Emma Rathbone - Losing It

The backs of my feet hit something below. I reached down to find a stack of photo albums. From staring at the pictures you would think Aunt Viv’s upbringing had been a series of listless county fairs and picnics next to rickety old houses. Generally-dissatisfied-looking people tromped through the albums. But there were some happy photos, too — kids crowded around a sparkler, their faces lit with delight; a group holding hands around a tree, all of them covered in mud.

One photo showed Aunt Viv at probably around eighteen or twenty years old, standing in front of the Alamo. It had been taken in an off moment — she’s looking off to the side, her face is troubled as if something had just occurred to her, something deeply worrisome. The hem of her dress is caught in the wind. The background is bright in the sun. I stared at it for a long time, trying to interpret her dark expression. I wanted to ask her about that photograph. What was she thinking about? What had she remembered? What was wrong that day?

—

“It’s a blue jay,” said Aunt Viv, squinting into the distance. “Bluebirds don’t have that crested head, they’re songbirds and we don’t get them here that often.”

We were sitting at a white plastic table on the wraparound porch in the front of the house, eating dinner together for the first time in days. You would think that her admission that night — it had been about a week since then — would have made us closer, but it somehow had the opposite effect. Aunt Viv had started avoiding me. She stayed late at work, e-mailing me to say that she was tied up at the office. When she did come home, she would mostly eat in her study with the door closed. The one Saturday that had intervened she spent gardening, squinting up at me in a distracted way when I walked down the front steps to go somewhere in my car. I didn’t mind — I was a little embarrassed, too, but it was getting ridiculous.

So when it happened that we were home at the same time that night, she seemed to embrace it, to want to reset and start over. And that’s how we ended up sitting on the porch, at a plastic table she’d dragged out of the garage for something different, eating Chinese food takeout.

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, stared at a shiny pond of brown sauce on my plate.

“It’s pretty,” I said. “It’s such a bright blue.”

“Yes. You can see hummingbirds, too, sometimes, around the honeysuckle at the front door.”

I nodded.

“I used to think I would become a bird-watcher,” she said. “I got a field guide and everything, but”—a gale of laughter went through her; she brought a napkin up to her mouth to stifle it—“it didn’t work out.”

Aunt Viv was in a good mood. There was something going on with her. “I got some great news today,” she said, confirming my suspicion, glancing at me and then pushing her napkin deep into her lap.

“You did?”

“A man named Pete Wexler called me at work. He said he was from Southern Imports?” She looked at me expectantly.

“The home-goods store?” I said.

“Yes, exactly,” she said, nodding.

She went on: “At first I thought it was some kind of mistake. I was in the middle of an admission report and I almost hung up on him. But then he told me he’d seen my website, and that he was going to be at the McCormick show. That that was something he did — he goes to antique shops and art shows and things like that to get ideas. He said he was only going to be in town for the one night, but he was planning to stop by the show, to see if the plates would be appropriate for the store.”

“Like to sell them there?” I said, chewing on some noodles.

Viv pushed her lips together in a perplexed, happy way and nodded.

“Wow, that’s fantastic, Viv!” I said.

She looked down at her plate, pleased. A bumblebee hovered just above the porch railing.

“So, what would that mean?” I said.

“Well, if I could get them sold there, that would be a real step. A really good step in terms of visibility and distribution. Well, and financially. They sell name-brand things there. It would mean everything. I would have to make it more of a priority.” I could tell she had already thought this through a number of times that day. Dreamed about it. “I would have to change my whole way of doing things.” She dabbed her lips. “I suppose a long-term goal, and this is something, you know, it’s probably too soon to start thinking this way, but that maybe one day I could quit my job.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to you.”

“Are you kidding?” I said, determined to straighten out any misunderstanding. “Of course it’s a big deal. It’s a really big deal. It’s wonderful!”

I could tell what it meant to her, and I was happy she had this good news, and happy to be happy for her. It was like some internal screw in her had loosened, and all her parts had settled a little with relief and excitement.

“I almost knocked over my cup of coffee at work,” she said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

“Oh, no!” I said, laughing.

She sighed happily, and looked into the distance, where the sun was just beginning to set, making everything look golden.

She had a kind of domestic finesse that allowed her to do little, old-fashioned things well — make preserves and then label the jars with pleasing cursive, tie perfect bows, bake rustic-looking scones without consulting a recipe. She often had lipstick on her teeth and had a habit of shaking her wrist to get her watch to sit right. These were some of the things I noticed about Aunt Viv.

She hummed beautifully when lost in thought, when gardening or absentmindedly putting things away. She pressed firmly into paper when she wrote and had a disarmingly legible signature. She was plump but not slovenly, and had a way of seeming clean and slapped fresh all the time, as if she’d always just stepped out of the shower. It might have had something to do with her complexion, which blushed easily. Sometimes when entering a room she would cast a cool, queenly gaze around it, and if you didn’t know better you could be forgiven for thinking she had an edge of snobbishness to her. I would remember that day at Alice’s party, and how she was holding court with her friends, like the popular one at a girls’ school, and how imperious she looked.

She read with all the sensuality and absorption of a preteen girl, stocking-footed, sliding down the sofa, completely immersed, her hand foraging on the plate of cheese and crackers next to her like something with a life of its own.

She liked gardening and yanking and patting things down, and you could tell she had grit — like the kind of person who would not freak out on a ship in some survival situation; the kind of person who would sit and watch quietly, taking stock, and only show the chain mail beneath her veneer when an emergency required it. She was a survivor, Aunt Viv. That, I felt, was true, even if sometimes when she laughed it was like the tinkling of simple, pretty light.

She looked more exhausted than a World War One soldier when she got home from work. I watched her once from the top of the stairs when she couldn’t see me. She dropped her bag in place and stared at herself in the hallway mirror. She yanked the little scarf off her neck and hung it on a brass hook; shrugged off her linen blazer and hung that up, too, so she was just wearing a white shirt, a circle at the collar revealing her red chest; pulled her earrings off. Things she liked doing included letting her face go all soft when listening to music, clapping her hands to rid them of flour, abruptly changing the radio station, ending a conversation with a quick look away from you, dismissing you, always in the process of dismissal — the hair tie she yanked off her head, the rings she hurriedly swiveled off her fingers, shaking her head to banish an unwanted thought, cleaning out the dirt from under her fingernails with efficient scrapes, shucking away layers to be free; all part of some fastidious, ongoing process — shucking, stripping, cleaning, in preparation for some never-reached point. And then sometimes she would stare into the distance with a bewildered expression and my heart would break a little and I wouldn’t know why.