Hieroglyphics

by Jill McCorkle

  One day when Shelley was sitting like this at the cemetery—still in her bathrobe and bedroom shoes—she parked under a shade tree and watched a funeral procession. It was peaceful, and lately, she needs peaceful. But more than that, she needs to know she still has her job, and so parked here at the courthouse is the right place to be, even if it is hot as hell and scared-looking people are loitering all over the place. And she needs more sleep, uninterrupted sleep. And she needs to know there is not a person coming into her house when she isn’t there or up to her car window. She locks the doors and opens the newspaper; it’s a month old, but she studies it closely while the people in the car next to her get out and go up those big steps. The man stops to light a cigarette, and the woman clutches her purse close to her body. They are both painfully thin and clearly not there for something happy.

  Night terrors. That’s what they call it when children wake and cry and are too terrified to sleep. Shelley isn’t crying, but that’s how she feels all the same, maybe the fallout of being a mom with a kid who can’t sleep, who often wets the bed, daily claiming he’s seen a ghost, as if she didn’t already have enough to worry and be afraid about without him giving her more. She looks up night terrors, and it says they can go on until adolescence! Harvey is only six, and the thought of seven or more years of this sounds terrible, like some of those plagues in the Bible, seven years of snakes and locusts and boils, all kinds of bad shit to mess you up.

  When both of her boys were babies, the doctor talked about the Moro reflex, how infants’ arms go reaching and grasping at the air as if something invisible is there to pick them up. The doctor said that it probably went way back to the beginning of time, babies reaching for the comfort of their mothers, kind of like the way Harvey always booby-traps her when she reads his story, one hand on her arm so that as soon as she tries to slip away, he wakes. The Moro reflex is the only fear humans are born with, the doctor told her; everything else is learned. The Moro is like those jerks and shivers you can’t help and people say a rabbit ran over your grave, the kind of thing she would never say to Harvey these days, the way he is so scared of everything, especially ghosts, or the ghost he thinks lives in their yard and comes in their house.

  With a cemetery practically across the street, it’s all even worse. It’s a pretty cemetery, some really old parts with great big trees, beautiful really, and Shelley has taken a lot of walks there since renting this house. It’s peaceful in the daylight, like when she stopped to watch the funeral, but as soon as the sun starts to go down, the cemetery has a different feel to it, and so she closes the curtains and locks the doors, turns on the night-lights in the hall and in the bathrooms. “It used to be one of the best parts of town,” a colleague at work had told her, not saying what was implied: But now it’s not. But compared to some other places Shelley has known, it had seemed fine, and the rent is reasonable, and there’s a big yard, and, no, it’s not as big as the house they used to live in with Brent, but that was another town, another life, and now, according to Google Maps, that house doesn’t look so hot either. This house will be okay once they feel settled. It takes time to feel settled, especially if you’re the only adult.

  “You’d be so easy to kill, Shell,” Brent had told her early in their time together. “You do the exact same thing every day. Same place. Same time.” They were in Atlanta then, and they’d laughed when he said this, and he’d pulled her in close. It was one of those days when she was aware of happiness; the sun was shining, the kind of golden light that makes even ugly things look good. He was teasing her, but it was true: the way she got up at the same time, made the coffee in the same way, used the same mug, parked in the same spot at work, parked in the same spot at home, sat in the same chair to watch the local news, and then circled back at ten to watch it again, to see if anything had happened or changed. He said that some nights when he came home from work, he could look in the window and see her there staring at the television, whatever was supposed to be for supper boiling or burning on the stove—teasing again.

  Brent worked hard. He knew all about cars; he could fix them, and he sold them. When they first met, he even took Jason for rides in an old Mustang he had fixed up. He was someone with dreams about wanting his own dealership, and so Shelley made up some dreams, too, like she said she wanted to go to college and study plants and trees—“Botany,” he told her—but the truth was, she felt like she was at the beginning of her dream when he welcomed them in. He got irritable sometimes—that vein in his forehead and flared nostrils were a sign—but he never touched her in a hurtful way.

  “I’ll knock you into next week,” her father used to say. “I’ll knock the daylights out of you.” There were times when getting knocked into next week had sounded good to Shelley, one slap that maybe would be the last one, sending you way up into the sky and landing in another time and another place. When she met Brent, she felt safe.

  But now, she has trouble sleeping and, yes, she hears things, too. Now that Harvey has talked about it all so much, she has started listening and she also is hearing the sounds, though sometimes it’s hard to know if it is real or part of a dream. There is so much to think about and worry about that of course she might toss and turn, so she tries to relax, to think of peaceful things, like the ocean—she sells seashells by the seashore—or the way Brent sometimes sat and strummed a guitar, not really playing anything in particular but doing what he called “playing with playing.”

  That same day Shelley stopped to watch the funeral, she saw a woman standing in the newer part of the cemetery, where there is no shade from the baking sun. The woman looked middle-aged, her reddish-gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, arms crossed over her chest as she stared up at a bunch of birthday balloons tethered to a headstone. Once again, someone had gotten knocked into next week and someone who loved them was left to wonder why.

  Lil

  A funny note from a hundred years ago.

  Dear Miss Lil,

  My Girl Scout project is to help you quit smoking. If you want too. If you don’t Okay. I love to dance.

  Lisa

  ps) I get a badge for making people not smoke for being a good neighbor.

  “A little emphysema,” your father says, “is like a little arsenic or a little bullet in the head.” We all know I need to quit smoking, but I would argue as I have many times that the very cigarettes that are trying to kill me now might have saved me so many other times. Or that’s the way I see it. I never felt alone with one between my fingers, moving back and forth, a cloud of smoke to shield my face from others, a cloak to make me invisible, like something Becca’s girls were talking about from a book not too many years ago. I could hold a whole glowing fire at the tip of my fingers, and then so easily and powerfully I could put it out, under the grinding heel of my shoe or the flow of water, or into a bucket of sand.

  October 24, 2016

  Southern Pines

  Sometimes I feel like a big antenna, circling and turning and picking up static and signals from others. Perhaps it is the result of seeking my mother, and how for years I thought I saw her, a face in the crowd, a woman at the top of an escalator or turning a corner and then gone by the time I got there. I have listened and watched for her, and now I am much older than she ever was. Isn’t it odd the way my mother will always be 34, that all these times I have felt her presence, that is the person I see.

  I believe in a lot of things: the calm that can come in quiet thought, the little murmurs of your intuition when you know something is awry and then gently feel your way to that weakened spot—a thin coat of ice on a river, the soft pulsing fontanel of your newborn, the whispered concern of your Jiminy Cricket. “And where has Jiminy gone?” I asked you all that so many times! “Where is Jiminy?” Remember Becca’s big party when we were out of town? Or Jeff’s little bouts of taking what didn’t belong to him? The missing $10 bill. The gum and magazines stolen at Star Market. Or what about the crack in my mother’s hand mirror, the dent in your fathe
r’s new Oldsmobile. “Where is Jiminy?” Sometimes, one of you broke down and confessed (often when you were young you did that), and then Jiminy got old, and who knows where he went (Vietnam or a trip to a monastery or a retirement home), and you two were left to fend for yourselves.

  “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll,” you said. “A new dawn. Let the sun shine.” Who knows what you two think of all that now, all grown, with so much of your own lives behind you. I am sure there are many lies I never learned and that your own children have little lies they have told you and their children will tell them. I know there are times in both of your lives when Jiminy just went to hell. I do know that. I do. What human doesn’t know about that? And yet it bothered me those times you didn’t come to me to talk about it, to confide, to let me help you make it better. I like to think that there mixed with Jiminy’s chirping, or whatever it is crickets do, is my voice as well.

  “Let it go, Lil,” your father says. “Let go.” He says, “They’re goddamn grown. They’re practically middle-aged, for God’s sake!”

  November 28 (once again), 2005

  Newton

  I feel my mother’s presence today. I do. It’s gray and rainy, low clouds like smoke, and I woke with her on my mind. People are so odd about believing in spiritual encounters, as if it might be crazy or stupid, and yet such a vast population of the world claims religious beliefs that sound like nothing more than a good ghost story, a haunting. My religion acknowledges the power of all the dead, all the souls. There isn’t a gatekeeper or a scorekeeper. You have to do those jobs yourself. You have to decide what it feels like at the end of the day to rest your head and close your eyes.

  I say I am not really a religious person, and yet in so many ways, I am. Bits of this and bits of that have stuck and stayed with me; the part of the Christmas story that I have always loved is when we are told that “Mary pondered them in her heart.” I always think, yes, that’s what mothers do. They ponder. They ponder in their hearts. Devoted parents never stop worrying. It’s one of those things you never really know until you get there—like what it’s like to have a baby, lose a parent, lose a good friend, lose many good friends.

  Part of my wanting to be a dancer was all about the props, and that it made me feel close to my mother; being a dancer had been her dream, her desire, and she loved all kinds of dancing and was quick to learn. She had a natural sense of movement and rhythm, which I had to work hard to master. I was always much more comfortable with ballet—the discipline, the way that I sometimes felt I disappeared while stretching at the barre, muscles warming and lengthening. I was never able to simply cut loose on a dance floor and shake and shimmy all over. I have always admired the kind of uninhibited force that allows people to go to such places. It still makes me laugh to think of my mother breaking into song and dancing, pretending she was adorned with jewels and feathers. She once bought a pineapple (not easy to find, and quite pricey, my father noted) just to hold it up on her head like Carmen Miranda.

  While I was never a natural dancer, I was a disciplined one, and I think that’s what enabled me to be a good teacher. What I loved most were those years of leg warmers and classical music, the wordless stories unfolding in movement. I wanted to teach dance as much as anything, to create the stage for recitals, to line up the little cubbies there by the door, where they placed their street shoes and jackets. I wanted to make a difference, and I think my little school would have made my mother very proud. That’s what I like to think. And at the end of the day, when all the children from the last class had been picked up and driven home, I loved to just sit there, rubbing my shoes in that box of rosin. And then I would turn the lights off and go to the center of the room, just the street light coming in, and rise on pointe, and then extend my left leg and see how long I could stay.

  My mother once told me how Anna Pavlova could stand on pointe for hours at a time, frozen like a statue. The longest I ever did was 11 minutes, the big wall clock counting my time, while I stared right into the photo of my mother I kept on the side wall, near the light switch; she had drawn a little circle around her face, in a long line of women dancing the cancan, arms raised and stocking legs kicking.

  I’ve always wondered if prayers and messages to whoever might be listening are heard as easily when they’re said in our minds, or if it’s better to say the words out loud. It seems the latter to me—perhaps because I like to think that what happens inside my head is mine alone. I think if I were a younger person and more the academic type like your father, that is a topic I could imagine exploring and thinking about. As is, though, the idea simply began the habit I have of talking aloud. You’ve laughed at it; perhaps you’ve even worried. For years, I had a dog there as recipient, and I miss that. I keep telling your dad how we need one more. Just one more to take us all the way home (perhaps a smaller one, a little poodle mix), and I tell your dad how it will let him off the hook when I have something to tell. But those nights, in my little dance school, there was no one there to hear me.

  “Momma,” I said, and sometimes still say. “You are missed.”

  “Momma,” I said. “Please help me understand all that I don’t know. Send me a sign.”

  One night in particular, in the studio at the end of the day, I could hear the clock ticking and the sleet against the window, and then I saw something from the corner of my eye. I knew that if I turned to look, I would lose my balance.

  “I love what you’ve done, Lily,” I imagined her saying. “It was never supposed to end that way.”

  “I know.”

  “I would never have done that to you.”

  “I know.”

  And then the streetlight outside sputtered and went dark. “Good night.”

  Your dad could explain it. Everyone could—it was in the paper; a car hit a pole, a teenager just learning to drive, with no business out in wintry weather, and that whole section of town was without power for hours that night. But for me it was a message: a miracle of timing, the promise that such connections are possible. I have never stopped believing.

  When I look back and think of those nights alone in my school, it is hard not think of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” It was one of those stories that made me cry as a young girl, which made me love it even more, that poor one-legged tin soldier falling in love with the ballerina he thinks has only one leg as well. I did it for the recital one year, remember? And, Jeff, I made you be the soldier because there were no boys taking class that year. You hated it, and your father told me he thought I was making a big mistake. He said if you turned out homosexual that it was all my fault, and that if I made you wear tights, he’d report me to Social Services. I can’t tell you how many times over the years (the many young women calling us to ask where you were, how you could be so heartless) I told your father that if only he had let me put you in tights, perhaps to play Romeo, or even the prince in “The Nutcracker,” that you might have been much kinder in the way you treated others.

  There was a time I hoped you were gay, thinking that might explain everything, and then it could be so easy; you would just come out and find a nice man, who would also call me Mom, and live happily ever after. Because, at the risk of saying too much, I do need to tell you this—a playboy can still be relatively attractive in his 40s (where you are right now, with your young new person, who really does seem quite nice even if she could be your daughter), but once you turn 50, it begins to get dicey, son. It does. It is a fact, and who cares what those like Hugh Hefner do? An ascot and a martini will not get rid of wrinkles and crepey, scaly skin and the inability to perform without medications. Get to 70 and 80 and then it is just sad to act like a playboy. Time is always relevant. Get to 70 and 80 and the joke is how poor vision is your best friend in the bedroom. But more true is how important real love and devotion are. That is what I want for you.

  The good news for you, Jeff (young you who did not want to be in the tin-soldier show), was that all the parents thought it was a sad and dark way for thei
r little girls to end the year, and so the next recital was back to buttercups and butterflies and little rays of sunshine, and you got to do what you liked best, which was help me paint props for two months, our basement filled with our work—castles and flowers and bright-blue skies—and then you opened and closed the curtains on the night of the show. We had so much fun doing that, didn’t we?

  Balance. I try sometimes now to balance on one foot, and I look like a stork with vertigo, so I hold on to something and I can close my eyes and picture what I looked like the night the lights went out. I am not what I used to be. Even a series of relevés and pliés, simplest of simple, tax me. In those years when I had my school, I ended each day with a moment of balance or a series of tour jetés, or fouetté pirouettes, my eyes fixed and spotting on the photograph of my mother; and then I put on my wraparound skirt—that black knit one I had for the longest time, and probably would still, except it was what Rudolf liked to sleep with in his final years, and what I took to the vet with us the day we had to say goodbye. Too many times to count, I put on my skirt and boots and then stood there, feeling accomplished and proud in the entryway of my own business, and I smoked a cigarette, that little tiny glow on the end so contained. Powerful but contained. And I snuffed it out into a deep bucket of sand that I kept by the steps.