“Heat up some of that turkey tetrazzini Martha Dawson brought over,” I suggested.
“I want something
new.”
“There’s bologna.”
“But no white bread.”
“Fry it.”
“Huh?”
“How has a child of mine lived so long without eating fried bologna? Denied a delicacy all these years.” I peeled red strips
from three slices, slapped them in a cast-iron frying pan, and turned on the stove eye. The fleshy pink circles ballooned
obscenely, sizzled and blackened at the edges.
“Good,” Mark mumbled between bites. “How’d you know about that?”
“Mark,” I said with mock weariness, “I know everything.” Mark rolled his eyes at my ritual response, coined by my father some
Sunday night as he walked through the den, where I sat rapt before
Lassie.
“Watch,” he’d said, “Lassie’s going to pull that badger away from the trap.”
“But how did you know?” I pestered, awed, after the plot had transpired exactly as he’d predicted.
“I know everything,” Daddy had said, laughing. Though dead for seven years, small things—a phrase, a song title—could resurrect
him and pierce me with fresh loss.
“Friend showed me,” I amended my answer, thinking of fried-bologna Saturday lunches at the O’Connors’, forked straight from
pan to mouth and washed down with Tab colas in pebbled bottles. “Next time,” I told Mark, “eat it right from the frying pan.
Tastes even better.”
His eyes widened. This from a mother who required glasses for orange juice.
I glanced out the kitchen window. Styrofoam packing peanuts from a neighbor’s overturned trash can littered the yard. “I’ll
pay you a penny apiece to pick those up,” I proposed, pointing. “Same offer Mother made me and my friend after storms, for
fallen sticks.”
“Please,”
Mark said. “Times have changed.”
I thought of our moneymaking childhood industries: sticks and lemonade stands, a handwritten neighborhood newspaper. “We bought
an Illya Kuryakin briefcase with our earnings.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”
“Who’s Illya Kuryakin?”
“Never mind. Have you finished packing your room? All those—
things
—on your bureau, and your bookshelf, and your desk, and—”
“Mom. It’s my stuff.”
Muh stuff,
I heard, a gruffness to my son’s voice that wasn’t merely pride in ownership, but maturity.
I let it go, content that Mark had been willing to undergo a seismic change in school and friends. An August move had advantages.
Summer vacation had grown stale for both children, yet school, with its social and academic whirl, was still distant enough
to forestall separation pangs. Mark would be a high school freshman, and while Hal and I had discussed boarding school with
him, the move had postponed any decision. Mark’s only real regret about leaving Durham was not being able to complete his
driver’s ed course.
“You’ve been great about all this, Mark. Seriously. I really admire your attitude.”
The compliment flustered him, but only momentarily. “As a reward can I get a car when I turn sixteen?”
“Don’t push it, pal.”
“Would you settle for not having to write thank-you notes for my birthday presents?”
“No bargains.” I dried my hands. “My father made a deal with me. He said if I didn’t drink or smoke before I was twenty-one,
he’d buy me a car. How’s that for a bargain?”
“Did you get it?”
“Hardly. I need to finish packing.”
“Would you settle for takeout dinner tonight?” he said, wandering from the room.
I knelt before the bookcases. At least these were easily packed items, easily chosen or disposed. There were few volumes I
couldn’t live without, and some that were downright embarrassing. To go were the books I hadn’t read but meant to. To throw
away were the encyclopedias, made obsolete by on-line information and out-of-date before I’d even been born. They’d originally
belonged to my mother, and though as a schoolgirl I shunned the volumes, with their black embossed covers and flimsy yellow
pages, Mother maintained that as long as Abraham Lincoln stayed dead, the set was perfectly fine. I’d longed for a set like
the O’Connors’, luscious red-and-blue
Encyclopedia Britannica
with glazed pages and colored illustrations bought from a door-to- door salesman. Out too went dog-eared copies of
Sweet Savage Love
and
The Flame and the Flower.
A coffee table book on interior decorating. Nor would I need Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
any longer, I thought with a twinge for myself and for Ceel.
Pushed behind the taller books, the way my children used to destroy the neat shelving during library visits, was a small paperback
that stopped me. Titled
Letters to Karen,
the cover pictured a young woman whose face was hidden by falling, golden-lit hair, madonnalike. The book had been a premarital
counseling gift from my minister. I fanned the stiff pages bound within an un-cracked spine, wondering if Hal too had failed
to read his corresponding volume,
Letters to Phillip,
and what had become of it. “You hang on to things too long,” Ceel has told me, and true to form, I boxed it with gardening
volumes, ones in which I could finally consult the cool-weather chapters.
Ellen came in as I was leafing through a yearbook, and I beckoned to her. “Come over here. I need a you fix,” I said, family
shorthand for a hug. She leaned over my shoulder, arms around my neck, enclosing me in her sweet scent of shampoo and skin.
“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing.
I laughed. “Me.”
“You look awful.”
I couldn’t argue. My ninth-grade smile was obliterated by braces, the most obvious feature in a face half-hidden by chin-length
hair. “My best friend told me a thousand times that parting my hair in the middle looked terrible, but I didn’t listen to
her.”
“What are those stripes on the sides?” Ellen asked.
“I slept in bobby pins so my hair would curl, and all I got was those dents.”
My daughter’s fingers traveled down the page. “But someone scratched out your name and put Angela.”
“My friend did that, too. She was making fun of me.”
“Weren’t you mad at her?”
“Oh no. When we were little girls playing pretend-like, I always wanted to be called Angela instead of Hannah. She could do
a perfect English accent, like Mary Poppins. Ahn-je-luh,” I imitated.
Ellen giggled appreciatively. “I like your name.”
I turned to kiss the smooth cheek warm against my own. “Thank God for small favors.”
“Let me see her picture.”
“Who?”
“The friend.” I obediently flipped to the Os. “Her hair looks good,” Ellen said.
“Yes.” I sighed. “It always did.”
“I would’ve hidden if I were you,” Ellen said with nine-year-old confidence and four-year-old tactlessness.
I laughed. “In a way I did. I went to a different school the next year.” Seeing an opportunity, I seized it. “Like you are.
Where your daddy will be a
teacher.”
“Was she your best friend?” Ellen persisted.
“Yes, she was.”
“Did you cut yourselves and press your fingers together? Were you best friends like that?”
“Oh no. We didn’t have to prove anything. We just . . . knew. Like you and Lila.”
Ellen’s brow creased. “Lila says she’ll write to me, but she said that when she went to camp and never did.”
“Don’t hold that against her. It doesn’t mean you aren’t still friends. Sometimes people mean to do things and don’t.”
“What happened to her?”
I stood up, surprised by Ellen’s interest. I forgot that about children, their intrigue with facts beyond their own timelines.
It’s both fascinating and impossible to picture parents in any guise other than their grown-up roles. Hard to imagine that
those giants of logic and imperturbability once wept over skinned knees and hurt feelings, schemed or cheated or climbed trees.
Children long for access to those people they can’t personally know. “She always liked her name just fine. Isn’t that weird?
Very weird,” I said. There, that was a fact.
But not enough fact for Ellen. “What happened to her?”
I scrunched up my eyes and forehead, pulling down the skin to make a gruesome face. “We both grew up and got all old and wrinkled.”
Ellen rolled her eyes. “
Mommy.
So?”
“So she moved. Like us.” I grabbed her bare foot. “So, so, suck your toe, all the way to Mexico.” She giggled again, and I
held up a sleek, also unread version of
The Velveteen Rabbit.
“Are you ever going to read this? Your godmother gave it to you.”
“Oh, Mom,” she said, breezing from the room, “I’m too
old
for that.”
I added the Wyndham Hall yearbooks to the T
O
G
O
box. Embossed on their covers was the school motto my classmates and I ridiculed in sonorous, melodramatic tones:
What we keep we lose, and only what we give remains our own.
Surrounded by years of accumulation, of possessions segregated into containers, it seemed that despite its intent, the motto
fell short. What about those things we never intended to lose, yet never intended to keep, those things that by our not deciding
remain part of us through simple default?
It was near dusk before I finished. Hal found me outside, trowel in hand and knees buried in ivy.
“So it’s come to this,” he said, and pressed a cold beer against my temple. “Burying a time capsule.”
I smiled at his reference to a family joke. I’d been married and a mother before I finally relinquished a timeline I’d made
for a seventh-grade history project, and only then because Mother herself was moving, six months after Daddy died.
“That was very important to me,” I said huffily, and tugged his pants leg. I’d liked the precision and detail required in
creating the assignment, liked the pungent chemical scent of Magic Marker, the bold black hash marks of history angling off
the line of decades and centuries. Certain, definite, unalterable events both in history and immediate deed since a trembling
stroke, an accidental omission of a single event on the unscrolling paper, and the entire project would be ruined. “You ought
to assign a timeline to
your
seventh-graders.” I wedged all ten fingers into the earth and carefully pulled out a crumbling chunk.
“What are you doing?” Hal said. “Taking dirt to Rural Ridge?”
I picked root threads from the moist handful. “This is a valuable plant.”
“Oh, I see. Because it’s invisible.”
“It’s arum. Just because it’s vanished doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Arum dies back every year this time.” I eased the invisible
plant into a plastic sandwich bag for transporting to Rural Ridge. “You can’t buy arum. Someone has to give it to you. This
came from our house in Cullen.”
The sky was deep violet. I sat on the top step, patted Hal to sit beside me, and took a long swallow of beer. Dark tufts of
grass poked through cracks in the entrance sidewalk at my feet.
“How nice,”
Mother had said when she first saw our house,
“a brick sidewalk when so many homes just have concrete slabs.”
Bricked entrances were an amenity I hadn’t known to appreciate. Hollow-core doors I knew. Our Cullen house had hollow-core
doors, and Mother had often commented enviously on the solid wood doors at the O’Connors’ older house across the street. I
sat forward and wrenched free a clump of the wayward grass.
“All done?” Hal said.
“Just about.”
“Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to go to bed without closure.”
Hal teased me about my need for closure, a term that, like the brick sidewalk, I’d never known existed before it was pointed
out to me. It was true, though; I couldn’t help it. I liked things tidied and completed. Open-ended decisions and circumstances
left me floundering.
“Just think,” I said softly. “This time tomorrow we’ll be watching the sun set over the mountains.”
From beyond the treetops, beyond our neighborhood, floated the familiar summer sounds of organ chords and muffled loudspeaker
voice from the baseball stadium downtown. In two weeks the sound would change tempo and direction as a high school band began
its nightly marching and practicing on the athletic fields in preparation for football season.
“You never hear children playing after-supper games anymore,” I said.
“After-supper games?”
“Red Light, Giant Steps, Mother May I.” A game called merely School, in which a small pebble was passed, or pretended to be,
from one pair of prayer-clasped hands to another. Evening noises in Cullen weren’t insect zappers and baseball announcers,
but the calls of children and bobwhites. As he challenged me to make my bed tight enough to bounce a dime, my father would
sit on the stoop and challenge me to count the bobwhite calls. “Listen,” he’d whisper with cocked head, “they say their name,”
then whistle his own identical three-note plaint:
bob bob white.
“Sad?” Hal asked, clasping my knee. “Melancholy baby?”
The chill stripe of his wedding band warmed against my skin. “You know, this spring was the first spring in five years that
cardinals didn’t build a nest in the smilax.”
He gasped. “My God. Shunned by the birds. Good thing we’re leaving.”
“It’s not that simple, Hal.” But I smiled with him; after seventeen years of dailiness you know what can’t be explained, know
that the insufficiencies of love can’t be punished. I leaned my head to his shoulder. If I was sad, it wasn’t about leaving.
“Moving gets a bad rap in movies and stories. Packing is always associated with some kind of sadness. Change, flight, departure,
death. This is different. This is hopeful. I feel as though I’m returning, not leaving. Going back to something I’ve always
known.”
“How philosophical of you.”
I looked to see whether Hal was mocking me and decided it didn’t matter. “Maybe a little sad,” I admitted. “Sad to leave the
driveway where I spent so many hours watching Mark and Ellen drive their Big Wheels.”
“I don’t think it’s the driveway or the Big Wheels you’re missing,” Hal said, touching his bottle to mine. After a moment
he added, “It isn’t permanent, Hannah.”