by Lisa Samson
And Prisma always tells the truth.
“Here she is!” Prisma smiled as I straightened up to my towering, gargantuan four feet ten inches and turned to watch as willowy Flannery of the sweet, Celtic face and copious ponytails walked in. I sat down, and she joined me, her fair features and hands scrubbed free of the black streaks that had striped them earlier.
She sniffed the underarms of her T-shirt. “Man, I need a shower! I’m going to make your kitchen chairs filthy, Miss Prisma.”
“They needed a fresh coat of red lacquer anyway. I’ll get Asil to start on that this afternoon after he finishes pruning the azaleas.”
I sipped my tea. “Prisma, could you ask the blessing? I’m too tired.”
“Too many questions too, I’ll bet,” Prisma said.
I nodded.
“Bless the food, Jesus! And restore Lark’s life tenfold, amen.”
Tenfold? Lord, no! Don’t listen to her. Just like before is all I can handle.
I spooned some eggs and cream in my mouth, experiencing for the thousandth time Prisma’s heavenly gift of helping people accept their troubles, of easing their load. I suspect she believes in a direct correlation between blood flow in your arteries and the troubles of life.
Comfort. Prisma in a word.
Prisma poured herself some more coffee. “I’ll wash your clothes while you sleep, baby.”
“Are you sure? You don’t have to treat me like a regular around here, Prisma. Hopefully I won’t be around for long anyway.”
She set her cup onto her saucer. “You know, there could be worse things than coming home.”
“I can’t think of what. I’m forty-one years old, Prisma. I’m tired. I’m worried.”
“Then you don’t need to be worried about cooking your meals. Not with all the playing you do and the prayer line. And think about how nice it’s going to be to eat a good, hot supper before you get to the evening callers.”
“I need to get that phone line installed here. Temporarily at least.”
Right?
“I’ll call today. You can count on me to get that up and running by Monday!”
Did desperation heighten her voice? “Prisma, you’re the last person that needs to be afraid of atrophy.”
She pointed two fingers at me, raising her brows above the rim of her cup as she sipped. “Your mama doesn’t eat much, Lark, and since the doctor went and put her on that dictatorial ‘heart smart’ plan, old Prisma has been a ship without a shore!”
Prisma adrift? Never! “It sounds like you’re missing Daddy. Cocktails after work, little meatballs in sweet and sour sauce, pickled onions, and a bowl of cashews.”
“Every day, 6:30 spot-on he’d walk in that door. And he left his cares behind when he ate my food!”
Daddy was a good man, born and raised in Highlandtown, a neighborhood with blue-collared necks of Continental European descent. Polish, German, Irish. How someone named Summerville settled down there on Fait Avenue still mystifies me.
But Daddy always loved beautiful things, which explains why he swept my mother right off her feet, off the horse farm, and straight to Baltimore and his newly constructed house on Greenway. Charles Summerville, fifteen years older and wearing a suit with more distinction and grace than anyone had a right to, told a bushel basket of lies to convince her to even look his way. He claimed he hailed from an old family with old money. Indeed, “the Baltimore Summervilles” earned a fair share of renown in the railway boom, and Leslie just assumed. But my daddy built Summerville Machine Parts up with a thousand-dollar loan from Maryland National Bank and a million-dollar brain. The only reason she stuck with him after the golden band hugged her finger was the fact that he gave her carte blanche in decorating the mansion. And Paris twice a year to buy clothes to boot! Well, what self-respecting female could resist?
Daddy told Prisma once that marrying a Strawbridge topped the list of the best investments he’d ever made. A classy girl from a classy family. Oh, and so slim and pretty. And he didn’t mind the nutty accent either. “I’m surprised she stuck around with this old fool!” he used to say.
One lesson I glean from this story is that even a man as good as my father told one doozie of a lie. Like father like daughter, I guess.
I laid a hand on Flannery’s bony arm. “We’d better get to bed.”
“Are you kidding? I just got my second wind, Mom. I’m going to shower and get ready for my interview.”
Prisma touched my shoulder blade. “Come on, baby. I’ve got everything ready.”
She accompanied me up to my bedroom.
Oh, there it all lay before me. My window seat. My bed. True, Mother redecorated a bit, employing shades of mint and peach and pink and yellow, but everything was arranged just the same, and my bookshelf, now painted white, still cuddled my childhood books ranging from Little Golden Books’ The Three Bears in their Russian outfits to my first couple of Barbara Cartlands. What a dame! On top of the dresser rested a stack of four albums of the circus postcard collection I’ve been assembling ever since I found some in an antique shop in London on a trip Daddy planned for my thirteenth birthday. It would save though. At that point I just wanted to crawl between the sheets.
“This stuff’s been waitin’ for you.” Prisma fluffed the beautiful arrangement of peonies and larkspur Asil had placed on the dresser. That man. “You just sit, Lark. I’ll go get one of your mother’s old nightshirts for you to wear. I meant to do that earlier.”
Probably a Puritan, scratchy gown. Fine by me.
I perched on the window seat. My window overlooks the walled garden on the east end of the house. Though the sun had not yet risen, I pictured the entire back of the lot. Walled by stone with gateways on either side of the house, the gardens softened the exterior of this place.
“We’re a tough lot, us Summervilles,” Daddy always said. But a tenderness, like Asil’s gardens, surrounds us, I think. The house suits us.
Keep talking, Lark. Maybe you’ll convince yourself everything is going to be okay. Maybe you’ll convince yourself that you’re a Summerville at heart, enough to start acting like one again.
Through a freshly baking dawn, I could see Mother’s fruit trees displayed a few ornery petals, but the peonies cast their delight in an aromatic net of pinks and lavenders. Usually Mother arranges glorious bouquets of them all over the house by now. Why not this year? Her complexion looked positively Madame Tussaud as she slept there on the couch. And this “heart smart” thing Prisma talked about? Why did Mother need “heart smart” anythings?
I turned away and pulled down the comforter, vibing Prisma to come back soon. All I really wanted to do was cry. This wasn’t home, and sometimes I don’t feel like it ever was.
Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.
Oh, Jesus.
All sorts of Bible promises flared up, assuring me this would all end up for my good, but right then I just couldn’t see how. Sometimes those promises burn when first applied like any effective wound cleaner. Heavenly peroxide. Divine Bactine.
Personally, I think God could have used a little Neosporin on me this time and saved me from this pain I felt. God bless ointments.
Prisma paddled in with a pair of silk pajamas in cherry red.
My word, Mother! Red silk p.j.’s?
She placed them in my hands. “Now you slip these on while I go heat up a cup of milk for you.”
“With a little cinnamon on top?”
“Just a tad.”
We smiled into each other’s eyes, and I watched her until the door shut behind her. Why can’t I be like you, Prisma?
I slid into Mother’s pajamas, the silken fabric cooling me to a quivering mass, the arms flowing down past my fingertips, the legs four inches too long. And I flapped my arms, feeling foolish and small.
Flannery
GRANDY AND I ARE IN NEW YORK to shop for new clothes at Saks 5th Avenue. Not a moment too soon either, the fire being a week behind us now. We traveled by train yesterday and are stayi
ng at the Plaza. She sleeps so late these days so I’m doing something that would horrify her if she found out. Right now I am sneaking down to the NBC studios at Rockefeller Plaza to get my face on the Today show.
Sometimes I just crack myself up!
These two ladies park themselves directly in back of the railing, clutching a poster that says, “Mom’s on Vacation in the Big Apple.” The names of their kids are written all around on the cardboard.
I smile at them. They smile at me, and we talk about the street vendor coffee. I probably don’t have to tell you, but bad coffee brings people together just as efficiently as good coffee.
The crew in the studios wave to us from behind the plate glass, giving thumbs-up to my new lady friends.
I feel sorry for men sometimes. They don’t make friends nearly as quickly as we women do.
Grandy is getting her hair done at her favorite salon, and I’m bored. “How ’bout if I meet you at Saks just before lunch, Grandy?” I say.
“That’s fine, Sweet Pea. I’ll meet you by hats at one o’clock. I’ve been needing a new hat for church.”
“Okay then.” And I kiss her cheek, which feels like a deflated velvet balloon. The dryer warms my ear and neck.
Oh, wow. There are my Today show ladies. I see them in Saks buying barrettes.
They greet me enthusiastically, and I ask them how the vacation is going, telling them, “I’d like some specifics.”
“Great! We had dinner last night in Little Italy, lunch at an Irish pub, and we’re going down to Chinatown tonight.” The lady who speaks is a fake blonde, and she’s wearing these crazy, skewed glasses held together with glue. But she seems so happy, like, really different from my mother. She looks like one of those bird-looking ladies. A beaky nose and these piercing blue eyes. If she was a color, she’d definitely be Robin’s Egg Blue even though she has on nothing but black. “It’s not a good vacation if the food’s no good.”
The dark-headed lady laughs really loud, and she is very pretty and natural, more like a girl cat. I peg her as Golden Mustard with overtones of Olive. “We measure all our good times by the food we’ve eaten.”
“If we don’t have to cook it, we love to eat it!” the other lady says.
And then they ask all sorts of questions about me, oohing about my art hopes and saying how my hair is great and don’t they wish they still had the glossy hair and pert breasts of youth?
Um. Okay then.
“We’ve nursed seven babies between us,” says the dark-haired lady.
To be honest, the thought of breast-feeding gags me out, but I don’t want to besmirch that which makes them so obviously proud.
We are eating dinner at the Rainbow Room looking out over the monoliths of the city. I ask Grandy if she nursed my mother.
“Oh yes. It’s much better for the babies.”
“Wow, Grandy. Did Mom nurse me?”
“Yes. You were a good little nurser.”
It is nothing I’ve ever thought to ask before, but I’m sort of glad I’m finding this out. I don’t think mothers should be far from their babies while they’re still babies. But I know that’s not a progressive way to think; I just know from experience. And most of my friends can hardly remember how long ago they had been given a key to the house either. But a lot of their moms have a choice. Lark Summerville bowed and swayed under the tragedy of my dad’s death. But she never buckled. Not until I had gone off. There were times I bet she thought her knees would bend too far and she’d fall over and take me with her. I look at her now and am amazed she was able to keep from going into the deep end for so long. I mean, she tries. And she makes herself do the basic-necessity things outside the house.
Mom wanted to be a concert organist when she went off to college, before she married Daddy and then got pregnant with me right away. I guess I ruined it for her, but she’s never said that. She says at least once a month, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” And I believe her.
I hate to see what’s been happening to her since I went away to college. Don’t get me wrong. She’s always been a reclusive sort, but she used to have a real job too, before she started receding into herself even further. Mom had been a manicurist since I was four because it gave her time for me even if we had to scrape along.
Then the organist job came along too, and I’d go with her and feel so proud, the notes running over, under, and through her as she glistened under the intensity of the song. Even now she is transformed from a childlike woman to a musical entity all her own. You almost forget she’s there, her sound is so all-consuming. I’m so proud of her.
I wish I could convince her of it. And in my deepest, craziest dreams I imagine someone from Carnegie Hall coming in, hearing her play, running up to her after the service and saying, “You must audition. I’ve never heard anyone play like you!”
Like Carnegie Hall sends people around even saying anything, let alone something like that!
But I hope that happens or something like it. I really do. Mom deserves that. She deserves something, that’s for sure, especially since the fire last week. But if widespread musical success came her way, I’m scared she either won’t recognize it or will go running off in a fright. After “San Francisco,” as we call the brief years with my father, I think she believes she cashed in all of life’s chances.
And then when she totaled the car, I think she took it as a direct sign from God or something that she needed to stay put in the neighborhood as much as possible. That’s when she quit her job at the nail salon too.
But who knows with Mom?
Sometimes I think I’ve got her sort of figured out, and then I realize my mother is one of those mysterious people no one can ever really know.
I don’t remember much about my father except a vague memory or two of him racing his motorcycle down the parking lot of our apartment complex in California, looking like a greaser. Really, really blond hair tangling like silken strips in the wind. Nobody wants to talk about him now and his parents, my other grandparents, never made an effort to keep in contact after he died, so I just say “poop on them.” And anyway, they moved to Pittsburgh years ago.
Mom’s never even taken me to his grave.
“Why bother with that, Flannery? Why go all the way out west to see a square of land that might be anywhere?”
She doesn’t say that with bitterness but with sadness and regret, and because of that, I forgive her for not realizing how important that is to me.
See, forgiveness is a big deal with me. I mean, years ago, when I was in kindergarten, I had this nice teacher named Mrs. Danaher. She taught me all about God forgiving us of our sins and how that is all really basic if you have any sort of faith. And all these years later, I’ve found her to be exactly right about it all. Someday, though, I’ll sit next to where my father lies and tell him all sorts of things.
Over dessert I fill Grandy in on the news Prisma gave me when I called home earlier today.
“Well, I got that job at Starbucks over in Towson.”
“Did you? That’s a coffee shop, isn’t it?”
“Sort of. They call them coffee bars now.”
“Oh my. Terrible when a bar becomes more admirable than a shop.”
I laugh. “Grandy, only you would have thought of it like that.”
“Why, thank you, dear.”
Leslie
PRISMA FINALLY STOPPED PESTERING ME regarding my drives out to the wooded hills of Dulaney Valley to ride every day this week. “What about your heart, Mrs. Summerville?”
My stars. I love riding, and I refuse to lay aside the reins. Virginia horse-country girls refuse to give it all up at the first ache or pain. My father, John Clarence Strawbridge, rode as usual the morning he died of a massive stroke at age eighty-seven. Larger than life, that man! Not that I knew him all that well, really, the way he spent most of his time on the thoroughbred circuit, but my genetics render a bit of hope for this seventy-one-year-old body.
Not
that I’d admit that out loud!
You know those ghastly, silly women who clam up when the conversation rolls around to age? Count me among them.
“Leslie Lee, for heaven’s sake,” I can hear Mama say, “when the subject of age rolls around, excuse yourself from the room, or do your best to change the subject!”
And so I sit there like some foolish Mona Lisa, hoping to be taken for mysterious, but realistic enough to know the main thought in the back of the other people’s minds. “Who does she think she’s kidding?”
A beautiful man named Jacob Marley, as in A Christmas Carol, works at the stables. A bit younger than me—actually, quite a bit younger than me, truth to tell—this forty-nine-year-old doesn’t look a day over forty.
“Let me help you up, Leslie.” His voice, raspy from all the Lucky Strikes he’s smoked over the years, abrades my memory. Frankly, it surprises me they still make that brand. Seems utterly World War II if you ask me. And why ever did they not return to the green pack? The white pack projects an utterly flaccid appearance to me. Namby-pamby, in Charles’s terms.
I’ve been climbing onto horses since I was big enough to walk, but when Jacob cupped his hand, my boot found it gladly. Jacob’s large, strong hand provided surprisingly solid footing, and up I went! I must say, the little thrill that tripped along my spine reminded of the time a furiously courting Charles patted my hindquarters as we climbed into the seats of the Ferris wheel at the Virginia State Fair. Beneath Charles’s businesslike exterior churned nothing but Marshmallow Fluff and peanut butter.
Now Mama would surely wonder about my attraction to men beneath my class. Not that Jacob Marley presents anything more than a pretty face, truth to tell. I played quite the game of charades, a yearlong game of charades, to keep up Charles’s lie, over on the Mayflower and such. For if I had made Libby Lee Strawbridge aware of the truth back then, well, her grave would have welcomed her gracious bones long before the lung cancer escorted her there two decades ago. She puffed to the end, my mama, refusing treatment, lying at home in her blasted boudoir with her two best friends Misters Daniel and Smirnoff. Prisma related just yesterday that Larkspur ate half a gallon of lime sherbet at one sitting. At eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning! And she watched that ghastly Baywatch all the while. Living up to her fullest potential? Surely not.