“Therese used to pose for me.”
I tried to imagine my mother posing for Leah. What had Leah seen in the curves of my mother’s face? My teacher once made us spend a month drawing trees. He told us that once we could draw one from memory we would own that tree. Was that how it was for Leah?
“Do you want to see some of my drawings?” she whispered, as though she was exposing something to daylight for the first time.
Even at nine, I understood the extent of the gift Leah was giving me. To show me images of my mother from her eye before she was my mother.
Before she deserted me.
I nodded carefully, fearful that showing too much enthusiasm might make Leah change her mind. We got up from the table and I followed her, expecting her to take me to the room off the kitchen that was her art studio. Instead, she led me upstairs to the bedroom opposite mine. She patted down a corner of the duvet and motioned for me to sit. Her room was the color of hot chocolate and made me feel like I was wrapped in a blanket. She got down on her knees and searched underneath. The mattress creaked as I shifted. It sounded like a cat and I pretended that Leah had one living in the springs of her mattress that she snuggled with at night.
She pulled out a large worn maroon portfolio and released the rubber band that held it together. Then she slipped out the drawings stacked between sheets of tissue paper and arranged them on the floor so I could see. There were ten all together, all portraits of my mother. There was something about the very last drawing, something about her expression that made me feel that if I reached out to touch it, I would feel flesh instead of paper. Her back had been to Leah, but she turned her head so that her eyes were visible. She looked like she was caught in the middle of thought and I wondered how Leah was able to capture her in that kind of a moment, almost like she knew what my mother was thinking.
“You like that one,” Leah said and pointed to the one I was staring at.
I nodded.
“I do too. I remember that day.” She was quiet and looked down at her lap. “Therese means a lot to me.” She reached back to retrieve the layers of tissue paper and suddenly an envelope appeared.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to it and hoping that her generosity would continue.
She unhinged the flap and revealed its contents. Photographs of my mother smiling and laughing. In one photo, she was sitting at a kitchen table, her fingers laced around a coffee mug and she was looking straight at me. Leah put the drawings back into the portfolio. She returned the photographs to the envelope and handed me the one that had caught my eye.
That night I studied it, trying to understand what it was that bound Leah to my mother. Why it was that Leah was whom she had chosen to leave me with. I slipped it into Matilda’s journal when I was through, but not before noticing that there was something very familiar about the setting. It was Leah’s kitchen. Except instead of being stark white like it was now, it was painted all the colors of the rainbow.
I wished that I could ask Matilda what she thought about Leah and her sparkling white kitchen, which at one time had been more colorful than an entire box of crayons, but Matilda was not here and I had no idea how long it would take for her to make good on her promise of coming back for me.
So instead I turned to Eveyln. I had never had a friend before but with Evelyn, it was easy because she did all the work. She told me where to sit, what to say, and even invited herself over after school. One afternoon, as Evelyn and I sat on the porch waiting for her mother to pick her up, I decided to try and ask her about Leah’s kitchen, but the words just jumbled up inside of my head, so instead I stared at the birds singing in the trees and started spelling what I heard—Twee Too Twee Too Twee.
“Leah’s nice, Franny. You’re lucky to live here,” Evelyn said as if she was reading my mind.
Her backpack was propped between her legs and she made a pleasing clicking sound every time she ran her finger along the teeth of the zipper.
I nodded, focusing on the new song the birds were attempting. Cha Cha Cha Weeo Weeo Weeo.
“Is she an artist?” Evelyn asked as she pulled at a stray thread that clung to her pants.
“She teaches art at the college. Leah told me my mom used to be a secretary there. That’s how they met.”
“That’s cool.”
“I’ve seen some of her pictures. They’re nice. Big.”
“Oh yeah? I meant it’s cool that your mom was a secretary. That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”
My mother had never complained about her work, but she always made it clear that it wasn’t very exciting. I couldn’t imagine someone would dream about growing up to become my mother. “Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Why would you want to be a secretary?”
“Oh, that. I guess I like the idea of being able to organize all day long. I think I would be good at it. But more than that, I like the secret part of being a secretary.”
I turned to her. “Secret? What do you mean?”
“The word ‘secret’ in the beginning of the word secretary. You know, like secret business.”
My eyebrows were frozen in place. “That’s what you want to do when you grow up? Be involved in people’s secret business?”
“Yes. That and also make sure that everything is always put away in its right place.”
The sunlight was strong but laced with chill. I brought my knees in closer, hugging them. “What kind of secrets do you think a person who is a secretary would be able to uncover?”
“I bet lots of things. Like who is calling the boss who shouldn’t be. Like where the boss goes when he takes a really long lunch. Like if the boss is stealing. Yes, that is definitely what I want to be when I grow up.”
I imagined adult Evelyn, hair pulled back in a bun with glasses hanging off the bridge of her nose, stenography pad in hand. Then I thought about my mother. “Do you think maybe my mom discovered a secret and that’s why she had to run away and leave me here?”
Evelyn shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe that’s what happened. She came across some big secret and had to run. Maybe she couldn’t risk your safety. Maybe Matilda was in on it or something. Did she leave behind a clue? Did she give you anything before she left?”
I thought about the two hearts my grandmother brought me because my mother had forgotten. I held them every night before going to sleep. My fingers rubbed over the gold so many times that I worried they might soon lose their shine. I thought about the journal filled with my sister’s words. Her promises.
“No. She didn’t leave me anything.” My arms were wrapped so tightly around my knees that my shoulders began to ache.
“We’ll figure it out, Franny. Don’t worry. I’m always right about these things. I can just feel that it has something to do with a secret.”
Evelyn’s mother drove up and as she stood, her bag brushed across my fingers. A gale of wind appeared from nowhere and the two large maple trees across the street began to shake, spraying their helicopter seeds into the air. They spun with such purpose that for a moment it looked like they were alive. The sun disappeared behind a cloud and suddenly I felt overcome by a large, dark shadow. In that instant my stomach lurched and I felt lightheaded. I don’t think I could have moved even if I wanted. I didn’t know what exactly was so frightening to me.
All that I knew, without question, was that Evelyn was always right about these things.
Therese
Therese couldn’t contain her excitement. Finally, she was going inside the little red house. She knocked on the door several times before Barbara came to let her in.
“It’s you,” she grumbled and turned back to the living room.
Mail was strewn across the floor, probably where it landed after Barbara lost interest. There were bottles of nail polish everywhere, some strategically covering cigarette burns on the Formica in the kitchen. The sink was filled with dishes that gave off a sickly sweet odor. She tried to cover her disgust but there was no
need because Barbara hadn’t given her a second look and had already returned to the living room and her spot across from the television.
The couch had so many colors weaved into it that it just looked gray. It cratered inward beneath her thighs and molded to her back. In front of her sat a tray table with an ashtray surrounded by bullets of charcoal-colored ash that had missed their mark. An episode of General Hospital was blaring from the television.
“How’s it going?” Therese tried discreetly removing a pile of magazines from the only other seat in the room.
“Shhhhhhhh!” Barbara hissed. “This is the good part. That bitch Bobbie Spencer is switching test tubes so she can win Scotty back from Laura. She’s going to trap him into being with her by pretending to get knocked up. What a whore.”
Therese blinked, her face starting to ache from her forced smile. It wavered for just a moment, but she recovered quickly. She folded her hands in her lap and waited for a commercial. She started to speak again, hoping that Barbara wasn’t as invested in children singing about how much they’d like to buy the world a Coke. “How are you doing with groceries?”
The large lump on the couch shrugged and pointed a perfectly painted red fingernail toward the refrigerator. Therese stood, made her way back to the kitchen, and opened the fridge. Inside were white Tupperware containers labeled with masking tape—meatloaf, tomato soup, and fried chicken all in Tim’s writing. Food he had prepared for her for the week that had now gone bad. Nausea affected her mostly in her ears, and even though she felt dizzy and unsteady, she managed to throw everything out.
“What are you doing?” Barbara howled from across the room. Where she was seated, she had a clear view of the kitchen and Therese. “That’s the food my Timmy made for me!”
“I’ll go to the store now. What do you want?”
“I don’t know. Timmy does the shopping. He knows what I like.”
“I’m going to visit him today. Want to come?”
“I don’t like hospitals. You find out when my Timmy will be coming home. And don’t stay too long. I don’t want you tiring him out.”
Barbara turned back to the television. As Therese walked to the door, she took another look around and saw that the house had lovely arches separating the rooms and large windows that were covered with sheets. The floors were wood and with a good scrub they would return to their original honey color. The house had potential, the only problem being the very large obstacle bolted to the couch.
For the first time she started to feel pangs of doubt and it confused her to suddenly question the correctness of her path. She returned to the kitchen, closed her eyes, and took in a deep breath but, never having tried to spark a house before, all she could smell was must and nail polish. She settled her mind and became so focused she could almost hear Barbara exhaling puffs of smoke in the other room. Still, there was nothing. She envisioned hiding places and secret phone calls and the many lies that had simply been absorbed into the walls. She waited, refocused, and three seconds before she was about to give up, she felt it. It wasn’t as clear as when it happened with a person, but there was no denying what she sensed. Beyond its shabby and dilapidated interior, it held secrets and there was no way she was going to turn back and give up now. Pushing her lingering doubts aside, she got into her car and drove to the hospital.
On her way in, she winked at Jim sitting at the front desk. He waved to her and she pretended not to notice the coffee cup he tipped over in the process. At the gift shop, she picked up a magazine and a pack of Wrigley’s Big Red. When she walked into his room, he was propped up in bed watching television. His selection might have differed from his mother’s, but his enthusiasm did not.
“C’mon, man! Mushrooms!! Mushrooms!!”
He tried to shake the remote control, which didn’t give him much satisfaction since it was tied to the arm of the bed. In the meantime, Richard Dawson stared hopefully at a clearly perplexed contestant and repeated, “Name a topping you eat on pizza.” The contestant looked dumbfounded and finally whispered, “Tomato sauce?” Richard Dawson snickered and shouted “Survey says . . .”
Therese never got to hear what the survey said because at that point Tim flung the remote so hard it slammed into the side of the bed and cracked. “Damn.”
“Rough day?” she asked, easing herself onto the side of his bed and rubbing his knee with her hand.
“I guess.” He slid himself up farther so that her hand now rested on his ankle.
She removed it and put it in her lap.
“I dropped my stuff off at your house and saw your mother.”
Perhaps it was just her imagination, but his face seemed to take on a grayish hue and then, as if on cue, the telephone rang. Tim reached over to the night table to answer it. “Hello? Yes, Ma. Yeah, okay. Uh huh. I don’t know. Bye, Ma.”
He tried to hang the phone back up, but the cord became twisted. After he pulled several times, the whole base fell to the floor. Therese slid off the bed to retrieve it.
“She wants cigarettes. Marlboro Lights.”
“I’ll get them for her. I brought you a magazine.”
“Thanks.”
“What are the doctors saying? How much longer?”
“Just a few more days. They want to monitor me to make sure everything’s stable. I’ll get out of here soon.”
“Thank goodness it was nothing more serious. I can’t believe it happened while you were driving. You were lucky not to have hit anyone.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of things.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. He turned away, occupying himself with the cracked remote control.
Halfway down the hall she remembered that she had forgotten her gum. She walked back to his room and stood outside the door for a minute while she adjusted her skirt. And then she heard talking.
“Hi, Ma. I know you miss me. It will be okay. I promise I won’t leave you.”
The loyalty in his voice pushed at her chest and she hated herself for the tears that came. She thought about how different Tim was than the others. The words he was speaking to his mother rang in her ears, a picture of her own father slowly appearing like an image from an old Polaroid before her eyes.
Her hand was still on the doorknob, but she never went back into the room. Instead, she walked away, leaving her Big Red and her doubts behind.
Matilda
Sometimes my feelings fly around inside of me and I can’t catch them. Other times, they find me when I am not looking. My stomach sinks and the space where it once was fills up and it feels like my insides will come shooting out of my mouth. Those are the times I hate to be alone.
Lavi and I were in the habit of buying french fries at McDonalds and bringing them home to eat after school. We sat in her kitchen on stools, hooking our feet around the legs and pouring salt into piles on small paper plates. Lavi liked the crunchy ones and I liked the soft, mushy ones, so most times we would just buy a large and share. She was lost in thought, using the tip of her fry to draw a heart in her salt pile. “My dad hates ketchup.”
I looked up, surprised. It was the first time she had ever mentioned her father.
I found a soft one and dragged it through the ketchup, watching as it folded under the weight of the thick red sauce. She was quiet for a few minutes. “He comes back and forth. A lot.”
I nodded, concentrating on a fry that was perfectly browned on the outside, but still soft on the inside. I had assumed that Lavi’s father, like mine, was permanently out of her life.
“What about your dad?”
That was an easy question to answer. I didn’t even need to think. “Nothing. I know nothing.”
She stopped making circles in the salt long enough to catch me rummaging at the bottom of the container in search of more limp fries. “What do you mean ‘nothing’? You must know something. His name? Where he lives? How long your mom knew him? Something?”
“Nope.” I shook my head
. “I know absolutely nothing.” I started licking my fingertips. Long ago, I learned that my mother would reveal her secrets when she was ready. As a result, I stashed away my curiosity like a bill that wasn’t due to be paid and didn’t give it much more thought than that.
“Do you think he was a jerk? Like he was mean to her or something?”
I was about to share the one tiny shred of information I had managed to discover. I was going to tell her that my mother told me never to see or speak to my father, but before the words came out, the front door flew open and in walked Lavi’s brother.
At sixteen, Daryl was lean and compact. Even when he smiled, his face looked compressed, as though it was too painful for the muscles to move into position. He sauntered in and tossed his books onto the counter.
“Hey,” he said, clicking his head back once in acknowledgment of our presence.
“Hey,” responded Lavi.
Daryl’s hair was buzzed short, which made him look like he was on leave from the military, and the faded fatigues he wore added to the illusion. I didn’t know much more about him because most times he would go into his room and slam the door when he came home. He had Lavi’s coloring, but that was all. Everything else about him was the complete opposite. It was strange how two siblings could be so different. My mind wandered to thoughts of Franny, so I didn’t notice when Lavi’s mother walked in a few minutes later.
She was never home during Lavi and my french fry feasts, so this was the first time I had ever seen her. Her hair was curly like Lavi’s, but the color had faded and it looked dry and wiry. What were probably once pretty tendrils now poked out from her hairnet like stiffened old fingers. She worked at the diner in town and still had on her apron, which was splattered with pale orange grease stains. Her eyes were wild and round and she was trying to speak, but all that came up were sputters of bubbled saliva. She didn’t seem to realize I was even sitting there.
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