The Last Romantics

Joe had wandered the neighborhood, walking in circles away from our house, he told us, calling Renee’s name.

“But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?”

Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I … um …”

“She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.”

Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”

The man who called Renee “baby” never returned. It was an isolated incident, but it infected us in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Renee stopped taking the late bus and would now wait until her coach was finished for the night and could drive her home. Caroline’s nightmares doubled in frequency and ferocity. I stopped roaming the neighborhood as freely as I once had. Perhaps this was for the best—a check on our behavior, a lean toward safety—but I remember it only as a chill up my spine, a dampness to my palms. The idea that someone was watching us. That we were unsafe.

The incident made us all feel vulnerable, although in different ways. For Joe it was fear of what might happen to us, his sisters. But for us, Joe’s sisters, it was fear for ourselves. The man might come again for Renee or for me or for Caroline, but he would not come for Joe. Only girls remained at the mercy of men with bad intentions. Men in cars that were brown or red or gray, who wore sunglasses or didn’t, who were young or old, white or black, strangers or known to us.

This fear uncovered the tenuousness of our position during the Pause. The cracks became evident, and I watched them widen. Caroline and Joe began to fight frequently, Renee to cry without reason, to serve us dinner with shaking hands. Joe spent more time with his friends, girls in particular. He was the tallest boy in fifth grade, and girls took a spirited, wholesome interest in him as though he were a fuzzy stuffed animal in need of cuddling. Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Julie. I remember their ponytails and squeaky Keds and sticker collections in hard-backed photo albums with plastic pages. In school they would tease Joe gently and give him the Oreos and juice boxes from their lunches. They refilled his water bottle at baseball practice. They told their mothers that their friend Joe needed a ride to the movies, or a new pencil case, or construction paper for the science report about mammals, and could they please help? Joe accepted their attentions. He began to spend more time with these girls, away from the house and me.

In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.

* * *

NOT LONG AFTER the man followed Renee, Joe took me to the old yellow house. It was only after the accident that I placed the two events together, not in the way of cause and effect but a more amorphous push-pull. A sense of growing unease. A secret interior turmoil finding its way into the open air.

The day we walked back to our old neighborhood was beautiful: sunshine and crisp air, clear sky, the rustle of flaming leaves underfoot. Autumn in full bloom. New people lived at the yellow house, a family with boys and girls, apparently. Joe and I stood for a spell on the sidewalk and surveyed the bikes, footballs, Frisbees and hula hoops that lay abandoned across the front lawn.

“There’s no car,” Joe said. He was holding my hand. “They must not be home.”

“But what about all this stuff?” I replied.

Joe shrugged. “Let’s go check.”

He led me around to the back door—down the side alley, past the garbage bins, turn left, cut across the lawn, over the patio, and there, the back door painted a bright white. I knew that door so well. It took my breath away to see it again.

“Maybe we could go in and look around,” Joe said.

“But, Joe …” I protested, though weakly. I wanted to go inside, too. I liked the idea of freely examining other people’s things, taking time to sort through the mother’s makeup bag, to check the Scrabble game for marked-up score sheets. Maybe I would find a journal, a notebook like the one I kept, filled with the secret thoughts of another girl. The possibility gave me a shiver of delight.

I followed Joe as he pushed open the back door and called “Hello! Hello!” We stood in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and listened to the quiet ticking of the clock, the silent settling of the house. The room looked the same, different only in small, frivolous ways. A new round table. Photos of unfamiliar faces pegged to the fridge. The smell was different, too, heavier than I remembered it, and more chemical.

“Let’s go upstairs,” Joe said.

Slowly we climbed the creaking steps. I went immediately to my bedroom but paused in the doorway. Unlike the kitchen, this room was fundamentally changed: bed, curtains, stuffed animals, all different, and, strangest of all, in a corner stood a bubbling fish tank that glowed blue. I saw no board games, no tantalizing notebooks. I stepped inside my old room and watched the fish dart in a mindless dance. They were the same size as the minnows from the pond, but these fish were brightly colored with stripes and spots, and they moved faster, with less purpose. There was nothing for these fish to do, nowhere for them to go. They were trapped.

“Fiona!” Joe called from the hall. “Fiona! Come here!”

I found him standing in what had been our parents’ bedroom. This room, too, was unrecognizable, with glossy furniture set in odd places and a large abstract painting on the wall.

“I thought he’d be here,” Joe said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Dad. We’re looking for Dad. That’s why we’re here.”

“Dad?” I barely remembered our father. I thought of him rarely and only with reference to Noni and all that she’d endured. “Joe, are you sure?”

“Yes I’m sure,” he whispered fiercely. “Now, shhh. I know he’ll come.”

The yearning in Joe’s voice shattered the still air into a million pieces. It shocked me into a stunned silence.

And so we waited, standing in the middle of a room that no longer belonged to our parents. The air became heavier, the walls moved inward. I could hear Joe’s labored breathing and the faint tick-tick of a clock from another room. The moments lengthened and spun like a carnival ride. I chewed the inside of my cheek and waited for Joe to be finished. Everything about this made me light-headed, vaguely nauseous. Back then I didn’t believe that we would ever see our father again.

Without warning I began to giggle. The silence, the discomfort, the ache in my knees, the outright strangeness of it all. I couldn’t contain myself any longer.

“Joe—ooooh—” I held up my arms and wiggled my fingers. “Look, I’m a ghost Joe! Look!”

I moved toward him with arms outstretched. On my brother’s face, I saw an immediate deflation and a flicker of shame.

“Yeah, a ghost,” Joe said gruffly, and laughed. “Got you, didn’t I?”

The slam of a car door startled us both. There were voices outside in the driveway, then footsteps at the front door. Joe grabbed my hand, and together we ran down the stairs and out the back. We were breathless and scared, both of us laughing as we made it through the side gate and across our old neighbors’ lawns and eventually home to the gray house.

I never told anyone about this episode, although later I came to see it as a marker of the end of the Pause. Certain things had become unsustainable. Certain pressures threatened to explode. Renee’s responsibilities, Caroline’s nightmares, Joe and his … I didn’t know what to call it. His lack. The way he had everything and nothing. The way he smiled and flicked back his cowlick and said everything that everyone wanted to hear, and yet it seemed that his manner began outside himself, externally, with the wishes of others who wanted something from him. Coach Marty, Noni, the team, his friends, his teachers, the girls. Even us, his sisters.

What did Joe want for himself? I never knew. It was only years later, after the accident, that I realized I had never thought to ask.

* * *

AFTER THE EPISODE with Renee, it was ironic that a man in a car at last brought us salvation. The Pause ended because a man in a car slowed and stopped.

It was Renee, of course, who saw to it that Joe attended every baseball practice and every game. This was Joe’s fourth year of Little League. His progress in the sport was a rare orchid that we tended with careful watering, pruning, reverence. “Tell your mother Joe is doing great,” Coach Marty would say to Renee. “Tell her he’s one in a million.”

Twice weekly the four of us walked from home to the Bexley playing field. The route consisted of one mile of calm, tree-lined residential streets followed by one and a half miles of flat, fast Route 9, a four-lane highway running through empty fields of tall, yellowed grass and splintered old fences, the occasional neglected house, and one you-pump gas station. There was no sidewalk, so we walked in the breakdown lane or in the grass. Surely we looked curious to passing cars: Renee striding forward with her solid, sure-footed step; Joe pristine in his baseball gear, bat slung over a shoulder; me with curly hair crazy in the wind, skipping beside Joe to keep up; Caroline wearing a long skirt, singing to herself, lagging behind. The trip took over an hour.

One morning a car slowed beside us. A man leaned over to peer through the open passenger window. It was Coach Marty.

“What are you kids doing?” he asked. “Joe Skinner, is that you?”

“We’re on our way to practice,” Renee answered, still walking. “I’m taking Joe to the field.”

Coach Marty’s car inched along beside us as he considered this answer. He looked at me chewing a wad of bubble gum too big for my mouth, and then he pulled to the side of the road just ahead.

“I’ll take you,” he said. “Get in.”

Renee hesitated. Later we would come to know Marty Roach very well, but on that morning he was only Joe’s coach, the funny man with the dark mustache whom we glimpsed from afar on the field.

“We’re good at walking,” Renee said carefully. “We do it every week.”

It was a cold spring day, and the wind whistled along the road and the grassy fields and reached through our thin coats. We were all shivering, hands in pockets. Caroline’s long hair whipped around her face.

“Please, Renee,” said Caroline. “Let’s go with him.” There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. Her tolerance for this life had reached its limits.

Renee looked at the road, she looked at Joe, who nodded, and then she said to Marty, “Okay.”

Marty’s car smelled of mint and tobacco, not cigarettes but the ripe, woody scent of pulp tobacco, and it seemed to me a cozy place, like a room with a fireplace in the days before Christmas. Years later I would date a much older man who smoked a pipe—pure affect, we didn’t date for long—but the first time he took the pipe out and lit it, I returned again to the back of that car. Coach Marty’s huge, meaty hands on the wheel, the back of his head a white dome striped with the dark brown of his comb-over. Gray vinyl seats, a pull-down armrest in the center that he pushed up to accommodate us, releasing a grainy silt that he wiped away with the back of his hand onto the floor of the car.

“There you go,” he said, and the four of us packed thigh to thigh into the back seat.

Some say there are no secrets in small towns, but I believe this to be false. There were people in Bexley who knew about Noni—I’m sure of it—but they kept the matter to themselves. Noni was a secret; Noni was something no one discussed. Back then there was no “reply all” or neighborhood message board. You had to pick up the phone and hope that the person to whom you wished to speak would answer. You had to walk out your front door and start up your car and drive to the Skinners’ new house and knock on the front door and hope that Antonia Skinner would not send you immediately away, as she did to Mrs. Lipton when she tried to drop off a tin of cookies that first Christmas.

The Skinner children went to school. We were fed. It was a difficult time—of course it was, everyone understood that. No one wanted to intrude. We were left alone.

Only Coach Marty did not leave us alone. Maybe it was the week after that first ride to the field, or the next month, or next season. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that one day Marty Roach came home with us.

That night there was a baseball game, a midseason corker between the Mavericks and the Eagles from neighboring Milford. Joe scored three runs, committed no errors, caught a high fly ball to close out the sixth inning, and you could see the hope drain from the faces of those Milford boys. The sun lingered in the sky after the game, bright pinks and orange, and in the air there was a buzzy warmth. My hands were sticky from melted ice cream. Joe’s purple-and-green uniform looked regal in the dying light, a worn-out king touched with glitter and dirt.

After the game Marty drove us home. I remember standing with him at our front door, which was painted the same dingy gray as the rest of the house. Our screen was torn, broken long ago during a game of pirates between me and Joe. The corner hung down, nearly touching the ground.

Renee used her key to let us in. She did not hesitate. She threw open the door as if to say, Here it is. Look and tell me, is this okay?

Coach Marty stood in the middle of the living room—a mess of unpacked boxes and dirty dishes, games, forts, discarded clothing, a trail of checkers I had laid days ago for a lost stuffed bear—and called for our mother.

“Mrs. Skinner? Mrs. Skinner? Antonia?”

No answer. And so Renee yelled, “Noni! Noni, come here!”

After a spell we heard a creak of floorboards. Noni emerged at the end of the hall in her bathrobe, which was dirty, her long hair wild around her head, and in that moment we saw her anew. Her face was indoor pale, her feet bare. I noticed the musty stench of the house, of unwashed floors and dirty dishes, damp towels, dusty corners. What before had been only Noni resting, always resting, now appeared to me terrible.

Our mother looked at Marty and said, “Oh. Hello.”

* * *

NOT LONG AFTER this, our Aunt Claudia arrived from Cleveland. She was childless, our father’s much-older sister whom we had met only once before at his funeral. She had tightly curled gray hair that sat like a bathing cap on her head and a long, horsey face. Claudia brought with her one pink suitcase and an air of rigorous competence. Our mother left the house; our mother returned; the house became clean; we became clean. Our mother left the house again, only this time she wore a neat blue skirt suit and lipstick colored a race-car red. Claudia told us that Noni was looking for a job, and about time, too.

“You’ve got to get on with things,” Claudia said as we watched Noni drive away. “Too much laying around isn’t good for anyone. Remember that. Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”

Aunt Claudia was proof of this lesson. She was the least sad and most busy person I had ever met. She swirled around our house with a cloth and a spray bottle like a bird looking for an exit, and everything she bumped into became clean, tidy, sparkling. Back home Aunt Claudia worked as a teller at a bank in North Royalton, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. She described for us the intricate details of her job, the piles of twenties wrapped in special paper, the safe as big as a room, the secret slots of the safe-deposit boxes where people placed the oddest things.

“Once a man came in and rented one for a pair of shoes, ladies’ shoes,” she told us. “Now, why would anyone do such a thing?”

For four weeks Claudia cooked large, well-balanced meals that we ate until our stomachs groaned; she cycled load after load of dirty clothes through the washer and dryer; she read aloud books we had read before, but still we listened; she bought us art supplies, and we colored diligently the pictures of forest animals and trees, though we were far too old for coloring books.

I wrote muscle, broom, thick, bristle, warm, squeak, soap, gravy, meat, full.

What we liked best of all was Claudia telling stories about our father when he was a boy: his extreme fear of ants, his favorite food (meatballs), the operation he had when he was ten to fix the knuckle of his right thumb (trigger thumb, she called it). When she recounted these episodes, her eyes would become glassy and she’d dab at them with a tissue she pulled from a small plastic pack that accompanied her everywhere.

One day we were eating lunch when Aunt Claudia said, “Joe, you look just like your father.” She paused to blow her nose into a tissue. “You’re the man of the family now. Don’t you forget it.”

We had never before considered the word man with reference to Joe. When Claudia said this, we all turned toward him. We were eating pink boiled hot dogs with white buns that disappeared like cotton candy in your mouth. Noni was out on another interview.

Suddenly Joe seemed altered. He felt it, too. He stiffened his shoulders, brought up his puffy chest. “I’m the man of the family,” he repeated, and I giggled because it struck me as both absurd and momentous. Joe was ten years old. A man.

Although we basked in Claudia’s attentions and listened avidly to her stories, inside we remained watchful. There was so much information, so much nutrition and stimulation that we barely spoke during the month that she stayed with us. We did everything she told us to do. We did not fight or talk back or make large messes because we were too exhausted by her capable, forceful presence. But secretly each of us wondered: what will happen when Aunt Claudia leaves?

On her last night, Aunt Claudia took us all to the International House of Pancakes. We were celebrating Noni’s new job as a receptionist at Dr. Hart’s dental practice across town. Dr. Hart, our father’s old competitor, had been looking for someone like our mother, someone who knew the ins and outs of the business, the peculiar dental vocabulary, the complexities of a dentist’s life.

Noni had cut her hair short with little wings on the sides like Billie Jean King, and it gave me a shock of strangeness to see her without a mass of dark curls. As she chewed her blueberry pancakes, her hand stole up to her neck to finger the sharp line where hair met skin.

“Thank you, Claudia, for taking such good care of us,” Noni said, and raised her glass of orange juice. We all clinked and called “Cheers!”

“Of course,” Claudia answered. “I only wish I’d come sooner. I just thought you needed some space, Antonia. That was really it.”

Noni only nodded.

“But I didn’t realize both your parents were dead. And no siblings. I hadn’t realized you were so alone, Antonia. Really, I hadn’t.”

“It’s okay. We’re fine now. Right, kids?” Noni looked around the table at each of us. Our fingers were sticky from maple syrup, our teeth and blood tingly with sugar. We had eaten stacks of pancakes, and yet our stomachs still felt empty. Were we fine? Yes. One by one we returned Noni’s gaze and nodded. Even Renee nodded. Yes, we said. We are all fine.

“Good,” Noni said. “Good.” She smiled a firm little smile.

And that was how it happened: we forgave our mother. We forgave Noni not because she was all we had, although this was true, but because we shared her. She belonged to the four of us, and for one not to forgive her meant that the others couldn’t either, and none of us was willing to shoulder the burden of that decision. None of us could bear to take Noni away from the others again.

* * *

AFTER AUNT CLAUDIA left, Noni returned with a vengeance. She began to call herself a feminist and to call us, her daughters, feminists, too. She bought books by Gloria Steinem and bell hooks and Germaine Greer that she read aloud at the dinner table. The year was 1984.

“Better late than never,” Noni said.

Only a few of my friends’ mothers worked. One was a professor at the University of Connecticut who wore half-glasses on a string of purple beads around her neck. Another, a family lawyer who rented an office in Bexley with her name printed in gold on the window. But for the most part, the mothers remained at home and oversaw play dates and drove us to the movies and lurked in the kitchen, where they banged pots and spread peanut butter onto saltine crackers for us to eat after school. While our father was alive, Noni had been this kind of mother. But after she began working for Dr. Hart, Noni changed. She would describe for us her day at Dr. Hart’s office, the patients and their troublesome dental quandaries, the new system of color-coded file notes, the car accident just in front of the building that closed the street for hours. We saw in these stories a Noni who enjoyed her life away from us. This life of drama and intrigue that existed far from the confines of the gray house and us, her children.

When I was in third grade, I memorized for the class Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Applicant,” which traumatized my poor teacher, Miss Adelaide. (“A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk!”) Fourth grade, I dressed as Gloria Steinem for Halloween and spent the entire night explaining the significance of my bell-bottoms and turtleneck. Fifth grade, Noni volunteered to assist in my puberty and health class, and I walked through the class handing out tampons and pads in purple plastic wrappers.

Noni regretted the Pause, she told us. She wanted to make it up to us, all those lost days while she rested. The missed baseball games and teacher conferences and Caroline’s flute concerts and Renee’s cross-country meets and dinners and bedtimes and love.

“I am so sorry,” she would say. “I am so, so sorry. I should have gotten some help. Thank goodness nothing horrible happened.”

We would look at one another and say nothing about the pond, or Ace’s accident, or the man who followed Renee from the bus stop. In fact, we told Noni nothing about the Pause. Wordlessly we agreed that it was better to keep these events secret. We saw this as protecting ourselves from discipline but also as protection for Noni. We believed that she required care and shelter, that we must not subject her to upheaval or stress. Our mother was a temperamental furnace, a rescue dog once hostile but then subdued.

Now Noni explained her own early life and marriage as a cautionary tale, the period of her paralyzing grief the price we all paid for her foolishness. In these stories our father emerged as a dashing but hapless prince, one who lulled the good princess into a life of fat complacency deep within a castle of tricks and mirrors. When the prince disappeared, the castle was revealed to be only a cardboard shell; there was no coach, no footmen, only the pumpkin and the simpering mice. The shock of it all sent the princess into a deep sleep, until a good fairy godmother—not another prince, please, anything but that—roused her. And what did the princess see when she first awoke? What greeted her and stirred her fully from the glass chamber? Why, it was the mice, of course. They clambered atop the wreckage of the castle and reminded her that she could build it herself again.

Chapter 4

THE YEAR WAS 1989. The first George Bush was president. The previous month on TV, we’d watched as young men and women with outdated haircuts and funny clothes took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall. There was a sense of radical change and diminished threats. It was June, a beautiful warm night, and we were eating dinner with the back door open. Light-hungry moths fluttered against the screen. The night air smelled of dew and pavement.

“I don’t want you girls making the same mistakes I did,” Noni was saying. “I loved your father, I did, but you must not rely on a man. You must have your own money. Your own direction in life.”

By now we were accustomed to this line of discussion. We all nodded. We were eating pork chops, steamed broccoli, underdone rice that stuck between our teeth. Tonight Joe had played baseball, and he still wore his uniform, which was dirty across the front from when he slid into home in the seventh inning. A nick of mud marked his chin.