He didn't say "I love you" very much. None of them did, but he said it maybe more than some of the others. Probably that's why I decided to tell him myself, rather than let him get the worst off somebody else's tongue. Someone was going to tell him anyway, and I'd nearly told him so many times before.
Once he asked me how I got interested in design, so out pounced the day I made an apartment building of shoeboxes stacked on their sides and how every room had a different color scheme, red and yellow and blue and orange and purple, room by room, box after box, across and up, and I made paper furniture of exactly the same color to match each room and then cut paper dolls and painted their faces too, the colors of the rooms where they lived. I guess I was seven or eight. My mother had had lots of shoes.
He was quiet for a while, staring off. He thinned his lips together, then said without a smile, “Sounds like a rage for order to me,” shaking his head. I tried to laugh, change the subject, I don't remember what. I didn't tell him I made the apartments after my mother's dollhouse. The house that had been hers when she was little, the one they put in my room on a low table so I could reach it. She was standing between me and the house one morning after I’d finished my cereal alone at the kitchen table and when I went in, the low light was raying past her so that I had to squint. She seemed to be holding something, her back to me, and then there came a sharp crack like the breaking of thin sticks and I saw her fists rise together over her head and they came down and I heard more cracking. I crouched out in the hall, like a child does, because if you couldn't see them then I knew you couldn't be seen. Through the door came her brown house shoes with their gray dust worn into the creases, to point straight at my knees rounded on the beige carpet. Then they walked past and away. Turning, I raised my eyes, only the eyes. Her fingers had blood on them, every one. They closed into fists again and black drops fell as she walked. The dollhouse had a hole in the roof, by the little wooden chimney, and some of the furniture was broken up, matchsticks of bedsteads and ladderback chairs, tiny scattered mattresses and cushions. Blood dripped from the little shingles, ragged drops of it on the floors of the upper bedrooms. Some of the little dolls were splattered.
I don't know what happened to the house. I never played with it. I know I was glad I didn't tell him the rest then, afraid maybe he'd ask if I ever worried about madness running in the family.
I do. I've seen madness running.
* * *
One day when the light looked nice we decided on a picnic. I don’t remember who suggested it first. By then we might have caught each other’s eyes at the same time, lolling in bed with the sunbeam slanting through the blind and throwing a golden crooked ladder that twist toward us across the crooked rug.
From the fridge we got the cheese and the crackers from the tin in the top of my closet, and he crossed the street to the market for the wine, always the bottle of wine then, his pocketknife always ready with its corkscrew, and we dropped it all into my backpack with his sketchpad and some book for me and left the dorm. It took forever, but he knew the best spot, he said. I knew enough not to ask how he'd found it, who showed it to him or who’d been there with him before. Since the past can only screw things up. And it was beautiful, when we got there, hiking through the cemetery on the other side of the stadium, over the river at a stone bridge, then up into hills and forest, trees going tall and straight like pillars and the sun all emerald overhead. Like a cathedral of green. But it took so long to get there, the best part of the light was down and gone. I was so ragged all I wanted to do was drop on the grass. He flapped out a sheet and got lost in his drawing, always a scratching pencil whenever there was quiet. I couldn't keep my eyes to my book. We nibbled without talking on this and that, but mostly I just looked up into the greens, olive and apple and sea, long sharp spears of light coming down at me when the leaves waved. But it was getting darker. I did well to see that. I was thinking about my mother and I decided to tell him. It had been long enough now, I felt like it was time. All the color frosted in my eyes and I asked him if he would mind putting his pencil down for a minute. I didn’t want to look at him yet. He said he only had two strokes to go. That was what he always said. I waited. “Please.” He must have heard something more than the word. The pad closed and I reached to touch the back of his hand out there somewhere, glanced, the whole crescent from the tip of his index finger to the tip of his thumb gray with brushed lead. And then started in, about the night.
Mama stayed up after everybody. I don't even know now if that was unusual. Who knows what goes on after they put you in bed and make the room all dark. But that night she shifted the breakfast table in front of the oven and lay down with her head inside and went to sleep and died. I told him about the boom that echoed through the house and singed off her lashes and blackened everything in the kitchen because a pilot light still burned in one eye of the stove. How after the rumble shook me awake and died away I carefully put on my pink robe and the slippers with no toes because she always told me that a lady never appears below stairs only in her nightgown and shuffled past the low table that was empty now. I took each stair with both feet, it was the only way I could come down by myself, my fingers wrapped around every baluster till I was at the bottom. My father stood over the kitchen table, not touching her, not crying, but saying her name again and again, more like a call really. I watched. She must have had a good reason for going to sleep on the table. She always had an explanation for everything. Except the dollhouse. All I wondered about was why she dusted eye shadow over her housecoat and the table and even on my white bowl standing in the drying rack on the counter waiting for the morning cereal. Her head was turned away and the little gold hairs cringed black and strange at her temple. Her hand hung off the table with its long loose fingers and I wanted to lay it back beside her.
My father turned and looked down at me and I looked up. He quit calling her. Then that arm went high and the hard flat hand went back and came toward me and I turned, slowly, always too slowly, beginning to run. If I could just reach the foot of the stairs, the post with its urn for decoration. A slipper came off, but my fingers stretched for the post. When I was there I could begin the climb and then the hand caught me across the shoulders and set me kneeling at the first stair. I crawled up not looking back.
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