The Magic of Ordinary Days (2 page)

But I had never run my life in order to meet men or find romance, although I wasn't immune to those things, either. I'd always dreamed that someday love would come into my life in some spectacular fashion. Probably it would happen in another country, on board a ship; most likely it would unfold during one of my future treks to uncover a secret of history. One side of me knew that these were the dreams of an inexperienced girl, and yes, I was inexperienced with love. But it didn't bother me. Every day, it didn't bother me.

Secretly I hoped to always disagree with my aunts. That way I'd know I hadn't succumbed to the limited view of so many of their generation. But my dear mother—I could see how my aunts' comments wounded her. Recently, however, I'd convinced her to stop stepping in on my behalf. Early on, I had learned my place on the family wall and found it not such an uncomfortable place to hang. My sisters and I weren't speechless, motionless tulips or ferns in a pattern of wallpaper. In the years of our girlhood, we could mingle and socialize during family outings. Abby, Bea, and I often stood at the front of my father's church, in the theater lobby, at the country club or museum, and we had become well practiced in the art of pastoral family presentations. And after years spent before others, at the easy perusal of relatives and friends, I knew exactly what I was.

I was the practice rug.

Among the Navajo, traditional weavers learn their art by first weaving a rough rug. It is a chance to hone their skills; the rug may contain loose weft, uneven corners, and other flaws. After this essential practice, however, the weaver may go on to produce masterpieces. And so it was with my family. I thought of myself as the first, rather average attempt at a daughter; then, after my birth, my parents brought into the world two rare beauties. I had the most common color of brown hair, a forehead a bit too broad, and a small, lima-bean-shaped birthmark just above my upper lip. My sisters were masterpieces woven of warm wool, natural blondes with unmarked skin and real smiles, not painted on hard canvas, and they were approachable, so that admirers did not hold themselves back. So unusually blessed, Abigail and Beatrice neither competed with me, nor did they gloat.

Despite the inevitable comparisons, Mother always pointed out the good qualities I did have. She'd say that my fingers were long and tapered, that I always sat tall in a chair, and that my teeth had come in straight and white like a row of dominoes.

“And you're as sharp as a tack, you are,” she'd say with a hug. “Someday you're going to go places.”

As we grew up, my sisters played with dollhouses and dreamed of futures beside successful husbands, whereas I became gripped by the past. The stories and struggles of olden days worked their way from the crepe paper pages of old books and under the seal of my skin. I was the Shoshone guide Sacajawea leading Lewis and Clark on their expeditions, or I was a pioneer woman leading her clan out west on one of the first wagon trains. As I grew into a young woman, a need to understand and experience began to drive me. My whole body became part of the chase; the desire for a fresh find seeped out of my every pore. It was Mother who understood. She helped me fill in my application for the university and collect references. She plotted out on the map with me all the places I might want to go.

But although many a learned woman wanted to deny its importance, even Mother admitted that in our society, beauty was still prized above knowledge and wisdom in a woman. Despite female accomplishments that for the first time held us up in a place where our feet could walk the earth at the same level as our male counterparts, many men most wanted a pretty image hooked on their arms. And yes, although a woman no longer needed a husband, Mother hoped that maybe someday I'd want one, one who could appreciate me, mind and all.

Mother's honesty was something I had always thought I would have; I relied on it.

Whenever I remember Bea's wedding day, I always remember the flowers. Before Bea left for her honeymoon, she gave me a white rose she had singled out and plucked from the bouquet before the bridal toss, and this I waxed and kept on the polished top of my dresser in the months that followed. And on that day, not only had the church and the country club been filled with lilies, gardenias, and roses, but outside on the city streets and in the parks, the crabapple trees had been blooming, every branch decked with blooms of pink, white, and fuchsia so deep in color it almost came to purple. That spring, the crabapple blossoms fell to the ground over a period of several weeks, coating the sidewalks and streets with cupped petals so thick the concrete beneath them disappeared.

My mother had always loved the crabapple blossoms, and I liked to believe their abundance that spring was gifted to her. During the wedding and reception, she held herself up well, with plenty of smiles and gracious small talk in the face of compliments for the wedding. Once I had heard that every person must complete something of importance before he or she dies, and perhaps witnessing her youngest daughter's marriage had been just that for Mother. She smiled and chatted with friends and members of Father's congregation throughout the long reception, as if it would have been impolite to show any sign of her illness. Father directed the event and would have tolerated little less than perfection.

Then afterward, Mother slipped away over several weeks, like water in slow-moving streams gradually sinks into the soil. My sisters busy with marriage and my father preoccupied with church duties, I was the one who left school to be with her. I was the one who eased her away.

Perhaps it was Mother's untimely death, perhaps because the cancer caused her to suffer so, or perhaps another absence between us caused the course of it all to change. But after her death, even my father lost his typical stern control. In the first weeks, he all but abandoned our two-story house in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood that Mother had always maintained with pride. In our house, fingerprints had rarely lasted long on the furniture, and any chipped dishes had been given away. Father let stacks of mail pile up on the foyer table, and he closed up other rooms to collect dust. He submerged himself in even more work of the church. And although we kept two radios, one in the kitchen and another in his study, Father would allow no music in the house. After all, a singer's voice might sound like hers. And we couldn't have flowers around again, although at the time of her death, the gladiolas were up, their tall stalks stabbing the sky and their blooms open, silently screaming.

I've often wondered, even to this day, why during painful times some people seem to step away from themselves and make decisions that fall far out of their usual line of character and behavior. Perhaps a natural reluctance to sit still is central, or perhaps, like the lesser animals, instinct forces us to go on even if grief has left us not up to the task. But no one could have guessed that the oldest, the strongest, the most independent daughter would be the one most altered by her death.

In the next few months, I put into motion the strange set of circumstances that would later find me losing my plans, the ones I'd mapped out with my mother. In one fleeting moment, I stripped away the petals of my future, let them catch wind, and fly away.

One

On August 30, 1944, only four months after Bea's wedding, my sisters accompanied me to Union Station to send me off on a journey that would please only my aunts. I thought of Aunt Eloise and Aunt Pearl often on that day. A shame they had missed this farewell into matrimony. Without knowledge of the circumstances, they would have been joyous.

During the war, Denver's Union Station served as a crossroads for some four million American soldiers who passed through its doors. Among the throng of uniformed servicemen and -women who daily boarded and debarked trains and made connections, Abby, Bea, and I walked to the ticket window and purchased a ticket for travel south, to launch the first step of a journey much different from the academic missions I'd once imagined. On that day, I would leave the city for the countryside, to carry out the plans for marriage arranged and urged on by my father.

Into my hand, Abby pressed gifts wrapped in new linen handkerchiefs and tied with ribbon. She held her face still. “I'm sorry Father couldn't make it.”

“He tried,” Bea said, but her youth betrayed her. Barely twenty years old and although a married woman, she hadn't yet learned to mask untruths on her face. It still flashed every emotion, just as it had when we three sisters shared a bed and huddled under a play tent of quilts in the sting of winter mornings. How little of the world she had experienced.

“Call us,” was all else she could say.

On that morning, just after the liberation of Paris, the entire country sat perched on the sill of celebration. Laughter was louder, and in everyone's eyes gleamed a hopeful prospect, a wish we all held on to for easy victory, despite doubting its likelihood. Inside the passenger car I rode, the air grew dense with smoke from unfiltered cigarettes held loosely between fingers, passed about, and shared. In 1944, cigarettes had become scarce, but not so on that day.

Near me, only one other woman traveled alone, a thirtyish woman with hair dyed platinum blond like Jean Harlow's. I thought of asking her to play a hand of rummy, anything to break the monotony of the ride and divert my attention. In the university library, once I'd introduced myself to a girl named Dot who later became one of my best friends. But the blond woman seemed engrossed in reading her newspaper, and perhaps I pondered on it too long. Perhaps people traveling alone wanted to be left alone.

I studied the scenes outside the window. In the last days of summer, wood ducks skimmed over low-water ponds, and ra zored pines swayed in the hills between Denver and Colorado Springs. Just outside of Pueblo, I saw a huge pile of salvaged rubber tires, precious commodities during the war, chained and watched over by a guard. In Pueblo, a town that held an Army air base and therefore another teeming depot, I debarked from the train, following the blond woman but preceding the throng of servicemen. An hour later, I changed trains and headed east. I tried to buy lunch in the dining car but changed my mind after I found it full of people pressed in against each other.

Across the plain, the land shook free of mountain, hill, and mesa, becoming instead long and close-fit to the earth's contours, as a sheet fits a bed. Wild sunflowers grew in patches just feet away from the tracks. They made me remember something Mother once said to me. I had everyone beat in the eyes. Mine, she had said, like her own mother‘s, were as big and as deeply brown as sunflower centers. And that memory nudged another one. Hadn't Mother once told us a story about sunflowers? During the years of our girlhood, she had whispered to us so many fairy tales, myths, and even some stories of her own making, that it was difficult to recall them all. In her own girlhood, she had once had aims of becoming a novelist, and in my opinion, she had an imagination fresh enough to have succeeded as a writer. Once I asked her if she'd ever regretted her decision to marry and have children, but she'd only laughed and rubbed my head. “Who better to tell my stories to than you girls?”

The story had been something about the sunflower heads, about how they follow the track of the sun. With my eyes closed, I reached far back onto the shelf of distant memory, but still I could not remember it.

The train made five stops between Pueblo and my destination, including one at Nepesta, where the Missouri Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads crossed. Outside my window, occasional ranch houses, signs of modest human habitation, dotted land that seemed most suitable for gophers and field mice. Then abruptly, outside of Fowler, the untrodden prairie ended, and miles of rowed crops in the fertile bottomlands of the lower Arkansas River began. For a few moments at a time, I saw stretches of the river—a silver-blue strand of waterway that curled back on itself and braided through stands of cottonwoods and willows. Near Rocky Ford, trucks piled high with ripe honeydew melons waited to cross the tracks, reminding me that summer was still at hand.

The train stopped at La Junta, home to another Army air base, where pilots received training in flying B-25 bombers. I debarked along with still more servicemen. La Junta, Spanish for “the junction,” was probably named for its location at the convergence of the old Santa Fe and Navajo Trails, and still served as a transportation hub, only now for trains and planes instead of horses and wagons. The train station was huge compared to the buildings in the surrounding area and contained a roundhouse, docks, restaurants, and hotel rooms.

I expected to see my party as soon as I arrived; however, for a time that seemed much longer than it surely was, I stood on the platform with my large traveling case sitting upright at my side, waiting alone.

My father's old friend from seminary, the Reverend Willard Case, was to meet me and introduce me to the man who would become my husband. I had not seen the reverend in almost twelve years and wondered if I would recognize him. But as the depot finally began to clear of uniformed men and family members bustling about, I saw him striding toward me down the platform. He looked much as I had remembered him—wire-thin with a brisk walk. He removed a felt hat, the kind men found fashionable to wear with their suits during the war years, and I saw that since I'd last seen him, his once dark and unruly hair had turned into ribbons of silver strung away from his face.