“There!” she yelled. “Right there.” And I saw her Ford, recognizable at a glance by the tinted windows and the fuzz-buster duct-taped to the dash, parked sideways in its slot. I laughed then—at the car, at Wanda, at the comedy of it all, Wanda hiding her fear behind outrage while I could do nothing but shake my head and follow close behind.
After, I kept thinking that it must have been that moment when Mama reached to grab Anne’s hand for the last time, when her mouth—no longer speaking what her mind was seeing—began that soft wordless howl. Twenty minutes of howling and then silence, and death happening then like the closing of a book.
“You mean and stubborn and completely Ruth’s daughter,” Aunt Dot had told me when I visited her years ago and would not give her the gossip about Mama that she wanted. I had made a mantra of her words. “Mean and stubborn and Ruth’s daughter. I don’t hold grudges. I kick butt and keep moving. Mean and stubborn and Ruth Gibson’s daughter.” But what did that mean in a world without her? Who were Ruth Gibson’s daughters without her?
After the good-byes and the weeping, walking away from the hospital together, my sisters and I became other people. All through the funeral rituals, we acted as if we had become careful strangers. I imagined myself crisp and efficient, doing what seemed necessary, barely pausing to wipe the tears I could not stop. Anne walked silently through the motions, white-faced and wounded, though the air around her hummed and burned. It was Wanda, my big sister, who startled me, putting me down in her own bed, serving food I didn’t know she knew how to cook, teasing the relatives out of their animosity. She even got my uncle Brice to talk to my aunt Maudy and kept me carefully out of my stepfather’s reach.
At first I wasn’t sure what my sister was doing, but at the funeral home I began to understand. We had gone through Mama’s things together, talked about buying something special, but finally chosen clothes for Mama that she had worn and loved—her lucky shirt, loose-fitting cotton trousers, and her most comfortable shoes. “Only woman ever buried in her bingo outfit,” I would tell friends later. But choosing those clothes, we had not laughed; we had felt guided by what Mama would have wanted. It was when I watched Wanda fasten Mama’s lucky necklace—the little silver racehorse positioned in the hollow of Mama’s throat—chat I saw.
Wanda was being Mama, doing what Mama would have done, comforting us the way only Mama had known to do. I looked around and saw Anne holding my stepfather’s shoulder as he sobbed, looked down and saw my own hands locked on the little bag of Mama’s jewelry we had found in her dresser. For a moment I wanted to cry, and then I didn’t. Of all the things I had imagined, this was the one I had not foreseen. We had become Mama.
I reached past my sister to put my hand on Mama’s face, to touch her again and push away my sudden fear. But the cheek was hard and cold, something marble and inhuman. I did not know then what was more terrifying—what my mama had become or what we had.
We divided Mama’s things among us.
My sisters have daughters. I insisted they take all the jewelry to pass on, but it was no great gesture. My mama had nothing worth any money, only one good bracelet and one good ring that I pressed on Anne and Wanda. They insisted I take the engagement band. It was cold in my hand. I tucked it in a little satin bag in which Mama had kept three spools of thread, tiny plated scissors, needles, and a thimble. A month later, in Los Angeles to do a reading, I would lose the bag, the ring, all my clothes, and the manuscript I was completing. But when I told my sisters about it, all I thought was that the sewing bag was the only thing Mama had owned that I really wanted.
Then I remembered the pictures.
For two decades, every time I visited, I shuffled through those pictures—scores of ancient snapshots stuffed in a box in the end table in Mama’s living room. Each time I pulled them out and asked Mama to go through them with me. The faces in Mama’s box were full of stories—ongoing tragedies, great novels, secrets and mysteries and longings no one would ever know.
“Who’s this?” I would ask about another cracked and fading sepia image of a child.
“That was your cousin that drowned.”
“And this?”
“She was the one ran off at thirteen. Now, what was her name?”
It was the ones no one remembered who pulled at me. Two women with bright-faced toddlers on their laps bracketed a sullen adolescent girl. Her hair pinned up on the crown of her head. Theirs was long and loose. All had the same eyes, the same eyebrows.
“Didn’t she marry Bo?” Mama’s finger traced the smile of the woman on the left. “This is her girl beside her, and the babies they both had the same year.” Mama flattened her lips and touched the face of the girl on the side where it was obscured by a flaw in the print.
“Don’t think I ever knew the other daughter.” Her lips parted as if she were about to say something, but she stopped and gave a slight shake of her head.
“Were they the ones who died in the bridge accident?” I reached for the photograph, but Mama pulled it away.
“What accident?”
“The one Granny told me about.”
“Oh, you know your granny.”
“Then what did happen?”
Mama’s grip on the photograph tightened, the tips of her fingers going white while her mouth set in a thin hard line. “Nothing happened to them,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
Mama would touch the pictures tentatively, as if her memories were more real than the images, as if she did not want to look too hard at the reality of all those people lost and gone. Every time I asked, she promised that as soon as she found a spare moment, she would go through the box, sort through the photos, and write it all down, each name, each fate she could remember. Every time, seeing the way her hands moved on those snapshots, I knew it wasn’t likely that she would keep her promise.
Now spread across Wanda’s coffee table, they were as anonymous as they had been all my life. My aunt Bodine went through them, but she seemed to know as little as I. “Never met her; don’t think I knew him.”
There were a few she did know. “Oh, that’s your aunt Dot, your granny, and the boys, David and Dan. Your cousins Billie and Bobbie. Your uncle Brice, the handsome one, and this one’s him with his best friend died in the Korean War. Your mama at fifteen, I think, and this one at sixteen.”
My mother was beautiful, that hard thing, beautiful. Men wanted my mama, wanted her before she knew what it meant, when she was twelve, thirteen, still a child. She showed me once that snapshot of herself at fifteen; white socks and A-line skirt, hair in a Kitty Wells cloud, schoolgirl blouse, Peter Pan collar, and the most hesitant smile.
“Just a girl,” Mama said, shrugging. “I was just a girl.”
“Pregnant,” my aunt Dot told me, “carrying you then. That was taken just before she ran off with that silly boy.”
That beautiful boy my mama loved, as skinny as her, as ignorant and hungry, as proud as he could be to have that beautiful girl, her skin full of heat, her eyes full of hope. And when he ran away, left her to raise me alone, she never trusted any man again—but wanted to, wanted to so badly it ate the heart out of her.
“WE COULD BE RELATED,” Lucy told me. She’d been living in Monte Rio a little longer than I had, and we’d see each other mornings when I walked down to the post office. I would sit with her on the bench under the post office window and watch the way she used her hands. She kept pushing her hair back, dark brown hair in a thick dry mass covering her neck and shoulders.
“I’m a Campbell on my granddaddy’s side,” Lucy told me proudly. “And a Gibson, I’m pretty sure, from a great-aunt I never actually met. My real name is Lillian, though people around here don’t know that. I don’t think anybody in the world knows anymore.” She stopped and stared off into the distance, as if she were looking for someone who remembered her from when she was Lillian.
“My people moved to Arkansas,” Lucy said. “I changed my name when I married P.J. He didn’t like Lillia
n.” And then she told the rest of it, how she left Arkansas at twenty-two, running away from P.J. and a load of debt. As she spoke, Lucy’s face changed, seemed to become painfully flat and hard, as if the morning sun had shifted in the sky, throwing no shadows to soften the line of brow or chin.
“Got on the Greyhound with two suitcases and a little patent leather handbag. Had me two Cokes and a fifth of Ancient Age bourbon, what P.J. called the poor man’s Jack Daniel’s. Nursed that whiskey across the whole Southwest, all the way to Arizona. But I came into Bakersfield sober, cold sober and crying. Lord damn, I think I cried straight through the first few weeks. Didn’t look back, couldn’t never look back. It was either kill the man or leave, and it wasn’t worth killing him.”
She stopped and looked around as if the change in the light had finally registered on her, too. “I’m cold,” she said. “You cold?”
She left him the furniture, the truck, and the house on a quarter acre of scrub oak. On the worked-pine dining room table his parents had given them, she left him the reason she was leaving—the hospital bill for their stillborn daughter, the one he had insisted didn’t matter. “It wasn’t like it was a boy.”
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
“I got a problem, you know, same old same old.” She laughed a familiar bitter laugh and looked at me sideways. “But I been clean a week now, and I’m doing good. It an’t easy like people pretend, changing your life this late in. An’t easy at all.”
She laughed again, smoothing the fabric of her loose trousers. “Hell, though, nothing is, is it?” And I laughed with her, not reminding her of last month or the month before. Every time I run into her we have the same conversation, how she’s getting clean—working at it, anyway—and doing good, doing good until she isn’t. Then she gets drunk again and sings to the trees.
When Lucy drinks she plays records and swears if she’d just had the chance she too could have been a country star. Maybe so. Sometimes when I hear her voice in the distance, I believe her, that contralto drifting up into the redwood trees as pure and clean as her rage ever was.
Maybe we are related. Among my mama’s photos there was one woman with a face similar to Lucy’s, another handsome woman with a dark cloud of hair, one of my mama’s aunts, I think. But Lucy’s drawl is Barstow, not Greenville. She spent five years in Bakersfield. Now she roasts turkey stuffed with jalapeño peppers, deep-fries artichoke hearts, and loves to make a salad of sliced pineapple and avocado.
“Where’d you learn to cook like this?” I asked her one afternoon.
“Family talent,” she tells me. “Just picked it up as I went along.” And she tries to get me to put a little whiskey in my fruit juice or at least have a beer to keep her company. The stories she tells then take me back three decades and would scare me sober if I let her make me drink.
My mama never told me stories. She might repeat something someone had said at work that day, or something she had said—lessons in how to talk back, stand up for myself, and tell someone off. But behind her blunt account of the day’s conversation was a mystery: the rest of her life.
Mostly my aunts respected Mama’s sense of propriety. They wouldn’t tell stories she didn’t want them to tell, nothing of my father or the husband she had loved and lost. Only my grandmother was shameless.
Mattie Lee Gibson would tell people anything. Sometimes she even told the truth. She was the one told me I had an uncle who killed his wife, but said she didn’t know if she believed his story about it, how he’d walked in on the woman in bed with another man. She was the one told me my mama had been married three times. My mama worked forty years as a waitress, teasing quarters out of truckers, and dimes out of hairdressers, pouring extra coffee for a nickel, or telling an almost true story for half a dollar.
“Get them talking,” she told me when she took me to work with her. “Or just smiling. Get them to remember who you are. People who recognize you will think twice before walking away and leaving nothing by the plate.”
Mama was never confused about who she was or what she was offering across that counter. “It’s just a job. People need their lunch served with a smile and a quick hand. Don’t need to know your business—if you’re tired or sick or didn’t get any sleep for worrying. Just smile and get them what they need.”
Three bouts of cancer and half a dozen other serious illnesses—not to mention three daughters and four grandchildren who courted trouble with every turn of the moon—but few of Mama’s customers knew how stubbornly she had to put on that smile for them. She was an actress in the theater of true life, so good that no one suspected what was hidden behind the artfully applied makeup and carefully pinned hairnet.
“You should have been in the movies, like Barbara Stanwyck or Susan Hayward,” I told her once as we looked at those pictures of her as a girl.
She just shook her head. “Life an’t the movies,” she told me.
Mama always said I was tenderhearted, I trusted too easily and would have to learn things the hard way. She was right, of course, and the thing I learned was the thing she knew intuitively: the use of charm, the art of acting, the way to turn misery into something people find understandable or sympathetic. Theater was what Mama knew and I learned.
Theater is standing up terrified and convincing people you know what you’re doing—eating oysters with a smile when the only fish you’ve known has been canned tuna or catfish fried in cornmeal. Theater is going to bars with strangers whose incomes are four times your own; it’s wearing denim when everyone around you is in silk, or silk when they’re all wearing leather. Theater is talking about sex with enormous enthusiasm when nobody’s ever let you in their pants. Theater is pretending you know what you’re doing when you don’t know anything for certain and what you do know seems to be changing all the time.
Six days out of seven I am a creation, someone who relies on luck, lust, and determination. The problem is that I know sometimes luck doesn’t hold. That’s when I become my mama—a woman who could charm time out of bill collectors, sympathy out of sheriffs, and love out of a man who had no heart to share.
The tragedy of the men in my family was silence, a silence veiled by boasting and jokes. If you didn’t look close you might miss the sharp glint of pain in their eyes, the restless angry way they gave themselves up to fate.
My uncles went to jail like other boys go to high school. They took up girls like other people choose a craft. In my mama’s photos they stare out directly, uncompromising, arms crossed or braced on their knees. I thought them beautiful and frightening, as dangerous for those quick endearing grins as for those fast muscled arms, too tall, too angry, and grown up way too soon. I remember my cousins as boys who seemed in a matter of weeks to become hard-faced men. Their eyes pulled in and closed over. Their smiles became sharp, their hands always open and ready to fight. They boasted of girls they’d had and men they’d get, ass they’d kick and trouble they’d make, talked so big and mean it was impossible to know what they meant and what they didn’t. They wanted legend and adventure, wanted the stories told about the uncles to be put aside for stories about them.
“Just boys,” Mattie Lee said of them. And so they remained all their lives.
Mama always loved the pictures of her mama and the twins, grandsons who towered over Mattie Lee. In one snapshot they were braced elbow to elbow, each cradling a newborn baby girl, and in their outside arms, held as tenderly as the infants, rifles extending up into the sky.
Sitting in a honky-tonk, in a clean white shirt and polished boots, hair slicked back and teeth shining white in a dark tanned face, my uncle is the same man who leans on his knee in another photo, bare arms streaked with dirt, and a cloth cap covering his sweatgrimed brow.
“An’t he a sexy man?” my cousin Billie teased. “Kind of evil-minded and quick to please. All them girlfriends half his age, and that reputation of his, like no woman ever turned him down. Wouldn’t think he’d wind up living in a one-room trailer in his sister??
?s backyard. Where’d they go, all them girlfriends and good times? What happened, you think, to that man everyone wanted to bed or marry?”
I fingered the photo and remembered one night when I was a tiny girl sleeping on the couch with my head pillowed on Mama’s thigh. I had woken up to her whispering and shifting on that creaky old sofa, the taint of whiskey and tobacco smoke telling me that someone was there, and the hoarse sobs that followed confusing me, for I had never before heard my uncle cry.
“What am I gonna do?” he had said then. “Ruth, I can’t stand this. I don’t want to live without her. I don’t think I can.”
She had pulled his head into her neck, hugging him close and whispering. “You’ll be all right,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I know, yes. But in the middle of the night, it feels like my heart is coming out of my chest.”
She kissed his forehead, said only, “I worry about you.” He shook his head hard, making her flinch from his sudden movement.
“You afraid of me?” he demanded, and she shook her head. But for a moment something burned in the cool night air.
“I just worry,” she said again.
“Don’t worry about me.” He ran his hands down his face as if he were not actually wiping away tears, then pushed himself up off the table. “Hell, I’m a man. I can handle it.”
His voice was gravel rough. He was still a handsome man but at that moment he reminded me of a painting in the Sunday school lesson book, a picture of the murdered John the Baptist, his face drained of color and pulled thin with despair. For the rest of my life I would not see him without remembering the way he looked on that night—a man who had lost the woman he loved, and with her his belief in his own life.