Sources of Light (4 page)

"How am I supposed to know what the right thing to do is?" I asked.

He shrugged and smiled, then put his hand on my head, his fingers stretching across. "You'll just know."

I ran my hand across the top shelf of my mother's closet and caught ahold of the bundle of old letters tied with blue ribbon—letters written by my mother addressed to my dad while he was overseas. My mother and I didn't talk about my dad much, or the exact details of how he died. I couldn't even say any of the words like
passed away
or
dead.
I thought to say those words would make it really so; so not to say them could mean that he was still alive.

"I don't remember—did he ever write back?" I held the letters out for my mother to see and take.

"He did. They're in there too." She pushed her chair back, took the bundle, and thumbed through the pages. She reopened a few and showed me.

Inside the letters were locks of her hair, menus from restaurants, prayer cards, a page of poetry from a book.

"He used to love to read in bed every night, especially to you. Remember? When I wrote him, I tried to keep things cheery."

"He put
Ha
here. And look,
Ugh.
" I pointed out his handwriting in the margins of her letters.

"It was like having a conversation," she said, tying the letters back up with the ribbon. She must have seen my expression.

"You can have the picture," she said. "If you want."

Sometimes I imagined what it would have been like if my dad were still alive. I thought of us picking him up after work at the barracks, or maybe after the war he would have gotten out of army life altogether. He'd come home with a briefcase, his tie loosened and his suit jacket slung over one shoulder, his tired eyes hidden behind sunglasses maybe. When he was alive, he gave me these tight, close hugs each time before he left, and then again when he came home. I could always count on those two tight moments with him.

I went and put the framed picture of my dad on my nightstand, then came back to my mother's room.

"How's the dressing-up-like-me coming along?"

I held up one of her gray skirts.

"You'll need something on top."

My mother had drawers full of sweaters mostly dark blue, gray, and black. She owned one girdle, but she never wore it. When she thought to, my mother wore slips. As usual, my options were limited, to say the least.

"That reminds me," I said. I told my mother about the dance coming up at our high school, and even though no one had asked me to it yet, I asked her if I could please please please get a brassiere. I could feel my face turn red and hot when I said the word out loud. "All the other girls are wearing them."

She said she didn't see why I couldn't just wear a slip, but
okay, okay, okay.

Meanwhile, my mother was telling me about some princess in Italy who was being taught to paint by Kokoschka. "Can you imagine?" my mother said. "I bet she has no idea how lucky she is."

I thought for a minute, then said, "Who's Kokoschka, and why do you even care?" I had just asked her for my first brassiere and she was talking about some painter with a weird name. Sometimes my mother's talk made my head hurt.

I put on the gray skirt and a white shirt, and bobby socks and loafers. I looked at myself in the mirror, shifting to a forward-tilting hunch I had seen a magazine model do. My mother and I were almost the same height, but even in grays she was more beautiful. I just looked like a boy. I pushed my hair away from my forehead. I took my ponytail out, then put it in again. It had looked better before I bothered with it. At least she let me wear lipstick to Mary Alice's party. And soon, soon I would have a bra.

***

Early that evening, Perry came over and set up his tripod outside, and he lit up all the rooms in the house even though he said he preferred daylight and didn't like using artificial lights. He wanted my mother to walk back and forth in the living room while he stood outside taking pictures. He said he was going for a kind of effect that would make my mother look like a ghost. It had something to do with the shutter in the camera being open longer that would make the walking blur. He was staying for dinner too. They were celebrating because one of his photographs had appeared in a book and someone had called him and asked if he could put together a whole collection of pictures for his own book.

My mother announced that this was the beginning of something.

Before my mother drove me, dressed as her, to the party, Perry insisted on taking my picture.

"Say gumbo," Perry said.

"Cheese," I said.

When I put my hands on my hips, he told me to quit posing. "We have enough grinning automatons in this world." He started snapping pictures. "And the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play," he said, his eye still pressed in to his camera, his finger still snapping pictures. He kept his left eye closed. I rolled my eyes. This dude was crazy.

"What's that from?" my mother asked, standing near him. She was holding his drink.

"Exodus."

It made me feel weird knowing that my mother was going to be alone that night with Perry Walker. Usually it was the
three
of us. Why couldn't she just sit home by herself, eat some gingersnaps, look through her box of glass slides, and work on her lecture notes like she always did on Friday nights? When she wasn't teaching, my mother sat at her desk, typing on her big black Underwood typewriter. She wore my dad's old flannel work shirt and a pair of men's dungarees held up by an old belt buckled to the last hole. That's when she seemed most herself.

"Now the two of you together," Perry said, getting his camera ready.

My mother and I stood next to each other, my mother smiling, her arm around me, me staring straight ahead.

Already, Perry was telling my mother about his morning at the Petrified Forest. "I should take you and Sam there. Even if you've been, that place is amazing! Sam, have you
seen
that petrified log called the Caveman's Bench?" I nodded and rolled my eyes again. Everyone in Jackson knew about the Petrified Forest and the Caveman's Bench, which was really a huge stone log from prehistoric times. But before I could say anything, Perry was already talking about something else. There was a writer he'd met at the grocery store, an older woman named Eudora Welty. He wanted to invite her to speak at the college. "She started off taking pictures for the Work Projects Administration—you know, the WPA—back in the 1930s. Great pictures of people out in the country, working, dancing, or leaning on a front porch."

"People around here call her Miss Welty," my mother said. "I love her stories. Ed gave me a volume of them when we first met." My mother said my father's name so casually, so easily, it put a chill up my spine.

It was like both of them couldn't wait to get rid of me so they could talk on and on.

***

We all arrived at once. Ten girls and me. Mary Alice came to the door dressed up in a low-cut dress. She held an unlit cigarette in one hand and an empty wineglass in the other, and supposedly imitated her mother. "Darling, I really think this neckline sends a message, don't you?"

She walked all us girls around her house, which smelled of lemon-scented Pledge.

They lived in a split-level home, the only split-level home I had ever seen. Because of the stairs, the pool outside, the shag carpeting, and the television in their kitchen, I decided Mary Alice and her family were the wealthiest, most important people in Mississippi. Her father had something to do with furniture—sofas and bedroom suites, which Mary Alice called
suits.
She said her father traveled to Birmingham and Mobile a lot. All of their furniture matched.

We toured their concrete fallout shelter downstairs. The two-room area was separated and walled off from the laundry room and the rest of their downstairs. As all us girls came down the steps, we saw him, the handsome boy from school, cycling on a stationary bike in a T-shirt wet with his sweat. He smiled when all of us came in, and he lifted his hand in a casual wave, as if he were cycling through the backstreets of France or Italy. Some of the girls giggled. I stopped breathing. A TV was on with local news about another Negro church burning.

Mary Alice pointed out their new sectional sofa for when the Russians attacked. She showed us all the canned food they stored in there too: Sanka, Carnation instant dry milk, and a box of instant whipped potatoes, which nothing, not even a nuclear explosion, could get me to eat. But nobody much cared for Mary Alice's fallout shelter tour. We were too busy smiling at the only boy in the stuffy room.

He had fun in his brown eyes. I saw too that his ears stuck out. So he wasn't so handsome after all. That made me like him even more.

I wished I had my camera then, to take a picture and to hide behind. I'd keep one eye closed to focus, the way Perry said to do. To bring what you want to capture closer.

"That's her brother Stone," one of the girls told me, because, I supposed, everyone knew this but me.

Stone got off the bike and switched the TV channel to
The Twilight Zone,
where a man on a plane looked out the window and saw a gorilla monster messing with the plane's wing.

My breath came back. "Oh. I thought." But I stopped myself. Mary Alice McLemore did not need to know that I thought her brother was her boyfriend.

Nobody heard me anyway. It was obvious I was one big accidental invitation. Mary Alice was busy explaining to us how a family of five can live comfortably in their fallout shelter for two weeks until radiation decreased outside. Like some television host, she pointed toward the built-in cabinets with the map of the world and a map of Mississippi thumbtacked on.

Then she showed us to the powder room even though nobody needed to go. Mary Alice's mother had set up the powder room with a full supply of cosmetics and hairspray just for us.

I attempted to fit in to this craziness. These girls were carrying around empty white patent leather purses with gold clasps and wearing matching shoes and pillbox hats, all the things their mothers wore every day, or so I imagined. I was of course dressed as my mother, looking more like a coed and not a posh lady with pearls and kid gloves. Mary Alice's little brother, Jeffy, buzzed around us dressed as an astronaut in a silver space suit that zippered up the front, silver boots, and a big plastic bubble the size and shape of a fish tank over his head. Each time he circled around to me, he kicked my shin. Nobody said anything.

Mary Alice led us all upstairs and over to a silver tray set up with glasses and bottles on the dining room table. She offered us drinks, pouring cherry Kool-Aid from a rum bottle. We sat at the table eating fish sticks, potato chips, and Twinkies.

It came time for Mary Alice to open her birthday presents. While we all gathered round and watched, Mary Alice ripped open colorful packages of headband sets, a shorts outfit, a record player that lifted up like a little suitcase, a record holder for all her 45s, and most all the hits she didn't already have.

Mary Alice was fifteen, and I had gotten her exactly what I wanted, a sparkly Hula-Hoop. It was wrapped in the Sunday funnies. Whenever a present needed wrapping my mother had me use the funny papers because, she said, it was "artistic." I knew it was just plain cheap. When Mary Alice came to my gift, she hesitated, actually reading one of the comics and smiling.

"This is really funny," Mary Alice said, not laughing.

"So funny I forgot to laugh," I heard someone say.

Mary Alice put the Hula-Hoop aside. I thought I heard someone whisper something about my crazy mother and cheap kid toys.

Little Jeffy forgot he had the astronaut bubble on his head as he tried to eat a Twinkie. His face was pinched up into a little fist. I laughed at him. I knew it was mean of me to laugh at him, but he
had
kicked me, and I laughed even more when I saw that the inside of his fish tank bubble was getting nasty-looking with all his mouth slobber on the side.

Mary Alice laughed too, not at me, but at her own little brother. Then she said I was funny. I wasn't sure what to say to this. Someone said something about if you kissed your elbow, you'd turn into a boy.

"Who wants to practice kissing?" Mary Alice said.

They all squealed and ran toward Mary Alice's room. I followed. I had never been to Mary Alice's room. I had never kissed or practiced kissing. I was never so scared in all my life. Why couldn't we just tell ghost stories or braid one another's hair like we used to do at all the other birthday parties in all the other towns I'd ever lived in?

Mary Alice had all-white bedroom furniture—even her own desk with three drawers and a matching chair. Everything matched, with gold hardware. Her walls were a pink she called "blush," and she had a pink bedspread, a pink bed ruffle, a pink ruffled lampshade, and a pink canopy on her bed. I had always wanted a canopy bed.

By the time I finished looking around, somebody had turned out the lights and every girl was already kissing and hugging a pillow in the corners of the room. Luckily there were no pillows left. While the other girls giggled, Jeffy stomped and jumped in circles, pestering them. He burrowed between girls and pillows while Mary Alice screamed that he was acting like a pervert.

I excused myself to the powder room down the hall. On the way, I passed another bedroom, with walls almost completely covered with posters of rocket ships, and astronauts standing in front of their machinery at Cape Canaveral, and pictures of planets taped to the ceiling above the bed. There was a pile of clothes in the corner, and shoes everywhere. The bed wasn't made and the blankets and sheets were whipped up like one of my grandmother's meringues. A catcher's mitt sat on a wooden bureau alongside a watch laid smooth. A bookcase beside the bed held volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica,
something I had always wanted for myself.

"Come on in," Stone said, popping up from his chair.

Standing there at his door, I jumped, terrified and embarrassed that he had caught me spying.