by Minrose Gwin
I’D BEEN DREADING Madame Butterfly since Christmas. It was a year and a half after the sparrow episode, a miserable night, the driving rain falling sideways in sheets. To make matters worse, I did not care for opera. When Mama played it on the record player, the songs took me by surprise, the high notes sounding like screaming, which heaven knows we had enough of around the house, given our parents’ long-echoing, high-decibel arguments.
Our parents fought about living in Opelika. Mama wanted to move back to New Orleans, where she’d grown up, where there were places to go and sights to see, juke joints and oyster bars, picture shows and parades and river boats, the Monteleone Hotel where a lady could go midafternoons and perch on a stool at the revolving bar and treat herself to a Sazerac: a city where she could find a real job like she’d had at Higgins during the war. Our father, who had grown up in Opelika, worried about getting comparable work in New Orleans. He had a good solid job at the lumber mill, an office job managing payroll. It would be irresponsible to just take off, throw caution to the wind at our mother’s whim. He studied the ads in the Times-Picayune and even made a few trips over to the City when he had a day off, but he never found the kind of work he’d come to expect as his rightful due. He’d be damned if he was going to collect garbage just so our mother could guzzle Sazeracs on weekday afternoons.
Meanwhile, Mama went on crying jags. Here she was, dying a dreary, boring death in this rattrap of a town in the middle of the swamps. How much more of this life could she bear?
It was not that my mother didn’t have her moments. One afternoon in September Grace and I arrived home from school to find her in the backyard singing like a bird. She was stretched out on her chaise lounge on the little back patio, her eyes closed, her full lips in the shape of an inner tube, chirping and twittering and cooing for all she was worth. In her sunglasses with the bright yellow frames and a turquoise scarf, she looked like a giant parakeet. There was a convention of birds in the trees, even a few squirrels, watching and listening, their heads cocked quizzically. Occasionally one of the birds, notably the male cardinal, would sing back to her, like she was a mate he was trying to attract.
After observing our mother for only the briefest of moments, Grace headed down the hall to her room and slammed the door. Mama jumped like she’d heard a gunshot, sat straight up in her lounge chair, and peered through the screen of the sliding glass door.
“Is that you, girls?” she called out.
I slid the screen door open and poked out my head. “We’re home.”
“Good. There’s lemonade in the icebox.” She lay back on the chaise and lit a cig, turning her shoulders against the breeze to shield the Zippo.
That night Grace slipped into my room and told me we were going to have to face the music: our mother was a fruitcake, all we could do was try to avert disaster until we were eighteen and could get out of there. Grace would go first. Then, when she’d found a job and a place to live, she’d come back for me. She’d tap on my window three times. I should have my bag packed. Meanwhile, we would both begin stealing our parents’ spare change so that when the moment arrived, she’d have some cash to make her getaway.
Over time, I’d begun to observe my sister’s face, how it turned in on itself, even her full mouth; how the lines on her face were already being drawn, like the thinnest of hairs, between the brows, from the sides of her nose running south to the corners of her mouth, then down to the edge of her jaw.
ON OUR MOTHER’S long-awaited opera night, I trooped out of the bedroom in last year’s Easter dress, a thin dotted swiss. Grace lay curled up like a cat on the living room sofa. Outside, the rain had settled in for the long haul. I was already shivering in my skimpy getup, which was both too tight and too short, but, unlike my sister, I’d become so unnerved by my mother’s unhappiness I would have endured just about anything to put even a whisper of a smile on her face. Even now, years after that night, even after my mother went and did what she did, her unhappiness still hovers in its long lazy circles, always watchful for that loosed moment when my guard is down. I turn a corner and see dark hair on a woman or a snag of color in a tree, and it plunges.
MAMA SWEPT OUT of her room like a queen. She had on her best outfit, the dusty pink suit with its matching blouse she’d worn when she and Dad got married. She’d ratted her hair so it stood high on her head, then smoothed it into a French twist with two jeweled picks poked through it. Her lips were Fire Engine Red and, over that lipstick shade, which she used only on special occasions, she’d slathered Vaseline.
Dad whistled. “Well now. It’s Madame Butterfly herself.”
She ignored him, turned to me. “Do you think the picks are too much?”
Personally, I did find the picks a bit much. Between the two of them, covered in rhinestones and antennae-like, and the dizzying height of her hairdo, she looked a bit like a praying mantis. In that moment I glanced at my father, who raised his eyebrows at me, reminding me of my job, which was to calm the waters of my mother’s stormy soul. “No ma’am,” I said, “I absolutely do not think they’re too much. In fact, they are just right for the occasion, just perfect.”
SO HERE I am, shivering beside my mother on a bench in the drafty school gymnasium, watching as the Japanese lady in the cheesy kimono frets on the gym floor with her little boy. She waits endlessly for her man to come back to her when everybody with a brain in their head knows he never will, jerk that he is. Meanwhile my mother hums to the music and stares up into the rafters, tears galloping down her cheeks, counting under her breath for dear life. She’s at one hundred twelve of whatever it is she’s counting. Her powder is streaked and clotted, the left pick in her updo sagging alarmingly.
What I’m not prepared for will come at the end, when the Japanese lady, her eyes drawn to slits (is she really Japanese? I wonder), gives, gives, her little boy to that wastrel of a father and his new wife like the poor kid’s a dress she’s outgrown. Then, lo and behold, just to top things off, she takes a monster knife to herself, hara-kiri style. This, in my opinion, is an overreaction of massive proportion, an unnatural thing for a mother to do. You don’t just fly off and leave your little child like that.
MAMA TAUGHT ME that the overture to an opera establishes the elements of the score to follow, its tensions and passions and grandeur. She would play the overture to Madame Butterfly for illustration and say, “Now listen, here’s where it sneaks in like a thief in the night: there, can you hear it?”
Later that night, I will crawl into my sister’s bed and warm myself against her back. Across the hall, I will hear something prophetic in my mother’s voice as she tells my father about the way the blossoms came down wrong.
Now she will begin her song: she will say to my father she hates this place, there is nothing here for her. Here, she will say, she is an alien species, a foreigner. Underneath her words, I listen for the thief, the intruder in the nest, the one who will lay us all low.
My father, for his part, will murmur a reply I can’t make out, a flutter of wings.
3
Grace
WE MIGHT HAVE SAVED HER IF WE HADN’T BEEN LATE that afternoon, if I hadn’t insisted on those two extra hours at the zoo. When you think about it, I’m really the one to blame. I should have been content with the giraffes, not asked for more.
It started like a regular Sunday in the City, nothing more or less. When we were girls together, June and I, our father would take us to watch the giraffes dance. It was an hour’s drive to New Orleans, first through Mississippi scrub pine, then the still swamps where egrets waded on their stick legs. When we turned onto Highway 90, red clay gave way to long fingers of alligator-still water and marsh grasses flat and bristly as our dad’s crew cut. It was as if we were at the center of the world with a million paths to choose from.
Out on the open road Dad would turn on the radio. Usually he played hillbilly, white trash music our mother called it, though she never made these trips with us. He’d tap the underside of
the steering wheel. Sometimes he’d hum a few lines under his breath, then whistle along. June and I would be in the back seat, playing tic-tac-toe on a little notebook we kept handy, the backs of our sweaty thighs sticking to the vinyl upholstery, our hair blowing in the wind. We’d twitch and squirm and make fun of Dad’s ears, which stuck out like flaps on a box and exploded at the edges in curly brown hairs.
We traveled over three rickety one-lane bridges and then the drawbridge over the sparkling Rigolets, where the Gulf and fresh water mingled. Finally we turned south onto Highway 47, which just plunged us deeper into swampland so that the road seemed like the thinnest of ribbons threaded through the murky water. When 47 became Good Children Street with stoplights and scraggly clusters of juke joints and Laundromats and fried fish shacks, it was as if we were entering the mouth of a huge exotic flower. “What happens when children are good?” Dad would call out when we hit Good Children, and my sister and I would answer in unison, “They get a street named after them!”
On the trip over, the chance we’d be disappointed loomed large. Sometimes the giraffes felt the urge to dance and sometimes they didn’t. When they didn’t, they behaved just like ordinary giraffes, nibbling the tops of the already bare trees in their enclosure or walking in wide circles like trained horses in a circus ring. Sometimes they didn’t even show up at all, in which case our father would shrug and say, Oh well, you can’t win ’em all, and take us to Morning Call in the Quarter for café au lait and beignets. The coffee’s heat would seal the sugar from the beignets to the roofs of our mouths like tar, the only thing standing between us and utter despair.
But it was the chanciness of it that we adored; our hearts did somersaults over giraffes. We imagined thundering herds of them galloping across the savannahs. Reticulated giraffes were our specialty. We thought we knew everything about them, how their kick could kill a lion on the Somalian plains, how they were cousins to camels and could go weeks without water, how their patternings were unique to each and every one, how they had four stomachs. That year, our science teacher, Miss Whiteside, had accused poor June of copying my giraffe report from two years back, which was a joke since June had done nothing but eat and sleep giraffes the whole month before the report was due.
We made the trip on Sundays. On Saturdays our father busied himself mowing the grass and trimming his bushes, or in the fall, raking his leaves (he called them “his leaves”) from one side of our small fenced backyard to the other. After Sunday dinner, we left our mother to clean roasting pans with black lines of hardened grease, bowls of congealed mashed potatoes, pots of gumbo and field peas. When she looked at all the mess, Mama made a noise in her throat that sounded like a cross between a chuckle and a snarl. Sometimes, when she thought Dad wasn’t watching, she slid whole casserole dishes into the garbage can.
We’re going to get out of your hair, Olivia, head on over to the City, Dad would say, cool as a cucumber. While we changed from our Sunday clothes, our mother went outside and walked along the inside edge of the backyard, tracing the fence line like a restless dog. Her pacing had worn a path through Dad’s grass. He asked her why she wouldn’t go out and take a walk on the sidewalk like normal people. She said she detested normal people and didn’t want to run into any.
While he waited for us, our father would go outside and lean against the Rambler’s hood and have a smoke. June and I would troop out in single file, quietly, as if ashamed. No goodbye or have a good time or even be careful on the road from Mama, though if she were back in the kitchen, we could feel her eyes burning holes in our backs as we walked out the door and down the front sidewalk.
THE PLACE WE went was not the zoo, but its outer east side, where an extension of the giraffe enclosure backed up to a grove of massive live oaks, limbs resting on the ground as if they’d been severed and sculpted in place. We knew not to ask to go to the actual zoo. There wasn’t much money and Dad was tight with a dollar, had to be, he said. He simply parked the Rambler on Annunciation Street, and we set off walking.
We entered down a small path between houses. He would lead us safari style through the brush, holding back the branches of small trees so they didn’t smack me in the face. I would in turn hold them for June. As he parted the way for us, we admired the heft of our father’s shoulders, the ropiness of his arms, the way highways crisscrossed on the back of his neck.
He said the enclosure was a secret place no one else knew about. The giraffes needed a special place, a private place, to dance and do the other natural things they were meant to do. Otherwise, he said, they would be miserable and live unfulfilled and therefore short lives. The longevity of animals, he told us, is directly related to their happiness.
We hardscrabbled our way through the brambles and, in summer, smoky clusters of mosquitoes. June, poor thing, suffered from their bites, which turned her legs into a pulp of bloody welts. If the giraffes were there, all we could see of them as we approached were the tops of their heads and about halfway down their necks. Usually there were two, never more than three. They would gaze at us politely but vaguely as though we were distant cousins passing through town, sometimes unrolling their snakelike tongues to lick our scent from the air.
Their enclosure was bordered by a penitentiary-style fence with exposed twists at the top. The fence had metal slats woven in and out of the links. My sister and I took turns peering at the giraffes through the gaps in the slats while Dad stood around and smoked. In the distance we could hear the monkeys cry out nobody nobody. Every so often a lion would groan. Our father never rushed us. Sometimes he took a peek, but mostly he seemed satisfied to watch us watching the giraffes. We stayed a good long time, until the mosquitoes and chiggers got the best of us or the giraffes decided to sashay back around to the front of the zoo.
One sultry day we arrived panting and sweating to find that the fence had been covered by a dark mesh, and we began to keen and wail. “Don’t be such babies,” our father said through his teeth. He whipped out his pocketknife, stuck it through a gap in the fence post and began to saw away at the fabric. He made two peepholes, one for each of us so we wouldn’t bicker over taking turns. As the years went by and he cut our peepholes higher and higher, the mesh came untethered from the fence and flapped in the occasional breeze. The motion must have interested the giraffes because they began shredding the material with their teeth as though they wanted to watch us as much as we wanted to watch them. Eventually, what was left of the mesh barrier slid to the ground.
THE LAST TIME we saw the giraffes dance was the day our mother did what she did. The day we were two hours late getting home.
It was November. We woke to a cold rain, but the morning soon turned out crisp and bright, heralding a nice day, a pretty day. The autumn sun had shifted in the sky and the light cut on a slant across the surface of the marsh grasses and the paths of still water that snaked through the swamp like the fingers of a hand. Behind the giraffe enclosure there was a lone sugar maple tree turned to fire among the oaks. June’s hair had relaxed, become cloud-like around her face. She wore a cowgirl skirt with fringe I’d outgrown, and her white socks spilled over her loafers. I was twelve and she was ten.
Our parents had been at it late into the night, our mother saying she simply couldn’t do this anymore and Dad saying she had gone and ruined everything.
She didn’t choose this, she said; she had wanted to go to Paris, France, and wear a beret and work for an embassy. She had wanted to see the world and be free. Why, I wondered, hadn’t he told her he was saving up to take her to the top of the Eiffel Tower, that he had a secret bank account where he deposited thirty-five dollars every month? Why hadn’t he said that one day he would wrap up those tickets in the blue beret he’d stashed in a shoe box years ago and holler, Surprise, Olivia, this is your lucky day? June and I lived in terror of that day, convinced that if our mother ever made it to gay Paree she’d never come home.
But our mother didn’t know any of our father’s plots and plans. Las
t night, she said it was his big you-know-what that had ruined everything for her again. She just got stuck cleaning up the mess afterward. As usual. Now here she was, in the middle of nowhere, no job—much less a career—and no way to get one, taking care of not one but two ungrateful children, no end in sight. What in god’s name had he expected her to do, start all over?
Their voices hushed, and there was more talk and then a strange sound, someone crying, not our mother.
The morning after the fight there were two empty bottles of cherry bounce on the kitchen counter. Our father was proud of his bounce, which he made from the wormy cherries off the trees in our side yard and stored in the basement. It was nasty stuff, the taste and consistency of cough syrup, a slimy sludge in the bottom of the bottles, the sludge all that was left in the empty ones on the counter that morning. The house was dead quiet when June and I got up, Mama nowhere in sight.
The two of us sat down at the kitchen table. I could tell by the odd way June held her head that she’d heard what our mother had said. She shivered in her summer pajamas and seemed to be trying to form a word. I kicked the leg of her chair to jar it from her. Normally she would have kicked me back and come out with something ugly, but she just turned and looked out the window at the ill-fated bluebird nest box in the backyard that had been boarded up over two years now.
After a while I got up and went to the icebox. “Want some orange juice?” I asked her.
“I don’t care.”
That fall June and I had at long last begun to plumb the depth of our mother’s unhappiness. In previous years, we’d made what we thought were helpful suggestions to alleviate it. The Christmas before, June, who was the optimist, got the bright idea that Mama would like to learn to sew and talked Dad into buying her a Singer on time. We saved our allowances and bought a pattern for beginners, a pretty lady’s sundress for summer, just to give our mother plenty of time to get the knack of sewing. We were careful to buy a pattern for a dress for her rather than ourselves; we didn’t want to be perceived as selfish. We managed, after several false starts, to tape together three sheets of Christmas paper, cover the black carrying case, and top the whole thing off with a big red bow. Mama thanked us politely. We suggested she set up the Singer on the dining room table we never used, but she didn’t unpack it and Christmas night she took it, still in its case, down to the basement. Every morning from the day after Christmas to New Year’s, June and I would peer down the stairs to see whether there were any signs that she’d begun to unpack it, but it remained in its case, still covered with bits of tape and shreds of paper, strangely illuminated by a watery shaft of sunlight from the single ground-level window, looking for all the world like some kind of ticking bomb. Then, a few days after New Year’s, it vanished into thin air.