Fig (36 page)

I watch the truck approach and the dust storm chasing after and my heart begins to race. It beats so hard, I can feel it in my throat. I begin to choke. I slip the rosary off my neck and use the pearls to breathe again, and then I return my focus to the flowers. I step back to examine what I have created, and the deep pulse in my neck begins to slow. I sit where Mama sits to see what she will see, and I find I built a fire and not a sun and I wonder if my father will try to extinguish it.

The maple leaves burn like red-hot stars and the yellow flowers blaze up from below. The feathery tips of the goldenrod resemble candle flames, while the delicate puncture vine and sprinkled mustard seem to spark and scatter, further spreading fire. Cut the shortest, the sprigs of chicory work to ignite the yellow, orange, and red; they rise from the water to act as the true-blue heart of this accidental inferno.

I hear the sound of the truck doors slamming, and I rush out to the porch to greet Mama. I find her standing in the driveway lighting a long white Salem. The dust has not yet settled. Mama looks at the house like she's never seen it before, while Daddy struggles to pull her suitcase from the truck bed. Mama holds another bag of reservation cigarettes, and as she smokes I remember something she once said to me about chicory when I was four or five years old.

We were walking through the meadow by the train tracks when she picked the wildflower and handed it to me. From a single stem, the chicory forked into other stems and formed a natural bouquet of eight blossoms total. I remember because I'd just learned how to count, so I went about counting everything I could find to count.

After I counted the last flower, she said, “Now look up,” and I did. I looked up, and then she told me to look back at the chicory, and when I did she said, “Do you see how the petals look like broken shards of summer sky?”

She was right. The blue was the same, and the petals resembled glass fragments from something shattered. With my face tilted up to heaven, I stood there forever and studied the sun-saturated blue dome of July. I wondered if the sky could break, and I'd wonder this again years later when my mother read
The Snow Queen
out loud to me, during the scene when the little boy looks up and his eye is penetrated by a shard of ice. This icy dagger, which worked to distort the way he saw the world, also turned him cold and hard from the inside out.

But that day, I was thinking about Chicken Little. He was running around inside my brain, screaming “The sky is falling ! The sky is falling !”

*  *  *  *

I sit with Mama after dinner in the day porch even though Daddy doesn't want me around the secondhand smoke. Mama sits in her recliner, smoking, and the silver smoke twists around the flowers and contributes to the overall effect of fire. Just before her eyes glaze over and Mama falls into another tranquilized trance, she smiles at me and she says, “The flowers are gorgeous, Fig.”

*  *  *  *

After school and on the weekends, I resurrect my mother.

The wildflowers help bring her into the moment—into the season—but she also needs my help remembering who she really is.

I make the alterations when Daddy is not inside the house. I make the rearranging look like Mama's doing, not mine. I bring apple crates in from the barn and line them up along the walls. I'm careful to put them under the windows, where the sun can't damage the books, and then I line the crates with texts written by all my mother's favorite authors: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Walt Whitman; I align their spines to create a library of memories—a collective body of books.

I take both dictionaries and flip through all the pages to show her all the words she has ever looked up and checked.

“Is there a word you'd like to look up today?” I ask, and she looks at me forever before she answers. “Not right now,” she says, and she is whispering the way she does when she doesn't want the other voices in her head to hear. And this is a good sign. I can tell she is thinking hard. She is searching for herself in the inner chambers of her mind where she's been hiding from her disease.

Daddy makes me put
Christina's World
back above the fireplace, which works to divide the living room area from the dining room, so I special order a calendar of Andrew Wyeth's work from the bookstore in Lawrence, and when it arrives Mama helps me tear out all the paintings. I run a length of twine like I'm about to hang a curtain over the middle wall of windows—the ones across from Mama's recliner—and I clothespin the portraits and strange landscapes to the line, where they flutter like prayer flags, and when the sun rises behind them they are luminescent like stained glass.

To keep Mama company while I'm away, I give her back the button-eyed teddy bear. When I can't be there, he sits in the wicker love seat to her left and recounts how once he was put together.

Annie,
he says.
Do you remember? Do you remember how your mother cut the pattern and stitched my stitching and stuffed my stuffing?
And she does remember. Mama nods her head, and then she says, “I do.” Next to the flowers I pick and arrange for her, I keep the picture of her parents. I imagine her tracing the figure of her mother with her finger, and then her father, and again she remembers—“I do,” she says. “I really, really do.”

The last object I transplant is the mirror.

I wait until a Sunday when Billy is here to help Daddy deworm all the sheep, and while Mama is showering I take the mirror and carry it down the stairs and position it dead center on the apple crate in front of Mama's throne. Then I sit where she sits and I practice being her. Holding a pencil like a cigarette, I smoke. I exhale a cloud of blue-gray, and when it clears the oval mirror offers itself to me—to be scried, and as I look I imagine Mama looking too.

I see her there: my face in her face and her face in mine.

We float in this pool of reflective glass; we drift across the mirror sky, and on either side the two brass birds remain ready to fly away. As I look, I fill the frame with memories. I project them from my heart into the glass, and later they will play back to her—again and again, and I know she will remember. She will re-become.

*  *  *  *

The seniors are herded into different classrooms depending on our last names, and we are supervised by strangers from the school district. I'm directed into a classroom with the J–O students, and I sit where I am told to sit. I sit next to Tanya Jenkins, and when she sees me she pinches her big nose and makes a face like I smell bad, but I don't. I smell good.

I smell like jasmine now. I buy it from the health food store in Lawrence where my father sometimes shops. Unlike the synthetic perfume sold in drugstores, this is an essential oil made from the actual flower, and scent is just another way to transform ugly into beautiful. Fragrance and vintage clothes are nothing more than masks, but like bandages, they are something worn for protection.

I sit at a desk with a pile of freshly sharpened number two pencils, scratch paper, and what is now the second booklet for the practice SAT testing. Everything is like it was yesterday, only we're in a different classroom. The same woman from the school district supervises us, and once again we will sit here and darken the multiple-choice circles on the sheets of paper before us. The woman drinks coffee from a homemade mug, and she reminds me of Alicia Bernstein. The mug is white with red lettering and it reads
BEST MOM IN THE WORLD
!

This woman keeps time—she tells us when to begin and when to end.

I finish early again, and again she eyes me suspiciously. But I don't care. I'm only practicing for the real test. I practice connecting all the dots. I connect them into lines to draw pictures to illustrate the stories in my head instead of answering the questions I'm being asked. Sometimes I just fill the circles in accordance with the phases of the moon—they cycle across the page, waxing and waning, and sometimes I just fill the entire page with graphite until I can see myself in the shiny gray; the reflection is dull and double exposed by the blackness of my shadow looking over my shoulder to see what I am doing.

*  *  *  *

The prayers from the Sacred Heart of Mary are finally answered. Rain falls on Douglas County like it is spring instead of fall, but this rain is cold and will only serve to deliver yet another winter and I am dreading the absence of the wildflowers on the farm.

At night, the waxing moon rises and the Silver River swells and the dry earth can't absorb the rainfall, and our cellar floods. I pull the doors open to look. The benches are buried by water, and I see dead leaves floating on the surface with one of Mama's pill bottles. She must have left it here the last time there was a tornado or a warning—that is, the last time she was here for one.

The white childproof lid remains screwed on, and despite the water damage a tiny island of the label still remains. I can clearly read my mother's name:
ANNIE JOHNSON
. She is there, typed across the wrinkled paper still clinging to the orange-brown plastic.

Wearing his waders, Uncle Billy climbs down into the cellar like it's not even flooded. He reaches down to clear muck from the drain, and then he climbs back up and squats down beside me. Together we watch the dirty water whirlpool away. The water swirls and pulls the pill bottle under where it disappears, until the cellar has completely emptied.

*  *  *  *

Mama's psychiatrist recommends having a family night once a week. The adults decide on Sunday. Family night is nothing more than dinner, only Gran of course still calls it supper like it's the olden days and not 1992.

Family night is the only time Mama actually comes and sits at the table for a meal. She pretends to eat, and sometimes she even talks. Dr. Stein is pleased with her progress, but when he says as much Daddy looks at him like the psychiatrist is the crazy one.

Daddy doesn't seem to notice Mama's increasing moments of clarity—moments I choose to savor rather than ignore. I even keep a log. I record the date and time and the nature of the event: what she said, or didn't say, if she smiled or frowned, and how long it lasted. In the two weeks since Mama was officially deinstitutionalized, she has exhibited clarity twenty-three times. For statistics I keep a chart, and from the graph I discover a trend: Mama is most clear when she and I are alone. We are most often alone after dinner, in the hours before I go to bed.

Billy helps me make the macaroni and cheese, and when I serve the meal Gran doesn't make a fuss about the meal being vegetarian. She and Daddy have a more important issue to address. “Fig,” Daddy says, “the adviser from Carter High called today.” He doesn't look at me, because I am looking at him. I am staring at him in the way I know will make him uncomfortable.

“She wanted to talk about the results of your practice SATs,” he says, passing the casserole to Gran. Taking the hot dish, my grandmother says, “The results were not what we expected.”

I hold my breath and cross my fingers as they go back and forth—a relay team; Daddy and his mother pound into me while everyone else remains silent. Mama watches her food while Billy eats. He never participates in the lectures. “I try to remain neutral,” I once heard him tell my father—Daddy was complaining that he needed backup, and Billy said, “Toby, I'm her uncle. I'm not her parent.” And while I didn't understand, I know my father did by the way he said, “Okay.”

Later, of course, Billy will take me aside to check in with me. This is what he always does. As my uncle. He will sit with me as I count pearls and breathe. And he will show me different mudras and teach me how to breathe in through one nostril and out the other. When I am calm again I will show him all the flowers I've recently discovered on the property. Like Mama and the dictionary, I check off the botanicals listed in my guidebook—I check off the ones I now know. I show him the pictures of what I've identified, and what I've cut and brought home: Jerusalem artichoke, blazing star or gay feather, kiss-me-quick, switchgrass, azure aster, false dragonhead, Western ironweed, and my new favorite—self-heal.

When I despair that winter is coming, he will remind me how the autumn palette of yellow, gold, and purple is blooming now to sow its seeds to be reborn in the spring. “Everything happens for a reason,” Billy will say, and then he will sit with me until I fall asleep, and in the morning I'll be cross-examined by my father. “What do you two talk about?” he will ask, and then he will want to know, “What exactly do you guys do up there?”

“The school is quite concerned,” Daddy says. Now that I am looking away, my father watches me. I'm looking out the window and thinking about how much I miss eating in the kitchen, where it feels warm and comfortable. Upon my grandmother's request, family night must be proper; we are to always dine in the dining room with real silver and a tablecloth, and whatever bouquet I choose to arrange.

“After all,” Gran said, “Fiona needs to practice everything she learned in charm school or else she will surely lose it for good.”

I can feel Mother Mary on my skin, hanging between my small breasts. Whenever I notice her there, she is always cold. I'm having trouble staying present, but I know better than to take the rosary off and work on my breathing in front of Gran, especially with her gift to me. So I uncross my fingers and I run a string of phantom pearls between my fingers.
One, two, three, breathe.
This is not the first heated conversation about my future. They seem to happen all the time now. Sometimes, Billy will try to change the subject—but not tonight. Tonight he works on eating.

“What happened?” Daddy asks, and now he wants to know about my college applications. “Have you been working on them at all?” he asks, and keeps asking even after Gran has given up.

My grandmother doesn't eat; she drinks instead. She is working on her second tall gin and tonic. Her rings clank against the crystal. Every now and then she leans forward and fusses with the centerpiece I made of Lady's thumb and Queen Anne's lace.