“It’s late,” you said. “My mother should be here by now.”
“I’ll drive you home, Mike.” That’s what we used to call each other, remember, Mike and Ronnie, not Catherine and Anne? Boys’ names to fool the boys who liked to snatch the tightly wadded notes we passed in the hallways and stairwells of Horace Greeley High. Names we allowed ourselves to say out loud only when we were alone as we were then—two long-limbed, yellow-haired seventeen-year-old girls born on the same day of October. Why those particular names? I don’t remember. I just remember how good they felt in my mouth, how their straightforward sound made us seem more alike. Because we were different, too, in ways we didn’t talk about. Your family had money: a grandfather was the head of Standard Oil or something, your father worked in his firm in Manhattan. Your mother called you her “one and only.” You summered in Hyannis, got a clothing allowance. I was the third of five. My father took us camping in Maine, my mother assigned chores.
We closed the book, hung up the black sheet, and climbed in my rusty VW. You looked out the car window, quiet as usual, and I stared ahead, quiet for once. The silence of Chappaqua’s back roads stilled me, the pale beginnings of spring drawing me in until your white house appeared on its grassy hill, a revolutionary eagle screaming over your front door, like all the front doors in your sought-after part of town. I dropped you off as usual in front of the garage and slowly backed down the tricky curve of your driveway, my head turned, so at first I didn’t see you.
See you jumping, your feet hanging loose from their ankles, jumping these strange little half jumps, helpless jumps I’d never seen before and never saw again. Smoke oozed under the garage door as if it wanted at you, too. Your arms were frantic motions of up-up-up, and your mouth, what I remember most is your mouth, a noiseless circle in the full moon of your face, a circle that became wider and took on sound as I rammed the car back up your driveway.
“Mommmmm,” you were yelling, “Mmmaaaaa-mmmm.”
Decades later, your voice still rings in my head, that word, which must have been your first, sliced in two, the word that now sliced our lives in two, the sound of Mom soaking into the us that was then and the us that was to be. You again, last night, another dream. Here in this house in San Francisco, not New York, in my bedroom where the moon hangs over the oak trees. My husband softly snoring beside me, my twelve-year-old daughter sleeping down the hall, and suddenly you appear. You’ve been stealing into my dreams for months now. I want to know what’s calling you back.
The dreams are not of this, not of what happened to your mother that afternoon in 1968, but everyday dreams, nothing special. A face. A body crossing the room. Your body crossing a room, a room in a house I’ve never seen. A white house, two stories. You’re wearing a brown hat, a silk scarf floats behind. I follow you, surprised, happy. Mike, Mike, it’s me, Ronnie. I didn’t know you were here. Your back’s to me, you keep walking. I follow you from room to room. Maybe you can’t hear. The music? “God Bless the Child...” Maybe I should call you Catherine? Catherine. Cath. Finally on the stairs you turn to face me, eyes huge. Go away. This has nothing to do with you. Then I can’t find you. Grimy dishes piled up block my view, books stacked on the countertop. I can’t find anything.
Only we did find her, your mother, that afternoon. Together we managed to open the garage door and rushed in, coughing. The yellow-gray clouds of exhaust were heavy with gasoline. I saw the blurry outline of your mother in the front seat of your red station wagon, her hands resting easily on the wheel. When she slowly turned, her eyes seemed to swirl with smoke, emptied of blue. Finally, she cranked down the window, crank by excruciating crank, and peered out as if we were the one who were ghosts.
“Unlock the door, Mom,” you screamed. “Get out!”
“Catherine? You’re all right?” Your mother’s words came out as if she were speaking underwater, bubbles rising from her lips.
Not seconds, but centuries went by before I reached in and lifted up the lock, so easy now, and you slipped your mother from the still running car, through the gray drifts, and out into the April sun. I stayed with her at the top of the driveway. You went back in the house to call an ambulance.
In my first memory of you, you were standing just outside the swirl of bodies at a middle school dance. “Wild Thing,” a song we’d heard too many times, echoed off the gym walls. The boys stood in bunches, hands hidden in their khakis. In the far corner, girls danced in two and threes. The music was so loud people yelled, or said nothing at all. You were wearing a lemon-yellow dress and sandals, one long leg casually bent, as if you were about to step forward, or back.
You were tall—too tall—like me. When the music changed to a slow dance, the boys didn’t approach us. Their heads reached only our shoulders, or worse, our chests. From opposite sides of the gym, I watched you watching everyone else. Your face was smooth, your blonde bangs precisely cut. The perfectly plucked arch of the eyebrow made me look away. My stick-straight hair was chopped short, my skirt a dull plaid from last year’s sale rack. I was known for talking too much and about the wrong things: astronomy, how much things cost, trees. We’d seen each other before in the halls, of course, but still I was surprised when a few weeks later you called. “Want to go shopping or something?”
Later you’d tell me you liked the way I talked. The way I could go on without worrying about what I was saying, or how I was saying it.
At the top of your driveway, words poured out of me. What was taking so long for the ambulance?
“Are you all right, Mrs. Parks?”
“Can you hear me Mrs. Parks?”
Your mother, as if she could barely feel her body below her, just stood there.
“Do you need anything, Mrs. Parks? Water? Crackers? I can get you something, you know.” My voice took on the urgency of a plea, a whine.
The ambulance drove up, the doors opened, and two men got out, men who called her Constance. One held out the oxygen mask and she accepted, slowly bringing the green cone to her face as if it were an exotic flower, delicious. She took your hand and gracefully climbed into the back of the white and red van.
“Mom,” you said, patting the seat, “here.” I remember seeing you and your mother framed in the rear window, your shoulders close but not touching. The ambulance pulled away, no lights, no siren.
I argued with myself all the way to the hospital in Mount Kisco. Cath’s mom just started the car and forgot. Happens.
It was your father, back suddenly from the city, who had to make it clear. In the Emergency Room, dark now, the three of us waiting for the psychiatrist to arrive.
“A psychiatrist?” I asked. “Why not a regular doctor, Mr. Parks? Don’t you want her to get checked?”
Your father looked at me, his face as smooth as yours, but his voice annoyed.
“Yes, a psychiatrist.” Glancing at the white door behind which your mother waited, too, he added, “Look, Anney, we appreciate everything you’ve done. But maybe it’s time you leave. Just family now.”
When I got home, I told my mother what had happened.
“Really? I’m sorry,” she said, continuing to sponge out the sink. “Mrs. Parks doesn’t seem the nervous breakdown type. Happy enough. All that money.” She wiped her hands with a dishtowel. “Have you eaten dinner?”
“No,” I said.
“You should eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I saved you a plate. Eat.”
I’ve never told you, but after the ambulance took you and your mother away, I went back into your house. I closed the car door and entered the big room off the garage. It seemed like your mother was just upstairs, about to come down. Dishes sat stacked in the sink, half-folded laundry covered the back of the sofa, a book lay splayed face down on the floor. The brown boxy radio next to the television w
as turned on. Loud. Hissing static, stuck it seemed between stations. Voices broke through the crackle, words clear, then lost again.
I’d never thought about your mother before. She’d just been a voice rising and falling on the phone, a pot clanging on the stove, a silent plate of almond cookies, a mother who, unlike mine, didn’t mind the music up loud. But in that empty room she turned, became for a moment someone who listened to static, who needed static to become voices, voices to become commands, commands to be what she must do: shut the garage door, start the engine, lay her hands on the vibrating wheel, and wait. Wait for the voices—those, yours, maybe even mine, wait for everything she touches, and is, and might be, to be still. I pushed the thought out of my mind.
On my desk at work I keep a small stone, a rock you painted. A blue sun wraps its face around the indented surface; the eyes are warped, the yellowish lips stretched big. Orange paint has chipped off one eyelid. I found it in a box with old charcoals, water-stained books. I like to run my hand over its surface, trying to remember when you gave it to me. I can’t. You were the one who began painting, not me, the one who painted everything: canvases, cups, stones, silk. All I have is this. Occasionally a colleague will stop and ask, “What’s that?” I pull my eyes away from the computer and see how old the thing looks, how dated. Sometimes I say, “A friend made it for me. A long time ago.” Sometimes I even out notebooks at the back of my desk, shrug. “I found it somewhere, liked the way it looked.” How can I explain?
We only talked once about your mother being in the hospital that first time. The two of us were in the front seat of the same red station wagon, driving back from White Plains, Bloomingdale’s or Lord & Taylor. On the road home, you turned to me, your eyes paler green in the afternoon sun.
“Up there. That’s where my mother is.”
I followed the trail of your long finger and saw a brown mansion on a hill, a black fence wrapped with blooming roses,
red spilling over the sharp posts.
“Oh,” was all I said. The way that big house silently capped the hill, no sign anywhere, and the way you looked away, your words opening and closing the subject of your mother in the hospital, I knew that was all I should say.
When your mother came home, she seemed all right. Better, really. I saw a new fullness to her waist, a silver chain added to her glasses. At first, I walked carefully, kept my eyes down, worried that just seeing me might bring that afternoon back for her. But your mother’s eyes, fresh and fully blue, sought out yours, mine. She cooked us coq au vin, Welsh rarebit, dishes I’d never tasted before. We sat on flowered chairs in your dining room, the maple table so polished I saw my own face looking at itself. At my house, we ate at the kitchen counter on vinyl stools. Someone always had somewhere to go: a basketball game, choir practice, Cub Scouts. My mother made us sloppy joes, fish sticks, tomato soup from a can. Foods that kept.
On her fiftieth birthday early that summer, your mother baked a pistachio cake and topped it with strawberries.
“No candles,” she said. “Might set the house on fire.” We laughed and ate the whole thing—one third, one third, one third.
“Never thought I’d ever get this old,” she said. “But here I am.” Fifty seemed impossible to me, too. Your mother made herself a pot of percolated coffee and drank only one cup. The rest would go to waste because your father was working. When I started asking questions—not about that, but “Why do some people put salt in cellars, like your family, Mrs. Parks, and others in shakers?” and “What’s the difference between teal blue and teal green?” and “What makes bone china bone?”—your mother listened intently. She rose from time to time to consult the big dictionary on a wooden stand in your living room, turning the tissue-thin pages until she found answers I don’t remember. What I do remember is that after dinner she wanted us to look at the moon.
“Girls. Come see,” she called.
She held the door open, her body half-in and half-out of your screen porch, pointing as if she were responsible for that pale creature caught in the dark tangle of summer leaves.
“Can you see the man in the moon?” she said. For the first time I made out a blurry face with brown eyes like mine, the mouth open either laughing or crying, I wasn’t sure. Laughing, I decided.
“In China, they see a rabbit. In India, a horned bull. Depends,” your mother said.
“On what, Mrs. Parks?” All I knew of the nighttime sky came from library books.
“Yeah, on what, Mom?”
“On who’s looking. On what we want to see. A face, an animal.” She paused. “We’re what the moon wants us to be, too.”
“Mom.”
“It’s true, Catherine.” Your mother stepped towards us and I felt my shoulders shake a little. I found this kind of talk exciting.
“The moon has more influence than people realize,” she said. “Take menstruation. Have you noticed that your periods change according to the phase of the moon? Start? Stop? Get heavier? Lighter? You girls are old enough to talk about this now.” Your mother raised one arm and let it fall. “Whatever made the moon made us.”
I’d never seen my mother do more than glance up over her head, too busy taking care of us, she’d say. She found my interest in astronomy strange for a girl. My mother couldn’t bring herself to say the words menstruation or period. It was those days, or your time, as if something more precise might make her mouth itself bleed.
You looked worried. I stared up at the black sheet of a sky, the white hole the moon had punctured in it.
“It’s cold, Mom,” you said. “Let’s go in. Laugh-In’s on.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s not Friday.”
“Anne,” you said nervously, “remember, the special?”
“What is the moon made of, Mrs. Parks?”
“Anne. Come on.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Goldie Hawn’s special.”
Your mother laughed. “Well, then. Laugh-In it is.”
You went in last, carefully closing the screen door so it didn’t bang.
Streets clog with bits of white time. Moments disappear. The us then seems not to have anything to do with us now. I look at my arm on my desk and think the flesh could never have been smooth, the skin clear. Lines have worked their way into the backs of my hands like faint hieroglyphics. When we were seventeen we leaned into the wind of time, pressing everything forward. On. Now I want it all to hold still. Go back. We’ll be forty-nine next month, you know, not even close to the age your mother had been.
Our last year of high school, 1969, we were not Mike and Ronnie anymore. We became Cath and Anne. The world was changing, and you and I with it. The hair we had had so precisely cut now grew out in profusion. Hair hid our eighteen-year-old shoulders, reached our back ribs. But eyebrows, legs, underarms, those we continued to meticulously and painfully pluck and shave, tweezers on the sink, razors edging the bathtub. We wore mauve coats with fur collars, skirts so short we couldn’t bend over, skirts so long you couldn’t see our feet. We twisted feathers in our hair. We didn’t talk about your mother much. She seemed normal, acted normal, she faded. We were the ones, the birds rising, the full-faced moon. The future wasn’t a black-sheeted booth, but a sky sprung wide open.
The nickel bags of weed, do you remember? Five dollars for an inch of crumpled green. Your hand passed a clumsily wrapped joint to mine, which passed it to another, which passed it to another and another, till it came back to you again. Circles so solemn they seemed almost sacred. Your eyes glistened under the man’s hat you liked to wear, a brown hat tied with orange silk scarf. You leaned back in the sweet, sharp smoke, giggling. Me, I couldn’t find my voice. I felt myself falling, nothing to catch hold.
Stoned, we walked in the woods behind your house. Peeling white birches. Giant sy
camores casting big hand-shaped shadows on the dirt. Boulders, saplings growing in cracks. Ashes, ashes, you sang.
“Let’s close our eyes. Be blind,” you said when we reached an open field. “We won’t fall down.” I cheated, watched you edging forward, arms out, touching nothing. Later, we found a long, low rock and sat. I picked up a flat stone, gray with quartz veins, and flung it between two trees. It bounced off the thick grass.
“If this were an ocean, we could skip these,” I said.
You picked up a brown rock and threw it. It wobbled and landed next to mine. “Yeah, but then we couldn’t see where they ended up.”
The rocks piled themselves close to one tree. In the shadows, they looked like an open mouth. Not laughing this time, I thought. Crying.
“Did they ever figure out what happened? Your mom, that time?”
Eyes glassy, you tucked your chin into your chest. “The doctors said she was paranoid. Extremely paranoid. She thought... she was sure...” I could barely hear your voice. “I was already dead.”
“You? You were with me.”
“I know.” You explained, keeping your eyes down. The doctors weren’t sure what had set your mother off. Maybe it was something she’d read in the paper. Or heard on the radio. Not that it mattered. The point was she got this thing in her head. She was sure she’d discovered a secret way vision could correct itself. The voices began, just a little at first, then every day. All that time you’d thought your mother was okay, a little spacey maybe, she had these voices inside her. The voices told her people were after her, after you. The Mafia or somebody. She was trying to steal their profits. She mustn’t leave the house. Not let anyone know where you and your father were. The men with the voices said they’d kill you if she didn’t do away with herself first. She did what she did to protect you.
“Me,” you said in an angry voice.
You took the stone in your hand and flung it hard. It hung in the air before hitting down. I realized I hadn’t seen the brown radio next to your TV for a while.
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