Life Sentences Read online

  “Nonnie was the queen of the mind-fuckers,” her father said, spearing cold cuts. “Do you know why she was so angry at your uncle Leon?”

  “No, she would never tell me.”

  “That’s because she couldn’t remember. He did something thirty years ago that pissed her off, but she would never tell him what it was. Then she forgot. She forgot the precipitating incident, but she never forgot the grudge. Your uncle Leon was desperate to apologize, but he never knew what he did. Your mother used to go visit her and try to guess what Leon did, so he might make amends, and your grandmother would say, ‘No, that’s not it,’ like some Alzheimer’s-addled Sphinx or a Hungarian Rumpelstiltskin, forcing the princess to guess his name when he didn’t know it himself.”

  Could it really be? Cassandra decided she believed him, although her father had never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

  “Those are your mother’s people, Cassandra,” her father said. “Thank God you take after me.”

  Now, more than a decade later, her mother was saying, “Thank God you take after me, Cassandra. In your resilience. You’ll come back from this, I’m sure of it.”

  “From what?”

  “Well—I just mean that I think you’re right, this next book could be something special.”

  Her mother did not mean to suggest Cassandra was a failure. Lennie simply couldn’t escape the context of her own life, which she saw as a series of mistakes and disappointments. Yet she had actually enjoyed a brief burst of local celebrity when Cassandra was in high school, appearing on a chat show as “Lennie the handywoman,” demonstrating basic repairs. That was when she had started to wear overalls and painter’s caps, much to her teenage daughter’s chagrin.

  A more ambitious woman might have parlayed this weekly segment into an empire; after all, the cohost of People Are Talking was a bubbly young woman named Oprah Winfrey. Years later, when Cassandra took her place on Oprah’s sofa, she had asked during the commercial break if Oprah remembered the woman who had provided those home repair tips, the one with the short sandy hair. Oprah said she did, and Cassandra wanted to believe this was true. Her mother had always been easily overlooked, which was one reason she had been enthralled with vivid, attention-grabbing Cedric Fallows.

  Cassandra had always thought her mother’s transformation would be the focus of the second memoir. But sex had taken over the second book—her first two marriages, the affairs in and around them, a bad habit she had renounced on the page, if not quite in life. Her mother’s cheerful solitude had seemed out of place. In fact, it had been embarrassing, having her mother in proximity to all that sex. But her mother’s story, alone, was not enough to anchor a book. It was too straightforward, too predictable. “It’s a little thin,” her first editor had said. “And awfully sad.” The second part had surprised Cassandra, who thought she had written about her mother with affection and pride.

  “Does it bother you,” Cassandra asked Lennie now, “that I never wrote about your life in the same way I wrote about Daddy’s?”

  “Oh no,” her mother said. “It’s the nicest thing you ever did for me.” Recovering quickly, she said, “Not that it’s bad, what you do. It’s just not my style, to be all exposed like that. That’s your father. And you.”

  “You just said that I take after you.”

  Lennie was at the sink, her back to Cassandra as she rinsed dishes. Lennie had a top-of-the-line Bosch now, but she hewed to the belief that dishes had to be washed before they could go in the dishwasher. “You take after me in some ways, but you take after him in other ways. You’re strong, like me. You bounce back. But you’re…out there, letting the world know everything about you. That’s your father’s way.”

  Cassandra carried her empty mug over to the sink and tried to quiet the suspicion that her own mother had, in her polite way, just called her a slut and an exhibitionist.

  CHAPTER

  4

  STOVE HOT.

  Baby bad.

  Stove hot.

  Baby bad.

  Stove bad.

  Baby hot.

  Stove bad.

  Baby cold.

  Stovebabyhotcold. Stovebabyhotcold. Stovebabyhotcold. Cold stove. Cold baby. Hot stove. Hot baby. Bad stove. Bad baby. Babystove, babystove, babystove.

  She awoke, drenched in sweat. Supposedly part of the change, but she didn’t think that was the whole explanation in her case. After all, she had been having this dream for more than a decade now. Although it wasn’t exactly a dream, because there was nothing to see, only words tumbling over each other, rattling like spare change in a dryer.

  But even if the nondream dream caused tonight’s bout of sweating, she knew menopause was coming for her. Up until a year ago, she had really believed there would be time to have one more child, to grab the ring that had been denied her repeatedly. First with Rennay, then Donntay. She wanted so little. Sometimes, she thought that was the problem. She had wanted too little. The less you asked for, the less you got. The girls who had the confidence to demand the moon got the moon and a couple of stars. They never cut their price. A man bought what they were selling or moved on. As soon as you began to bargain, the moment you revealed you were ready to take less than what you wanted—no, not wanted, but needed, required—they took everything from you.

  The flush had passed, but she couldn’t go back to sleep. She changed into a dry nightgown, put on her robe, and went out to the glassed-in porch, which overlooked her neat backyard, her neighbors’ yards beyond it. It was a house-proud street, not rich, but well tended. Pretty little house, pretty little town, pretty little life. Bridgeville, Delaware.

  She would rather be in jail.

  She was in jail, actually, only this time, there was nothing to sustain her, no hopes or dreams or promises. No, not jail. Hell. She was in hell. Which was not, as it turned out, a place of fire and brimstone, of physical discomfort and torture. Hell was a pretty little house in a pretty little town, with plenty of food in the refrigerator and enough money in the bank. Not a lot, but enough, more than she had ever known. Her mind free from workaday worries, she had all the time in the world to dwell on what had gone wrong and could never be made right. What if she—? What if he—? What if they—? Bridgeville, Hell-aware. Most people would think it was a better fate than she deserved.

  They would be right.

  AMO, AMAS, AMAT

  I WAS FIVE WHEN MY FATHER decided that I should start studying Latin and Greek. No one found this odd. He was, after all, a professor of the classics. He had named me for Cassandra, the ignored prophetess. This was after my mother refused to consider Antigone, Aphrodite, Andromeda, Atalanta, Artemis, any of the nine Muses, or—his personal favorite—Athena. After all, Athena sprang, fully formed, from her father’s head, while her mother, Metis, remained imprisoned inside. My father admired this arrangement.

  My mother would have preferred to call me Diana, as Artemis is known in Roman mythology. But my father hated the Roman names and often railed at their primacy in our culture. When I had to learn the names of the planets, I couldn’t rely on mnemonic devices—My very elegant mother just served us nine pickles—because I had to transpose them in my head: Hermes, Aphrodite, Earth (“Gaia!” my father would correct with a bark), Ares, Zeus, Cronus, Uranus (“The one Greek in a batch of Romans, that sly dog, and incestuous to boot,” my father liked to say), Poseidon, Hades.

  Again, no one found this odd, least of all me. My father was a man of many emphatic opinions, which he announced with the same vehemence of callers to WBAL shouting about the Orioles and the Colts. The Greek gods were preferable to the Romans. Nixon was a criminal—my father’s verdict long before Watergate. Mr. Bubble was bad for the skin and the plumbing. Jiffy Pop would give you cancer. Pornography was preferable to any ghostwritten syndicate novel, such as Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Girls should not wear their hair short.

  The last, at least, was mounted in my defense, when my exasperated mother wanted to chop min
e off because I fought so during shampoos. “You take over her hair,” she challenged my father, and he did, finding a gentle cream rinse and a wide-tooth comb that tamed my unruly mane. “It’s too much hair for a girl, but you’ll be glad when you’re a woman,” he often said. One of my happiest memories is of standing in the never-quite-finished bathroom off my parents’ bedroom, my father pulling the comb through my hair, insistent but never cruel. My father—incapable of throwing a ball, bored by most sports—would have been lost with a son. The only man he understood was himself.

  So, in the world according to Ric Fallows, insisting on language lessons for his only child was not at all strange. But everyone wondered why my father didn’t tutor me himself. He could read both languages, although he was far more skilled in Latin. Instead, my father took me to the home of a faculty colleague, Joseph Lovejoy, whom I was instructed to call Mr. Joe, in the Baltimore fashion.

  Mr. Joe and his sister, Miss Jill, lived in our neighborhood in a place I liked to call the upside-down house. It was built into a bluff above the Gwynns Falls, with the living room on the top floor, the next floor down housing the kitchen and dining room, and the bedrooms on the garden level. Mr. Joe sat with me in the study on the top floor, while my father helped Miss Jill prepare tea—not just the beverage but a proper tea of sandwiches and sweets. The Lovejoys were British, visiting Baltimore on some kind of academic exchange program. Miss Jill had what my father called that famous English skin, although it looked like anyone else’s skin to me. Mr. Joe was tall and gaunt, and he had skin that no country would claim.

  One particularly warm Saturday afternoon in May, the teakettle whistled on the floor below us. It continued to sing for almost a minute and Mr. Joe decided to investigate. I could hear him walking around the floor below, then continuing down the steps to the first floor. He returned a few minutes later and announced that would be all for today. My father arrived, but not Miss Jill with the sandwiches.

  “What about tea?” I asked.

  “There will be no tea today,” Mr. Joe said.

  “Did the kettle run dry?”

  “Did the—yes, yes, it did.”

  “And the sandwiches, the cakes?”

  “Cassandra, your manners,” my father said.

  I was almost fifteen before I figured it out. By then, I knew my father had lots of romances—“Not romances! Dalliances. The only romance I ever had was with Annie, and I married her.” But I didn’t know about any of the others until he left my mother for Annie and I started piecing together my father’s long history of infidelities. He rejects that word, too. “I was never unfaithful or faithless where your mother was concerned. Sex meant nothing to me, it was a bodily function. That was the problem. I didn’t know you could have both, sex and love, until I met Annie.”

  We had this conversation a few days before I headed to college. My father had decided to lecture me on the double standard, persuade me that my own virginity was precious. He was a little late.

  “And Miss Jill?”

  “Miss Jill. Oh, the redheaded Brit. Yes, she was one. But not right away. It wasn’t a plan. Well, maybe it was a little bit of a plan.”

  “What did her brother think?”

  “Her brother? Her brother?” My father was genuinely puzzled.

  “Mr. Joe.”

  “Mr.—oh, honey, he was her husband. Where did you get the idea that they were brother and sister?”

  To this day, I comb my memory, certain I will find the moment of the lie. Perhaps it was my father’s insistence on calling them Mr. Joe and Miss Jill, a localism that my father normally belittled. But what would have been the point in deceiving me? A sibling relationship may have kept Mr. Joe from being a cuckold, but it would not excuse what my married father did with Miss Jill while “making tea.” A tea, I see now, that required no preparation—the cakes were store-bought, the sandwiches made well ahead of our visit, the crustless bread dry from the air yet damp from the cucumbers that had sweated on them.

  Why did I think they were brother and sister? Because even my five-year-old self sensed something was off. My language lessons ended when the Lovejoys went back to England that summer. Miss Jill—Mrs. Lovejoy—sent us Christmas cards for several years, but my mother never added them to our list. I spent my junior year abroad in London and discovered I hated the social convention of tea. But I loved Englishmen, especially redheaded ones—gingers—and fucked as many of them as I could.

  BANROCK STATION

  February 25–28

  CHAPTER

  5

  CASSANDRA HAD BEGUN HER LAST two projects by packing a laptop and retreating to a weekend resort, attempting to replicate the serendipitous origins of her first book. My Father’s Daughter had started almost by itself, an accident of heartbreak and idleness: A romantic getaway, planned for West Virginia, had become a solitary one when her first husband left her, walking out after revealing a gambling addiction that had drained their various bank accounts, meager as they were, and saddled their Hoboken condo with a second and a third mortgage that made it practically worthless, despite the robust real estate market of the mid-nineties.

  Disconsolate, terrified of the future, but also aware that the room was prepaid, she had driven hours in the wintry landscape—God help her, it was the weekend before Valentine’s Day—thinking that she would spend the two nights and two days crying, drinking, and eating, but she ran out of wine and chocolate much faster than anticipated. The second night, a Saturday, she awoke at 2 A.M., her head strangely clear. At first, she chalked it up to the alcohol wearing off, but when she was still awake an hour later, she pulled on the fluffy robe provided by the bed-and-breakfast—one of two fluffy robes, she noticed, feeling the clutch and lurch of fresh heartbreak—and made her way, trancelike yet lucid, to the picturesque and therefore infuriating little desk not really intended for work.

  She found a few sheets of stationery in the center drawer and began scratching out, with the crummy B and B pen, the first few pages of what would become My Father’s Daughter. She had kept those pages, and while the book changed considerably over the next six months, as she wrote to blot out her pain and fear, those first few pages remained the same: I didn’t speak until I was almost three years old. Later, when she began to query agents, a famous one had said he would represent her, but only if she consented to a rewrite in which she excised that opening.

  He took her to lunch, where he explained his pet theory of literature, which boiled down to The first five pages are always bullshit.

  “It’s throat clearing,” he said over a disappointingly modest lunch of spinach salad and bottled water. Cassandra had hoped the lunch would be grander, more decadent, at one of the famous restaurants frequented by publishing types. But the agent was in one of his drying-out phases and had to avoid his usual haunts.

  He continued: “Tapping into a microphone. Is this thing on? Hullo? Hullo?” (He was British, although long removed from his native land.) “It’s overworked, too precious. As for prologues—don’t get me started on prologues.”

  But Cassandra believed she had written a book about a woman finding her own voice, her own story, despite a title that suggested otherwise. Her father was simply the charismatic Maypole at the center; she danced and wove around him, ribbons twisting. She found another agent, a Southern charmer almost as famous but sweet and effusive, unstinting in her praise, like the mother Cassandra never had. Years later, at the National Book Awards—she had been a judge—she ran into the first agent, and he seemed to think they had never met before. She couldn’t help wondering if he cultivated that confusion to save face.

  She had started the sequel at a spa in the Berkshires, another shattered marriage behind her, but at least she was the one who had walked out this time. Paul, her second husband, had showed up in the final pages of her first book; she had believed, along with millions of readers, that he was her fairy-tale ending. Telling the truth of that disastrous relationship—along with all the others, b
efore, after, and during the marriage—had felt risky, and some of her original readers didn’t want to come along for the ride. But enough did, and the reviews for The Eternal Wife were even better. Of course, that was because My Father’s Daughter had barely been reviewed upon release.

  Then, just eighteen months ago—not enough time, she decided now, she hadn’t allowed the novel to steep as the memoirs had—she had checked into the Greenbrier, again in West Virginia, but much removed, in miles and amenities, from that sadly would-be romantic place where the first memoir had begun. Perhaps that was the problem—she had been too self-conscious in trying to recapture and yet improve the circumstances of that first feverish episode. The woman who had started scratching out those pages in the West Virginia bed-and-breakfast had an innocence and a wonder that had been lost over the subsequent fifteen years.

  Or perhaps the problem was more basic: She wasn’t a novelist. She was equipped not to make things up but to bring back things that were. She was a sorceress of the past, an oracle who looked backward to what had been. She was, as her father had decreed, Cassandra, incapable of speaking anything but the truth.

  Only this time, the answers were not inside her, not most of them. Last night, in her sterile rental, she had started jotting down, stream of consciousness, what she could remember. Her list wasn’t confined to Calliope but covered every detail of life at Dickey Hill Elementary, no matter how trivial, because she knew from experience that small details could unearth large ones. The memories of the latter had come readily: foursquare, the Christmas pageant, Mrs. Klein teaching us about Picasso and Chagall, the girl group. The girl group—she hadn’t thought about that in ages, although it had been key to a scene in the first book. Now and Later candies—did they even make those anymore?—the Dickeyville Fourth of July parade, her own brief television appearance, lumpy in a leotard, demonstrating how adolescent girls cannot do a full, touch-your-toes sit-up at a certain point during their development. She couldn’t decide what was funnier—her desperation to be on television or the fact that people believed those sit-ups accomplished anything.