liquor store next door, and I gathered my mother’s Polaroid camera—this was before the film was like gold dust, so I took along plenty of it—and all my Edie paraphernalia—more of it than you might imagine your average middle-aged third-grade teacher to possess—and I went to Somerville.
I’ve told you about this. I got a bit drunk. I played the music pretty loud. I danced, and posed, and I took pictures. I was being free, and I suppose in some way it was an exorcism—surely that’s not the right word? By allowing Edie’s ghost to inhabit me, I was banishing the meek and accommodating Miss Eldridge, the calm and responsive Miss Eldridge, the good friend, good daughter, good teacher, doormat Miss Eldridge, the Miss Nobody Nothing that everyone smiles at so cheerfully and immediately forgets. I was getting rid of her.
I danced and drank and smoked and took cartridges of blurry Polaroids of myself, as if I were Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith at one and the same time. And this went on until the whole bottle was empty—I drank most of it, but somehow a goodly bloody dollop ended up on the front of my Edie white T-shirt. It was a splotch on my left boob that then dribbled downward, so it looked like a bleeding heart. And then I took it off, so I was dancing in my white bra, stained in one spot by the wine.
And do you know what I did, in that dizzied state? I tiptoed into Sirena’s Wonderland forest and I lay down on the Astroturf grass with the flowers waving around and above me and casting shadows on the walls in the half-light, like dancers; and I closed my eyes and I slipped my flat hand under my waistband, and I tickled my own stomach, following with my blind fingers its declivity between my hip bones; and with my fingers seemingly independent explorers, I traced a blood-ringing, singing line down either side of me, over my hips and into the fur of my groin, and from there into the wetness between my legs; and I wasn’t, for a while, Edie or Alice or Emily or anybody but a body, or I was another Nora altogether, and with the grass prickly beneath me, and both my hands now against myself, inside myself and on my reverberating skin, all there was, was yes, yes, yes, and I was in Wonderland, and for that brief unashamed, unhidden time, I was free.
9
I got up the next morning a new person. At least, I thought so. Replete, I looked at the self I’d been all week—all month—for months—with mild dismay, the way an ex-smoker looks at his former, needy self, and marvels. I got up, I called my father, I drove to Brookline, I took him to brunch at Zaftigs, and then I drove him to the arboretum and we walked for a long time among the trees in their young maiden green and their bursting Disney blossoms. He limped because of his bad hip, but every time I asked he said he wanted to keep going, so we did. It was cold, but we didn’t overly notice, and I could see the color of health spreading in his saggy cheeks, my dear, gray father, so nobly struggling on. I was sad to have neglected him.
He talked about the Red Sox game he was going to watch later that day—against Tampa, I think it was—and we talked about my mother’s love of flowers and blossoms, the zeal of her gardening, but we laughed at how bad-tempered she’d get when her plants died on her, when they didn’t make it through the winter. As if it were a personal insult. I said I’d always thought it was because she didn’t control anything in her life and she felt at least the plants ought to listen to her, and that her confidence was devastated when they didn’t.
My father looked at me like I was nuts. He said, “What are you talking about? Your mother controlled everything in her life, in our lives. She chose where we lived and how we lived and what we ate and when and what we wore and who we knew and how and when we saw them. She chose how many kids we had—your brother and you, she chose; I wanted six of you—and also when we had you. She controlled everything always, and that’s why gardening made her so damned mad, because she found one