The Long Goodbye Read Free Page B

her own way to school. Not long ago, I was asking him what he remembered most about her, and he said, “The way she wanted everything to be fun.” He reminded me of a game our mother used to like to play: a game of never letting the car come to a full stop on the way home. Sometimes she pressed the gas pedal a bit harder than she should have, and at other times she dawdled, rolling down a block so she’d reach the light just as it turned green, antagonizing the drivers behind her.
    She was aggressive in the car. Whenever anyone cut her off or acted wishy-washy (she hated wishy-washy), she’d inevitably honk the horn and, slowly and expressively, say, “You asshole.” One morning when she had a meeting, my dad drove my brother to school. Eamon was then about two and a half, with blond curls and long-lashed green eyes. A car cut off my dad. He hit the brakes. Silence. Then, from the backseat, came my brother’s lilting voice: “You ath-hole.”
    My mother grew up on the Jersey shore, in a large Irish Catholic family, good at merriment, teasing, and storytelling, bad at expressing serious emotions. (Her father died when she was seventeen, and she almost never spoke of him to me.) The oldest of six—there were five girls, and a boy, Sean, whom they all “spoiled”—she was tall, fizzy, and athletic. She looked a little like Ali MacGraw. She showed me a portrait of herself at sixteen, wearing a Western-style shirt, with her thick, shiny black hair parted in the middle and pulled by her shoulders, the sideburns twisted together and slicked in front of her ears in curlicues. “I would spit in my hands and rub it in and pull that hair forward like that,” she told me, laughing. “It looked ridiculous.” I didn’t agree. She was luminous, her dark eyes as open and cool as a horse’s. She liked to spend the summers barefoot, taking the bus every day to the beach club, where she swam, or to the Tricorne Farms, where she rode. My earliest memory of my grandmother’s house is of studying my mother’s riding ribbons pasted up over the den’s window—the rich reds and blues, the printed gold lettering (FIRST PLACE), the crimped edges starting to curl.
    My mother had me when she was twenty-three; Liam was born two years later. Her youngest sisters were still in high school and college when I was a little girl. I remember them getting ready for dates on Saturday nights, doing their hair and putting on makeup while my mom teased and watched, her long legs crossed, one always jiggling. My aunts used to give me sips of their beer— Stop that! my mother would say lightly—and Barbie dolls, and, once, a drag of a cigarette. In their high spirits, I could see the sparkly girl my mother had been, an image that imprinted on me, so that I was, as a child, already nostalgic for her youth. (I think I wanted to grow up to be my mother, and it was confusing to me that she already was her.) I’d sometimes pretend that I had her life, returning after school to a house with a pool, having friends over to swim, being surrounded by sisters. I tried to write a novel about it when I was thirteen as a way of imagining myself into that world. On warm summer weekends we’d drive out and my parents would put me to bed and then swim in the pool in the dark night, the crickets cheeping. I would peer down through the blinds, watching as my aunts, their boyfriends, and my dad did flips off the diving board, their laughter filling the air.
    Growing up as a Catholic had left my mother with a distaste for the Church or any doctrinaire talk of God. It was an antipathy that was a little difficult for me to understand. Raised without religion, I was dreamily attracted to spirituality and rituals. I half believed that there were forces governing my life I couldn’t understand. But after my mother made it clear that she thought religion was hogwash—and restrictive