A Lotus Grows in the Mud (32 page)

I
squeeze Jean Lynn’s hand as we watch her little sister’s casket being lowered slowly into the frozen earth. In step, we both walk over and throw our single white roses into the grave before she is covered with dirt to be marked by just another headstone like all the rest.

It’s a cold November day. Family and friends huddle together in a steam of mist to say good-bye to our Lyla, taken in her forties. When we were children, it never occurred to us that she might be the first to die. We teased her mercilessly, calling her “Illa” and making fun of her transparent skin and brown teeth. A chronic diabetic, she was fragile even then. But we didn’t think of that. She was just the kid sister who suffered the teasings of her older siblings and their friends.

She had a great big laugh, and she followed us around like a devoted puppy. “Stop trying to copy us,” Jean Lynn would say when we were stirring rocks into our mud to make pies. “Leave us alone.”

She had the worst kind of diabetes. She gave herself a shot every day. Now and then, we were witness to her diabetic reactions, which were scary to see. But we were just children, and like all children we thought she’d live forever, no matter what. We were wrong.

Standing around the casket are the cast from my childhood. Jean Lynn is married now, with kids of her own, and she works in a bank not far from here. I look over at David Fisher, my first boyfriend, from the age of two. My, how he has changed! That first set of teeth has long since
gone, and the boy I used to interpret for has grown into a handsome, middle-aged businessman.

I see his brother Jimmy, now a university instructor, standing to his right. I remember those languid summer afternoons when we’d camp out on their wraparound porch playing game after game of red canasta while his mother baked in the kitchen. He was the trickster of our clan, breaking up our lemonade stands, eating all of our homemade cookies and blowing bubble gum in my hair. But I loved him so much, it didn’t matter.

Then there was Joey, Jean Lynn and Lyla’s older brother, now a nuclear physicist living in California. The one who knocked over our Christmas tree. He made fun of me too. He’d joke about the way Mom would call me in for dinner. “Go-All-Day!” he made me repeat over and over, faster and faster. “Go-All-Day! Go-al-day. Go-al-die!” breaking it up phonetically until I eventually sounded just like her. He made me so mad.

So here we all are, the core group, the tribe that helped define who I was and who I’ve become. Our eyes to the ground, we silently drift away from Lyla’s grave and into our separate sadnesses. This is clearly a passage we’re not ready for, this sharp reminder of our own mortality. Truly the end of childhood.

Jean and I catch up with David and Jimmy, and we embrace each other in a group hug.

“Hey, guys, let’s go to Gifford’s,” David says suddenly.

“Gifford’s?” That was our favorite ice-cream parlor in Silver Spring. “Is it still there?”

“My mom thinks it’s moved, but I think I know where it is.”

I look at Jean to see how she feels about this. “Come on, honey,” I say. “Let’s have a hot fudge sundae for Lyla.”

We share a conspiratorial look, and, jumping into my rental car, the four of us are on a journey to retrace our past, starting with a childhood treat: a visit to the ice-cream parlor.

We get lost, of course. The old signposts are all gone. We drive around and around in circles looking for familiar landmarks, the laugh
ter beginning to bubble up inside us. It feels so good to be together again, as if no time has gone by.

“This is weird, isn’t it?” Jean says, echoing all our thoughts.

Just then, Jimmy yells, “There it is, over there!”

I spin into a little strip mall and spot Gifford’s sitting between a 7-Eleven and a computer store. How life changes. Only, right now, it feels as it always did. My car feels like a time capsule where everything is just as it was all those years ago.

We order ice cream—the same way—Swiss chocolate hot fudge sundaes with marshmallows. The four of us sit at a table and stare at each other, all grown up, and yet we can still see the kids we once were. My best girlfriend Jean Lynn is still my best girlfriend Jean Lynn, David and Jimmy too. It’s as if no time has passed at all. One by one, we start to laugh. One by one, the laughter turns to tears. Giggling, crying and remembering, we are alternately rolling with laughter and hanging on to each other. When we are spent and have dried our eyes, we sit and eat our ice cream in silence, each one lost to the memory of past times.

“Hey!” I say, breaking the silence. “Let’s go back to our old stomping ground. I want to see my old house.”

Everyone agrees, and we scramble eagerly back into my car and drive to our old Victorian neighborhood nestled on the other side of the tracks. I can’t wait to see the dead-end street I grew up on.

We cross the tracks into Takoma Park, and I can feel our excitement growing. It’s been far too long since we traveled in this pack, down the sidewalks of our tiny lives.

Seeing the sign for Cleveland Avenue, I make the turn. I can hear my mother growling at the cabdrivers, “It’s that sharp left on the corner.” We drive down my quiet street, still filled with potholes, past mountains of leaves piled high on the roadside.

“Oh my God, guys, remember how we used to jump in the leaves after we raked them up from the lawn?”

“Stop!” Jean Lynn yells. “Stop the car. I want to get out.”

I have hardly brought the car to a halt before she throws open the passenger door and jumps feetfirst into the pile of leaves outside Mr. Morningstar’s house. “I just had to do it!” she shrieks, her face almost
obscured by the leaves she is throwing up all around her. We all join in, laughing like children, tears in our eyes. If it wasn’t for this day of death, this gathering of loved ones for dear Lyla, we would never be experiencing this bliss. Go figure.

Brushing ourselves off, we look around. There’s my house, number 9. Over the back fence, we can see the Fisher and the Sror houses, side by side. Nothing much has changed. As one, we walk over to the redbrick duplex that was once my castle. It looks so tiny. I don’t think I ever really noticed before that it was attached to another house. They both look much smaller than I remembered.

We walk up the steps to my porch, our minds replaying childhood memories.

“Jean, do you remember when we cracked rocks open and dried them here, just to watch them sparkle in the sunshine?” I ask.

Before she can answer me, David chimes in, “Yeah, I remember when we played out in the backyard tent ‘I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours’!”

I howl with laughter. “Oh, David, you were my first!”

We knock, but there is no one home. Our hearts sink. One by one, my friends begin to turn away.

“No!” I cry. “No! We have to go in, guys. We just have to!”

“Let’s try the door,” Jean says, her eyes brighter than they’ve been all day.

“You’re kidding! You think?”

“Yeah,” encourages Jimmy. “Why not? It was your house first.”

I turn the handle. The door is open, just as it always was. “Hello?” I call. “Hello? Is anyone home?”

I half expect to hear a reply from the nice lady I know who bought the house from Mom, but all I am met with is silence.

“Come on, guys,” I say, leading the way.

The whole gang obediently follows me inside. The house still smells the same: slightly musty. In our funeral garb, we walk through the rooms, touching everything, remembering happier times. I can almost hear the voices coming out of the walls—Dad’s, Mom’s, Patti’s—and Nixi barking his greeting.

In the kitchen, my eyes fall on the old butler sink where Mom bathed me when I was little. “Oh, great, she didn’t get rid of it!” I cry, running my fingers over its smooth ceramic surface.

“It’s probably a valuable antique now,” David laughs.

Looking at the wall by the telephone, I’m sad but not surprised to see that the new owner has wallpapered over the phone numbers we scribbled straight on the plaster—the collage of names and numbers from my past. Aunt Tootsie, Uncle Charlie and Aunt Sarah, the school, the store, Hawn’s Watch Shop. Now all hidden beneath the pretty floral paper.

Walking upstairs, everyone following, I look down through the balusters, remembering the Christmas parties and all the pretty lights. “Hey, Jean, let’s go look in our closet!” I cry as we rush to my old room and open the door to the closet we used to hide in, tucked in side by side, lighting candles and burning the sashes to my dresses. Trying to sit inside again, we can’t even close the door.

Down in the basement, where I found my dear Nixi dead one day after school, I look longingly at where my father’s old workbench stood and wish it was still there.

“Come on,” Jean says, pulling me away. “Let’s go over to my house.”

We scurry out after leaving a note for the owner, telling her we were there and apologizing. I hope she isn’t mad.

Walking down Cleveland Avenue in our little troupe, just as we did every year for trick or treat, we peer at the houses of all the neighbors we used to know and the doors we used to knock on dressed as ghosts and ghouls. The scent of wet leaves takes us straight back to the damp fall nights and going back to school.

Jimmy starts to laugh. “Oh my God, Goldie, remember that naked lady you and Jean used to carry around the neighborhood?”

“That wasn’t a naked lady, Jimmy, it was my mother’s sewing form she kept in the basement.”

“Her name was Mrs. Tookey!” Jean Lynn screams with laughter at the memory. “Oh my God, do you remember we left her in Mrs. Tyrrell’s yard and waited around the corner to see what she would do? We were insane!”

“All I remember about Mrs. Tookey is that she had huge breasts,” Jimmy says.

“Oh my God, Jimmy. You’re still sick.”

Pushed to the front, I tap gently on the front door of Jean Lynn’s old house. A young mom with a toddler at her side opens it. Recognizing me instantly, she opens her mouth in surprise.

“Hi,” I say, smiling. “Listen, I’m really sorry to trouble you, but this used to be my girlfriend’s house, and we all used to live in this neighborhood and…”

“I lived here,” Jean adds wistfully, peering in beyond the new owner. “With my brother and my sister, Lyla. We buried her today.”

Jimmy chips in, “And we were wondering, well, could we possibly take a look around?”

“It would mean so much,” David adds.

The woman looks from one to the other and doesn’t know quite what to say. “Well, sure,” she says, finally. “Come on in. I’m afraid it’s all a bit of a mess.”

We troop in, our little crew, and stand awkwardly in her hallway. She stares at us for a moment and then retreats to the kitchen to let us look around. Tiptoeing through our past, we move as one from room to room, inspecting every nook and cranny, remembering the wild parties Jean Lynn’s parents used to have, the music and the fun. Piling down to the basement, which has been completely remodeled, she and I look laughingly at where we hid under the oilcloth, afraid of the bomb.

“Oh my God, remember the shows we used to put on for the whole neighborhood in your garage?” I say, looking out the back window.

“We used to make poor Lyla run around after us like a little slave,” Jean recalls.

“She was always so willing to help, so happy to be with us.”

“We could never have done it without her.”

“Do you remember when we found the squirrel that was dying in the garage?”

“Oh my God! We put him into a wheelbarrow under your doll blanket and wheeled him all the way into Silver Spring over the railroad
tracks to the animal hospital. But then they said he could have rabies. Rabies! We couldn’t get out of there fast enough!”

There is so much history in this house, in all of our houses. The sleepovers. The Oreo cookies and milk in bed. Watching scary black-and-white movies. And staying up late. Walking into David’s house next door, I can literally smell the chocolate chip cookies David’s mother seemed to make all day long. She was the Betty Crocker of the neighborhood, the stay-at-home mom.

“Are you remembering our games of miniature golf?” David asks, standing at my side as I stare out longingly at his old backyard.

“Yes, but mostly I’m remembering the fence,” I say. He follows my gaze and smiles. There it is, the chain-link fence, just where it always was, dividing his world and mine. It is all I can do to stop myself from running out and climbing it, just as I always did, hooking my toes back into each link.

Our journey into our past now over, that night I go back to Jean Lynn’s house in Silver Spring, not far from where we grew up. Tired, wistful, I take a long, hot shower and slide between the cold, crisp sheets.

There is a gentle tap on the door. It’s Jean Lynn.

“Hi, Poo-poo-face,” she says, using our childhood language. “Can I come in?”

Sitting on the edge of my bed in her nightgown, she pulls the scrunched-up face we practiced for hours as children, “Our Face.”

“Are you giving me ‘Our Face’?” I say, pursing my lips around my teeth similarly, just like Bucky Beaver.

“Don’t go tomorrow,” she says, her lips still puckered up. “Stay, Poo-poo.”

We both laugh.