Toward the end of the discussion Donna saw the supermarket’s boy trundle in a case of young asparagus, as mauve as a rabbit’s nose. “Donation!” he yelled. The pantry mice, she’d noticed, had swallowed all their poison. They must be back behind the walls, dying.
And now it was Friday afternoon. Free Food had just delivered several baskets of very soft tomatoes. The staff would stew them as soon as possible. Pam and Donna were separating the merely overripe from the absolutely rotten.
“I got a glimpse of Signe’s handiwork the other day,” Pam said.
“What’s it like?”
“Like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s a hollow coil that seems to turn inside out every so often. I can’t imagine its purpose.”
“A noose, maybe?”
Pam shuddered. “She probably rips it out every night, like what’s her name.”
“Penelope. But Signe does make their clothing. She can do useful needlework.”
“Maybe the coil is her hobby,” said Pam. “Ugh,” she said, as a tomato imploded on her palm.
Most of the guests had left. The staff and the volunteers mopped the floors and cleaned the kitchen and stacked chairs and tables. Michelle, on her way to a weekend with her boyfriend, ran by—a toothy smile, a pair of fast denim legs. “Oh, Donna, I forgot to put away the cleaning bucket in the Children’s Room. Have to catch the bus. Sorree!” Donna waved her on and went into the empty Children’s Room to fetch the bucket.
But the Children’s Room wasn’t empty. Signe and Rhea sat on their low chairs, facing each other. They were reciting something in words Donna couldn’t catch—a tuneless but emotional song consisting of questions and responses. Signe intoned the questions. Rhea declared the responses. The child’s eyes were closed, her sparse lashes long on her unmarked cheeks. Signe’s eyes were open, watching the girl with consuming interest. “You can’t . . .” Donna began, lurching forward, banging her shin on Michelle’s pail.
Rhea opened her eyes. Both Signe and Rhea turned to look at Donna, who was standing on one leg now, rubbing the other. We can’t what? they seemed to be inquiring. What rule were they breaking? They were not drinking. They were not doping. They were not yelling. They were not striking each other. The tone of their liturgy was charged but it wasn’t abusive. How was Donna to finish her admonition—you can’t look peculiar? You can’t try to save your child from corruption? You can’t pray?
“Sorry,” she muttered. Limping, she pushed the wheeled pail out of the Children’s Room. The harsh duet resumed. Rhea’s words sounded like numbers. Perhaps she was reciting the populations of the world’s capitals. Perhaps she was calculating square roots.
Whatever her catechism, it was soon over. Mother and daughter emerged, now in their capes, while Donna was putting away a stack of newly washed tablecloths. At the same moment a small figure with half a dozen arms and legs whirled into the dining room from the area of the bathroom, capturing the attention of all three. It was Elijah, in flight. He scooted diagonally across the empty dining room, a pinwheel shooting sparks. Then his mother ran in too, her now unbraided satin hair streaming over her knapsack, a hunchbacked bird. “I’m going to get you!”
There was a swoop. The pinwheel was caught. But his captor was not the raven but the bat: Signe. She held him high, above her upturned face. He grinned down at her. Her cape hung in a column behind her. Elijah’s mother skidded to a stop.
“My baby!” she demanded.
Rhea joined them.
“I a plane!” shouted Elijah, flapping his elbows. “Donna, I a plane!”
Rhea lifted her arms in imitation of her mother. Elijah’s mother lifted her arms too. “My baby,” she said, in a softer voice. Signe placed Elijah in the girdle formed by Rhea’s hands. Rhea held the child aloft for a moment, then passed him to his mother. She too held him briefly like a chalice before settling him onto her shoulder and marching out.
Signe adjusted her cape. Then she turned to her daughter. They exchanged a long, silent stare—a gaze of peace and intimacy and intricately tangled pleasure. The space between them became briefly radiant. Donna, though blistered, watched. She wondered whether she would ever again pay honor to that meagre virtue getting-along-with-people. She knew that she would never again claim to understand anything about mothers and children.
They left. Donna walked into the kitchen. It would be a pleasure to stew tomatoes until they burst through their skins.
Home Schooling
Nauseated, dizzy, I lay on the back seat of our dusty car, my head resting against the garment bag that held my father’s two tuxedos. Beyond my raised knees I saw a mortar sky. Above the front seat rose my Aunt Kate’s pony-tailed head and shoulders, and my twin sister’s head, or at least the top of her baseball cap. Willy kept fiddling with the radio and singing French songs we’d learned from our parents. “Yaagh,” I said every so often.
“Feeling better, hon?” said Aunt Kate, not taking her eyes off the road. Yesterday, the day we’d left home, she’d quit her graduate program in Classics, chucked those Romans as if they were all losers. “Feeling the same?”
“Feeling worse.”
“Let us know if you have to stop.”
“I have to stop.”
So at the next opportunity Aunt Kate pulled over. I sat on a hump of grass and thrust my head between my thighs. Aunt Kate stood nearby. Willy gazed at us from the car. “It might be better if you did throw up,” she said, not unkindly. “Carsickness is your specialty.”
“Vomiting is not my specialty,” I reminded her, though I spoke into my skirt and probably couldn’t be heard. I can still remember that ugly plaid, turquoise and peach. At the time—we were ten—I thought it gorgeous.
My carsickness had something to do with my inner ear, our pediatrician told us: I had an atypical vestibular canal. Willy’s vestibular canal was less atypical, the doctor tactfully said, when pressed. More normal, better—but he didn’t say those things. Who cared? I had a more atypical memory than Willy. That is, she remembered not a lot and I remembered almost everything.
Otherwise we were pretty similar in aptitudes and tastes, though we didn’t look alike—I am dark and she is fair, I have a blunt short nose and she has a long thin one. In those days we both wore braids.
I didn’t throw up, not once on the three-day journey to Boston. My father had thrown up at the beginning of his illness, when the headaches began. He was already in our new home while we were driving and I was not throwing up. Our new home was a rented flat in a three-decker section of the city. My parents had flown ahead with two suitcases and my father’s violin.
When not in the hospital for treatments my father slept in the front bedroom with my mother. A congregation of mahogany furniture kept them company. On the highboy stood a stag line of Dad’s medications. Mom’s perfume bottles flared their hips at the pills.
Aunt Kate had the middle bedroom. Willy and I shared the back room. Our window looked down on an oblong of brown earth rimmed with pink geraniums, an abcess of a yard. The view horizontally at our third-floor level was more encouraging—clapboard three-deckers like ours, their back bedrooms close enough to see into at night. These were children’s rooms. We gave the children epithets: Nose Picker, Curls, Four-Eyes, Amaryllis. Amaryllis was a stalk of a girl with a beautiful drooping head. She was about thirteen. Beyond and between these nearer houses we could see bits of the other side of their street—more houses with front porches—and beyond that row still another set of back windows. “Like scenery,” said Willy. I knew what she meant: the flat overlapping facades destroyed perspective, turned the daytime view into backdrop. At night, though, when the near windows were lit, the rooms behind them acquired depth, even intensity. Nose Picker practiced his perversion. Curls read magazines on her bed. Amaryllis smiled into the telephone.
There were black-bellied hibachis on some of the porches. It was the era of hibachis. It was the era of consciousness-raising. The previous year our third grade had been told that wo
men could be anything they wanted to be. We were puzzled by this triumphant disclosure; nobody at home had hinted otherwise. It was the year of war protests and assassinations. Hubert Humphrey kissed his own face on a hotel TV screen. There were breakthroughs in cancer therapy.
Whenever my father went into the hospital for his treatments he had to share a room with some other patient—sometimes an old man, sometimes a young one. They too were recovering from surgery and receiving therapy. My father wore a turban, entirely white, though with no central jewel. He and Aunt Kate, siblings but not twins, resembled each other more than Willy and I did—the same silky red hair, the same soft brown eyes. His eyes were dull, now, and his hair had vanished into his sultan’s headgear.
Most mornings Willy and I found Kate and my mother at the kitchen table silently drinking coffee. During the fall some brown light made its way through the one spotted window; by winter the only light came from a table lamp: a dark little pot whose paper shade was veined like an old face. We owned no appliances—a fortunate deprivation, for the kitchen had no counters. We kept crockery and utensils in a freestanding cupboard, drawers below, shelves above. Our canned goods marshaled themselves on a ledge above an ecru enameled stove. The enamel had worn off the stove in some places; it looked like the hide of a sick beast. Kate and Mom said that the atypically patterned stove was a period piece, a survivor; they seemed to feel a pet-owner’s affection for it.
A brand new refrigerator occupied most of the back hall. It was too big for the blackened space in our gypsy kitchen where a smaller refrigerator had once stood. In place of the vanished fridge my mother installed her teletype. She nailed corkboard onto the wall above the instrument. From the corkboard fluttered pages of computer code. The teletype was usually turned off in the morning, but when she was expecting a print-out she turned it on, and when we came into the kitchen we could hear its hum. During breakfast the thing would seem to square its shoulders against an onslaught. Then the message would begin to type out. Paper rose jerkily from the platen. Sometimes what scrolled into our kitchen was a copy of the program my mother was working on, with its three-letter instructions and fanciful addresses:
TAK FEEBLE PUT FOIBLE TRN ELSEWHERE
We knew that such a series represented the transfer first of information and then of control. We understood the octal number system and the binary number system and their eternal correspondence. Fractions and decimals, however, were still terra incognita to us; and Willy, invoking her not atypical memory, hadn’t yet bothered to learn any method of long division.
At breakfast Mom and Kate wore flowered wrappers trimmed with lace. They lingered over their coffee as if they had all the daylight hours to kill. Early in the fall, when Dad was home more often, when he was still getting up for breakfast, he told them that they looked like demi-mondaines and that Willy and I looked like semi-demi-mondaines and that we were his harem and the teletype his eunuch.
When the New England winter settled in my mother bought oatmeal, and on those dark mornings it bubbled on the stove. We hated oatmeal. But it was the glue of normality, the stuff that was supposed to stick to kids’ ribs through a morning of math and grammar. So we spooned some into bowls and joined our mother and our aunt at the round table. They had already divided the newspaper between them; now each divided her section with one of us. The teletype throbbed. Kate got up to pour more coffee. Her hips were as slim as a boy’s. She sat down. The teletype spat. After a while Mom got up. She bent over the machine, hair falling forward, hand splayed on lace bosom.
It was not usual in those days for a programmer to have a teletype installed in her home. But my mother was not a usual programmer. Her mind could sinuate into the circuitry of a machine. She understood its syntax and could make use of its simple doggy logic. “I have a modest gift,” she earnestly told us. “I was just born with it, like freckles.” Fifty years earlier—ten years earlier, even—a person with such a faculty would have had to divert it to accounting, or weaving, or puzzles. My mother had been born into the right generation for her talent. In that regard she was lucky.
She had landed a part-time job a week after our arrival. A month later she was offered the home teletype and told that she could work as many hours as she pleased, at twice the original rate of pay. She had to attend the weekly staff conference; that was the only requirement made of her. But she considered contact with her fellow workers important, and anyway she always did more than people asked. So she and we went into the office two days a week, often staying until midnight. On those days she’d visit my father in the morning, and then drive home to pick us up. I sat stiffly in the front seat and willed myself not to get carsick.
Computers were hulking giants then, with lights and switches and whirring magnetic tapes. Mom’s machine growled in an airconditioned warehouse, surrounded by a warren of offices with fiberboard walls and desks that were just planks on iron legs. Programmers hung snapshots and party invitations and straw hats above their desks. My mother’s walls were bare; but in one corner of her office a pair of old school chairs with armrests sat at a thirty-degree angle to each other. She had picked them up in a secondhand shop near the hospital. Between the chairs stood an oversized tin bucket filled with books and games. Under it all was a small fake Oriental rug.
Whenever I see the word happiness I think of that corner.
Few of Mom’s co-workers were married, and none were parents. Some brought their dogs to work. One evening one of her fellow programmers took us to a wrestling match. We held our breaths each time a fighter was pinned, sighed when he was resurrected. Later in the year a young woman took us to the Flower Show. Clubs from the suburban towns had created real gardens in real earth in front of painted houses. We brought home a pot of daffodils and a paper poppy. “I will extract some paper opium from this,” said our father in his weakened voice. “We will have such dreams . . . Dreams!” he suddenly shouted.
But field trips were rare. Mostly we spent Mom’s workdays in our corner.
An elderly secretary labored for my mother’s group. She kept conventional hours, and it was a while before we had any commerce with her. But one December afternoon at about five she stopped us on our way back from the sandwich machine. She was seated at her typewriter, and she didn’t lift her fingertips from the keys when she spoke to us, though the tapping ceased. “Harriet and Wilma,” she said by way of greeting.
All we had to do was say Hello Miss Masters and smile and skedaddle. But: “Harry and Willy,” Willy corrected.
Miss Masters slid her hands onto her lap with an awful gravity. “Twins but not identical.”
“Fraternal sisters,” said Willy.
“What grade are you in?”
“Fourth,” I said at the same time that Willy said “Fifth.”
“My oh my” was the extent of Miss Master’s reply, but her tone was inquisitorial.
“She’s advanced,” I said, my explanation ruinously coinciding with Willy’s “She’s retarded.” Then we did skedaddle. When we’d turned a corner I grabbed Willy by her bony shoulder.
“Do you want to go to school?” I demanded.
“Jeez. No.”
“Well, then.”
My mother was sitting at her slab of a desk, writing code. Whenever she was bent over her work, her shoulder-length hair, abundant but limp, separated of its own accord and fell on either side of her neck. We settled down on our chairs with sandwiches and books, our presence unacknowledged. We understood that absorption, not indifference, made her ignore us, just as we understood that our father’s sudden explosions were disease, not rage. My mother’s pencil scratched. We read and chewed. She began to hum—a sign that she had solved a problem. She straightened and moved her chair outward, and it protested faintly, aagh. I looked up and began to sing the words to the tune my mother was humming. The song was “Good Morning” from the movie Singin’ in the Rain—we’d seen it twice in the Revival House back home and once on somebody’s television. Willy joined in, a
third higher. We sang the words and Mom abandoned the melody and hummed continuo. The wrestling programmer, walking in with a flow diagram, stopped to listen to this makeshift serenade.
When we didn’t go to work with Mom we went to work with Kate. After my mother left for the hospital, after we had finished the housecleaning (Kate wore a blue bandanna over her hair) and had made a trip to the library and the Civil War Monument and had perhaps listened to the organist practice in the little brick church or visited chilly Walden Pond, traveling by bus, or inspected the daily catch up in Gloucester, traveling by train, or curled up at home, listening to our aunt read her own translation of Ovid . . . after that, we set off for the Busy Bee Diner. Aunt Kate did a half-shift at the Busy Bee, from four until eight.
On our walk to the diner we saw the children of the neighborhood engaged in their various childish activities: practicing hoop shots, or minding toddlers, or, at the variety store, fastening powerful gazes onto the candy counter so that Baby Ruths would leap into their pockets. Often we recognized the young people we’d spied on from our window—Nose Picker, his hands safe in his pockets; Curls, pretty; Amaryllis, gorgeous. Other kids, too. They wore hand-medown clothes and they looked strictly brought up. They were all white, and most were fair. Not Amaryllis, though. Dark brows shaded dark eyes: a Mediterranean siren in this Hibernian tract.
We looked at the familiar strangers, and they looked back at us. Did they wonder about us? Parochial School students probably thought we went to Public School. The Public Schoolers knew we had never been seen in their cinder-block building; did they notice that we didn’t wear the pleated skirts and white blouses of Catholic scholars? How did they explain us to each other? We speculated about their speculations.
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