Lisa Unger - Die For You

Over a roast chicken, she’d told us a few months earlier.

“I’ll be marrying Fred. He’s a good man. He’ll provide for us, give us some stability.” She said it as if he was someone we knew, as if it was news we should have been expecting. We’d met him once when he came to pick her up for an evening. And once he’d had dinner at our house. Margie’s such a sensible woman. She always knows what to do . That’s what my father always said about her.

The news landed like a fist on the table, something inside me rattled hard. Neither Linda nor I said a word at first. We both stared at my mother and I remember her looking back and forth at each of our faces, almost defiant. My eyes drifted down to her lean, veined hands and saw that the wedding ring she’d always worn was gone. There was no mark on her finger. I wondered when she’d stopped wearing it. She cleared her throat in the silence, took a small bite of mashed potatoes, a swallow of water. My sister’s face was the same stoic mask it had been since the morning she found my father. I’d yet to see her shed a tear.

“I really have no choice, girls,” she went on when we said nothing. She smoothed out the napkin on her lap. “Your father has left us with nothing, and I’m afraid I’m without skills or experience. With what I could earn, we wouldn’t be able to keep this house. And I think we’ve lost enough.”

My sister pushed food around her plate and I remember the fork suddenly seemed very heavy in my hand. There was no sound but the clinking of silverware and the ticking of the large grandfather clock my father had loved. I looked over at the chair where he would have sat. He was the clown, my mother the straight man. He’d be cracking jokes, she reprimanding him with a smile, and sometimes a blush. He’d ask us about our days and really listen to our answers. My mother liked us to be dressed at dinner; there was no lounging in jeans, or eating in front of the television. We sat and ate together “like a nice family.” To say I missed my father would be like saying I was thirsty when all the water in the world had drained, leaving rivers and oceans dry, beds cracking in the heat of the sun. My mother saw me looking at his chair; something passed quicksilver across the features of her face, a flash of something angry or sad.

“There were a lot of things I didn’t know about your father,” she said then. “Someday when you’re older, you’ll better understand.”

“What things?” I said, finding my voice. The words sounded surprisingly sharp, loud and startling, like a hard and sudden rap on the door. How did I know I wasn’t supposed to talk, to ask ugly questions? No one had ever said as much to me. But my question was an uninvited guest in the room, greeted with stiff politeness, clearly unwelcome.

My mother closed her lavender-shadowed lids, then opened them slowly. It was something she did to show us she was summoning her patience. She gave me the lids , our father would say.

“It’s not important now, Isabel.”

“I want to know what you’re talking about,” I said firmly. “What didn’t you know?”

She shook her head, released a long breath, as if she regretted starting the conversation and now lacked the will to go on. Looking back, I realize she was very young to be a widow with two daughters, just two years older than I was the day Marcus disappeared. She’d married at nineteen, been pregnant by twenty. She was thirty-five when my father killed himself.

“I’m sorry, girls. I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, sounding weak and tired. “Really, the only thing you need to know is that he loved you both. Very, very much. You were everything to him.”

She reached for our hands. I let her take mine. Linda snatched her hand away.

“Did you even love him?” my sister asked. All the color had drained from her face. My mother looked down at the table, tapped her outstretched hand on the wood, seemed to consider her answer.

“Marriage is not just about love. Only little girls believe that.” She didn’t say it unkindly. Her voice was thick, unlike her.

“He killed himself because he knew you didn’t love him anymore,” my sister said simply with a prim shake of her head. There was a frayed edge to her voice; her hands quavered. I felt anxiety building in my chest; it was expanding, threatening to bust me open wide.

“That’s not true, Linda,” my mother whispered, tears springing to her eyes. “It’s just not true.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, strangely bright, her eyes wide. “And everybody knows it.”

My mother dropped her head to her arm and started to sob right there in front of us. My mother, who was a study in self-control-never speaking too loudly, never laughing too hard. Her makeup was always done; her clothes were always perfect. To see her sink like a rag doll and weep was shocking. I put my hand on her back and felt her heaving, touched the silk of her hair. I remember how golden it looked against the green cotton of her shirt. She was so real in that moment, so soft and full of life, so overcome by grief. It was terrifying and at the same time exhilarating. She was solid, was tied to the world by her pain. She couldn’t just drift away and be gone like him.

“You silly, selfish bitch,” Linda said. Rising from the table, she looked down at our mother, who released a deep sob at her words. Linda’s features glowed with a dark victory, a grimace of disgust and condescension pulled at her mouth. She was a sliver of a girl, thin and narrow as a pencil, but that night she was a titan in her rage and her sadness. Just months before, she’d loved Duran Duran and set the VCR to tape episodes of The Young and the Restless while we were at school. She’d slept with the same blanket she’d had since she was a baby. She’d giggled at all my stupid jokes and stories. That girl was gone, just her brittle shell remained. Then she left us there. I listened to her walk up the stairs, her pace measured and unhurried, and slam the door to our bedroom hard.

I sat rubbing my mother’s back. “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry.” It was all I could think to say.

“I did love him, Isabel,” my mother whispered. “I truly did. It just wasn’t enough for him.”

And, even at ten, when I didn’t understand the power of things like love and money and secrets between husbands and wives, I knew it was true. My father was a ghost who walked among us. He was a sweet, kind man, who always had a smile, who always said the right thing, who always gave the most extravagant gifts, who never failed to hug or stroke. But even as a child I sensed that he held the largest part of himself inside, that he was too far away to ever touch. He was like a bright-red helium balloon always just about to loft away-until he did.

BUT I WASN’T like my mother, turning away from signs, closing shadowed eyes against the things I didn’t want to see or know. I couldn’t be that. I’m the seer. The observer. Life is a liquid that sinks into my skin; I metabolize all the ingredients. I ask the questions, hear the answers, extrapolate meaning from the rhythm and nuance of language and tone. In our arguments, it used to come down to words. Marcus, not a native speaker, would throw up his hands, walk away, so angry that I could get hung up on the semantics, the connotations of the words he used, ignoring, he claimed, his true meaning, the argument itself. But words are all we have, their essence the only passage into our centers, the only way we can make people feel what we feel

“You use language like a weapon, like a sword, Isabel,” he said one time. “Am I your opponent? Will you cut me because I can’t wield it as well as you?”

“And you use it like a blunt-force instrument-imprecise, clumsy, banging, banging, banging to get your point across. You’d use a jack-hammer for needlework.”