by Lynne Hinton
“My sister was right, miss.” She nodded her head and stepped away from me as if I had made magic. “It’s just like being God.”
And I laughed and went back to work, at ease and at one with myself and my full, leaping womb, divine.
16
“Do you think I shouldn’t have come?” Lilly was dipping out the ice cream to put on the apple pie I had made for our afternoon together.
Maude turned toward me, distressed. She pulled at her blouse, pushed her hair behind her ears, her face a bright shade of red. “Oh my, I think I left the stove on at the house.” She got up and headed out the door before I could say anything to convince her it was all right for her to stay.
The door slammed behind her.
“What was that about?” Lilly stuck the spoon in her mouth, pulling it out slowly.
“You know Maude.” I took a bite of my pie. “Crazy as a bat.”
The apples were tart, Granny Smiths, not like the ones from around home, not like the mountain apples.
“Well, what do you think?” She stared at me with those familiar eyes.
“Does it matter what I think?” I pushed a napkin toward her plate, wondering why she asked me such a question.
“I’m not sure it did when I came, but now I’m curious. What do you think of me showing up just before your husband died?”
I put down my fork and I paused. I thought how Emma would be almost Lilly’s age. How she and I might have sat together at the table like this, talking about her father, the neighbor, or what I think about something, eating pie too close to dinner time. How she might have been similar to Lilly, similar to me.
I enjoy having Lilly come by these days. It’s usually only once every couple of weeks. It’s never strained, feels like she belongs, relaxed and comfortable. She’s thinking about going to the university nearby, so she drops by after she’s had an interview or a tour or taken a look at apartments in the area.
She spent the night once, slept in the guest room. And I liked it. I like having her call and drop by. I like our conversations about the mountains and restaurants, gardens and children, the thought of even going to Italy together.
I’m sure lots of people consider the fact that I have a relationship, a meaningful relationship, with the daughter of my husband and his lover as pathological, that I was in need of finding my dead daughter and that she was searching for her missing father, her recently deceased mother, that we’re both sick and desperate for a fix. But it doesn’t feel that way, doesn’t seem to be clinging or unnatural. And since no one can really know or understand all the layers of another person’s life, why would I care what anybody else thinks anyway?
It was only difficult, strange, in the beginning when she called, when I heard she was visiting O.T., when I first had to face what it meant. Once I met her, once I had sorted through my marriage, sorted through my grief, my life, once it fit who she was and how she knew us, it was uncomplicated.
When she first walked up, it was shocking, awkward. With their physical similarities, she and my husband were related somehow, I knew, and then once I understood who she was, I realized that she was not only related but of him, a part of him. After I got over that, it just seemed like meeting a friend of a friend or finding someone who had come from the same hometown. Once I got through the surprise of hearing who she was, we settled in together, into some kind of relationship I’m not sure can be cleanly defined.
“You had every right to come,” I said, wiping my mouth.
“I didn’t ask you if I had a right,” she responded quickly and then took a sip of coffee. “I asked you if you think I shouldn’t have come.” She was not letting it go.
I took a sip too, put down my cup, and placed both of my hands on the table.
“Lilly, you are a result of my husband’s love. You are warm and kind, a woman who is a joy to be around. You and O.T. would have—” I stopped, not knowing how to say it. Then I made myself clear. “I am only sorry that you did not come sooner.”
I took in a breath and ate some more of my pie. She faced me, smiled, and turned away.
“Maybe you won’t want to hear this,” she said shyly, “but you remind me of my mother.”
I sat with her appraisal, her idea that these two women, connected by a man, her father, were somehow alike, somehow made from the same cloth. I let the words, the possibility, sift through the feelings and the memories that I had only recently allowed to surface, and I found that I was not offended or upset.
It would make sense that O.T. had found two comparable women to love. One when he was young and unbridled, the other when he was chained up, old inside. The idea that I bore some resemblance to the second woman my husband had cared for did not leave me bewildered or displeased. It was the same as having Lilly in my life, another wrinkle smoothed down.
“Do you think it’s odd?” she asked.
“You mean about us or about O.T. and your mother?”
She shrugged her shoulders like she didn’t know and ate another bite. “Everything, I guess.” Then there was a pause. “What’s it like for you?”
I wondered at her questions, if she really wanted to know what I thought or if she was just trying to find more proof that I was okay with her, that her coming didn’t in some way break me or lessen my life with O.T.
“There’s a lot,” I replied, deciding how to tell her what place I had come to with all these things I now knew. I wasn’t sure she would want to hear everything—how it was at first, the slight but sudden punch of betrayal, the struggle with anger and guilt, the immediate but then quickly released response of bitterness. I thought about her question and then answered as carefully as I could.
“My grandmother, my mother’s mother,” I added, “was a Navajo woman who married a Cherokee. Her name was Thelma Whitebead, but we often called her Grandma Cedar because she was strong and red like bark.” I remembered how my mother had given her that name. As a child I had thought it was a perfect description of her. “When I was little she told me the story of the Spider Woman and how the Navajo women learned to weave.”
I sat at my kitchen table and recalled the face of my grandmother when she told me this story. Her eyes narrowed, the lines around her mouth stiffened. She talked slower, her words like beats of a drum. She spoke as if the thing she was saying was the most important thing I would ever hear.
I turned to my husband’s daughter, fully, and in the voice of my dead grandmother told her the tale from my childhood.
“There was a little girl who came upon a small hole in the ground as she was walking through the woods. As she peeked into the hole there was smoke rising from within. She moved closer. And when she examined what was inside, she saw an old woman weaving strands of thread with a wooden stick. She watched her and then asked her what she was doing. The woman replied that she was weaving a blanket.”
Lilly was attentive, still.
“For three days the young girl stayed with the old woman and learned how to weave different designs into blankets. With each stitch, she followed the weaver’s instructions, copied her, until she was able to make the same lovely blankets that the old woman was making.
“When the little girl had learned all that she needed to learn, the old woman said to her, ‘Child, there is one warning I must give you, and you must pass this along to all those who weave these designs. Whenever you sew a blanket, you must make sure that you leave a hole in the middle. For if you do not, all of your weaving thoughts will be trapped in the stitches and will stay inside.’”
I remembered how my grandmother stretched her hands wide and slid her crooked fingers in and out of each other as she ended the storytelling.
I continued. “‘It will not only bring you bad luck,’ the old woman said, ‘it will also make you crazy.’ So when the little girl returned to her village and taught the others how to weave, she always remembered to share the old woman’s warning. From that day on, my grandmother recounted, the Navajo leave a tiny hole in t
he middle of their blankets in obedience to the old Spider Woman’s counsel.”
Lilly nodded like she understood, but I knew I needed to explain.
“Since before I ever met O.T., your father,” I said with respect, “I have been weaving a blanket, making my life. I am white and Cherokee, the child of a blind man and a sorrowing woman, the daughter of mountain people. All of this woven in me.” I leaned closer to Lilly.
“I am the only child of my parents who lived. Three children, and I am the only one who survived. All of my family died before I was old enough to understand what it meant to be left alone. And I was so lonesome, so completely by myself, I even begged their spirits to stay with me.” I sat back and remembered the house of my childhood, wondered if it was still full of the ghosts.
“And all that death and the loneliness was pulled like strands of cotton hard and taut into my heart.”
I sat forward, resting my arms on the table.
“Even and especially when I could not have a child and then finally had one and she was born dead, I yanked and sewed and made this life of over seventy years.”
I paused, now understanding what I had not for more than six decades.
“In all that time, in all that weaving, I did not leave a place for my pain to get out. I did not leave a hole like the old woman had said, like my grandmother had warned.”
I stopped for a moment, to recollect, to make sure I was saying it just right, to make sure I was understanding this for myself.
“Only once,” I continued, recalling that night at the ocean, “did I ever let what I felt be released from me; only once did the seams that I had so carefully stitched together get pulled apart. And that happened only because I knew that if they didn’t, I would fold up inside myself, smothering under the weight of such sorrow.” I took a breath, that winter night at the beach a long, unforgotten moment in my life.
“Only once did I let the fear and the anger and the resentment and the sadness spill out of me. And even after I did that, I quickly sewed up the rip that had frayed and kept those feelings, that disappointment and grief, from ever slipping out again.”
I stopped. I opened like a flower.
“My life has been so tight, so ordered and neatly sewn, that there was no room for O.T. to find what he needed. I shut him out. And I think that even though he was not loose with his emotions either, not one to deal with or talk about the things that burden a man, I think that somehow the love and the width of your mother’s heart freed him, warmed him, eased him in a way that I could not.”
I thought about O.T. and how painful it must have been for him to leave Clara. After Emma died and he came home, he was never the same again. He was a man engulfed in guilt, prepared to be punished because he believed that he was the cause of our daughter’s death, that he alone, because of his infidelity, had stolen the breath of the baby his wife had wanted more than anything and then lost.
Surely, O.T. returned thinking that what he had done by loving another woman had produced seeds of evil, one single seed of disease that passed from him into our baby’s heart, eventually spreading, multiplying itself into death. So that, because of his guilt, because of his lack of redemption, he put aside any thoughts of true love and replaced them with the regimen of devotion to the one to whom he was promised, the one he had so deeply invaded and wounded. He came home, extracted his need for attention, his desire for passion, and narrowed the size of his heart.
After Emma died, he stayed close to the farm, sending others to sales and fairs, and never allowed himself the pleasure of remembering how it had felt to be adored. All of what he had known from his two years with Clara, all of the little things he could not share with anyone but her, all of the simple silence and the romance and the deep, deep way he could sleep only next to her, he wrapped and packaged and put away. And he never again tampered with or peeked into the slender sleeve of love he had only briefly known.
I drew in another breath, waving off more thoughts of O.T. and how he suffered, and finished answering Lilly’s question.
“So how am I doing with all of this? You want to know. What am I thinking?” I closed my eyes to consider the question more clearly, to make sure I was being as honest as I could be. I opened them and answered her as truthfully as I was able.
“I am trying to make a hole in my blanket, trying to unhook the deeply made stitches, sew them together again around an opening that lets my heart release its contents. A hole, not a tear, not a rip or forced split this time. An intentional and purposely placed loop that pulls out all the pain and joy and fear and sadness and keeps it from being locked and hidden in tight hems ever again.”
I paused.
“People look at me, my lack of anger at O.T. for having an affair, you and me, our friendship, and they may think it is odd or strange in some way. But that’s not what is strange. Our relationship, my reaction—these things are not what is so out of the ordinary.” I slid aside my cup of coffee.
“What is strange, what has been strange, is that with everything that has happened to me, the deaths, the loneliness, the hard choices, all of it, the oddest thing of it all is that I thought I could lock it away, put it out of reach, protect myself, and never deal with any of it. And that somehow as long as I didn’t share it with anyone else, it would be forever harmless to me and everyone around me.”
I reached my hands across the table toward Lilly.
“Your coming has opened me in a way I had not expected. And I don’t understand it; it’s you and it’s not you. I can’t explain it. But for whatever reason, your being here has allowed me, some might say forced me, but regardless, it has let me walk again across the paths of my life and see who I have become, feel what has happened to me, understand who I am.”
Rays of late afternoon sun flooded through the window, and I suddenly felt warmed.
“You have done what my parents, my siblings, my grandmother, my daughter, their spirits, my husband were never fully able to do. You let me remember and feel the deep and burdened things that have been inside me, cluttered and undisturbed for most of my life. You let me remember and feel them, and then you let me see that I would not die because of it. You have helped me grieve all the death that has always surrounded me. You have brought me permission to be in touch with my heart.”
We sat in a long, unbothered span of silence before either of us spoke.
“You know,” Lilly said finally and matter-of-factly, “Mama would have liked you.” She laughed, the thought of saying such a thing surprising her. “And even though she would have thought it was peculiar that you and I could be friends and she probably would never have said so, she would have liked that too.”
I smiled at her and nodded my head, the thought of her mother’s approval, like the early evening sunlight, an unexpected delight.
I settled again into my place at the table and realized what I enjoyed most about my husband’s daughter. She was, in ways I had never experienced, truthful. She spoke without restraint.
We finished our pie quietly, without further conversation, bathing in the dazzling pink light of the setting sun. We said nothing else to each other, and I understood that, unlike the days of my early life, everything that needed to be had, in fact, already been said.
17
Maude flies into the house. It is well into the month of May, past early spring, brilliant. A world melting into soft color.
“Your water,” she is yelling at me while I walk toward her, still in my pajamas, from the bedroom. “Your water is clear, blue!”
She is frantic, full of her own news.
I go over to the window and open the curtains. Daffodils and orange-red tulips line the walkway. The morning sky is wide and undisturbed. I yawn and move toward the kitchen. “Coffee?” I ask.
“Decaffeinated?” She follows in behind me.
“Yeah, I can do that,” I reply, wondering why I allow her to change my morning routine. I pull the bag out from behind several plastic caniste
rs in the cabinet.
Then I stop and think for a minute whether I had locked the door last night. “How did you get in here?”
She is sitting at the table, sticking her finger in my African violet, checking to see if it needs water. “The key above the door frame in the garage,” she answers.
“You went out to my garage and took the key and let yourself in?” I ask, surprised at her boldness.
“Sure,” she says. “I did it a lot when you stayed with O.T.” She wipes her fingers on a paper towel. “You did tell me where it was and asked me to check on things,” she says, like I invited her in this morning.
“That was only if you thought it was important,” I reply, pouring the water in the top of the coffeemaker.
“Well, it always was.” And then as if she suddenly remembered why she is here, she adds, “And this is even more so.” She comes over to the sink next to me and washes her hands.
“Last night I dreamed about you.” She searches around for a towel. “You were so beautiful,” she says, like it could only happen in a dream.
Then she sits down again.
“The water after I saw your face was like from a waterfall.”
The coffeemaker starts to drip and I take out two cups. I listen.
“It wasn’t motionless, still, like a pond or a lake. It was,” she stops and turns toward the living room window, where the sun is shining through making slender white lines across the wall. “It was moving like a mountain stream or brook.” She seems so pleased with herself.
“Like a creek?” I ask, feeling as if I had the same dream.
“A clean one,” she answers, “not like what we have now.”
I sit down next to her and begin to remember.
“Is there red clay on one side, granite rock and moss on the other?”
She stares at me, stunned. She nods.
“And as you go along is there a large tree, an oak or elm, a big one, growing crooked and leaning across the creek, its branches almost reaching the other side?”