Up from the Blue

by Susan Henderson

  After we cleared the table, Dad brought a hamburger and a pile of wrinkled peas to Momma. I followed him like a shadow into the humid room, where he raised the blinds and set dinner on the bed beside her face.

  “Please,” he said. That was all.

  Without raising her head, she reached her thin hand from the sheet to take nothing but the top bun. She barely opened her mouth, straining to take a single bite, and soon she and the bun slid beneath the covers so that only her orange hair showed.

  Dad swatted me on the bottom so I’d leave the room, and when I was in the hallway he asked, “What am I supposed to do?”

  My brother stayed out of all of it, hunched over the rug in his room, where he took apart his rubber band ball, band by band. It went from a sphere the size of a cantaloupe to a hundred loose ends covering the floor.

  • • •

  There was so much the neighbors couldn’t have understood about our family by staring at our blue door from the lawn that day. They could not have known the relief I felt in hearing grown-ups in the house—even the sound of Momma crying facedown on the bed and Dad cursing as he scrubbed the different rooms, putting everything right. They couldn’t have known the comfort of sinking into bathwater for the first time in days and washing the fine clay dust from my skin, or of hearing clothes tumble in the dryer along with the scrapes of pennies that had fallen out of Phil’s pocket. Most of all, they could not have appreciated the small miracle of Momma coming to my room that night to tuck me in.

  She came in her pink terry cloth robe, carrying the beautiful cup we’d made together. It had started out as just an ordinary white mug from our cupboard, but we had glued plastic rubies to it.

  “There you go, Bear,” she whispered, handing me the steaming cup. She settled at the edge of my mattress, her face still creased from her long sleep. I chattered about baby carriages, ladybugs, and sour Kool-Aid until she closed my hands around the cup and insisted, “Taste it.”

  I sipped the warm, bitter drink, feeling the rubies with my tongue in between swallows.

  “I’m trying,” she said. “I’m trying for you, okay?” And she reached for Alice in Wonderland, turning to the page where we last stopped. I was captivated with her singsong voice, how quiet it was that night. Sometimes she read the same sentence twice, and sometimes she had to pause until she’d wiped the tears from her eyes.

  I was fading, blinking, trying to will myself to stay awake, to have this time with her a little longer, but every part of me felt heavy. The cup began to slip from my hands, and when I squeezed my fingers closed to catch it, one of the rubies fell into my lap.

  Momma took the cup from me, and I picked up the ruby, saving it in my pillowcase, where I liked to tuck my hands. What the neighbors couldn’t see as I lay my head down was how Momma adored me, how she didn’t leave until I was asleep. I tasted the bitter drink in the back of my throat, and the room began to spin.

  2

  Bear

  A SMALL, BARELY LEGAL TRAVELING circus had pulled into our town in the middle of the night and set up in the parking lot of Ace Hardware. Dad and Momma took three-year-old Phil to this circus, where they sat on the shaky bleachers with the store to their backs and the mountains creating a backdrop for the performers.

  Sometimes when Momma told the story she left out the fight. Other times it was the focus—how Dad had seen other officers with their families sitting higher up in the bleachers, and how forcefully he’d insisted that our family join them. Despite his wishes, Momma chose a seat in the front row, where she and Phil shared a box of Cracker Jack, eating the caramel corn and throwing out the peanuts. Dad paced there in front of them, shoulders hunched, believing my mother would change her mind. His gray hair and the ten-year age difference between them was only one reason my parents were regularly mistaken for father and daughter. The other was the way he scolded her, and the way she fought his control.

  Eventually, Dad sat down beside Phil because he was blocking someone’s view. My brother spent most of that hour and a half shrieking and flinging himself off of the bench, mad that he no longer fit on Momma’s lap because I was there, still in the womb, but already invading his space and stealing attention from him.

  Even with all of this distraction, Momma was completely absorbed in the show, which featured animals in ankle chains, standing on one leg, waving and roaring on command. Throughout the performance, Momma heard complaints from the officers’ wives that the tricks were pitiful, a waste of their money and an afternoon when they might have otherwise grilled hot-dogs with neighbors. But Momma found the circus perfectly marvelous: the musky smell of animals, the taste of Cracker Jack stuck to her back teeth, the oohs and ahs of children holding pinwheels that spun in the wind. And there was the woman wearing a gold sequined gown who presented each act with her arms raised to the sky.

  When the bear came on, or rather, when the sheet over its cage was pulled away, Momma said I began to kick wildly.

  “Our baby loves this bear,” she had told Dad.

  It was a young bear and meant to dance when given the command. Instead it stood on its hind legs and roared. When the sheet was dropped back over the cage, it continued to roar and I continued to kick.

  Dad wanted to leave right away to avoid traffic, but Momma insisted on staying after the performance to ask the name of the bear. Taking hold of Phil’s hand, she climbed onto the wooden platform, where the woman in gold knelt beside the bear’s cage, still covered in that white sheet, counting a stack of dollar bills.

  “Excuse me,” Momma said to her back. “Excuse me, please. Can you tell me the name of the bear?”

  The woman turned to Momma with eyes thickly lined in black, and in a Russian accent she said, “You mean this naughty little girl?”

  She banged on the bars with the palm of her hand, the cage rocking back and forth, and the bear sniffing the fabric into its nostrils. Phil pulled free of Momma’s hand, sprinting to Dad.

  “You want to know her name?” The woman drew the sheet to the side, her arm shining with sweat, and the bear tottered closer, shaking its head, reaching its paw, like a giant fuzzy slipper, through the bars. The woman did not speak the name, but sang it: “Ma-teelda!”

  They walked back through the parking lot of the hardware store—carpenters wheeling lumber in rattling metal carts and children with cotton candy stuck to their faces pulling against their parents’ hands—when Momma announced, “If our baby is a girl, her name will be Matilda.”

  Dad’s only response was to grumble about the line of cars all trying to exit at once. But Momma wouldn’t let him ruin her mood, saying, “Imagine just deciding one day that you’d like to buy a bear and travel from town to town, and you go and do it. And then you say, ‘I’d like to wear a sequined gown in a parking lot in the middle of the day,’ and you do that, too.”

  Momma had recounted this story so often. Sometimes details were left in or out, but there was always the gold sequined dress, and always the officers’ wives passing judgment from their higher seats.

  Back when she still picked me up after school, Momma had always been different from the others with her long orange hair and Indian-print skirts that went to her ankles. I remember, once, finding her with another mom as I worked my way to her through the crowded schoolyard.

  “It’s never done,” I heard her say. “Every day I spend hours cleaning, cooking, doing these things I hate, and it’s never ever done.”

  The other mom nodded, but also took a step backward as if to make clear they were not friends. “What if you relaxed in a bubble bath?” she suggested.

  By this time, I was near enough to reach Momma’s skirt, and as I scrunched the fabric in my fist, she pet the top of my head and pulled me close into her hip.

  “If I take a bubble bath, I’ll be even more behind!” she said. And laughing, she added, “What if I sink under the water to rinse my hair and just decide to stay there?”

  When the other woman’s child rushed to her a
rms, they left abruptly. Even though we were all headed in the same direction, she dragged her child up the hill so fast we couldn’t catch up.

  Momma had always been different from the others, and perhaps that was the reason we were slow to notice she wasn’t well. She began to do things only partway. She’d start a sewing project, then become bored of the color thread she’d chosen. She’d quit the Game of Life and Uncle Wiggily right in the middle, would just wander away and not come back. Dirty clothes went into the washer, but by the time she remembered to put them in the dryer, they needed to be washed again. Often I went to school in clothes I’d already worn, and once I had to borrow a pair of my brother’s clean underwear with an old stain in the seat and a weird pocket in front.

  But if anything pointed to her decline, it was the wicker laundry basket she kept on her side of the bedroom closet. When the mail came, she dumped it there. Our school work went in, too—drawings we’d made, permission slips, stray socks, even a few dirty dishes. Momma kept a dress draped over the top of it.

  My parents shared the bedroom closet—Momma on the left, Dad on the right. Momma’s side didn’t close all the way because there were jeans, pantyhose, and slips hung over the rod. Dad’s side was tidy: five work shirts buttoned to the top, slacks carefully folded along the crease, shoes filled with shoe trees and lined in pairs. When the dress that covered Momma’s laundry basket crossed the line over to his side and he bent down to pick it off the floor, he discovered a problem larger than the unpaid bills and notes from my teacher.

  After he was done shouting and balling his fists, he took her to the local clinic. Maybe a blood test or an X-ray would explain this change in Momma. Maybe her trouble getting dressed in the morning or doing the simplest things was caused by cancer or some other medical problem. That he would have understood. But after a thorough exam and a series of blood tests, the doctor concluded that she was absolutely fine.

  This news from the doctor sent Dad into a rage. “Enough of this! You don’t have cancer!” he shouted at her the next time she said she couldn’t get out of bed. Momma’s problem, he decided, was one of stubbornness. She was sloppy, helpless, emotional. Unforgivable things.

  I didn’t like when he shouted at her, and it was not because I was afraid of shouting. I liked the way an angry voice brought out goose bumps on my arms and legs, like I’d been plugged in and something suddenly buzzed through me. But every time he shouted or criticized her, she was less likely to get out of bed.

  I tried to help her clean so he wouldn’t yell. When dishes disappeared into a sink filled with brown water that never drained, I pointed to a switch on the wall and told her, “Flip that up and it’ll clean the sink.”

  “Oh, but the garbage disposal is so loud,” she said. Then she bent down and whispered a secret just between us. “Besides, I always get the strangest urge to stick my arm down the drain and let it gobble me up.”

  “No, I’m going to gobble you up!” I told her, giggling.

  She reached down to tickle me and I danced out of the way. When she finally caught me, she curled me in her arms, planting loud kisses on my cheeks. Then she tickled under my chin, and always, when someone tickled me, I bit.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Momma.”

  The single joke in our family, when we still joked, was to be careful naming children after wild animals. “You can’t be wild now,” Dad would say. “You have to be a tame bear.”

  And Momma famously answered, “You can’t tell a bear not to be a bear.”

  WHEN DAD RETURNED FROM his trip to Washington, the sight of our neighbors gathered on our lawn and the state of our house when he came inside convinced him to get control of Momma. Each morning he physically dragged her out of bed. As she would slump to the floor, he shouted, “Stand up, and pull yourself together.” He tucked his arms under her armpits and pulled. “Stand up, damn it!”

  Most days she would stay where he left her, collapsed on the floor, looking almost purposefully uncomfortable. I stayed with her until I had to leave for school, braiding her hair or decorating her wrist with bracelets. “Momma, get up. Don’t cry.”

  Once Phil tried to lift her off the floor, as Dad did. He had always wanted to be the little man—hammering scrap wood when Dad built bookshelves, handing him tools when he changed a bike tire, shaving beside him, but with a comb in place of a razor. He wrestled his arms under Momma’s and tried to stand her up.

  “Leave me alone,” she snapped, and he removed his hands from her as if he’d received a shock, Momma crumbling back to the carpet in tears.

  My brother was not the type who had to be told anything more than once. From that day on, he left her alone—walking around her in the mornings, going straight to his room after school to do his homework or build his model airplanes. When the weather was good, he left the house. He liked to play at the very edge of the yard, digging roads for his Matchbox cars around the roots of our piñon tree, or near the fence, poking things through to the other side. When Dad allowed it, he hopped on his bike and rode to the opposite side of the base where the planes took off, and tried to outrace them.

  My father’s plan for getting control of Momma was clearly failing—she just wasn’t cooperating, he said—and it interfered with his work. He didn’t have time to wake her up or lift her off the floor or check on her throughout the day. He understood that leaving us with her was the same as leaving us on our own, and so he began coming home when we returned from school, but with no patience for stories about what we’d learned in class or what we’d played at recess. There were dishes and clothes to wash and dinner to cook, and in every spare moment he sat in the armchair with papers in his lap and a ballpoint pen in the corner of his mouth.

  If we needed him, we stood near his chair until he looked up and asked, “What is it?” And when we told him that we were bored or hungry or had had a disagreement, he gave a frustrated sigh, and we knew we’d interrupted him with something unimportant.

  After a while, I could predict his answers: “I suppose, if you’re hungry, you’ll eat all your vegetables at dinner” or “You two will have to figure out how to resolve it, then.” Phil stopped going to him at all. But I kept trying.

  “Yes? What is it, Tillie?”

  “A scrape,” I said, showing him my elbow and trying not to let him see my tears.

  “And you don’t know where the Band-Aids are?” he asked.

  “The hall closet,” I said, my shoulders dropping. I had not even taken a step away when he was scribbling notes again.

  I walked right past the hall closet and into my room because it wasn’t the Band-Aid that stopped the tears; it was someone pressing it where it hurt and saying, “There, there.”

  DAD WORKED DURING EVERY bit of free time, reading stacks of papers and filling up yellow legal pads with formulas, until one evening he set us on the couch. The government wanted him to work in a new office, he said, on something called DNSS. He used a ruler to draw a picture of a five-sided shape with a hole in the center of it, and tapping on the drawing with his pencil he said, “My new job will be right here.”

  Later, I asked Phil, “Did you understand anything he said?”

  My brother sat at the back table in his room, where he painstakingly glued model airplanes together. His room was hot and stuffy, but he wouldn’t open the windows and risk letting the red dust ruin his work.

  “He’s designing guided missiles,” he explained. “They say his inventions will make our country mightier than we’ve ever been.”

  He opened his drawer and took out a notebook filled with newspaper clippings. Again and again, there were articles with my father’s name underlined, and pictures of him with important-looking people, receiving awards. In one picture, I recognized the faces of men who’d flown in from Washington, D.C. to meet with him.

  “But why did he draw a donut?”

  “Not a donut, Tillie. The Pentagon. It’s a building. He was trying to tell us we have to move.”

&n
bsp; “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “That’s where he went on his business trip. They told him right away that they wanted him. He spent most of the trip finding our new house.”

  “We have a new house?”

  Phil nodded, as if these were things I would know if I paid better attention. My brother worked so hard to listen and to do what he was told, but while he knew more of what was happening than I did, he was never a part of what was happening. He was so quick to understand and cooperate that he faded into the background. You could see this even when we were in public together. The four of us could stand in line at a restaurant, and the waiter would ask, “Table for three?”

  At bedtime I lay awake, wondering what our new house looked like and how far it was from here when I heard Momma’s bedroom door open and her soft footsteps down the hallway. This was the sound I’d been waiting for. Since Dad returned from his trip, she’d been leaving her bedroom each night to tuck us in, though it seemed to take all of her strength to do it.

  She went to Phil’s room first, where her good night was brief. “Time for bed,” she said.

  Phil, who always did as he was told, immediately turned off the lights and closed his eyes. Sometimes she stood there a little longer in the dark. “Do you need anything?” she asked in a quiet voice. “Can I bring you a glass of water or read to you?” But Phil always gave the answer that made Dad proud: He didn’t need anything.

  When it was my turn, I got so excited that I kicked my feet against the mattress. Now, the warm drink had become part of our nightly routine, and I had to wait a little longer. But finally she came to my room, carefully handing me the ruby cup. I took slow sips as she sat beside me, her hair tangled, her pajamas damp with sweat.