Now they take 45 down into Mississippi. They stop in Tupelo for the night, nearly four hundred miles under their tires, and Edith gets them a room with two beds. She lies beneath a pane of moonlit glass and stares at the shadows on the ceiling. Her father is snoring loudly and this yanks her back to her childhood when her sisters would try to come up with the funniest description of the sound traveling through the walls and ceilings from their parents’ downstairs bedroom. “It sounds like a bear choking on a mouthful of frogs.” “. . . a saw rubbing over a washboard.” “. . . a tractor mowing nails.” She’d wondered how it was possible for her mother to sleep right next to this sound; then one day she thought of their friend, whose family lived a few dozen yards from the railroad tracks. Whenever Edith visited their house and a train went through, the noise was enough to make her put her hands over her ears, but her friend didn’t seem to even notice. That was the answer, then. You can get used to anything.
Edith’s not sure she believes it anymore. Maybe the ear can get used to rude noises, but the body as a whole seems incapable of accepting new realities. Edith feels the loss of Moira even now, in this motel room, with her parents sleeping a few feet away. Lying on her side, she feels a tightness in her spine that goes all the way down to her tailbone. Her very wrists register the absence; they feel flimsy and brittle. Moira used to curl herself around Edith, and they’d fall asleep that way. The physical memory has ruined sleep. She hates to lie on her side because of it, but it’s the only position in which she can ever drift off.
After what must be at least an hour listening to her father’s snores, Edith flings back the sheet. Her suitcase is open at the foot of the bed, and in the moonlight she plunges her hands in among the clothing to search for the bottle. The smell, when she removes the cap, is so sharp she fears that it will wake her parents. But no, they continue sleeping. She sits in bed with her back against the wall and takes small sips, counting snores in between them, waiting for ten and then fifteen and then twenty snores to pass before she allows herself another drink. In this way she gets through another half hour or longer. Once a dancing warmth has settled into the soles of her feet, she replaces the cap on the bottle and hides it in the sheets beside her, then slides down so her head is on the pillow.
At some point she’s awoken by someone shoving her shoulder. Her eyes flip open to see the shadowy form of her mother hovering over her, not quite spinning but not staying still, either. “Ma,” Edith says, heart racing, cutting through the haze. “What are you doing?”
“You think you can sleep all morning? Your father needs his breakfast. Up two hours already, milking and—”
“Ma, I don’t think—” Edith puts a hand to her head, trying to steady it. “Daddy’s right there.” She points to the other bed.
“Don’t you back talk.” Her mother slaps her swiftly on the cheek. It makes a flat sound in the three seconds of silence in between her father’s snores. “You get out of bed and come help. I was down in the kitchen just now and couldn’t find the big skillet. You put it somewhere it doesn’t belong. You or one of your sisters. How many times have I told you, you’ve got to rub grease on it, and now it’s got all rusty. You come on.”
Edith sits up, one hand to her cheek, which is hot and stinging. It was a pretty good hit, considering the darkness and the angle. Her mother isn’t looking at her, and she’s glad for the chance to assess her own condition. A light drunk, but nothing too severe. She can keep her words straight, though what does it matter if her mother isn’t even in the same reality? And Louisa is now glancing worriedly around the room. “It’s so dark out,” she says. “Gonna be a storm before long.”
“That’s fine,” Edith says after a moment. “We need the rain.”
“That’s right, we sure do. I’d forgotten about that. A good rain will do us good. I don’t care for lightning, though.”
“But we’ll be inside the house. Why don’t you sit down here by the window and watch?” Edith stands a little unsteadily in the narrow space between the beds and helps her mother to sit down on the mattress next to Bert. He’s still sleeping, though his snoring has temporarily quieted.
“But there’s breakfast—”
“Hazel will help. You just rest here, Ma. It’s going to be a busy day.”
“Yes, all right.”
Edith crosses to the door. Now that she’s awake, she’s got to use the toilet, and the shared bathroom is down the hall. At the door, she glances back at her mother, whose face now shows a kind of patient embarrassment; she doesn’t see any rain, but doesn’t want to admit it.
Out in the hall, Edith doesn’t feel the regret she’d expected. Diving into someone else’s delusion—she’s done that before but always regretted it after. Sometimes when Moira was drunk, really drunk, right up at the edge of passing out, she’d mumble to Edith about places and things that had nothing to do with them or their life together. A classroom, a chalkboard. Bleachers. Slurring her words, she’d make Edith blush with talk about tongues and fingers, but it was all taking place somewhere else, in her past. She’d had an affair when she was in school. A fellow student, or a teacher. Fifteen or sixteen years old, and she’d been doing things that Edith at her age wouldn’t have even known to wish for. All those years later Moira was still going back to it, remembering, yes, and also slipping into the past, and sometimes when it happened Edith would feel so jealous of the person her girl was moaning for that she’d pretend to be her. She’d whisper that Moira was a real sexpot, a Sheba in schoolgirl’s clothes. She’d say they had to be careful they didn’t get caught. Even while she was speaking the words, Edith would feel ashamed, imagining a witness who would call her on the charade.
When she gets back to the room, her mother is still sitting on the edge of the mattress. The bedside lamp is now burning, and she turns at the sound of the door. “Let me see you,” she says, and Edith feels nervous as she crosses the room, afraid that her mother is back in her senses and has smelled the bourbon on her breath, or found the bottle in the sheets. “I know I know you,” she says slowly. “But the strangest thing is, I can’t think who you are.”
Edith sits down on the bed across from her. “I’m Edith. I’m your daughter.”
“Oh, yes,” Louisa says, though she still looks unsure. Then she glances over at the sleeping form beside her. Bert’s turned on his side, facing away from them. “And that,” she says, turning back to Edith, “must be a sack of potatoes.” Which could be another delusion, except that she winks.
Bert wakes to the sound of a door slamming. His eyes fly open, and the first thing he sees is a sheet of rain. Then a concrete wall. “Lou?” he says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
“We’re here,” she says from somewhere behind him. He turns and finds her in the backseat of the car. A car, Iris’s car, but where’s Iris? He blinks and scratches his stomach, thinking. Looks out the rear windshield behind his wife’s head and through the rain sees three palm trees, all in a row. Vacation, Biloxi, palm trees. They’re here.
The door beside him opens, and he turns around to find Edith handing him his cane. In her other hand she clutches an umbrella. “Let’s go get checked in. We’ll drive the car around closer to our room, once we know where it is. It’s raining to beat the devil.”
The place the travel agent booked for them is called the Oceanview Motel, but there aren’t any ocean views. Across the street, in the direction of the water, a stand of trees crowds the landscape, blurry in the rain. One block down is a filling station. In the other direction is a line of souvenir shops. Edith, trying to hold the umbrella over the three of them, shepherds her parents into the motel check-in office and up to the desk, where a large man with a goiter on his neck greets them in an accent so thick she only manages to understand the words because they’re the expected ones. She gives him their name, and he pages through the reservations book.
“That’s two beds, you say, ma’am?”
“Yes, two.”
&nbs
p; The man shakes his head. “You’re in a one-seater, says right here.” He points to his book as if the upside-down scribble of words proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, where the blame doesn’t lie. “But that’s all right, I’ve got a room’ll do the trick for you folks. Down the end, second floor.”
“We can’t stay on the second floor,” Edith says impatiently. “The stairs—” She glances at her father, but it’s clear he hasn’t managed to keep up with the exchange. Edith lowers her voice. “He can’t handle stairs very well.”
The man glances at Bert and makes a noise from the throat.
“What’s taking so long?” Bert demands. “Didn’t you make a reservation?” He gives Edith a reproving stare, then turns and gives the man behind the desk the same look.
Edith sighs. “I’m afraid we’ll have to go somewhere else.”
“Now, look,” the man says, shifting in his chair, “I don’t know how it happened that you didn’t get a two-seater, ma’am—miss?” He glances at her left hand lying atop the counter.
“Miss,” Edith says stoutly.
“Miss, then. The name’s Baumann, isn’t it? Like I was saying, Miss Baumann, I don’t know how this happened. Could be the fault lies on this end, could be it lies on yours.” He pulls another book across the counter and flips it open. “But how about we look at our options and work out something that pleases every last one of us—even you, mister.” He smiles and shoots a finger gun at Bert.
Ten minutes later, Edith helps her parents settle into a small room on the first floor, just a few doors down from the office. A fine unit with a single bed and a desk, a small radio, even a private bathroom. All in all, a better place than she’d originally expected. And she has the key to another room on the second floor. Suddenly she feels the rush of her good fortune: the nights will be her own—no more of her father’s snoring, her mother’s waking in the dark hours of the morning. “I’m going upstairs just to set down my things. Then why don’t we head out? I don’t know if we want to try the beach today—” She glances out the window at the rain pouring off the roof in sheets.
“I need to eat a hot meal,” Bert says.
“And souvenirs,” Louisa puts in. “I want to bring back something for Iris and—and her sisters.”
“Sure, Ma,” Edith says. “You told Hazel you’d send her a postcard.”
“I told who—”
“Did we pack the address book, Lou?”
Louisa looks at Bert, wide-eyed. The address book—is it in her purse? Surely it would be too big to fit in there. As large as they make them now—last time she used one it was the size of a record machine. They used to be the size of a deck of cards. But here’s her purse, and it does feel heavy. She sets it down on the bed and begins riffling through. “Surely,” the woman is saying, “you don’t need to look up Hazel’s address.”
“I’ve never been there—”
“Hazel’s?”
Louisa blinks at the woman, whose face is so like her daughter’s but whose manner is not. This woman is—well, meddling would be the word. Telling her, Louisa, where she’s been and where she hasn’t. And meanwhile the hinge on the door isn’t staying put. That door, behind her. It’s sliding, somehow, the hinge is—moving down when it should stay still. Louisa abandons her purse and steps quickly over to the door.
“Lou, what do you think you’re doing?”
Bert’s angry with her for something, probably having to do with the door, but was she supposed to just stand there and watch the hinge slide off? “It’s fine,” she says. “It’s all fixed now.”
“Wasn’t broke to start with,” he says.
Edith looks from one parent to the other. “She’s in and out sometimes,” Hazel had warned her. “You won’t always know what she’s talking about.” Of course people start to drift when they’re as old as her mother. Stranger to Edith is the way Bert and Louisa seem to have exchanged personalities. Her father, who was always so steady and grave, has gotten tetchy. Whereas her mother, who used to descend into periods of darkness that lasted for weeks, who would accuse you of stealing from her (once it was a spoon; another time it was an arrowhead from the jar full of curiosities she kept on display in the living room), who would go chasing you across the yard and slap you silly if you forgot to close the cellar door—now she’s mostly pleasant, only occasionally upset, and even then the cause is something buried deep in the past, visible only to her.
In other words, there are some things worth fighting over and many more that aren’t, and for the present Edith is happy to leave her parents on their own to sort out their version of what’s happening. Report back, she wants to say, whenever you’re done. Just let me know what you decide on, and that will be fine.
The door to Room 208 is open, so Edith goes right in. But a moment later, a woman peeps her head out from the bathroom. “Just finishing up here, ma’am,” she says. “Come on in, if you like. Watch out for the cart.”
Edith glances at the cleaning cart and then at the woman. “I can come back if I’m troubling you . . .”
“You won’t bother me, ma’am. Give me three minutes, and I’ll have the place spick-and-span.”
She disappears into the bathroom, and Edith stands looking after her before lifting her suitcase onto the bed. Her dress suddenly feels tight across the chest, and her heart is thumping hard. It’s the maid being there in the room when she had expected it to be empty. And it’s her voice, too. It came out the voice of a Negro, but the woman looks white. It boggles the mind to hear one thing and see another. The maid has got auburn hair and—Edith would swear she saw freckles. Of course, there are light-skinned Negroes living all over the country, but this is something else; this is a decision. Surely, the woman could pass if she wanted to, yet here she is talking that way, not hiding a thing. And in Mississippi, no less. The only Mississippian Edith ever met before coming here was another nurse in the WAC, a fat girl with the most beautiful eyes and the most terrible teeth, who explained, the first night Edith met her, why Arabs, though dark-skinned, are superior to Negroes. “Just look at them noses. Closer to Roman than nigger”—as if that answered all questions one might have about the matter.
Edith begins pulling out the dresses she’s packed and shakes out the wrinkles, listening to the sounds from the bathroom, the swishing and scrubbing, the running of the tap. If she closes her eyes, she’s back in Chicago and that’s Moira moving through the background, cleaning their apartment on a Sunday morning. They never went to church; in Chicago, where there were so many churches of all types and denominations—a steeple on every corner—it was possible not to attend because you could always lie about where you went and no one could prove any different. All kinds of things are possible in the city that aren’t in a town like Edwardsville. Or in Biloxi, Edith is willing to bet.
The maid comes out from the bathroom toting a little carton of cleaning supplies and the trash can. “I’ll just dump this, ma’am, and you’re all set.”
“Thank you.” Edith watches her collect the other trash can from the room and take them both out into the hall. If she could only get her to speak again. If she could just get a good look at her face. She glances down at her suitcase, willing her hands to busy themselves with unpacking. There’s a feeling bubbling up inside her, a kind of happy excitement. By the time the maid comes back in, Edith’s heart is pounding, and she looks up from the pair of stockings she’s pulled from her suitcase to give her a smile so big it surprises them both.
“Oh,” the maid says, crinkling her eyes with what might be amusement. Then she grasps the handles of the cart, backs out into the hall, and is gone.
They’ve come a long way from home. Not since he was a young man, a new husband, has Bert traveled this far. But he knows what’s what: he doesn’t have many years left on this earth, and there are things that are possible now that never were before. He hadn’t known he wanted to see the ocean until Louisa started to act strange, and then suddenly the desire came over him t
o experience, with her, something totally new. Something that wouldn’t send her straight into the past. More and more, that’s where her mind goes, and there’s never any warning; she’s suddenly somewhere else, seeing people who aren’t there, talking to the dead. The worst of it is that he doesn’t always realize when it’s happened. Only last week, he and Lou were sitting on the porch watching the birds and the people who came trooping by on the sidewalk carrying paper bags from the store, and the occasional car rolling down the street, and they were commenting on all of it, just chatting. It was such a pretty day. Bert took his wife’s hand and she smiled and told him how glad she was that he was here. Me, too, he told her. And she said: I wasn’t sure you’d find me. He thought of how he had found her—that was exactly it—he’d found her all those years ago in the parlor of her father’s house in Marietta: this pretty girl that reminded him of a dragonfly, her stillness full of movement. I found you, he said. I was one lucky son of a gun. Yes, you were, she said. And then, not two seconds later, she looked over and said, Well, Junior, we’re glad you’re home now, but we sure wish you would’ve told us where you were going.
After lunch at a diner, they open their umbrellas against the downpour and head down the sidewalk in search of souvenirs. It’s not necessary to look far: every place that isn’t serving food is selling postcards, painted shells, collectible plates and glasses and ashtrays and spoons. Bert takes them past the first shop, and the second, until he sees that they’re all selling the same things. “I like the look of this place,” he says when they arrive at the doorway of a third store, identical to the others. Edith raises her eyebrows, but Louisa’s whole face lights up. There it is, that excitement. He hopes this turns out better than the shrimp sandwiches he’d ordered for both of them at lunch. At the sight of those little critters spilling like ants out of the bread, Louisa had given him a wild look. “Bert, what is this?” she asked, and he’d had to pretend it didn’t alarm him, that it was exactly what he expected. He’d taken a giant bite and almost gagged at the texture. But hidden it, for her sake.
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