I could not imagine my mother living on that street, but when it was my turn to talk to her, she assured me she was. “But where?” I asked, thinking I must have missed seeing something on that street, some dwelling that might more accurately represent her.
“Number forty-six,” she said. “Right in the middle of the block. It’s the building that always has red tulips in front every spring.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You know which one I mean?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t understand what was she doing there, why she was in that apartment and not in her house. And yet I did not exactly want her home anymore. I did not miss her in the old way: what had felt raw and urgent had changed into something dull and distant—and protected, like the soft essence of a mussel. In many ways she felt less like my mother than some faraway relative whose rare visits brought mostly a guilty discomfort.
I pulled at the phone cord, jiggled my foot restlessly, turned around to look for Sharla or my father. They had left the room.
“Will you come and see me tomorrow?” my mother asked.
I had no idea what to say. I wondered if she had asked my father and my sister, too, wondered what they had said.
Finally, “I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Well. Why don’t you think about it, all right? I’d like you and Sharla to come over after school. Just for a bit. So we can talk.”
I said nothing.
“Ginny?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you hear me?”
“I have to go,” I said.
She sighed. “All right. Put your father back on, will you?”
I laid the phone down, called him. He came into the room and picked up the receiver, but did not speak right away. Instead, he looked at me, trying to assess the expression on my face. I made myself crack the smallest of smiles to tell him I was all right. At that point he said hello, but he was still not present to my mother—I heard it in his voice: his mild, floating syllables, his ultimate disregard. He might have been talking to someone soliciting a subscription to an unwanted magazine.
I remembered him sweeping up a broken glass in the kitchen the day before, funneling the shards into the dustpan while his face was raised toward me, talking. The damage was forgotten before it was gone. I remembered, too, his receiving a phone call from a pleasant-voiced woman last night, and how content he had seemed afterward. “Who was that?” I’d asked. He’d put his hand on top of my head, tousled my hair lightly. “Friend,” he’d said, in a playful whisper.
I went to find Sharla.
She was standing in our bedroom, looking out the window, her hands in her back pockets. When I came in, she turned around and spoke angrily. “We have to go and see her, can you believe that?”
“Who said?”
“Dad.”
Actually, I was relieved.
I had read the first few letters my mother sent almost daily; then I began throwing them away unopened. They made no sense to me, what with their talk about her soul, her “growth,” the light of truth. And they frightened me. I wanted to relax into a new life that was working out well enough and that did not include her. Our father had lost the pain and bewilderment in his eyes; last Saturday, he had hummed the whole time he made breakfast, and he had made French toast, which he served with strawberries. Yet now I wanted very much to see my mother. It felt programmed into me, a reflex as unstoppable as a blink.
“We’ll be together when we see her,” I told Sharla. But it was more a question than a statement.
“Of course!” Sharla said. “Do you think he’d let us see her alone? She’s dangerous!”
I sat on my bed, scratched at the side of my neck, considered this. My mother had picked out the bedspread I was sitting on. I tried to envision her doing this, standing in Monroe’s and sorting through the selections, her pocketbook dangling from her arm. When a figure came into focus, I realized I was not seeing the woman who had last been in my bedroom, begging me to try to understand something. I was seeing someone else, someone who had disappeared from my life as surely as if she had drowned. At that moment, I understood that the person who had so carefully deliberated over this bedspread was never coming back; she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. I shivered, pulled my covers down, and got under them without removing my shoes. Sharla watched me, didn’t say a word. Which meant, I decided, that she knew exactly what I was thinking. And agreed.
“It smells like pee in here,” Sharla whispered. It was six-thirty in the evening; we were in the hallway of our mother’s apartment building. Our father had dropped us off, telling us he’d be back in an hour.
“That’s not pee,” I said.
“Cat pee, I mean.”
“It’s not cat pee, either. It’s medicine.”
“How do you know?” Sharla scoffed.
“I just do. It’s Vicks VapoRub.”
Sharla sniffed the air again. “Oh. Right. I hate that smell.”
I didn’t. My mother was a great believer in Vicks. Whenever we had colds, she would slather it on our chests at night. I grew to love the smell of it, even the stickiness, believing that it was a cure made manifest: so long as my pajama top adhered to my chest, something was working hard to bring me back to normal.
“What number is it again?” Sharla asked, but the answer was unnecessary; at that moment, our mother opened a door a few feet away.
She was dressed in one of her housedresses, the lemon yellow one, freshly ironed and stiff at the collar. Her hair was neatly styled; she wore red lipstick and small gold earrings. But her hands were clasped too tightly and she bit absentmindedly at her lip: she was not really put together at all. And when we got closer, I could see that her eyes were red-rimmed; she’d been crying. This annoyed me. Why did we have to come over if all she was going to do was cry?
She embraced me, then Sharla, then gestured toward her open door, saying, “Go right in.” And then quickly, laughing, “Well, I hardly need to say that, do I? This is your place, too.”
I felt my mouth open in outraged wonder. But I closed it again, said nothing. I didn’t have to, because Sharla said loudly, “What are you talking about?”
My mother put her finger to her lips, closed the door, leaned against it. “I just mean”—she smiled, waved her arm vaguely toward the small apartment—“that you are as welcome here as in your own house. It really is your place, too.”
Silence.
“Well,” she said, finally. “Come with me, let me show you something.”
Our mother led us down a small, dark hall to a bedroom at the back of the apartment. There were two twin beds there, with barely enough room to walk between them. There was a small dresser, leaning slightly to the left, but decorated beautifully with painted flowers. A small lamp was on the dresser, turned on, and the effect was cozy. On the wall was a small canvas, a painting of a chair in front of a window. It reminded me of the chair my mother sat in at home, but this chair had an ethereal glow, and in the window behind, winding around the wooden rails of a balcony, were flowers the likes of which I’d never seen: shapes like stars, like shells from the ocean. The leaves were veined with thread-thin lines the color of blood.
“Did you paint that?” I asked, my voice a tight bundle in my throat. But I already knew the answer.
“Yes,” she said. “And the dresser, too.” Then, more tentatively, “Do you like it?”
I shrugged. “I guess. What is that a painting of, anyway? Where is it?”
“It’s in my head,” she said. “My imagination.”
“We’re not going to sleep here,” Sharla said, suddenly.
“Well, not tonight,” my mother said.
“Not ever.”
My mother turned toward Sharla. “It’s just here,” she said. “I just wanted to show you that. You have a room here.” They stared at each other, neither softening. Finally, my mother said, “Now I’ll show you the
rest of the place.”
“We saw it,” Sharla said. It was true: the place was small; we had seen everything on the way to our bedroom. Still, my mother led us on a determined tour. “This is the bathroom,” she said. I nodded. Sharla, still angry, would not look at the rag rug on the floor, the pink shower curtain, the bar of Ivory soap emitting the comforting, familiar smell.
“My bedroom,” she said, turning on the light and standing aside. It was smaller than ours, I saw; there was room for only a bed and small nightstand. There were books piled on top of the nightstand, thin ones, colored burgundy, navy, and mustard. The little kitchen, which she brought us to next, had a scarred round table in the corner, a few dishes behind cabinet doors made of glass. An embroidered dishcloth hung on the stove handle: flowers in a basket. “You like those, don’t you?” my mother asked me when she saw me looking at it, smiling in a way that I thought conveyed misplaced pride.
“What, the flowers?”
“Yes, embroidery.”
I shrugged. I only used to. She was not keeping up with us.
The living room, with its three large windows abutting each other and looking out onto the street, was the only room that had any natural light; still, my mother had the single floor lamp turned on. The only furniture was a large green sofa, its cushions nearly U-shaped, which was pushed against the windows. A well-worn burgundy rug on the floor emitted a faint smell of mothballs.
“I’ll be getting some more things, of course,” my mother said. “This is just for now.”
Neither Sharla nor I said anything. What could she possibly get that would work against the sadness of this place—the plaster-patched walls, the creaking floorboards, the chipping tile in the bathroom, the rust stains in both sinks?
“Did you buy this furniture?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, with some measure of pride. “I’ve sold two paintings already—out in Santa Fe. People pay for my art!”
She smiled at me, then at Sharla, then at me again. Next door, someone hawked; then the toilet flushed. “Uh-huh,” I said, finally. I wanted to punch Sharla. She wasn’t saying anything. I felt as though I might as well be here alone.
As if reading my mind, my mother said, “Sharla?”
She did not respond, at first. But then, “How can you live here?” she asked.
Not my question, exactly. Why are you living here, is what I wanted to know. And then there was this: Who are you?
“It’s what I can afford right now,” my mother said. “Later, I hope to have my own house.”
“Like Jasmine?” I asked.
“Well …” She went to the refrigerator, began taking things out: a package of chicken legs, lettuce. “Jasmine sold her house. Just last week.”
“She did?” I had not seen any activity in Jasmine’s house since she and my mother had left: no people, no sign saying the place was for sale.
“Yes. It was really quick—some family where the father got transferred. They only looked at it once, isn’t that something? They’ll be moving in in a few weeks.”
“We’re getting new neighbors?” I asked.
“Yes. I understand the children are quite young; maybe you can baby-sit.”
“But …” It irritated me that so much could have happened unbeknownst to me. “When did they look at it?”
“I suppose you might have been in school.”
“But what about all Jasmine’s stuff?”
“Well, that’s … I meant to talk to you about that. She will be having a truck come, a moving truck, next Friday. And they’ll … Well, I’m going to use it, too. To bring my things here. Just my things, you know, my clothes, and so on.”
“But you—”
“Jasmine will be moving back to Clear Falls, too,” my mother said. “That’s how we can share the truck. Isn’t that lucky?”
“Where is she moving?” Sharla, now. Angry.
“Nearby, I think,” my mother said.
She turned slowly, faced us. “You know, she’s become an awfully good friend to me. I—”
“I want to go home,” Sharla said.
“Just a minute,” my mother said. “Just a minute! You just got here! We need to talk about some things!”
Sharla would not look at our mother. She stood stiffly, her mouth a grim, straight line.
“Look,” our mother said, her voice softer, reasoning. “You won’t talk to me on the phone, not really. You won’t write to me. And now you just got here and you want to leave.”
Silence. The tap dripped.
Sharla continued to stare straight ahead. I thought of statues I’d seen, blankness where eyes should have been.
My mother walked partway over to Sharla, then stopped. “Sharla, I’m your mother, my God, I … look at me, why won’t you let me tell you anything!”
“I’m waiting outside for Dad.” Now Sharla’s face was flushed; I could see she was trying not to cry. She moved toward the door.
“Sharla,” my mother said quietly. “Please.”
Sharla opened the door and my mother rushed to her, put her arms around her. “Will you stop this, will you just—”
But Sharla pulled free, and was gone, running down the dim hall.
My mother turned to me, her eyes wide and bright. “I bought chicken,” she said, walking quickly back to the kitchen. “I thought I’d fry it. Mashed potatoes. And I made a cake, too, and guess what kind of frosting it has? Caramel! It’s in the refrigerator, take a look.” She put on an apron.
“I don’t want anything,” I said. “Thank you. I have to go with Sharla.”
“No you don’t,” my mother said, her back to me. She pulled down a small sack of flour from the cupboard, began shaking it into a bowl I had never seen before. “You can stay.”
“I don’t want to. I really don’t.” I backed up slowly until I got to the door; then I, too, began running.
My father received several more phone calls in the next week from a woman whose name we learned was Georgia Anderson. And then she came for dinner.
She was a secretary at my father’s office; she worked, in fact, for his boss. She was blond, blue-eyed, slightly overweight, but very pretty. She had a shy way about her, but she opened up when Sharla brought her to our bedroom. She told us she loved our room, examined with care (but without touching) our figurines, the pictures we had on our walls, the books on our nightstand, our stuffed animals. She told us she had shared a room with her sister when she was growing up, that she had loved and hated it, that they had used a piece of red yarn to divide the room exactly, that they spoke to each other at night on tin can telephones, that they got to have their own miniature Christmas tree on their dresser every year.
She had brought dessert: a cherry pie she had made that was still warm from the oven, the top decorated with beautiful pastry leaves. By the time we ate it, it seemed everyone felt relaxed and happy. I loved having our table balanced again, loved seeing my father converse with someone other than Sharla and me. When my father poured coffee for the two of them, Sharla and I excused ourselves to go and do homework.
“So what do you think of her?” Sharla asked. She was lying on her stomach, her head bent over her book, her hair hiding her face.
“I don’t know.” I liked her.
“I like her,” Sharla said.
“Me, too.”
Sharla turned onto her back, stretched out luxuriously. I shut my book, did the same.
“She made the dress she was wearing,” Sharla said.
“She did?” It was a beautiful green wool dress, full-skirted, with a soft bow at the neck. There was a matching green belt.
“Even the belt?”
“Yup. She sews everything: curtains, coats, tablecloths; she made Halloween costumes for all her nieces and nephews.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me, when you were in the bathroom.”
“I wish she’d make me something.” My wardrobe was in terrible shape; we never had gotten clothes f
or school, and I had in fact outgrown many things. I knew a girl at school whose mother sewed for her; she always wore matching headbands with her outfits.
“Ask her.” Sharla yawned. “She’ll do it.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she really loves to sew. And she really loves Dad.”
I looked quickly at Sharla, thinking of something to say that would undermine her remark, that would take away some of the strength and surety of it. But there was nothing to say. It was true.
Sharla stared back at me. She was not unhappy about this, I saw. Nor, I realized, was I. Somewhere inside, I’d been waiting for it. Now it was here. And it was not a bad thing. This weekend, we had decided, we were all going to look at Christmas displays in the store windows, then have dinner out at the fanciest restaurant we could think of.
I pushed my school books out of the way, reached for the Seventeen magazine Georgia had brought us as a happy-to-meet-you present. I began looking at the clothes. I wanted suggestions for all the things I could ask for now.
Georgia taught Sharla and me to sew. Sharla never kept it up after high school, but I did. I love it. There’s something about the self-reliance of it all, of understanding secrets about how things are made, of being able to make invisible repairs.
Even after we could make our own clothes, Georgia still made the harder things: coats, prom dresses. And now she makes wonderful things for our children. Lately, it’s quilts. My kids always open her presents first at Christmastime, and they always love what they get. They call her Grandma. I want them to. They know she’s not my real mother, but they don’t care. She does everything right. When my father died last year, it was Georgia who brought all of us peace. As she always had. In direct opposition to you-know-who.