The Long Journey Home

by Margaret Robison

  Bubba was special, even with his earaches and his bawling. Though I was three years and eight months old when he was born, I still remember how proud Mother was of him. She would get all dressed up afternoons and push him in the wicker baby carriage back and forth in front of the house for everyone to see. One day I sat at my rolltop desk and drew a picture of Mother pushing Bubba in the baby carriage. I worked a long time on the drawing, bearing down hard with my pencil.

  When I went out to the sidewalk to show it to her, she didn’t even notice me. I had to pull at her skirt to make her look down. “Mama, I’ve done a drawing for you.” She glanced at my picture and said, “That’s nice,” in a tone of dismissal. Then she went back to pushing Bubba’s carriage. It was around this time that I stopped saying “Mama” and began to say “Mother” instead.

  IV

  1944

  Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” on the Stromberg-Carlson radio that stood in the living room by the love seat. The whole house was filled with the aroma of turkey and dressing baking in the oven, fresh cranberries bubbling in the pot, yeast rolls rising on the stove. Bubba and I sat on the living room carpet watching his new electric train running around its track, the engine hooting and hooting. I felt sick with envy. I could hardly bear to look at the handsome engine with its fine wheels turning, smoke puffing out of the smokestack.

  I wanted an electric train of my own. I wanted to feel the cool metal of the engine in my hands. I wanted to touch each detail of window, door, step, and wheel with my fingers. I wanted to fit the sections of track together to create my own loops and curves. I wanted to bring my train to life by switching the switch on the transformer. I watched, furious with wonder, as Bubba fumbled with the mysterious wires that sparked and sputtered.

  Bing Crosby crooned as the train turned a curve. His words mixed with the hooting of the train and with my horrible feeling of shame; girls were not supposed to want electric trains. Girls were supposed to want tea sets, dolls, play kitchens, and stuffed animals. Wanting an electric train was just one more indication that something was wrong with me, that I was terribly flawed.

  The Atlanta Journal crackled in Daddy’s hands as he sat reading in the wingback chair by the fireplace. The fire crackled too, but inside I felt cold. I looked across the room at the bride doll abandoned under the Christmas tree, along with its wrinkled wrapping paper and tangles of bright ribbons. The doll was terribly expensive. I’d seen her price tag in Rich’s, the big department store in Atlanta that we went to around Christmastime. I knew that Mother had made some sacrifice to buy such an expensive doll for me. The doll had a hole in her head for each hair—dishwater blond, hair the same color as mine—and pale blue eye shadow delicately suggested on her eyelids. Her full lips were painted a warm rose color. She was elegant and beautiful, and I hated her. I hated her most because I was supposed to love her.

  “She’s very beautiful,” I said to Mother. She was a large, stiff wooden doll, and when I tried to bend her straight legs to make her sit down, I pushed too hard and she cracked from one end of her torso to the other. Thankfully, her body stayed in one piece so that the crack was covered by her white wedding dress. Mother wouldn’t know.

  The train continued tooting and puffing. Bubba added his own sounds to those of the train as it entered a long tree-covered tunnel and came back out again.

  Bing Crosby continued his crooning.

  I walked to my room and got my notebook and pen. Then I went back to the living room, curled up on the love seat, and wrapped the afghan around me. I was lonely for Miss Brown, my fourth-grade teacher. I thought about how just before Christmas, her boyfriend came home from fighting the Germans overseas and walked right into the principal’s office and asked to see her. The principal sent a fifth-grader to our classroom to give Miss Brown the message that her boyfriend was there.

  She rushed from the room, wordless, her hands trembling. I imagined her in his arms, oblivious to the principal and his secretary, Miss Muriel Adams, with her tight, thin features and her bony fingers tapping and tapping at the typewriter keys.

  I tightened the afghan around my shoulders. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote on the first line in my best penmanship. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote again. My breathing relaxed. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote again, and no longer felt cold. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote until I reached the bottom of the page, then turned the paper over and continued writing the same words until the paper was filled. I imagined so hard that it was almost as if I were there, in the principal’s office, hugging them both and being hugged back. I felt like we were in a circle of love, complete and safe.

  “Margaret, you can set the table now.”

  Mother’s words shattered my bliss. My face flushed with shame. I wasn’t certain why, but I knew that if Mother read what I’d written, my words would upset her. “Just a minute, Mother.”

  I ripped the paper out of my book, crushed it, and threw it into the fire.

  I went to the dining room, lifted the heavy plates from the china cabinet, and set them at their places on the special white linen tablecloth. Then I put the silver beside each plate. The handles of the sterling silverware were covered with tiny flowers of all sorts like miniature gardens.

  I loved the table setting and the story of how Daddy had seen a dining table all set up in a window at Rich’s. He’d liked it so much he’d just marched into the store and bought everything—tablecloth, napkins, plates, bowls, cups and saucers, salad and dessert plates, serving bowls, silver, and glasses—just as he’d seen it in the department store’s window. He brought the whole thing home to Mother. From that time on, this replica of Rich’s window was on our dining table every Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter, and every other special-occasion dinner.

  Mother brought the turkey in and set it on the table, its plump thighs high in the air, breast browned with butter, juices leaking out through the holes where she’d punctured the skin to test its doneness. The turkey, as always, lay on the enormous ironstone platter that had belonged to Daddy’s mother, and had held all the Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys of my childhood. The platter had a long, dark crack down its middle, a flaw like the flaw I felt in myself.

  V

  I don’t know what ruined me. I thought about it as I walked home from fourth grade alone. I thought about it on my way to school as I walked past the sandspur patch where Marty the bully crouched, waiting to fling sandspurs at me. Sometimes they left bloody scratches on my legs. Sometimes they buried their sharp points in my socks and hems. It hurt my fingers to pull them out.

  I walked, thinking about how I had to hide my flaws from Mother. She’d go crazy if she found out about them. Mother always talked about going crazy, going to pieces. “Just to pieces,” she would scream, hitting her head with her fists.

  I thought about how ruined I was as I walked past Uncle Frank’s house. Sometimes he forced me to stand on the sofa in his sunroom and rub his bald head. “If you stop, wild horses in the basement will trample you,” he threatened. I thought the sound of the wild horses was really the sound of the fire rumbling in the furnace. But what if I was wrong, what if it was really the hooves of horses, restless and wild to escape? I hated rubbing Uncle Frank’s head. Aunt Mary was never around when he asked me to do this. She was in the kitchen, cooking, or down at the creek, fishing. Aunt Mary loved to fish.

  Sometimes Uncle Frank asked me to spend the night at his house. He always let me sleep in his daughter Roberta’s room. It was all plush and satin, lavender, white, and purple. Even the toilet, tub, and washbasin in her bathroom were lavender. She was married and gone now. Daddy told me that Uncle Frank was terribly upset that Roberta had married a man almost as old as Uncle Frank himself. Daddy said the man owned a nightclub, someplace in Florida. Now there was only a photograph hanging over the bed, a close-up of her head. She was lying on a rug with her long hair spread around her. She was movie-star glamorous like Lauren Bacall. I wished I was beautiful
like Roberta.

  I loved being in her room. It felt like being in Hollywood. But even sleeping in Roberta’s room, I didn’t really like to spend the night at Uncle Frank’s. Only I felt guilty if I didn’t. He was Daddy’s brother, and Daddy loved him more than anything. Uncle Frank wore pajamas with stripes—white stripes and stripes the color of Welch’s grape juice. “Come here and sit on the bed with me,” he’d say. “Rub my head.”

  I walked past the Dunns’ house, with its strange tropical fruit tree that looked like a palm tree. Long woodlike things grew from it that looked like round-bottomed canoes stuck face-to-face. When the fruit was ripe the canoes burst apart; the orange fruit inside was about the size of a kumquat. Mr. and Mrs. Dunn were old, white-haired, and kind. They liked children and told me that I could come into their yard any time and eat the fruit. Sometimes I did, but not often. The fruit had a strange taste and texture, but I loved sucking on its smooth black seeds, rolling them over and over with my tongue.

  Once Roberta’s younger sister, Marybell, caught me walking along the sidewalk just past the Dunns’ house. I was making up a play and saying all the parts aloud. I was so caught up in being those characters that I didn’t realize I was talking aloud, or how loud I was talking. I felt like dying when I saw Marybell on her horse, riding beside me, listening to every word I was saying. I’d not even heard the footsteps of her horse, an old white horse retired from Barnum & Bailey’s Circus, a horse with one pink eye and the other one blind. I didn’t want Marybell to know that I saw her. That would just make me feel worse. I clamped my mouth shut and walked on, looking straight ahead, trying hard to forget what had just happened.

  I remember the exposed roots of the oak tree that grew beside the dirt sidewalk where Mother pushed Bubba up and down in his carriage when he was a baby. I remember the fig tree from which my rope swing hung at The Old Home Place. I remember sunlight through the fig leaves. I remember the first time I saw my cousin Hugh’s butterfly collection—all those beautiful butterflies, dead, their exquisite wings forever pinned down in that box.

  But try as I do, I can’t remember what caused me the dreadful shame I felt. Maybe it’s just such a part of me now that I don’t need to remember what caused it any more than I need to remember that I have arms, legs, and feet.

  VI

  My cousin Margaret, and her brothers, sisters, and parents, lived with her grandmother just down the street from us. Aunt Wyche, Margaret’s grandmother and my great-aunt, had an enormous two-story Greek revival house with tall white columns that rose magnificently just like those on Tara in Gone with the Wind. The yard was broad and had few flowers, only shrubs. Margaret and I played with our dolls on the grass in the cool shade of the old oak tree near the house. She had a Scarlett O’Hara doll with pale skin, a long yellow dress, pantaloons, and lips that Margaret had painted red with nail polish.

  Except for the bride doll that I hated, all of my dolls were boys. I had Hans, the Dutch boy with blond hair, blue pants, and real wooden shoes. There was Robin Hood, with his green tunic and a feather in his cap. Pedro, my Mexican doll, had a real straw sombrero and leather sandals. He was beautifully made, with stitching to define each toe and finger in the fabric of his dark skin. His body was stuffed with sawdust, his hair was black fuzz. A bright pink circle was painted on each cheek, and a cigar was stuffed in his open mouth.

  Margaret loved her Scarlett O’Hara doll.

  The role of Rhett Butler and those of the other leading men in our plays were reserved—comic as it might seem—for the Raggedy Andy doll Mother had sewn for me. His body was made from unbleached muslin, and he wore the bright blue pants and red-checkered shirt as illustrated in the series of Raggedy Andy and Raggedy Ann books. Mother embroidered his features by hand.

  Looking back, I believe I chose to play with him most often in the many romantic stories that Margaret and I made up because he felt soft to touch, and because he, more than any other doll, felt most like a part of me. I’d had him since I was very young. He slept with me every night, my arms hugging him tightly to my chest, his coarse wool curls against my face. He shared my dreams and was with me much of the day. He was the constant observer, his wide unblinking eyes staring at everything that went on in the family, and at night staring out into the darkness.

  “Rhett,” Scarlett of the nail-polish-painted lips said with a sigh. “Oh, Rhett!”

  “Scarlett!” exclaimed Rhett of the bright orange hair and embroidered face. Then he caressed Scarlett’s smooth, pale face with his muslin, pawlike hand, and together they tumbled to the grass in a passionate embrace while cars passed slowly on North Broad Street.

  VII

  Bubba smashed the sharp edge of a small glass truck against the bridge of my nose. It was one of those glass trucks that you bought at the five-and-dime, filled with tiny colored candy balls. You turned the truck upside down, pried up the cardboard bottom, and ate the candy. Then you were left with a clear glass truck, or a car, a puppy, or a phone.

  Blood spurted from the gash in my nose, but I didn’t go running to tell Mother. I couldn’t. I’d been teasing him unmercifully, telling him that the spirit of his sister had left my body, which was now inhabited by a wicked witch. I crooked my fingers like claws at him and cackled.

  Bubba wasn’t buying my witch act at all. Maybe I was a poor actress, or maybe he was too smart to believe it. Maybe he was too old to be as gullible as I’d been when Mother had done the same thing to me. I’d not been more than a year and a half old when I began to learn the Mother Goose nursery rhymes by heart. Mother was so proud. She told me how she would misquote lines so that I would correct her. A couple of years before her death in 1986 she brought up the nursery rhymes on the phone. It was then that she told me about how she used to change her voice, claiming that she’d left her body and that a wicked witch inhabited it. “You were such a smart little thing, I couldn’t believe I could fool you like that,” she said with what sounded like mild amusement as she remembered my fear and gullibility.

  My mother had just told me something I’d had no memory of, but which I’d done to my brother. I felt sick. Even after nearly half a century, it was still just a joke to Mother. To me it was an example of harmful behavior that had been passed down through the generations. How many other damaging things had been done to me that I’d mindlessly reenacted on my brother and—later—my sons because Mother had taught me by her own actions when I was so young that I didn’t remember? To even think about it hurt.

  But the day Bubba slammed the truck against my nose I had no idea that it was Mother who’d taught me that teasing way of retaliation, for something I no longer remember. Maybe my disagreement with Bubba had to do with picking up toys. Often, enough building blocks to erect a small city lay scattered on the living room floor, along with battalions of plastic soldiers with their machine guns, rifles, and hand grenades clenched in their fists, the tin aircraft carriers that Daddy had brought from Macy’s in New York City, and dozens and dozens of tiny plastic planes, almost obliterating the wool flowers woven into the carpet.

  While Bubba and I were fighting, Mother was screaming that she didn’t know what she’d done to deserve such children. Now she was sitting on her bed banging the back of her head against the wall, screaming, “I’m going crazy! I’m going crazy!”

  I rushed to her room and stood in the doorway, watching. Remembering the scene now, I see that she looked like an enormous child having a temper tantrum, not unlike those that Bubba had when he beat his head on the floor as a toddler. But looking at Mother from the perspective of a child, I saw her as frighteningly fragile, while Bubba and I had the power to shatter her.

  Maybe this time, I thought, she is really going crazy. As young as I was, I’d already been filled with horror stories of the state insane asylum in Milledgeville—bloodcurdling screams heard in the street, and inmates shouting scary things while pacing behind barred windows for passersby to see.

  “I’m going crazy!” Mother screame
d, beating her head on the wall. I felt like a lead weight was pressing against my heart and lungs, suffocating me with the fear that someone would take Mother away to Milledgeville, leaving us forever abandoned.

  Finally she stopped banging her head and began to collect herself. But another attack could start at any moment. I persuaded Bubba to come with me to our bedroom, where I knelt down with him on the floor and prayed aloud to Jesus, asking him to please help Bubba and me to be good and not drive Mother crazy.

  VIII

  1945

  ABSOLUTELY NO DIGGING FOR BURIED TREASURE. This message, painted on a board and nailed to a pine tree, was the first thing I looked for after Daddy turned off the Tallahassee highway onto the narrow dirt road that cut through the woods to Wakulla Springs. The sign was nailed to a live oak, followed by another sign, signs scattered through the woods. I looked at the sandy soil with renewed wonderment each time we went to Wakulla, where Bubba and I swam in the clear springs and the family had picnics in the woods near the water and ate ice cream at the soda fountain in the Lodge. We went often in the summer.

  Daddy parked the car behind the Lodge, and Bubba and I went to the bathhouse and changed into our bathing suits. Then we walked down the path to the springs. In front of us, glass-bottomed boats for the Wakulla Springs Cruise and boats for the Jungle Cruise on the Wakulla River were tied up at the dock. Thick vine-filled woods grew on the other side of the springs. Alligators slept along the cypress-lined bank. I watched one slide into the water and swim slowly near the shore with only its snout and eyes above the surface.

  Bubba and I turned to the left of the dock and walked down to the beach. Mother and Daddy were already sitting in low wooden chairs at the edge of the sand in the shade of trees hung heavy with Spanish moss. Baby Mercer was parked in his stroller beside Mother, squirming to get out. Mother picked him up, gave him his tin bucket and spade, and set him on the sand in front of her. Bubba and I spread our towels on the sand and then raced to poke our feet into the water that was always as cold as the coldest ice water imaginable.