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When I was alive, everything my grandmother did was bad. But an odd thing happened when she arrived in her rented limo that day, opened up our house, and barged in. She was, in all her obnoxious finery, dragging the light back in.
“You need help, Abigail,” my grandmother said after having eaten the first real meal my mother had cooked since my disappearance. My mother was stu
“Mother, that is so nice of you.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “I’ll just run out to the front hall and get my bag o’ magic.”
“Oh no,” I heard my mother say under her breath.
“Ah, yes, the bag o’ magic,” said Lindsey, who had not spoken the whole meal.
“Please, Mother!” my mother protested when Grandma Ly
“Okay, kids, clear off the table and get your mother over here. I’m doing a makeover.”
“Mother, that’s crazy. I have all these dishes to do.”
“Abigail,” my father said.
“Oh no. She may get you to drink, but she’s not getting those instruments of torture near me.”
“I’m not drunk,” he said.
“You’re smiling,” my mother said.
“So sue him,” Grandma Ly
“Grandma Ly
My mother was being led by Buckley to a kitchen chair my grandmother had turned to face her.
“What?”
“Could you teach me about makeup?”
“My God in heaven, praise the Lord, yes!”
My mother sat down and Buckley climbed up into her lap. “What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“Are you laughing, Abbie?” My father smiled.
And she was. She was laughing and she was crying too.
“Susie was a good girl, honey,” Grandma Ly
Buckley got down and moved onto a chair. “This is an eyelash curler, Lindsey,” my grandmother instructed. “I taught your mother all of these things.”
“Clarissa uses those,” Lindsey said.
My grandmother set the rubber curler pads on either side of my mother’s eyelashes, and my mother, knowing the ropes, looked upward.
“Have you talked to Clarissa?” my father asked.
“Not really,” said Lindsey. “She’s hanging out a lot with Brian Nelson. They cut class enough times to get a three-day suspension.”
“I don’t expect that of Clarissa,” my father said. “She may not have been the brightest apple in the bunch, but she was never a troublemaker.”
“When I ran into her she reeked of pot.”
“I hope you’re not getting into that,” Grandma Ly
Lindsey tried to imagine her own eyelashes, but instead saw the star-clumped lashes of Samuel Heckler as his face neared hers for a kiss. Her pupils dilated, pulsing in and out like small, ferocious olives.
“I stand amazed,” Grandma Ly
“What?”
“Lindsey Salmon, you have a boyfriend,” my grandmother a
My father smiled. He was liking Grandma Ly
“Do not,” Lindsey said.
My grandmother was about to speak when my mother whispered, “Do too.”
“Bless you, honey,” my grandmother said, “you should have a boyfriend. As soon as I’m done with your mother, I’m giving you the grand Grandma Ly
“An aperitif is something you…” my mother began.
“Don’t correct me, Abigail.”
My grandmother got sloshed. She made Lindsey look like a clown or, as Grandma Ly
While everyone else slept, Lindsey stood at the mirror in the bathroom, looking at herself. She wiped off some of the blush, blotted her lips, and ran her fingers over the swollen, freshly plucked parts of her formerly bushy eyebrows. In the mirror she saw something different and so did I: an adult who could take care of herself. Under the makeup was the face she’d always known as her own, until very recently, when it had become the face that reminded people of me. With lip pencil and eyeliner, she now saw, the edges of her features were delineated, and they sat on her face like gems imported from some far-off place where the colors were richer than the colors in our house had ever been. It was true what our grandmother said – the makeup brought out the blue of her eyes. The plucking of the eyebrows changed the shape of her face. The blush highlighted the hollows beneath her cheekbones (“The hollows that could stand some more hollowing,” our grandmother pointed out). And her lips – she practiced her facial expressions. She pouted, she kissed, she smiled wide as if she too had had a cocktail, she looked down and pretended to pray like a good girl but cocked one eye up to see how she looked being good. She went to bed and slept on her back so as not to mess up her new face.
Mrs. Bethel Utemeyer was the only dead person my sister and I ever saw. She moved in with her son to our development when I was six and Lindsey five.
My mother said that she had lost part of her brain and that sometimes she left her son’s house and didn’t know where she was. She would often end up in our front yard, standing under the dogwood tree and looking out at the street as if waiting for a bus. My mother would sit her down in the kitchen and make tea for the two of them, and after she calmed her she would call her son’s house to tell them where she was. Sometimes no one was home and Mrs. Utemeyer would sit at our kitchen table and stare into the centerpiece for hours. She would be there when we came home from school. Sitting. She smiled at us. Often she called Lindsey “Natalie” and reached out to touch her hair.
When she died, her son encouraged my mother to bring Lindsey and me to the funeral. “My mother seemed to have a special fondness for your children,” he wrote.
“She didn’t even know my name, Mom,” Lindsey whined, as our mother buttoned up the infinite number of round buttons on Lindsey’s dress coat. Another impractical gift from Grandma Ly
“At least she called you a name,” I said.
It was after Easter, and a spring heat wave had set in that week. All but the most stubborn of that winter’s snow had seeped into the earth, and in the graveyard of the Utemeyers’ church snow clung to the base of the headstones, while, nearby, buttercup shoots were making their way up.
The Utemeyers’ church was fancy. “High Catholic,” my father had said in the car. Lindsey and I thought this was very fu
But her pregnancy allowed her to get out of what Lindsey and I couldn’t stop talking about for weeks and what I kept dreaming about for long after that: viewing the body. I could tell my father and mother didn’t want this to happen, but Mr. Utemeyer made beeline for the two of us when it was time to file past the casket. “Which one of you is the one she called Natalie?” he asked. We stared at him. I pointed to Lindsey.