Never Coming Back

by Alison McGhee

  * * *

  Sunshine and Brown and their parents were all talkers. They sat around the dinner table late into the night, laughing, high-fiving when they agreed on something and raising their voices when they didn’t. They were voluble. They believed in both small talk and big talk. They were gracious and charming and diplomatic with guests in that upper-class way; their manners were impeccable and they knew how to make anyone feel at home. Including me.

  Do you have to talk much, though, to know one another? Is that a given? My mother was not a talker. She was a woman of economical physical movement. See her in our house, the house that used to be ours, back in Sterns. See her at the table, watching the birds at her bird feeder. See her hanging clothes out on the clothesline that she herself strung between two two-by-fours that she herself dug the holes for and then cemented into the ground. See her tossing firewood into those big, messy piles on the porch, and see me lecturing her on how it needed to be stacked in neat rows instead.

  My mother was a no-nonsense type. A woman who worked and worked and worked and wouldn’t answer most of the questions I kept asking her, then made me go far away to college. Threw me out of the house and out of the state, was how it felt at the time, unlike most of my high school friends. The mothers of those friends had always been with them. These friends married one another. They lived now in Sterns and their children went to Sterns Elementary. Some of those children were already in Sterns Middle School. Sterns High, even. All of this I knew from reading the Sterns alumni newsletter.

  “Do you have any kids, Clara?”

  This was a question I heard a lot at the mixer before the one Sterns High School reunion I had gone to, our tenth.

  “I don’t, no.”

  Later in the evening, after a few drinks and a few hours: “Do you want any kids?”

  No, I don’t? Maybe, if I meet the right guy? I haven’t thought much about it, to be honest? Minefields, all of them. Either You don’t know what you’re missing, or Have you tried online dating because my cousin met her husband that way, or There’s not much time left, is there? Don’t miss your chance, now. Tick-tock tick-tock. Gene mutation, were you in there? Were you listening? Maybe there was no chance at all.

  Me to Tamar, late at night after I drove back from that reunion: “Why does it matter if I want kids or not? Why does anyone care?”

  “It’s not whether or not you want kids,” she said. “It’s that children are the ultimate defense weapon.”

  “What does that even mean, Ma?”

  “You know what it means.”

  End of subject. The Fearsome had spoken. But I did know what she meant. From the outside looking in, which was where I was then and now, it took all your energy to raise a child, and all your money and all your time. So you couldn’t for a minute think about whether the toll was too great. You walked around wearing the fact of your children like a shield, like armor, like a permanent excuse. You had no choice but to believe it was worth it.

  My mother was not a woman of small talk. She was also not a woman of big talk, if big talk was defined as the kind that Sunshine’s and Brown’s parents were so good at, long evenings of expansive conversation with others who wanted to talk about string theory, maybe, or the California school of plein air painters, or whether a socialist female governor could ever win a presidential election.

  Say it once and mean it. Provide no explanation or context.

  Those were the rules according to Tamar, not that she would ever have put them into words that way. Putting my mother into words was the job of the one she called the word girl. My mother didn’t hide behind me, then or now. She made no excuses for herself, then or now. She called things as she saw them, then and now.

  Like my heart.

  You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed.

  Words she had said to me multiple times ran along the bottom of my brain, peaking and valleying, like the readout on an EKG.

  “Did she believe it was worth it, do you think?” I said to Sunshine and Brown. “Having a kid? A kid like me?”

  They didn’t look surprised at the change of subject. They were used to it. And they didn’t say, Yes. They didn’t say, Of course. They didn’t say, How can you even ask that question.

  “Don’t ask us,” Sunshine said. “Ask your mother.”

  * * *

  “I made a grid for you,” Brown said.

  It was the next morning and we were at Walt’s Diner, waiting for pancakes. Blueberry for me and Sunshine, plain buttermilk for Brown. Brown, the man of logic. Brown, the writer of code so precise it almost never needed revision. Brown, who would never need the services of Words by Winter, had constructed a Jeopardy! grid, with my mother the focus of every category.

  Cans and Jars

  Baseball

  Breakup with Asa

  Choir but No Church

  Out-of-State College

  Self-Eviction

  $2000

  $2000

  $2000

  $2000

  $2000

  $2000

  “From the ridiculous to the sublime,” he said. “I put the baseball one in there for me, but the others are all yours. Talk to Tamar. Talk to anyone who knows Tamar.”

  Just like that, she had gone from being The Fearsome to Tamar. It felt like a demotion. No! Keep calling her The Fearsome! The exclamation marks boldfaced themselves and marched along the bottom of my brain. ! ! ! ! ! ! But the change had happened without conscious thought. It was clear from the way Brown said the word. In the face of new information about The Fearsome, a spontaneous natural event had happened, and The Fearsome was now Tamar. It was like cell division. Once begun, it could not be stopped.

  “Also, Brown and I want to help,” Sunshine said. “We want to go with you when you visit her.”

  “You can’t. She made me promise not to tell anyone. I owe her that. I owed her that, and I broke the promise.”

  “And for good reason. What does it matter at this point if anyone else knows? We want to see Tamar. We love Tamar.”

  The pancakes came, plate-size, and then the server with the special coffee-pouring technique came by and transfixed us by refilling our coffee cups. That was good, because the effort of talking about my mother this way, almost clinically, was too much. The pain of it sat there with us at the table, crowded in among the plates and mugs and maple syrup and the white bowl filled with tiny plastic tubs of butter.

  “Also, when are we going to your boyfriend’s bar?” Brown said.

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend,” he said again, ignoring me. “I love saying the word boyfriend in conjunction with you. All these years you’ve lived like a nun, and finally, a boyfriend. Boyfriend.”

  “Also, free drinks,” Sunshine said. “Don’t forget the free drinks, Brown.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “He probably has nice hands,” Sunshine said. “You know how she is about hands.”

  “Piano players,” Brown said. “They’re all about the hands.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend. And I only played piano in college.”

  “But does he? Have nice hands?”

  The bartender’s hands appeared in my mind, fingers grazing the table where I sat. Prelude hands. That light touch. I watched my own fingers open three butter packets. Steam from the blueberries on the underneath pancake curled out when I lifted the top pancake to spread the butter.

  “He does,” Sunshine said. “You can tell by the faraway nice-hands look in her eyes.”

  “Do you think he’d like Walt’s?” Brown said.

  “Who doesn’t like Walt’s?”

  My pancakes were buttered. Time for the pouring of the syrup, which was a two-step process: first the underneath pancake, then the top pancake. Most people neglected the underneath pancake. Not me.

  “The syruping of the bottom pancake has commenced,” Sunshine said.

  The syruping of
the bottom pancake was a crucial step that required concentration, what with the size of Walt’s pancakes—dinner plates—but I looked up halfway through. One of those times when you look up for no reason, except that there must be a reason, an animal kind of below-the-surface reason, and there he was.

  “Winter, heads up,” Brown said. “You’re about to spill.”

  I looked back at my plate but too late. Sunshine and Brown had followed my gaze and were looking at him, leaning against the doorjamb, waiting his turn for a seat at the counter.

  “Who’s that?” Sunshine said. “Wait. That’s not him, is it?”

  It was. The bartender, descended from his dark bar north of Inlet and come down to earth here in Old Forge, waiting with the other mortals for a spot at Walt’s. I said nothing. I dug into my pancakes. I did not look up again, either at the doorjamb or at Sunshine and Brown.

  * * *

  You might think that making your living writing three to five Words by Winter a day would be easy. You might think, How hard could it be for a word girl to churn out a few hundred words at a hundred bucks a hundred? You might think, Aren’t words what she does, who she is, what matters to her?

  You would be right, and you would be wrong.

  You would be right when it came to someone like John Stein, a self-published poet who paid me to write blurbs for the back of each of his books, five or six of them a year. All the titles were variations on Real Poems for Real People. The latest was More Real Poems About Real People with Real Problems. Words for John Stein were easy.

  In his latest volume, the cannot-be-stopped poet John Stein explores territory familiar to all those over fifty or with a family history of colon cancer. “Up There” takes the reader to literally dark places, places most of us care not to venture. And yet by journey’s end, Stein’s devoted followers may find themselves even more grateful for their polyp-free status. Suitable for all adult readers, those who have had their first colonoscopy and those who are contemplating one. Real poems about real people with real problems indeed!

  One hundred dollars, please.

  But you would be wrong about other parts of it. That words were what mattered to me was true. That words were what I did was true. That words were easy was not.

  What matters most is also what hurts most. If you were a person to whom words were living, breathing animals, animals that you loved and whose lives were in your keeping, then you couldn’t take them for granted or treat them flippantly. Instead, you bent your brain into pretzels of strain, trying to find just the right words. You stood up and paced around the room, opened the porch door and stepped out into the cold morning air, roamed your eyes around the stalwart trunks of the white pines as if they held answers.

  Easy? No.

  Words for me were best sought early in the morning or late at night. In the morning they were just-born babies new to the world, depthless eyes fastened on yours. As the hours floated past they lost that newness, that innocence. They turned guarded and wary. They put up walls. They stood at the parapets with buckets of burning oil, ready to vanquish those who would steal the kingdom. At night, though, they rose again from the weary remains of the day, cool, dark air beckoning them back to the bower. A tiny light began to glow in their bellies. Firefly words floated up and glimmered among the white pines. If you were lucky you could catch some of them, keep them for a while and then let them go.

  There was wonderment out there in the Words by Winter world, and sorrow, and regret, so much regret. There was wishing and hoping and more wishing and more hoping. Craft a note from a gay son to his born-again parents who believe that homosexuals will burn in hell. Craft a note from a girl to her lifelong crush, asking him to prom in a way that he won’t be able to refuse. Craft a note from a middle-aged woman to her elderly stepmother, an apology for making her life hell when she was an adolescent. Craft a note like that, do it right, and do it in under a hundred words with a one-day turnaround.

  See? Hard. So much harder than you’d think.

  Speed and precision were essential. But the hardest part about words-making wasn’t the words themselves but the invisible scaffolding that lifted their black-and-white stick-figure-ness from the page and turned it into heart and soul. Dear Mister or Miss Winter, please help me. Dear Winter, I wonder if . . . Dear Words by Winter, I need your help.

  The only way out was through, and what through meant was that you had to transfuse the words you wrote with your own heart and soul. As Jacob wrestled with the angel, as Teresa of Avila contemplated silence, as Jonathan Livingston Seagull tried and tried again to lift his heavy body from the earth, so I wrestled, and contemplated, and tried. And tried again.

  Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the seventies book about the teleporting seagull? Did she really just stick a seagull in there with Saint Teresa and the angel-wrestling Jacob? Did I read that right?

  Yes, yes and yes. I put him in there because of Tamar. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you squawking heavy bird, my mother read you over and over and over again. There must have been something in you that had thus far escaped me. As words were my witness, I would seek it out.

  * * *

  Can’t we? No. Why not? No. Come on. No.

  That was Sunshine and Brown, asking to go with me to the place where my mother lived now. They kept asking, and they wouldn’t stop, and after a while it was harder to say no than to give in, so we all drove down together. Brown held the book of the week, My Side of the Mountain. Sunshine had a notebook and pen.

  “Tell us what we should know,” she said. “What to do, what not to do.”

  “Don’t tell her she’s wrong,” I said.

  “Like anyone would do that?” Brown said. “She wasn’t called The Fearsome for nothing.”

  It was more than that, though. Different from arguing with an ordinary person about a point of fact, the way Sunshine and Brown and I might do when playing Jeopardy!

  “It’s more like training yourself not to correct,” I said. “It’s figuring out how to listen. To whatever she’s saying, even if it doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

  “Follow her,” Sunshine said, and I nodded. Yes. Follow your mother wheresoever she goeth.

  “And don’t ask her to remember things. Don’t even use the word remember.”

  Vigorous nods. That was a no-brainer, was what the look on their faces said. But it was a far harder task than you might think, to train yourself out of saying, “Do you remember?” In the course of my failures, which by now were many, I had learned just how often that word wanted to be said. It lurked, a danger word, ready at any time to fall into the air between my mother and me and rend the fragile peace that not-trying-to-remember meant for her.

  Remember when . . . ? A phrase that links one human being to other human beings. It is a phrase of heft and permanence, the verbal equivalent of Sunshine and Brown’s old garage-sale telephones. It puts you into another world, a world that used to be and no longer is, a world that you and the person you’re talking with both remember. Unless one of you doesn’t.

  “Remember when” was something that Sunshine and Brown and I said all the time to each other. We went back many years, to that first week of college. But before age eighteen, I had no one left. My high school friends and I had lost touch. Annabelle Lee was my mother’s friend, not mine, and we exchanged no confidences. I might once have had Asa Chamberlain, but he let me go, and then he left the earth in a fury of blasted metal and flesh. Regrets for $2000.

  We walked in together, me leading the way. Hello to the nurses, hello to the aides, hello to the woman who sat by the miniature rock fountain with its endless trickle of water, hello to the old man by the piano, one finger stroking its closed lid. Hello to the Jokes and Jingles Workshop attendants, sitting around the table in the conference room, today playing a game involving cards and cookies and laughter. You had to be in the early stages to attend Jokes and Jingles, and Tamar didn’t qualify. Not that she would have joined anyway. Never a joiner, my mother.
Always a loner. Like now, in the Green Room—it was no longer the Plant Room—the television remote in her lap.

  “Tamar,” Brown said. “Remem ​—”

  “Brown!” Sunshine said. “Shhh.”

  She held the notebook up in the air—she was still clutching it—“Remem”—then she too stopped herself. See? It was harder than you’d think, not to use the word. Tamar, remember me? That was what Brown had been about to say. My mother looked from Brown to Sunshine and then to me, accusation in her eyes. She knew something was not right, but what?

  “Ma, I’m sorry,” I said.

  “We pried it out of her, Tamar,” Sunshine said. “It’s not her fault.”

  “You pried what out?” she said. “What’s not her fault?”

  They didn’t know what to do with those questions. Welcome to the club, best friends. Welcome to Jokes and Jingles. Brown handed her My Side of the Mountain.

  “This book is for you, Tamar,” he said. She placed it in the exact middle of her lap, the way she always did, but she repeated the question.

  “You pried what out?”

  “The keys to the kingdom,” Brown said, which made no sense. But somehow it did the trick, because she nodded.

  “Is it time?” she said.

  “It is, Ma. It’s seven-thirty. Time for Jeopardy!”

  “Time for Jeopardy!” she echoed.

  * * *

  The four of us sat together on the couch, waiting for the show to begin. Sunshine and Brown urged me on with their eyes, their Talk to her eyes, their Time is running out eyes.

  “So, Ma,” I said. “I’ve been wondering about some things.”