by Laura Wiess
I watched her leave, then looked slowly around the room. The ache in my chest was sharp again, almost as bad as it had been that last moment in the graveyard when they pulled me away from the casket and made me leave my mother there alone. I put my hand to my heart, felt the blunted corner of the souvenir cardboard Ciro’s photo beneath my undershirt and pressed it to my skin.
How could I take only what I could fit in the box? My whole world was here and it wouldn’t all fit in the box. What would happen to the things I couldn’t bring with me? Would people steal them? Would Kitty sell them or hand them out to the neighborhood?
No, that didn’t make sense. It was my stuff. My mother’s stuff. No one could just take our stuff and give it away without us saying so.
I looked at the clothes stacked next to me, the white underpants and undershirts, the school pants and dungarees, shorts and blouses and skirts, the sweater and oxfords, the socks and pajamas. I looked at the bureau, at the top two drawers that had been my mother’s.
I wasn’t supposed to take my mother’s things. No one said I could.
They’d said, Pack your own things, Louise.
No, actually the state lady had said “a box of necessaries” but if I brought those things and left my mother’s, they would be stolen right out from under me, all of them, and I would never see them again.
I glanced at the door. Rose on trembling legs and, avoiding the creaky spot in the carpeted floor, eased the door closed. Hurried to the bureau, opened the drawer, and slid a hand beneath my mother’s lacy nylon slips, not sure what I was searching for but finding an envelope. Inside it were pieces of an old brown, crumbling pressed flower.
Shaking, I took it.
I grabbed the almost empty bottle of Evening in Paris cologne, too, because my father had given that to her on their wedding night. I opened her jewelry box and took the stickpin with the fake pearl, the sparkly costume earrings, broaches, and necklaces, the matching sets she’d loved, and hands full, I dumped it all on a pair of underpants, rolled it up, and set it in the bottom of the box.
I was crying now, as every piece I took made me a terrible thief, but if I didn’t steal my mother’s things, they would be laid out, worn, torn, and pitiful, for the world to see.
The thought filled me with such panic that I ran back to her underwear drawer and found the two old bras with the safety-pinned straps and put those in with my undershirts, found the blue and the pink nylon panties with the rust stains that would never wash out, the polka-dot pair with the saggy elastic, the green pair with the hole on the side and added those to the box, found the lumpy, badly darned woolen socks that had always made my mother’s ankles itch and threw those in, too.
Those were my mother’s secrets. Those were, not my father.
I wrenched open the closet door and nearly fainted as the scent of my mother billowed out. I leaned into it, breathing deep, every cell raw with yearning, stepped into the row of dresses and sweaters and skirts, pressed my face into the soft fabrics, wrapped my arms around them, weeping and begging God to please please make them into my mother just once, just for a moment, just one more moment.
But he didn’t, and Kitty would call for me soon, maybe come up to see what was taking me, so I sank on watery knees and reached back past the shoes to the turquoise box where my mother kept our photos. The box was too big for the liquor store box, so I dumped the contents into my box, just dumped it and then stuffed a pair of pants and a skirt on top of the pictures.
I couldn’t reach the top shelf of the closet, where my mother always hid the Christmas presents, so I dragged over her chair and, for the first time ever, stood on the tapestry cushion and felt around until I found another envelope, a bigger one, and so I took that, too, took it without even opening it, because I knew if my mother had hidden it, then she hadn’t wanted anyone to see it.
What else, what else? I looked frantically around the room, ran to the bookcase and fumbled out the Treasury of Best Loved Stories. Went back to the closet to my mother’s winter coat, dug the soft angora mittens with their happy kittens pattern from the pockets and pushed those into my coat pockets, and then I took the scarf and the hat, too.
I jammed it all in the box, covered it with pajamas and a sweater, and as I searched for more, I knew that my mother really was gone, because if she were alive, if there were any chance at all that she would be back, then I would never be doing this, but she was gone and I was alone now, a bastard and an orphan, and the knowledge tore terrifying rents in the fog, leaving the pain and shame to sear sharp, stark channels into my heart.
I took all the leftover hand-me-downs Kitty had piled on the bed, stuff I wasn’t taking, and jammed them back in the bureau drawer so she wouldn’t see what I’d done.
“Louise?” Kitty called from downstairs. “Come on. It’s time to go.”
“Coming,” I said, gazing around—what else, what else?—and finally seizing on my mother’s hairbrush and reading glasses.
It was all that I could carry.
I paused the CD and looked at Gran. She was still awake, arms twitching and writhing, legs jerking. “One more?”
I waited and when she finally blinked, it was twice, so I asked again and it was once.
I hit play.
The first month at the home was a terrifying haze of unfamiliar adults and new rules, giant rooms filled with cots and girls with blank faces, of waking up one morning in pain and finding blood, blood, not on my pillow but lower, destroying my nightgown and underwear, staining them like my mother’s had been stained and knowing it was tuberculosis, knowing I had the same bleeding from down there as she did and I couldn’t stop crying.
They came to take me somewhere and I fought hard because I had heard of sanitariums for the dying. They held me down, faceless people in white who were chewing clove gum, and I heard a man say I was hysterical, and I heard them say, Mother deceased, no father or other living relatives…illegitimate…kindest thing…state is legal guardian, and then I woke up with different pain and two small gauze bandages on my abdomen, and all I remember asking the nurse was, Is this a sanitarium? and she looked surprised and said, No, you don’t have TB. This is a hospital ward and you’ve just had a little operation to make you feel better, and that made me cry with relief, and I said, I’m not going to die? No, she said, but you must eat your Jell-O.
I parted the confusion one more time to ask why I was there, but the nurse just patted my head and said, Never you mind, doctor knows best, and since I was afraid to make them angry, I didn’t ask anything else, only slept and wept and did whatever they told me to.
When I was sent back to the home, I arrived as a bruised and broken nobody, stripped of my mother, my last name, my home, all my things, my friends, my school, and my familiar, child’s body.
I would lay in bed in the girls’ dormitory at night, tracing my two little scars under the covers and staring into the dark until my eyes ached, begging my mother to manifest like a ghost in the movies or a gentle, invisible hand ruffling the curtain, and I would know it was her, loving me from somewhere I couldn’t get to.
And all the time, this new empty, lonely silence surrounded me. The funeral was over, the party thrown, the grave closed, and the orphan disposed of. Evelyn Bell Closson was dead and the world had moved on, all except for me. I wore the loss like a heavy, impenetrable cloak stitched with grief and pain, woven with disbelief, shame, and betrayal.
I began wishing that I would fall asleep and never wake up so I would never again have to relive that gruesome moment when I looked at my mother and she didn’t look back. I didn’t want to dream of those murky eyes or the blotchy purple skin, didn’t want to wake up with my empty hands reaching and never finding, with this ache so huge it cracked my ribs and produced tears that would overflow whenever and wherever they wanted to.
I didn’t care what I wore or what I ate. I didn’t care about anything at all.
The home sent me to finish freshman year at the local high school, a huge, noi
sy place that rang with laughter and hundreds of footsteps pounding down stairways and echoing through halls. I could have disappeared there—they were used to seeing the poorly dressed state kids, I guess, scuttling along the edges of life and had learned to ignore them—but the home had registered me as Louise Bell instead of Louise Closson and I was so shocked the first time the English teacher took attendance and called, Louise Bell, that I blurted, “Closson! Bell was my mother’s maiden name.”
The realization of what I’d said, of what it meant, hit me at the same time the teacher’s lips tightened. The boys in the class snickered and the girls’ eyes bulged and they quickly edged their desks away as if I was contagious.
I was sent down to the office for a meeting with the assistant principal, who, stiff with disapproval, said that while only crude people would stoop to calling me a bastard, there was no denying that the unfortunate circumstances of my birth did in fact make me illegitimate, a child whose parents had never been married and that when the time came for me to look for a husband, I must be honest and confess this, as most men would feel duped if they unknowingly courted a young woman (not lady, but woman) of questionable background.
I didn’t blink when he said this. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even see him, so blinding was the humiliation. And then he made it worse by adding that any young woman indiscreet enough to volunteer such shameful information before a class of impressionable young students would be watched closely in the unhappy event she became too friendly with the boys. He said I must strive to overcome my dubious legacy, maintain a pristine reputation, and be thankful the state had given me a home, clothes on my back, and three solid meals a day.
All I could think of while he was speaking was, Please, God, let me wake up and find out this was all a nightmare, a terrible, awful mistake and that my mother’s been back at Kitty’s all this time, going crazy searching for me. Please, I swear I will eat all my vegetables and dust the furniture without complaining. I won’t even argue about bedtime only please, please, let me go home.
I was dismissed with that warning but I wasn’t invisible at school anymore. Now I was snickered at and whispered about, bumped into, shoved aside, and on one terrifying occasion, caught in a stairwell by a pair of hulking, freckle-faced seniors, who trapped me between them and laughed as they groped my behind, ignoring my panicked struggles until I started to cry, and then they let me go and disappeared back into their crowd.
I told no one because there was no one to tell.
But I dreamed about the encounter, and somehow it became a good dream where the groping softened to holding and hugging, and I woke up sick at the residual happiness and longing the physical contact had left me with. I’d felt cared for in the dream, wanted and protected, important to someone, and it left me so hungry to be touched.
There was no affection between the limited home staff and the crowd of children, no spontaneous hugs or squeezes, no one to lean against or a hand to hold, nothing. Approval was expressed with nods and smiles, maybe a rare pat on the shoulder, and while the staff wasn’t cruel, neither were they kind. They didn’t fraternize with the children, didn’t take the little ones on their laps or listen to personal problems or breech the invisible walls between those who had families and those who didn’t.
There were too many of us, too many unwanted, unclaimed faces, some upturned and eager to please, some downturned and creased with sullen bravado, the mask of the unloved. Some kids became the mothers they didn’t have, cuddling the younger children, seeking love and acceptance in their needy embraces. Others grew hard and mean, pinching the smaller kids, pushing them around, socking them, or stealing their stuff, pleased to be dreaded by the home’s ward mothers, to be called down for a one-on-one scolding, to lose privileges and brag about it.
I fell prey to the bullies at the home, too, and over the months, the box that contained my life was slowly emptied, stolen piece by piece. My mother’s hairbrush disappeared and reappeared in someone else’s hand, her earrings clipped to someone else’s ears, the photos cut for paper dolls. The last straw came when I walked into the dorm and saw one of the big girls holding the bottle of Evening in Paris. I went blind with rage and threw myself on her, punching, kicking, and biting until the ward mother pulled us apart.
As a result, what was left of my mother’s things—the last few drops of cologne, some photos, and the few flimsy brown pieces of the dried orchid—were confiscated and locked in the home’s office along with the contents of the big envelope the state lady had taken from my box on the very first day.
The only thing I had left was the cardboard souvenir photo from Ciro’s, and no one tried to steal it once the bigger girl, sporting a black eye, bloody nose, and fearsome bite marks on her forearms, told the other kids to steer clear of me because I was nuts.
The staff labeled me incorrigible, a rebel who insisted on clinging to the past instead of putting it behind her and moving forward.
And I was fine with that because I didn’t want to put my mother behind me. I didn’t want to forget I’d had a real home once and a life where I wasn’t an orphan and a bastard but a girl with a mother, and a father who’d died in the war.
While my heart didn’t move forward, other parts of me did, and I developed a real waist, hips, and large breasts. With those came my second period, perhaps originally delayed by shock and occurring some months after the first episode.
I’d woken up one morning feeling awful and gotten dressed only to have the ward mother take me aside on my way to breakfast and say, “There is a blood spot on the back of your skirt, Louise. You’re going to be fifteen soon, you’re a young lady now and must practice better feminine hygiene.”
“Blood?” I whispered, because I’d heard stories of course, but they had been vague references to the arrival of an Aunt Tillie, and there had been pale girls who held their stomachs and were excused from gym class, and those white Kotex dispensers in the lavatories, but none of that applied to me—
“Follow me,” the ward mother said, leading me into an empty stairwell. “I didn’t realize you missed the girls’ health film.” She cleared her throat and focused somewhere past my left ear. “Your menstrual cycle is your body’s way of preparing for a baby. The nurse will give you napkins and a belt you must wear until the flow stops. You mustn’t swim while you have your monthlies, and you must change the napkin often or you will smell unpleasant.” She glanced at the arms I had crossed protectively over my tender breasts. “You’ll be given deodorant and a razor, and this afternoon you’ll be fitted for a brassiere. No more undershirts. It will be your responsibility to wash your brassiere in the sink nightly, along with your underpants. Young ladies must be modest, clean, and fresh at all times. Keep your fingernails trimmed and your hair combed. No one likes a dingy girl.
“Boys will be paying attention to you now, so you must be very careful not to encourage them. Always sit with your knees together and your ankles crossed. If you have any questions, you may come and see me during your free time, all right?”
No. Yes. I didn’t know. What was this heated river rising inside of me, so grateful for her instruction, for her taking the time to talk to me one-on-one and for knowing my name? Throat aching, I reached out and touched her arm. “Thank you, Mrs. Sanders.”
“You’re welcome.” The ward mother nodded, stepped back, breaking the connection, and said briskly, “I’m glad you’re finally coming around. Now please go down and see the nurse.”
And the moment, as fragile as a bath bubble, popped.
Two months later, only a week after Christmas, a doctor from a rural community upstate queried the home about fostering a neat, quiet, able-bodied girl to help around the house and keep his invalid wife company.
He arrived for an interview on New Year’s Eve, and some hours later, they sent me home with him.
I paused the CD and glanced at Gran.
Her eyes were closed, so I turned off the player, did my homework, and when Grandpa fin
ally returned, loaded the deer food, opened the cans of cat food, and did what I was supposed to do.
It was cold and gray out, a depressing twilight, and most of the stray cats were huddled in the three-story cat condo. Normally there would be little electric heaters or lamps glowing inside to bring heat, but I guess they couldn’t afford it anymore, because the heat wasn’t on.
When I walked into my house, fingers numb from the cold, nose running, I looked at my parents and said, “If I died tomorrow, what would you do with my stuff?”
“Garage sale,” my father sang out, but when I didn’t laugh, he glanced at my mother.
“We would keep it, of course, because you loved it and we love you,” she said, watching me.
“Good,” I said hoarsely and made it up to my room before I started crying.
Chapter 27
Hanna
Seth and I can’t mess around at my house because my mother’s always home in the afternoon, so we usually go straight to his house after school and stay in his room until his parents get home from work. I don’t know how his classy, sophisticated-looking mom can breeze in, look at me sitting on his bed reading one of the many paperbacks I always keep in my purse and him sitting on the floor playing his guitar, and not know we were all over each other, sometimes only minutes earlier. How does she miss this?
I can see how his father misses it, because he’s kind of absentminded but not in a cute way, more like a rumpled, grumpy bear irritated at being woken from a lifelong hibernation way. He doesn’t talk much, only comes home, takes off the top part of his suit and tie down to his T-shirt, puts on moccasin slippers, and watches TV, grunting occasionally or making arrogant comments. Seth’s mom chatters at him but he hardly ever does anything but mutter back.
Still, he’s nice in his own way to me, so I have no complaints.
It’s been three weeks now, and I’m kind of becoming a permanent fixture in his house, which is very cool, although my being there so much has also brought me some pretty weird information.