Besides, doing things the way Mama did them helped me feel closer to her.
“I’m very proud of how you are adjusting,” Mazy began after she sat down across from me.
I was on the sofa, which, despite how I had vacuumed, always seemed dusty. Whether she liked it or not, it was time to get a new one. I was working up the courage to tell her. That she could be proud of her house amazed me, but I knew she was.
“Some of the things your mother did to raise you were very good. You have some very good instincts. I hope I’m not wrong, but neither of your parents appears to have spoiled you. Since you spent more time with your mother, she would have had the most influence. Do you remember when she began to change?”
Usually, she just dropped a question about my parents while we were doing something else. Maybe she thought I would answer her questions more truthfully if they came as surprises. Perhaps because of Daddy’s second letter, she thought it was time to learn more about my family. She was asking more questions than I remembered the police asking after the fire.
I thought hard about her question about Mama. It was one I had asked myself often as well. I didn’t remember the exact day or anything, but I did recall when I began to sense things were different.
“I’m listening,” she said when I didn’t start. “Did you wake up one morning and find a different mother?”
“No. She was never a different mother. She was…”
“Just different?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
I couldn’t help feeling like a tattletale.
“It’s all right. I need to know what happened to you, don’t I? To do that, I need to know what happened in your home. I’m not going to publish it in a newspaper or tell anyone. You and I have to trust each other. I’ve told you lots of unpleasant things about my own mother. I trust you,” she said, smiling.
“Mama stopped doing little things for Daddy,” I said quickly.
“Like what?”
“Sometimes she didn’t wash his clothes or iron anything.”
“Did he yell at her?”
“No. He just began to do it himself.”
She stared at me a moment, her eyes scanning my face. “She wasn’t taking care of you properly, either, was she?”
I shrugged. “She didn’t care if my room was messy. When I looked in at her and Daddy’s room, I saw how messy it was as well.”
“What did your father do about that?”
“He complained, and then he stopped, like he didn’t care,” I said.
“What did you do?”
“I tried to make it less messy.”
“You felt more alone?”
I didn’t want to say yes, but I nodded.
“People die slowly sometimes,” she said, but turned away first so it looked like she was saying it to herself.
I thought that was all she would say or ask, but she turned back to me and said, “Married people have arguments, but they make up and love each other again. That didn’t happen, did it?”
She waited, but I didn’t want to say.
“It’s better to talk about it. If you don’t, it will burn you up inside.”
I still didn’t talk. I thought that would be the end of this uncomfortable cross-examination, but it wasn’t.
“You once mentioned that you heard them arguing often recently. Do you remember what it was about?”
“No. I didn’t like the sound. Once I even put my pillow over my ear.”
She nodded, holding her smile like she was waiting to have her picture taken. “Did your father ever try to make your mother happy again?”
I recalled him buying flowers and candy, even jewelry. I told her how Mama stopped wearing any of it and what she had said about not wanting to be “decorated” like a Christmas tree.
For a reason I couldn’t fathom, the Umbrella Lady widened her smile. She looked sincerely happy to hear what I said.
“She had a sharp tongue, did she? When she said nasty things to him, what did he say? Was he very nasty to her?”
“No. Most of the time, he would walk away and go to his office.”
“Men and their offices,” she said, as if she had lived with dozens and something similar happened. “I should call them caves.”
“Is that what happened with Arthur?” I asked. I thought that was fair. If she was going to ask me so many questions, why couldn’t I ask her some without her jumping out of her body?
Her eyes almost exploded with surprise, looking like they were boiling. Then she seemed to simmer down and even smiled again.
“I must try to remember that your age is a lie.”
“A lie? Why?”
“Life, your basic intelligence, has made you older.” She sat back. “Yes, Arthur tried to be that way, but I chained him to the chair.”
Now it was my eyes that nearly exploded, and she laughed. She squinted and grew serious.
“How long was it before the fire when she stopped teaching you and stopped playing with you?”
I shrugged. It was weeks, I thought, maybe months. I didn’t have an exact date. Those memories seemed to float together, anyway, maybe because I so wanted to forget them.
“A while.”
“This is important,” she said, leaning toward me. “Did she ever go to a doctor, one of those doctors who try to help you feel better? Did your father take her? Do you remember that? Did they take you along? Did you wait in a lobby, or did the doctor come out to talk to you?”
I thought about it and shook my head. “I don’t remember.”
“But you said that your mother had medicine?”
I nodded.
“More than one medicine?”
I nodded, and she sat back, looking satisfied. Why did that make her happy to know?
“Did your father have to remind her to take her medicine?”
“Sometimes, especially when she said something he didn’t like or just sat and stared. He’d say, ‘Go take your pill, Lindsey.’ ”
“Lindsey,” she said, and then said it again, softer, as if she was practicing how to say it.
She looked out the windows. It was late April, but it was snowing again, more like flurries. As she had predicted, we had dropped into winter like falling into a well, where it became darker earlier and colder. The winter coat she had found in a closet for me looked brand-new. It was quilted and gray, with adjustable sleeves. In the pockets was a pair of black pop-top gloves that also looked like they had never been used.
“Whose were these?” I had asked when she gave it all to me.
She had snapped her answer back at me so sharply—“They’re yours. What difference does it make whose they were?”—that I stopped asking about the clothes and just took them.
The day she gave me the coat and gloves, she took me to the department store in Hurley and bought me two pairs of black waterproof pants, a sweater, and warmer socks to go with my fur-lined boots. I noticed that she didn’t look at the prices. She crumpled up the receipt before putting it in her pocket. How was Daddy going to know how much he had to pay her back? I wanted to ask her, but I was afraid of the answer. She might just say, “What Daddy? Who expects to ever see him again? Stop believing in Santa Claus.”
Before we had gone shopping, it had just snowed, but the roads had been cleared. The sidewalks weren’t, and she had complained and muttered about the “lazy government people.” She had held my hand firmly as we walked on the road and back to her house. Her walkway was always shoveled out by someone I didn’t get up early enough to see doing it. She did tell me that if it snowed during the day, she and I would have to do some shoveling before we went to sleep. Usually, my job was to clean off the steps.
A man I only knew as Mr. Cauthers delivered firewood every few weeks. She kept it in the garage that had no car, but that was why she had her driveway cleared. It had soon become one of my chores to fetch a few logs for the nightly fire, and during the day, I went into the woods behind the house
and gathered kindling. She had gone with me three times to be sure I knew what to bring back and what not to and how far to go into the woods.
She had a fire going right now. For a moment, she was so deeply quiet that I thought she had fallen somewhere into herself. She once told me that our bodies were like clamshells. We could close them down and snuggle up inside, safe in our own darkness.
“That’s probably what your mother did,” she added, and set me off thinking about the many times Mama had looked like she had done just that. She might be staring at me and not see me or hear a sound I made. In the beginning, that was frightening, but eventually it became strangely comfortable. She looked out of pain, beyond a sad word or memory. Without her knowing, I sometimes tried to imitate her, but I always got fidgety and wanted to do something.
Right now, in the silence, I stared at the flames and listened to the wood crackling in the fire. Unfortunately, it brought back the horror of our house burning. I wished we didn’t have to have a fire every night, but Mazy was so pleased with her fireplace I couldn’t say anything nasty about it. She knew, though; she knew what was flashing in my mind, especially when I turned away from the flames or looked down. She saw that was what I was doing now.
“When you fall off a bike, you get right back on,” she said.
“What? I don’t have a bike.”
Was she going to get me a bike?
“That’s a wisdom quote. It means you don’t run off whining when you have an accident or fail at something. You face what defeated you, and you conquer it. Fear will defeat you every time. You face down your fears. Make them cower. Remember that word, cower, from the book about the knight and the lady?”
“Yes.”
I knew what she meant for me to do. I glanced at the fire. I’d never stop fearing fire, but I nodded anyway.
“Good,” she said. “I promise I won’t ask you any more questions about your parents while everything is still fresh and raw in your mind.”
I grimaced.
“That means it’s painful to remember. Right?”
I nodded.
“We’ll talk about it all again as time goes by, but whenever you remember something you think was important about your mother and your father, you tell me, okay?”
“Why?”
She looked away and shook her head. “Why didn’t I expect you would ask why?” she said to the wall.
She turned back to me.
“I want to know exactly who you are, and I can’t do that if I don’t know the way you were nurtured. Maybe your mother eventually treated you like the magical plant in the flowerpot of marbles, planted nothing and watered nothing.”
What a silly thing to say, I thought. She knew who I was.
“I told you who I am.”
“A name is the least revealing thing about you, especially you. It’s obvious. Saffron… your hair. Big deal,” she said. She held up her right thumb and forefinger. “It tells me this much about you. Just like a flower, you’re the result of the place your roots were first sunk. Parents mold their children with good lessons or bad habits. However, the more I get to know you, the more I think you might be one of those untouchables.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone so independent she can’t be molded. But don’t worry. We’ll get to know each other lots better, and what has to change in you we’ll change as time goes by. You can take that to the bank.”
“What bank?”
“Oh, give me strength. That’s another wisdom saying. It means it’s a solid truth. Sometimes,” she said, squinting at me, “sometimes, I wonder if you’re playing me, girl.”
What did that mean? Playing her? She saw the look on my face.
“All right. Don’t worry about it. We’re not going to pull out your teeth,” she said, laughing. She looked at the miniature grandfather’s clock on the mantel above the redbrick fireplace. Another chore I now had was cleaning out that fireplace every day. I thought now that she wanted me to do that so I’d confront the remains of a fire until it no longer triggered bad memories.
“Okay, I see we ate up quite a bit of time here. You can go to your room and read or finish the workbook assignment.”
When I didn’t move, she raised her eyebrows. “Well?”
“Why don’t you have a television set?” I asked, my angry tone pretty clear.
“Well, listen to you, the guest who took over the house. For your information, I’d rather listen to music and read than watch the idiot box. You become a sponge.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Or a couch potato like my husband. From the moment he rose to the moment I would wake him to tell him to go to bed, he sat with the light flickering on his face. It didn’t matter all that much what stupidity he was watching. He was just… hypnotized.”
“But there are good things on television,” I insisted. “Mama had me watch them.”
She looked away, as if hearing something good my mother had done disturbed her.
“I wasn’t a couch potato, hypnotized. I learned stuff. You even said I knew a lot more than a girl my age when you first met me.”
She pursed her lips and thought. “I swear you could change Moses’s mind. We’ll see,” she said.
“See what?”
“Isn’t it your birthday soon? I believe you’re going to be nine.”
Her question shocked me. Weeks before my birthday, I would think about it, but I hadn’t recently, and I wasn’t thinking about it now. I never had a birthday without my parents. Maybe that was why I didn’t think about it.
“Who told you when my birthday was?”
She stared at me. I was expecting her to say, Miss Marple strikes again, but she didn’t.
“Someone put your birth certificate and the dates of your inoculations in that smelly carry-on bag you had on the train.”
I know I looked dumbfounded. I hadn’t done it. I didn’t even know where all that had been kept in our house. Why would Mama have done it? Was she planning on going somewhere with me? Maybe running away from Daddy?
“Who?”
“Who? Who? What are you, an owl? What difference does that make? Who’s not important right now. The good thing is it was there. If you continue being good, I’ll see about buying a television set to put…” She looked around. “Maybe in here, though I once vowed never to do that. See how I’m changing just for you? Since you’ve been behaving and we’ve been doing good work, I haven’t added a penny to the new jar. And you haven’t, either. But we did put some nickels in the new jar. What do you have to say about that?” she asked.
“You’ve been keeping me too busy to think sad thoughts.” I had been thinking them, but I wouldn’t tell her.
She laughed harder than I had ever seen her. “I swear, I might enjoy you yet. Now, go on. Do what I told you to do, finish your book.”
I rose slowly, still thinking about what had been in my carry-on bag. Had Daddy found it all before he had come to my room to get me that night? How could he have so much time to do all that and not get both me and Mama awake? My memories felt like they were under lock and key, and the safe in which they were kept was creaking open.
“I’ll make you a birthday cake, too,” she said as I started for the door. I looked back at her, surprised at how extra nice she was being. “It’s been years since I celebrated anyone’s birthday, including my own.”
Normally, I would have thought that was strange, but during all the time I was here, I never saw her greet a friend or talk about a relative, talk to anyone who would celebrate a birthday with her. Maybe I should feel sorrier for her, I thought. I wondered if I could. But if I did, I thought she would be angry about it, and she would make me put a penny in the jar.
When I was back in my room, I opened the sock drawer and took out Daddy’s second letter to read again. Should I wish that he’d marry his new girlfriend quickly? The quicker he did, the faster we would be together. I wanted to, but something inside me, my memory of Mama’s
smile especially, made it practically impossible to wish such a thing.
Perhaps when he told this new woman about me, she would be so upset she wouldn’t want to be with him anymore. Surely then, I thought, he’d come hurrying back to get me.
Wish for that, Saffron, I told myself. Wish for that.
Three days later, a television set was delivered to the Umbrella Lady’s house. As she had suggested, she had decided to put it in the living room and had the deliveryman hook it up. It took quite a bit of time to do, and while he worked, she wanted me to stay away and not be distracted. I had to remain in the classroom. After a while, she came up to tell me my birthday gift was ready.
“We’ll leave it off until after dinner. For now, we’ll turn it on for exactly two hours a day. You’ll decide if you want those hours before dinner or after dinner. But if you watch before dinner, you’ll have to stop to help in the kitchen, and you’ll have to show me you’ve done all the work I gave you and read what I gave you first. Understood?”
Why only two hours? I wanted to ask, but I thought she would get angry and say, Only one hour just because you asked.
I nodded. After all, anything sounded good.
“I hope I don’t regret this,” she muttered, and left me.
I returned to my math workbook and the pages she had told me I had to do. Sometimes it was so easy I could do it quickly and get it all right. When I did that, however, she added more, so I deliberately spent more time on it than I had to. She watched me suspiciously. I think she knew what I was doing. I had this fear growing. She’s playing with me, I thought. I’ve become her television set.
The set she had bought for me was placed on the wall on the left. She had turned the sofa a little so it would face it. When we went in to watch after I had done the dinner dishes and cleaned the table, she handed me the remote.
“I imagine you know how to use it better than I do,” she said.
I studied it a moment. I did.
“Well, I’m interested to see what you select,” she said, and sat on the sofa, folding her hands in her lap.
There was no question in my mind that this was another test of some sort. She watched me slowly take my seat on the sofa and turn on the television. She clicked her tongue as I flipped through the stations until I found the show I knew. I never imagined she would like it as much as, if not more than, I did.
The Umbrella Lady Page 11