“Look, Winter,” Brown said. “A chainsaw bear for only two Words by Winters. Doesn’t every porch deserve a chainsaw bear?”
“Too gifty,” I said. “Just like everything else about Lumber Days. I like the Woodsmen’s Field Days better.”
“Of course you do,” Sunshine said. “You’ve always been a sucker for a handsome lumberjack.”
“Don’t make the bartender feel bad, Sunshine,” Brown said.
“Oh, I’m sure the bartender knows his way around a piece of wood,” Sunshine said, and then blushed. “Oops. Sorry, bartender.”
Adirondack Hardware had set up a Lumber Days photo booth inside their store, next to a display of decorated fake Christmas trees, before which Brown stood shaking his head, muttering about plastic trees made in China, for sale right here in the Adirondacks, what was the world coming to, it was like a silent insurgency, a dagger in the heart of the tree farm industry, and here on Lumber Days weekend, for God’s sake.
“Let’s dress up in period lumberjack costume and get our photos taken in the photo booth,” Sunshine said. She was a sucker for period costume, British, especially—Merchant-Ivory films, movie adaptations of Jane Austen novels—but she would settle for Americana if she had to. Pioneers, Old Sturbridge Village, covered wagons, the hallowed days of Adirondack guides and the estates they served. A trunk next to the booth spilled over with homespun long dresses, breeches and vests and waistcoats and fake mustaches and large lace-trimmed hats. A mishmash of generalized pioneer-ish finery. I pulled on a linsey-woolsey apron.
“Check out my linsey-woolsey,” I said.
“You only put that on because you wanted to say the words ‘linsey-woolsey,’” Brown said. “Admit it.”
It was true. Linsey-woolsey. Said often enough, it blended together into the exact sound and feel of the material it was named for. Coarse and strong. Built to last. Linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey, linsey-woolsey. Linsey-woolsey could be a girl’s name, a proper name that appeared on a birth certificate but from which the woolsey was left off in real life, leaving Linsey to stand alone. Linsey. A pretty name. A name that reminded me of the gauzy white embroidered shirt my mother used to be so fond of, the shirt she was wearing in the photo we had christened The Mystery.
The bartender put on a fringed buckskin vest, jammed a Stetson on his head and held his arm out to me. There was only one stool in the photo booth, so I sat on it and he stood behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. The photo countdown began to flash.
“Look straight into the mirror and look stern,” I said. “Like an old-school lumberjack thug.”
We simultaneously frowned at the mirror. My hands suddenly looked un-lumberjack-like, too smooth, too unworn. I looked for linsey-woolsey pockets to jam them into, but then the flash went off and I had missed the first photo. I stuck my unworn hands behind my back but the bartender was standing there. The next flash went off. I sat on my hands for the third, which wasn’t right either, and finally the bartender pulled me up off the stool and wrapped his arms around me. “Think thug,” he said, and the fourth flash went off.
We took off our period costumes and waited for the photo strip to emerge into the metal cage. Sunshine and Brown were arguing over who should get to wear the buckskin vest next. Brown claimed it was an outer garment suitable for males only.
“I don’t disagree,” Sunshine said, “but the fact is, I would look cute in that vest. Plus, I’m a cancer survivor.”
“Let’s do survivor smiles in our photos,” Brown said.
“Only if I get to wear the vest.”
The photo booth plunked out our photos and the bartender and I studied them.
“These are terrible,” I said. “Look at me.”
“These are great,” the bartender said. “Look at you.”
Every photo of me was disarray: me frowning at my hands, me hiding my hands, me blurry mid-turn, me swallowed up by the bartender’s arms.
“Good God, Winter,” Brown said, peering at the photo strip. “What are you, two years old? Can you not sit still?”
But I had quit looking at myself in the photos and was looking instead at the bartender. Unlike me, he was not fidgeting or trying to hide his hands. He was not looking straight into the mirror, nor did he look stern. In each photo he was looking down at me, and his face had a certain look on it. Not of laughter, or impatience, or forbearance in a let’s-get-this-over-with kind of way. None of those words applied. I looked from the photo to him, the real him, and that look was still on his face. Though Brown was standing next to us, the sound of his voice and the laughter in it receded. The feel of the buckskin vest brushing my arm as Sunshine put it on was barely there. The bartender looked at me and I looked at the bartender.
“Chris?”
That was the sound of my voice, almost inaudible even though it was me talking. Me saying his real name for the first time. He nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s me.”
And it was. It was him. Him with that look on his face, nodding and now the beginnings of a smile, because was I looking at him the way he was looking at me? As if I loved him?
Not as if.
The world rose around us again: Sunshine and Brown standing next to Chris and me, both of them silent and watching, knowing that something had just happened. A group of teenagers bent over the trunk of dress-up clothes, waiting their turn for the photo booth. Johnny Cash sang about a ring of fire on the store PA system. My mother’s words floated into my head: Bullshit. Decide you’re going to be your real self and then be your real self.
The car heater blasted on the way home, drowning out conversation, not that any of us were talking. Much had already been said, and most of it silent. I held Chris’s hand in the backseat of Sunshine and Brown’s station wagon but I didn’t look at him because my mind was filled with fifty-fifty and everything it meant in that moment: I had found him, I didn’t want to let him go, and I didn’t want him to live through what I was living through, either. Flip sides, same coin.
We were halfway up Turnip Hill Road, me studying the photos again, when something else came to me. The look on Chris’s face was familiar. You have seen that look before, I thought. But where? I kept looking at the narrow strip of photos, chemical-smelling and still a little tacky to the touch. Me in motion, the bartender straight and still, that soft look on his face. Then I knew.
That thin wisp of worn photocopied paper propped up on the kitchen shelf in the cabin. My mother, younger and smiling. The look on her face was the same look on the bartender’s face in the photos in my palm, shimmering up from the frayed paper on the shelf next to Jack. She had saved that photo all these years, ever since she stopped wearing that pretty shirt. In it, she was looking beyond me, at whoever was taking her photo.
My mother had loved someone. And someone had loved her back.
Final Jeopardy
It was not possible.
That was my first thought. Because had she ever been on a date? Had she ever kissed anyone? Had she ever asked someone to a Sadie Hawkins dance, or been to a prom? Had she ever gone to a bar with someone and put quarters in a jukebox and played pool and ordered a second cocktail because she was having fun? Had she ever sat across from a man who had put on a clean shirt for the occasion, at a small table with a tablecloth and a candle and not one but two menus, one for wine and one for food? Questions shoved up against each other in my head.
No and no and no and no and no.
The interviewer, her legs crossed, her fingers hovering over her keyboard—“Miss Winter, to your knowledge, did your mother, Tamar Winter, ever go on a date?”—No, before the quotation mark was fully slotted next to the question mark. “Did your mother, Tamar Winter, ever go on a dateNo.” A broken sentence. Part question but mostly No.
Why so quick with the No, though, Miss Winter? Wouldn’t you want her to have gone on a date? Wouldn’t you want your mother to have had some happiness in her life that way, a few hours where she was not just you
r mother, but a young woman out with a young man who thought she was lovely?
Lovely? Lovely? Stop it.
It was not possible to think of her as anyone other than exactly who she was, who she had been: a woman of the north woods, a lumber-woman in a lumber jacket, a splitter of wood, a remover of decals, a non-Sunday singer in a choir, a manless woman, a boyfriendless woman, a husbandless woman, a dateless woman, who was, who had been, my mother. The word lovely did not apply, but for the fact that it did.
After I waved goodbye from the porch, I went straight to the shelf in the kitchen. My mother’s faded face smiled up from her perch next to Jack. My heart skipped a beat and then began rocketing around its prison of sinew and bone, looking for a way out. Et tu, heart? Heart, quiet thyself. But the wayward heart did not listen, and down I lay on the floor, photo flat against my shaking chest, the diminished stacks of books-as-coffee-table rising around me.
New images of my mother scrolled by, leaping and dancing across the spines of the remaining books of my childhood. Tamar with her hair French-braided, wearing that pretty white shirt, standing on the porch and smiling as a car drove into our driveway just beyond the frame of the picture. Tamar at the Boonville County Fair holding the hand of a faceless, bodiless, voiceless man just beyond the frame of the picture. Tamar at Hemstrought’s Bakery in Utica, pointing at a half-moon cookie and smiling at a man just beyond the frame of the picture.
Just beyond the frame of the picture. He, whoever he was, was there. Had he been there all along?
“You are way overreacting here, Clara,” I said out loud as the photo and I lay on the floor by the books. “Calm the hell down. It’s a photo.”
But there are times when you know a thing, immediately and of a piece, and you can’t un-know it. You can’t convince yourself that you are overreacting. I held the photo above my head and looked at it this way and that way, sideways and upside down. Nothing made the look in my mother’s eyes go away. Nothing from here on out would make the softness, that softness I had never seen, go away.
Who? When? How? Where?
* * *
Out the door and into the Subaru the minute my heart reverted to a normal rhythm. Down the half hour to Sterns, then onto Fox Road. When Annabelle opened the door I held the photo up in front of her, pincered between my thumb and forefinger. She leaned back instead of forward—middle-aged eyes, reversing course—and squinted. When she didn’t say anything, I waved it back and forth, dancing it through the air between us. I didn’t trust the steps I was standing on. They were made of plastic and flimsy metals. They could give way at any time. I waited for her to say something.
“Nice to see you too, Clara,” was what she said, after a minute or so. She stood aside so that I could come in, but I didn’t move. From what I could see and smell there was nothing baking in her kitchen, nothing bubbling on the stove under a pot lid. “How can I help you?”
I said nothing. I stood there and kept holding the photo. If my instinct was right, then Annabelle would crumple before my silence and tell me what she knew about this unfamiliar Tamar Winter dancing in the air before her. She would tell me about the look on my mother’s face. She would tell me who had taken the photo.
I stood silently, and so did Annabelle. She tilted her head as if she were trying to figure out why I was holding the photo before her like a piece of evidence. She frowned. She looked at me, except not really, because her eyes didn’t meet mine. And when someone’s eyes won’t meet yours, even though you can tell they’re trying to make their eyes meet yours, when their face turns even a fraction of an inch away from yours, when you can feel the unease flowing through their body even though they are forcing themselves to stand elaborately, casually still, that’s your answer.
Cultivate silence. Silence, and patience, and determination.
Now that I had my answer—she knew who had taken that photo—I stepped inside. The trailer felt warm. Not thermostat warm, not oil or gas or baseboard or electric-space-heater warm but warm by nature, as if Annabelle herself, the great furnace of her body and her heart, were all that was necessary. I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. Annabelle stood across the table from me. She was trying to intimidate me by not sitting down, not joining me, as if that would make me stop whatever it was I was doing. Too late, Annabelle. You’ve already given yourself away and there’s no going back.
I laid the photo in the precise middle of the table. “Who took this?”
“No clue.” She was trying not to look at the photo but her eyes kept dragging back to it, as though there were something fascinating about it.
“Where was it taken?”
“No idea.”
“When was it taken?”
“You got me.”
The kitchen was the detaining room and Annabelle was the suspect, trying her best not to cave until the public defender arrived.
“Annabelle, tell me what you know.”
She shrugged. “It’s a nice photo of your mother. Something else to add to the pile.”
“The pile? The pile of what?”
“Things you have of her. Memorabilia.”
“She’s still around, Annabelle. She’s not dead.”
“You know what I mean.”
The sentences sounded like Annabelle sentences but the Annabelle-ness of her voice was gone. She sounded quiet. She sounded tired. The photo lay on the table between us, a jigsaw piece missing its puzzle. She pressed down on one slightly ripped corner with the tip of her finger, as if she were trying to make it whole again.
“You know more than you’re telling me,” I said. “Please, Annabelle. I’m trying to figure out my mother.”
I meant to sound like a detective, insistent on the piece of evidence on the table between us, but I didn’t. I sounded like myself.
“Did she . . . have a boyfriend?”
It didn’t come out right when I said it. There was a squeak at the end of boy, and friend trailed off. I tried again. “Or, like, a girlfriend?” That didn’t sound right either.
She shook her head. Immediate and clear. No. Not a girlfriend.
“Some guy? After I went away, maybe?”
Shake. No one in my mother’s life after I went away. But she kept shaking her head, too long to make a point, and suddenly another possibility came to me.
“Are you saying there was a man in my mother’s life when I was around? Before I went to college?”
She kept shaking her head, or trying to, but her eyes slid away. The giveaway.
“Before I went away?” I said. Repeating myself, as if there were a chance she didn’t understand. “While I was still here? I mean here as in Sterns, living with her in our house? Back then?”
She wouldn’t look at me.
“Who?” I said.
Silence.
“WHO.”
Silence.
“I will find out, Annabelle.” My voice was on the edge of breaking. My most-hated voice, the tremble. “If not from you, then from someone.”
She put her hands on the back of the chair in front of her and sighed. “Clara. Leave it be now.”
“I can’t leave it be when I don’t know what it was. Who it was. My mother had a boyfriend? And I never knew?” The italics went squiggling by at the bottom of my mind.
“Honey,” which was something that Annabelle had not once, ever, called me or anyone else I knew, “it was long ago and far away. Leave it be.”
And that was it. She was done talking.
* * *
“Who was it, Dog?” I said to his ashes.
Dog must have known. If there was someone in my mother’s life, before I left or after I left or in the middle of my leaving, Dog would have smelled him. The nose of a dog could smell 400,000 times better than a human’s nose, although how any scientist knew that for sure, with that level of precision, was beyond me. But the fact was, Dog would have been able to smell the scent of anyone who came within touching distance of my mother. One deep
snuff, the way he used to do when we came home from anywhere we’d been, no matter how close or how far, was all he needed.
Dog had known. Annabelle had known. The someone my mother loved had known. Who else had known?
Had she kissed this person, whoever he was? Had she taken her clothes off with him? Slept with him? I sounded like a child. I sounded like an idiot. I sounded the way a person stepping gingerly into an ice-cold lake looks.
“For God’s sake, Clara,” I said out loud. “Don’t be a fool. Of course she did.”
Who had he been, though? Someone up north, in Watertown, maybe—I seized on Watertown because my mother had spent many days there, scraping old decals off milk trucks and applying new ones—and maybe there was a man up there who she worked with. It couldn’t have been anyone in Sterns. They whisked through my mind anyway, random neighbors and teachers and men, their faces as familiar to me as the urn that held Dog’s ashes: Burl Evans, William T. Jones, young Joe Miller the mechanic, Mr. Silvester the custodian, every male teacher I’d ever had from Sterns Elementary and Sterns Middle and Sterns High School. No. None of them. It was not possible. Except that it was.
“How oblivious did I have to be, not to notice what was happening, Dog?”
Very.
“Was she that good an actress?”
No.
“So you’re saying that I just didn’t notice? That I had one vision of her and no room for anything else?”
Yes.
I sat there on the porch and pictured my high school years. All those afternoons and evenings with Asa, slipping out to meet him, roaming around the country roads, walking into the clamor of parties and out into the cool darkness filled with the songs of night birds and tree frogs, the squeak of boards on his porch, the silence of cement on mine, the long backseat of his car where we loved each other. Where was Tamar in those memories? She was home in Sterns, leaning against the counter eating supper by herself, out chopping wood, whistling for Dog and heading down Williams Road, driving down to choir practice, lying on the couch and reading that ridiculous seagull book yet again. Maybe, on rare occasions, meeting Annabelle Lee at Crystal’s Diner for a milkshake.
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