coming home from work, it should have encouraged me to call directly, but it had the opposite effect. I had broken off talking to my mother while she was still vibrating with hatred for my father and the mayor and love for everyone else. I did not want to find her again only to discover that she had been diminished.
One day, out walking in a neighborhood near campus, I had a very clear vision of the house where I grew up, as seen from overhead: the brown rectangle, the green rectangle, the white fence. In my vision, my mother was there, standing forlornly in a corner of the front lawn, and I suddenly came over with an idea. Since I could no longer write letters to Jill, and since I could no longer speak to my mother on the phone, I would write letters to my mother.
The first one was written with the kind of unthinking innocence that always reveals itself, in time, to be a form of deceit. I decided to type it because my mother had always complained that she could not read my handwriting. I obtained onionskin paper because it was the best lightweight paper available at the campus bookstore. (Perhaps the Shrink Fence would challenge both of these statements.) In that first letter, I affected a more adult tone because I wanted to impress her with my independence. “I know we haven’t spoken for a while,” I wrote. “I wish it weren’t the case. Life in the States is good.” The rest of it was small talk about the news, save for one long sentence at the end where I tried to communicate what I understood of human connection: “The way in which I faded away is unforgivable and I would not blame you if you agreed,” I wrote, “which is why I am not asking that you write back, only that you continue to let me write to you.” I was helping my girlfriend move some furniture at her parents’ house that weekend, and I deposited the letter virtuously in a box at the corner of the street.
A few days later, my mother called me. “Guess what?” she said. “Your father wrote me a letter.”
The monstrosity of this misunderstanding should have compelled me to clarify matters right then and there. Why I didn’t, I will never know. But rather than disabuse my mother of her delusion, I redoubled it. I sent another letter, and this time I clearly took on my father’s persona, right down to the easy eloquence he assumed when painful matters were close at hand. “So much time,” he wrote, “and so little time within that time to make amends. Going backward, well, that is the behavior of a fool, but going forward without acknowledging the ways in which I crippled the past so that it could only hobble into the present, that is the behavior of a villain.” When I mailed that second letter, I was sure that I would be found out, if not by my mother, then by Jill. But Jill was out of the house, and my mother was failing, and this letter was something that she believed in more completely than if it were true. On the phone, she told me that he had written her again. “He moved to the earth,” she said, as if she had forgotten that I lived there, too. She was calling me regularly now, in part because she was rejuvenated by the letters, and in part because she was aging rapidly and forgot the calls almost as soon as she made them.
I should have stopped after two letters, or three, or five, or ten.
When Jill decided to marry Jack Holland, there was no thinking long and hard. She just did it, stepped into a bone-white cocktail dress and drove herself to a justice of the peace on the other side of town. Jack came straight from the pizza shop to meet her there. I didn’t think he was right for her, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she was only eighteen. He was too powerful, too big, with reserves of rough strength it seemed unlikely that she would be able to control. She was a delicate person, no matter how much she liked to pretend otherwise.
I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I congratulated her and asked her if there would be a party to celebrate. “Mom said she’ll throw one, but she’s slipping further every day,” Jill said. “I think I’ll have one for myself. But you have to promise to come and to bring your girlfriend.”
“Where will it be?”
“At the house, of course,” she said. Her voice had an offended note in it.
My girlfriend had never been to the moon, and I over-prepared her with stories about everything I could remember. Our flight was delayed, and we arrived midway through the party. As I came across the frontage, I saw that there were balloons tied to the fence. It looked like they were holding it up. I opened the gate gingerly and motioned my girlfriend through. Jill was the first person I saw, and her new husband was the second. I hugged her and shook his hand and told them both that, for the first time in my life, I felt certain that I didn’t have to worry about my sister. Behind them was a long wide table loaded with pizza. “Very nostalgic,” I said to Jill.
“What do you mean?” Jack said thuddingly. “I brought the food.”
“You did,” Jill said, and pulled him close to her. He refused to bend, and he towered over her, but he looked down with an expression that had no condescension, no cruelty, and no pity. It was an expression of total and unconditional devotion, and it came through loud and clear.
Jill and I stood in a corner of the yard while Jack took my girlfriend on a tour of the house. We made the smallest small talk: when I thought I might graduate, where she and Jack would live. Two little boys and a dog were playing tag outside of the fence. One boy lunged for the other, who evaded the tag. He bumped into the fencepost closest to us, which pulled up slightly.
“Someone should fix that,” Jill said.
“I’ll get right on it,” I said.
“You should see Mom,” Jill said.
“Of course,” I said. “Do you think I forgot?” But the truth was that I had.
My mother was sitting up against the house, in an armchair someone had brought out to the lawn. She was a small brown husk, hardly recognizable. But she brightened immediately when she saw me. “Is this your girlfriend?” she said, pointing at Jill. She grasped Jill’s hand. “You’re an angel,” she said. “I hope Goosey isn’t bothering you. He’s a horrible little thing.”
Jill scowled, then remembered who she was supposed to be. She smiled and excused herself. “I’m going to go powder my nose,” she said.
My mother took me by the elbow and pulled me down close to her mouth.
“You know who I’ve been hearing from?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Your father,” she said. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to upset you. I know that he stopped writing to you a while ago.” She paused, gripped the arms of her chair as if she might stand, thought better of it, relaxed. “Letters from your father,” she said. “Will you get a load of that?”
“I am so sorry,” I said. The grief in my voice was real.
DOWN A POUND
(Providence, 1990)
SHE HATES THE WAY HE WEIGHS HIMSELF EACH DAY. SHE HAS turned this into a kind of jingle. “She hates the way / He weighs himself / Each day.” It has the same melody as a commercial on television for a local car- repair shop. The repair shop’s song is “When something breaks / Just take your car / To Lake’s.” Sophie is thinking about the repair shop jingle while she drives along. Something has been rattling in the corners of the dashboard. Joe rarely rides in her car, and he won’t let her drive his truck, so the noise is her problem. “I’ll take a look at it,” he had said the night before, without a shred of conviction. Then he went into the bathroom to weigh himself.
He thinks that she doesn’t notice that he’s vain about his weight. She does notice, because when she was younger, she had a close friend named Peter who always used to complain about men who weighed themselves. “A man should only know what he weighs within five pounds,” Peter said. “And if he lies about his weight, he should lie on the high side. Being a man is about being a mass, at least in part.” Peter communicated his theories to her in rambling monologues that he wrote up longhand and sent as if they were love letters, which she supposed they were. He was uncertain about some of his theories, like the one about the faked moon landing or the one about feline telepathy. But he was sure about men and weight. “Look at me,” Peter said. “I’m two-twenty. You don’t hear me crying about my weight.” Peter was one-ninety, tops. She took his point.
Joe was two-twenty, most days. That morning he had come out of the bathroom with a smile on his face. “Down a pound,” he had said. Sophie was still in bed. She smiled back at his smile without thinking about why she
