Once a week, Julia phoned Rose. The call sounded like the long distance it covered: Sometimes there was static, and Rose sat on her condo’s balcony, where she could see a sliver of ocean, so there was noise on her end too. Wind, occasional car honks, perhaps the sea.
“The air is different here,” Rose said. “Softer. Saltier too.”
“Alice can almost roll over,” Julia said. “Did you get the last set of photos? The ones I took in the park?”
“Yes,” Rose said. “She looks healthy. Did I tell you the ladies and I take turns cooking dinner?”
Julia looked down at Alice, who was lying in her lap. The baby was holding and inspecting one of her feet. What a marvel, Alice seemed to be thinking. Look at this craftsmanship. Julia smiled.
She heard her mother say, You have to let me go.
“What did you say?” Julia said.
“I made enchiladas for the first time. They weren’t bad either.”
Julia shook her head to clear it. She said, “Mama, did you feel different after having me? After becoming a mother?”
“What a question! I barely remember that time, Julia. By the time you were Alice’s age, I was pregnant with Sylvie, wasn’t I? I was far too busy to think about how I felt.”
Julia nodded. What had happened seemed to have happened only to her. “I have to go now, Mama. This call is expensive.”
When she hung up, Julia put Alice down for her nap. The baby was always amenable to the idea of sleeping. Each time she was laid in the bassinet, she seemed to set her mind to the task at hand. Alice closed her eyes, a small smile on her lips, and tried her best to sleep.
Julia pulled the shades and lay down on her own bed. She’d figured out why it was her father she’d yearned for since Alice was born. She wanted to explain to Charlie how she now saw the world, because he was the one who would understand. Her father had seen her power—understood its scope—before she had. When Julia told him that she and William were getting married, Charlie had looked disappointed for a split second. That reaction hadn’t made sense to Julia at the time, because she knew her father liked William. But Charlie had stopped calling her his rocket around the same time, and Julia realized now that her father had hoped for more for her. He’d seen her potential and wanted to watch her soar, not marry and make a home. “I can do both, Daddy,” she said now into the room softened with the sound of light baby snores. “I’ll figure out how to do both.”
Sylvie
FEBRUARY 1983–AUGUST 1983
THERE WAS A THREE-MONTH GAP between when Sylvie stopped sleeping at Julia and William’s apartment and when she got her own place. She’d told Julia that she had an apartment to stay in when she moved out. This wasn’t true, though. She didn’t have anywhere lined up. She’d simply known, the evening she’d forgotten her keys and spoken to William on the bench, that it was time for her to live somewhere else. That was the second time Sylvie had cried since her father’s death; the first was after she’d read William’s manuscript.
She’d been surprised to hear herself talk about how she missed Charlie, and surprised to talk about the stars, and surprised to start crying, and surprised to feel William’s sadness beside her too, as if in answer to her own. It felt like she’d tripped a switch and ended up in a place where she saw her brother-in-law’s true state, and he saw hers. William had recognized the loss she was carrying inside her and spoken it aloud. No one else in Sylvie’s life had identified the specific swirl of her pain; no one had understood her since her father died. That recognition had felt like drawing in giant mouthfuls of air after holding her breath for a long time.
Later that night, lying on the couch while her sister and William slept in their room down the hall, Sylvie decided it was too risky for her to continue to stay there. She felt vulnerable, at risk to her own elements, in William’s company. This didn’t feel like his fault or her own; it felt as if the amalgamation of her grief over Charlie, plus reading William’s footnotes, plus the handful of minutes when she was too tired to put up boundaries on the bench, had made it impossible for Sylvie to act like a normal person around her brother-in-law. She was also aware that when William had announced they should go inside, she’d almost grabbed his arm and said no. She’d felt seen during those minutes on the bench, and she’d wanted to remain with William in that spot. Sylvie knew it wasn’t appropriate for her to crave more time alone with her sister’s husband; she knew better.
After she moved out, she slept on co-workers’ floors and sofas and several times with Emeline in her single bed. When Head Librarian Elaine went on vacation, she put Sylvie in charge of the library, and on those nights Sylvie slept in the library’s lunch room. The room had a soft yellow couch that functioned well as a bed, and Sylvie used a washcloth to clean herself in the bathroom sink before opening the library’s doors for the day. She often carried her overnight bag to evening classes, because she’d be sleeping in a different location from the night before. The wind off the lake was brutish that spring, and she had to fight for every step.
This transience made Sylvie feel skittish and unfocused—without a home, her movements often felt random. She’d always lived with family, and she hadn’t realized how big a role waking up in the morning to the sounds of her parents, or Julia, played in her feeling like herself. Her family was a mirror in which she recognized her reflection. When she woke up on a co-worker’s couch, not sure where she was for a few moments, she didn’t know who she was either. She was visited by William’s questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Who am I?
Sylvie had to come up with tricks to create a sense of continuity and keep track of herself. Wherever she was staying, she went into the bathroom first thing in the morning and studied herself in the mirror. She had never done this before. She’d never been particularly vain or interested in her appearance, but now she needed to remind the girl standing in front of the mirror that she was roughly the same person day after day. She looked at the state of her hair, which was never negotiable—she accepted whatever crazy angles or cowlicks appeared after a night’s sleep—and noted the green flecks in her brown eyes. She said, “Good morning, Sylvie,” and then brushed her teeth.
She started rereading her father’s copy of Leaves of Grass. Charlie had underlined passages and written in the margin too many times to count: Wonderful! It had been several years since she’d read the collection from start to finish, and this time Sylvie was surprised by how much death was in it. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman listed numerous definitions of grass, but Sylvie’s favorite was the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Sylvie thought of this when she visited her father’s grave. According to the poet, death wasn’t final, because life was tangled into it. Sylvie and her sisters walked the earth because of the man they’d buried. These thoughts, and reading Whitman’s words, made more sense to Sylvie than the polite chatter of the lady in the seat next to her on the bus or the fact that there never seemed to be enough money in her purse.
Rose left for Florida in the middle of that period. Kissing her mother’s cheek goodbye, and then rushing to the hospital to meet baby Alice a few hours later, felt correct to Sylvie—it matched the level of upheaval inside her. Her father was gone, and now her mother and their family home were gone too. Sylvie had seen a photo of the aftermath of a massive earthquake once, and the image had stayed with her. A road split in half lengthwise, revealing the middle of the earth, and how silly humans were to build houses and schools and cars on top and pretend they were safe. Sylvie felt like she spent her days carrying an overnight bag and a book, leaping over that chasm. The morning that Rose left, Sylvie stood in front of the bathroom mirror and said, “Goodbye, Mama. Good morning, Sylvie.”