Authors: Susan Wiggs
Molly hands me a cream leather hobo bag. “You are so pretty, Mom. Wait until Dad sees you. Wait until everyone sees you.”
In the end, I buy about half of what she wants me to get. Even that seems excessive to me, but with all the nice things to choose from, it was hard to narrow them down. We walk out of the store with a parcel as big as the quilt bag. It’s filled with new jeans and shoes, a top and sweater and skirt, a wrap dress and hoop earrings, and a melon-colored paisley scarf I couldn’t bear to leave behind. Molly and Darcy made me keep the new undergarments on, leaving my elastic-less ones in the trash. “When you start with a good foundation,” Darcy pointed out, “everything looks better.”
“Well,” I say, setting the shopping bag on the backseat next to the quilt. “That was unexpected.”
“That was fun,” Molly said. “Way more fun than a fabric shop.”
“A different kind of fun than the fabric shop.”
She’s not done, and her enthusiasm is infectious. On Darcy’s recommendation, we go to a nearby salon for a shampoo and style. We have our toenails polished candy pink and emerge from the salon flipping our hair around and giggling.
“Look at us,” Molly says, primping in the Suburban’s visor mirror. “We’re new women.”
The next day, the sheen is off our hair. Molly urges me to wear something new but I decline, not wanting to wrinkle the clothes, sitting in the car all day. The bag with the beautiful new things stays on the backseat. The outfits are too nice for a car trip. I want to save them for something special.
According to the peeling roadside billboards, we have two choices for lunch—a Stuckey’s that has ninety-nine-cent burgers, or Bubba’s Beach Shack, on the scenic shores of Lake Ontario.
“It’s a lake,” Molly says. “How can it have a beach?”
“It’s one of the Great Lakes.” I am nearly cross-eyed from sewing. The end of our journey looms
closer, an outcome I can see and practically touch. I stayed up late last night, working on the quilt. Working is, of course, an elastic concept. I can be staring out at the night sky and call it “working” if I’m planning the next quilt.
“I never thought about a lake having a beach. Back home it’s just…a shore, I guess.”
“We should have taken you to see the Great Lakes when you were little.” And here it is again, that sense of things left undone, unfinished. What else have I forgotten to show her, to teach her?
She glances over at me. “You took me to Mount Rushmore and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and the Everglades. You can’t show me everything.”
“I wish I had, though. We always had such fun on those summer driving trips, didn’t we?”
There is a heartbeat of hesitation. And in that heartbeat, I hear a contradiction. Could be, she has memories of being hot, carsick, bored. Sometimes Dan and I were short-tempered and we were terrible at picking out places to stay. Bad motel karma became a family joke. Remembrances of summers past are marred by nonfunctioning swimming pools, moldy smells, shag carpets.
“Sure,” Molly says. “We had a blast.”
“But the Great Lakes—I remember going to Mackinac Island on my high school senior trip. I saved up for months in order to go. It was so beautiful, like stepping back in time. I wish we’d taken you there.”
“You can’t take me everywhere,” she repeats.
New adventures lie ahead of her, a vast stretch of unexplored terrain. She’ll be taking trips without me, seeing and experiencing things I’ll never share. Which is as it should be, I remind myself.
Without further debate, she takes the next exit and wends her way through a threadbare town of redbrick buildings and convenience stores plastered with fading advertising posters. The route to Bubba’s is well-marked, and within a few minutes we enter Tanaka State Park in western New York, a quiet oasis on a weekday afternoon. As we head to ward the water, I notice that the colors of summer are fading here, the greens subtly shifting to yellow, the wildflowers casting their petals to the breeze.
The beach shack is adorable, and I’m instantly glad we’ve come. It has a huge deck with picnic tables covered in red-and-white checkered oilcloth,
and a long dock reaching out to the deep, wind-crested waters of the lake. And it truly is a beach, fringed by sand and weathered by wave action. From this perspective, the lake looks as infinite as the sea itself. There are even herring gulls here, and I wonder if they lost their way and became land-locked, and if that would matter to a bird.
The waiter is the sort of gorgeous teenage boy who makes me feel like an urban cougar as I check him out. I can check him out as much as I want, because he has not even noticed me. He’s eyeing Molly. Who wouldn’t? Boys have always been drawn in by her pretty eyes, her smile that hints that she knows a secret.
We order the fish fry lunch, and it arrives in paper-lined baskets with French fries and coleslaw. It’s beautiful here, and graceful boats skim across the water in the distance, the sails puffed out in the breeze.
“Check that out,” Molly says, indicating a parasail kite flying from the back of a speedboat.
“Yikes, looks scary.”
“Looks awesome.” She dips a French fry in her coleslaw, a habit she acquired from Dan ages ago.
She gazes dreamily at the sky, studying the little sailing man with stick legs, like a paratrooper GI Joe.
As we watch, the parasail is reeled into the back of the boat, and they tie up at the dock right below the restaurant.
“It’s definitely awesome,” the cute waiter says, coming to refill our iced tea glasses. From the pocket of his half apron, he hands her a card. “Here’s a coupon for $5 off a ride.”
I shake my head. “We won’t be needing—”
“Thanks.” Molly snatches the card. “Thanks a lot.”
“We’re not doing it.” I dole out cash to cover our tab, leaving a generous tip even though I wish he hadn’t put ideas in Molly’s head.
“Come on, Mom. We’ve got time.” Ignoring my protests, she heads down the stairs to the dock, her steps light with excitement. When I get to her side, she’s already talking with the guys in the speedboat.
“It takes fifteen minutes,” she says, “and we won’t even get wet, except maybe our feet.”
“We’re not doing it.”
“Ma’am, it’s very safe. I’ve been doing this for years,” the boat driver assures me.
I hate looking like a stick-in-the-mud. But I also hate the idea of dangling several hundred feet above the lake, tethered to the world by a rope no bigger than my finger.
Molly has that expression on her face. I don’t see it often, but when I do, I know she means business. The stubborn jaw, the fire in her eye. A minute later, she’s signing a faded pink form on a clipboard without reading it, and asking if I’ll pay the fee. I haven’t read the disclaimer, either, but I’m sure it absolves the boat guys of any liability if we happen to wind up at the bottom of Lake Ontario.
Studying the form over her shoulder, I point out one line. “It says here you need to weigh at least a hundred pounds. Last I knew, you were just under that.”
She shrugs it off. “After this summer, I’m well over a hundred.”
The boat guys seem to believe her. They put her in a high-tech life vest and helmet and she kicks off her shoes.
“A helmet?” I ask.
“Just a safety precaution,” the man says.
I want to ask how a helmet is going to keep her safe if she plummets into the lake. I want to say that she’s never tipped the scale past a hundred pounds, but I stop myself. It’s my nature to cite the potential disaster in every situation. I recognize that. So, apparently, does Molly, because she learned to dismiss my fears years ago. She has gone mountain biking, horseback riding, scuba diving. A spirit of adventure is good, I remind myself. It’s small and mean of me to dampen it.
Just the other day, I was thinking about what a pushy mother I’ve been. But the things I pushed her to do didn’t place life and limb at risk. Especially pointless risk.
She’s grinning ear-to-ear as they harness her to the sail. “’Bye, Mom,” she says. “See you when I come back around.”
“Be careful,” I can’t help saying, and now there’s a fire in
my
eye as I send out warning signals to the boat driver and his helper.
Then there is nothing more to say as they head away from the dock, the big engine cutting a V-shaped wake behind the boat. My heart is in my throat as they reach open water, and the rainbow
colored sail fills with wind. Then, a moment later, Molly is aloft, a tiny doll tethered by a slender cord. She flies like a kite tail, higher and higher until they run out of rope. I shade my eyes and look at her, silhouetted by the sun.
Then my heart settles and I wave both arms wildly over my head. “Go, Molly!” I shout, jumping up and down on the dock. “Go, Molly!”
Watching her fly is incredibly gratifying. I fumble with my mobile phone, try to get a picture to send to Dan. She’ll probably look like no more than a speck against the sky, but he’ll get the idea.
A gust of wind ripples across the water in a discernible path. I can actually see the gust filling the sail and then turning it sideways. Molly’s stick figure legs swing to and fro like a pendulum.
“Omigod,” I say. “Omigod, she’s going to fall.”
Apparently the boat driver knows something isn’t right. His partner starts cranking in the cord, his movements fast, maybe frantic. I stand motionless on the dock, my feet riveted to the planks, my stomach a ball of ice. Here is the definition of hell—knowing something terrible is happening to your child and being completely powerless to stop it.
If she dies, I think with grim clarity, so will I.
The wind whips her like a rag doll. Her screams sound faint. I wonder if she’s calling my name. I send up a prayer, pushing it out with every cell of my body and soul.
The screams grow louder, and then I realize she’s not screaming at all. She’s laughing.
“You should try it,” Molly says, combing back her wind-tossed hair and pulling it into a bun. She is still shivering from the lake, her lips tinged a subtle blue. With her hair pulled back, she looks sophisticated, older. We return to the beach shack to get her something warm to drink. The hunky waiter hovers, bringing her hot tea in a small stainless steel pot.
“In my next life, maybe.”
“Seriously, Mom, you’d love it.”
“I’m too chicken to love something like that.” Still, I feel a slight twinge. What would it be like, dangling in midair like the tail of a giant kite? But
no. That is so far out of my comfort zone I can’t even imagine myself doing it.
“What’s that piece of fabric?” Molly asks, indicating the dotted Swiss. She’s been enjoying my stories about the pieces in the quilt.
“This is from your grandmother’s square-dancing skirt. There’s plenty of fabric, yards and yards of it, so I used it for sashing. Do you remember how she and Grandpa used to go square dancing?”
“Sort of. Maybe just from looking at old pictures, though.”
My parents were avid square dancers. They belonged to a club that held a dance the first Saturday of every month. I can still see them in my mind’s eye, my dad trim and dapper in a Western-cut shirt, with mother-of-pearl snap buttons, and a string tie. My mother’s dresses were outrageous confections. She made them herself, with yards of ruched calico or dotted Swiss draped over a pinwheel froth of crinolines. The dresses had puffy sleeves that sat like weightless balls on her shoulders, and she always wore these horrible little one-strap dancing shoes.
The sight of my folks in their square-dancing getup might have made me squirm, except that
they were so damn happy to be going out to the dance hall together, to laugh with their friends and drink sticky fruit punch.
“They loved those dances so much,” I tell Molly, drawing a stitch through the sashing. “Grandma more than Grandpa, but he was a good sport about it.”
“I never saw them dance,” Molly says.
“Every once in a while, they’d have family night and we’d go.” Of course she wouldn’t remember that; she was in a stroller at the time. Still, I could see her swinging her tiny feet and clapping, mesmerized by the noise and the movements.
When Molly was in the second grade, my mother suffered a massive stroke. She was just sixty-four; it shouldn’t have happened. I took Molly to see her, praying my child wouldn’t act frightened when she saw Mom’s altered face, the left side slack and unresponsive, her neck encased in a cervical collar.
I needn’t have worried. Molly had happily rolled an ergonomic table in front of my mother and said, “Now you can play cards with me.”
The funny, sewing, square-dancing mom I knew vanished that day, even though she lived for two more years. Her personality changed, and dark
anger emerged from a place we never knew was inside her. It was as if the stroke awakened a slumbering dragon inside her. She raged at how hard she had worked, and how frustrated she was that she hadn’t given her kids more. I constantly reassured her that what she’d given her family was enough. She always liked it when I brought Molly to visit her, though. Seeing her only granddaughter quieted the angry sadness.
She was supposed to get better with a long and rigorous course of physical and occupational therapy. She hated the therapy, though—squeezing a hard blue rubber ball, poking a thick shoelace through holes on a board to form the shape of a spider, walking back and forth between parallel bars. Most days, she refused to do any of it, preferring to let my dad tie her shoes and push her wheelchair. Her hands, which used to effortlessly knit Fair Isle sweaters and mittens and hats, closed around some invisible object and refused to open. Once or twice, she tried knitting again, but the yarn wound up in knots of frustration on the floor. The physical therapists told my father that in the long run, she’d be better off dressing herself and learning to walk
on her own, but Dad didn’t listen. It was more important to him to do what my mom wanted.
“I wish I could remember the square dancing,” Molly says. “Not the assisted living place.”
I wish that, too. Even though I know it’s irrational, I feel irritated at Molly because she doesn’t remember my mother the way I want her to. I want her to recall the funny singing voice, the strong hands with their faint smell of onion, the perfect bulb of hair held slick with Aqua-Net. I want Molly to miss
that
woman, even though I understand it’s impossible.
“How did she die?” Molly asks. “You never talk about that.”
“Ask me how she lived. After all, that’s what she spent most of her life doing.”
“You talk about that all the time,” Molly notes. “And I do love hearing the stories, Mom. But you’ve made her into this Disney grandma who’s barely real to me.”
“She got pneumonia and was too weak to fight it.” I smooth my hand over the fading calico. “She died early one morning when you were in fourth grade. I didn’t tell you right away because you had
a school party that day. I didn’t want to ruin it for you. So I waited until you got home.”
Molly is quiet for a minute, sipping her tea, staring out across the lake, where the wind whips up white tufts in the water. Wrapped in a blanket someone at the restaurant gave her, she looks little and lost. But there is a sharpness in her eyes. “You were always cushioning me, Mom.”
“It’s what mothers do.” I wish my own mother could see this young woman now, vibrant and excited about her future. My dad, who has grown quiet and slow with age and loneliness, often tells me he wishes that, too.
“It didn’t work,” she says, not looking at me. “I knew, anyway. I could tell from the way you rushed me off to carpool. I was scared to say anything because I didn’t want to see you cry.”
This shocks me. Dan and I had been prepared; Mom’s doctors had let us know her death was imminent, even offering signs and markers to watch for. For me, the sense of loss was so overwhelming that I hadn’t been able to talk about it.
Even now, years later, it’s still hard. There is something about losing your mother that is perma
nent and inexpressible—a wound that will never quite heal.
“I had a rotten day at school that day,” Molly explains. “Hated the party. There were these awful cupcakes, and the games were lame. So it’s not like you spared me anything.”
“Moll, I never realized you knew what was going on that day.”
“Nope. You didn’t. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to upset you. We were both trying to protect each other, and it didn’t work.”
I draw the thread to the end and make a tiny, invisible knot before cutting it free. “How did you get so smart?”
“Must’ve inherited it from my mother. We’d better get going.” She drinks the last of her tea, combs her hair again. The breeze is reviving her curls. She stands up and folds the blanket. She waves a thank-you to the waiter and he hurries over to our table.
I put my things into the crafter’s bag and head back to the car while she lingers to talk to the waiter. Looking back, I feel a jab of annoyance. I don’t like the way he stands so close to her, checking her out. It’s on the tip of my tongue to call out, to remind them both that I’m standing here. Then I
think about what Molly said about me always stepping in, trying to smooth things over for her, to absorb the body blows life tends to deal out from time to time.
The afternoon at the lake caused an almost imperceptible shift in our mood. We’re more on edge. Our silences are longer, corresponding to the flat, boring stretches of highway.
How do long-haul truck drivers handle the tedium? How will I handle it, driving back alone, the Suburban emptied of Molly’s things, devoid of her fruity-smelling hair products and her lively chatter?
What’s really eating me is this. We’re almost there.