Diary

These pencil lines, the crest of a flood tide. The years 1795 ... 1850 ... 1979 ... 2003. Old pencils were thin sticks of wax mixed with soot and wrapped with string to keep your hands clean. Before that are just notches and initials carved in the thick wood and white paint of the door.

Some other names on the back of the door, you won’t recognize. Herbert and Caroline and Edna, a lot of strangers who lived here, grown and gone. Infants, then children, adolescents, adults, then dead. Your blood relations, your family, but strangers. Your legacy. Gone, but not gone. Forgotten but still here to be discovered.

Your poor wife, she’s standing just inside the front door, looking at the names and dates just one last time. Her own name not among them. Poor white trash Misty Marie, with her rashy red hands and her pink scalp showing through her hair.

All this history and tradition she used to think would keep her safe. Insulate her, forever.

This isn’t typical. She’s not a boozer. In case anybody needs to be reminded, she’s under a lot of stress. Forty-one fucking years old, and now she has no husband. No college degree. No real work experience—unless you count scrubbing the toilet ... stringing cranberries for the Wilmot Christmas tree ... All she’s got is a kid and a mother-in-law to support. It’s noon, and she’s got four hours to pack everything of value in the house. Starting with the silverware, the paintings, the china. Everything they can’t trust to a renter.

Your daughter, Tabitha, comes down from upstairs. Twelve years old, and all she’s carrying is one little suitcase and a shoe box wrapped with rubber bands. With none of her winter clothes or boots. She’s packed just a half dozen sundresses, some jeans, and her swimsuit. A pair of sandals, the tennis shoes she’s wearing.

Your wife, she’s snatching up a bristling ancient ship model, the sails stiff and yellowed, the rigging as fine as cobwebs, and she says, “Tabbi, you know we’re not coming back.”

Tabitha stands in the front hallway and shrugs. She says, “Granmy says we are.”

Granmy is what she calls Grace Wilmot. Her grandmother, your mother.

Your wife, your daughter, and your mother. The three women in your life.

Stuffing a sterling silver toast rack into her pillowcase, your wife yells, “Grace!”

The only sound is the roar of the vacuum cleaner from somewhere deep in the big house. The parlor, maybe the sunporch.

Your wife drags her pillowcase into the dining room. Grabbing a crystal bone dish, your wife yells, “Grace, we need to talk! Now!”

On the back of the door, the name “Peter” climbs as high as your wife can remember, just higher than her lips can stretch when she stands on tiptoe in her black pair of high heels. Written there, it says “Peter, age eighteen.”

The other names, Weston and Dorothy and Alice, are faded on the door. Smudged with fingerprints, but not painted over. Relics. Immortal. The heritage she’s about to abandon.

Twisting a key in the lock of a closet, your wife throws back her head and yells, “Grace!”

Tabbi says, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s this goddamn key,” Misty says, “it won’t work.”

And Tabbi says, “Let me see.” She says, “Relax, Mom. That’s the key to wind up the grandfather clock.”

And somewhere the roar of the vacuum cleaner goes quiet.

Outside, a car rolls down the street, slow and quiet, with the driver leaning forward over the steering wheel. His sunglasses pushed up on top of his face, he stretches his head around, looking for a place to park. Stenciled down the side of his car, it says, “Silber International—Beyond the Limits of Being You .”

Paper napkins and plastic cups blow up from the beach with the deep thump and the word “fuck” set to dance music.

Standing beside the front door is Grace Wilmot, smelling like lemon oil and floor wax. Her smoothed gray head of hair stops a little below the height she was at age fifteen. Proof she’s shrinking. You could take a pencil and mark behind the top of her head. You could write: “Grace, age seventy-two.”

Your poor, bitter wife looks at a wooden box in Grace’s hands. Pale wood under yellowed varnish with brass corners and hinges tarnished almost black, the box has legs that fold out from each side to make it an easel.

Grace offers the box, gripped in both her blue, lumpy hands, and says, “You’ll be needing these.” She shakes the box. The stiff brushes and old tubes of dried-up paint and broken pastels rattle inside. “To start painting,” Grace says. “When it’s time.”

And your wife, who doesn’t have the spare time to throw a fit, she just says, “Leave it.”

Peter Wilmot, your mother is fucking useless.

Grace smiles and opens her eyes wide. She holds the box higher, saying, “Isn’t that your dream?” Her eyebrows lifted, her corrugator muscle at work, she says, “Ever since you were a little girl, didn’t you always want to paint?”

The dream of every girl in art school. Where you learn about wax pencils and anatomy and wrinkles.