Authors: Richard Ford
I looked out my mother’s window, between the closed curtains, and into the yard. Maybe ten minutes had gone by since I saw her leave in her bathrobe with Warren Miller carrying his boots. There were no lights on in the houses on our street and no cars moving. I could just see the back of Warren Miller’s car, see the exhaust still coming out of it. I could hear, I thought, the low rumbles of the motor. I guessed that whatever they’d been doing in my mother’s room had all of a sudden been hard to do or had made too much noise, so that the car had seemed like a better place. Out in our little yard the grass was white with frost and moonlight. The weeping birch tree cast a wider, denser shadow toward the street. A magpie stood in the middle of things there, alone. It moved, a hop one way and another, picked into the grass, looked around, then moved again. I put my flashlight flat against the glass and clicked it on and shined a dim light out onto the bird where it stayed still and did not look up or at me, but stared straight ahead–so it seemed to me–at nothing. It did not know I was there. It could not feel the light that was on it, couldn’t see anything different occurring. It just sat as though it was waiting for something to start to happen that would give it a reason to move or fly or even look in one direction or the other. It
wasn’t afraid simply because it knew nothing to be afraid of. I tapped the cold glass with my fingernail–not loud, just enough for the bird to hear. It turned its head so that its red eyes went right up into the light. And it opened its wings once as though it was stretching, then closed them, hopped once toward me, then flew suddenly straight up at the light and the glass and at me, as if it was about to hit the window or break it through. Only it didn’t touch anything, but flew up into the dark and out of my sight completely, leaving me there with my heart pounding, and my light shining onto the cold yard at nothing.
I heard a car door close. I switched off my light and stood by the side of the curtain so that I could still see out but not be seen. I did not hear anyone’s voice speak, but my mother appeared on the sidewalk then, hurrying the way she had before, her arms folded across her chest, her shoes tapping the concrete. She turned in the driveway and went out of my sight. And when she did, Warren Miller’s car moved away slowly in the dark without its lights. I could hear it, its big muffler making a deeper rumbling sound down the quite street. I saw its taillights snap on red, and then it disappeared.
I walked out of my mother’s room and back down the hall in the dark to the spot I had been in when she and Warren Miller had left the house fifteen minutes before, or maybe thirty minutes before. I had lost track of time, though with all of what was going on it didn’t seem to matter. I heard my mother open the back door. She opened it just the way she would any day–as if everything was normal. I heard her in the kitchen. The ceiling light went on. I heard her running water in the sink, filling a glass, and I knew she was standing, drinking water in her bathrobe–something anyone would do on any night. I heard her run more water, then wait, then put the glass away and go and lock the door.
Then she walked straight out through the kitchen into the hall where I was waiting in the shadows as I had been before.
But she did not see me. She did not even look in the direction I was, toward my door. She passed across the hall and went into the bathroom. I had only a moment to see her. Her bathrobe was open and I could see her bare knees as she took her steps. Inside, she turned on the light but did not close the door. I could hear her use the toilet and then the flushing sound and water running in the sink and the sound of her washing her hands. I was waiting there, outside the light. I had nothing planned to say or to do. I must’ve believed I would say something when she came back out, or just wanted to say, ‘Hello,’ or ‘This is all right … I don’t mind.’ Or ‘What are you doing?’ But none of those words were in my mind. I was simply there, and it occurred to me that she didn’t know it yet. She did not know what I knew about this–about Warren Miller and her, about what I’d seen or thought of it. And until she knew it, until we talked about it–even if she assumed everything and I did, too–it had not exactly happened, and we did not exactly have to have it between us after tonight. It would just be a thing we could ignore and finally forget. And what I should do was go back inside my room, get into my bed and go to sleep, and when I woke up try to think about something else.
But my mother came out of the bathroom before I could move. Again she did not look in my direction. She turned toward her bedroom, where I had been five minutes before. But all at once she turned back because she’d left the light on in the bathroom, and I suppose wanted to turn it off. And that is when she saw me, standing in the shadows in my underwear, watching her like a burglar who’d broken in the house to steal something and been caught.
‘Oh God damn it,’ my mother said before I could say a word or even move. She came down the hall to where I was,
and she slapped me in the face with her open hand. And then she slapped me again with her other hand. ‘I’m mad at you,’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I didn’t try to move or raise my hand or do anything. Her bathrobe was open in front, and she was naked underneath. I could see her stomach and all of that. I had seen my mother naked before but this was different and I wished that she had her clothes on.
‘I wish I was dead,’ she said, and she turned around and walked back down the hall to her room. She was not crying. And she did not try to close the front of her bathrobe. When she got into the light that came out of the bathroom, she turned around and looked at me. Her face was angry. Her mouth seemed large and her eyes wide open. Her hands were made into fists, and I thought she might be thinking of coming back down the hall and hitting me again. Nothing seemed impossible. ‘You probably want to leave, don’t you? Now, anyway,’ she said. ‘Go ahead. That’s the way everything always happens. People do things. There isn’t any plan. What’s next? Who knows?’ She raised her hands with her palms up in a way I’d seen people do before. ‘If you’ve got a plan for me, tell me. I’ll try to do it. Maybe it’ll be better than this.’
‘I don’t have one,’ I said. My face was beginning to throb where she’d hit me. It hadn’t hurt at first, but now it did. I wondered if the second time she hadn’t hit me with her fist–maybe by accident–because my eye hurt. ‘I don’t care,’ I said. I stood back against the wall and didn’t say anything else. I could feel myself breathe, feel my heart beat, feel my hands going cold. I must’ve been afraid but didn’t know it.
‘A man like him can be handsome,’ my mother said. ‘You don’t know about that. You don’t know anything but just this. I guess I should be more discreet. This house is too small.’ She turned around and walked down the hall and into her room. She did not turn the light on. I heard her
shoes hit the floor, heard her bed squeeze down as she got into it, and the sound of her bedspread being moved to cover her up. She was going to sleep now. She must’ve thought that was all there was to do. Neither of us had a plan. ‘Your father wants to make things better,’ I heard her say out of the dark. ‘Maybe I’m not up to that. You can tell him all about this. What’s the difference?’
I wanted to say something back, even if she wasn’t talking to me but was just talking to herself or no one. I didn’t think I would tell my father about this, and I wanted to say so. But I didn’t want to be the last one to talk. Because if I spoke anything at all, my mother would stay quiet as if she hadn’t heard me, and I would have my own words–whatever they were–to live with, maybe forever. And there are words, significant words, you do not want to say, words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway. Telling my father about all I’d seen or telling my mother that she could rely on me to say nothing, were those kind of words–better off to be never said for simply being useless in the large scheme of things.
I walked back into my dark room and sat on the bed. I could still feel my heart beating. I was cold with just my underwear on, my feet cold on the floor, my hands cold from nervousness. Out the window it was still bright moonlight, and I knew the next day would be colder and that maybe winter would come on before it ever became true fall. And what I felt like was a spy–hollow and not forceful, not able to cause anything. And I wished for a moment that I was dead, too, that all three of us were. I thought about how small my mother seemed out in the hall with her body showing in the light, how she had not been strong or forceful, and that she must’ve felt that way herself, and that we felt the same way at that moment, saw the same future alone in our rooms, in our beds. I tried to imagine that this was a
help but could not quite do it. Then a car went down our street, and as it came in front of our house it blew its horn–two honks and then a very long one. I jumped up to the window and looked out. I thought it would be Warren Miller–I didn’t think it would be anyone else. He wanted to come back, or he wanted her to come where he was, or he just wanted her to know he was out there, in his car, in the dark, riding around Great Falls thinking about her in a kind of panic. The horn changed sound as it got farther down the street, and I never saw the car–if it was Warren Miller’s Oldsmobile or someone else who did not know us. I saw its taillights and that was all, heard the horn stop. Then I got in bed and tried to be calm. I listened to the night in our house. I thought I heard my mother’s bare feet on the floor, moving, thought I heard her door shut down the hall. But I could not be sure of it. And then I went to sleep.
The next morning was cold, as I thought it would be. I turned on my radio and listened to the forecast, which said there would be wind out of the southwest before the day was over, and that it would stay clear, though along the Rocky Mountain front snow was expected to offer relief for the crews fighting the Allen Creek fire.
I could hear my mother in the kitchen. She was wearing shoes that scraped the linoleum floor, and I knew she was going out soon. The air base, I thought, or to the grain elevator, or to Warren Miller’s house. Anything still seemed possible. For some reason I thought I’d be leaving. I didn’t have a place to go, or any place I wanted to go, but I realized I had waked up thinking, ‘What am I going to do now?’ And that seemed like a thought you had before you left someplace, even if it was a place you had always lived or the people you had always lived with.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table when I got dressed and came out into the house. She was eating a piece of toast and a scrambled egg on a plate and drinking coffee. She looked worn out, though she was dressed in a nice way–a white blouse with a white bow up to her neck and a brown skirt and high heels. She looked at me, then looked at the clock on the stove which said it was ten fifteen, then went on eating her breakfast.
‘Drink some coffee, Joe,’ she said. ‘Get a cup. You’ll feel like a white person in a minute.’
I took a cup down and poured coffee out of the pot. My cheekbone hurt where she had hit me, but there wasn’t a bruise I could see. I sat down across from her. I didn’t think she would talk about last night, and I was not going to bring it up. It was all clear enough to me.
‘What’re you about to do now?’ she said. She seemed very calm, as if something had stopped bothering her that had bothered her very much.
‘I’m not going to school today,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect you’d go. I understand.’
‘What are you going to do?’ I drank some black coffee. I had not drunk much coffee before that, and it seemed too hot and not to have any taste to it.
‘I’m going over to those Helen Apartments and rent a place,’ she said. ‘It’ll have two bedrooms. You’re welcome to live there.’
‘All right,’ I said. I didn’t think she wanted me to, though it was not because she didn’t love me. It just wasn’t the first thing in her thinking that morning.
I sat at the table and tried to imagine what I could say to her, something that we could talk about together, anything ordinary about the future or even that day, but there didn’t seem to be anything. She looked out the window toward the backyard, where the sky was visible–blue and with no clouds in it–then she drank some more coffee, picked up her fork and put it on her plate.
‘Can I tell you something?’ she said, and sat up straighter.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You’re going to have all these other mornings in your life when you wake up and nobody’ll tell you how to feel,’ she said very slowly. ‘You’ll just have to know. So would you let me tell you how to feel this time? I won’t tell you any more. I promise.’
‘Okay,’ I said. And I was willing to do that. It was the thing I didn’t know how to do at that moment, and I was glad she thought she did know.
My mother put the tips of her fingers on the edge of her plate where there were only some crumbs left and her dull silver fork. She looked at me and narrowed her lips. ‘I haven’t lost my mind yet,’ she said. She looked away from me then as if she was hearing those words and thinking about the ones she was going to say next. ‘You don’t want to think when people do things you don’t like that they’re crazy. Because mostly they aren’t. It’s just that you’re not part of it. That’s all. And maybe you want to be.’ She smiled at me and nodded as if she wanted me to agree with her.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I understand that,’ and I did.
‘I know you don’t want to have this conversation with me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t blame you. But I’m still alive. I haven’t died. You have to get used to that. You have to account for everything. We all do.’
‘Are you going to see Warren Miller today,’ I asked.
And this was a question I wish I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t really care what the answer would be, and she had something she thought was better on her mind because she said, ‘Christ almighty.’ She got up and took her plate to the sink and ran water on it. ‘The sky’s falling,’ she said. She leaned to the side and looked out the window at the morning sky. ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it?’ Her back was to me.