“Choir practice.”
“At the Twin Churches?”
She stopped walking and looked directly at me. “Where the hell else?”
That was Tamar. That was a Tamar thing to say. She was there, she was right there with me, the daughter who never stopped asking dumb questions. The look on her face would wither a lesser woman. Let me not be a lesser woman.
“I don’t know, Ma. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, maybe?”
She shook her head and shooed me away with her hand. Annoyed. But I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was she. It was a Wednesday night in upstate New York, and it was my job to follow my mother wheresoever she went, and where she was going was choir practice, just like she did every week for thirty-two years despite the fact that she never went to church.
It was practice only, for my mother. A lifetime of practice.
There was a time when she wanted to leave upstate New York, desperately wanted to, but she got no farther than a party in Utica.
Autochthonous was an adjective. It meant formed or originating in the place where it was found. Autochthonous meant native. Autochthonous was the definition of my mother, Tamar Winter, formed and found in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I thought back to those nights when she was pretending to be the spelling bee judge and I was pretending to be the spelling bee contestant, each of us needling the other, sitting there at the kitchen table, and I thought, Was that the time in my life when everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt, and I didn’t even know it?
She stopped pushing the walker and touched my arm just below the elbow, where the wire began.
“What’s this?” she said, and she pushed the sleeve higher, twisting my arm, trying to see the whole tattoo.
“I got it when I was twenty-five,” I said. “Right after Asa died.”
“Asa,” she said, and the sound of his name in her voice made my heart pound. Again. “What happened with you and Asa?”
“He died, Ma.”
“I know he died. He died after. After”—she cast her hand out into the air, searching for the word or words that escaped her. “After.”
“After we broke up.”
“Broke up.”
“Yes, Ma. It happened after that night I came home and the two of you were sitting at the kitchen table talking.”
The image rose up in my mind again. In the wake of the breakup I had thought about that night, the sight of them across from each other at the table, each leaning forward. The intent look on Asa’s face, the look on hers of—what? Surprise? No, something more. They must have been there for a while without me—I was out babysitting—because the air in the kitchen, when I walked up on the porch and opened the door and breathed it in, was stale. Stale and charged and full of invisible words that had been spoken without me there to hear them.
The next day he returned to the house and ended it between us.
“Do you know why he ended things, Ma?”
A calm detachment, the Buddhist way of regarding the things that make you suffer. I made my voice sound quiet and mild. There was a difference between fake quiet and mild and actual calm detachment, though. I could hear Brown in my head—Why does that still eat away at you?—and in my head I looked at him with fake calm detachment and said, I wish it didn’t, but it does.
“Asa,” she said again, and then, “Eli.”
“Yes, Ma. Eli used to come over sometimes too. We used to play cards together, all four of us.” Just in time, I stopped myself from saying the word Remember?, which you were not supposed to do. “Eli was Asa’s father,” I said. “Is Asa’s father.”
Which he was, wasn’t he? You didn’t stop being someone’s father when the someone died, did you?
“Maybe Asa was planning to enlist and he was afraid to tell me,” I said. “Maybe he figured I would want to leave Sterns and he didn’t want to keep me stuck there. Maybe he didn’t love me anymore.”
All things I had tried out in my head, then and in the years that followed our breakup and my leaving Sterns. I heard my own voice, a thin ghost filled with question marks, strutting and fretting their time on the stage, signifying nothing, and my mother was frowning and shaking her head.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“Why then, Ma?”
The category was Breaking Up for $400. The contestants stood at their podiums staring into space, ghost question marks floating in the air around them.
* * *
My mother was right about Josh Gibson. He was a Hall of Famer who never played in the major leagues due to a “gentleman’s agreement” that black baseball players wouldn’t play in the major leagues. He had a baby face. Soft eyes, soft lips. 1911–1947, which meant he died when he was barely older than me, the same year they brought Jackie Robinson up from the minors.
Did I even know that my mother liked baseball, let alone knew enough about it to know about Josh Gibson and the gentleman’s agreement? No.
“Ma?” I said. “You were right about that Josh Gibson question.”
She gave me a withering look, an Of course I’m right, and what kind of idiot are you? I soldiered on.
“I never knew you were such a baseball fan. Do you have a favorite team?”
“Of course.”
“Who is it, then?”
But she waved her hand at me and turned away. Fool, was what that shooing motion meant, and my mother suffered no fools, then or now. If the fool sitting next to her was dumb enough not to know what her team was, why should my mother tell her?
When Sunshine and Brown and I played Jeopardy! we suffered no fools either. We played it for real. We made bets, we kept score, we slammed our hands down on the table. Six categories and five clues each, just the way it was done on the real show. Our only variation was that each category had to have something to do with our actual lives. Snap out a clue and one of us would slam a hand on the table and snap back an answer.
Upstate New York Mountains We Have Climbed.
Books We Most Loved as Children.
Best Diners in the Adirondacks.
Cocktails We Got Sick on in College.
Best Drugs to Counteract the Side Effects of Chemotherapy.
Names No Child Should Be Given.
“Baseball for sixteen hundred,” Brown said. Baseball was one of his favorite categories. I slammed my hand down so fast and hard that the tiny bowl of salt, with its matching tiny spoon, jumped on the table.
“Name of Tamar Winter’s favorite baseball team,” I said.
“What is the Yankees?” Brown said, and he looked at me for verification, but I made a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine face and shrugged.
“It’s a yes-or-no question. Are the Yankees or are they not your mother’s team?”
“It’s upstate New York. So they’d have to be, right?”
“You tell me. She’s your mother.” His eyes narrowed. “Winter,” he said, which was what he called me when he was annoyed at me. “There are no maybes in Jeopardy! You know the rules. Don’t pose a clue without knowing the answer.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“Is she really a baseball fan?”
“Apparently.”
Brown made a shooing motion with his hand, exactly the way my mother had when I asked her which team she liked.
“If your mother’s a baseball fan and you don’t know her team, what else don’t you know about her?”
He wasn’t being unkind. It was a simple question. A wonderment more than a question. A musing. But it was the kind of question that wedged itself into your chest and didn’t go away.
* * *
Facts I Knew About Tamar Winter for $800: 1) She graduated from Sterns High School at age seventeen and 2) immediately tried to head south to Florida for adventure and 3) to get away from Sterns and her father and 4) the memories of her mother, who had died earlier that year, but 5) she was raped at a party in Utica and 6) got pregnant with me and my twin sister, Daphne, who was 7) stillborn, so 8) it had been
just me and her for all the years since and 9) it was still just me and her. Me and my mother. My mother and me.
Brown’s question—What else don’t you know about her?—was not answerable. It was a situation of unknown unknowns.
“It would have to be the Yankees,” he said. Still frowning. “It’s upstate New York—who the hell else would she root for. Seriously, she never talked baseball with you?”
“Seriously, she never did.”
But maybe she had. Maybe she had, and I just didn’t remember, or didn’t notice, or was so uninterested that it was as if she’d said nothing. Was there a whole part of my childhood that I had forgotten? That I was leaving out? Memory is everything that’s ever happened to you, I would have said when I was a child. Everything, held in images and conversations and knowledge buried safely in the recesses of your brain, with safely being the operative word. Something that could not be taken away from you. But I was no longer sure of that.
Whatever was happening on the outside with my mother, was there a secret place inside of her that still knew everything, remembered everything, was full of pictures and conversations in which she was still herself, a self that couldn’t be touched? Rooms within rooms within rooms, and all of them invisible.
At night sometimes, when I came in late from the porch wrapped in the quilt, bottle of Jack dangling from my fingers, I looked at the photo propped up on the kitchen shelf. Sometimes I talked to it. “Ma? Who took that photo of you? What’s that look on your face?” She said nothing. Her face was tilted, her eyes looking past me. As if she were seeing beyond me into another room, as if something good—something wonderful, from the way her eyes were lit up—was about to happen. But the photo was taken a long time ago. It was worn and soft, Xerox color copy turning streaky with age. The place where the curl of tape had held it to the photo of orange-snowsuited me was worn almost through.
When I was with her these days we turned on the television in the Plant Room and we sat together on the couch, calling out Jeopardy! answers. On a recent visit, one of the categories was Iconic Singer-Songwriters of the 20th Century. Clue: The singer who penned “Suzanne” for $800. Tamar slammed her hand down on the couch.
“Who is it, Ma?”
On television, a history professor had guessed Neil Diamond. Wrong. He was back to zero now. Next to me, Tamar pounded on the couch again. She was looking at me, something angry and frantic in her eyes. Her mouth was half open.
“Ma?”
She shook her head impatiently. Furiously. She knew the answer but it wouldn’t come out. She clutched the book I had brought for her that week—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—and held it out like an offering to the word gods. What had the clue been again? Singer who penned “Suzanne.” Think, Clara. “Suzanne.” “Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.”
“It’s your boy Leonard, Ma,” I said. “Leonard Cohen. Right?”
Her face eased. She nodded. The words had gone floating by her and spun themselves up into the ether before she could grab hold and bring them down to earth. Now they were back in her hands.
“You got it, Ma. You just won eight hundred dollars.”
Leonard Cohen was my mother’s favorite singer. The whole time I was growing up, she sang his songs, “Hallelujah,” especially. “Hallelujah” in the kitchen, “Hallelujah” by the woodpile, “Hallelujah” in the strawberry field. “Hallelujah” times a thousand.
“Nice work. You beat Mr. Professor.”
She turned to regard me, her daughter, the woman who kept showing up and calling her Ma.
“What’s your line of work again?”
In her real life, my mother would never have asked a question like that, because in her real life, she wouldn’t have needed to. In her real life, she would have known who I was and what my line of work was. Shhh, Clara. This is her real life.
“Words,” I said. “I’m a word girl.”
* * *
To move back home-ish was to move into a new world, a world of displaced time and misplaced memories. After I walked my mother back down the hall to her room, I drove home and wrapped myself up in quilts on the front porch chair. Me and my bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the fairy lights twinkling in the dark, no mosquitoes or bears, a deer once in a while. The flock of wild turkeys muttered their way over the bluff behind the cabin—they were birds of dusk—but I didn’t move.
What went wrong between you and your mother? Sunshine had asked. A single moment, that was what had gone wrong, a moment that got away from us and turned into silence and walls. And now I was out of time, wasn’t I? I never thought it would go so fast, did I? Was a television quiz show really the only thing my mother and I had left? Because if so, it was not enough. Not anywhere near enough. Had we but world enough and time, had we but time enough. In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse . . . I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. Fragments of disconnected poems floated around me in the darkness and turned into tiny italicized word trains trundling along the bottom of my mind. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
Sing to me, mermaids. Please sing to me.
Panic churned within, skin-prickle-heart-pound panic. I took a long pull on Jack and then another. And then another. Then I called Annabelle Lee, the choir director, my mother’s best and only friend. Don’t call her Annabelle Lee, my mother’s voice sounded in my head. She hates that name.
“Do you even know what that name is from?” I once asked my mother. Seventeen. Know-it-all.
“Some poem,” she said. “Some long poem that her father liked.”
Right back at me. No backing down. She didn’t know the poem and she didn’t care that she didn’t know the poem. Another difference between the two of us.
We were still on the porch, me and Jack in his bottle and the fairy lights twinkling in their almost-unseen way, when I heard the choir director’s car grinding and moaning around the curves of Turnip Hill Road. Once heard, the sound of Annabelle Lee’s car could not be unheard. It was an ancient Impala, kept running by the sheer force of Annabelle’s will, her math-and-music mind, and the parts she scavenged from Ron Hubbard’s car graveyard. She had insisted on driving up from Sterns when I called, said she wanted to see the Tiny, as she’d heard it referenced in town.
“Forsooth,” I said to Jack, “what car through yonder woods approaches?”
The urge to uncap Jack and take another long swig overcame me; I fought it. The urge to leap out of my chair and run inside and turn off the lights and lock the door overcame me; I fought it. The urge to jump into the Subaru—the keys were already in my pocket—overcame me; I would’ve done it had the Impala not already been mumbling its way up the bumps and rocks and exposed roots of the driveway. Annabelle Lee slid across the vast expanse of the front seat to the passenger’s side, because that was the only door that still opened, and emerged. I picked Jack up by the scruff of his neck and dangled him in the air. If battle was upon us, Jack was my ally. It would be the two of us against the one of Annabelle. ’Tis enough, ’twill suffice. A fisher cat screamed from somewhere nearby. It sounded like a girl in peril.
“Are you angry at me?” I said.
That was not what I intended to say. The sound of my voice, the childish tone of it, made me angry, and I was me. Annabelle Lee hauled herself up onto the porch. Hauled. Heaved. Hefted. Hove. H words went scrolling along the bottom of my mind. The porch planks groaned under her weight.
“A little,” she said. “You’ve been here a year and you never returned my calls. A lot of time’s gone by.”
“I’m trying to make up for that. For lost time. I’m trying to fill in the blanks.”
It seemed important to emphasize the word blanks. Hello, my name is Clara Winter and I am powerless over italics. Heads nodded around a table, murmuring, Hi, Clara. Hi, Clara. Hi, Clara. Jack was still in my hand and I swung him back and forth
to make the italics stop but they kept coming. Annabelle Lee—it was hard to think of her as anything but that, hard to call her by just her given name—regarded me.
“Maybe I can help fill them in, those blanks. Some of them, anyway.”
“She’s my mother, though.”
“She’s my best friend. And you’re the one who called me, finally, at least tonight.”
Annabelle Lee had seen my italics and raised them with her own. She shifted weight and the porch floor groaned again. Unlike my weightless mother, whose singing voice was bigger than anything else about her, Annabelle Lee’s organlike contralto matched her body.
“Still the distance between you two, Clara?”
“It’s not that far. I go down there every other day.”
“That’s not the kind of distance I’m talking about,” she said, a tinge of scorn in her voice. Impatience. Breathe in, Clara. Breathe out. Regard Annabelle’s scorn and impatience with calm and detachment.
“There was a lot of stuff back then,” I said.
“There’s always a lot of stuff,” Annabelle said. “It’s called being human.”
Calm. Detachment. Fake it till you make it. “I’m trying to figure things out,” I said. “Before it’s too late”—she opened her mouth, about to snap out more scorn, but I held up my hand and she stopped—“and I figured you might be able to shed light.”
To shed light. That sounded good. Annabelle nodded, wary but willing. Okay. Good job, Clara. Begin with small questions, such as why had my mother gone to choir practice every Wednesday for more than thirty years but never sung in church, not once? Why had she always eaten out of cans and jars? Those kinds of questions. Mild questions. Beginner questions.
But that was not what I did.
“For example, do you know what happened between her and Asa that night?” I said. “Why he broke up with me the very next day? Why she literally, physically, ripped up my MVCC application? Why she didn’t tell me that whole fall that the two of you were plotting and scheming to get me out of the state? And what about the house? Why didn’t she tell me she was selling the house?”
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