Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“I saw a row of three across open back there,” Martha says, after she’s eaten most of her breakfast. “I think I’ll go on back and stretch out for a while.”
“Okay.”
“Unless you were thinking of that, too. In that case, we could flip for it.”
“No, this is fine,” I say. “I’ll have more room, too. Anyway, I’m not going to sleep.”
“Really? Any plane trip over an hour, I have to sleep. Otherwise I get stir-crazy. Once I brought letters to read on an airplane. You know, the kind of thing you keep, thinking sometime you’d really like to read them again, but then you never do. I brought along this huge stack of letters from old boyfriends. I took them out and read them all. They passed the time all right, but it was so embarrassing—they made me cry. I’ll never do that again! Better to go to sleep and embarrass yourself by drooling.” She stands, opens the overhead bin and pulls down a pillow and a blanket, heads down the aisle.
I know what Martha means about old letters. One rainy day after my younger daughter had gone to school, I went down into the basement and got out my battered cardboard box of love letters. I brought it up to the bedroom and dumped it out on the bed. Then I remember putting on this old purple cardigan that had a rip at the
elbow—it was a little cold—and I sat and read those letters. All of them: sweet, morning-after notes full of misspellings that Tom Winchell had taped onto my bathroom mirror; fountain-penned missives from Tim Stanley, who went on to study theology, and I know why—so he could stand in a pulpit and talk, talk, talk. I read things that made me get soft at the center again, that made me stare out the window and sigh. I got absolutely lost in reverie; I felt really out of it for hours after I’d finished reading those letters. I almost called one of my old boyfriends, but I could anticipate what would happen. I would pour out a rush of sentiment—“Now, this doesn’t mean anything, but do you remember, do you
remember
the incredible
love
we felt for each other, do you remember when we stayed out all night to watch the sun come up by the river and you put your jacket around me and I had a cut on my lip and you kissed me so gently it made me think I could never, never leave you?” I’d say something like that and the now-balding Larry Drever, holding the phone at the desk from which he sells life insurance, would say, “…
Who
is this?”
So I know it’s dangerous to reenter the past. Especially when things come back to you as strongly as they do to me. I’m extremely good at remembering, have had this ability since I was very young. Give me one rich detail, and I’ll reconstruct a whole scene. Say “Dairy Queen,” and I’ll recall a night in high school when I was there with a bunch of friends and a cloud of gnats hung around Joe Antillo’s head and he reached up to swat them away and spilled his root-beer float all over himself and Trudy Jameson, who was wearing a blue shirt tied at the waist, and jeans with one back pocket torn off and
her silver charm bracelet and “Intimate” perfume. She had a cold that night. A few days earlier, her eight-year-old brother Kevin had fallen off his bicycle and cut his knee so badly he’d required seven stitches, half of which he removed later that night with his sister’s manicure scissors—“just to see what would happen,” he told his horrified parents when they drove him back to the emergency room. “How do you remember all these details?” people ask me all the time. I don’t know how. I just do. One image leads to another, then another, as though they’re all strung together. And in any given memory I summon up, I become again the person I was then—I feel the weather, I feel everything. I lose the person I am now to some other, younger self.
It can hurt you, remembering—the shock of reentry, the mild disorientation, the inevitable sadness that accompanies a true vision of the past. Still, right now, staring out the window at the land far below me, realizing I have no idea where I am, I want nothing more than to do absolutely that. I want to go back to the time when I started to lose my mother, and search for clues as to why and how. I suppose it’s about time. I lean my seat back. Close my eyes. Begin.
I
t started in 1958, in the very small town of Clear Falls, Wisconsin, where I grew up. It was the summer I turned twelve, the year my thirteen-year-old sister Sharla and I began sneaking out of the house at night to sleep on the lawn. It was so hot and humid that year; we felt we couldn’t breathe. The sheets were as irritating as army blankets against our bare limbs, and the tired fan in our bedroom only made things worse, blowing stale, warm air on us that my sister said felt like Uncle Roy trying to kiss us. This my mother’s massively overweight brother did ceaselessly every Thanksgiving when he visited from Raleigh, though only in front of other people, so we felt less threatened than enraged. “Aren’t y’all my girlfriends?” he would bellow, and we would say no, we were not. “Sure you are!” he’d say, and we would roll our eyes and be as rude as the proximity to our parents would allow.
We suspected our parents would object to our sleeping outside, so we never asked them if we could. Instead, we would wait until the grandfather clock downstairs bonged midnight in its old, metallic voice, and then we would tiptoe out—silent, we were sure, as any Indian ever was. We admired Indians. We dyed sheets with coffee and made long-stitched dresses out of them, cut the bottoms into unlikely looking fringes, and then cinched the
waists with beaded belts. We tucked our parakeet Lucky’s discarded feathers into our hair and put on the moccasins we’d begged for at Christmas, even though their color was an untrue pink. We arranged rocks into circles for a campfire, hunted for squirrels and chipmunks in order to commune with animal spirits, and rolled jewel-colored berries in leaves for dinner.
Mostly, though, we practiced walking noiselessly through the woods behind our house. It wasn’t easy. I thought the best approach was to
think
yourself very light, and to intuit where the twigs were—if you tried to see them all, you’d only fail.
Our parents went to bed early, as did virtually everyone in our neighborhood. No doubt we would have been safe exiting the house around ten, but midnight had a romantic and dangerous flair to it. Besides, we liked being on the cusp of something, being exactly between days, moving about like ghosts when Monday gave way to Tuesday. We thought if ever there was a time for the extraordinary to occur, this was it. And we longed for the extraordinary. People rooted in security often do.
All along one side of the house were lush white lilac bushes, and it was in them that we hid our sleeping blanket, an old quilt that our family once used for picnics—long after it had been used for many beds. The colors in the quilt—pinks, purples, yellows, greens—were faded beyond pastel; they resembled the bleeding edge of a watercolor, and the fabric was so worn it felt almost like touching nothing. The pattern was of flowers in a basket, and the person who made the quilt had embroidered a bee hovering over one of the roses. I liked thinking about how, a hundred years ago, someone else had been charmed
by the sight of a bee and a flower, had believed it worth commenting on in this quiet way. I loved the natural world, too. I loved all aspects of science, in fact—everything I read having to do with that most elegant of subjects thrilled me, though usually I did not understand what I read. It was an oddity about me that the subject I had the most difficulty with was the one I loved most. I would stare at formulas and admire them for their spare beauty without being able to grasp their meaning. The fact that they cleanly explained some higher law to someone else was enough for me. It comforted me.
Sharla and I would spread the quilt out in the middle of the backyard and then stretch out luxuriously. We would spend some time contemplating the constellations, reciting to each other all the star lore we’d learned thus far. It seemed like an Indian thing to do. Plus it required the beautiful necessity of focusing on the dark heavens, letting the phase of the moon register on the back of the working eye. The grass was a deep blue color in the dim light of night; the smell was rich and horsey. The whine of the occasional mosquito was thrilling because we couldn’t see the insect, and therefore our minds made it roughly the size of a little airplane. We wore sleeveless T-shirts and waist-high underwear, the white cotton uniform of the flat-chested.
Just before dawn, when the sky lit up at the bottom with its hopeful shade of gray/pink, we would sneak back into the house. Now our beds were acceptable, and we would pull down the shades and sleep until around ten, then come tousle-headed and blinking into the kitchen for a breakfast of peanut-butter toast and orange juice. Except for those rare times when our mother wasn’t
home—when she put on her gloves and hat and took the bus to the dentist’s, say. At those times, we would have miniature Coke floats, served in the thin, light-refracting champagne flutes our parents kept in the high cupboard over the refrigerator.
We had some thoughts about life that summer: it was a smooth and plodding thing, as comfortable as slippers. It was pleasantly predictable, widely safe. Without knowing exactly what our futures would hold, we nonetheless felt sure about the way to march toward them. Right was right. Wrong was wrong. The difference between the two was easy to see.
And then Jasmine Johnson moved in next door and set off reverberations in our minds and in our centers that would shape us more surely than anything else ever had, or would.
I
was the one to see the moving van first. I came downstairs early one Tuesday, bent on finding a “dew nest.” This, according to my sister, was the morning home of the sacred Egyptian jewel spider, a delicate creature with a multicolored pattern on its back. Much prettier than your average spider. And capable of granting wishes. If you were so fortunate as to find one still in the nest, you put your hand over it, made a wish, kissed your fingertips, and, voilà, at the end of the day anything you desired would be yours. Anything. I half knew this was another one of my sister’s fanciful lies—she believed in benign forms of torture—but I got up early just to check. My mother was in the kitchen making breakfast, the radio turned on low to “keep her company.” Perry Como was singing one of his nice-guy songs and my mother hummed along shyly. She had a crush on Perry Como. She said that. It was all right; my father had a crush on Dinah Shore.
My mother was dressed in her beautiful yellow summer robe, the tie cinched evenly into a bow at the exact center of her waist, but her auburn hair was sticking up in the back, an occasional occurrence that I always hated seeing, since in my mind it suggested a kind of incompetence. It was an unruly cowlick, nearly impossible to
tame—I knew this, having an identical cowlick of my own—but I did not forgive its presence on my mother. It did not go with the rest of her looks: her deep blue eyes, her thin, sculptured nose, her high cheekbones, her white, white skin—all signs, I was certain, of some distant link with royalty. She would not pursue the notion; I intended to do it for her when I grew up. “There!” I would say one day, presenting her with papers embossed with gold seals. “Oh, my,” she would say softly, handling the papers with a combination of wild joy and great delicacy. “Thank you, Ginny! I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. Thank you!”
“It’s all right,” I would say, wiping the tears from her old face. “At least you got to finally know.”
As for now, my mother looked up from the electric frying pan to ask, “Where are
you
off to?”
“Your hair’s sticking up,” I answered.
“I know,” she said, though she had not known. If she had, she would have fixed it. She put her hand to her head, pressed down, and I saw a hint of embarrassment, a rising up of pink to her cheeks. This was a tender thing; and I thought about crossing the room to hug her around the waist, to feel her hand with her loose wedding ring on the back of my head, cradling it, but I was getting older. And I had work to do. The spider had to be found still in the nest in order for its magic to work.
“I’m going out to look for something,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Do you want eggs?” my mother called after me. “Bacon?”
“No,” I told her. “I’m going back to bed.” Although as I stepped outside I realized I wasn’t tired anymore. Early
mornings invigorated me; it was the clean-slate aspect of them, the way the air seemed washed and expectant.
The screen door banged behind me. I stretched, searched the backyard, found nothing. Then, though I doubted the spider would be so public, I went into the front yard, and there it was, an orange monstrosity of a truck, backed up
over the lawn
to the front door of the house beside ours.
Mrs. O’Donnell lived next to us, and I had supposed she always would. She was a widow of indeterminate age. She was slow-gaited, but not dependent on a cane; she dressed in clothes that were dowdy but not quite grandmotherly; and she had a voice that was thin but not quivery. She wore thick bifocals with pale-blue frames, one side repaired—apparently permanently—with a tiny gold safety pin. Every spring she gave herself home permanents that were an advertisement against them: her steely gray hair reminded me of Brillo pads, minus the thrill of the hidden soap. She wore a dark-pink lipstick that disappeared from the middle of her mouth and caked at the edges of it, and excessive amounts of rouge that on anyone else my mother would call suggestive. With the exception of our annual Christmas cookie exchange and the halfhearted ritual of waving when we saw each other coming and going, she mostly kept to herself. I never saw anyone come to her house, except for her nephew Leroy, who was a cop. He would visit irregularly in his show-off work car, pull up in front of her house at an angle that suggested extreme emergency. He exited his vehicle with difficulty; his belly got in the way of the steering wheel. Sometimes when he left the house he would be carrying a brown paper bag folded over
neatly at the top. I had no idea what was in there, but I liked to think that it was fried chicken, wrapped up in aluminum foil. A leg and a breast, which Leroy would eat while he sat in his car, waiting for speeders, longing for salt.