Emma Rathbone: Losing It

I continued slowly along the driveway. A humid breeze came through the windows. It had been a sticky seven-hour drive that included two wrong turns and lunch at a shopping complex where elevator music stood in the air like pond water. Northern Virginia had been a three-lane highway lined with sound walls, which opened up into strip malls, churches, thrift shops, and gun stores as I got farther south. Then it was pretty, sloping fields, and pastures and farms; small towns with deserted streets and mansions set back from the road and fruit stands and dark, closed-down shop fronts. The way got narrower as I approached Durham, and for forty minutes I trailed a truck with two haunted-looking horses inside.

I tried to bring up all my memories of Aunt Viv. I kept thinking of us playing the card game Spit in our kitchen in Texas. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I thought of our hands whirring over the table, over ever-building and eroding piles. Viv is wearing a cotton shirt and she has an air of quiet superiority over her. But I don’t mind, because the companionship I felt with her was like being the sidekick to someone immensely capable. I remembered walking slowly through the backyard — she must have been visiting for the summer — and she’s pointing out what different plants are called, satisfied by my interest, a soft tower of facts. The feeling I had about her at the time was that she knew a lot of secrets. That there was a funny helix at the center of everything and she was the only one who was aware of it, and she would convey this with an amused side-glance that only you were meant to be in on.

I pulled up, got out of the car, slammed the door, and stretched. I looked around. A hot, wide, creaking day. There was the echo of faraway hammering. In the distance on each side were the trees and fences of other properties. The house was weather-beaten red brick, with a wraparound porch and a copper roof. Weedy wildflowers dotted the grass along the foundation. Three tall windows on the bottom level looked dark. An overgrown path led to what looked like a storage shed.

I went up the porch steps and knocked on the door. Nothing. I crouched down and looked through one of the windows but saw only heavy-looking furniture and dark shapes. I turned around, shaded my eyes from the sun. In the distance, a pickup truck crawled by on the road. I went back down and walked toward my car and was about to get back inside when I heard the door open behind me. I turned around and saw Aunt Viv for the first time in probably sixteen years. I tried to compose my face in the right way.

She walked toward me, smiling. She was wearing a T-shirt tucked into khaki pants. Her face had a scrubbed-fresh, almost abraded quality. Her long, dyed-red hair was swept to the side over one shoulder and tied in a floppy orange bow with fake berries sticking out of the knot. She smiled at me, a warm, conspiratorial smile.

“Julia,” she said, in a low, excited way. I remembered that from when I was a kid — how her voice could have a thrilled treble in it. We embraced. We pulled apart and regarded each other. She had aged, and there was a jowly heaviness to her face that hadn’t been there before, but you could still see the shadings of the girl she had been, how I’d remembered her from long ago — when she’d been pretty in a sort of game, clear-eyed way. “That’s a pretty bow,” I said, and then for some reason: “Did you make it?”

Her hand shot up, touched it. Something, ever so slightly, dismantled itself in her expression.

“Oh,” she said, “does it look that way?”

“No, in a good way!”

She smiled again, recomposed. “Look at you,” she said. “Come on up. I’ll show you your room.”

—

I leaned my suitcase against the wall and looked around. I was in a sparse, clean room with faded wallpaper. After we’d made some small talk about the trip, Viv had led me up the creaking stairs. “Well,” she said, “I’ll let you get settled. The bathroom is just down the hall.” She hesitated, then left.

I walked over to the bed and hauled my suitcase on top of it. There were two windows, surrounded by frilly curtains. I opened one. The room bloomed with warm, humid air. The wallpaper was a pattern of beige and pink flowers. The furniture was all wooden and looked antique, handed down. There was a white-painted chest of drawers that let out a musty smell when I opened them, a closet, a small wicker desk, and a night table with a decorative pitcher on it. It all had the feeling of a slightly moldering bed-and-breakfast, down to the little satchels of potpourri leaning against a mirror. I stared at a framed poster that read “The 1976 Newport Jazz Festival,” which showed a flower piping out some musical notes. I picked up a heavy silver jewelry dish with rippling sides.

I unpacked and went to the bathroom. I sat on the squeaking bed and stared straight ahead. Then I lay on my stomach and looked out at the field and the trees in the distance, and the hazy yellow late-day sky, and tried not to feel like a rope had been cut, and I could only tell it had ever been there by the new sense of drifting.

Half an hour later, I wandered down the stairs and found Viv in the kitchen, savagely mixing something in a small bowl with a towel slung over her shoulder.

“Can I help with anything?” I said.

“No,” she said distractedly, and then gestured toward the table. “There’s wine if you like. The opener should be in one of those drawers.”

I busied myself looking for it, rummaging around. I couldn’t tell — should we be talking, making small talk, laughing and catching up at this point? Everything I did seemed too loud. “Here it is,” I said to fill the silence, when I found the opener.

I hovered for a moment, and then wandered into the adjacent living room — a dim area with a cinnamon air-freshener smell and pashmina shawls draped over things. I sat down for a moment, then got up. I looked at a frame with a bunch of seashells hot-glued to it. I thought of our hands whirring over the cards. We’d had a few pleasant, polite phone conversations in the weeks leading up to my arrival, and I wouldn’t have thought it would be like this, like it was fifteen minutes later when we sat quietly across from each other at a long table in the red dining room under a badly tilting brass chandelier. She chewed quickly. Her hair was parted down the middle and tied back. She had changed clothes — she was wearing a shirt with pastel handprints on it. Her nails were painted red and she looked abrasively clean.

“Wow, this all looks great,” I said.

“Good,” said Aunt Viv. She arranged a napkin in her lap. She smiled. I smiled. I took a sip of my water.

“I really like my room,” I said.

“Good, good,” she said. She nodded expectantly, like I was supposed to say more. Like something more was supposed to happen in that moment.

“I was looking at that poster,” I said. “Do you like jazz?”

“You do?” she said politely.

“No, I mean, do you? I was asking if you do.”

“If I…”

“Like jazz. Jazz music. Are you a fan?”

It dawned on her. She tried to shimmy herself into the conversation. “Oh, oh of course,” she said, waving her fork, squinting. “I’ve tried, you know?”

“Sure, yeah,” I said.

She nodded and went back to her food.

“Dad says you paint plates?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, dabbing the side of her mouth with a napkin. “‘My little hobby,’ right?”

“Oh, no, no,” I said. “He didn’t say it like that.”

She shrugged, and sawed at her chicken.

“But so, you do?” I said. “You do do that?”

“I do, yes,” she said. “I do.” I had a flash of her cracking up with my dad on the sidewalk outside our house as they tried to hold on to whipping and wheeling sheets of poster board in the wind. There are gray clouds in the background. She’s laughing helplessly, her eyes shining, their efforts futile against the forces.