My mother walked beside me, Dog on his leash. She listened to all my surface chatter. She followed my arm with her eyes as I flung it right and flung it left, describing the wonder of the days I was living now. She went to the dinner and the brunch and the tea and the campus walkabout with me, she and Dog, and both nights of the weekend they left me on campus after dinner and drove out to the pets-allowed cheap motel half an hour away.
Sunday morning they left. She put her arms around me and squeezed my shoulders. She said nothing and neither did I. Then she and Dog got back into the truck and drove down from the White Mountains and over the Green Mountains, crossed Lake Champlain and made their way into the Adirondacks, to the house where I used to live but didn’t anymore and never would again.
* * *
I got a ride to the Utica thruway exit for winter break my senior year in college. Tamar was there to pick me up, but Dog wasn’t in the backseat waiting the way he usually was.
“Where’s Dog?”
“He didn’t want to come.”
“Since when? Did you tell him you were coming to pick me up?”
She said nothing. Gave me a look. Tamar was not a believer in explaining to animals what was going on, the way I was. If Dog didn’t feel like a ride, then she wouldn’t press the issue. By the woodstove he would remain, his head resting on that old stuffed monkey.
But when I walked in the door, he struggled up from the rug and the monkey and wobbled toward me. Those were the words: struggled and wobbled. Tamar was turned away from me, shaking the snow off her jacket and scarf.
“Ma,” I said, tried to say, but nothing came out.
Dog had made his way to me but his head was tilted and stayed that way, as if he couldn’t lift it all the way up.
“MA.” That time it came out.
She turned then, and saw me crouched down next to him. Confusion and surprise and then something else flitted over her face and I knew she was suddenly seeing him the way I was, with eyes new to the scene, eyes that hadn’t beheld my dog in four months. She crouched down then too, and we both put our arms around him. The memory of a night the spring of my senior year in high school flooded into my head. I had been out at a party, one of the constant parties that seniors seem to have, the same franticness to all of them, as if time were running out. I came up the dirt driveway late, in my flip-flops. The house was dark. The door was unlocked. No sound from upstairs, where Tamar was either asleep or lying awake silently.
Dog, though. Dog was waiting for me at the door. He wasn’t a barker, just a low rrff once in a while, if an unfamiliar car pulled into the driveway. He pushed his head into my leg, there in the dark kitchen, and I fell onto the floor next to him. I lay down and clutched him as if I were drowning and he was my life preserver. I had missed Asa all night long, missed his presence next to me at the party, and in that moment I missed him with my whole body, aching for him, for the life we had shared, the one he had abandoned for the army, the life I too was about to leave behind.
Once I returned to college after that winter break, Dog took himself out in the woods to die. He had taken to standing by the door, nosing at it, and Tamar would let him out, but when she went to let him back in a few minutes later he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t come when she called either. She went searching for him, in the old storage barn, down the dirt road, in the woods. Each time she found him he would be nearly invisible, a shadow by a dark tree. Each time, she led him back to the house with one hand on his head to encourage him along.
That was the way I imagined it. My mother didn’t use any of those words. Her words were more like He kept wandering away down the dirt road and He wouldn’t come when I called.
“Remember when Tamar called to tell me that Dog had died?” I said to Sunshine and Brown in the car. We were on our way back from DiOrio’s. “He’d died the night before, but she didn’t tell me. You were with me when she finally called the next morning. The next morning!”
Neither of them said anything. I could feel them talking, though, without words, in that way they had. Brown cleared his throat. He was riding shotgun. “Maybe she wasn’t sure how to tell you,” he said.
“Give me a break. ‘Dog died.’ That’s all she had to say. She should have told me right away.”
Sunshine leaned forward from the backseat and put her hand on my shoulder. “Listen, Clara,” she said. “Remember we told you she used to call us sometimes? That was one of those times.”
“What? Why?”
“She was worried. She didn’t want you to be alone when you found out. She wanted to make sure we were with you when she called. She knew what Dog meant to you.”
But Tamar was my mother. Dog was my dog. Italics scrolled along the bottom of my brain.
“How often did she used to call you guys, anyway?”
“Once in a while. When she was worried about you.”
My mind, with the influx of new information, was adding and subtracting, shaking everything up and redistributing it. Shuffling a deck of memory cards. A Jacob’s ladder, each tile clapping down upon the next. Dominoes. Games of chance and skill barreled their way through my mind, each of them built around the image of my mother on the phone, the heavy old phone in the kitchen at our old house, talking to Sunshine and Brown over the years that I had known them. I pictured the Jeopardy! grid that Brown had printed out for me, back in the cabin, pinned under a shot glass on the kitchen table.
Cans and Jars
Baseball
Breakup with Asa
Choir but No Church
Out-of-State College
Self-Eviction
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
$2000
“But I’m her daughter,” I said, as if somehow this would bring insight that had thus far escaped me.
* * *
“Do you know anything about her dreams?” Sunshine said.
“She sleeps okay,” I said. “As far as I know, anyway. Sylvia or whoever’s on duty that night calls me if she gets too agitated.”
“No, the other kind of dreams. Things she wanted to do, places she wanted to go. Is it too late or could we take her somewhere?”
“She told me once she wanted to go to San Francisco.”
My mother had told me this late one night. She always went to bed early, before me, but on this night I went to the kitchen to make some popcorn, and she was sitting at the kitchen table reading something. Number one, she was not a reader, and number two, when she looked up at me her eyes were wet. She was wearing the same pretty white shirt as in the mysterious photo. The shirt I didn’t remember her wearing in later years. The sight of her crying twisted something up in me.
“Ma? What are you reading?”
I pretended I didn’t notice she was crying. Stop crying, Ma. Stop it. She slid the paper, stapled sheets of notebook paper, across the table to me. It was an essay I had written for Great Books. Compare and contrast Virginia Woolf’s dream of a room of her own to a personal dream of your own. Stupid topic. Why was she crying? Stop crying, Ma.
“I didn’t know you wanted to go to Hong Kong,” she said.
MA. STOP CRYING.
Who wouldn’t want to go to Hong Kong? Sampans and red lanterns and the Star Ferry and that famous harbor. Chinese food. Why not go to Hong Kong? But I had chosen it at random, because it was far away and easy to write about and sounded like a place that a person who wasn’t me would dream about. A dream that sounded like a dream but wasn’t my real dream, which was to one day, some far-off day, live inside a world of words. Words to bring back the old man, words to wall off the memory of Asa, words to build barriers, words to take them down, words to soothe the savage breast. Stop crying, Ma.
“Me, I always wanted to go to San Francisco,” she said.
“San Francisco?”
I laughed. San Francisco was the most doable dream in the world. Get in the car and head west. Eventually you�
��d hit the Pacific Ocean. Hong Kong, now Hong Kong, even though I was only pretending I wanted to go there, was a different matter entirely. I stood there in the yellow light from the lamp she’d dragged over to the table—Tamar hated overhead light—and laughed. At her. Instantly, she stopped crying. She looked away. She got up from the table and turned herself sideways to slip past me in her Tamar way. Her two-dimensional way, which was how thin my mother was. She didn’t say another word about San Francisco, then or ever.
Back then, if you had asked me why I was laughing, I would’ve told you that compared to Hong Kong, San Francisco was such a tiny dream. Tiny, small, a laughable nothing kind of dream.
If you asked me now why I was laughing, I would tell you that I was an angry, sad girl who hated to see her mother cry. Whose world went black when her mother cried. Who would’ve done anything, who did do anything, like laugh at her right in her face, to make her stop.
Now, fifteen years later, I pictured Hong Kong in my mind. Did the lanterns still hang from sampans in that famous harbor? Or were sampans a thing of the past? I wouldn’t know, because I hadn’t been to Hong Kong. The dream I dashed out on notebook paper when I was seventeen and a senior at Sterns High School was a false dream, one I made up to finish a paper as fast as I could, a paper I got an A on.
Tamar’s dream, though? That was a true dream. A real dream.
“She wanted to go to San Francisco,” I said again. “But I think it’s too late.”
* * *
“Maybe we could bust her out,” Brown said. “Not to San Francisco but for the weekend. Or a day, even?”
It was the next morning and we had just finished breakfast at Walt’s. No wait, no lines, because the foliage—the ridgelines on fire, folding one over the other on their curving march to the far horizon—was done for the year.
“I mean, it’s too late for San Francisco,” Brown said. “I get that. But what about Old Forge? Is it too late for Old Forge?”
“Music, maybe?” Sunshine said. “She always liked music.”
“Yes! A concert!”
“Or a drive,” I said. “She likes drives. Or she used to.”
“Yes!” Brown said again. His exclamation-mark voice. “A drive up to Lake Placid, maybe, and then some food, and some music.”
Outings for $200. An afternoon with Tamar. Okay. Next day we piled into the Subaru, hours earlier than usual so as to have her back in the early evening. But it was a day of confusion and brain fog. The walls were coming up, or going down, and she was wary.
“Ma?”
She sat on the couch in the Green Room and shook her head at me. Here I was again, the strange woman who kept calling her Ma.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Tamar?”
“Yes?”
“We were wondering if you’d like to go for a drive.”
Her eyes went from me to Brown and back again. Suspicious. Maybe it was Brown’s excitement, radiating out from him into the air of the room. She looked him up and down, carefully, then back to me. Wary. It was only when she noticed Sunshine, still standing in the doorway, that she relaxed.
“It’s you,” she said, and Sunshine smiled.
“It’s me,” she agreed. Tamar patted the spot next to her on the couch and Sunshine sat down.
“Pretty girl,” Tamar said. Sunshine’s sitting down seemed to settle her, and she gestured at Brown and me to sit in the rocking chairs. Which we did.
“Do you want to go on a drive with us, Tamar?” Brown said. Still hoping. His whole plan for the afternoon was almost visible there in the air: the drive, the food, the music. But she shook her head.
“I miss my daughter,” she said. “I can’t find her.”
Brown and Sunshine looked at me and opened their mouths, their hands already lifting off their laps to point to me, the daughter, the daughter! Right there! Right here in the room with you, Tamar! But I frowned at them. Don’t argue. Don’t correct. Remain calm. Remain detached.
“It must be hard, missing your daughter,” I said.
“Oh, yes. It’s very hard.” She pinched her thumb and fingers together and scribbled them in the air as if she were holding a pen. “Those things, you know—pinpricks. Clouds.”
“Pinpricks and clouds.”
“She was good at them. Clouds.”
“She was good at making things up, maybe.”
“Yes. That’s what clouds are.”
She frowned at me. Her daughter the word girl wouldn’t have said something dumb like that.
“You miss your daughter,” I said. “And I miss my mother.”
She looked out the window then, past Brown and Sunshine, past me, focused on something out there or maybe nothing out there. I wanted to say something, something that would pull her back with us, but she started to hum. She motioned us to sing—her fingers waving as if she were a choir director—but I couldn’t. That was all right, though, because Brown took over and began singing with her. That same baffled king, still composing his hallelujah, the king my mother never tired of singing about. Her alto, Brown’s tenor, Sunshine’s arm around my shoulders. And the inked wire holding me together.
* * *
Next night I went back to the bar. It was not a busy night and I sat on a barstool and helped the bartender polish wineglasses. Around and around each rim with a clean cotton dish towel, hold it up to the light and examine it for any remaining marks, then stand up and slide it into its slot on the overhead hanging rack.
“So you were a piano major?” the bartender said. Not a college man, he was curious about college, about majors and minors, semesters and schedules.
“I was.”
“But you never tried to get a job using your piano?”
I shook my head and waited for him to tilt his head in that typical quizzical way and ask, Why not? But he didn’t do that. What he did instead was wait. The bartender was good enough at waiting to beat me at my own waiting game.
“I studied piano because I loved it.”
“And the loving it was enough?”
I nodded. Unlike most people, the bartender didn’t pursue the topic, didn’t ask why I had studied something I hadn’t used since. Didn’t ask why I had put all those vast late-night solo soundproof practice room stretches of time into getting better and better and better at something that I had then abandoned.
Even though I hadn’t abandoned it.
I never said that, though. It wouldn’t make sense. How could I explain that all those hours, fingers crawling or flying or stumbling over the keys, up and down and up and down, thousands of miles of black and white notes floating up out of the massive stringed throat of that instrument, had embedded themselves in me, in my blood and flesh and bone, in my heart, so that wherever I went in this world, music went with me? As hymns were to Asa, so my piano was to me.
“It was a refuge. Somewhere I could go and sit and work and work and work and when I was done it was like I had worked myself into another world.”
He smiled. “Another world where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, like Gayle’s tattoo?” He nodded in the direction of the server.
“Where beautiful was inconsequential. Where beautiful and ugly and in between had disappeared, because your fingers had played themselves out and there wasn’t anything left to think about.”
Just then my phone buzzed, vibrating against my thigh deep in my pocket, in its home next to the hammer earring. “Ma,” read the screen, which meant not Ma but someone who looked after Ma. Sylvia, usually. The phone twinkled and shook in my hand.
“This is Clara.”
“Hi, Clara. It’s Sylvia.”
“What’s going on?”
“She’s having a hard time tonight. She keeps looking for you. She says she needs to go outside and find you. I’m sorry for calling so late. I thought we could calm her but —”
“I’m on my way.”
The phone went dark and I pushed it back into my pocket. The bartender’s hands folded the dish
towel into half, then quarters.
“Your mother?”
“The nurse.”
“What’s going on?”
I shook my head. I pictured her searching for me, pushing her walker up and down hallway after hallway, stopping at the Green Room, stopping at the reception desk, at the juice station, at the cleaning closets. Picking her walker up and throwing it at the wall. Yelling at Sylvia.
“I have to go.”
“Do you want company?”
“No thanks.” Already I was mentally in the Subaru. But as I got up from the stool—goodbye, quiet bar, goodbye, quiet conversation, goodbye, upside-down wineglasses shining in your quiet rows overhead—my heart flared.
I sat back down and breathed. Breathed in, breathed out. Long and slow. But my chest shook with frantic fluttering. I closed my eyes and put my fingers on my carotid artery and pressed.
“You okay?”
He came around the end of the bar and took my other hand in his.
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing.”
The fluttering intensified. I had to lie down. Where? The floor was a bar floor, and the chairs and stools were high and small. The long black booth in the back was empty and I made my way toward it, my eyesight fuzzy, and lay down and drew my knees up and closed my eyes. There was the sound of a chair scraping across the floor. He was sitting next to me, his knees touching my hip.
“Clara, what’s going on?”
“It’s just a glitch in my heart. It races sometimes and I have to lie down until it goes back to normal. It’s nothing.”
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