I marvel at the kitchen’s pristine, museum-like qualities. If it weren’t the real kitchen where I spent the latter half of my childhood, the Post-Abandonment Years, it would pass as an exact replica. Except for some mess—piled dirty dishes, cluttered counters, open cereal boxes. Tilton hasn’t been tidying, but still, the care and determination it must have taken to keep it just so! How have the appliances survived? The magnets on the fridge are for plumbers who have to be dead by now.
I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that the house wants to tell me something. Be present, I think, having heard this on a self-help tape. But my path has looped back on itself. When you’ve been enveloped by the past, how do you accomplish presence? Eleanor and that goddamn bedtime story. I can hear my mother’s voice in my head: “Once upon a time…”
The shady house looms around me. I remember again, keenly, being in Wee-ette’s room, telling her about a way of doing math called chisenbop and the box of SRA cards to help with reading comprehension and how I’d made it all the way to the purple level, which was probably a lie and meant nothing to Wee-ette anyway. When I ran out of things to say, I stood there. The room smelled of death, old newspapers, typewriter ink, burnt paper. One time in particular, Wee-ette wanted to tell me something. She even leaned forward in a way that made me lean forward. I am leaning forward now, out into the stale lemony air of the kitchen.
“Ruthie,” a voice says.
And I startle and turn.
It’s Tilton.
But Tilton is not an exact replica. She takes my breath. She’s grown-up, fuller now. Her hair, still pulled back in barrettes, is only chin length, thicker and stiffer. The coiled curls are gone. Her face is still dainty. She’s wearing pale-pink drawstring sweatpants with the elastic cut out of the ankles and a plain T-shirt, both of them inside out. Seams have always chafed her, as well as elastic. This small detail brings tears to my eyes. I’m here for Tilton. I’m here to set her free. I left her behind, and now I have to right the wrong.
“Tilton,” I say. “It’s you!” And I mean that it’s not Wee-ette and not the house itself speaking to me. It’s Tilton, and this is a relief. I walk to her and touch her hair.
She looks at me and says, “And it’s you!”
And for a moment I wonder, Is it me? And if so, who’s that?
Chapter Eleven
The Widgeon
Tilton
Ruthie is here. She touches my hair. I open my arms and wrap her up in them. I say her name again and again. I close my eyes and sway. She’s warm but not soft. She’s thinner and shorter than I remember her. My cheek rests on a sharp collarbone. She doesn’t smell like her Jean Naté after-bath splash, or the baby oil and iodine she used in summer. I imagine that Wee-ette sees us here. Ruthie is the migratory bird. This is the nest that lasted through the long winter. Years of winter.
To describe her, I would say: head and body rather elongated, small bulk; dorsal slightly hunched, as if she’s not exactly sure of herself; teeth large, white, but unevenly serrated because she left before she got braces; eyes wide, blue; the tip of her nose compressed and slightly decurved; her hair generally close, rather compact around her face; fringe of bangs sweeping her arched eyebrows. She’s still pretty.
I want to show Ruthie everything so she can remember. I think about us winding our clasped hands with kite string in the attic, and I know that she’s keeping the pact she made the night she left—to come back and save me.
I don’t need saving, I say to Ruthie now.
I know. You can save yourself, Tilton. I’ve always been the one to believe that.
I think about this, but don’t know what it means. Has she only respected half of the pact?
She says that her dogs are in the car. Her voice is flatter than on the phone. She whispers like she doesn’t want to wake someone sleeping not far off.
I tell her we don’t have a car and our mother is still in the hospital. It’s strange to call her our mother. She doesn’t belong to us. We belong to her. I tell Ruthie what Mrs. Gottleib told me—that our mother might come home as early as tomorrow. Tomorrow!
Really? she says. Then she shows me the rental in the driveway.
The driveway is where everyone is last seen. The driveway of our old house is where George put Marie Cultry’s suitcase in the trunk and helped her into the passenger seat. This driveway is where I last saw Ruthie. She turned around and looked for me in the window. She waved and I waved back. And then my mother called my name and I dipped away from the window. I knew that Ruthie was coming back. I just didn’t know it would be so long. Welcome home, homing pigeon.
I pick up the hem of the kitchen curtains, which are lacy, and I see a lidless red car with two white dogs. I tell Ruthie I’m allergic to dogs.
Mom made that up, Ruthie says. She wanted Dad to get rid of that stupid Labrador.
Our mother wouldn’t lie about allergies, I tell Ruthie. Allergies are serious, and I don’t remember a Labrador.
You were little.
I remember a lot of things from when I was little. Mother says it’s preternatural.
Fine, Ruthie says. She walks through the kitchen and peers into the living room. Brown shag, she says. It’s an ancient artifact! It’s like it was inspired by Burt Reynolds’s chest pelt. Do you remember Eleanor going to Burt Reynolds movies? The ones where he drove a truck? Smokey and the Bandit?
Our mother doesn’t like movies or TV, I remind Ruthie.
She used to like Burt Reynolds movies, Ruthie says, and she knocks on the wooden doorframe like she’s here to test the house somehow.
We already had termites once, I tell her. Some of the wood beams went airy.
So what’s up with the TV, then?
I tell Ruthie that I’m repairing the TV for Mrs. Devlin. I don’t tell her that earlier there was a show about lawyers and murderers. My mother warned me about TVs. Hypnotic, she calls them.
I went to school with Mrs. Devlin’s daughter, Ruthie tells me. She was a pothead who wore fringed moccasins. That TV must weigh a hundred pounds.
It almost killed her.
The TV almost killed Mrs. Devlin?
Our mother. This TV almost killed her.
Really?
I want Ruthie to be happy that she’s back in the nest. There are many kinds of nests—scrapes, mounds, burrows, cavities, cups, saucers, plates, platforms, pendants, and spheres. It makes sense to be happy to return to the nest you first knew. But if you were, you wouldn’t call it a chest pelt.
Ruthie may no longer feel like a native species here. Invasive species like the mute swan have a very negative effect on the ecosystem. Mute swans were brought over as decorations from Europe and Asia in the 1870s. But some escaped in New Jersey and then New York and then all over. And they invaded the Chesapeake Bay. They eat the native species’ food and take over their nesting grounds. They thrive because they don’t face the natural ecological controls, such as predators and disease, which develop alongside a species in its native environment. Nature has checks and balances, but when species move from one place to another—not just in migratory patterns—it’s all messed up.
Mute swans smelled foreign too, I bet, when they first arrived.
I look at Ruthie and I tell her that mute swans are not really mute. They grunt, snort, hiss, and whistle roughly. And their wings are noisy. You can hear them a mile away, throbbing in flight.
That’s beautiful, Ruthie tells me. I forgot the way you come out with things like that.
I don’t make them up.
I know. It’s how you say them, though, and when you choose to say them.
I don’t choose to say them. It’s like the words are in the air and they choose me to say them.
Jesus, Ruthie says, and she smiles and shakes her hair.
The words could choose you, I tell her.
But they don’t, Ruthie says. I should go get the dogs. She pinches her nose, which is what my mother does when she’s crying. And I know that Ruthie i
sn’t an invasive species.
I’ll make Tang, I tell her.
Does anyone still drink that? Ruthie asks.
Astronauts. And us.
Ruthie and I walk back to the kitchen. She leaves through the side door.
I make the Tang—clang, clang, clang—as well as I can. I close my eyes and tell Wee-ette that I can feel the new ending too, but I don’t know what it is. For now, we’re in the middle.
When Ruthie comes back, she lets the dogs loose. Their floating dander makes my heart edgy. But I sip Tang and give Ruthie a tour of the rest of the house.
The dining room, which we don’t use, has four chairs and a table with the leaves folded down. She asks where the long white tablecloth with yellow flowers is. She says, I lived under the dining room table with a tablecloth over it for a couple of weeks. You were too little to remember. I loved that tablecloth.
I tell her that it’s probably folded and stuffed in the bottom of one of the corner hutches.
Then the downstairs bathroom. I got my period here, she says.
As we pass through the living room again, she says, This room could inspire a double homicide. A suicide pact. It’s that grim.
But it’s not, I tell her.
But it is, she says.
The dogs pad around after us, like they’ve imprinted on us. The stairs whine a little. The dogs pad, pad.
The upstairs bathroom. She says, I cried in here a lot.
My mother’s bedroom, which was hers even back in my mother’s childhood. Ruthie says, I remember that smell. What is that smell?
I don’t smell any smell.
That’s because you’re used to it.
Then there’s Wee-ette’s bedroom—dark, the way she liked it. Ruthie walks to the curtains, which are thick and heavy, a red brocade so long that the hems rest on the floor. They’re drawn tight. Wee-ette liked to keep the sun out, Ruthie says, and peeks out at the yard. She walks to Wee-ette’s high bed, and then to Wee-ette’s little writing desk and the typewriter. She touches the ribbon and says, It’s dry.
I ask her if she expected it to be wet and she says she doesn’t know.
I want to show Ruthie all of our pieces of wound string, our pacts, hidden in the heating vent. But she says, My husband writes about Harriet Wolf. My soon to be ex-husband, I think.
Ron, I say. He writes about Wee-ette? Why?
He’s a scholar. She published during the era he covers.
I’m not sure what to say because my mother hates Wee-ette scholars. Ruthie married the enemy. I ask her if he’s cruel. Is he a bad person or good?
She looks at me, startled. Honestly, she says, I don’t know if he’s good. Deep down. Then she gives a puff of air. Huh! It seems like you should know this about your husband. Is he good—yes or no? It’s the most basic question in the world. Never dawned on me!
She walks out of the room quickly, like it’s grown cold, her arms tucked to her chest.
Then there’s Ruthie’s old bedroom. I tell her it’s the guest bedroom now.
Do you get many guests? she asks.
I tell her no. We don’t ever. It’s also the sewing room, I tell her. There’s a sewing machine in the corner, a sewing box, and stacks of fabric. There’s also a stack of National Geographics and boxes. She touches the boxes, which are labeled: Tilton Grades 1–5, Tilton Grade 6, Tilton Homeschool Grades 7–12. Tilton College.
Ruthie asks me if Eleanor tried to homeschool me on the college level.
I tell her that I did very well. I say, You’d be surprised how high-achieving I am on the bubble test.
The SATs?
Yes.
Where do you go to take them?
I got a home version.
So this is my box, she says, looking at the box marked Ruthie—Random.
Do you want to open it? I ask.
Like I want to see the contents of my entire childhood confined to one lousy box.
You left us, I tell her.
But I existed before I left, didn’t I?
Do you want to sleep here? I ask, gesturing toward the small bed. You’re not a guest, though, I tell her. You’re family. This is your room again.
Sure, Ruthie says, but it’s a sad and demented house.
Don’t say that!
She apologizes and we walk into my room, full of bird books and manuals on how to fix common household items. As in Wee-ette’s room, a typewriter sits on a little desk. This is where I write poems for people’s special occasions, I tell Ruthie. I sleep in a canopy bed. I keep a journal. I point to it on my pillow. I paint birds too, like Audubon, but not as good.
Ruthie reaches between two of my paintings on the wall and lays her hand flat against the wallpaper—bicentennial, with little soldiers with guns, and eagles and stars. I remember this wallpaper. It’s burned into my head, she says. Maybe I’ll stay at a hotel, she adds.
I sit on the bed, and then let myself fall to the floor, cross-legged. The white dogs think I have come here, to their level, so we can sniff each other. But I haven’t. Don’t, I say to Ruthie. I want you to stay here.
She walks to me and sits on the edge of the bed and slides to the floor just like I did. Tilton, she says, this whole trip is even heavier than I thought it would be.
I tell Ruthie she used to be taller.
No, she says, you used to be shorter. And then she tells me that the world out there has changed. There are ways to help people who are different. There are ways to help people with fears and conditions.
That’s very good, I say.
I mean, there are conditions that some people have that aren’t bad at all, and they can get help. Therapies.
Are you okay? I ask her. Are you one of these people?
No, she says. Not me. And she stares at me, sad in her eyes.
I want her to cheer up, so I tell her that I can feel the new ending.
The ending to what?
The bedtime story.
She says, Jesus, Lord. I hated that bedtime story. She doesn’t still tell it?
Of course she still tells it! I say. It’s our story! And then, for no reason I can name, the new ending appears in my head.
Tilty? she says. Probably she can tell that some change has come over me—the American widgeon sensing something that no one else senses yet.
We’re going to be a family again, I tell her. All four of us. A mother, a father, and two children, as it should be. Plus a grandmother ghost.
Her lips form an O. You really would want that? she asks. Eleanor and George Tarkington? They’re strangers now. And I am too, I guess.
I rest my head on her shoulder. It’s the new ending, I tell her. It doesn’t matter if we want it or not.
She pats my hair and she tells me to hush. We can’t know the future, she says.
I tell her that I can because I’m like a widgeon. And I pet one of the dogs on its fluffed head, just like Ruthie was patting me, and I tell her, I don’t think I’m allergic to this kind of dog!
LORDY, LORDY
And then, right around dinnertime, Mrs. Gottleib arrives with a foil-wrapped spaghetti casserole. She talks to Ruthie, a little breathlessly, like Ruthie’s a movie star. She asks her where Ruthie’s been all these years. She says that Ruthie sure has traveled, sure has lived an exciting life, sure has learned a lot, and sure has pretty dogs. And she goes on telling about Albert’s death, and I should feel sad all over again. But I don’t. Albert had a bug up his tush, permanently, and, as my mother says, there are worse things than your husband leaving you, and that’s called Albert Gottleib staying with you.
Mrs. Gottleib says my mother is being released tomorrow morning at eleven, and insists on bringing her home. That way, she says, you’ll have time to get the house in order.
I see the mess now. The plastic milk jug has swelled a little from having sat out in the warm air. The cabinet doors yawn into the kitchen. The cereal bowls have piled up. The butter is a slick shiny blob in its dish.
Ruthie says, No
, no, Mrs. Gottleib. You’ve done enough.
I don’t mind! Mrs. Gottleib says. And there’s absolutely no need for Tilton to walk into that hospital again. Then she whispers to Ruthie that I got wound up last time.
But finally Ruthie gets her to leave. When Mrs. Gottleib is gone, Ruthie brings out a bottle of wine from an oversized canvas bag. She asks me if I want some.
No thank you.
But you’re over twenty-one, Tilton.
I say, Okay okay okay.
Ruthie has done so many things in her life, and I wouldn’t mind being a little bit more like Ruthie and a little bit less like myself all the time. No offense to me.
Ruthie pours wine into two juice glasses. We sip. The wine is not sweet, but it takes up more space in my mouth than a normal drink. I swish it because it seems like it could clean a mouth. The dogs have plopped onto the linoleum.
How’s Hailey? I ask. I’ve never told my mother, but I think of Hailey a lot. I think, What does she look like now? What does she love?
She’s good, Ruthie says. I think. I see her in August. She lives with her dad, you know.
In Tucson, I say. I want to meet her.
One day, Ruthie says, but she says it like a wish, not a promise.
I have to get the television back to Mrs. Devlin. I fixed it for her.
Who gets TVs repaired anymore? Everyone just goes out and gets a new one.
A lot of people get things repaired, I tell her. Toaster ovens, hand beaters, mixers, and record players. I swirl my wine, take another sip, and it’s not as good as cough syrup. I tell her, Eleanor brings them home. I fix them and get paid by my clients.
You ever see these clients?
I never see people, really. You know that, what with my weakened immune system.
Do you really think you have a weakened immune system? I mean, do you get sick a lot?