My hand shook just a little as I knocked.
A woman wearing her hair in a chignon opened the door and looked at me blankly. No, no, she said when I asked, she hadn’t heard of Tenaj. Or Stony. Petal? Nope, never heard of anybody by that name. She’d lived here for over a year, she said, and she didn’t know where the previous tenants might be. “They left this place an unholy mess, that’s all I know,” she said with a laugh.
I went back to the cab, grateful now that he’d waited. It was nearly ten, and the driveway stones crunched under my feet. A wind had come up, and I shivered.
We sat in the cab trying to figure out where I should go. The blackness was pressing against the windows. This is freedom, I thought. I am the bravest I have ever been in my whole life.
“Don’t worry about me. I guess I’ll just spend the night in the bus station and look for her in the morning,” I told him.
“Nah, I can’t let you do that,” he said. His eyes, looking at me in the rearview mirror, were kind. “Listen. Let me call my wife to see if she’s still up. I can take you to our house. We have a spare bedroom. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, a young girl like you. By the way, my name’s Bill.”
“I’m Phronsie,” I said.
“Phronsie, huh?”
“Yeah. I was named for a character in a book that my mom liked.”
We stopped at a pay phone, and I waited in the car while he got out and made the call. When he got back in the cab, he said it was fine with his wife. “She said I gotta stop doing this to her, though, bringing folks home with no notice.” He laughed and started the car again. “But you know, that’s what the sixties was about, huh? Hell, none of us were strangers.”
“My mom and dad met at Woodstock,” I told him.
“Is that right? I was there. That was a powerful experience,” he said. “Lotta people don’t think about those days anymore; it’s like it never happened. But Hendrix, man. That performance alone. Changed my whole life.”
“They named my twin brother Hendrix because of that.”
“No kidding. Wow! And your mom’s still living up here.”
“Yeah, she’s an artist. Tenaj is her name.”
“Your mom is Tenaj? Holy shit.” He banged on the steering wheel. “I know Tenaj. Wow! Small world. She does all kinds of amazing things with glass. I love her new gallery. She’s good people, that Tenaj. She and Jesse.”
“She has a gallery? Of her own?” And a Jesse?
“Yeah. You didn’t know? The Magic of Found Objects. And I gotta say—I love the way she just carries that baby everywhere with her, wherever she goes. Jesse doesn’t have a chance with that kid. Chloe’s a mama’s girl for sure.”
The breath slowly curled out of my body, like a trail of smoke. I stared out the window, feeling my throat closing up. It was starting to rain, and little rivulets of water were streaking down the pane. He was talking on now, about this and that. I couldn’t pay attention.
“I take it you don’t get to see your mom very much,” he said.
I cleared my throat. “No. I live in New Hampshire with my dad.” Then, striving for a casual tone, I said, “So how old is the baby now, would you say?”
“I want to say she must be about two now. Always at the gallery with Tenaj, riding around on her hip, like I told you. A real butterball, that one. Cute as a button.”
Two years old, I thought. So that child would have been born around the time that Tenaj and I stopped having our weekly conversations. Was that why we’d stopped talking? I remember that I’d stopped calling her. I was too busy dating Steppenwolf and writing bad poetry and running the school newspaper and plotting my escape to New York. And I suddenly didn’t have time to go to my old phone booth.
It was my fault. Totally. I had stopped calling her. But damn it, we had a long-lasting bond; we were kindred spirits, weren’t we? But by not calling her, I’d missed out on the news that she’d started a whole new life. And—there was another nagging thought rattling around in my head, too—why hadn’t she thought to get in touch with me? I wouldn’t have expected her to call me at my dad’s house, of course, but couldn’t she have written me a letter? Couldn’t she have called Bunny?
My head started to hurt.
“You know,” I said, “maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all. If you would just take me back to the bus station, I’ll take a bus back home. I-I don’t think I want to see her.”
“What?” he said. “No way. You can’t do that.”
“I-I want to. I don’t think I can go see her after all.”
He suddenly jerked the steering wheel and pulled the car over and turned to look at me. His eyes looked alarmed and sad. “Oh, my. You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you? I read faces, with this job. And I knew when you got in my cab that you were in some kind of trouble. And here you are, looking for your mom, and then I have to go sound off with my big mouth, tell you all about her new life now. I am so, so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not you. She isn’t going to want to see me. I want to go home.”
“No, no, no. Lemme just tell you one thing. Ain’t no mama alive that wouldn’t want to see her child that took a long bus ride just to find her. She’d be so crushed if she found out you were here, and then you went back.” He looked out the front windshield and then back at me. “I don’t know what’s gone on in your life that made this breach happen—”
“I was a mistake, that’s what happened,” I said. I started to cry. “She got pregnant from my father at Woodstock, and they didn’t know each other, and they split up, and now nobody knows what to do with us. A big, big mistake.”
“You are not a mistake,” he said. “You are not a mistake. God, don’t think that. Nothing that came from that festival could be a mistake. That’s just impossible, right there.” He looked at me for a long time. “You came from a moment that was magic in the world. Something that had never existed before. There was music and love and all this connection going on—people laughing and loving each other and being generous and sharing this experience like nothing anybody had ever seen. And you came into being right then. You were called to earth by all that love and joy. Think of that, will you? The spirit that is you was answering the spirit that was that time!”
He started up the car. “So here’s what we’re going to do, Woodstock Baby. I’m going to take you home to my house, and my Janie will fix us some dinner. You probably didn’t get much to eat today, did you? And then you’ll get a good night’s sleep in our spare room, and tomorrow morning we’ll go over and see the gallery and find your mom, and she’ll take one look at you, and she’ll remember the magic. And seeing you will remind her of all that love. And if she doesn’t remember it, I’ll be right there to tell her.”
Tenaj’s gallery was small and tucked on a little side street off the main drag, next door to a coffee shop. There were trees and a cracked sidewalk, and the smell of bacon and eggs wafted out through the open doors, and I could see customers clustered around the counter inside, laughing and talking. My stomach growled. Janie had offered me oatmeal and toast, but I’d been too agitated to sit still and eat more than one tiny bite. I hadn’t had much sleep at all, and now it was like every cell in my body was rigid with wanting—and fear.
I made Bill drop me off and leave, promising him I’d be fine.
“I am the bravest right now that I have ever been in my whole life,” I said, despite feeling sick with fear. Tenaj had once told me about affirmations—how you could chant something to yourself, and your subconscious mind would make it be true. Or something.
There was a wooden sign outside the window that said THE MAGIC OF FOUND OBJECTS in a flowing script in lavender, with little blue curlicues. I stood there staring in the window, feeling like my head was overrun with bees. A chime sounded when I opened the door. Inside the gallery, it was all a riot of art and color: bright red, turquoise, yellow. The stucco walls were loaded with glassworks, mosaics, and knitted scarves hanging down th
e wall like animal tails. Glass jars of colored beads were arranged along the side wall, and there were animal-print armchairs and bright-colored pillows and rugs scattered everywhere. A turquoise table with a cash register (painted red) was near the front.
Nobody was in the main space. I could hear a baby talking from the back, and Tenaj’s voice saying, “Oooh, I think somebody came in. Shall we go see who it is? You readdddddyyyy?”
And then there she was.
My mom.
I hadn’t seen her since I was ten, and here she was. Baby on her hip, and wearing a long, patchwork gypsy skirt. Her blonde hair was browner than I remembered, and it was tied back and looped up in a bun on top of her head, and she was smiling her public smile, impersonal but warm. And as I watched, her face went white with shock.
“Phronsie!” she said. “Phronsie? Oh my goodness. Look at you! You’re all grown up!”
I could only imagine what she was seeing when she looked at me, grown up now. We looked alike—the same long blonde ringleted hair and blue eyes. I was tall now and wearing jeans and a leather jacket and my cowboy boots. Looking as boho as I could, as if that could remind her who I was to her. Stake my claim as her daughter.
The baby on her hip was staring at me with an open mouth. She had curly blonde hair and fat, red, chapped cheeks. She was wearing what you’d think a hippie baby on display might wear: a tie-dyed romper and red tennis shoes. At the sight of me, she took two plump hands out of her mouth and placed them on either side of my mother’s face and turned her head, forcibly.
“Yook at meeeee, Mama!” she said. “Yook at meee!”
“Baby, I am looking at you. But look who’s here! This is Phronsie, sweetie cakes! We love Phronsie.”
At that, she crossed the room over to me, and tried to gather me in a hug. For some reason, I stepped back. Maybe I was tired from not getting much sleep, maybe I was reacting to the gooey presence of Chloe, whose hands were wet with a mangled-up cracker. Tenaj had traces of cracker on her face. Her smile faded. I saw her look at the suitcase I was holding as she stepped back.
“Are you all right?” she said. “How did—why are—what’s happening? How did you get here?”
She was wearing dozens of beaded bracelets and rings on every finger. I took it all in—the jewelry, the hippie clothing—the look of her that didn’t quite jibe anymore with what I remembered. She seemed a little false, like someone who wanted to appear hip, an actress maybe who had studied the look. She used to wear rags most of the time, artlessly flung over her shoulders—embroidered jeans, T-shirts, but now she looked like a hippie in a Hollywood movie instead. The All-American Hippie Artist, all fresh-faced and natural, ready for her close-up. But I could see the lines around her eyes, and oh my God, she was wearing eyeliner. She was trying too hard, and it was sickening.
She was—how old? I stopped to figure it out. She had been twenty-three when I was born—no, twenty-four, because she was a Scorpio, she had told me, so her birthday was in late October—and I was seventeen, so she was forty-one. Forty-one. Too old for this charade. Obviously.
“I came on the bus,” I said. I was fighting back tears. “I came to see you. I didn’t know when I left home that you had—” All I could seem to do was wave my arm, to take in the whole scene—the gallery, the child, the jewelry in cases, even the eyeliner. My nose started to run, and I set down my little suitcase on the wooden floor. It fell over, and I had to lean down to set it upright again.
When I looked back up at her, everything was blurry, and she seemed like somebody who’d been turned to stone. Like she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. There was grief in her face. She was upset that I was there; she didn’t want me and whatever complications I was bringing along.
“Well,” she said at last. “It’s great to see you. And this little one here is Chloe.”
“Hi, Chloe,” I said.
“She’s going to be two next month,” she said. She was smiling at Chloe like she’d never seen her before, like Chloe was the embodiment of all that is heavenly and holy on earth, and that if she could just concentrate on her, then maybe I would vaporize myself and not exist at all.
“Nice,” I said. “She’s cute.”
“Two!” yelled Chloe.
“Yes,” I said. “You’re a very cute person of two.”
I felt like I’d been hit in the stomach. Looking at those fat little hands, the blonde curls that had been like mine, those reddened cheeks, and the proprietary way that Chloe rode on Tenaj’s hip, maneuvering her face around whenever she pleased, made me feel nauseated. The way Chloe touched her. Owned her. The way I surely had when I was a baby.
“So my life has taken, ahhh, several unexpected turns,” Tenaj said. “For one thing—ta-da!—I got married. Can you believe it?”
But you said . . . you SAID . . . marriage was bad for women. You were a free spirit!
“To Stony?” My voice sounded all croaky.
“Stony? No! Oh my goodness, no. That was—that was never in the cards.”
Chloe again: “I two, Mama! Two! Two! Two!”
“Yes, Chloe, you’re two. I married a guy named Jesse. He’s a musician. Sort of new to the area scene here. A really good guy. He’s—haha—calming me down. I’m channeling some of his vibrational energy now, for success. You know? Like how it’s not a crime to be successful at things?” She smiled and shrugged. “A whole new way of looking at things.”
“That’s great,” I said in the dullest voice I’d ever heard come out of my mouth. It was like there was cotton batting on my tongue. “I’m so happy for you. I didn’t know you ever thought it was a crime to be successful at things.”
She started to talk about herself then, but she seemed all fluttery. She said she thought she’d been “keeping herself small” out of a misguided idea that artists needed to suffer. I could tell I was making her nervous, and I hated the way I had this stone-cold resentment sitting right at the center of me. What I could see, though, was that she wasn’t mine in the least. She was saying things about life and success and the universe and dreams that came true, and the miracle of found objects. Transformation. Transformation as it related to jewelry. Blah blah blah. Transformation as it related to the sky and to babies, to light. But there was nothing about me in there. I might as well have been just another customer showing up in the gallery, examining her life choices along with her jewelry.
“Do you like the gallery?” she said. “Isn’t this just a marvelous space?”
“I do,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“So much light,” she said. “It grounds a person, this kind of light. Grounds me, and also seems to give me wings. You know? It’s perfect, like a sacred space in here. A sacred space of art.”
“Yes.”
“Jesse found it for me. And you’re not going to believe this, but I have employees! Can you believe that? Me, a boss, hiring people?”
“Well, sure,” I said.
“The universe certainly comes up with some surprises,” she said. “I met the love of my life, and now I have a baby . . . well, obviously.” Maybe she saw my face then or felt how much time had passed, because she trailed off, and then she said, “Look. I’m sorry if I’ve been out of touch. It’s just so hard to know whether I should, you know, intrude. You have your whole other life.”
“Well,” I said stiffly. “You’ve had a lot going on.” Never mind that you are a big liar and a hypocrite who has gone back on every single thing you ever said. You said we’d be together sometime. You said that you’d never get married again. You said women have to live for themselves, for their art. You said . . . you said . . .
“We both have had a lot going on,” she said.
She went silent, fiddled with Chloe’s shoe, which had a speck of something on it.
“This is the part when you might want to ask me why I’m here,” I said.
She laughed. “I’m sort of scared to, to tell you the truth.”
“Well,” I said, t
aking a deep breath. “I ran away from home.”
“I was afraid of that when I saw the suitcase. Tell me this: Does your father know you’re here?”
“Well, he might know by now. I left a note with Bunny. I caught the bus from Manchester yesterday morning.”
“Yesterday morning,” she said slowly. She didn’t say, But where have you been since then? Where did you spend the night? How are you doing? Oh, my poor lamb, are you okay?
Chloe said, “Milkies, Mama, milkies,” and started pulling at Tenaj’s tank top, and in a gesture that was almost balletic, my mother sank to the floor in a cross-legged pose and pulled up her shirt so that Chloe could latch on to her breast. A brown nipple came into view, then disappeared into Chloe’s wide, wet mouth.
I wasn’t shocked exactly, just a little taken aback with the suddenness, and my mother’s unquestioning compliance. I had never known her to do anything upon request.
“I’m pretty much a snack bar to her,” she said, laughing. “This is how we spend our days. She rides around on my hip, and then periodically we do this. I’m not even able to do art anymore most of the time with only one hand available. So this is what we’re doing. My new life.”
“Milkies,” I said.
“Yes.”
We were silent for a moment. I tried to take a deep breath, to look at the beam of light shining through the front windows, look at the rainbows dancing across the stucco walls. I followed the light; they came from dagger-shaped prisms in the window. Chloe was smacking loudly, and my mother was staring down at her face.
I sat down next to her on the hard, wooden floor, and I told her all the things she should know, all the things that a good mother should have asked about. I pointedly said that I didn’t have her new phone number, so I couldn’t alert her that I was coming. I told her I couldn’t tolerate my dad’s authoritarianism anymore, that he wouldn’t even let me go to New York City to college. Then I told her about the bus ride, and the leaving home early in the morning. I told her how I left a note for Bunny, and that I was planning to mail a letter to the rest of them telling them I was safe. I told her about meeting Bill, the cab driver, and then Janie, and being allowed to sleep at their house, and how he dropped me off that morning at the gallery.
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