there were parts of your life you kept to yourself. There were things Julia would never tell them, things that should stay unshared, unconfessed. There were secrets that should die with people.
When Julia was alone, her personality unbound, drifting, she had no idea what she was like. Would her children recognize her? Didn't she twist herself, quickly, instinctively, into the shape she always wore for her children? Was it different from the shapes she wore for other people? For her parents?
The guest-room door opened, and Katharine stood in the doorway, leaning on her cane. Over her hair was a blue paisley scarf, tied dashingly at the nape of her neck, like a Gypsy's. She smiled at her daughter.
As a young woman, Katharine had been beautiful, with high cheekbones, liquid brown eyes, a square Gallic face and aquiline nose. She was still a beauty; the soft skin was weathered, but the cheekbones and profile were still firm. Her loveliness lay now in her warm luminous eyes, her inclusive smile: Katharine had always enjoyed her days.
Julia saw her mother's younger face beneath this one, as though a steadily thickening net, a veil of age, were being set over it. The earlier face was still present, but dissolving into this one, soft, lined, mottled.
Katharine made her way slowly down the hall. She wore baggy blue pants, a loose flowered shirt. Her small body was now shapeless— thick and bulky at its middle, slack and gaunt elsewhere. The womanly landmarks—waist, breasts, hips—had slid into insignificance.
Katharine walked unevenly, her torso dipping with each step. Her hip had been injured long ago, before she'd been married. It was part of the family history. An accident: icy roads, a skidding milk truck. Before it, Katharine had swum, skied, danced, played tennis. She'd famously climbed to the top of Mount Washington with her older brothers. Afterward, for a while she'd seemed to recover, but over the years everything had steadily worsened. Her spine had shifted, compensating for the damaged hip. An ankle had given way and had been fused. The other ankle weakened, a shoulder froze. In spite of operations and therapy, her body had become increasingly twisted. Now she leaned heavily on a cane, her movements slow and awkward.
What was her mother like, alone in a room?
Alone with her pain. Pain was the thing that was never mentioned. Katharine never spoke of it, nor did Edward, though they all knew it was present. There was nothing to be done; it was to be endured. To talk about it, even to admit it existed, was somehow shameful.
Her mother's life swam around Julia, a dense transparent layer of existence, like the veil of atmosphere surrounding her planet. Julia held in herself the sunny stretch of her mother's childhood as the darling of the family, the youngest child, the only girl. The Depression, when she'd nearly had to drop out of college. The accident, then the dark stretch of the war. Her domestic world, her husband, her three children. The ebbs and flows of Katharine's marriage—would Julia ever know about these things? Did she want to? Could she bear knowing them? She did not want to know her mother's pain, it was unbearable to consider. The intimate knowledge of her mother's life was charged, dangerous, too powerful and frightening to approach. Though in some way she did know these things, she knew them by breathing in her mother's life with her own. Julia was encased by her mother's life; she saw her own life through it, it was her air. We think back through our mothers, if we are women, Virginia Woolf had said. But it was alarming to think back, to venture into the closed and secret chambers of the mother's life.
Now Katharine smiled up at her. “I love those yellow walls in the guest room,” she said. “It's such a pretty color. And thank you for the flowers. You know rugosas are my favorites.”
“Oh, you're very welcome,” Julia said lightly.
Her tone—airy, noncommittal—implied that the walls just happened to be that shade, that the flowers had somehow gotten into the room by themselves, that she didn't know her mother loved rugosas. Julia would not admit to trying to please her mother, though she did. She would not accept her mother's gratitude or praise. She resisted her mother, held her at a tiny stubborn distance. Some subterranean line had been drawn between them, sealing Julia off.
Edward appeared now, behind Katharine. “I wanted to look up where we are,” he complained, “but Julia doesn't have an atlas.”
“I do have an atlas,” Julia corrected him. “I just can't find it right now.”
“Well, I don't know how you can say you have it if you can't find it,” said Edward to himself.
“Edward,” Katharine said humorously. She caught Julia's eye and shook her head. She was used to this, distracting attention from Edward's bad manners, making him seem charming and funny. Julia saw her father smile to himself, pleased, like a naughty boy.
Julia turned away from them both, from their collusion, her father's irritating manner. “I thought we'd eat out on the porch.”
They sat in a row in the bright shade. The air was hot and dry, with a whiff of cinnamon from the ferns. Before them the long pink grass rippled down to the cove.
Katharine sighed. “This is awfully nice. You have such a lovely place.”
“It's a pretty nice view,” Julia said.
“But the house,” Katharine insisted, “the house is lovely.”
“Falling to bits,” Julia said cheerfully.
“But in such a charming way,” Katharine said, smiling.
“I wish I'd found that leak in the bathroom,” Edward mused. “I'd have fixed it for you.”
Julia said nothing. Having her parents here roused something in her. She felt she was holding something at bay. She was patrolling the border. She was never not patrolling the border. It was a peacekeeping mission, she would not provoke an incident, but she would patrol, with armed guards. She picked up her sandwich and squinted into the bright light. For the meadow, for that smoky pink grass, first an undercoat of dead green, for depth. Or maybe yellow, deep yellow, for vitality.
The sky was brilliantly clear and blue, but the sun had moved around behind the house, and the shadows—still short and black— were beginning to lean toward sunset.
Edward followed his wife as she made her way to the back door and carefully onto the porch. As Edward stepped down, he felt the floorboards yield springily beneath him.
Rotten, Edward thought, pleased. He liked discovering flaws, it made him feel successful. Through some arcane law of psychophysics, every flaw that Edward discovered elsewhere increased his own sense of well-being.
He knew what should be done to this, the rotten boards ripped out, the punky orange shards piled on the lawn. New dry wood, the snapping of the chalked string against it, the blurred shadow flawlessly straight. The boxy, blunt-tipped pencil, the dull iron shine of the nails. Everything set in place.
Edward once would have done it himself, though now it was beyond him. Still, he'd have liked to watch it. He enjoyed watching construction—carpentry, wiring, plumbing—anything with mechanical complexity. He liked this larger, inanimate counterpart to his own world of cutting and clamping and reconnecting. He liked knowing how systems worked, all of them; he used to read instruction books on wiring and plumbing. He'd once done those things. He liked having the
