daria rang the bell, Betsy came out on the porch with Tracy but the boyfriend was nowhere to be seen and Daria was not invited in. She stood on the porch waiting, staring at the sinister ruin of the house next door, boarded up and marked with an official warning against trespassing. A charred smell hung in the air still.
Covertly she examined Tracy as they sped off. Her auburn hair, a shade redder than Daria’s, was tightly curled all over her head in a new style Daria found attractive. “Have you been missing Nick a lot?”
“Some, of course.… I guess I’ll see him.”
“Didn’t you call him to tell him you’re coming home?”
“I wrote him a couple of weeks ago I might. I never had a chance to call. It’s been so frantic at school, Mama. So much work!”
Daria shut up about Nick. Nick and Tracy had gone seriously steady the last two years of high school. Their senior year they had been sleeping together, a situation Daria had read long before Tracy had been silly enough to let Ross figure it out. Tracy had announced they were going to be married right after high school (in the Greek Orthodox Church) and that she had no need of college, which was a waste of time. One wave of trouble at a time, Daria thought, slamming on her brakes as a typical Boston madman ran a light.
“I met this guy Gordon in my psych class—he’s intense,” Tracy was saying.
Tracy was intense. Enthusiastic. All the way on or all the way off. She would cool with time, and perhaps Robin would warm. They had in some underhanded way been played off each other, the sisters, each scrambling to occupy turf the other had not claimed. Robin played field hockey? Tracy would sit out gym. Tracy studied piano and sang with Ross? Robin would claim to be tone-deaf.
“And he says I’m beautiful, Mama. Nobody ever said that before—”
“You’ve always been beautiful to me.”
“Sure, Mama. I suppose deformed babies are beautiful to their mamas.” Tracy stopped abruptly, as through both their minds Frederick Jonathan Walker briefly passed. Tracy had been too young to remember Freddy in the flesh. Daria said nothing.
“Anyhow, Mama, when somebody like Gordon says it, it counts. Know what he said, Mama? He said I look like a Raphael madonna.”
Daria laughed out loud before she could stop herself; then she was ashamed. With Tracy glaring, she had to explain. “Darling, that’s an old line.” Tracy had Daria’s own dark deep-set huge brown eyes and her rounded face, passed on from mother to daughter during the four generations she had witnessed in person and in photographs. “Every guy I dated in college used that line. One reason I liked your father right off was because he didn’t.”
“He probably didn’t know who Raphael was.”
“But he has a wonderful feeling for music,” she said, automatically defending. “Your father’s been under a lot of stress lately. I don’t know what it is—something at work. You know how he hates me to pry. But he’s been on edge, sleeping poorly. Ducks, try not to set him off. Not this weekend, please.”
“I won’t say a word. I won’t even talk to him, for fear of bugging him, the way I always seem to.”
“Teresa, you don’t have to sulk about it. Just don’t go out of your way to irritate your father.”
“I never go out of my way. It’s my way he can’t stand. It’s me.”
“Sweetheart, I want you and your father to make up. To be close again. You used to share so much, with your music—”
“Why should I have to give a damn performance for him to like me? Robin doesn’t have to. She makes fun of music, and she’s the one he adores.”
“Promise me you’re not going to fight with your sister all weekend.”
“Mama, it’ll be a wonderful birthday, you’ll see.… Did they really give you that madonna bit?”
“Afraid so. Doesn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth about finding you attractive.”
“They said the same thing to you?” Tracy was staring at her mother in alarm.
Daria understood. She had never relished being told she looked just like her mother. All the women in Daria’s family were pleasant-looking sweet-faced women who retained an aura of girlishness into old age, with soft round chins, round arched brows, immense rounded eyes and perhaps too-round bodies. A touch of red in their dark brown hair, a touch of olive in their skin: the family look handed down from mother to daughter. The men might turn out otherwise, but no matter who the women married, mothers gave birth to daughters who resembled them: except for Robin, whom Ross had wanted to be a boy and who took after Ross. Daria loved Nina with an unsatiated dogged yearning that never felt fully returned, as she felt sure Tracy loved her more happily, but she had never wanted to become her mother and she had never enjoyed being told how close was the resemblance.
Describing her classes, her roommate Betsy’s habits and clever sayings, Gordon’s every shining word, Tracy stopped suddenly, drawing up. “And how have you been keeping, Mama?”
Daria thought of her friend Gretta who would talk about herself with scarcely a pause for breath for forty-five minutes, keeping Daria on the phone fretting over all the things she was not getting done. Then in the last minute of the call with melodious insincerity Gretta would warble, “And how about you, Daria darling. Is anything new?” But with Tracy, she was touched. It was very adult to turn polite with your own mother, to recognize the social contract as reciprocal even to the extent of bothering to ask. She wanted to hug her daughter but confined herself to tapping her near knee. “That tour was draining. I’m so glad to be back home I can’t say it often enough.… Let’s see, your father wants me to go on a diet, and I suppose I must. It just seems boring and trendy, and I don’t want to look like a fourteen-year-old boy. Does James Beard look anorexic? Does anyone demand that Julia Child resemble Brooke Shields?”
“What’s for supper tonight?”
“I’m not cooking, not tonight, not on my birthday. But I’ll make an early dinner tomorrow before you go back. What do you want? Anything.”
“Duck! Flamed, and I get to light it. Or a Chinese feast with the pancakes. Let me think about it. The food at school is dreary, Mama.”
She never gunned her car up their hill, negotiating the twists and turns to her house, without a pang of satisfaction. Ross would add that the best houses were on top of the hill around that artificial little pond, but she did not covet those mansions. They were too grand to live in, and she had better soil. No matter that here in the winter they had twice the snowfall of Boston; no matter that the streets collected ice and were gutted with potholes, kept in disrepair out of a kind of snobbery, she loved the hill. To her it represented both luxury and adventure.
Her own house gave her the deepest pleasure. It was one of the oldest houses on the hill, of a pale yellow clapboard contrasting the weathered slate of the paths and the grey shingles of the roof, with dark grey shutters and trim. Instead of the common expanses of lawn broken only by hedge, she had put up a picket fence enclosing a dooryard garden rimmed with old-fashioned perennials, including hollyhocks in a row at the west end where they got just enough sun.
Tracy smiled at her, knowing her mother’s satisfactions, and for an instant they touched hands. Ross’s Mercedes wasn’t in the garage. Where had he gone? Perhaps to pick up Robin, who drove an old Honda that often refused to start. That idea pleased her; so symmetrical, she picked up Tracy while he fetched Robin. But Robin arrived on her own within the hour,
dressed in bright blue running clothes that set off her strawberry blond hair, just a shade lighter than Ross’s own.
“Where’s Dad? He was going to run with me today.” Robin paced the downstairs peevishly, stepping over Tracy who lay on the floor playing with the kittens while Torte watched with an occasional uneasy thump of his tail.
“They’re such special cats, Ali and Sheba. I’m glad we took them in.” Tracy was snuggling Sheba under her chin. “Aren’t you glad now?”
“Asshole names,” Robin muttered, pacing. She had her father’s nervous energy, part temperament, part imitation of him. “There’s Annette.” Their next door neighbor.
“You’re back, Daria!” Annette was holding out a package almost at arm’s length. “The UPS dropped this at my house yesterday, since no one was home here.”
“Is it a birthday present?” Tracy sat up, arranging herself gracefully.
Daria took the box, profusely thanked Annette, who could not stay as she was preparing a dinner party. “No, it’s addressed to your father. Ugh. No wonder Annette was carrying it that way.”
“Why?” Robin leaned close and then leaped back. “Gross. It stinks.”
“I can’t imagine what it is.” The return address was illegibly scrawled so she could read only Allston MA and the zip code. She carried the package into Ross’s study and set it on center of the green blotter he liked kept immaculate on his neat walnut desk. The wastebasket was overflowing. Monday she must tackle the house.
Torte was barking, running into the kitchen. He always heard the car before she did. She shut the door of Ross’s study and met him carrying a Lord and Taylor box. “Happy Birthday, old kid,” he said with a big grin. “I straightened everything out.”
“Ross, what a sweet thing to do! I can’t believe it.” He didn’t like shopping any better than she did, so his trip verged on the heroic. He knew she would put off the exchange. Department stores confused and overheated her so that she was always deciding once inside them that she could get on perfectly well without whatever she had come for.
“First a little extra to make up for the mistake. Ta dum!” He fished out a golden packet of Godiva chocolates.
Robin grimaced. “You know what a chocolate freak she is.” Robin considered chocolate a cut below heroin as a habit.
Tracy said, “But I thought you wanted her to go on a diet.”
Sometimes she could wish for a little silence from the girls. Were they jealous when he did something caring for her? “Not today. I’m opening it right now and everybody have a piece. Ross?”
Ross succumbed. “One won’t hurt. Now open the big box.”
It held a pastel paisley shawl. “But, Ross, what happened to the gorgeous nightgown?”
“They didn’t have it in your size. They seem to be wearing shawls again.”
She cooed over it, angry with herself for missing the nightgown, a gift that had seemed to hint of a renewed sexual interest. Oh well, the shawl was pretty and in the winter to come, it would serve. “This kind of fine wool paisley, they used to call a wedding ring shawl—it would fit through a wedding ring.” She worked her ring off to demonstrate for Tracy. Robin and Ross were chatting about running and football. The shawl would not fit through.
While Robin and Ross jogged, Tracy brought out Daria’s present, a quarter ounce of Madame Rochas perfume. “Tracy, I adore it. You know I love perfume. But this is beyond extravagant!”
Tracy agreed giggling and followed her out to the garden, a procession of animals behind them. There Daria knelt to put in a row of early blooming Kaufmania tulips, rimming a new bed where she then dug in bronze Darwins for May. She would keep it coppery all year: marigolds later, calendula, nasturtiums. She was a little nervous about Ross’s new habit of running a couple of mornings a week and then weekends with Robin. Annette had told her horror stories of husbands dropping dead suddenly in the driveway, expiring dramatically on street corners. All the local men had taken up jogging at one time; Ross was simply the last to start. Perhaps she resented jogging because she had the idea it was something he was doing instead of making love with her. Today, her birthday, surely they would. How could she object to a healthy habit? He could have taken to drinking too much like Gretta’s ex-husband or womanizing like her own father. Would Nina call today? Lately Nina seemed especially miserable. Pops had begun spending a great deal of time at Joe’s restaurant. Joe was their oldest surviving son, who had moved down to Florida too. Kneeling to tuck the bulbs into their neat holes with the maple glowing over her, nonetheless she sensed something wrong she could not identify. “Is school really all right?” she asked Tracy sharply. “Are you keeping up? You’re not too lonely?”
“Mama …” Tracy said slowly. “Some of the girls at school, they’ve heard of you. I mean, I never realized you’re famous. I always thought your books were … kind of a family joke. But they’ve seen you on television.”
“Well, does that bother you?” Daria felt a little pang of guilt.
“Bother me? No. I’m proud of you. But, like, it was a surprise. Do you know what I mean?”
“Are there any of the girls you’ve met that are your special friends?” Daria quickly changed the subject. Talking too much about her work or the modest measure of celebrity it had brought felt dangerous around the house, even if Ross wasn’t in earshot.
When Robin returned tousled and sweaty, she brought a package from her Honda that turned out to contain an oversized apron stenciled in big red letters I AM A KITCHEN WITCH/HOT STUFF. Daria tried very hard to admire it. Robin dressed Ivy League to her job at an insurance company, but otherwise she had no taste at all.
“Dad and I did five miles today. Don’t you feel great, Dad? How many are you doing on weekdays?”
“Three. I’d like to do more. I need a running partner.”
“Can’t you get one of your buddies from the neighborhood to run with you?” Robin urged. When she was excited, her voice always rose, reedy.
“I’m trying. If I could only run with you every morning, when you run anyhow, I know I’d keep up my pace.”
“But Dad, I’m not that far from your office. You could come in a little early and run with me.”
He stopped halfway up the staircase, hanging over the bannister. “My smart daughter. I knew I could count on you. You just may have an idea. If you’d put up with me.”
“Of course I would, Dad. It’d be super.”
“I’m going to ponder that. We might be on to something.” He clumped on up to their bedroom, whistling an air from Don Giovanni.
Daria frowned, made her forehead smooth and turned away. Mornings were the time they had traditionally made love. Why did the conversation sound staged to her? She brought her hands up to her eyes and rubbed. She was still tired from travelling, a little crazy with fatigue. The day was slipping rapidly away from her.
They all dispersed to dress or make phone calls. She laid out the baby blue chiffon on the bed so that she could wear the shawl with it, then dabbed on Madame Rochas. In the bathroom he was singing loud and clear above the force of the shower. Robin had tickets to a basketball game with friends from work and Tracy was going out with Nick after all. She would miss the girls, but lately she had been missing Ross more. He had been busy, harassed. Then she had been gone ten days. A romantic evening out would do them good, for once a Saturday night without six to ten other people to feed and entertain, to dazzle and impress. My wife, the great chef. She curled up on the queen-sized bed, not putting on the dress just yet, facing the wall of photographs.
Ross had a darkroom in the basement; for years he and his Nikon had commemorated every family event, every trip, every holiday. He had taken portrait studies of each of them including Torte. The bed faced a wall of mounted eight by tens on the matte paper he preferred. He had put them up in his own arrangement, not chronological, so that Daria pregnant with Robin and wrapped in a white and blue Moroccan kaftan looked toward Robin holding up a striped bass she had caught surf
casting. The wall was full and no new photographs had been added since that summer, three years before.
He had not photographed the kittens, she realized, which was odd because he adored young things, puppies, babies, the unprotected. There was Orville regarding her, the pet crow they had when Tracy was still in middle school and Robin a sophomore in high school, a nestling they had found and raised and finally freed. There was Miss Muffet, the grey cat who had died out front, hit by a car that had never stopped. She remembered Ross holding her as she died, crying himself as the girls cried. He had that sweet tenderhearted core she loved. He would not hurt a living thing. He would never strike an animal with his car and then speed on.
As he swung out of the bathroom he glanced at her arranged on the bed and his singing faltered. Then he started rummaging in his closet. Embarrassed, she slipped off the bed to dress. As they went down together, she remembered. “A package came for you yesterday, but it was left at Annette’s.”
“A package? From where?”
“I put it on your desk.”
When he opened his study door, the smell came out at them, stronger in the small room. “Pee-you. What is that? Something rotten?” He peered closely at the package, looking at the return address.
“Who’s it from?”
“Ummm. Daria, I think I left my car keys upstairs. Beside the bed or on my dresser. Could you run up and get them for me?”
She thought she heard them clinking in his pocket, but obediently, she looked for them. Then she leaned over the railing. “I can’t find them, Ross.”
He did not answer. When she came down he was outside by the garbage can. Dusting his hands he came into the kitchen and washed them. “Let’s get going.”
Apparently he had his car keys now because he got into the Mercedes and waited for her. “What was all that, Ross? What was in the package?”
“The package? A cheese. It was a present from a man I did some paperwork for on a building closing. That’s all. The cheese had spoiled.”