Poppy

I found out Poppy Smith was sleeping with my father back in 1956, when I was thirteen, and today I learned she hanged herself on her bathroom doorknob with her own nylon stockings. It's been nearly six years since I saw her last, but the news prickled at me, something in between shock and annoyance.

I was still at Bryn Mawr packing to come home for Christmas when I found out. My roommates and I had saved our newspapers all week to pack breakable things, and I was using some to wrap my mother's gift. That's when I saw it, in smudgy ink: Poppy's name and age and cause of death, and a quote from a policeman who said how unusual it all was, and how they only found her after a neighbor's dog wouldn't stop barking at the wall, disturbed by the scent of dead next door.

I didn't say anything to my roommates about it. There's a difference, after all, between wanting someone to talk to and actually talking to them. Besides, they were barely speaking to me, only acknowledging me when it was unavoidable. It wasn't worth it to break our new little routine for Poppy. The pair of them stood by their beds at the opposite end of the room, silently filling their suitcases and refusing to look at me. I shoved the section of newspaper underneath my pillow and waited until they left for dinner to rip out the column, making careful, tiny tears around the corners. I folded the paper twice and slipped it into the pocket of my coat, still hanging on the rack. Later, on the train ride to New York, I kept reaching inside to touch it. Pure compulsion, like reaching for a rosary. By the time we pulled into Grand Central, the paper had gone soft and my fingers tasted of ink. But I didn't take it out to read again. I didn't have to—the story repeated itself in my mind on its own: the policeman's exact phrasing, how he and another officer had to shoulder open her bathroom door. I could imagine Poppy's lithe but heavy body, lying limp under the doorknob, blocking the men from coming inside. But I couldn't picture what had happened before, could not decide whether Poppy had been methodical or if she had just followed through on a moment's whim with what she had on hand. The newspapers said nothing about that. They made it sound like something had been done to her—that even as she stretched the stockings and tied the knots, Poppy couldn't possibly have known what she was doing.

The story never mentioned my father. He must have been careful enough to keep everything in her name—her apartment lease and all that. Or maybe Poppy had been the one who asked to have it in her name, I wouldn't know. I didn't even know where she lived until the newspapers reported it. My father had tucked her away somewhere on Waverly Place, far away from my mother on the Upper West Side, but close enough to his office across from the Flatiron Building. I had to hand it to him: each world could be kept spotless and separate, and he existed in both with an ease I could never possess in one. He never had to stuff dirty underwear in his coat pocket, never had to scramble for socks in the morning. He probably kept different pairs of pajamas in both apartments. At least until Poppy had to go and die on all of us.

I've only been home for a couple of hours now, but I already feel embarrassed to see my pragmatic, unfussy father like this. He leaves for the bathroom abruptly, eyes red-rimmed and unfocused; the little trash bin in there is filled with snot-soaked tissues. Poppy had already been dead for a couple of days by the time they found her, but who knows how long my father had noticed her absence before...