“And she didn’t have any,” said Gaby. “Poor thing, poor thing. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. And then . . . then she moved. After she married somebody we didn’t know. She moved to Detroit.”
“Right, she lived in Detroit. Can you imagine?”
Lizzie said, “Imagine.”
“No, I mean this was Mary Pat Halley. That sweet girl,” said Susan, slowing down to match Gaby’s sobriety. “I mean she was still just like she is in that picture. Just looking for the right one. Don’t you remember how she was in high school, Chrissie? Lizzie?” Susan had moved back, by the time we were in high school. “You-all weren’t that far behind us.”
We didn’t remember. High school. That made us all think of the real subject, Janna and the blowjobs.
Susan said, “I know I wouldn’t have picked her to be the one to do what she did.”
“Don’t say it,” said Gaby.
“She did. She did it with a rope. There she was, hanging from the landing. And he came in the front door. The last husband.”
“Last one I guess,” said Lizzie.
Susan ignored her. “You know Gaby, this was the one had money and they went and lived in Detroit.”
“Detroit,” said Gaby. She had stood up and gone to the screen, where she stood listening for something through the sound of the peepers. “But at least that was the one worshipped her.” That was the kind of thing you still heard said around there, that somebody worshipped somebody else. It meant an age difference, normally. Some gulf that could be seen across, possibly in both directions, with respect or wonder. “Though they said he was a good bit younger,” Gaby added with tears in her voice, laying her forehead on the screen. “You know, I always thought something might happen to Mary Pat. Ever since our wedding.” She turned around. “I mean it, Susie. Remember them pinning my flower and telling me, Come, come and get Mary Pat over it, she’s having a crying fit. It was when they were buttoning up that dress on her.”
“It was real to her,” said Susan, without Gaby’s sympathy.
“And somebody had the idea the lightest little smack would help her get over it but Mrs. Halley said, ‘You touch her and I’ll scream.’ Remember that?”
No one else remembered.
“Shh,” said Gaby. “Somebody’s on the front porch.” We heard the door open. Gaby listened. “That’s Janna,” she said. The fright had left her voice. She stood up with a tired, helpless eagerness. “Well, I know she did say they were all going to the sleepover. But here she is.” There was a long silence and then the kitchen light went on and Janna stood in the doorway. Her hair was all over the place and her eye makeup had smeared onto her cheek-bones. Her eyes were wide with the effort to focus. “Honey?” said Gaby.
“I’m home. Hi, Aunt Lizzie. Hi, Aunt Chrissie,” Janna said, as if I hadn’t seen her that morning. She thought for a second. “Susan, hey. When did you get here?”
“Hi, honey,” we said together.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
Nobody said, We thought you were at a sleepover. We all tried not to stare at her beautiful smudged child’s face. She looked like someone who had crawled free of some snare and dragged herself miles.
“What’s this?” she said, coming over unsteadily to the open scrapbook. “Oh my god.” She sank against the table. “These are those pictures. Oh my god. You’re looking at these. Mom was the groom.” She bent over the pictures. “Mom. You were so cute.”
We tried not to look at each other in the candlelight, or at her, in our relief. She had come out onto the porch. She was talking to us. Surely life had not altered as much as we had been saying.
“Those fat little babes. On the same chair. My aunties,” she said. “Whoa. Those dresses.”
“Watch your hair,” Gaby said before she could stop herself, as Janna’s pale hair fell forward over the candle. A string of notes burst from somewhere, muffled and exultant. Janna began a struggle with a tiny bag. Finally she pried the phone out, and still propped against the table she tried to read the screen. She drew a long sobbing breath as she read, leaning over the flame so it lit her face from below in the dire way women learn to avoid, lest some banshee hidden away in us make her appearance. “But how did you stand it,” she said, yanking the hair back and shielding the phone as she glared, “any of you? Living in those days?”
Beloved, You Looked into Space
OUR FATHER MARRIED a woman who took an ax to a bear. She did it to save her first husband. The bear that charged him was blond at the neck and had enough bulk there that she saw it as a grizzly, a thin one. Later she knew it to have been a black bear, with half a paw shot off and a slug in its shoulder. A hunter told the papers there had been word of a problem bear in the area. The couple had no way of knowing that; they were staying in a remote cabin and although the husband was a hunter himself, he had no gun because they were there to fish and take it easy. So our father said later.
The wife was a little distance upriver casting her own line when the bear grappled him down. Twice she heard a growl she thought was a plane overhead fading in and out. That was before he made a sound. He was trying to get under the water. When he came up he screamed for her to get away. Of course a bear goes into water, and it swatted him back to the rocks where it could straddle him.
They were fishing catch and release, late in the winter season, really the spring melt, when bears are lean and ranging for food.
Grizzly: anger. Black bear: hunger. Something to keep in mind about bears, our father said. He was a veterinarian, but bears were a new interest. His warnings were for my sister Shelley, the one who hiked and camped alone. Shelley had worked for the Forest Service and knew more about wildlife than he did, and by this time she had her own veterinary practice, so she could have expressed an opinion, but she didn’t. The subject was his now.
Earlier the husband and wife had been taking turns splitting wood for the stove. The ax. She ran uphill and skidded back. The first blow she struck was a true one, splitting the ear and causing the bear to drag its head off her husband, turn a blood-filled eye on her, and stand up. The head swung, a paw swiped her arm and knocked her down. But the bear dropped back to her husband. Unaware she was hurt she pulled herself onto her knees, her eyes level with what was going on. She felt for the ax, got to her feet. Like a batter, she swung it into the neck.
“I mean that next swing picked her up off the ground,” our father said. It was he who was compelled to repeat the details, from the time he met her until the time we did, at their wedding. “I think I’m the first person to hear it,” he said proudly. “From her.”
Gerda. She was a small woman, he said. But she was a rock climber, with arms on her. Scars—although she was not one to spend time in front of a mirror—made her cover them up in long sleeves. I could picture her, short, windburned, one of those sturdy, gray-headed, big-wristed women you used to see looping cord or portaging kayaks on the ramps of the old REI, with a look in her eye like Mother Jones, or like Ripley in the cargo-loader in Aliens. And what in that look would make a man, and not just any man but our peaceable father, savior of animals, decide in one week to marry her when he had mourned another woman for decades?
Our mother’s sister Karen had met her. Ordinarily Karen would have gone into detail, but she had agreed that she would not. “I promised. Your father made me promise. You’ll meet her.”
“But not until the wedding.” Gerda was in the Midwest settling things. “Come on, Karen. Tell.”
“Let your father describe her. He wants to.”
This was something new. Our father didn’t describe people. Persuaded to speak of our mother, even long after her death, he had never put so many sentences together. “In that situation, most people would be lucky to get an ax blade through the guard hairs in the coat. Thick as rope, at the neck.” He was eager to confirm these things. “I mean man or woman. Just wouldn’t hit true, nine times out of ten. This girl cut clear down through the strap muscles, j
ust short of the carotid.”
For the bear was tracked and shot, examined and photographed. The old embedded slug, missing toes, abscessed teeth, ax wounds—these reached the Seattle papers.
It was three years afterward that Gerda Hagen and our father met, saw each other every day for a week, and decided to get married. To the best of my knowledge our father had gone out with two women in the twenty-three years since our mother died. “I tried,” Karen always said. “I had friends waiting in line. Kathleen made me promise her.” Karen smiled across the table at Shelley because it was Shelley who remembered the personality of our mother, the powers of tolerance she had displayed, for almost everything that had come to pass.
And Gerda—Gerda had never gone out with anyone but Bob, the boy she married at eighteen. “It’s true,” Karen said. We were in a restaurant, talking over the situation. “So these two, somehow . . .” Karen had her wallet photos out, flipped to the picture of her sister. “Two virgins,” she said to the face.
ALL THROUGH GRADE School, we got off the bus at Karen’s house. We called her Karen, though our uncle was Uncle Cal. Karen didn’t like the word aunt because she didn’t think it expressed her relationship with us. “I know you’re not my daughters,” she said. “I know that. But I have my feelings and I don’t like the word aunt and for that matter I don’t like niece. Niece. It’s the sound. Penis. There’s another one, same sound. That niceness. Phallus is a different thing.”
“Stop right there,” said Uncle Cal.
“Well, geese and piece. And p-e-a-c-e,” said Shelley, who was the smart one. It was said in the family that she had read the newspaper at three. Our mother had taught her. In the second grade she was reading our father’s home copy of The Anatomy of the Cat.
Karen worked half days; at home she took care of her sons and of us, and fought the nuclear industry. She talked on the phone as she stuffed envelopes and assembled casseroles and cleaned as far as the telephone cord would go. Or Shelley would set up the board and beat her at Scrabble while she talked. It was the height of the antinuclear movement. Nuclear fuel rods stood in a hot pool just across the Sound from us; a couple of states away, underground silos hid Minuteman missiles in the wheat fields. In our minds Karen had some kind of official standing that required her to call people up and warn them. Or her next-door neighbor Lois would come over and the two of them would take turns calling people who already knew the danger, to strategize. With Lois there the talk usually worked its way around from missiles to alarming or disgraceful stories in the newspaper: freeway crashes killing whole families, and cuts in food stamps, and kids found chained in basements.
It was Lois who introduced our father to Gerda. Lois had known Gerda and her husband Bob for years and years; she had known them when they were holding hands in the corridors of Garfield High School. It was no surprise to hear that at the time of the bear attack, Lois had spent hours in our aunt’s kitchen going over the details. When Gerda came back into town, Lois invited Karen over to meet her. Inside of an hour Karen had it arranged that Lois and Gerda would come over for dinner and so of course would our father. Just a casserole, Karen said. And really nothing would please Cal more than seeing his brother-in-law John and his neighbor Lois that very night. And Lois’s friend of course. Gerda.
“NOW DON’T YOU girls step on a spider,” Lois told us more than once in the early days, waving her cigarette at Karen’s frog poster. “Not in this house.” The frog presided over the kitchen, crouched in a spiral of print that read SENTIENT BEINGS ARE NUMBERLESS; I VOW TO SAVE THEM. I remember Karen explaining sentient to Shelley. It meant that a frog took an interest in its kind. It meant spiders had fears. Hiding, waiting for food to draw near, driven by thirst down porcelain inclines, they feared us. The last thing they wanted, before their intense lives of waiting shriveled to gray lint in the basement, was to run into one of us. To this day I don’t think Shelley and I see a spider without wondering whether it has had enough to eat and drink. And the poster didn’t sound like a rule but it was one, a Buddhist rule. Karen explained Buddhism. I tried to listen the way Shelley did, but Karen’s explanations took time and you were supposed to ask questions. Questions did not come to me the way they did to Shelley. What about bacteria? Sentient or not? What about the ones you cremated along with a person? Our mother had been sick, there must have been a lot of bacteria. No, bacteria were not at fault in our mother’s case.
The cremation occupied Shelley’s mind for a long time. She wanted to see where they cremated the dogs and cats at the clinic, but our father wouldn’t take her. She took the encyclopedia to her room and made her own study of the subject of fire on flesh. Because what if the person being cremated was sentient? How did anyone know what went on when you were dead?
“She set fire to herself!” Karen told Lois on the phone. “I did not,” Shelley said. “I didn’t catch on fire, did I, Jenny?” But she had not let me in the room when she rolled up her sleeve, struck a match and held it to the skin of her elbow long enough to raise a blister that opened and reopened in the ensuing weeks, being on a moving joint.
After that she went to see a therapist, an old woman from Karen’s meetings and marches. In the therapist’s bathroom, where Shelley once went to throw up, there was a cartoon of a naked woman on horseback. The woman carried a flag with a broken bomb on it. Shelley told me about it. Hearing us, Karen explained that the woman on the horse was Lady Godiva, who, being in fact an early activist, had ridden naked through a town in order to make her husband lift a tax on his people. “How come?” Shelley said. “Why would that make him?”
For once Karen had no explanation. Shelley got the encyclopedia and reported that it was a legend. “Shelley honey, lighten up,” said Lois. “Somebody did something like that or there wouldn’t be a legend.”
When Lois was told a bad enough story from the newspaper, she crossed herself. I noticed that; I liked to see the little shake of the torso she gave once she had brushed off some threat. Nobody in our family had a religion except Karen, with her one rule, but we were allowed to have one if we wanted to, and I prayed to everything, from the stars to the giant statue of a dairy cow on the trip to Carnation Farms. I prayed to our fish circling the bowl with its gracious trailing fin, and occasionally to the point of light on the old TV when you turned it off. On camping trips I prayed to the tent flap, arched like a church window when the flashlight shone on it from outside. I prayed to all possible candidates for messenger to or from our mother. For what did I pray? A prayer was not so much a specific petition as a mental drone, unsought and surprising in its arrival, a fit of abjection with a luxury to it, a drama attaching to oneself, however invisible it might be to others. Tell her to come back. Just once to see Shelley.
ANY NUMBER OF women at home with their kids answered the phone in the dark afternoons of Seattle. So a lot of us heard the things talked about in Karen’s kitchen in the ’80s, and I wonder how many think about them the way Shelley and I do when we see kids get off a school bus in the rain. In our minds nuclear war existed in a kind of Magic 8-Ball, coming to the surface along with the numberless sentient beings, the ozone hole, Scrabble words scattered by the phone cord. Stevie Wonder on the stereo singing “Higher Ground,” or, when Shelley started piano lessons, Glenn Gould playing and humming an infinity of ascending and descending notes that never quite turned into a song but made Shelley roll her head and goggle her eyes and sing them in a way we agreed was the right match.
She was seven. I was four. I wished to become Shelley, reading words and music, knowing how to find out what people meant, when to argue, when to be unafraid, when to grow cold and faraway. But without tears: Shelley wouldn’t cry the way I did, even when she hurt herself. She remembered everything, as I did not. I did not connect a repeating vague bleakness in certain rooms and at bedtime with any condition of my own. I thought I would always have to look for a sign and ask, Are we sad?
Rain streaked the windows; our father, stooped and silent, wa
s somewhere sewing up a dog; our mother’s body had gone up in flames; warheads could melt the flesh off your bones—yet Karen laughed, she cooked, she followed her rule. Why? Why protect the spider?
What about the things the spider had to trap and eat alive or it would starve?
“Hoo, you got her there!” Lois crowed.
“Shelley, we can’t save everything we want to.”
At the end of the day when our father came to pick us up, Karen would open the oven to let out the smell of her casserole so he would stay for dinner. “Oh, John, just let the girls finish their game,” she would plead. Or, “Shelley’s almost finished her homework. And Jenny’s so cozy. She’s under the table in the fort. Shh, I think she’s asleep.”
I liked to think our mother would have been the same way, had Karen been the one who died.
Uncle Cal liked to tell people he had spent years in a commune with four hungry guys and two sisters with feathers in their hair, who painted their toenails and played the guitar and knew how to cook. “Those two,” he said. “They would make enough food for ten people and you better go out and find ten or it hurt their feelings. So they could feed ’em to-fu.”
Karen said Cal was the reason for the women’s movement. She said the place was not a commune but just a big student house with rooms rented out and a shared kitchen.
They each had a day to cook the meals, but our mother Kathleen had been the best, Karen and Uncle Cal agreed. She was the youngest, but she could put a big meal together in twenty minutes and every so often she broke loose and cooked meat. They argued about who in the house had eaten it openly and who in secret.
I could picture somebody at a skillet, spatula in hand. Meat sizzling. Her feet were bare, her back was to me, the blond hair hanging down. What did she look like? Pictures of her had turned into something lined up on the bookcase with the goldfish bowl and the cat anatomy book. In the big, framed one, our father’s favorite, she stood in the snow on her cross-country skis, waving a gloved hand. But the hair was pushed up under a wool hat and a blot of glare took out the eyes behind the glasses.
Marry or Burn Page 22