I was skittish. My tongue was thick. No matter how badly I craved a pill now, Pauline was right. I had to stop.
I alone had let Janie get hurt.
“Take care of her,” I said to Dennis. I was so ashamed I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t show my face. “Just please leave me alone.”
Pauline said, “Dennis, if you need anything, you can call on me or Bob. You know that, right? Anytime day or night.”
He thanked her. Then I overheard him phoning his mother.
I have no idea how long I’d lain there before Mother Glenn knocked on the door and tiptoed in. Hours? A day? I did know she wasn’t supposed to be here. It was dark out. She had late-summer work at the farm, corn to shuck and freeze for the winter. She closed the blinds. My blankets and cover sheet and bedspread were scattered in heaps as if I’d been fighting a bull in my dreams. But I didn’t think I’d slept at all. Mother Glenn brushed my forehead with a feather touch of the backs of her fingers.
“You have a fever. You’ve got to drink something, eat,” she said softly. “You’re shaking. Are you cold?”
I was, I was freezing, but I hadn’t realized it until she asked. She straightened the covers, tucked me in as if I were Janie’s age.
She returned a few minutes later. “Sit up a bit, honey. Sip this soda. Take this aspirin.”
I complied. “Just take care of Janie, please. Leave me be.”
A better woman than me would’ve hated the idea of her mother-in-law thinking less of her—which Mother Glenn was sure to do—but I didn’t care. I was incapable of caring. I needed to heal.
“Dennis wants to talk to you. Pauline’s concerned, too.”
“No.” I was too ashamed to let him see me. Or Pauline.
Then my body racked with some kind of seizure. “Oh, dear girl,” Mother Glenn said. “Hang on.”
I would look back on that moment and wonder if I’d really heard fear in her voice, or if it had been an effect of my altered mind. The only mother I had left in the world put her arms around me, holding me tight until the tremor subsided.
“Drink. I’ve brought you a banana, too. Potassium.” She unpeeled it and broke off a bite. “And some warm Cream of Wheat.”
I slumped back into the bed after swallowing a few bites and guzzling a quarter of the soda, my breathing erratic. “I have to use the bathroom.”
She let me lean on her as I staggered across the hall, my elastic knees almost giving out, and she helped lift my nightgown so I could get to my underpants. My energy had drained with my confidence. As I sat on the stool, she unspooled the roll of toilet tissue and handed me a fistful. She stroked my hair. It must have felt like a giant bird’s nest resting atop my head. A mess. Then she stepped out and closed the door to wait.
As we scuffed back into the bedroom, Dennis stood in the hall. He flipped on the light. He watched me as one might view an injured driver crawling out of a wrecked car.
“I love you,” he said. His face was sad, sad as it had been when I’d told him Kathleen had been dropped.
I didn’t remember anything else until the venetian blinds were open again and the sunlight peeked through.
“You’re still here?” I asked Mother Glenn.
“For as long as you need.”
But what about her chores? The chickens. The vegetables that needed pulling.
I was shaking again, shivering. Thirsty. I wanted one little pill. Just one. Just one.
It was a new day.
“Mommy, Mommy,” Janie cried from somewhere in the house. “I want my mommyyyy.” There were times my daughter wanted her daddy. But she still wanted me. Guilt spiked in my heart because I wanted to comfort her, to hold her, but I knew I wasn’t good for her.
Mother Glenn’s voice tried to soothe her, “Shh, shh.”
Janie’s cut—and the bright-red blood—took over my mind’s eye. The memory of her screaming made me roll over and yank the pillow around my head, cramming it to my ears, trying to deafen the voice. Trying to forget. Trying to forget so much.
I was unaware of how long it’d been. “I fixed you some Jell-O. Raspberry,” Mother Glenn said. She fed it to me, one slow bite at a time.
“I told you once,” she said, “that I’d bear all your burdens of pain for all you lost, if only I could.” In went another bite. I met her eyes. “But I can’t.”
Silence. A long, thick silence. My legs jerked convulsively. Silence still.
“You’re the only one who can bear it, sweetie,” she said. “You have a little girl who needs you, never mind your husband at the moment. Janie needs her mama.”
Over the hours Dennis’s mother prayed with me. She told me stories of the Glenn family matriarchs the century before, of their struggles and fortitude. “And then there was my own aunt Agnes,” Mother Glenn said. Dennis’s great-aunt Agnes had played “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” on the piano at our wedding. “She had an awful ordeal during the great Flood of ’37,” Mother Glenn said.
I remembered that flood from when I was twelve, how the streets at Third and Vine had been like a canal. Electricity had gone down across the city. People had died. It was the worst natural disaster in Cincinnati history—and the Ohio River’s flood had wreaked havoc from Pittsburgh to Illinois.
“Aunt Agnes,” Mother Glenn said, “was a young widow living near the river with her four-year-old boy. Her home flooded so badly, she and her son escaped in a rowboat out the window of her second-floor bedroom, oaring with a broom between the limbs of their treetops. It was January—and record rains and melting snow had caused the flood. Her little boy got hypothermia, and but for the Red Cross set up at a school, his shivering body would never have survived. Aunt Agnes had gotten him there in time.”
My eyelids weighed heavy as Mother Glenn spoke. I said, “I didn’t know Great-Aunt Agnes had gone through that.” I drifted off to sleep, dreaming of mothers who were strong for their children against all odds.
Two days passed. Now four. A visiting doctor came once. I was addicted, and he couldn’t do any more for me than my mother-in-law already had. I’d have to ride this out.
I got up to use the toilet. Alone this time. I combed my hair by myself, too, and washed the sleep from my face. I climbed back into my bed. I still hadn’t spoken to Dennis. I hadn’t seen my daughter. She called for me, but I didn’t deserve it.
Opa’s marble was on the nightstand, in the cherrywood box my husband had made to display it. I took the glass sphere into my hand and squeezed. And with that squeeze my tears broke through, as if they’d been all dammed up like the yellow and orange swirls frozen inside the marble’s glass.
Janie getting hurt had been tantamount to my losing the baby all over again. It’d been as if I’d lost Opa and my mother at the same time as Kathy: all one horrific catastrophe. It reminded me, too, of losing my goodness on a flagstone walk before a Tudor house when a widow apologized to me. Janie’s injury symbolized my losing one more precious thing—like losing my childbearing womb—gone. Carved out of me. Or forsaken through my own stupidity and pride. I’d neglected my duties. Harm had come to my girl. Mother Glenn, hovering somewhere in the hall, gave me comfort—but she also added to my shame for the mother I’d become.
I took the cool glass marble between my hands again, rolled it around and around and around in the pit of my palms until the German glass turned hot. I thought of all the times my opa had held this marble in his hands, too. How he’d been young once, like I had, and he’d knelt to a circle in the dirt with the other boys, competing for bragging rights.
I would not swallow another pill. There were three kinds of people in the world, Opa had taught me. I would be the good girl my opa always saw in me. You’re Millicent the Strong. Don’t you ever forget it.
“Dennis,” I called out. My voice was weak, but he stood inside our room in less than a minute, his expression every bit the little boy he’d been once, and it was as if he awaited news of getting a new pony. He was eager for me to be back in hi
s life.
“I love you,” I said. “Please bring our Janie and come sit with me.”
He stretched out his arm to take my hand. “I’ll always be here for you.”
2015
The girls and I still stood outside the church. Clouds had overtaken the sun, and the breeze was more of a wind.
“So your episodes with the barbies,” Jane said, “were more harrowing than I realized.”
I felt a quick rise and fall of my brows.
“Grandma, good for you for persevering.” My darling Kelsey gave me what she called a high-five hand smack.
I reached to touch Jane’s scar then with the tip of my index finger, gently, and she let me. “You were little more than two and a half years old. I hope you’ll accept my apologies.”
“The day I got cut is my earliest memory,” she said. “All I recall is bleeding and crying and you pressing things to my face. But you know what? It was worth reliving the bad parts so I could come out on the other side.” She kicked at a pebble in the crack of the sidewalk. “If only I could get past my invisible scars as easily.”
I didn’t recoil. I didn’t get struck with a lightning bolt. I held amazingly calm. I would soon learn of her invisible scars as she had learned of mine.
As if Kelsey intuited my thoughts, she said, “Mom, Grandma, this is where I leave you two for some much-needed one-on-one time. I’m parched. I need another bottled water. I need to eat. Baby Glenn-Goldberg is hungry, too. I expect to hear a date to celebrate. Soon.” She kissed us goodbye. “Mom, I’m beyond thrilled that you’re not sick.”
Neither Jane nor I tried to convince Kelsey to stay. Thank heavens I had my cane. I couldn’t stand much longer. And the afternoon chill had begun to snake its way through my jacket and the yarns of my sweater to my skin.
“Let’s hop in my car,” Jane said. Her white four-door was parked in front of the church near mine.
“We should’ve climbed in here twenty minutes ago,” I said as she opened the passenger door for me.
There we sat, the console and gear shift feeling like a barricade between us. I cupped my hands in my lap. Jane turned on the car’s heat. I wasn’t sure how much of Jane’s “troubled childhood” I could stand to hear.
But she deserved for me to try.
Mother Glenn once said there was no sense in beating around the bush. It was high time I learned.
“Tell me, Jane. Tell me about your invisible scars.”
She patted the top of her thigh nervously. Had she played in her mind a film reel over the years, about how one day she’d tell me her story? And now the moment had come? I suspected she’d learn it wasn’t as easy to do as it sounded.
She blew out air in the way of exhaling a cigarette’s smoke. “In 1963,” she started, “spring break was not good for me.”
My insides contracted.
The days leading up to Kathy’s spring birthday had always been hardest on Dennis and me. I moistened my lips with my tongue.
“I was thirteen,” Jane continued, “and back then, I logged a day’s activities in my diary. You’ll recall the small white one bound in faux leather I got one Christmas. Its pages had shiny fake gold on the edges, and there was a lock and key the size of a penny.
“I attended my first slumber party with the cousins and their friends in the basement at Carrie Ann’s house. We played forty-fives on the record player—the Beach Boys, Chubby Checker, and the Shirelles. We told our fortunes with the Ouija board, and you know what? That damn thing knew I’d never get married.” Jane sniggered while I went rigid.
“The older girls played Truth or Dare, and we younger ones tagged along,” she went on. “When they got bored and left to read Seventeen magazine or to talk about boys, Linda Jo and I continued the game.
“‘Truth or Dare,’ I said. She responded Truth. ‘What’s the worst thing your perfect mother ever said?’ I asked her. Linda Jo scratched her head and hemmed and hawed.
“Then she told me how she had walked into the kitchen one morning while Aunt Abbie was on the phone with her own sister. The words Linda Jo overheard—and those I later wrote down in my diary—were: ‘I tried to stop her, but that Millie Glenn went to a doctor who butchered her. No more babies for her.’”
I choked. It took me a few seconds to recover. Abbie had broken her promise? She’d told someone about my unauthorized procedure? My skin seemed to bubble up on my bones. I was furious. And shocked. But . . . Jane hadn’t known about my sterility until I told her this week. That much had been clear. So I was confused.
A school must have let out close by, because long yellow buses tracked past the church and Jane’s car one after another, shadowing the interior of the car.
“You know what we teenage girls thought about that?” Jane said. “The butcher doctor and no more babies? Linda Jo said you had an illegal abortion after I was born. It was then that I began to absorb how deeply I’d disappointed you. So much so you couldn’t stand the thought of raising another child—”
“No—” I reached across the car’s center barricade, but Jane pulled back. I was mortified.
“Let me finish,” she said curtly with her hand to her heart. “I might’ve given you the benefit of the doubt, but in the days that followed, my memories reinforced Linda Jo’s conclusion.” She paused. “Such as the clay baby you didn’t like. And sad Mother’s Days. And Daddy burning french toast for supper because you couldn’t get out of bed and cook or even to sit by me. Other times you smothered me and protected me like I was a pet project—one that suited your social appearance in the world.”
I shrank back into my seat. Could I make myself invisible? Dread hovered over me like an enemy helicopter in a war-torn field. I might not survive this battle.
In life, did we remember the bad things more prominently than the good?
“Of course,” Jane went on, her tone softening, “I now know the impetus for all these things and more. I know I grossly misconstrued them. But you see, on that day, all I knew was I felt unwanted.”
“Is that why you later punished me by not letting me know you had Kelsey?” I said. “That’s why you withheld her until she was three months old?”
“Partly that. There were times when I was feeling especially sorry for myself, where I assumed you wouldn’t want my baby any more than you wanted me.”
“Oh, Janie. Oh my gosh, that cannot possibly be true. Please tell me it’s not so.” My jaw and teeth ached from their clamping through the stress of all this.
“Okay, okay, let’s not overstate it,” Jane said quickly. “I mean, I’m a complex, fucked-up human being, like the rest of us.”
Like the rest of us. Then something else hit me.
Suddenly Jane’s and my argument from years before Kelsey was born made sense, too: it was 1973, the day after Roe v. Wade came down. Jane was home for a week for Tommy’s wedding. She was twenty-three, and we’d just finished the breakfast dishes.
“There’s something I must discuss with you,” I’d said, my tummy queasy, my heart thumping. I was ready to tell her about Kathy for the first time. “You might want to sit down.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, her voice raised and sounding like a smart aleck. “Abortions are legal now, but I won’t be running out to get one. I’m glad for women everywhere; they get to choose. It’s the best thing to come out of Washington since the signing of the Civil Rights Act. But it’s not my bag. If ever I conceive, I’ll have the baby and love it.”
“That’s good,” I’d said, completely thrown for a loop. Was Jane building up to letting me know she was pregnant? “Why are you telling me this?” I said. “It’s not remotely connected to what I had to say.”
“Don’t pretend with me, Mother,” she said. “I know you had one done in some seedy back-alley bed.”
“I never,” I said, the pitch of my voice as low and loud as hers was high. What had made her think I’d had an abortion? She was frightening me. Was she on psychedelic drugs? Hallucinating? “I t
hink you—”
“What? What do you think about me, Mother?”
“Forget it, Jane,” I said. No matter what her problem was, she was a twenty-three-year-old woman, and I wasn’t going to stand there and be abused. She had no earthly idea what she was talking about, and I couldn’t tell her my life’s worst nightmare under these conditions. “I won’t trouble you with what I was going to say after all,” I said. “You’re obviously much smarter than me.”
And there it lay.
She’d gone back out west after Tommy’s wedding and would not have a child until several years later. My family secret remained buried. And the rift between my daughter and me widened.
I realized now that Jane had indeed had a cancer growing all these years after all: it was a tumor born of misinterpretation and doubt and blame.
How had she not considered for one second that what she’d heard about me was false? My head pounded. The answer was easy: because she was no better than her own mother. I had thought the worst of her father once, too.
Jane reached over the car’s console to nudge me. “Mom? You listening? We were talking about the day I brought Kelsey home.”
“Sorry. Say again?”
“Honestly, I saw your face when you beheld your granddaughter for the first time, and I felt deep remorse for what I’d done.” Jane looked full of repentance, and my heart soaked it in like a hug. “It was clear that you accepted my baby,” she said, “from the instant you reached out your arms. I never withheld Kelsey from you again.” This much was true.
Jane dabbed tears at the bags beneath her eyes. “But the unresolved problems you and I had, well, they remained.”
“The words ‘I’m sorry’ will never be enough,” I said. The degree of compunction I felt was surely more than a human was intended to bear. I felt bludgeoned. “How do I make it up to you? How do I fix us?”
“Don’t you see?” she said earnestly. “No matter how old we get, no matter the pent-up resentment or how wronged or injured we’ve felt all our lives, we all want our parents’ approval. We strive to be granted their love.”
Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel Page 28