Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

  Walking Distance

  Sometime in her forties, my mother stopped moving forward. Somehow when we weren’t looking, she must have curtsied, performed a little shuffle sidestep, and exited stage right. In retrospect, she’d been rehearsing for some time. She went up to bed often without saying good night, or stayed home from family outings with ambiguous symptoms.

  “You’ll be fine without me,” she always said.

  She grew up in New York City and told stories about a magical New York childhood: Rockefeller Center and the big tree at Christmas, skating and picnicking in Central Park. After college she rented a tiny studio and walked to her job at a magazine every morning. She was beautiful, with large dark eyes, a quick smile, and quiet manners. She met my father one afternoon on a park bench where she was eating her lunch and he was reading. She left New York to follow him to graduate school.

  She was away from the city for a long time, and when she finally went back she took me. I was sixteen, she was forty. I held her hand and we walked everywhere. When I got tired, I asked if we could take a bus or the subway, but she said New York was a walking city. Everything was walking distance, she said, so I squeezed her hand and tried to keep up.

  My mother always said she knew my name before I was born, before she was pregnant, before she was even married. She’d always known, she said, that one day she would have a daughter named May.

  “What if I’d been a boy?” I would ask.

  “I knew you weren’t,” she said.

  “You didn’t have any boys’ names picked out?”

  “I knew you were a girl,” she said simply. “I knew you were my May.”

  May. May may help. May, help? I was the plan all along, but it wasn’t enough. I was born into a role I couldn’t play.

  The first Christmas she was in her room, I gave my mother a pot of reindeer moss (Cladonia rangiferina) wrapped in some silver foil. It’s a remarkable little gray-green lichen that can survive just about anything. Keep it in the dark, freeze it, dry it to a crisp; it just goes dormant and waits for things to improve. Eventually my mother had a line of them on her windowsill. After she died I threw them all out, but for all I know they’re thriving in a landfill somewhere. I don’t care for it as a Christmas decoration anymore.

  Sometimes I think my mother slowly removed herself from the story until the story simply no longer had a role for her to play. But now I’m forty and what do I know? We had happy times, though our happiness was always a little desperate because it was never an adequate fix for whatever was making her sad. That is how grief infects families and turns some of us into detectives. The first grief was my mother’s; I inherited it.

  My first winter break home from college, I called my mom from a phone booth in the town square (this was when there still was a phone booth in the town square). She had been in bed all day and I thought it would make her happy to know I was looking at the city tree all lit up for Christmas. She’d always loved it.

  A fabulously beautiful woman was waiting to use the phone. Her long winter coat looked like rabbit fur and her hands were tucked into a muff. She looked like a princess, as if she’d just dismounted from a sleigh. I turned toward the phone box and hunched over the receiver.

  I asked my mom if she’d thought about volunteering, perhaps with children or animals? There was a long pause, during which I could hear her sniffling.

  I peeked out at the waiting lady. A handsome man was talking to her, offering her the use of his cell phone.

  My mother asked if the tree was pretty.

  Yes, I said. It’s beautiful. Do you want me to come get you?

  Maybe, she said.

  But I knew she didn’t. We’d been here before. She wanted to come, until she didn’t.

  Local Attractions

  Sunday morning, Mona knocked on my door very early. I called “Come in” before I was fully awake. I couldn’t remember where I was, which bed, which house, and it took a minute for the room to right itself.

  “My mom says you’re sad because you’re too old to have children.”

  I turned my head and blinked. Mona stood in the doorway, stroking her Hello Barbie’s hair. She’d shown me the day before how the doll was programmed to have conversations. Blessedly, she was quiet at the moment.

  “She told you that?” I said, struggling to sit up.

  “She told my dad, but I heard her.”

  I smoothed my hair. “Well, you know, your mom was a really good babysitter when we were growing up.”

  “So?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “You were a bad babysitter?”

  “No, I didn’t babysit at all. I hated it.”

  Mona’s eyes widened, then she turned and left.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Lindy and I went for a drive. She took me to the town’s historic center where there is a whale fountain. Just the tail, actually, rising up out of the concrete like a dropped ice cream cone with flippers. Lindy said in summer a stream of water dribbles off the flippers and parents sit on the steps all around while children splash. We were across the street from the train station; to the left was a street corner with a couple of boutiques featuring loose women’s clothing and leather bags. The idea had been to walk around the waterfront a bit, but the wind had come up and the shops were mostly closed. I watched a toddler in a harness veer close to the whale tail, but the leash in his mother’s hand went taut before he could touch it.

  “I don’t love this town, actually,” Lindy said. “But the schools are good and Max’s work is here. So.”

  It was uncharacteristic of her, this confession of present unhappiness, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “But you seem so settled. Your house and garden.”

  “Sometimes I drive around and pretend I’m a tourist in the area, just to make things interesting.” She laughed at herself. “What about you? Are you happy in Anneville? You could go anywhere.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  I asked if there were any more café-barns I needed to see. Lindy rolled her eyes and said she’d take me to a place I’d really like.

  “How do you know?”

  “Just wait,” she said.

  The Coffee Greenery smelled of roasting coffee beans and there were plants everywhere in “living” walls, which I’d seen before, and in “living” sofas, which were new to me. Many were ferns, which was not surprising. Ferns are highly adaptable and grow in almost every habitat on earth. More impressive were the soft mosses and other lichens that were growing in pouches along the tops of the sofa cushions. You could lean your head back and feel like Titania in her bower. A sign on the wall informed customers about improved air quality and oxygen levels, but I knew that already. We sat on one backed with Irish moss (Sagina subulata), its little white flowers in bloom, and I couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I could live here,” I said.

  “You are too nice,” Lindy replied.

  “No, really.”

  “I’ll have to put some moss in my guest room.”

  I asked if she’d heard of May disease. She shook her head.

  “It’s when all the worker bees in a hive leave all of a sudden . . .”

  “Sorry,” Lindy said. She had bumped her drink and some of it spilled. “Let me just get some napkins.” She stood up, ran into someone she knew, chatted briefly, got the napkins, and returned.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  I tried to relocate my enthusiasm for the conversation. “The bees abandon the hive sometimes. Except the queen, who is left behind. No one knows why or where they go.”

  “And it’s really called May disease?”

  I nodded.

  Lindy stirred her cappuccino. “Wow. So what are you saying?”

  Two women behind us we
re talking, one of them energetically describing a recent trip until the other said, some impatience in her voice, “Yeah, I saw all this on Facebook.”

  The friend stopped talking. “Oh, right,” she said.

  Here’s a question: If a friend tries to make conversation out of a social media post you’ve already seen, do you let her? Consider it, because new material can be awkward.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, I found Mona’s Hello Barbie in my bed, tucked in next to my pillow. When I pulled back the covers, she spoke to me.

  “Yay, you’re here!” she said. “This is so exciting. What’s your name?”

  “May,” I said, against my better judgment.

  “Fantastic,” Barbie said. “I just know we’re going to be great friends.”

  I wondered if I needed to cover her head to turn her off. “How do you know?” I said.

  “I can just tell that you’re a nice person,” Barbie said thoughtfully.

  I was silent.

  “You’re welcome,” Barbie said happily. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Oh,” I started, thinking I’d tell her the day was over, but something in my tone tipped her off.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I looked out the curtains. They were made out of a gauzy material that filtered the sunlight nicely during the day but provided questionable privacy at night. I’d put on my nightgown in the closet. Now that it was dark in the room, I could see the trees moving in a wind I couldn’t hear. At home my windows rattled in their frames.

  “Do you want to play a game?” Barbie asked.

  “Really?” I said.

  “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, mimicking what I thought was a typical girl’s response.

  “What about a veterinarian?” Barbie said.

  “Animals don’t like me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I thought we might be done, but Barbie continued.

  “What about a scuba-diving instructor?”

  “I am a botanist,” I said firmly.

  “That sounds amazing!”

  I shifted in the bed, ready to grab Barbie and turn her off, but the movement somehow redirected her questioning.

  “Hey, can I get your advice on something?” she asked. She explained that she and her friend Mona had argued and weren’t speaking. “I really miss her, but I don’t know what to say to her. What should I do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You’re right. I should apologize!” Barbie sounded so relieved. “I’m not mad anymore. I just want to be friends.”

  I grabbed her. There was a tiny button on the minuscule waist. I pressed it and waited, half afraid I’d activated another mode, but she was quiet. I held her under the bedside lamp to get a better look. Lindy had said these dolls were very popular, built from scratch by the best engineers in Silicon Valley to be the perfect friend. The more I stared at her, the more I thought she looked like someone remembering to smile, not someone who was actually smiling.

  Souvenir

  Emily Post has pages and pages of directions for hosts. About being a guest she writes, “The perfect guest not only tries to wear becoming clothes but tries to put on an equally becoming mental attitude.” So, which is harder, hosting or visiting? It depends on what kind of person you are, I suppose. Perhaps I’m neither. Walking through the airport I felt like a sailor on land after a voyage, glad to have firm ground beneath my feet again.

  When I reached my gate, I realized I’d left my phone charger at Lindy’s house. I wheeled Grendel back into the concourse until I saw a tiny airport store where I could get a new one. The woman behind the counter was wearing a sari and every time she had to come around the counter to help a customer, she dipped and elegantly swept the fabric to the side. I purchased what I thought I needed, but when I got back to the gate and plugged my phone in, it didn’t work. Grendel and I rolled back to the shop, dodging excited kids, steely businessmen, and a team of young women in giant sweatshirts.

  The Indian woman was helping another customer. I thought I wouldn’t bother her, so I stepped around the counter to get another charger. She came rushing over.

  “Oh, no, no,” she said. “Please. Let me help you.”

  I explained the problem and she shook her head. “It will work,” she said. “It will work.”

  I said it hadn’t and that I needed a different charger.

  “No, that is the one.”

  “But when I plug this one in the charging light doesn’t turn green,” I said. I tried stepping around the counter again so I could reach the one I thought I needed.

  “No, no. Please,” she said. “You are not allowed to come behind the counter.”

  I stepped back and as I did so I saw a sign that said merchandise could not be returned once opened. She could have pointed out the sign and been done with it, but she hadn’t.

  “I will get in trouble,” she said, looking up and down the concourse as if her boss might appear. She took out her phone. She spoke quickly for a few minutes in Hindi, all the while watching the concourse. When she hung up, she said, “My son says this is the one. Sometimes if your phone is”—she made a flat-line gesture with her hands—“it takes time.” She plugged my phone in behind the counter. “Leave it. You will see.”

  I had my doubts, but I waited. She rang up a few other customers, and several minutes later the green light on my phone appeared.

  * * *

  —

  UNPACKING IS EASIER THAN PACKING. When I got home I took out of Grendel the jeans; the dress I’d never worn; the tank tops, cardigans, and scarves; the shoes, toiletries, and underthings; Emily Post; my thermos; and a pink tape measure. I’d lost my flashlight and the pink tape measure was not mine, but sometimes what you pack and what you own are not the same. Aren’t we all magpies, more or less? Borrowing from our friends’ lives as fast as we can, gathering what we need to live?

  Weeping birch (Betula pendula)

  III.

  Weeping Birch (Betula pendula)

  If the weeping birch sounds like a depressing choice for a memorial tree, then you are not familiar with its twig structure. It can grow fifty to one hundred feet tall with a crown of slender, weeping twigs at the end of each branch. The effect, particularly in winter when the leaves are down, is of a firework just at the moment the sparks turn to cascade to the ground.

  The tendril-like branches of the weeping birch allow plenty of sunlight to reach the ground beneath it. Thus it is common for a wide variety of mosses, grasses, and flowering plants to thrive in a birch forest. The tree is considered a “pioneer,” a hardy species that is the first to colonize a previously disrupted or damaged ecosystem, beginning a chain of ecological succession that leads to a more diverse, steady-state ecosystem. In other words, it’s a nurturing tree that doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past.

  This tree sheet was taped to my side door when I got home from Lindy’s, and judging from its condition, it had been up a few days and endured a rainstorm or two.

  Posts and Tweets

  I don’t know why people start thank-you notes with the word just. Just a quick note to thank you for a wonderful time. Just wanted to say thanks for everything. It reduces expectations right from the start. It says: I understand the importance of saying thank you, but I won’t be writing a real letter. It says: I’d like to follow the best social conventions, but I won’t be spending that much time on it. I’ve even seen stationery that has “Just a Note” printed on the front. If you start there, why write the note at all? Consider the synonyms: merely, barely. Would you write: Barely a note to thank you for the visit? Merely a hasty paragraph to acknowledge all you did for me?

  When I wrote to Lindy, I used my best stationery, creamy whi
te, by which I mean if a tree is going to be made into paper, the paper should be high quality. I also sent her a pot of butter-yellow daffodils. Cut flowers make me sad, so I send potted ones if I can. This way Lindy’s landscaper will have the bulbs to plant in her garden when the flowers finish.

  Certainly thank-you notes don’t require thank-you notes; that would be a never-ending hell. So it was odd to see a reply of sorts a few days later on Lindy’s Facebook page. A photograph showed my card propped against the potted daffodils. The vase of juniper and birch was gone.

  Feeling blessed. Just spent a long weekend with one of my oldest friends. Best tonic in the world!

  It’s true tonic can mean refreshing, but it also means bracing. It seemed to me it had been both. Part of the trouble with friendship in the age of documentation is that Lindy knew I would see her update, so it was a communication to me. But it was also a communication to the rest of her friends on Facebook. In a few words, she had summarized and packaged our visit for broader consumption. Nothing wrong with that these days, but I don’t always understand the rules.

  What would it mean if I didn’t comment, or post my own picture and reflection? In just one minute scrolling through the rest of my feed, I found myself wondering: Is my dining room table that pretty? Do I miss my cat that much when I’m away? Am I cool enough to dance to eighties music and bake banana bread at the same time?

  I liked Lindy’s post and left it at that. Only connect, after all.

  * * *

  —

  MY FIRST DAY back at work, Sue asked me if I was on Twitter much. We were covering the topiary on the president’s lawn to protect it from winter snow.