31
Tragedy Then Farce
The day before I returned to England, I drove seven miles along the mountain
range, then turned onto a narrow dirt road and stopped in front of a powder-
blue house. I parked behind an RV that was nearly as large as the house itself.
I knocked; my sister answered.
She stood in the doorway in flannel pajamas, a toddler on her hip and two
small girls clinging to her leg. Her son, about six, stood behind her. Audrey
stepped aside to let me pass, but her movements were stiff, and she avoided
looking directly at me. We’d spent little time together since she’d married.
I moved into the house, stopping abruptly in the entryway when I saw a
three-foot hole in the linoleum that plunged to the basement. I walked past
the hole and into the kitchen, which was filled with the scent of our mother’s
oils—birch, eucalyptus, ravensara.
The conversation was slow, halting. Audrey asked me no questions about
England or Cambridge. She had no frame of reference for my life, so we
talked about hers—how the public school system was corrupt so she was
teaching her children herself, at home. Like me, Audrey had never attended a
public school. When she was seventeen, she had made a fleeting effort to get
her GED. She had even enlisted the help of our cousin Missy, who had come
up from Salt Lake City to tutor her. Missy had worked with Audrey for an
entire summer, at the end of which she’d declared that Audrey’s education
hovered somewhere between the fourth- and fifth-grade levels, and that a
GED was out of the question. I chewed my lip and stared at her daughter,
who had brought me a drawing, wondering what education she could hope to
receive from a mother who had none herself.
We made breakfast for the children, then played with them in the snow.
We baked, we watched crime dramas and designed beaded bracelets. It was
as if I had stepped through a mirror and was living a day in the life I might
have had, if I’d stayed on the mountain. But I hadn’t stayed. My life had