Local Souls

by Allan Gurganus

  Irr. French verb: Maudire: “to curse.”

  • • •

  LIKE ICE HERSELF, I’m not a “natural” parent—too tense to be literal, not trusting enough to relax ungirdled into being Mother Earth, the turquoise-wearing bread-baker. Still, I’ve learned to fake a certain bovine calm. But I can ruin even that with stabs at burbling charmingness.

  I’ve sometimes overheard my kids soothe their little friends, “She didn’t mean to barge in just now and go so loud. Mom’s good underneath. Only, around strangers she sometimes tries too hard is all. But you should see her when she thinks she’s mainly by herself. Boy, then she can act almost happy.”

  Living alone with them, I am in motion by five-thirty a.m. First thing, while compiling school lunches, I read my precious lifeline the New York Times. (I think the headlines are messages seeking my help, smarts, untapped diplomacy.) I’ll clip the odd article—anti-doping sports items for my boys, reviews of works on poetry and African economics for Cait. But I won’t let them see the whole paper, the rancid world picture, till after dinner-hour. I am their morning filter. The world is too disturbing for those just starting out soft-boned. Let my wee ones imbibe adult-strength Chaos just a pinch at a time. Their homoeopathist, my dosages show mercy.

  • • •

  I’LL SKIP CAIT’S eye-popping PSAT scores, her all-state-orchestra flute skills. At sixteen she won a national contest, Best Poem Concerning the Homeless. Her sestina she titled “Outside It.” This meant Cait got published in a regional (if not a national like the Atlantic) magazine. She was soon enlisted by a local crew that distributes soup and free blankets in our Old Town’s most dangerous alleys.

  Her adult supervisor, this laissez-faire Quaker wearing filthy wire specs, swore he’d keep an eye on her. But when I asked how many kids worked under him on Caitie’s late-night shift, he said, “Roughly nineteen, take or leave a few, why?”

  Sometimes it would be 3 a.m. and she was still out wandering the street of train station bars, her backpack stuffed with pounds of power-bars for favorite junkies. The girl was seventeen and scarily pretty. She favored short tops, low jeans. Beautiful navel, if I do say so myself. Some midriffs are too ideal for even Falls’ idea of a slum at 3 a.m., thanks.

  One night I made Cait hysterical by loading her pajama-ed brothers into our battered wagon while patrolling the town’s darkest streets. First I’d find, then guard her. I’d had a premonition. Caitlin, when busted by Mom, would roll her eyes then shoot me the finger whilst struggling even harder to blend in with the Ragged.

  Once I caught her supporting a very old bum so he could pee against a wall. First I spotted her pink canvas backpack she won’t ever let me wash. Helping him, she looked like a nineteenth century English nurse, newly-graduated. Cait was picturesque in the strong simple way she hoisted this scrawny bearded misfit. She did everything for him except pulling out what my sons these days—somewhat optimistically—call their main drains. She did appear lovely doing it.

  I vowed I’d never let my daughter know I’d seen this happen.

  —YES, A GIRL who’d give away the new novel you are reading, with just thirty gripping pages left to go. Cait passed our stuff to the Needy, meaning those even Needier than we. See, I’ve been clever at stretching Ed’s child support. (My tricks: cheap maple syrup funneled into bottles that once held the real stuff. I only do such transfers late, the kids asleep.)

  It gave my darlings a false sense of security. I clearly overdid the job on Cait. First she hated being a spun-sugar blonde; then she felt all guilty for our wealth. If she’d only known!

  When I summoned her downstairs to close the front door again, she lectured me—in her most patient singsong—about how Saint Francis, when he sought virtue? had to purge himself of his aristocratic family’s lavish clothes? before he could even, like, start being bare-boned good! Strange but in that same sainted way, I—stripped shoeless by my kid—was forced to send off for this footgear needed to begin my own jail-term holiday.

  • • •

  LAST SPRING, SHE runs in with a letter, tells me the homeless poem has won her a summer internship plus free transportation to said job. “Great, dear. —A ride where?”

  “Africa,” her smile ignites and she’s immediately listing ten tropical-disease-shots she’ll now need. Then I say something awful. I usually do. (Other people claim they regret making certain sharp replies, but they mean they wish they had. Me, I blurt, then waste my life force regretting whatever just leaked.)

  “You’ll cure disease in Africa over my dead body! —Young lady, you’re one inch from getting into Radcliffe (and you know how I’ve always felt about that school). Now you want to jet clear to Africa, and why? To hold up old tribal-bums so they can pee against . . . straw huts?”

  Horrified, she gave me such a look: first pure fear, then—far worse—the visual wash of total Caitlin pity. She settled on the floor beside my rocker. She placed her head so it must be cradled in my lap. I pressed my hand against her warm ear, her cheek.

  “What hurt you so early, Mom? Your bitterness scared Dad off, okay. But I keep imagining what it’s gotta daily cost you. Was your Ice Queen mom as frozen-solid as you say? Then I totally hate her for maiming you. For how she’d hide your lipstick, follow your dates’ cars, eavesdrop on phone-calls. Harsh. I cannot imagine. Gran was truly twisted. —But, look, is it getting worse for you? ’Cause, lately you seem . . . Mom? let me take some of it on myself, whatever the burden. I know I’m not super-fun to live with. One grin from me at breakfast seems to work your last nerve. I see it in your face. And I’m sorry. Truly. With me trying everything out and heading to far places, it must make stuff way harder here. Even so, Mom, I can’t quite see I have a choice. The divorce made you want to hold us even tighter. Probably natural, you ole sweetie. But, my growing up fast? my taking chances? that’s one life path I can’t refuse. Ask for anything else, Mom. —Love you. And am definitely going.”

  (Incredible girl. —Who could not love her?)

  HER FATHER JOHN-HANCOCKED Cait’s every travel waiver. Anybody ask for my permission? I was not even technically a “Mrs.” now. My body had just been her emergency landing chute, a chute that later got up and walked around, believing it still had rights. Edward let the Quakers off the hook in advance for whatever dire might happen abroad.

  Even so, the girl was nearly eighteen. She could have left without my blessing, which—I hated myself afterward—she had not got.

  THREE GALS FROM Cait’s school are what’re nowadays called “boy magnets.” It’s either funny or sickening how many full-grown boys and married men in cars will circle a given house containing one small-boned promiscuous girl. Or no, not even sexually-active necessarily, just beautiful (if in a far coarser way than my Caitie). But our home forever had that yellow Goodwill van swooping into our cul-de-sac.

  Caitlin kept its mobile number punched among her cell’s “top ten.” I eventually knew the two main drivers’ names. “Mrs. Indian Giver,” they teased me as my station-wagon followed their truck, me honking, signaling again, Pull over, at least give the blender back. No questions asked.

  • • •

  LET’S SEE: CAITIE palmed off her own desk chair. She passed along to strangers my only broken-in walking shoes. Next to bite the dust, our admittedly-seldom-used backyard picnic table, then the pretty red Ann Taylor blazer I’d bought her a month before she left. “What are you, prepping me for stewardess school, Mom?” She looked darling in it too. Like a Norwegian guide at the UN.

  Also missing, a solid-silver family christening cup, circa 1840 and therefore in admitted need of polish. That proved to Cait I hadn’t daily earned it. (What certain of Falls’ poor folks did with it, Christ knows. Melted into pawnable ingots probably.) But oh, my girl always felt wonderful afterward.

  The more I yelled at Caitie, the more canonized she looked, eyes on the ceiling, lit way up. Secretly, I found her openhandedness not uncute. But I still had to instruct her, straight-faced
for Character’s sake.

  I scowled but nobody was more a connoisseur of her beauty’s many unearthly moods. It is comforting to have gorgeous kids. But you mustn’t be caught gloating about your somebody’s looks, especially by them.

  “Radiant,” the tributes all repeated. She appeared especially-so after donating major furniture. Her coloring skimmed between the silver and the pink, as platinum as I’d once been. A rosy freckled child born for causes. She is not the kind of girl who tortures you by being bad. That’d be too easy.

  I once found Jehovah’s Witnesses reorganizing their tracts along my granite kitchen counter with Cait feeding them my famous oatmeal cookies. Discovering six windows open in August, I’d yell, “Caitlin Mulray, we are not cooling the entire globally-warmed outdoors.” “Why not, Mom?” Her comic answer undercut her own goodie-two-shoes earnestness. “Can’t every citizen make a difference by lighting one little cooling ozone candle, hmm? Jeez, Mom. ‘The Melting Polar Icecap That Could’ might cheer up, if only each house on earth would air-cool its yard for just, like, three minutes a day . . .” then she cackled. Joking about her own solemn doomsday rhetoric. Play: a sure strategy for a person’s surviving anything. Or so I told myself . . .

  Caitie’d had braids since turning five. Her father claimed she looked like the teenage Ingrid Bergman. She did have the film-star skin that gives back value-added light. But, however lovely our Cait, the fact is: nobody else has ever looked like Ingrid Bergman young. (Not even her own bright if slightly off-brand daughter.)

  III

  SO, YES, AFRICA. MY OVERACHIEVING CAITLIN COULD NOT stay home and simply teach wood-and-bead-craft at the state park four miles from town. Oh nooo, that’d be too typical. She had to go drill ABC’s into tribal babies with flies working the wet corners of their little eyes. I feel for them, don’t get me wrong. But what’s the use—when one whole continent’s unappeasable hunger is offered the single steamed-dumpling of my child’s 99 lbs.? Or so ran my rude suburban reasoning as she stuffed the one pink backpack she’d agreed to take.

  Cait asked her kid brothers what they wanted her to bring home from Africa.

  “Spears? Spears!” Nicky said. Caitie made a mouth, started to do a prim explanation about the Dark Continent’s actual modernity, but wisely gave that up. Look, if the place is all that up-to-date, why is she so desperately needed to come teach there at age seventeen? Her brothers’ request did crack me up, though: bring us our own personal spears!

  Boys are simpler creatures.

  That’s why we women need men so. The ultimate flattery:

  Men are so simple, they think women are!

  • • •

  SHE LANDED IN Cape Town and promised to call me at once. I had paid in advance for a new super-duper cell phone with flash-camera attachment and all these bonus hours. I’d half convinced myself that this new appliance might draw us closer together. I believed the brochure! The twins and I would eat a lot of “mac and cheese” to offset this onetime telecommunication expense.

  Eventually she thought to check in, explaining how her whole new country seemed a dead zone in terms of cellular reception, maybe the dry heat? One week later, from a hotel pay phone—shouting over some bad live combo’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (a good sign?)—she reverses charges; Cait admits her silver mobile has already been stolen. “He barely jostled me. But considering the unbelievable poverty here, who can blame one little go-to thief? He was a child. Shows initiative,” she adds with a laugh.

  Two weeks later, it’s the day she turns eighteen, Caitlin Mulray finally lets me know she is still alive. A “somebody” always reverses charges to “whatever.”

  • • •

  “PLEASE GO OUT and buy another phone, hon. Show some youthful initiative yourself.” There comes the pause. I know these. They always mean, What an Out-of-Shape Upper-Middle-Class Idiot You Truly Are, Pillow-Woman.

  “Mother? Probably it’s nerve-shredding having your first kid abroad alone. But here’s a little ‘Google Earth to Mother’? I am on the, uh, veldt. We’re so far into nature, how can I phrase it? —Maybe, ‘There’s not even a Target out here, Mom’? You know I love you and want to help relax your obsessive-compulsive thing. But here’s a news crawl for you—‘I am in Affff-ri-ca, Mo-tther.’”

  “Thank you for clearing that up, Cait. ‘Across the Great Wat-er,’ right?” I long to tell her that, my suburban cul-de-sac address aside, I am not exactly brain-dead. I actually published a poem in the Atlantic Monthly when I was nineteen, barely nineteen; so she has less than one year left. Instead I literally bite my tongue.

  • • •

  NO, I DO not like to be sneered at as some soccer-Volvo-lump—certainly not by the person whose every jump shot, steeplechase, flute lesson I have paid for, then convincingly overpraised. But irked as I feel, with this much long-distance drying between us, I dare not defend myself, not now. That might block her next call to me, one essential to her mother’s own continued breathing. So for once jolly Jean here even tries tact.

  I ask her to describe the kids she’s teaching. How many? probably cute, huh? Cait answers, Thirty hilarious and ever-so-responsive boys ages eleven to nineteen, is exactly what she says. I inquire as to what she does after lessons with her limited free time. “Oh, we eat pounds of roasted chicken feet we buy from this sweet little old man, Abas. (Mother, I guess I’d say that chicken feet are the potato chips of Africa.) Then we all jump into the pond, a swimming hole that has cypressy tannin in it so its water’s black as ink but always the perfect temperature.” Trying for further bonding girl-talk about clothes-and-mini-pads-and-makeup, I ask which of her two as-yet-undonated swimsuits she’s brought with her. Again, the pause that chills all mothers’ souls. Especially when it rolls clear back from toasty grassy Africa to milder, lawn-mown Falls, NC . . .

  This silence seems a schooling flash-freeze lesson for your heart. You fear this is your starter-blast, prep for that long-dreaded nighttime communiqué we parents most fear. Sleep’s hush gets punctured by the three a.m. phone call from some international stranger who has just found your kid’s broken form along a jungle pathway.

  Caitlin remains silent to my wondering aloud which bikini she’s favoring.

  “No suit at all, hunh, Caitie mine? Brilliant. You are the only blond female in that whole jungle country. Your father, at least, thinks you look like Ingrid Bergman, young. You mean to tell me you are skinny-dipping with forty butt-naked African men ‘hilarious and ever so responsive’ of all ages?”

  “Yeah, and?” she snaps.

  “Christ, Caitlin, if I have to EXPLAIN . . .”

  —I THINK IT’S that, like Cait, I have also been giving things away all my life. To others, always others. I see how profoundly gifted she is. Hard to explain how she often enters a room like delayed news of some Democratic victory. And the sec she leaves, that room feels six degrees cooler, more than ninety-nine pounds emptier.

  It’s organic and inevitable, my wanting her to achieve the several things I haven’t. Look, I know how being really smart can jeopardize a very pretty girl. I think of my own talents, how mine sometimes seemed to cut me off from the very things those should’ve unlocked. Big gifts upset little people. Not to mention Beauty.

  Hard admitting but, on my worst days, I wish I were as conventional and right-wing as most neighbor ladies out our way. They sense my judging. It doesn’t make me a bit more popular.

  “What’s she got to be so jacked about? Hand-carving the forty pumpkins paving her yard for trick-or-treat? Her weight? Who her ex was?!” Oh, I hear them, one-aisle-over not-unloud, in discount stores. They then go on about an idolized local doctor; about who got onto the country club membership committee and how that affects their chances. People are limited. And I am not so ditzy as they claim. But name one way I might shame Falls into admitting it?

  Whereas Cait sees everybody as a fellow wounded creature she alone can cure. This brings the girl so much love at once! Her prize poem wa
s technically perfect, without ever smirking over its finish as mine had. My ditty was only about spring; hers faced actual hunger. At nineteen, I was still trapped in ladylikeness. (Even Plath was then, as Mademoiselle magazine’s college guest editor.) But my Cait, she’d already cut through all that. She owned “the chops” and subject matter, both. Making shapes from the worst of the mess of the world.

  My one hope? “May my child wind up with a life that is about her.”

  • • •

  AFTER CAIT’S PHONE-CALL, I could not get through again. I annoyed the 1-800-Alltel support girl. Her contention was that Africa boasts excellent reception. “Oh?” I tell her. “Cells pretty prevalent? Must be hard to get booster towers set up across desert and jungle and so forth, no?” “We always support our technology. It’s there for those able to access and understand it. That, madam, is why we even use the phrase ‘World Wide.’” I hung up so fast. Imagine insulting a paying customer, and with my IQ. Still, I got the hint: Cait might’ve had me, if not actually blocked, then taken off her top-ten-fave list. Was our relationship changing?

  • • •

  TIMES I TELL myself, I’m incognito, only briefly playing Tubby Abandoned Wife. Hell, I’m so undercover I can’t recall my own first, preferred identity. Though inwardly talkative, I seize up before a microphone, a crowd. This means I “dwell in shadows,” as my worst girlhood poem put it. Why live disguised here in this minor town encircled by tobacco-rich farmland? Where else, with three kids? Manhattan? On my alimony? A single parent must do all the heavy lifting, including that most strenuous of bench presses: daily making it look effortless, even fun!

  My folks sent me to finishing school to learn finger bowls. Teachers at St. Cecilia’s urged my reading Sarah Teasdale’s poems. She’d been a talented sickly St. Louis girl who wrote poems good enough to get her to Manhattan and win a Pulitzer. But she married some Missouri business-traveler. He left her at home alone till she got so sad, the poor thing killed herself. Some role model! My gender’s generation was programmed to offer fullest energy to families, then boyfriends, next husbands, finally kids, grandkids. Sure it was okay for a bright girl to publish the stray poem, but only as some sidelight parsley garnish, thanks.