Authors: Laura Wiess
I sniffled and wiped my face on my sleeve.
“Just…whatever you do, don’t leave ’em in the park, not even on a picnic table. They got clowns out there who think it’s funny to throw puppies in the pond to see if they can swim.” He shook his head and, grimacing, rubbed the shoulder stump where the empty shirtsleeve hung. “Must be gonna snow.” He gave it one last rub. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I mumbled and, when he didn’t say anything more, made my way out of the store and back down the block to Kitty’s.
When I returned, the state lady was on the phone in the hallway and Kitty was upstairs in my room, standing in front of the closet mirror holding my mother’s best black velvet dress with the rhinestones on the collar. When she spotted me she turned away, hung it back in the closet, and said gruffly, “You shouldn’t sneak up on people that way. There”—she pointed to a pile of clothes on the bed—“I got your things ready for you.”
I stared at her, unsure of what to do. She’d been in our closet, in our bureau drawers, and was standing here in the middle of our
home,
touching all our things. If my mother was alive, she never would have done this—although when my mother was sick Kitty had come in and
straightened up, brought her hot tea and toast, swept the carpet and put away the laundry, so maybe it
was
all right?
And suddenly it didn’t matter to me that she was in here and my mother wasn’t because as long as
someone
who cared about me was here, then I could be here, too. I set the box on the bed next to the stacks of clothes, winter sweaters and skirts and pants…and noticed my summer shorts and tops, the playsuit my mother had made me for my birthday, and my summer pajamas in the piles, too. I stared at them, heart thudding, and said in a small, wavering voice, “When do I get to come back?”
Kitty, on her way out the door, paused without turning and sighed. “Come on, Lou, you’re a big girl. Don’t make me spell it out.” Silence. “You don’t come back, okay? You’re gonna go live somewhere else now.”
“Oh,” I said as the world narrowed to a pinpoint and a weird ringing started in my ears. The fog returned, sapping the strength from my knees, so I felt behind me for the bed and sank onto it. The room was stifling, and I clawed open my coat and scarf.
“I can’t keep a kid. I have to get this place cleaned out and rented. I didn’t mind carrying your mother all those times she was sick because I knew she was always good for it, but this last month she was sick more than she worked, and if it wasn’t for the church taking care of the burial, well, I don’t know what would have happened.”
I gazed at her stocky, blurred figure and all I could think was that my mother’s beautiful velvet dress would never fit her. Never.
“Besides, I hear the state home’s a real nice place for an orphanage,” she said in a hearty voice. “Somebody even said the kids get ice cream twice a week. Now, hurry up and pack your box, and I’ll see you downstairs.”
I watched her leave, then looked slowly around the room. The ache in my chest was sharp again, almost as bad as it had been that last mo
ment in the graveyard when they pulled me away from the casket and made me leave my mother there alone. I put my hand to my heart, felt the blunted corner of the souvenir cardboard Ciro’s photo beneath my undershirt and pressed it to my skin.
How could I take only what I could fit in the box? My whole world was here and it wouldn’t all fit in the box. What would happen to the things I couldn’t bring with me? Would people steal them? Would Kitty sell them or hand them out to the neighborhood?
No, that didn’t make sense. It was my stuff. My
mother’s
stuff. No one could just take our stuff and give it away without us saying so.
I looked at the clothes stacked next to me, the white underpants and undershirts, the school pants and dungarees, shorts and blouses and skirts, the sweater and oxfords, the socks and pajamas. I looked at the bureau, at the top two drawers that had been my mother’s.
I wasn’t supposed to take my mother’s things. No one said I could.
They’d said,
Pack your own things, Louise.
No, actually the state lady had said “a box of necessaries” but if I brought those things and left my mother’s, they would be stolen right out from under me, all of them, and I would never see them again.
I glanced at the door. Rose on trembling legs and, avoiding the creaky spot in the carpeted floor, eased the door closed. Hurried to the bureau, opened the drawer, and slid a hand beneath my mother’s lacy nylon slips, not sure what I was searching for but finding an envelope. Inside it were pieces of an old brown, crumbling pressed flower.
Shaking, I took it.
I grabbed the almost empty bottle of Evening in Paris cologne, too, because my father had given that to her on their wedding night. I opened her jewelry box and took the stickpin with the fake pearl, the sparkly costume earrings, broaches, and necklaces, the matching sets she’d loved, and hands full, I dumped it all on a pair of underpants, rolled it up, and set it in the bottom of the box.
I was crying now, as every piece I took made me a terrible thief, but if I didn’t steal my mother’s things, they would be laid out, worn, torn, and pitiful, for the world to see.
The thought filled me with such panic that I ran back to her underwear drawer and found the two old bras with the safety-pinned straps and put those in with my undershirts, found the blue and the pink nylon panties with the rust stains that would never wash out, the polka-dot pair with the saggy elastic, the green pair with the hole on the side and added those to the box, found the lumpy, badly darned woolen socks that had always made my mother’s ankles itch and threw those in, too.
Those
were my mother’s secrets.
Those
were, not my father.
I wrenched open the closet door and nearly fainted as the scent of my mother billowed out. I leaned into it, breathing deep, every cell raw with yearning, stepped into the row of dresses and sweaters and skirts, pressed my face into the soft fabrics, wrapped my arms around them, weeping and begging God to please
please
make them into my mother just once, just for a moment, just one more moment.
But he didn’t, and Kitty would call for me soon, maybe come up to see what was taking me, so I sank on watery knees and reached back past the shoes to the turquoise box where my mother kept our photos. The box was too big for the liquor store box, so I dumped the contents into my box, just dumped it and then stuffed a pair of pants and a skirt on top of the pictures.
I couldn’t reach the top shelf of the closet, where my mother always hid the Christmas presents, so I dragged over her chair and, for the first time ever, stood on the tapestry cushion and felt around until I found another envelope, a bigger one, and so I took that, too, took it without even opening it, because I knew if my mother had hidden it, then she hadn’t wanted anyone to see it.
What else, what else? I looked frantically around the room, ran
to the bookcase and fumbled out the
Treasury of Best Loved Stories.
Went back to the closet to my mother’s winter coat, dug the soft angora mittens with their happy kittens pattern from the pockets and pushed those into my coat pockets, and then I took the scarf and the hat, too.
I jammed it all in the box, covered it with pajamas and a sweater, and as I searched for more, I knew that my mother really was gone, because if she were alive, if there were any chance at all that she would be back, then I would never be doing this, but she was gone and I was alone now, a bastard
and
an orphan, and the knowledge tore terrifying rents in the fog, leaving the pain and shame to sear sharp, stark channels into my heart.
I took all the leftover hand-me-downs Kitty had piled on the bed, stuff I wasn’t taking, and jammed them back in the bureau drawer so she wouldn’t see what I’d done.
“Louise?” Kitty called from downstairs. “Come on. It’s time to go.”
“Coming,” I said, gazing around—what else, what else?—and finally seizing on my mother’s hairbrush and reading glasses.
It was all that I could carry.
I paused the CD and looked at Gran. She was still awake, arms twitching and writhing, legs jerking. “One more?”
I waited and when she finally blinked, it was twice, so I asked again and it was once.
I hit play.
The first month at the home was a terrifying haze of unfamiliar adults and new rules, giant rooms filled with cots and girls with blank faces, of waking up one morning in pain and finding blood,
blood,
not on my pillow but lower, destroying my nightgown and underwear, staining them like my mother’s had been stained and
knowing
it was tuber
culosis, knowing I had the same bleeding from down there as she did and I couldn’t stop crying.
They came to take me somewhere and I fought hard because I had heard of sanitariums for the dying. They held me down, faceless people in white who were chewing clove gum, and I heard a man say I was
hysterical
, and I heard them say,
Mother deceased, no father or other living relatives…illegitimate…kindest thing…state is legal guardian,
and then I woke up with different pain and two small gauze bandages on my abdomen, and all I remember asking the nurse was,
Is this a sanitarium?
and she looked surprised and said,
No, you don’t have TB. This is a hospital ward and you’ve just had a little operation to make you feel better,
and that made me cry with relief, and I said,
I’m not going to die? No,
she said,
but you must eat your Jell-O.
I parted the confusion one more time to ask why I was there, but the nurse just patted my head and said,
Never you mind, doctor knows best,
and since I was afraid to make them angry, I didn’t ask anything else, only slept and wept and did whatever they told me to.
When I was sent back to the home, I arrived as a bruised and broken nobody, stripped of my mother, my last name, my home, all my things, my friends, my school, and my familiar, child’s body.
I would lay in bed in the girls’ dormitory at night, tracing my two little scars under the covers and staring into the dark until my eyes ached, begging my mother to manifest like a ghost in the movies or a gentle, invisible hand ruffling the curtain, and I would know it was her, loving me from somewhere I couldn’t get to.
And all the time, this new empty, lonely silence surrounded me. The funeral was over, the party thrown, the grave closed, and the orphan disposed of. Evelyn Bell Closson was dead and the world had moved on, all except for me. I wore the loss like a heavy, impenetrable cloak stitched with grief and pain, woven with disbelief, shame, and betrayal.
I began wishing that I would fall asleep and never wake up so I would never again have to relive that gruesome moment when I looked at my mother and she didn’t look back. I didn’t want to dream of those murky eyes or the blotchy purple skin, didn’t want to wake up with my empty hands reaching and never finding, with this ache so huge it cracked my ribs and produced tears that would overflow whenever and wherever they wanted to.
I didn’t care what I wore or what I ate. I didn’t care about anything at all.
The home sent me to finish freshman year at the local high school, a huge, noisy place that rang with laughter and hundreds of footsteps pounding down stairways and echoing through halls. I could have disappeared there—they were used to seeing the poorly dressed state kids, I guess, scuttling along the edges of life and had learned to ignore them—but the home had registered me as Louise
Bell
instead of Louise
Closson
and I was so shocked the first time the English teacher took attendance and called,
Louise Bell,
that I blurted, “Closson! Bell was my mother’s maiden name.”
The realization of what I’d said, of what it
meant,
hit me at the same time the teacher’s lips tightened. The boys in the class snickered and the girls’ eyes bulged and they quickly edged their desks away as if I was contagious.
I was sent down to the office for a meeting with the assistant principal, who, stiff with disapproval, said that while only crude people would stoop to calling me a
bastard,
there was no denying that the unfortunate circumstances of my birth did in fact make me
illegitimate,
a child whose parents had never been married and that when the time came for me to look for a husband, I must be honest and confess this, as most men would feel duped if they unknowingly
courted a young woman (not
lady,
but woman) of questionable background.
I didn’t blink when he said this. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even see him, so blinding was the humiliation. And then he made it worse by adding that any young woman indiscreet enough to volunteer such shameful information before a class of impressionable young students would be watched closely in the unhappy event she became too friendly with the boys. He said I must strive to overcome my dubious legacy, maintain a pristine reputation, and be thankful the state had given me a home, clothes on my back, and three solid meals a day.
All I could think of while he was speaking was,
Please, God, let me wake up and find out this was all a nightmare, a terrible, awful mistake and that my mother’s been back at Kitty’s all this time, going crazy searching for me. Please, I swear I will eat all my vegetables and dust the furniture without complaining. I won’t even argue about bedtime only please, please, let me go home.
I was dismissed with that warning but I wasn’t invisible at school anymore. Now I was snickered at and whispered about, bumped into, shoved aside, and on one terrifying occasion, caught in a stairwell by a pair of hulking, freckle-faced seniors, who trapped me between them and laughed as they groped my behind, ignoring my panicked struggles until I started to cry, and then they let me go and disappeared back into their crowd.