I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (16 page)

Since 1999, I’ve been thinking about shoes. In 1996, a book had come out about the children in Woburn who died from leukemia, their water contaminated. A few years later, out of the blue, Sue Anne from work said she used to live near Brockton, that her husband’s company had tested the land in Brockton for a bus station, but it had been too contaminated to build on. Then, Sue said she’d seen an article from
Boston Magazine
with high childhood leukemia deaths in Brockton. I looked the article up online. I thought it said 100 deaths. What was the time frame? How many children have died since Tommy died? A few months later, I was invited to a money seminar. Broke, I went and was introduced to a woman who told me that she had self-published a book about her son who had died from leukemia after growing up in Brockton. She said that she felt his death was environmentally related. I always felt there was something wrong with the city. It felt so gray—the sky, the trees like stick figures reaching out in panic.

In 2006, in Boston, the Commonwealth filed a complaint against Brockton for pollutants in the public water, fined the poor city. There’s now going to be an $86-million sewage-treatment upgrade. But I’m not thinking phosphorus, chlorine, fecal coliform, ammonia—I’m thinking carcinogens, lethal environmental hazards. I’m thinking of the leukemia that came from the ground in Woburn, from tanneries, the making of shoe leather. All the Woburn kids who died from leukemia.

Summers, I’d ask to see my son. He was so close. On the Cape, staying with my mother’s parents in the Yarmouth Campground, a circle cut in the woods, train track running in a field behind the house, across the entrance to the campground. “Can we go to Brockton today,” I’d ask my dad, “to Tommy’s cemetery?” I wouldn’t say
grave
. Whispering in the front yard, the attic of the house behind us, its one dark window listening. A secret. When I’d wanted to go to Tommy’s funeral, my father had said, “No one knows where he came from.” He’d said, “I’m not saying you can’t go, but you have to call his parents, and ask them if you can be there.” My relatives. Tommy’s adoptive parents. I couldn’t ask. I didn’t go. I’m a secret too, a secret mother.

Our family was inside the house, and to the left at the picnic table, a round barbecue. “Everyone will ask where we’re going,” my dad said. As if that was a solid reason not to go to Brockton. “And I don’t know if I can even find it. I’d have to ask …” Whom would he ask? His relatives, the ones we can’t hurt, and if we ask for directions, we’ll hurt them. We’ll remind them that I gave them Tommy, and Tommy died. My dad is looking around at the ground, as though he’s dropped several things at once. And that’s that. We can’t separate from the others, we can’t tell them where we’re going, we can’t ask directions, we can’t hurt the relatives. It’s an hour drive to Brockton. I imagine it is all uphill, the highway climbing after I cross the bridge, past the cranberry bogs, and the
white boulder walls, the pine trees like individual steeples. When I leave the Cape, the houses look sad until I get to Boston. The in-between. Brockton is in the in-between.

I’ve had plans to get there myself. Once, I left my family at Nana and Gramp’s house in the campground, and took the Plymouth-Brockton bus to Boston, to see Frank who’d worked with me at the health food store in Florida. I slept with his two cats on the floor. My bus home left after dark. I didn’t want to leave the city, so took the latest returning bus. It was the Fourth of July, and all around me people went in and out of stores, until it was dark. Then they surrounded me in one big parade. I liked their voices, how they reminded me of the first voices I heard. I kept my suitcase in a locker at the station until I boarded. Around ten, my bus had been near Brockton, and it was going to stop. I thought of getting off the bus with the handful of dollars I had left. I could call my relatives and say, “I’ve come to visit.” Or, I could stay in the train station all night, and call in the morning, ask them for directions to the cemetery. Or, I could get off the bus and just walk, let my feet feel the ground, and ask strangers to point me the right way. I could sleep on the grass beside Tommy, all night. No one would see me there. It’s dark. I’d find a pay phone, call my parents, lie. Say I’m staying one more night in Boston.

I didn’t even stand up. Or reach for my bag. The bus just carried me over the bridge. Cargo. Once, as a way to access my subconscious to find out what I wanted, I wrote with my left—nondominant—hand. I used a crayon. I had to buy a box of crayons to do this. When I wrote the first question with my left hand, it was wobbly, like a child’s, as if I were just learning cursive. The question read: “Why don’t you go to him?” I wrote back with my right hand, said that I wanted my new boyfriend to go with me. He seemed practical, more practical than me. But when I’d asked him, he’d looked at me sorrowfully, as if I were an animal, one of
his cats, in pain. He had a very sorrowful face. He’d nod and listen and appear convinced, looking as if he’d love me forever. He’d go across the street to school and sit in my friend’s office and tell her how much he loved me. But he wouldn’t lift a finger. Wouldn’t go. I wrote with my left hand again. The second question read: “You have a car. You have a vacation. Why don’t you go?” I had a car I’d bought for $500, an orange Oldsmobile. People drove old cars across the country all the time. They unfolded maps. I would get lost, no doubt. I was nervous about reading a map, trusting the blue and red rivers to get me where I wanted to go. And once there, I’d have to ask, “Where is he? Where is my son?” Asking quietly because no one could know I was asking. It felt almost shameful, my wanting to find him when it seemed as though I had no right, or little right. As if I’d just been the vehicle, the receptacle. Not the real mother. Not the responsible people who flew across the country to take him, to take care of him every day, a married couple, into their own home. A family.

Over the years, my asking my parents became a blur. But in 1998, I was in a car with my father’s mother, Nana Smith, who had lived in Brockton all her life. She was giving us directions to Calvary. Being driven by others is a form of captivity—it’s hard to know the way when I’m not driving.

The stones spell the cemetery name across the grass. It’s so big, you could see it from the sky, from a low plane, like HELP written in the sand or snow. Help. Nana Smith helps me with the flowers. The florist is nearby, and inside there is a patio of flowers. She said Tommy liked pink carnations. “He liked the petals,” she said. So, I got those, and a yellow rose. My mom brought a spade and water in a plastic watering can.

My dad helped me dig, but once the flowers were in the ground, the rose on the stone ledge, they agreed all at once to leave me alone, and walked off as if they had somewhere to go. I buried my
silver fish ring with the turquoise eyes in the dirt. It was the closest thing I had to a toy. I can’t tell you when it happened, when I heard his voice. I know I was alone. I tried to hide my head behind the stone, so my family couldn’t see me, so I could be unseen with my son. I didn’t want to be careful, to keep myself calm—I wanted to pay attention to him, not keep my face emotionless for others.

I’d only heard his voice when he was born, when he cried. And little breaths, tiny contented sounds when I held him. His crying when I gave him away. And once, on the phone with Julia who’d been calling for my dad, I’d heard Tommy in the background—“la, la, la,” he’d said. He was singing. He was only fourteen months old when he died. He wasn’t speaking in sentences. How old is a soul? And how do the dead talk anyway? How do you hear the dead talk? I have no idea. But when I sat there alone on the grass in front of his stone, he said, “You’re here!” with more joy than I have ever heard in my life. I’d been afraid he’d be mad at me for taking so long to get there. For not knowing how to save enough money to fly there myself, to rent a car, to be brave enough to ask directions to the cemetery, to find it alone. To visit him. But he wasn’t mad at all. I heard it in his voice, his gladness. He loved me. I was his mother. I’ve never heard the dead before or since. The force field lifting just long enough for me to hear his voice.

Each year after that, I went to Calvary with my family—once Nana Smith’s half sister came, once my nephew came and helped me dig to plant yellow tulips. I tried to pick the most fun-looking flowers, the happiest. The last time Nana Smith went with me, she had Alzheimer’s. She’d been Tommy’s caretaker when my relatives worked. I wanted to ask her to tell me about him, but I couldn’t. And now she was forgetting. That trip, in the backseat of the car with Nana Smith, the return trip, was the only time I cried in front of anyone in my family. Except for the day my dad told me Tommy died—but that was an uncontrollable blur of grief. This
time my grief is stark. It was terrible. I felt so unprotected. My mom turned her head a little from the passenger seat. To the left. Tense. The front seat was tense. In a way, they are like children I am trying to trick. I’m trying to trick them into thinking I’m okay. Nana Smith covers my hand with her hand on the vinyl seat. It’s summer, my palm is hot, the vinyl is sticky, ridged. It feels as if she has a dozen rings on her fingers, pressing into mine, hard. But her hand is almost bare of jewelry, skin cool, her grip increasing in strength, as if she’s relieved to finally see what I need, and to know what to do. She comforts me.

In the summer of 2003, I rented a car, and met Nana Smith’s half sister, Anne. Nana Smith was in an assisted living facility by then, briefly, before she would run away. Before she’d be put in a hospital where she refused to eat, where she died. I had called Anne and asked her if I could see Nana Smith. She said, “Yes, I’ll help you see your grandmother.” But when I’d arrived, Nana said, “I don’t know what to say to you without your parents here.” She was scared of me. I’d been late, which had been an upset. The worry had made Nana ill. She wasn’t herself. Afterward, I asked Anne how to get to Calvary, and she said, “I’ll show you.” I followed her car in my rental car. At the stoplights, I wrote down streets, turns, anything direction-wise to help me later. I had a little journal that I balanced on the steering wheel.

It’s 2006. I have an appointment at the Brockton Shoe Museum. I want to look around. But first I’m going with my parents to visit my son’s grave. They live in Massachusetts now, for half the year. I’m visiting. My father is aggravated about going to Brockton this summer. His mother, Nana Smith, has died just weeks before. I was coming to see her, I had a ticket. But she died. I missed her. I missed her funeral. I signed a guest book that the funeral home set up online. Relatives I don’t know signed it. One typed in a Millay poem, with a woman who disappears down a dark path.
I didn’t know anyone in my family liked poetry. These unknown relatives use nicknames I don’t know. Maybe my dad is just upset. I should let him be upset. His mom died.

The florist beside Calvary has had a fire. It’s ashy. My parents are driving. They’re flummoxed by the fire. I need to buy flowers. “There’s a Walmart back the way we came,” I say. “It’s too far,” my mom says, irritated. We still don’t know the way here very well, without a guide, without Nana Smith. It’s slow going. We look for flowers in the immediate vicinity to avoid getting lost. My dad and I walk into a derelict store in a derelict shopping plaza, with clothes on tables on the sidewalk. Mom waits in the car. There is a nice, dark-haired cashier in the beat-up store selling home supplies. Men are holding beams of wood, standing in line at the cash register. The cashier’s skin is like bluish milk, as if he never goes to the beach, his eyes red-rimmed, and when I ask, “Do you know where I can buy flowers?” he says, “That’s a good question.” It feels almost like a compliment. I would like to take him for coffee, and maybe date him, but I don’t live here. And if we lived together, we would be so poor (this place can’t pay much at all), even our electricity would be wan. We’d sit across the table from each other in the weak light wondering how to leave. But I feel as though I belong in this dark place, that I should house-hunt here.

As we drive away, my mom or dad says, surprised, “That’s the old Bradlees where Nana Smith worked.” The derelict store was the old Bradlees, with all the toys. I was a child the last time I saw her working there. I’d walked through the door swish, gone to my right, then left, the sections like a maze, and there she was with her piled-high hair, wearing a smock. It had seemed glamorous to me, her job: all those shelves and knowing where to stand, how to help, how to move through the aisles. She lived across the street and walked to work. She lived at 87 Howland Street, in a blood-red house. Old blood. The milky-nice cashier was walking in the
aisles where she walked. That I walked as a child. I remember it in black-and-white, as if it was a movie.

The cashier gave us directions to a Home Depot, but I’d been looking at his kind eyes, not listening carefully to directions, and we wind up in dead end after dead end. We take the long drive back to Walmart. My parents wait in the car. “Don’t take forever,” my mom yells. I come from speedy people, but I am not speedy. They don’t like waiting. It’s hot for Massachusetts, muggy, and my father is sweating in the car. He likes the Cape, the breeze. We’re too far inland for him. I buy beautiful yellow flowers still in their pot, very tall and happy. The cashier snips off the stalks that have died. She says, “It needs water.” When I ask, “Do you have some?” she says, “Wait.” The cashier reaches under the counter, fills up the bottle she drinks from, pours it in.

In the backseat of my parents’ red car, shiny red of penny candy, I hold the pot of flowers on my lap, and the weight of it is like a child.

When I visit my son, I always put my fingertips inside the shamrocks carved in his stone. “Sweetest boy,” I say. It’s like touching the keyhole to a door I don’t know how to open. I say, “Mom’s here.” If I were alone, I would lie down on the grass, over him. I would get as close and quiet as I can. But I don’t want anyone else to see this. I can only pay attention when I’m unseen. So, I save the lying down for later.