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  The television flickered from the corner next to the fire place, and on the screen, a throng of people, wild and bobbing under placards and balloons, crowded around one man. In the next moment, his turned his profile to the camera and I saw, instantly, the face of John F. Kennedy.

  A kind of horror and dread hung on my mother’s face. She was standing, staring at the screen, holding her small hands to her mouth.

  “What are we going to do?” she said, barely above a whisper.

  My father’s face was hidden. Only the back of his head was visible to me, steady and still above the horizon of the couch.

  “Ray,” she said, more urgently, as if he should get up and do something. Her voice caught. “We have a Catholic in the White House.”

  My father replied, his voice dark and derisive. My stomach fluttered as I caught only two words: Irish Catholic. I didn’t wonder what he meant. I didn’t have to ask. I knew the tried-and-true Christian we wanted, the red-blooded American we could trust, was not John F. Kennedy.

  Now, as I lifted my eyes and started up the last hundred yards to my house, I felt my stomach move in a gray, watery roll. Was it possible that my mother and father would be glad the president was dead? When I stepped through the back door, the house felt empty, save for the faint, tinny sound of the radio. My mother usually called out hello from some corner of the house, and a new balloon of worry surged in my chest. Might it be possible this was a day of bad happenings, the beginning of the end, when the whole world was dying, and my mother and Roddy were already gone?

  Then I heard the rumble of marbles, and I breathed. The sound drew me to the top of the stairwell and I followed it down the stairs to the basement den. There was Roddy, sitting on the rug, legs trembling, a fistful of marbles running helter-skelter down the gullies of his marble chute. My mother, a few feet away, looked up at me, the iron suspended in her hand. My father’s striped blue shirt draped over the ironing board, sleeves limp and dangling over the sides. The couch was covered with orderly piles of underwear and socks.

  “The President died,” I said, hoping she’d say it wasn’t so.

  “Yes.” She nodded to the radio.

  I scanned the edges of her eyes and face, searching for what was there. She shook her head quietly in a way I couldn’t read. Was she horrified at what the world was coming to? Or was she saying, I might have told you this would happen? I didn’t know. She looked down again, steam sputtering from the iron.

  “Who killed him?” I said, my voice high and hurt.

  “I’m not sure, honey. They’ve arrested somebody.”

  I sank down into the couch, my dress wrinkling under my thighs, and looked over at Roddy a few feet away, reveling in his marbles. His hands plunged like steam shovels into the bin, grabbing bunches of cat’s eyes and hauling them up to the top of the chute. Dropping them in, he fell back to his haunches, trembling and flapping as they roared down one shaft and clanked to the next, gathering speed and spitting out the bottom, missing the bin and vanishing beneath the Lazy Boy.

  Twisting around, he turned his chin and the perfect swirl of his ear my way.

  “Under there,” he said, waving his fingers at the dark under-chair.

  I moved off the couch and down to the floor, dropping to my knees and reaching my hand into the thin crevice between carpet and chair. I felt grateful. For the first time, since hearing the news, I knew what to do. Moving my hand, I coaxed each marble forward, six in all, and placed them in Roddy’s outstretched hand.

  “More in there,” he said, pointing again.

  Obeying, I bent forward, and as I did, it came to me that Roddy didn’t know. He wouldn’t ever have to know. For those few small moments I felt some relief, and I stayed, fetching his marbles, doing this small task and collecting comfort.

  For the rest of the weekend, the concrete walls of our basement den closed me in with the death of the president. The last time my family had gathered in this room, we had come together to laugh at the First Family. My father had brought home a comedy album—a spoof of President Kennedy’s New England accent and his marriage to Jackie, her breathy voice and bubbleheaded decisions around decorating the White House. They both sounded like morons. I didn’t understand every joke but giggled anyway, thrilled to be laughing with my family, a rare occurrence. I kept asking to replay the record again and again.

  Now, I sat near Barbara Ann, my legs folded on the rug before the television, waiting for the next newscast, my social studies book opened and papers around me, abandoned. I couldn’t bear my homework. I didn’t care if it ever got finished. Each time I lifted my eyes and looked at the television, there it was: everything I wished wasn’t real. I could hardly look, and yet, my eyes clung to everything I saw. A scrawny man in a T-shirt, the barren room where he’d nested and then aimed his gun, and the radiant face of Jackie Kennedy as she clutched a spray of red roses, riding beside her husband through throngs of people, ten and twelve deep, toward the Triple Underpass and the man in a window.

  Time moved, as if bent, from this moment through death, to when she stood, ash-white, beside Lyndon Johnson and his oath-raised hand. The lifetime in between—John Kennedy slumping forward, Jackie crawling in panic onto the back of the car—weren’t yet visible to the world. They wouldn’t be for five more days. Until then, there was only this: a woman stricken, her dress splattered, her legs spidered with a madness of dark threads.

  I scribbled in my notebook, sliding it quietly over to Barbara Ann. She looked down at my written question, moved her pen to the page, and wrote, in finely curled letters, That’s his blood. I read these words and glanced up, quickly, to her face. She nodded at me, her eyes sorrowful.

  On Monday, the whole world felt raw and sore. In the day’s bleak and chilly light, I pulled on sweat pants, wrapped myself in a woolen sweater, and went downstairs. By one o’clock, the hour of the funeral, we were all there: my mother, ironing; my father with his pipe, on the couch; Barbara Ann, sharing the rug with me, her knitting in her lap; Roddy, fussing with his marbles.

  I sat with my legs entwined in the cloth of my clothes, and the tragedy rose and swallowed me; this time to a deeper depth. I felt myself there, moving into the Rotunda with its high dome of air, holding fast to the velvet rope, breathing shallowly and not wanting to be there, on this day, in this year of time. Caroline and her mother moved forward, surrounded by silence. Together, they knelt, and Caroline’s tiny gloved hand reached for her father’s coffin.

  I knew then the depth of loss, what it looked like and how it sounded—matted, deeper than sadness and despair. I stood inside of it, in the chill, my breath visible, the echoing clop of horses in my ear, the turning of wheels beneath a caisson, the thunder of guns. Soundlessness descended like a giant net over the whole of the world.

  When I looked at Barbara Ann, she had a damp Kleenex to her nose. Her cheeks glittered. I didn’t turn to where my parents sat on the couch. I kept my eyes forward, all the while pushing down my sorrow, even as the black stallion appeared, riderless, its hero fallen from its back. And even in the cemetery, when they lifted the flag—folding its edges thirteen times and holding it out for Jackie.

  Not until her hands reached to take it did I feel something small break deep inside me. She lifted her eyes. In that moment, through her veil, I saw the shatter of a heart. And in that same instant, I saw someone I knew. She looked like my mother had when she first found out about Roddy.

  Wildly, I swung my eyes around the room, first to my father’s face, dry-eyed and solemn, and then to my mother’s. Held above her folded hands, my mother’s face, with its thick lashes and finely drawn cheekbones, was unnerved. Tiny hairlines of pain webbed her eyes.

  I turned back, and for the first time, put my head in my hands. I let go my tears, feeling a hidden part of my own heart. In that moment, I knew Jackie and her children were suffering. They mourned and feared and didn’t know how they were going to live through this. I didn’t want to scorn them anymore, or believe
they were sinners and weren’t going to heaven.

  On that November afternoon, in the midst of a nation’s mourning, I made up my mind to love in whatever ways I could.

  Chapter 14

  Pieces

  Seeking privacy was a suspicious act in my household. It meant you must be up to something, which I was. I was thirteen years old and sitting on the floor in my parents’ bathroom, having dragged in the telephone from their bedside table and run the cord beneath the door. Now the simple act of dialing the number unleashed a clacking sound that bounced off the commode and shower stall, making me cringe. Snatching a bath towel off the rack, I hastily rolled it up and wrapped it around the carriage.

  “Hello,” I whispered into the receiver smashed to my lips. “May I speak with Natalie, please?”

  “Who’s calling?” Natalie’s mother demanded sharply.

  She knew who I was, but that was beside the point. Natalie’s parents, like mine, had strict rules around telephone etiquette. One was to identify yourself, in case you were a good-for-nothing.

  “This is Margie calling,” I said.

  If my mother were listening on the other side of the door this was the moment she would rap her knuckles twice against the wood. Miraculously, nothing happened. I exhaled and waited.

  “Hiya,” Natalie said.

  “Do you have it? Did you buy it?” I rasped, beside myself.

  She didn’t answer. I heard some crackling and wire rustling and guessed that she must be putting the receiver up to her record player. Yes! There it was! The heart-stopping song from a band of hairy British hooligans: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” ripped straight through the phone into my ear and down into my lungs.

  I had never heard the likes of it or felt myself rising to this dangerous delicious height. I didn’t have to ask; I knew this music was not allowed in my house. Gripping the receiver, I pressed it against my ear lobe, cutting off the circulation. My ear drum buzzed from the beat and shuddered with the wailing of notes.

  Until then, I had only touched a piano, my fingertips lightly prancing around on the keys. I couldn’t imagine twanging electric guitar strings or wildly beating on drums. In my home, music was an obedient and diligent pastime. My piano teacher, Mrs. Desmond, the pastor’s wife, taught me and Barbara Ann in the Baptist sanctuary. For the first hour, I sat in the pew and killed time during Barbara Ann’s lesson, and then for another hour, I sat on the piano bench myself and plucked at the keys, sending my own notes echoing through the baptistery. The melodies arising from my fingers were silly and childish, assigned from a stepladder of workbooks. They weren’t meant to stir the heart.

  If I were to surrender to passion, it had to be religious. Fervor was not a word spoken out loud in my house, but in church, especially during revivals, it flew around and dropped people to their knees. On my own, I had begun to learn the notes of hymns, yearning for some sliver of emotion. “How Great Thou Art” was the closest I had come to feeling my inner stirrings crackling from my heart down through my hands and into the ivory keys.

  A shadow rippled under the bathroom door.

  “Margie, what are you doing in there?”

  “Talking to Nat.”

  “What about?”

  “Homework.”

  “Well, come on out of there, then. You can jolly well talk in the kitchen.”

  “Gotta go,” I said into the receiver, pushing the button down. The music, galloping through the wire, dropped dead.

  I was becoming handy at duplicity. Most teenagers do this sooner or later, but I was particularly skilled. The façade I had created as a young child, the ability to be two people at once, to flatten my face when everyone was staring at my family, to be invisible, aloof, unaffected, when really I was mortified inside, was a skill I now applied at home. I was one child when my parents were looking and another when they were not. Back in my room, I sat on the floor and pushed my back against the door. Though I had my own room now, my territory, painted in my favorite blue with a matching eyelet bedspread, I did not have a lock on my door; only my parents had that privacy. Still, it was place of my own.

  Turning my transistor radio down to its lowest volume, I jammed it up to my ear. The wild thrash of rock and roll thrust through me, awakening a new realm of senses I couldn’t name. I felt like a sinner, and at the same time, good and alive. I was awakening parts of myself I never knew I had, and I wanted to know them even if I had to veil them away.

  One afternoon, I came home from school and went straight to my room. I had a hard, twisted rope in my throat. Nat King Cole had just died and I couldn’t bear it. I didn’t want this to be true. I had fallen in love with him. To me, he was pure romance, his velvet voice and suave rhythm just as alluring as the wail of the Beatles. He was another kind of passion, the part that was quiet and just between him and me, not on display. I didn’t know how to relieve the ache in my stomach except to bring him into my room. He poured over the airwaves: “Ramblin’ Rose,” “The Very Thought of You,” “Those Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days of Summer.” Sitting on my bed with one leg folded beneath me, I spread out my homework and listened, losing myself in his voice, riding on the waves of his notes, comforted in knowing he was still reachable. For once, I didn’t have to turn down the volume or push my back up against the door. Nat King Cole was not the Beatles or any kind of rock and roll: He was Perry Como and Mel Tormé, singers my parents listened to all the time, the songs of whom my father bellowed out on the way to the garage.

  Just as I finished my history essay, my bedroom door flew open, banging against the doorstop. I jumped, jamming my pencil into my thigh. My father stood on the threshold, his face flushed red.

  “Get that crap off the radio,” he said. He spoke through his teeth, his jaw bone clamped.

  Startled by the tone of his voice, a kind of dark fury, I stared at him and didn’t move.

  “Snap at it.” He did not raise his voice. He flattened it like a blade. “Turn it off.”

  Struggling to understand, to make sense of his severity, I dropped my eyes, reached for the knob, and clicked. The room fell silent.

  “Get out here and help your mother set the table,” he said, closing the door.

  A wave of hot bile came up into my throat. Acid tears burned my eyes. Ripping a page from my notebook, I slapped it down and tore at the surface with my pen—the black ink slashing across the page. I didn’t know my father’s disapproval lay with Nat King Cole’s blackness, not his music. The sin my father wanted banished from my bedroom was the admiration I had for a black man. In 1965, with post-Kennedy civil rights rumbling in the South, southerners like my father were uneasy. He had relocated his family to white territory, outside of Denver, in a suburban white neighborhood where blacks didn’t exist, where there were no overt racial tensions for him or my mother to comment on, no black faces or attitudes to deride. But the racism was there. I would not know the depths of it until I was a grown woman and my parents had moved back to the South to live out the rest of their lives.

  All I knew that day was that something ugly had crossed between my father and me. Until then, he had been my ally, my tree-climbing partner, my fellow plane flyer. He had been the one who never spanked me, who never raised his voice to me. Now, I couldn’t get the look in his eyes out of my mind. It burned like a hot coal.

  Blindly, I scribbled as if someone else held my pen—someone or something inside me. I didn’t stop until the pen tore a gouge down the middle of the paper and I threw it on the floor. Breathing, I sat, holding the paper in my hands, looking at what I had drawn: five figures, a man and woman, two girls and a little boy. My family. Words bubbled from the man, my father, a fierce tall figure standing over me: Get that crap off the radio. In high heels, her shoulders drooped, tears in her eyes, mouth pursed, my mother ran the vacuum, its roarrrrrrr jumbled with I’ll blister you! Barbara Ann in her Chinese coolie hat, bending over: Go on get it over with. Roddy on the floor pushing his lady bug: Uh uh uh. Me standing behind a door: I
want out of my family; fuck you!

  I had barely registered what I’d done before I crushed the paper into a ball, shoved it into the trash can, fished it out again, tore it into shredded strips, folded and tore the shreds into a hundred pieces of confetti. I didn’t hate my family, not my sister, or my brother, not even my parents. I just wanted to punch the unhappiness, the dearth of joy in my home. Scooping the pieces into the bottom of the trash can, I covered them with wadded Kleenex, and for several minutes crawled around on the floor, retrieving stray bits floating on the air currents in the room. As if the anger of my family, my anger, could be destroyed and pushed out of sight, as if it could be shoved into a trash can and I could be rid of it once and for all.

  Over the next two days, I trudged to school and back home, barely speaking to anyone. Not even Natalie could get me to laugh. I didn’t tell her what had happened; I was too insulted and embarrassed. I knew my life was choking, though I couldn’t say it to myself.

  On the third day, my mood started to lift. Natalie had given me an early birthday present: a John Lennon doll. I had laughed out loud at its oversized head of hair, tiny black-suited body, and even tinier guitar. He was tucked into my pocketbook and was enough joy to make me forget about the torn paper and everything on it. I got home and headed to my bedroom, envisioning exactly where I was going to display John Lennon, right in the nook of my headboard.

  As soon as I stepped into my room, my stomach roiled. There it was, on my bed: the whole portrait pieced back together, an intricate tell-tale puzzle. I reached out to scatter the pieces but, instantly, my mother was in the doorway. I looked up at her. She stood with her hands on her hips, mouth set, eyes dark: the same way she had looked every time she had lined me and Barbara Ann up for spankings.