The Honeymoon
BIRMINGHAM, 1975
The day I started my first period, my father invited me for a walk after supper. It was a typical walk, a familiar habit, until he spoke: “Your mother tells me you became a woman today,” he said.
He was holding my hand—at thirteen I was still holding my father’s hand with half my body even as I was bleeding with the other half—and reflexively I pulled away. Are there any words more appalling to a girl savoring the privacy of new transformation? If a volcano had erupted below my feet in the heart of Alabama, I would gladly have gone up in ash.
My mother had offered nothing beyond the pragmatics: instructions on how to work the straps to the belt that came with the box of pads she’d pulled down from her closet shelf. How often to change the pad. How to wrap it up and take it to the kitchen trash can, which the family dachshund could not reach. The absolute, unvarying importance of that trash can.
I never knew if she had asked my father to broach the subject, or if she had merely passed along the day’s news over the glass of whiskey they always shared before supper, a relic of postwar civility in the chaotic days of Watergate and Vietnam and never enough money in our hollow-doored apartment outside town.
Catholics aren’t squeamish about sexuality, and my education at Our Lady of Sorrows School had already included a unit on human reproduction, including a poster-sized diagram of the female reproductive system and a teacher armed with a pointer stick and a holler-it-out insistence on correct pronunciation: fa-loh-pee-an, oh-va-ry, en-do-mee-tree-um, clit-or-is. All in the context of a religion-class unit on family life and the moral implications of sexuality.
It would take more than a year for Mom to make her own half-hearted attempt at The Talk. I laughed out loud before she’d gotten a whole sentence out of her mouth, and that was the end of the subject. In all the years afterward, I never heard her make even a veiled reference to her own sexual life or to mine. My mother, I decided, was something of a prude.
I don’t remember when I found the lone honeymoon photo in my father’s sock drawer. It was a black-and-white Polaroid of Mom wearing a frothy gown-and-peignoir set. She’s standing in a doorway, her hair freshly brushed, and the corner of a bed is visible in the foreground. Her smile is open, utterly guileless, happy.
“Where’s this?”
“I took it on our wedding night,” my father said, taking the photo from me and peering at it. It was a picture of Mom moments before she joined him in bed for the first time—a picture of a woman who was not suffering even a hint of shyness.
As a child I would ask my mother, “But why did you wait so long to get married?”
Sometimes she would cite, obliquely, the Catholic prohibition against birth control: “We couldn’t afford to have a family yet.” Sometimes she would say, “We loved to dance. Once we got married and the babies came along, there wouldn’t be many chances to go dancing.”
No money for children. No money for a sitter. I was the reason they had waited so long. I, who lived nestled in their love like a world-sized cradle. I, who had always felt so sublimely like the center of their universe. They hadn’t wanted me to join them yet. They had wanted to keep dancing.
After my mother’s death, I found the rest of the honeymoon pictures in a box that had sat in an Alabama attic for more than fifty years. In the one I think of as the morning-after companion to the wedding-night picture, Mom is the photographer, and Dad is the subject, standing before the mirror in a motel bathroom, shaving. But it’s Mom I like to imagine. I think I can see her, barefoot in the doorway to the bedroom, relishing the intimacy of life with her new husband, the man who had not yet become my father.
In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of Her Brother’s Death
LOWER ALABAMA, 1976
I’ve left out when Wilfred died, haven’t I? Well, in May—no, in June—of 1976, he was down to go with us to the church reunion, and he had Joseph with him, his first grandchild, and was so proud of him. And Mother went home with them that Sunday, to be there with them the next Sunday, which would be Father’s Day. Wilfred left for a business trip on Tuesday. And of course he kissed them goodbye, and on Thursday they called to say they had found him dead in a motel room where he had gone back to take some medicine, some blood pressure medicine. Well, it upset us terribly because we had just seen him so well.
Mother, of course, was brokenhearted because she had lost a child. When she went to the casket to see him the first time, she stood there and looked at him and said, “Why couldn’t it have been me?” And she sobbed, and that’s the only time she cried. When they brought her to our house on the day of the funeral, I went out and hugged her. And she had a few little tears but not much. She was real composed. And so he was buried on Saturday before the Father’s Day that she was to spend with him.
Squirrel-Proof Finch Feeder, Lifetime Warranty
The steel grommets around the miniature openings, fit only for conical beaks, cannot be chewed open by even the most persistent rodent. Both the top and the bottom of the feeder detach for ease in filling and cleaning, but the pegged fittings can’t be managed by thumbless hands. The seed is black niger—a feast for goldfinches, distasteful to squirrels. So say the experts at the bird supply store.
The experts have not met this squirrel. He takes the feeder by the perches, one in each hand, pulling it to his mouth like an ear of sweet corn at a Fourth of July potluck. He makes his own mouth small to match the cleft mouth of the feeder, and he licks the seeds out, one by one. This is an embrace, a kiss that goes on for hours. Seed by seed, he fills his belly. He has nothing but time, and the squirrel-proof finch feeder, impervious to fury and force, is undone by patience and time. He knows I am at my desk barely more than an arm’s reach from the window, but I do not concern him. I am only watching through the window, and I do not in any way concern him.
There Always Must Be Children
LOWER ALABAMA, 1976
At the end of our great-uncle’s funeral, our great-aunt stopped the pallbearers as they carried him out of church. She fell upon the casket, trying to reach with her frail arms all the way around it and wailing like one whose own life was ending. All five of us, my brother and sister and both cousins, watched from the front pew, entirely untouched by devastating loss. Our parents and grandparents went to our aunt and surrounded her and held her up when her legs could no longer bear her weight.
We looked at each other. What would happen next? And what would we ourselves be called upon to do? Our favorite aunt, howling with uncontainable grief, resembled no human being we had ever seen.
When the next-youngest child coughed to disguise a laugh, the rest of us collapsed between the pews. We huddled together on the board floor and buried our faces in our arms, strangled by swallowed laughter.
Tracks
BIRMINGHAM, 1976
Walking around the neighborhood soon after we moved to the house that decades later he would die in, my father tapped his toe against the place on the side of the road where rusted trolley-car tracks emerged from the asphalt. “Every day I would wait right here for my father to get home from work,” he said. “Every day he got off the trolley and asked, ‘Have you been a good boy?’ And every day I would have to tell him no.” He hadn’t minded his mother, or he’d fought with his brother, or he’d bothered the chickens. And then the grandfather I never met would walk home with the little boy who grew up to be my perfect father, and he would spank that child with a belt.
My grandfather died in a car accident when my father was five years old, and my father remembered almost nothing about him except one thing: that every day when he was a boy he would meet his father at the trolley stop and walk home with him for a beating.
In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of My Grandfather’s Death
LOWER ALABAMA, 1977
Let me see, it was on the Thursday before Christmas. I brought him home from the hospital, and he seemed so happy, and I was happy. I’d had hi
m a chair moved in—I bought a chair and had them to bring it. I said, “Be sure to have it there by ten o’clock,” so they had. The hospital had one that he could sit in and press himself up. He had said, “I want a chair like this,” just offhandedly, so that was the kind it was.
In the car I could see him observing the trees and where things had been planted and just everything. He was very alert. And we drove into the yard, and Max Junior was there under the pecan tree. So we got Max out with his walker, and he walked around the front of the car, and we got the door open, and he got just inside the door. And I said, “You see your Christmas gift over there?” and he nodded his head.
And that was it. His feet began slipping out, and I held him until he got to the floor, and Max Junior and I did all we could. Neither one of us knew much about resuscitation. And Nina called down to the store, and there wasn’t but one man there and he came, but she also called the paramedics. And everybody worked on him. I don’t think he ever breathed again.
We got to the hospital, and the doctor came out and said, “It was just too late.”
“No,” I said. “Is he gone?”
And he said, “Yes. It was just too late.”
Well, Max Junior and I both just almost collapsed. The doctor got hold of us and he said, “If I had been right there I couldn’t have done anything.” Said, “Everything about him just quit at once.”
And we went back and called Olivia, and of course all of you were there by morning. Now that was on Friday, you see. Well, we had to bury him on Christmas Eve. And the day of his funeral it was just pouring rain, and I remember very distinctly how many people came anyhow, even if it was Christmas Eve and raining like it was.
And when we got back to the house I went to bed, and all five of y’all came in there quietly—I wasn’t asleep, but you came in there very quietly—and said, “Mimi, will it be all right for us to fix a Christmas tree?” I said, “Sure you can.” I said, “Granddaddy would want you to.”
My Mother Pulls Weeds
BIRMINGHAM, 1978
The kitchen can be full of unwashed dishes, both counters covered in granules of spilled sugar and puddles of congealed milk. The tops of the curtains can be dusted with droppings from the cockatiel who screeches his sorrow so plaintively that she cannot bear to cage him for long. The chairs in the living room can be piled high with laundry, and magazines dated years earlier, and junk mail still leaved together with the unpaid bills, and my sister’s forgotten schoolwork, the manifold worksheets of a child still in elementary school. My mother’s need for order has nothing to do with the chaos of a life with too little space and too little money and almost no chance to make something beautiful of it all. The chance to create loveliness is always waiting just past the door of our matchbox rental.
She never prepares for gardening—no special gloves, no rubber garden clogs, no stiff canvas apron with pockets for tools. No tools, most of the time. She steps out of the house—or the car, setting her bags down before she even makes it to the door—and puts her hands in the soil, tugging out the green things that don’t belong among the green things that do. Now another bare square of ground appears, and there is room for marigold seeds, the ones she saved when last year’s ruffled yellow blooms turned brown and dried to fragile likenesses of themselves. The light bill might be under the covers at the foot of her bed, the unsigned report card somewhere in the mess of papers on the mantel, but she can always put her hands on last year’s seeds. And later, in the summer, the very ground she walks on will be covered in gold.
Fly Away
BIRMINGHAM, 1978
His face was ridiculous: the rouged cheeks of Raggedy Andy, an elaborate Kabuki crest. He had the run of the house, swooping from curtain rod to curtain rod and door top to door top, joyfully shredding the newspaper and nibbling the spines of my books, his round gray tongue probing at the bindings, searching for glue. Though he knew a few human words, he spoke mostly in his own inscrutable language, muttering conspiracies to my sister’s toys, shuffling among the stuffed animals and attempting to incite a riot. Claiming a teddy bear for his mate, he hissed at my sister, his yellow crest flattened, if she tried to take it away.
When I called, he flew to me, but he bit my lip at least as often as he held still for a kiss. He loved to be scratched, offering up each angle of his face to my fingers, and his trust thrilled me. I rubbed behind his crest, under his white-ringed eyes, beneath his gray beak. I could feel the hot skin beneath his feathers and the swift pulse just beneath the skin. When new feathers came in, he would present himself for preening, waiting as I unfurled each one, rolling them between my fingers. The powdery new feathers smelled earthy and alien at once.
He came to harm at times—singed feathers when he flew too close to an open flame on the gas range, an entire toenail lost to a slammed door—but he complained so bitterly in his cage, pacing the wooden perch, biting the bars, clutching the closed door with both feet and screeching, that we always gave in to his demand for freedom. The bounded freedom of our 1,300-square-foot house.
Inevitably, he flew away. Propping the storm door open with her hip one day, my mother stooped to pick up a bag of groceries, and he landed on her head before launching himself into the sky. He lingered in a tall pine, waddling along one branch and hopping to another as I stood below, holding my finger in the air and calling. Soon I couldn’t see him in the gathering gloom, but I followed the sound of his voice as he talked to himself: “Pretty bird. Kiss, kiss, kiss.” I didn’t see him leave the pine.
Days later, more than a week, a miracle: my father woke me on Sunday morning, newspaper in hand. There, in full color, perched on an old man’s finger, was our wayward cockatiel. We knew him instantly by the missing nail on his crooked gray toe. My father called the paper and somehow reached the photographer, who gave vague directions and a general description of the house.
We made the drive past factories and industrial parks to a part of town that couldn’t rightly be called “town” anymore, with dirt driveways, bunched trailers and clapboard shacks, and lots overgrown with struggling saplings. A world I couldn’t reconcile with the world.
We knew the house by the broken-down car out front, a cinder block where one of its wheels should have been, and the peeling red paint. It was some time before the old man from the photograph answered our knock. Opening the door, he stepped back, and my father stepped back too, explaining. The man pointed at the car. “No window screens here at the house,” he explained.
I took the steps two at a time. The bird was lying on the back seat, his feet curled, his body still warm—from the heat of the closed car, perhaps, or because he’d died even as we stood on that porch asking for him. I held him in my hands and wept, pressing him to my face. All I remember for sure of that moment is his familiar smell. And the sight of my father and the old man standing together, side by side, at the bottom of the crumbling steps.
Church of Christ
BIRMINGHAM, 1978
One day my father picked me up from the children’s shoe store where I worked after school and pulled into the Church of Christ parking lot around the corner from our house. Then he shut off the car and said, “Your mother’s been crying all day. She thinks you don’t love her.”
I looked at him. I had no idea what he was talking about. “Why would she even think that?”
“She says you had an argument this morning. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about or what you said to her. What could you have possibly said to your mother to make her cry all day?”
I was seventeen. I had given no thought to my mother that day. I gave hardly any thought to either of them on any day at all. Even prompted in the dark church parking lot, I could not recall a single conversation that might have made my mother cry.
I said, “I don’t remember having a fight with Mom before school.”
Migrants
Every spring my bird-watching neighbor across the street tells me she is waiting for the rose-breasted grosb
eaks to return to her feeders for a day or two during their long, long migration, and every spring they turn up, right on time, to feast on the safflower seeds she puts out especially for them. I keep a safflower feeder up all the time—primarily to discourage visits from European starlings, who dislike safflower seeds—and so I started looking for the rose-breasted grosbeaks every spring, too. I was always disappointed.
Then, one year, I had grosbeaks every day for two solid weeks. At first they were skittish, heading into the trees as soon as I stepped out the door, but they got to know me. I could walk around the deck, watering plants, sweeping, and they would peer at me from the back side of the feeder for a few moments before going back to their meal. All day long they lined up for a turn, it seemed, waiting on the nearest branches until a perch opened up at the feeder.
Tennessee is just a way station for the grosbeaks, who spend winter deep in the rain forests of Central and South America but mate and rear their young primarily in the northernmost reaches of the United States and Canada. Appalachia appeals to them too, and my neighbor is sure that our guests are headed to the mountains of northern Georgia. And why not? Her guess seems as good as any.
But guessing is getting harder to do as the songbird migration is complicated by the effects of climate change. The timing of spring has shifted, and migratory songbirds, leaving the equatorial jungles at the usual time, arrive in North America too late for the food sources they expect to encounter along the way. For thousands and thousands of years, the path of the migrating songbird has been synced to the growing season of plants that now bloom and fade out of their once typical seasons. What will the birds eat if the berries they rely on have long since withered by the time they arrive? Is that why the grosbeaks—one of the species most affected by changing climate patterns—finally came to my feeder? Why they came and stayed and stayed and stayed?
Late Migrations Page 6