were mounted on marble bases. On the coffee table, a red carnival-glass dish was filled with black wooden spools. And the Louis XIV table. Franny had impressed its existence upon Jane and her sister, Nan, and me each time we had flown into the living room instead of walking. I noted the photograph of Franny that had been framed for the funeral. She looked like one of those Avedon models from the ’50s.
—I don’t mean anything too detailed. I just need to get an idea of which items will be held out for the family. You can think about what you’d like an exact appraisal on—I’ll help you with that. And if you hope to sell by the piece or the lot. But we’ll get there, I said, opening my briefcase. I felt like a realtor or mortician giving a pitch. I don’t think they understood what it meant to settle an estate, especially one like Franny’s. The time for each appraisal, lining up buyers. And things tended to change daily where several interests were involved: the items Jane and Nan would fight over. I knew Jane would hand me the phone, expecting me to settle things between them.
I took a half-dozen yellow rule-lined pads and a box of pens from my case and set them in the middle of the coffee table so they would have them when they were ready.
—You brought office supplies from Chicago? Jane laughed. I struggled with the shrink-wrap covering the tablets. Seeing me grow flustered, she smoothed my hair as if it were flying about from static electricity. Mike gave me a sympathetic look.
It was a cool morning, but a couple of swimmers were out in the short waves now. For the first time I saw the cat lying in a corner of the room, looking dead. A small rug of an animal.
—Is Trader all right? I asked.
—I gave him too much of the tranquilizer. By mistake, Jane said. Then she picked up the box of pens and spilled them onto the table as if she were about to read a fortune with yarrow sticks. I wanted to say I miss Franny, that it seems impossible that the house will be sold, that it isn’t necessary to dump all the pens out.
I thought it was the large business of settling Franny’s estate that had them so keyed up. I’d seen this before: the sense of separation people can feel from themselves or each other when sorting the objects of the past. My boss often said you have to have a particular deficit of emotion to move freely through other people’s lives. Some families pay the auction house to go over every last thing of their relative’s. Letters, photos, spice jars, closets full of clothes, carried off in plastic bags for salvage or trash until they get down to the things they can sell. It’s a stupid way to break down, but I never wanted another career. Even if I’m left to wonder if strangers will rake through my things eventually.
Just then Mona ran down the stairs carrying one of Franny’s ivory jars from the matched set on her dressing table. She sprinkled face powder everywhere. Livvy ran after her until she saw me, then slowed to a walk and went over to look in a suitcase for something. This was the first summer she had made dramatic alterations to her appearance. The ear cuffs, the hair, the piercings, the black clothes.
Jane took the powder away.
—Hi girls, I said.
—Hi Mat, Mona said.
—Mattie, Livvy corrected her. Hey.
—Hey, I said.
She surfaced with a pink swimsuit, which she handed to Mona, who held it up so I could read the words emblazoned on the front: LOVES TO SWIM.
Mike winked at Livvy. Then he turned to me and said:
—We should invite the neighbors over for dinner tomorrow night.
He seemed eager to include me in things.
—To get in the mood? Jane said.
But I wasn’t sure which mood she referred to, and I knew she didn’t want me quizzing her, and it didn’t matter to me if we had a dinner party or not. Mike didn’t say anything, went out to the deck.
While Jane unpacked, I looked around the living room. The early-afternoon train came through heading north. It rode Franny’s house like an act of nature. A familiar door above the stove always swung partway open with the vibrations. Franny used to cut sticky-back tape into dots and squares to fasten down her sculptural pieces. The yellow, cracked adhesive patches were still in place, stuck to the bookshelves. They no longer held the objects they were intended to safeguard
As Jane searched for swim fins and Livvy and Mona robbed the linen closet of towels, I watched Mike. I thought he had given up smoking, but there was a cigarette in his mouth. He bent each match outside the matchbook cover, lit it, and waved the book until it went out. As he stood there, I was aware that the deck looked more like a container than an open platform.
The house was right on the beach and the visibility was good that day. The coast runs west to east midway between Point Conception and Port Hueneme. The ocean is due south and in the summer people prop their chairs, slather up, let their toddlers go nude, wrestle with kayaks. Kids line up their boards like Cadillac Ranch. Dogs run in packs.
It was low tide, so there were fifty feet of beach at most and coastal access for all. Of course sometimes the beach disappeared entirely and the water pounded the lower decks. A newspaper left out could turn to a bit of papiermâché stuck to a railing. The houses ranged from the substantial to the badly weathered, mostly wood framed. There was the pseudo-Spanish one of stucco, and a couple of blue-and-white nautical designs with overloaded themes.
Franny had owned her place down to the retaining wall. In winter she heaped sandbags around the pilings to keep her house from being carried out to sea. The lower deck had been rebuilt three separate times after bad storms. Flooring and carpet ripped up and replaced. Yet each summer when we arrived, her house was back in order.
I was eight when I met Jane. She was nine. My parents and I stayed at a rental a few doors down. It was always different at our house. Impermanent. Fragile. The kind of place where you could stiff a landlord on the last month’s rent.
It was important to keep everything picked up, especially between my bedroom door and the bunks, so Lois, my mother, wouldn’t trip in the dark. When she came home, she sometimes woke me to say good-night, sending out an exhaust of salt, peppermint candies, and gin as she spoke. She asked if I had spent time on my workbooks, if I had kept myself out of trouble. I said yes and yes, and when I attempted to sit up in the dark, she put a cool hand on my forehead, as if I might have a temperature.
I could make out the outline of her hair, brittle from the ocean, and I knew her lips were stung by weather. In daylight they were almost white, sometimes blistered. If she had something to say about children who hide in abandoned refrigerators or men who fall into elevator shafts, this was where she whispered to me, often drifting off and not quite finishing her stories. My mother gave me this advice: If you have to jump from a burning building, leap second. Let someone else go first. This gives the men with the nets a chance to study the wind direction and velocity.
Once she held up a piece of paper. There was a wheel in the center, my name in the upper left-hand corner, my birth date. Lois said: I talked with a woman today. And she looked at your chart. She wants you to know that something will happen around travel . . . or a car. That was it. A car will change your life. It has to do with the planet Pluto. You’re overloaded with Pluto.
While she pointed to the black ink marks, I lay still, imagining a wheel rolling over me, flattening me to sleep. You understand, don’t you? This woman knows a good deal about these things. You should hear what she said about me. Then Lois pulled herself up and receded into the hall, as if she hadn’t been
