Page 9 of The Things We Never Say

In his state of dismalness, Artie remembered this, his sister’s last words: What are we going to do now?

—

And he remembered also how as a child, so pale (like their Irish mother), Maria, two years older than Artie, had been prone to weight gain, and their mother—he often thought this—had been very hard on her. It may have been no more than the fact that Maria was a girl, or it may have been that Maria was not what their mother had wanted for a daughter. In any event, their mother had been harsh with Maria, frequently criticizing her, just as she had with Artie but it had rolled off him more, and also, he had learned by watching his older sister and realizing when their mother was going to have one of her “spells,” where she screamed at them uncontrollably and then ended up in tears, and he would be able to dodge her at such times. Artie’s father would say when these spells were looming, he would say to both his children, “Mom’s tired,” before leaving for work at one of the buildings, and Artie would know to watch out. But even with the warning, poor Maria would often step right into it, not disappearing into her tiny bedroom but trying instead to please her mother, which was the opposite of what was needed at such times. And Artie would see their mother’s arms flailing at Maria and a sickness would fill him, as the girl’s pale skin became splotchy and then, later, yellow with bruises. Their father was always out of the apartment when such episodes happened.

—

Below their basement (garden) apartment—where through the back door there was no garden, only a space filled with old air conditioners and a few spare tires and ancient heating units that had been stored there seemingly forever—was another basement, they referred to this as the cellar; it was big enough to stand up in, filled with furnaces and oil burners, and it always had the smell of oil; but in that cellar Artie’s mother had her clothesline, and even though it was often damp down there, the clothes—he remembered his father’s underpants and Maria’s blouses—would be hung on the clothesline with wooden clothespins. Also in that cellar Artie’s father had built a series of shelves that extended beneath the wooden staircase, and on these shelves were kept extra flour sacks and extra boxes of confectionary sugar, but mostly it was cans of tomatoes and corn and beans. Often Artie’s mother would send Artie down near suppertime to get one of these cans.

When Artie was really little he would play down there—sometimes with Maria, but as she got older she would not join him—but they would, as small children, sometimes play “grocery,” and they would line the cans up on a board and take turns being the checkout person, the other putting the cans into a bag.

Around the time Maria had just started to have small breasts protruding from beneath her sweaters (Artie would look away from her, because they somehow made him ashamed), Artie went down into the cellar one day and he was surprised to find Maria there. She was standing beneath the stairs where the extra food was, and he said “Maria!” because she had startled him. And what he always—for the rest of his life—remembered was this:

The young girl was standing with her face alarmed and guilty and pale, always so pale she was, and in her hand was a box of confectionary sugar, and he could see that she was holding a spoon, and her mouth had the white powder of this sugar around it. She had been eating the confectionary sugar. He could not remember that she said anything, just the look of vast guilt and fear on her white-streaked face, and he had gone upstairs and never told anyone what he had seen.

But the memory of her eating that sugar came to him these days, as it had infrequently throughout his life. As he thought about this, he understood that the poor girl had just desperately wanted sweetness in her life.

The next night as they ate their dinner, Evie laughed and said, “Remember the last time we had dinner at Flossie and Reginald’s?” She wiped her mouth and took a sip of wine.

“Not really,” Artie said.

“Sure you do. Sophie was so awful to Rob. Come on, you remember.”

The two couples had—for any number of years—occasionally socialized, and now Artie recalled—vaguely—the night that perhaps Evie was referring to. “You mean when Rob called Sophie a prissy little prick?”

“Is that what he said?” Evie took a bite of food from her plate.

Artie now remembered the four of them eating at the table at Flossie’s, Flossie on her way to being drunk, as she often was. The MacDonalds’ house had not been as nice as the Dams’ house, and they sat in the small dining room that overlooked the woods out back. The children—how old were they? ten, maybe?—had gone off together, having finished their dinner, while the adults continued to sit with dessert. Reginald sat at the head of the table, so tall and superior-looking, and Flossie said something about “You want to know why I married Reginald?” And she laughed. Something green (in Artie’s memory this was true—lettuce, perhaps?) was stuck in her teeth. “Because he asked me!” And she laughed, and Reginald looked at her coldly.

And then Sophie came running down the stairs and said, “I’m sorry, you two, but I can’t stand your son,” and they were all tremendously startled. Reginald stood up.

“He was right.” Evie said this now. “Sophie was a prissy little prick. I never liked her.”

“I know that,” Artie said. He thought of Reginald that night walking across the floor as Rob came slowly down the stairs, and Reginald said quietly to Rob, “Are you all right?”

And Rob replied, also quietly, “Sophie’s a prissy little prick.”

Artie thought that this was what had happened: Reginald had put his hand on Rob’s shoulder and said, “She can indeed be.”

“Mom! Did you hear what Dad just said?” Sophie had screamed this, and Flossie, wiping her mouth with a napkin that was already stained with her lipstick, stood up from her chair uncertainly.

That was all Artie could remember.

“Those kids never got along. Even when they were little. But after that night we sort of decided we didn’t have to see them again. I mean, together,” Evie said, putting her hands down on the table and gazing out at the water.

“What made you think of that?” Artie asked.

“No idea.”

He thought about Flossie, out in Ohio now, living near Sophie. “I think Sophie’s still that way. Flossie doesn’t seem very happy.”

“Flossie was never happy,” Evie said, and Artie was surprised by this, but he did not answer. “Reginald only married her because she claimed to be pregnant, and she wasn’t. She lied. But there they were, stuck together.”

“Really?” Artie looked at Evie, who was once again sipping her wine. “I never knew that.”

Evie shrugged.

That next Saturday the sky was once again a terrific blue; white clouds rolled past, puffy-looking like enormous cotton balls. Artie put on his rubber boots and walked across the lawn down to the wharf, where he started to untie the dinghy, but it was colder than he had expected. He turned and walked all the way back to the garage and put his old coat on over his sweater.