Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”
Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.
Your wife, your daughter, and your mother. The three women in your life.
Stuffing a sterling silver toast rack into her pillowcase, your wife yells, “Grace!”
The only sound is the roar of the vacuum cleaner from somewhere deep in the big house. The parlor, maybe the sunporch.
Your wife drags her pillowcase into the dining room. Grabbing a crystal bone dish, your wife yells, “Grace, we need to talk! Now!”
On the back of the door, the name “Peter” climbs as high as your wife can remember, just higher than her lips can stretch when she stands on tiptoe in her black pair of high heels. Written there, it says “Peter, age eighteen.”
The other names, Weston and Dorothy and Alice, are faded on the door. Smudged with fingerprints, but not painted over. Relics. Immortal. The heritage she’s about to abandon.
Twisting a key in the lock of a closet, your wife throws back her head and yells, “Grace!”
Tabbi says, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s this goddamn key,” Misty says, “it won’t work.”
And Tabbi says, “Let me see.” She says, “Relax, Mom. That’s the key to wind up the grandfather clock.”
And somewhere the roar of the vacuum cleaner goes quiet.
Outside, a car rolls down the street, slow and quiet, with the driver leaning forward over the steering wheel. His sunglasses pushed up on top of his face, he stretches his head around, looking for a place to park. Stenciled down the side of his car, it says, “Silber International—Beyond the Limits of Being
Paper napkins and plastic cups blow up from the beach with the deep thump and the word “fuck” set to dance music.
Standing beside the front door is Grace Wilmot, smelling like lemon oil and floor wax. Her smoothed gray head of hair stops a little below the height she was at age fifteen. Proof she’s shrinking. You could take a pencil and mark behind the top of her head. You could write: “Grace, age seventy-two.”
Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace’s hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.
Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You’ll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it’s time.”
And your wife, who doesn’t have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”
Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.
Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn’t that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn’t you always want to paint?”
The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.
Why Grace Wilmot is even cleaning, God only knows. What they need to do is pack. This house: your house: the sterling silver tableware, the forks and spoons are as big as garden tools. Above the dining room fireplace is an oil painting of Some Dead Wilmot. In the basement is a glittering poisonous museum of petrified jams and jellies, antique homemade wines, Early American pears fossilized in amber syrup. The sticky residue of wealth and free time.
Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.
Instead of packing anything of value, something they could sell, Grace brings this old box of paints. Tabbi has her shoe box of junk jewelry, her dress-up jewelry, brooches and rings and necklaces. A layer of loose rhinestones and pearls roll around in the bottom of the shoe box. A box of sharp rusted pins and broken glass. Tabbi stands against Grace’s arm. Behind her, just even with the top of Tabbi’s head, the door says “Tabbi, age twelve” and this year’s date written in fluorescent pink felt-tipped pen.
The junk jewelry, Tabbi’s jewelry, it belonged to these names.
All that Grace has packed is her diary. Her red leather diary and some light summer clothes, most of them pastel hand-knit sweaters and pleated silk skirts. The diary, it’s cracked red leather with a little brass lock to keep it shut. Stamped in gold across the cover, it says “Diary.”
Grace Wilmot, she’s always after your wife to start a diary.
Grace says, Start painting again.
Grace says, Go. Get out and visit the hospital more.
Grace says, Smile at the tourists.
Peter, your poor, frowning ogre of a wife looks at your mother and daughter and she says, “Four o’clock. That’s when Mr. Delaporte comes to get the keys.”
This isn’t their house, not anymore. Your wife, she says, “When the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the four, if it’s not packed or locked up by then, you’ll never see it again.”
Misty Marie, her wineglass has at least a couple swallows left in it. And seeing it there on the dining room table, it looks like the answer. It looks like happiness and peace and comfort. Like Waytansea Island used to look.
Standing here inside the front door, Grace smiles and says, “No Wilmot ever leaves this house forever.” She says, “And no one who comes here from the outside stays for long.”
Tabbi looks at Grace and says, “Granmy,
And her grandmother says,
Tabbi starts to open the front door, to take her suitcase to the car. That rusted junk pile stinking of her father’s piss.
Your piss.
And your wife asks her, “What did your grandmother just tell you?”
And Tabbi turns to look back. She rolls her eyes and says, “God! Relax, Mom. She only said you look pretty this morning.”
Tabbi’s lying. Your wife’s not stupid. These days, she knows how she really looks.
What you don’t understand you can make mean anything.
Then, when she’s alone again, Mrs. Misty Marie Wilmot, when no one’s there to see, your wife goes up on her tiptoes and stretches her lips toward the back of the door. Her fingers spread against the years and ancestors. The box of dead paints at her feet, she kisses the dirty place under your name where she remembers your lips would be.
JUST FOR THE RECORD, Peter, it really sucks how you tell everybody your wife’s a hotel maid. Yeah, maybe two years ago she used to be a maid.
Now she happens to be the assistant supervisor of the dining room servers. She’s “Employee of the Month” at the Waytansea Hotel. She’s your wife, Misty Marie Wilmot, mother of your child, Tabbi. She almost, just about, nearly has an undergraduate degree in fine art. She votes and pays taxes. She’s queen of the fucking slaves, and you’re a brain-dead vegetable with a tube up your ass in a coma, hooked to a zillion very expensive gadgets that keep you alive.
Dear sweet Peter, you’re in no position to call anybody a fat fucking slob.
With your kind of coma victims, all the muscles contract. The tendons cinch in tighter and tighter. Your knees pull up to the chest. Your arms fold in, close to your gut. Your feet, the calves contract until the toes point screaming straight down, painful to even look at. Your hands, the fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist. Every muscle and tendon getting shorter and shorter. The muscles in your back, your spinal erectors, they shrink and pull your head back until it’s almost touching your ass.
