Fig

by Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

  Daddy is a contradiction. He doesn’t want me around Mama, yet he expects me to help out. For example, we spent the entire summer getting the house ready for Mama’s final return. Gran called it “babyproofing,” and everyone ignored her. Dr. Stein, my mother’s psychiatrist, advised us to buy a large steel lockbox, and this is where the medication is now kept to prevent Mama from ever helping herself to it again.

  While I was taking a walk with my uncle, Daddy programmed the four-digit code that opens the lock on the lockbox. And now he is the only one who can open Pandora’s Box. “Just in case,” he says, but he doesn’t finish. “In case of what?” When I make it a point to ask him, he acts like there is no answer, and when I ask again he suddenly cannot hear me.

  During the last reintegration trial, Daddy doled out enough pills every morning for me to administer to Mama throughout the day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime, and as needed. He is paranoid. He hides the daily dose in a new place every time. So every morning before he goes to work, he has to stop and show me where he hid the medication for that particular day. This ritual seems like overkill; aside from Mama’s overdose over ten years ago, she hasn’t exhibited any signs of being suicidal.

  Mama still refuses to sleep upstairs, so we found her a recliner at the same garage sale where I bought a narrow pair of black leather Mary Janes, an Edwardian nightgown with a crocheted neckline, and a leopard-print pillbox hat that looks amazing with my new hair. Unlike the clothes, the recliner is hideous—something my former mother would have detested. But the recliner is more comfortable than the rocking chair that Daddy made for her once upon another time.

  Outside, in the driveway, Daddy sprayed the recliner with fire-retardant. He soaked the ugly blue upholstery. “Just in case,” he said, and I didn’t need an explanation, yet this time he insisted on providing one. I kept telling him I understood, but he would not stop talking. If Mama fell asleep with a lit cigarette, she could die. This is what I tried to tell him, but he just looked at me grimly and said, “Fig, we could all die if that happened.” Then he shook his head.

  Once the upholstery was dry, we carried the chair into the day porch, and I covered it with a crocheted wool afghan I’d found in the attic. The outline is black, but each square contains a different-colored flower. I found it when I was going through my paternal great-grandmother’s steamer trunk looking for more vintage clothes. The uglier something is, the harder I work to make it beautiful—the afghan will not only hide the terrible chair, it will create a barrier between the fire retardant and my mother’s precious skin. And this is what I do for myself: I wear only beautiful clothing now, and each garment works to keep my fingernails away from my flesh.

  Maybe because of Mama’s parents, Daddy is prepared for fire. His precautions make me think about Jane Eyre and the madwoman in the attic who liked to play with matches. And I wonder if he’s ever read the book. He screwed a smoke detector to the ceiling in the day porch and mounted a red fire extinguisher to the wall above the washing machine. The extinguisher is the same stop-sign red as the blinking light on the detector. I inspected the devices while Daddy watched. And once again, he said, “Just in case.”

  He says “just in case” so much, he is beginning to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic. “Just in case,” I said back, and I didn’t say it nice. I sounded a lot like Mama when she has an episode.

  Later when I tried to explain to Billy why Daddy and I are fighting all the time, he smiled a sad smile. “Fig,” he said, “you do realize what you guys have in common?” And when I shrugged and looked out the window, he said, “You two worry more than anyone I have ever known.”

  The red light on the smoke detector winks at me from the ceiling and brings me back into the present moment. I clear my head. I’m working on a bouquet to welcome Mama home for good. Rather than worrying about the secret meanings of the flowers, I am trying to be like Tasha Tudor.

  I do as she would do.

  The boughs of Japanese maple I cut are waiting in a pail of water on the floor with the fern, chicory, marigolds, puncture vine, gray goldenrod, and Indian mustard, all of which I gathered this morning at dawn after a night of insomnia. I harvested the materials from the pasture south of the orchard, and from along the banks of the Silver River.

  As I walked beside the river I saw the feral dog again. Walking along the other side, she didn’t feel as feral as she did before, nor does she look as old. I watched her from the corner of my eye, and I watched her in the mirror that was made by the water running between us. She looks a lot like a blue heeler, the kind of dog the Fergesons use to herd their cows.

  Every time I stopped, so did she.

  I stopped to identify the wildflowers by flipping through my field guide and comparing the pictures against the reality. The dog traipsed through my peripheral vision, but when it was time to go home I looked for her and she was gone. Aside from the Japanese maple, the chicory, and the dark green fern, I only picked yellow flowers. I am not only bringing inside the gardens and the land she used to love, I am bringing her the light and warmth she must be missing. When Mama comes home today, she will find a benign sun waiting for her.

  Money has been tight for everyone, and Billy finally took the job at Wallace Dairy they’ve been begging him to take for years. As their vet, he’s at their beck and call. In return, he receives a solid salary plus room and board. When I called this morning, Billy told me he couldn’t come.

  “The cows have pinkeye,” he explained. “They need to be treated with antibiotics, and then I have to figure out what to do about the flies.” He sounded worried, but not about the animals; he was worried about me. That was when I realized I’d be okay. That I already was.

  The wildflowers had filled, and would continue to fill, the void of waiting. They took the place of old habits; instead of tracking time by carving notches in my skin, I can arrange the plant material.

  I found the floral frog when I was looking for the ashtray back in May. Gran swore to Christ there was an ashtray somewhere in the kitchen cabinets. “It’s crystal,” she insisted. “Your grandfather smoked cigars on occasion—besides, we used to entertain, and back then everyone smoked. It was considered fashionable, but I’ve always found the habit to be repulsive.” Gran continues to be an expert at making remarks about my mother without doing so directly.

  I used a step stool to search the high cabinets built along the ceiling in the kitchen, and just before I found the ashtray, I found the frog—only I didn’t know what it was until Gran explained. “You put it at the bottom of a vase,” she said, “And then you stick flowers into it.” She was sitting at the kitchen table as she held the small bed of pins in her palm; it was the first time I’d ever seen her look nostalgic.

  “Flower arranging was yet another skill I learned in charm school,” she said, but when I asked why the metal object was called a frog, she didn’t know. “Maybe because it’s green?” she offered, and then I wondered why the Flower Lady didn’t sell them in her store.

  I cut the maple at an angle so the branches better stick into the frog just as Gran showed me to do, and then I trim the marigold and add the spicy-smelling flowers to the arrangement. I use the kitchen scissors for the flowers, but for the branches I’m using a pair of pruners I found in the potting shed by the orchard and the remains of Mama’s flower beds.

  It’s as if the potting shed had disappeared for years and years and the structure had suddenly reappeared. I swear I hadn’t seen it there until I needed something to cut the branches from the trees, and as I remembered the potting shed the stones materialized as did the actual structure. The window was curtained with cobwebs, and the terra-cotta pots were beginning to crumble. Mama’s straw hat was still hanging on the back of the door, and on the worktable, I saw her gardening gloves, the leather fingers stiff and brittle after so many damp summers and frozen winters—after so many years of not being worn.

  I’ve decided to turn this building into my sanctuary.

 
; I want to grow flowers of my own. I can make arrangements, both fresh and dried. And I can press the flowers too, and even sell them. Last spring, I began cutting branches of apple blossom from our orchard and gathering moss to sell to the Flower Lady. I can learn to make sachets and potpourri, and maybe even extract the essential oils of rose and lavender.

  I’d like to live a life surrounded by flowers, but I could never work in a flower shop or deal with people all the time like Sissy does. I’d like to live in a home full of flowers, and I think Mama will like this too. It will be good for the both of us.

  As I imagine my own gardens and how they will wander away from the immediate yard to blend into the wild beyond as do the gardens of Tasha Tudor, I add more flowers to the bouquet for Mama, and I’m just finishing the arrangement when Daddy’s Dodge comes rattling down the driveway, followed by a long trail of brown dust.

  There’s been a terrible drought this summer, and when I went to church with Gran last Sunday, everyone prayed for rain. I held my breath and crossed my fingers instead, and Gran didn’t scold me when she saw. She just pursed her lips, nodded as if to approve, and went back to praying.

  I watch the truck approach and the dust storm chasing after and my heart begins to race. It beats so hard, I can feel it in my throat. I begin to choke. I slip the rosary off my neck and use the pearls to breathe again, and then I return my focus to the flowers. I step back to examine what I have created, and the deep pulse in my neck begins to slow. I sit where Mama sits to see what she will see, and I find I built a fire and not a sun and I wonder if my father will try to extinguish it.

  The maple leaves burn like red-hot stars and the yellow flowers blaze up from below. The feathery tips of the goldenrod resemble candle flames, while the delicate puncture vine and sprinkled mustard seem to spark and scatter, further spreading fire. Cut the shortest, the sprigs of chicory work to ignite the yellow, orange, and red; they rise from the water to act as the true-blue heart of this accidental inferno.

  I hear the sound of the truck doors slamming, and I rush out to the porch to greet Mama. I find her standing in the driveway lighting a long white Salem. The dust has not yet settled. Mama looks at the house like she’s never seen it before, while Daddy struggles to pull her suitcase from the truck bed. Mama holds another bag of reservation cigarettes, and as she smokes I remember something she once said to me about chicory when I was four or five years old.

  We were walking through the meadow by the train tracks when she picked the wildflower and handed it to me. From a single stem, the chicory forked into other stems and formed a natural bouquet of eight blossoms total. I remember because I’d just learned how to count, so I went about counting everything I could find to count.

  After I counted the last flower, she said, “Now look up,” and I did. I looked up, and then she told me to look back at the chicory, and when I did she said, “Do you see how the petals look like broken shards of summer sky?”

  She was right. The blue was the same, and the petals resembled glass fragments from something shattered. With my face tilted up to heaven, I stood there forever and studied the sun-saturated blue dome of July. I wondered if the sky could break, and I’d wonder this again years later when my mother read The Snow Queen out loud to me, during the scene when the little boy looks up and his eye is penetrated by a shard of ice. This icy dagger, which worked to distort the way he saw the world, also turned him cold and hard from the inside out.

  But that day, I was thinking about Chicken Little. He was running around inside my brain, screaming “The sky is falling ! The sky is falling !”

  * * * *

  I sit with Mama after dinner in the day porch even though Daddy doesn’t want me around the secondhand smoke. Mama sits in her recliner, smoking, and the silver smoke twists around the flowers and contributes to the overall effect of fire. Just before her eyes glaze over and Mama falls into another tranquilized trance, she smiles at me and she says, “The flowers are gorgeous, Fig.”

  * * * *

  After school and on the weekends, I resurrect my mother.

  The wildflowers help bring her into the moment—into the season—but she also needs my help remembering who she really is.

  I make the alterations when Daddy is not inside the house. I make the rearranging look like Mama’s doing, not mine. I bring apple crates in from the barn and line them up along the walls. I’m careful to put them under the windows, where the sun can’t damage the books, and then I line the crates with texts written by all my mother’s favorite authors: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Walt Whitman; I align their spines to create a library of memories—a collective body of books.

  I take both dictionaries and flip through all the pages to show her all the words she has ever looked up and checked.

  “Is there a word you’d like to look up today?” I ask, and she looks at me forever before she answers. “Not right now,” she says, and she is whispering the way she does when she doesn’t want the other voices in her head to hear. And this is a good sign. I can tell she is thinking hard. She is searching for herself in the inner chambers of her mind where she’s been hiding from her disease.

  Daddy makes me put Christina’s World back above the fireplace, which works to divide the living room area from the dining room, so I special order a calendar of Andrew Wyeth’s work from the bookstore in Lawrence, and when it arrives Mama helps me tear out all the paintings. I run a length of twine like I’m about to hang a curtain over the middle wall of windows—the ones across from Mama’s recliner—and I clothespin the portraits and strange landscapes to the line, where they flutter like prayer flags, and when the sun rises behind them they are luminescent like stained glass.

  To keep Mama company while I’m away, I give her back the button-eyed teddy bear. When I can’t be there, he sits in the wicker love seat to her left and recounts how once he was put together.

  Annie, he says. Do you remember? Do you remember how your mother cut the pattern and stitched my stitching and stuffed my stuffing? And she does remember. Mama nods her head, and then she says, “I do.” Next to the flowers I pick and arrange for her, I keep the picture of her parents. I imagine her tracing the figure of her mother with her finger, and then her father, and again she remembers—“I do,” she says. “I really, really do.”

  The last object I transplant is the mirror.

  I wait until a Sunday when Billy is here to help Daddy deworm all the sheep, and while Mama is showering I take the mirror and carry it down the stairs and position it dead center on the apple crate in front of Mama’s throne. Then I sit where she sits and I practice being her. Holding a pencil like a cigarette, I smoke. I exhale a cloud of blue-gray, and when it clears the oval mirror offers itself to me—to be scried, and as I look I imagine Mama looking too.

  I see her there: my face in her face and her face in mine.

  We float in this pool of reflective glass; we drift across the mirror sky, and on either side the two brass birds remain ready to fly away. As I look, I fill the frame with memories. I project them from my heart into the glass, and later they will play back to her—again and again, and I know she will remember. She will re-become.

  * * * *

  The seniors are herded into different classrooms depending on our last names, and we are supervised by strangers from the school district. I’m directed into a classroom with the J–O students, and I sit where I am told to sit. I sit next to Tanya Jenkins, and when she sees me she pinches her big nose and makes a face like I smell bad, but I don’t. I smell good.

  I smell like jasmine now. I buy it from the health food store in Lawrence where my father sometimes shops. Unlike the synthetic perfume sold in drugstores, this is an essential oil made from the actual flower, and scent is just another way to transform ugly into beautiful. Fragrance and vintage clothes are nothing more than masks, but like bandages, they are something worn for protection.

  I sit at a desk with a pile of freshly sharpe
ned number two pencils, scratch paper, and what is now the second booklet for the practice SAT testing. Everything is like it was yesterday, only we’re in a different classroom. The same woman from the school district supervises us, and once again we will sit here and darken the multiple-choice circles on the sheets of paper before us. The woman drinks coffee from a homemade mug, and she reminds me of Alicia Bernstein. The mug is white with red lettering and it reads BEST MOM IN THE WORLD!

  This woman keeps time—she tells us when to begin and when to end.

  I finish early again, and again she eyes me suspiciously. But I don’t care. I’m only practicing for the real test. I practice connecting all the dots. I connect them into lines to draw pictures to illustrate the stories in my head instead of answering the questions I’m being asked. Sometimes I just fill the circles in accordance with the phases of the moon—they cycle across the page, waxing and waning, and sometimes I just fill the entire page with graphite until I can see myself in the shiny gray; the reflection is dull and double exposed by the blackness of my shadow looking over my shoulder to see what I am doing.

  * * * *

  The prayers from the Sacred Heart of Mary are finally answered. Rain falls on Douglas County like it is spring instead of fall, but this rain is cold and will only serve to deliver yet another winter and I am dreading the absence of the wildflowers on the farm.

  At night, the waxing moon rises and the Silver River swells and the dry earth can’t absorb the rainfall, and our cellar floods. I pull the doors open to look. The benches are buried by water, and I see dead leaves floating on the surface with one of Mama’s pill bottles. She must have left it here the last time there was a tornado or a warning—that is, the last time she was here for one.

  The white childproof lid remains screwed on, and despite the water damage a tiny island of the label still remains. I can clearly read my mother’s name: ANNIE JOHNSON. She is there, typed across the wrinkled paper still clinging to the orange-brown plastic.