Go Ask Fannie by Elisabeth Hyde

Author:Elisabeth Hyde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

2016

10.

Gravity

For a long time after the accident, Lizzie leaned on Ruth for just about everything. And Ruth obliged. She was there to help Lizzie choose her outfits each morning. To make her school lunch. She supervised Lizzie’s homework and forged the requisite permission slips. After graduating from high school, Ruth left for college and couldn’t help with these things, but she was only two hours away, so she came home for Lizzie’s frilly ballet performances, for her piano recitals, and when Lizzie got her first period, it was Ruth who advised her what to buy—Murray not having thought to stock up on feminine hygiene products.

But it was around that time that Lizzie began to feel the loss of her mother most acutely. At twelve she missed having a mother who yelled at her for wearing too much eye makeup or too short a skirt. She missed having someone to wait outside the bathroom door while she struggled with her first tampon. “Tilt it a little,” Lillian could have suggested, saving Lizzie the discomfort of walking around with it half in, half out. She missed having someone to bitch about with her friends. She even missed the cigarette smoke. It’s true. She did.

Murray himself didn’t know quite what to do with a house full of estrogen. Come to think of it, he’d barely noticed Ruth’s adolescence. But Lizzie stomped around like a tyrant some mornings. She burst into tears over a haircut. She screamed at George when he ate the last piece of Sara Lee. She mouthed off to teachers (still). Bewildered, Murray took to fining her; and when that didn’t work, he grounded her; and when that didn’t work, he forced her to accompany him to the beach house for a weekend of home repairs. He feared the hammer in her hands.

Basically, Lizzie hated her mother for dying, and she wasn’t about to make things easy for Murray. Oh, she gave it to him. Shoplifting. Drugs. She learned how to hotwire a car and pick a lock. Murray got an ulcer. It wasn’t until her midtwenties that her rage began to cool, after George and Ruth read her the riot act one Christmas and persuaded Murray to cut off funding unless she shaped up. Lizzie felt chagrined. She dug a hole and filled it with all her anger and tamped down the dirt. She enrolled in a PhD program. She met Bruce. She pledged to make things up to Murray, and when the job came through at the state university in northern New Hampshire, near where Murray had just bought a farmhouse for his retirement, she took it, glad that she could be around to help him in the coming years, to cook the dishes her mother had made, to spell him during the sunflower harvest. She felt like the daughter she’d never been and was happy for it, and the only thing she cursed was the passage of time as the years ticked by, one after the other.

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