Raven was running an errand down in Rutland and I had been the one to take Opal to the emergency room and sit with her. She seemed severely shaken, not just by the fall, but by whatever had happened in the barn just before the jump. She claimed someone had been up in the loft with her, but when Gabriel went up to check, all he found were a couple of rusted pitchforks leaning against the wall and a few clumps of long-rotted hay.
“Who did you see up there?” I had asked, but she’d never answered.
To distract her during the endless waiting between examinations, X-rays, and getting a cast, I asked her to tell me about her favorite stunts. She told me she’d been reading about the days of barnstorming and the wing walkers.
“Charles Lindbergh got his start that way,” she said. Then she went on to tell me about the women, her voice bubbling with admiration and excitement.
“This one lady, Gladys Ingle her name was, practiced archery on the top wing of her Curtiss Jenny.”
“Her who?” I asked.
“Curtiss Jenny. It’s a biplane. I’ve got a model of one in the tepee. Anyway, Gladys Ingle was also famous for jumping from one plane to another, midair. How cool is that?”
“Pretty cool,” I agreed.
“Then there’s Bessie Coleman. I did a report on her for school. She was the first African American woman pilot. She was a wing walker, too. Oh, and Lillian Boyer—‘Empress of the Air’—she quit her job as a waitress to learn to wing walk.”
“That’s quite a career change.”
“And you’ve heard of Buffalo Bill? I bet you didn’t know about his niece, Mabel Cody. She was the first woman to transfer from a speeding boat to a plane.”
By the time Opal described how the days of wing walking ended in 1936 when the government outlawed getting out of the cockpit below 1,500 feet, the mysterious visitor in the loft was forgotten. And by the end of our three hours in the emergency room, I was ten-year-old Opal’s new best friend and she was right by my side every remaining minute of that visit, showing me pictures in books of wing walkers and models of early planes she had made. The Curtiss Jenny was hanging on fishing line from a pole high at the top of the tepee. Opal had glued a small plastic woman to the top wing, complete with a tiny bow she’d made from a stick and string and toothpick arrows. There was a bull’s-eye target set up on the other end of the wing.
Opal, at least to my outsider’s eyes, seemed to love life in the tepee, and it was never more apparent than when she showed me her curtained-off bedroom that afternoon and sent that plane flying in circles over our heads with a push from her fingertips. I looked around with a strange sense of déjà vu, and had to remind myself that it was not the original tepee, the one my mother and I had lived in, but the third or fourth incarnation. But now it, too, was going to have to be replaced, and my mother was to blame.
AFTER OPAL LEFT TO REPAIR HER BIKE, Gabriel, Raven, and I returned to the topic of my mother. We sat at the long wooden table in the big barn that had once served as the community kitchen and gathering place. The barn seemed cavernous and empty, our voices lost in all that space.
New Hope had gradually petered out over the years. Gabriel’s vision of utopia had somehow been lost along the way, falling to ruin along with the buildings and gardens. My childhood home was little more than a ghost town, a ruined shell of what it once had been, and although I was disappointed, I wasn’t all that surprised. Call me a skeptic, but I’ve always thought that it takes more than organic vegetables and talking circles to make an ideal society.
Raven was ten years younger than me and had been the only other child at New Hope when I was there. She was born my third night at New Hope. I slept little that night, listening to her mother’s screams coming from the big barn, which had been turned into a “birthing center,” complete with a sacred ring of candles and a young hippie named Zack alternately playing “Happy Birthday” and The Lone Ranger theme song on his guitar. I lay awake wondering what hell my mother had brought me to where babies weren’t even born in hospitals.
When Raven was small, I changed her diapers and, later, taught her to tie her shoes. This was my only legacy to her—accidental pinpricks and a story about making the limp shoestring into a bunny, then sending the bunny through a hole—things I doubted she even remembered.
Raven had grown into a striking woman—nearly six feet tall, with long dark hair and high cheekbones. She worked part-time at the town clerk’s office and was taking night classes toward a degree in psychology. When I went away to college and never came home, Raven quickly became my mother’s surrogate daughter, a fact that tugged at my heart a little, gave me pangs of jealousy and guilt whenever my mother mentioned her name over the years. Raven, not even my mother’s flesh and blood, was the good daughter. The present daughter, who promised never to abandon home and who was able to give my mother the grandchild she never got from me. And me, I was the skinny kid in the photos my mother kept around the tepee—freckles fading in each consecutive picture as if to show that one day my whole self would disappear forever. The invisible woman who called once a week to say how tough college was, then nursing school, married life, one all-consuming job after another—always some excuse for not coming home. But that hardly mattered because Raven was there, standing beside my mother in her neatly tied shoes.
Raven’s own mother, Doe, had died of pancreatic cancer—one of those horror stories where you go into the hospital for stomach pain, and three weeks later, it’s all over. Raven’s father, well, no one really knew whatever became of him. His disappearance, the reasons behind it at least, had been my fault, although I was the only one who knew it. It was yet another in a long list of New Canaan secrets I carried with me throughout my life—heavy and loathsome baggage.
Raven got pregnant with Opal when she was eighteen, just a few months after Doe’s untimely death. I was in Seattle by then, and experienced the whole pregnancy through my weekly phone conversations with my mother—the morning sickness successfully treated with raw almonds and ginger tea; the hour’s drive to special prenatal yoga classes in Burlington; the search for a midwife who would attend the birth in a tepee with no running water. The subject of who Opal’s father might be was never addressed directly, though I always assumed he was just some hippie passing through New Hope. If anybody, including Opal, was the least bit concerned about her being “fatherless,” I never heard about it.
Gabriel, at eighty-two years old, was still in excellent shape, both physically and mentally. With his round glasses, white beard, and red suspenders, he looked like a lean, off-season Santa. He had been the patriarch of New Hope, the founding father. His common-law wife, Mimi, had died the year before, leaving him to shuffle around the big barn alone, no doubt recalling more glorious times. Days when there had been many mouths to feed, quiet revolutions to plan.
At New Hope’s beginning, in 1965, there were only four members: Gabriel and Mimi and another couple, Bryan and Lizzy. Over time, the numbers grew. When my mother and I moved to New Hope in the fall of 1970, there were eleven of us living there full time (the largest number there would ever be), not counting the college kids who stayed for the summer, drifters who came and went. There were Gabriel and Mimi, Bryan and Lizzy, Shawn and Doe, baby Raven, Lazy Elk and my mother, me, and nineteen-year-old Zack, the only single adult New Hope resident and unofficial community balladeer. However many people called New Hope home at any given time, it was clear they were all looking to Gabriel to give the place its bearings, to define utopia.
I LISTENED PATIENTLY, sipping one of Gabriel’s herbal infusions, which tasted like licorice and mud, while he and Raven filled me in on my mother’s condition as best they could. They warned me that she might not know who I was. She had had a bad week. There was the fire five days before, which was the last straw—the reason they finally called me and said I needed to come back and make some decisions about long-term care. They described how she had fought Gabriel when he was pulling her out, biting his arm viciously enoug
h that he needed stitches. (His wound, I noted, was covered with a neat, sterile bandage, not a compress of rank-smelling weeds as it would’ve been in Mimi’s day.)
Try as I might, I couldn’t reconcile my mild-mannered, peace-loving mother with the maniac they were describing. I tried to picture her foaming at the mouth, shooting fire from her fingertips.
“Since the fire,” Gabriel explained, “she’s been on a downward spiral, lashing out at everyone around her.”
Ho-Ho-Ho.
When they were through describing the latest details of my mother’s steadily declining condition, I told them my plans. I had taken a three-week emergency leave from Lakeview Elementary in Seattle, where I worked as a school nurse. Speaking to them as if addressing the school board, I explained how, in the next weeks, I would, with their assistance, assess my mother’s situation and come up with a plan for long-term care, which meant, more than likely, getting her placed in a nursing home (and possibly fitting her with a muzzle—a suggestion I didn’t mention). I’ll admit that I sounded like a social worker, not like a daughter, but in a way, that’s how I felt. This was my responsibility, and I intended to fulfill it—but I hadn’t really been a daughter since I left home at seventeen.
Gabriel and Raven nodded at me, satisfied with my plan, with my level-headedness. They were pleased, although perhaps slightly puzzled, with how very well I seemed to be taking things. But wasn’t that my job? Wasn’t that what they’d called me in for? To do what they knew needed to be done, but hesitated to do themselves. It would be me who made the final decision to lock up my mother, to take away all her freedoms for what I would tell her was her own good. Neither of them wanted that on their conscience. And who could blame them? They set me up to be the bad guy, the villainous prodigal daughter, and I fell right into it, as if it were a role I was born to play.
I TOLD YOU, DOE, I don’t want her here.” My mother’s five-foot-two, ninety-pound frame occupied her doorway, rocking back on her heels, then rolling forward to stand on her tiptoes. Back and forth she moved like some hypnotic snake, trying to make herself look bigger. I stepped back, giving my mother some distance, half expecting her to let out a hiss.
Raven sighed, putting a hand to her forehead. “I’m Raven, Jean. Doe’s daughter. And this is your daughter, Kate.”
“I know who she is!” my mother spat, shifting her gaze from Raven to me. “I know who you are!” She was leaning forward when she said it. Spittle sprayed my face. Her hands hung at her sides like oversized white paws, odd and useless. Raven and Gabriel were right. I was in no way prepared for this. There was a fire in my mother’s eyes I’d never seen. I took another step back.
“Well, Kate’s staying. She’s going to stay with you in your house.”
“This is not my house.”
Raven tried another tack.
“Jean, where’s Magpie?” She opened her shoulder bag and retrieved a can of StarKist tuna. The muscles in my mother’s face loosened and she gave a half smile.
“Inside. She must be inside. Under the closet. Inside the bed. Magpie! Here, Miss Magpie! Breakfast!” My mother turned and walked inside, calling to the cat. Raven nodded at me, and we followed my mother into the cabin.
I had seen my mother’s tiny house for the first time during my last brief visit two years before. She was just adding the finishing touches, the trim and moldings, after building the whole thing herself. There had been a few more residents at New Hope then, and they helped raise the framed walls and roof. Opal and some friends dug the pit for the outhouse. But other than that, it was my mother’s project. The four-room cabin was built by her own seventy-year-old hands almost entirely from donated and salvaged materials. It seemed to me then, as she took me on my first tour of the place, to be more a work of art than a home. She proudly showed me the built-in shelves, the flooring from an old silo that Raven had helped her nail down, the flat slabs of granite rescued from the reject pile behind a polishing shed in Barre that now served as her kitchen countertops.
My mother, after years of living in the tepee and then in the loft of the big community barn, had made a home that was truly hers. It was to be her house to grow old in, tucked about three hundred feet behind the big barn, bordered on the back side by the sloping woods that led back down the hill, away from New Hope, right into the farmland once owned by the Griswolds.
LOOKING BACK on my last visit to New Hope, I found there were signs of my mother’s sickness even then. There had been little clues all along, but nothing that set off any alarms, rang any bells that would toll loud and clear with the weight of the words dementia, Alzheimer’s. She had seemed a bit more absentminded, more scattered. She repeated herself, forgot things I’d told her. She seemed preoccupied, a little on edge. I figured the strain of building the house was taking its toll. She was a seventy-year-old woman, after all.
During that visit two years ago, I learned that she’d wrecked her car and had decided not to get another one. When I asked what had happened, she said she was out for a drive and fell asleep behind the wheel. The car went off the road and into a drainage ditch. Luckily, she escaped with only minor bruising. It happened near Lancaster, New Hampshire.
“But what were you doing in Lancaster in the middle of the night?” I had asked. And she shrugged off the question. Later, Raven told me she’d been getting lost from time to time, finding herself farther and farther from home. Usually, she’d run out of gas and call Gabriel or Raven to come rescue her. She kept the New Hope numbers pinned to the Pontiac’s visor. My mother had known those numbers by heart for years. Her needing to pin them to her visor should have set off alarms, but it didn’t. Her body was strong and healthy enough to build a house. But her mind was going, and she must have felt it slipping away, memory by memory, beginning, perhaps, with something as simple as those phone numbers.
As I followed Raven through the front door into the living room, I saw that the inside of the house looked the way I remembered: the same overstuffed plum-colored couch, wooden rocking chair, and braided rug. To the left of the door was a bench to sit on while taking your shoes off and there was a row of coat pegs along the wall. Hung on it were a yellow rain slicker, a down parka, and a blaze-orange vest for walking in the woods during hunting season. No doubt about it—I was back in Vermont.
Walking forward and turning left into the kitchen, I saw the white enamel wood-burning cookstove and the round wooden table that had been with my mother since the tepee days. The door to my mother’s bedroom at the far end of the house was closed. Beside it, the door to her painting studio was ajar, and I caught a glimpse of the colorful canvases and the cot and dresser pushed against the far wall. The house smelled of wood smoke, oil paints, and the lavender lotion my mother used. Familiar smells that I couldn’t help but find comfort in.
What was different about the house were the notes tacked up everywhere—signs on white paper written in bright markers. On the inside of the front door: KATE, YOUR DAUGHTER, WILL BE HERE THIS AFTERNOON. And below it, someone had taped up a snapshot of me taken during my last visit. In the picture, I’m staring straight ahead, eyes heavy and sullen—a regular Wanted: Dead or Alive mugshot. I could picture the description now: crime of abandonment, reward offered.
There were several signs in red marker taped to the stove: STOP! DO NOT LIGHT! There were signs on all the cupboards saying what was in each one: DISHES, GLASSES, CEREAL. The phone on the wall had a list of names and numbers next to it. There was also a sign saying, DO NOT DIAL 911 UNLESS IT IS AN EMERGENCY! (I learned later from Raven that my mother had been calling 911 several times a day, asking whose house she was in, wanting to know if there was more yogurt anywhere.)
Magpie had been just a kitten when I last visited, a gift from Raven and Opal. Now she came trotting out of my mother’s studio and wound herself around my mother’s legs, doing little figure eights, loop de loops, a sleek little black-and-white thing. My mother picked up the cat, cooed at her and carried her over to the Servel gas
fridge.
“What’s for lunch?”
“You had your lunch, Jean,” Raven told her.
“What’d I have?”
“Grilled cheese.”
“What’s for supper?”
“You just had supper. Gabriel brought you stew.”
“I’m hungry,” my mother said, her voice whiny as a child’s. She unceremoniously dumped Magpie back onto the pine floor. “What’s for lunch?”
Raven ignored her. She opened the StarKist and plopped it into Magpie’s bowl on the kitchen counter. The cat danced around her feet now, saying “Murl?” again and again in a plaintive voice. My mother leaned in quickly and stuck her face into the cat’s bowl. She gulped at the tuna, getting a good bite before Raven yanked it away.
“I’ll fix you a sandwich, Jean. Now go sit down.” There was an edge to Raven’s voice I hadn’t expected—a touch of hostility. She gripped the edge of the counter and blew out a long breath.
My mother turned toward me. “They’re starving me,” she said. I just stared. Flakes of tuna were stuck to her face.
“I know you,” she said, smiling.
My stomach ached. I fought back the urge to run from the cabin, legs pinwheeling like a cartoon character’s, jump in the rental car, and hop the next plane back to Seattle. I hadn’t been close to my mother in years, but I knew her to be a bright, resourceful, dignified woman. This person who had replaced her was a complete stranger. My mother, it seemed, had vanished completely without my even noticing she was taking her leave. Ah, I realized, she’d pulled the same trick on me that I’d pulled on her. Touché.
LATER, after making my mother a sandwich, Raven and I put her to bed, then settled down on the living room couch. I longed for a stiff drink but knew there was nothing in the house. My mother had always frowned on alcohol—“Katydid, I will never understand why on earth you would want to dull your senses, the wits God gave you, with that stuff.”
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