Crybaby Ranch

by Tina Welling

  I am reminded of the one admonishment I heard most frequently as a child: “This talk stays strictly within the family. Understand?”

  The Florida sky looks tarry an hour before dawn. Coral hibiscus blooms beside the driveway; just above the highest blossom rests a paler coral moon. Creamy breezes fold my nightgown hem around my calves as my father loads suitcases and fishing poles into the trunk of his car. Then headlight beams hop from palmetto bush to oleander to bougainvillea to the mailbox at the end of the drive. I am alone with my sleeping mother.

  I wonder why I felt compelled to wake at four thirty to wave my father off this morning, why Dad sneaked his suitcases out of the house last night and hid them in the bushes in case Mom woke before he left. She doesn’t recognize the uses of anything inedible now. Like a toddler, she aims all items toward her mouth. As for me, I’m still engaged in an imaginary competition with my mother for title of Daddy’s Best Little Girl.

  Too late to go back to bed, too early to hope for the Sunday paper, so I sit with a cup of coffee in the screened porch and watch the sky lighten over Bessie Creek. How am I going to make it through the next seven days? Since my last visit, my mother has become a stranger, and caring for her all alone scares me. She has acquired a fear of moving air, fans, and breezes. Those picnics I’ve planned, those strolls along the river walk in old town Stuart, the beach—all of it would make Mom cower with fright. She won’t allow an open window in the house and won’t come out to the porch anymore. The first day looms unendingly ahead of me.

  “Addie?” My mother is padding down the hallway. I can’t tell, is she calling my father by name or calling him Daddy?

  A Sunday movie matinee. The idea strikes me as brilliant. Mom has always loved movies. And popcorn and Coke.

  Timing is the key. We can’t arrive at the movies with extra minutes to fill or my mother will not stay in her seat. Neither can we get there after the lights go down, because she’s edgy in the dark. If I can get her seated with a bag of popcorn in her lap less than five minutes before colored pictures flash on the screen, the venture will be a success. My muscles tense for the race against the clock.

  I notice an easing of my mother’s customary agitation as soon as we have gained a steady traveling speed across the Palm City bridge on our way to the Regency Theater. She likes riding in the car, I note. Of course, I have to keep the windows rolled up.

  “Look.” My mother leans forward and points out the windshield to the sky above the St. Lucie River. “I see those every time.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Those things up there. Every time we go out I see them.”

  “Clouds?” I ask.

  Mom sits back in her seat satisfied that we’ve communicated. “Yes. Those are nice, I think.”

  “I think so, too,” I say. “Clouds are one of my favorite things.” She and I smile at each other. We’re doing great. My father just doesn’t know how to handle her; he never did. He makes everything harder than it needs to be. I’d just forgotten that. My sweaty grip loosens around the steering wheel.

  I carry Mom’s sweater, my shoulder bag, two popcorns, two Cokes, with my mother attached to my elbow. The usher has to fish around in my skirt pocket himself to collect our tickets.

  Mom keeps saying, “What is this place? Where’s Addie? I think we better leave now.” But I know once I give her food, she’ll be content.

  My mother’s seat won’t stay down unless she sits in it. I can’t get this idea across to her. My hands are full, so I try to hold the seat down with my left knee.

  One of the Cokes slips out of my grasp. It splashes across my sandaled feet, runs between my toes, and on down the sloped floor toward the people in front of me.

  “Shit,” I hiss between my teeth.

  At least I’ve freed one hand. I press down my own seat, sit, secure the two popcorns and remaining Coke between my legs and hold down Mom’s seat for her.

  I convince her to sit, finally, and hand over her popcorn. The lights partially dim, but before I can congratulate myself on the perfect timing, Mom, startled by the abrupt darkness, knocks her popcorn to the floor. She pats the air in front of her face as if she were blind. “Oh, dear God, dear Addie, help me.”

  “It’s okay, Momma.” I point to the concession stand advertisement on the screen. “Look. Pictures.”

  “Please, let me out of here.”

  Thank God she’s whispering. I hold her hand and offer a piece of my popcorn to her lips. “Looky, your favorite, ’member?” I notice my speech is regressing and feel a momentary confusion about my position: I am pleading with my mother like a toddler might, while also pleading as a mother might to a toddler.

  Loudly this time, my mother says, “I’ll give you anything. Just let me go.”

  “Shh…it’s okay, Momma.” I put my arm around her. I show her the Coke.

  In a commanding voice that sounds just like my real mother, she says, “I’ll pay you any amount of money, but, please, let me go now.”

  Heads turn.

  I smile at the strange faces in the half-light and wish the room would fall darker.

  “I don’t know you and I don’t want you touching me.” She shrinks from my arm.

  No one would believe this woman is ill. She sounds sane and cultured. And wealthy and kidnapped.

  “I demand that you release me.”

  “Momma…” I talk a bit loudly, too, just to assure everyone. “It’s okay. I’ll take care of you.” I add righteously, “Like I always do.”

  “Let me out of here. Please let me out of here.”

  She sounds panicked and shrill. A little crazy, I’m relieved to notice. I hope the theater audience notices, too.

  She continues her pleas. “I must go home.” The lights have completely gone down. The movie is beginning, but all the pale faces are turned toward us.

  At last, I understand the hopelessness of this and I say, “Okay, we’ll leave, Momma.” She stands when I do, her seat snaps up and grabs her butt. She jumps, clinging to my arm, and the other popcorn tumbles out of my grasp. I rest the second Coke on the floor while I gather Mom’s sweater and my purse, then forget about it and kick it over. I think I hear a collective sign of impatience from the theater audience, though maybe it’s just the Coke fizz, which I feel nibbling at my bare toes like tiny piranha.

  Finally, unencumbered, I take my mother by the hand and we scoot out of the row of seats, slopping through spilled Coke, crushed ice, and soggy popcorn to the aisle.

  Out the door of the theater, a blast of heat greets us and immediately bakes the Coke syrup inside my sandals. Every step sounds like paper tearing as my foot peels off the insole.

  Without speaking, we walk across the parking lot, my mother meekly trotting to keep up with me. Once we’re seated inside the car, I drop my head to the steering wheel.

  Why didn’t my father tell me it was this hard? I wish I could cry, but I’m bound too tightly with frustration and hopelessness.

  I feel my mother touch my cheek, and I tip my head to look at her. She smiles softly at me, eyes clear. My real mother has returned again. She smoothes the back of my hair and tucks loose strands behind my ear.

  “You’re doing fine, honey,” she assures me. “Really you are.”

  Normally, Mom spends her days contentedly sitting on the sofa beside my father as he studies law books, answers mail from a laptop, and confers on the phone with colleagues. To borrow a favorite joke of hers when I was growing up: I have created a monster. Since the movie fiasco she asks, “Can we go someplace now?” Over and over, ten, twenty times an hour.

  So we go. To the grocery store, to the Elliot Museum on the island, to the mall. The moment we arrive she pleads with all the drama of the movie theater episode to be taken home.

  She is happiest in the car. My father is going to be shocked at the gas charges I’m racking up. We fill the Lincoln’s tank every day. We drive up the coast to Vero Beach, down the coast to Jupiter. Up to Indial
antic, down to Hobe Sound.

  And once in these other towns, we drive through all the newly built subdivisions. There seems to be a pattern to Florida developments: Kill off the predominate species of the area, then name the neighborhood after it. We drive through Cougar Creek, Sandhill Estates, Panther Lagoon—here commemorating both the demise of the panther and the filling in of the lagoon.

  Home again, I pull into the garage. Since my mother has forgotten how to open a car door, I try to assure her, as I have done hopelessly all week, that I will come quickly around to her side and help her out.

  Before I trot clear of the car’s rear end, my mother is clawing at the side window and whimpering. Hurriedly, I fling open her door and she falls into my arms. “Oh, thank you. I thought I’d never get out!” Both of us are breathing hard with the struggle to keep her fear at bay.

  Inside the house I help her take off her sweater. One arm is out. Mom smiles sweetly. “Oh, good,” she says, “we’re going someplace.”

  I begin to explain that no, we are taking the sweater off, not putting it on. We just got home…. But I give it up. There are still six more hours until bedtime, and I know she will ask me to go someplace many, many times between now and then. I put her arm back into the sweater and wonder where we can drive next.

  Mindless driving gives me unexpected time to think about Bo, and a distance of two thousand miles makes thinking about him more comfortable. One thing becomes certain: A thread stretches between Bo and me—I feel it even here. Beside Bessie Creek in my parents’ backyard, a strand of spider silk is spun between two scrub pines standing fifteen feet apart. The silk, like the connection I feel exists between Bo and me, is only visible when light strikes it a certain way. Yet the elasticity of the thread holds even when winds blow hard and rain pelts in a sheet.

  At times I believe I’ve imagined this connection between us. That I am holding one end of the thread alone, while the other end flings blindly in an errant search for home. But then I catch his warmth, sent through a glance, a brief touch, a remark that spins the two of us into sudden laughter, and I am reassured.

  I think of the aftermath of our laughing together when our eyes hold and the heated surge of energy from clenched stomach muscles and the mental slide into surprise diffuses throughout my body. This feels like moments past orgasm when two lie together, body parts still interlocked, waiting for pulses to subside and skin dampness to evaporate. I am convinced, then, we inhabit this uncertain place together.

  If Bo and I are, indeed, having a romance at all, we are conducting it sideways. We are paralleling our emotional lives, assuming the two paths will meet in the infinite future. For now, I am content with a schedule based on a geometric supposition. But one day we will embark upon something huge and new to us both, something frightening and full of risk. Until then, I believe we need to grow strong within ourselves and be patient with each other.

  Or maybe I’m making all this up. Maybe such fantasies support me as I heal from my divorce and the crushed ideals I once carried about love, the recent independence of my stepson, Beckett, the long goodbye with my mother. I am losing the connections of love that have defined my life.

  Tonight, after my mother’s steady breathing assures me she is fast asleep, I sneak out to the living room. I open a window and breathe in humid, fragrant air. I listen to crickets and night birds. Then turn on a reading lamp and get comfortable with my book and my solitude.

  Ten minutes pass. Is that a doorknob turning? I decide that it isn’t and return to my book. Suddenly, my mother appears in the living room. She is fully dressed. She has not dressed herself for half a year.

  “Good morning,” she says. She looks quite refreshed for having only fifteen minutes’ sleep. And she looks beautiful. Intelligent and cheerful. She looks familiar. The dread I felt at having my time interrupted glides smoothly into pure delight at seeing her remembered face.

  “Aw,” I say, hating to disappoint her, “it’s not morning. It’s still nighttime.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Oh, never mind. Come sit with me.” I pat the cushion next to me.

  She walks around the coffee table and sits on the sofa beside me. She looks at my face a long moment, then says, “You know, you are very pretty. There’s just something about you…something special.”

  I say, “Thank you. You always make me feel special. That’s why you are such a wonderful mother to me.” At the word mother, I almost lose her. Her eyes slip focus a second, before she regains her composure. I warn myself not to ruin this time for us, to be careful of what I say. But I don’t want to heed my warning. I am with my lifetime best friend and we are telling each other important things.

  She notices my flowered nightgown and admires it.

  “Daddy gave this to me for my birthday.”

  “Oh? Do you know Daddy?”

  “Yes…I do.” I stop myself from saying more.

  “Well, imagine that!” She marvels over my knowing my own father, but I smooth that away in my mind. My whole being soaks up her presence. So many nights since I was a young girl she and I have sat like this—the sounds of Bessie Creek lapping at the dock, the occasional croak of the pig frog, the mottled duck squawk drifting in to us and mingling with our confidences. This is the gift of one more night. I don’t want it to end.

  My mother looks relaxed and happy. She notices the opened window. “Goodness, it’s black out there. What’s that say?” She points to the clock.

  “Eight thirty.”

  “What in the world are we doing up?” With the expression familiar to me as a prelude to joking, my mother raises her eyebrows, gives me her impish look and says, “One of us is crazy.”

  fifteen

  Three weeks’ worth of mail towers on my kitchen table. From the doorway I turn to Bo, who’s carrying my suitcases behind me. “Thanks for bringing over my mail while I was gone.” Still waiting for one of the scarce post-office boxes to become available, still using Bo’s. Then I notice one letter bobs from a string tied to a helium balloon, hovering over the kitchen sink.

  “What’s that?”

  On the balloon, fireworks explode around the word CONGRATULATIONS.

  Bo swings my suitcases into the mudroom. “Open it.”

  He grins and rests his hands halfway into his coat pockets. The man isn’t wearing any gloves. It’s only three or four degrees above zero tonight, yet when he cupped my face for his hello nose rub at the airport, those hands were warm as mugs of cocoa. Or maybe that heat was generated by my cheeks. I practically wiggled my hindquarters like Hazer at Bo’s greeting.

  I shrug out of my coat and reach for the envelope. The return address is Three Peaks, One River—a local fine-crafts gallery. All three gallery owners get together twice a year—November and April—and make decisions prior to each tourist season about the work they’ll accept. I submitted Storytelling Necklaces, a takeoff of the Navajo Grandmother Necklaces. Beads strung on tiger tail with hand-carved stone fetishes to spur stories: buffalo, turtles, bears, rabbits. I love making them so much I can hardly get myself to bed at night. I’ve sold several just from wearing one to work at the bookstore.

  “It could be a rejection,” I say, warning us both. Bo raises knowing eyebrows and opens the refrigerator. He pulls out a bottle of Mumm’s and digs into his Levi’s pocket for his knife.

  “Bo, really. They usually phone. Mail: bad news. Telephone: good news. That’s what I heard.”

  “Maybe, since you haven’t been home to answer your phone in three weeks, they had to use the mail.” Bo doesn’t take off his heavy jacket, a gold brown canvas with a sheepskin lining. He just continues to slice through the leaded foil around the top of the champagne bottle. He now reaches for a dish towel to hold over the cork.

  “Bo, really…”

  “Zann, you’re in. I ran into Tom, one of the owners.” He loosens the cork.

  It rips through my thin garage-sale dish towel and hits the balloon—not the window, thank God. The
balloon dips and weaves, suds foam out the bottle and into the sink. I find myself shrieking, “Yahoo!” as I pull an acceptance letter out of the envelope and read it. If my work sells well enough, they’ll give me more space for the summer season. A gallery in Jackson Hole.

  Bo sets the Mumm’s on the counter. He crooks his arm and dips his knees in an exaggerated invitation to square dance. I accept, and we swing around, back up, change arms, and circle in the opposite direction. Bo pulls out of his coat, and we decide which sort of unmatched jelly glasses lining my cupboard shelf would best suit champagne. We settle on two stemmed dessert dishes.

  We toast. It’s so good to be back in Wyoming. And it’s so good to be with Bo.

  “I’ll have to tell Kelly my good news,” I say.

  “Kelly?” Bo takes a sip of his champagne.

  “My famous artist friend—I told you about him.”

  “You said you met him in the bookstore. I thought that meant you sold him a book or something.”

  “We go out for coffee, sometimes lunch. He critiques my pieces for me.”

  “I critique your pieces for you.”

  “You critique them, I revise them, and then I pass them on to Kelly.” Bo seems slightly miffed. By the time I take another sip of champagne and look at him again, I decide maybe I imagined it. But I keep to myself that Kelly is gay.

  In return for Bo picking me up at the airport, I’ve brought home Florida specialties for dinner. I told him about it over the phone last night because he had planned to cook for us. First I unpack the shrimp and a jar of cocktail sauce from my canvas carry-on bag. The main course will be yellowtail snapper, the most divine of ocean delicacies, drenched in a lemon-butter sauce. Bo carries the fish into the living room to complete the thawing near the woodstove, where he has kept a fire going for my houseplants while I was gone. When he returns, I parade fresh strawberries under his nose. I toss him a meaty red tomato and waggle a handful of pencil-thin asparagus.