Sentencing Silence

By Kathleen Cecilia Nesbitt

Set in Chicago in the 1980s, Sentencing Silence chronicles the journey toward breaking the silence that holds June, a trophy wife, Reni, a call girl, and Sandy, a factory worker captive in the traumatic past that thwarts their dreams. June denies her future by submerging herself in domestic life as she tries to repair a damaged and dangerous marriage. Embracing her anger, she recreates herself as Reni and decides becoming a call girl is both her fate and a fast-track to earning tuition and living independently. As "the life" takes its toll on her, she falls deeply in love with an eccentric young artist who renames her Sandy and promises to return her to a time of unadulterated innocence. With each turn through tragic loss and increasing silence, she slowly realizes that it is the crushing silence she's been burdened to keep that prevents her not only from realizing her hopes, but the possibility of any meaningful existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kathleen Cecilia Nesbitt
• Release date: Nov 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543959710

Kathleen Cecilia Nesbitt

Kathleen Cecilia Nesbitt studied fiction and poetry writing at Columbia College in her hometown of Chicago, and earned an MA in Transformative Language Arts and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont. She has worked voluntarily assisting incest survivors, domestic abuse survivors, incarcerated women, homeless teen mothers, and veterans with PTSD break their silence through the healing power of the written word. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Whiskey Island Review, Big City Lit, 20 Pounds of Headlights, Threads, Dagda, Dead Beats, and Mojave River Review. She is currently working on her second novel in between walking her beloved old English Cocker Spaniel, learning to cook like a boss, gardening, and dancing the Argentine Tango. She is a survivor.

Book preview

March 31, 1987

The bus jerks forward as she boards. It is crowded. She is thrust from pole to pole down the center aisle like a pinball. Searching for a seat, she ducks underneath suitcases jutting from the overhead and trips around trunks edging out into the aisle. Music plays: the low drone of a synthesizer; the cudgel of a stick across a tight drum; the high sear of violin strings; a nervous flute; simultaneous and separate, rapid and leaden. A young boy with a boom box in his lap smiles at her. She looks deeply into the garden of bodies. Old people, their wrinkles relaxed or tangled like twine. She peers past them out the window and sees only red neon light whirling, ricocheting, and sliding across vast silver surfaces.

She comes to a seat taken by a khaki-colored metal strongbox next to a woman in a yellow-and-blue polka dot kerchief. Swaying back and forth in the aisle, she motions to the woman that she wants to sit down. The woman studies her with violet eyes surrounded by black freckles. She has two mouths – one painted from coral lipstick surrounds the pallid flesh of her true pale mouth.

She would want you to tie up these loose ends, the mouths utter as the woman places her spotted hand on the strongbox.

Who?

The woman makes no reply, stares at her steadily.

The bus doors swing shut, leaving her on a corner with the strongbox in her arms. As the bus rushes away she cries after it, "Who is she?"

In the middle of a stainless-steel-and-cement city the palette of dusk – mauve, Payne’s grey, alizarin crimson – she listens. A warm pressing wind roars. As she turns her back to it she feels the wind’s force from all directions; it smells of mesquite and oil, and the pungent odor of burning hair. She begins walking. The box in her arms – large as a file-cabinet drawer – pulls her forward through empty streets. An immense church leans back against the dark sky like a picture frame leans on its cardboard flap. Its sign trembles in the thick wind: Saint Mary of the Angels.

Inside, she climbs flight after flight of spiraling stairs. Looking behind her she cannot see from where she came. Peering over a balcony overlooking the sanctuary, she sees hundreds of candles glowing, yet the church is not bright; each flame is singular against a burgundy velvet void. Underneath the candles’ glimmer, shapes begin to emerge. At first only a few silhouettes are scattered between the long tapers. They grow in number until thousands of porcelain figurines emerge like refugees. They are all forms and sizes, from dime-store angels to willowy goddesses, jewelry-box ballerinas to barefoot peasant boys. Many are whole, but as many are broken. Some miss hands, others whole arms or wings; even heads are broken off, exposing white chalk and hollow necks. As the figures turn to face her, their porcelain surfaces glint in the candle glow. Their mouths open in a silent choral O.

She feels the metal box pinching into her skin. Placing it on the floor, she fingers the lock. It opens at her touch. Envelopes and papers swell over the edges. She pulls them out one by one, removes envelopes, unfolds letters, only to find each document, each piece of paper is bare.

.1

May 13, 1982

The graceful trapeze artist is suspended between swings. The tightrope walker strikes the balance. A seal in a striped shirt holds a ball on her nose. The stallion, silvery and muscled, knows which gait will keep the ballerina on his back, while the tawny lion feigns wide-jawed ferocity so he can be tamed.

The ringmaster, standing so large and alone, confounds her. She circles his figure from a distance wondering, if leadership is a gift, are the rest of them meant to be lead? Perhaps he is only for show. At night he sits alone in his trailer. Naked, except for a pair of tattered boxer shorts, with a bottle of vodka and a gallon of ice cream. He squints at the TV screen bouncing in shadows of any local channel he can find.

Bearded ladies, snakes with human heads, and Siamese twins floating in formaldehyde drift between what is and is not painted on nursery walls. It is the darkness of the circus that creates the sideshow.

I shut myself off in the room full of mismatches to write. I tell myself to stay in practice, hear in my mind, school will start before you know it. This room, the second bedroom, is overfilled with exiles; everything that goes with nothing in the rest of our apartment crowds the room. The metal typewriter stand Muth painted years ago to emulate wood, Mateus bottles stuffed with dried baby’s breath from my first studio apartment, a box of paperbacks (Cam and I debated whether poetry got along with architecture in the living room bookcases but agreed that, bottom line, paperbacks did not go with hardcovers). This room where the circus came to town and took root; of all the murals the last tenant painted and left behind as her legacy, I agree with Cam and his friends on this one: I don’t want to write nursery rhymes, and there will be no child in this apartment. The circus has to go.

Eradicating the mural is a nightmare. After two coats of paint the heavy outlines still bleed through. It’s like watching a memory disrobe. The first resurfacing of the ringmaster’s big red belly evokes a recurring nightmare I had as a child: a rotund court jester with bells, sharp teeth, and an ax dismembered each person in my family as they took turns entering the dark master bedroom. They emerged armless, one-legged, sometimes carrying their own heads. When they returned to the safety of the fully lit bathroom, their limbs reappeared, fizzling into shape like when one adjusts the antenna on a television set. From my place on the cold tile floor, I could hear each dull and fleshy whack; I refused to take my turn and my father’s face grew stern. I ran from the house, through the neighborhood, but at each intersection I ran toward, the snarling jester reappeared, wielding his shiny ax until I woke up.

From beneath the second coat of pale sage, mischievous clowns and happy seals reemerge. I stir the wooden paint stick around the bottom of the can, pull and churn, hoping to drag something of substance up from the bottom. Aqua and yellow streaks spiral to the surface, and I think of Cam’s olive eyes, marbled with shards of blue and gold. Watching the liquid run from the stir stick back to its source without so much as a ripple across the surface, I decide the paint I purchased is thin, poor quality. I call the hardware store to complain, and they tell me to use a primer first.

Covers up water stains, grease pencil, and ink, the voice barks into the receiver. Muth and I had painted my childhood room together many times, but she never used a primer.

Frustrated, I wander out my back door and lean into the porch railing. Across the street, the old woman with the bright plaid poncho, whom I call the five o’clock woman, ekes out each step toward Walgreens by placing her silver walker ten inches in front of her, pulling herself to it, and lifting and securing the walker again. She telegraphs to me how late it has gotten. Every day she is there, a slow plaid smear across the brick façade with her black plastic shopping bag swaying on her wrist as she plods forward while people clip past her. Each time I see her I think I can make it down the stairs, across the back courtyard and the busy street, to open the heavy glass door for her; I wonder if she’d shake me off. I wonder what her story is; maybe I worry what her story is. Isolated.

I close the outside out, slip back inside and into decorating mode. Without practice, you’ll be far behind. Since we moved in last August, dressing up the apartment has been a posture that’s been both fluid and fast, starting with a mammoth bump on the first Monday we woke in our own home. We had plenty of hand-me-down furniture from our families, but only a set of mattresses and stacks of boxes in the bedroom. Cam had one of his spur-of-the-moment ideas while I was in the shower. We needed a bedroom set!

It would be nice to have at least one room not look like early Salvation Army. There’s no cohesion, he shouted over the racket of water raining down on my head. I peeked around the shower curtain as he set our shiny new credit card on the bathroom sink and said, Go and do this today and have fun. What you love, I love. You can call my mom, she’s been furniture shopping lately. Of course she’d been furniture shopping, I thought. Why else would she empty the rooms we had lived in in her basement on us? Ingrate. Cam left me in the shower, wide-eyed with panic and disbelief.

I’d had this excruciatingly romantic vision of my husband and me wandering hand in hand around furniture stores, complete with slow motion falling onto showroom beds, laughing. I was reluctant, wanting to wait for an evening Cam and I could do this together, yet felt like all my number-two pencils were sharpened and someone just commanded, Begin! So, with all my pencils in hand, I hastened to the North Shore to places Cam’s mother, Lena, would furiously shop like the Red Baron in a Chanel cape. But each of those high-end showrooms in Evanston and Highland Park left me feeling a little like I was hobnobbing, and absolutely immoral to even consider the prices they were asking. What on earth did a couple who spent three thousand dollars on a bed look like?

With half the day wasted, I drove back into the city through the syrupy heat and found, like a horse to water, Pergolesi’s, a little granola joint where I had often mellowed out when I was in school. Luscious burro’s tail succulents still cascaded in the front window, and a hand-painted map of Chicago on the wall indicated YOU ARE HERE with a fat, red feather hatpin. As I sipped an Italian soda, my shoulders felt the weight of my husband’s mother and my own like those two little angels recording my deeds. Lena threw pearls before swine on my left, laughing and chanting, Divine divine divine! The white carpeting in her condo swept through a suite of rooms decorated with jade plants the size of Christmas trees, big fat couches that suggested cozy formality but were probably stuffed with twenty dollar bills, and a shiny chrome espresso maker played solo at a precise angle on her kitchen counter, mirror clean. Muth stood on my right shoulder with her ceramic Virgin Mary stuffed with plastic greenery, smoked mirror squares glued to the wall, and my father’s cowhide rug on the family room floor. Queen of Montgomery Wards, Muth pointed to the sturdy – but dated – bedroom set she had purchased twenty years ago. She’ll die with that set, I muttered out loud, and Muth harrumphed, Precisely.

I was nothing like my mother-in-law, but I adored her home. Traitor.

I stared through the green tumbling burro’s tail at a sign across the street for a good ten minutes before I put the letters together: LOST ERAS ANTIQUES. An unassuming, three-story building with rough old bricks the disparaging color of raw liver. But the window displayed a lighted lamp of a bronze-caste woman holding a rose-colored fringe shade like a golden umbrella. I chanced across the street.

I tap the hammer around the lid of the paint can. With each contact a hollow glug reverberates, that same glug that’s reverberated in my chest since Cam and I returned from Florida. I wonder what kind of primer is available to cover up a bungled...honeymoon. Tiny droplets of sage green paint land on my face, like the spray of the rain on the beach that night. …Come back! It’s too rough. I look around to make sure nothing else is splattered, but everything is covered and protected with old sheets. I want to finish this room and move forward. Unpack, sort through the clutter, discard what I won’t use or need. I already know that the desk will sit next to the window, at an angle that will be perfect to view my little corner of Lake Michigan through the spaces between the apartment buildings. It’s the room I need to finish, but I guess that won’t be today. Quitter!

I pull an old floral sheet aside and rifle through the box of paperbacks, latch onto Adrienne Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, a gift from a girl in my Women In Society class before I quit school. When I open the slim book, a photograph drops to the floor. It’s an un-faded Polaroid, taken by a stranger, of Cam and me before we married. Why it’s stuck in this book of poetry I don’t remember. Since it has fallen out, I can’t tell if it marked a page that is somehow significant, or if the two items joined merely out of convenience. But it startles me. We haven’t had a photograph taken together since our wedding pictures last May.

In this one, in front of the Chicago Stadium, the morning light is crisp. We wear jeans and T-shirts. We had spent the night on the sidewalk surrounded by people in sleeping bags under makeshift canopies waiting to purchase Led Zeppelin tickets – the In Through The Out Door tour they never made. That was the late spring of 1980. We were already engaged. A few months before, Cam had come to me in my little studio apartment late one morning after we had broken up. For three months we hadn’t spoken, and then he was down on one knee; he held the tiny velvet box in his hands like a bird that might escape, and said, I can’t do it without you. We decided on a May wedding the next year because our first real date had been in May two years before. So many Mays. I remember saying to myself, if we are still together by January, we’ll make that May wedding.

Lost Eras was expansive, cool and dimly lit, with a lingering, old cedar chest smell. As my eyes adjusted from the bright sun, different tones and grains of wood shone around me. Table lamps warmed little conversation nooks of velvet sofas and floral printed chairs. Charmed, I wanted to try each setting to see how it made me feel, to see whom I would meet. Mid-warehouse, under another golden light, a man with wire-rimmed glasses sat at an old roll top desk. He had thin, sandy gray hair. As I neared him I was surprised to find that he was actually quite young, late twenties maybe. He looked up from his ledgers, peering over the tops of his wire frames.

Heellooo, I’m Robert. His voice was warm stew with a buttered biscuit.

I’m on a mission for a bedroom set today, I blurted. His slender face rounded, a child on the beach, radiant with delight.

I have some wonderful pieces, but only one truly complete set right now. Pressing his palms together, he circled around the desk, revealing Bermuda shorts; his plain, soft white T-shirt draped from wide shoulders. Sets get separated over time, sibling rivalry, fires, smaller accommodations, oh you name it. But if you’re shooting for a feel or an era, the joy is in the hunt.

He ignited, hurried towards the back of the old warehouse. I caught up with him in the jam-packed bedroom furniture section where he was already formally introducing me to a complete oak set, Highboy, dressing table, wardrobe, and four-poster bed. All hand-carved. Circa 1840.

It’s really gorgeous, I agreed, but remembered Cam had often complained that oak was overrated. Robert continued to introduce me to several single pieces that could be matched, as though we were at a party and these were all the strangers who were friends I hadn’t met. I was almost overwhelmed when two matching pieces lurking in the shadows captivated me. Robert rubbed his palms together as I inched through the crowd to get a closer look.

A gentleman’s bureau with a built in jewelry box and mirror top, and matching lady’s kneehole chest of drawers. Note the small shelves around the large beveled mirror for your cut glass perfume bottle collection. I listened intently, savoring each bit of information.

They’re perfect for my new apartment. It’s a 1920s vintage building. My husband – he’s an architect – says it’s Craftsman.

Burled walnut, very elegant. I’ve never seen hand-tooled pulls quite like it on anything. These are William and Mary influenced, probably 1890s or later, not as ornate as true William and Mary furniture, which can be tragic. My partner just brought these in; I haven’t had a chance to clean them up. Robert caressed the swirled wood grain on the gentleman’s jewelry box.

Are they for sale? I timidly asked while Robert slid the drawers out and back in. His long pause made me want them even more, but I tried not to show it.

Of course, Robert smiled at me like a grandmother. You’ve got excellent taste! I touched the lady’s kneehole dresser top. Mine.

But there’s no bed, or night stands. Cam had said, set. I let my hand drop to my side.

This is the fun part, Robert whirled and I sped after him again. We spent the next hour in another dark nook filing through stacks of bedsteads: Simple, ornate, retro, even diva. Wow, this one looks like it could have been a wall behind an altar in a church.

Mission style! Robert sniggered.

No! Is that what it’s called? I laughed with him. When we recovered, Robert ahemed: indeed, the style might be a little intimidating for newlyweds, and we giggled some more.

We agreed that the English, burnished-brass bed was perfect.

Leaving the ghostly circus scene behind, I carry the Polaroid of Cam and me down the hall into our bedroom. I trace the image, the sleeping bags, pillows, and down jackets piled at our feet. Our faces are captured in a moment of laughter; I notice my hand on Cam’s stomach and his arm around me, his fingers curled over my shoulder are soft and relaxed without leaving an imprint. The knees of Cam’s worn jeans are blown out, and I wear a wide-brimmed, brown felt hat with a wide black band. In this photograph, Cam is two years into his architectural degree, but in his broad smile and shining eyes I still see the journeyman carpenter I had met. Born to it, like some people are born to write or preach, his angular body – caught in this moment of joy – seems to dance with the same grace and elegance of his carpentry; a smooth rumba. His angle cuts and mortise joints still sing, and customers line up for the elaborate decks he builds – with hot tub surrounds and even circular stairs. In this photograph I am still a budding poet. I carry the smallest of spiral notebooks and golf pencil wherever I go. In everything I see there is metaphor; I capture images in my notebook like this Polaroid. But now, there is not one comfortable rip in Cam’s wardrobe. Underneath the professional white button-downs and creased pants that Conrad, Owens, and Hale silently demand, I rarely glimpse a tanned carpenter. I can’t remember what happened to that brown floppy hat.

I ease into the wing chair by the window and look closely at our faces. I see the hours we spent listening to Led Zeppelin, evenings after work and school, bouncing around in Cam’s big-tired truck through mud, unchartered back woods, and riveted prairieland, then playing our air guitars while we parked under skies resplendent with stars. I remember the fall morning we heard on the radio that John Bonham had died. Leaves made thick, soft beds on the ground; the world felt silent around us.

Now, Robert smacked his hands together after we thoroughly inspected the brass bed, since you’re buying all of this, I can give you a very good deal on a pair of handsome work tables. These were occasional tables, he explained, and described them as we wove though the maze of rooms: Walnut with hand cut-outs on the cross stretchers, and a tri-toned floral pattern inlay on the top, perfect night stands for such a high bed.

I began to lag behind. Everything intrigued me – tags named fainting couch, sheet music cabinet, pie safe – things I never heard of before.

In our first house my mother had blonde Formica tables with tiers shaped like internal organs, I told Robert.

Dear God in Heaven! I remember that look – Space Age Atrocity!

She has chrome and glass now. Revolting.

Oh, you poor child! I feel your pain, Robert placed his hand over his heart, and I laughed. But I wondered if my sudden infatuation with all the different woods and grains was because I had been deprived of it as a child, and now I was like a worm searching for earth. The nubby tweed and plastic covering of my past had never really invited me to pause, touch, or settle in. I left home when I was seventeen because it was the only way that I would ever qualify for student loans, by putting a full years’ distance from parental support. Perhaps another reason why I left was the way texture and pattern could repel or invite – determine your inclusion or exclusion.

The intricately carved worktables were definitely included.

Robert carefully scribed the details of my purchase at the roll top desk. I couldn’t stop staring at a small, overstuffed wing chair, dark olive velvet with a tilted back, and a beautiful floor lamp standing next to it. I was already picturing them in front of the window in the bedroom. I could hear Muth’s old standard, One pair of shoes now, maybe another later… I nudged her off my shoulder.

How much more would those two things be, Robert? Again he peered over his wire-rimmed glasses at the objects of my inquiry.

I’m going to love you, June.

Voices of the local hookers arriving for work drift through the open window from the passageway under my building three stories below. Nightly, they service their customers under the stairwell. I pause and listen, but their words are muffled … Don’t fight it; relax. I wonder if I had fiercely glommed on to the Florida trip because I needed to slow down, even though it did mean postponing my return to school for another six months. When Cam and I first returned, I found small puddles of sand in the bottoms of the suitcases; I pushed aside the last night on the beach, even the whole two weeks. Your sword, madame. Perhaps I am still being defiant, like the three-year-old me who climbed cabinets to get the cookies on top of the refrigerator. Or is retreating into a room to escape turbulence inveterate? I sneak sideways glances at Cam as if I can somehow catch the truth this way. The space between us in our bed has become awkward, so I resist it by making myself fall asleep in the wing chair, a book spread open across my lap, its spine facing the ceiling. While I wait for the sound of Cam’s key in the door, scraps of conversation from the prostitutes drift up from the vestibules below the window and mingle in my mind with snippets of poems I read out of Dickinson; These are the days when skies resume / The Old – old sophistries of June, a flat back is forty-five at the pad, For each ecstatic instant / We must an anguish pay, you want some company? Hand job’s fifteen.

I ran my finger across my husband’s name on the credit card, Cameron Michael Barrett, thinking, Mrs. Cameron Michael Barrett, wondering how I signed the receipt because the credit card did not say June Marie Barrett. I had never signed for a credit card before. Robert whipped the metal slide bar across the shiny plastic and put his finger where my name should go. He tore the slips apart and handed me the yellow copy. In that brief second it felt like I had made a crossing. It was a feeling I had never captured, but had wanted, three years before when I first moved away from home. Seventeen years old, I had a full-time job, and started taking what I could afford in college courses, a couple of electives, writing and literature. I had rented a small studio on Chicago’s north side in East Rogers Park. That tiny apartment was white on white: so many layers of chipped white paint that windows wouldn’t open and doors couldn’t click shut. Another tree fort entirely, it seemed – another place to look at my house from a safe distance. Cam stayed over frequently, and we slept in the twin-sized bed he’d designed and built to serve as a bookcase and sofa. Now, I signed for a complete bedroom set for our new apartment. Home.

Robert and his partner, Bruce, delivered the furniture late that afternoon. When the buzzer rang, I skipped to the door. A thud resounded in my chest when I looked into our living room. My mother-in-law’s hand-me-downs. Cam really did like those pieces – high-end sixties den furniture – nothing like what I had bought. Lena, with her bright orange lips and carefully coiffed auburn hair, hovered above like a wicked witch on a Mercedes broomstick. I swung my arm over my head to knock her off.

Bruce, Robert and I shoved the bed around the room until it balanced well against the wall facing the only real window, a window that nearly disappeared amidst the artist’s murals. Sweat beading on our foreheads, we collapsed on the bed and admired the paintings: Veils of sheer curtains billowing in and out over wrought iron railings that overlooked a perpetually lush park. Le Jardin des Tuileries, Bruce crooned, waving an admiring hand. It was these painted gardens that I thought of when I stopped to buy linens on my way home. Blooming in pale fuchsia and deep violet, complete with strolling women holding parasols beside the verdant hedges. Unlike wallpaper or paint, these walls were living and breathing, would always castigate the harsh reality of a Chicago winter, and the brutal new architecture vying for attention beyond the real window. These murals in the bedroom were my favorite murals in the apartment – Cam and his friends’ least favorite – and I shuddered, remembering how they had dissed the garden scenes the day we moved in; off-whitewash everything, they’d said. Architects!

By eight o’clock I had the furniture polished to gleaming, damp-sponged inside all of the drawers and tenderly unpacked our clothes into the dressers. I began to arrange the bedding several different ways, and looked at it from different angles. I chose celadon and ruby solids to complement the stout masculinity of the antiques, adding some fat plaid and a few large floral-printed throw pillows – a full range of patterns that married a boy and a girl. I wanted the bed to say welcome home, pillow fights allowed, passion encouraged. Love. I turned down the coverlet. This was our first real bed. Not Ben and Lena’s, a showroom bed, made by the maid of a woman in a Saks diamond choker with purebred cats. I reorganized the pillows to look less rigid. I didn’t want it to look like my parents’ bed either, a plain, king-sized bed, actually two twin-sized beds attached at the corners of the headboard that spanned their pillows, their bodies, their dreams. My mother separated those two beds at the center every day, made up her side, and rolled them back together, smoothing the whole thing over with a dark king-sized bedspread. As I rearranged the pillows one last time, I remembered how I had disliked helping Muth make her bed, the sour smell that mingled with the blue odor of aftershave.

Dusk, in all its fuzzy gray tones, had come and gone when Cam called to say one of the partners asked him to assist with out-of-town clients developing warehouses south of the Loop into office space, lofts, and condominiums – very big stuff. He would be delayed for a few more hours.

I arranged myself in a sleeveless cotton nightgown that buttoned all the way down the front, placed the receipt on Cam’s new dresser by the bedroom door, and settled into the velvet wingchair I’d placed next to the window. I glanced through the French doors to the sunporch across the room (the corner room of the apartment that led to the living room) where painted butterflies and hummingbirds hovered over hollyhock and bergamot. The wind had turned, and the lake’s cool aroma combined with the musty sweet scent from deep inside the wingchair. I imagined a large bouquet of saffron gladiolas in a pitcher and bowl on my dresser, or those cut glass perfume bottles Robert mentioned, to fill the empty spaces. The room sighed, I whispered back. My room, my room.

It was half past one when I awoke to the sound of crunching paper and opened my eyes to see Cam standing in the pale pink light of the new Art Deco torchiere.

I wanted to surprise you, blindfold you and lead you in by the hand, I sat forward and waited for Cam’s face to illuminate. His eyes swept the room, passing quickly over the bureau and the lady’s kneehole chest of drawers. He barely glanced at the worktables. Instead, he looked through the French doors into the onyx dark that now filled the sunporch. When he turned and walked out, leaving the beautiful English brass bed, arranged with that full range of patterns that married a boy and a girl, behind him, I looked again. The furniture still embraced the room, still shone with gratitude, as if exhaling after a long separation. Had it grown too dark for Cam to see it?

Cam poured himself a drink in the dining room at the other end of the apartment. I hovered in the doorway at the wake of his silence until he reeled around and said, What do you want me to say, ‘Great job June. You got us some more used furniture’?

"Used furniture! Cam, they’re antiques! I bought them in an antique store." I heard a pathetic squeal in my voice. Not nearly as trustworthy as Robert. Cam buried his fingers in the thick blond hair at his forehead to sort the commotion in his head. His gaze at a pile of blueprints on the floor was unseeing. Pictures spun behind his eyes. Images he may or may not share. Was Lena in there, again, trying to mold her son into what she expected? Was what he had envisioned so different than what I had selected?

It’s just that we can afford nicer things now, and we deserve them, he said to someone underneath the blueprints. You didn’t have to go second hand.

"I didn’t find anything I liked first hand. And like you said, ‘What I love, you love.’"

Seems to me it’s more like what you love, I’ll get used to.

Cam turned his back on me and strode to the bank of windows that flanked the east wall. I could see into each apartment beyond them, the curved outline of the top of a man’s head in front of a television, a lava lamp illuminating a Parliament poster. I suddenly felt exposed. I looked at my toes squinching into the hardwood floor as I wrapped my arms around myself. As much as I loved Lena’s home, her taste, her eye, I had pushed it aside all day. That was true. Had I pushed Cam away at the same time? What did I do?

Okay, you caught me, I never once considered your taste. I regretted it the second it fell out of my mouth.

Cam remained framed in the lights from the windows across the way. He would not reply. A memory of my mother’s face flashed, the roll of her eyes when my father beamed over his new cowhide rug. She had compromised.

I’m sorry, Cam. It all went so well with the apartment. We really should have done this together. We can do it together. I said these things; I meant them. Even so, this burned coming out, I’m sure I can return it all.

Cam turned to face me blowing a gust of breath out of his mouth. His jaw slackened. There’s a whole lot of pressure at work this week. Last week’s designs are garbage. I have to totally redraft this spiral staircase and… He kicked at the blue prints on the floor. I nodded and started out of the room, resisting the urge to say that I certainly hadn’t been under any pressure, things were smooth as honey for me. My number two pencils had been sharpened, but I had filled in all the wrong circles.

I heard the drink slide down Cam’s throat and the tumbler thump against the surface of the built-in breakfront. He rushed up behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist; his lips pressed against my temple. The sour smell of vodka and the tang of perspiration brushed the back of my throat.

Damn it June, help me, he seethed. I led him by the hand, down the hallway, to our new bed complete with a full range of patterns that married a boy and a girl.

The phone blasts from both ends of the apartment like a hammer shattering my glass reverie.

There you are! I was starting to worry. Didn’t you get back two weeks ago? Muth is exasperated.

Has it been that long? This startles me. Has one long rainy day for soup and an old movie actually turned into two weeks? I’m fine. I…

Muth plunges ahead. Words leap from her. It’s like she’s chipper, not a word I often pair with my mother. Promotion, substantial raise, bonus, and relocation expenses. She is moving. I can tell she doesn’t expect my long, empty pause. Roanoke, Virginia! My brother and his new wife of three months and her child are going along. It will give him a fresh start, Muth says. I slide down against the wall and sit on the hall floor. Splotches of sage-colored paint have dried on my knees.

When can I bring you the rest of your things? Muth rattles off a list of items that are neither useful nor an intrinsic part of me: my old baby clothes, boxes full of talking, walking, and tumbling dolls, art projects and report cards, the set of Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias complete with missing pages, the antique bassinet… I finally stop her. I haven’t thought about these things for years, but imagining them in a big blue Salvation Army dumpster makes my stomach coil.

I’m free on Monday, I suggest.

Twelve o’clock? Which means eleven forty-five.

Staring at the Polaroid of Cam and I still in my hand, I remember how I had pressed it against the warmth of my chest that morning in front of the Chicago Stadium. My father, who had taken many Polaroid pictures while I was growing up, had shown me this trick to make them develop faster.

.2

May 17, 1982

You think of Alison’s house and with it, gingerbread.

Oval rag rugs and cotton café curtains dress the gingham kitchen.

A stone hearth, a black and white springer spaniel holding point in an oil painting, a fall-colored afghan tossed across the den’s burnt umber davenport.

Rising and creeping like morning light, a restless girl of ten, you peer over the banister at crisp wooden shadow boxes with miniature porcelain colts hanging in the lower hall and Alison’s parents lingering there at the foot of the stairs. No space between them, playful yet sensuous, Alison’s father whispers, You take care of yourself today. With her hand cupping his face, Alison’s mother repeats his words to him like church-quiet maxims.

You will Alison out of her sand-sprinkled sleep, because this house has a sandman, you’re sure now. Under patchwork Alison mumbles, What?

"Your parents, you whisper. Do they always kiss like that?" Thinking it wasn’t so much the kissing as the cupping.

"Like what?"

"You know, all lovey-dovey have a nice day I’m gonna miss you, like that!"

Alison moans, Pretty gross, huh?

The image of Alison’s parents loiters in your mind, not gross but extraordinary.

You paste the picture into a mental scrapbook somewhere between Scarlet and Rhett

Bogie and Bacall.

I let the hot shower pour across my shoulders until it begins to turn warm, but before it turns cold. I think of Muth lounging in her aqua-blue tub with a hot washcloth over her face. Throughout my childhood, Muth took extended, hydrotherapeutic baths. While she soaked, I sat on the floor with my tree-fort scratched knees pulled up to my chin, or I stretched flat across the plush blue bath rug and watched the carnation-scented steam rise to the ceiling. I like to remember those hours as times we girl-talked. But I don’t remember telling her about how bugs had invaded the wooden storage box I sunk in the ground by my tree fort, thinking it would make a great cooler, or how Rick Turner had suddenly kissed me on the cheek when we were sitting under the swamp willow by the creek. Maybe I told her how my chest ached when I watched poor, bullied John Brown walk home every day with all of his books and his violin stacked in his arms, but what I remember more, what I relished, was Muth narrating poignant stories from her own childhood during The Great Depression. From time to time, my Grandmother June slipped newspaper in Muth’s sandwiches as a joke, hoping for a distraction, because when the newspaper was removed, all that was left to eat was a lettuce sandwich. Muth’s father had worked two jobs to be able to buy my Grandmother June a beautiful Chinese rug so her feet would land on something warm and soft on those brutally cold Chicago mornings. At the time, I didn’t hear the stories as reminders of how fortunate I was, but as the things that made Muth strong. Strong enough to put herself almost all the way through college, strong enough to leave behind her blue-collar roots, head to California and get a job in Hollywood, where John Wayne had actually knocked her over as he hurried by and never looked back. California was where she worked, among other positions, as a producer on a game show, a script editor, and as an assistant to Loretta Young. Ah, California! Where Muth had almost become a writer.

Our bath-time trysts stopped abruptly when I was twelve. I had returned an I.D. bracelet to the blue-eyed boy with the braces. Like everyone else, he and I had been going steady. Like everyone else, we snuck out of our backyard tents, pitched for the summer, in the middle of the night and visited other kids in their backyard tents. Like everyone else, we were navigating the bases, and I let my blue-eyed boy with the braces touch my breast, even though it was only on top of my training bra. I remember the queer feeling, a little black worm wriggling deep in my belly. The next day I met my blue-eyed boy behind the Kmart, and in the middle of sizzling cement and melting tar – the heat of a still, late summer day – I handed him his bracelet. I was still straddling my bike when I said he was going to high school in two weeks and I was still going to be in junior high. His blue eyes flooded, tears streamed down his face, and in that second I felt a tremendous anguish, like I had just watched someone kick a puppy. I jumped on my bike and rode away as fast as I could.

Muth found me sobbing in my room. I told her what I had done. She folded her arms across her breasts.

You don’t know what pain is, Muth said.

She went on to tell me about a man she had been engaged to in California, the love of her life. She was saving herself for her wedding night. "But then, at our engagement party, the woman he was…well this woman just had to tell me he wasn’t waiting for the wedding night. Said she felt obligated to let me know. Muth paused, gazing off to a place in another time. She probably did do me a favor. I returned his ring that night. It was the most painful thing I… You’re twelve years old, June." Here was a California story that brought no joy to Muth’s face.

I don’t remember what specific stories I shared with Muth during those intimate bath times, but I do remember what I wanted to tell her, but couldn’t. I couldn’t tell her that I was afraid to go to the next base with my blue-eyed boy with braces, because I wasn’t afraid, and very easily could. The moment she told me about her broken engagement, it was clear to me, Muth’s mores were rock solid; I could not shatter them; all I could do was bring shame on myself. As I stood there at my dresser, wiping away the childish tears, I looked in the mirror and said, I don’t know what pain is.

I seat myself in my favorite booth by the window at Mitchell’s Diner and watch Viola carefully attach twisted red, white, and blue streamers to the ceiling with a thumbtack. Viola decorates for every holiday, even Memorial Day. She complains about it, says that Lefty, the owner, makes her do it, as if she doesn’t have enough to do. But her precision, although maybe a little heavy-handed, says differently. I look at dozens of little flapping American flags strung from the ceiling fans. Viola balances for a moment, hands outstretched, ready to catch the streamers if they fall, before she smooths her uniform down around her hips, and then carefully descends the ladder. When she sees me her face brightens. She waves, chirping, Hi hi hi! all the way over to my booth. Her long turquoise earrings gallop around her neck.

Hey honey! You’re back! Viola puffs, and pats at her heavily sprayed hair. I nod and smile. Almost. Part of me is still lingering in Florida, a captive kelpie.

Cam and I discovered Mitchell’s the day we signed the lease for the apartment. As the disheveled janitor locked the door behind us and handed Cam the shiny new keys, rain exploded from the sky. We darted through the downpour in a futile attempt to stay dry, but Cam’s truck was too far away. I tugged his arm and we ducked into a doorway: Mitchell’s Diner. It was weeks after the Fourth of July, but little top hats sparkling with stars and stripes still dangled on fishing line from the ceiling. Between cups of brown water, we laughed at the velveteen mural of giraffes and zebras munching lime green leaves on the north wall. Where’s Elvis? Cam grinned. He’s off with Marilyn under the baobab tree, Viola answered and laughed with us before she breezed away with our orders.

How was your trip? You’re so tan! Viola marvels.

I am? I touch my face. I’ve spent little time in front of a mirror lately; there’d been too much self-reflection before the trip. Viola waits. Her fingers, laden with turquoise rings, rest on her hips. I lift and stare into the scratched bowl of the teaspoon.

What’s the soup today?

Chicken noodle, she says.

Is there any chicken in it? I ask.

It was wershed in it, she laughs and I feel a smile. It’s a joke between us. The first time I had the chicken noodle soup I ladled and ladled, but found only noodles. When Viola came to clear and ask how everything was, I chided her; I was sad I hadn’t discovered the chicken treasure. You have to order the fried chicken for that, she winked. We just wersh the chicken in the soup.

Viola looks at me steadily. She wants to hear about my honeymoon. I’d gone on and on about it before I left. When I don’t give it up, she pulls her pad out of the front of her apron, What can I getcha?

I’ll wait, I say. My mother is meeting me. Feeling the need to get out of the apartment this morning, I called Muth and asked her to meet me for lunch, like old times.

Your mother! How wonderful! I can’t wait to meet her! I just can’t wait to see where my very favorite girl in the whole wide restaurant comes from!

You’re too much, Viola, I say. Not because Viola isn’t larger than life, a five-foot ten-inch Amazon warrior with big, auburn hair, and the initials V.M. pasted in tiny rhinestones on the edge of her rose-tinted glasses, but because I feel myself blush. It feels good to be someone’s favorite girl in a whole wide somewhere. Bump on a log…

Before Viola can climb back up the ladder, I ask her to bring me a vanilla malted to nurse while I watch out the window for Muth.

Shortly after I graduated high school and moved out, Muth and I began our chats again. We met every few weeks at the Big Boy in the center of the suburban town I’d left behind for the big city. My old bedroom became Muth’s combination painting studio and office, where she dabbled in pen and ink, watercolor, and oils, and practiced being a life insurance agent. I had often hoped I was entering a new season with Muth, one of meeting for coffee and sharing our lives; I had a teetering feeling of wanting my own life, but not wanting to leave other things behind; I never wanted to see that look on her face, that look that said she doesn’t want me around, or worse, she doesn’t need me, that I had caused simply because I had been thirteen and wanted to go to the mall with friends instead of her. But something always sat between us. After the I.D. bracelet episode when I was twelve, I attributed it to being a generation and a half apart; Muth was twelve in 1939 and I was twelve in 1972. How could we possibly build a bridge across thirty-three years?

We continued our lunches through the years I lived in Cam’s parents’ condo. About a week before my wedding, we sat across from each other in the greasy Naugahyde booth at Big Boy, Muth gazing out the picture window into the asphalt parking lot. I talked about Cam’s new position at the architectural firm, and how we hoped to move into the city before fall. She talked about joining the Peace Corps. It came out of nowhere. She wanted to do something meaningful. I considered it, and then visualized her weeding a garden in India or snapping Sally Struthers out of her tears in Africa. As she pushed the little pirate-flagged toothpicks to the corner of her plate, it occurred to me that not only had her private insurance practice failed, but her paintbrushes and watercolors had dried up. Muth looked at me over her club sandwich and sighed, I know you haven’t been living at home for a while, but now I think I’m going to miss you even more. And there was that look – she doesn’t need me. Why? I wondered. I wasn’t going into a nunnery. Her eyes settled on a horizon beyond a vast impenetrable forest. I filled with worry – not that she would actually take off to throw seeds into a garden made of sand, but that she wouldn’t. She sat there, staring into that parking lot beyond the window, and I was about to reach across the table to take her hand when she magically snapped back and gave me a reassuring smile. That thing, whatever it was, jumped on the table between us again; it held us at arm’s length.

We’ll talk all the time, I said.

Yes. Yes we will, she said.

You’re deep in thought. Viola slides my malted in front of me, obscuring any view of what might have happened had Muth gone off to Africa. Before I can reply, the door whips open with a gust of wind and crashes against the wall. Muth reaches to catch it, her wavy brown hair flying around her head. She clutches her purse protectively under the other arm, pushes the door back into its frame against the wind.

Don’t worry about it honey, Viola calls. Dang wind always throws that door! Muth’s attention snaps toward Viola’s voice. She spots my hand held up in the air, nods crisply. She maneuvers through the diner with clarity; Muth has always had this commanding walk, her frame held like a queen’s – a queen who might off your head. When she arrives at the table, I think I see Viola nearly and involuntarily bow as she takes a full step back.

Before Muth can even sit down, Viola bubbles, I’d know it a mile away! Oh my!

Viola turns to