She was running away from me, slapping at herself. It was almost like old times: Theresa rushing off home and talking halfway down the walk. She called, “Don’t ever tell Dan I smoked, okay?” And then she retraced her steps and came toward me, oblivious to the swarm around her. “Maybe heaven is whatever you want it to be,” she said. “For me it’s mothering, even the bad parts. I’m very clear about that now. For Lizzy it
should be just about the whole nine yards except baths, and Mrs. Klinke’s German Shepherd. She’s gung ho about—about life. I keep telling her, ‘Hang in there, Lizzy. I’ll still be your mom when I’m eighty. I’ll remember everything, absolutely everything about you, and when I get there we’ll pick up where we left off.’ ”
Chapter Six
——
S
HE LEFT ME REELING
in the orchard. She was quickly out of sight, on her way home to her quiet husband, or to the pond where, perhaps for her, the angels would sing. Maybe they were always there, but Theresa would hear them, and see them as they made themselves visible to her, one by one, across the water. Theresa had been remarkably fluent. Despite her crushing blow she had been coherent. I envied her her Holy Spirit even as I told myself that God didn’t go lighting up highways. I didn’t know if I was now allowed to visit Vermont Acres and carry on, or if we were finished with our business, nothing left for us but the exchange of awkward pleasantries in public places. I tried to think again if our bond was strong enough after all, to carry us over the disaster. We had more than once admitted to each other, with the ardor of schoolgirls—and with hope that the feeling was returned and with fear that it wasn’t—that we were each other’s best friend. I tried to think how I would cope if Emma or Claire met with disaster up at Theresa’s, if they got stuck in one of her modern conveniences and died. I wouldn’t forgive her the needless contraption or her negligence; I could never meet her without placing blame. Despite Father Albert’s advice to consider my pain, despite Theresa’s generous heart, it was impossible to imagine that she could forgive me
enough to at least resume some kind of superficial patter. And I didn’t know if the forgiveness itself was light, glittery stuff that showered down and absolved a person and set them free, or if, instead, it was heavy, cumbersome, a new debt, a currency that was continuously renewed no matter how much was paid out.
I didn’t want to bump into her again, and since I didn’t have any idea where she was going I wandered, as slowly as I could, in and out of the trees. Was Theresa, despite her ability to construct whole sentences, well? It was so tempting to indulge in the idea that all the dead people were up in the sky, impervious to the effects of gravity and the orbiting shuttle litter, waiting for us to take our turns and come to them. Lizzy, my Aunt Kate, my mother. I didn’t notice the gnats after a while, as I thought of heaven, of Aunt Kate miles above smelling of tobacco and lavender soap, stooping to receive Lizzy. I had hurt a great deal and for so long through my childhood that I had years before made heaven into a stock routine: My mother was yonder, her apron tied around her trim waist, waiting and waiting with her hands folded at the table, with the cookies overlapping slightly in a circle on the china plate, and cold milk in tall glasses.
As I had grown up, the fantasies were seductive only temporarily, before the logistical problems of heaven reared their ugly heads. Did young people stay forever young, did old people revert back to their prime, were unpleasant characters, people who would have been likable if they hadn’t had lousy childhoods—were they given personality makeovers? What if my mother really didn’t want to sit with my father at the same craft table during the celestial craft hour? What if she’d taken up with someone who loved her for herself, who could meet her needs?
Any loss I suffered always took me back to that first loss. My mother died when I was eight, of lung cancer. She had majored in home economics in college, in preparation for her life as my father’s spouse. Her death taught me that there wasn’t any such thing as logic or mercy. She had had a native distrust of fatty acids long before it was fashionable, and in the face of her family’s scorn she served up margarine and replaced the Sunday pot roast with fowl. She had no vice other than excessive glee when she beat my father at bridge. On those rare victorious occasions, the otherwise perfect 1950s housewife stood up from the table and executed several entrechats in her flat black pumps. My father, who has remained a
mystery to me long after his death, drank moderately, expressed himself infrequently, and only if my behavior was rude and unseemly. He sat all day in the fog of his own cigarette smoke in his office where he designed pulley systems. And yet he woke each morning without a cough, each foot gliding into his proper slipper under the nightstand.
When the neighbor, Mr. McCrady, kindly explained the biology of cancer to me, how cells went haywire, I imagined my mother’s lungs crusted with fat slimy coils, like snails without shells. It was no wonder she had trouble breathing and had to be under a doctor’s supervision. Because I knew that my mother had had me in a hospital, and because, like all children, I was not rational, I had the idea that the two events, the birth and the cancer, were linked, and that I was responsible. I’m not sure I’ve ever really forgiven myself for her death. My father and I ate chicken potpies in silence, night after night for the nearly eight months it took her to die. I went to school, and after, climbed the stairs by twos up to my room and shut the door. I read, and worked on my map of the world. I felt well hidden in our cavernous five-bedroom Victorian house with three stories and four-and-a-half baths.
On the afternoon of the death my father came home and went into the study, and before he shut the door I slipped in and stood by his desk. I had made up my mind to find out why there was a flood of food coming in from the neighbors at the back entrance. My father, I later learned, had discouraged them during my mother’s illness, but now, with the official word, they could restrain themselves no longer. Something had changed. I was slightly more frightened of the change than I was of asking him for an explanation, so I took a deep breath and tried to frame the question.
Before I could get the words out he looked up and said, “Mother’s gone.” He took a flat square box out of his drawer and handed it to me, as if I had come in expressly to fetch my present. There was a tape reel inside. The doorbell rang then and he came past me. I made for the yellow case in the hall closet that held the tape recorder. It was heavy, and I had to stoop to pick it up with both hands. I managed the stairs to my room, closed the door, and then barricaded it with my dresser. It was no easy task to push the white bureau from one end of the room to the other. I threaded the tape, and then lay down right next to the small silver holes around the middle of the box. When I reached over the top of the
machine and turned the lever to the ON position, a voice I’d always known said, “Hello, Alice. I’m going to read you some of this book that I love, and that you love too.
Little House in the Big Woods
, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. ‘Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house.… ’ ” Her voice was coming off a shiny ribbon. I understood, all of a sudden, what my father had meant. My mother wasn’t just gone to the hospital. She was dead. With my face down on the rug the voice came right into my ear. It was as if there was a rough hand grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and carrying me to a new place. There was nothing to do but lie perfectly still, no way to fend off the gripping hand. I closed my eyes and saw under my lids the yellow daylight going dimmer and dimmer. The voice went on, one tangled word after the next, until the end of the second chapter, when my dead mother said, “Good night, Alice. You make me so proud. I love you. Good night.” I lifted my head. It was midafternoon. Why hadn’t she recorded the rest of the book?
When the tape finished it went around and around, the end unmoored and flapping. It flapped while I got up and stood in the center of the room, waiting for something, anything, to happen. It flapped while the neighbor woman, Mrs. McCrady, banged at my door and demanded I come downstairs. By the time she managed to push through I was out my window, up on the roof. As a last resort she left a dish of canned peaches with Miracle Whip on top, on the window ledge, and I remember laughing a little at her, to think I was like a mouse who will come in to sniff, and then eat, the poison.
At the funeral I sat in the front row next to my father, fiddling with the frayed end of my black plastic belt. He prodded me when it was time to stand and sing. “Sleep, my love and peace attend thee, All through the night.” Everyone around me was blubbering as they tried to sing,
Angels ever round thee
,
All through the night
.
They should of all fear disarm thee
,
no forebodings should alarm thee
,
They will let no peril harm thee
All through the night
.
I stared at the blurred words in the hymnal, hating the angels for taking my mother, and I thought then that I wouldn’t possibly survive to be an adult, that I couldn’t carry the thing in my heart that weighed so much and hurt, that I couldn’t possibly carry the load through all the years ahead of me.
At first I listened to the tape quite a bit. The flat black box on my dresser called to me. “It’s mother. I’m here.” I had to slide off my bed, had to pull the recorder to the outlet, and thread the brown ribbon through its slots. I knew that if I could look into the closet fast enough she would be behind the dresses, kneeling in the clutter of old shoes, with her arms outstretched. I flung open the door. Nothing. Nothing but the small thin words coming like worms out of the box in the corner of the room. The voice was out of breath, reading with forced expression. My mother hadn’t really been interested in the book after all. She had been in a wheelchair with a headband holding back what was left of her hair. The last time I’d seen her she had stretched out her veiny, trembling hand and then let it fall to her side, too tired, too tired to want me. It had been a trial to her to read the two chapters, each word an aggravation. I put the tape recorder in its yellow case at the back of the closet and shut the door. I sat on the bed and stared down the wall across the room. My mother was curled up like a cat inside the tape recorder, clawing at the holes, waiting for me to open the lid.
Aunt Kate, whom I had met briefly when I was four, was suddenly and improbably in our kitchen, cooking and quilting, making paper, doing our wash, working terrible jigsaw puzzles that were reproductions of Surrealist paintings. She wasn’t really my aunt, but a childhood friend of my mother’s. Years later I found out that she’d been living in Sweden and that she had not been told about my mother’s illness. She had no idea when she received an envelope in Stockholm that it was going to contain my mother’s last will and testament. She was fifty-one and half my size, with gray hair cut in a bob. The angels themselves could not have come up with a better replacement. She had been married once, very young, without success. Aunt Kate packed up her life in Stockholm, moved into the attic room in our house, and lived with us until she died of a heart attack, the summer before I went to college. It was an unlikely arrangement but my mother must have known that it would work. My father
retreated into his gears and gadgets, into his study, where the liquor cabinet was kept. He was like a reclusive border, taking his meals on a tray in front of the news, ducking out in the morning to the office, coming home late. Aunt Kate treated me, not exactly like the daughter she’d never had, but like an old friend she’d traveled a great distance to find.
My freshman year in college I used to take the tape my mother had made for me to the music listening room. There the music students all sat in a row listening to Copland, Monteverdi, Handel, and Schubert, following their scores and chewing gum. I had been so lonesome and I wanted to hear from someone I knew. My mother’s voice came from the machine into my earphones. Her words, at full volume and in stereo, ran down my throat like water. I closed my eyes against college. I shut out everything in the present, waiting to be filled. All I needed was her voice to guide me through the darkness.
Chapter Seven
——
T
HE MORNING AFTER
I
’D
met Theresa in the orchard Nellie got up at five o’clock, kissed Howard good-bye, and left for Minneapolis. She was admirable and courageous, going off to Rumania to tend sick babies for two months with a team of doctors and teachers. I had skulked around the back door the night before until she was out of the kitchen, and when the coast was clear I’d made a beeline for our bed. I’d gone straight to sleep without apologizing or thanking her. And I hadn’t gotten up early to send her off either. I had been rude and ungrateful. While I was dozing in broad daylight, hours after she’d gone, I dreamed that I might write to tell her that I was going to try to follow her good advice and look on the bright side. Emma came whimpering into the room because the figurine that had come in her Happy Meal had been stepped on and was mutilated. She buried her head in my arm and said, “I wish you could get up. It’s hot. I want to swim today. Why can’t we swim?” Before I could think what to say she pulled away, knowing I wouldn’t respond, and went to find Claire.
I got up that morning only because Howard told me I must. He came into the bedroom after his chores. “Emma is hungry,” he declared. “Claire’s diaper is soaked. Either you feed them or I feed them.” As
always, he spoke in clipped sentences which went right to the heart of the matter. He was so good at fixing and managing, tending to details. The barn was as beautiful and clean a barn as could be found in all of Christendom. He pulled back the sheet, sat down, and put his hand over mine. “Why isn’t Claire toilet-trained? I’m having trouble with the irrigation rig again.” He pulled me up and held me with his arm around my shoulders. “Alice,” he said, “I need your help.”