Two sisters meet for the first time after their father has killed their sister and himself; a man dying of cancer rescues a small boy from a closed refrigerator; an alcoholic, long divorced, shows up at his daughter’s wedding; a man who long ago abused his daughter realizes at last the full impact of what he has done.
These are among the situations described in Absent Without Leave, and they hit with a force that will shake you, disturb you, and teach you the truths you do not already know. The tales are clear-eyed but deeply moving; the characters spring three dimensional and alive from her pages; the stories are dangerous and fearless and thus not sentimental. We are confronting life here, made vivid by art.
Two sisters meet for the first time after their father has killed their sister and himself; a man dying of cancer rescues a small boy from a closed refrigerator; an alcoholic, long divorced, shows up at his daughter’s wedding; a man who long ago abused his daughter realizes at last the full impact of what he has done.
These are among the situations described in Absent Without Leave, and they hit with a force that will shake you, disturb you, and teach you the truths you do not already know. The tales are clear-eyed but deeply moving; the characters spring three dimensional and alive from her pages; the stories are dangerous and fearless and thus not sentimental. We are confronting life here, made vivid by art.
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Overview
Two sisters meet for the first time after their father has killed their sister and himself; a man dying of cancer rescues a small boy from a closed refrigerator; an alcoholic, long divorced, shows up at his daughter’s wedding; a man who long ago abused his daughter realizes at last the full impact of what he has done.
These are among the situations described in Absent Without Leave, and they hit with a force that will shake you, disturb you, and teach you the truths you do not already know. The tales are clear-eyed but deeply moving; the characters spring three dimensional and alive from her pages; the stories are dangerous and fearless and thus not sentimental. We are confronting life here, made vivid by art.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781480400153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Delphinium Books, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 190 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Absent Without Leave
And Other Stories
By Jessica Treadway
DELPHINIUM BOOKS
Copyright © 1992 Jessica TreadwayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0015-3
CHAPTER 1
AND GIVE YOU PEACE
When the waitress comes, my sister asks her if they serve hamburgers in this restaurant.
"Well, we have the sirloin platter. Number Five," the waitress says, leaning over to point at the menu.
"What is that, basically?" Christine asks.
"A hamburger."
Christine looks at me from under her bangs, and I can see her eyelids rise. "I guess I'll give that a try, then," she says to the waitress, whose badge tells us her name is Nora.
I order the lasagna and settle back in the dark red plastic of the booth we've chosen, close to the window, with a view of a squat Manufacturers Hanover branch across the street and Antonelli's Pizza on the corner. This is the town we grew up in, and nothing has changed since we moved out. Before our father and youngest sister died, the four of us used to order take-out from Antonelli's about once a week, because our mother had left and taken the family's cooking skill with her. Now Christine and I have not been to Antonelli's for months. And I don't know about her, but I never even eat pizza anymore. The smell of the sauce is a physical memory—reminds me always, with a quick nauseous thump, of those nights we spent hunched around the TV, eating slices straight out of the carton while we watched reruns of "I Love Lucy" and "Get Smart," which was our father's favorite. He always used to get red stuff on his chin, laughing at Max when he dialed the phone in his shoe.
"It'll be a year, soon," Christine says casually, letting the ice in her water glass chink against her teeth. She's right; and I guess I had been thinking about it, but not in the front of my mind, where things can hurt if you let them press for too long. I reach for a breadstick and rip off the cellophane with a crackle, then split it and hand over half to my sister. "Thanks," she says, and white crumbs fall down the front of her blouse.
I pick up my fork and make little stabbing taps on the tablecloth. "I wish she'd hurry up with the food," I say, even though I know that if Nora actually appeared at that moment with our orders, it would be hard for me to swallow.
This is the way they died: our father went into Meggy's bedroom on a drizzly July morning, and shot her in the back of the head with a gun none of us had ever seen before. Then (all of this came from the police report afterward, when they had talked to Mr. Hausler next door) Dad walked around the house for a while and then went outside to trim the rosebushes; but after he trimmed them he cut the roses off, too. Then he went back into his own bedroom and shot himself, putting the barrel of the gun to his head. Nobody heard anything, no gunshots, no screams, no bodies falling. Christine found our father when she got home from a party that night, and the police found Meggy when they came a few minutes later.
It wasn't until the next day that the police gave us the letter, which began: "By the time you read this, Meggy and I will be in a better place ..." The woman on the TV news said the letter was blood-spattered, but actually it was very clean, considering, with only a light trace of something reddish and pale on the top corner. It was folded neatly, and originally it had been addressed to Liz-Christine-Meggy, but then the Meggy had been crossed out and the sentence about the two of them being in a better place had been scribbled at the top of the letter. I don't know where it is now. I suppose our mother got rid of it after the funeral, or the police have it somewhere as evidence.
"How much do you think about it, now?" Christine asks me. She is fiddling with the cellophane the breadstick came in.
I shrug and feel I should lie, but I don't. "A lot," I tell her. "You know? All the time."
She nods and looks down at the table, and a brown curl falls across her eyes. Always, before, she would be doing something with her hair as she spoke—twisting it around a finger, sucking on a braid, tucking side pieces behind her ear—but now she just lets it hang there, as if the effort to push it aside is not worth the trouble. "I know what you mean," she says, letting her voice slide low. "Sometimes I can go a whole day without remembering, like when I'm at school and there's stuff going on, a lot of people around and we're all having a good time. I can tell jokes and watch TV and write a paper, and if somebody else wants to talk about something—like this girl Tracey in the next suite, who broke up with her boyfriend over Christmas—I can sit there and listen, and I won't start to cry even if they're losing it all over the place.
"But when it comes time to go to sleep, I wish ... God had never invented the nighttime. I lie there and begin to feel myself letting go, and then right when I think I'm about to fall off, it comes rushing back at me. Like there's somebody standing over me with a hose, just waiting to blast me with cold water as soon as I start to forget." She balls up the cellophane and drops it in the ashtray. It begins to crinkle back open to its original shape, and she picks it up again with a sighed grunt and stuffs it out of sight in the napkin dispenser at the side of the table.
"I can't stand all this crap in my way," she says.
Now Nora brings me my salad, plunking the small wooden bowl on top of the breadstick crumbs dotting the tablecloth. "Don't I get one, too?" Christine asks, seeing there is no other salad on Nora's tray.
"Only with pasta," Nora tells her. "Otherwise, it's extra."
"Well, I think that sucks," Christine says loudly. I am amazed; my sister has always been softspoken, and modest in her language. "I just think it sucks that I can't get a goddam salad with my dinner," Christine continues. Nora looks embarrassed.
"Bring her one and we'll pay the extra," I say under my breath, as if Christine is a child we have to humor to avoid a scene. Nora starts to move away, scribbling on her pad, until Christine calls her back.
"Never mind," she says. "I'll just take some of hers." She leans over to pick out the carrot and radish pieces in my bowl, because she knows I don't like them and she does. "This is something you can only do with a sister," she says to me, smiling, and in that instant it hurts to love so hard.
She's probably just nervous, I tell myself, being back here, and remembering. It was my mother's idea that I should try to talk to Christine, although it was my idea that we come here to do it. Mom is worried about her, says there's something not right about the way she looks, or the way she has been acting. "I don't think she's told anyone at school about what happened," Mom told me. "I just don't think it's healthy." It's true that Christine does not look all that well—she's lost weight, and her face, even in the mornings, is drawn and weary. There is something forced in her voice when she speaks, and she smiles mechanically, without mirth. It occurs to me that she might need to laugh a little.
"Mark told me some jokes the other day," I announce hopefully. "Wait—let me think of how they go." I press my fingers to my forehead and try to retrieve the punchlines.
Mark is my lover. He started out being just a good friend, the brother of a girl I roomed with at school before moving off campus this past semester, with money I got when our father died. Last summer, when it happened, Mark and I were working together in the bookstore on campus when the police called and said there was an emergency. Mark drove me home, getting there in three hours when it normally takes four, and he stayed in town for two weeks after the funeral; I knew he was there even though I did not want to see him. We became lovers one weekend in the fall, after school had started up again. The first part of the weekend I spent crying and punching him and throwing up in the wastebasket, but by Sunday I was letting him close his arms around me, and then I was giving more to him than I had thought it possible for me to give, and losing myself so thankfully in something larger than grief that I ended up crying again, and then we fell asleep crying together.
"What did Grace Kelly have that Natalie Wood didn't?" I ask Christine now, grateful that the jokes have come back to me, because I promised them.
"I give up," she says, dutifully.
"A good stroke. Why didn't Natalie Wood take a bath on the yacht the night she drowned?"
"Oh, God!" Christine says. "I don't know."
"She preferred to wash up on shore."
Christine groans and snickers simultaneously, exposing her teeth in a wide appreciative yawn. I had forgotten how much I missed her. This is the first time we have been together, without other people around, since we went to visit the graves over Easter break. Usually, when we are at our mother's house on the other side of the state (the house we grew up in, here, was finally sold eight months after they carried the bodies out), Mom is always flitting around, asking us if we need anything, not letting us out of her sight, as if she is afraid of what we might do while she is not looking. If she has to go to the store or the dentist or something, she tries to make sure her husband will be around to keep an eye on us. Paul is a little man with a quiet voice, and I don't know how he could stop Christine or me if we got it in our minds to do anything, but for the most part we keep to ourselves and let them both believe they are protecting us. We never talk about the shootings, and if the subject ever threatens to come up—like a finger pressing gently, testing an exposed wound—one of us always manages, at the last minute, to snatch the conversation back safely to the weather or the merits of Mom's Hungarian goulash.
Across from me, Christine has caught her breath sharply and is craning her neck to see out the window. "There's Candy Anderson," she says, softly, pointing through the glass at a stocky girl walking down the street, her plastic clogs flopping on the sidewalk. Candy was a friend of Christine's in high school—could it have been only a year ago, last June, that they stood next to each other on the gym risers at their graduation, singing "The Lord Bless You and Keep You" with the rest of the choir? Like most time recalled with regret, it seems impossible. Do you know that hymn? The words move across the music with a sharp, sweet pain, which, once you've felt it, stays as memory in your bones:
The Lord bless you and keep you,
The Lord lift his countenance upon you,
And give you peace
And give you peace
The Lord make his face to shine upon you,
And give you peace.
We watch as Candy stops to read the menu posted outside Antonelli's, counts the money in her pocket, and goes inside. When the screen door shuts behind her like a slap, we can't see her anymore.
"Don't you want to catch her when she comes out? Just to say hello?" I ask.
Christine twists back around in her seat and sighs. "No," she says. "I thought I would, for a minute, but I changed my mind." She pushes her lips together as if deciding she will not speak again, but then reconsiders and adds, "I don't want to scare her away."
Meggy was a softball player. She played on the team sponsored by Rodney's Refuse Service for three years running, fielding at third base the first year, then moving up to pitcher when she was thirteen and fourteen. We all used to go to her games at the park, after supper on summer nights; I mean, Christine and I went together, and our father would come if our mother wasn't going to be there with Paul. They sort of worked it out by tacit alternation—our father would come on weeknights, and our mother would come to the Saturday morning games. It took her longer to get there, because she lived that much farther away.
Last year, the year she died, Meggy decided she didn't want to play anymore. She told our father it was because she wanted to spend her summer evenings at the park pool, but he didn't believe her and kept bugging her until he made her cry, and then she said, "Okay, okay, if you really want to know, I can't stand going to games knowing you and Mom are afraid you'll see each other, it makes me sick that you can't even look at each other, it makes me want to puke." Then she threw her laundry-battered Rodney's Refuse cap at him in a little fit of drama, and went outside to sit on the swings.
Later, she told Christine and me, she overheard our parents talking on the phone; our father was nearly in tears, saying the divorce had been too much for her, Meggy, to handle. "But he's the one who can't handle it," she told us, in the room she shared with Christine, with the door closed and the radio turned up loud. "I can deal just fine."
"Remember Meggy's softball uniform?" I say to Christine. The food has come and Nora sets it down in front of us, moving cautiously as if she's afraid Christine will bite her hand off. Steam rises from my plate and films my sister's startled face, and I realize we have not said Meggy's name out loud, to each other, in nearly a year.
But she seems relieved that I have brought it up. "The way she washed her jersey so many times, so the letters would fade out?" she says. Meggy had always been embarrassed to wear RODNEY'S REFUSE across her chest. "She always wanted to play for The Golden Fox, remember?" It was a restaurant in the city.
"Yeah." I bite into my lasagna and chew it quickly. "Remember whenever we played Crazy Eights, the loser had to smell the winner's feet?"
"Of course I remember—I broke a blood vessel in my nose when she beat me that time."
"And the night she swallowed all the cough medicine by accident."
Christine snickers. "She was drunk as a skunk. She kept rolling off the sofa and cracking herself up."
"Yeah, I remember." I take a sip of milk, and then I have to smile. "Look at us. Talking about Meggy. Dr. Nettelson should be here to listen to us now."
Christine's face darkens. "I never liked that woman," she says, reaching for the Heinz.
Dr. Nettelson was the shrink our mother made us go to last summer, beginning a week after the funeral. Mom herself had to see the doctor, but that was in the hospital, where they took her for two weeks after she got hysterical at the church service—she started screaming and crying and calling out Meggy's name, and she threw her handkerchief at our father's coffin but it fell before it touched the wood, so she started taking her clothes off and throwing them, before Paul and Uncle John grabbed her and took her outside.
Dr. Nettelson was on call that day and admitted our mother to the psychiatric wing of the hospital, where they saw each other two times a day during our mother's stay. Christine and I went less often, twice a week to Dr. Nettelson's office, sometimes together and sometimes separately. She was always comparing us to things: when we couldn't say much to her (because it was so fresh and we did not want to give it away), she said our anger was like rice boiling over a pot on the stove, spilling down the edges with nothing to catch it up. That one killed me. She just wasn't someone I felt like trusting, personally, but I did not hate her the way Christine did. I remember her asking the doctor if she didn't think oatmeal would make a better emotional metaphor, because it was so much messier than rice when it stuck onto something, so much harder to clean up.
"I didn't like her much, either," I say to Christine. She nods approval, shreds of lettuce peeking out of her mouth. "But Teen—there were a couple of things that came up, when I talked to her, that I always meant to ask you about ... but I just didn't."
She looks at me suspiciously—maybe fearfully is a better word—and stops eating. "Like what?"
"Well, for one, I always wondered if you blamed me for not being there," I say. "When it happened? I mean, my deciding to stay on campus last summer and work? You pretty much had to take care of Meggy, and the house and everything, by yourself."
She makes a face and tilts her water glass back, catching the last sliver of ice to crunch between her teeth. "It's okay," she says. "If I could have gone away somewhere, I would have, too."
"It didn't have anything to do with you or Meggy, why I didn't come back," I tell her. "It was all just Mom and Dad."
"Oh, I know," she says, nodding. "I—you know."
"Okay," I say. For a few minutes we eat in silence, looking at our food. It could end here, but there is something else I want to ask, something I need to know to fill a blank space, a space now filled with a furious red terror in my dreams at night. Actually I am afraid to hear the answer, but I ask anyway.
"What did it look like? When you found Dad?" I say. "I mean—just what did it look like?"
Her mouth drops slightly, and she pushes her lips hard into the napkin in her fist. For a moment I am afraid she may run from the booth, because the table gives a quick tremble under her hands as she brings them away, slowly, from her face. But then she is still again, and her fingers, when she grips her fork, are calm.
"I can't talk about that, Liz," she says, and her voice is a combination of apology and horror. "Just please don't ask me again, ever, okay?" She looks down at her plate, where half of the burger and most of the fries float in a ketchup pool. "Do you think the waitress will mind all this mess?"
But no, as it turns out, Nora doesn't mind, in fact is probably very glad to escape unassaulted by Christine, as she whisks all the dishes from the table with a flourish, letting silverware clatter on the tray as it falls. Christine and I both move to take out our wallets, but I make her put hers back. "At least let me leave the tip," she says, and tucks four dollar bills under the empty water glass. When she sees my surprised look she defends herself: "Why not? I mean, for putting up with me."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Absent Without Leave by Jessica Treadway. Copyright © 1992 Jessica Treadway. Excerpted by permission of DELPHINIUM BOOKS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- CONTENTS
- Epigraph
- And Give You Peace
- Outside
- Commencement
- Wedded
- Absent Without Leave
- Uncle
- The Touch-A-Thon
- Welcome to Our Village
- Warmth
- Something Falls
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- Copyright