Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  That baby was named Norman, and then the very next year they welcomed Maureen McCarthy, who ended up working as the librarian in your high school. “Small world,” she and I would say each time we ran into each other, and seeing her always triggered that memory of my mother dancing there in the kitchen, finger pointing to those galoshes that remained by the back door for way too long after she died.

  It’s so mysterious where our minds take us. Your father has said that if he could attend one more archaeological dig in his life, it would be a tour of my brain and all that is hidden there. I told him that it’s a gold mine and that he would need every available tool!

  Sometimes, the most insignificant thing can become important. For instance, there was no reason to save a receipt from Stop & Shop, except that it got mixed up with lots of other scraps of paper stuffed in a drawer, probably one of those times I emptied my purse and thought I would sort it all out later, but later never came. It was a day I bought baby food and I also bought Barbasol, my father’s brand of shaving cream. It would have been one of those many days I went between my two lives, there with you and your father, and then back to School Street to check in on my father. I never intended to save it (why would I?) and yet, years after the fact, the figures nearly faded, it reminds me how I felt so responsible and torn some days, back and forth, back and forth. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Hours to days to weeks to years.

  It seems I never get to the bottom of that one box filled with notes. I keep finding things.

  June 4, 1967

  Mom, thank you for not making Rudolf leave even though he ate some of the kitchen floor and scratched up the hall door. He loves me and I love him. He threw up on the floor and is good now. He is sorry. Your son, Jeff Wishart

  I never would have made him leave. He did love us—that beautiful, selfless soul, with the perfect poodle coat. The scratches were still there when we left, too, not as obvious—we sanded and painted—but still there. Poor Rudolf died long before those shirts that keep dogs calm in a storm were invented; that would have made such a difference for him. Whenever I say that, your father says it sounds like I’m talking about the polio vaccine or antibiotics, and I say yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

  Spring 1988? (pretty sure this is right)

  Mom,

  I appreciate your questions and offerings of advice and opinion. I do, but I also beg that you please understand my need to handle this my own way and in my own time. You have never been divorced, and so there is a lot you really do not know, even if you have read a lot of books. Trust me on this. Your whole life has been defined by losing your mother young and wishing that she had been there to advise you at every turn (or thinking you do), but that is not my story. I hope you will understand when I say that I do not need any more advice. I just don’t. I am doing fine and need for you to treat me like the adult I am.

  Love, Rebecca

  June 21, 1982

  Dear Mrs. Wishart,

  I only met your father once but my father was a long time co-worker of his—Sam Merriweather, you may have heard his name. He died several years ago. He always said James Porter was one of the nicest and most honest people he ever met and I thought you would like to know that. He said it was especially amazing given all that he had gone through. People say he was a fine gentleman and I thought you would like to know that. I know he will be missed.

  Sincerely,

  Everett Merriweather

  Mother’s Day 1965

  IOU-

  I will not hit Becca.

  will feed dog and play

  will not say what you sed don’t say

  Jeff Wishart

  Lately, I wake and wonder if the people who moved into our old house have figured out that you can’t open that one cabinet if the oven door is ajar, or that there is a hairline crack in the window over the stairs that we chose to leave because it’s the original window, the glass thick and wavy. I forgot to tell them how they might think there’s a burst pipe but it is probably only the sun hitting that one part of the roof, the snowmelt filling the gutter with a runoff so powerful no bush below has ever managed to survive. Frank begs me to stop. “Please stop,” he says. “I can’t think about it right now. I do not want to think about any of it right now.”

  Harvey

  Harvey would be scared at night if he didn’t have Peggy. She is fat and warm and she snores and sometimes her paws move like she’s chasing something, like she will chase something if she needs to, and Harvey wakes her up to tell her to do it but sometimes Harvey is the only one awake and so he whispers in Peggy’s ear to wake up, just to make sure she will do it when he needs her to. Her ear stinks a little in a good way, like how her neck smells under her collar, kind of like the school cafeteria and those big rolls on spaghetti day. His teacher held one up to the principal and said, “Do you think we feed these children enough starch? And does this sauce really count as a vegetable? Really?”

  Harvey’s teacher said, “Really? Really?” when she thought you were lying. “So you already did your work,” she would say. “Really? You really want me to believe that?” And they did want her to believe that, because she is the youngest teacher at the school and has a convertible and a boyfriend who makes beer. Somebody asked did her boyfriend know she always eats lunch with Mr. Stone, the man who teaches second grade and runs the summer camp Harvey’s mom is making him go to. The same kid asked why didn’t she dump her boyfriend and go with Mr. Stone. She already has everything anybody wants, a car and a dog—a pit bull mix named Suzy—but Mr. Stone can dance and wears cool shoes.

  Harvey kisses Peggy and smells inside her big soft ear. He keeps his eyes closed and pulls Peggy tight when he hears the back door open and close. He knew it would. Peggy doesn’t wake up and Harvey’s mom doesn’t wake up. Just Harvey knows someone’s in the house and in the hall, and whoever it is stops and stands in the door, just like last time. He wants to look but is scared to, because there is some ghosts that’ll blind you for looking and cut out your tongue too, so he just breathes real quiet into Peggy’s soft ear and waits.

  Lil

  November 28, 1969

  Newton, Massachusetts

  It’s snowing, and we’re supposed to have over a foot by morning. Frank and the kids are watching something on television, one of those old monster movies I hate, but I like hearing their screams and laughter. I’m on the back porch, wrapped in a blanket and counting the minutes. Twelve short minutes, but how unbearably long they must have been to those trapped. Inside my cigarette case is a note from the children: These will kill you. “Yes,” I say, and light one in anticipation of the 12-minute wait. “So many things will.”

  That night in November, my mother was going to teach a dance class, something she did more and more often at Arthur Murray, where she began by just filling in for a friend. She knew all the dances of the time, and when she couldn’t convince my father to practice with her, she would let me; sometimes I saw her practicing there in the living room, right hand extended, as if to an invisible partner. She loved to dance, and she loved getting paid to do it, telling my father and me that whatever she brought home was “mad money” to go to the movies or on a vacation.

  She was all bundled up in her black wool coat, a pale-pink scarf over her head and wrapped around her neck; she was wearing her favorite shoes, the black suede wedges with ankle straps. I can see her there at the top of those steep stairs, her hand on the banister. In my memory, it is as if she pauses, like someone stopping to look both ways before crossing the street. I was there in my room; my father was seated by the radio in the living room, I assume listening to the news. It was 1942, so there was a lot of news, and he was often there, eyes closed as he listened.

  My mother had two different fragrances she wore: Tabu for the average day, and then on special occasions, Pavlova, a fragrance named for the great dancer. “From Paris,” she whispered, and smiled and then showed me the tiny bottle, doll-sized, that she pres
sed against each slender wrist. She smelled wonderful (perfume, cigarettes, spearmint gum), and I recall thinking she looked like so many of the movie stars she admired and talked about as if they were friends of hers: Rita Hayworth and Jane Wyman and Joan Fontaine and Lana Turner. She loved going to the movies and often went on her own, leaving the little ticket stubs in the pockets of her coat and at the bottom of her many purses, with loose tobacco bits and gum wrappers.

  It is important I remember this. No matter the weather or whatever else is going on in life, it is important I stop and remember how it all started with the strike of a single match. I stare at the second hand on my watch while I imagine and then try not to imagine: one minute, two, a tiny flame in that dark corner of the lounge, catching and spreading, fabric and wood, walls and ceiling, fake palm trees, starry sky, hundreds of people there to have fun.

  November 28, 1994

  Was it planned all along that she would go to the Cocoanut Grove that night, or did something suddenly beckon her to go that way? I have looked for clues, thinking I had something a couple of times. There was the name of a man who had taken quite a few classes and danced with my mother many times—a name traced to an address and then to a daughter who had moved to Ohio and by then was middle-aged. “Did you know your father was taking dancing lessons?” I asked her. “Did he ever mention my mother’s name?” Perhaps she’d had no suspicions about her father until I planted that seed, or perhaps there really was nothing to suspect. My mother had called an old friend of hers that night, someone who also taught dance classes, but the woman said her husband had answered and by the time she got to the phone, it had gone dead. “Are you sure?” I asked, and it was clear that I was suggesting she might not be telling me the truth, but the woman reached for her husband’s hand and assured me that was what happened. If there was something she didn’t tell me, it died with her a few years ago.

  All I have are bits and pieces of a giant puzzle, like those 2,000-piece ones we used to do when we went to Gloucester. Remember, Jeff, how you would always steal a piece so you could magically produce it at the end? We should have taken better note of that. We should have had a conversation, because I think this tendency might explain what happened in your marriage and your divorce—things like withholding what’s important, keeping to yourself what might benefit another, the need to always be the winner or the one who has the answer. Becca, you didn’t seem to care. You just wanted to go buy some flip-flops or the latest suntan oil, or go to Virgilio’s for a sandwich and then get back in the water, but, Jeff, you controlled those puzzles. And of course it feels good to find that final piece, the snug placement that completes the whole picture.

  April 6, 2017

  Southern Pines

  It is too hot to be outside today. I breathe better in the air-conditioning, even though then I am freezing; the windows all fog over with condensation. I asked your father what if we are in a terrarium on a shelf somewhere in the twilight zone, where they are studying old age, migration, and evolution. He said he suspects we are giving them their money’s worth.

  I have saved some things I didn’t want to save, and I’m not even sure why I did that except perhaps to remind myself what I am capable of being and doing. They remind me of times I never want to relive. Like finding that note left under my windshield wiper that time. “Leave Me Alone!” it said, among other things. You were both in your 20s, and I still look back and think that the two of you must have noticed the changes. Your father and I were like total strangers. Or were you both so caught up in all the events of your own lives (and there were many!) that you didn’t even notice? I’ve often wondered if I would’ve been better off in the bliss of ignorance, emotionally unaware and somehow paralyzed, and I can’t help but wonder if people are really unaware or if they are in denial, slapping on a pair of blinders and a muzzle, plowing the same old row until the old ox returns to the yoke, or doesn’t.

  A lot of women have done that, I guess, and men, too, maybe. Jeff, your first wife, Anna, did that, right? She waited, hoping, though I don’t see that it helped her, and I am sorry. And, what’s more, you’re lucky she’s not one of those vindictive ones; I have sometimes thought she should have been, and then I remember that I am your mother. But I really did like her. I loved her. She and I liked many of the same things, unless she was just pretending; we both loved spending long hours at the aquarium, and we also loved going to all the crafty places, just wandering and touching yarns and beads and stencils and glue guns. And she made that wonderful dessert with all the layers in what looked like a giant brandy snifter or goldfish bowl, I forget what you call it, begins with a “t.” She left the special bowl here one Christmas, and I never sent it back to her. I wanted to, and you kept telling me to wait, not to interfere. “Don’t bring up one more goddamned thing to argue about,” you said.

  So eventually, I bought one of those fish, the fancy Dr. Seuss–looking thing (a red one), to live in the bowl, because I doubted I was ever going to make a trifle. That’s the name, and how ironic is that? Trifle. And add to it that those betta fish are creatures that just can’t do well with a partner. Even if they see themselves in a reflection, they bristle up, ready for combat. “Don’t trifle with me!” that fish said. That was my joke, and one your father actually thought was funny.

  I made that joke when David was staying with us while you all were dividing up your household. I took him to the aquarium, and your father and I watched those vapid purple-dinosaur videos with him until we thought we would die. We all went to a baseball game, and somewhere in there David asked me would I rather a booger taste like candy or be filled with helium and float away. Needless to say, I voted for helium, and I suggested he remember that the next time his fingers were going toward the wall in the middle of the night and get up and get a Kleenex!

  We had a lot of fun in spite of all that was happening. He only mentioned once that he was going to have two homes: two bedrooms and two Christmas trees, and maybe even two dogs. He looked so much like you, Jeff; it was good for us to feel tugged back to a happier time.

  What you need to know if you don’t already is that infidelity is really about immortality (note the “t” in there). You may have figured that out by now. Some people do things in order to locate a pulse, a breath, a drop of blood. Others do things for ego, the fountain of youth. Dress it up and call it lust or call it love, but really all it is is a call: You’re getting old. You’re going to die. You feel trapped, an animal with its leg caught in the metal teeth of time while everything young and fun is scampering past, all those things you never got to do or see or have. Such desire can be dangerous; so many of the things that brought such easy exhilaration in childhood (skates and bikes, climbing and jumping from great heights) become increasingly perilous when there is so much at stake.

  I am someone who was always already old, and not by choice, certainly not by choice at all, but it was what I was given and I grew into it. I look back and, yes, I can see what I missed. But I also think that my cautiousness has served me well, even though people are rarely appreciated for the right thing at the right time. So much comes with hindsight. Look at this, these scraps of notes, a whole stack of entries where I wrote: Something is not right. What is going on?

  I had nothing to go on but intuition; it was like that moment when a snake comes into a yard and silence falls; the birds know. It is a deafening silence.

  How many times has your father accused me of thinking I know everything? “Let’s hear it, Lil, Miss Knower of Everything.” When he says that (and sometimes he still says that) I will say, “Not true.” I say how I have never fully understood quantum physics and a couple of other things, like I don’t speak Swahili. These days he laughs at all of that. A joke of, what, 60 years? Still, there is so much I don’t understand in and of this world, the mind alone such a mystery. We think we will come to a place with all of the answers, but it just doesn’t work that way, even though I hope the opposite for you two. The romantic me wants
you to be the ones to defy all odds and solve the mysteries, get all the way into that promised land. The realistic me simply wants you to find peace with all that you will never know.

  After my mother’s death, my dad and I knew we had to give each other solid facts. Our lives depended on it. We never actually discussed this, and yet it was understood.

  I will be at the library with so-and-so, and if I am not here by 5, you will know I stopped by Woolworth’s.

  Sometimes I met my friends at the counter of Prospect Street Drug Store, and we sat and talked about this or that (school, clothes, boys), but I knew better than to let my dad down and leave him to worry. Many days, I hurried along those icy streets in saddle shoes or galoshes—oh, I could have used the tough warm boots I have worn in these recent years—and all the while, I imagined him pacing, peeking out the window where the streetlight glowed, and my chest ached and pulse quickened knowing the look on his face each time I was just seconds late. “Leave a note, Lil,” he said a million times, and so I did, and he did as well. Be right back, we often wrote. Sometimes we just wrote BRB. I have saved many of his notes (the solid clear letters, his B’s with a long tail like a cat). BRB, Lil. I tell you this because otherwise, you might spend years wondering, “Who is BRB?”

  BRB was security. BRB was a promise.

  Frank

  What to say? The train has left the station. I love you because. Though he has imagined this moment many times, Frank hesitates now, pen poised and ready. Certainly he should leave a note; it’s the decent thing to do. The house is filled with Lil’s notes—reminders of appointments and who people are, the day and the weather—Remember, the notes say. Don’t forget.