Of course, not being around them, Red and my sister, except on those rare weekends home, where the subtexts of my return overpowered any attempt to sit and talk, I didn’t know how they were really doing. I did watch them once, from the doorway of my parents’ house, on a later visit, standing by their late-model Volvo, having what looked to be a fight. This was five years ago, when I’d been more or less reinstated as acceptable because of my changed status to “widow.” The boys, then twelve and thirteen, had waited on the sidewalk, hands in their Sunday trouser pockets, looking around casually, as if they weren’t overhearing their parents argue. Red was leaning with his back against the passenger door, facing the house, his arms folded across his chest, looking defensive. My sister, angry, moved her mouth and flung her arms in the air in frustration. When she abruptly turned her back to him, I could see her wipe her eyes and straighten the belt on her sleeveless saffron linen dress. Then she gathered the boys together and hurried them all into the house.
“Hello, Ella.” Red spoke in that easy way he always had, as if he’d just seen me yesterday. “You’re looking good.”
“Hey, sweetie.” Terrell had given me a hasty hug, her eyes glittery with recent tears. “We were just having a family conference. Too much weekend company, I think. I’m frayed at the edges.” She held me at arm’s length, checking me out. “You look good. Blue’s your color.”
Still, it never dawned on me that the two of them might be having real trouble, serious trouble. Couples had words by the car just the same as they had words in the backyard or the bedroom. That was the nature of living together. It hadn’t occurred to me that Terrell might really mean to leave him.
“Be careful,” I’d told her on that January phone call. And I guess I wasn’t thinking of her plane ride.
Austin
6
It seemed strange, waiting on my parents’ porch like a caller, a visitor, a bouquet of old roses in my arms. I felt homesick, if not exactly for the yellow frame two-story, my growing-up home, then for the girls my sister and I had been here. For the time when we were the children of this house in its familiar, settled neighborhood west of downtown, on a limestone bluff above a creek.
Henry had cut and wrapped for me a selection of his finest roses, an armful of almost unbearable fragrance and melting hues. I held them as an offering.
“Aren’t you going to ring the doorbell?” Birdie asked. “Mom?”
I stood, hesitating in the harsh heat. “Yes,” I told her, and I did. I rang the doorbell of my mother’s house.
Daddy welcomed us inside, dressed as he always was at home, in a pressed blue dress shirt (damp across his back), long khaki pants (damp across the seat from working all day at his desk), house slippers with felt insides.
“Guten Tag,” he said, hurrying us into the cool hallway.
“Bonjour.” I kissed his whiskered cheek. He looked older, more stooped, as if the wind had been knocked out of his sails. Perhaps I hadn’t been too observant in January at the funeral.
Birdie stood to one side, lugging the strapped suitcase we shared. Because direct flights between New Orleans and Austin were scarce, we’d opted to fly through Houston, two short hops on Southwest Airlines, and so packed for an overnight visit.
“You’re supposed to say ‘Hi,’ ” Daddy told her, winking and taking the heavy bag.
“Hi,” she said agreeably.
“Your mother will be along shortly, Ella.” He moved us into the living room. “Sorry to make you girls take a cab, but our old bones and our old car in this heat—”
“Did you know I play the cello, Granddaddy?” Birdie asked him, grabbing his elbow to get his attention. “In the String Project?”
“I believe I heard that.”
“My mom says you have a lot of music. Can I see?”
“Well, now, let’s have a look. I might happen to have a few CDs to your liking.” He led her along. “Your mother reports you’ve made a change in your name.”
“Robin is still my real name, but my friends and everybody call me Birdie, because that’s what I like.”
“What do you reckon they call you at your granddad’s house?”
Birdie giggled. She looked up (half a mile) at my daddy, and, imitating his pitch exactly, boomed, “ ‘Hey, Girlie.’ ”
Daddy laughed out loud, something I hadn’t seen in years, and, putting a hand on her shoulder, led her into his book-lined library.
Left alone, I felt rooted to the spot, short of breath. I peeled back the tissue paper so the roses could breathe. The living room seemed to be someone else’s. I felt the way you do waiting in a school friend’s house, looking all around at the matching stuff, wondering what it would be like to live in a place like this, what people who lived like this did, what they said to one another. The paired green chairs, the facing flowered sofas, the matted bird prints behind non-glare glass, the egg-yolk-yellow walls, the apple-green rug. Had I really lived here?
My cradled roses, each cupped and sumptuous bloom as old as history, in here seemed faded, shabby.
“My dear,” my mother murmured, sweeping into the bright room, wearing an appliquéd cotton sweater over a green shell and slim slacks. “I’m sorry not to be here the moment—I assumed you had your bags to wait for, and the awful taxicab ride your dad insisted on …”
“How nice you look,” I said, handing her the roses.
“Why, what’s this?” She brightened and pecked my cheek. “From your garden, Ella. Isn’t that thoughtful. We haven’t had enough flowers to—I quite gave up on my azaleas this spring.” She held the bouquet away from her and headed for the kitchen in search of a vase. “Perhaps in the guest bath? I have pink guest towels somewhere.” She peered at me while she put them in tap water. “I suppose shorts do make sense in this heat. But on an airplane—? Well, your generation—” She studied the effect, frowned, and headed for the small guest bathroom that I remembered as cloying in its mingled scents of the soaps and sachets to which professors’ wives fell heir. “Where’s your girl?” she asked when she returned.
“She’s with Daddy in the library. They’re talking music.”
Tears came to my mother’s eyes. “Did you know this, Ella? Robin was the name your sister liked the best. I’m sure if she’d had a daughter … She used to ask me, when she was just a little thing, could she change her name to Robin? I’d always scold her: Terrell is a good family name.” She pinched her nose with her fingers and smoothed the line between her eyes. “What could it have mattered?”
“She’s called Birdie in school.”
“Well, a nickname like that won’t last, now will it?” She called toward the open doorway. “Judah?”
Daddy came at once, with my daughter in tow. “Agatha, do you recall that our granddaughter plays the cello?”
Mother nodded, still shaken. “Terrell, you remember, had a fine proficiency at the piano by that age. Musical talent runs in our family.” She squinted at Birdie. “Did you have all that hair the last time you were here? I can’t think … it must be dreadfully hot.”
While I stood there, trying to keep my anger in check, Birdie walked up to her grandmother and held out her hand. “My mom and I always pull our hair back for public occasions. I imagine you used to do that.” She stared up at my mother’s cropped, once-auburn hair, now a mix of cinnamon and tan.
“Well, Robin,” Mother said, “I believe that perhaps while you are visiting here …”
“She wants a nickname,” my daddy said, “then Birdie it is.” He offered the opinion that young people were not so preoccupied with names as many of the older generation. “My dad,” he told my daughter, “gave me and my brother Bible names, strong names with a prophecy to them. Take Judah, my name, he’s the one people will gather round and praise. Take my brother, Reuben, he’s the one given dignity and power. Now is it any surprise I turned out to be a teacher, and my brother a judge back in Ector County? And Agatha, your grandmother, she plucked names from her family tree�
�Terrell and Ellis—though we softened that one a bit when your mama came along, another girl, called her Ella.”
Sitting on the glassed-in porch that looked out on Mother’s yard, I could see a few things blooming—yellow rudbeckia, blue plumbago, red geraniums—but the beds, usually a quilt of summer blooms, looked depleted, and the stone birdbath, baking. Under the glare of the blistering afternoon sun, the watered grass had turned brown on top.
Mother began a story, one of her yard stories. Her way of putting a bit of distance between herself and us. This one involved a crow, not as frequent a visitor to her garden, she said, as the mockingbird. She leaned toward us, a tall woman, trim, turning seventy, her legs crossed, one foot swinging slightly. “There he was, waddling the way crows do, like penguins, their wide-apart gait, going right up to this squirrel who was eating the leftover biscuit I’d put out by the hibiscus. Retreating, walking around, in that sideways way they have, then coming right up to the pesky squirrel and doing just what I’d have liked to do myself, poking him, sharp as a needle, with his beak—”
Daddy brought us a tea party, iced spiced tea with orange slices and a plate of wafer-thin ginger cookies. “I’m working on walking again,” he allowed, setting the tray down in slow motion. “I read in the Tufts Health Letter that walking shoes are no help to folks in my decade. That the trouble is, the thick, spongy soles that are supposed to cushion your feet only make you unsteady. I’m going to take their advice and buy myself some leather shoes with hard rubber soles.”
I could think of nothing to say. I drained my iced tea. Birdie had a third cookie. “What time are they coming tomorrow?” I asked. I didn’t know what to call my sister’s family, afraid to say her name.
“I told Rufus to bring my grandsons about eleven,” Mother replied evenly. “A daytime event, because of the young people. Your dad suggested this get-together, having the idea that I should be photographed with all my grandchildren this year.” She rose abruptly and began to collect our spiced-tea glasses on the tray.
“Will they stay on in their house?” I asked, wondering if I should have said her house, Terrell’s house. With Borden, the older boy, going off to college next year, and Bailey, the next, I thought my sister’s fine home might seem too large, too empty.
“Now that you mention the matter,” Daddy began, “they already made some changes. Before she—”
“No need to go into all that at this time, Judah,” Mother snapped. She looked through the glass at the dry yard. “I cannot understand how we can have a humidity in the sixties day after day, as if we were on Galveston Island, with a temperature reaching a hundred and not a drop of rain condensing out. Can you tell me why on earth they can’t seed the clouds?”
“Mother,” I suggested, trying to offer them an outing, “we didn’t bring you a proper birthday present, but Birdie and I would like to take you and Daddy out for Mexican food tonight.”
“Oh.” Mother almost dropped the tray. “The last time we went, with Terrell—” She shut her eyes, blinked.
“How about the Spanish Village, Agatha? We haven’t tried that for years.” Daddy looked pleased at the idea, perked up. To me he said, “Remember how we used to go when you were a little thing, Ella, and you’d eat the deluxe dinner right down to the bare plate?”
Mother steadied herself. “We could do that,” she agreed. She smoothed her face with effort. To me, she said, “You two might want to take a little rest, dear, unpack and clean up, perhaps change from your shorts. You must be tired after your trip.” Her gaze speaking louder than words: How was she to bear it that this daughter, the wrong daughter, was here on her porch, while her favorite, her firstborn, was gone?
7
The next morning, Sunday, dressing for Mother’s birthday brunch in the large double room I had once shared, I kept glimpsing Terrell instead of my daughter in front of the full-length mirror. My sister as she had been as a schoolgirl, so serious, brushing her fine, light hair, music going on in her head (as it must now be with Birdie). Sometimes Terrell would hum, without being aware of it, or tap her fingers on the dressing table. I could see the back of her, across the blue carpet, straight legs, straight spine, listening attentively to what I couldn’t hear. And then—where did that girl go? My sister a sweetheart nominee in high school, a Bluebonnet Belle in the university, molting into a lawyer’s wife with a sailing club. Maybe she’d run off, as I had, but in a different way.
My secondhand celadon linen dress greened my spirits. How could my mother not be delighted with it? I put on my face, took an aspirin, and brushed my damp brown tangles into some sort of shape.
Birdie had cut off the ties of her elephant-gray jumper, and used one piece to pull her own waterfall of hair back into a thick ponytail. The dress itself (shortened by Felice’s mom) fell to her ankles, cool and proper, in the style of a storybook girl from the last century, complete with Chinese slippers (borrowed from Felice), black and strapped, the modern Mary Janes.
“I guess Grandma is having a hard time getting over losing Aunt Terrell.”
I looked past my daughter into the mirror. “You don’t get over something like that. You just wear it down or it wears you down.”
“I guess you’d have a hard time, wouldn’t you, if I died like that?”
“I’d tear my hair out by the roots, is what.”
She made a shy smile and looked away. “Maybe Grandmom tore some out.”
“Maybe she did,” I said, and smothered my daughter in a hug for her charity.
I would have been absolutely crawling out of my skin with nerves at the idea of one of these red-letter, special-event birthday parties, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Red would be here. Someone from the past, who’d not only known me when I was that earlier version of me that my mother still couldn’t forgive, but had known us all, the whole family, for over half my life, and his, too. He must have been around, we all must have—he and Terrell, Buddy and I—for Mother’s forty-fifth birthday. Was that possible? Her ever being the age I was fast approaching? That he and Terrell had already reached? Young, she must have been, my mother, then. And different? Or (sad thought) the same?
It would be good to see the boys, too. All I recalled from the funeral, the lot of us in shock, was them suddenly grown, in dark suits, polite, shaking everyone’s hands, their faces stricken. Not the young, stringy kids I remembered from my last birthday visit home (me, a fresh widow, back in favor), waiting on the sidewalk, hands jammed into pockets, while their parents quarreled. I knew the older boy, Borden, would be going off to Yale this fall—good news my sister had not lived to hear. And that Bailey, the younger one, had a number of the attributes of second siblings: not quite as many accomplishments, grades not quite as stellar, and the look of expecting that somehow he’d done something wrong. A look I’d seen often enough in the mirror.
“Now that’s nice, dear,” Mother said when Birdie and I came downstairs, taking in my linen dress, my pale hose and summer sandals. With the smallest of frowns, she reached up and pushed my still-damp hair into shape. “And you, too, Robin. Did you know—my girls used to wear just such jumpers?” Her voice caught.
“Mom bought it for me, Grandmother, in the Pink Mall, for your birthday.”
“Well. Isn’t that fine.” She stared at my daughter as if she were some rector’s child or young professor’s daughter, someone to be kindly toward. Composed, readied for the event, for turning seventy in the presence of family, she wore a silk dress in her favorite pale yellow with a double strand of pearls. Early this morning, she’d slipped out of the house and got her hair done, so that it now shone with auburn highlights. She turned to me. “Ella, I put those flowers from your garden out on the sunporch. They looked as if they could use a little light. Or fresh water? I’m sure you wrote me the names of several of them; I hope you’ll forgive me, I’m a bit distracted.”
“Of course,” I assured her. “Roses don’t travel well, even with the stems in tubes. I only wanted—” Wha
t had I wanted? I might as well have brought a homemade, misshapen birthday cake that she needed to pretend to appreciate. Past her head, on the dining table with its white linen cloth, I saw an arrangement of yellow florist’s daffodils and green lemon leaves. My roses belonged to another world; here, their fragrance disappeared, as the smell of a peach in an aroma shop. “Your own flowers are doing well in this heat and drought,” I told her. “That’s your green thumb.”
“I try,” she said, looking past me to the glass-walled porch and the yard beyond. “I do try.”
Then I heard the doorbell and rushed out into the hall in time to see Daddy clapping Red and the two grandsons on the shoulder, saying, “Come in, come in.” He’d got himself in a fresh sky-blue shirt and tie, and had put on leather shoes instead of his felt-lined bedroom slippers. “Good, good, you brought your camera, Rufus. Ours has been acting up. We haven’t taken many, I guess you understand, in recent months.”
“Red,” I said, restraining myself from throwing my arms around him. “Gosh, I’m glad to see you.”
“Hello, Ella.” He looked glad, too, taking my hand in both of his. “How are you?”
“Did you remember I’m called Birdie now?” my daughter asked the boys, who towered above her.
“Yeah.” The younger one smoothed down his cowlick, which stood straight up. He wore a dress shirt for the event that didn’t quite fit (the neck too big, the sleeves too long), probably a hand-me-down from his brother. “Yeah. Dad said.” But he didn’t look too sure.
Wanting to show my nephews I was glad to see them, which I was, I held out my hand to each in turn, hesitant to try a hug. “Hello, Bailey,” I said. “Hello, Barnum.”
“Borden.” The older boy gave me a vexed look. His fair hair was slicked back, Gatsby-style, and he was as tall as my daddy, a basketball star and brain, with his mom’s good looks.
Ella in Bloom Page 4