Perhaps my mother was having a poet’s flight of fancy. She is always finding things on the shore or in the lagoon and bringing them into the house to dry, rocks and shells and starfish. She sometimes brings things home from the sea that we don’t recognize. Odd bits of sponge and sea life. Then she names them. And in that moment we all believe her. It is mermaid hair, seahorse halter, Persephone weed, your father.
This is always how I thought she found us. Washed up on shore. Carrying us home in her pockets. Jane, Maya, Max, Hershel. That she is enough in herself alone to have made us. That she has dreamt us into being.
And now I think she has found this man and decided to give us a father to view. She has found him on the rocks, aired him out, brought him into our house, and will later return him to the sea. This feels right to me and I return him happily there myself. I don’t need this father, I want to say to her. I am happy with things as they are. You don’t have to scrounge one from the sea to satisfy me.
I am thinking these thoughts and staring out the window when I see a woman making her way across the beach to our house. It is Mrs. Merriweather from the church. Finally she reaches our door and knocks on it and my mother answers. Mrs. Merriweather has news! She doesn’t know my mother very well but they both know Mrs. Parks. Mrs. Parks has had a thrombosis!
“My heavens, when did this occur?” asks my mother, always concerned for the sick and dying. She writes them poems when there is nothing else to be done.
“Nobody knows exactly when it occurred,” says Mrs. Merriweather. She is eyeing the big plate of just-made oatmeal cookies on our kitchen table. She sits down and eats three rapidly as if afraid that at any moment we will tell her to stop.
When she speaks again it is with a full mouth. “But she noticed it early this morning when she was out with her geese.”
“Those geese would cause anyone to thrombose,” says my mother, sitting down and eating a cookie herself.
“They are evil birds. All birds are evil as far as I’m concerned, but geese are the most evil. Bad intentions bespeak bad hearts, and geese come at you and bite. Well, anyway, I would be happy to stay with Mrs. Parks—she’s taken a notion that the thing may travel up to her brain and snap out her lights like this!” Mrs. Merriweather snaps her fingers to demonstrate.
“My, my,” says my mother. She has laundry on the line, and a look at the sky tells us it might have to be taken down anytime soon, but you don’t leave a neighbor to have her lights snapped out by a wandering thrombosis over a trifle like clean clothes.
“I would normally be happy to stay with her and keep watch for any unusual brain activity, but you know it’s strawberry season and I’ve promised to drive up to Maine today with some for my sister Beatrice.”
“Is she jamming?” asks my mother. “I am making strawberry jam myself this week.”
“It isn’t just that, my dear. I wouldn’t leave Mrs. Parks for that. No, it’s that I promised her berries. Their strawberries are no good up there. It’s a queer dark tree-laden state. Full of old lumberjacks and bears and those dark, tart blueberries. Not like here, where our sweet little strawberries grow.”
“All they have are bitter berries,” agrees my mother.
Mrs. Merriweather nods, thankful that my mother understands. They are fast becoming friends. “No…flavor…a-tall,” whispers Mrs. Merriweather as if to seal their friendship with a conspiracy. “Now, I don’t like to be a fussbudget but even if I took the day shift with Mrs. Parks and drove up tonight like the very devil, I’m afraid those berries when I got them to her would be mush. They’re already picked at their peak. You know berries. But, of course, if this is not convenient for you, what with the children…”
“The children can come with me. Or Jane can watch them here. But I think they should come. They might cheer up Mrs. Parks. Perhaps they could take turns reading to her. Or rub her feet.”
Maya and Max and Hershel look a bit wild-eyed at that. We are hovering in the background, waiting for the upshot of this visit.
“I’ll come back for the night shift, then, dearie. I will be late but I will be here,” says Mrs. Merriweather.
“I’m sure you’re one hundred percent reliable,” says my mother, and shakes Mrs. Merriweather’s hand, which seems at once an oddly formal and a too intimate gesture. She is overcome by emotion at the thought of Mrs. Merriweather’s goodness. Of her own.
“Summer storms are so fierce,” says my mother as she finds her purse. Mrs. Merriweather nods. I know my mother is thinking of the laundry again and whether or not to take it off the line before we go. Mrs. Merriweather does not know why my mother is talking about storms. Mrs. Merriweather nods and smiles all the same. My mother is doing her a great favor.
“I don’t want our underwear carried out to sea,” my mother goes on.
“Well, no, of course you wouldn’t. Of course you wouldn’t want that,” says Mrs. Merriweather, hustling us all out the door. She is passionately agreeable in her hurry to get us to Mrs. Parks’s.
“No, let’s leave the laundry where it is,” says my mother as we start across the beach for the parking lot and Mrs. Merriweather’s car. It is always a treat to get a car ride. “Let’s be optimists.”
“I like your attitude,” says Mrs. Merriweather, huffing and puffing as her feet sink, leaving deep prints in the sand.
Mrs. Parks’s house is a grim, old, narrow, gray thing, as parched and slit-eyed and suspicious-looking as Mrs. Parks. I do not know Mrs. Parks well, only from church and the looks she gives me or Maya or my brothers if we wiggle too much during the service.
My mother has brought a basket of her good lettuce for Mrs. Parks. When she opens the door, I can see that she needs stronger measures of hope than even my mother’s lettuce can provide.
“I’M DYING!” Mrs. Parks cries. She grabs my mother around the neck and propels her down the steps.
“Oh no!” says my mother, who has not anticipated being sucked into such a climactic occurrence quite so early in the visit. “Oh no.”
“It’s only a matter of time before THE THROMBOSIS REACHES MY BRAIN!”
“Mrs. PARKS!” shouts my mother. “Why has Dr. Callahan not put you in the hospital? Oh my lord, what is he doing? He mustn’t let you die like this!”
It turns out this is Mrs. Parks’s way of thinking as well. She explains that Dr. Callahan has not put her in the hospital because her illness is too boring.
“Well, it isn’t boring for you,” says my mother in her most supportive manner.
“They’re all the same, these doctors. They want young patients with interesting illnesses. People whom it makes sense to save. Suppose he saves me? So what? It won’t be long before I just up and die of something else, that’s the way he looks at it. I’m eighty years old. When you’re eighty they whisper, Well, if you won’t tell anyone you’re thrombosing, Mrs. Parks, I won’t either.”
“Oh no. To say such a thing to you!” declares my mother.
“Or something like that,” says Mrs. Parks, looking shifty-eyed. “He told me Mrs. Nasters has cancer, but he sent her to the hospital because she’s got an interesting illness. They can all stand around and stare at her.”
“I’m sure they’re not going to stare at Mrs. Nasters. She wouldn’t stand for it,” says my mother. “What is happening to our congregation? Both you and Mrs. Nasters struck down in the prime of life.”
We all look a little startled at this statement, but especially Mrs. Parks.
I think what it will mean to have both Mrs. Nasters and Mrs. Parks missing from church on Sunday. They wear hats with fruit on them. When I get bored I stare at their fruited hats. I wonder if we can convince some of the younger old ladies to take up fruited straw hats. Like passing the torch. Or will they regard this as some kind of next-inline-for-the-tomb designation? My mother wears a straw hat to guard against the sun but her hat is fruitless. I think sadly of her in old age, adding every year a cherry.
“He hardly talked about my thr
ombosis with me. He had no interest. He just wanted to gossip as usual. As if nothing much were wrong!” says Mrs. Parks.
Dr. Callahan is the only doctor in our small Massachusetts town and the clearinghouse for a lot of gossip. My mother says we don’t even need a newspaper with Dr. Callahan around.
“He sent me home to die but I’m not going to do it,” says Mrs. Parks.
“Good for you,” says my mother.
“I’m going to go visit my sister in California instead.”
“Well, that seems like a better plan,” says my mother, putting down her basket and folding her hands. She still has Mrs. Parks draped around her neck like a barnacle.
“He doesn’t think so. He says not to take an airplane unless I want my leg to explode!”
“Oh dear,” says my mother, trying to disengage herself gently from Mrs. Parks’s grip. I know she is just trying to keep from being strangled but the timing is unfortunate because now it looks as if she is afraid Mrs. Parks will explode on her.
“So you gotta drive me,” says Mrs. Parks. “We must leave right now. Who knows how long it takes to get there—all the way across the country—and how long I’ve got? We mustn’t put it off. We must seize the day.”
Mrs. Parks hustles us out the front door, locking it as she goes, and herds us to her ancient car, where she pushes the four of us children willy-nilly into the backseat with no regard for the natural pecking order. Thus I end up without a window.
My mother looks uncertain as Mrs. Parks tosses her the keys. My mother doesn’t often drive but I don’t think that is wholly what is bothering her. She debates quite often the efficacy of her good deeds and I think this is what she would like to do now except that the answer seems pretty clear-cut. Here is someone dying who has told her exactly what my mother can do for her. How can she refuse? Even with laundry on the line? So she puts Mrs. Parks in the front passenger seat, where she can pass her gum and climbs into the driver’s seat.
We drive like lightning all day, stopping now and then for food and bathroom breaks. All of us children are mesmerized by the big wide world to either side of the interstate. Mrs. Parks snoozes off and on and Hershel asks considerately from time to time, “Are you dead yet?” but she never is.
“But thank you for asking,” she answers.
My mother tells Hershel to stop asking Mrs. Parks if she is dead but Mrs. Parks says it is okay. Like Mrs. Merriweather, she is bowled over by my mother’s easy accommodation to her needs. As if contagious, it brings out an uncharacteristic affability in her. And I think, We affect people around us so much with our moods. A depressed person can make a room gloomy and a sweet nature can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb. I think how lucky we children are to have randomly landed a mother who inspires a spirit of goodwill. Then I crawl over Hershel to take his window seat.
Halfway across the state and halfway into the night we stop at one of the restaurants perched on overpasses crossing the interstate. They seem to look down on us with their large glassed-in eyes, beckoning us up for saltwater taffy and pecan logs. Mrs. Parks buys a bag of saltwater taffy and we amble out to the parking lot overlooking the highway while my mother uses the restroom. We are all chewing thoughtfully and looking down at the tops of cars when Mrs. Parks decides she has had enough.
“I don’t like all these freeways and their big trucks,” she says to my mother on her return.
My brothers spit on the backs of trucks, like huge migrating animals, rushing on below. All the lovely colors of the taffy lull me. I am sleepy. I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks’s hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers’ heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.
We get in the car and start driving back the way we came, hurrying down the highway. Going through a tunnel of dark, it is as if the car is going through the birth passage, being born to morning light, bearing the gift of saltwater taffy and the soft, unbloomed hearts of my brothers and sister and the worn, hopeful hearts of my mother and Mrs. Parks and my own heart, buzzing with the excitement of the night, full of want.
“And I was getting tired of sitting. I was getting a sore bottom,” Mrs. Parks explains further now that we are headed home.
“But I thought you wanted to see your sister,” says my mother. Then she looks at Mrs. Parks and sighs and realizes what a useless thing she has said. Mrs. Parks wanted to see her sister and now she doesn’t. It is as simple as that.
Mrs. Parks keeps rotating in her seat and offering us the bag of saltwater taffy. We only take one or two pieces each because she has paid for it. We have all slept but my mother, who has driven most of the night.
When we pull up at Mrs. Parks’s house Mrs. Merriweather is standing in the doorway looking worried. We have forgotten even to leave a note. But she is so relieved, she is not angry, and she makes us eggs and Mrs. Parks smiles all through breakfast and says she feels much better.
As we prepare to depart through the kitchen door, Mrs. Parks gives Hershel the rest of the saltwater taffy. She has decided she doesn’t like it after all, she says, but I think she is just relinquishing the last of the adventure. She is done with all that. She helps Mrs. Merriweather put the dishes in the dishwasher. She doesn’t think Mrs. Merriweather is doing it right. Through the open door I see Max being bitten by one of the geese and my mother kicking it in the nose. The goose’s beak bleeds. I did not know that if you kicked a goose it would bleed. It is disconcerting. The geese are so mean they look as if something else should be running through their veins, something vile and milky. Not blood like my own. I shove Maya the rest of the way out the door and we join my mother, Hershel and Max.
Mrs. Parks comes to the door again to wave goodbye and asks what has happened to the goose. She is staring at its bloody beak. My mother says she doesn’t know. I don’t think she is trying to cover up her action. I think she is too tired to explain.
We walk home because Mrs. Merriweather is too busy keeping an eye on Mrs. Parks’s thrombosis to drive us, but the thrombosis seems so long ago and beside the point that we want to tell her it is ancient history. Mrs. Parks is cranky but content now. She has not stayed around to die. She has gone to visit her sister even if she never got there. She has gone into the night and bought snacks. She has found out she can still have adventures. But Mrs. Merriweather probably wouldn’t understand this. She was busy at her sister’s bringing berries. She has had another sort of day and will never know ours. Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know. I see all those millions of different days crowded into the one.
Max says he sees a whale even though we haven’t reached the beach yet and cannot see the ocean. When we get past the parking lot, my mother carries Maya across the sand because she is too tired to walk and puts her to bed. But my mother does not go to bed immediately herself, even though she has not slept. The sun is just over the horizon and the waves are gently sparkling and she and I get the laundry off the line. “Look at this, Jane,” she says to me. “The clothes are all dry. They smell like the night.” She gathers them into her arms. “We didn’t have a storm after all. We were spared it.” And she goes back into the house to rest a bit before seeing what the new day will bring.
Delivering Bibles by Balloon
My Third Adventure
It is Sunday. Nellie Phipps exhorts the congregation to pray for the speedy recovery of Mrs. Parks. We pray for the other folks in town, and then, says Nellie, we are to pray especially for Mrs. Nasters and her cancer. It is exactly what Mrs. Parks complained about. Why should Mrs. Nasters be given special consideration? And so I refuse to pray for Mrs. Nasters. Mrs. Parks has put me and our fami
ly firmly on her side with her underrated illness. But Nellie’s sermon is about positive energy and positive thoughts and how these things affect our lives and I begin to worry about whether such closing of my heart to Mrs. Nasters’s cancer will have bad effects on my adventures.
I know Nellie believes in miracles—miraculous healings, mystical events. I would like to know if these things exist too. I pray for a sign. If such things can be, then let me see a circle of purple light against the sky.
I decide to ask Nellie about these things. I also want to ask her what she thinks about my not praying for Mrs. Nasters. If that is what she means by negative energy.
At the door of the church as Nellie is shaking hands and kissing babies I grab her proffered hand and hang on to it as to a lifeline. “I have a question, Miss Phipps,” I say. “A question about energy.”
“Later, Jane Fielding,” she says. “I’ve got hands to shake.”
“Please, it’s pressing,” I say.
“You just think it’s a pressing question,” says Nellie Phipps. “Now go out and enjoy your youth. Young people don’t have pressing issues.”
There is something wrong with me, then. I feel nothing but a kind of insistent pressing. As if there is an understanding I must move toward or into.
“Please,” I say.
“Be young, Jane,” she says encouragingly. She picks up one of the lilies that decorate the church and waves it from side to side. “Be like a lily. A lily. They toil not.”
She twirls it in her hand.
“Neither do they spin,” growls an old lady, squeezing by. She has been in line to shake hands and I have held her up. She gives up on shaking hands and heads grumpily down the steps instead.
“Can we talk after you’re done?” I ask.
“Go! Go wait in the Sunday school room if you must,” Nellie says. “And consider the lilies. They have no pressing questions. They’re very ding-dong positive.”
My One Hundred Adventures Page 2