The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

clean. Our mother left the house again, only this time she wore a neat blue skirt suit and lipstick colored a race-car red. Claudia told us that Noni was looking for a job, and about time, too.

      “You’ve got to get on with things,” Claudia said as we watched Noni drive away. “Too much laying around isn’t good for anyone. Remember that. Keeping busy is the best defense against feeling sad. It’s simple, but it’s true.”

      Aunt Claudia was proof of this lesson. She was the least sad and most busy person I had ever met. She swirled around our house with a cloth and a spray bottle like a bird looking for an exit, and everything she bumped into became clean, tidy, sparkling. Back home Aunt Claudia worked as a teller at a bank in North Royalton, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb. She described for us the intricate details of her job, the piles of twenties wrapped in special paper, the safe as big as a room, the secret slots of the safe-deposit boxes where people placed the oddest things.

      “Once a man came in and rented one for a pair of shoes, ladies’ shoes,” she told us. “Now, why would anyone do such a thing?”

      For four weeks Claudia cooked large, well-balanced meals that we ate until our stomachs groaned; she cycled load after load of dirty clothes through the washer and dryer; she read aloud books we had read before, but still we listened; she bought us art supplies, and we colored diligently the pictures of forest animals and trees, though we were far too old for coloring books.

      I wrote muscle, broom, thick, bristle, warm, squeak, soap, gravy, meat, full.

      What we liked best of all was Claudia telling stories about our father when he was a boy: his extreme fear of ants, his favorite food (meatballs), the operation he had when he was ten to fix the knuckle of his right thumb (trigger thumb, she called it). When she recounted these episodes, her eyes would become glassy and she’d dab at them with a tissue she pulled from a small plastic pack that accompanied her everywhere.

      One day we were eating lunch when Aunt Claudia said, “Joe, you look just like your father.” She paused to blow her nose into a tissue. “You’re the man of the family now. Don’t you forget it.”

      We had never before considered the word man with reference to Joe. When Claudia said this, we all turned toward him. We were eating pink boiled hot dogs with white buns that disappeared like cotton candy in your mouth. Noni was out on another interview.

      Suddenly Joe seemed altered. He felt it, too. He stiffened his shoulders, brought up his puffy chest. “I’m the man of the family,” he repeated, and I giggled because it struck me as both absurd and momentous. Joe was ten years old. A man.

      Although we basked in Claudia’s attentions and listened avidly to her stories, inside we remained watchful. There was so much information, so much nutrition and stimulation that we barely spoke during the month that she stayed with us. We did everything she told us to do. We did not fight or talk back or make large messes because we were too exhausted by her capable, forceful presence. But secretly each of us wondered: what will happen when Aunt Claudia leaves?

      On her last night, Aunt Claudia took us all to the International House of Pancakes. We were celebrating Noni’s new job as a receptionist at Dr. Hart’s dental practice across town. Dr. Hart, our father’s old competitor, had been looking for someone like our mother, someone who knew the ins and outs of the business, the peculiar dental vocabulary, the complexities of a dentist’s life.

      Noni had cut her hair short with little wings on the sides like Billie Jean King, and it gave me a shock of strangeness to see her without a mass of dark curls. As she chewed her blueberry pancakes, her hand stole up to her neck to finger the sharp line where hair met skin.

      “Thank you, Claudia, for taking such good care of us,” Noni said, and raised her glass of orange juice. We all clinked and called “Cheers!”

      “Of course,” Claudia answered. “I only wish I’d come sooner. I just thought you needed some space, Antonia. That was really it.”

      Noni only nodded.

      “But I didn’t realize both your parents were dead. And no siblings. I hadn’t realized you were so alone, Antonia. Really, I hadn’t.”

      “It’s okay. We’re fine now. Right, kids?” Noni looked around the table at each of us. Our fingers were sticky from maple syrup, our teeth and blood tingly with sugar. We had eaten stacks of pancakes, and yet our stomachs still felt empty. Were we fine? Yes. One by one we returned Noni’s gaze and nodded. Even Renee nodded. Yes, we said. We are all fine.

      “Good,” Noni said. “Good.” She smiled a firm little smile.

      And that was how it happened: we forgave our mother. We forgave Noni not because she was all we had, although this was true, but because we shared her. She belonged to the four of us, and for one not to forgive her meant that the others couldn’t either, and none of us was willing to shoulder the burden of that decision. None of us could bear to take Noni away from the others again.

      * * *

      AFTER AUNT CLAUDIA left, Noni returned with a vengeance. She began to call herself a feminist and to call us, her daughters, feminists, too. She bought books by Gloria Steinem and bell hooks and Germaine Greer that she read aloud at the dinner table. The year was 1984.

      “Better late than never,” Noni said.

      Only a few of my friends’ mothers worked. One was a professor at the University of Connecticut who wore half-glasses on a string of purple beads around her neck. Another, a family lawyer who rented an office in Bexley with her name printed in gold on the window. But for the most part, the mothers remained at home and oversaw play dates and drove us to the movies and lurked in the kitchen, where they banged pots and spread peanut butter onto saltine crackers for us to eat after school. While our father was alive, Noni had been this kind of mother. But after she began working for Dr. Hart, Noni changed. She would describe for us her day at Dr. Hart’s office, the patients and their troublesome dental quandaries, the new system of color-coded file notes, the car accident just in front of the building that closed the street for hours. We saw in these stories a Noni who enjoyed her life away from us. This life of drama and intrigue that existed far from the confines of the gray house and us, her children.

      When I was in third grade, I memorized for the class Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Applicant,” which traumatized my poor teacher, Miss Adelaide. (“A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk!”) Fourth grade, I dressed as Gloria Steinem for Halloween and spent the entire night explaining the significance of my bell-bottoms and turtleneck. Fifth grade, Noni volunteered to assist in my puberty and health class, and I walked through the class handing out tampons and pads in purple plastic wrappers.

      Noni regretted the Pause, she told us. She wanted to make it up to us, all those lost days while she rested. The missed baseball games and teacher conferences and Caroline’s flute concerts and Renee’s cross-country meets and dinners and bedtimes and love.

      “I am so sorry,” she would say. “I am so, so sorry. I should have gotten some help. Thank goodness nothing horrible happened.”

      We would look at one another and say nothing about the pond, or Ace’s accident, or the man who followed Renee from the bus stop. In fact, we told Noni nothing about the Pause. Wordlessly we agreed that it was better to keep these events secret. We saw this as protecting ourselves from discipline but also as protection for Noni. We believed that she required care and shelter, that we must not subject her to upheaval or stress. Our mother was a temperamental furnace, a rescue dog once hostile but then subdued.

      Now Noni explained her own early life and marriage as a cautionary tale, the period of her paralyzing grief the price we all paid for her foolishness. In these stories our father emerged as a dashing but hapless prince, one who lulled the good princess into a life of fat complacency deep within a castle of tricks and mirrors. When the prince disappeared, the castle was revealed to be only a cardboard shell; there was no coach, no footmen, only the pumpkin and the simpering mice. The shock of it all sent the princess into a deep sleep, until a good fairy godmother—not another prince,