The Nearings didn’t know how to solve the troubles next door, and preferring to steer clear of the vagaries of emotion, they let us be. Their own children, and many surrogates, were always falling short of their hopes, it seemed. Angered at what he saw as the capitalist rebellion of his adopted son John—the editor at Time who had a big house in the suburbs—Scott had been returning John’s letters unopened via his other son Robert. Then on December 1, John, still estranged from his father, died of a heart attack at age sixty-four, while on a speaking tour in Chicago. It’s hard to know how the news affected Scott, as he never spoke of such things, but certainly it must have hit hard on the heels of Heidi’s death.
Then, as always, it seemed, life renewed itself. A baby girl was born to Anner in December. Gabrielle, feminine in French for Gabriel, an angel of god. Gaboo, we called her.
By January, the snow came to cover the farm and our hearts with its cool blanket. Sometime after that, Mama, Clara, and I were eating breakfast by the front windows when Papa and a strange woman walked up the front path, the distinct outline of their figures set off from the backdrop of white. The woman wore a fitted coat and tan scarf and moved with a deliberate aloofness, as if she only just happened to be in the neighborhood.
When Papa introduced us to Gerry, her smile emphasized how much fuller her mouth and lips were than Mama’s, and though her eyes were almost the same color, they were a more reliable brown, with no flecks of lighter colors in them. Her skin was olive in tone, and she had a defined nose like Mama’s, but with more emphasis on the nostrils. Straight brown hair fell from a cowlick on her forehead and down over her shoulders. She wasn’t prettier than Mama, but she seemed to me more assured of her presence in the world.
Papa and Gerry met at a MOFGA conference where Papa was speaking about the most recent European farm tour. “Would you like to buy a cow?” Gerry asked him when they were introduced, a slight smile in her brown eyes. She’d come to the conference with her husband, Zeke, and some friends from their homestead in Wytopitlock, a small settlement in the remote reaches of Maine’s Hancock County. Having grown up an only child on a quiet middle-class cul-de-sac in the Shadyside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Gerry found another world while attending Temple University. Dressed in the hippie wardrobe of the time, she met Zeke, who with his long hair, Hells Angels beard, and jacked-up motorcycle represented the rebellion her young heart sought. After college, they’d moved to an abandoned shack in Maine to start a homestead, but the thrill was fading with the realities of their relative poverty.
“Actually, yes, I am looking for a cow,” Papa said. Our goats were gone by then, and our neighbor Keith seemed to be benefiting from his new cow, and his new relationship with Chip. As Gerry and Papa conversed, he was drawn to her self-assured manner. Unlike Mama, Gerry didn’t seem to need anyone or anything. Papa never did buy Gerry’s cow, but when Mama looked out the window that morning she knew, in the way you know, that Gerry was there to stay.
Shortly thereafter, on a morning in February when I was again at school, Papa brought home another rental car. “It’s over,” he said to Mama, wanting only for her to stand on her own feet and find her own way. He barely had the strength to take care of himself, and her need for him felt like a weight around his throat. Rather than undergo surgery, he’d decided to try what would be one of two radioactive iodine treatments. The pill was supposed to take several weeks after ingestion to shrink the swollen gland, but so far it wasn’t providing the easy fix the doctors had hoped for. Instead of his thyroid, it felt as if the radioactive iodine was removing his heart, leaving only anger at the world as he turned and walked away from Mama and out of the farmhouse.
“Fuck you!” Mama screamed after him, but she packed up herself and Clara and drove away from the farm along the narrow, icy roads. When she reached the stop sign where the cape road met the main road, she stopped, then turned around and headed back to the farm.
“I’m not going,” she said, standing in the door of the farmhouse, begging, ironically, like Heidi, to be let back in.
“This has got to end somewhere,” Papa yelled, his calm assurance unhinged at last.
“Just go,” he shouted, no longer caring about the pain it caused them both. “Go!”
The strength of Mama’s resolve withered in the light of Papa’s anger. She turned and went back to the car and drove with Clara, both of them crying much of the seven hours along icy winter roads, and the final lonely stretch of 88, to Westport Point.
Her parents were at a loss to see her return yet again, so she sought refuge at a nearby abbey. It seems incredible to me that this could be for real, but the nuns took her in, even with baby Clara, and she found solace in the hymns and quiet pace of life there. A school friend of Mama’s who lived outside of Boston helped her apply for welfare. She couldn’t believe the government would send her a check, just like that, but she rented a place in Cambridge with the money, where she and Clara stayed until she was accepted to Naropa, a Buddhist school she’d heard about in Boulder, Colorado. Then she paid for the tuition and bought a VW bug, driving out to Boulder with Clara to start summer classes in June.
“Can a woman’s tender care cease towards the child she bear?” was the quote Mama copied into her journal that spring above a photo of Clara and me, fighting, as she was, the numbing plunge into depression.
Back at the farm, the white-throated sparrow returned, heralding the still constant reliability of the seasons. “There’s a special providence in the fall of the sparrow,” Hamlet famously said, referencing the line in the Bible from Jesus. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father.”
The death of even the smallest sparrow was thought by Christians to be part of God’s plan, but that was a comfort unknown to all of us at the time. Helen might have counseled us on what she saw as the comforts of reincarnation. “Death, we felt,” Helen would later write, “was a transition, not a termination. It was an exit-entrance between two areas of life.” Scott agreed, adding, “Death is a change; a good deal like the change from day to night—always thus far followed by another day. Never the same twice, but a procession of days.”
Helen held to the Buddhist and Hindu belief that the spirit survives death to be reborn in another body. That is, when a body has done its work in this world, the spirit makes a choice to move on to another. Why some stay longer in some bodies than others is open to speculation, but this concept eases the pain for the living. When I think of death as an opening and closing of doors, a flash of light, an end and a new beginning, it becomes easier to find peace with it and its part in this story. Perhaps Heidi, through some wisdom known only to her, had decided to take a new form.
I don’t remember returning from school to find Mama gone that second spring. I don’t recall anything about that spring, in fact. The next thing I remember is my first flight in an airplane that June—the excitement of going to see Mama in Colorado coupled with the agony of getting airsick and throwing up in the pocket of the man sitting next to me.
Mama’s VW Beetle moved under the constant sun like a green ladybug. Across the plains of yellowing grass we flew, the abundance of open space sliding away behind us as we drove from Colorado to Maine. I carried my Colorado memories close to my heart, like the coins in the magnifying box from the piñata, treasures I could examine through the larger-than-life lens of memory. There were the crisp beauty of the mountains and hugeness of the Colorado sky, the dry warmth of the sun that erased shadows at high noon, the friends I’d made, the adventures inner tubing down Boulder Creek, hiking in the Flatirons, going to my first movies, Jesus Christ Superstar and Star Wars. My happiness made Mama’s struggles all the more evident, and so she had decided it was time to go home.
; Mama drove into the rising sun as Clara and I hung our heads out the open windows. The wind tightened the skin on our faces, ripping our hair and making it difficult to open and close our eyelids. We spilled our food and fought like baby groundhogs, rolling on top of each other in the back seat, the wind muting our screams. Bounded only by the walls of the car, we climbed back and forth from the front seat to the back, catching the legs of our shorts on the round ball of the stick shift.
“Get in your seat,” Mama shouted whenever her attention returned to the present.
“Mama,” Clara begged. “Mama, lap.” Mama tried it one time, her arms holding the steering wheel around Clara’s shoulders, but Clara squirmed so much, Mama didn’t let her after that. Still, Clara kept asking.
“Maaaamaa, laaaaaap,” Clara said for the hundredth time. I pinched her arm. She screamed. I pinched again. She screamed louder. “Stop it,” Mama said. “Stop it, stop it, stop it.” Her voice was wavery and loosy-goosy, as we called it. She said, “Stop it, or I’ll lose my grip.”
Don’t lose your grip, Mama, I whispered out the window. Hold on, hold on, or we will crash.
When it got dark we camped in Mama’s tent, tossing and turning, arms and legs and heads all mixed up together. “Please let me sleep,” Mama said, “please just let me sleep.”
There was the end-of-summer glow in the air as we drove, the days too perfect to last forever—warm and lazy with a touch of cool air underneath, so it didn’t feel as humid as July. The car sickness began as we left the open stretches behind, the wide sky shrinking to fill the space of roads becoming hilly and curvy. When I threw up out the open window, the wind whipped it away as Mama kept driving. I breathed in the smell of late-cut hay and the cool dampness of pine and moss through the open windows, and knew we were getting close to home.
“We’re almost there,” Mama said. “Hang on a little longer.”
We crossed the Flying-di-Dying bridge, and Mama started to cry. Clara joined her, and they wailed as I watched Heidi in the front seat, flapping her arms out the windows. Flying-flying-di-dying. She was wearing her little brown Greek fisherman sweater on backward, and the nest of her hair caught the light. I knew better than to say anything to Mama, even though I thought she should move her backpack from the seat so Heidi could have more room. At the far side of the bridge Heidi waved at me and flew away.
“H-O-M-E,” I spelled out when we passed under the H.O.M.E. sign of the artist colony by Bucksport. Mama pulled the car to the side of the road to brush her hair and put on a clean dress. We ran the cricks out of our legs and jumped for joy.
“Come on,” Mama called to us. “Let’s go see Papa.”
“Yay!” we said as we tumbled into the car. “Pa-pa, Pa-pa, Pa-pa,” we chanted. “Gonna see Pa-pa.”
Mama’s smile had lost its dryness in the rearview mirror and become a living thing on her face again. My stomach didn’t even feel carsick because I was so excited to be home. Papa would be glad to have us all back together as a family again, like the old days, before Heidi died, when he used to give us double piggybacks. Now we could do them with Clara.
“Papa will give us piggybacks,” I said. “Yay!”
We drove past Hoffman’s Cove and the wide-open view across the sea to Pond Island, where it looked like you could walk across the water into the blue spaces around the islands, the sun warm and yellow coming through the windows. Dust kicked up on the dirt road, and I hung excitedly between the front seats, almost in Mama’s lap. She didn’t tell me to settle, just smiled back at me. Clara sang, “La-la-la-la-la-lap. Lap.” I no longer felt the need to pinch her.
When we emerged into the open space of the blueberry field across from our driveway, Mama pulled the car to the side of the road just past the place where the trees opened up to Heidi’s grave. She looked back toward that opening, and her face shifted, became dry again.
Don’t lose your grip, Mama.
“I’m going to see Heidi’s grave,” she said. “Stay here in the car.”
Mama walked down the road behind us, disappearing into the trees as Clara and I fell into a waiting space. We heard voices through the open windows of the car and watched as two people came up to the Vegetable Garden sign to change the placards. Gerry held a TOMATOES sign that Mama had once carved and painted and varnished. She looked over at our car but did not see us inside, did not recognize the car. Clara started to moan for Mama and began picking at the door handle.
“Wait,” I said. I could feel a shape like a cloud, twisting over me, over the car, over the farm, blocking out the sun. I turned to see Mama coming back from Heidi’s grave, walking step-by-step the way she did after meditating at Marpa House. Gerry looked over from the sign to see Mama. Their eyes met and recognition passed across Gerry’s face. Her olive skin burned dark.
Mama got in and closed the door. She took a deep breath that seemed to suck all the air out of the car, and when her breath released, we were surrounded by her sadness.
Fall came, apples ripening and shriveling in the Holbrook sanctuary, no longer to be smuggled home by Mama and Papa. Most days I walked across the garden and past our orchard to the campground to visit Papa in the log cabin where he was staying with Gerry, while Mama lived in the house with Clara and me. To say it was not an ideal situation was an understatement, but no one knew what else to do. Papa had been offered a job at a farm in Massachusetts, but couldn’t start until after he and Gerry returned from the third European farm tour in November. And Mama had nowhere else to go, she said. Papa, remorseful for sending her away before, decided to let her be, and we cradled the hope that somehow life would return to normal.
If Papa wasn’t at the cabin, Gerry would tell me stories about her life in Wytopitlock with her husband, Zeke. “One time Zeke was driving on his motorcycle behind a logging truck when one of the logs slid off the pile toward him,” she said. “He watched as the log shot forward like a cannonball, likely to knock him and the motorcycle over and leave him for dead.”
She paused, with a slight smile for effect.
“But the end of the log landed upright in front of him like a tree, pausing there for a second as he hit the brakes, then bounced over his head and off the road!”
She said he kept driving for a few minutes as if nothing had happened, then had to pull over to the side of the road because he was shaking too much. She talked so fondly of Zeke, telling me things like this, but not the reasons why she was now here. Looking back, I see it must have been hard for Gerry on the cape, our small community frowning on her for trying to take Mama’s place.
Gerry had a lot to learn, so I began teaching her, giving her spankings when she did something wrong. “What did I do?” she asked, as if it was a funny game. I had to come up with something new. It could be anything, but it had to be something she did that was different from Mama. Woke too late. Not the breakfast I wanted. Smiled too much. Didn’t overreact to my tantrum. Sometimes I came up from behind and spanked her for no reason. My hand made a solid smack that bounced back, ready for the next one.
“Spank. Spank,” I said in a serious tone, but she just smiled. Something about that smile made the spank bounce off her and back to me.
I sat between Papa and Gerry in the front seat of the Silver Bullet. Gerry didn’t know to let me sit by the window so the fresh air would settle my stomach, and if it didn’t, I could lean out and throw up over the side. She also didn’t know not to let me drink red grape juice in the car. For some reason Gerry wore a white coat with white gloves. I’d have to remember to spank her for both things when I felt better. White clothes were stupid because they get dirty, and she shouldn’t put me in the middle.
Papa was in his driving bubble, somewhere far away in his mind, but his eyes were watching the curves of the road as he went over hills too fast, a grape juice bottle in the V of his legs. It was his favorite juice because it was one of the few bottled drinks with
no added sugar. The hills made my head heavy. A soft thing like a baby rabbit crawled up from my stomach and waited in my throat. No, baby rabbit. It got bigger, swelling with grape juice.
“Papa,” I said, meekly.
“Uh-oh,” Papa said. “Roll down the windows.”
Papa and Gerry turned shoulders and their arms moved fast, elbow over hand, working the widow cranks. Cold air smacked in from either side, scattering my hair. I turned to my right where the window was supposed to be, but instead there was Gerry. The vomit landed right on her.
“I’m pulling over,” Papa grunted.
The car slowed to a stop, but the red oatmeal continued to gush onto Gerry’s white coat. Gerry escaped the car, peeling off gloves, unbuttoning buttons. Then she bent and looked in at Papa with the hint of a smile, the ball of her coat folded around the gloves, all traces of red buried inside.
“That was the most of it,” she said.
I was the only one with any vomit left on me, wet on my cheeks.
“Here,” Gerry said, wiping my face and handing me a mason bottle of water, not grape juice, this time. “This will wash it all down.”
By November, most of the leaves were gone and the garden beds olive with seaweed, nights cooling. Mama was entering her “hibernation mode,” which meant lots of naps and checked-out time. Papa and Gerry were packing for the European farm tour, and Gerry asked me to take care of Pussy Tats while they were gone.
“Pussy Tats is my all-time favorite cat,” Gerry said. “Take good care of him.” Sleek black with a perfect white star of fur at his throat, he was quite handsome, especially compared to Helen’s hairball striped coon cats, but Pussy Tats was not my all-time favorite cat. In fact, I didn’t much like cats at all. I didn’t like the way he purred and kneaded his claws into my lap when he wanted attention or sat in the sun in the farmhouse and licked his fur until it shone. In general cats seemed needy, like when Mama said, “You’re being needy,” if I hung all over her. But I did try to take good care of Pussy Tats.
This Life Is in Your Hands Page 25