[11]

St. Patrick’s Day, 1979

There was no wind on St. Patrick’s Day. It was a humid day with highs in the eighties. A month had passed since Edna’s funeral. It was a school day for Becca.

Mary had planned a shopping trip to Raleigh with her friend Laura.

Plans change. Nine-year-old girls get sick. School nurses track down mothers at their friends’ homes at nine o’clock in the morning, and mothers, who’d prefer to spend the day shopping in Raleigh with their friends, cancel their plans and drive to Chapel Hill Elementary to pick up their fourth-grader.

Mary parks her car on the street because her husband’s and her babysitter’s cars are in the driveway. She tiptoes inside and then thinks better of tiptoeing because there’s a sick daughter to think about. The sick daughter turns on the TV. She wants some soda. Daughters are selfish.

Mary opens her bedroom door and sees Millie sitting naked on her bed. Millie says, “Oh my God! Oh, shit! Oh, Mary, I’m sorry. Oh, fuck,” and fumbles to pull on her jeans, one foot in, one out, tripping across the floor into a tower of glossy Yachting Today magazines that slide and spread reds, whites, and blues across the hardwood floor. Mary sees Millie’s thighs, the young pink goose-bumpy flesh, her flat stomach, her pink fingernails covering her perky little breasts, then tugging the waist of her jeans, hopping, her breasts bouncing, to cover up. Then Mary sees Rowan, shirtless, exiting their bathroom in a pair of khaki shorts. He stands beside their rumpled bed, silent, while Millie continues to fumble across the bedroom floor. Rowan bends down and slides a copy of Yachting Today from the feathered pile. Why is he picking up a magazine? Why is he doing this to her?

Rowan says to Millie, “The joint’s in the bathroom.” Sloppily dressed, Millie goes to the bathroom. Rowan says, “You were right. It’s good shit.”

Mary says, “Becca’s downstairs. The nurse telephoned. She’s sick.” She doesn’t know what else to say. In shock, she stands there, watching Millie exit the bathroom. Millie smells of marijuana. Mary remembers when she and Rowan smoked pot together. It was before Becca.

Rowan tosses the magazine on the bed and pulls his polo shirt over his head.

Mary leaves the room, shutting the door on the husband and the babysitter because she can’t think. She knows about the affairs, but suspected someone named Patty—from the strawberry note. She’s known about the affairs for years, but not in her own bed, not with the babysitter, who isn’t so smart. Why her? Do you like stupid? Why here? Why not in her dorm? Why does it have to be in my face? In my home?

Mary is only thirty-two, but already she feels old. It’s St. Patrick’s Day today. She remembers another St. Patrick’s Day when they first met, when they were in love. There’s a picture of the two of them on a parade float. She’s wearing a top hat and he’s kissing her. She’s looking at the camera, knowing he can’t keep his hands or his eyes off her. He loved her. It’s past tense, isn’t it? Where’s that picture?

She thinks about taking Becca into the bathroom, or asking Becca to stay in her room so she won’t see Millie come down the stairs, but she doesn’t. She leaves Becca right where she is so Becca can see Millie leave. Maybe Becca will put two and two together and know that her father is a real shit. Where is that picture?

Becca says, “Hey, what are you doing here?” when Millie descends the steps.

“Nothing.”

“Happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sick.”

“Yeah. Your dad was helping me with school stuff.” She leaves. She didn’t say “Feel better” or “What’s wrong?”

Becca hears the squeak of the liquor cabinet’s antique door, she hears an irritating, breathless moan, and when she thinks about the midday highball her mother is about to mix, about the two cars in the driveway, about Millie’s shirt untucked and her hair mussed, she understands. Having a fever of one hundred and two degrees, Becca stays put. She’s too sick to do anything. She wishes someone would bring her some juice and some baby aspirin, but she’s been forgotten. She remembers the day she saw Millie and her dad walking outside Mario’s, his hand grazing Millie’s arm, and it makes her feel sicker, knowing what he’s doing. She wishes she were naive. She doesn’t want to know about her dad’s philandering. (Last year, Aunt Claire called Becca’s dad a philanderer. Becca had assumed it was a good thing, but wrote the word down to look it up. It’s not a good thing.) Why can’t she fix her parents? Why can’t they get along?

That afternoon into evening, Mary sits on the den floor, flipping through photo albums, dumping shoe boxes of pictures between her legs. Sorting through pictures and drinking, saying, “I don’t know where that picture is. It’s got to be here.” She says it over and over before making another drink. Becca is too sick to get up, but her mother does bring juice and aspirin. She also brings apple wedges and sliced cheddar. Becca is grateful, but sad for her mother. “You know what picture I’m talking about, right?” Mary asks.

“I don’t think so,” Becca admits.

“It’s got to be here.”

“Maybe look for it tomorrow.”

“Today is St. Patrick’s Day. Not tomorrow, Rebecca.”

“Oh, right.” It’s best not to disagree with her mother when she drinks this much. It’s best to keep quiet or say what Mary wants to hear.

Becca’s father stays upstairs.

Becca goes upstairs to bed, tiptoeing past her parents’ door. She can’t see her father, not now. She just can’t. She didn’t have dinner, but she goes to bed with a stack of Chips Ahoy cookies wrapped in a paper towel, leaving her mother passed out downstairs, a pile of wrinkled photographs under her cheek.

No one yells—not that night, the next day, or the next week. No one speaks.

Rowan parks the Austin Healey in the backyard and sleeps in the garage on an old army cot. Becca’s birthday is April first. Carrie spends the night, and they eat cake with Becca’s mom. Later, they play the board game Life in the garage with Becca’s dad. After the house is dark, Carrie whispers, “This must be the worst.”

Becca says, “It is.” She had one wish on her birthday. I want my parents to love each other again.

Carrie asks, “What did you wish for? Did you wish for Kevin Richfield to like you?”

“I can’t tell or it won’t come true.”

Throughout April, Becca’s dad stays in the garage, smelling of kerosene and lying to Becca, telling her that sleeping in the garage is fun, just like camping out. She ought to spend a Friday night camping out in the garage with him. She tries. She doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. They play six hands of gin rummy. Becca loses every time. In the middle of the night, she goes back inside to use the bathroom and falls asleep in her own bed.

Losing at cards isn’t fun and neither is sleeping in the garage.

The world can be fuzzy or sharp or somewhere in between. After Bo was struck by lightning and Grandma Edna died, things were painfully sharp for Becca. When it thundered, she worried that she would bring the lightning to her house and accidentally kill her own dog, Whiskers. She didn’t want to hurt or kill anyone, and even if she’d had nothing to do with Bo’s death, she nonetheless felt responsible. She took precautions: staying clear of windows, water, and electrical wires during thunderstorms; bathing in the morning when storms are less likely; and wearing only rubber-soled shoes.

Sitting crouched in the den with Whiskers curled between her legs, she checked the bottoms of her shoes for sticky bits of metallic bubble gum wrappers, pennies, and paper clips. When it wasn’t storming, she had other things to worry about. There were the bombs and the Russians and the whales being brutally harpooned. There were seals being clubbed and foxes being trapped. She worried that Whiskers was aging prematurely. She worried that her mother would pass out one night and never wake up. She worried that her father would leave the garage and she’d never see him again. She worried that if it weren’t for her escapes—TV, books, and art—she’d go crazy. She was too young to go crazy. When she worried, she drew pretty pictures. Like in Mary Poppins, she jumped into those pictures, imagining bright sunny places without sticky liquor drinks and cheating husbands. Her other escapes included The Wonderful World of Disney and The Six Million Dollar Man, praying to Grandma Edna in heaven, and eating Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies for dinner. Becca’s world, she knew, was sharp. It had a point, and she’d prefer a dull edge—like a butter knife’s.

That summer, Becca and Carrie straddled their bikes outside the 7-Eleven, counting change to buy Coca-Cola–flavored Slurpees. They watched the comings and goings of the Chapel Hillians. Sometimes Becca saw things that weren’t there and had to look twice. She saw a twenty-something man in dark sunglasses leaving the store with a six pack of Budweiser and an arm full of red roses. She asked Carrie, “They sell roses at 7-Eleven?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The roses.”

“You need glasses, Bec.”

Becca looked again and saw that the roses were a crinkly bag of pork rinds. She had to look twice at a lot of things. Sometimes at night, as she sat in the den with Whiskers, the door leading to the backyard flew open. Whiskers started barking. Once, Becca saw Grandma Edna and Bo. When she looked again, they were gone. She shut and locked the door, marching upstairs to tell her mother.

“You shouldn’t have gone to see that scary movie. I told you.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t scary. It was Grandma and Bo.”

“Please leave me alone.”

Becca shut her mother’s door and went back downstairs to the TV.

In early July, Becca’s dad moved back into the house. Becca wasn’t sure what it meant exactly but hoped that the philandering would stop. She hoped that her parents would reconcile. They might fall in love again. As sharp-edged as her life was, there were nuanced things she remembered and mentally cataloged. For instance, she took haloed photographs. She saw roses instead of pork rinds. Once in a while, she propelled the second hand on a random timepiece to tick counterclockwise. Truthfully, Becca couldn’t live in the world without hope. She was a girl. She was not a disbeliever, a naysayer, or a cynic. She was a girl with her whole life ahead of her.

Mary Wickle Burke, saving crumpled photographs of an unrecognizable life, decided to extricate herself from this life too: First, she quit chemistry socials on Thursdays; next, her Wednesday-night card game. She boxed her most expensive gowns and donated them to the Salvation Army. She resigned from the Garden Club board and the Historic Preservation Society.

When she’d quit everything that occupied her time, she took her calendar off the wall, crammed it into the garbage, and in permanent black marker wrote I QUIT where the calendar had hung.

She drank her cocktails at home and smoked cigarettes in the backyard. Rowan slept in their “marital” bed, but he didn’t touch her. He wouldn’t say he was sorry about the babysitter, just “It didn’t mean anything” and “You’re being ridiculous.”

“I’m being ridiculous,” she muttered. “I’m being ridiculous,” she said again, her voice louder. “Me! I’m ridiculous!”

He told her, “Settle down. What is it with you that everything has to be dramatic?”

He had no idea that what he’d done did mean something. It meant that he didn’t respect her. It meant that he didn’t love her.

Pathetically, she still loved him.

Absolutely, she was ridiculous.