Jane didn’t know Merle was a sweet but melancholic alcoholic who would have trouble, all his life, finishing anything—fencing projects, novel writing, the dishes. Merle didn’t know that every member of Jane’s family had at least one substantial secret, and that all these secrets had pooled in her body and her brain.
Jane was beautiful, as beautiful as her lost mother, Asta, who’d existed only in photographs since a car accident in 1941, and as Asta’s mother, Perdita, Papa’s first wife, who’d died soon after giving birth in 1917. Jane was so lovely that Polly could remember being eight, living with Papa and Dee, watching visitors—poets and academics—spilling things while they tried to have a conversation with her. On the first day of school, Jane was always the mother everyone looked at, and Polly would feel a bolt of pride make its way through her dread of the new. Even at the time she’d known, without minding, that she would never come close. Jane could beat Polly in tennis while hitting with the handle, and on the iced-over pond near the farmhouse in Michigan, Jane would make graceful figure eights around her daughter, who fell again and again. Jane was elegant; Polly was not. Whatever genes Papa and Perdita had brought to the table—beauty, the ability to glide, the ability to kill with a look—very few had been left for Polly, whose figure was closer to that of Merle’s sweet dumpling mother, Cora.
Jane was still a junior at the University of Michigan when she became pregnant. She managed to receive her bachelor’s degree two years late, but everyone gave up something. Instead of hitchhiking around Europe, or writing poetry, or whatever escape he’d half planned, Merle signed up for a graduate degree in microbiology in Ann Arbor. They moved into married housing but spent most weekends at Merle’s family’s house a half hour away, a small plain place with linoleum and thin-planked oak floors, a cross on the wall next to school portraits. Merle’s parents, Cora and Frank, fed them; a swarm of teenagers cared for Polly when Merle and Jane needed to be young and alone.
Jane, child bride with no siblings, became silly and giddy with the noisy, chaotic Schusters. Merle’s brothers and sister and the flood of cousins in the neighborhood dressed Polly up and took her to church and for walks. Everyone paid attention to her, first grandchild, novelty—they read books to her, taught her games, gave her their best marbles. They took her to a cabin and towed her around a lake in an inner tube; they pretended she was managing to whip the cream or smash the potatoes on her own power.
The world was happy, accelerating—Merle would ditch science to write novels, Jane would get a doctorate someday, in something, because she knew everything—until the morning Merle’s father, Frank, and sister, Evie, were given a ride in a plane as a gift by Merle’s uncle, who hired an air force veteran to fly them. The ride was a celebration of Evie’s fourteenth birthday, but the plane dropped into Lake Michigan a mile from Elberta, a place of beautiful white sand dunes. The pilot had been intent on suicide, waiting for an opportunity, and they were simply unlucky. Polly was three. A family can be snapped to the ground, just like that, and almost forty years later, the wounds still bled red tears.
As a result of these absences, Polly came up with some specific ideas about death. She believed that when people died, they disappeared but began anew somewhere else, disguised and hidden from the people of their old life. This explained all the youthful angels in art books, and Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Polly didn’t know what had ended up in Frank’s and Evie’s coffins, or how to explain the mangled airplane, but she believed they were hidden away, warm and unripped and safe, not understanding how sad they’d left the world. But when she tried airing her ideas, she upset Merle, and Jane explained again that Frank and Evie were gone forever, either buried in the ground in Michigan or up in heaven.
When Merle and Jane announced they were moving to New York a few months later, Polly assumed that the point was to find the dead again. Why else would they leave her world behind? She was bereft, and theories and solutions filled her brain. She would find Frank and Evie on her own, because clearly no one else knew how to go about it.
And so Polly and Merle and Jane set off for the city, three against the world. Merle drove the cat with a baggie of veterinary downers, and Polly and Jane took a sleeper train from Detroit. Polly remembered thinking through her task—she remembered remembering, even though Jane now claimed she’d been too young—on the ride from Michigan to New York, watching the landscape blur by in a frenzy of supposition. There was no photograph of the train.
In New York, they found a third-floor apartment on Thompson Street. Papa and Dee’s place was a few blocks away, but it wasn’t big enough to take in refugees. They were often traveling, and they were a blank in Polly’s mind until she was six or seven. She was a denning child, given to blanket forts and shipping boxes, the queen of small spaces, and she refined her plan while hiding in a thicket in the muddy courtyard behind the apartment building, a secret trampled place among elderberry bushes that she made her own. The lacy white umbels gave the thicket a dizzy feel when they moved in the wind, and later the berries, though bitter, looked like jewels. Back then, she thought the older children never saw her, but now she was sure they chose to ignore her. They at least allowed her to listen to their games: If you were an animal, what would you be? What country would you live in, and how big will the kingdom be? How many children will you have, what will your new name be, what will you see?
You could pick whatever you liked. It seemed reasonable.
The three of them on Thompson Street learning how to live. They made coffee at the same time every morning, stopped letting the laundry mildew on the floor or in the washer, began to have dinner at 6:00, with an eye on Walter Cronkite. Merle put on his badly ironed starch-rippled shirts every day to be an assistant for a biologist he despised, and Jane took summer classes at NYU, though she was always behind, always late. She’d grown up with Dee, a world-class cook, without ever paying attention, and now she floundered through Joy of Cooking and Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She was only twenty-two, hot and resentful in a housedress, starch water in a Coke bottle with a saltshaker top, ironing work shirts badly while they watched Julia Child on television. Polly remembered the mundane moments, not just the laugh reel, the construction of a stew, a cake, a sauce. “Soufflé on a Platter,” for instance—Jane was a real mouth-breather for that episode, watching with a steno pad and a pen. Some experiments were repellent (salmon soufflé with canned salmon, bones and all), but the triumphs—duck à l’orange, béarnaise sauce, éclairs—burned their way into Polly’s soul.
Giddiness when a meal worked, hungover mornings. At night, even when she was three years old, Polly never dreamt of breaching the wall of the bedroom door. It was Merle and Jane’s world. They were different people on Thompson Street, always whispering to each other, always close, and Polly was always with them but forever in her own world watching. They were nothing like the people she knew now, another point for memory over imagination.
Whenever she was out in the city, Polly searched for her dead aunt and grandfather. She always looked at the eyes, because it might be the only way she’d know. Evie had huge chocolate eyes with soft brown eyebrows. Polly didn’t know how old Frank and Evie would be now—time seemed infinite, since they’d left Michigan, and she believed they’d choose whatever age they liked. Frank might be a teenager, Evie a baby, but Polly hoped they’d both be her own age. She spied on people in museums, circled customers in the fish store to look up at their faces. Back at the apartment, she’d sort what she’d seen against photographs in the grubby brown photo album.