his sleeves and doing the sorts of work he should have been doing when he had been in the pulpit. He insisted this wasn’t atonement. Altogether, it was a lot of information, and at first it felt rather formulaic to me. But then I came to a paragraph in which I saw his relentless self-control quiver: “If I make it to eighty, I wonder who will look back with me at the footprints I’ve left on the beach. I presume both that I will be the only one gazing at them and there will be but one set. This isn’t another plea for you to hear me out (I’ve already done that) or a plea wrapped in the most transparent of gauze that you’ll reconsider your distance; it is merely an acknowledgment that I am conscious of the tendency I have to wall myself off from others and that this inclination may not serve me well in the end.” I might have been more sympathetic if he had used the word
IT WAS AMANDA who said most firmly that I was being ridiculous about Stephen. She came to New York to meet with a gallery owner who represented Norman’s birds, and as she does always when she visits, she stayed on the daybed in my loft. That evening, while smoking a cigarette and sipping a diet soda watered down by melted ice, she told me, “You took in too much of our parents’ quarrels. You’re thinking too much about the fights that young girl must have seen over the years in Vermont. You’re looking for a reason not to commit.”
She was wearing a smock dress that fell to midthigh and a cardigan sweater that was navy blue. But I could see from her knees that she had put on a little weight. Not a lot, but some. Clearly she was in a better phase than she had been back in August. Somehow she had learned that I’d called both her therapist and her nutritionist, but she hadn’t been angry with me. Her hair had regained a bit of its natural luster.
“He had been sleeping with Alice Hayward and hadn’t told me,” I reminded her.
“So what? Think of all the angels and devils you’ve slept with.”
“And he killed a man.”
“He killed a man who had beaten his wife for years and just strangled her with his bare hands. Not a great loss for humanity.”
“I could never feel safe with him,” I said.
“You spend too much time reliving our childhood and adolescence.”
“Funny. I told Katie Hayward just the opposite. I told her I don’t.”
“And these days it’s not just ours you relive. It’s hers, too.”
“Hers? Katie’s?”
“Yup, that orphan. The kid.”
I thought about this. “Actually, it’s Alice I seem to think about most.”
“Maybe. But I know you. You’re fixated on the Haywards and you’re fixated on the Laurents. You think about us. You and me and-I don’t know-pick a night. Pick the night we cowered behind the living-room couch.”
I sipped my wine. Here was a memory that-try as I might-I was never going to repress. I was in the third grade at the time, and so Amanda had been in the fifth. It was a weekend, probably a Saturday night. Our parents had been out that evening, and our father had just returned from driving the baby-sitter home. Both our mother and father had been drinking heavily, and there must have been an angel looking out for that baby-sitter that night, because otherwise I can’t imagine how she would have survived the three-and-a-half-mile drive to her house. Our mother had kissed each of us sloppily as she had checked in on us in our bedrooms, accidentally waking us both with her awkwardness, and then stumbled back down the stairs. I remember vividly how it sounded as if she’d fallen the last few steps. Amanda and I hadn’t planned to get out of our beds when our parents returned, but we had both heard the slight tumble and gone to investigate. We saw that our mother was already up. She was standing in the kitchen between the sink and the dishwasher, leaning against the counter the color of fossils. She had a juice glass in her hand, half filled with scotch. She was in her own world and didn’t realize we were watching. When we heard our father pulling in to the driveway-squealing to a stop and splintering one of the wood panels on the garage door with the sedan’s bumper-my instinct was to race back upstairs to my bedroom, but Amanda grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me into the living room.
Their struggle that evening was about our mother’s drinking. At least that was what on the most obvious level had led our father to start in on her. On another level he had undoubtedly been angry at himself for dinging the garage door. And while I expected my mother to fight back by observing that he wasn’t exactly a teetotaler, instead she brought up some woman from his office with whom, she implied, he was having an affair. In reality I have no doubt that her language was far more specific and colorful. Sufficiently specific and colorful that he said she had a sewer for a mouth and he couldn’t believe he had ever once kissed it or (and Amanda insists that we have not made this up, our father really did say this) stuck his penis in it-though, again, he did not use so clinical a word as
At first we listened in on our parents’ fight from a perch atop the couch, but when we heard the rapid-fire sound of her open palm on his cheek and then the grunt as he punched her hard in (we would learn later) the abdomen, we dove over the back of the couch and hid underneath the table behind it. A moment later, our parents moved from the kitchen to the living room. Amanda and I have deconstructed what happened next any number of times in our adult lives, trying to make sense of what we heard or thought we heard in light of what we would discover later about the confusing and disturbing place where violence and adult sexuality sometimes intersected. Had our father sodomized our mother against her will that night over the front cushions of the couch? Had she asked him as he worked hard to hurt her whether he did this to his girlfriend, too? Had he told her, as the couch shoved the table against the wall and I almost cried out myself as one of its wooden legs tore a strip of skin off my pinkie, that she was a completely unfit mother and everyone would have been better off if he’d only fucked her there all these years?
“You know,” Amanda was saying now, “those troopers acted like they suspected Norman and me.”
“You? Why?”
“Well, Norman and I don’t make the best presentation, if you get my drift.”
“I thought they were just checking Stephen’s and my story.”
She chuckled and took a small sip of her soft drink. I noticed how carefully she nursed it, and I presumed this was a habit from drinking beverages that might have actual calories. I had drained my second glass of wine, and she had barely made a dent into her first diet soda. “Oh, they were. But when you meet a fellow with a criminal record who is as badly socialized as my Norman and a woman with my”-and here she paused, choosing her words carefully-“issues, you think they might be capable of anything. Anything bad, that is.”
After our father had finished with our mother, he slapped her one last time on her rear, and the sound was so sharp it echoed. Later I would think his hand must have hurt, too. Amanda and I wouldn’t go upstairs until our mother had lurched disconsolately into the bathroom (powder room in her vernacular) to clean up. We moved quickly but silently, because we understood that neither parent could ever know all that we had overheard. The next morning there would still be a small Rorschach of blood-a tree leaf, maybe, perhaps that of an oak-on the rug by the base of the couch, and the slipcover from one of the cushions would be in the laundry.
“I knew they thought I might have been involved,” I said. “But the two of you? That’s absurd.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. But I can see them looking at either you or me. Let’s face it: We’re both pretty damaged goods.”
Had she meant to be hurtful? It was possible. She knew that I didn’t view myself as any more damaged than most mortals. She knew that I took comfort in the way I was held close now by angels. When I said nothing, unsure how to respond, my older sister continued, “Seriously, Heather, just because our parents’ marriage was a disaster in every conceivable way, you shouldn’t assume all relationships are. My advice? Spend less time with your cherubim and seraphim. Spend more time with real people.”
“You’re the one living in the woods with the world’s quietest man,” I reminded her.
“And I’m a disaster. I’m nobody’s role model, least of all yours. But until you cut bait once again on what had the potential to be a terrifically normal-perhaps even healthy-relationship, I always presumed you were doing a lot better than me.”
There was never going to be anything normal or healthy about my involvement with Stephen Drew, but I was not going to argue that evening with Amanda. I remembered that Tuesday at the end of July when I had first met
