Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (18 page)

“Nobody in particular; just a friend.”

“Your father gets sweeter every day,” I think she says, and I am sure that her head angles to one side, a long neck made longer by the tight poodle cut of her hair, already graying, already thinning, the corrugations of her neck where it arches no wider than those on the spine of a hardbound book.

“Yes,” I say. “Well.” She takes the edge of one puff and twirls the eyelet, arching the iron into each semicircle on the board, expertly smoothing it so that when she releases it each arch buoys into a perfect wave. It occurs to me that I can do this, too.

“You know, I’m not sure I feel too well,” she says, as if surprised, mumbling now, but she is an old hand at the audible mumble, and I will not rise to it.

Instead I say, “All we need to do is embark on a minor conflict. Anything will do, any of the old ones. My posture, for instance, or the state of my room. Smoking will do. Or that my hair needs cutting.”

My elder son has joined the army and writes that he has had his hair cropped; it never occurred to me before that a crew cut makes one a member of a crew. My younger son has scissored his blond thatch so short that it also seems to have erupted out of World War II, but for him it has an altogether different ideological significance. He does not, however, want it called punk. I am so anxious he should like me that I pay to have his left ear pierced and offer him a diamond-chip stud of which I have lost the mate. He accepts it cheerfully, but most days he wears a diaper pin through the punctured lobe.

She deals with the eyelet of the other sleeve, and she turns to me. I am so startled by this success that I reach into my Italian handbag for a cigarette, and my glance catches no higher than the hand she splays protectively over her stomach; I concentrate on the lighting of my cigarette, and can only suppose the shape of her mouth, narrow-lipped but open wide in the narrow-lipped friendly “hah” shape, large straight teeth except for the crossing of the two lower incisors that I encounter in my own mirror every day of my life. I hear her say, nasal on the vowels, “I just don’t want you to be indis
creet
, sissy.”

This confusingly hits home. I recognize the authenticity of it — the plaint, the manipulation, but also the authenticity. Because I am indiscreet; it is my central fault. I confess to freshman students, junior colleagues, anyone with a dog smaller than a bread box. I expose myself by telephone and telegraph; I say it with ink. I betray the secrets of my friends, believing I am presenting their cases. I embarrass clerks in the Kmart.

But she has her back to me again, and all I can see is the parting of the pin-tucks left and right as she deftly presses them away from the pearl shank buttons. Because she didn’t mean the right thing and has no notion that she has hit home.

“What does that mean, indiscreet?” I ask, a little shrill, so that I deliberately draw the smoke in after I’ve said it, feeling the depth of my lungs, my verbal bottom. “Do you mean sex? Do you mean: lie better?”

“I’m not going to be sidetracked into a discussion of words,” my mother says, a thing she would never say.

“It’s not a sidetrack,” I nevertheless reply. Her forefinger sizzles.

I need an ashtray. I know there are no ashtrays here, but I’m willing to choose carefully among the things I know are here: the amethyst-glass pot with calico flowers set in paraffin; the Carnival glass cup with her name, “Alma,” etched in primitive cursive; the California Fiesta pottery in the lurid colors of the zinnias along the front walk. I cross to the cupboard and take the little Depression glass fishbowl because I know it best, because it currently houses a tiny goldfish on the window sill to the left of my typewriter in my house in Florida.

“It’s true that I’m indiscreet,” I confess, indiscreetly, “but it’s not entirely a fault.” I tap my ash, and my hair prickles hot against my turtleneck. Both of my husbands liked my hair long, although the second one did not smoke and the first blamed me for indiscretion. The convolutions of authority are confusing. “It’s also simply the way I am; it’s a negative side of my strength. The thing I want most of all is an understanding audience, a teaching one. The best thing is to tell and be understood. Do you understand?”

“I’ve never looked at any man but your father,” she replies, to the oleanders, to the waffle iron, to the piqué collar that she designed and made and that she now parts into two perfect eyelet-edged arches of Peter Pan.

“Mama!”

No, that won’t do. I must not put myself in the hysterical stance because if anything is clear, the clear thing is that she is the hysterical one and I’m the one who copes, deals, functions, and controls. I am the world traveler, the success.

I continue in a more successful tone. “We could start with Dad if you like, but I don’t think it’s the best place because it’s so hard to be honest.”

“I
hope
I brought you up to be honest!” Back to me still, she whips the dress from the board and holds it up for her own inspection.

“I mean that there are so many ways of lying apart from words, especially where marriage is concerned. I think it would be better if we just kept it between you and me.”

“There’s lying and there’s telling the truth, especially where marriage is concerned!”

This strikes a false note. She is not speaking to me as she must speak to me because I am not speaking to her as I must speak to her. I tap my ash into the fishbowl while she takes a copper wire hanger and buttons the now-perfect dress onto it at the nape. With one hand she holds the hook and with the thumb of the other she flicks one neat flick at the button while index and middle finger spread the hand-bound buttonhole and the button pops into place. I can see the gesture with magical clarity; I can do it myself. Once when I was caught playing doctor in the tamaracks with crippled Walter Wesch, she sat me in the basin and spread my pink bald mons veneris with the same two fingers, soaping with the flick of her thumb, scourging me with her tongue in terms of Jesus and germs.

“Mama, look,” I say, “the reason I want to do this — try to understand — is that I
want
to tell the truth. I want to capture you…as you really are.” I squirm on the plastic, hair hot at the nape, and add despairingly, “As a
person
.”

Does she say, “Hah!”?

“I’ve tried before, and you came out distorted. I know you’re remarkable…”

Now she is doing one of Daddy’s Arrow shirts, a plain white one with a narrow stitched collar. The point of the iron faces one point of the collar, then the other. The long strong far hand stretches against the stitching so the hot collar lies perfectly flat without any of the tiny corrugations that even a laundry leaves these days. I can do this. My two sons can do it.

She turns again, one eyebrow raised and a mocking smile. “What, then, am I the most unforgettable character you’ve met?”

Not like her, neither the eyebrow nor the words, which have the cadence of a British education. I’m the one with the British education. I try again. She turns back like the film run backward, the point of the iron faces one point of the collar, then the other, she stretches with the strong far hand, the bones of which she has never seen, and turns again robotlike, profile gashed with a smile. “Honey, write for the
masses
. People need to
escape
. They need to
laugh
.”

This is closer. My fist is too big to go in the goldfish bowl, and I have no way to stub out my cigarette. I have to hold it while it burns down to the filter and out. So it turns out to be me who says brightly, “Okay, why don’t I do you up as ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met’?”

To which, against my will, try as I might, she replies, “Why me? Hah, hah, there are plenty of fish in the sea.”

“No!” I slam the bowl down dangerously, but it doesn’t break. How could it, when it houses the goldfish next to the calendar on the window sill? Dangerously shrill, I say, “That’s exactly what I don’t want you to say!”

She hands me a shirt out of the basket, a blue one with the same narrow Arrow collar; I understand that I’m supposed to sprinkle it. I fetch a pan from under the stove and fill it with warm water, holding the hot cigarette filter in the hand that turns on the tap. I run water over the filter, which sizzles, and reach for the garbage bin under the sink, ashamed because my back is to her now and I am doing this in full view. The bin is of the step-on sort, chrome lid on a white cylinder adorned with a bow-tied posy of photographically exact nasturtiums.
Nasty urchums
, Bud and I used to call them in the sandbox years, though I don’t remember if we dared to say this in front of Mama. I toss the cigarette in the bin and, when the lid slams, curb the impulse to take the garbage out.

My last love affair was trashed over the question of taking out the garbage. It’s a common story. He said, “What can I do to help?” and I said, “Thanks, I’d appreciate it if you took out the garbage.” He said, “It makes no sense to take it out now; it isn’t full. Do you want the sausage sliced or mashed?” I did not want the sausage sliced or mashed, and said so in no uncertain terms. He said, “What are you on about?” And I was, I admit, a trifle eloquent; it’s my job. I put myself in the hysterical stance and he put himself in the imperturbable stance, but it was he who slammed out and that was that. It’s common. My mother used to say: common as an old shoe. She meant it for praise, of people who didn’t stand on their dignity.

I carry the pan back to the table. “D’you remember when Bud came up with the phrase, ‘Mama’s Homey Canned Platitudes’?”

At this she swashbuckles; the whole haw-haw comes out and I can hear it from the bottom of her lungs but cannot look at her again because she misses the point; she can laugh at herself but she doesn’t know there was real grief in it for us, Bud and me, to whom honesty comes so hard except for money. All I can look at is the linoleum, which is annoyingly and irrelevantly clear, the black outlines of rectangles on a flecked gray ground, the absurdly marbled feather shapes at the upper left corner of each rectangle: it is not the linoleum I want to see.

“Look, you don’t understand,” I stumble, splashing points of warm water from the pan to the shirt on the table, each spot an instant deeper blue as if I were splashing paint. “The point is that it’s become a kind of platitude for us, Bud and me. It’s easy to remember your clichés, but they prevent us from remembering you; they only conceal something we never saw because we were kids and kids have to…see…”

The telephone rings rescuingly. She crosses from the ironing board to the phone, which she pulls through the little sliding door that my dad designed and made so that it, the phone, can be both reached from and closed into both the kitchen and the den; she answers, “Hello?” and swashbuckles the laugh. How can it be that the laugh is false and the pleasure genuine? Can I do this myself? “Why, Lloyd!”

It’s the preacher, then. As she stands at the telephone I notice what she wears, which is a green cotton cap-sleeved house smock edged in black piping, sent her one Christmas by Uncle Jack and Aunt Louellen and which has, machine embroidered over the flat left breast, a black poodle dog with a rhinestone stud for an eye. I can see this though her back is to me, and I can see the sharp shadow of the wing blades underneath the cotton, the bones she has never seen. I cannot see her face.

“Lloyd Gruber, how nice of you to call! Oh, as well as can be expected for an old lady, haw haw. Yes, she’s home, fat and sassy; you know she’s got another book out and she’s on a
tour
, well, I wouldn’t want to tell you I’d pass it around in the Women’s Society for Christian Service but you know it’s
those
words that sell nowadays. What? Oh, no, that broke up ages ago. Why, Lloyd, I’m not in the least bit worried about her; you know I was twenty-three myself before I married, yes I was, she’s a spring chicken…”

“Mama!”

Discouragement appears on me as wrinkles in the elbows of Galway tweed. My mother can embarrass clerks in Kress’s five-and-dime. I leave the rolled shirt on the table and escape to the dining room where I watch, in the eight thousand prisms of the glass brick window, eight thousand miniature distortions of the sterile orange tree outside, a bough bobbing under the weight of its puckered fruit. I can taste the acrid taste of these oranges from the time Bud tricked me into lagging a tongue across the wet pebbles of their useless flesh. I think I have changed my mind. I think I will simply cross the living room and thread my way down between the zinnias that line the walk…

But there she is, crossing toward the living room herself, with the dress and the shirt flapping from the hooks over her hand. She is there, of course, because she is the pushmi-pullyu of the psychic Midlands. If I go to touch her she will recoil, but if I walk away she will be at my heels. I can do this, too. Somewhere are two teenaged boys and a half a dozen former husbands and lovers who will attest that I can do it, too.

She has hooked the hangers on the knob of the corner cupboard to inspect a possible inch of misturned eyelet, a possible crease in the French seam of the Arrow armhole. She says, “Now
what
it is you want, honey?”

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they don’t understand why you’ve come.

“I want to put you in a story,” I say evenly.

Back to me, she presses a hand over her stomach, she makes a little clucking sound of pain, her back arches in the instinctive position of a Martha Graham contraction and releases, rolling upward from the flat buttocks that I do not mention in her presence. I will not mention Martha Graham, Martha Quest, Billy Graham, Billy Pilgrim, Janet Pilgrim. I may mention graham crackers.

“Sissy, I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Not a real fight, Mom. That’s just a device to get us started. What I really wanted to do is catch your essential…”