Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

Linda shut her eyes and dropped her head, as if in prayer. Nobody ever taught Lee how to pray. It was something she’d only seen actors do until Big Mort’s funeral. Her mother in black, standing and reciting words in Hebrew by rote. When Lee had asked her about it, Linda said it was the kaddish, as if everyone knew what it was. Like, leave me alone, my father is gone, and I don’t want to talk. Not until later that afternoon — maybe when it occurred to her that Lee’s father was gone, too — did Linda seek comfort in her daughter. At the house in Mamaroneck, she took Lee upstairs while the rest of the family gathered below, and they looked at photo albums. In the his-and-hers closets in the master bedroom they discovered a shoebox of yellowed newspaper clippings, ads that Big Mort had placed for his stores twenty and thirty years back. They seemed fairly generic to Lee, but they made Linda cry. How strange it was to see Linda supplicant. Stranger even than hearing Linda’s story now, which Lee had somehow known all along. She had known it from Marion. She had known it since Flintwick’s and that blooming that opened in her stomach and crept up the back of her neck when he told them how Linda showed up at his studio after Jesse died, how it felt like a theft. She had known it, felt it, ever since then, but probably long before. Probably her whole life.

“And then what? They crashed and you just drove away?”

“Yes. I got back in my car and I drove away. I was in shock. Do you understand? I don’t remember stopping at a pay phone, but I must have. The police received an anonymous call. All I remember is driving. I drove all the way back to Mamaroneck, to Big Mort and Bubbe’s house. You were sleeping in my old twin bed with the white headboard, and you were sleeping so soundly. I remember the room smelled different with you in it. It smelled like applesauce muffins. I lay down on the carpet, as close to the bed as I could get, and I just listened to you breathing. You were so peaceful and perfect. I remember looking up as the sky got lighter through those white nylon sheers. I was about to lose it. I went downstairs so I wouldn’t wake you. Big Mort never slept past five-thirty. He was sitting in his favorite chair in the den, and I came so close to telling him. He knew something was very wrong. I was shaking, and he held me and I told him I lost Jesse and I think he knew what happened, somehow. He must have put some version of it together when the police showed up that morning. They came to inform me of Jesse’s death. They asked me questions, but they never really interrogated me and my father told them I had come home earlier than I had, that I left the lodge and was back before he turned in for the night. They knew Jesse was drunk and those roads were dark, with the fog and all the deer. .”

Lee remembered that house, the room, those white nylon curtains like veils waiting for brides. Watching Big Mort and Bubbe play cards in their kitchen with the red countertop. Crazy Eights. Gin Rummy. Hearts. The crystal chandelier in the front hall. In the morning, when the sun came through, into the tear-shaped prisms and into your eyes. Dust beams slanting down. But the rest had always been hazy — what she and Linda were doing there. Where Linda went when it was just Lee and her grandparents. Big Mort’s bearish arms. His big white teeth, which she realized only years later were dentures. Hadn’t there been something formidable about him or something once-formidable that you could still detect, still feel in his presence? His power to make it go away, whatever it was, if it came to that. The gut feeling that Big Mort had covered for Linda in the way Lee instinctively knew that Linda would cover for her, if it came to that. An amoral protective gene. Linda the fixer.

“All you had to do was take care of Marion, right?”

“I went to see Marion in the hospital, yes, after the crash. But I went because I felt responsible, not because she was a loose end or whatever terrible thing you may be thinking. I sat by her bed every day and I told her everything I just told you. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know if she could hear me. It just spilled out. Once it was out of my system, I could straighten up, pull myself together, enough to get through the day, the week, the next week.”

“Enough to buy Marion off and banish her.”

“Banish? You’re overestimating me. Even if I ever had those thoughts, I’ve never had that kind of influence. And I’d hardly call Big Sur banishment.”

“But you have had those kind of thoughts.”

“It was an accident, Lee. My god, it was an accident!” The quake in Linda’s cry made Lee think of ancient pillars toppling. One summer, she had found a copy of the Bible at her grandparents’ house, an easy-to-read edition that one of her cousins must have brought home from Hebrew school. The stories were as vivid and indelible as fairy tales. She thought of Samson now. Delilah over his hair with a knife. Linda was both of them, rolled into one. “He was my life,” said Linda very quietly. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I wish I had those tapes, those stupid fucking tapes, because I wish I could give you something more of him. You didn’t get nearly enough.”

But that was just it. Linda couldn’t give her anything more of him. As though she were taking an inventory, Lee noticed something missing here among all the detail and revelation — the satisfaction, however small, however adulterated, that you might expect from someone asking your forgiveness. Linda was truly broken up. She was sorry for Lee. She just wasn’t exactly guilty about it. Linda failed to ask for her daughter’s forgiveness, Lee thought, not out of defiance or denial, but because Lee wasn’t the one she needed forgiveness from. Only Jesse. It was always, ultimately, between Linda and Jesse. That impenetrability they had. Hi, Jesse. Hi, Linda. Linda had been living with her boyfriend, and Jesse cornered her in the kitchen and that was that. I love you more than anything. It didn’t end, even when it was over. Even when Marion pulled him up off the floor at Flintwick’s and took him upstairs, and Linda found herself with a bottle of pills at a deserted resort, and Lee was in her pajamas, in a small bedroom at the house in Mamaroneck, Bubbe and Big Mort reading her a story before kissing her good night. Lee could blame her mother for taking her father away from her, but she suspected deep down that Jesse wasn’t hers to be taken, she never had the claim on him that Linda did. That maybe this is why it felt so sad and pathetic to be looking for some piece of him. It made her a misguided, humiliated Electra. And Jesse wasn’t an innocent victim in all of this. If it had gone the other way, if Jesse hadn’t swerved off the road, if he had hit Linda, if he had killed her, it would have been something he signed on for, part of the deal, their destructive dance. Marion was collateral damage, as was Lee. Was it any wonder she had felt so at home with Marion? Marion’s familiar and relaxing loneliness, like a long bath.

Linda worked her fingers along the gold-hemmed edge of a colorful throw she’d picked up on a trip to India and reproduced for last fall’s Linda West Home line. The look would be “exotic but fresh,” as someone in Marketing put it. How Lee could have used someone in Marketing right about now, not to make sense of this situation but to package it, using words that no longer meant anything in order to sell it to her.

Lee drank her water down though it did little to wet her throat. How could it be possible — she gauged her own astonishment — that she felt for Linda’s loss? Maybe it meant that her mother, not just her father, was something of a stranger, and Lee could swim in currents of sadness for strangers: people she watched on talk shows, people who posted pleading photocopied signs for their lost pets. So she felt for this woman she didn’t know. But in a snap, as if a change in barometric pressure thinned the air around her, the cruelty inside pushed outward with greater force.