Windfalls: A Novel Read online

  “No,” Anna said, looking across the yard at the quiet fields and trying to keep the ache out of her voice. “I think it’s a nice idea—preserving light.”

  Above them in the deepening sky the first stars were appearing. Anna felt the ache widening inside her, felt the gaping yearning returning.

  “I was always so practical,” her grandmother said lightly. “It frightened me, when I first started thinking like that. Later I got used to it, I suppose.”

  “Hmmm,” Anna answered, and then roused herself to ask, “What made you think that way? At first?”

  There was a pause so long Anna thought her grandmother hadn’t heard. Then she said, “I lost a daughter.”

  Lost? Anna thought, trying to make the words fit inside her head. A daughter? A sizzle of warning ran along her spine. She felt a moment’s disbelief, a refusal as if her grandmother were joking or even lying, or as if she’d somehow gotten the facts of her own life wrong. Anna darted a startled glance at her, but she appeared as serene as ever, looking quietly out toward the darkening garden. She said, “I doubt your father ever told you.”

  “No,” Anna answered cautiously. “Dad never said a thing.”

  Her grandmother nodded. “It was before he was born—or Charles or Henry, of course.” She was silent for a moment, and then she gave a gentle laugh. “I haven’t spoken of her for years—decades, maybe, by now.”

  Anna thought, I cannot bear to hear this. “What happened?” she forced herself to ask.

  “She died,” her grandmother answered, “being born.” She spoke so mildly she might have been talking about a recipe or the weather. “I carried her to term, but I lost her before she ever took a breath.”

  Anna made a small involuntary moan, a little sound of pain and sympathy.

  “It was a difficult birth,” her grandmother continued, the yarn still jigging between her needles. “A dry birth, was what they called it back then. It took so long to get her out, I’d nearly given up on living myself by the time she came. I used sometimes to wonder if that was what had killed her, me forgetting about her in all my pain.”

  “Oh, no,” Anna answered ardently, reaching her hand toward her grandmother, although she sat too far away to touch her. “That couldn’t—”

  “I know that now,” her grandmother said. “But then I wanted so much for there to be a reason. I needed some way to understand it, something to blame. Even if the blame was mine, it seemed easier to bear. It’s hardest, you know, just to let things be.”

  Warm as the light from a candle flame, a glow was widening low in the sky behind the crest of the farthest hill. The moon, Anna thought, and beyond all expectation she felt an answering bloom of hope.

  “Afterwards,” her grandmother went on, “everyone had an explanation for why I shouldn’t take it too hard. They said the Lord needed her in heaven, or that her heart was so weak she would only have suffered had she lived, or that it was a blessing I hadn’t had her longer and come to know her more and love her better before she left me. But I just wanted to hit them when they talked like that, all of them—the doctor and the preacher and even my own mother. I wanted to spit at them, and kick and scream. There was a wildness,” she said awkwardly, “I’d never known before. Sometimes that winter I wanted to tear off my apron and all my clothes and run into the fields and lie down in the snow and die. I had a longing to let the winter wheat sprout up through my ribs. I wanted to join her—my only daughter—in the dirt.”

  All the crimson roses had vanished into the evening, although the white roses still remained, hovering like glowing ghost-flowers in the darkness.

  “What was she like?” Anna asked, and then cringed, afraid she’d asked something wrong.

  “She was the loveliest thing,” her grandmother answered promptly, her voice ringing as though she were reading from the Bible or telling a story she knew by heart. “Though I got only a glimpse of her, in the nurse’s arms. They said it would be too upsetting if I held her. But I never forgot how she looked. She was the prettiest of all my babies, the very prettiest one.”

  The edge of moon rose above the horizon, spreading a wide nimbus of yellow light in the dark blue sky. “How did you stand it,” Anna asked softly, “losing her?”

  So harshly it almost sounded like a rebuke, her grandmother answered, “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “I—know,” Anna said. “I’m sorry.” She pressed her open hand against her stomach.

  “No one has a choice,” her grandmother added gently. “You always think, ‘I couldn’t bear that,’ but when it happens, you see you have no option but to bear it.”

  The moon broke free of the horizon, rose full and huge and golden into the clear night sky. Her grandmother spoke again. “You fold it back into your life, as best you can. I suppose a corner of my heart died when she did, and it never came back. But the rest of my heart compensated somehow, like the way they say a blind person’s other senses get more alert.

  “It’s funny,” she went on. “The boys all outgrew me, moved on into their own lives. But she stayed with me, all these years. Of course I imagined a life for her, how old she’d be, what she’d be doing, the kind of woman she’d have become, but she never left me, never moved on.”

  Gentle as a whisper Anna asked, “What was her name?”

  “They buried her before I had a chance to name her. They said that was for the best, not to wait. But later I named her anyway, in my thoughts. I would have called her Lucy, had she lived. It’s queer,” she added softly. “But I only just now realized—I don’t believe I’ve ever told anyone that before.”

  “Lucy,” Anna repeated, looking at the moon. She wished she had the courage to cross the porch and fold her grandmother in her arms. She wished her grandmother would come across the porch to hold her.

  “It’s from the Latin,” the old woman explained, “for light.”

  The breeze they had been waiting for suddenly arrived, rustling through the wheat like a sleeper shifting, wafting the scent of roses over them, licking Anna’s bare arms so that she shivered and pulled her knees tighter to her chest. In the darkness the roses still bloomed, offering up to the night the shapes and colors that could no longer be seen by human eyes.

  “I suppose,” Anna mused, though she spoke so quietly she wasn’t sure her grandmother would hear, “you just go on, in spite of everything.”

  There was a silence so long that the moon had risen higher in the sky before her grandmother finally spoke again. “Not in spite of,” she answered above the soft clicking of her needles. “Because.”

  By now the moon was small and high and white. Around them, the fields seemed to be floating in the moonlight like pale roses. Looking across their curves and shadows, Anna suddenly felt as though she were seeing them for the first time. It was as though her vision had been doubled, as though her sight had expanded to include what was lost. She felt a deep ecstatic ache, felt the slow burn of tears rising in her eyes, felt the emptiness inside her thrumming like a gift. “Because,” she whispered, gazing out on the glowing fields through the living film of her own tears, “because.”

  INTO THE FLUX

  SATURDAY MORNING WAS ALWAYS THE WEEK’ S SWEETEST TIME, when the last five days of hurry and hard work and being apart from Melody had already begun to recede into the past, and the whole weekend still stretched out ahead, like a beach untouched by footprints, like a cake without a single bite gone. Saturday mornings Cerise did not have to punch in at the nursing home two hours before Melody’s school began. On Saturday mornings they could get up together, Cerise waking long before Melody and then lying in bed, warm and grateful and dozing, waiting for Melody to crawl up from her mattress at the foot of Cerise’s and worm her way into her mother’s arms. On Saturday mornings Cerise did not have to worry about Melody getting up and dressing and fixing her own bowl of cereal and getting herself to school while Cerise was fifteen miles away, mopping her way down Woodland Manor’s endless halls.

  S
aturday mornings they could have breakfast together, the two of them kneeling next to each other at the coffee table in the cramped front room, eating toaster waffles smeared with Jiffy and pooled with Aunt Jemima while cartoons flickered across the TV screen. It was their favorite breakfast, their Saturday breakfast, the breakfast Cerise splurged on once a week. It was the breakfast they fixed together for each other, working elbow to elbow in the cramped dark kitchen—Cerise keeping watch over the treacherous toaster while Melody spread peanut butter soft as shortening across the surface of each steaming waffle.

  It was the breakfast they could savor, Cerise eating her waffle slowly, while Melody raised her plate to her face to lap up the last sticky goo. As they ate, Melody talked about the kids in her class and what her teacher had said, about what she had to do for homework and the kind of clothes she thought were cool, and Cerise, remembering her own unhappy days in school, listened in proud astonishment to her daughter’s chatter.

  There was a rhythm to Saturdays, a progression of pleasures that repetition only seemed to hone. After they had finished eating, Cerise cleared their dishes off the coffee table while Melody ran to the bathroom to get the hairbrush and the box that held their collection of sprays and gels and bows. On weekdays Melody had to brush her own hair. But Saturdays Cerise could fix it for her. On Saturdays she could take her time, glorying in the golden heft and gloss of her daughter’s hair, brushing until it shone and crackled, and then, when it lay across Melody’s shoulders and down her back like a tamed waterfall, trying out the styles she’d imagined all week as she dusted and mopped.

  Once the first mean snarls were out, Melody would grow dreamy beneath the strokings of Cerise’s brush. Sometimes she would sit for over an hour, gazing at the TV, her lips slightly parted, her eyes half-lidded, her head bobbing to the rhythm of her mother’s work.

  “When you’re older,” Cerise would promise, pausing in her work to study the girls on TV, “we’ll find the money to get you in one of those modeling schools.” Her fingers flew, firm and deft and certain, twisting and smoothing strands of hair. “You’ll like that, won’t you?” she said, nodding at the screen. “When you’re on TV, too.” It was a rainy Saturday in mid-November, but the grimness of the weather only made their apartment feel cozier. With her hands busy in Melody’s hair and the TV murmuring to itself and Saturday morning not even half over, it seemed impossible that everything would not turn out the way Cerise knew it should. Melody would become a model, and maybe they could afford to rent a bigger apartment or even buy a house, but nothing else would change. They would still have their Saturday mornings, would still have their waffles and the rest of their weekend pleasures.

  They kept a box of crayons and a stack of coloring books beneath the sofa, and every Saturday, once Cerise was satisfied with Melody’s hair, they got the crayons out. Coloring was another of their rituals, a weekend passion begun so long ago that by now it seemed they’d always done it. Together they had developed their own tastes and techniques for coloring, their own rules for how a finished picture should look. They knew all about shading and outlining, knew when to make their strokes parallel or when they should fill a space with tiny circles. They had an abhorrence for letting their crayons cross over a printed line or for pressing so hard that the colors left crumbs of wax on their work. They had learned how to keep their crayons pointed as they used them, turning them in their fingers so that their ends stayed sharp, and how to peel the wrappers off in tidy strips.

  It was Melody who insisted they keep the box organized “by the rainbow,” and they had long ago memorized the names of all the colors, reading them off the sides of the sticks like taxonomic facts—Indian red, carnation pink, Pacific blue, flesh. Magenta and gold were their favorites, and those they had to ration while they forced themselves to use the ugly colors, too—olive and brick and seal gray.

  Once or twice Cerise had tried to amuse Melody by drawing her own copies of the pictures in their coloring books. But rather than being pleased by her mother’s talent, it had only frustrated Melody that she couldn’t make her own drawings look as good. So Cerise had abandoned drawing and returned to coloring, to the simple pleasure of choosing colors, to the little challenge of keeping within the lines, to an activity at which she and Melody could work as equals.

  Now, taking her place beside her daughter as the rain came down outside, Cerise flipped through the book Melody had laid out for her and chose the page she wanted to work on first. Pulling the plum crayon from its spot between wisteria and violet, she started in on Snow White’s skirt. Beside her, Melody chose aquamarine and began on Peter Pan. For a long time the patter of the rain, the rhythmic whispers of their crayons, their own soft puffs of breath, and the TV’s chortle were the room’s only sounds. It was hypnotic, the way each stroke left its color on the rough paper, fascinating the way the colors sang or jangled against each other. Cerise knew it was just a kid’s thing, coloring, and yet it was so soothing on Saturday mornings to kneel beside Melody and rub their crayons in matching rhythms on their separate pages. It was so satisfying to inhale the woody scent of newsprint and the butter and Vaseline smell of the Crayolas. And sometimes it felt oddly urgent, too, to fill those empty shapes with color.

  Cerise traded plum for butter and began to work on the collar of Snow White’s dress. Gradually she forgot the ache in her back and the sick feeling of the worries she carried in her gut all week long. She forgot about the electric bill and the broken oven, forgot about her sore molar and her promise to call Rita, forgot about the new gym shorts Melody said she had to have for school, and once again two of them—she and Melody alone together—filled all the world.

  When the knock came on the door, her first impulse was to ignore it, to sit in silence until whoever was on the other side gave up and went away. But glancing down at Melody, she realized that would be too much like lying to pretend they weren’t at home, so she rose and answered the door.

  “Grandma!” Melody cried when she saw Rita standing outside. “We’re coloring.”

  “That’s nice, darling,” Rita said. Beneath her raincoat she was wearing black leggings and spike heels, and when she came inside, she filled the room with the smell of her perfume. Turning to Cerise, she said, “I got you a date.”

  “A date?” Cerise echoed in surprise.

  “Tonight. Fred has a cousin whose wife just left him. He has a little boy about Melody’s age. Fred and I’ll take care of the kids, and you two can go out and have some fun.”

  “A boy?” said Melody, looking up from her picture and wrinkling her nose.

  “I don’t know,” Cerise said warily. “Maybe not tonight.”

  “What,” Rita said as her glance raked the room, taking in the coloring books, the crayons, the grainy TV screen, the shabby sofa, “you have other plans?”

  “Well, Melody—”

  “Melody can stay with us. She can make a new little friend.”

  “A boy?” Melody repeated indignantly.

  Turning to Cerise, Rita said, “You need to spend more time with people your own age. You need to find some outside interests. And so does Melody. She needs friends.”

  “I have friends,” Melody spoke up. “Lots of friends, at school. Girls,” she added staunchly.

  “She needs more going on at home,” Rita said, speaking to Cerise. “She’s nearly ten, for godsake. That’s way too old to spend her weekends coloring. She needs a father.”

  Cerise felt a jab of confusion and concern. As much as she dreaded going on a date, she wanted what was best for Melody. “I didn’t have a father,” she said.

  “Not because I didn’t try,” Rita answered curtly. “And besides, look what happened to you. You’d be in a lot better place right now if Fred had come along sooner.”

  “I don’t mind it,” Cerise said softly. “Where I am.”

  Rita looked around the room disdainfully. “You’ve lived in this dump ever since you moved out on me. That sofa must be ninety years old
, at least, and it was junk when it was brand-new. You need a man to help you get ahead. How long have you been working at that place, anyway?”

  “Woodland Manor? Four years, last month. Ever since Melody started kindygarden.”

  “See? You’re never going to get anywhere, working there. All those old people.” Rita gave a delicate shudder.

  “They’re okay,” Cerise answered. “I like them. They can’t help it that they’re old.”

  “Fred’s nephew’s a great guy. He has his own business. You’re probably a little tall for him, but he’s already been in AA for eighteen months.”

  “I’m sure he’s nice. I just—”

  “It’s not good for you to build your whole life around a kid. What will you do when Melody grows up and moves away?”

  Melody looked up from her coloring indignantly. “I’ll never move away,” she said. “I love it here. I’d never leave my mommy in a million years.”

  For a moment Cerise gazed at her daughter, her heart swollen with so much gladness that it was hard to pay attention to what her mother was saying next.

  “When you get older,” Rita said, her voice somewhere between sugar and acid as she looked down at Melody, “things will change. You’ll want a husband and a nice house of your own.”

  “I’ll never want a husband if he’s a boy,” Melody exclaimed.

  Turning to Cerise, Rita said, “Don’t say I never tried to help you. Don’t you ever say that. You got where you are all by yourself.”

  “I know,” Cerise said mildly, bowing her head.

  “Coloring!” Rita scoffed, taking a last disdainful look around the room before she swept back into the rain.

  But even after Cerise closed the door behind her mother and Rita’s footsteps echoed away down the steps, Rita’s scent remained, her perfume lingering like a reproach that kept Cerise from returning to the morning. Rita was probably right, she thought as she watched Melody bending over her page, her lovely face intent, her French braid following the perfect curve of her head. Melody needed more in her life than a mother who was always tired and a weekend filled with coloring and toaster waffles. Melody needed more than the promise of modeling lessons someday.