by Karma Brown
Tansy Tea
1 to 2 teaspoons dried tansy flowers
1 teaspoon sugared orange rind
1 cup boiling water
1 teaspoon honey
Steep flowers and orange rind in boiling water until it becomes a golden hue. Add honey and drink quickly. Repeat as necessary.
ELSIE MATILDE SWANN
BELOVED MOTHER, GONE TOO SOON
SEPTEMBER 2, 1907—OCTOBER 5, 1948
It had been six months since Nellie had last visited her mother, and things were quite unkempt around the headstone. The grass grew wildly—some blades longer than others, some greener, some fatter. It was as though the grass didn’t know how to grow uniformly without Elsie Swann, and her green thumb, alive to coax it. Nellie yanked a few unruly tufts from the ground, shaking free the loose earth. She set the bouquet of dahlias—a most harmonious flower, the vivid petals springing from its center like a work of art—at the base of the headstone, the pink and white blooms cheery against the day’s overcast dreariness. Dahlias were long bloomers (Nellie had even seen them survive an early frost) and signified an unbreakable commitment between two people. While Nellie found the flower too gay for such a profound meaning, Elsie had insisted that was why dahlias were so enchanting. “Just as powerful as they are pretty. Like you, my sweet girl.”
“Hello, Mother. Happy belated birthday.” Nellie ran her fingers across her mother’s name etched into the cool, mauve-tinted stone, lingering on the date of death. “I’m sorry it has been so long, but it was difficult to get here. Though I do think soon it will be easier to visit more often.” She tucked her dress under her and sat beside the grave, the grass prickling her calves. As always, Nellie tried not to think about the last time she had seen her mother, though it never got easier. The horrible scene she’d come home from school to find that day, almost seven years ago. The bathtub. The water, to the brim. Her mother fully clothed under its surface with eyes wide yet dull. Nellie was too young to navigate life alone, but her mother had left her no choice in the matter.
Elsie never met Richard, was not at Nellie’s wedding, and would never read the letters her daughter had been penning. For whatever reason, it was important to Nellie to keep the truth about Elsie from Richard, even in the beginning, when things were decent between them. Perhaps she was embarrassed—most would agree taking one’s own life was a sin, and Nellie didn’t want Elsie’s memory tarnished. But more likely it was fear that the darkness that took Elsie might one day come for Nellie, too. And if Richard knew this, well, perhaps he would have used it against his wife.
Elsie Swann, Richard believed, was in nursing home care outside Philadelphia, suffering dementia. The nursing home staff recommended brief visits, and Nellie alone, which was why Richard had never accompanied her. However, Nellie had never been to Philadelphia, as her mother was buried in Pleasantville. Only a short trip from where Nellie and Richard now lived.
“Things have become . . . unmanageable with Richard,” Nellie said. “But I’m hoping that improves once I go back home.” She had told Miriam she would be out of town for the night, visiting her mother in Philadelphia. Miriam had asked if Nellie wanted to take the letters with her on this trip, but Nellie had said, “No, sadly, my mother won’t be able to read the letters.” Miriam had hugged her tight, her arthritic fingers rubbing Nellie’s back in soothing circles. Said maybe Nellie would find her mother more lucid this time, and that she’d pray for her. Nellie didn’t enjoy lying to Miriam, but it was easier that way.
Richard had initially resisted the trip, citing the pregnancy and Nellie’s responsibilities at home. But she had insisted—her mother wasn’t doing well at all. This could be her last visit. Richard finally relented, making her promise to stay only the one night despite the distance.
“I’m pregnant again,” Nellie said now, speaking to her mother’s headstone. “Richard’s over the moon about it.” She sighed deeply. “I tried, I really did, Mother, but he was too strong. Too . . . determined.” Nellie rearranged the dahlias, though they didn’t need it.
“However, not to worry,” she added, her voice brightening. “I know what to do and everything will be all right in the end.”
Nellie closed her eyes to picture Elsie’s beautiful smile, knowing her mother would be proud of her resilience and courage if she were here. “I was thinking about your friend, Mrs. Powell, the other day.” There was a low growl of thunder, and Nellie looked to the sky, where ash-gray clouds clustered together. The hairs on her arms stood on end, the electricity of the looming storm making its presence known. “Remember that gorgeous pearl cigarette holder she gave you? Even though you didn’t smoke, you carried it around with you everywhere. . . . It’s funny, the things that stay with us, isn’t it? Anyway, I use it all the time now. It was a lovely gift.”
Betty Ann Powell had been a stunning woman—tall, angular, never without rosy lips or glossy nails or a cigarette in her mother-of-pearl holder—and to Nellie, at thirteen, was the most exotic woman she had ever seen. Nellie had been a mother’s helper to the Powells’ two young children and had always enjoyed her conversations with Mrs. Powell. She was bright, in both mind and energy, at least until the day she found out she was expecting again. Betty Ann Powell stopped smiling then.
When Nellie asked her mother what was wrong, Elsie explained that while it might be hard for her to understand, Mrs. Powell did not want another child. “Women have so few choices, Nellie. Our gender can be our greatest strength, but it is also our greatest weakness.” As her mother predicted, Nellie didn’t understand—neither the lack of desire for a child (didn’t every woman want children?), nor the comment on strengths and weaknesses—but she’d nodded as though she did.
That was also, perhaps, the moment when Nellie began to see her own mother differently. Was having Nellie a choice Elsie made, or something her mother had been forced to do? “My heart continues beating, Nell-girl, only because you can hear it,” Elsie had once said. It had scared Nellie—not yet mature enough at the time to comprehend that the heart keeps beating, even through tragedy and grief, though Elsie would teach her that lesson eventually—and it cemented in her a belief that women’s survival was ensured only by having children.
Nellie then learned the truth about the heart and her mother’s illness—realizing, too, that, choice or not, having Nellie had forced Elsie to endure deep, long-standing pain. Without Nellie, Elsie could have succumbed years before she did—to live for another person is no small sacrifice. Soon after her mother’s revelation about Mrs. Powell not wanting another child, she and Elsie spent an afternoon at the Powells’ home. The women spoke tête-à-tête in hushed tones on the verandah as Mrs. Powell sipped at the golden tansy tea—Elsie’s recipe, with flowers from her garden—while Nellie played with the children, thinking about choices and beating hearts.
Two days later Nellie was called on to look after the Powell children again. Elsie explained that Mrs. Powell had caught a bug, a stomach ailment that made her violently ill, and she had lost the baby. Nellie, young and prone to magical thinking back then, thought maybe Mrs. Powell’s baby had died because it knew it wasn’t wanted, privy to Mrs. Powell’s innermost thoughts and regrets. It was only later, when her mother felt her old enough to understand the truth, that she learned the miscarriage had nothing to do with the flu, or wishful thinking.
The wind changed direction, blowing across Nellie’s bare calves, and she shivered. “I’m sorry to say I should be going, Mother.” She stood and brushed a few blades of grass from the pleats in her skirt. “Don’t want to get caught in a miserable downpour.”
Nellie bent and pressed her lips to the stone. It started raining, the drops fat and frequent. But she didn’t mind the rain or the way her soaked clothes pressed to her skin, making her tremble as she ran back to her hotel, looking forward to a hot cup of tea.
* * *
• • •
&nbs
p; Back in her hotel room, not far from the Pleasantville cemetery where her mother was buried and the home she shared with Richard, Nellie made a cup of tea to fight the chill of the rainstorm she’d been caught in. The tansy flowers, which looked like fuzzy lemon-yellow buttons when they bloomed, were dried and shriveled in the paper bag Nellie pulled out of her handbag. She added some candied orange rind to her cup and poured the steaming water over the mixture of flowers and rind, waiting for it to steep. In went a teaspoon of honey for a little sweetness, as the flowers had a somewhat bitter flavor. Nellie would drink three cups of the tea before resting on the bed, though she did not sleep. She was wide-awake and contemplative after her visit with her mother.
A few hours later Nellie became violently ill. She was sure, as she lay shivering on the tiled washroom floor, that she was dying. Perhaps there was truth to the cadence of a woman’s heartbeat. For a moment she welcomed the idea, imagining the next time she threw up her heart would stop and it would all mercifully be over. But by morning the worst had passed and Nellie was awoken by the steady rainfall, filling puddles in the streets.
She stood gingerly, shaky-handed as she clutched the sink, and a fierce cramp rippled through her abdomen. Nellie doubled over, gasping and moaning with the pain as another cramp crested. The relief was nearly as strong as the pain.
Even though she believed it the only way, Nellie sobbed until her uterus stopped contracting and the shards of pain receded. This was not a choice she wished on her worst enemy, but she was grateful to have it. Thankful for the gifts a garden, and its flowers, offered a woman in need.
Afterward, weak and exhausted, Nellie cleaned herself up and rinsed her teacup, all traces of the tansy flowers washed down the bathroom sink. Smoking one of her Lucky cigarettes through the bathroom window, Nellie watched the rain, wondering when it might stop. The telephone rang as she was packing her small valise on the bed she hadn’t slept in. The phone’s shrill ring echoed in the small room, and she let it go a few times before picking up.
“Nellie?” Miriam said, slightly breathless. Nellie pressed the handset to her ear, anticipation flooding her. “Oh, honey. You need to come home right away.”
* * *
• • •
Soon after, Nellie was on the train, waiting for it to depart and take her home to Greenville, where nothing would ever be the same again. She was hunched in her seat with arms wrapped tightly around her midsection, the colicky cramping not finished with her yet. The rain was unrelenting, and Nellie leaned her tear-stained cheek against the train’s window, eyes tracking the drops as they left streaks down the glass.
Once when Nellie was quite young and helping Elsie prepare the garden beds for planting, it had started to rain—pour, actually. “Seems it’s raining cats and dogs, Nell-girl,” her mother said, though she stayed put and continued the task, unconcerned by the teeming rain, or the promise of animals falling from the sky. Cats and dogs? Young Nellie had glanced up to the sky, blinking repeatedly to move the drops from her eyes, fearful about what was to come. Elsie had laughed hard, tossing her head back and sticking out her tongue to catch a few raindrops.
“It’s a saying, Nellie. Only water falls from the sky, my love.” Nellie, relieved, also tipped her head back to drink the rain, cool and sweet against her tongue. And as the storm continued and her mother went back to her gardening, she said, “After the rain cometh the fair weather.” It came out of her with fervor, as though she believed it a promise the sky wouldn’t even imagine not keeping.
However, Elsie didn’t do well with stormy skies, and the day Nellie found her mother’s lifeless body in the overflowing, blood-tinged bathtub marked the seventh day without a speck of sunshine. It had been a horribly rainy week; flash floods, people going out only when absolutely necessary, hiding under somber umbrellas. The day after Elsie drowned—a half-drunk glass of milk (emerald green in color, thanks to the poisonous Paris green insecticide she had stirred into it to ensure she would never awaken) on the tub’s edge—the sun came out, strong and hot and life changing, and Nellie would think about what her mother had said. Would forever wonder why she hadn’t been able to believe it that time. The sun always returned . . . as long as you were strong enough to wait for it.
37
Housewives spend so much time alone they often fail to understand that a man’s being “left alone” does not imply real loneliness—it just means being set free from all female demands and constraint. Some husbands achieve this illusion by taking a night off to bowl or play pinochle with the boys. Others shut themselves up in the garage and overhaul the car—or read a detective story. Whatever specific use a man makes of these happy moments of aloneness, it’s smart for a wife to see that he gets them. No doubt about it, husbands need to slip the leash occasionally.
—Mrs. Dale Carnegie, How to Help Your Husband Get Ahead in His Social and Business Life (1953)
Alice
SEPTEMBER 4, 2018
I think I know why your mom had those letters of Nellie’s,” Alice said. “Or at least why they were never mailed.”
Sally poured coffee into two mugs that read, DOCTORS DO IT BETTER—a gift from a medical student she had worked with years earlier. “Why?”
“Her mother died years before Nellie even met Richard. Which means there was no one to mail them to.” She took a piece of the lemon loaf she’d made when she was supposed to be writing, the sticky icing transferring to her fingers. “I was doing research, for my book, and found a death certificate for an Elsie Swann, from Pleasantville. It had Eleanor Swann written in the informant box.”
“You don’t say.” Sally added cream to her mug, stirred until the coffee was uniformly beige.
“Apparently, she died of poisoning and asphyxiation, and get this, ‘drowning from temporary insanity.’ Whatever that means.”
“Ah. That means it was suicide,” Sally said. “‘Temporary insanity’ under cause of death was the genteel way to say someone killed themselves. Before suicide was decriminalized in the early sixties, you could go to jail if you attempted it.”
Suicide. Nellie’s mother had taken her own life. A wave of sadness moved through Alice. It was strange to feel so much for a stranger, a woman she had little in common with except for a house. Yet, Alice felt a kinship. She sensed there was more to Nellie than her letters revealed. “I wonder why Nellie kept writing to her mom, after she was gone.”
“One can only guess.” Sally glanced out her front window. It was raining, so they had been forced inside for their afternoon visit. Six months earlier Alice would have scoffed at the idea of having daily coffee with her elderly neighbor, but now it was the part of her day she looked forward to most. “Perhaps she missed talking with her.”
“Do you miss your mom? Being able to talk with her, I mean?”
“I do. Every day. I always felt guilty, leaving her here alone. But she was resilient. After my dad died, she found a way to be happy again. She had a very full life, but I know she would have liked me to live closer. Also, maybe to have had a grandbaby she could knit sweaters for.” Sally smiled, looked uncharacteristically regretful for a moment.
“I’m not close with my mom,” Alice said. “We’re pretty different.”
“How so?”
“In nearly every way you can imagine. She’s optimistic; I’m realistic. She drinks tea; I prefer coffee. She’s thin; I like lemon loaf. She’s been doing yoga since before it was trendy and I’m about as unbendy as it gets. I run sometimes, but mostly to compensate for these calories.” Alice took a big bite of loaf and raised her eyebrows, prompting Sally to chuckle.
“I don’t doubt she loves me, but she was a single mom.” Alice shrugged. “I got the sense she resented motherhood a bit, you know? That my life came at the sacrifice of her own, or something like that.”
Sally smiled sympathetically. “I can’t know for sure, not having had children of my
own, but I suspect being a mother is a most complicated role.”
Alice sighed. “I suppose she did her best. She doesn’t really get me, and I don’t get her. But we both know it, so somehow it works well enough.”
“What about your father?” Sally asked.
“My stepfather is awesome. Solid, caring, shirt-off-his-back kind of guy. But my biological father left when I was a kid.”
Sally didn’t say anything, waiting for Alice to go on or to change the subject. And suddenly Alice wanted to talk about her dad, about how terrified she was that she was nothing like her mother because she was exactly like her father. “He died almost two months ago.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, Alice. That’s a tough pill to swallow no matter what the situation.”
“Thanks, though I should add I haven’t seen my dad, or talked to him, in twenty years.” But Alice knew no matter if your parents were present or absent, good or bad, they remained part of you. Inside you, whether you wanted them there or not. “He was basically a stranger.”
“Stranger or not, he was still your father. Relationships are never easy. Especially the ones we’re born into.” Sally reached out a hand to Alice, and the women held on for a moment. “So, tell me, Miss Alice. How’s the book coming along?”
Alice groaned. “It’s not. Can I take a pass on that topic too?”
“Writer’s block again?”
“Sort of, I guess. I have this idea I’m excited about, and I’m doing research, but I’ve written so little I’m not even sure it would qualify as a short story at this point.”
Sally considered this. “Do you even want to write a novel?”
“I think so.” Alice stared back at her. “Or I thought I did. But now I’m not sure.”