Thunderstruck & Other Stories Read online

  “Why don’t you do the speech for me?” Sylvia asked Lisa now. She sat down on the sofa, her hands clasped. “Then you can just enjoy the party.”

  “No, thanks. Daddy says I should save it for the performance.”

  “What performance?”

  The girl shrugged. “He taught me Hamlet’s speech to his players, too. ‘Speak the speech, I pray you.’ ” Another grape. This one she tossed in the air: it bounced off her chin. “Oops. Anyhow, it was his idea, when I told him about the party. So I better.”

  “He doesn’t understand—”

  “Grandma,” the girl said seriously. “You have to do what sick people ask.”

  In earlier years, Sylvia had been a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other person. When disasters happened (her mother had taught her) you strode firmly in the opposite direction, because calamity followed catastrophe followed disaster. People who believed things couldn’t get worse were the ones who were killed, by man or nature. You had to get away.

  But the Bicentennial summer, all she could think was, my fault. She could hardly move for culpability. That’s what happened when you were the oldest surviving member of your family. You could not cast blame any further back: it was yours, like your spinster aunt’s diploma. Everyone else refused it, and the only way to hand it down was to die.

  She’d fed that boy, her son, too well. That’s what Rena said: she’d starved the girl and stuffed the boy. Last Thanksgiving Rena had come with her steno notebook full of all the ways that Sylvia had damaged her, as though at the end she might present her mother with a bill. Distrust of men: $9,000. Fear of living alone: $15,000. “I need to do this,” said Rena, and she flipped page after page and listed injury: how Sylvia and Ben had always taken Aaron more seriously; how in the family you had to be careful about hurting men’s feelings but women didn’t matter; how they hadn’t bought her a piano when that was all she really wanted. Aaron wanted a dog, he got a dog. Aaron wanted a car, he got a car.

  “I don’t remember you ever asking!” Sylvia had said.

  “You knew,” said Rena darkly. Then she added, “You never loved me unconditionally. There were always strings.”

  “What are you talking about? Darling, I absolutely loved you. Love you.”

  “You didn’t love me the way you loved Aaron.”

  What could Sylvia say? That was true. Not more nor less but differently. If one could measure love—but even then love was too various, one love would have to be measured by degrees Fahrenheit and one by atomic weight. First born, second, boy, girl: of course different loves. To compare was nonsense. What Rena wanted: scales with packages of maternal love, finally squared—but then she’d complain about something else. You just gave me the same love you’d already given Aaron! You didn’t treat me like an individual!

  A different love for grandchildren, too: unreserved. Gleeful. Greedy. Sylvia was allowed to rub Noxzema into Lisa’s sunburnt back after a day at the swimming pool. She let Lisa pick out expensive shampoo at the grocery store, something called Milk Plus that smelled like the 1930s baby soap she’d washed her children with. So what if Lisa’d fallen asleep with the bubble gum they got from the candy store, and it ended up in her hair and had to be cut out? They walked down to Sal’s salon, and now Lisa had her first real haircut from a professional. They cuddled on the orange guest bed and watched television and ate popcorn. Oh, if Rena ever found out how Sylvia loved the childish flub of her granddaughter, the dense bakery heat of her limbs, her neck like a loaf of bread—a voracious love, a near starvation though here the girl was in front of her. That was what the love of children was like, in Sylvia’s experience, and she supposed it made sense that Rena was sad that such mother love had to end, to mellow. You couldn’t bite a grown-up. You couldn’t sniff at an adult woman’s neck. If she went to Rena’s therapist—that was who had insisted on the steno pad, the formal accusation—she surely would have hated to hear what it meant, her longing to bite children. To devour them. She nibbled, she tickled, she nuzzled, she inhaled. That was the real end of childhood, wasn’t it, when you looked at a stringy kid and loved her but didn’t want to bite.

  But it pained her, too, the pudge of her granddaughter’s thighs. The straps of her bathing suit cut into her shoulders, and her face had changed. She’d been so casual about the split pants, as though it happened all the time. At ten, weight didn’t matter so much, and of course, a smart girl like that was more than her body. Rena had said, You made it seem as though your love for me was dependent on my weight! No, of course not. A mother loves her children no matter what. But other people, darling Rena, she wanted to say, other people do care, other people might well love you less. Her job as a mother—she believed this then, believed it now—was to make sure that her children would be loved by the maximum number of other people. This was the source of all of her anxiety.

  They would get the weight off before it was time for Lisa to go home, she’d decided. Surely that was possible.

  · · ·

  They were getting ready to leave for the block party when the phone rang.

  “Hold on!” Sylvia called. The nearest phone was in the kitchen.

  “I’m going to see Mrs. Tillman,” Lisa said, and Sylvia tried to give her a wave that said both all right and don’t ruin your lunch.

  “Mama,” said Rena on the phone. “I need you to be calm. All right?” But Rena’s own voice was not calm. Sylvia took off her sunglasses and replaced them with her indoor ones. She sat at the kitchen table. The phone cord just reached.

  “Mama,” said Rena. “It’s Aaron. Mama, things do not look good.”

  The clock on the kitchen wall was shaped like a frying pan. Why on earth, Sylvia wondered, what could it mean, a clock like a skillet?

  “He’s on a ventilator,” said Rena. “But—they’ll take him off it. This afternoon, probably.”

  A heart attack, a little heart attack, like his father’s first one. A good heart attack, the kind that could scare you into behaving. Sylvia cleared her throat. “And then what happens?” she asked.

  Rena let out a long rattling noise, halfway between a sigh and a moan, which Sylvia understood as another accusation of maternal crime.

  “Mama—”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Well, he’ll stop breathing,” said Rena. “So.”

  “I’ll call the airline,” said Sylvia. “I’ll hurry. Lisa’s—no, we’ll drive to the airport right now—”

  “We need you to stay there,” said Rena.

  “We? Who?”

  “I’ve talked to Marjorie. That’s what she wants.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here at the hospital. I drove up last night, when things started to look bad.”

  “Rena!” said Sylvia, and now she was standing up, the phone cord wrapped around her hand (that twisted, loved, comforting phone cord, like a length of worry beads). “Rena, of course I have to be with him, I have to—”

  “Mom,” said Rena. “No.”

  “I can help! If she’ll let me! Aaron,” said Sylvia, as though that was the problem, a mother needed to say her dying child’s name aloud, to call him back to life.

  “This isn’t about you,” said Rena, in her kindest voice.

  Well, who was it about, then? That was the thing: Rena always remembered that Sylvia was their mother but somehow forgot that this meant they were Sylvia’s children.

  “And you can help,” said Rena. “Keep Lisa with you, and happy. Tomorrow—when it’s over, it would be wonderful if you could bring her home. All right?”

  “What do I tell her?” said Sylvia.

  “Nothing. That’s very important, Mom. All right? Marjorie needs to figure out what to say. She’s the mother.”

  “All right,” said Sylvia. “OK. You’ll call me?”

  And then Rena’s voice fully broke, and she said, “Of course. You’ll be the first one. I’ll see you soon.”

  · · ·

  There were
only eight units in the building, all with the same floor plan, identical or mirrored, depending. To see what other people did with their apartments was disconcerting, a separated-at-birth moment. Your life would look like this, if you weren’t you. She could hear dim mechanical sounds inside Mrs. Tillman’s apartment after she’d rung the bell. What was her first name, anyhow? Sylvia imagined a tag on her that said (like her husband’s goods) TILLMAN. That’s what brand of woman she was. Sylvia was doing her best not to cry. She had a few seconds more of doing her best on her own.

  The door opened to reveal Mrs. Tillman, behind her a wall of hung decorative plates, each with a scene of Hummels through the seasons. China plates with china figurines. Sylvia was panting, she realized.

  Then she reminded herself that she had a job: to keep Lisa happy.

  “Ah!” said Tillman. Her hair was coral-colored. She leaned on a walker that seemed too short for a tall woman. It gave her a restrained look, as a lunatic is restrained in a sanitarium. “Hello, Syl. We had a little problem.”

  Sylvia wondered, for a moment, whether Mrs. Tillman had had a stroke; then she saw that she’d merely applied her lipstick off-center.

  “We had a little problem,” Mrs. Tillman repeated. “We used something without permission. Talcum powder.” She gestured at a dusty-headed, teary-eyed Lisa, who stood by a garish bird-patterned sofa. Lisa knows, thought Sylvia. How does she know?

  “I wanted to look like I had a powdered wig,” said Lisa.

  “Ah!” said Sylvia. “Did you say you were sorry, darling?”

  Lisa nodded.

  “So we had a little spank,” said Tillman in a bright voice, “and now we are friends again.”

  A little … spank? Sylvia tried to make sense of this. Tillman nodded encouragingly, and then mock-spanked the back of her own wrist, to illustrate.

  “You spanked her?” Sylvia looked at the plates again and saw them for what they were: portraits of children who in five years would join the Hitler Youth, little lederhosened, dirndled monsters. She wanted to pluck the plates one by one from the wall and smash them, and then she realized the strange feeling in her arms was her hands, which were heavy as sandbags and had been since she’d hung up the phone. Grief had made them huge. They felt ready to drop off her wrists. Lisa couldn’t get out, not past the walker, which seemed not the support of an elderly woman but a torture device to be used on small children. Sylvia reached over and picked the walker up and moved it closer to Tillman’s body.

  “Syl!” said Tillman, stumbling back, and so Sylvia grabbed her by the wrist. The other hand she held out for Lisa, who took it and was out of the apartment and under her grandmother’s wing, smelling of ticklish, tickling babyhood.

  “Are you crazy?” Tillman said. “Let go!”

  Sylvia was still holding Tillman’s wrist. She felt she could snap it. The ulna of a Hummel: of course china people had china bones.

  “I’ll call the police!” said Tillman.

  “You?” said Sylvia. “Call them! I’ll have you arrested!”

  “You’re hurting me! Let go!”

  “Call the police!” Sylvia said. “You don’t spank someone else’s child! Nobody’s! It’s barbaric!”

  “Grandma,” said Lisa. “It didn’t even hurt! Please!”

  Sylvia flung Tillman’s wrist back at her, and the door closed. From the other side they heard Tillman say, “The police? You call the police on me, I’ll call them on you!” A thud: she must have struck the inside of her door; then they heard the chain lock slide closed.

  They stood in the hallway together, Sylvia and Lisa, not yet bereaved.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” said Lisa. “Let’s go to the party. Let’s go the back way.”

  Poor girl, thought Sylvia, but she meant herself.

  She was returning to her body. Her hands still felt oversized, but filled with helium. All she really wanted was to go to her apartment, to her bedroom, to the back of her walk-in closet, to sit among the shoes. She thought she might feel better if she gnawed on one.

  No. They had to keep busy. That was the only way they might manage. She didn’t know what a ventilator was, exactly. Did it go over your face? Down your throat? Whenever she heard the words life support she pictured a series of cords attached all over a sick person’s body, all leading to one enormous plug in the wall: that was the plug that was pulled, when you pulled the plug. Suddenly she understood life support as something that involved a certain amount of brute force. A shim, a brace. The phone might be ringing in her apartment even now. They walked away, down the back steps. When her children were little and first came home from school to tell her things they’d learned—for instance, that Ponce de León had come to the United States on Columbus’s second voyage—she’d always felt unnerved: they knew things she didn’t. Now they still did. Aaron would die. He would die. (She repeated this in her head a few more times.) And apparently this death was not about her and not about Lisa.

  They were outside now, in the sun. The street smelled of gunpowder and lemonade. Little kids held their hands in the bright showers off sparklers. Everyone else was in shorts and sleeveless shirts, Sylvia saw. Nobody else was in costume.

  “Don’t eat anything with mayonnaise,” she told Lisa.

  “Because it’s fattening?”

  “It goes bad in the heat. You could die from hot mayonnaise. No potato salad. Listen, darling. It isn’t right that Mrs. Tillman spanked you. No one has the right to spank you, you understand?”

  Lisa nodded seriously. Then she said, “Can you fix my queue?”

  “Your what, darling?”

  “My pigtail.” The girl turned and presented her back. Sylvia tightened the sad braid, the brown hair slippery under the talc, faded, like a sun-damaged photo. The bow was blue. Her shoulders were broad. Sylvia stroked them. Without turning around, Lisa said, “My dad spanks me sometimes.”

  “Well,” said Sylvia, shocked, “did you deserve it?”

  But Lisa was already hopping away on her smudged espadrilles towards the dessert table.

  She came back with a cream puff—cream puffs! worse than tuna salad!—and with Bill Antoni, the superintendent of the building, a retired custodian. He and his wife lived in the basement, next to the all-purpose room and the storage lockers. He was wearing a tank top that said FORD across the chest, the word buckled by the curve of his belly. Even from this distance, the mustache that hid his upper lip looked dirty.

  “George Washington here has a question for you!” he said to Sylvia.

  “Patrick Henry,” said Lisa.

  Sylvia looked at Lisa, as seriously as she could: as much seriousness as Lisa could hope for herself, or for Patrick Henry. “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “Can I have a sparkler?”

  “Of course.”

  “Told ya,” said Bill Antoni. He smiled at Sylvia, with a little wink like an afterthought.

  Should she tell him? A mad spanker in the building. Surely he should know, so he could attend to it, the way he attended to the furnace and the landscaping. But she felt the moment she opened her mouth she would unravel, tell him everything, fall into his arms. Bill Antoni’s mustache was nostril-damp in two channels. He was fat, healthy, alive. The sound of a police siren came winding from the distance, and Sylvia wondered whether it had been hailed by Tillman, coming for her.

  Bill Antoni handed Lisa the thin wire of the unlit sparkler. “Hold steady. That’s it. Hey, there’s going to be dancing later.”

  Lisa stared at the spot where the stick met Bill Antoni’s flame, and said, “I don’t dance,” and Sylvia thought that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard, and besides, Don’t stare at fire.

  The sparkler caught. Lisa held on to it with both hands, as though it were a responsibility, not a pleasure. Yes, thought Sylvia: my fault, my fault. She had made Aaron, and Aaron had made Lisa (though Sylvia herself had no sense of being made by her parents, only loved). If Rena had been there with the steno pad, Sylvia wou
ld have signed it, like a confession, and demanded, at last, her punishment. Surely her crimes were capital. She wished to burn like the sparkler, beautifully, fatally. They all watched.

  When it sputtered out, Bill Antoni said to Lisa, “What do you mean, you don’t dance?”

  “I’m more into forensics,” she said.

  He scratched his head with the hand that held the lighter. “Like dead people?”

  “Speeches. I give speeches. I’m going to give one today. I have it memorized.”

  Sylvia thought this would put an end to it. Bill Antoni would make it clear: this is a block party, not a debate meet, you strange, strange child.

  “Well, why not?” he said. “Come this way. That all right with you, Grandma?”

  I am not your grandma, thought Sylvia, but she nodded. A moment to breathe. A moment to herself. “Right, then,” said Bill Antoni, and he led Lisa away, and Sylvia knew she’d made a mistake. She never wanted a moment alone for the rest of her life.

  The last time she’d seen Aaron in person had been at Thanksgiving, in Boston, ice on the ground; on this day he was dying, it was hot; which would she remember?

  They should be inside, to answer the phone. They should be out here, in order not to. She pictured the phone ringing and ringing, Rena forced to stand by one of the hospital payphones, thinking of her mother, cursing her, “Mom, come on, answer,” and Sylvia wanted to fold that girl in her arms, too, the one about to lose her brother, my God, there was no loss like that, was there. Sylvia had gone through it herself with her sisters. Aaron’s eyes were violet and his hair was black. Had been black before it turned silver. That was why she should be with him now, to see the actual person she was losing, though of course she was losing every version of him: the daredevil baby, the thoughtful ten-year-old, the know-it-all teenager.

  There was nothing she could do. She was not in Boston. She could only take care of the girl in Des Moines. As long as they were out here, among the slaws and the Jell-O and the burnt hot dogs, the beguiling array of potato chips, the flags attached to tricycles, made into bunting. Out here Lisa was not fatherless and Sylvia was not sonless. Aaronless. They hadn’t yet sustained that particular damage. Damage: a Rena word, as though any of us made it through life in mint condition. But surely some things were worse than others. As long as Lisa didn’t know, she was still perfect. Flawless.