Up from the Blue

by Susan Henderson

  “It’s that one,” I said.

  Shirl’s grandmother stopped humming when she pulled in front of the house.

  “And just one family lives in there!” Shirl said and then whistled. When no one responded to her comment, she whistled again.

  “Stop that,” her grandmother snapped, and then to me, “All right, child. Time for you to go.”

  I closed the car door, and Shirl’s grandmother backed down our cul-de-sac rather than turning around at the end. As I went up the walkway, I tried to see my life the way Shirl did. I was the daughter of a homemaker and a colonel with a silver eagle on his shoulder. For a moment, I pretended there wasn’t even a hint of the constant worry I’d feel when I went inside. I threw my book bag down on the porch, wrapped my hand around a column, and walked in circles.

  29

  The Mall

  THOUGH IT WAS A Saturday and the weather was sunny, I didn’t feel like going outside. I sat on the floor of my room, my back against the bed, and let an hour go by. When I finally began to move, it was only to alphabetize my books by the authors’ first names, as Momma liked to do. I quit partway through.

  Dragging my hand down the banister, I wandered past the unfinished puzzle, past Dad coming around the corner with a stepladder and a package of light bulbs, and found Momma on the living room couch, a pillow in her lap, picking at the seam.

  “I don’t feel good,” I said, wrapping my arms around my middle as if the pain were only there.

  “Do you think you have a stomachache?”

  “It kind of hurts all over. It doesn’t actually hurt anywhere. I can’t really explain it.”

  There was the squeak of Dad twisting light bulbs in and out of a socket.

  “I know the feeling,” she said with a heavy sigh. “Sorrow is a stubborn thing.”

  It seemed sorrow was doing cartwheels and tasting honeysuckles one day and then returning to your own kind of normal the next.

  When the doorbell rang, we both flinched. It was rare for anyone to ring our bell—and always an appointment we were expecting—a Sears delivery, the exterminator. Dad hurried down the ladder.

  There was the bell again, and then we heard Anne’s voice through the mail slot. “Knock knock?”

  “Don’t answer it,” Momma whispered, but Dad turned the knob.

  “Oh, good, you’re home!” Anne said, walking into the foyer. “I was so excited about this, I had to drive right over. He loves the proposal you wrote, just loves it.”

  When she saw me enter the room, she turned to explain, “The congressman who wants to get the missile project funded.” Then, giggling, she corrected herself, “The navigation project.”

  “He called?” Dad asked.

  She nodded energetically. “Yes. He was planning to leave a message, but there I was, getting some extra work done. He just went on and on about how he’s looking forward to meeting you.”

  She stepped deeper into our house, two wrapped presents in her arms, and her purse slipping down to her elbow. “One for you,” she said, sticking the gift in my hands. “And I hope Phil’s around.” She turned her head toward our practically bare living room with Momma’s things cluttered in the corner.

  “He isn’t,” I said as Momma joined me, food crusted on her bathrobe, her hair uncombed and loosely twirled on the top of her head.

  “Sleeping in?” Anne said. “Oh, I could never do that. I get too antsy about all I could get done.”

  Anne’s tidy new hairstyle, parted on the side and curling outward around her face, her pressed white slacks, carefully tucked-in pink blouse, and matching purse reminded me of the officers’ wives at the air force base—how, when Momma stood beside them, she looked shy and messy.

  “I have to tell you about our phone call,” Anne said, turning back to Dad. “We had such an enthusiastic talk about Block 1 satellites, NAVSTAR, and attitude control systems.”

  “She’s just saying all of this to be a show-off,” Momma whispered, watching with astonishment as Anne, who had not let anyone else talk since she came over, uninvited, walked farther into our house. “I’ll set Phil’s gift over here,” she called from the dining room. And when she was standing over the puzzle, she reached down and put a piece in its place.

  “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself,” she laughed. “My mind has always loved numbers and shapes; I can’t help seeing where the pieces go.”

  “It’s not a good time,” Momma said, crossing her arms. “Roy?”

  “Thank you for stopping by,” he told Anne. “It really isn’t the best time.”

  “Oh,” she said with exaggerated concern. “Anything I can help with?”

  “He means leave,” my mother said, but the tone of her voice didn’t match her words. She sounded weak and unsure of herself.

  “Mara,” Dad whispered. “She’s only trying to help.”

  “We don’t need her help.”

  “It’s all right,” Anne said, calmly slipping her purse strap to her shoulder, and grinning at my mother with the kind of glee I saw in the kids who teased Phil. “Maybe we’ll see each other another time. If you’re feeling well enough.”

  “Get out!” Momma yelled.

  “But Roy,” Anne said, placing her hand on his arm. “Roy, I’m sorry, but he wants to meet with us right now. That’s why I’m here, to give you a ride.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Momma said.

  “Mara,” he said, “it’s my job.”

  Anne walked tall and triumphant out of our house, Momma holding her hands on her hips, and the hair that had been swirled on her head flopping down over her eye. Dad let Anne get a few paces ahead before he said, “This meeting could change everything.”

  “Go, then,” she said, slamming the door behind him. But the moment it latched, she bent over sobbing. “She was throwing around all those scientific words just to make fun of me. Did you see that?” She leaned against the door.

  I was glad all of Anne’s talking and Momma’s yelling had stopped.

  “I wonder what she got you,” Momma said, frowning at Anne’s present in my hands. “Aren’t you just dying to know?”

  My finger had already ripped a tiny opening in one end, but now I tucked it closed. “Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Well, then, you have my permission to throw that thing away,” and she waited until she heard the thunk it made in the trash can. “We’ll get you something much better than that. I know the kinds of presents you’d really like.”

  She opened the hallway closet and dug through the deep pile until she found a skirt and a top. And believing she was hidden by the door, removed her robe and stood there perfectly naked except for her baggy pink underwear. Her shoulders were sharp, her breasts like thin, hanging sacks, and one whole side of her body was marked by seams from the couch and her robe.

  She pulled on an emerald green tube top, and then a slightly sheer, very wrinkled white skirt, took the bobby pins out of her hair, squirted herself with perfume, and used the television screen to apply her makeup. She outlined her eyes in thick black, the way Rhoda, our favorite character on TV did hers, and asked, “Are you ready to go?”

  “Go?”

  “We’re going shopping,” she called out as she went to my father’s bedroom. “We’re getting presents we actually like.”

  Shocked, I stood up tall. “Shopping?”

  She came back dangling the spare car key. She had Dad’s credit card in her other hand, along with a blob of toothpaste on one of her fingers, which she spread on her tongue and swallowed. “We could both use some cheering up, don’t you think?”

  She opened the front door, and heart beating fast, I found my sneakers under the table and stepped my bare feet into them, mashing down the heels.

  She breathed heavily as we walked to Dad’s car. Her tube top was on inside out, showing the tag, and a bobby pin was tangled in the bottom of her hair, but I didn’t tell her. I didn’t want to be one more person in our family to criticize
her, or remind her how she was different.

  “I can’t believe her nerve,” she said, unlocking the car. We both sat up front where I had never been allowed before. I extended my legs and enjoyed looking through the windows in every direction. It felt dangerous being up front. I’d never shopped anywhere but the commissary or the PX, but here I was, doing what my classmates did with their mothers: walking out the front door together, buckling into a car, heading to the mall.

  Momma showed me how to move the seats back. She blasted music and the a/c, and it didn’t feel like Dad’s car anymore. We backed out of the driveway and drove through our neighborhood roads lined with green lawns and perfectly trimmed azalea bushes. No one stopped us.

  “First, I need to find out where the mall is,” she said, and crossed to the other side of the road, honking at a woman walking down the sidewalk. “I’m trying to get to the mall,” she called out as she rolled down her window.

  “The mall?” the woman said, her forehead suddenly showing three horizontal strips. “You’ve got a long ways to go.” And there was a lot of back and forth, trying to explain how to get to the highway, and which exit to take.

  I sank in my seat, and when Momma started driving again, I asked, “Do you think we should just go home?”

  “No, I’ve got it.” She rolled up the window. “Are you having a good time?”

  I wasn’t sure, couldn’t actually move my head yes or no.

  She turned the music so loud I felt it in my legs. Kris Kristofferson, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway. Momma sang along to the choruses, humming when she didn’t know the words. Sometimes she made the car go fast or slow to the music, and sometimes she made it go bump bump bump with the drums. I would have rolled down the window to get a break from Momma’s perfume, but I liked the distance the glass provided me from the other drivers, some who glared at my mother. One flipped her the bird.

  As we got near enough to the mall to see the signs and the massive building in the distance, Momma made a series of U-turns until we finally reached the underground parking lot. She drove up several cement ramps, then followed the arrows through the shady rows, until we found a space.

  It wasn’t until she took the key out of the ignition, that I noticed the mood I’d felt that morning was still there. I was slow to get out of the car, but the strong smell of exhaust and the bustle of women carrying shopping bags and calling children out of traffic soon put that feeling out of my mind again.

  “Want to know how we can remember where we parked?” Momma asked as we got out of the car, walking under the low ceilings and dim fluorescent lights.

  “F5?” I said, reading a sign on the wall.

  “But how will we remember F5? Think of an author whose name begins with F.”

  That was easy because of the way Momma organized her books. “Franz!” I said.

  “Good! And now let’s think of something he’s written with five syllables in it.” In no time, she answered her own question, “Metamorphosis! We’ve got it. And now how will we remember all of this?”

  “F5?” I guessed, pausing as a car with its blinker on turned into an empty space.

  “No, no. How about bug?”

  “We just have to remember bug?”

  We had now walked through the parking lot and entered the automatic glass doors that parted for us. Until that moment “the mall” meant the Smithsonian museums, but now it meant a giant indoor city decorated in tiny white lights. As we rode up the glass elevator, Momma pointed to one store after another, and it seemed the bright and colorful items inside might fill something that had been empty.

  Our first stop was at a variety store, where Momma found a ballpoint pen so decorated with feathers and glitter I thought it was a toy. She used it to draw a small bug on my hand to help us remember where we parked, then, smiling, said, “We’ll buy this, for starters.”

  30

  What’s Lost Is Found

  STORE AFTER STORE, WE bought t-shirts with iron-on decals, compact mirrors, beaded bracelets, Love’s Baby Soft perfume, Certs breath mints, blush we knew even at the counter was too orange to look good against Momma’s pale skin. Anything I pointed to, she simply said yes and handed over the Master Charge card with Dad’s name on it, then signed Roy Harris.

  At the clothing checkout, where we collected armfuls of clothes we hadn’t tried on, Momma spun the earring tree, finding handfuls of hoops and studs and gave them to the clerk.

  “You’ll look great in these,” she told me.

  “But I don’t have pierced ears.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yes! Yes, I do!” I was terrified, but I’d be the only one in my class to have pierced ears, and that in itself was worth someone holding a staple gun to my ear.

  “Ma’am.” The clerk held up an earring. “This one doesn’t have a match to it.”

  Momma placed her hand on my back. “We’ll mix and match, won’t we?”

  My face felt hot as the clerk waited for my response.

  Momma’s fingers drummed against my skin as she whispered, “You want that beautiful earring, don’t you?” And not looking at the clerk, I nodded my head.

  After sitting on a stool in the center of the mall and hearing the terrifying bang of a gold stud going into each earlobe, we took a breather at the Magic Pan restaurant. I set the bags down on an empty chair, and the handles left a deep pink stripe on the insides of my fingers.

  “I’m going to the bathroom to look in the mirror,” I told her.

  “Here,” she said, tossing me a t-shirt we’d just bought—stretchy and yellow with a drawing of Gloria Steinem’s face on it. “You can change into it while you’re there.”

  Dressed in my new shirt and examining my sore earlobes in the mirror, I was surprised how much I didn’t look like myself. And I wondered, Where was I? Where was I anymore?

  When I returned to the table, Momma had ordered us spinach crêpes and coffees. I’d never had either before, and we unwrapped sugar cubes, then dropped them in our cups. I unwrapped another cube and put it directly into my mouth.

  “How’s this for presents?” she asked, showing me how difficult it was to find space under the table and around our chairs for all the shopping bags. “Are you feeling better now?”

  “I think so.” I couldn’t tell. I’d been too busy to notice, though, now, it seemed the sugar did help a little.

  “I wonder if your father’s enjoying his little meeting,” she said, and we both opened plastic containers full of cream and poured them into our coffees.

  It felt as if I wasn’t supposed to answer. I held my hands around the cup, as Momma did, sorry I’d added so much cream. I had wanted to see the color of Mr. Woodson in my cup; instead, I saw Shirl’s grandmother.

  “Have I ever told you the story of when we first moved to the air force base in Albuquerque?”

  I straightened in my seat, surprised she wanted to talk about the old house. I had been so careful not to mention it, afraid to bring up anything that might remind her of the days she lay crying on the floor.

  “The house,” she said, “smelled like dogs and cigarettes. We opened all the windows to let in the breeze. It was a hot day, and your father and I went down the street in search of an ice cream shop that sold root beer floats. This was when Phil was in diapers, and we strolled him down the sidewalk. Everyone thought he was such a cute, fat baby.

  “When we came back to the house, the smell had aired out, but inside was completely coated in red sand.”

  “I remember it,” I said, my voice so quiet I hardly recognized it as my own. “That red dust got on everything.”

  Something about her story made me nervous. Why tell it now? Why on a day he’d been so cruel to her?

  “I started to cry,” she said, continuing her story, “because our new house was ruined and it was too much to clean. Roy told me to go wash my face, and I felt ashamed of my tears, hurrying to the bathroom to see if my mascara had run. But this was all a ploy to get m
e to see that he’d written ‘Cootie’ on the mirror with his finger.”

  “Why Cootie?”

  “On our first date, he tried to call me Cutie but was nervous and it came out wrong.”

  “It’s a nice story,” I said, though it was also a terrible story, because the man in her memory, this nervous man who would go out of his way to please her, no longer existed.

  “Those are the kinds of things that keep you going,” she said. “Otherwise, life is just an awful rowing toward God.”

  “That’s one of your books,” I said, remembering the title.

  “Yes,” she said. Normally when we talked about books, she was pleased with me, but this time her eyes were distant.

  We both turned our attention to the spinach crêpes, though I mostly cut mine into smaller and smaller pieces because my stomach hurt again. We hardly looked up until the waiter cleared our dishes.

  “It’s been such a pleasure to serve you today,” he said, a kindness in his voice that seemed to break through her mood, however slightly.

  When she pulled out the credit card, I couldn’t help but imagine this man as a replacement for Dad. Maybe he’d be nicer, I thought. Maybe he’d dance with her.

  “How about the bookstore next?” she asked after signing the bill, though she seemed as tired as I felt.

  “Okay. And then maybe we’re done for the day,” I said, cringing at how much I sounded like Dad. When we got up from the table, I brushed some spinach from her hair.

  “Did you like your coffee?” she asked as we weaved through the restaurant’s tables, our hands full, once again, with shopping bags, and I realized I hadn’t even tasted it.

  At Waldenbooks, Momma found a copy of The Feminine Mystique and handed it to me. “Here,” she said. “One of your very own.”

  The cover was crisp, shiny, and not as nice to hold. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I could just borrow yours when I need it,” not that I was ever expecting to need it.

  “I’m absolutely sure,” she said. “Would you like anything else while we’re here?”