Now Is the Hour (8 page)

There was a moment in time, though, when the universe conspired. It was spring, a bright day, and that mysterious place in Mom came out from inside her and stuck around all day, from sunrise to way past sunset. Such a rare day, when Mom was happy, when my whole family was happy, and we were all together as a family should be. One day of how it might have been, but wasn't. A day to remember.

My maiden aunt Alma, Mom's oldest sister, was coming to visit. Alma and her roommate, an artist from Portland, Theresa Nussbaum, were traveling the six hundred miles from Portland in Alma's new Chevy convertible coupe with a rumble seat and the top down.

We were up by the crack of dawn. Everyone in a tizzy with this visit from sophisticated city folk. That house got scrubbed from top to bottom, starting with the kitchen. Even Dad was in the kitchen, Dad wasn't out in the fields, and he was wearing an apron, his big hairy hands in the hot soapy water. Mom brought out her best of everything. Her best dishes with the Puritans on them having Thanksgiving with the Indians. Her best real silver silverware she kept in a wooden box in her cedar chest lined in red velvet. Her best linen tablecloth and linen napkins. Nothing was too good for Alma.

Sis and I vacuumed the front-room carpet while Mom scrubbed every inch of every surface of the bathroom. The bathroom smelled so much like Clorox, Mom had to open the window and spray some of her perfume in there so you could breathe. Sis and I dusted the front
room. We had that old piano shining. Mom checked up on every cleaning project. It had to be just right.

At five o'clock, the Big Ben alarm went off, which meant it was time to bathe. Mom and Sis and I all used the same bath water, but Dad got his own tub of water. Mom put on her best gold dress, green and gold and kind of see-through, so she'd dyed her underwear in Rit the same color green so her underwear didn't stick out. And new lipstick, not the old red lipstick. She'd bought the new Orange Exotica lipstick on sale a month before. Aunt Alma's visit was the perfect excuse to break it open.

When I walked past the bathroom once, Mom was smiling at herself, one shoulder up a little, her head tilted back. No doubt about it, scintillatingly gorgeous.

Sis wore her yellow sundress. I wore my Sunday pants and white shirt and clip-on red and white bow tie. I polished my Sunday shoes. Dad put on his navy blue suit and blue tie and black shoes, and his dress socks and his garters. He looked like Fred MacMurray.

Six o'clock, Mom had the chicken fried. The spuds were mashed. The gravy made, the canned green beans with Campbell's mushroom soup on top. The pineapple upside-down cake Mom pulled out of the oven made the world smell like heaven.

Mom paced the rooms for anything out of place. Everything had to be perfect. Alma, Mom's big sis, who had worked her way up from a secretary in Blackfoot, Idaho, to a high-paying job in the faraway city of Portland. Alma, a woman who had made her way through the world on her own. Alma, perfectly coifed and dressed in the latest styles. Alma who rode to work on a trolley car. Alma with her important friend, an artist, was paying a visit to
us.

When Aunt Alma drove her Chevy coupe into the dusty yard, Toby, our dog before Nikki and Tramp, started barking, and the cats started running every which way, then Toby started chasing the cats.

It was some kind of magic Aunt Alma. A whole new world we didn't know. A whole new kind of magic that wasn't my mother's. The magic of a faraway Brenda Starr or Nancy Drew, the Queen of England in a tan coupe, her long yellow scarf, her long red hair, with her friend, Theresa, the artist from Portland.

Mom was a green and gold streak into the bathroom. I ran into the bathroom after her. I just didn't know what else to do. In the mirror, Mom was smiling real wide to see if there was Orange Exotica on her
teeth. Still holding her mouth that way, Mom told me to get the hell out of there. So I ran into our bedroom. Sis didn't know what to do either, so she crawled under her bed and hid. I did too.

Then we heard Mom sing out loud:
If I knew you were coming I'd have baked a cake!

Even under the beds you could feel it. The whole house was buzzing. Aunt Alma's voice, Theresa's voice passing by in the hallway. So refined, so exotic, their laughter so gay. In nothing flat, Sis and I crawled out from under our beds.

In the front room, when I could make my eyes finally look at them, Aunt Alma and her friend, Theresa, the artist from Portland, were both wearing pants with pleats. They were smoking Herbert Tareytons. Besides the cigarette smoke, they smelled of perfume.
Evening in Paris,
my mother whispered to me when I asked,
the both of them.

Late afternoon light through the window, dark gold. Aunt Alma's lipstick was red on her lips and red on her cigarette. Her red hair, her green sweater fit tight.

Aunt Alma took hold of my hand. Her fingernails were perfect fingernails and they were painted red.

Rigby John, Aunt Alma said, I'd like you to meet my friend, Theresa. She lives with me in Portland.

My hand was so tiny in Theresa's hand.

Pleased to meet your acquaintance, I said.

I didn't look at Theresa. I looked at Aunt Alma instead.

You have sensitive hands, Rigby John, Theresa said. Are you an artist as well?

Theresa wore no lipstick. Her black hair was cut short and came off her forehead in a marcel wave.

Her eyes were too big to look into so I lifted my hands, palms up, and looked at my hands.

I didn't know what to say.

Dad says I draw flies, I said.

After supper, after the dishes were done, when the sun got pink and behind the cottonwoods on the road, Dad walked out to the milk barn with the milk pails to do the milking.

Mom and Aunt Alma went into the front room with their coffees and sat on the davenport. When Aunt Alma reached for a cigarette, Mom asked for one. Mom leaned in close with the cigarette in her
mouth. Aunt Alma lit Mom's cigarette with a silver lighter she flipped open. Mom inhaled, and a lick of smoke came out her mouth and went up her nose. I didn't even know until then that Mom could even smoke. Alma's smile was everywhere. Sis sat down between Aunt Alma and Mom, and it wasn't long before those three females were laughing so hard their gums showed.

Outside on the front lawn, Theresa and I sat at the picnic table. Her oil paints on the picnic table in two lines of round spots, colors I'd never even known existed she carried in a wooden case.

Sitting that evening in the flat world, at the green picnic table, the skinny white house we lived in, the red brick barn, the gas pump behind us, I watched her, Theresa, the artist from Portland, dip the brush in the round colors, painting what was out there, painting what I had never really looked at before, brushes of color onto the white canvas the way the world looked. My elbows on the table, her with the gold, the green, the blue, the alfalfa green blooming purple, me with the colors and her, her long body next to me, her Evening in Paris, the sun going down, sun on my neck, the purple-orange-pink-dark-gold sun on Theresa's face and arms.

It was almost dark when Theresa laid her brush down.

Is the painting finished? I asked.

For now, she said.

I touched the painting around on the four edges.

I asked: Have you ever seen
The Wizard of Oz
?

Yes, Theresa said, I love that movie.

The magic part where black-and-white turns to color, I said, is my favorite.

Who knows what Theresa said then, maybe she just looked at me. Maybe she wanted to know why I said that. All I remember is that the way her eyes looked at me gave me the gumption to ask.

At the end of the alfalfa field. I said, All's I can see out there is flat. Where'd the green and purple mountains come from?

If I wasn't up close I never would've noticed that she smiled. When she spoke, Theresa spoke the biggest magic ever. Words my mother could never give me.

The forest and the green mountains are inside, Theresa said. That's what an artist does. She travels the world looking for something inside.

Now twelve or so years later, here's me looking with these same two eyes at my two tennis-shoe feet on the gravel on the side of Highway 93 on my way to San Francisco. Right next to my feet, my backpack. The moon is so bright, the backpack has its own shadow.

When I left home this morning, besides my Levi's, two pairs of socks, my other T-shirt, a couple of pairs of jockey shorts, my toothbrush and my toothpaste, my roll of toilet paper and sack lunch, my white shirt with the iron burn on the collar, I packed three things in my backpack.

Grandma Queep's corncob pipe.

A photograph, and in my pocket a wadded-up piece of paper and a dollar bill — I'll tell you about the photograph and the wadded-up piece of paper and the dollar bill later.

And Theresa Nussbaum's painting. A magic that long ago set me off into the world, into myself. A magic my mother never knew.

I was careful and put a plastic sack around Theresa Nussbaum's painting. Laid the photograph alongside. Tied the sack on with rubber bands. Put my socks and underwear around the painting and the photo and the pipe so they won't get squished.

Theresa Nussbaum's trees and green mountains are traveling through the world with me, an artist, looking for what's inside.

Later on that evening, after Dad finished milking the cows, Mom called out the kitchen window to Theresa and me to come in and eat dessert. Theresa and I set the painting on a shelf on the back porch to dry.

Pineapple upside-down cake and vanilla ice cream. Dad got to have two pieces, but us kids got only one piece, but I went in the kitchen anyway, and chipped away a piece of cake and brown sugar stuck to the black frying pan, and ate it.

Then it was just adults talking and smoking and then at one moment, my father said, Hey, Mom, why don't you play us a tune.

Asking Mom to play the piano was like asking Mom to breathe. But this night my mother leaned back and folded her hands, her cut-to-the-quick fingernails, her rough, red farm hands, into the lap of her new green and gold and kind of see-through dress, her slip dyed the same color green. Her mouth one thin Orange Exotica lipstick line.

And there they were. My mother's eyes. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes, one pitched a little south, the other east, every which way the
light in them traveled right on past, right on through, or hardly ever settled on me at all.

The faraway place in her where no one touched. The yearning she felt to be touched there.

Dear broken Mother, here, let me hold myself in such a way that you will see me, and if you see me, if I can make you smile, the trouble will leave your eyes and your eyes will go soft and be gold.

Some other time, Mom said.

Then to her oldest sister, the sister with the piano lessons, Mom said: Alma, Mom said, the piano is old and burnt and needs some tuning, but why don't
you
play something for us.

The way Aunt Alma played the piano was so differnt. The way she played and what she played. The way she played sounded like an old lady playing, all kinds of trills and fancy stuff. The songs she played were nice enough, like “The Blue Danube,” and the Northwest Mounted Canadian police song that goes,
I am calling yououououououou.
And something fast called “Gloria Mazurka,” but Alma's songs weren't at all like Mom's songs, “The Beer Barrel Polka,” “Du, du Liegst Mir im Herzen,” “Little Brown Jug,” nothing like them at all.

My aunt Alma and her friend Theresa may have brought the gift of exotic sophistication into my life, but my mom could still kick ass on the piano better than her sister any day.

Everything changed when Russell came home, and the magic of that day with Alma and Theresa, and the magic that came down to grace us at other times — not as often as I wanted, but often enough — became all the rarer in our lives. Russell came home screaming, and he screamed for a hundred days, and no one could sleep, and then he died. Mom was never the same. The music stopped, and she locked herself inside her room with Dad, and me and Sis were outside her room, and her eyes were never the same. I couldn't find her anywhere in them, couldn't find me, she was so far away.

Before Russell was born, the new word that everybody said was
brood lamp.
After he was born, they said
incubator, disease,
and
cripple.
That's what the doctor told Mom, that she had a cripple, and because of his disease he had to be in an incubator. I heard those words all the time and thought about them all the time, even when I did my chores. I asked Sis to write them out in longhand. I thought about
them even more after Russell came home. But he looked just like a baby to me. After all that talk, after all those words so many times, my brother looked like a baby to me.

One day I asked her to show me what was wrong with him. It was still winter when I asked, sometime within the first ten days of his one hundred days, after he got home from the hospital, before the time when she thought she had smothered him, before the time when the pigs got out, before he died in the spring, after the chores were done, and after school and before supper. Not day and not night, when the shadows were long and running in together, and when the chickens flew up to roost, to sit, and to listen to the world.

On the porch, before I went in, before I asked her, I could smell her bathing him. I took off my coat, my cap, my mittens, pried off my overshoes on the top step, and all the while in there, in the kitchen I could smell her: the Ivory soap, the steaming water in the porcelain pan, the baby oil, the clean diapers. All of those were her smell, and his. When I asked her, Mom put her almond-shaped hazel eyes onto me, gold just around the edges. Then she did something she hadn't done in a long time. She picked me up. She leaned her body so that her hip held me. Her arm was around me, the flesh of her arm against my arm, the smell from her armpit from under her red housedress. She showed me Russell's head and said, You see how his head is so much larger than the rest of him is?