Another contraction tore through my bowels.
—There was one night, she continued, one night in particular my mother told me about. She’d made this soup, this pistou. She spent the whole day. She used the basil she was growing in a little clay pot against the window. And our father never came. He never called. She smashed the pot of basil against the windowsill. Her whole hand was cut up. She told me she went to bed without cleaning it. When she woke up the next morning, she swore she would never be hurt by him again. She swore she would not pass that pain along to her child.
I laid my head against the cool window. Who knew how Alice’s mother might have acted had my father done to her what he did to mine. I’d come to learn, in any case, that it wasn’t my mother who was weak. It was my father who was weak to his own trivial needs. It was my father who had driven my mother mad. But once again, mad is not right. The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.
Staring straight ahead at the road, wavy with heat, I spoke very quietly.
—Do you want to know how our father died? I asked.
—What do you mean? she said.
—He didn’t die of cancer.
—How did he die, then?
—My mother killed him. She stabbed him many times with a regular kitchen knife. And then she slit her wrists in the bathtub. It looked like every movie you’ve ever seen and yet it was my mother. And our father was on the bed. He was in the pajamas I gave him for Christmas. They were wool and brown with four-leaf clovers. Nobody in my family was Irish.
—Why!
—Because of your mother and you.
She was shaking and asked me to please God tell her that wasn’t true and she was carrying on in a way my mother would have found hyperbolic. Another contraction. Alice became more hysterical. I worried about her ability to drive. But I’d been waiting to get to this point for many months. I’d been waiting to tell her. She was the only person who could make me feel less alone. Along the way I worried it was possible he loved her mother more than he loved mine. But that was not the right thing to wonder. The right thing was, Did my father love me as much as I thought he did?
That was why my mother killed him. Not because he cheated, not because he fathered a child with his mistress, not even because she believed he wanted his second family more. Men love a second chance, Gosia told me. They don’t deserve it, not at a woman’s expense.
The reason my mother killed my father was because he didn’t love her—or me—as much as he claimed to. I remember that time we visited Los Angeles and my father bought me that dress with the Peter Pan collar. I saw it in the store and loved it and my mother said I couldn’t have it and then later that night at dinner he passed a shopping bag across the table. The bottom of the bag dipped into the juices of my mother’s pollo alla Valdostana. The coveted dress was inside. I cried with love. When he got up to use the bathroom—perhaps to call his lover—my mother said to me, You love your father better, and that is all right. I thought she was being petty, but suddenly I could call up the pain in her eyes. The unfairness that I thought he was the better of the two of them.
My father did not love one family more than the other. It was that he didn’t care about either more than he cared about himself. And just like that, I understood why my mother did it.
And here was Alice, my younger sister, who of course knew nothing. I’d imbued her with a sorcerer’s wisdom and she was only a child. All she knew was happiness, the gift of a mother’s love that had never spoiled. I wanted to give you that. I wanted to be good. I knew at the very least that I would be better.
—Did she plan it?
—No, I said. I don’t think so. I also don’t think she planned on killing herself. She probably just hated herself as much as someone could hate herself.
Alice was crying so much that she had to pull over. I knew it wasn’t good for the labor. But I couldn’t stop her. She fell against me and I held her. She cried and clutched me. I said, Shh, shh, and I told her it was all right. Now we had each other. I told her I had always felt her beside me, that it was one of the things that had sustained me. That, starting the week after my parents’ deaths, I felt her in my bed snuggling against me. Tugging on my leg as I got up to use the bathroom, smiling while she listened to me pee, trailing me into closets as I dressed. Following me up the stairs and down the stairs. Later, borrowing my jeans, all my old slutty dresses. Reading beside me. Asking me to help her with makeup. Asking about boys. Gosia making barszcz with uszkami, these terrible
