Rooms Read online

  Trenton. My beautiful, graceful, perfect Trenton.

  As soon as Trenton is gone, Minna stands, approaches the kitchen island, and pours herself a glass of wine. She’s at least four inches taller than her mother, and much thinner, but the fact that Minna has lightened her hair increases the resemblance between them. Minna is the angular, modern version of Caroline’s watercolor.

  “Where’s Amy?” Caroline says.

  “Upstairs,” Minna says. She pauses, then adds, “She wanted to know why Grandpa isn’t here.”

  “That’s normal.” Caroline drinks again, this time forgetting to be so careful. Her glass is now more than half empty, and she sets it on the counter. “My glass must have sprung a leak,” she says, with a high, nervous trill, before refilling.

  For a second, there’s silence. Then Minna says: “It’s strange being back here. It looks so . . .”

  “Different?”

  Minna shakes her head. “No. The same. That’s what’s weird about it.” She reaches for a small porcelain pig saltshaker, one of a dozen saltshakers Richard Walker accumulated. “Why did he keep all this junk?”

  “Oh, you know.” Caroline takes another sip of wine. “Your father was never very good at parting with things.” The words sound unexpectedly bitter.

  Richard Walker was a collector. He brought back hand-painted ashtrays from Mexico and beads from Guatemala as well as Buddha statues from India and cheap posters from Paris, which he hung, without shame or irony, next to original Warhols in his study. He collected foreign coins and clocks, cheap Venetian masks and original Eskimo art, mugs and key chains and magnets.

  Minna walks a small circle around the kitchen, like a caged animal. “Junk, junk, junk, junk,” she says. “Junk everywhere. It’ll take forever to sort. I say we just trash it all.”

  “It’s not all junk, sweetpea,” Caroline says, and then sighs. “Some of it must be worth something. And money is money, after all.”

  “Did you schedule the auction?” Minna asks.

  The kitchen door bangs. Both Minna and Caroline jump; neither had noticed Trenton push his way back into the kitchen, dragging his mother’s luggage. The suitcases remind me of Ed’s shoes, after they’d been worn for too long and polished often and painstakingly. The luggage has no visible spots or imperfections, just a kind of sad, sagging look.

  “What are you talking about?” Trenton says. “What auction?”

  Minna and Caroline go momentarily still. Caroline is the first to unfreeze. “An auction to sell off your father’s things,” she says brightly. “Whatever we don’t want, of course.”

  “When?” Trenton stands with his back pressed against the door, as far away from his mother and sister as possible.

  “At the end of the month,” Caroline says, reordering the saltshaker Minna displaced.

  Trenton looks from his mother to his sister. Minna avoids his eyes. “Sick,” Trenton says. “Truly sick. We’ve been here less than an hour—”

  “It isn’t like he can hear us,” Minna says, rolling her eyes.

  He stares at her. “And I’m morbid.” Then he jerks forward and bursts out of the kitchen. His feet are hard on the stairs. Each time he stomps, deliberately loud, I feel a distant explosion of pain and sensation—like the bursts of color I used to see behind my closed eyes after accidentally staring at the sun.

  “I don’t understand that boy,” Caroline says.

  “He’s sensitive.” Minna waves a hand. “Besides, he hardly remembers Dad. He can’t be expected to know what an asshole he was.”

  “Don’t talk about your father that way,” Caroline says mildly.

  “He was an asshole,” Minna insists.

  “I’m hungry,” Caroline says. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really,” Minna says.

  “Amy must be hungry.” Caroline begins opening cabinets: these, too, are overflowing, although Richard Walker hardly ever cooked. There are boxes of pancake mix and half-eaten bags of chips; a half-dozen cereals, cans of beans and tuna, two jars of honey, cemented to the shelf by a sticky, golden ring of overspill; sardines and pasta and bags of rice in which mites have started to nest.

  “What are you doing?” Minna asks.

  “I’m looking for something to have for dinner,” Caroline says. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  Minna leans over the kitchen island and slams the cupboard shut. “We can’t eat his food,” she says, as though Caroline has just suggested she eat an insect.

  Caroline tries to open the cupboard again; Minna keeps her hand on it firmly. “Minna, please. You’re as bad as Trenton. He won’t miss it, will he?”

  “No, I mean—” For a second, Minna looks ashamed. “I mean it’s disgusting. I mean, it’s been sitting here just—just absorbing his germs.”

  Caroline widens her pale blue eyes. “For heaven’s sake, Minna. The last time I checked, death isn’t contagious. It isn’t an infection, you know.”

  Minna wrenches her hand away from the cupboard. “I won’t eat it. And I won’t let Amy eat it, either.”

  “Oh, Minna.” Caroline sighs dramatically, but she removes her hand from the cupboard and instead picks up her wineglass and drains it.

  SANDRA

  I’m not afraid to say that what you’ve heard so far is a big honking load of bullshit. And no, I won’t mind my language. Jesus Christ, it’s practically the only thing I have left.

  I bet she didn’t even tell you this: my death was no accident.

  I’m not saying Alice lies, per se. Her problem is she’s a prude, straight out of the wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap generation, and secretive as anything.

  Take Minna. Alice is always going on about how beautiful she is. Yeah, if you like that look—a great big pair of fake tits screwed on like a lid, and eyes that always look like they’re trying to see through your pants to how much money you’ve got in your wallet.

  No thank you.

  I know Minna had a rough start. All those years in that crusty basement practicing piano until her fingers ached and God knows what else. But listen, we all get served a deck with some cards missing. Get up and get on with it, is what I say. I’ve done my reading about all of it: neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, and compulsions, blah, blah. I used to work for the Dr. Howard Rivers, of the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, for God’s sake. And I’ve seen my fair share of churches and twelve steps.

  It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?

  For example: I didn’t exactly have it easy growing up. We were in Silverlake, Georgia: land of shotgun houses and trailer parks, an all-white county park, peach trees with fruit like drooping tits, and summers that slapped you in the face like a dog’s tongue. Dad had a mouth like a closed-up zipper, and when he looked at me at all, it was usually to ask how come I couldn’t play nice like the other girls and stop getting into brawls on the playground and why can’t you ever learn to listen.

  I don’t think I ever once saw him kiss my mother or even hold her hand. He spent all his time with his friends at the Rotary Club, especially his friend Alan Briggs, and my mom used to go into hysterics on the phone with her sister, wondering where he was and whether he was cheating on her and what she would do if he left her for some young tramp. And then one day when I was seven, she came home early from her once-a-month steak-and-lobster buffet dinner with the girls in Dixie Union and found my dad and Alan in bed, buck naked. At least, that’s the way my mom told it to me later.

  My dad and mom divorced, and Mom and I had to move to a small one-bedroom in what was still called the colored part of town. It was 1960 in the South, which was like 1940 anywhere else in the world, and at school whispers went around that my dad was a queer and I was a nigger lover besides. Those aren’t my words. Silverlake, Georgia, was a pretty place, full of ugly people. I remember houses set up in a row like dominoes, yellow in the morning sun, explosions of bright red trumpet creeper, and picket fences
dusty with pollen; and I remember “Whites Only,” and fields crawling with chiggers, and cockroaches the size of a child’s palm wriggling out of the drain.

  Colored, black, white, yellow, queer, straight—from the beginning, it never mattered to me, maybe because even though my dad hardly ever said a word to me, and liked to diddle his male friends behind my mother’s back, and wore the same bowling shirt every Saturday and Sunday, I still loved him. Who knows why or how. Maybe only because he brought me candy buttons, or let me sit on his lap while he cruised down Main Street in his sky-blue El Dorado, big as a boat, shark finned and smooth.

  Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don’t get to choose it.

  My point is, I didn’t sit around sobbing about my problems and expecting everyone to feel sorry for me. I wanted out of Georgia, and so I got out of Georgia, and I didn’t wait for some man to saddle me with a ring and a lifetime of laundry to do it.

  By then it was 1970, anyway, and things were changing. The farther north I got, the more they changed, until finally, in New York City, I discovered it had been the future all along.

  Funny, isn’t it, how quickly the future becomes the past? I bet Trenton doesn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was. Joplin, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia—forget it.

  What can I say about Trenton? A sad sprout of a human being, halfway between a boy and a broccoli. Then there’s Caroline, a big sodden biscuit, soaked morning through night. I’m not one to talk—I liked getting knockered sometimes, who doesn’t?—but at least I had the decency to do my drinking alone.

  Richard was probably the worst of all of them. Couldn’t keep his prick in his pants and made everybody’s lives miserable with his whims and his moods and demands, especially at the end. No chicken soup, I want tomato. Turn the heat up. Now turn it down. Now up again. We used to catch his poor nurses crying in the dining room, hidden in the dark, hunched between dusty furniture—grown women, blubbering silently into their palms. The biggest favor Richard Walker ever did for anyone else was die.

  Do you think I’m being harsh? I’ve never been one to sugarcoat the truth, and at least I’ve still got a sense of humor, even if I’m all splinters and dust everywhere else. That’s another thing that drives me crazy about Alice: no sense of humor at all. I can feel her, wound up tight, like a soda about to explode, like clenched butt cheeks.

  So I ask you: What’s she holding in?

  TRENTON

  The truth: that’s all Trenton wanted. For someone in his family to tell the truth.

  It was seven o’clock and he was lying in his old bedroom, which looked almost exactly the same as he remembered it except for the piles of junk everywhere, listening to the murmur of his sister’s and his mother’s voices. They were arguing about what to do for dinner. And it occurred to him that since the last time he’d been to Coral River, he probably hadn’t heard a single word from either one of them that wasn’t some kind of lie.

  He didn’t know why it still mattered to him. Maybe it was because he’d been hoping for integrity. He liked that word, integrity, had picked it up in Brit Lit II, which among the guys at Andover was known as Boner Lit. The teacher, Ms. Patterson, was hot. Most of the teachers at Andover were really old, past forty, and strapped into their clothes like psychos into straitjackets, as though their fat might attempt an escape.

  But Ms. Patterson wasn’t. She was twenty-eight—she’d told them so—which wasn’t that old. And she looked even younger. She wore her hair loose. It was soft and brown and kind of fuzzy, and all the girls made fun of her because they said it was frizzy and she didn’t know how to blow-dry it right. They made fun of her clothes, too, because she wore sneakers sometimes with her skirts and dark old-lady tights; and other times, loose black pants and a shapeless fleece on top.

  But Trenton liked that. He found he couldn’t even jerk off thinking about the girls at Andover, even the girls younger than him. They were all out of his reach. Their jeans were suctioned to their butts and their hair was slick as an oily river, and their mouths were always curled up and laughing at a joke he was never a part of, and on weekends they took planes and cars down to New York and came back, triumphant and smirking, with a new story: they’d gone down on so-and-so in a cab. They’d done ecstasy and taken over the DJ booth at Butter.

  Plus they were smart. He, Trenton, slouchy and barely hanging on to his grades, had nothing to offer them.

  Integrity. Integrity was showing up with your hair fuzzy, in a fleece. Integrity was doing your best in school because you liked it, even if people called you a fag and elbowed you into the walls, when they weren’t busy pretending you didn’t exist.

  Everyone in his family lacked integrity. They were corrupt (antonym). His mom, Caroline, was the worst. She had lied to everyone for so long, Trenton wasn’t even sure she knew the difference anymore. He thought probably she’d always been fake, and he had only noticed recently. Now he knew he couldn’t trust anything she said, especially things about his father. “He loved you, Trenton, very much . . .”

  Bullshit.

  He had believed for a long time that Minna had integrity, but he’d been wrong. He could hardly look at her, ever, without noticing her additions, which seemed to point at the world like an accusation. And he knew, from his mom, there had been other stuff: tugs and pulls, needles and pills, all things she didn’t need. He might have been prepared to forgive her if it hadn’t been for what had happened during Family Weekend in the spring.

  And Minna hadn’t even apologized. She avoided the subject neatly, the way she avoided everything, because she lacked integrity, because she was corrupt, because she was full of shit.

  Amy was all right. But Amy didn’t count because she was six and didn’t know better. She would probably grow up to be as full of shit as the rest of them.

  He’d hardly seen his dad since his parents divorced, and Trenton had never been back to Coral River. Instead, Richard came to New York. He took Trenton to shows he didn’t care about seeing and dragged him to restaurants where everything on the menu had some disgusting ingredient, when Trenton would have preferred to get a burger. But in a weird way, Trenton had been closest to his father. Trenton knew his dad was impossible—particular, obsessive, pompous (another word from Ms. Patterson), a complete egomaniac and kind of a dick.

  But he’d also been honest. Brutally, totally honest. Trenton still remembered the time they’d been at Boulud, and Trenton had been trying to conceal the fact that he had a hard-on (why the fuck did he have a hard-on? The waitress, who wasn’t even that hot, touched his shoulder with her breasts for one second, as she leaned down to take away his wineglass), and his dad had suddenly said to him: “Look, you’ll hear a lot of bullshit from your mother. And I was a shit husband. I was. But the woman is batshit crazy and I did my best. Remember that, Trenton. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.” And later, after half a glass of wine, Trenton had found himself in the back of a taxi, blinking away tears and feeling grateful.

  “Dinner, Trenton!” His sister’s voice came through the floorboards, and he thought he heard a slight sigh.

  Integrity. That word was still there, like a small staircase in his mind, leading up to the inevitable.

  Trenton wanted to die with integrity. There was one reason—and one reason only—that he had agreed to come back to this place that was no longer a home: to die.

  As he passed into the dark hallway, and felt his way to the stairs and the light down below, he turned that idea over inside of him, and it brought him comfort.

  And he ignored the wisp of a whisper that seemed to say, from very far away, “I wish they’d let the whole place burn.”

  ALICE

  Dinner is delivery from Mick’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant. I recognize the name from the dinners the night nurse would pick up for Richard, when he was still eating solid foods. Macaroni salad and roast beef sandwiches were his favorite.

  I’ve never been to Mick’s. In my day, Cora
l River had only a general store, a Woolworths, a post office, a bar, and a movie theater that showed one film a month. Sandra informs me that when she was alive, Coral River added an Italian restaurant and a McDonald’s, a new bar, two more gas stations, a hardware store, a bookstore, and a clothing boutique called Corduroy. The town can only have grown since then.

  Minna, Caroline, Amy, and Trenton eat their dinners straight from the deli containers, not even bothering to throw out the plastic bag, which they leave balled on the center of the table. Trenton eats a cheese sandwich, plain, on white bread. He chews moodily, noisily, occasionally letting a bit of cheese drop onto the wax paper the sandwich came in, now unfurled on the table like a stiff white flower.

  Caroline eats cold macaroni salad—an unconscious echo of her ex-husband’s preferences—and hot chicken soup, and becomes increasingly withdrawn as the vodka in her water glass takes effect. Minna picks at a chef’s salad and complains that the produce is disgusting. Amy eats a tray of baked ziti and winds up covered with tomato sauce, a ring of red around her lips like a second mouth.

  Sandra misses drinking. I miss food. It’s funny—I never had much of an appetite when I was alive. Even when I was pregnant with Maggie, I was hardly ever hungry, and what little I did eat came up just as quickly. My doctor said I was the skinniest pregnant woman he’d ever seen. I made it through all nine months on tinned green beans, tuna fish, and a little bit of beer. That was all I could keep down, and of course we weren’t so concerned in those days about drinking when we were carrying a baby.

  Now food is practically all I can think about: pork roast and gravy; buttered potatoes and my mother’s spiced Christmas loaf; fried eggs, yolks high and proud and orange as a setting sun; toast dipped in bacon fat and the first summer peach; pools of cream; and fluffy biscuits.

  I remember the first time Ed and I ate a TV dinner in front of our twelve-inch black-and-white, how happy we were balancing the small plastic tray on our knees and eating the mass of mushed peas, the disintegrating roast. And I remember the first time I took an airplane to visit Maggie, when I was already in my fifties: the shiny look of the pleather seats, and the way the stewardesses smiled; compartmentalized mashed potatoes, a flat gray disk of turkey, and Jell-O, each thing separated by small plastic dividers. That’s modernity, if you ask me: endless division.