by Mary Morris
The locksmith arrived just as Mara did. Jason was sitting on the floor, his fingers still barely touching mine, as I read to him from a book of fables.
Mara came over the next morning. She carried a large box containing another batch of Jason’s things. “I didn’t know how to thank you,” she said, “so I brought you the next installment—for next winter.”
I opened the box, which was filled with sweaters, pants, pajamas. “I’m the one who should thank you,” I said.
A look of sadness swept over Mara’s face—the kind of look I’d seen only a few times before. “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
She sighed and was about to speak when I opened the closet where I kept Bobby’s things, which was filled with clothing that had been Jason’s. She went to the closet and held in her hand what had once been her son’s clothes. She touched the fabrics. “Jason wore this his first Easter,” she said, fondling a red suit. “And this he had on the day his father left.” She ran her hands over every item. “I can remember when he wore these.” She touched overalls, shirts, as if all the memories of his babyhood came spilling out of the open closet. “It’s all here, isn’t it,” she said.
“Mara, what’s wrong?” She sat at the kitchen table while I pulled on Bobby’s sweatshirt. I handed her a cup of coffee and watched it turn cold in her hands.
“I have to tell you something, Ivy,” she said, “but you won’t like it, I’m afraid.”
I sat down across from her. “Tell me, what is it?”
“I’m moving,” she said at last. “I’ve had my apartment on the market for so long I just forgot about it. I didn’t even mention it to you because I just assumed no one wanted it. But someone’s made me an offer. One I can’t refuse. I need the money. I can’t afford the private schools. We’re moving upstate to Montrose. It has good public schools, and I’ll buy a little house. It’s not that far.” She reached across and took my hands. “You can visit on weekends.”
“Weekends?” I was shaken. “I’m used to having you across the street. I don’t know what I’ll do.”
I wanted to weep, though I couldn’t explain it to her. Whose window would I look at? Whose light would I try to see in the night? Who would be there to comfort us? There would be no one to turn to in an emergency, no one to go to in need. Suddenly everything was changed.
“You’ll come and visit,” Mara said. “That’s what you’ll do.”
I looked toward the window where I’d watched her, without knowing her yet knowing her, all these years. “Yes,” I said, “but it won’t be the same.”
“We’ll make it be the same.”
I squeezed her hands. “We’ll always be friends,” I said. “Do you understand? You’ve clothed my child.” Then I said it more emphatically. “You’ve clothed my child.”
THIRTY-TWO
I FEEL THEM FADING; the images recede. Just as they came, so they have left, the way I always imagined ghosts would leave, or the lost souls who have at last found their rest. I have been like those people in Madagascar who dance with their ancestral bones. But now I have polished and dressed them, laid them back to rest. Like Bobby, I am learning to sleep through the night. It is as if I am a child again, learning everything from scratch. Even though I sit up with Bobby late into the night, I cannot conjure them. They’ve gone far away. Spirits who’ve left the fourth dimension. Ghosts who’ve moved on to rest. Or, rather, I’ve given them their leave.
I try to picture my mother and Sam in the various stages of their lives, but like an erotic fantasy in a person who has at last found true love, the images are played out and no longer have the power to arouse me. I do not picture them in housing tracts or bungalows by the sea. They are not on any coast in any life. When I call to them, they do not come. If they are dead or if they are alive, it does not matter much. They have become the dear departed.
I have come to the place where I must admit that what happens with most people is a mystery to me, and probably to themselves as well. And that there is no reason to try to comprehend. My mother is gone. That is a fact. She left with my sister long ago, and they won’t be coming back. Try as I do to make sense of this, to find the answer so that it all comes out clear, I have to acknowledge that there are many unanswerable questions in this world, and my story will be one of them. I thought that it would all somehow become clear—a letter found in a drawer, a confession from my father, a sign, an attempt to elucidate it after all these years, but that is not the case.
I will never know why my mother left or where she went. I will only know what I can know. That there are people in this world who have cared for me and others who have not. A poet once said that our lives are shaped as much by those who refuse to love us as by those who do. I am left wondering why we give so much power to the former, so little to the latter. But I am one whose life has had such a shaping. I have had love in some of its incarnations and I have a child to take care of. These are the facts. The rest are mysteries to be solved at another time. There will be no simple answers, no sudden revelations, no miracle cures here.
At night now as Bobby sleeps, I find myself up until all hours, painting with a vengeance. And I mean exactly this: as if it will be my revenge. I draw roads I’ve never seen, places I’ve never been. I draw detailed sketches of roadside diners where I can taste the grilled cheese and French fries; I can see the waitresses with their bouffant hairdos, practically glued high on their heads. The stuffed antelope on the wall, the six-shooters crossed, framed photographs of the Marlboro man, a Navajo face.
I seem to have found this way of recording, communicating, exorcising the past. I recall my dream of the rat that wouldn’t let me out of a room and realize that rat is art turned inside out. When I do not do my work, the rat takes over. On my work table now, images begin to emerge again, the contours of a woman’s face. Not an abstract, really, but rather more like a picture coming slowly into focus. Around her I have painted in photographic detail as if I were some eidetic artist—memory artists, they are called—old motel keys, Chaplain on Call cards, a tornado alert, receipt from the Eureka Hotel, Eureka, Kansas. And the landscapes—dinosaur tracks, endless vistas broken only by the red flattops of buttes, a ghost town on a hill. These I draw as well.
Now I look and see the face as I had not seen it before—recognized would be a better word. It is the image I have assumed to be the fabrication of my mother’s features, though from time to time other women emerged—Mara, Dottie, Sam. Now, looking more closely as I draw, I wonder how it is possible. The face has been so familiar, yet so foreign. How could I have missed it? For it is my face I see. It has been a self-portrait all along.
THIRTY-THREE
SITTING at my work table, I imagine this. Bobby is eight, and we are in a car, driving. It is like a picture I could paint with my eyes closed. We have been driving for a long time. He dozes, breathing heavily, his head bobbing from side to side. When he wakes, he stretches and stares out at the flat prairie he has never seen before. “Where are we?” he asks. The grass flows reddish and yellow. I have not seen it in years myself, but I know that beyond the grass lie the mountains and on the side of the mountains is the desert that I know. “Kansas,” I tell him. “This is what Kansas looks like.”
He takes out a coloring book and begins to draw. Cowboys and Indians. Horses. We bought the book for this trip. It is what he imagines the West to be. I promised him all kinds of things on this journey. Antelope, buffalo, the Navajo reservation, the Grand Canyon. So far, he has been patient with the long drive. When we stop, he eats all the hamburgers and French fries he wants. That is part of the deal.
I look at his legs and can’t believe how they’ve grown. His hair is thick and dark. Matthew, whom he does not see, must have once had this hair. Otherwise he takes after me. People assume the man I’ve been seeing is Bobby’s father. I met this man at an opening of my own work. When people refer to him as Bobby’s father, I don’t correct them. Neither does Bobby. But no one else is d
riving with us on this trip.
Bobby is still a child but on the brink of change. I can barely recall your babyhood, I want to tell him. Those little expressions you once said. The invisible people you believed in. The misspoken words. Once you heard my “footprints” downstairs. The wonder of discovered things. That snake you caught in your bare hands one summer in Maine. Now it is almost lost to me. We have entered this new phase. He is strong, beautiful. He still drinks chocolate milk and colors in coloring books and curls up beside me for stories at night, but each night I say to myself maybe this is it, maybe this is the last time. I’ll lie down beside him, and he’ll say, “Hey, Mom, cut it out.” Or “I can read that book by myself.” Now he plays soccer (which I’ve learned to like) and talks about girls with a slight look of longing in his eyes that is unmistakable. When he asks me to, I toss a baseball with him, but even my own son says, “Mom, you throw like a girl.”
We stop for the night, then drive again, then stop for another night, and soon the landscape shifts. As we drive past the lower rim of the Rocky Mountains, the land turns red, huge red buttes appear, rising out of the blood-red earth. He pauses from his drawing and looks out. “Wow, this is awesome,” he says.
“Awesome,” I agree.
We enter Navajo land. I know the way without looking at a map. I could drive it with my eyes closed. This land before me, red, arid, vast, is what I’ve always known. Let me tell you a story, I say. He puts down his book and I tell him of the ghost of Coal Mine Canyon. There are many versions of this story, but the one I’ve known since I was a little girl is the one my mother told me when she brought me here—about the maiden from the Bow Clan who became distraught, and nothing and no one could comfort her. One day she paused at the edge of Coal Mine Canyon, among the ghostlike rocks, and felt that her troubled spirit belonged to the beautiful canyon. Or perhaps a spirit beckoned to her.
When the Hopi discovered her body they left it where it had fallen. With the full moon her form appeared on the rocks, though this wasn’t strange to the Hopi, for to them wherever someone dies, the light of the spirit shines through.
I remember the whole story. How some say that unrequited love killed her. Others, that it was the death of her son. I have walked the rims of canyons with my own mother, fearful that at any moment she might jump. In a sense I suppose she did. Now I can stand with Bobby and look down.
All time is around us, I tell him; this is what the Indians believe. He looks up at me, his face squinched the way it is when he thinks I’m putting him on. Then he shrugs, smiles, and begins to draw again. This present moment encompasses the future and the past. It’s not only what the Indians believe, I tell him, touching his hand. I believe it too.
Bobby has missed some things in his childhood, but he has had others. He asks about his father from time to time, but he seems to have made peace with what we have. “I had you because I wanted you,” I tell him when he asks.
THIRTY-FOUR
LATE ONE NIGHT Mara called. At first I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying, but then it sounded as if she was doing both. “You won’t believe it, Ivy, what my day was like. I just don’t know where to begin. Where to start to tell you everything that went on. It was my day to bring snack to Jason’s day care center. They have this horrid system where the parents must bring the snack one day a month and you have to sign up, but what you bring is preordained. Things like blueberry granola and celery sticks. Very New Age. No sugary cake at birthday parties. Oh God, I found that out the hard way. Did I tell you? I brought a chocolate ice cream cake with apple juice, I’ll admit, and the teacher, this woman named Uriel or Ariel, some ethereal spirit, she shrieks and says, double sugar, they can’t have double sugar. I brought hats, blowers, cake, candles, the works, and she makes the kids gulp down the cake in five minutes and then run around the yard for an hour to wear off the chocolate.
“Anyway, that was last month, but this month, it’s my snack day and it was, you guessed it, blueberry granola and celery sticks and some organic juice. I feel like I’m back in the sixties out here. Anyway, I got a late start and had to go to three stores to get everything we needed—you know, this at the health food store, that at the produce market. I was running late, and I must have hit a rock. It made a big thud under my car. I get to the school and green liquid is streaming out of the car. Just pouring out. I take Jason out of the car seat in back, grab the snack food, and race in. And there are thirty militant three-year-olds, forks in hand, already at their tables, pounding for their snacks. So I turn the food over to the teacher and head out the door, worried about the green liquid. Thinking if I take the car to the garage and it has to stay there, who’ll pick up Jason at two o’clock, who’ll get Alana at three o’clock?
“So I’m driving along without thinking much, except about my car, and all of a sudden these two guys in a Roto-Rooter truck come up alongside me. They’re honking and waving like crazy. ‘Lady,’ they’re shouting, ‘your baby! Your baby!’ So I look at where they’re pointing, and there’s the back door of my car open and the car seat flung up, just as if the kid has fallen out. I just wave at the guys. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell them. ‘No problem. It’s okay.’ And they shake their heads, and drive away …
“So this is my life now,” she says. “It really isn’t so bad. Of course I’m lonely and maybe it was stupid to move away, but the kids are outside all day long and there’s a nice duck pond nearby, and we got a puppy at the Humane Society, and really I have to say it isn’t so bad.”
THIRTY-FIVE
IT WAS a cold midwinter day as I made my way to Grand Central Station, weighed down as usual with Bobby’s stroller, a bag for him, one for me, some gifts for Mara and the kids, and Bobby in hand, toddling along on shaky legs. “We’re going bye-bye,” I tell my son. “We’re going away on a choo-choo for a few days.” I used to think women were fools, talking to their children this way, but now I find myself mimicking them. I told Bobby we were going to see Jason and Alana and Mara and their new puppy, and though I couldn’t be certain he’d remember them, he smiled at their names.
We arrived almost an hour early, so I bought our tickets and we strolled through the station, beneath its vast arching dome. We paused to buy cookies and to admire the huge photo that spanned the wall overhead, a Vermont farm complete with skaters on a pond, snowy hills, icicles dangling from a red barn, a place I promised Bobby I’d take him to someday. “Maybe we’ll live somewhere like that,” I said. “Would you like it? You would, wouldn’t you?”
We stood in the middle of the station munching on our cookies as I explained the place to Bobby—the platforms, the clock, the tickets and trains. Suddenly there was a flurry as commuters raced for early Friday afternoon trains. People rushing in from the doors, down the stairs, pouring in from the subway. Now the station, which was empty moments before, was deluged by commuters headed for their four o’clock trains. I grabbed Bobby by one hand, stroller in the other, and braced myself against the throng.
I was happy to be going to see Mara. It was several weeks since she moved away. And I was happy to be getting out of the city. I had just begun to feel that something was behind me and something else was ahead—not just because I was making new friends or my work was getting out there again, but because I believed that somehow I had been tested and had passed, and something was over and something else was about to begin.
It was then that I saw her coming toward me. I recognized immediately the red hair, the subdued, even sad but determined—always determined—expression in those eyes. And of course the distinguishing trait—the birthmark by which I always knew I’d know her—that graced my sister’s cheek. She walked quickly with her briefcase, in sneakers, Walkman on her head, racing for a train she seemed desperate to make. It was how I’d thought of her—directed toward a goal, no matter how small, often the wrong goal at that, but the one she was determined to make. Her mouth, her jaw were set, the way I’d seen them so many times when she could have told
on me but never did. Yet I stood perfectly still, stunned, for in all my imaginings of her—in all my nights of sitting up, wondering about Sam—I never once thought of her here, in this city, working in these buildings, walking this pavement. Living this life.
She was coming straight at us, but of course she didn’t see me. Or if she saw me, there was no way for her to know me. But I’d have known her anywhere. I would always know that face with its dark and light sides, distinct even in this crowd. I was dumbstruck and could not move. She was walking so quickly, veering off to the left, and at first I did not follow her. Before I knew what was happening, she headed in a different direction, toward a train she was about to miss.
I called, but she didn’t hear. I cried out louder, but she didn’t turn. Others did, dozens of people who looked askance at me. But this meeting was just as I’d told O’Malley, the detective, it would be: I’d see her face in the crowd, the face I’d know anywhere, in an airport, a shopping center, a train station, and I’d rush to her. What will O’Malley say when he hears this? I wonder. Won’t he be surprised.
But she had not heard me. She had not seen me. She did not stop, but headed off like the White Rabbit, racing toward its hole. Realizing I must chase her, I started to run, but I had Bobby, and his stroller, and our bags, and didn’t have the strength to lift them all off the floor.
Except for Bobby, I dropped everything, leaving it in the middle of Grand Central, as I ran after my elusive past. But I was losing her. If only I could run faster. If only I could put Bobby down, just for a few moments, I could catch her. I recalled the old ethics problem, the one I’d confronted in high school. If you are fleeing a burning building, what do you take with you? A rare painting or the cat? I’d always answered the painting. I figured you could always get another cat. But now I had Bobby and I would not put him down.