clear. A head of garlic was resting alone on the counter, so I dug in my thumb and pulled it into sections. Pressed the heel of my hand on the side of a broad knife to smash down each clove. Peeled papery white layers off the firm yellow centers. Minced.
My mother hadn’t seen the bed out on the balcony, and when she came back, she was too agitated to cook, so I said I would do it. I’d already started. As Dad spoke to her in low tones in the next room, I salted a pot of water for spaghetti. I opened a can of good tomatoes, and added it to the chopped garlic and onion sizzling in olive oil. It was the first time I could remember making a whole meal, start to finish. As best I could, I kept focused on the task at hand, and as I chopped parsley into small wet green bits, I just tried to let the ingredients meet each other, as I had tasted in the onion soup.
Dinner’s ready, I said, after an hour. My father stepped in, prompt, stretching, and my mother wandered in with weary eyes and set the table. Her shoulders heavy. I placed a bowl of grated Parmesan cheese in the center of the table and served everyone a bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce. Dad rubbed my hair like I was a little kid; Mom opened a bottle of wine. They picked up their forks and folded into their bowls and ate quietly. I watched them eat for a few minutes, and then my mother asked if I was going to join them, so I felt the narrowness of the corridor and picked up my fork and twirled the pasta around it. The first full meal I’d made on my own. My hand shaking a little as I bit in.
The sauce was good, and simple, and thick.
Sadness, rage, tanks, holes, hope, guilt, tantrums. Nostalgia, like rotting flowers. A factory, cold.
I pressed the napkin to my eyes.
It’ll be okay, said Dad, patting my hand.
Once, during the meal, my mother looked up. Her eyes were wet. You made this?
Yes.
It’s good, Rose, she said. It’s filling. Where did you learn to cook?
Nowhere, I said. I don’t know. Watching you?
Have you been practicing?
Not really, I said.
They each had two helpings. I ate four bites of mine.
My father cleared his own dish, rinsed it and left the room.
My mother stayed at the table. Waves of worry about Joseph broke over her as she ran fingertips beneath her eyes.
We sat together, for a while, at our place mats. I tried to stay calm, after those bites. I hardly understood most of it.
When she stood up, moving more slowly than usual, we did the dishes together, washing the red streaks down the drain, spooning leftovers into bowls. I checked the pasta box ingredients to see what factory I’d tasted but nothing seemed to match.
Mom finished rinsing and drying the silverware. The lavender-scented dish soap, a pure clear purple. Outside the kitchen window, lamplight glimpsed off a dog collar as a neighbor toured the sidewalks, pulling the leash.
She squeezed out the sponge to dry and placed it on the aluminum bridge between sink sides. It seemed she’d forgotten I was there.
Where are you? she whispered out the window, into the night.
Part four. Here
35
I lived at home throughout what would’ve been my college years. I did not go to college. I worked first as a tutor for middle-school kids and then as an administrative assistant at a commercial company that produced cable TV ads. All those smiling people my father and I watched as we sat together paid my bills.
While Eliza and Eddie and Sherrie cycled through the dorms, and the dorm cafeterias, I took down my high- school movie-star posters and replaced them with landscapes and painting prints. I moved the weatherworn marriage stool into the closet and packed my dolls and high-school books in larger boxes and settled those in the garage. It was probably better for me anyway, to go simpler, to avoid the drama of the dorm cafeterias entirely, but mostly I stayed at home because Joseph was gone.
After my visit to his apartment, he did return, one more time. My mother had been driving over every day, several times a day, and on the sixth afternoon she found him facedown again on the floor of his bedroom, starfished. He’s back! she sang to us all, on the phone, from his place. He’s alive! She sat with him at the hospital, kissing his hands, drenched in reprieve, and my father nodded as if he’d known it all along, and more calls were made and fanfares blown, but I did not feel any relief. Doctors came and tested him extensively and my father called up experts and called in favors, but once Joseph was released he only stayed a few more days. As soon as he had an hour alone in his apartment he disappeared again and did not come back. There wasn’t even time to decide if he could stay at Bedford on his own anymore-he went there for a few hours to pack up books for school and Mom had to get groceries for dinner and that was it. To me, this was not a surprise; the act of seeing him there, changing, had been enough to point towards the inevitable future. Whether or not he returned once or twice or three times more, he was headed in, or into, away, and what I’d seen that day was a certain harbinger. The most sobering moment of my life.
When he did return that one time, pasty, exhausted, more drained and dehydrated than ever, refusing to comment, I went once to the hospital to visit, and that was the last time I saw him.
My mother still drove to his apartment every day, on her way to the studio. To check. He loved this apartment, she said, paying the rent and kissing the envelope fold before dropping it into the mailbox. He will return here, she said, when we drove past. She kept up the lease even though the rows and columns in the red leather ledger advised her otherwise. After six months went by, my father tried to convince her that Joseph knew where we lived-on Willoughby-and that he would come to his primary home first, but she raised her eyebrows when he started talking about it and walked right out of the room. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation about Joseph she would walk out of the room and then out of the house itself and we’d hear her car drive off. I never saw her grab any keys. I think she took to leaving them in the ignition, dangling, like a getaway.
On nights when she was home, in the TV room, huddled close to my father and that red leather ledger, muted television colors making stained-glass shapes on the carpet, he whispered into her hair about investing the rent money for a future day when Joseph would come back and need his savings.
Not yet, she said, sitting straighter. I feel he’s returning soon, and he’s going to want that place. I felt it strong today, as I was driving home, she said.
She ran her fingertips over the ballpoint-indented numbers, as if they could swirl into a code and tell her where to look.
It was the landlord who finally said no; he wanted to re-do the apartment appliances, and when he found out no one seemed to be living in apartment four at Bedford Gardens, he called up my mother, annoyed. She made up a story about how Joseph was attending graduate school back east in anthropology but that he loved the apartment for his times in L.A. and wasn’t it better to have a scarce tenant? The landlord, suspicious about sublets, asked her to move out, and so, on an overcast chilly Monday, I took the morning off work and my mother and I loaded all the items from Joseph’s apartment into the same green Ford truck she’d borrowed from the lumberyard long before. There wasn’t a lot to pack. Inside, the apartment itself looked just like how I’d seen it last-even the same distant smell of starch still hovering in the kitchenette.
I felt uncomfortable being there, so I kept an eye on his stuff, standing at the edges like a bodyguard, and in each room, my mother wept. She stood at the window in his bedroom, holding the edge for support, like a painting for the neighbors who might look up from their worlds. She stood at his bedroom closet for a while, as if trying to find a secret trapdoor he’d built into the wall leading to a nest he’d made in the insulation of the building. As if he
