by Bob Tarte
I asked Linda to follow me into the bedroom and showed her the offending sweater. “You know how Dusty won’t chew on some of those leather belts you bring home from the thrift store? The ones that have a kind of snakeskin pattern?”
“He’s terrified of them.”
“Look at the stripes on the sweater.”
“They look like snakeskin!” She shook her head. “Maybe he thought a big snake had hold of you.”
“I doubt it. He’d be celebrating if that happened.”
“But isn’t it odd that he would have a genetically imprinted fear of snakes, even without ever having seen one?”
The telephone rang in response, triggering my cellular-level antipathy toward telemarketers, but the caller ID informed me otherwise.
“Mom just called,” said Joan. “She’s lost her purse again.”
“I can’t possibly drag myself over there tonight.”
“I can’t go either, Bob. You know how upset she gets no matter how often this happens, but I think I calmed her down. I’ll get it tomorrow with the purse finder. I just wanted to let you know that I talked to her in case she calls you next.”
I PULLED INTO MY mom’s driveway right behind Joan, treating the phone call as an excuse to visit both of them at once. I had hoped my mom might have already located her purse—possibly in the course of hiding the electric hedge trimmer behind my dad’s old hi-fi console in the den—but as soon as we walked through the door, she met us in the vestibule and gravely announced, “Somebody came in while I was eating breakfast and took my driver’s license.”
“You found your purse?” Joan asked.
“My driver’s license is in my purse.”
Joan gave my mom a hug and assured her that she had simply mislaid her handbag. I bragged that I would find it before the tea water even had a chance to boil, and sure enough, before the kettle hit the stove, the familiar bing-bong chimed in the dining room as I pressed the doorbell button. A moment later I stood holding one of my mother’s shoes and fixing a stupefied Buffy-the-hen gaze at the purse finder nestled inside it.
“Mom,” I told her gently, “see where this says, PURSE FINDER—KEEP IN PURSE. Why do you think you put it in your shoe?”
“I didn’t put it there,” she answered. “Somebody’s trying to drive me crazy.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Joan. “Everyone loses things.”
“We always found your purse before you had the purse finder, and we’ll find it again,” I said.
“You always found what before? I don’t ever lose my purse.”
While my mom finished heating up a can of soup for Joan, the two of us decided that I’d search the familiar hiding places. If I came up empty, Joan would join the hunt after savoring her lunch-meat sandwich. My mom tended to use a favorite cubbyhole for several days in a row, then abandon it for a more obscure location. But once in a while she would break loose of habit and revisit an earlier niche. So I had plenty of spots to check. Armed with a flashlight, I poked my nose into and underneath the chairs and couches, paid a courtesy call on the narrow space behind the dehumidifier, then said my quick hellos to my father’s writing desk, the vestibule closet, the china cabinet, and the kitchen cupboards.
“Why are you looking in the bread drawer?” my mother asked me. “I never keep my purse in there.”
Joan and I exchanged the look.
Upstairs, I roused the slumbering dressers in two bedrooms, levitated the mattresses, crawled under the beds, briefly closeted myself, took a pessimistic peek into the wastebaskets, made a private trip to the bathroom, and finally trundled down the hall to my old bedroom, now a sewing room. So much had changed over the years, and especially in the past several months, I was grateful to note scant traces of my former presence. Long ago my parents had refinished the floor, eradicating the water stains caused by my six-hundred-pound saltwater aquarium, plus the char mark where a stick of burning sandalwood incense had prostrated itself before my Donovan and Dylan posters in 1969. Only a few of my knickknacks remained, including a hunk of petrified wood and a small ceramic pig. I reached behind the rows of paperbacks in a fleeting hope that an old copy of Playboy might somehow still reside there. No magazine. No purse.
This was new, and this was strange. My mother had apparently progressed from merely stashing her handbag out of sight to seriously concealing it. I enjoyed a flicker of triumph when I unearthed a brown purse from a laundry basket in her closet, but I recognized it as one that she hadn’t used in years.
“I didn’t have any luck,” I told Joan.
“Well, it can’t just have walked away on its own,” declared my mom.
Joan asked me if I had removed everything from every drawer upstairs. When I answered no, picturing myself floundering in a heap of my dad’s clothes and my mother’s costume jewelry, she resolved to go thoroughly through each piece of furniture on the second floor—including the linen closet, which hadn’t been excavated in so long it probably still contained the Bronze Age remnants of my crib bedding. I followed her to pitch in, but she stopped me. “It’s better if one person takes care of it, so we don’t get confused about where we’ve looked.” I took this as a merciful dismissal.
• • •
I SLIPPED AWAY from my workplace an hour early the next morning. Joan hadn’t turned up anything in her search other than the stuffed dog Malcolm, which I’d vomited on as a tot. My mom had dutifully cleaned him up, but in my eyes the accident had altered the bed companion, who involuntarily retired to a cabinet nook among tea cozies from my mother’s 1937 trip to Cuba. I unlocked the front door, and on the verge of tears my mom intercepted me in the living room. “I did a really stupid thing,” she said. “I lost my purse.”
“I know. We’ve been looking for it.”
“I had it last night.”
A dull chill hit me. Joan and I could find ourselves playing a game of musical chairs with the handbag if my mom had, in fact, remembered where she had stashed it and then hidden it a second time. That meant that every single place that we had already investigated was in play all over again. I searched the downstairs couches, chairs, and crannies, explaining the sorry situation to Joan when she arrived. While she and my mom enjoyed a can of soup and a lunch-meat sandwich, I repeated the previous day’s performance upstairs.
“This isn’t going anywhere, Bob,” Joan said. “I’m going to start looking in the basement.”
The basement was our version of the Library of Congress, if you substituted cheese boxes filled with hardware for books, cartons of old paint cans for bundles of rare manuscripts, and ephemera dating back to World War II for government librarians. “She wouldn’t put her purse down there,” I said. When Joan responded by giving me the look, I gamely replied, “I’ll search the den.” Under normal conditions, I couldn’t imagine poking through the cluttered room where we had played as kids to keep out of our parents’ hair. But it was child’s play compared to ransacking the cellar.
Two hours later, the sad scraping sounds and ominous crashes from below gave way to meditative silence. I assumed that Joan had finally given up, but she called out proudly, “I found it!”
“Where was it?” my mom and I shouted in unison from different corners of the house.
Joan kept mum until we had joined her downstairs near the clothes dryer. Underneath a hulking wooden utility table—whose chipped grey paint revealed chipped white paint revealing a green base coat—stood a wooden trunk handed down from my dad’s mother and containing who knew what. On top of the lid sat a neatly folded electric blanket from the Eisenhower era. Joan slid her hand into it and retrieved the missing handbag to great acclaim.
For two days my mom had been as upset as I had seen her since the funeral. But while Joan and I remained rattled and exhausted from the search, my mom gained tranquillity in direct proportion to the number of sips she took from a cup of surprisingly palatable ten-year-old jasmine tea that I’d met in the den while reacquainting myself with a set o
f old cocktail glasses. Joan spoke sleepily about her ferrets. I managed to croak out a few sentences decrying my having to hold the water bowl for Moobie. My mom held the floor with an effusive recap of a telephone conversation with one of her friends from church. When she finished, she met Joan’s bleary stare and asked her, “Now, were we looking for something?”
THE LEAVES SPIRALED down from the trees, making it difficult to spot any yellow-rumped warblers in flight, had any flitted around for me to spot. The leaves flecked the surface of the river, and through the bare trees on the opposite bank I noticed for the first time a cultivated field. Near our little pristine island, a picnic table stuck its fat nose into the primeval setting, but still no doughnut shop appeared. A song sparrow sang a halfhearted autumn song. A few woodpeckers and a brown creeper climbed the spindly maples as if searching for the orioles, buntings, grosbeaks, and flycatchers that had gassed up and zoomed south, collectively carrying my mother’s purse.
I didn’t even bother bringing the two-way radio to the river. I hardly needed it to communicate with my wife. As soon as Linda spotted my wispy figure trudging birdlessly toward the house, she called for me to meet her behind the barn. “She’s back!” she hollered before I had even halved the distance between us. Four miles away, two nuns in downtown Lowell scanned the shelves of the BookAbout for Brother Cadfael mystery novels. The older of the pair dropped a Grisham novel in surprise. “Who’s back?” she asked the other.
“Look, sweetheart, look.” Linda couldn’t have been happier had I fixed the broken window in the bedroom. “Look who came back again.” Cemented to the center of her web as if she had never left was the golden orb weaver that had disappeared in the middle of a cold snap ten days earlier. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really missed her.”
“So, does that mean you’re not afraid of her now?”
“Are you kidding? I’m absolutely terrified, but I came to kind of like her in a way.”
A phone call to Mrs. Martini-Martoni verified the fact that once a spider vacated its web at the end of the season, it would be highly unusual for it to return. She hadn’t ever heard of an Argiope aurantia spinning more than one or two egg casings, either. But within a few more days, our weaver had added a remarkable fifth cocoon to her collection.
“She sure is devoted to her babies,” Linda told me.
“Let’s hope at least one of her egg cases makes it through the winter.”
Constructing the final cocoon had physically depleted our spider. Her once round abdomen had shriveled to a fraction of its former size, spoiling the painted-mask effect on her back. After taking a single fly that Linda had tossed against her web, she refused to eat again. Yet day after day she remained fixed to her zigzag, in accordance with some mysterious schedule of her own. One Saturday morning, the temperatures had plunged so low overnight that the water pails in the barn had skimmed over with ice. Surely she couldn’t have survived, I thought, and I made so bold as to brush her leg with my finger. When she failed to respond, I gingerly touched her body, causing her to spring to life and in a burst of motion zip to the bottom of her web and hide in the grass.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I told Linda. “I made her use up the little bit of energy she still had left. I’m sure I killed her.” By the next morning, though, she had returned to her usual place.
Almost two weeks from the day that our spider had made her unexpected reappearance, Linda found the web empty when she did her morning chores. This time the golden orb weaver did not come back. “I looked for her in the grass,” Linda told me. “I checked the cracks in the cement wall for her, too.”
“Were you going to bury her?”
Linda gave me a look worthy of my sister. “I wouldn’t bury a spider. I just wanted to see her again.”
At least the spider never had a purse to lose. I wouldn’t have relished the thought of calling Joan over to the house, telling her, “Well, it’s not our mom, it’s another mother that Linda’s been looking after, and could you whip up another of your wireless doorbell contraptions? But this time we need it to be a wee bit smaller.”
CHAPTER 9
Somebody Left Something Somewhere
I couldn’t imagine who would be blasting a gun behind our house in the black of night. During daylight hours, beer-sloshed deer hunters occasionally popped off a few unsteady rounds at squirrels on the state land next to us. But the explosions I heard from my upstairs office came from just beyond the backyard fence, and there was nothing but ice all the way to the river’s edge. Unseasonable spoutings of rain, consequent flooding, and subsequent zero-degree temperatures had turned the woods into a frozen lake. I couldn’t figure out who could possibly be back there.
I heard a splash between rifle cracks. Fearing that a deer might have fallen through the ice, I trotted down two flights of stairs to the basement, suited up for a visit to a frigid moon, and trained my puny flashlight on a plain of steely grey and white. As I stood at the back fence, a dull noise midway between a crash and a clatter—like a picnic table dropped down an old stone well—echoed and warped weirdly a few hundred feet away. Closer to me, the darkness snapped. The eastern horizon hit a walnut with a brick. Out west, Paul Bunyan’s great-great-great-grandson split a willow tree in two.
Normally, I’d no sooner stay outside in the cold than I’d stay outside in the sun, but the cracking sounds of the expanding ice amazed me. I remembered Linda telling me about hearing this very same thing when she had lived up north in a cabin overlooking Morley Pond. But the bangs and pings of the frozen Grand River had never come within earshot of our house before. If I couldn’t have bird songs in January, and if I couldn’t ever seem to catch the northern lights, I could at least marvel at this eerie percussion until the bloodcurdling temperature drove me back indoors.
Stepping over the fence, I walked down the hill to the lip of the ice. A popping greeted me, followed by a low ascending note. I shivered on top of my shivering as the strangeness of the scene took root. Ever so politely, the familiar world was crumbling around me. This was exactly the kind of night that a howling primate would relish, and for all I knew a giant hominid might be watching me from the crook of a tree with dinner on his mind. Fortunately, I didn’t believe in the local Sasquatch. I could also ignore a dead vaudevillian named Gatsby who telegraphed Star Trek titles through the Ouija board, and I could even disregard Bobo the Roller Clown, with his circus train of garish coincidences. But I couldn’t look Buffy the hen in the eye and convince myself that the mighty force of reason was anything more than a trickle, out of touch with the great current of life. If my mom, who had always been our family’s wellspring of common sense, could begin to come unraveled, what lay in store for any of us?
On this cheery note, I gathered my jacket around me and sloshed back to the house against a sound track of things breaking. From the bathroom window, I could still hear the frozen fireworks out back. The largest cracks extended all the way to Linda’s faux-sheepskin rug on the living room floor, and we hoped they would splinter off into the bedroom to lull us to sleep.
The moment the bedroom light went dark and Linda’s thrashing died down—after the air purifier, heater, and lip balm had each received its nocturnal throttling—a chipmunk, red squirrel, or bison inside the wall hurled itself at the plasterboard inches away from my ear. With a thump and a scuffle it sunk its claws into the gypsum and scrabbled loudly up to a hidden perch that gave its activities the resonance of a band-shell performance, then began exercising its teeth on what sounded like shards of ceramic tile. If you were to shake a metal box filled with ball bearings with every ounce of your strength, the energetic chewing would have easily drowned out any clatter you could muster.
In past winters, I had fought back. I would batter my fist against the wall, raising such a ruckus that the cats would streak into the basement, the parrots would squawk from the dining room, and plaster would rain down from the bedroom ceiling. After just enough of a tranquil interval
had passed for me to wrap an adhesive bandage around my hand, while Linda calmed the critters and vacuumed white dust from the floor, the dental exercises would start up fresh and invigorated, as if the chipmunk, red squirrel, or musk ox had benefited from the brief intermission.
So I did nothing. Typically the concealed billy goat would fall into a reverie of comparatively quiet meditative nibbling after several minutes of munching on plate glass, but the intruder had come to us in an inordinately cheerful mood. It couldn’t resist augmenting its remarkable crunching with friendly clawing scratches upon the plasterboard. I did my best to fall asleep despite the din. The odd acoustics of the bedroom made the chomps and scrapes inaudible a mere twelve inches in any direction from my pillow—and from Linda’s rhythmic breathing, I could tell that she had plunged directly into unconsciousness.
After a while, the chewing and grating took on an almost hypnotic quality, and I hovered just above a state of sleep upon my padded bench inside a sawmill. As I dozed, the tooth-and-toenail sound track disturbingly transmogrified into words. “You don’t do enough for your mother,” the raspy voice accused me. “You care more about your animals than your mom.”
That was enough to send me to the couch in the living room. I paged through an old copy of Reader’s Digest, but the “Humor in Uniform” funnies failed to divert me for once. I felt immensely grateful for my two sisters, who had shown unflagging consideration for Mom. From the moment my mother’s memory problems had worsened, Joan had repeatedly called and faxed the doctor with reports of her behavior. Routine office visits had failed to uncover a condition that Dr. Doering might treat, but finally Joan and Bett had talked Mom into taking a mental-proficiency test. We had pinned our hopes on this. Amazingly she sailed through the short-term memory exercises.