Then there came a morning when she wouldn’t get up, when she lay motionless in bed, staring at nothing. I stood by the door, thinking that if I said the right thing, she would smile, then laugh, then hold me against her and say, “Oh, you know, don’t you?” I sat on the bed once, lowered myself carefully next to her, tried to look into her eyes. She stared straight ahead. Her breathing was so quiet. She was like an alive dead person. She scared me, and I ran to Helen. “She’s sick,” Helen told me. “Daddy’s taking her to the hospital. Come, I’ll do your hair in braids like you like. You can use my yellow ribbons.” This, more than anything, terrified me. I never got to use Helen’s ribbons. She kept them on her dresser, laid out like museum pieces. If I ran my fingers along them to feel their satin surfaces, she would shake me by the shoulders. I didn’t want to wear her ribbons. I wanted my mother back. But this time, she was gone too far away. I watched my father carry her down the steps and out to the car. His face as he drove away was as impassive as hers.
Things changed drastically after my mother went into the hospital. My father immediately hired a stout blond German woman named Anna to help out around the house. She was a spinster who sat on her porch and frowned at all of us children when our ball landed in her yard. She lived with her brother and his wife, two doors down from us. She had always smiled and waved at my father, secretly straightened the back of her dress when she stood talking to him. She didn’t do well at holding jobs, as her brother seemed to enjoy pointing out. “Anna speaks her mind come hell or high water,” he said. “She doesn’t win many popularity contests.” But she liked my father, and she was happy to take a job with us. “You girls behave for her,” he told us. “I’m not paying her much of anything. We’re lucky to have her.”
Anna believed strongly in order and discipline. We ate regular meals at regular times. I remembered often the last meal my mother had made. It was hot outside, and she’d made fruit salad. When my father came home and saw what was on the dinner table, he’d said, “Fruit salad?” Mary, the youngest of us at five, said excitedly, “With whipped cream, Daddy!” He’d opened the refrigerator, scowling, and then left the house, slamming the door. My mother shrugged. “He’s gone out for a steak,” she said. “He’ll just get hotter, I’ll bet you.” She pulled her blouse away from her chest. “It must be ninety-nine degrees. When it’s like this, it is such a pleasure to eat something so cool. Don’t you think?” “It’s pretty, too,” I’d said, and my mother had smiled at me. Later that night, I heard the screen door slam. Then I heard my mother’s apologetic murmurs, and the short, angry sentences my father said back to her. He’s still mad, I’d thought. Even after he’s had his steak, he’s still mad.
Now we had meat, potatoes, and a vegetable every night. We were to eat everything on our plates, clean them well enough to flip them over, and then efficiently have dessert on the other side. We no longer picked out our own clothes to wear—Anna chose an outfit for us each night before she went home. Although my teacher commented positively on my improved appearance, I didn’t like having my clothes picked out. Nor did I like the influx of strangers into our house—friends of Helen’s began coming over, and giggling with her behind closed doors.
When it was bath time, Anna made me stop whatever I was doing immediately. “Come now,” she would say. “You wash like I told you—start with your hair, and work all the way to your toes. Don’t forget anything in the middle. And hurry—there are others waiting.” I used to stare into her ruddy, stiff face as she ordered me about, looking for a way to see into her. But there was no access for me. Her braids were wound so tightly around her head. Not a single hair was out of place—loose, blowing softly, and itself. I looked carefully, in front and behind, but everything was exactly in place.
While I grew more and more unhappy with this new arrangement, I noticed something about my father: he seemed more and more content. He smiled at me one night after dinner, patted his lap, and said, “Come here, Lizzy. Tell me what you did in school today.”
I climbed onto him and said, “Mary misses Mama. She was crying today.”
“Ah, well … I know. And you—what did you do in school? Numbers? Spelling?”
I heard the clatter of the dishes Anna was doing in the kitchen. I saw that my father’s hair was neatly combed. I ran my fingers along the line of his part, and he pulled my hand away.
“Where is Mama?” I asked.
He stopped smiling. “She’s in the hospital, Lizzy. You know that.”
“When will she come home?”
He moved uncomfortably under me. “Get off me, now. You’re getting fat!”
I climbed down, then asked again, “When will she come home?”
He sighed. “I don’t know, Lizzy. The doctors are trying to help her.”
“Does she miss us?”
“I’m sure she does.”
“I want to see her.”
He looked away from me. “Where are your sisters? Where did everyone go?”
I put my hand on his arm. “Can I see her?”
“Lizzy, it’s not a place for little girls. I can’t bring you there. They have rules. Why don’t you draw her a picture? I’ll go and see her tomorrow and bring it to her. She likes your pictures.”
I considered this. “I will draw her a picture. But I want to give it to her.”
I felt Anna’s presence behind me, and then heard her voice. “You’re first tonight, young lady. Up into the bathroom.” I didn’t move, and my father started to get up.
“No, Carl,” Anna said. “I can do this. You read your paper.”
I saw my father smile, and then he leaned back into his chair. “Go, Lizzy,” he said. He began to read.
After my bath, I drew my mother a bouquet of flowers. They were all small blossoms, which I knew she liked best. “They seem so shy, don’t you think?” she’d told me. “And inside, the most secret.” I made them all different colors, even silver and gold. “For you,” I wrote, “who I love, love, love. Love, Lizzy.” I folded the picture into fours, then slid it under my nightgown. I lay on my stomach so that it would stay where I’d put it: next to my heart, like a promise being made.
That night, I dreamed that a flower grew out of my eye. I was astounded, and stared and stared at myself in the mirror. I knew it was impossible, but there it was: a thin, supple stem exploding into a deep purple blossom, with a glowing yellow center. It swayed delicately back and forth as I turned my head, trying to see the source, to understand where it came from. Then I reached up and picked it, and ran to tell my father that it had grown out of my eye. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. I stood before him defiantly, and grew another flower, from the same eye, which was even lovelier than the first. I picked it again, and handed it to him. “Here,” I said. Behind me, my mother materialized—filmy, beautiful, and smiling. “You can see the connection, Carl, can’t you?” she asked. “Look at the veins on the petals. Now see them on your eyelid. They are both part of the same thing.” I awakened suddenly, feeling frightened and inspired both. I felt for the drawing and, finding it safely against my chest, held it there while I went to look in the bathroom mirror. I saw nothing but my familiar self. As I was returning to bed, I heard a woman’s voice coming from downstairs. I crept into the living room and saw Anna sitting close to my father on the sofa. Her voice was low and thick sounding, and she was smiling. Then I saw my father reach out and touch along the side of her face. I was horrified. I had seen Anna as a kind of machine, a necessary evil we would have to endure until my mother came back to take over in her comfortable, haphazard way. Now it occurred to me that Anna was a woman, and that she saw my father as a man. I had seen Anna eat, and she was greedy and thorough. She and my father had been sitting in the dim light for who knew how long, alone. I cleared my throat and they both jumped and turned toward me. “It’s time for you to go home,” I told Anna.
My father, flushed, said, “Lizzy …”
Anna stood up. “Well, you are right, Lizzy. I
have finished my work for the day. Now I am just talking to Carl before I leave. It is business for big people, and not little girls.” She came toward me. “I will help you back to bed.”
“I don’t need any help,” I said, and turned toward my father.
He paused, then rose and said, “Well … thank you, Anna. I’ll see you on Monday.”
I saw her eyebrows raise slightly. “All right, then, Carl,” she said, and smiled at him. When she turned toward me, her smile was gone.
Early the next morning, I dressed and came into the kitchen, where my father was sitting at the table with his coffee. I was relieved that it was Saturday and I could talk to him alone. I held my drawing out toward him. “This is what I made for Mama,” I said.
He looked at his watch. “It’s so early, Lizzy. Why are you up already? Everyone else is sleeping.” I nodded, agreeing. “Why don’t you go back to bed? I’ll bring your picture when I go to see your mama.”
“I want to come.”
He sighed. “You can’t. I told you little girls can’t come there.”
“How do you know?”
He stared at me, exasperated. “If you come, your sisters will want to come, too. I can’t bring so many.”
“They don’t want to come.”
“I’m sure they do, Lizzy.”
“No, they don’t. I asked them. They don’t want to come with me. They’re scared. But I’m not.”
He folded the newspaper. “All right, I’ll bring you this time. But if they say you can’t come in, you’ll have to wait in the lobby by yourself. Can you do that?”
I said yes, because I was supremely confident that I wouldn’t have to. I knew I would see my mother. She had come to me in my dream last night. She wanted to see me.
I played dolls with Mary until it was time to go. My good fortune was making me feel benevolent, and I let her lead. “Now we are going to the park,” she said, and we took the dolls into the backyard.
“Now they get to the park,” I said, “and it’s a funny kind of sky and all of the sudden they see a bush with diamonds growing on it, and they pick them and buy a castle with alligators in the moat.”
“No!” she said. “I say what! Now they see a bush and it has money all on it.”
“All right,” I said. “That’s fine.”
There was some reluctance on the part of the hospital staff to let me see my mother. But eventually, they said I could visit her if I would stay only ten minutes. I agreed readily, and then, holding my father’s hand, went down the long hall toward my mother’s room.
There were two narrow beds in her room. The one by the window was empty, and the one by the door held a woman who looked somewhat like my mother. She was motionless, lying on her back. Her eyes were open, though, and I was relieved to see that she looked at me when I came over to her. “Mama?” I said. “I came to see you. I brought you a drawing. It’s of something you like.” I held the paper toward her, and she began to weep. “Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t cry, Mama.” I looked for help from my father, but he was standing far away, looking embarrassed. “See?” I said, opening the drawing. “It’s flowers.”
She smiled, and traced the outline of the blossoms with her fingers. Then she put her hand under my chin. I had forgotten the wonderful lightness of her touch, and I leaned toward her, missing her more at that moment than I had in all the time she’d been gone. “You are Lizzy, aren’t you?” she asked. I was shocked at first, then embarrassed, like my father. But then I climbed up on the bed to sit beside her. “Yes I am,” I said. “And you are the best mother. And soon you will come home, and we will have a party with paper plates.”
“Yes.” She sat up in bed and propped the pillow behind her. Then she looked up at my father. “Carl?”
He stepped forward.
She hesitated, closed her mouth, which had started to say something, and leaned back against the pillows to stare into his face for a long moment. Then she said in a low and carefully controlled voice, “I do want to come home.”
I grew very excited. But my father said, “I don’t think yet, Marion. The doctor said it would be a few more weeks, anyway.”
She nodded, and looked down into her lap. Her hands looked thinner to me, her hair dull and unkempt. I didn’t understand her compliance. Why didn’t she simply get dressed and come with us, laugh gently at my father and ignore his protestations in the way she had always done before? A nurse came in and handed my mother a paper cup full of pills. She swallowed them without looking at them. “What was that?” I asked.
She shrugged, and answered in a flat voice, “I don’t know.”
I felt an area at the base of my throat hurt with sudden anger. “Why don’t you come home today? Why don’t you?”
My father stepped forward and took my hand. “We’ve got to go now, Lizzy. Tell your mother good-bye.”
I pulled my hand away. “No.”
“If you behave that way, you can’t come back anymore.”
“I don’t care.”
My mother reached out toward me. “Come here, Lizzy. I will tell you a secret.”
I hesitated, then went to her. She brushed back my hair, and whispered in my ear, “I am with you still.”
“No you’re not,” I said petulantly. “Big, fat Anna is.”
She looked at my father. “The woman from down the street that helps out,” he said. “I told you about her.”
“Ah, yes,” she said, and raised her chin in a way that made her look herself again, proud, a little careless, and remarkably beautiful. I had forgotten that. My mother was very beautiful. I put her hand to my mouth, kissed it loudly three times, and told her good-bye.
“I’ll come again,” I said.
She smiled at me. “Do,” she said. “I will have something for you next time. Something from nothing. A treasure.”
In the hall, on the way out, I said, “She’s getting better.”
My father stared straight ahead. “Maybe.”
“Oh, she is,” I said. “I can tell easy.”
“Lizzy, last time I saw her, she didn’t even speak. It’s rare that she does.”
“Well, you should have brought me.”
“She’s still sick, Lizzy. It’s just hard for you to understand.”
“She’s getting better,” I said.
When we got home, Helen called me into her room and closed the door. “What did she look like?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Mama.”
“Did she have pajamas on?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“Well, think, Lizzy! Did she look crazy?”
“What do you mean?”
Helen narrowed her eyes. “You know, did she say strange things? Or did she act regular?”
I thought about what “regular” might mean. Then I said, “She acted regular. And she wants to come home.”
Helen sat on her bed and stared past me. Her mouth was a bitter straight line. “She can’t come home until she can take care of us,” she said. “I’ll tell you that right now.”
“She can take care of us!”
“I mean really take care of us. Like Anna does.”
“Oh,” I said. I walked over to Helen’s bookshelf, where she kept her collection of glass figures.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to,” I said. “I was just looking.” But I was going to touch something, hard.
The weather began to grow cold, and Anna and my father took us shopping for coats. I rejected everything Anna suggested. “How about this one, Lizzy?” she would say, holding up a blue parka. “I hate blue more than anything,” I would say, scarcely looking. “This one, then,” she would say later, her tone assuming a bit of an edge. “No,” I would say. “Well. Aren’t we fussy!” Anna would say under her breath, and make a show out of helping her more accommodating charges. My father finally suggested a coat that I thought must have been made for a boy, but I took it happily. “Yes, this
one,” I said. “I like this one very, very much.”
This kind of thing was not unusual. Anna and I fought quiet battles constantly. But Mary had grown used to Anna, sat happily on her lap, and was read to each evening after her hair had been brushed and admired. Helen enjoyed a kind of peer relationship with her—they planned dinner menus together, made lists of chores for Mary and me to do. And my father continued to smile his satisfied smiles. In addition to that, I had heard him with Anna again late at night, only this time in his bedroom. I’d stood outside the door, listening to their whispers and painful-sounding moans. I’d put my hand up to knock, but then changed my mind and went back to bed. I stared into the darkness for a long while, thinking of how I would save this information and use it later. Then the pain would have a purpose.
The next time my father went to visit my mother, I came along. She was in the dayroom, sitting in front of a television. When she saw me, she smiled and held out her arms. I ran to her and she said, “This is a such a good day, Lizzy! I get to come home for Thanksgiving!” My father seemed nervous with the information. “Are you sure?” he kept saying. Finally, my mother brought him over to the nurse behind the desk. “Tell him I get to come home,” she said. “He’s having difficulty with the concept.” Then she leaned forward and added in a stage whisper, “Do you have a pill for him?” The nurse smiled begrudgingly.
I told Anna the news when we got home. “Guess what?” I said.
“What?” She sat down across the table from me but didn’t look at me. She was waiting for my father to come into the room. Then she would pay careful attention to me. But when I said that my mother was coming home, I had her attention legitimately. “When?” she asked.
“Thanksgiving,” I said. “We will have a big turkey and three pies. That’s how we always do it. And my mother will cook,” I added pointedly.
My father came into the kitchen, and Anna asked him if it was true. “Well, that’s what they said today,” he said. “Of course, it’s a week away.”
Ordinary Life: Stories Page 10