“Look what I found!” their mother called, coming toward them and waving a handsaw. She looked pretty and rosy from the cold and Beatrice felt her heart lurch painfully.
“Are you planning to use my room?” she found herself asking, to her own dismay. This was not at all what she had wanted to say, especially in a voice that sounded high-pitched and sulky. “Using it as part of your business?”
Her mother frowned. “Beatrice, sweetheart. That room is always yours to stay in, whenever you want. You know that.” She held out a pair of crusty gardening gloves.
“Are strangers going to be sleeping there?” The sulky voice persisted. “Don’t you think that’s risky, considering all the valuable things around?”
An opening: her mother nimbly leaped. All those old magazines, she said—they were a serious fire hazard. All those little knickknacks and photos gathering dust on the bookshelves. And what was Beatrice still keeping in her drawers? Certainly nothing she’d ever think of wearing again. In fact, her mother had picked up some empty cartons at the liquor store, and was hoping that over the weekend they could make a trip to the drop-off bin outside the church.
A little box floated beside another item on the list, waiting to be firmly checked.
“That’s archival material, Mama!” The fanzines, the flyers, the packet of ketchup given to her by the drummer from the Volcano Suns. Her first leather jacket. Her first plaid schoolgirl skirt, pleated and saucy. Her first piece of black velvet, held together by safety pins. “You expect me to give away my Sister shirt?”
“You have an apartment,” Maggie said. “You could keep it there.”
“My apartment is minuscule!” Beatrice wailed. “We’re talking about important cultural history here!”
Their mother laughed. “What do you want me to do? Keep your bedroom hermetically sealed? A shrine to your youth?”
“Well, yes.” This was exactly what Beatrice wanted. A shrine. Dim, magical, hushed, undisturbed. Ideally climate controlled, so the vinyl wouldn’t warp. She had never put it into words before, but this was precisely what she was looking for when she came back to the house where she grew up. And, as always, her mother had managed to divine her heart’s desire. She had an uncanny ability to do so, which made her refusal to grant its secret wishes that much more exasperating. How had she known, one summer morning long ago, that Beatrice walked out the back door so purely delighted with herself, feeling like anything at all might occur that day, dressed as she was in torn T-shirt, leopard mini, ripped fishnets, red heels—an outfit ingeniously designed to disguise sluttiness as irony (So Sid and Nancy! she’d thought in the closet)—how had she known her daughter’s happiness? And happened to drive from the post office to the market along the same route that Beatrice was tottering her way to the bus stop? Beatrice heard a car honking from behind (in appreciation, she’d thought) and was discouraged to turn around and find her heat-seeking mother, face aglow, hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel. Somehow the episode—of thwarted desire; of surprise and humiliation—was remembered as a little piece of family comedy: an opportunity for Mama to roll her eyes and everyone to laugh about the time Bea left the house looking like an insane prostitute. And Beatrice knew even as she now spoke, even as she sighed, “Yes, actually, that’s what I want,” this very moment was becoming laughable, toothless, the time Beatrice tried to turn her bedroom into a museum.
“It’s not like you’re dead!” said Maggie cheerfully, and began kicking at the yew bushes again.
BUT THEIR FATHER WAS DEAD. It was impossible to come home and not think this thought every hour you were there. Maggie the biter had been right all along—everybody in that rackety house would disappear. First Beatrice, off grudgingly to college. Then Calvin, a few years later, with his towering backpack and his untouched passport. Their father next, falling to his knees on a tennis court. And their mother—still strictly present, of course, still standing there agitating her pans on the stove, but you could argue that she had been the first of them to leave. Beatrice wasn’t sure, but she thought it might have happened when Papa moved into the carriage house. Something shifted then; some agreement was reached between their mother and solitude. “You have to understand, Chinese don’t get divorced,” she had said one night when Beatrice and Calvin returned from a long afternoon of cheese sandwiches and Hearts. But she said it with defiance. She said it with a strange sort of exultation. She would be doing what no one else in her family or her acquaintance had ever done. She’d go back to graduate school—something useful, like accounting? University administration? She’d make appearances at parties alone. She’d practice a wartime frugality, keeping wings of the big house unheated and the children in hand-me-down clothes. It was doable. It was demanded of her. She’d pull through; she’d find ways; she would manage. The thought terrifying, but also bracing—like jumping
