Authors: Marisa Silver
Mary
29.
Santa Clarita, California, 1982
M
ary sat on the examining table, wearing a flimsy piece of paper that was supposed to be a robe, listening to the doctor explain things to Ellie and Trevor as if Mary would not understand. The doctor’s fists were balled up in her lab coat pockets as if someone had told her that she moved her hands too much when she talked.
“But her numbers were down,” Ellie said in the tone she used with difficult customers at the Pharma-Save she managed or with wrestling coaches who didn’t play her twin seventeen-year-old boys to her satisfaction. She had recently tortured her hair into a permanent, and her curls jumped around like little girls desperate to go to the bathroom. Mary felt a sadness open up inside her not on account of the foolish disease that was making a repeat appearance but because of how dearly Ellie wanted those curls when she was a girl. It was strange how you knew from the very beginning what would happen in the end. Toby had the seeds of his death in him from the get-go. Ellie was a girl determined to get what she wanted even if she had to wait fifty years to do it. The problem was that no one wanted to admit that the story was already written. Well, she supposed that was what they called foolish hope.
“There are studies that link a good attitude to a positive result in certain circumstances,” the doctor said, “but this is all anecdotal. Stomach cancer is particularly intractable at this stage.”
“English, please,” Ellie said. She was as smart as they came and she could knock someone down a notch by playing Okie and pretending she couldn’t understand what they were talking about. She’d turn their assumptions about her ignorance right back on them like a boomerang and end up getting what she wanted. If Della or June were here they would act as if the doctor’s words had the authority of God. Those two would travel from their homes in Bakersfield as soon as Mary called for them, but she had not told them about the new round of illness; she was not ready for their fuss. James was driving a long haul to Michigan. He was always a solace to her, and although she didn’t like him driving an eighteen-wheeler all those hours with no one to keep him company, she was glad he wasn’t here now. He was never comfortable around people, and the hustle of a hospital where nurses checked your most private areas without even introducing themselves would make him miserable. And she did not want to contend with that wife of Ray’s who had a habit of turning someone else’s tragedy into her own for the sake of attention. For now, she wanted Ellie and Trevor near her: Ellie, because she was a fighter and Mary didn’t have a lot of fight left in her; Trevor, because Mary never wanted him to be alone with bad news. She would never forget the day he ran back through the camp where they had stopped after the car was fixed, waving a newspaper in the air, screaming, “Mama’s been shot! Mama’s dead!” The improbability of seeing his mother in the paper had made him lose all reason and it took a while before he realized that the big black spot on her forehead in the picture was just ink. Once he’d calmed down, she’d told him he had better give that paper back to whomever he got it from because she didn’t have five cents to pay for it.
That was the first time she’d ever seen herself in a photograph. It was a queer feeling to study the face of a woman who looked like a stranger and have to remind herself that the stranger was her. It made no sense, as if her features were just shapes on a face that did not add up to the person who was in her mind’s eye when she thought about herself. And what did a face have to do with it? A person was just feelings that came and went like clouds drifting across the sky and decisions that sometimes ended up to be good and sometimes bad. But this woman in the picture was someone who looked a certain way and would never change. Like a table or a shoe. Back in those days, Mary had stopped considering her looks and hadn’t seen herself in a mirror for months. She’d felt angry at the woman in the picture for being so thin, and ashamed that her children were dirty, and, oh, all right, a little bit excited because now her kids were jumping up and down, yelling about how their mama was in the newspaper, and other women from the camp came to see what the noise was about. But later, when she was alone, she felt something else that made fear and shame and pride a lie: she felt jealous. She was envious of the woman in the picture because that woman had not had to suffer the future that began the moment the photographer got into her car and drove away.
Ellie wrote notes on a pad that had one of those infernal happy faces on its bright yellow cover. Mary wondered how she had lived long enough to end up in a world where people thought a cartoon drawing of a smile could make your problems go away. As Ellie peppered the doctor with the questions on her list, Mary thought about how her daughter liked things to be orderly. Ellie’s house was too tidy as far as Mary was concerned. It was the kind of clean that shook a finger at you when you sat in a plumped-up chair or put your hand on a freshly waxed table, warning you not to leave any evidence of yourself. The Wrestlers—which is what Mary called the twins—skulked through the rooms like cat burglars, careful not to unsettle things. Ellie’s husband, Valerio, worked nights on highway construction, so his presence was noticeable only as clues, his dusty work gloves in the utility sink, a bowl rinsed clean on the drying rack—he knew who he was married to. Mary took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Soon she would be living in that house. It would be the first time in sixty years that she would have to submit to another woman’s rules.
Trevor stood behind Ellie, bowing his head as the doctor spoke. He was a big man used to hunching and stepping back so others could see. As the doctor delivered the bad news, he covered his eyes the way men did when they wanted people to think they were simply tired, but Mary saw his shoulders shake. She would have given anything to be able to hop off the examining table and wrap her arms around him, but she didn’t have that kind of agility anymore, and her robe would certainly fall off, which would do Trevor more harm than good. He didn’t question what the doctor said; he didn’t have the imagination to expect more than what was in front of him. It was her fault, Mary thought. You can’t raise children the way she did and tell them that they can be the president of the United States if they just work hard enough. She’d always told her children the truth. The sharp and dissatisfied ones like Ellie and Ray shut their ears to her and wanted what they wanted. The quiet ones like Trevor and James listened closely and believed what Mary told them more than she wished they had. Trevor was a good son and a loyal man, a quality that had kept him with women who loaded all their unhappiness onto his broad back like he was a mule and then left without collecting their baggage. There were times when it would have done him good to be more defiant like Ellie because it took a little bit of ill humor to make yourself up out of nothing. And Ellie was a good daughter in her way, which was the way of making decisions about the right route to take to get from here to there or where a person ought to live out the end of her life.
Well, there was nothing Mary could do about that, either.
Doris also said that Mary would not know who she was until she lost the things in her life. Mary thought it was not something a girl should have to hear on her wedding day. And now, sitting in this examining room, she knew her mother had been wrong. The hard bargain was that you lost and you lost and still you didn’t know.
Ellie kept asking questions, trying to find some loophole in the doctor’s logic, as if it were purely a grammar mistake that stood between Mary’s life and her oncoming death. The doctor’s answers were all versions of the same information: Mary’s best, her only hope, was further treatment. Further treatment. Mary shut her eyes as if to block out the idea. She’d had enough of the sucking tiredness and the vomiting and tingling hands and not being able to stand cold and then not being able to stand heat and her tongue feeling like an eel inside her mouth. She’d had enough of her scalp hurting. And where would the money come from? It cost too much to keep her alive, and for what? A few more months? If there was one thing Mary could say for herself it was that she knew what was worth a dollar and what was not. When Ray was a boy, he used to tell her she could split a penny into four parts. He didn’t say this with admiration because he wanted things—a toy truck he saw in the store window or second helpings when there was hardly enough to go around the first time. When she denied him, anger took over his body, and he would hold his breath until he turned blue, and she’d have to smack him on his back.
“But I don’t
feel
sick,” Mary said suddenly.
Everyone in the room turned to her as if they had forgotten she was there.
“You’re sick if you feel sick,” she continued, “and I’m feeling as good as I did yesterday and the day before. So we can stop all this and go home.”
“Mrs. Coin,” the doctor said. “The tests show—”
“The tests are one side of the story.”
“I’m afraid that they are, unfortunately, the truth,” the doctor said.
“Aw, honey,” Mary said, suddenly feeling sorry for the doctor. “The truth isn’t the unfortunate one in this room.”
“Mother, now you’re just being mean,” Ellie said.
“Give me my clothes,” Mary said. “I’m going home.”
30.
P
eople always talked about the body betraying a person in illness, but Mary did not believe the body had intentions. It was just a thing that worked until it broke down. People were the fickle ones. This is what she thought as she watched Ellie unload the trunk of her Tercel. Collapsed boxes that had once held aspirin and latex gloves destined for drugstore shelves were now going to be filled with everything that Mary had ever owned.
When she had woken up that morning in her trailer, made her bed and turned on her coffeemaker, Mary had been aware of everything as if she were watching another woman perform these tasks. There’s that dying woman brushing her teeth. There she goes lifting the blinds. There she is cleaning the grease off the stove because it is rude to leave a place dirtier than you found it.
Ellie came inside, set down her awkward load, wiped her forehead with the back of her arm and started to reassemble the boxes with packing tape. She wore her blue smock from the drugstore. “There’s no shortage of boxes in this world. Everything comes in a box, if you stop to think about it,” she said.
“I don’t think that’s strictly true,” Mary said.
Ellie looked at her mother. “Don’t fight me on this, Mama,” she said.
“Who’s fighting?”
“You can’t stay here anymore. You probably shouldn’t have been living on your own for as long as you have. That’s my fault, I guess.”
“If you give in to a little cough you give in to everything,” Mary said. Of course, this hadn’t been the case with Toby or Betsy, or, in the end, with Doris herself. But some things were right even though they were wrong.
“Valerio and I want you to live with us,” Ellie said. “The boys have already cleared out a room. They’re excited to bunk together just like when they were little.”
“Those boys are too big to fit in one room.”
“It doesn’t do for you to be alone now.”
Now,
Mary thought. Time was always being split between then and now.
Then
she had been a child in Tahlequah.
Now
she was a mother in California learning how to care for babies.
Then
Toby had been alive,
now
he was dead and she’d had to bury him and accept other men into her bed for reasons besides love.
Then
she had seven children.
Now
she had six. Except this separation of time was a false one. Because you never stopped being one thing when you became the other.
“So,” Ellie said, “where would you like to start, Mama? I thought we’d start with the kitchen cabinets. You sit down and don’t do a thing.”
It went on like that all day. Ellie asked what Mary wanted to do about the cookbooks and then in the same breath mentioned how out-of-date those dog-eared books were and how no one in her right mind should be cooking with that much butter anyway and no wonder half of America suffered heart attacks and weren’t people just getting fatter and fatter? Or she pretended to consider where, in her living room, Mary’s green Naugahyde recliner would look best when Mary knew there was no amount of money in the world that would convince Ellie to let that chair in her house. It had belonged to Mary’s third husband. She’d divorced Tom Ducette, a drinker she’d had to get rid of after he laid an angry hand on James, and met Nelson Hendricks when she worked at an industrial laundry. He loved to bet on the horses and he loved his awful cigars, but otherwise he was a decent enough man to keep company with, and he could make her laugh. On the weekends he sat in the recliner, holding his radio to his ear and listening to the races, bouncing in his seat as if he were the winning jockey. And then one day he stopped bouncing. She buried him and decided that she was done with husbands.
“Maybe we ought to see if Trevor wants that chair,” Ellie said.
“If you’d rather me die on one of your nice sofas, I won’t argue with you,” Mary said.
Ellie clicked her tongue against the inside of her teeth the way she did when she won an argument she knew she’d really lost. Then she got back to work. She kept up her chatter as she packed the boxes, laughing at the ancient eggbeater Mary had brought from Tahlequah.
“You don’t throw out anything, do you?” Ellie said, holding up an iron with a frayed cord.
“Why should I throw that away?”
“It’s cheaper to buy something new than get it fixed. With my discount I can get you a new iron for twenty dollars.”
“It works fine.”
“This cord will kill you.”
“The cord isn’t what’s going to kill me, honey.”
Ellie’s eyes filled. Suddenly, Mary saw her little girl standing before her, willing herself not to cry when Mary criticized her for not helping to put up the tent, or when she had to wear Trevor’s shoes. Ellie tried to gather herself, wondering out loud whether she had cinnamon at home or if they should take Mary’s jar even though it was probably ten years old, and how long did Mary think spices stayed fresh, anyway? Mary said there was something called advertising and that sell-by dates just made you buy more of whatever you already had enough of. Ellie said Mary was a paranoid old lady and Ellie wasn’t going to kill her kids on account of ten-year-old cinnamon. By then she was crying.
“Come over here,” Mary said.
Ellie didn’t move.
“Sit right down,” Mary said, patting her knees.
“Oh, Mama.”
“Do what I say.”
Ellie shook her head, but Mary insisted, and Ellie sat down on her lap. Mary felt a hard twisting in her belly and stifled a groan. She had lied to the doctor about the pain.
“I can’t remember the last time I sat like this,” Ellie said.
“Getting you to cuddle up was like trying to trap a fly.”
“I didn’t want to be a baby.”
“I know that.”
“I’m sorry about all this, Mama.”
“I know that, too.”
Trevor came by after his day at the garage, still wearing his coveralls. Mary liked seeing her children in their uniforms. She had raised them not to be afraid of hard work, and each one of them had a solid job. Not every mother could say that. Trevor stood in the bedroom doorway watching as Ellie packed Mary’s clothes, while Mary sat on the stripped bed, worrying a mattress button. It was a good bed, and she’d grown accustomed to its particular contours, but it would have to go to the dump. Goodwill wouldn’t take mattresses for fear of bedbugs or worse.
“Looks like you two got everything squared away,” Trevor said. He had a habit of reminding people that he was of no use to them. He’d had one wife who left him and another who was about to do the same. He was aware that it was going to happen but didn’t do anything to stop it because he knew that, big as he was, he couldn’t stand in the way of his life.
“Those dresses. They can go to Goodwill,” Mary said, eyeing the contents of her closet. “All of them.”
“You ought to keep some,” Ellie said. “What if we go out to a nice dinner? What if my boys manage to graduate high school?”
“They’ll graduate just the same whether I’m wearing a dress or not.”
“I can’t believe you still have these!” Ellie said, holding up the white patent-leather shoes Mary had worn to Ellie’s wedding. The pumps had made Mary’s heels blister, and she’d finally taken them off and walked out of the church in her stocking feet, upsetting Valerio’s family who weren’t happy about their son marrying a white girl to begin with.
“Those can go, too,” Mary said.
“Will you look at this?” Ellie said, holding up a felt hat with plastic fruit glued to the band. “Where on earth . . . ?”
Mary could still picture Doris’s embarrassment when Mr. Winkler saw her staring at the red velvet hat in the window of his store in Tahlequah. He crooked his finger like he meant to pull her inside with an invisible hook. Mary was surprised when Doris let him have his way. She had never once in her life seen her mother submit to vanity, and the idea that Doris might consider the purchase struck Mary as so irregular that she felt frightened. Doris bowed her head when Mr. Winkler placed the hat on her as if she were receiving his blessing. He adjusted the brim, saying a
bissel
this way and a
bissel
that way and how
ele-kant
she looked even though Doris told him that if he didn’t stop lying to her she wouldn’t buy anything at his store ever again and she had girls who would need wedding clothes. She stared at herself in the oval-shaped mirror that stood on the counter. She tilted her head in a way that was unfamiliar to Mary and that made her realize that Doris had once been someone besides her mother. Doris’s cheeks worked like she was having an argument with herself, knowing how much money the hat cost on the one hand and feeling the pull of a shameful and impractical yearning. Finally, she glared at Mr. Winkler and slapped her money on his counter as if she blamed him for her foolishness.
Mary had no idea what had become of that particular hat, but when she saw the one in Ellie’s hand at a yard sale years ago, she bought it, put it in a box and stored it on a shelf in her closet. Now, watching Ellie place the hat on her head and pose, hands on hips in an unconscious mockery of Doris, Mary began to understand what it would mean to live under her daughter’s roof. There were certain stories she would never tell her children, parts of her history she would not give away. How could she explain that the original hat sat untouched in its box beneath her mother’s bed because to have worn it would have been a personal pleasure Doris would have considered weak? How could she make them understand that a person needed to know that desire was still alive even when there was no reason for it to flourish?
“Give it away,” she said, waving her hand dismissively toward the hat.
When they finished in the bedroom, Trevor went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for the Goodwill truck to arrive. Ellie sat at the small table in the trailer’s main room and filled a box with the items Mary had chosen to keep, wrapping picture frames in newspaper. Mary sat on the recliner, her eyes closed, depleted.
“Will you look at this?” Ellie said.
“Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” Mary said.
“It just never ends,” Ellie said.
Mary opened her eyes. Ellie was holding out a newspaper, and Mary took it from her. There was the photo, now as part of an advertisement for a museum exhibit in San Francisco.
Vera Dare: Framing the Truth.
“Doesn’t it just make you mad?” Ellie said.
“Oh, I don’t know, honey.” Mary could not tell her daughter what she felt. Over the years, she had listened to her children fret about the picture, complaining that it made it seem like Mary never stopped living in a tent and eating dead birds when she was living in a nice trailer in a decent trailer park and each and every one of her kids had a high school diploma. Ray and June had two years of JC, and Della would have, too, if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so early, but you could never regret children no matter when they came. Once Ellie had even convinced Mary to write a letter to a magazine to tell them to stop publishing the picture. Mary pretended to care because it seemed important to Ellie, but payment or the lack of it was not what she thought about when the subject of the picture came up. She never talked about the baby, and her children knew never to ask.
• • •
T
he cranking gears were so loud that Mary thought the Goodwill truck was going to plow right through the wall of the trailer. She let Ellie help her out of the chair and they walked outside where the activity had drawn some of the neighbor children away from their street games. Mary knew it was exciting to watch people move away. She remembered this from the camps. People moved because they were either on their way up or on their way down, and watching a family lash rolled mattresses to running boards made a person feel lucky or left out.
The Goodwill men carried furniture and boxes from the house to the truck. They nodded politely at Mary but betrayed nothing in their expressions. She was sure they were used to all sorts of situations—clearing out the houses of the dead or the divorced or of people who had reached the point where giving up their favorite set of dishes or their television console was worth it for the negligible tax break. One way or another, these men’s work came at the end of hard times, and she imagined they had perfected transparent expressions to avoid hurt feelings.
When the men finished loading the truck and Ellie was signing their papers, Mary walked back into her empty home. The sun had slipped away without her realizing it, and the main room lay in shadows. She started for the light switch but changed her mind. This was no longer her home. It was four walls wrapped around nothing. She looked out a window. Ellie and Trevor were loading up their cars with her suitcases. The porch lights from other trailers glowed. She felt a chill. She remembered nights of slicing cold, her kids tucked up into every nook and cranny of her. They breathed one another’s exhalations. Sometimes, tired as she was, she would untangle herself from them and slip outside. She would listen to the cicadas scratch, to the sound of a night bird. She could sense the blood pulsing in her veins. At night she had been most certain that she would survive.
The truck pulled away. The curious children scattered. Trevor turned and gave Mary a wave and climbed into his pickup for the drive to Ellie’s house.
“You ready, Mama?” Ellie said, standing at the trailer door.
Mary dreaded being swept up into a future she had no control over. She remembered storms from her childhood, when the lightning seized the sky and she would stare out the window, waiting for the following thunder. If it did not come, she was left with a feeling that she’d asked a question that never got answered.