“Once, during the Depression,” she began, “times were so desperate. I’ve told you. We had three grown cousins down on their luck living with us. I was in college, working full time, trying to help feed everyone, and I heard about a teaching job Daddy would have been perfect for, but he wouldn’t even go see about it. I yelled at him. ‘How can you just sit there, when there’s no food in this house!’ Mother heard me, and she got up out of her sick bed to come in and say to me, ‘Alice, I’m ashamed of you, talking that way to your sweet father.’”
I never liked that little snippet of family history, always told to laud my grandparents’ perfect marriage. “Don’t you get tired of staying quiet when Daddy starts yelling?”
A chill passed over her face, and I knew I’d gone too far. I stared at her through the thick air, and she looked back as unsmiling as I was. Finally I asked, “Have you had any dreams lately you can remember?”
* * *
By the end of July I realized I no longer had any friends. The girlfriends from high school who’d called for a movie or a swim at the beginning of the summer didn’t even call to talk. I wouldn’t, of course, have talked to them about Mama. Everyone knew you weren’t supposed to talk about family matters outside the home. Of course, at our house, we didn’t talk about family matters inside the home either, and the only secrets that were mine to tell were about sins I had committed myself or misfortunes that had befallen me. It was best, of course, not to talk about these either.
Poor Ernest banged away every day in an airless room, as though he was actually going to have something to carry him down a river one day. And my own project—Mother’s recovery—seemed just as doomed. I felt her sinking as though into a subterranean vault, lying still, waiting for the sod to cover her.
She spoke sometimes of her beloved grandmother, Olivia Jane Hale, a woman who pioneered first in Nebraska, then in Oklahoma, living in a dugout. Ever since I’d been a little girl, this woman had been my model, a distant star of perfection. “The sweetest creature who ever lived,” Mother said, “What an angel, never raised her voice or argued or spoke ill of anyone, and if someone was criticized in her presence, she would come to his rescue: “Wendell may be a little shiftless, as you say, but he’s so pleasant to be around.”
The greatest compliment I was ever given was years ago when my Aunt Fel said of me to Mama, “She’s going to be another Olivia Jane.”
Oh no! I thought now. Not another sweet, long-suffering woman. Surely there was another great grandmother back there in time I could take after. I knew nothing about Grandma Vic’s mother except that her name was Margaret and she was from North Carolina. Maybe she was a real southern belle, fiery like Scarlett O’Hara.
* * *
I lay on Tom with my total, sex-drugged weight, our bare bodies sealed with sweat. There was no breeze through the open window, and we breathed a thick mixture of each other’s odors. “Tom?” I looked up into his eyes. “I need to ask you a question.”
“Shoot,” he said. I could hear his heart’s deep, steady ka-thumping and wished I were a girl with nothing on her mind.
“How do you feel about anger?” I asked. “I mean people getting really mad, yelling at each other, saying mean, exaggerated, hurtful things.”
With both hands he lifted my heavy face from his chest. “Patty, are you angry at me?”
“No, never!”
“Cause if you are, let’s get on the cycle right now and head for the woods, so we can wrestle and yell.”
“Oh, Tom.” I could see it: Tom and me crashing around in the trees, him tearing my clothes and me throwing him off and standing my ground, spitting it all out, every big hurt and petty aggravation about my family, hurled into his teeth—everything, including that excruciatingly long list of those things that weren’t mine to tell.
I laid my head back down and panted, my cheek slipping minutely back and forth in the sweat that sealed me to his chest hair. I wanted to marry him right then, and my throat tightened as it might have if I were going to cry.
Mother’s crying had dried to a silent, black grief that felt contagious. The other members of the family began avoiding each other. Olivia finished her laundry duties earlier and earlier. Ernest stayed in the storage room, sometimes working. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings. The General did not mention my malingering.
* * *
“You’re going to the doctor, Mother!” Freud had completely let me down. His explanation for weak egos in women—feeling inadequate regarding their plumbing. Ridiculous!
“Oh, darlin’, I’d be too ashamed to face Dr. Tilghman.”
“So I’ll call another doctor.”
“No, no, I just need to be patient and stop telling God what he should—”
“Mother, maybe God wants
me
to decide what we should do.”
She looked shocked but didn’t answer back.
Dr. Whittle, usually our third choice, put her in the hospital and prescribed sedatives. “We’ve got to help her shut off all this crying,” he said.
The General visited her every evening alone. Afterwards, he said he drove around for a long time to clear his head. So I imagined they discussed important matters, things about their marriage. I didn’t ask, of course. When I visited her in the afternoons, she was asleep or too groggy to make much sense.
The hospital was on Tom’s side of town, and I always managed to drive past his boarding house, going and coming. I knew I wouldn’t see him, but it was a comfort to see the motorcycle leaning against the garage and think of him at his desk in the back, his sleeves rolled up tight, perhaps stopping now and then to think of me. In the daylight the street looked pretty poor. A few other boarding houses and some bungalows slumped behind unkempt, junky yards.
One afternoon as I cruised down this street, I saw my father and Olivia on a porch. I pressed the horn before I saw that it wasn’t Olivia, just a young woman who had the same long blond hair. He was holding her hand in both of his. I floor-boarded the Buick.
Unbelievable! Another woman. Driving around to clear his head, huh? This secret side of him and whatever it meant was what Mama must lay buried under. An outsider might have said I had very little evidence, but that scene at that shabby house shifted so much of what I had taken for granted, I knew there was a lot more to discover.
Should I tell Olivia what I’d seen on Kemper Street? Shoot, Olivia was probably onto him years ago and knew tons of stuff I didn’t. Keeping it from me could be what kept her step so light.
* * *
Under the kitchen window in back of our house was a hiding place. As a little girl I figured out that if I sat on the box that housed the gas meter, no one could see me when they looked casually from the driveway because of the way the enclosed back porch stuck out. And if someone glanced out the window, they’d look right over my head. I had remembered this as a high perch from which my legs dangled down, so I was surprised how low it was now.
I listened to my father’s car pull in beside the Buick, and I heard him inhale as he opened the screened door to the back porch. His keys dropped, clank, on the dryer as usual. Then nothing. He was searching the rooms, not calling my name, just quietly looking for me. I waited.
It was getting towards supper time, and I could hear him begin to open some cans and bang pans, but I didn’t rush in to help, just leaned back on the white clapboards and gazed into the long shadows gathering in the old orchard. The happiest time of my life was the Second World War when my father was away in the Philippines. I was four years old when Mama returned to the house she’d grown up in. Her sister, Aunt Felicity, had moved in as well with her two kids and their little dog, Fluffy because Uncle Harold had shipped out to Italy. We used to play war right there in the orchard. Harold Jr., seven years older than me, taught us to goose step and salute like Nazis and to make the screaming-bloody-murder cry of a kamikaze pilot crashing into one of our carriers. Fluffy went wild when Howard, up in a gnarled old peach tree, bombed us girls with green peaches.
Aunt Fel and my mother taught us kids to do the Charleston and play ukuleles. They peeled all the old greasy paper off the walls in the kitchen and put up big, beautiful pink roses. The man at the store had told them that rose wallpaper was meant for bedrooms, but they put it up anyway and painted the woodwork pink. Then they took Grandmother Brady’s old walnut china cabinet and painted it pink too and the round oak table—pink like a birthday cake sittin’ there in the middle of our rosy kitchen. They said they were wild women. They laughed like crazy and had to put down their paintbrushes to wipe their tears and blow their noses.
* * *
Scraping sounds of spoons getting the last of the stew out of the bowls let me know it was time to leave the meter box and go inside. I’d heard The General tell Olivia and Ernest I was at my friend Deanna’s. I hoped he thought I had hanged myself.
I slipped in the back door and smiled at Olivia and Ernest. My father’s eyes were wide and he was breathing through his mouth. I went to the sink and began to scrub the pan.
“Let me do that, Patricia,” he said. “Then we can take a walk.” I hung onto the pan when he tried to pull it away. He raced around the kitchen, snatching the bowls from in front of Olivia and Ernest. I worked slowly at the sink, all but sterilizing each dish before I put it in the dishwasher.
“Want a Dairy Queen?” Olivia whispered to Ernest and within thirty seconds the Buick roared out the driveway. My father and I were alone in the kitchen.
“Let’s sit at the table, Patricia,” a thin version of his commanding officer voice said, trying to make me a child about to be disciplined. He’d spanked me after I was twelve—old enough to be totally humiliated. “You need to understand some things,” he said. “The city is widening Kemper Street. As city engineer I have had to visit every property owner. I can show you the blueprints at the office. Please sit down.”
Still facing the sink, I slowly dried my hands on a tea towel. “No,” I said.
“Why not? I need to talk to you.” He spoke to my left and when I turned my head away, he danced to my right. “Kemper is going to become part of Route Nine.” He wasn’t angry. Panic was what I was hearing, and I gripped the cold edge of the sink, fighting the urge to relent and sooth his panic as he expected any of us to do.
“The city owns the land the trees are on, but, as a courtesy— You saw me saying goodbye to one of the property owners. Please sit down.”
He didn’t know how much I knew, that it was only a glance: His shoulder had been against the screened door. His hat was off, maybe still in the car the city provided to him during business hours. He’d held her hands in both of his, his head cocked to the side, a lingering gesture, tenderness I’d never seen.
“No.” I still did not turn around.
“We can’t just not talk,” he growled.
I whirled around. “Sure we can not talk! Nobody in this family talks.”
His jaw hinge was working, throbbing like a heart. I’d never yelled at him before. “What do you want me to do?” he begged, palms up.
Do? What did he mean? I steadied myself on the back of a chair. He was offering something. Was there anything in the world that would help us? I took a deep breath, then gritted my teeth. “You could be a real daddy to Ernest. He looks up to you, slaves to get your attention and approval. And you do nothing but stay busy, busy, busy. He’s suffering. He doesn’t understand what’s going on with this family. Pay him some attention, for Heaven’s sake!” I was shaking.
Daddy eyes were wide and his mouth gaped.
“You can start by figuring out how to get Ernest’s canoe out of the storage room.”
“What’s wrong? Can’t he get it out?”
“It’s fifteen feet long and too wide to come out that little door. ”
“Does Earnest know it’s too big to come out?”
“I’m sure he does. He’s just working away, embarrassed, hoping we don’t know.”
He ran his hand through his curls and patted them into place. “We can’t rip open the floor and spoil the bedroom ceiling. He’ll have to take it apart.”
“No. The whole canoe, safely outside. You figure it out.” I left the kitchen.
* * *
News had gotten around town that Alice Brady, church pillar and model citizen, was back home from the hospital, mysteriously confined to her bed. Mama’s friend, Angela Worth, had been stopping by regularly with food or an offer to sit with Mama while I went out, but I didn’t think she’d like the hours I wanted to be away, every night. I thanked her and promised to call if I needed anything. But other visitors knocked, fellow Methodists from our large congregation, a few I didn’t even recognize. I caught some of them looking past my shoulder into the front room, eyeing my housekeeping.
The knocking on the door hammered Mother’s body in a way Ernest’s work never had. She lay still like a creature in hiding.
“Mother’s sleeping. It’ll mean a lot to her that you came by,” I would tell them so they’d feel they got credit for this visit and wouldn’t return. But the official church visitors, Mrs. Pryor and her sidekick, Mrs. Plottle, hung on like plaque, coming back every few days, so I finally let them in.
Mother’s inability to eat much had stripped her of her curvaceous figure, leaving a skinny, adolescent body and a strangely youthful face dominated by her large wounded eyes. But her voice was as ravaged and full of scrapes and pockets of air as a ninety-year-old’s. As I brushed out her auburn hair, the sight of her sharp little shoulder sticking out of the nightgown broke my heart. What kind of tribe submitted its weakest member to such painful rituals as church visitation? She managed to sit against her fluffed up pillows, and before I let the visitors into her room, I opened the blinds so the sunlight fell across the bed.
“How are we doing, dear?” Mrs. Pryor cooed. I resented these women, their careful footsteps, their funereal tones. I also suspected they were glad to see Alice Brady brought low and were looking for specific information they could carry away. I got them seated and turned up the big oscillating fan.