Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (19 page)

The ironing has apparently passed muster because she picks up the hangers again and carries on through the living room. The threadbare grape-cluster pattern of the carpet passes before my eyes, the inset knickknack shelf that my father made, the gilded miniature watering can that I broke on the way home from the fourth-grade hobby fair and lied about; the big blond console TV that can’t have appeared before I was in high school; the bookcase with
Hurlbut’s Stories of the Bible
and the complete works of Edgar Guest. I follow at her heels, black patent Cuban heels, from which emerge the graceful corrugations of the quadruple-A ankles she is so proud of and of which, having the same ankles in spite of my big bone structure, I am so proud. We pass the bulbous, sagging couch, the oversized chartreuse fronds and magenta flowers on the slipcovers that she produced in an awesome lapse of taste, the impossible flowers into which I flung my hot face on the occasion of my first heartbreak: Ace Johnson, yearbook editor, senior class councillor, and jilt. My face sizzles in the flowers as she pronounces the phrases of impossible misunderstanding: “Why, sissy, cheer up, haw haw, there’ll be another one along in a minute; there are plenty of fish in the sea.”

My elder son is on a transport ship, seeking discipline and the romance of camaraderie. My younger son is the lead singer in a band called Beloved Children, which plays in bars he is legally too young to enter. I am on occasion invited to hear this group, and I do. I sit wondering at the sweet demonic presence of these children, who wail a noise that I like and envy. As a girl I knew nothing better to do than sit a sizzling wallflower and pray that someone would ask me to dance. The Beloved Children crop their heads and embrace freakdom. One of their lyrics praises masturbation, “the central occupation, generation to generation,” but they do not have the courage of their erections because one by one the members of the band come by to warn me that I will be shocked. To which generation do they think I belong? I politely assure them that I can take it.

Now we are into the hall, the cupboard where the Bible and the Ansco camera are kept, the laundry cupboard that my father designed so you could put the clothes in from the bathroom or the hall and which we called a chute though nothing chutes from anywhere to anywhere.

“Let me tell you about something,” I say, hurrying after her. The trouser suit is an insane thing to be wearing in this heat, long sleeved and cuffed, lined and turtled at the neck. My hot hair prickles; I was thirty-four and living in England before I had the courage to assert that I would wear my hair straight and long. “Once I went back to a house I’d lived in years before. Not this house, you understand, some other house. I went back, and it hadn’t been sold, the real estate market was bad, and it was a white elephant of a house, so it was being rented, and a lot of my old things were still there. I went in, the tenant was very nice, and we fell into conversation, and I lit a cigarette…”

I wish I hadn’t got into this. I remember the first time she caught me with a cigarette, she and Daddy together, and Daddy said, “Aha! Caughtcha!” but Mama said, “You’re trying to kill me!” She hangs the dress and shirt, both, in the long closet with the sliding doors, which makes a kind of sense because when I was five this was my room, but later it was hers and Daddy’s, and I see from the set of her shoulders that she has drawn in her chin, but I don’t know if it’s because I mentioned a cigarette or not.

“He set an ashtray in front of me. It was a cheap, simple, glass ashtray in the shape of a spade, like the ace of spades.”

She probes her stomach again. I think she sighs again.

“I’d bought a set of those ashtrays in a little country market some dozen years before and I had used them daily for — what? — four or five years; and in the intervening time I had not thought of them once, they did not form any part of my memory. When he set this one down I flicked my ash in it, and I recognized the way the cigarette sounded on the edge of the glass.”

She is at the bureau with her back to me, her face averted even from the round rimless mirror, and she begins to lay out things from the drawer, as if for my inspection: the ebony-handled nail buffer, the little pot of waxy rouge that I once stole and lied about, the porcelain doll that sits now on the sill to the left of my typewriter in my house in Florida.

“I was flooded with a whole sense of the reality of that house, and of my life there. I know I’m not explaining myself very well.” And I’m not, but I’m not going to make any reference to Proust. “I was homesick, Mama.”

She slides the nail buffer along the bureau top toward the window sill where the oleanders nod. The milk of the oleander leaves is poison, Bud and I were taught, as I later taught my boys that the pods of the laburnum were poison, in the garden of the English house that held the glass spade ashtray.

“There’s a story,” I blurt, inspired, “by John Cheever. In which one of the characters says that fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.”

“Which marriage was that?” she asks, and smiles at me in the mirror while she is putting on her vermilion lipstick so that her mouth is stretched and distorted over the cartilage and the bones.

“Which marriage was what?”

“In that house.” She takes out the powder box decorated in peach-colored feathers and opens it in a minor explosion of peach-colored ash, arranges it in front of the buffer, the pot, the doll on my window sill beside the calendar and the goldfish. It was indiscreet to use a name she doesn’t know. I could have quoted Edgar Guest, how it takes a heap o’ livin’ to be homesick all the time. I should have said that Jesus said life is one long longing to go home.

“Which marriage was it in that house?”

“My first. Look, what I’m trying to say…Mama, sometimes — usually when I’m driving, for some reason — I think about something that has happened in my life, good or bad, and I think,
I can’t wait to tell Mom
, or else I think,
I can’t tell Mom
…

“And then,” I say, “it’s like waking up from a dream, a good dream or a nightmare, the sadness or the relief. Do you understand?”

Facing herself in the mirror she places a finger on her nose and deforms it slightly to the right while with the index finger of her same hand pressing downward and the other index finger pressing upward, she produces from her pores several dozen live curling worms of ivory colored wax. I avert my eyes in the old embarrassment and then in the old fascination focus again on the one specific section of the mirror where she places a finger of the other hand on her nose and deforms it slightly to the left. Everyone who grew up in America in the fifties can do this, too.

“
Will
you understand?”

She takes the puff and dabs the peach-colored ash over her nose and cheeks. Minute clogs of powder catch in the emptied pores. She smiles at herself in the mirror, chin tilted, a smile for the PTA or the Women’s Society for Christian Service, and as I avert my eyes in the old embarrassment she says, nasal on the vowels, “All I want is your happiness, sissy.”

I put my head in my hands. Through my fingers I can see the knees of my trouser suit, baggy and crushed, with the stains of crushed grass on them. My hair is hot and heavy. I will confess to her. I confess, “Nobody knows better than I do how hard it is to make words say what you mean. But it’s taken me all these years to know it was just as hard for you.”

“All I
ever
wanted was your happiness,” she says for the PTA.

“It’s not so!” I adjust my tone and say more successfully, “It isn’t so.” I go to her and try to take her insubstantial shoulders, try to force her toward the mirror and the crossed lower incisors, but am uncertain whether I see her grimace or mine, the powder in her pores or mine. “You wanted me to be happy your way, by your rules: don’t smoke, don’t wear pink with red, marriage is sacred, the wages of sin…. And the truth is you were holding on to a bunch of phrases just like me. You knew they didn’t work. The truth is…”

The truth is that my elder son is a romantic militarist and my younger a punk rocker. I laugh to my friends: I don’t know where they came from! But I know at least one place they are headed, somewhere years hence, to seek for themselves why they are so much, and so threateningly, me.

“Mommy isn’t feeling very well, dear. I think the old ulcer is acting up again.”

“Don’t go to bed. Please don’t go to bed.”

But she is out of the smock, which she hangs on the brass hook over the shelf of the shoes. She raises a modest and protective hand to her collarbone above the peach satin slip, over the rosily mottled V of flesh below the collarbone she has never seen.

“Don’t go to bed!” I say. “It doesn’t fool me, I can do it, too. It’s a way of getting what you want without asking for it; you’ve got ulcers and high blood pressure and adrenaline flux, I’ve got a fibrolated coccyx and chronic otitis and atopic dermatitis; it doesn’t fool me, Mama. I can do it, too.”

But I notice that my trouser suit is also gone; it has disappeared from my body as abruptly as it disappeared from the parked station wagon in New York in 1972. I am standing in nothing but my ivory satin teddy. My hand goes to my collarbone and the mottled V of flesh. She reaches into her end of the closet for the polished cotton housecoat in stripes of pink and gray sent her one Christmas by Uncle Jack and Aunt Louellen: she sizzles the zipper up, and I reach into my — later Daddy’s — end of the closet for the puffed-sleeved pansy dress, which I disengage from the hanger with a deft flick of my thumb at the button at the nape and of course it does not fit; it binds at the armholes and the breast, its hand-stitched hem is above my knees; and yet, it fits so much better than it ought; the time is out of joint.

“Would you get me some milk, sweetie? Funny thing, I always hated milk, and now it’s the one thing I can have for my ulcer.”

“Don’t go to bed.”

But she slips under the rose chenille bedspread and lays her tight poodle cut back on the pillow, producing minute wrinkles in the perfectly ironed pink pillowcase, smiling with eyes closed, arms folded over her flat breast. I pull the puffed footstool to her and sit clumsily, crushing the pima pansies as I try to cover my knees, which are stained with grass and tamarack.

“There’ll be a brighter day tomorrow,” I am almost sure she says. On the nightstand is the photo of her taken on the morning of her wedding day, which now sits beside the doll in my house in Florida. Distractedly I tap my ash; the goldfish attacks it for food. In the photograph she stands beside a mirror in a simple twenties shift of pin-tucked chiffon, her hair marcelled into a shelf so that the profile is half obscured and the mirror image is full-faced, the strand of pearls breaking over the collarbones, the mouth pensive and provocative, the eyes deeply sad. Daddy used to call them bedroom eyes.

“Mama, look at me.”

“Sissy, let me tell you, there are so many people in the world worse off than we are.”

“Oh, Jesus, Mama, the starving in China, the man who had no feet.”

“Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”

“It’s the way I talk, for God’s sake.”

“No child of mine ever talked that way!”

“Don’t be an ass, Mama, it’s only words.”

“I’ll wash your mouth out for you!”

“Will you, will you?”

“It kills me to hear you talk that way.”

“Does it? Then let me give you something to wash out of my mouth. Daddy’s remarried. He’s married again!”

Her eyes have been fluttering and slit, but now they open. I have got her now. She glances away and back, her smile parts on the gash of the crossed incisors.

“There are plenty of fish in the sea, haw haw!” I say.

She says, eyes averted, “Your daddy gets sweeter every day.”

“Jesus Christ, don’t you understand anything? I saw your bones!”

The pima dress is wrinkled, sweaty, and has sand in the pockets. It will have to be washed again, and ironed again. The compressor on the air conditioner will have to be replaced again. “We carried your ashes up to the top of Marble Mountain, Daddy and I; we flung them over the quarry and the foundations of the house you lived in, over the roof of the general store. And do you know, Mama, they’re rubble, the marrow looks like dry dog food. I saw the mineral in your bones, blue melted mineral in the chunks!”

Now her eyes widen, the melted hazel and amber of her eyes speak terror, and I know that mine will do this, too.

“We scattered them, Daddy and I!”

“You’re trying to kill me,” I know she says.

“No!” I grip both her long strong hands in my own. “No, I’m trying to keep you!” I finger the veins and freckles, feel for the bones of her hands and see my own hands long and strong on the black bones of the typewriter keys. I avert my eyes. Beyond the calendar — the fish, the doll, the photo of her bedroom eyes — tropical sun slants through the azaleas, outlining the veins in their fuchsia petals. I hold her eyes.

“Let me see you, Mama!”

But the hands go limp in mine and the eyes begin to close. The lids are delicately veined. I grip her hands. “I’ve got you now!”

“Not altogether so,” my mother says.

A thing she never would say.

Her hair is blued, purpled, and her pores have disappeared. There is an odor of pansies, oleanders, roses, orange blossoms, peach. The planes of her face have been expertly ironed. All the wrinkles of her cheeks are gone, and her mouth, closed, seems fuller in repose. Deep buttoning makes symmetrical creases in the rose satin on the coffin lid. The people passing speak of her; they say:
dear soul
, and
always cheerful
, and
devoted wife and mother
, and
a lady
. Her hands, crossed, are delicate and smooth. There is about her a waxen beatitude.

I don’t know how they do this, but everybody says it is an art. Everybody says they have done a splendid job. They have caught her exactly, everybody says.