A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“You sound sad,” I observe.

I can hear her clothing shrug.

“Scared?”

She says nothing.

“Ash, if it’s okay, I’m just going to talk for a couple of minutes, but I want you to feel free to interrupt at any point. Okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. So the woman who runs your school called me. I know what happened. And the first thing I want you to know is, it’s okay. I want you to know that you’re not in trouble. And that I understand and don’t think it’s weird or anything. I also want you to know that you can talk to me, tell me whatever you want or not tell me, I just want you to be okay. The thing that I care most about is your well-being.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“Do I have to move back into my old house?”

“Your old house?”

“It’s officially called Rose Hill, but everyone calls it Patchouli.”

“Is there a reason you shouldn’t live in your old house?”

“Well, where I am now there’s a TV, and I really like watching TV. It helps me calm down. Like at night, if I can’t sleep, I just put it on and Miss Renee doesn’t mind.”

“Miss Renee? The head of the lower school?”

“Yeah, and then, like, if I’m really stressed, sometimes I come back in the middle of the day and watch, like, All My Children, General Hospital, One Life to Live, and then all is good again — it’s like they really help me understand the world and get some perspective. Also, my life is more like the people on the soaps than most of the people around here.”

“Interesting,” I say. “I need to think about that.”

“I really can’t go back to the old house,” she says. “I’m not okay with that.”

“I hear you.”

She starts to cry. “I want to come home.”

“We can do that,” I say.

She sniffles. “I have a project due. …”

“How about you come home for the weekend?”

“Okay,” she says, sniffling.

“Can you manage until then? We don’t have to decide about the house issue right now. I think Mrs. Singer said you could stay with her —I bet she has a television.”

“Not as many channels,” Ashley says, still sniffling.

I pick her up on Friday afternoon. The entire way up to the school, I marvel at the scenery; the trees have sprung into bloom.

Ashley babbles the whole way home — going on and on about soap operas. I can’t tell if it’s an anxiety response, an odd verbal downloading of daytime drama, or some kind of hypomanic state — I simply let her roll.

“ All My Children is set in Pine Valley, it has the Tylers, the Kanes, and the Martins; it’s been on for, like, forty years, that’s more than ten thousand episodes. …” She details a bit about Erica and the Cortlandts.

“And then, this week …” She lays out the story lines — the past history, who was married to who, who fathered what child, what secrets have not yet been revealed.

“Ash, how long have you been watching these shows?”

“A long time,” she says. “I started when I was, like, seven and was home with mono for a month and Mom let me watch them with her.”

“Your mom watched them?”

“She loved them. She’d been watching the exact same shows since she was in junior high and stuck at home with a broken leg. And once, at an airport, she actually saw Mrs. Tyler, Mrs. Phoebe Tyler! Mom saw her at the airport and ran over and helped her with her bag. Her ‘real’ name was Ruth Warrick. She died a few years ago. Mom said something about having seen it in the newspaper.”

“You really miss your mom,” I say.

“I have no one,” she says.

“Well, I’m very glad to see you, and Tessie and Romeo will be happy to see you — you’re gonna love Romeo.”

“Could we go to the cemetery?” she asks. “Would that be weird?”

“We can go — I’m not sure how it would be.”

“What’s it like there?”

“We were there for the funeral; do you remember?”

“Not really.”

“It’s like a big park and there are some trees and the graves are flat.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the Jewish tradition, to have flat graves, and a year after the funeral there’s what’s called an unveiling, and the plaque with your mom’s name will be there. And whenever you visit you leave a small stone on the marker, which indicates that you were there and the person is not forgotten.”

“Why does it take a year?”

“That’s the tradition. We could go visit your grandmother — would that be fun?”

“Can we take her out?”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. Just out — it’s like she’s one of those fragile dolls in a box that you can just kind of look at, and maybe she’d like to get out and go somewhere.”

“We can certainly ask her; my sense is, she’s pretty happy where she is — but, like I said, we can ask. So what do you think? Visit Grandma? Bake cookies? Clean your closets?”

“We could bake cookies and bring them to Grandma,” she says.

“We could.”

“Okay, so tonight, when we get home, we’ll make cookies.”

“Tonight, when we get home, we’ll have dinner and go to bed.”

“Okay, so tomorrow morning we’ll bake the cookies and go see Grandma,” she says, pleased to have a plan.

“When you bake cookies, what do you do?” I ask a couple of minutes later.

“What do I do?”

“Like, how do you make them?”

“We either do slice-and-bake or we mix together all the things that are listed on the back of the chocolate chips — they call that ‘from scratch.’”

“And you know how to do that?”

“Yes,” she says, like now I’m the idiot. “Have you never made cookies?”

“Never,” I say.

“We better stop at the store,” she says, and we do. Ashley makes a beeline for the chocolate chips, and we buy everything as directed on the back of the bag, plus extra milk.

“You have to have really fresh milk,” she says. “Otherwise there’s no point.” And then she looks around, smiling at the rows and rows of groceries. “I really miss grocery stores,” she says in a way that reminds me of the oddity of her existence, and how boarding school is an isolated kind of social/educational incubator.

We make the cookies, and when the kitchen starts to fill with a wonderful warm chocolaty smell I feel deeply accomplished. We immediately eat too many and drink the milk, and Ash was entirely right when she said it was all about the milk’s being fresh. It’s amazing — a truly sublime experience. We start laughing for no reason, and the cat comes out and rubs my leg for the first time since I gave away the kittens — I pour her a saucer of milk.

And when the cookies are cool, we go to the nursing home. On the way there, I explain about Grandma’s progress and Grandma’s boyfriend.

“I don’t get it, are they married or not?”

“Not officially.”

“And what’s the deal with her crawling and swimming?”

“Remember how she was in bed last time we saw her?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, she’s out of bed now. We’re not sure if it’s a new medicine or perhaps she forgot why she was in bed. I myself can’t remember exactly what happened. I know that we put her in the nursing home because she was bedridden — I’m not sure anyone ever knew why.”

“Well, so that’s cool, she’s getting better.”

“That’s one way to describe it.”

“Hi, Mom,” I say as we walk into her room.

“So you say,” she says.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’re here,” she says with a particular expression of annoyance, as though long-awaited aliens have finally made themselves known.