by Jane Smiley
When we left, Rose and me with Pammy and Linda by the hands, leaving Pete and Ty behind and taking the car, it seemed to me that we were fleeing. I kept saying, “Where are we going? Where are we going?” certain there was somewhere to go. But we went straight home, as if there were no escape, as if the play we’d begun could not end. Since then, I’ve often thought we could have taken our own advice, driven to the Twin Cities and found jobs as waitresses, measured out our days together in a garden apartment, the girls in one bedroom, Rose and I in the other, anonymous, ducking forever a destiny that we never asked for, that was our father’s gift to us.
Book Four
29
I DON’T WANT TO MAKE TOO MUCH of our mother by asserting that she was especially beautiful or especially distinguished by heritage or intelligence. The fact is that she fit in. She belonged to clubs, went to church, traded dress patterns with the other women. She kept the house clean and raised us the same way the neighbors were raising their children, which meant that she promoted my father’s authority and was not especially affectionate or curious about our feelings. She cared about what we did or failed to do—our homework, our chores, our share of the cooking and cleaning—and expected our feelings about these doings to rise and fall according to some sort of childhood barometer, irrelevant to her, having to do with “phases.”
We were given to know that the house belonged in every particular to her—that she was responsible for it, but also that damaging it was equal to damaging her. I remember once when Caroline was about three, she got hold of a lipstick and made large circular marks on the wall of the upstairs hallway. My mother was not forgiving of Caroline’s youth, nor did she blame herself for leaving the lipstick around. She spanked Caroline soundly, repeating over and over, “Must not touch Mommy’s things! Must not draw on Mommy’s wall! Caroline is a very bad girl!” Even our things were her things, and when we broke our toys or tore our clothes, we were punished. From our punishments, we were expected to learn, I suppose, to control ourselves. A careless act was as reprehensible as an act of intentional meanness or disobedience.
She had a history—she had gone to high school in Rochester, Minnesota, and one year of college in Cedar Falls—and for us this history was to be found in her closet. The closet was narrow and deep with an oval leaded window at the end. The closet pole ran lengthwise, and there was a single high shelf above the window. The wall that the closet shared with the closet in the adjoining room did not meet the ceiling for some reason, but was finished off with a gratuitous piece of oak trim. A pink shoebag hung from the door and slapped against it as the closet was opened. In each of the countless pockets of the shoebag rested a single shoe, heel outward. There were seven pairs of high heels that Rose and I counted each time we opened the closet. On the floor of the closet were two cylindrical hatboxes, and in these were eight or ten hats, some with flowers or fruit, most with half veils. Also in the hatboxes were four or five corsages with their pearl-tipped pins stuck into the satin-wrapped stems. We admired these, and picked them up and held them to our chests, always knowing that if we pricked ourselves with the pins, we had only ourselves to blame.
The fabric of the dresses was cool, and if you stood up underneath them, the crepey freshness of the skirts drifted across your face in a heady scent of dust and mothballs and cologne and bath powder. Although her present was measured out in aprons—she put a clean one on every day—her past included tight skirts and full skirts and gored skirts, peplum waists, kick pleats, arrowlike darts, welt pockets with six-inch-square handkerchiefs inside them, shoulder pads, Chinese collars, self-belts with self-buckles, covered buttons, a catalog of fashion that offered Rose and me as much fascination in its names as in its examples. The clothes in the closet, which were even then out of date—too narrow and high for the postwar “New Look”—intoxicated us with a sense of possibility, not for us, but for our mother, lost possibilities to be sure, but somehow still present when we entered the closet, closed the door, and sat down cross-legged in the mote-filled sunshine of the oval window. These were things of hers that our mother didn’t mind us playing with. We were out of her hair and we treated them carefully, as the holy relics they were. Now, when I seek to love my mother, I remember her closet and that indulgence of hers. Of course, of course, I also remember Rose, my constant companion beneath the skirts, on whose shirt I carefully pinned the corsages, on whose head I balanced the hats, with whom I stood among the dresses, pretending to be ladies shopping.
After the church dinner, Jess needed a place to stay until everything blew over. Rose suggested that he stay at Daddy’s house, not in Daddy’s bedroom, of course, but in one of the other rooms. There were four bedrooms, after all, three going to waste in any circumstances. After she proposed this, it seemed like a good time to take a look at the house, straighten it up a little, put a few of Daddy’s things in a little bag, in case he ever wanted them.
I went over after breakfast one day, after sharing Ty’s wordless meal and hearing him recite his plans for the day and the incidental information that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He didn’t ask me my plans. “Fine,” I said, that red flag response, but he didn’t react. I waited until he drove away in the pickup, then headed down the road to Daddy’s. Ty may not have known that Jess was moving closer, was, in some sense usurping Daddy’s place. It was fine, too, that he didn’t know. If he had mentioned it, I would have told him that anything could happen now.
As I neared the house, it seemed like Daddy’s departure had opened up the possibility of finding my mother. It was not as though I forgot that I’d been there every day of my life. I knew that. But now that he was gone, I could look more closely. I could study the closets or the attic, lift things and peer under them, get back into cabinets and the corners of shelves. She would be there if anywhere, her handwriting, the remains of her work and her habits, even, perhaps, her scent. Might there not be a single overlooked drawer, unopened for twenty-two years, that would breathe forth a single, fleeting exhalation? She had known him—what would she have said about him? How would she have interceded? Wasn’t there something to know about him that she had known that would come to me if I found something of her in his house? The hope was enough to quicken my steps. I passed the kitchen display in the driveway, the white brocade sofa still sporting its tag, upended on the back porch. I ignored the fact that the place was depressingly familiar, that Rose and I had spring-cleaned there every year. There had to be something.
Already the attic was baking. It had never been insulated, and the reflective powers of the metal roof did little if anything against the summer sun. A path had been cleared to each of the four windows and the east and west ones were propped open to ventilate the house. Considering that our family had lived in this house for sixty-five years, there wasn’t much up here—a roll of carpet, almost-new gold shag that Daddy must have gotten somewhere—it was never laid in the house. Three floor lamps with those old twisted black cords and round Bakelite plugs. A folded-over mattress. Three boxes of back issues of Successful Farming. Another box of Wallace’s Farmer, dating from the early seventies. An old fan, its black blades unshielded by any grid. Under the eaves there were old-looking boxes, and in them some newspapers from the Second World War, including a copy of the Des Moines Register for VE Day. Folded into this was an invitation to my mother for a wedding in Rochester of some people I had never heard of. I smelled it. It smelled like the newspapers. Deeper in the box were farm receipts for 1945. The other boxes also held farm receipts and a few copies of Life magazine. Nothing else. I crawled back toward the center from under the eaves. My dusty shirt clung to my chest.
The second-floor closets were just as I had known them—full of boots and my father’s clothes, which were largely overalls and khaki pants. Actually, only two of the closets had much in them. The others had collected mostly hangers. In my father’s room, I looked at the pictures on the wall—my Davis great-grandparents standing formally for a portrait on the ev
e of their departure from England. That was the last picture they ever took. My Cook grandparents had their wedding portrait taken in Mason City, and there was also a later picture of Grandfather Cook standing beside his first tractor, a Ford with spiked, tire-less wheels. My mother’s engagement picture, as printed in the Rochester Post-Bulletin, which I had seen over and over. I looked more deeply into it this time, but I found nothing. The impenetrable face of a hopeful girl, dressed in the unrevealing uniform of the time; her demeanor was sturdily virtuous. Also on the wall was one black-and-white picture of a baby in a hat, but it could have been any of the three of us. I had seen it many times, but it was a measure of my distance from my father that I had never admitted to him that I didn’t know who it was. Perhaps he would have said he didn’t remember. It was us, then, interchangeable youth. I looked under the bed. A sock, an empty bottle for aspirin, dustballs.
I opened the drawers that once had held her white gloves for church, her garter belts and girdles and stockings, her full slips and half slips, her brassieres, her long nightgowns, her pink bedjacket with three silvery frog closures that she always wore if she was sick in bed and wore day after day before she died. Now they held only old man’s shorts and undershirts, bandannas, thick white socks, thick wool socks, black socks for dress (three pairs). Thermal underwear. I’d put it all in here, so I knew that it was here. The newspapers folded across the bottom of the drawer were dated April 12, 1972, too late, too late.
Her collection of decorative plates marched around the dining room, on an oak rail just below the ceiling. I’d dusted them the previous spring, not that spring when Rose was sick, but a year earlier. There were no yellowing notes taped to the bottom of any of them. Grandma Edith’s breakfront held nothing but clean linen, clean dishes, clean silver. How did we get so well trained, Rose and I, that we never missed a corner, never left a cleaning job undone, always, automatically, turned our houses inside out once a year?
All at once, I remembered how it was that our mother disappeared. It was Mary Livingstone who did it. Daddy would have called her. At any rate, some weeks after Mommy died, Rose and I came home from school to find all the ladies from Mommy’s church club moving her things out, taking her clothes and her sewing fabrics and her dress patterns and her cookbooks for the poor people in Mason City. It was the accepted course of action for disposing of the effects of the deceased and we didn’t question anything about it. The Lutheran ladies, of course, were as thorough as Mommy herself would have been.
After remembering this, I climbed the stairs, intending to make a bed in one of the rooms for Jess Clark, and the only conscious sense I had of renewed grief at this memory was a kind of self-conscious distance from my body as it rose up the staircase. My hand on the banister looked white and strange, my feet seemed oddly careful as they counted out the steps. I turned on the landing and the downstairs seemed to vanish while the upstairs seemed to fling itself at me. I put Jess in my old bedroom. The sheets were in the hall linen closet, yellow flowered, the same sheets I’d slept in for four or five years.
In the linen closet was where I found the past, and the reason was that Rose and I always washed the sheets on Daddy’s bed and put them back on, and we always washed the towels and washcloths in the bathroom hamper and hung them back up. It may be that no one looked in the linen closet more than once a year. There were sheets and towels and bed pads and an unopened box of Sweetheart soap. Behind the stack of towels, hidden entirely from sight, was a half-full box of Kotex pads and in the box was an old elastic belt, the kind no one had worn in years. Certainly these were not artifacts of my mother, but of myself. I took out the sheets and pillowcase, reflecting only that this was sort of interesting. If Rose were here, she would assert that Daddy had seen the Kotex box plenty over the years, he’d just never dared to touch it. I smiled.
The sheets fit smoothly over the single bed in the yellow bedroom. I folded back the top edge over the blanket, plumped the pillow. I thought that Jess would sleep there, and I lay down where he would be lying down. The dressing table was beside the window; the closet door was ajar; the yellow paint on the empty chest was peeling; some bronze circles floated in the mirror; a water spot had formed in the ceiling. Lying here, I knew that he had been in there to me, that my father had lain with me on that bed, that I had looked at the top of his head, at his balding spot in the brown grizzled hair, while feeling him suck my breasts. That was the only memory I could endure before I jumped out of the bed with a cry.
My whole body was shaking and moans flowed out of my mouth. The yellow of the room seemed to flash like a strobe light, in time to blood pounding in my head. It was a memory associated with the memory of my mother’s things going to the poor people of Mason City, with the sight of the church ladies in their cars with my mother’s dresses in the backseats, with the sight of Mary Livingstone’s face turned toward me with sober concern, asking me if I wanted to keep anything, and I said no. I lay down on the wooden flooring of the hallway because I felt as if I would faint and fall down the stairs.
Rose was supposed to meet me here at some point, and for a while I just said her name, “Rose, Rose, Rose,” hoping that I could materialize her at the top of the stairs in spite of the fact that no door had slammed, no voice had shouted for me. If she’d been there, I’d have insisted that accepting this knowledge, knowing it all the time, every day for the rest of my life, was simply beyond my strength. And certainly there was more to know. Behind that one image bulked others, mysterious bulging items in a dark sack, unseen as yet, but felt. I feared them. I feared how I would have to store them in my brain, plastic explosives or radioactive wastes that would mutate or even wipe out everything else in there. If Rose had been here, I would somehow have given these images to her to keep for me. She was not there.
So I screamed. I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before, full out, throat-wrenching, unafraid-of-making-a-fuss-and-drawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams that I made myself concentrate on, becoming all mouth, all tongue, all vibration.
They did the trick. They wore me out, made me feel physical pain which brought me back to the present, that house, that floor, that moment. After a bit, I got up and brushed myself off. I had given myself a headache, so I went into the bathroom and took four aspirin. Rose never came. When I got back to my house, it was nearly nine o’clock. Only nine o’clock. My new life, yet another new life, had begun early in the day.
30
IN THE DAYS AFTER THE CHURCH SUPPER, I looked for Jess Clark to come by. There seemed to be a lot to talk about, but as it turned out, I only saw him twice. Even then, he was quiet and inaccessible. The candor of our earlier talks, which I longed for in spite of myself, had vanished. All he said was, “I’m surprised at how lost I feel”; “I can’t believe how sure I was that he’d changed”; and “I can’t think of anywhere to go now.” These three remarks went unelaborated upon. When I answered them, my responses hung between us—before I finished speaking, Jess was already preoccupied with his own thoughts again. His bearing changed, too. His former fluid grace, the acceptance of change and movement that ran through him, had stiffened. He held himself upright.
It hurt and embarrassed me to see him. I ventured awkward sympathy that failed to ease or soften his demeanor. I knew he was, as always, telling me the truth. He was lost.
I didn’t tell him about my revelation when I lay down on the very bed he was sleeping in every night, even though I couldn’t think of his sleeping in my old room without thinking of it. Nor, after all, had I told Rose, though I’d come close. For one thing, I’d been so certain that she was wrong—suspicious and dismissive of her memories. For another, it was easier to be her sympathetic supporter than her fellow victim. And she would surely remind me of incidents that I could not bear to remember. As certain as sunrise, discussion would open that terrible sack and shine a light into it, and she would press me and I would not be able to resist her, until the drama and anger of it would sweep me u
p, too, and I would feel a growing obsession to remember surging through me, seizing me, taking me into a danger that I could not endure yet.
We talked about what Harold had done at the church supper. What I thought was that Jess’s driving up to that organic farm, then caroling on and on about it had been some kind of last straw. I had never thought Harold would be sympathetic to Jess’s organic farming idea, but I thought he had been of two minds about Jess himself. Rose took a darker view: that Harold had been plotting to humiliate Jess for a long time—maybe since Jess’s return—that he’d been playing him off against Loren and encouraging him with the will talk in order to get his hopes up. That was the Harold we had discussed during our Monopoly games, the Harold who hid calculating purposes behind foolishness. I related the incident I’d seen helping Jess transfer their frozen food from their freezer to ours—the way Harold snapped from rage to repartee without even a moment to collect himself. “Doesn’t that prove,” said Rose, “that it’s all a game with him? That everything he does is the result of some calculation? He gets people to laugh at him, but he’s not laughing.”