Up from the Blue

by Susan Henderson

  “And you’re not in my club anymore.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Then I’ll take this with me.” She removed a package of giant Sweet Tarts from her pocket and held it in front of my face.

  “I don’t care,” I said, and stupidly added, “I don’t even like candy.” After she stomped out of the clubhouse, I wrote “Hope stinks” in the sand.

  • • •

  For days after our fight, I tried to sneak to the secret room, but I was frightened I’d be caught and only got as far as the basement door. Standing there, her room eerily silent, Hope’s words haunted me. It’s all a bunch of BS. I don’t believe a word of it.

  I felt desperate to prove her wrong, and angry I hadn’t just opened the door and let her see Momma for herself. As the week rolled on, I felt more panicked, needing to find a way to visit, needing to see her again with my own eyes and prove to myself that she was real.

  I began collecting food, a handful at a time, so I’d be ready. But I needed a plan for waking up at night that didn’t also wake up Dad or Phil. I couldn’t use my alarm clock. I had to be clever. My bedtime was eight and Dad was always in bed by ten, so I needed to pretend to sleep until ten, and then somehow keep myself from nodding off during the wait.

  Just after my bedtime, I drank a pitcher full of water, and in the middle of the night, woke up urgent. I peed, but did not flush, and then put on my bathrobe, which already had the pockets stuffed full with carrots, salami, and Saltine crackers. I crept through the house, butter knife in hand. Down the last set of stairs, I held the rail with both hands so I wouldn’t fall into the black. And when I reached the bottom, I felt along the wall for the door and then the handle.

  I was afraid of what I’d find—Momma starving, or worse, nothing more than a closet, just as Hope believed. I inserted the knife into the keyhole, and slowly let myself in. There. The blue flickering light. Something glowing in the corner of the couch under the small lamp. It was her. I breathed a sigh of relief to find Momma sitting up in her bathrobe, books crowded into her lap, and the television showing the same picture on it.

  “I didn’t tell him,” I whispered.

  “Good girl,” she said. “Come sit with me. I was just about to read.”

  It felt like something the size of an acorn had just become lodged in my throat. I inched toward the couch, wanting badly to hear a story, and when she scooted the books out of the way, I curled up beside her. I’d often thought about the last chapter in Alice in Wonderland, wondering which way the story turned. I could have checked out the book at the library and simply read that final chapter myself, but it was Momma’s smiles and tears for Alice that I longed for, and how she always read until I drifted off.

  Remembering the food I brought for her, I reached into my pocket and placed it between us. She smiled and then opened a book with the odd word “PLATH” written across it and started to read out loud:

  The claw of the magnolia

  drunk on its own scents

  asks nothing of life.

  I had no idea what a “magnolia” was. The other words I knew, but they seemed like they were in the wrong order. Still, I loved how she read the poem into the top of my head, her lips touching. It was a feeling of being in a brand new world and wondering how I’d ever tolerated the old one. “Read some more,” I begged.

  Momma read from other books that night—strange, serious books that were nothing like the ones I’d read before. Each time she finished, she passed me the book, warmed from her hands, with her favorite passages underlined perfectly in felt-tipped marker.

  When I was so tired I didn’t think I could make it back up the stairs, I waited for a space in Momma’s talking, where I could say good-night. She seemed to sense I was about to go, and whispered, “I love you the best.” She said it with a kind of fierceness.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I asked as I opened the door. This was a test to see if she wanted to escape, or if she was too afraid.

  “I better stay here,” she said, and smiled with her lips closed, one side of her mouth curling upward, the other side flat and guarding her secret.

  At the bottom of my pocket, I felt for a piece of paper that had been folded over and over into a small square. I dusted the cracker crumbs off of it and handed it to Momma, my hand shaking. It was my poem about the moon.

  17

  Chair Legs

  MY FATHER’S WORK INVOLVED creating some kind of navigating system in which things on earth could be tracked, and possibly even directed, from space. Sometimes at breakfast he tried to explain this idea to me, describing satellite geometry and signal frequencies. It sounded like science fiction, and I found it hard to be interested in space and in the future when more important things were taking place right here in our own house.

  Still I nodded, saying the occasional “hmm” so as not to raise suspicions. But what I really thought about were his lies. Even the times I remembered as good ones—camping in the backyard or going to the Pentagon with him—were different now because of what I knew. When I was missing Momma and begging to know where she was, he could have told me.

  My head could nod. My mouth could smile. My body could rise and collect my book bag and find its way to school. I could do all of this by rote, though my mind was somewhere else entirely. Sometimes it was churning with questions: Why did he do this? How could he be so cruel? Most often, my mind was far away in the secret room, reliving favorite scenes with Momma over and over, but revising them so that my words were smarter and there were fewer pauses in-between.

  I walked down the hallway at school, wondering where the day had gone. Students were packing up to leave for home, and those of us cast in The Wizard of Oz headed to the cafeteria for our first rehearsal. The janitor had transformed the room into an auditorium by putting the lunch tables back into the walls and setting out rows of metal chairs. I sat in back, slumped in my brother’s Baltimore Colts shirt, since none of mine were clean, and tried to work up the nerve to quit the play.

  “We’re going to play a little get-to-know-you game,” our director, Mrs. Newkirk, announced. “Everyone, pull your chairs into a circle.”

  The game involved a ball. You had to say your name, your part in the play, and then throw the ball to someone you hadn’t thrown to yet. The ball went back and forth between the popular students who shouted out lead roles. At last, out of necessity, someone threw the ball to me. I said my name, and my voice sounded small, the way I sounded when Hope and I recorded ourselves on her cassettes. I was meant to keep up the rhythm—name, role, throw—but I stalled. I couldn’t say the name of my part, even when the other students laughed and said it for me. I felt desperate to return to Momma’s blue-lit room, and when I threw the ball at another student, I threw it like I was playing dodge ball. The next time the ball came to me, I threw it even harder.

  When I returned from school, Phil, sitting on the front porch, said, “I heard you got sent to the principal’s office.”

  “Don’t tell Dad,” I said.

  “I’ll bet they already called him at work.”

  “The principal said he wouldn’t because I was so sorry and my grades were good.”

  My brother grinned and said, “Still might have called.”

  At dinner that night, I braced myself for a lecture, one that would end with the question, Why? Why would you do such a stupid thing? And I would only be able to say, I don’t know. Because the more truthful answer—It just felt good—was something I’d have to keep to myself.

  I swung my legs back and forth—it calmed me to concentrate on the rhythm—and as I did, I thought, She’s there, right below us. She would understand why I’d thrown the ball at those girls. She would cheer me on. And could she hear my feet banging into the chair legs?

  I wanted so badly to see her, but it wasn’t easy to wake myself in the middle of the night, even with my many methods. Some part of me fought it—the part that wanted to rest and stay warm, to have a full night’s sleep the wa
y other kids did.

  “Would you please pass the salt?” Phil said.

  Dad and I both looked up at the same time and said, “What?”

  There was something so quiet and formal about my brother that he could just blend in to the background and you’d forget he was there. When our family used to walk together on the air force base, rare as it was, sometimes Dad would say, “What a lot of traffic. They should create another lane so it doesn’t back up like this. Do you smell that exhaust?” Or Momma would say, “Listen to the birds chirping. Don’t you love their songs?” And until they mentioned traffic or birds, you were completely unaware of them. It was like they didn’t exist until someone reminded you.

  And it was like that with my brother. Except no one tended to say, “Do you notice the curly haired kid with the silver tooth who eats his vegetables and uses his napkin? Do you see him there, sometimes pressing his fingers to his front teeth, moving from the regular tooth to the funny one?” No one tended to point him out the way they pointed out traffic and birds, so when he spoke up and asked for salt, it was kind of like, “Oh, yeah. You.”

  “The salt,” he said again, but mumbling because, lately, he tried to talk without letting the silver tooth show.

  “Phil, speak up. If you’re not clear, people will think you’re weak.”

  My father would not pass the salt until Phil apologized. Then he let it go, and we all found something on our plates to spear.

  This sudden focus to Phil doing something wrong was good news to me. It was obvious the principal hadn’t called, and I could relax again. There was never a worry about Phil telling on me. The one thing you could count on was my brother following Dad’s rules, and he knew Dad didn’t like tattlers. I kicked the legs of my chair again—a secret hello to Momma.

  18

  Great Tap Root

  I FEARED THE VIEW OUT my window when I set out to be with Momma. At that hour, the glow of streetlamps shone only enough to reveal the endless span of night. I crept slowly through the house, sure I could hear my father’s breath behind me, sure that I’d turn a corner and he’d be there.

  Down the wooden stairs, gently tiptoeing to avoid splinters, I made my way to the bottom. The cold of the cement floor worked itself into my feet as I unlocked the door and entered the hum and the blue light coming from the TV set. Momma had her head on a pillow, eyes closed, legs stretched across the couch and glowing blue. Only my footsteps on the carpet made any noise.

  “I’m here,” I whispered, but there was no answer.

  I sat near her feet. My corner of the couch had a hole in it, and each time I sat there, I pulled out stuffing, twisted it into thin ropes then stuffed it back in. Most visits I was so nervous about being discovered even our whispers seemed too loud, but now it was the quiet that left me feeling afraid. I turned the sweaty ropes in my hands.

  “I’m here. I’m here,” I said. “Please wake up. I came to see you.”

  I noticed a sock sticking out at the end of the blanket, and with my shoulders held stiff, I touched it to see if she would move, if her body was warm. It was. I breathed out. I let my fingers wrap themselves gently around her foot, squeezing to wake her.

  “Momma. Momma, it’s me.”

  Very slowly, she breathed more deeply under the blanket. She stretched and turned until after a moment, she was sitting up, groggy.

  “Will you read to me?” I whispered, and I reached to touch the cover of Sylvia Plath, which had been shoved between the cushions.

  She rubbed her face in her hands and took the book from me. Then she turned on the lamp beside her and spent some time finding the page she wanted. A rosy color moved from her chest to her face when she found the passage to read aloud:

  I know the bottom, she says.

  I know it with my great tap root:

  It is what you fear.

  I do not fear it:

  I have been there.

  Momma’s voice was wonderful and dramatic, not at all like mine or Phil’s or Dad’s, the way we sounded so plain. I practiced the words in my mind as she closed the book.

  “Do you understand it?”

  I nodded my head as if I did.

  “The very bottom of the elm tree roots,” she said. “As low as you can go.”

  “We learned about roots in school,” I said. “Each student got a plant in a Styrofoam cup.”

  “But in this story, the roots are filled with disease and sorrow, and they spread though the whole tree. It’s about a sadness so deep you don’t know how you can go on. I understand that feeling.”

  I nodded again. Her face was happier when I seemed to understand, and I was ashamed I’d mentioned something so stupid as a science project.

  “She will die with her head in an oven.”

  “Who?”

  “This poet. She’s so sad that the oven is a relief.”

  I was stunned. My father never told me these kinds of secrets, darker and more thrilling than anything I could have invented in my own mind. “Someone found her with her head in the oven?”

  “That’s right. She killed herself because life was more painful than death. It was a short life, but not a shallow one.”

  I sat speechless on my sagging end of the couch as she hummed again and placed small objects in my hands: a painted figurine, a tiny key to turn a tiny lock, a lotion she rubbed into my skin until I smelled like peaches. We shared the pleasure of details—the smell, the texture of anything within reach. Momma called us poets at heart.

  She passed another object, this time carefully because it was loaded with pins: a cushioned tomato from the old sewing kit.

  “Oh, Momma,” I said, remembering how I used to sit on her lap while she pinned crinkly patterns to fabric and made them into miniature shoes and vests. I thought of us around the Christmas tree full of Momma’s ornaments, and was she down below even then? If I was right about Dad, she was.

  “Are the pins hurting you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, pausing, choosing my words. “It’s just, I missed you so much at Christmas time.”

  “I heard you playing.” She put her hand on my arm. “I always listen for you.”

  I couldn’t respond to what she’d said. I felt sick that I hadn’t found her sooner. Sick knowing I had opened presents and ridden my new bike while she suffered. If I had discovered her any later, she probably would have died.

  “How long will you be down here?” I asked, though my real question was, Momma, what should we do? Because I don’t know, and I’m scared.

  “Whenever you want to visit, I’ll be here,” she said.

  I understood then. What she meant was that it wasn’t safe for her to leave this room. I repeated her answer over and over in my mind so I wouldn’t forget to write it down in the notebook where I kept details about our visits. On paper, I was trying to put together the puzzle, but I was careful about gathering information. I didn’t want to ask questions that would upset her—not after all she’d been through. I wasn’t going to be the one to make her curl up on the floor and cry. And something deep inside made me careful, as well. There was a sense of danger in knowing too much at once. Sometimes the edges of conversation are like the dim edges of the streetlamp’s light. You know better than to wander past its glow and into the endless dark where you could find anything at all.

  She touched the blanket where my legs were nestled beneath it and announced, “Time for you to go to bed.”

  Of course I knew it was coming, the journey back through the dark house before I was ready and the shock of cold on my legs from not being under a blanket with her. Our closeness was always followed by distance—days apart, maybe weeks—and afterward, I’d think too much. Had I been as interesting or smart as she believed me to be? Had I said anything to bore or upset her?

  I returned to my room without showing the items I’d stuffed up the sleeves of my nightgown, things I thought I wanted to show her, like my collection of animal erasers and a black light bulb that made yo
ur teeth glow and showed the dust you never knew was on your face. But the items from my world seemed silly and trivial when I was with Momma, and I kept them hidden, and scolded myself later for bringing them at all.

  I read from the notebook I’d been keeping: Very thin. Door locked. “Don’t tell your father.” Won’t follow me. “I better stay here.” “It’s our secret.” I added some new notes: Leave childish things in room. Read more of Momma’s books. Understand them! Don’t say dumb things! Remember Sylvia Plath.

  I held the notebook to my chest, my mind stuffed full with questions, fears, and secret joys. I knew things about Momma that no one else in the family knew. I felt almost tingly, with the pleasure and agony of not speaking a word about our time together.

  On another page in the notebook, I had drawn her room—everything I could recall of it: the magnifying mirror, the makeup-stained pillow, so soft and flat that you could fold it in half. I added the pin cushion and the book she read from that night. Then I wrote her name, over and over in my best script. I wrote Momma. I wrote Mara.

  “LOOK WHAT I BROUGHT!” I stood in the middle of the school playground, raising a bottle of Flintstones chewables in my fist. “I have been to the bottom of the root and I do not fear it! Are you with me?”

  I felt bold, like I was showing some new and secret part of myself in public, bringing something from my hidden world into school. “I do not fear it!” I shouted as I worked at opening the cap.

  Most kids played on, ignoring me, though I heard one say, “That girl’s crazy,” when I pretended to eat a handful of the vitamins. I fell to the ground, coughing and kicking my legs in spasms.

  “Tillie?”

  I knew it was my teacher’s voice even with my eyes closed, and I slowed my legs to a stop, feeling not as great as I had hoped to feel.

  “Come with me, Tillie.” Mr. Woodson held me gently by the arm and walked me closer to the building and our classroom window. “I’ve been doing some thinking about you,” he said, gently pressing down my hair where I’d forgotten to comb it. “Here, let’s sit.”