Things That Helped by Jessica Friedmann

Author:Jessica Friedmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

VIRGINIA’S SCARF

IN THE MONTHS after Virginia died, I often thought I saw her on the street. Walking Owen to day care, we would pass a woman in her sixties or seventies, and I would catch a glimpse of nautical stripes, or large gold earrings, or a dark bob streaked with gray, and for a second Virginia’s face would superimpose itself on the face of a perfect stranger. After death, memory begins to ossify, fixing a person in time and space, but Virginia, in my mind, had long been static; unbending and unyielding, not much given to change. That is how I always thought of her—impervious—and maybe that was why she could appear so strikingly on the faces of other women.

I see her sometimes in photos, of my mother and myself, in a wry, grim set of the mouth that tells the photographer to get on with it. In candid shots our long necks are graceful and our slim shoulders roll forward, our mouths gentle and relaxed. We are most often watching others, carrying trays, holding babies: a quiet audience and domestic machinery, and perhaps this is why our faces in portraits are so embarrassed and defiant. Or maybe it is more simple: nobody ever taught us how to gracefully become the center of attention. The photographs in Virginia’s house, long gone now, grouped us all as children, our names beneath our faces in dark blue ink.

If I close my eyes and enter the house, I can visit it lucidly, the details never changing except for seasonally, as approved. The carpets are light, and the tiles are cool underfoot, a kind of beige slate that is polished, not dusty. In the kitchen, a wooden birdcage houses a wooden bird; the green velvet lounge suite is arranged around a hearth, a stack of logs set neatly in the grate, waiting to be lit. Walking to the back of the house, I can look out onto the garden, fringed in mammoth daisies, where a green shed houses my grandfather’s model trains.

To the right, off the kitchen corridor, a long room splits in two, with children’s drawings and wooden toys lining the sitting room to the left. The right side holds the Princess Bed, guest bedroom for us grandchildren, “princess” because of the long canopy that drapes and enfolds us in our sleep. There are snores coming from this room, not from sleeping children but from the old hound, Geordie, who wheezes loudly as he breathes. A tumor was excised from his throat and left its mark on his vocal cords, so that in his waking doggy life, he could never again hunt rats.

If I people the house, I see Virginia again, buttering white bread in the kitchen for sandwiches and passing plates over the counter for us children to arrange on the dining table. In this ghost house where everything exists at once, I add my grandfather, really stepgrandfather, Jim, bringing back the slight stoop of his shoulders, the nicotine-yellow cast of his white curly hair.

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