by Lynne Hugo
The afternoon was settling. I could feel the change in the light, how it was mellowing. Ben had talked to me all afternoon, telling me stories about his family, and when he was a boy, and why he and Marilyn had settled on the Cape, after all. Throughout the hours, I had been torn between a guilty happiness—deciding my father’s name might be Ben rather than Bob—and a deep unease. Where was she? What was wrong? What would happen? Ben began his cleanup ritual.
“Well, sweetheart, I’m sure not going to leave you here,” he said finally. “We’ll put a note for your mother on the front door to let her know you’re at our house.” I knew perfectly well how Mother would take such a thing.
“Really, I’m fine here.”
“Ruth, I feel…responsible. There was a misunderstanding, and your mother’s feelings may have been hurt. And, even if that weren’t so, I’d not knowingly leave anyone’s child by herself at night.”
At that I simply couldn’t help it. I had no warning from within, but I couldn’t have held on anyway. Tears started out of my eyes.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” Ben said, and put his arms around me. I lay my head on his chest, and I do believe I would have sobbed there forever had I had a chance to start, but that was the moment Mother chose to drive up.
“I SEE NOW, MR. CHAUNCE, I SEE everything with total clarity.” She mocked the pronunciation of his name. “It was my daughter you wanted.” Even the car had sounded enraged as she slammed it to a gravel stop. She crossed the walkway in yesterday’s blue sundress looking terrible—haggard and distraught.
I watched Ben absorb her words and recoil. “Oh, my God, Elizabeth, no.”
She didn’t let him or me get any further. “Excuse me, but I’ve seen for myself.” Turning to me, she said icily, “Get inside.”
“Mother—”
“Now.”
She was furious, and it was my fault. I never should have made her look bad by accepting the care of an outsider. Worse, I had wanted it, I had sunk into his arms like a rock into the ocean.
“Please,” I began desperately. For a moment I thought there was hope. She glanced at me dismissively, but then it was as though something had occurred to her, and she turned to me fully and stared. She studied my face, and I thought she was going to listen. But revulsion crossed her features; she’d seen something and hated it.
“It was you, too, wasn’t it?” she said softly, only it wasn’t a question. “It didn’t take long.”
I stood there, confused as tangled thread, unable to follow her line. I knew I’d been wrong to lean into Ben’s comfort, but it seemed she was onto something else entirely. I had no idea what that was.
“What…I don’t know, I’m sorry Mother,” I was stammering.
Ben tried to intervene. “Look, Elizabeth, I’m not sure what you’re getting after here, but—”
“What I’m getting after? What I’m getting after? It was you, mister. It was what you were after all along.”
Ben appeared dumbfounded. He was trying to have a reasonable conversation with her, to straighten something out, but he didn’t know her.
“I’ll thank you to get out of here this minute,” she shot. “If you come around before we’re gone, I’ll make a police report.”
Ben shook his head and started to say something. She took a step toward him, her eyes dangerous as an animal about to attack. Ben extended his hand, spoke quietly, “Ruth, come with me.”
She exploded. “She’ll not step one foot with you, or any other man, no matter what she paints herself up to be. I’ll deal with my daughter. Get out.”
Ben was looking for my eyes, I could feel his on my face the way people look at something caged, something that can’t hide. I wouldn’t look at him. Mother would have seen me, and it would have made everything worse. “Please, it’s fine. We’ll be fine. It’s best you just go,” I said to the ground, terrified that he’d say something like “call me if you need help,” or something equally kind and disastrous.
He didn’t. I felt his eyes on the top of my head before he turned and walked away. I wanted to call “thank you, thank you so much, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry,” after him, but of course I didn’t.
He didn’t even pick up his equipment, just quietly turned and walked to his truck. Mother waited until the motor started and Ben made the U turn that would take him inland toward Route 6.
Then she turned to me. I opened my mouth to begin an apology. She raised her hand and I braced myself for a flame of pain and humiliation on one cheek, but it did not come. Instead she put her palm upright in a stop sign, which I took to mean I mustn’t speak. She turned and went into the house. Within a few minutes, she was throwing our belongings onto the back porch, and I knew vacation was over.
5
AFTER WE GOT BACK FROM TRURO, I began my junior year. I was on the young side of my class and didn’t turn sixteen until October. Mother made me wait until second semester to even take Driver’s Ed at school. I think she felt that after Roger got his license, he kept right on rolling and had ended up most of a continent away. In my secret heart, I knew this theory wasn’t all that off base.
Indeed, Roger’s absence left a frayed hole in the fabric of our existence. It seemed to me, too, that after we got back from Cape Cod, Mother had less to say about God. It might sound strange, but secretly tired as I had grown of how she usually insisted the most mundane events of life had a cosmic spiritual significance, the change frightened me. I couldn’t imagine Mother without that dimension to define and hold her together, and when she changed ketchup brands without reporting that God had led her to the store brand instead of Heinz, I actually found myself suggesting that perhaps it was His will. She shrugged, and I realized then that whatever is familiar is what we try to save, however strange or painful.
Am I making us out to be worse off than we were? I remind myself of how utterly I loved her, and how an approving smile, to say nothing of her laugh, was enough to live on for days. I know others felt her charisma—she never had trouble recruiting new students no matter where we moved—and by that I reassure myself: what I saw in her was real. I remember the early days, how her enthusiasm was like perfect, dry kindling for a winter fire, how her laughter warmed like a lit hearth. Expeditions to find used clothes and furniture were adventures; she could find life and beauty ordinary people had overlooked and thrown out. She’d warned me the world didn’t know or understand her; how could I know my heart’s doubts were anything but proof that I, too, was merely ordinary? That I, like outsiders, couldn’t see the Truth? Even as late as that fall, there was a string of October days clear and perfect as blue beads. One Sunday, we raked all the leaves for the Jensens just to have a reason to be outside. It was Mother, not I, who jumped in the pile and came up giggling, her hair spilling bright maple leaves. It was Mother who shouted, “Jump!” to me, clambering out of the way and shaping the pile of rustle back into a mound so I’d get the full effect. So how could the teacher who was supposed to discuss math, but instead told Mother how I was too old for my age: how could she have known what she was talking about? It was Mother who jumped in the leaves first. It was Mother, not I, who’d gotten us a half gallon of fresh-pressed cider and powdered sugar doughnuts and started us hooting with laughter at our bizarre white lips. You see? There were very sweet times, too. In the end they weren’t enough, but they were real.
GRANDMOTHER HAD BEEN calling with increasing frequency since we got back from the Cape at about the same time Mother seemed to be abandoning God (or vice versa: who knew?). She was disdainful of Jesus Christ, Superstar when it came to the little Malone movies. I’d thought she’d want to see it, but I was definitely wrong. She said the music was profane and disgusting when I borrowed the album from a girl at school.
I mentioned it to Roger when he came home for Christmas, but he, too, was unable to discern what was going on. His visit brightened Mother for a week before his arrival, but shortly after he arrived, she began to anticipate his departure and began a desc
ent back into gloom. I could tell Roger agonized with his own guilt, yet I never felt him truly waver about returning. I was angry and impressed in equal measure.
Roger returned to Colorado on January 2, and the winter of my failure to compensate for his absence slushed and lurched into a late spring. One day, I came home from school to find Mother in a frenzy of clothes, shoes and toiletries.
“We’re going to Seattle,” she announced. “Get packing.”
“Seattle?” I parroted dumbly, putting down my books.
“Your grandmother has to have help. She’s sick.”
This was treacherous ground. “Oh?” I was cautious.
“Is that all you can say? Don’t you care?”
“Of course I do. I’m sorry.” I was quick to add the automatic apology.
“Well, move it. We need to go tomorrow. It’ll take a good four days. You can help drive.”
“What about school?” I was supposed to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test in a week and a half.
“You can make it up.”
Another curve in the road. I’d not told her that I, too, wanted to go away to college, or that Mr. VanFrank was in there pushing me just as he had Roger. I stood in her bedroom like a tongue-tied four-year-old, fidgeting and twisting, and the little I finally got out was the closest to rebellion I’d yet come.
“I need to take my test.” I couldn’t look at her. When I checked my feet, the penny in one loafer was brighter than the other.
“What test?” she demanded, her face a cross between surprise and anger. I’d paid the fees out of babysitting money, and hadn’t found a way to even tell her I’d registered.
“My college test.”
“How can you be so self-centered? How? How?” she bore down on me. Then I saw there were tears in her eyes, and guilt claimed me again.
THE NEXT MORNING, I DIDN’T even call the school, although it was dawning on me that I’d probably not finish the year. Mother made mention of returning—if we were no longer needed then in Seattle—via Boulder and helping Roger get ready to come home. It was just mid-April and his semester ended May 15. My finals would be the last week of May, but I couldn’t imagine being prepared to take them even if we were back.
It took us until almost noon to pull out of town in Mother’s turquoise Rambler, her at the wheel and the small car almost groaning in dread. Mother had grossly overpacked, distractedly including all manner of objects for which she imagined we might develop a need. It seemed that we’d never return and I wondered if that was her intent, that we’d just abandon everything, leave the bills unpaid again and start over, but I knew it couldn’t be: although she’d brought her flute, she’d left behind our heritage, reboxed and in the window seat.
Through the afternoon, we pushed across upstate New York and across the northernmost tip of Pennsylvania on I-90. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see,” Mother sang. We slept in the car that first night just after crossing into Ohio, finally pulling into a rest stop, where we washed in the ladies’ room sink and bought snacks from a vending machine before cramping our bodies into the front (me) and the back (Mother) to sleep. I’d begun to realize that there would be no relief in the landscape, which was dreary and industrial, no school day for respite. I would be with Mother every minute, always, always found. I prayed, but Roger did not appear, nor, it seemed would God show up in any other form.
By the time we were approaching Chicago the next day, Mother had begun to talk a little. “Cancer,” she said at one rest stop. Later, while I was driving, she added, “in both lungs, and metastasized,” as though it were a sequitur, which it wasn’t, and as though I knew what metastasized meant.
“Oh,” I tried the cautious response again and got by with it this time. Perhaps it sounds inhuman of me, but remember, I didn’t know my grandmother, and Mother’s references to her were usually bitter, with a terrible, unfinished edge.
“Well, who knows what to believe. It’s not as though she hasn’t…” Her sentence trailed off suggestively. “We’ll see,” she finished, and fell silent. We spent the second night in a rest stop nearly indistinguishable from that of the previous evening, several hours west of Chicago. I was losing track of what state we were in at any given time, and was confused late the next day to see a sign announcing the number of miles to Sioux Falls, when Mother roused me, cottonmouthed and dazed, to take another turn driving, this time into a slanting glare of sun. We were no longer in Wisconsin, where I’d last paid attention, but nearly halfway across Minnesota. It made sense, though: I was stiff, and my eyes gritty, stinging with fatigue and worry. When Mother drove, the speedometer crept to over eighty on a fairly regular basis. I felt safer during my turns at the wheel, though the enormity of the trucks that would sometimes flank me on two sides made me clench the wheel, my hands cramping toward paralysis.
“For God’s sake, Ruth, get in the left lane if the trucks bother you. Then they’ll only be on one side of you. Pass him, will you? I’d like to arrive there before the end of the century,” she said more than once. If I let up on the speed too much—though I never dared drive as fast as she—she’d instinctively wake and instruct me to step on it, so I didn’t dare get in the right lane where I’d have been more comfortable; I’d never driven on a freeway until two days earlier.
It was late afternoon the next day before we left I-90 for the first time, at Kadoka, east of the Badlands. Certainly it wasn’t for sightseeing, although all day I’d been catching signs for astonishments like Badlands Petrified Forest, Black Hills this and Black Hills that, to say nothing of the town of Deadwood, which a billboard informed me has one street on the narrow floor of Deadwood Gulch while the town clings to the steep sides of the canyon. I wanted to see the dogtooth spar in Sitting Bull Crystal Cavern and Beautiful Rushmore Cave, but Mother had decided we would get a motel room, so we could shower and get a better rest. The hum and grind and relentlessness of the drive was, I believe, getting to her. We’d been stopping as little as possible, watching money closely, but we got to that point between exhaustion and giddiness and she let go of her single-mindedness.
For a while another dimension had entered the monotony, too. When I was driving, I got to pick the radio station. At first, I left it on the classical station to please her, but as we both became glazed by life in the car, I’d put it on a popular station while she slept and noticed she didn’t change it as soon as she opened her eyes. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” was hop-scotching to the top of the hit parade so, of course, it seemed Tony Orlando and Dawn were bopping ahead of us across the country toward some fanciful welcome. How soft was the tie that binds when it was yellow ribbon; how we kept time with our bodies, how even my hands let go the death grip on the steering wheel to tap out the beat. My mother singing and snapping her fingers to rock ’n’ roll? Is it any wonder I thought we’d crossed more than state borders?
We went into town in search of an inexpensive room, following what Mother thought was the route noted on a highway sign we’d seen, but apparently, she took a wrong turn. We found ourselves on a road that seemed headed out of town; the houses were suddenly spaced much more widely, and whole fields between them appeared vacant. Spring was greening the ground and underbrush, but the trees had only just begun to bud. Still, the afternoon was close to hot, in the unstable manner of late April.
Suddenly Mother slowed the car to a crawl. Ahead of us, in the middle of the road a small girl was hunched over the body of an animal. Mother pulled the car to the shoulder and got out. I followed.
“Are you all right?” she asked the child.
The little girl looked torn between running away and staying with a muskrat lying open-eyed and breathing across the dotted yellow line.
“Don’t be afraid,” Mother said, her voice low and kind. “We only stopped to see what was wrong. I know you’re probably not supposed to talk to strangers, and that’s good, but we won’t hurt you. What’s happened?” She leaned over to look
at the animal. The little girl, who looked perhaps seven or eight, shifted enormous brown eyes back down to the muskrat, whose dark, dull fur visibly rose and fell in rapid but steady breathing.
“She’s hurt, but she’s just resting. She’ll be fine. See? Her eyes are open and all,” the little girl said, eagerness winning over fear. She had on denim overalls, a red plaid blouse underneath.
Indeed, the muskrat’s eyes were open, though they didn’t appear to be seeing anything. I could have been wrong, though. What did I know about animal injuries? But the little girl was positive. She knew.
Mother reached toward the animal, which made no reactive flicker.
“Honey, I know it looks as though she’s just resting, but see, she’s hurt badly. She’s bleeding inside where you can’t see it. She’s not going to get well.”
“Yes, she will. See, she’s breathing and everything.”
“What’s your name, dear?”
“Gayla.”
“Well, Gayla, this little muskrat is hurt too badly to live. The thing is, she may be in a lot of pain. If we try to move her out of the road, she’s likely to bite us, because she’s wild, you know? The best thing we could do for her is to let her die quickly, so she won’t suffer or be afraid.”
“No, she’ll get well.” Gayla’s skin was so white it was translucent, with a smattering of light freckles over her nose. Her hair was a deep brunette, cropped short. Tears started in her eyes. I would have left it at that, maybe tried to work some cardboard under the animal, pull it to the side of the road, so that Gayla—I surmised she had no intention of leaving—would be safe, and go on. Maybe I would have asked for her phone number and stopped at a phone booth to try to call Gayla’s mother. But, then, maybe Gayla was in front of her own home. I don’t know what I would have done. But I wouldn’t have done what Mother did next. Not that I’m saying she was wrong. I don’t know about that. I just know I didn’t have the strength to swim upstream against what someone else wanted and needed with her most earnest being. Not then, anyway.