Today, I join the grand migration.
Three-quarters down the hall, Suzanne leads us through a doorway into a large gathering hall. Several rows of folding chairs face an empty area obviously meant for dancing and mingling. Across the dance floor, a man stands behind a folding table, sorting through a stack of CDs. He pulls one out, then places it into a player and presses a button to start the first selection.
It sounds like Appalachian porch music and I suddenly can’t determine if I’m a child or a grown woman. I conclude I’m much too young to be among this sea of gray-headed people.
Surely, I’ve been brought here by mistake.
I inch into a chair next to a window where a swath of light, wide and heavy, falls across my lap; I’m tiny under its weight. Still, the provocative music dives under my skin and lifts me. Lifts me.
Lifts me.
Slowly, I push the sun away from my legs and stand. I shuffle across the dance floor until I’m standing in front of a thumping music speaker. I look for my woman. She stands just inside the doorway watching me. I wave at her while I grab the arm of another woman, a stranger, who seems to be trying to shuffle her feet to the music.
“You’re doing it wrong. Here… here’s how you do it,” I say. I take her hands and together we sway and hop from side to side, trying to keep to the frantic guitar and banjo rhythm. It’s faster than our feet can manage, but we do all right.
When the song ends, I look again for my woman. She’s gone, but a small crowd of people move toward the dance floor as the music-playing man starts a Carter Family song. Slowly, beat by beat, it feels like home. I’m on my porch, swinging my feet to the rhythm of Pa’s guitar. I shuffle and wiggle and jump and hitch until the song ends. Hands touch mine. Faces with frozen smiles float into me.
I’m home. I’m home.
Over the next two hours, we dance to hillbilly jigs and modern country, with the likes of Glenn Miller, Little Richard, and Kenny G tossed in for good measure. Someone brings pitchers of lemonade and a stack of plastic cups for our thirsty mouths. A man tries to dance with me. He’s not my Ivan so I push at his startled chest and turn his gray head away. I don’t want him to look at me. I make a mental note to tell my woman to find my fan. A Southern lady never attends a dance without her fan to fend off approaching men.
I return to my seat several times trying to locate my dance card. It seems to be missing and I make another mental note to tell the woman with the big teeth that there are thieves about.
At noon we’re shuffled to another room where we’re served a hot lunch of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn and enough dark, lumpy gravy to drown most of Sacramento. I’m just finishing a piece of lemon cake when my woman taps my shoulder.
“You’re late for lunch,” I say.
“That’s okay,” my woman says. “Are you ready to go home?”
“Home?” I stutter. “I thought I was home.”
“No, but you can come back on Wednesday if you’d like.” Jewell’s voice gently pulls me from my chair.
“Oh, I need to come back. They’re counting on me to teach them more dancing steps.” I lean toward my woman and whisper into her ear, “They should serve wine with their meal, you know. These people really need to learn hospitality. And they’re such poor dancers.” I shake my head. My tongue tsks behind my teeth. “Terrible dancers, they are.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Night is horrid.
Night is the unwinding of everything known; every memory, every thought, is somehow fastened to the sinking sun and it makes me frantic. I want to run after what the sun drags down with it. I’m awkward and discordant and I don’t know what to do.
Every evening, I wander through the house muttering. Bring me back. Bring me back. My woman, the one whose name I now forget a thousand times over, watches me walk endless circles as if I’m a donkey with carrot stick memories dangling in front of me. Round and round I plod my circles, grinding wheat for a merciless master. Bring me back. Bring me back.
Sometimes she catches my hand up into hers; she walks with me like we’re schoolgirls headed home for the day. We hold hands and she makes up a traveling song which makes me smile as we circle from room to room. After a while, my woman unclasps her hand, leaving me to continue wandering a solitary path, my mouth feeling sad like my school chum is home, but I must continue on alone.
My woman is on the phone, but I’m so busy grinding the wheat to make the bread to feed the memories to grow the grain to make the wheat to make more bread, I pay no attention to what she’s doing. I figure she has her own carrot stick to follow.
Sometime later, when my legs are tired and my brain is nothing but sticky shards stuck together with bits of scotch-taped thoughts, my beloved Bryan comes to the door. He hauls a wooden rocker into the house and places it in the center of the living room. My woman looks on with a smile.
“What’s this for?” I ask.
My woman answers. “It’s for the soothing of you, ma’am. For the soothing of you.”
“Here, come sit down, Mom,” Bryan says, an eager smile spreading across his face. He pats the seat of the chair and looks at me like a boy who has just presented his mother with a wooden thing he has labored over for weeks in woodshop class.
The chair has neither a harness nor a carrot dangling from a stick, so I consider it safe. I run my fingers along the polished wood and then let my legs fold into the contour of the chair. It fits me and I fit it. My body rocks in rhythm to the words I still haven’t stopped muttering. Bring me back. Bring me back.
I slowly rock, allowing the chair to determine the length of each stroke. With this gentle movement, the mantra from my lips seems to melt into the delicate polish on the chair’s arms. John Milton the Cat jumps onto my lap; my hand falls absently across the soft roundness of his head. I look at nothing in particular and think of nothing more important than the perfect shape of a cat’s gray-muzzled face.
For one glorious moment, I am soothed.
Bryan smiles at me and my woman smiles at me and John Milton swoons beneath my hand. Sometime later, I stand without a word and carry the cat to bed.
I sleep well, getting up only once to circle through the house to try the doors and rattle the windows. Outside, rain slides down the gutters and patters across the drive. I barely notice the normal confusion of my footsteps across the carpet and I’m blessedly not compelled to cry out for help. On my second round, I realize there’s a new chair in the living room. When I run my hand across its back, there’s an oddness of familiarity I can’t quite make out. I want to ask my woman about the chair and if we’ll be adding more new pieces to the house, but she’s asleep. I finish my round of the house and slide back into my bed.
In the morning, my woman wakes me. She is smiling. Singing. She sings, Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire, as she tidies me for the day. She shakes her hips and I clap with delight.
When she’s done fixing me up for the day and the last note of her song is left to hang in the air, I ask my woman if she can keep a secret.
“A secret? Of course, ma’am. I’m good with secrets.”
“Then come with me,” I say. I take her hand and lead her to my closet where I pull down the letterbox.
“What a beautiful box,” she says, touching the smooth, fragrant cedar lid.
“My father made it.”
“Ah, well, then, all the more beautiful.” Jewell smiles. Her face is luminescent in the low light of the closet.
I shuffle through the papers and remove a letter from the box. “Can you read?” I ask, handing her the folded paper.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then read this to me. It’s mine… I… I wrote it, but now I’m… it’s getting hard for me to read my own handwriting. It’s a bit scrawling, as you can see. But… shhh… you mustn’t tell anyone I have you read for me. People think unkindly of the illiterate.”
“No one could possibly think unkindly of you, ma’am.” Jewell unfolds the letter with
gentle, practiced hands that seem to always smell of lemon oil and cinnamon toast. “Shall we go to the other room where the light is better?”
“No,” I say. “We stand here… here in the middle of the closet. We read right here in the center because this is where the memories are.”
“I see,” Jewell says. “Of course, then.” She settles the paper in her hands while I wait with my listening heart for the words of my memories. Jewell inhales and then begins to exhale words that hold me in rapture. She reads:
My dearest ones:
I don’t know how to write this letter. I’ve started and ended so many times, I’ve lost count. This is my final try, so I suppose I’ll just have to let whatever words that fall from my hand be as they will. I’m writing of when your father died. There! I said it.
We’ve never really talked about the day our lives ended. We’ve bumped against the issue many times. We’ve held each other and cried our plentiful tears, but we’ve never really talked it out. We’ve never talked about how we stood in that hospital emergency waiting room, wordlessly looking into one another’s eyes while doctors were in another room working madly (and in vain) to restart your father’s silent heart. I remember clutching our hands together, as if by doing so we could rearrange the thing that was really killing us.
After all this time, maybe we should let go of that day. But I don’t know how. There’s not been a time since that terrible day that your father hasn’t been part of every wakeful moment, alive in every conversation, the center in every speck of light.
It would be just like your father to still be part of everything. He always hated to be in the other room away from us, missing some bit of fun. We were like a four-stranded braid, your father always the central cord in everything. Always, always, he was with us.
On the day of his funeral, we stood in the rain, holding to each other, our heads touching, our stiff legs like a tripod, or a three-legged stool. It wouldn’t have taken much to tip us over, but we stood as well as we could, while the sky shuddered over our shoulders and ran down our coats. We formed our shaky goodbyes to your father as best we could, whispery and frightened beneath his graveside tent.
At the end of that day, after everyone left us to ourselves, after the food was put away and the sympathy cards were shuffled into a pile to take care of later, when we finally loosened our grasp of one another, we simply untwined and unraveled.
Without your father to hold us together, we had no idea how to braid ourselves together again. A bird doesn’t go far if the structure of its wings is too poor to fly. Your father served as the bones of our family and, as hard as we tried, we simply couldn’t fly without him.
When it came time for you to leave that evening, I watched your slumped backs as you walked down the driveway, hand in hand toward your cars. I watched you hug one last time, and then I watched you separate. I watched you split apart, your shadows breaking away, your hands releasing.
I was sad for you.
I stood in the doorway, alone, also breaking apart, with the light from the living room streaming across my back and casting my own lonely shadow to the ground.
I was sad for me too.
The failure of our bodies, our shadows, our hands, to hold tightly together was a great sadness we didn’t expect. How could we know that we should have stayed braided, that we shouldn’t have pulled inside ourselves, grieving, alone and separate, retreating from one another?
In that moment of parting—you two on the driveway, me in the doorway—it seemed we simply lost our senses. We each just flew off into our own dark nights. I’ve always wondered if you blamed me for your father’s death. I suppose that would be normal. Not right, of course, but understandable. I wonder if you still hold thoughts of what if.
As for me, all what ifs are gone. My own thoughts died with your father. I buried them. I took a rose and tucked every thought and dream I ever had inside its petals and I placed it in your father’s hands for safekeeping. I did that just before the casket was closed and wheeled from the mortuary to the gravesite. Then I took my handful of dirt and let it fall from the height of my hand to the depth of his death, sealing that act of releasing the total sum of myself for your father’s eternal safekeeping.
So everything—my thoughts and memories, my love, my dreams and desires—everything, is buried with your father in Space 243 at East Lawn Memorial Park.
We’ve come back a great deal since that horrid time. We have our dinners and clink our wine glasses together; we’ve done our best to re-twine into something—anything—resembling what we once were. We try. Sometimes we don’t do as well as other times. But we try.
I hope this discussion doesn’t upset you. It’s meant, rather, to give you some long-needed peace. We’re as whole as we can be now and that in itself is comfort.
It’s good!
I also hope you’ll not think unkindly of me for giving away my memories. When I gave them to your father for his care, I honestly didn’t think he’d keep them. I laugh now to think that if there’s anything you need from me after I’m gone, you’ll have to go first to East Lawn Memorial Park and look for your answers in Space 243.
All my deepest love,
Mother
Jewell refolds the letter and returns it to its place. Her eyes glisten. She places the box back on the shelf and then takes my hands up into hers.
“Oh, ma’am,” she says. “Oh, ma’am. What a beautiful letter for your children.”
“Good,” I say. “Letters should be beautiful. Now, do we have any red wine left?”
“Red wine?”
“Yes. I’d like some this morning with my eggs.”
Jewell laughs. “You know you’re off the sauce now, ma’am. It’s not good for you and what ails you.”
“I don’t know why my children gave you to me. You’re not at all gracious,” I say. “Not one little bit.”
“Yes, ma’am. Yes indeed, ma’am.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Here’s what I know: I know my children, although sometimes when their faces turn white and papery and moist with sadness, it seems I don’t quite know them at all; I know my woman and the dark whorls of her kind fingers, the low hum of her voice beneath all the scraping and whirring kitchen noises; I know scrambled eggs, although sometimes I forget the name of their color. Yellow! That’s it, yellow. I know the constant itching of my legs and how these beleaguered legs need to walk and walk and move and move until I rub and rub them into stillness and indifference.
I know my garden.
I know John Milton the Cat and how he slips into my bed each night to curl his lanky body next to the length of mine. I know my body, except for my hands. My hands confuse me. I know the rooms of my house and how they flow like one daydream into another; I know my rocking chair and its comfort on my neck and beneath the backs of my legs. I know the sound of my feet. I especially know the sound of my feet. My hair seems odd, but I know most of my face. I know my earlobes, the endlessness of a day, the sound of thunder, stars in the night that flash their tiny teeth like smiles over me.
I know my Ivan is waiting for me. Ma and Pa, too. It’s hard, but I’m trying to hurry toward them.
Here’s what I don’t know: everything, everything, everything else.
This morning, my woman leads me into the sparkling daylight of the garden. She says we’re going to have coffee and biscuits on the patio and sit quietly while birds peep at us, begging for crumbs to take into their little beaks. I clap my hands. Coffee with the garden birds is my favorite thing.
My woman is kind to me and she’s kind to little birds. I add that to my dwindling list of things I know.
The garden is agog with color and movement, light and shadow, deep thrumming sounds. Bees with heavy yellow legs haul themselves from flower to flower. Tomatoes hang low and weighty on the vine. It’s deep into summer and they’re plenty ripe for their destiny.
Sparrows and small little darkish
birds with yellow beaks and black eyes gather watchfully near our feet. They dart about on their little toes like dancers. Jewell pours my coffee and hands me a buttered biscuit. I pinch off a piece and toss it toward the birds. It doesn’t land quite far enough from my legs, causing the birds to shuffle sideways in complaint. Their tiny feet dance forward and then back again. Little mouths, like scissors, open and close to snip at a blue paper sky.
I toss out another piece of biscuit; the birds skitter about, a syncopated troupe. Together they move forward until they reach the edge of their stage: my feet, my legs, my knees. Every now and then, one tugs at his feathers like he’s adjusting his dancing costume.
I pitch out more crumbs, again and again. The birds flutter in and out, none brave enough to come under my feet, but still peeping hopefulness that the next toss will come their way.
Finally, I give up and look out over the garden. The heat of the day is already shimmering through the air. I say to my woman, “I need to pick the… um… the—”
“Vegetables?” My woman often finishes my sentences for me now. I think my children pay her for that service and I’m happy for it.
“Yes… vegetables,” I say. “They’ll spoil in this heat.”
“Yes, ma’am, they sure will. I’ll pick those for you right after our coffee. They can go in tonight’s dinner.”
“No. It’s my garden. I’ll do it.”
“Truly, I’d really like to do the picking,” she says. “Besides, I need to learn how to pick for the day when I’ll have my own garden.” Jewel smiles brightly. “You can sit here and tell me what to do.”
“You mean you don’t know how to pick?”
“No ma’am. It’s not something I’ve learned yet.”
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