Dana

The tapping at the door is so faint and tentative it’s easy to pre- tend it’s not happening. The words that follow are whispered just as softly, but too audibly to ignore. Mrs. Dana, good morning. It’s after seven o’clock. The car is downstairs. Hello?

Brisk footfalls pad away. Dana has been dressed and ready to leave for more than an hour but is not yet prepared to face Marcella who begins flipping on light switches and emptying the dishwasher every morning at six-thirty. Marcella is an excellent cook and keeps the house in order, but it galls Dana how patronizing she can be, often speaking to her like she imagines someone addressing an imbecile—crossed arms, tilted head, exaggerated care—with words that to a stranger might sound respectful, even kind, but Dana hears disdain behind every syllable.

It’s time, Mrs. Dana, Marcella singsongs from behind the door, as if coaxing a child to eat vegetables. Time to go.

Another voice, higher-pitched and less sure, follows. Yes, hello?

Miss Goss, are you awake? Marcella’s right. It is time.

Christina. Marcella has brought her as back-up, Dana thinks, eyeing the door as a chess player anticipates her opponent’s next move.

The driver called to say he’s parked outside. It’s Philip. The one you like . . . not one of the old ones.

Christina is less annoying, but she can be manipulative, too, when Marcella puts enough pressure on  her. She’s younger than Marcella, who’s in her early sixties, though to Dana hardly looks fifty. The olive skin, she thinks. And the extra weight. Dana remembers something her grandmother told her when she was in high school: When you get older you choose your fanny or your face—one or the other, but never both. Just look at your Aunt Lee, she looks young and adorable, for her age, but she absolutely can’t wear clothes. She looks like an Irish nanny with good jewelry.

Looking in the mirror across the room from where she sits on the bed, Dana reports joylessly, Grandmother, today I choose my fanny. She runs her hands across her flat stomach to remind herself why she has allowed her face to thin the way it has. She loved her Aunt Lee when she was alive, but agreed with her grandmother: size two and scary was better than size ten and adorable.

Good morning. Hello? Are you awake?

Christina again. What Dana appreciates most about Chris- tina is that she doesn’t exude disapproval the way Marcella does; does not presume to know what is best, nor register impatience when she refuses to finish the meals Marcella has prepared, or when she does not respond right away when called to wake up. Unlike Marcella, who lives in Washington Heights with her husband, daughter and granddaughter, Christina has no children, no husband, and lives in a room behind the gym in the basement of Dana’s townhouse. She is nearby, and more useful, though lately has frequently been called away to tend to her mother’s ill health.

Christina’s mother was one of the maids in the apartment Dana grew up in on the Upper East Side. Her name was Ada and she’d come with her parents from Florida, and Mexico before that, to work for Dana’s family when she was a girl. Ada had already dropped out of high school by then, but her younger sister, Lupita, was only nine, one year younger than Dana. Their mother, Maria, had been in charge of everything inside the apartment in the city as well as at Edgeweather, the estate in Connecticut that had been in her father’s family since the Civil War. Maria’s husband, Joe, took care of the house and grounds, and lived there year-round with Lupita, while Maria and Ada stayed in the city during the week and came up with Dana’s family most weekends.

Dana can still remember how ecstatic her mother was when the arrangement had been made to have the Lopez family come from Florida to work for them. She’d overheard her parents discussing it and her father finally agreeing to some kind of legal responsibility having to do with green cards that her mother had been pressing him to commit to. There hadn’t been a full-time staff at Edgeweather since the Deckers, a couple who’d taken care of the place for many years, had to leave because they’d gotten too old. Dana’s mother was also having a bad run with housekeepers and maids in the city at the time and the only person she trusted was Maria Lopez, the part-time maid in their house in Palm Beach. For a while it seemed that Dana’s mother’s entire well-being hinged on whether Dana’s father could manage to deliver Maria and her family to New York. Once he had, Dana remembers hearing him tell a colleague who’d come to their apartment for drinks that not since the days when staff was shipped from Africa had anyone gone to the lengths he’d had to go to in order to employ the Mexican family his wife had become fixated on.

Miss Goss, Christina pleads from behind the door. You said to make sure you were out the door by seven and it’s already seven-fifteen.

Christina is on her own now. Smart, Dana thinks with a rival’s respect, imagining Marcella ten steps down the hall, motioning with her fist for Christina to knock again.

I’m so sorry, she says, beginning to sound defeated, but we’re running out of time.

Fine, Dana exhales, shrugging her shoulders like a teenager, as if leaving the apartment on time wasn’t precisely what she’d insisted on the night before. Groaning, she pulls an old briefcase from her bed to her lap. It was a gift her father gave her the summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Bryn Mawr, the summer he’d arranged for her to work at the bank with him. The case is the darkest brown, nearly black, made by the same company in England that had made her father’s. The brass hard- ware was now dulled, but in gold her embossed initials, D.I.G., marched crisp and clear and still embarrassing beneath the handle. Dana Isabel Goss. The case was ridiculous. It always had been. Boxy and manly and expensive, and save for her father’s far more preferable initials, G.R.G., an exact copy of the one he carried most days of his life. Dana had held hers only a few times. As her mother had predicted, Dana didn’t last long at the bank. After two and a half days on the job she withdrew three hundred dollars in cash from the trust her grandmother created, something her nineteenth birthday in March had finally allowed, walked out onto Park Avenue, and with briefcase in hand, hailed a taxi. She remembers feeling simultaneously rebellious and professional, a soon-to-be-fugitive in a tasteful blue blazer and skirt, clothing her mother had insisted on. Wells, Connecticut, she com- manded after closing the taxi door, sounding as much like her father as she could. When the driver began to say, Miss, I don’t know . . . she clicked open the briefcase, pulled out a handful of cash and fanned it in front of her so that he was sure to see it in the rearview mirror. This was something she was sure her father would never, ever, do. Okay, okay, just tell me how to get there, the driver said. Already mortified by her own theatrics, she slumped back in the seat and tried her best to explain how to drive from the city to Litchfield County.

The day was July 3, 1969, a Thursday, one of the only dates Dana remembers. Not because she’d left the bank that morning without telling her father, or even because she’d spent the first money from her trust on a ridiculously expensive taxi ride. She remembers the date because it’s the one that marked the last day of what she would imprecisely call her youth, a period where her actions didn’t yet have consequences, or if they had, they hadn’t mattered very much.

Do you need my help? Christina calls again from behind the door, louder than before, her tapping escalating to a full-blown knock.  I can help, she offers, the manipulation creeping in, Marcella no doubt looming nearby.

Coat on, briefcase held in front of her with both hands at the bottom corners, she gets up from her bed and walks to the door. When Christina’s knocking finally stops, Dana speaks—just above a whisper, with a trace of acquiescence, as if selflessly agreeing to perform a very difficult task being asked of her. I’m ready, she says, and waits for the door to be opened.

Jackie

A vinyl shade slaps the window near the foot of her bed. From the basement, a slow ticking, the bang and shudder of the propane furnace. Outside, old tree limbs creak and pop above the single- story house. Robins and finches deliver the news of morning, but more loudly than usual, as if they are greeting sunlight for the very first time.

Eyes closed, cheek pressed into the foam pillow she’s slept  on for decades, Jackie curls onto her side toward the middle of the mattress. She rubs her feet together, circles the pillow   with both arms, and burrows deeper into the familiar softness. The lingering fragrance of dryer sheets tugs her gently back across the gap between awake and asleep, where ghost sounds of crowded mornings fill her ears—cabinet doors slamming shut, young voices tangling from the kitchen, a chair squeaking along the linoleum floor. An old, low flame of duty flickers to life. Lunches to pack, report cards to sign, laundry to graduate from the washing machine to the dryer, hamburger meat  to  move from the freezer to the refrigerator to thaw, a blouse to iron for work. A rapid-fire volley of shouts, Give it back! Leave me alone! I’m telling Mom!

A crow’s mad caw fouls the air. Nawwwh! Nawwwh! The shrill holler repeating, repeating. Jackie refuses to open her eyes, though the half-dream of facing a day busy with errands and work and children has gone. Nawwwh! Nawwwh! The almost-words feel like rocks thrown at her. She winces and pulls the bedding around her shoulders. The crow continues, its call bossier, more human.
Now!, it insists. Now! Now!

When it finally stops, Jackie listens for the noise of her squab- bling children, both of whom have long since grown up and moved out. She tries to will the old feeling of too many demands on her time to return, but she only becomes more awake and aware of the morning as it actually is. The slapping shade. The tick and moan of the furnace. The straining hum of the refrigerator in the empty kitchen. And on the other side of her bedroom door, what is always there: lifeless rooms and a day that does not need her.

Jackie opens her eyes, but remains still. She needs to drink a glass of water, she decides, but does not get up. Something flashes in her peripheral vision and she tilts her face to the wall next to the bed. On the scuffed pine floor, blades of light expand and thin as the shade gapes out and up, then down. She remembers how her son, Rick, would taunt the family’s cat, a skittish calico named Maude, with the beam of a flashlight along any surface. Watching Maude scramble and rush after the bright spot was one of his favorite mischiefs. No matter how forcefully Amy would marshal her older-sister authority and insist he stop, Rick was unmoved. The cat would go berserk and hurl itself at the elusive glow until it slammed into the wall or a piece of furniture, shaking its whiskered head, stumbling to regain equilibrium. Amy would eventually put a stop to it, scoop Maude in her arms. You’re going to kill her, she’d hiss. Look at her shaking! Rick’s pleased grin made clear that his sister’s fury had been the goal all along.

The window shade calms and the light show ends. What’s left is a bedroom wall with cracked paint and brown silhouettes of small fist-shaped clouds—water stains from a roof leak in the ’90s. Jackie hears the dull sizzle of a bumblebee buzzing and bumping against the screen. She’s seen the bee only once, less than a week ago, when it came around for the first time. It was enormous, and appeared drunk or ancient or both and seemed barely able to stay aloft as it knocked softly against the wire mesh. It has returned every morning since but only as a sound.

She remembers Rick mowing the lawn at fourteen, upsetting a nest of yellow jackets. When Jackie first heard his shouts she’d reflexively reached for a dish towel and ran it under water. Swat- ting and howling, ripping off his shorts, T-shirt and underwear as he made his way down the hall, Rick exploded into the kitchen like he was on fire. But before she went to him, she noticed small, blond-brown hairs curling at the center of his chest, under his arms, above his privates. She could also see the beginnings of muscles along his shoulders and arms, nudging from beneath his still-perfect boy’s skin. For the first time approaching her son’s body, she paused. In that split second Jackie felt simultaneously startled, shy, and betrayed. It was as if he’d deliberately grown up behind her back, and was only now, by accident, getting caught. A sharp pinch of fear tightened in her chest with every other complicated and all-at-once feeling. She rushed to her son and began swatting the yellow jackets from his neck and legs, stomping them under her rubber-bottomed slippers as they fell to the kitchen floor. Get them! Hurry, Mom!, he’d shouted as he danced naked and desperate, a little boy again, between the butcher block and the kitchen sink.

Outside the bedroom window, the bee’s drone fades, and an older memory overwhelms the one of her son. Floyd, the summer between her junior and senior years in high school, standing alongside a green barn, looking intently at something, or some- one, behind the building. There is no break from his focus and Jackie cannot tell if he’s upset or curious. She’s pulled into the dirt driveway at Howland’s Farm to pick up eggs for her mother. A quarter for a dozen, which everyone who knew to do so left in a rusty blue coffee can that sat on the plastic crate by the door. Of course she’d hoped to run into Floyd. Why else would she have driven her mother’s Mercury wagon twenty minutes to get eggs when the grocery store in Cornwall was less than five minutes from her house? Seeing him right away feels like a too-good-to- be-chance stroke of luck, like a shooting star at the first glimpse of the night sky. And here he is. The second tallest boy in the senior class, the one who kissed her two Saturdays ago on the dock at Hatch Pond. It hadn’t been a long kiss, and it started more on her right cheek than on her lips, but it was her first. He’d kissed her again last night, too, briefly, in his truck, after driving her home from the Fourth of July picnic. Now, appearing in almost perfect profile to her, so transfixed by whatever lay just beyond the barn’s edge that he hadn’t heard the tires of the station wagon crunch dirt and rock as it rolled to a stop, she wonders if these had been his first kisses, too.

A pipe rattles in the bathroom wall. Jackie opens her eyes, but it’s not the edge of her pillowcase bunched against the fitted sheet that she sees, it’s Floyd’s blue shirt. It must be new, she decides, as it starts to fade from view, because the collar is stiff, like a dress shirt, and the color—some shade between denim and cobalt—is flawless in the way that’s only possible before a garment has had its first wash. Against the brilliant green of the barn, the blue is striking, even strange. Has she seen these two colors, on their own or together, since? Not likely, she thinks, squinting her eyes shut—tight, quick—and opening them with purpose to switch off the memory as she would an annoying television commercial.

Jackie jerks from her side to her back and begins to sit up. She grabs the cool, unused pillow and places it behind her on top of the warm, wrinkled one she’s clung to all night. She scooches her back against it and straightens her spine, the noise of mattress coils ceasing as she stills. How many times has she completed these precise movements, drifted into these same half-dreams and considered how often this exact morning has happened before? She ignores the old question and breathes in deliberately, deeply, as if bracing for an attack, or preparing for an action that demanded great courage. Fully awake, she exhales, and in the silence that follows feels the present gather as a dull weight on her chest and shoulders.

The window shade floats up and light dazzles the room. Cool air chills her hands. Through the exposed gap she sees the spotty April lawn, the cracked asphalt driveway, the budding and newly leafed trees. She scans for the scolding crow and the bumblebee but sees neither. The shade glides down, settles again. Jackie’s right hand covers her left and her fingers find the surface of her wedding ring. She presses her thumb into the small round diamond there, her pointer and middle fingers taking their positions along the thin gold band to commence their old habit of twisting back and forth, tugging the ring gently and then occasionally with force, against her knuckle.

From outside, she hears the low crumble of tires on asphalt, the smooth growl of an engine whining momentarily as it shifts to a high, soft, idling hum. At first Jackie thinks it must be the UPS truck, or Amy, but minutes pass without the expected sounds of cut engine and slammed door.

Eventually, the shade lifts again, slowly, as if by a reluctant hand. She sees only for a second what is there, parked at an odd angle as if to further emphasize how temporary and unlikely its visit. A black car, dark-windowed and new, with New York plates and plumes of exhaust billowing extravagantly into the cold morning air like cream clouding into tea, or the special effect Jackie had seen in movies when she was young, the one that signaled the presence of a diabolical ghost, or the arrival of a witch.

Not a word in all these years, and now so many. I found your number in a photograph, it was on the side of your van. I’m sorry, I know that sounds strange. I thought . . . Can you please call me. It’s important. She’d never heard the sounds of her first coos and mangled words, and now, in her ear, complete sentences, hurried  and adult. The woman speaking in the voicemail message is so upset she forgets to say who she is, where she’s calling from. But Lupita knows. She’s listened to the message twice since dropping off a family from Ann Arbor at their hotel in Princeville. Her phone had rung an hour before from an unidentified number. A pale, blonde woman with her bald husband and teenaged son were still in the minivan, telling her about the harsh Michigan winter they’d just escaped. She’d clicked the button on the side of her phone to silence the ring and let it go to voicemail as she half-heard the family’s stories of frozen pipes, canceled basketball games, and fender benders on ice-slicked roads—the same calamities of winter Lupita had grown up with but left behind when she moved to Hawaii half a century ago.

As she’s heading back to the airport in Lihue to pick up another weary family antsy for Kauai’s wild beaches and misty cliffs, her phone rings again, vibrating in the dashboard mount, Unknown Caller flashing from the screen for several seconds before it vanishes. She exhales when the call drops and only then realizes she’s been holding her breath.

Traffic on Route 56 slows to a stop. Brake lights on cars and buses and vans blink a long, erratic line of agitated red ahead of her. A local girl without a helmet speeds past on a mini-bike, the ragged growl of her wrecked muffler for a moment the only sound; she shoots ahead in the narrow space between the traffic and the road’s shoulder, her long brown hair whipping behind. Lupita watches until she disappears over the first hill. The phone rings again. Distracted, she pushes the green “Accept” button on her phone screen.

Hello?, the voice is timid, no trace of Mexico but why would there be. Is this Lupita Lopez? Harsh, crackling static suggesting a very long distance fills the van. Before she hears another word, Lupita stabs the phone with her finger and ends the call.