Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

When I got up the morning after Pom’s party it was later than usual, and Pom had long since gone to the clinic. A note beside the coffeemaker said, “BB Bwanas impressed with T&A but I’ve seen better right here. Be home early.” Mommee was still asleep, and the guest room where Cookie had slept was empty and tidy. Cookie’s note, taped to Mommee’s closed door, said, “I gave her a pill because she had a real fit last night when Glynn came in and it was 3 A.M. before I got her settled. She should sleep till midmorning.”

Glynn was home, then. I had not expected her to return from the house party at her friend Jessica’s family vacation home at Big Canoe until tomorrow afternoon, Sunday. I wondered if anything was wrong. I pushed open her closed door slightly and saw the slight mound of her sheeted body sleeping deeply in the gloom. “Morning, pretty,” I whispered. I closed her door and tiptoed into Mommee’s room and looked down at her. She, too, was sleeping soundly. Her breath came light and regularly from between slightly parted lips.

In the morning gloom she looked young and very pretty, almost like a child; she had lost weight since the onset of the illness and seemed actually to have shrunk in her bones. The diffused light gave her face a nacreous cast, like the inside of a wet seashell, and she slept with her fists curled under her chin, childlike. She wore a long white cotton nightgown with a ruffle around the neck. Cookie had brushed the thin gilt-white hair before she left, and it floated over her forehead like a newly shampooed toddler’s. Pity and affection squeezed my heart. This was not a Mommee anyone often saw, transmuted into the tenderly loved small girl she must have been long ago.

I brushed the hair off her forehead with one finger.

“You didn’t choose to be like this, did you? Sometimes we forget,” I whispered.

When I went back down the hall I heard the shower in Glynn’s bathroom running, and I went in and sat down on her bed.

“You’re home early,” I shouted into the bathroom.

“Be out in a minute,” she called back.

She came out wrapped in Pom’s huge, white terry robe, which she had appropriated. It hung down to her ankles and drooped over her slender hands. Her hair was wrapped in a white terry turban. Lord, but she was lovely; the oval face under the towel looked, scrubbed clean and almost translucent, like that of a very young novice in a fifteenth-century convent. Siena, I thought, or Assisi. I could almost see the delicately veined, pearly lids dropped over her eyes and the long fingers clasped in prayer. She had not yet acquired her light summer tan and looked, damp and shining with body lotion, like she had been carved out of alabaster. She had my height and coltish slenderness and tawny hair, though hers hung thick and smooth, and Pom’s blue eyes, mine and my father’s chiseled cheekbones and Mommee’s tender mouth. Her coloring, or lack of it, was entirely her own. Her paleness could be mistaken for plainness, until you looked at her features one by one. Then she was extraordinary. But she was without real impact yet; that, I thought, would come later, when everything had coalesced into maturity. I hoped that day was still a long way away.

“Hi. What’re you doing home early?” I said.

“Oh…nothing, really. We all left last night. It wasn’t just me.”

“Why, sweetie? What happened? Is something the matter?”

“I don’t guess so, really. It just seemed like a good thing to do. Mr. and Mrs. Constable sort of had a fight, and it upset Jess so much that we all decided to just come on back. Marcia took her to her house.”

Once, I knew, Jessica would have come home with Glynn for succor. Poor Jess. Poor Glynn.

“What was the fight about? Feel like talking about it?” I said casually. More and more often these days she did not bring her problems and hurts to me, but took them to Jessica. I knew, from Laura’s childhood, and later Chip and Jeff’s, that this was a normal stage of growing up and away from us, but it still hurt. This child was so vulnerable, so without armor.…But Jessica was across the river in the arms of another friend, and my daughter had come home to a house empty except for an old woman who howled of death. And there had been more trouble from that quarter. Who did she have left to talk with but me? I hoped desperately that she still felt that she could.

“I don’t think so,” she said noncommittally, and then she whirled to face me. Her face was miserable.

“Mr. and Mrs. Constable are getting a divorce,” she said, her voice treble and childish. I had not heard that voice in a long time; it was the voice of small Glynn, when she was frightened and angry.

“Oh, sweetie. How do you know?”

“Because they had this awful yelling match last night, after dinner, when they thought we were all asleep. I think they were both drunk. They drank an awful lot of wine with dinner, and after. You couldn’t help but hear what they were saying, and it was just awful, just gross. Poor Jess finally ran out there screaming for them to stop, and then her mother cried and Jess cried and everybody else cried, too, and her father slammed out of the house and went down to the boathouse. Her mother took off after him. And Jess just got hysterical. So we left. We took her mother’s Blazer. He’s been going around with some woman at his office. I think Mrs. Constable just found out last night, and I know Jess did. I hated it, Mom!”

“Oh, love I’m so sorry,” I said, putting my arms around her and drawing her close. She lay slackly against me for a moment, and then stiffened and pulled away.

“And when I came in—” she said.

“I know. Mommee. Cookie left a note. What was it, the death thing again?”

“Yeah. Mom, sometimes I think…I just wish she wasn’t here! I wish Daddy was home more! What’s the matter with everybody?”

It was a wail of pain and impotence. I felt tears sting my eyes.

“I think you’re just running head-on into adulthood,” I said, wishing she was still within arm’s reach. I wanted, suddenly, to march into Mommee’s room and shake her and shout, “You leave my little girl alone! You’ve had your life! You stay out of hers!”

“You come on home and stay home,” I wanted to yell at Pom.

“Well, then, adulthood sucks and I don’t want anything to do with it,” she said, her voice wobbling on the edge of tears.

“I don’t blame you. It ain’t what it’s cracked up to be,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “But I don’t think you’ve got a lot of choice in the matter. Don’t worry, baby. You don’t have to take on the whole world yet. That’s what we’re around for. By the time you do, you’ll be able to handle it. You’re a strong person and a very good and dear one. You’ll know the right thing to do and you’ll do it.”

“So are you, and so do you, but things aren’t all that red-hot good for you, are they?” she muttered, not looking at me. “I mean, you’ve still got Mommee on your neck. And Aunt Laura. And me and all my hang-ups, and you had the boys…I mean, what kind of life is it for you? It doesn’t look to me like being strong and good matters diddly-squat.”

“I have you, and that’s the shiningest thing in my life,” I said. “And I have your dad, and that’s the next shiningest. I have everything I want.” I hated it when the pain of the world bore in on my vulnerable child, though I knew very well that it must.

“Do you have Daddy, really? Do we really have him? Are you sure, do you promise? I know Jess thought she had her dad, too…”

So that was it. More than pain at her friend’s grief, more than the betraying craziness of her grandmother, she was feeling the cold wind of loss and emptiness herself, where none had ever existed before. Well, I knew about that, didn’t I? Thanks to Sweetie Cokesbury, I had felt, for a moment, the breath of that awful, empty wind.