Because she had never had to.
I had never spoken to her like that.
That was the image I couldn’t get out of my head. Those were the seventy words—I wrote them out once and counted them, like a Words by Winter assignment from hell—I could never take back. My mother, her trembling hands, the stricken look on her face that not once before or after that night did I ever see again.
* * *
Next morning she was gone before I got out of bed. In the kitchen there was no trace of her: no coffee mug, no bowl rinsed of Cheerios, no spoon laid to dry on a dish towel. The truck was gone too. None of this was unusual—sometimes, if the Dairylea trucks they wanted her to un-decal were hours away, she had to head out at dawn—but I crept through the house, all senses alert, like a detective at a crime scene.
Because that was what it was.
Once words have been raged at someone, they can’t be taken back. They enter into the body and heart of their victim, and they change the victim forever. What is not as commonly acknowledged is that they do the same to the one who screamed them out. Nothing was the same after that. We never spoke of what had happened between us on that dark night. Not then, and not ever.
From school that afternoon I walked into the village and headed south a mile out of town. Whenever a car approached I stepped carefully onto the narrow shoulder of the road, trying to avoid the ditch, which was deep and filled with snow and ice. My boots were heavy and I clutched my silver hammer earring in my mittened hand. It took a long time to reach the choir director’s trailer, where her Impala was parked in the driveway, which meant that she was home, and it took a while to get up the courage to knock on her door.
“Clara? Is everything okay?”
Which meant that she didn’t know what had gone down the night before. My mother hadn’t talked to her. This was clear from the easy worry on her face, the way she leaned against the doorframe and held the door open for me.
“What’s going on? Did something happen to Tamar?”
At that, I nodded. Yes. Something had happened to Tamar. The lightweight had come flying out of her corner, a demon of a fighter who hadn’t known she had it in her.
“What is it, Clara? Tell me what happened. Something to do with those goddamn decals? Did she fall off the ladder?”
I shook my head. She was losing patience, I could see. Worry and fear flitted across her wide face. “Clara. Talk to me.”
“Annabelle!” I cried, my voice strangled, and she caught me in her arms. It was the first time I had ever called her by name instead of Miss Lee. She held me, and I cried, and she asked me over and over what was wrong, what had happened, but all I said was that my mother was okay and that I was sorry, my mother was okay and I was sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. The smell of fried potatoes filled the air of her trailer. The miles back north that I walked later that afternoon were long and cold. Tamar didn’t look up when I walked into the house. She had already eaten, an empty can of SpaghettiOs filled with water and sitting in the sink.
Nothing could take those memories away. Facts for $2000, the Daily Double, bet small or bet it all.
The night I raged at my mother, the night that something broke inside both of us, was something that Sunshine and Brown didn’t know about. They knew that my mother had been resolute that I leave home, that I go far away for college, they knew that my high school boyfriend and I had split up and he had joined the army and died later in Afghanistan, but they didn’t know about that night. It was buried inside me, a shame too great to let surface.
* * *
I knew Asa Chamberlain from age twelve on, when he and his family moved to Sterns from Vermont. I knew him the way you knew someone who lived nearby, someone you rode the school bus with. We weren’t friends. He was two years older, and when you were growing up that was an unbridgeable gap a) unless you were next-door neighbors, which we weren’t, or b) until you got to high school, which we did. Asa was a senior and I was a sophomore when we started going out.
The bleachers at a football game was how it started. I had jumped down to look for my tiny silver hammer earring, which had fallen out of my hand and down between the seats into the depths. That was what we called it, my friends and I: The Depths. Who knew what you would find down there: trash, chewed gum, cigarette butts, condom wrappers, empty beer cans, dead mice or couples making out.
Not me, though. I didn’t make out with anyone. Not because I didn’t want to. Sometimes when a couple was down in The Depths making out during a game, or when I was at a party and the basement was dark and full of friends cradled together on chairs or the couch or the floor and the air was thick with beer and lust but I was upstairs with the ones who’d come up for air, drinking in the kitchen or eating chips in the living room, my whole body would spark and tingle with want. But there was no one for me. I was an island of one.
But that day, the day of Asa, I had jumped down from the bleachers and there I was, rooting around in the mess of thrown-away cups and bottles and Doritos bags and napkins. I had to find the earring. It was my old-man earring, the earring that the old man who looked after me when I was a child, whose trailer in Nine Mile Trailer Park I went to on Wednesday nights when my mother was at choir practice, had made for me. He was a metalworker, long gone now, the person who inspired my book, The Old Man. If the earring wasn’t in my ear it was in my pocket, the pocket of whatever I was wearing, and I wore nothing that didn’t have pockets, for that reason.
I looked up from The Depths and there was Asa, working his turn at the concession stand the way the varsity did for the JV and vice versa. That was how we did it at Sterns High. Maybe every school did it that way. Maybe it was a nationwide ritual, the way making out in basement party rooms was a nationwide ritual, a ritual that had somehow passed me by. Asa was standing by the hot dog grill, half smiling, watching me.
“You lose something?” he said. I remembered his voice as quiet, but it couldn’t have been. There was a distance between the concession stand and The Depths. I pointed to my ear. I was close to tears. That earring was the one physical remnant of my time with the old man, and I had to find it.
“I’ll help you,” he said, and then he was next to me, crouched down and looking. He was smart in the way he searched, tracing a path with his eyes and then retracing. He inched forward foot by foot, going over every bit of ugly under-bleacher wasteland.
“There you go,” he said, and he plucked it up from under a foam cup that had once held coffee.
He dropped the earring into the palm of my hand. But then he did something else, which was take my fingers in his and fold them up around the tiny hammer. Unexpected. In that second, before I looked up at him, I knew that my life had just changed. A window had blown open on the island and fresh air was breezing in. A boy had touched me, was still touching me. I kept looking at his hand wrapped around mine, the tiny silver earring held tight in the darkness between all our fingers.
“You going to look up at some point, do you think?” he said, and there was laughter and something else—tenderness—in his voice. Why? He didn’t even know me, did he?
“Look up,” he said. “I dare you.”
Up I looked. He was much taller than I was. Jeans and T-shirt and boots, like every boy I knew and like no boy I knew. “You’re Clara Winter,” he said, and I nodded like a toddler. Like a girl who had never kissed a boy, never gone down in the basement, let alone The Depths. Which was where we were. And which was where he kissed me, then and there.
I had not known you could meet a boy and everything could just fall into place. That I wouldn’t have to think or worry or plan. Nothing about it would be easy, was what I used to think, but everything about Asa Chamberlain and me was just that. Easy. Until it wasn’t.
* * *
“What went wrong between you and your mother?” Sunshine said. “Brown and I always thought she was cool.”
“The coolest,” Brown agreed. “She wasn’t like any of the other parents, back in sc
hool.”
From the first time they met her, that first year in college, Sunshine and Brown had loved my mother. We were from different worlds, Sunshine and Brown and I, and their fascination with my mother’s physical toughness, her fearlessness in the face of winter and chainsaws and axes and life as a solo mother with no one to take care of either her or her daughter, had always struck me as suspect.
“She wasn’t like your parents,” I said. “I’ll give you that. But you and I come from different worlds.”
We were sitting at their table. This conversation about my mother was one we’d had many times over many years, and this was where it always ended: them pushing, me resisting, end of subject. It was late and dinner was long over and it was time to go home. Back to the cabin. Back to Dog in his urn and Jack on the shelf and the unreadable look on my mother’s face in the photo next to it. Back to my bed of books. I still had a Words by Winter assignment due the next day, a man who wanted a birthday note in haikus to his daughter on her eighteenth birthday, one haiku for each year of her life. Haikus were not as easy as you might think. 5 syllables + 7 syllables + 5 syllables x 18 = 306 syllables exactly. Eighteen haikus were going to take me a long time, and I was tired.
But Sunshine didn’t let it drop.
“Remember the first time we met her, that first Parents’ Weekend?” she said. “She came bearing fudge, fudge for me and for Brown because you must have told her we were your friends.”
“Peanut butter fudge, as I recall,” Brown said. “From Hogback Mountain, in a little white box with a little white plastic knife inside the box.”
“And remember that summer in Old Forge after sophomore year, when you were working at Keyes and Brown and I were working at the water park? She took the day off work and took us all hiking up Bald Mountain.”
“She scampered right up that bare rock part at the top,” Brown said. “Put the rest of us to shame, as I recall.”
That was the second time he’d said as I recall in three sentences. It was driving me nuts.
“Also, and you might not know this,” Sunshine said now, “but she used to call us when she was worried about you.”
What?
“She did not.”
“She did. Sometimes.”
“So our impression of her is different from yours,” Brown said, and the delicate way he said it made me think that he and Sunshine had talked together earlier, had decided to press the issue of my mother. “Yes, she’s tough. But she’s also not.”
I shook my head. My mother had called them? About me? Look at the two of them, sitting across the table, remembering the fudge and the hike and the phone calls. A revised version of my mother was filling my head now, new information squeezing its way into the image I had of her.
“But Asa,” I said. “She said something to Asa back in high school. She must have, because he broke up with me the next day. No explanation. And then she sent me away, she banished me from Sterns. Goodbye and good riddance to the prodigal daughter.”
“Why does that still eat away at you all these years later?” Brown said, and Sunshine nodded, a nod of You need to weigh that one specific hurt against the entirety of your life together, everything she did for you.
Why, Brown? Because words. Words, the spoken and the unspoken, the real and the imagined conversations, pile up. Because I screamed at her, because I hurt her, because she hurt me. Words turn into walls. Walls turn into mazes. With the passage of time you find yourself deep in, winding and twisting and turning, and where is the way out?
“We never talked about it,” I said. “She would never talk about it. And now it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late,” Sunshine said. “You’re both still alive, right? Track her down, wherever she is right now, and talk.”
* * *
It was the end of a stage of life, that night I flung those raging words at my mother. It was the first time that I saw no clear way out of something I had done. Shame filled me, on top of the hurt of losing Asa, and they fused together and seeped into my bones. I walked around that winter, the winter of my senior year, with the images of Asa the day he broke up with me and my mother the night I screamed at her rising up before me like ghosts. His head, a back-and-forth metronome of no, and her hands, trembling, rising and falling at the sides of her head. That fathomless look in her eyes. Her parted lips.
“It’s strange that she would interfere with you and your boyfriend,” Brown said. “And strange that she was against you going to school close by. Tamar seems like a live-and-let-live type.”
“You would think,” I said. “But you would be wrong.”
The shame I felt at hurting my mother could be another Words by Winter assignment: Write a letter to your mother, apologizing for that dark night. What would I say and how would I say it? What would she say back to me? We had never talked about what happened. Parts of the story were missing.
Is it possible that parts of the whole story are always missing? Like when I was buying fudge for my mother at the Hogback Mountain gift shop and the cashier sat behind the fudge counter, crocheting something—from the round, small look of the thing it was a baby hat like the kind Sunshine made—and she refused to look up from her crocheting. Hello, hello, fudge lady, I’m here, can you see me?
I coughed. I jingled my keys. I coughed again, louder. I said, “Excuse me,” but did she look up? She did not.
“HI.”
Both letters uppercase, and in boldface. At that she looked up, startled. “Oh my goodness, dear girl,” she said. “Have you been standing there a long time?”
That was when I saw the hearing aids, big ones. The on-a-budget hearing aids instead of the expensive, barely noticeable ones. For God’s sake, Clara, she’s deaf. The fudge lady was a kind old lady who was deaf, and she carefully cut and weighed and packed my half-pound of peanut butter fudge and then counted out my change, which I fed into the Donate to Vermont Food Shelves jar on the counter, one coin at a time, in penance, for which she smiled and thanked me.
It was so hard to know the whole story. Nigh on impossible. Remember that, Clara, I told myself.
* * *
Changes in the ability to communicate are unique to each person with Alzheimer’s. In the early stages of dementia, the person’s communication may not seem very different or he or she might repeat stories or not be able to find a word. As the disease progresses, a caregiver may recognize other changes such as:
Using familiar words repeatedly
Inventing new words to describe familiar objects
Easily losing his or her train of thought
Reverting back to a native language
Having difficulty organizing words logically
Speaking less often.
The Life Care Committee had printed out some guidelines for me, taken from the Alzheimer’s Association website. In the beginning I used to read them over and over. They were mostly memorized now but I still went through them sometimes. A ritual. Familiar words and phrases used repeatedly. She was always a strange child. She was a word girl. Inventing new words to describe familiar objects. “The iron claw.” That was the term my mother used for the hammered-metal hands that cupped the single book on her windowsill.
“You mean the bookends, Ma?”
She shook her head, annoyed, and pointed at them. “No. Them. The iron claw.”
“Yeah. The bookends. That’s what they’re called.”
She picked up the pillow next to her and threw it at me point-blank, a distance of twelve inches, because I was sitting right next to her on the couch. I caught it and laughed, a laugh of how strange, how surprising: my mother, throwing a pillow right at my face.
This was only two days after our last visit, but she was different yet again. That too was something they’d told me early on to expect. She will come and she will go, they said, and you must learn to meet her where she is.
“So,” she said, nodding, when I walked in next time.
“So,” I
said.
She held out her hands, both hands, in a way she never had before, not now, not back then. Don’t think about back then, Clara. Meet your mother where she is. I took her hands in mine.
“I’m glad to see you, Ma.”
“I was looking for you,” she said. “I keep looking.”
“So they tell me. I had a bunch of work to do first, four one-day Words by Winter turnarounds—you know how it is.”
She nodded. She knew how it was. Did she have any idea how I made my living? Would she have cared if she did?
“And you know how it is up in the north woods”—I waved in a vaguely northern direction, there in the Plant Room with the orchids—“there was some road work on Route Eight.”
“Road work never ends,” she said. “Am I right or am I right?”
That wasn’t a Tamar remark. Never would she have said something like that in the olden days, which was how I was beginning to think of them. Shhh, Clara.
“You’re right,” I said. We sat down on the green couch together, she still holding both my hands in hers. She leaned toward me. Her eyes were bright.
“Is there enough wood?”
Follow her.
“There’s certainly a lot of wood,” I said, because there certainly was. There was a lot of wood in this world. All those trees, at least in upstate New York.
Enough wood was always something on my mother’s mind, back in the olden days. Fire- and ply- and more. She cut and hauled and split and then we both stacked—in the storage barn, in the unused garage, on the porch—all summer long and as far into the fall as the weather and light let us. Enough wood to get through the winter. Survival.
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