by Karma Brown
the time to comprehend that the heart keeps beating, even
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through tragedy and grief, though Elsie would teach her that
lesson eventually— and it cemented in her a belief that women’s
survival was ensured only by having children.
Nellie then learned the truth about the heart and her mother’s illness— realizing, too, that, choice or not, having Nellie had
forced Elsie to endure deep, long‑ standing pain. Without Nellie,
Elsie could have succumbed years before she did— to live for an‑
other person is no small sacrifice. Soon after her mother’s reve‑
lation about Mrs. Powell not wanting another child, she and Elsie
spent an afternoon at the Powells’ home. The women spoke tête‑
à‑ tête in hushed tones on the verandah as Mrs. Powell sipped at
the golden tansy tea— Elsie’s recipe, with flowers from her
garden— while Nellie played with the children, thinking about
choices and beating hearts.
Two days later Nellie was called on to look after the Powell
children again. Elsie explained that Mrs. Powell had caught a
bug, a stomach ailment that made her violently ill, and she had
lost the baby. Nellie, young and prone to magical thinking back
then, thought maybe Mrs. Powell’s baby had died because it
knew it wasn’t wanted, privy to Mrs. Powell’s innermost thoughts
and regrets. It was only later, when her mother felt her old
enough to understand the truth, that she learned the miscar‑
riage had nothing to do with the flu, or wishful thinking.
The wind changed direction, blowing across Nellie’s bare
calves, and she shivered. “I’m sorry to say I should be going,
Mother.” She stood and brushed a few blades of grass from the
pleats in her skirt. “Don’t want to get caught in a miserable
downpour.”
Nellie bent and pressed her lips to the stone. It started
raining, the drops fat and frequent. But she didn’t mind the rain
or the way her soaked clothes pressed to her skin, making her
tremble as she ran back to her hotel, looking forward to a hot
cup of tea.
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. . .
Back in her hotel room, not far from the Pleasantville cemetery
where her mother was buried and the home she shared with
Richard, Nellie made a cup of tea to fight the chill of the rain‑
storm she’d been caught in. The tansy flowers, which looked
like fuzzy lemon‑ yellow buttons when they bloomed, were dried
and shriveled in the paper bag Nellie pulled out of her handbag.
She added some candied orange rind to her cup and poured the
steaming water over the mixture of flowers and rind, waiting for
it to steep. In went a teaspoon of honey for a little sweetness, as the flowers had a somewhat bitter flavor. Nellie would drink
three cups of the tea before resting on the bed, though she did
not sleep. She was wide‑ awake and contemplative after her visit
with her mother.
A few hours later Nellie became violently ill. She was sure, as
she lay shivering on the tiled washroom floor, that she was
dying. Perhaps there was truth to the cadence of a woman’s
heartbeat. For a moment she welcomed the idea, imagining the
next time she threw up her heart would stop and it would all
mercifully be over. But by morning the worst had passed and
Nellie was awoken by the steady rainfall, filling puddles in the
streets.
She stood gingerly, shaky‑ handed as she clutched the sink,
and a fierce cramp rippled through her abdomen. Nellie doubled
over, gasping and moaning with the pain as another cramp
crested. The relief was nearly as strong as the pain.
Even though she believed it the only way, Nellie sobbed
until her uterus stopped contracting and the shards of pain re‑
ceded. This was not a choice she wished on her worst enemy,
but she was grateful to have it. Thankful for the gifts a garden,
and its flowers, offered a woman in need.
Afterward, weak and exhausted, Nellie cleaned herself up
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Karma Brown
and rinsed her teacup, all traces of the tansy flowers washed
down the bathroom sink. Smoking one of her Lucky cigarettes
through the bathroom window, Nellie watched the rain, won‑
dering when it might stop. The telephone rang as she was
packing her small valise on the bed she hadn’t slept in. The
phone’s shrill ring echoed in the small room, and she let it go a
few times before picking up.
“Nellie?” Miriam said, slightly breathless. Nellie pressed the
handset to her ear, anticipation flooding her. “Oh, honey. You
need to come home right away.”
Soon after, Nellie was on the train, waiting for it to depart and
take her home to Greenville, where nothing would ever be the
same again. She was hunched in her seat with arms wrapped
tightly around her midsection, the colicky cramping not fin‑
ished with her yet. The rain was unrelenting, and Nellie leaned
her tear‑ stained cheek against the train’s window, eyes tracking
the drops as they left streaks down the glass.
Once when Nellie was quite young and helping Elsie prepare
the garden beds for planting, it had started to rain— pour, ac‑
tually. “Seems it’s raining cats and dogs, Nell‑ girl,” her mother said, though she stayed put and continued the task, uncon‑
cerned by the teeming rain, or the promise of animals falling
from the sky. Cats and dogs? Young Nellie had glanced up to the sky, blinking repeatedly to move the drops from her eyes, fearful
about what was to come. Elsie had laughed hard, tossing her
head back and sticking out her tongue to catch a few raindrops.
“It’s a saying, Nellie. Only water falls from the sky, my love.”
Nellie, relieved, also tipped her head back to drink the rain, cool and sweet against her tongue. And as the storm continued and
her mother went back to her gardening, she said, “After the rain
cometh the fair weather.” It came out of her with fervor, as
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though she believed it a promise the sky wouldn’t even imagine
not keeping.
However, Elsie didn’t do well with stormy skies, and the day
Nellie found her mother’s lifeless body in the overflowing,
blood‑ tinged bathtub marked the seventh day without a speck
of sunshine. It had been a horribly rainy week; flash floods,
people going out only when absolutely necessary, hiding under
somber umbrellas. The day after Elsie drowned— a half‑ drunk
glass of milk (emerald green in color, thanks to the poisonous
Paris green inse
cticide she had stirred into it to ensure she would never awaken) on the tub’s edge— the sun came out, strong and
hot and life changing, and Nellie would think about what her
mother had said. Would forever wonder why she hadn’t been
able to believe it that time. The sun always returned . . . as long as you were strong enough to wait for it.
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37
q
Housewives spend so much time alone they often fail to under-
stand that a man’s being “left alone” does not imply real
loneliness— it just means being set free from all female demands
and constraint. Some husbands achieve this illusion by taking a
night off to bowl or play pinochle with the boys. Others shut
themselves up in the garage and overhaul the car— or read a de-
tective story. Whatever specific use a man makes of these happy
moments of aloneness, it’s smart for a wife to see that he gets them.
No doubt about it, husbands need to slip the leash occasionally.
— Mrs. Dale Carnegie, How to Help Your Husband
Get Ahead in His Social and Business Life (1953)
Alice
septeMber 4, 2018
I think I know why your mom had those letters of Nellie’s,”
Alice said. “Or at least why they were never mailed.”
Sally poured coffee into two mugs that read, Doctors Do
it better— a gift from a medical student she had worked with
years earlier. “Why?”
“Her mother died years before Nellie even met Richard.
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Which means there was no one to mail them to.” She took a
piece of the lemon loaf she’d made when she was supposed to be
writing, the sticky icing transferring to her fingers. “I was doing research, for my book, and found a death certificate for an Elsie
Swann, from Pleasantville. It had Eleanor Swann written in the
informant box.”
“You don’t say.” Sally added cream to her mug, stirred until
the coffee was uniformly beige.
“Apparently, she died of poisoning and asphyxiation, and get
this, ‘drowning from temporary insanity.’ Whatever that means.”
“Ah. That means it was suicide,” Sally said. “ ‘Temporary in‑
sanity’ under cause of death was the genteel way to say someone
killed themselves. Before suicide was decriminalized in the early
sixties, you could go to jail if you attempted it.”
Suicide. Nellie’s mother had taken her own life. A wave of sadness moved through Alice. It was strange to feel so much for
a stranger, a woman she had little in common with except for a
house. Yet, Alice felt a kinship. She sensed there was more to
Nellie than her letters revealed. “I wonder why Nellie kept
writing to her mom, after she was gone.”
“One can only guess.” Sally glanced out her front window.
It was raining, so they had been forced inside for their afternoon
visit. Six months earlier Alice would have scoffed at the idea of
having daily coffee with her elderly neighbor, but now it was the
part of her day she looked forward to most. “Perhaps she missed
talking with her.”
“Do you miss your mom? Being able to talk with her, I mean?”
“I do. Every day. I always felt guilty, leaving her here alone. But she was resilient. After my dad died, she found a way to be happy
again. She had a very full life, but I know she would have liked me to live closer. Also, maybe to have had a grandbaby she could knit
sweaters for.” Sally smiled, looked uncharacteristically regretful for a moment.
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“I’m not close with my mom,” Alice said. “We’re pretty dif‑
ferent.”
“How so?”
“In nearly every way you can imagine. She’s optimistic; I’m
realistic. She drinks tea; I prefer coffee. She’s thin; I like lemon loaf. She’s been doing yoga since before it was trendy and I’m
about as unbendy as it gets. I run sometimes, but mostly to
compensate for these calories.” Alice took a big bite of loaf and
raised her eyebrows, prompting Sally to chuckle.
“I don’t doubt she loves me, but she was a single mom.”
Alice shrugged. “I got the sense she resented motherhood a bit,
you know? That my life came at the sacrifice of her own, or
something like that.”
Sally smiled sympathetically. “I can’t know for sure, not
having had children of my own, but I suspect being a mother is
a most complicated role.”
Alice sighed. “I suppose she did her best. She doesn’t really
get me, and I don’t get her. But we both know it, so somehow
it works well enough.”
“What about your father?” Sally asked.
“My stepfather is awesome. Solid, caring, shirt‑ off‑ his‑ back kind of guy. But my biological father left when I was a kid.”
Sally didn’t say anything, waiting for Alice to go on or to
change the subject. And suddenly Alice wanted to talk about
her dad, about how terrified she was that she was nothing like
her mother because she was exactly like her father. “He died almost two months ago.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that, Alice. That’s a tough pill to
swallow no matter what the situation.”
“Thanks, though I should add I haven’t seen my dad, or
talked to him, in twenty years.” But Alice knew no matter if
your parents were present or absent, good or bad, they remained
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part of you. Inside you, whether you wanted them there or not.
“He was basically a stranger.”
“Stranger or not, he was still your father. Relationships are
never easy. Especially the ones we’re born into.” Sally reached
out a hand to Alice, and the women held on for a moment. “So,
tell me, Miss Alice. How’s the book coming along?”
Alice groaned. “It’s not. Can I take a pass on that topic too?”
“Writer’s block again?”
“Sort of, I guess. I have this idea I’m excited about, and I’m
doing research, but I’ve written so little I’m not even sure it
would qualify as a short story at this point.”
Sally considered this. “Do you even want to write a novel?”
“I think so.” Alice stared back at her. “Or I thought I did.
But now I’m not sure.”
“Then, good heavens, why are you doing it?”
“Because I was fired from my job for doing something stupid
and I didn’t tell Nate what happened. He wanted to move to the
suburbs and I had no paycheck and no more excuses for why we
had to stay in Murray Hill, and writing a book was something I
always said I wanted to do because it seemed like the sort of thing most people want to do, and it offered as good a distraction as any while I tried to
get pregnant.” Alice paused, sucking in a breath.
If she had gone on she might have confessed the IUD fiasco and
her deep regret over it. Or her ambivalence about having a baby,
and how it made her feel she was failing her marriage. Or she
might have admitted her fear that Nate was keeping his own se‑
crets, and maybe wasn’t as good a husband as he seemed.
“My mother always used to say, ‘Never ask a simple question
if you want a simple answer.’ ” Sally smiled reassuringly.
“I mostly feel restless. Like I’m waiting for real life to begin,
and I’m just putting in time, watching everything fall apart
until things make sense again.”
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“Honey, I wish I had advice to give, but I don’t know the
first thing about writing a book, or being married, or feeling the
pressure to start a family,” Sally replied. “Well, I guess I know a little about that last one because Mother was endlessly harping
on me to have a child, even on my own. She said I could move in,
work at the hospital here, and she would help me raise the baby.
She even had a list of eligible bachelors in the neighborhood she
updated and mailed to me regularly, with a pro and con column
for each. That list always made me laugh. She had things like
‘sharp dresser’ on the pro side and ‘beginning to bald’ as a con,
as though those attributes were in any way connected to the
success of a marital partnership.”
They laughed, and then Sally continued. “Yet despite her up‑
bringing, and the pressures of the time for women to be seen but
not heard, to have no aspirations outside the home, my mother
was actually quite the feminist! One of the greatest gifts she ever gave me— and she was a wonderful mother, so there were
many— was to have me answer one question.”
“Which was?”
Sally sat up straighter, put on an animated face, and waggled
a finger the way Alice assumed her mother must have. “She said,
‘Sally, the hardest question we have to ask ourselves in this life is,
“Who am I?” Ideally, we answer it for ourselves, but be warned
that others will strive to do it for you— so don’t let them.’ ”
There was a lump in Alice’s throat; she was on the brink of