by Jacki Lyden
To steady myself, I watched the red rose of her mouth, the slight imbrication of her lower teeth. She might as well have said, "Divorce means you are going to turn blue today. Your skin will always be blue. You will never return to your normal color, you will just have to get used to being blue." My mother had bewitched us in her mirror, and I was under her spell. I was sitting in a big yellow grapefruit of a revolving chair she kept by the window. I swirled around and around in the chair, propelling it with my foot. I spun on the circumference of the equator. The walls passed by with a glint and a flash. Japan: the music box on my mother's dresser with the ballerina in jeté on hot pink velvet over black lacquer under painted cherry blossoms. Mexico next: my mother's maracas. Wisconsin: the deer on the deer vase bounding into a thick bramble of orange mountain ash stuck over their heads, antlers of fire. As if a fire had consumed them all and left us three girls behind, stone miracles. I knew of no other children whose parents were divorced, even if they shouted at each other, as many parents did. I had heard the neighbors screaming. "I'm sorry I ever married a fat cow, fat slob," a Brobdingnagian monster like you. Taillights screeched away in the darkness, and high-pitched cries floated over the night crickets on dewy lawns. In the morning, though, the men came home, pale and staggering. Divorce meant that we were different from the families whose fathers returned, took up their old places, and felt their youth leave them.
When two people can't live together anymore, my mother had said, and the words have rolled on with me over the years. She was so much more exotic and younger than all the other mothers. I knew the women on our street, who were slow and deliberate and had veinous legs. My mother wore a size 5A shoe, called a quinn. Even after she had three girls, she had a princess's feet. Other mothers did not trim the fat from the roast with pinking shears, as she did, or turn a cucumber into a rabbit's head for the kindergarten flower show, or decorate the Jell-O ring with real violets. I would not have traded her for five of the slow mothers on the lane, mothers without jewelry or makeup. My ears warmed at the slippery needles in the neighbors' voices as they commented on our household as if I were as deaf as my father. So what if after the divorce some of their children were not allowed to play with us. But that came later.
The bedroom was hot. I thought of our lane on Lake Puckawasay, its surf of loose white pebbles poured on the tar each spring, pinging as the cars rolled past us, tamping the pebbles down into eddies and the shapes of continents. On the lane, my sisters and I sold lemonade and dead wildflowers that we'd picked and stuck in milk cartons. That lane led to the wider world, my mother said, raising her bedroom window, propping her face on cupped hands. All up and down the road were signs. The Krecklows. The Baumgartners. The Mertzes. Signs shaped like fish or miniature shovels, signs like hearts or sailboats or forks and spoons, but as regular as beads on a rosary. I had planned to be famous on that road. I liked to walk up and down it, singing loudly, "God Bless America," and hoping everyone would hear.
"We will not be anything without a dad," I said to my mother. The room and the road outside looked gauzy behind the shimmering heat. The thought of fatherlessness was a free fall from the planet, a dizzy sense of time eternal. There was a mystic father, a father on a gigantic cross, and my own father. A hole inside me worked its way open, like the seam on a glove. I knew it would always be this way, this unraveled love, and I felt myself sliding toward a dark void. "We will not be anything without a dad," I repeated. My mother turned to look at me, then looked back at her image in the mirror.
"Well," said my mother lightly, applying Revlon's Cherries and Ice, her mouth pursed like a fresh cutting of rosebuds, "let's wait and see what happens."
Later that summer, my mother cut up the fuchsia satin dress from her sweet sixteen, to make us girls Miss America outfits for the annual Fourth of July costume contest, telling us the story again of her debut party. It had six attendants, she said. Six, and each had made a dress a shade lighter than this one. We felt special that she was cutting up the fuchsia dress just for us, the dress that had premiered at the Knights of Columbus Hall. You might correctly guess, if you drove through our small town, that Technicolor pageantry was called for on the Fourth of July. Patriotism was in demand as a backdrop for national optimism, the current religious rave. It was 1959. Atomic nightmares vanished in the sunniness of our small town's remove from reality. In our kitchen, the dark satin flowed over the table like spilled wine. I touched the fabric to my cheek, feeling the balm of the slipper-soft satin. We were in awe as my mother pinned us into the tiny bandeaux she had cut out to match the tap pants she'd made. Fantasy in her needlework. We preened, and our bare bellies stuck out like marshmallow creams in burgundy wrappings. My mother took glitter and glue and spelled out "Miss America" on three pink satin cummerbunds, bestowing one on each of us, and we hopped on our bikes, crepe paper streaming, to ride to the assembly point of the parade. Children rode behind the Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose bulges jounced over the lifting and clumping of their boots, lifting and clumping. Next came the boys' corps from the St. Columba's Military Academy. They looked lost and abandoned and hot in oversize peaked hats and serge. I felt sympathy for these boys, who had no homes and no visible parents. You'd see them at the drugstore, sucking Popsicles in their uniforms, and now they sweated and lifted stiff legs, marching forward, while my sisters and I rode our bicycles, as cool in our finery as we were rooted in our identity. I stuck out my belly. Miss America, you are so beautiful to me. At the costume contest, my sisters and I shared first prize and received rhinestone tiaras. All the winners were invited to a little stage to sing the national anthem. My father was in the crowd that Fourth of July, his face round and shiny and genial. No matter how hard I sang, he couldn't hear the words, but he clapped as if he could. It made me angry, his embrace of the air.
I couldn't comprehend what his deafness cost him. I feared that my father had given up on the difficult parts of his life, of which we girls were one. A woman speech teacher had come to our house and formed words on his lips, pulling at them like rubber bands, twisting his mouth into E's and A's and Us. Later, when my father and mother wanted to have adult words, they spoke silently, shielding their mouths with their hands lest we children read in their lips the rubber consonants and meandering vowels. I didn't need to hear my mother and father talking out loud to know that they were angry with each other. I could tell by the way my mother held her hand up beside her face and moved her head in nervy twists. We unconsciously started to use our hands to speak to my father in invented signs. Big: stretched hands. Small: a pinch sign. Faster: scroll your hands. More: gesture with your right hand toward your chest. Usually, we merely wanted more. More time, more ice cream, more of him. His station wagon pulled up mostly just on Sundays now, and Sarah began to call him our Sunday father. "The Sunday father is coming today," she would say, "and we will have to go with him." The Sunday father is taking us to the park. The Sunday father is taking us to the zoo to see the bears.
"Oh hell," my father now shouted at my mother. I thought I had heard him yell it perfectly clearly, through the Fourth of July crowd's fervent clamor for patrimony, for country, for themselves. My father felt the crowd's martial thrill, the thrill he had felt as an army paratrooper. It was as if he could speak again, as if his words had finally dried out and stiffened, could stand up straight by themselves. "Bullshit," he said clearly to my mother. "To hell with you." Then he turned and walked away. We girls now had full citizenship in another country called Yesterday. At home that afternoon or the next, he hugged us good-bye in our living room. My father's boxes of junk and tools and fishing gear, long packed, moved with him to a new place. He tugged them up from the basement, put them in the car trunk, and was gone. There was nothing left of him in the house. I felt the pain ring around my rib cage. I had seen such rings in the sawed stumps of big trees. He himself had shown me how to count the years there, in the sable cinctures of the tree stumps. When I am old and dead, I thought, then they can cut me open and count the cin
ctures on my ribs. I knew that day would leave such a shadow ring, big enough to see on an X ray. I knew it then, and I know it now.
And then once he moved out, my mother was free, really free. Levitating with freedom. Oh my God, she sang silently to her reflection. I'm free. She piloted her two-tone aqua and white Chevrolet with its miles of chrome trim like a rocket ship, parting the air with a clear sense of where she was going. Our car hummed and radiated with her energy. She was twenty-seven. She drove us to the beaches and small lakes nearby, lakes that glowed in the sunshine like pearls on green baize. We girls kneeled on the back seat, damp sweat on our necks. We rolled down the windows to stick our heads out and let the wind blow through our hair. Kate's red blond hair bounced from her head in curls, Sarah's was a curtain of wheat and fanned straight. Waves of green corn flowed past the windows. The wheels brushed over the highway. We stopped for root beers at the A&W, we stopped so that we could spell out the words in the Burma-Shave sign because I was trying to read: Ben met Anna, Made a Hit, Neglected Beard, Ben-Anna Split. We stopped for sweet corn, eighteen cents a dozen, the same as the price of a gallon of gas in the summer gasoline wars. We stopped for no one, no one in the world. Until we met the Doc. And we stopped for him.
I knew the Doctor slightly. I'd met him again when we went to watch my mother play in the Menomenee Legion Band. He played the first clarinet in a saturnine way, with deep attentiveness, like Buddy De Franco. In fact the Doctor invited various musicians—like De Franco, Clark Terry, Raphael Mendez—to play with the Legion Band, and sometimes, idling on the summer circuit, they came to Menomenee, pleased to be in lake country, they said, after the coast. Coasting where? I wondered. Is it my memory? Did Buddy De Franco really sit in our living room, telling me he had married his first wife when she was fourteen? I know that Clark Terry was the first black person I ever spoke to. He handed me his publicity photograph, on which he'd drawn a little trumpet. "Stay as sweet as you are," it said. And I wondered how he could possibly know.
The Legion Band played every Sunday night in our band shell in the city beach park on Lac La Jolie in Menomenee. Our mother was one of the band's chief attractions. As the timpanist, she was its beating heart. Notes swelled like ticking time bombs until she exploded each and every one of them with a crack from her drumsticks in the John Philip Sousa marches. Thunder came from the smears of her drumsticks, lightning from the gold epaulets on her shoulders. She was the crescendo rising to the stars. She wore a cap like a policeman's, they all did, the whole band, midnight blue with gold trim. They were all splendid, but my mother's timpani spoke the whole hidden meaning of the music, which I felt sure was about glorious conquest.
As far as I was concerned, the band was it. Notes ricocheted off the band shell, boats floated up to the shore to watch. Once the weather turned an evil green, staining the canvas of sky, and within minutes a tornado tore over Lac La Jolie. Half the audience ran. The rest of us huddled together in the band shell, a giant Tilt-A-Whirl that might at any moment become airborne. Then the skies calmed, and my mother fiercely resumed the drums that had heralded the extreme weather. On Sundays, you knew the concert was over when the conductor, Mr. Laufenberg, who was young and handsome, stabbed his baton up to the heavens and then laid it down and bowed to the crowd. His bow never failed to get thunderous applause. We girls rushed to gather up my mother's sheet music and put away her various cymbals, drumsticks, glockenspiel and other assorted tribal noisemakers. Most fascinating to me were the red maracas, which had an authority of their own.
One night I was suddenly as aware of the Doctor as if he'd swept from the sky like the cyclone that passed a few weeks before over Lac La Jolie. His gaze and voice carried through to us girls in the postconcert clutter of snapping music cases and squawking instruments. I shook the red maracas slowly in his direction, chanting gibberish, but he failed to vanish. During the daytime, I knew, he belonged to the small hospital he operated in Menomenee in an atmosphere suffused with ether and noiseless white shoes and hands that intruded with needles and peering instruments. He was contained in his clinic, where I went sometimes with my grandmother, whose physician he was. He was by that time my mother's doctor too; he'd delivered Sarah a few years before. My grandmother told me he did not live with his family, which made him even more ominous and mysterious. In fact, she said, he had three little girls of his own. Keep them, I thought.
And now here was the Doctor in his brown Cadillac (there was a new one each year) on the highway, dressed like a civilian with a fedora on his head and gesturing in a friendly way to our mother! No band uniform or white smock! Out here in the woods and fields, the thousand byways on which my mother and sisters and I would cruise and drift, picking blueberries and wild asparagus and daisies in a limitless stratosphere, out here where I'd thought we'd always be safe, he'd found us. Out here, in our Chevrolet with our mother, this tall dark doctor was a forbidden stranger and the ancient green man in the woods. I was completely mystified. Perhaps my mother had invented a new way for us to get shots and he would soon take out his stethoscope and hypodermic and come after us. Left behind in the Chevy or hiding in the long grass, we girls spied on their courtship, could hear riffs of intimate laughter rippling from the Cadillac. I tried to think of some plan to get rid of the Doctor: a Comanche raid, a cyclone for one, a stealthy maraca blow to his left temple. My plans often foundered over the fact that he possessed a secret weapon: a genuine Kodak Instamatic camera. It was a bronze contraption of precise, jaw-dropping beauty. It brought me running the second it appeared. In the Kodaks flash, I froze in fascination. You could photograph the violet as it died in your hand. You could photograph a dream and have it. If he brought the Kodak along, I would beg him to let me hold it, feel the power of time locked in a box. I watched our images distill onto white paper; watched the hugely antiseptic Doctor carefully coat our pictures with a bitter clear lipstick to fix our afternoon, sunlit bodies, before they disappeared into oblivion. As if a surgeon, and only a surgeon, had the power to capture our faces and bodies on paper. I still have the instant Kodak pictures he made then. Kate and Sarah and I stand beside the road, garlanded in daisy chains, holding hands, a nosegay of little girls. I wonder if it would have been different had we been holding rubber tomahawks and toy pistols. We three girls look so tame and shy above our wild hearts. So pliable, like children. I think of the lawless world I've known. I think of grenades like lanterns in children's hands and the other lethal things they carry, half knowing. The armed hands of children do not surprise me in the least. Children are fierce, without nuance or hesitation. Children's hands hold grenades that are invisible to all but them.
The Doctor could not see the weapons I carried, but I could feel his hands probing somewhere around my heart, and they were freezing, dipped in mercury. His voice dazed me, caught me in a way that made me think of ants trapped in amber. "Dummy," he would chide, jotting in red ink over the stories I wrote in my notebook, red ink spiders that wriggled on my good words. "Dummy," he would say, untying and retying Kate's shoes. "Girlie," he called to my mother. "Pretty dolly." As if my mother too would obey on command as dolls did and girls were supposed to do. Spank it and tip it over. And then I felt stupid, started to stutter, to say my words backward to myself. I who had always loved words found them scattered someplace I couldn't reach. I listened for the oiled timbre in his voice, the distant fugue before a summer cataclysm. The timpanic voice. "Think you can get it straight, chum? You tie your shoelaces like this, not like a moron ties them. You close the door after you leave the house, not leave it open like an idiot. You button a button like this." There was no action too small for his scrutiny. "Is that how we're going to do it, chum? Don't be asinine. Good. I'm glad we agree." I felt thick, thick and slow.
"Dearie," he'd say, an instant later, and I panicked at the oozing intimacy. "You keep your voice down, and we'll be friends. You show me you know how to be polite." The low notes of my mother's timpani had thrilled me, but the broadsides of the Do
ctor's voice struck irregularly and without warning. Left my knees buckled and brain hollow. Out on a drive with the Doctor, I didn't know whether he'd buy me a soda or call me stupid, or quite possibly both. Both could happen in the same moment, yanking from polite calm to terror, so that I felt witless, drugged, a million miles away. I felt guilty for making him hate me so much. Just as suddenly I'd go weak with relief that he seemed to like me, pals, smiling while the two of us yakked it up with the gas station attendant with the dogboy face. Buddies, perhaps, the Doc and I.
"Which do you want, Dr Pepper or grape?"
"Grape, please."
"Grape it is, pardner."
And then a look that hung you on a meat hook, my cheeks warming like the soda warming in my hand. I'd stare out the window, trying to deny that anything was wrong, to disassociate myself from myself. I had no words for menace, and my mother had no sense of it. She was falling in love. I was excelling in school, though always marked down for talking too much. The teacher said that she thought I would indeed talk the paint off the walls. My mother hummed in the kitchen, and sang for him the songs I had thought she reserved only for us.
"If you don't happen to like it," she sang, "pass me by."
Whatever fantasies of harmony and patriarchal order that the Doctor may have harbored, he stepped into our games and lives as a ringmaster, refashioning the rules, recomposing our voices into a conditional tone. My mother and the Doctor were dating openly by then. One night I couldn't stand it anymore, felt sorry for myself, worked up a keen feeling of neglect and injustice. I marched into my mother's room. "Don't go out with Doc tonight," I bullied my mother, imitating his tone of command. She sat at her vanity, combing her hair, and her gilt brush caught me in the mouth, the shock of the soft bristles between my teeth, as soft as a stolen kiss and as stunning. "What was I to do?" my mother asks today. "Three little girls. Who knew? Who could have foreseen what would happen? He was the love of my life. Tall, dark, and handsome." And rich. I nodded as she spoke, but inside I felt the old scales and pulleys, braced for her adjustment, roll down into their final position and lock. I'd colluded in the past. Even as a child, I knew the Doctor was the ticket out of the ring-bologna life that my mother abhorred and which I had begun to sense could take us only so far. Maybe only as far as the edge of our small town. Our father was gone, and not coming back. And I was greedy. I wanted Disneyland, to which my mother and the Doctor had gone just days after Sarah was born, marching in the Rose Bowl parade.